Threshold of War

by Heinrichs, Waldo;

  Washington, suffering from heavy March snows, bitter cold, and “howling” winds, heard these rumblings of coming blitzkrieg in the Balkans with the deepest foreboding. The European situation, wrote Assistant Secretary of State Adolf A. Berle, Jr., was “thick and … getting infinitely thicker by the minute.” The lightning campaigns of 1939 and 1940 had created such an aura of frightening power and efficiency surrounding the German war machine that the coming “eruption of violence” in the Balkans seemed only a prelude to further stunning conquests. “Practically everyone in Europe seems to think he is next on Hitler’s list,” Berle observed. Americans sensed a great historical juncture with vast forces gearing for “hideous” struggle and events unrolling too “horrible” to watch. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson warned a select group of correspondents that the United States was “in great world-wide peril.”3

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just turned sixty. Entering his third term, he was the longest-serving president in American history. His hair was thinning and turning white, and the burdens of the 1940 election and constant world crisis were leaving their mark. More than usual in the spring of 1941 he was ill in bed. Yet a fishing trip to Florida or the Caribbean or even a long weekend at Hyde Park seemed to restore his health and spirits. Roosevelt was at a peak of skill and experience while retaining his buoyancy and strength.

  On March 8, 1941, the Senate passed Lend-Lease by vote of 60 to 31. Three days later the House of Representatives concurred, and the bill went to the White House for signature. The “great debate” was over, and the American people had chosen by decisive margins to intervene in the war at least to the point of supplying aid to Britain. Throughout the two-month Lend-Lease debate and indeed back through the presidential campaign in the latter part of 1940, Roosevelt had been severely circumscribed by politics in dealing with burgeoning threats abroad. He had to gain a mandate for his leadership and his party’s and in Lend-Lease secure the foundation of British resistance and American rearmament before risking new military or diplomatic initiatives. Now at last he had some elbow room.

  He could not move too fast or too far, however. The nation was not ready for war as a matter of choice. Public opinion, as Roosevelt probably saw it, was touchy. It was moving in the right direction, passing the marker buoy of aid to Britain even at the risk of war. But a declaration of war was not even in sight. Decisive executive action might slow or shift it. Isolationism as it weakened became more bitter and vindictive. It would revive with attacks on Roosevelt as warmonger and dictator. The result would be division and disunity when national consolidation was essential. He must avoid being the issue. He needed to dispel complacency, but opinion could not be forced: it must flow from the facts of international life themselves, from the very real menaces. It required education, subtle reinforcement, nurturing—in short, time.

  Time was desperately needed to retool for war as well. The economy was still only in the first stages of transformation. War orders were reviving it. Consumer demand was rising; cars were selling. Profitable at last, business resisted conversion. As profits and the cost of living rose so did labor’s demand for its share. The spring of 1941 was a time of labor strife. Violence occurred at the Ford River Rouge plant, Bethlehem Steel, and International Harvester, and in Harlan County, Kentucky. By April the strike at Allis-Chalmers, a key machinery manufacturer, was entering its third month. For major constituencies of the Democratic party, the New Deal was at stake as the Roosevelt administration moved from reform to rearmament, from partisanship to consensus, and as Republicans began filtering back into Washington to supervise war production. Changes in the American economy produced division enough for the president.

  The establishment of a war economy had its own dynamics, as Roosevelt knew from World War I. The theoretical sequence was simple enough: first allocation of resources, then building plant and obtaining machine tools and manpower, and finally switching on the assembly line. Setting up priorities and sequences for the economy as a whole was a different matter. First one needed timber, girders, cement, riggers, masons, and skilled machinists. Bringing together the components of new factories at the right time and place was itself impossible in 1941; delay was inevitable. The steel industry was reaching full capacity. Plant construction, ship hulls, and tank production would have to vie with each other for a limited output until steel could build new plants itself. Keeping the completely different aircraft-engine and air-frame industries in tandem so that one did not wait upon the other was another headache, to say nothing of propellers, generators, ammunition, and radios. Manpower problems were always acute. Should industry and the armed services maintain existing units—factories, warships, infantry divisions—because of their present efficiency or withdraw cadres of skilled personnel to form new units, thereby multiplying size?

  These immediate questions raised larger ones. At what point in time was this national effort aiming? Should the nation ready itself for war immediately, sacrificing time-consuming armaments like battleships, or for the longer pull? What kind of war would be waged with what arms and what enemies? Defending the Western Hemisphere or invading Europe? Germany alone or the Axis? America alone or with allies, and which allies? These questions were impossible to answer in any satisfactory way in the spring of 1941.4

  Roosevelt went about these problems with his distinctive decision-making style. Never given to formal bureaucratic ways, he dealt with officials in terms of competence and function rather than hierarchical position, as well as the relative importance of a particular policy domain and his interest in it. Thus, as usual, his involvement varied widely across the policy spectrum.

  His closest involvement was in regulating, as commander in chief, the strength, dispositions, and rules of engagement of the United States Atlantic Fleet. Of course naval affairs had always aroused Roosevelt’s keenest interest. Over the mantelpiece in the Oval Study hung a painting of the four-stack destroyer Dyer on which he had traveled to Europe as assistant secretary of the navy in World War I. This was the same type of destroyer exchanged for bases with the British in 1940, the same that still in March 1941 composed most of the destroyer force of the Atlantic Fleet. According to the flag lieutenant to Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations, the president would phone frequently to say, “Betty {Stark’s nickname from Naval Academy days}, I want this done right away,” and then rattle off a list of five or six assignments. The White House maintained a direct wire to the navy’s Ship Movements Division to keep track of vessels on neutrality patrol in 1939–40. The president rarely saw Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox alone. He not only dealt directly with Admiral Stark, his vice-chief of operations, and his war plans director, but also individually with the dour and driving commander-in-chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King, Not just a passion for seafaring encouraged his intervention in Atlantic problems, but U-boats and the risk of war as well.5

  In dealing with the army, Roosevelt developed a different method. He usually did not see the uniformed head of the army, General George C. Marshall, except in company with Stimson and others. He meant no disrespect, for the good judgment and forthrightness of this austere soldier were winning admiration in the administration and Congress. More likely, Roosevelt was operating the way Stimson preferred, through the secretary of war rather than around him. Stimson the president did see alone, and not just on army and war production business. The secretary of war, age seventy-three, had served in the cabinets of Presidents William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover. As secretary of state during the Manchurian crisis he had tried his best to mobilize public opinion and Anglo-American resistance to Japanese expansion. Now, assuming the role of senior statesman and high policy adviser to the president, he lost no opportunity of vigorously urging intervention in the European war.

  The two men were a study in contrasting styles of national security management. To Stimson, who believed in orderly, hierarchical patterns, Roosevelt’s informal, ad hoc practices were a constant source of desp
air. “It literally is government on the jump,” he complained. The one had the rational, analytical, argumentative mind of a successful trial lawyer, the other the well-guarded intuitive faculties of a consummate politician. Stimson at first found conversation with the president “like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around a vacant room.” The orderly secretary was ardent for action, the improvising president persistently wary and cautious. However, they shared the same patrician background, the same vision of an orderly, peaceful world so powerfully articulated by Woodrow Wilson, and the same respect for the reality of national power and the art of its use. Somewhat reluctantly Stimson came to admire certain qualities of mind in his chief, the “wonderful memory,” for example, and the “penetrative shrewdness.” As confidence if not easy agreement built between the two, Stimson became one of the very few to get a glimpse of Roosevelt’s inner thinking on policy. A long talk on strategy in January provided him an “almost thrilling evening.”6

  The British-American relationship was a decision-making universe in itself. At the heart of it was Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s most zealous and trusted New Deal lieutenants, whose frail health and incisive mind were now totally at the service of the president. During his trip to London the past January, Hopkins had cultivated closer ties between Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and by March the two were exchanging messages briskly, Churchill usually seeking and Roosevelt occasionally providing. Supplementing the principals were the ambassadors, John G. Winant in London providing key reports on the mood and unspoken needs of the Churchill government, and Lord Halifax in Washington sending what the president preferred to convey orally, informally, and outside American channels. These formed only the tip of the iceberg, however. Anglo-American collaboration was becoming an unprecedented trans-national enterprise. Hopkins would now expedite Lend-Lease from the White House assisted by his aide Averell Harriman in London. Every agency seemed to require liaison. Dozens of purchasing missions, special observers, communications experts, and military delegations crossed the Atlantic both ways. As the historian of the relationship put it, “The cords that bound the two countries were becoming thicker, more tangled and more secure.”7

  In most policy areas Roosevelt preferred not to involve himself personally. American-Soviet relations, for example, were exceedingly cold on account of Nazi-Soviet ties and the Russian war on Finland. Even so, the president and Secretary of State Cordell Hull considered it prudent to keep the way open for improving relations, so Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles had been engaged in a series of fruitless discussions with the Soviet ambassador, Constantin Oumansky, since mid-1940. The haughty Welles, a family friend and close adviser of Roosevelt, was the perfect foil for the surly Russian.

  Roosevelt stayed aloof from the Chinese too, but for different reasons. He gave them every encouragement in their lonely war with the Japanese but very little material aid. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his agents in Washington pestered officials for more. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and White House adviser Lauchlin Currie represented their views to the president, but the Chinese were rarely allowed to approach the throne themselves.

  Relations with Japan most closely approximated the bureaucratic paradigm. Roosevelt was happy to leave the difficult and dangerous problems with Japan in the hands of the secretary of state and his Far Eastern experts. He put his finger in the pie occasionally but he knew that the wily and cautious Hull, the very essence of rectitude in international conduct, would neither provoke nor condone Japan but keep relations in satisfactory suspense. The constraints on Japanese conduct, however, military deterrence and trade restrictions, were not in Hull’s hands.

  All the threads of policy led ultimately to the White House. By this flexible and eclectic system Roosevelt could oversee or intervene depending on the issue. Only three trusted advisers — Stimson, Hopkins, and Welles—secured both ready access and some appreciation of the president’s thinking and outlook. Morgenthau remained a close friend and retained influence on economic and financial questions but drifted out of the mainstream of decision-making as military issues became more prominent. Hull had ready access but little empathy. Frequently now the president called together at the White House the two service secretaries, Knox and Stimson, and the two uniformed heads of the services, Stark and Marshall, as well as Hull and Hopkins. This group, which Stimson called the War Council and which resembled the Defense Committee of the British War Cabinet, was as close as Roosevelt came at this stage to institutionalized decision-making in national security affairs.

  In his estimate of German intentions for 1941 President Roosevelt depended on a chaotic supply of intelligence. Alongside American military and diplomatic reports, occasionally brilliant, usually sketchy because of wartime restrictions, and too often mediocre, a mélange of rumor, desultory fact, and limp estimate, were the tantalizing secrets of MAGIC, the closely guarded American process of decrypting Japanese diplomatic messages. However, what was valuable in the intercepts was difficult to isolate from a mass of irrelevant data that strained available reading time. No digest was provided; no copying was permitted. Use of this raw intelligence, as one authority has said, “had to be impressionistic.”8

  In 1941 the United States government had only a meager ability to coordinate and effectively evaluate the rising tide of information from abroad. President Roosevelt was keenly interested in improvement. He authorized a separate agency for intelligence in June 1941, but it needed time to establish itself and contributed little that year. Change came slowly or not at all: both the president and Stimson wished to replace the army’s chief of military intelligence, Brigadier General Sherman Miles, but he hung on past Pearl Harbor.9

  Roosevelt soaked up facts, taking particular interest in reports of German and Japanese war resources and American production figures. A steady flow of letters from friends abroad and American diplomats who knew him personally, such as Lincoln MacVeagh in Athens, William Phillips in Rome, and Joseph Grew in Tokyo, provided mood and context. A special delight must have been one from the former French ambassador in Washington and poet, Paul Claudel, forwarded by Claudel’s son. The distinguished old man wrote of the Italian attack on Greece in 1940: “Every evening at the radio we give ourselves the pleasure of listening to the Italian commentators explaining in a sorrowful, encouraging, and consoling voice the daily defeat.” The president read MAGIC or heard the gist of it from regular briefings by army and navy intelligence officers, usually in the late afternoon after callers. Probably a great deal of what he learned came from talk with his advisers and from voracious reading of newspapers at breakfast. It may not be far from the truth to say that page one of the New York Times, assigning relative weights to stories by position and multi-column headlines, framed his view of the day’s foreign affairs.10

  The most prized American source of intelligence about Hitler’s intentions was a German who remained anonymous but who in all probability was Dr. Erwin Respondek, a former civil servant in the finance ministry, Catholic Center party member of the Reichstag, supporter of former Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, professor of economics and consultant to I. G. Farben and other German corporations. This very brave anti-Nazi retained highly placed connections in the Nazi party, the Reichsbank, and the army high command. He was in touch with the former crown prince of Saxony who was now a Catholic monk, who in turn was a friend of General Franz Halder, chief of the German General Staff. Respondek’s American contact was Sam E. Woods, commercial attaché of the American embassy in Berlin, a genial southerner with a breezy disregard of diplomatic conventions.11

  Respondek would reserve side-by-side seats at a movie theater and in the dark slip his reports into Woods’ pocket. Woods forwarded these first through the American military attaché in Berlin in January 1941 and then by diplomatic pouch to an administrative official in the Department of State who brought them to the attention of Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Brüning, at the time a professor
at Harvard, authenticated the source. Examination of the typewriting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation established that the author of these and earlier reports possessed by Brüning was the same person. The Department of State was satisfied that it was not the victim of a “plant.”

  Respondek’s reports dealt with a wide variety of problems facing Germany: raw material stocks, manpower, food, finance, and morale. Those of January 3 and February 19 conveyed information about strategic plans. Both stated that Germany had two objectives in 1941: the invasion of England and the conquest of the Soviet Union. The January report stated that Britain would come first in the spring, followed by the Soviet Union in the summer. The date of the attack on England would depend on the weather and the amount of American arms assistance, especially airplanes, Britain had received. The earlier the invasion, the better Germany’s opportunity.

  According to Respondek the German high command anticipated a short, decisive campaign against Russia, using “motorized attack divisions” in three main concentrations: one in the north, including Norway, East Prussia, and north Poland, to contain Soviet forces in the Baltic region; a second in the center attacking eastwards through Kiev to Kharkov; and a third, the main thrust, in the south aimed at Odessa and Rostov in the Caucasus. Arrangements would be made for Japanese forces to contain Soviet armies in the Far East. The information was second-hand, simply a stark outline of “massed possibilities” without documentation. It fitted no particular plan under consideration, least of all the final directive for BARBAROSSA of December 18, 1940, with its concentration in the center toward Moscow. The report was a hazy reflection of the uncertainty over priorities and debate over strategy for the Russian campaign preoccupying the General Staff during the latter part of 1940.