Roosevelt (15 page)

In fact the Japanese had no master plan, no global strategy, to guide their expansionist thrust. Hopes that had bloomed in mid-1940, after the fall of France and the air blitz on Britain, were ebbing. Tokyo had calculated that Axis power and unity might discourage British and American aid to China, attract Russia to the Tripartite Pact, and persuade Chiang to accept a settlement dictated by Japan. Instead, Russia, as well as Great Britain and the United States, was still giving aid and comfort to Chungking. Now the Japanese were waiting on the next move abroad—on Hitler’s strategic decisions, Britain’s capacity to survive, America’s response to Axis moves.

No co-ordinated strategy at this point could have emerged from the unstable equilibrium over which Premier Konoye presided. Every week or so, in a small room at his residence, a “liaison conference” was held to link diplomatic and military policy. The meetings were dominated by the military—by Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff, and by young staff officers in close touch with extremist elements in the General Staff. But the division in Tokyo was not simply between the soldiers and the civilians. The military leaders, too, were divided—especially the Navy and the Army—and some of the civilians were more militant than some of the military. Foreign Minister Matsuoka startled even the saber-rattlers with his grandiose dreams of expansion.

Unsure of their strategy, divided in their councils, the Japanese tried to divine the inscrutable Occident. Would their German ally launch an invasion of Britain, or turn south, or even attack Russia? Could Britain maintain its power in the Pacific—in India, Singapore, Hong Kong—if the Nazis stepped up their pressure on the home islands, in Africa, or in the Atlantic? Above all, what about the United States? To Tokyo planners Roosevelt seemed the most baffling of Western leaders. He appeared to shift overnight from conciliation to threats to high-blown preaching to invitations to parley. But item by item—so gradually as to rob Tokyo of a dramatic issue—he was restricting the export of war materials to Japan.

In February Matsuoka left Tokyo on a good-will mission to Moscow and Berlin. He had a vaulting ambition—endorsed by many of his colleagues in the liaison conferences—both to tighten Japan’s bonds with its Axis partners and to bargain for Soviet recognition of Japan’s role in northern China, Manchuria, and the whole Co-Prosperity Sphere. Thus Japan’s northern flank would be protected while its soldiers drove deeper toward Chungking—protected, too, in the event that its Navy and Army turned south.

In Washington, Roosevelt viewed the journey with wry detachment. “When it is announced that a certain gentleman starts for
Berlin and Rome,” he wrote to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, “it might be possible for the Secretary or you to express a slight raising of the eyebrows in surprise that he is not also planning to visit Washington on his way home!”

Matsuoka’s first stop after taking the slow train across Siberia was Moscow, where he offered Stalin a nonaggression pact. The Russians were cautious. Then on to Berlin, where Matsuoka was received with pomp and punctilio. Soon he was closeted with Hitler, who concentrated on impressing his visitor even though he was in the midst of the Yugoslav crisis. To his silent guest the Führer boasted of his war successes: how he had crushed sixty Polish divisions, six Norwegian, eighteen Dutch, and twenty-two Belgian, one hundred and thirty-eight French, all in a year and a half; how he had routed the British Army in France; how he was winning the Battle of the Atlantic and bailing out the unlucky Italians in North Africa. England had already lost the war and was now simply looking for any straw to grasp. It had only two—America and Russia.

He did not want to provoke Roosevelt into war, he went on, at least for the time being. America had three choices: it could arm itself, or it could assist England, or it could fight on another front. If it helped England it could not arm itself. If it abandoned England, the latter would be destroyed and America would be left isolated and facing the Axis. But in no case could America wage war on another front. As for Russia, the Reich had made treaties with that country, but far more important were the 160 to 180 German divisions for “defense” against Russia. Hitler said not a word to Matsuoka about his plans for its invasion.

Then Hitler dangled the bait before the Foreign Minister’s gold spectacles. This, he said, was the perfect moment—indeed, it was unique in history—for Japanese action against Britain. Of course there was risk, but it was small now, with Russia immobilized by German divisions on its western border, Britain weak in the East, and America in only the early stages of rearming. The Axis, moreover, would suffer no division of interests; Germany, whose interest lay in Africa, was as little concerned with East Asia as Japan was with Europe. America would not dare move west of Hawaii.

At last Hitler stopped talking and looked challengingly at the Foreign Minister. Matsuoka spoke guardedly. He agreed with the Führer in principle, he said. He himself wanted to follow such a strategy—he had specifically favored an attack on Singapore—but he could not overcome the weak intellectuals, businessmen, court circles, and all the others who were balking him. He could make no commitment, but he would personally work for the goals he and the Führer shared. Hitler was visibly disappointed, and he decided to show his hand a bit. Bidding Matsuoka good-by, he
said: “When you get back to Japan, you cannot report to your Emperor that a conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union is out of the question.” But the Foreign Minister left Berlin, as Hitler carefully planned, without any definite knowledge of Nazi plans for Russia.

If Hitler deceived his Japanese ally on the most crucial question of the day, Matsuoka had an agreeable opportunity to turn the tables when he returned to Moscow. Not only had Hitler made clear that Russia would not be invited to join the Tripartite Pact, but Ribbentrop had advised Matsuoka not to get too involved with the Russians. Matsuoka still had his own game: settling his nation’s differences with the Russians. Those differences were acute: Soviet aid to China, Japanese threats to Moscow’s Far Eastern borders, and Russian demands that Japan sell the southern part of Sakhalin as against Tokyo’s insistence on its oil and coal rights in the Soviet northern half. In several days of hard bargaining, Matsuoka won Stalin’s approval of a simple neutrality agreement that avoided the basic issues. Stalin merely dropped his demand for southern Sakhalin in response to Matsuoka’s promise that he would urge his government to ease its objectives in northern Sakhalin. The cardinal point was an agreement to maintain neutrality in case either party was attacked by a third.

Konoye welcomed Matsuoka home with his pact. The Japanese rejoiced; their Foreign Minister had managed—seemingly—to strengthen ties with Berlin and at the same time narrow the danger of Soviet pressure in Asia. There was some grumbling. The diplomatic and military situation in the southern seas was as awkward as ever. But now Tokyo could turn to its main goal: the final conquest of China through war and diplomacy. Now Chiang would see the futility of his efforts; now Washington would reconsider its aid to Chungking. All other considerations of strategy were subordinated to this transcendental goal. Japan’s prestige and honor were too exposed, the military too entangled, the people too psychologically committed, the losses already suffered too great, the political repercussions of a withdrawal from China too dire, for Japan now to compromise its long struggle on the mainland.

In Chungking, a thousand miles up the Yangtze from the coast, the Nationalist government experienced neither the luxury nor the quandary of strategic choice. At the end of 1940, after three years of resistance, the Chinese faced a bellicose enemy holding almost all his seaports and the richer sections of the country. With insouciance, Japanese aircraft rained bombs on the capital; the Nationalists had neither planes nor guns to drive them away. People huddled in deep dugouts in the high cliffs of the city; any day correspondents
could see bloated human corpses floating down the river, drifting against junks, and being pushed away by boatmen with long spiked poles.

In an unpretentious mansion called “Ying Wo” (“Eagle’s Nest”) lived Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek and a small staff of servants and guards. With his wiry frame and lean chiseled features, the Generalissimo looked like the ascetic he was; he dressed in simple khaki uniforms, ate lightly, drank little, and smoked not at all. But in early 1941 he presided over a country with a horrifying contrast between rich and poor, even in wartime; a country becoming slowly more disorganized, demoralized, and even defeatist. Chiang was still the public symbol of national revolution, but by now he was as anti-Communist as he was anti-Japanese. His army, underfed and badly cared for, was barely able to stabilize the front; and the old admiration for the Nationalist leader was changing in some quarters to suspicion that he was far more anxious to protect his postwar position and bleed the Americans than to withstand the Japanese.

China’s situation was in fact critical. Tokyo had set up a puppet regime in Nanking under Wang Ching-wei, and however much the Kuomintang railed at the “arch-traitor,” he obviously presided over a widening suzerainty. In the northwest the Chinese Communists maintained a state within a state and an army within an army; while committed to the struggle against Japan, the Communists were demanding from Chungking concessions that could only bolster their position in the long run. With the Burma Road cut off for months, Nationalist China was almost isolated, and it was caught in a soaring inflation. The Army was vast but inefficient and under-equipped, the generals often incompetent, the old war lords still un-dependable. Japan’s Axis partner was trying to bully Chungking into accepting Tokyo’s terms. Germany had won the war in Europe, Ribbentrop told the Chinese Ambassador in Berlin; clearly China could not hope for succor from Britain, or from the United States either.

In its extremity China had redoubled its appeals to Roosevelt. His nation was nearing collapse, Chiang had warned the President through the American Ambassador, Nelson Johnson. He particularly needed dollars and planes. His pleas brought a sympathetic answer from the President and a flurry of activity in Washington, but tangible aid was still low. The War Department opposed any more diversions of weapons from its already deprived forces, or from Britain’s. By the end of 1940—after all the fervent appeals and fine responses—the United States had sent only nine million dollars in arms and munitions to the Nationalists.

In January 1941 Chiang did receive from Roosevelt an important
emissary in the person of Lauchlin Currie, an administrative assistant to the President. Looking at China through an economist’s eyes, Currie was pessimistic about helping Chungking overcome inflation, but he returned to Washington more sensitive to China’s desperate needs. During the spring, while Matsuoka was known to be urging Moscow to abandon its aid to China, Chungking received promises from Washington that it would be eligible for aid under Lend-Lease, and that Currie himself would be in charge. The Generalissimo had a persuasive representative in Washington in his brother-in-law, T. V. Soong. By now Chiang was asking for over half a billion in aid, including over a thousand fighting planes and bombers.

And Russia? News of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact fell like a thunderbolt in Chungking. At first Chiang was convinced that Moscow would abandon him; surely Matsuoka must have exacted this as part of the bargain. But the mysterious Russians promptly got word to Chungking that the new pact did not affect the Chinese. The Soviets would help them as long as they kept on fighting the invaders. At the same time Washington, jarred by the pact, renewed its promises of assistance. Plans were quickly made to speed money and supplies. In mid-April Roosevelt signed an executive order, which he left unpublicized, authorizing American airmen to resign from their services for the specific purpose of forming a volunteer and “civilian” group in China. This was the beginning of the Flying Tigers, under Colonel Claire L. Chennault, who had been Chiang’s adviser for air since leaving the United States Army. And the President, in response to Chiang’s request for help in getting a political adviser, suggested a scholar named Owen Lattimore, who would soon be on his way to Chungking.

In May, as China approached its fifth year of struggle against invasion, Chiang was still lecturing his friends from his moral pinnacle as the first victim of aggression. At a farewell dinner for Ambassador Johnson he threw down his challenge to Washington. “We believe our ultimate victory can be secured on the mainland of Eastern Asia alone provided the American people second their government’s policy without reserve and bring their full weight to bear in support of Chinese resistance. If, on the other hand, the nations of the Pacific are careless of their responsibilities, each waiting for others to move first, exhibiting afresh the
laissez-faire
and slothful conduct of the past, ignoring Japanese designs and ambitions and failing positively to assist Chinese resistance—then a great war involving the whole Pacific area will ensue with consequences that do not bear thinking about.”

While soldiers and statesmen around the world were calling in their final credits, making or renewing commitments, and finally choosing sides during the early months of 1941, Franklin Roosevelt remained the strategic enigma in the swaying balances of global power and purpose. His December 29 broadcast and the Lend-Lease Act had made clear his commitment to the survival of Great Britain. But what was his purpose beyond material aid to America’s old partner? Some foreigners assumed that Roosevelt’s wavering course actually cloaked a firm global strategy. At home the isolationists suspected that the President, despite his artless ways, was directing a Grand Conspiracy designed to plunge the country into war. Even some presidential subordinates, operating in their tiny enclaves, assumed that the Commander in Chief, with his spacious White House perspective, was forging some master plan.