A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (120 page)

In short, the Roosevelt war legacy is mixed: although he clearly (and more than most American political leaders) appreciated the threat posed by Hitler, he failed to mobilize public opinion, waiting instead for events to do so. He never found the Soviets guilty of any of the territorial violations that he had criticized. Just as the war saved Roosevelt from a final verdict on the effectiveness of his New Deal policies, so too did Pearl Harbor ensure that history could not effectively evaluate his wartime preparations oriented toward the Atlantic. One could say the Roosevelt legacy was twice saved by the same war.

Reelection and Inevitability

Roosevelt kept his intentions to run for reelection a secret for as long as he could. Faced with the war in Europe, FDR had decided to run, but he wanted his candidacy to appear as a draft-Roosevelt movement. He even allowed a spokesman to read an announcement to the Democratic National Committee stating that he did not want to run. It was grandstanding at its worst, but it had the desired result: echoes of “We want Roosevelt” rang out in the convention hall. The “draft” worked, and FDR selected Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture and a man to the left of Roosevelt, as a new vice president. Against the incumbent president, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, chief executive of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation, a utility company. Willkie, in addition to being a businessman, was also an Indiana lawyer and farmer, owning “two farms he actually farmed,” in contrast to the country squire Roosevelt.
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Willkie actually managed to gain some traction against Roosevelt on the economic front, arguing that the New Deal had failed to eliminate mass unemployment; still later, he tried to paint FDR as a warmonger. Without a clear vision for a smaller-state America, Willkie was doomed. In the reelection, Roosevelt racked up another electoral college victory with a margin of 449 to 82, but in the popular vote, the Republicans narrowed the margin considerably, with 22 million votes to FDR’s 27 million. Once again the Democrats controlled the big cities with their combination of political machines and government funds.

In charging Roosevelt with desiring war, Willkie failed to appreciate the complex forces at work in the United States or the president’s lack of a well-thought-out strategy. Throughout 1939–40, Roosevelt seemed to appreciate the dangers posed by the fascist states, though never Japan. However, he never made a clear case for war with Germany or Italy, having been lulled into a false sense of security by the Royal Navy’s control of the Atlantic. When he finally did risk his popularity by taking the case to the public in early 1940, Congress gave him everything he asked for and more, giving lie to the position that Congress wouldn’t have supported him even if he had provided leadership. Quite the contrary: Congress authorized 1.3 million tons of new fighting ships (some of which went to sea at the very time Japan stood poised to overrun the Pacific), and overall Congress voted $17 billion for defense. The president appointed two prominent Republicans to defense positions, naming Henry Stimson as secretary of war and Frank Knox as secretary of the navy. Both those men advocated much more militant positions than did Roosevelt, favoring, for example, armed escorts for U.S. shipping to Britain.

One sound argument for giving less aid to England did emerge. American forces were so unprepared after a decade’s worth of neglect that if the United States energetically threw its military behind England (say, by sending aircraft and antiaircraft guns), and if, despite the help, the British surrendered, America would be left essentially defenseless. Only 160 P-40 War Hawks were in working order, and the army lacked antiaircraft ammunition, which would not be available for six more months. Advisers close to Roosevelt glumly expected Britain to fall.

Hitler’s massive air attacks on England, known as the Battle of Britain, began in July 1940 to prepare for Germany’s Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England. Use of radar, combined with Churchill’s timely attacks on Germany by long-range bombers, saved the day. By October, the Royal Air Force had turned back the Luftwaffe, but Britain remained isolated, broke, and under increasing danger of starvation because of U-boat attacks on merchant vessels. At about the time the British had survived Germany’s aerial attacks, Mussolini attempted to expand the southern front by invading Greece. With British support, the Greeks repulsed the Italians; Britain then counterattacked in Africa, striking at the Italian forces in Libya. Mussolini’s foolishness brought the Nazi armies into North Africa, and with great success at first. General Erwin Rommel took only eleven days to defeat the British and chase them back to Egypt. Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete also fell, joining Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria under German rule.

At that point, during a critical juncture in world history, two factors made American intervention to save Britain unnecessary in military terms and yet critical in the long run for stabilizing Western Europe for decades. First, following a November 1940 raid by the Royal Navy, the Italian fleet at Taranto had to withdraw to its ports, ceding sea control of the Mediterranean to the British. This made it difficult, though not impossible, for Hitler to consider smashing the British ground troops in Egypt and marching eastward toward India, where he entertained some thoughts of linking up with the Japanese. As long as the British had free reign of the Mediterranean, however, resupply of such an effort would have to be conducted overland. This prospect led to the second critical development, Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. In part, the Soviet invasion was inevitable in Hitler’s mind. Since
Mein Kampf
, he had clung to the notion that Poland and western Russia represented the only hope for Germany’s “overpopulation” (in his mind).

As a result, when the bombs fell in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, the shocking unpreparedness of American forces and the disastrous defeat at Pearl Harbor provided just enough evidence for critics of the president to claim that he had what he had wanted all along, a war in Europe through the back door of Asia. Here the critics missed the mark: FDR had had no advance warning about Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, his unwillingness to stand clearly in favor of rebuilding the military at the risk of losing at the ballot box ensured that, despite Roosevelt’s otherwise good inclinations, somewhere, at some time, U.S. military forces would take a beating.

Democracy in Peril

W
orld War II presented an unparalleled challenge to the United States because, for the first time, two capable and determined enemies faced America simultaneously. These foreign enemies were not merely seeking to maintain colonial empires, nor were they interested in traditional balance-of-power concerns. They were, rather, thoroughly and unmistakably evil foes. Nazi Germany had the potential technological capability to launch devastating attacks on the American mainland. The Empire of Japan had gained more territory and controlled more people in a shorter time than the Romans, the Mongols, or the Muslim empires.

Also for the first time, the United States had to fight with a true coalition. Unlike World War I, when Americans were akin to modern free agents entering the war at the last minute, the United States was allied with England, France, and Russia. The USSR was the dominant power west of the Urals, and the United States was instantly accorded the role of leadership on the Western Front. Although America was substantially free from enemy attack (aside from Pearl Harbor), the conflict brought the nation closer to a total-war footing than at any other time in its history. But as in previous wars, the business leaders of the country again took the lead, burying the Axis powers in mountains of planes, ships, tanks, and trucks. Emerging from the war as the world’s dominant power, imbued with both military force and moral certainty of cause, the United States stood firm in democracy’s finest hour.

“The Americans Will Be Overawed”

“Blitzkrieg,” or lightning war, became a familiar word as the Nazi panzer (tank) armies slashed through Poland in 1939, then France in 1940. Technically a
tactic
(a method to obtain an objective), blitzkrieg also constituted a
strategy,
that is, a large sweeping plan for victory in war. Few recognized in 1941 that both Germany and Japan had adopted blitzkrieg because of the perception that without access to vital oil supplies, they would quickly lose, but Germany had slashed through to the Caucasus oil reserves in southern Russia, and Japan had seized oil-rich Indonesia.

There were key differences in the two foes, though. Germany’s productive industry and technological capabilities might have sustained her for several years. Japanese planners harbored no such illusions about their chances of success. Admiral Nagano Osami, who had strongly supported war with America well before the Pearl Harbor plan was formulated, grimly promised to “put up a tough fight for the first six months,” but if the war went for two or three years he had “no confidence” in Japan’s ability to win.
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Just two months before Pearl Harbor, Nagano again said that the imperial navy could hold its own for about two years; other voices in the military thought a year was more realistic. Asked point-blank if Japan could win a quick-strike war similar to the Russo-Japanese War nearly forty years earlier, Nagano stated flatly that “it was doubtful whether we could even win,” let alone come close to the success of 1904.
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But the army dictated strategy, and the Bushido warrior code, combined with the assassination of dissenters, sealed Japan’s doom. In retrospect, Japan essentially marched grimly into a disaster with most of its leaders fully aware that, even with extreme luck, victory was next to impossible.

By 1939, Japan’s army had already wallowed for three years in China, helping itself to Chinese resources. Despite the fact that China, a pitiful giant, was too divided among feuding factions and too backward to resist effectively, Japan had trouble subduing the mainland. By 1940, the Japanese occupied all the major population centers with a ruthlessness resembling that of the Nazis, yet they still could not claim total victory. Imperial policy exacted great costs. In July 1939 the United States revoked the most-favored-nation trading status provided by a commercial treaty of 1911, and a month later, in a dispute little noticed in the West, the Soviets defeated Japanese troops in Mongolia.

Japan’s China policy stemmed in part from the perverse power of the military in a civilian government on the home islands, where any civilian or military leaders who interfered with the expansionism of the army or navy were muffled or assassinated. Yet for all their recklessness, many in the empire’s inner circle viewed any strategy of engaging the United States in a full-scale war as utter lunacy. One logistics expert starkly laid out production differentials between America and Japan: steel, twenty to one; oil, one hundred to one; aircraft, five to one; and so on. His arguments fell on deaf ears. By 1940, no Japanese official openly criticized the momentum toward war. The American-educated Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto came the closest to outright opposition. He had flown across the United States once and soberly observed America’s awesome productive capability. His visit to Dayton’s Wright Field, while opening his imagination to the potential for long-range air strikes, also reminded him of the vast gulf between the two nations. When he raised such concerns with the imperial warlords, they transferred him to sea duty.

Military ascendancy was complete by October 1941, when Japan installed as prime minister General Hideki Tojo, known to the British press as the Razor. A stubborn, uncompromising man, Tojo’s ascension to power essentially ended all hopes of a diplomatic solution to the Asian situation. Tojo became enamored of a quick knockout blow to the United States, advocating a strike in which “the Americans [would] be so overawed from the start as to cause them to shrink from continuing the war. Faced with [the destruction of ] their entire Pacific fleet in a single assault delivered at a range of over three thousand miles, they would be forced to consider what chance there would be of beating this same enemy [across] an impregnable ring of defensive positions.”
³

Americans had little appreciation for a society steeped in a tradition of extreme nationalism, reinforced through indoctrination in its public education system and replete with military training of children from the time they could walk.
⁴
Nor did most westerners even begin to grasp Bushido, the Japanese warrior code that demanded death over the “loss of face.” It simply did not register on Main Street, U.S.A., that Japan might pose a genuine threat to U.S. security. Quite the contrary, in February 1941,
Time
publisher Henry Luce declared the dawning of the “American Century,” reflecting the views of probably a majority of Americans.

Americans may have misjudged their enemy, but the delusion in Japan was worse. Withdrawing from Indochina and China, to them, was simply an unacceptable loss of honor. Therefore, by mid-1941, Japan’s civilian and military leadership had settled on a course of war with the United States. Most agreed, however, that Japan’s only hope of victory was a massive all-Asian offensive with a key surprise strike at the U.S. Navy’s main Pacific base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, with simultaneous attacks in the American-held Philippine islands, British Singapore, and Hong Kong. Never in human history had military forces undertaken such sweeping and ambitious operations, let alone attempted such strikes simultaneously. Most astounding of all, not only did Japan make the attempt to swallow all of Asia in a single gulp, she came within a hair of succeeding.

Back Door to War?

Hitler’s quick conquest of France in 1940 put French possessions in the Far East up for grabs. After Vichy France permitted the Japanese to build airfields in northern Indochina, the United States passed the Export Control Act (July 1940), restricting sales of arms and other materials to Japan. Over time, scrap iron, gasoline, and other products were added to the strategic embargo. The Japanese warlords spoke of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a term they used to describe an Asia dominated by the Japanese Empire. The fly in the ointment remained oil, since Japan had
no
domestic oil reserves. This made the empire fully dependent on foreign energy sources, a fact that had shaped Japan’s war planning.

In September 1940, Tokyo made a colossal blunder by signing the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, mainly as a way to acquire British Far Eastern possessions that would be available if Hitler conquered Britain. Japan’s dalliance with Germany had run both hot and cold, but now the Japanese threw in their lot with the Nazis. In the eyes of many westerners, this confirmed that the Japanese warlords were no different from Hitler or Mussolini. The alliance albatross hung around Japan’s neck for the entire war. Hitler hoped to lure Japan into opening a second front in Siberia against the Soviets, but Japan, remembering the ill-fated land campaign of 1904, instead planned to move south for oil. To eliminate interference from the Russians, Japan signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviets in April 1941.

The nonaggression pact freed Japanese troops in Manchuria to move south, whereupon Japan announced its intention to control all of Indochina. Roosevelt had had enough. He restricted all exports of oil to Japan and froze Japanese assets in the United States, which had the effect of choking off Japanese credit and making it nearly impossible for Japan to buy imported oil from other countries.

Freezing Japan’s assets left the empire with a two-year supply of oil under peacetime conditions, but less than a year’s worth of “war oil” because the consumption of fuel by carriers, battleships, and aircraft would rapidly deplete Japan’s reserves. Thus, FDR’s efforts to coerce Japan into withdrawing from Indochina had the opposite effect and certainly increased pressure to go to war. However, notions that Roosevelt provoked Japan are absurd. Japan was already on a timetable for war. Even before the embargo, “Japan was trading at a rate, and with trade deficits, which ensured that she would have exhausted her gold and foreign currency reserves some time in early spring 1942.”
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Put another way, with or without the frozen assets, Japan faced national bankruptcy in mid-1942, making the “crisis entirely of Japan’s own making.”
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Equally important, based on shipbuilding ratios then in place, the imperial navy was in a once-in-a-lifetime position of strength relative to the Americans. (Even without combat losses, by 1944, the imperial navy would have fallen to 30 percent of U.S. naval strength, which, as a result of the Two-Ocean Naval Expansion Act of 1940, would include enough vessels to render the Japanese naval forces “nothing more than an impotent irrelevance, wholly deprived of any prospect of giving battle with any hope of success.”)
⁷

Contrary to the back-door-to-war theories of the Roosevelt haters, Japan’s warlords had all but committed themselves to a conflict with the United States in January 1941, well before the freezing of the assets. Moreover, there is some question as to how badly the embargo hurt Japan: from July 1940 to April 1941, when petroleum supposedly was locked up, American oil companies sold 9.2 million barrels of crude to Japan, and permits were approved for 2 million additional barrels. It is hard to argue that under such circumstances the United States was squeezing the Japanese economy to death.
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Additional warning signs came from American code breakers, who in December 1940 deciphered the Japanese diplomatic code, called Purple. This allowed the United States to read Japan’s mail for over a year. From these intercepts it was clear that Japan intended to expand to the southwest (Singapore, a British possession), the south (the Philippines), the east (striking at Pearl Harbor), or all three. A final, failed negotiation included an offer to resume full trade with Japan in return for her withdrawal from China, after which the imperial fleets raised anchor, placing the 7th Fleet at Pearl Harbor in the center of Yamamoto’s crosshairs.

“A Date Which Will Live in Infamy”

Japanese strategists began planning an air attack on the U.S. naval base in Hawaii in the summer of 1941. Japanese preparations for the Pearl Harbor strike comprised only
one third
of the overall military operation, which included two simultaneous invasions of the Philippines and Malaysia. Any one of the three prongs of attack would have been a major military undertaking—especially for a small island nation with limited resources—but coordination of all three spoke volumes about Japan’s delusion and her desperation. The goal of the ambitious strategy was for no less than a knockout blow aimed at all the remaining allied powers in Asia except for India and Australia. Despite the interception of Japanese messages, no one had dreamed that this small island nation, which had never won a major war against European powers, could execute three separate military operations spanning thousands of miles and engaging two of the most powerful nations on earth as well as nearly a dozen regional military forces.