The World at War (28 page)

ANTHONY EDEN

It was obvious from our first tough conversations, at which Ambassador Sir Stafford Cripps was present too, that we were going to have plenty of trouble in the future. My general view was the sooner we could get down to discussing these matters with the Russians the better. Because as the war progressed, as we were confident we would win it, so it was likely the Russian demands would become more formidable and if we could pin them down it would anyhow strengthen our position for argument later. But of course one couldn't move in any of this except in agreement with the United States, which is what I told Roosevelt then, and also in consultation with the Dominion governments who were all in the war at the time. I think the Russians were doubtful as to what our attitude really was. We had been a year in the war already and the Russians had certainly done nothing to help us in their time. On the contrary, they supplied Germany with a great deal that Hitler had asked for, materials of various kinds, in order, presumably, to try and buy him off, to delay the moment of his attack on them. So it would be natural that they were suspicious, but I think gradually they got to understand that we were in the business completely with them.
Churchill's broadcast after Russia was attacked was a masterpiece in that respect and I'd been with him in Chequers the night before and discussed this, and we'd agreed I should go and see Maisky and speak to him in exactly the same sense, which I did. I think the Russians were gratified; they began to feel perhaps we really would help. But then, of course, they wanted everything.
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AMBASSADOR HARRIMAN

The question of wartime strategy was a matter of concern; General Marshall wanted to make a cross-Channel operation a major effort and so back as early as 1942 we were talking about what might be done. There was a misunderstanding of American Chiefs of Staff and the British capability. I think you had twenty-six divisions but they were only twenty-five to forty per cent equipped and in no sense in a position to engage immediately in warfare. So when it was finally decided to postpone that Second Front, which
Stalin had asked Eden for when he went to Moscow in December 1941 to relieve the pressure on the Russian Front,
Churchill decided that he'd better go and see Stalin himself to give the news that there could be no Second Front in Europe, but there could be one in Africa. I worked with him and Churchill had some very tough talks with Stalin in August 1942. That was the time Stalin accused the British of being cowardly in their action. Stalin said never before in history had the British Navy turned back, and once the British realised the Germans were not supermen they would have the courage to fight. You could imagine this did not go down well with Churchill and, I think in one of the most brilliant speeches he ever made, answered Stalin and he told what the British had done within their resources and were prepared to do. And in spite of his annoyance he never did ask Stalin where he was with the Second Front when he made his deal with Hitler. He kept his temper. There was an old interpreter with the British Embassy who tried to interpret but Churchill had a bad habit, from an interpreter's standpoint, of making long statements. I would have thought that to translate Churchillian English to Russian would be very difficult at best. In any event he was trying his best and seemed to be stumbling along.
Churchill pushed him, 'Did you tell him this – did you tell him that,' and at one point Stalin put his head back and roared with laughter. He said, 'Your words of no importance, what is vital is your spirit.' And that exchange, the brutality of Stalin and the manner in which Churchill took it, laid the basis of this wartime relationship. Stalin, in my presence, toasted him, 'My comrade in arms during the war, a man of insatiable courage and determination' – but he added, 'in this war'. I think he knew quite well there would be very little in common between them at the end of the war.

ANTHONY EDEN

From the first Stalin was eager for the Second Front and I don't blame the Russians for doing that – they were sustaining a terrific burden from the German attack. On the other hand it was quite impossible at any time, though we had endless conversations, to make him understand the difficulties of an operation across the sea. The elephant just couldn't understand the whale's limitations of operation and I suppose to some extent the whale was impatient with the elephant for not understanding. It was a constant source of trouble until eventually the landings in Normandy put an end to the dilemma as far as it existed in Stalin's mind. He was quite clear in his mind as to what he wanted: he wanted us and the Americans in due course to agree on what should be the main terms of the peace settlement that ended the war. What concerned him was the security of Russia and he wanted to be quite sure what had happened to his country should not happen again, regardless of what the effect of that would be on the feelings of some of his neighbours.

SIR STAFFORD CRIPPS

Speech given at a 'Russia, First' rally, 1942

The Soviet Union has no idea and no wish to interfere in the internal affairs of any other country. I know that from the lips of Stalin himself.

CHAPTER 11
PEARL HARBOR

In 1940–41 the Roosevelt administration inched towards active participation in the European war and at the same time forced the British government and the Dutch government in exile, whose hopes for eventual victory now lay entirely with the USA, to join in a campaign of increasing diplomatic and economic pressure on Japan to abandon its war on China. Although the Japanese began their 1904–5 war with Russia by sinking the Russian Asian Fleet in harbour, the principal US naval base in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor was completely unprepared for the Japanese attack of 7 December 1941. As the attack was so politically advantageous to Roosevelt, suspicions about his complicity have never abated and as late as May 1999 the US Senate voted to annul the 1942 censure of the Hawaiian Fleet and Army Commanders because they were denied vital intelligence available in Washington. The truth is that the threat was incorrectly evaluated because of racialist underestimation of the Japanese (itself a crucial factor in creating the climate for war in Japan), and because of a generalised assumption that if the Japanese did attack, it would be southwards to seize the oilfields of the Dutch Fast Indies. This made it all the more inexcusable that the principal American deterrent, the heavy bombers based in the Philippines, were destroyed on the ground ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. There could be no doubt, however, that the attack would provoke American rage, so there was a strong element of justified incredulity in the American reaction to the attacks. Germany and Italy did Roosevelt the further favour (so often ignored by historians) of declaring war on the United States four days later, but only Japanese Americans were interned. Until the Japanese carrier force was crushed at Midway in June 1942 Roosevelt's greatest problem was justifying
a 'Europe First' policy to the American people. The Doolittle raid on Japan in April 1942 was a harbinger of the fate that awaited, Japan and a gesture to show that something was being done in the Pacific.

CHARLES BOHLEN

US diplomat

Roosevelt began to see during the Thirties the dangers that were looming in the world with the rise of Hitler and militaristic Japan, and he felt that the interests of the United States were directly connected with these developments. Our interests clearly lay on the side of the democracies against the totalitarian states but he was very conscious that the instinctive feeling of the American people was just against sending our boys abroad to fight on foreign battlefields. The best illustration of that was in 1937: he made a speech in Chicago in which he proposed rather a mild solution and the reaction he got from the political public was very short and very negative. So we had this problem all the way through the late Thirties and even the early Forties, up to the time of
Pearl Harbor.

AMBASSADOR W AVERELL HARRIMAN

President Roosevelt's Special Envoy to Europe

I don't know anything about it until I went in March 1941, but Roosevelt, almost immediately after the attack on the Low Countries in May 1940, began to move. He was there for the deal, for the destroyers, and then he had a defence committee; we had a partial industrial mobilisation and then the extraordinary piece of legislation which was
Lend-Lease, proposed in December 1940, became law in March 1941. Under that he was authorised to take action after Hitler's attack in the Low Countries. The President did everything he could to give aid to Britain, and my instructions were very simple and brief: they were to contact the British government and find out what we could do to help Britain short of war, and we began at once doing all sorts of things which were not really neutral under the literal interpretation. We were repairing British naval vessels in American ports and we escorted your convoys across the Atlantic as far as Iceland and we transferred two million tons of shipping. The battle for the Atlantic was raging when I first came over, about ten per cent of your ships were being sunk, and it didn't take much of a mathematician to figure out it was becoming increasingly difficult.

NORMAN CORWIN

American 'Poet Laureate of the radio'

It was a stroke of absolute imbecility for the Japanese to have bombed Pearl Harbor because that unified the United States. Many of the war measures such as steps to give aid to Britain when she was standing alone used to squeak by in Congress. Even programmes of armament, of military preparedness, got through Congress on very, very close votes – one-vote margins in a total of four hundred to five hundred votes – so that there was considerable division which represented a strong current of isolation. There was a strong anti-British feeling in certain parts of the country; it was felt that Britain was trying very hard to drag us into its war and that the war was none of our concern and that we could simply twiddle our thumbs and it would all go away. But this only furthered the isolationist attitude which Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and the rest of his colleagues, who voted down our participation in the League of Nations after World War One, had established during the days of Woodrow Wilson.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ALBERT WEDERMEYER

Author of the US Army's strategic 'Victory Program', known as 'Germany First'
The American people were repeatedly told by the President in fireside chats and in official announcements that the administration was doing everything within its power to avoid involvement in the war. This could be interpreted as deceit, but subsequent to the war and as information has become available to me concerning the policies and actions of President Roosevelt, I have decided that he may have known better than those who opposed our entry into the war where the best interests of the United States lay.

AMBASSADOR HARRIMAN

We did things entirely against the rules of neutrality such as repairing naval vessels in and convoying ships. They were very close to warlike acts on our part, but there was no indication that they provoked Hitler. Japan, I believe from the record, appears to have been provoked by Roosevelt's declaring embargo on the shipment of oil and scrap-iron – they resented that very much. Roosevelt indicated that as long as they were going south through Indochina into Indonesia, that we would not supply them. That seemed to have an influence on the Japanese decision to attack, but I don't know of any indication that our act provoked Hitler. Hitler accepted them and didn't seem to care to bring the United States into war, but suddenly at this moment he declared war. There was no agreement I understand between Hitler and the Japanese. Interesting psychological action on his part, which relieved Roosevelt of his difficulties.

JOHN McCLOY

US
Assistant Secretary of War

It's difficult for me to say how close we were but I've no question that the trend was towards an intervention in the war and I'm inclined to think it would not have been far removed. It did take the Pearl Harbor incident to consolidate opinion and bring us into the war, but I feel there were steps that were developing, to be sure somewhat comparable to the steps that took place in World War One. I think with the moves that Mr Roosevelt was making – the Cash and Carry Programme, that he had agreed the protection of the convoys, the destroyer deal and one thing and another – which would be apt to produce an incident that would set war off. The trend of public opinion generally throughout the country was towards an intervention, I think. It was not only the aggressive attitude of Hitler that caused concern but his excess in the Jewish affair, and the general body of opinion was shocked.

CHARLES BOHLEN

I think the Neutrality Act was really a desire to prevent the United States being drawn into war, which the isolationists felt was none of our business. I think they were wrong and I think the American government thought they were wrong, but it was a very definite problem. Roosevelt saw the thing clearly and did what he could to help move public opinion along, but certainly without such an event as Pearl Harbor it was very doubtful that the opinion would have been moved to the point of taking positive action except under extreme provocation.

COMMANDER MINORU GENDA

Japanese naval airman, planner of Pearl Harbor attack

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto told Vice-Admiral Takijiro Onishi the idea of attacking Pearl Harbor and I was instructed by Vice-Admiral Onishi to make a study of it. This was not an official order because I was not under Vice-Admiral Onishi's command. I was Chief of Staff of an entirely different unit but we had close relations from before and so Admiral Onishi asked me, because of our special personal relationship, to make a study of attacking Pearl Harbor. It was felt that in case of war, if Japan were to fight in a conventional way there was little hope of winning. Therefore the idea was to strike against the US Pacific Fleet in the Hawaii area simultaneously with the start of the war. There were three difficult points in attacking Pearl Harbor. First was to keep it a secret, as if the Americans found out that the Japanese fleet was approaching Pearl Harbor they would be immediately counter-attacked. The second point was what course to take in the approach to Pearl Harbor; the possible routes included a southern route from Truk Island, a central route that passes the Midway Islands and a third to pass south of the Aleutian Islands. The point was which of these three to select; many things had to be considered – the weather, the size of the waves, the visibility. The third point concerned the attack, the actual attack itself: would it be possible to conduct a torpedo attack? This was a very big problem, because if this were not possible the raid could not succeed. We had to figure out how to make a torpedo attack in the shallow waters of Pearl Harbor.