in Europe, Asia, and Africa, there was little doubt where their sympathies lay.
Most readers of the Tuesday papers were surely gratified to read the bold head-
line: “ GERMAN ARMIES ARE REELING UNDER HAMMER BLOWS OF
BRITISH AND SOVIETS .”
On the southern front, Soviet troops continued to pursue General Paul Ludwig
von Kleist’s armies retreating from Rostov. Remnants of his armies were in danger of
being trapped by hard-charging cavalrymen pushing westward. The Soviets claimed
to have shot down 102 Nazi planes and exacted a toll of 118 German tanks, 210 field
guns, and numbers of small arms “impossible to count.” The Germans attributed
their retreat to superior Soviet numbers. German armies were also under pressure on
the Moscow front where violent attacks were repelled by Soviet defenders. 1 , 2
*
German General Johann von Ravenstein, captured by the British, summarized
the war in the Western Desert: “A paradise for a tactician but Hell for a quar-
termaster.” It was one thing upon which the adversaries could agree as the tides
of battle shifted east and west. German commander Erwin Rommel attacked
the British Tobruk-Rezegh line in an attempt to break the Twenty-First Panzer
Division out of its pocket east of the main British forces. But counterattacks were
repelled, and the Axis forces suffered another defeat when the British attacked
the Italian Ariete Division, “turning their full fire power on the rather inad-
equate armor of the Italian tanks, half of which had been lost the evening before
while the rest were in full f light northward toward the Mediterranean.” 3
There was an American presence on the desert battlefield. The New York Times
reported that tanks with which the British armies were being equipped were “the
56 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
finest tanks now in use by any army on any battlefront” as evidenced by the per-
formance of its lighter tanks that were routing heavier Nazi units. At least so it
seemed at the time. Historians would later disagree.
*
The war at sea continued, as it always does, on a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-
day-a-week basis. The Admiralty reported that the cruiser Devonshire had shelled and sunk an armed raider in the South Atlantic. In evidence of how savage the
war had become, the raider’s crew took to the ship’s boats “but were not picked
up because of the proximity of a German submarine.” 4
*
The glare of preparations for war blazed out across the Pacific. The Governor
of Singapore, Sir Shenton Thomas, declared a state of emergency, and issued a
proclamation calling out all volunteers, Army, Navy, and Air Force, for active
duty throughout Malaya. Soon guards and patrols in full war kit would be seen
at important points. The Governor pointed out that volunteers were an integral
part of the defenses of Malaya, were equipped with modern weapons, and formed
a strong fighting force. Nevertheless, the government communiqué advised that
the call-up of volunteers did not signify an immediate deterioration in the situa-
tion, but meant only that “the situation has not been clarified.” 5
Further mobilizations were ordered in the Netherlands East Indies; Premier Cur-
tin of Australia emphasized that his nation’s preparations were entirely defensive, and
that there would be no war in the Pacific unless it were to come as the result of Japa-
nese aggression. In Manila, Admiral Thomas C. Hart, Commander of the United
States Asiatic Fleet, met in secret with Lieutenant General Douglas MacArthur, U.S.
Army Chief in the Far East. Official sources declined to comment further. 6
In the face of all of these preparations, Singapore remained calm. But the feel-
ing was widespread—war was close at hand but not inevitable.
The Threat of War: The President Takes Command
The President had rallied the nation against fear itself. He had addressed the
needs of the one-third of the nation that was ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-housed.
He had reminded the nation of the Forgotten Man. He had addressed the stag-
gering woes of a great depression with a panoply of programs, agencies, and rules
that created a new balance (or imbalance) in the relationship of the public and
private spheres of activity in the nation. Yet all this was in the civil arena and
within the boundaries of the nation. He now presented himself to the American
people in a very different role. On his return from Warm Springs the President
assumed direct command of diplomatic and military moves relating to Japan. 7
While he remained the nation’s chief executive and chief magistrate, he now
donned the cloak of the Commander-in-chief. This was the predominant role he
would play through the war years and until the end of his days.
On his return to the capital, the President met in the Oval Office with Chief
of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark and with Secretary of State Hull, who
Tuesday, December 2, 1941 57
had talked for more than an hour earlier the same day with Japanese envoys
Nomura and Kurusu. Presidential advisor Harry Hopkins rose from his sickbed
at the Bethesda Naval Hospital to join the President, Hull, and Stark for lunch.
The President then met with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles who had just
conferred with British Ambassador Lord Halifax.
*
“Authoritative circles” pronounced few grounds for optimism in the pending
negotiations, warning that a Japanese move into Thailand would not be toler-
ated. This called to mind a U.S. statement of the week before that left little doubt
the country would meet, with force, any Japanese attempt to cut off the f low to
the United States of essential defense materials, such as tin and rubber. 8
The conference that day with the Japanese envoys had brought no reply to
Secretary Hull’s questions of the previous week. The Japanese envoys were por-
trayed as entering the conference that morning smiling but departing grimly.
Kurusu did say that there would be further conversations “if I am instructed to
the effect.” 9 It was widely reported that “the lights of peace flickered low in the Orient,” while Admiral Nomura told reporters that “there must be wise statesmanship to save the situation.” 10
The lights of peace flickered low. There were those who held that Japan might
yet retreat from its aggressive stance and that, in any case, the next week should tell
whether there would be war or peace. 11
There was certainly no softening in the Japanese position. Foreign Minister
Togo called the statement of American principles “fanciful, unrealistic and regret-
table.” The Japan Times Advertiser said that Japan needed to bring home to the
United States some probably unpleasant truths about the situation in East Asia:
that to apply American principles could happen only in dreamland. The news-
paper Hochi warned of American disillusionment if they thought Japan could be
intimidated into acceptance of the American proposals. In Washington, envoy
Kurusu emolliently told reporters that Prime Minister Tojo had been badly mis-
quoted in reports of his declaration that Britain and the United States must be
“purged” from the Far East.
&n
bsp; America’s Role: Confidant Estimates
Nations do not go to war expecting to lose. History is the grim record of such
miscalculations. American policy would be deeply affected, indeed made, by the
studied opinions of the military, the executive, and by that body of public opin-
ion which, in a democracy, must support them. The public heard many voices.
They were, to an extraordinary degree, positive.
Hugh G. Grant had resigned several months before as United States Minister
to Thailand. His opinion was nothing short of exuberant. “If the Japanese really
want war, now is the time to let them have it.” 12 “I believe we can smash them within a period of a few months with our superior air and naval forces.”
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox exuded confidence in a signed article in the
mass-circulation American Magazine. “The United States today has the greatest Navy
58 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
in the world. We are prepared to meet any emergency which may arise on one or on
two oceans.” “Some Naval officers” may have been over-optimistic in claiming that
the U.S. Navy could wipe out the Japanese Navy in two weeks. The more cautious
estimate of the time required was six months. Ralph T. Jones, writing in The Atlanta Constitution , offered two predictions: that although there might be fighting in the Philippines and in Thailand, the U.S. part in any war with Japan would “be almost
entirely confined to naval action.” He followed this with an equally rash prediction:
“They [the Japanese] are pitifully vulnerable to attack from the air and if our Navy
can’t smash the Japanese Navy we have been woefully misled.” 13
There were those who were respectful of Japanese air power; to underestimate
it, commentators said, would be a mistake. If Japanese bombers had betrayed
notoriously poor aim at the start of the “China incident,” knowledgeable crit-
ics believed that there had since been a vast improvement. One who for several
years had manufactured planes in China for Chiang Kai-shek opined that the
workmanship and performance of Japanese planes would compare favorably with
American planes.
But there were others who took a sharply divergent viewpoint that surely had
a racial tinge. Lucien Zaharoff was a popular writer on aviation topics. He pre-
dicted: “Japan would crumble like a house of cards if engaged in a great air war.”
American Army officers writing in The Army and Navy Journal in 1937 concluded
that the Japanese had “a marked inaptitude” for aviation, added to which they
were poor marksmen. In a report that may have seemed incredible to newspaper
readers in December 1941, Lynn C. Thomas writing in the magazine Western
Flying reported that the Japanese Air Force suffered from a “suicide psychosis”
in which they would deliberately dive their bomb-laden planes into their targets.
Japan’s war in China had started several years before December 1941. Foreign
military experts in Shanghai had been quoted then as saying that one hundred good
American bombers and fifty American pursuit planes were capable of annihilating
the Japanese Air Force in the Shanghai and Nanking areas within a week. 14
America’s Role: A Clash of Opinions
There was a substantial body of American opinion that did not rise to salute the
Commander-in-chief, but remained deeply suspicious of where he was leading
them. A bordered box in the Chicago Tribune bore this message:
F. D. R. AND
AMERICAN YOUTH
On January 3, 1940, in his annual message to congress President Roosevelt said:
“I can understand the feelings of those who warn the nation that they will
never again consent to the sending of American youth to fight on the soil
of Europe. But, as I remember, nobody has asked them to consent—for
nobody expects such an undertaking.” 15
Tuesday, December 2, 1941 59
Only the day before, the America First Committee had announced that it
would play an active role in the 1942 primary and general elections. It would
mobilize all those who opposed further steps to involve the country in war. It
was necessary, the Committee said, because of the President’s efforts to deny the
American people any voice in the gravest issues that had ever confronted the
nation. Fascism, the Committee darkly observed, results when other branches of
government surrender to one man the power to make decisions for the whole
people. 16
The opponents of the President’s policies were by no means a fringe ele-
ment. In the recently published book We Testify , “A must book for every thinking American!,” they labeled themselves not as isolationists but as noninterventionists. Contributors to the book included former President Herbert Hoover, whose
accomplishments in international humanitarian crises had led him to the Cabinet
and to the Presidency; Robert Maynard Hutchins, sometime enfant terrible Dean of the Yale Law School and now President of the University of Chicago; the eminent
divine Harry Emerson Fosdick and, inevitably, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh
and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Other contributors were General Robert
Wood of Sears Roebuck, aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky, and from the political
sphere, Senators Burton Wheeler of Montana, Elbert Thomas of Utah, and Robert
A. Taft of Ohio.
Agree or not, said an advertisement for the book, Americans needed to know
what “anti-war” speakers had said and why they had said it and why their conclu-
sions had proved to be “appallingly accurate.”
Arriving firmly at quite opposite conclusions, Walter Lippmann feared that
the object of Japanese diplomacy was to drive a wedge between the United States
and China, resulting in a Far Eastern Munich in which China would be granted
some temporary relief against permanent Japanese overlordship, based on the sup-
ply of critical American war materials to Japan. There could be a general peace,
he thought, only if the Japanese became convinced of America’s overwhelmingly
superior armed force. As contrasted to a general peace, a New Order in Asia,
subjecting its vast populations to Japanese hegemony, would only set the stage for
the nightmare of two generations, the conflict between East and West, the war
between yellow people and whites.
Lippmann was eloquent in his conclusions:
So we cannot retreat. The elementary dictates of prudence forbid it.
Honor, which among nations is force without violence, prevents it.
Duty, which is our obligation to those who come after us, compels us to
say that we shall not deliver those who come after us to a mortal conf lict
between East and West. 17
Lippmann spoke of principles. The Chicago Tribune saw the crisis as grounded
in material interests. The “old time adventurers,” the British, the Dutch, and the
French, had exploited the populations of Asia. The real material interests in the
conflict, it opined, were represented in London and in Tokyo. Imperialism was, in
60 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
fact, inimical to American principles. Always content to accuse Britain of hypoc-
risy, the Tribune quoted Churchill as saying that the Atlantic Charter of Freedom did not run in the Far East. In essence, America was doing the talking and might
; well find itself doing the fighting. 18
Looming over this conflict of views and visions there were those who came to
an ominous conclusion:
There can be no misinterpretation of the numerous indications that affairs
between this country and Japan have reached a crisis so critical that the
two countries may be formally at war before many days have passed. 19
America’s Role: Political Wars
The President had served for two full terms and was embarked upon an unprec-
edented third term. No administration had ever done more to change the power
relationships between the citizen and his federal government. One government
program emblematic of the New Deal was the Rural Electrification Adminis-
tration (REA), charged with bringing electricity to the nation’s farms, ranches,
and rural areas. It was not unexpected that foes of the administration’s foreign
policy would also raise fierce opposition to many of its domestic initiatives.
Thus, asserting that the administration was leading the country into an unde-
clared war, Representative Winter of Texas also levied charges against the REA.
FIGURE 6.1 President Roosevelt and Fala.
Courtesy of National Archives, photo 678526 from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library collection.
Tuesday, December 2, 1941 61
“Communists” and “fellow travelers” in the REA were hoarding copper wire
in Texas cotton fields that, due to its size, could be used only in high-voltage
transmission lines and would never serve a single rural home or barn. He further
alleged that the OPM was allocating copper only to publicly owned transmis-
sion lines, denying copper to private companies for their private customers. In
essence, he said, the REA was a dog in the manger, “teeming with communists,
fellow travelers and bureaucrats who put political theory above the safety of their
country.” Moving on to specifics, Representative Winter offered the information
that no less than thirty-four “communists” and “fellow travelers” in the REA
were earning a grand total in salaries of $115,720 per year. 20
*
A similar theme was propounded by the president of the Investment Bank-
ers Association, who told members assembled for its annual meeting that the
Crucible of a Generation Page 10
