American Experiment (316 page)

“I believe you will agree,” Churchill concluded, “that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.”

Carrying Churchill’s letter, a seaplane splashed down next to the cruiser
Tuscaloosa
off Antigua, where the President was vacationing in the bright Caribbean sun. He read the letter with a poker face and seemed unmoved, but Hopkins sensed during the next few days “that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree.… Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program.” The whole program was Lend-Lease—the simple but drastic idea that the United States could send Britain munitions without charge and be repaid, not in dollars, but in kind, after the war was over. The President could not doubt Britain’s financial urgency; word came from Washington that London evidently had less than $2 billion available to pay for $5 billion in orders.

Back home, in press conferences, speeches, his eve-of-1941 fireside chat, and in his inaugural address, the President used the momentum of his election victory to press for massively increased aid to Britain. He wanted to “get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign,” he told reporters, and offered an example. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire.” Afterward he would ask for no money from his neighbor—only to have his garden hose back. Few challenged Roosevelt’s analogy, save for
Senator Robert A. Taft, who said that lending war equipment was like lending chewing gum—you wouldn’t want it back.

Isolationists pounced on the bill as soon as it was introduced into Congress in mid-January. The great debate got off to an acrimonious start when Wheeler called the bill “the New Deal’s triple A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.” Telling the press they could quote him, Roosevelt labeled this remark “the most untruthful, as the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has ever been said.” Wheeler, Hamilton Fish, and others pictured the bill as an act of war. It was a bill for the “destruction of the American Republic,” thundered the Chicago
Tribune;
a bill designed to scuttle American democracy, cried Father Coughlin. Lindbergh urged in congressional hearings that America should concentrate on building up her air power and retire behind continental defenses; he predicted German victory in Europe but denied he favored it. Claiming he was barred from testifying, the blatantly anti-Semitic Gerald L. K. Smith threatened to bring in a petition with two million signatures against the bill. Almost drowned out in the furor were the words of thoughtful critics of the bill such as the historian Charles A. Beard, who warned that the measure would engage the government “officially in the conflicts of Europe and Asia.”

The passage early in March 1941of Lend-Lease by overwhelming majorities—60-31in the Senate and 317-71in the House—had just the effect that interventionists wanted and isolationists feared: deeper entanglement of the United States in the war. The stakes were higher now: Roosevelt’s in having supplies reach England, Churchill’s in receiving them, Hitler’s in halting them. All the stakes were raised after the Führer’s unstoppable armies invaded Yugoslavia and Greece in April. As the spring days lengthened, the Nazi threat to North Atlantic shipping grew sharply; as did pressure on Roosevelt from Stimson, Knox, and other interventionists to convoy ships through the submarine-infested waters. But Roosevelt feared that convoying would move him too far ahead of public opinion. He would only patrol—but his naval and air patrols, he confided to his war cabinet, would notify British convoys of the whereabouts of Nazi raiders.

Slowly—all too slowly for his impatient advisers—the President involved his navy and his nation in the Battle of the Atlantic. He did everything save convert his “undeclared naval war” into a declared one: he took over the defense of Greenland from Denmark; authorized British ships to be repaired in American shipyards and British pilots to be trained on American airfields; transferred ten Coast Guard cutters to the Royal Navy; sent his patrol ships farther north and east; proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency.” His destroyers became ever bolder in tracking U-boats and
reporting their locations. Roosevelt half feared, half hoped for some incident in the brumous mists of the North Atlantic. But it had to be a major incident that would unite the country, not a minor incident that might merely inflame the debate at home. When the American freighter
Robin Moor
was sunk in the South Atlantic by a U-boat in June, the President found it an inadequate excuse to start convoying.

By late spring 1941 Roosevelt was impaled on the horns of his own strategic dilemma. He had so insisted that aid was a means of avoiding rather than preparing for war that he cloaked his aggressive Atlantic patrolling in secrecy. Hitler could ignore small provocations; Roosevelt dared not try a large one, such as armed convoying, which would divide Congress and the electorate. So he had become hostage to Hitler’s strategy; as long as the Führer refrained from responding to an action of FDR’s as
casus belli,
the President was imprisoned in his policy of aid short of war.

Only another momentous event now could free the President from his dilemma. Germany’s massive invasion of Russia in June 1941 transformed the global struggle but it only served to worsen FDR’s predicament. For Hitler, now that he was fighting on two fronts, was all the more intent on keeping the United States out of the European war, and hence all the more intent on edging Japan toward a more belligerent posture in the Pacific. More than ever on the global chessboard, Roosevelt seemed to be a pawn edging ahead one or two steps, or a knight moving obliquely—and certainly not a queen radiating power across the board or a king offered as the supreme prize of battle.

If the President felt constrained in the Atlantic, he felt positively frustrated in the Pacific. On becoming President he had inherited an enmity between his own country and Japan that he had found no opportunity to overcome. In the fall of 1931, a year and half before he entered the White House, Japanese officers of the Kwantung Army had used a manufactured incident to attack and then take over Manchuria, which Tokyo thereupon recognized as Manchukuo. Soon Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, had promulgated the “Stimson Doctrine,” which held that the United States would not acknowledge agreements impairing the sovereignty of the Republic of China. Later Japan denounced the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, quit the League of Nations, promulgated the “new order” as a substitute for the “antiquated” Open Door policy, and stepped up its aggressive activities in North China. Stimson, now FDR’s Secretary of War, pressed the President to take a firmer stand in the Pacific. Whenever the Administration appeared to be making concessions to Japan at the expense
of China, moreover, protests and lamentations arrived from the beleaguered President Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking.

It was no simple matter, the President was discovering, to be aggressive in the Atlantic and pacific in the Pacific. Around the globe the fronts were linked in numberless ways: Tokyo would benefit from the success of Hitler’s drive east into Russia; Hitler hoped for Japanese action against Russia; Britain’s interests in Asia were imperiled; Vichy’s authority over Indochina was vulnerable; the Dutch had a presence in the East Indies; and these all were further linked with the interests of secondary powers. The President had to calculate how these fears and ambitions were cantilevered by the complex and ever-shifting strains and thrusts of military power and strategy. One blow could upset the swaying, quivering mobile of global balances, but what kind of blow and with what effect?

And always the President had to act amid the murk of secret plans and obscure rivalries. “The Japs are having a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves,” he wrote Ickes early in July 1941, “and have been for the past week—trying to decide which way they are going to jump—attack Russia, attack the South Seas (thus throwing in their lot definitely with Germany) or whether they will sit on the fence and be more friendly with us. No one knows what the decision will be.” The Japanese leaders had no less difficulty divining the Administration’s intentions. Through myopic eyes the inscrutable Orient and the incomprehensible Occident viewed each other.

Events were no less cloudy in the Atlantic. The five months of diplomatic activity, military planning, and incidents from the early summer of 1941 to the end of November were among the most critical and complex in the history of American foreign relations. Not only were the events themselves significant, but how they were perceived or misperceived by the other side closely affected the course of events.

In mid-August, Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly at Argentia Bay off Newfoundland. It was less a time of close military planning than an opportunity for the two leaders to size each other up face to face, discuss postwar problems and opportunities, and issue an eloquent Wilsonian Atlantic-Charter of war aims. To Hitler it was a meeting of warmongers plotting the “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a phrase in the sixth article of the Charter.

Only three weeks after the Argentia rendezvous, the American destroyer
Greer
encountered a U-boat southeast of Iceland, tracked it for several hours, all the while reporting its location to a nearby British bomber, and later became itself engaged in an indecisive battle of depth charges and torpedoes with the German submarine, which assumed its adversary was
British. Six weeks later the American destroyer
Kearny
sped four hundred miles to the aid of a stricken convoy, joined in depth-bombing the attacking wolf pack, and was hit by a torpedo that killed eleven American seamen and put the
Kearny
out of action.

Roosevelt grossly exaggerated the provocativeness of the German actions and minimized that of the American in his public reaction to the incidents. Following the
Kearny
episode he said in a major address, “Very simply and very bluntly—we are pledged to pull our own oar in the destruction of Hitlerism.” Berlin boiled with indignation. For once the master falsifier had been outfalsified. From Hitler’s headquarters on the Russian front came a statement that “the United States has attacked Germany.” But Hitler would not yet escalate incidents into war.

Things were somewhat quieter—but potentially even more explosive— on the opposite side of the globe.

Each of the big powers in the Pacific played from poker hands that changed month to month as the shifting circumstances of war dealt out the cards. The problem was not so much lack of communication as too much of it. As factions tussled for influence in each capital—diplomats against soldiers, politicians against bureaucrats, old diplomatic hands against new—the official and unofficial channels were a source as much of confusion as of clarity. Amid the day-to-day chatter and bustle the leaders lost perspective on the towering conditions and events, hopes and expectations, that were holding the Pacific theater in their grip.

The most crucial of these forces was the increasing determination of the Japanese to hold and extend their presence in China. This was a matter not simply of global strategy but of national pride and ideology. The Japanese could not forget the American exclusion of Orientals and other racist discriminations; they could not ignore America’s use of the Monroe Doctrine to buttress its political and economic power in Latin America; they could not ignore Washington’s imperial and colonial ventures in the Pacific. The jingoists of Tokyo were demanding that Japan pursue its old nationalist and imperialist ambitions. Japan was heavily dependent on external sources, including the United States, for economic and military materials, and Washington was withholding high-octane gasoline and scrap iron; warriors and diplomats in Tokyo were therefore determined to extend their grip to Indochina and to the economic lifelines in the South Seas.

Half a world away Churchill had a clear set of priorities, or at least hopes. His greatest hope was that the United States would declare war on Germany, but he saw this as unrealistic in view of Hitler’s spurning the gage
of battle in the Atlantic. The next great hope in his global wish list was for a war between Japan and the United States, which Britain would join “within the hour,” but Washington would take the lead in protecting both American and British interests in the Pacific. His mortal fear was that events would leave Britain facing Japan alone and thus locked into the kind of two-front war that all the contestants sought to avert. Hence the Prime Minister devoted much time in 1941to helping stiffen Washington’s posture toward Tokyo.

And Roosevelt? He too had his priorities, but his wish list was the shortest and simplest of them all. He hoped above all not to be involved in a shooting war in the Pacific when the real enemy was Adolf Hitler. He too feared a two-front war. He recognized, of course, that understandings between the two Axis countries would sooner or later turn a war against Japan into a war with Germany, but much depended on what was sooner and what was later. Hence Roosevelt’s essential stratagem, through all the diplomatic windings and twistings of fall 1941, was to play for time—to drag out negotiations, to be conciliatory at one point and tough at another, all the while coping with pressures from London and Chungking to be more resolute. And he needed time for rearmament.

But time, more than Roosevelt realized, was an even greater imperative for the Japanese; they were as insistent on speed as Roosevelt on delay. Tokyo diplomats and militarists alike recognized that the only chance for Japan in a total war was a smashing victory over its adversaries, the establishment of a huge and impregnable defense bastion, and the rapid military and economic consolidation of conquests in China and to the south. Otherwise the immense economic and military power of the United States and Britain would prevail in two or three years. For some months during 1941 the military leaders of Japan allowed the diplomats to pursue their negotiations in case Japan could achieve its goals through parleys rather than war. Early in September they set a deadline—if there was no agreement by mid-October, Japan would prepare itself for battle against the United States, Britain, and Holland. This was the most momentous decision in the tortuous road to war in the East.