Roosevelt (34 page)

The Kuomintang’s elation at gaining two allies was soon offset by its growing fear that American aid, with many more mouths and guns to feed, might fall off rather than increase, at least for a time. Japan’s invasion of Burma threatened to cut the Burma Road, along which a trickle of supplies was coming in. The great connecting points with the West—Singapore, the Philippines, the East Indies—were already under attack. Chiang accepted supreme command of Allied land and air forces in the theater he already commanded. The only other step Roosevelt felt able to take was to arrange for a “political loan” to Chungking. “I am anxious to help Chiang Kai-shek and his currency,” he wrote to Morgenthau. “I hope you can invent some way of doing this.” Reluctantly—because he had little confidence in China’s capacity to fight—the Secretary obtained from Congress authorization for a half-billion-dollar loan to China, with repayment deferred until the end of the war. But Chiang still lacked what he wanted—massive aid in arms and a seat in the top strategic councils.

The Australians faced their own predicament. With three of its best divisions in North Africa and a fourth in Singapore, Canberra felt denuded in face of the Japanese thrust south. In ports along the northern coast, and even the eastern, Australians were preparing for attack. Within ten days of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had authorized Marshall to plan a major base in northern Australia—but would the Japanese get there first? The Dutch had a special grievance; in their haste Roosevelt and Churchill neglected to clear Wavell’s appointment with them ahead of time, and Roosevelt felt constrained to salve wounded feelings by asking Marshall to release some war munitions to them “even though they be very modest.” The Filipinos were beginning to doubt that the Americans would be able to save their country. And India, the second most populous nation in the world and also in the path of Japanese conquest, was hardly consulted at all.

But it was the place of Russia in the United Nations that raised the most fateful questions of all.

On New Year’s Day the President was sitting with Churchill and the rest of the dinner company when the talk turned to Russia. At this point the Germans and Russians were locked in a critical struggle west of Moscow. Churchill, having served as War Secretary
under Lloyd George in World War I, was not to be outdone by his host in tales of combat. Dispatches from the Russian front reminded him of the days when he was directing British military intervention against the new Bolshevik regime. His forces had got as far as Tula, just south of Moscow. But now, he said, he forgave the Russians “in proportion to the number of Huns they kill.”

“Do they forgive you?” asked the brash Hopkins.

“In proportion to the number of tanks I send,” Churchill said.

Roosevelt disagreed. He thought they did not forgive, he said. And he was probably right. Even in the first flush of United Nations collaboration, with Britain and the United States ranged solidly with Russia against the Axis, the fissures in the coalition were all too obvious. As the German armies had moved on his main cities, Stalin had complained about delays in arms shipments. Eden had been on his way to Moscow for conferences with Stalin and Molotov at the time of Pearl Harbor, and Churchill had been much disturbed by his ensuing reports from Moscow. Stalin had proposed to Eden an immediate secret agreement returning to Russia the Baltic states, the frontiers of 1941 with Finland and Rumania, and a frontier with Poland based on the old Curzon Line. Eden had demurred on the ground that Roosevelt had asked the British not to enter into any secret postwar reorganization of Europe without consulting him. Such an agreement would also be contrary to the Atlantic Charter.

Stalin had been annoyed and mystified. How could there be a wartime alliance if war aims differed? In Washington, Churchill was annoyed, too. Even now, after six months of brave Soviet resistance, he could not forget how Russia had been indifferent and even hostile to Britain’s interests before June 1941, and had fought the Nazis only when attacked. But Churchill’s opposition to making postwar agreements stemmed more from strategic calculations than either pique or principle. “No one can foresee how the balance of power will lie or where the winning armies will stand at the end of the war,” Churchill counseled Eden. Britain and America would be economically and militarily strong; the Russians would need their aid. Churchill would defer postwar arrangements until he could move from a foundation of power.

The transcendental issue was the second front. In the critical days of late 1941 Stalin had pleaded for British action that could relieve the excrutiating pressure of the German war machine. Churchill had authorized Eden to discuss sending British troops into the Caucasus and into the Russian fighting line in the south. Nazi pressure in Africa, however, had led London to withdraw this offer, and a guarded proffer of RAF squadrons was dropped after Pearl Harbor. By late December the fortunes of war had changed. At just
about the time the Japanese were smashing Pearl Harbor, the Russians were unleashing a tremendous counterattack on the Moscow front. For a few days the Red Army made spectacular progress.

Now it was Moscow’s turn to announce tens of thousands of enemy soldiers encircled and trapped, vast war booty captured, key cities, including Kalinin and Tula, relieved or recaptured. After a few weeks Russian progress was slowed by the snow and cold, lack of transport, severe arms shortages, German tenacity, and sheer fatigue. But during the days when Eden and Stalin were meeting in Moscow, and Churchill and Roosevelt in Washington, Stalin was no longer in a begging mood. He could afford to look far into the future. No longer need he ask for American troops for the Russian front. But on one issue he would not change—would never change. He was still demanding a second front that might soften the tremendous blows that he knew Hitler would launch against him during the new year.

On the Far East, Stalin was coldly realistic. He was not ready to attack Japan. He reminded Eden that he had had to switch many divisions from Siberia to the Western Front. Moreover, war against Japan would be “unpopular with our people if the Soviet Government were to take the first step,” he told Eden. “If, on the other hand, we were attacked, the feelings of the Soviet people would be strong.” He even thought a Japanese attack on his country likely in the spring. Eden warned him that Japan would try to destroy its opponents one by one, including Russia, but Stalin commented that Britain was hardly fighting Japan alone.

Roosevelt had tried a more indirect approach. In mid-December he cabled to Stalin that he was suggesting to Chiang that he at once convene in Chungking a conference of Chinese, Soviet, British, Dutch, and American representatives to prepare for joint planning in the Far East. Stalin quickly answered that the President had not made clear the aims of such a conference and he wanted “elucidation,” in effect putting the President off. But Stalin added: “I wish you success in the struggle against the aggression in the Pacific.”

So committed was Roosevelt to Atlantic First strategy that never during these feverish days did he seriously consider the only alternative that might have brought Russia into the Far Eastern war—a Pacific First strategy that would have thrust American power on a direct axis across the northern Pacific, there to link up with the Soviets in a second front against Japan. Such a strategy would have faced formidable difficulties and represented a distinctly minority view. Yet it was some such plan as this that MacArthur had in mind when he cabled to the War Department that, with the Japanese so overextended to the south, a “golden opportunity” had arisen for a
“master stroke” if Russia could be induced to enter the war against Japan and attack from the north. MacArthur did not explain how Russia was to be brought into the Pacific war. The President invited Stalin to discuss “joint planning” with the American, British, and Chinese Ambassadors in Moscow, but Stalin responded to this vague suggestion as coolly as he had to the idea of a Chungking conference.

So the Soviet Union remained half an ally—a member of the United Nations, the main foe of Germany, but not at war with the enemy in the Far East, and not a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Roosevelt was satisfied with these arrangements, at least for the moment. He could understand Stalin’s caution in Siberia; he felt that events would bring their own compulsion toward unity. The Soviet leader, he told friends at dinner on New Year’s Day, had to rule a very backward people, which explained a good deal. Harry Hopkins, on his return from Moscow, had told him that Stalin had a sense of humor—which meant, the President said, that he also had a sense of proportion.

Clearly the President was bent less on setting grand strategy during these days than on establishing relationships, ordering priorities, soliciting views, laying immediate plans. The code name
ARCADIA
had been assigned to the Washington meetings, and a slightly idyllic atmosphere often seemed to surround the proceedings. The long-run decisions—aside from the reaffirmation of Atlantic First—were not to prove crucial. The importance of the conference lay in its certification of Anglo-American unity, establishment of joint machinery, and discussion of tactical plans. And
ARCADIA
left the two principals closer than ever in concord and comradeship.

The extent of Anglo-American co-operation, and indeed of the “industrial-military complex,” was vividly shown later when Marshall came to Harvey Bundy with a rumor that Churchill was about to replace Dill in Washington. Dill had worked so closely with the administration that the Pentagon was dismayed at the thought of his leaving. Marshall suggested that Bundy arrange for Harvard to give Dill an honorary degree at a special convocation and thus raise him in London’s estimation. Bundy tried with his friends in the Harvard establishment, but was told that Harvard never held special convocations. He then tried with his friends in the Yale establishment, only to be told the same thing. But then Yale thought of a way out: what about awarding Dill a prize for fostering Anglo-American co-operation? This was arranged, and the top Pentagon brass flew up to New Haven with Dill for the occasion. Dill’s speech was given front-page treatment in the New York
Times.
Marshall told Bundy later that Churchill had been duly impressed; in any event, Dill stayed.

On January 14 the President and Hopkins drove with Churchill to his special train. Roosevelt sent with the Prime Minister’s party some presents for Mrs. Churchill and a note:

“You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip.…I didn’t see him take anybody’s head off and he eats and drinks with his customary vigor, and still dislikes the same people….”

With his friend gone, the President could get more sleep. He could also devote more attention to the domestic state of the union.

“For the first time since the Japanese and the Fascists and the Nazis started along their blood-stained course of conquest they now face the fact that superior forces are assembling against them. Gone forever are the days when the aggressors could attack and destroy their victims one by one without unity of resistance….”

It was January 6, 1942. The President was delivering his address on the state of the union—delivering it to Congress in person, as usual. He was in a militant mood.

“The militarists of Berlin and Tokyo started this war. But the massed, angered forces of common humanity will finish it.”

The President proceeded to offer Congress a breath-taking set of production goals.

“First, to increase our production rate of airplanes so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 60,000 planes, 10,000 more than the goal that we set a year and a half ago. This includes 45,000 combat planes—bombers, dive bombers, pursuit planes. The rate of increase will be maintained and continued so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 125,000 airplanes, including 100,000 combat planes.

“Second, to increase our production of tanks so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 25,000 tanks; and to continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 75,000 tanks.

“Third, to increase our production rate of anti-aircraft guns so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 20,000 of them; and to continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 35,000 anti-aircraft guns.

“And fourth, to increase our production rate of merchant ships so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall build 6,000,000 deadweight tons as compared with a 1941 completed production of 1,100,000. And finally, we shall continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall build 10,000,000 tons of shipping.

“These figures and similar figures for a multitude of other implements of war will give the Japanese and the Nazis a little idea of
just what they accomplished in the attack at Pearl Harbor.

“And I rather hope that all these figures which I have given will become common knowledge in Germany and Japan….”

The shipping goal was the most audacious of all. The President told reporters how he had called in Maritime Commission officials and put the problem to them.

“What are you making now?” he had said to them. “ ‘Well,’ they said, ‘we can step it up to five million tons.’ I said, ‘Not enough. Go back and sharpen your pencils.’ …So they went back and sharpened their pencils, and they came back, and they said, ‘It will hurt terribly, but we believe that if we are told to we can turn out six million tons of shipping this year.’ I said, ‘Now you’re talking.’ And I said, ‘All right now, for ’43 what can you do? Can you turn out four million more tons, to a total of ten million tons of shipping?’ And they scratched their heads, and came back and said, ‘Aye, aye, sir, we will do it.’…”

It was not quite so easy as all this. The
ARCADIA
Conference was making clear during these days that transports and merchantmen were now the worst bottleneck in all the war planning. Not only were the Allies scrambling for tonnage, but the President’s services were competing fiercely over the building of warships versus army transports. Troop transports were so short, army planners concluded with dismay, that no other major troop movement could be undertaken in the Atlantic for at least three months if the North African operation was undertaken. Roosevelt had to raise his own sights. Within a few weeks of his January demands he was asking Chairman Emory S. Land, of the Maritime Commission, and Admiral Howard L. Vickery, of the Navy, to commission nine million tons in 1942 and fifteen million in 1943.