A World at Arms (33 page)

By the time Hitler made a public gesture, suggesting on July 19 that England should call off the war, the government in London had long passed beyond considering such possibilities, and it was left to Lord Halifax to reply with a public rejection.
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Hitler’s assertions in his speech that the Allies had been about to invade Holland and Belgium, that the British had bombed Freiburg, and that they should now simply leave him with his conquests were not likely to inspire confidence in a government which knew that he was lying.
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Hitler made fun of the British government’s intention to continue the war from Canada if necessary, noting that the British population would then be left behind to face the harsh realities of war. He refrained from explaining his government’s intention of deporting the male population aged 17–45 to the continent, but people and government in England had some understanding of the nature of Hitler’s “generosity” without needing to have it spelled out.
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In holding on, the British looked for support to the United States. They would need weapons made in the United States, and they faced the early exhaustion of the financial resources needed to pay for them,
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a process necessarily speeded up both by London’s taking over the French contracts in America and any increasing deliveries of American arms. The United States was neutral, though most of its people were sympathetic to the Allied cause. There was some talk of improving German-American relations again on both sides in early 1940, but nothing came of the idea of returning the ambassadors who had been recalled in November 1938, when the
United States reacted against the anti-Jewish violence in Germany.
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The ideological differences were too great.

Hitler continued to think the United States as of no importance, a view reinforced by the German military attaché in the United States, General Friedrich von Bötticher, whose misassessments of America reinforced Hitler’s own.
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For Hitler, as for all who believed that Germany had been defeated in World War I because of the stab-in-the-back by the German home front, it was America’s military role in assuring Allied victory which was the legend. To cite only one example from the spring of 1940, Hitler was quite certain that the United States could never reach the production goals for airplanes set by the President, production goals which were to be surpassed two years later.
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A critical question which the Americans faced in 1940 was the Presidential election scheduled for that year. Roosevelt was inclined not to run; he preferred to return to Hyde Park, and the traditions of the country were strongly against any third-term candidacy. His neighbor, close associate, and Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, was certain that the President would not run and did not change his mind until May or June under the impact of the German conquests in northern and Western Europe.
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Roosevelt wavered literally until the last moment;
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he appears to have veered reluctantly but steadily in the direction of running again. Modifying his own traditional exuberant partisanship, he tried to create something of a coalition government. Simultaneously with his breach of the “no third term” tradition, he broke with the established party context for the highest offices. He tried to get Alf Landon, his Republican opponent in the last election, to join the government; and when that failed, on June 19 took Frank Knox, the Republican vice-Presidential candidate of 1936, into the Cabinet as Secretary of the Navy. At the same time he recruited the last Republican Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, to be Secretary of War (who in turn secured another Republican, Robert Patterson, as Assistant Secretary); and soon after Roosevelt brought in an additional prominent Republican, William Donovan, for special assignments which would eventuate in his heading the Office of Strategic Services.
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It was hardly a coalition government like the one the British had formed six weeks earlier, but it was the closest thing to it in the history of the United States before or since.

These unprecedented developments did not, of course, end the political struggle in the United States during an election year. The German government intervened into that struggle in a way and to an extent that was also probably unprecedented. In addition to sending espionage and
sabotage agents on a scale large enough to cause trouble in German-American relations but never remotely adequate either for the collection of much intelligence or the carrying out of substantial sabotage, the German government tried very hard to sway the election.
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Many of the details of this major intervention by a foreign power into the American electoral process remain unclear–the recipients of German money as well as their German paymasters were understandably reticent–but there is enough evidence to show that the effort was on a vast scale.
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The hope clearly was that Roosevelt’s defeat would facilitate lulling the American people while Germany consolidated her hold on much of the rest of the world and, as will be discussed presently, prepared for war against the United States. The invasion of a string of neutrals, however, served to undermine the work of German and isolationist propagandists in the spring and summer; dramatic reports to the American public on the bombing of British cities in the fall and winter had similar effects. As German actions had propelled Roosevelt into running once more, so they contributed to the decision of the majority of American voters in returning him to office.

From that office, the President could see dangers on the outside and the stark remains of apathy on the inside.
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Roosevelt had lived in Germany for years in his youth and recalled those experiences as he watched developments in 1940.
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The assault on one neutral country after another suggested that there was no limit to German ambitions; the defeat of France and the threatening defeat of England opened up the darkest prospects. From the French colonial empire in Africa–now open to penetration by the Axis–there seemed to be a major threat to Latin America, especially those countries with large numbers of settlers from Germany.
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Suppose Germany began to seize islands in the Atlantic as she had seized Norway? A new framework of measures would be needed for the defense of the Western Hemisphere.
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But what to defend with?

The armed forces of the United States had been neglected in the 1920s and reduced further in the 1930s. There had been some new naval construction ordered over the objections of the isolationists, but otherwise the picture was grim. What efforts the administration made to increase preparedness were met by skepticism in the Congress–on April 3, 1940, the House Appropriations Committee cut the armed forces budget by almost 10 percent, eliminating two-thirds of the 166 planes to be ordered!
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When the Germans struck in the West, the United States army could field fewer than a third the number of divisions Belgium put in the field; there were all of 150 fighters and 50 heavy
bombers in the army air force.
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Under the impact of the German blows, the country began to wake up. Army Chief-of-Staff George C. Marshall enlisted Morgenthau’s help for building up a major army with a President inclined to look toward the navy, his old favorite, and for a vast increase in aircraft production.
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The Congress now hastened to vote enormous sums of money as soon as they were asked for. The army and the army air force were both now to be built up. As long as it was assumed that the country need face only one possible major enemy at a time, a one-ocean navy which could be moved when necessary from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Panama Canal would do; with the collapse of Britain seen as possible, the country would need a “two-ocean navy,” since dangers could be simultaneous. In July the bill to create such a navy easily passed the Congress.
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Signed by the President on July 19, it authorized the construction of 1,325,000 tons of warships. By far the largest such increase in the country’s history, this meant roughly doubling the nation’s fleet, and with modern ships at that.

Ironically, that naval buildup confronted Japan with a dilemma it chose to resolve by going to war with the United States. In the 1920s the extremist elements in Japan had been upset over the Washington Naval limitation Treaty of 1922 which restricted the number of Japanese capital ships to three-fifths that of the United States. What they failed to realize until after they had insisted on the abrogation of those limits was that they operated to restrict
American
construction far more. Once the United States decided to build, it could easily outbuild Japan not 5 to 3 but, if the Congress and President agreed it was necessary, 10 to 3 or 20 to 3 or 30 to 3. From the summer of 1940 on, the Japanese had to reckon with the fact that the fleet being built by the United States would some day be completed, that their own limited and strained resources precluded any prospect of matching such a building program, and that they would be left hopelessly behind. If therefore they did not turn to the offensive against the United States soon, their opportunity to do so was certain to vanish.

The long-term implications of the American naval buildup for Japan will be reviewed subsequently; here, in discussing the early months of 1940 it must be noted that the United States was very conscious of its vulnerability at the time and tried hard to discourage the Japanese from adventures. The President repeatedly restrained those in the administration who wanted to take a harder line with Japan. As he made clear to Cordell Hull in December 1939 as the expiration of the Japanese–United States trade agreement approached, Japan should not be pushed too hard.
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He hoped to provide Japan with incentives for restraint,
letting the treaty expire in January and planning only the most limited–and practically insignificant–restrictions on Japanese purchases of critical materials in the United States when the six months termination period ended in July.
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Japan was on notice: the United States would end its most important commitment in East Asia, control of the Philippines, in 1946 in accordance with legislation passed and signed years before,
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but Japan had best be cautious in the interim and would have no choice thereafter. It would all look very different from Tokyo, especially to those who kept their eyes and minds closed.

More immediate to Roosevelt’s concern than these distant prospects was the rapidly developing situation in Western Europe. And it was to enable the United States to devote attention to it that he had insisted on a cautious position toward Japan. Since the preceding October, the President had been receiving periodic comments and reports from Winston Churchill, then still First Lord of the Admiralty. This contact, known to and approved by the Cabinet in London,
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was expanded after Churchill became Prime Minister in May. It would provide a major avenue of direct communication between the two leaders until Roosevelt’s death in 1945, and it came to play a significant role in the development of Anglo-American relations. In the critical days of 1940, it was supplemented by daily and occasionally twice daily secret reports which Churchill had the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, hand to the President beginning on May 19. On May 25 the ambassador by mistake left the original British embassy document at the White House along with the President’s copy. It now rests among the papers at Hyde Park, mute testimony to the anxiety of days when the whole world seemed to be collapsing. Five days later, Lord Lothian added to that day’s report the handwritten postscript that he had just heard that up to 5:30 that morning 180,000 troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk. On July 4, the ambassador’s handwritten addition noted “that Winston Churchill has taken the action in regard to the French fleet which we discussed and you approved.”
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In the midst of the crisis created by the German victories, the United States found herself temporarily cut off from her own diplomatic service by the discovery that diplomatic codes had been compromised by a massive leak in the London embassy. Tyler Kent, a code clerk there, had taken some 1500 coded telegrams as well as duplicate keys to the code and index rooms and had apparently made these available to individuals in a spy ring run by Italy, penetrated by the Soviet Union, and also connected to the Germans. Kent claimed that his actions were motivated by a desire to keep the United States out of war.

All the details and implications of this security disaster have not yet
been clarified; it is clear that American codes had been compromised, certainly to the Italians and Soviets and probably also to the Germans, that a British Member of Parliament, Captain Ramsey, was involved in the affair, and that numerous members of the spy ring went to jail. President Roosevelt had Kent’s diplomatic immunity lifted, ordered more careful FBI supervision of isolationists in the United States, and reduced his reliance on State Department communications.
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The hemorrhage of American secrets was only partly plugged; high-ranking officers in Washington who disapproved of the President’s policies provided secret information to one of his key domestic isolationist opponents, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, to show that there was no danger to the United States in June 1940, and in December 1941 would leak the American victory program. British officers had once given Churchill inside information on the British and German air force which he could use in Parliament to urge rearmament; analogous steps taken in the United States were designed with the opposite purpose in mind.

The most immediate and difficult problem facing Roosevelt was whether and how much to assist Britain in the critical summer months. The United States was itself desperately short of weapons and warships; did it make sense to sell weapons which might be lost as quickly as the planes sent to France and to transfer ships which might be sunk in a hopeless cause or, worse still, end up in German hands, perhaps manned by the crews of German destroyers lost in the Norwegian campaign? Was not the first priority the rebuilding of America’s own forces and, in view of the dangers perceived there, the defense of Latin America? Here was a series of conundrums as fateful as they were difficult to resolve. Complicating their resolution were the political angles. What would the American people–as voters–say about a President who overruled his military advisors to send weapons to a losing cause, thus leaving American troops stripped of arms to face a hostile world? How could warships be legally transferred to a warring power in the face of the needs of America’s own navy, a strong contingent of isolationist opponents in the Congress, and a public that had for years been subjected to a barrage of attacks on the President asserting that he had dictatorial tendencies?