by Lynne Olson
For almost three months, Wedemeyer and his small staff worked virtually around the clock on their gigantic task. They sifted through a multitude of priorities and requirements, including the smallest details involving training, equipment, armaments, ships, planes, trucks, and thousands of other items needed for defense. The result was a stunningly prescient analysis that ended up serving as the basic blueprint for U.S. military planning and mobilization throughout the war. Years later, Robert Sherwood would call the Victory Program “one of the most remarkable documents of American history, for it set down the basic strategy of a global war before this country was involved in it.”
In the study, Wedemeyer and his team declared that Britain was not capable of defeating Germany on its own and that if the Axis were to be beaten, the United States would have to enter the war. Once it did, its first major objective must be the “complete military defeat of Germany … while holding Japan in check pending future developments.” Noting that “by themselves, naval and air forces seldom if ever win important wars,” the authors of the Victory Program made it clear that vanquishing Germany and Japan would require a massive U.S. land force. The date that Chesly Manly claimed was fixed for the start of a U.S. invasion of Europe—July 1, 1943—was actually the first date on which, according to Wedemeyer’s estimates, America would be fully prepared for action.
The Victory Program study served as a rude wake-up call for the country’s lackadaisical mobilization program. It estimated that defense production would have to double, at a cost of at least $150 billion, to meet the needs of the United States and its Lend-Lease partners. “Ultimate victory over the Axis powers,” the analysis observed, “will place a demand upon industry few have yet conceived.”
Thanks to the Victory Program, the White House and the rest of the administration were finally confronted with the stark reality that business as usual was no longer an option. In the words of Donald Nelson, a key defense mobilization official, the plan “revolutionized our production and may well have been a decisive turning point.”
In mid-September, copies of the lengthy top-secret report were handed out to Stimson, Knox, Marshall, Stark, and a few other top officials, all of whom understood they were to disclose the contents to no one. On September 25, Stimson hand-delivered a copy to the president. After hearing a summary of the program, FDR indicated disagreement with one of its conclusions. “He was afraid of any assumption of the position that we must invade … and crush Germany,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “He thought that would [lead to] a very bad reaction.” The war secretary replied that he believed U.S. entry into the war “would help production very much and would help the psychology of the people.” On that point, Stimson noted, the president “fully agreed.”
Yet Roosevelt never formally signed off on the plan. He apparently still clung to the hope that the United States might be able to participate in the war without having to send an army to Europe. Indeed, at about the time he received the Victory Program report, he suggested to Stimson and Marshall that the size of the army actually be cut in order to help pay for more resources for Britain and Russia.
Nonetheless, the president did send to Capitol Hill a request for $8 billion in additional military appropriations to push defense production into high gear. Congress had just begun considering the legislation when the Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald dropped their Victory Program bombshell.
WHILE WEDEMEYER AND HIS team were working on their report in the late summer and early fall of 1941, Robert McCormick was trying to figure out a way to ruin the debut of a new morning newspaper in Chicago, created specifically as an interventionist rival to the Tribune.
The Chicago Sun was the brainchild of Marshall Field III, a grandson and heir of the department store magnate Marshall Field. The year before, Field had bankrolled the launching of PM, the interventionist New York daily. Now he wanted to replicate the feat in his family’s hometown.
Field was encouraged in the effort by two of McCormick’s fiercest enemies: the president of the United States and Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who owned Chicago’s main afternoon paper, the Daily News. Knox, who leased the top three floors of the Daily News building to Field and allowed him to use his paper’s presses, boasted to members of the Chicago Club: “Well, we have got the Tribune fixed now. Marshall Field is going to start a morning paper with the backing of everyone from the President down.” According to the London Daily Mail, the founding of the Sun represented “the last great drive to torpedo isolationism” in America.
Members of the Chicago chapter of Fight for Freedom distributed buttons emblazoned with the slogan “Chicago Needs a Morning Newspaper,” along with leaflets showing a swastika atop the Tribune building and reading “Billions for defense, but not 2 cents for the Tribune.” An anti-Tribune rally on South Michigan Avenue turned into a raucous street brawl, with McCormick opponents smashing Tribune vending boxes and setting copies of the paper afire.
McCormick, for his part, was determined to do everything he could to spoil the Sun’s first day and take vengeance on FDR and Knox. Months before the paper’s December 4 launch date, the Tribune publisher ordered his managing editor and Washington bureau to find a scoop sensational enough to take attention away from the Sun’s birth.
Chesly Manly, the correspondent who came up with the story, was a diehard conservative who believed that the Roosevelt administration was riddled with “Godless Communists.” On Capitol Hill, Manly’s best sources were lawmakers, many of them isolationists, who were as implacably opposed as he was to the president and his policies. When Manly produced his account of the Victory Program, leaked by an anonymous source, red flags went up in the Tribune hierarchy. Managing editor J. Loy Maloney was troubled by the idea of revealing vital, highly sensitive military secrets that clearly would be of great value to potential enemies of the United States. Sharing Maloney’s concern was Walter Trohan, the Tribune’s White House correspondent. Although anti–New Deal himself, Trohan believed that Manly was deliberately deceiving his readers by referring to the Victory Program, clearly a contingency plan, as a cast-in-iron program for war.
His underlings’ doubts, however, had no impact on the jubilant McCormick, who called the Victory Program leak “the greatest scoop in history.” The story not only completely overshadowed the Sun’s debut, as he had hoped, it also, in his view, dealt a potentially devastating blow to the credibility and prestige of Roosevelt and his administration.
On December 5, a front-page Times-Herald headline blared: WAR PLAN EXPOSÉ ROCKS CAPITAL, PERILS ARMY APPROPRIATION BILL; CONGRESS IN UPROAR. In the Senate, Burton Wheeler declared that the story proved what he and other isolationists had been saying all along—that the president was trying to trick the country into war and that his promises to keep the country out of the conflict were nothing but lies. The Montana Democrat said he would introduce a resolution calling for an investigation into the origins of the secret plan.
Ruth Sarles, the Washington director of America First, wrote to a colleague that although the Victory Program was clearly “the sort of plan any War Department would have ready if it were on their toes,” nonetheless “we can take advantage of this break if we make it stick.… If Senator Wheeler introduces a resolution of inquiry … as he has said he would do, we ought to give it tremendous support.”
Stimson and Knox, meanwhile, insisted that McCormick and other Tribune and Times-Herald executives should be prosecuted and punished, along with the still unknown government leaker or leakers. “Nothing more unpatriotic or damaging to our plans for defense could very well be conceived of,” Stimson fumed. He told War Department associates that every effort must be made to “get rid of this infernal disloyalty which we now have working in America First and in these McCormick family papers.” At a December 4 cabinet meeting, Attorney General Francis Biddle said he believed the newspaper executives could be indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917.
Initially, the president approved the idea of pro
secuting McCormick and others, but he soon had second thoughts, instructing his press secretary, Steve Early, to release a statement declaring that the administration would not challenge the right of newspapers “to print the news,” no matter how inaccurate it might be. FDR did, however, authorize investigations by the FBI and Army into the source of the leak.
Tribune reporters and editors were questioned, and their home and office phones were tapped. Walter Trohan asked a Washington police lieutenant, who was a friend of his, to check his home phone for monitoring devices. After doing so, the lieutenant told Trohan that he “had never seen such a setup, that I had taps on taps.” According to the Tribune correspondent, his phone conversations were being recorded by the FBI, Army and Navy intelligence, and even, somehow, the Anti-Defamation League. For all their digging into Tribune affairs, however, FBI investigators failed to turn up the leak’s origins. Despite vigorous questioning, Chesly Manly refused to divulge any information about how he acquired the government report.
Unsurprisingly, given his well-known isolationist leanings, the main suspect in the case was Albert Wedemeyer, the Victory Program’s architect. When Wedemeyer arrived at the War Plans Division office early on the morning of December 4, all conversation abruptly stopped. His secretary, who clearly had been crying, handed him a copy of the Times-Herald. He knew he was in deep trouble as soon as he saw the front-page headline. “I could not have been more appalled and astounded if a bomb had been dropped on Washington,” he later recalled.
The strikes against Wedemeyer were many: his intense opposition to U.S. involvement in the war; his intimate knowledge of the secret plan; his training in Germany; his marriage to the daughter of another noted isolationist, General Stanley Embick; and his close relationships with Truman Smith, America First, and Charles Lindbergh, whom he had first met during one of the aviator’s trips to Germany. Stimson received an anonymous letter accusing both Wedemeyer and his father-in-law of being the guilty parties. Several of Wedemeyer’s Army colleagues told FBI investigators that they believed he was the leaker. The FBI, said Wedemeyer, “descended upon me like vultures upon a prostrate antelope.”
In its report on Wedemeyer, the FBI noted: “He is reported to be most pro-German in his feelings, his utterances, and his sympathies.… He engaged in rather heated discussions with fellow officers at the War Department concerning his lack of sympathy with the Administration’s international program.… He personally traveled through Germany with Colonel Lindbergh. He has entertained Lindbergh in Washington and has been entertained by Lindbergh.” The report added that Wedemeyer had taken four days’ leave in September 1941 to attend an America First event in New York at which Lindbergh spoke.
Wedemeyer did not deny any of that. He acknowledged his closeness to Lindbergh: “I respect him and agree with many of his ideas concerning our entrance into the war.” He also said he agreed with many of America First’s views and had often attended meetings of the group, although never in uniform. Nonetheless his FBI questioners were unable to find anything that directly tied the leak to Wedemeyer, who stoutly proclaimed his innocence. Later, the FBI publicly exonerated him.
Hiding in plain sight, meanwhile, was the middleman who had been given a copy of the Victory Program and passed it along to Manly—none other than Burton Wheeler, who had indignantly called for an investigation on the floor of the Senate. No one implicated him at the time, and it was not until he published his autobiography in 1962 that Wheeler himself disclosed he had been the intermediary.
According to the senator, the report had been handed to him by the same Army Air Forces captain who had been passing him confidential information for more than a year.* During the Lend-Lease debate in early 1941, the captain had given Wheeler statistics showing that the country’s air force was still seriously lacking in modern aircraft—information that Wheeler used in a speech to protest Roosevelt’s plan to hand over planes and other armaments to Britain. In September 1941, the captain told Wheeler that the armed forces, at Roosevelt’s behest, had drawn up a master plan for a “gigantic American Expeditionary Force.” When the senator asked to see the plan, the captain said he would see what he could do.
Less than two months later, he appeared at Wheeler’s house with a “document as thick as an average novel, wrapped in brown paper and labeled ‘Victory Program.’ ” When Wheeler asked him if he was afraid of “delivering the most closely guarded secret in Washington” to a senator, the officer replied: “Congress is a branch of government. I think it has a right to know what’s really going on in the executive branch when it concerns human lives.”
Wheeler, who had been one of Chesly Manly’s key sources for years, invited the Chicago Tribune reporter to his home, where the two men skimmed the report, marked the most important sections, and had them copied in shorthand by one of Wheeler’s secretaries. Late that night, Wheeler gave the document back to the captain so he could return it to the War Department early the next morning.
The Montana senator rationalized his unauthorized disclosure of military secrets by claiming that the public had a right to know “what was in store for them if we entered the war—and the fact that we probably would.” But if he felt so strongly about sharing the information, why didn’t he do so on the floor of the Senate, rather than turning it over to a reporter? In his autobiography, Wheeler claimed he had considered giving the report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but had decided against it because he feared the interventionists on the committee would bury it.
It was a weak excuse. Wheeler clearly had no intention of taking responsibility for his actions, and neither did the high military officer who was behind the leak. According to Wheeler, Walter Trohan, and FBI officials, that officer was General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces.
In his book, Wheeler did not name Arnold—or anyone else—as the leaker. But he did tell Wedemeyer after the war that the Air Forces chief had “made available” the study to him through “one of his boys low down.” According to Wedemeyer, the senator added that Arnold “did not approve of this business of going to war until he had raised an Air Force, and he would do all he could to retard it.”
Arnold already had developed a reputation as a skilled leaker—“second only to Roosevelt,” Walter Trohan said—and an adept bureaucratic infighter. Earlier in his career, he had repeatedly rebelled against superiors’ actions and decisions; after one such revolt, he was exiled to Panama for a time. In March 1940, FDR threatened to send him to Guam if he did not stop his rearguard actions.
The Air Forces chief lowered his profile after his confrontation with Roosevelt but continued his impassioned lobbying for more and better aircraft. He was particularly opposed to the Lend-Lease program, accusing its creators of leaving the Air Forces’ cupboard bare and making clear he was against going to war until that cupboard was fully stocked. In the fall of 1941, he pointed out that only two bomber squadrons and three fighter groups were ready for combat.
According to several accounts, Arnold and others in his service were also incensed by what they viewed as the failure of the War Department to recognize the vital role of airpower, citing as an example the Victory Program’s alleged shortchanging of the Air Forces in its suggested allocation of resources.
The Air Forces brass vigorously opposed the report’s emphasis on a large ground army and objected to what they considered an overly generous allocation of funds to the Navy for building more destroyers, aircraft carriers, submarines, and other vessels. “There was a strong conflict right away,” Wedemeyer acknowledged, “not only as to the industrial side, but also as to the strategic implications. The Navy was going to usurp a lot of the missions.” Echoing that view, Stimson noted after the war that the Navy’s “whole effort was to … put everything of ours [i.e., the Army and Air Forces] behind everything of theirs.” To stop that, Wedemeyer said, Arnold “would fight, and he would fight well.” By leaking the report, he would take his case to Congress and the American pe
ople, hoping to halt the Victory Program—and the kind of war it proposed—in their tracks.
Officially, the case remained unsolved. But in 1963, Frank Waldrop, who had been the managing editor of the Washington Times-Herald at the time of the leak, said he had been told by a top FBI official after the war that his agency had uncovered the guilty party in ten days. According to Waldrop, the official—Louis Nichols, an assistant director of the bureau—described the culprit as “a general of high renown and invaluable importance to the war,” whose motive was to reveal the plan’s “deficiencies in regard to air power.” In a later interview with the historian Thomas Fleming, Waldrop quoted Nichols as saying, “When we got to Arnold, we quit.”
Throughout the years, there has been speculation on the part of Fleming and others that the president himself leaked the Victory Program to goad Hitler into declaring war on the United States. Those espousing that view have stressed that FDR seemed loath to pursue the culprit and that, if in fact it was Arnold, the president and Marshall took no action against him. Yet even without Burton Wheeler’s and Louis Nichols’s identification of Arnold as the guilty party, the scenario of FDR as leaker seems highly improbable. At the time, Japan was clearly on the verge of entering the war, and the idea that the president, so cautious in the past, would suddenly encourage a two-front conflict is far-fetched. In the words of Frank Waldrop, it was hard to believe that Roosevelt would have “thrown gasoline on a fire.”
It is also important to note that the FBI’s identification of Arnold was reportedly made just a few days after the United States entered the war. For the administration, creating a sense of national unity was the paramount goal. If that meant covering up an act by the chief of the Air Forces that many saw as unpatriotic and disloyal, then so be it.
ON DECEMBER 5, THE day after Chesly Manly’s story appeared, Roosevelt was handed an intercepted message from the Japanese government to their embassy in Washington. After reading the belligerent dispatch, which had been deciphered by U.S. codebreakers, the president soberly remarked, “This means war.”
