The Chairman

by Kai Bird

But such appeals for calm on the editorial page were contradicted by the tenor of the newspaper’s reporting, which focused on the possibility of imminent Japanese raids up and down the West Coast. Such reports merely underscored the general public’s instinctive explanation for the astonishing Japanese successes; few could believe that the enemy was not operating without the assistance of an elaborate network of spies. Even the most skeptical military minds believed for a time that a Japanese invasion of the West Coast was possible, if unlikely.117

  With Germany’s formal declaration of war on the United States, McCloy and other officials debated whether the country’s resources should be concentrated against Japan or Germany. Public opinion was certainly inclined toward defeating the Japanese first and then turning on Germany. Winston Churchill naturally opposed this course, and in order to thwart an “Asia-first” strategy, he wired Roosevelt immediately after Pearl Harbor to say that he intended to visit Washington to review “the whole war plan.”118

  During the next few days, McCloy met frequently with Stimson, Lovett, and Harvey Bundy to discuss preparations for the president’s conference with Churchill. McCloy opened their deliberations by handing Stimson a draft of the overall “strategic situation.”119 This was basically a revised version of the “Victory Plan” McCloy, Wedemeyer, and others had written in the months prior to Pearl Harbor. McCloy’s latest draft accepted what he called the “grand strategy of the war—the defeat of Germany first.” But he startled Stimson by arguing that German forces should first be engaged in North Africa and the Middle East. Both Stimson and Marshall disagreed vehemently, believing it essential that a “second front” be opened in Europe as soon as possible by means of a cross-Channel invasion of northern France.

  McCloy argued that North Africa—and, indeed, the entire Middle East—constituted a “gravity center” from which Russia could be supplied. “Above all,” he wrote, “the loss of this area would give Hitler oil—the thing he needs most and must have in order to prevail. It must constantly be borne in mind that the greatest oil deposits of the world are in this area.” Denying Hitler access to Middle Eastern oil was the key to Germany’s defeat. “The line North Africa-Iraq-Iran must be held. . . . With it held firmly in Allied hands, Hitler is confined to his European conquests, which from the point of view of the real fruits of victory are very slight.” He correctly pointed out that up to this point the Soviet Army had successfully denied Hitler access to the oil fields of the Caucasus. As a result, he warned, Hitler would “seek it [oil] a different way soon.”

  He explicitly warned against “over-defending” other war sectors, including the North Atlantic “life line to Britain,” and even the U.S. military installations along the West Coast and in Hawaii, which he estimated “in all probability” were “only subject to raiding attacks.” Other than in North Africa, he believed that only in Australia should U.S. forces be built up heavily in order to check the Japanese advances.120 Stimson rejected McCloy’s arguments and, in preparation for Churchill’s visit, wrote his own memo that day, giving Roosevelt all the reasons why an American expeditionary force should be built up in Britain. Though Marshall and most other military men supported this view, the matter was far from settled.

  Churchill arrived in Washington on December 22 and moved into the White House, where he slept in a large bedroom across the hallway from Harry Hopkins, the president’s closest confidant. The next day, the first of many meetings—known as the Arcadia Conference—took place between Roosevelt, Churchill, and their respective advisers. Everyone agreed on the broad principle of defeating Germany first. But there was sharp disagreement on how this should be done. As McCloy listened to Churchill, whom he had just met for the first time, he realized that the British prime minister was thinking very much along the lines of his December 20 memo, rejected by Stimson only three days earlier.

  Churchill argued that Allied forces in 1942 should concentrate on the occupation and control of the whole of French West Africa and the entire North African shoreline from Casablanca to Cairo. On the Pacific front, a holding action should be attempted which would not “absorb an unduly large proportion of United States forces.” Looking ahead to 1943, he posited not a single massive invasion of the European continent, but a series of smaller invasion forces landing in such widespread points as Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, and “possibly the Balkans.” In this scenario, the ultimate defeat of Germany would occur when “internal convulsions in Germany”—sparked by “economic privations” and an Allied bombing offensive—toppled Hitler from within. He hoped that such a strategy would avoid the inevitably high casualties associated with a frontal invasion of the continent and a ground invasion of the German homeland.121

  Underlying Churchill’s cautious approach was the assumption that the Soviets would by themselves continue to hold off the great bulk of German ground divisions on the Eastern front. As McCloy’s December 20 memo had put it, “. . . the manpower problem seems to be solved there.” Almost as an afterthought, he concluded that the “Russians should have, and richly deserve,” all the supplies that “limited means of access” permits. But a second front on the European continent was not necessary, not in 1942, and maybe not even in 1943. Instead, Hitler could be “confined” to Europe and eventually driven to surrender or, in Churchill’s scenario, toppled by his own people in revolt.122

  Roosevelt was surprisingly receptive to Churchill’s proposed “Operation Super-Gymnast,” telling him “it was vital to forestall the Germans in Northwest Africa. . . .”123 Accordingly, early on in the three-week series of meetings, the president gave his qualified approval to “Gymnast” even though Stimson and Marshall were firmly opposed to sending American troops to theaters they considered “peripheral” to an invasion of Western Europe. Marshall went so far as to tell Roosevelt that Gymnast was “a very dangerous operation.”124 Germany’s defeat, he believed, would ultimately require a single major invasion across the English Channel.

  Marshall favored a European strategy with three distinct components. First, he argued, a large joint British-American expeditionary force should be built up in Britain and trained for an eventual cross-Channel invasion of the continent. He later code-named this buildup in Britain Operation Bolero. Second, this force had to be prepared, in the event the Soviet front seemed about to collapse, to mount an emergency invasion of Europe as early as the autumn of 1942. Third, if this emergency invasion, later code-named Sledgehammer, was unnecessary in 1942, Marshall planned a decisive cross-Channel invasion, code-named Roundup, for the spring of 1943.125

  No clear-cut resolution between these two radically different strategies was achieved during the Arcadia discussions. But it is clear that the postponement of this decision ultimately opened the road to implementing much of what McCloy had outlined in his December 20 memo. There were compelling domestic political reasons for the North African invasion. As Marshall explained it, “The President considered it very important to morale, to give the country a feeling that they are in the war . . . to have American troops somewhere in active fighting across the Atlantic.”126 If a major invasion of Europe could not be launched in 1942, a smaller invasion by American troops of North Africa might be a politically suitable substitute. So, despite Marshall’s conviction that Super-Gymnast would delay a cross-Channel invasion, the seeds had been planted for a joint Anglo-American invasion of North Africa. This was the most fateful “nondecision” to emerge from the Arcadia Conference as it eventually led to a year-long delay in the opening of a second front.

  Some concrete decisions were made during Churchill’s three-week visit. On December 28, Stimson took McCloy along “as a recorder and helper of my memory” to a meeting in Roosevelt’s White House study. Once inside, Stimson handed Roosevelt another McCloy memo, this one a revised estimate of war production projecting that $27 billion worth of production capacity for various munitions had not yet been contracted.127 As a result, in discussions later with Lord Beaverbrook, a member of
Churchill’s entourage in charge of British war production, 1942 production targets rose 70 percent over what they had been only three weeks earlier, before the United States entered the war. The number of aircraft scheduled for production rose from 12,750 to 45,000, and the previous 1942 goal of producing 262,000 machine guns was nearly doubled.128 America’s tremendous industrial capacity, underused for more than a decade, was now about to supply all the weaponry necessary for a two-ocean global war.

  One day early in 1942, Marshall called McCloy into his office and asked him to “check out” a new officer working in the War Plans Division. “His name was Eisenhower,” recalled McCloy. “So I went down to meet this man; I don’t think I ever told him that I had been sent to spy on him.”129 Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been called to Washington one week after Pearl Harbor and assigned by Marshall as Gerow’s deputy. Marshall was already impressed by the affable, hardworking career officer. In the weeks since the attack, Eisenhower had been working furiously on finding means of supplying reinforcements to his old boss in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur. His common sense and lack of pretense elicited trust even from men inclined to oppose him. Unlike McCloy, he sometimes displayed a red-hot temper, but even such outbursts were quickly followed by self-deprecating humor and the appearance of his characteristically lopsided grin. He had initiative and, unlike Gerow, he was willing to make decisions without bothering Marshall with every detail. In short, “Ike,” as he was known throughout the army’s officer corps, was very much a man in McCloy’s mold. The two established an immediate rapport. McCloy gave Marshall a glowing endorsement of Eisenhower, who shortly thereafter was appointed to take General Gerow’s place as chief of the War Plans Division.

  On January 6, 1942, Stimson escorted his wife and Ellen McCloy up to Capitol Hill once again, this time to hear Roosevelt’s State of the Union speech. The president pledged in soaring rhetoric to fight the enemy until German and Japanese militarism were eliminated: “We will hit him, and hit him again, wherever and whenever we can reach him.” Stimson expressed satisfaction that the speech had finally knocked “the last bottom out of the old isolationist ideas. . . .” Two days later, McCloy held a press conference to praise the American public’s response to the war, citing the nearly sixty thousand young men who had volunteered for military service in the month of December as “overwhelming proof of great eagerness to serve.” He told reporters that it was the American habit “to reach for a gun and not a bottle of soothing syrup” when attacked.130

  CHAPTER 8

  Internment of the Japanese Americans

  “You are putting a Wall Street lawyer in a helluva box, but if it is a question of safety of the country, [or] the Constitution of the United States, why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

  JOHN J. MCCLOY, 1942

  A week after the U.S. war began, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox returned from a whirlwind inspection of Pearl Harbor and announced, “I think the most effective ‘fifth column’ work of the entire war was done in Hawaii, with the possible exception of Norway.”1 The statement did much to encourage the press to focus on the alleged fifth-column network of Japanese spies on the West Coast. Even though J. Edgar Hoover told the Justice Department that “practically all” of those Japanese aliens he thought to be a security risk were now in custody, on the West Coast the highly publicized arrests only seemed to legitimize the idea that all Japanese were suspect.2

  Then, on January 4, 1942, Damon Runyon, a syndicated Hearst columnist, reported that a radio transmitter had been discovered in a Japanese boarding house. The report had no basis in fact, but Runyon nevertheless concluded, “It would be extremely foolish to doubt the continued existence of enemy agents among the large alien Japanese population.”3 Soon West Coast politicians began issuing similar warnings. On January 16, 1942, Congressman Leland M. Ford of Los Angeles wrote Stimson demanding that “all Japanese, whether citizens or not, be placed in inland concentration camps.”4

  The 120,000 Japanese and American citizens of Japanese ancestry who lived in California, Oregon, and Washington actually constituted a small minority. But they were far more visible than many other, larger ethnic communities. More than two-thirds of these people had been born in the United States and thus were American citizens, known as Nisei. Their parents were called Issei, and under U.S. immigration laws they were prohibited from acquiring citizenship however long they may have lived in America.

  When Stimson had delegated the West Coast security problem to him in late December, McCloy was not entirely ill-disposed toward the “enemy aliens.” He thought, for instance, that those who volunteered for military service should be given U.S. citizenship. Upon learning of this, Justice Frankfurter jocularly wrote him, “For a Tory—I am told you are a Tory, aren’t you?—you seem to be awfully tender even about ‘enemy aliens’ who are able to fight for Uncle Sam.”5

  Initially, there was no consensus within the War Department on how to control enemy aliens, let alone citizens of Japanese ancestry. The army’s chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal General Allen W. Gullion, argued in the earliest of these meetings for a mass evacuation. Gullion’s position, however, was not supported by General John DeWitt, the officer in charge of the Western Defense Command area. An evacuation was also firmly opposed by the Justice Department’s representative, the young New Dealer James H. Rowe, Jr., who had recently been appointed by Roosevelt as a deputy to the attorney general.

  McCloy had not been called upon to take a position on the issue until late January 1942. Strictly speaking, the Justice Department, not the War Department, was responsible for enemy aliens. But as the weeks went by in January, the pressure grew on McCloy to intervene and mediate what was becoming a jurisdictional dispute between the two departments. General DeWitt, who in late December had thought a mass evacuation impracticable, was beginning to be persuaded otherwise. He was not a man possessed of strong political principles; according to Biddle, he had a “tendency to reflect the views of the last man to whom he talked.”6 Soon he was referring to the Japanese Americans as an “enemy race.”7

  General Gullion, who had continued to press for a major evacuation, now ordered a young lawyer with the rank of an army captain to serve as his personal liaison to DeWitt in San Francisco. Captain Karl Bendetsen was no stranger either to the issue of enemy aliens or to McCloy himself. Earlier in 1941, Bendetsen had seen McCloy as often as once a week to report to him on odd assignments within the War Department. Among other things, McCloy had asked him to study various contingency plans for the internment of enemy aliens in the event of a war with Germany.8

  During the last three weeks of January, Bendetsen practically commuted between Washington and San Francisco; he was the one man within the War Department who had studied the enemy-alien problem, and was in constant contact with DeWitt, various California politicians, and the West Coast congressional delegation on Capitol Hill. He had a “can-do” attitude about everything in his job, and by the end of January, he had convinced himself and DeWitt that the evacuation of over a hundred thousand Japanese would not be such a difficult task. McCloy, however, was still uncommitted.

  Meanwhile, political pressure to do something dramatic about the West Coast security situation continued to rise. On January 30, a West Coast congressional delegation meeting informally in Washington formulated a detailed evacuation plan that provided for the forcible internment of those Japanese, “whether aliens or not,” who failed to submit to “voluntary resettlement and evacuation as a patriotic contribution.”9 At this meeting, Bendetsen violently disagreed with Rowe and another Justice Department official, Edward J. Ennis, director of the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Control Unit. Rowe and Ennis saw plenty of legal problems and no military justification for the evacuation of American citizens of Japanese ancestry. Bendetsen disagreed, however, and promptly took the initiative to phone DeWitt with news of the proposal. He urged DeWitt to prepare a report that could be used to c
onvince Stimson and McCloy that such an evacuation was a clear military necessity.

  In the meantime, Rowe and Ennis persuaded Attorney General Biddle to obtain Stimson’s consent to schedule a meeting on Sunday, February 1, 1942, to resolve the issue. Stimson delegated McCloy to represent the War Department. McCloy showed up at the meeting with both General Gullion and Bendetsen. Also in attendance, and clearly in the opposite camp, were Biddle, Rowe, Ennis, and J. Edgar Hoover. The same day, the FBI chief wrote a memo for Biddle in which he attacked the army’s intelligence capability on the West Coast for exhibiting signs of “[h]ysteria and lack of judgement.”10

  Seizing the initiative, Rowe began with a personal attack on Bendetsen, suggesting that he and the Western congressmen were encouraging people to get “hysterical.” When Rowe flatly stated there “was no evidence whatsoever of any reason for disturbing citizens,” Biddle chimed in and confirmed that the Justice Department would have nothing to do with any interference with citizens, “whether they are Japanese or not.”

  “They made me a little sore,” Gullion commented later. In fact, he was so offended by this criticism of the military that a heated argument ensued. Gullion insisted that the military situation out on the West Coast was so precarious that General DeWitt might indeed have to “get all the Japs out. . . .” McCloy had kept his own counsel throughout this exchange. But now, with his own War Department officers under attack, he interrupted to tell Biddle, “You are putting a Wall Street lawyer in a helluva box, but if it is a question of safety of the country, [or] the Constitution of the United States, why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”11 For McCloy, it was simply a question of whether the removal of the Japanese Americans was a military necessity. He was fully prepared to allow the military authorities to make this judgment. Now, as tempers flared, he suggested to Biddle that the commander of the “men on the ground,” General DeWitt, should be given a chance to assess the situation. He indicated that if DeWitt favored an evacuation on grounds of military necessity then the War Department would probably concur. After some discussion, Biddle agreed to postpone a decision until DeWitt’s position could be clarified, and on this note the meeting was adjourned.12