ROOSEVELT AS GRAND STRATEGIST
Why did Roosevelt reverse his China strategy at the critical moment? Stilwell’s answer was simple: the Commander in Chief was a weak and procrastinating politician, an “old softy” who had refused to bargain with Chiang, who knew little about China, and who was probably ill, to boot. The truth, as usual, was not so simple. Roosevelt, with his sensitivity to personalities, doubtless felt that he was responding mainly to Chiang’s insistence on his prerogatives as chief of state, to Stilwell’s crusty individualism and inability to get along with Chiang, Mountbatten, or Chennault, to the views of Hurley, who was siding with the Generalissimo against Stilwell. But his main reason for ending pressure on Chiang stemmed from his basic Chinese strategy.
Since Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had been pursuing two aims in China: to strengthen it as the central base for the final attack on Japan, and to treat it as a great power that would be a bulwark of Asian stability and democracy after the war and a focus of American co-operation with Asia. While the first aim was a matter of military need and the latter of long-run hopes, the two goals meshed. By sending men, munitions, and money to China he was strengthening its postwar as well as its war role; by including China as one of the Big Four, by bringing it into summit conferences such as that at Cairo, he was bolstering Chungking’s legitimacy, giving it a greater claim on war supply and on participation in military decisions.
Roosevelt sharply modified his first goal during 1944. As Chiang’s armies melted away before the Japanese ground attack, as Chennault not only failed to break up that attack but also lost his advance air bases, as Chiang refused to undertake drastic reforms of his government and army command, and—most important by far—as American amphibious forces hopped across the Pacific with ever-growing power and momentum, the President lost hope that China would constitute the main springboard for the climactic assault on the home islands. Stalin’s promise to take on the Japanese armies in Manchuria sometime after Hilter’s fall, along with the anti-Japanese and pro-American attitude of the Yenan Communists, made Chiang’s role even less vital. In telling the Generalissimo twice in October that the ground situation in China had deteriorated so sharply that he no longer wanted an American officer to take command of Chiang’s forces under the Kuomintang, Roosevelt was not only venting his frustration, but he was signaling his changed military policy, and he was demonstrating once again that essentially military considerations dominated his basic strategy.
The shift in military policy, however, was not accompanied by a shift in political. Faced with his failure in China, Roosevelt had a choice of only two fundamental alternatives. He could continue or even accelerate his military effort in China and try to persuade or compel Chiang to produce basic reforms, thus giving the government the military basis for its aspirations as a great power; or he could scale down his political goals for China at the same time he scaled down his military ones. In fact, the President tried to do both and ran the risk of succeeding in neither. He kept talking to and about China as a great power even while he was giving higher and higher military priorities to other theaters.
This separation of strictly military and operational from broad political or strategic considerations in Asia exemplified Roosevelt’s approach to the European situation, too. Europe First had been his firm priority from the start, regardless of political-military implications for Asia. And in planning strategy in Europe he and Stimson and Marshall had put it to the more politically minded British that the invasion of France was the quickest, cheapest, and surest means of defeating Germany. Churchill had struggled to plant Allied influence in the Balkan area, only to give in to Roosevelt’s insistence on nourishing the invasion of France even at the expense of the Allied effort in northern Italy. In the fall of 1944, as Allied troops pressed to the border of Germany, the American emphasis on a focused, massed military effort, regardless of political considerations, seemed vindicated.
Other examples of Roosevelt’s setting military over political priorities could be cited—his cautious approach to rescuing the Jews of Europe, his handling of the occupation zones in Germany, his withholding of atomic information from the Russians—but his absolute insistence on unconditional surrender seemed to some at the time and to many in retrospect as the clearest example of his subordination of long-run political concerns to immediate military ones. The practical purposes of unconditional surrender were to allow the Allied commands to concentrate on winning a total military victory over Germany, to strengthen the anti-Hitler military coalition by insuring that neither Russians nor Anglo-Americans would negotiate for a separate peace, and to help insure that the Russians would live up to their promise to join the war against Japan. Neither Churchill nor Stalin supported the doctrine with Roosevelt’s determination, but each gave it lip service while seeking to modify it to meet particular situations.
If military strategy, in Samuel Morison’s words, is the art of defeating the enemy in the most economical and expeditious manner, Roosevelt must rate high as a military strategist. As Commander in Chief he husbanded military resources in both the Atlantic and the Pacific until the enormous power, industrial and technological, of the nation could be brought to bear on the military scene. Despite endless temptations to strike elsewhere he stuck firmly to an over-all strategy of Atlantic First, and in Europe, despite the diversions of Africa and Italy, he and his military chiefs finally delivered the full weight of the Anglo-American effort into France. He helped gain a maximum Soviet contribution to the bleeding of German ground strength and brought Allied troops into the heart of Germany at just the right time to share in and claim military victory; he found the right formula for getting the most militarily from the Russians without letting them, if they had so wished, occupy the whole continent. And if he was deliberate and single-minded in Europe, where victory demanded consistency and continuity of effort, he was opportunistic and flexible in the early stages of the Pacific war. He shifted from a strategy of depending on China and Formosa as huge bases for ground forces to stepped-up island-hopping by amphibious forces. Compared with Soviet, German, and even British losses, and considering the range and intensity of the effort and the skillful and fanatical resistance of the enemy, American casualties in World War II were remarkably light.
He had been an architect of military victory. Well could the Commander in Chief boast in his Navy Day campaign talk in Philadelphia on October 27, 1944, that, since Navy Day a year before, the Army, Navy, and Air Force had participated in no fewer than twenty-seven landings in force on enemy-held soil and that “every one of those 27 D-Days has been a triumphant success.” Until the final days of 1944 Roosevelt never met a major military defeat after the setbacks of Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Kasserine Pass, and in the Pacific during the first fifteen months of the war.
But grand strategy—achieving the nation’s broad and enduring goals by marshaling its full military, diplomatic, economic, and psychological resources—puts a much harsher test to a Commander in Chief.
Grand strategy requires not only putting ends before means, political goals before military, long-run aims before immediate successes. It is not merely, in the Clausewitzian sense, the subordination of war to diplomacy, and diplomacy to politics. It is the marshaling of a series of plans and decisions in every relevant area of a nation’s life—war, diplomacy, economics, popular opinion, domestic politics—in such an order that power and action can be mobilized persistently and widely behind a people’s enduring principles and goals, that the instrumental ends and means—governmental policies, military decisions, institutional patterns—be continually readapted in the light of the wider purposes being served, and that the goals and principles be reassessed in the light of those ends and means. The language of grand strategy is the language of priorities. The priorities serve and structure a nation’s ideology.
It has become conventional to see Roosevelt as a master pragmatist or opportunist or improviser who waged war without political ends in mind, or who
at least subordinated his ends to his means and made a mess of the former, or even of both. The dichotomy was not this simple.
Roosevelt had political goals; few leaders in history, indeed, have defined them with more eloquence or persistence. He expressed these goals most broadly and simply in the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom from want—a bit more extensively in the Atlantic Charter, and at great length in a host of pronouncements, campaign speeches, press releases, fireside chats, letters, and conversations. The Four Freedoms, he said, were the “ultimate stake,” perhaps not immediately attainable throughout the world, “but humanity does move toward those glorious ideals through democratic processes.” Those freedoms would be realized through the more specific aims of the Atlantic Charter—the end of territorial aggrandizement, the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government, the free and fair sharing of raw materials, international collaboration to raise living standards, abandonment by nations of the use of force. Serving these goals in turn were a host of still more concrete policies and institutions: Big Power unity and co-operation, the complete eradication of Nazism, general disarmament, a United Nations with power to enforce the peace, and a variety of international agencies and arrangements for specific purposes in education, transportation, relief, refugees, and many other fields.
It is said that while Roosevelt stated noble ultimate ends and appropriate instrumental ends and generally believed in them, he ignored or compromised them when an immediate purpose or advantage could thereby be achieved, that he was supremely subject to what Alfred Vagts has called the vice of immediacy. He decided in favor of the invasion of North Africa, for example, without fully grasping its inevitable effect of delaying the cross-channel attack on Germany; and he “walked with the devil” in the person of Darlan and Franco and Badoglio without seeing the implications for democratic principle and morale. Too, in 1942 he could urge on Smuts that the United Nations not adopt a hard-and-fast strategic policy for 1943 until 1942 operations were concluded. And he could tell Churchill, in perhaps the most revealing phrase of all, that the “political considerations you mention are important factors, but military operations based thereupon must be definitely secondary to the primary operations of striking at the heart of Germany.”
The sharpest indictment of Roosevelt on this score concerns unconditional surrender. It has been ably argued that this policy, on which he insisted to the end and which was gleefully exploited by Goebbels, may well have hardened the resistance of the German people and of the Wehrmacht, discouraged the resistance to Hitler inside the armed forces and without, prolonged the war, and caused unnecessary loss and bloodshed, and that all of this was at variance with Roosevelt’s goals. Yet unconditional surrender is a prime example of how the standard indictment of Roosevelt can be turned around and can require a closer look at his grand strategy.
Unconditional surrender flatly contradicts the usual argument that Roosevelt was pragmatically and opportunistically concerned with immediate specific results at the expense of the more general and long run. It was fully apparent to the President, as to his friends and critics, that the Nazis could exploit unconditional surrender to stiffen resistance to the Allies. Indeed, the President’s own Chiefs of Staff had advised him to modify the doctrine for military reasons. The Commander in Chief not only insisted on unconditional surrender, but he also resisted Machiavellian notions that he modify the doctrine publicly and later apply it in fact. Roosevelt’s ultimate insistence on a direct attack on Germany, whatever the military cost, as compared to a strategy of encirclement or attrition, his decision to recover the Philippines largely for symbolic reasons despite practical military arguments for bypassing them, his own warning to Senators that there could be no sharp division between political and military matters are other examples of his willingness to subordinate immediate military advantage to broader goals.
The real point is less Roosevelt’s simple separation of political ends and military means than his capacity to marshal his means of all kinds—military, institutional, propagandistic, diplomatic, and indeed political—in support of his most fundamental objectives. His failures lay in linking the ends and the means. Thus he was banking on Soviet popular as well as governmental confidence in the willingness of the Big Four to share and sacrifice together, yet he agreed to a long delay in the cross-channel attack. He wished to recognize the potential role of the several hundred million Chinese people but made Chungking a poor third in the allocation of military assistance, and he was unwilling to apply the political pressure that was the only conceivable way to bring about military and possibly political and economic reforms in China. He was deeply concerned about colonialism and expressed strong views to the British about India in particular, only to draw back when Anglo-American collaboration seemed threatened. Even when Churchill appealed to him in 1944 for some ships after an ammunition ship had exploded in Bombay Harbor sinking vessels loaded with 36,000 tons of grain, Roosevelt refused to divert shipping from military needs.
Roosevelt was a practical man who proceeded now boldly, now cautiously, step by step toward immediate ends. He was also a dreamer and sermonizer who spelled out lofty goals and summoned people to follow him. He was both a Soldier of the Faith, battling with his warrior comrades for an ideology of peace and freedom, and a Prince of the State, protecting the interests of his nation in a tumultuous and impious world. His difficulty lay in the relation of the two. The fact that his faith was more a set of attitudes than a firmly grounded moral code, that it embraced hope verging on utopianism and sentiment bordering on sentimentality, that it was heavily moralistic, to the point, at least in the view of some, of being hypocritical and sanctimonious—all this made his credo evocative but also soft and pasty, so that it crumbled easily under the press of harsh policy alternatives and military decision.
Roosevelt’s moral credo was a patchwork of attitudes and instincts about honor, decency, good neighborliness, noblesse oblige. It was often hard to translate these attitudes and instincts into clear directives, operative programs, specific policies. His mind rejected comprehensive plans and long-run programs. He shrank from set institutional arrangements because these tended to freeze rather than invigorate end-means relations. Trumbull Higgins has said of Roosevelt that when his “dichotomies could not be resolved by the great political magician himself, they were left to circumstance.” But Roosevelt’s lofty dreams and his parochial compromises not only collided with one another; they also inflated the importance of each other, for the higher he set his goals and the lower he pitched his practical improvisations, the more he widened the gap between the existing and the ideal and raised men’s expectations while failing to fulfill them.
Roosevelt’s views of atomic secrecy are a case in point. All his instincts were toward trusting people, toward sharing, toward fostering the community of learning. Churchill had aroused his fears and suspicions at Hyde Park about the Soviet quest for atomic information, but when members of the scientific community became less alarmed about the German threat and more alarmed about the dangers of secrecy, and when scientists brought influence to bear in the White House during the fall of 1944, the President may have drifted back toward his original instinct of putting some trust in the Russians and restricting the use of the bomb. Alexander Sachs got in to see him in December and claimed later that Roosevelt agreed that the first step should be a nonmilitary demonstration of the bomb observed by international scientists and clergymen, following which a warning would be given, specifying the time and place of an imminent nuclear attack, thus permitting civilians to escape. But he never did instruct Stimson to carry out such a plan, and he took no step toward sharing the secret with the Russians. He talked about the global brotherhood of science and the ability of all peoples to work together for peace, but between the idea and the reality, between the conception and the creation, fell the shadow.
If Roosevelt was both realist and idealist, both fixer and pre
acher, both a prince and a soldier, the reason lay not merely in his own mind and background, but also in his society and its traditions. Americans have long had both moralistic and realistic tendencies, the first strain symbolized by Wilson, the second by the tough-minded men—Washington, Monroe, the two Adamses—who directed the foreign policy of the republic in its early years. No modern American statesman could fail to reflect this dualism. If Roosevelt’s values were a bit overblown and vaporous, they were developed against a background of liberal values and internationalist impulses so widely shared and diluted as to provide little ideological support for politicians and parties. To some extent Roosevelt succumbed to the classic dilemma of the democratic leader: he must moralize and dramatize and personalize and simplify in order to lead and hold the public, but in doing so he may arouse false hopes and expectations, including his own, the deflation of which in the long run may lead to disillusionment and cynicism.
American foreign policy in particular has been shaped by two diplomacies, as Russell Bastert has argued—one diplomacy of short-run expediency and manipulation, of balance of power and sphere of interest, of compromise and adjustment, marginal choices, and limited objectives, and another diplomacy—almost an antidiplomacy—of world unity and collective security, democratic principle and moral uplift, peaceful change and nonaggression. Then, too, the institutional arrangements in Washington—the separation of decision making between the State Department and the Pentagon, and in their lines of access to the President, the absence from the White House of a staff that could integrate diplomacy and military policy, the institutional gaps in Congress among legislators specializing in military, foreign, and domestic policies, and indeed the whole tendency in Washington toward fragmented policy making—all reinforced the natural tendency of the President to compartmentalize.
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