Roosevelt (31 page)

Next day, round after round of applause greeted the President as he slowly made his way to the rostrum of the House of Representatives.

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

“The United States was at peace with that Nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And
while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.”

The chamber was dead quiet. The President was speaking with great emphasis and deliberateness.

“It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

“The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

“Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.

“Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.

“Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.

“Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.

“Lask night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.

“And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.”

A long pause. The chamber was still quiet.

“Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and will understand the implications to the very life and safety of our Nation.

“As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.

“But always will our whole Nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.”

Applause broke out and quickly died away.

“No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion”—the President’s voice was rising with indignation—“the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”

At last the chamber exploded in a storm of cheers and applause.

“I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but we will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

“Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

“With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding
determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.

“I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

F
OR FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT THERE
had been the shock of Pearl Harbor, then the sense of relief that the uncertainty was over at last, then the growing alarm and agony about the extent of the losses. All this had been followed by a calm acceptance of the fact of war. Congress voted for war thirty-three minutes after the President finished his address: only one Representative voted Nay. The Great Debate was adjourned, the isolationists suddenly stilled, the domestic strife seemingly over—as was the struggle within Roosevelt’s mind and soul. No need now for misgivings or recriminations. Only one fact mattered: the United States was at war. Yet it was only half a war. What would Germany do? The President would not take the initiative; here, too, he wanted the American people to be presented with the fact of war. But Berlin, aside from exultation in the press over the devastating Japanese blow, remained ominously quiet. Was it possible, after all Washington’s elaborate efforts to fight first in Europe, with only a holding action in the Pacific, that the United States would be left with only a war in the Far East?

The answer lay mainly with one man: Adolf Hitler. He had hoped that Japan would join his war against Russia; failing that, he was eager that Japan go to war against the Anglo-Americans in the Pacific—in which event he would join that war, too. The crucial strategic question now was whether Japan in turn would attack the Soviet Union; otherwise Germany’s mortal enemy, Russia, and Axis ally, Japan, would be left without a second front. For a quarter-century Hitler had warned against a two-front war; would he take on the most powerful democracy in the world and increase his own two-front gamble without pressuring Tokyo to help out against Russia? And if Tokyo resisted the idea, would Hitler honor his promise to intervene?

Britain’s stand was never in doubt. Churchill leapt at the chance to fulfill his promise that if the United States and Japan went to war the British declaration would follow within the hour. It took the members of Parliament longer than that to return to London
and take their seats, but on the afternoon of December 8 Churchill redeemed his promise. He warned Parliament of a long and hard ordeal. But “we have at least four-fifths of the population of the globe upon our side. We are responsible for their safety and for their future.” Both houses of Parliament voted unanimously for war against Japan. Roosevelt had wanted Churchill to wait until Congress could act, but the Prime Minister moved so quickly that Roosevelt’s message did not arrive in time. Britain was formally at war with Japan several hours before the United States was. The relations between the Atlantic Allies had already changed. When someone at a British staff meeting the day after Pearl Harbor took the same cautious approach to America as when its intervention was in doubt, Churchill spoke up with a wicked leer in his eye.

“Oh, that is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her; now that she is in the harem, we talk to her quite differently!”

While waiting tensely on Hitler the President rallied his nation to the job ahead. Even under the pressure of crisis he would not abandon his regular press conference on the ninth—though the newspapermen would get “damn little” from him, he warned Early. The reporters filed in slowly because each one had to be checked by the Secret Service; during the lull Roosevelt joked with May Craig about her being “frisked” and announced he would hire a female agent to do the job.

He gave the hungry reporters a few tidbits. There had been an attack that morning on Clark Field in the Philippines, he told them, and he had met with SPAB and agreed on both a speeding up of existing production and an expansion of the whole program. The President saved his main remarks for a fireside chat that evening. He started by reviewing a decade of aggression, culminating in the Japanese attack. It was all of one pattern.

“We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of war.

“So far, the news has been all bad. We have suffered a serious set-back in Hawaii. Our forces in the Philippines, which include the brave people of that Commonwealth, are taking punishment, but are defending themselves vigorously. The reports from Guam and Wake and Midway Islands are still confused, but we must be prepared for the announcement that all these three outposts have been seized.

“The casualty lists of these first few days will undoubtedly be large.…It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war.” But the United States could accept no result but victory, final and complete.

Roosevelt still had to deal with the awkward fact that the Nazis had not yet declared war—and might not. He simply asserted that Germany and Italy “consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain or Russia.” For weeks, the President said, Germany had been telling Japan that if it came in, it would receive the “complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area” and that if it did not, it would gain nothing.

“That is their simple and obvious grand strategy. And that is why the American people must realize that it can be matched only with similar grand strategy. We must realize for example that Japanese successes against the United States in the Pacific are helpful to German operations in Libya; that any German success against the Caucasus is inevitably an assistance to Japan in her operations against the Dutch East Indies; that a German attack against Algiers or Morocco opens the way to a German attack against South America, and the Canal….”

Roosevelt’s White House was now in battle uniform, but in its own casual way. The bright light under the portico no longer shone at night; Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, the housekeeper, went shopping for blackout curtains; gas masks were handed out and put aside. Morgenthau, who controlled the Secret Service, ordered the White House guard doubled. He also wanted to ring the grounds with soldiers and to place light tanks at the entrances, but Roosevelt demurred. No tanks, no men in uniform inside the fence, and only one soldier about every hundred feet outside it. Work was hastily begun on a special air-raid shelter in the vault of the Treasury, but the President did not take this seriously either. He told Morgenthau he would go down there only if he could play poker with the Secretary’s hoard of gold.

Tuesday passed, and Wednesday—still no declaration from Berlin. But by now Hitler had made up his mind and was simply waiting to stage his announcement. After receiving the news of Pearl Harbor at his headquarters behind the bleeding Russian front, he had flown back to Berlin during the night of December 8-9. He would declare war on the United States; he would not demand that Japan intervene against Russia. His reasoning was, as usual, a combination of rational calculation and personal emotion. He could not bluff Tokyo, for Roosevelt had been so provocative that a German-American war was inevitable anyway. There was little that he could offer Japan in the Pacific struggle and hence little he could threaten to withhold. Japan could not wound the Soviet Union mortally from the east; Stalin had thousands of miles to trade off in Siberia. It was better that Japan focus its efforts in the Pacific, and since the war had become global anyway, the stronger the Japanese effort in that ocean, the better for Hitler in the Atlantic, where he hoped
to cut off American war supply to Britain and Russia. Above and beyond all this, though, was Hitler’s xenophobia and racism. He did not need the racially inferior Japanese to help him beat Russia, and he had only hatred and contempt for Americans, half Judaized, half Negrified, and certainly not a warrior race.

For months the Führer had publicly kept his temper in the face of Roosevelt’s threats and name-calling. Now he could pour out his hatred. On December 11 he appeared before his puppet Reichstag, assembled in Berlin’s Kroll Opera House. He began by denouncing “that man who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside, the man who is the main culprit of this war….

“I will pass over the insulting attacks made by this so-called President against me. That he calls me a gangster is uninteresting. After all, this expression was not coined in Europe but in America, no doubt because such gangsters are lacking here. Apart from this, I cannot be insulted by Roosevelt, for I consider him mad, just as Wilson was…. First he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack—in the approved manner of an old Freemason….

“A world-wide distance separates Roosevelt’s ideas and my ideas. Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the democracies. I was only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry.” He dwelt on the contrast between them: in the Great War Roosevelt had a pleasant job, while the Führer had been an ordinary soldier; Roosevelt had remained in the Upper Ten Thousand, while Hitler had returned from the war as poor as before; after the war Roosevelt had tried his hand at financial speculation, while Hitler lay in the hospital. Roosevelt as President had not brought the slightest improvement to his country. Strengthened by the Jews all around him, he turned to war as a way of diverting attention from his failures at home.

The German nation wanted only its rights. “It will secure for itself this right even if thousands of Churchills and Roosevelts conspire against it….

“I have therefore arranged for passports to be handed to the American chargé d’affaires today, and the following—” The rest of Hitler’s words were drowned out in applause as the Deputies sprang to their feet. That afternoon Ribbentrop coldly handed the American Chargé d’Affaires Germany’s declaration of war and dismissed him. Later in the day the three Axis nations declared their unshakable determination not to lay down arms until the
Anglo-Americans were beaten and not to make a separate peace. The President sent written messages to Congress asking that a state of war be recognized between Germany and Italy and the United States. Not one member of Congress voted against the war resolutions.

The war news from the Pacific was almost all bad. The Japanese were following their Pearl Harbor strike with lightning thrusts in the Philippines, Guam, Midway, Wake Island, in Kota Bahru, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong. The small, almost defenseless garrison on Guam faced impossible odds. Marines on Wake beat off the first Japanese landing, but the Pacific fleet was too crippled to send help, and it was clear that the Japanese would return. After smashing Clark Field, near Manila, enemy planes were striking at Cavite naval base. The Japanese, with nearly absolute freedom of naval and air movement, were rushing troops and arms west, south, and east.