A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (123 page)

In reality, civilians did far more than they imagined. Important equipment like the jeep came from civilian-submitted designs, not government bureaucracy. Farmers pushed their productivity up 30 percent, and average citizens added 8 million more tons of food to the effort through backyard “victory” gardens. Scrap drives became outlets for patriotic frenzy, and a thirteen-year-old in Maywood, Illinois, collected more than 100 tons of paper from 1942 to 1943.
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Some 40 percent of the nation’s retirees returned to the workplace. It was as close to a total-war effort as the United States has ever seen.

Is This Trip Really Necessary?

The war allowed Roosevelt to accelerate implementation of some of his New Deal goals. In 1941, FDR proposed a 99.5 percent marginal tax rate on all incomes over $100,000. The measure failed, but undaunted, he issued an executive order to “tax all income over $25,000 at the astonishing rate of
100 percent.
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Other insidious changes in taxation found their way into the code, the most damaging of which involved the introduction in July 1943 of withholding taxes from the paychecks of employees. That subtle shift, described sympathetically by one text as an “innovative feature” where “no longer would taxpayers have to set aside money to pay their total tax bill…at the end of the year,” in fact allowed the government to conceal the total tax burden from the public and make it easier to steadily raise taxes, not just during the war, but for decades.
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It was that burden of laying aside the money that had focused the public’s attention on taxation levels. Subsequently, many limited-government critics have argued that the single most effective change in regaining control of the bloated tax code would be to abolish withholding and require that all individuals make a one-time tax payment per year, due the last week in October—right before the November elections.

When it came to applying taxes and regulations, however, the administration took care not to unnecessarily cripple or alienate business leaders and entrepreneurs. Some obvious restrictions were necessary. War-critical products such as oil, gasoline, cotton, rubber, tin, and aluminum were rationed. (A popular phrase of the day, and one that made its way into most cartoons and movies, was “Is this trip really necessary?”) Various food items, especially meat and coffee, also went on the ration lists. Civilians enthusiastically pitched in with tin can drives, rounded up mountains of old tires for recycling, and collected used toothpaste tubes for their aluminum content.

To manage the war production and procurement system, Roosevelt named Sears, Roebuck president Donald M. Nelson as the head of the War Production Board (WPB), which coordinated the effort. The WPB immediately ordered all civilian car and truck production halted to convert the factories to the manufacturing of tanks and armored personnel carriers. In theory, the WPB was to have exercised the same types of powers that the WIB under Bernard Baruch had in World War I. But Nelson was not Baruch, and the demands of this war were much steeper.

Realizing the nation needed a single source of direction for the production effort, in 1943 Roosevelt created the Office of War Management (OWM), headed by former Supreme Court Justice (and FDR crony) James Byrnes. Byrnes soon demonstrated such great access to the president that people referred to him as the president’s assistant. Byrnes got the job done, allowing larger companies to make as much as they could, with profits tied strictly to numbers of units produced. The government had little regard for the cost of specific items—only performance and delivery mattered. The United States was rich enough to survive postwar debt and inflation, but there would be no surviving a victorious Hitler.

War costs demanded the largest loan the American government had ever received from its people, in the form of war bonds. Bond drives resulted in a deluge of money for the war. Yet it paled beside the demands for cash—$8 billion a month!—to combat the Axis. Between 1941 and 1945 the national debt skyrocketed, from $48 billion to $247 billion. As a share of GNP measured in constant dollars, this represented a 120–fold increase over precrash 1929 debt levels.
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This debt growth illustrated one reason isolationsists were wary of war in the first place, and it also confirmed their fears about the rise of a permanent engorged bureaucracy.
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In another area, that of domestic surveillance and intelligence gathering, people sacrificed liberty for the war effort. Keeping tabs on the enemy and foreign agents led the government to nearly triple the budget of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in just two years. Domestic surveillance increased as the attorney general authorized extensive wiretapping in cases of espionage. A new propaganda agency, the Office of War Information, coordinated the information campaign. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also needed information on the enemy, so they formed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which would be the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, to gather intelligence and to conduct psychological warfare against the enemy. After Americans began to take large numbers of enemy prisoners, the United States had to establish camps in the Arizona desert to house the POWs. (One U-boat commander, determined to escape, broke out of the Papago POW compound near Scottsdale, Arizona, only to find himself confronted with desert as far as his eyes could see. He was recaptured after holing up in the dry Arizona buttes for several days.)

Ironically, the very traits often denounced by the New Dealers—individual effort, self-reliance, and capitalism—were now needed to fight the war. Government-backed science, however, did succeed in delivering what no individual could, the “ultimate weapon,” although the atomic bomb remained one of the best-kept secrets of the war until August 1945.

The Gadget

Experiments with splitting the atom had taken place in England in 1932, and by the time Hitler invaded Poland, most of the world’s scientists understood that a man-made atomic explosion could be accomplished. How long before the actual fabrication of such a device could occur, however, no one knew. Roosevelt had already received a letter from one of the world’s leading pacifists, Albert Einstein, urging him to build a uranium bomb before the Nazis did. FDR set up a Uranium Committee in October 1939, which gained momentum less than a year later when British scientists, fearing their island might fall to the Nazis, arrived in America with a black box containing British atomic secrets.
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After mid-1941, when it was established, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), headed by Vannevar Bush, was investigating the bomb’s feasibility.

Kept out of the loop by Bush, who feared he was a security risk, Einstein used his influence to nudge FDR toward the bomb project. Recent evidence suggests Einstein’s role in bringing the problem to Roosevelt’s attention was even greater than previously thought.
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Ironically, as Einstein’s biographer has pointed out, without the genius’s support, the bombs would have been built anyway, but not in time for use against Japan. Instead, with civilian and military authorities insufficiently aware of the vast destructiveness of such weapons in real situations, they may well have been used in Korea, at a time when the Soviet Union would have had its own bombs for counterattack, thus offering the terrifying possibility of a nuclear conflict over Korea. By wielding his considerable influence in 1939 and 1940, Einstein may have saved innumerable lives, beyond those of the Americans and Japanese who would have clashed in Operation Olympic, the invasion of the Japanese home islands.
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No one knew the status of Hitler’s bomb project—only that there was one. As late as 1944, American intelligence was still seeking to assassinate Walter Heisenberg (head of the Nazi bomb project), among others, unaware at the time that the German bomb was all but kaput. In total secrecy, then, the Manhattan Project, placed under the U.S. Army’s Corps of Engineers and begun in the Borough of Manhattan, was directed by a general, Leslie Groves, a man with an appreciation for the fruits of capitalism. He scarcely blinked at the incredible demands for material, requiring thousands of tons of silver for wiring, only to be told, “In the Treasury [Department] we do not speak of tons of silver. Our unit is the troy ounce.”
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Yet Groves got his silver and everything else he required. Roosevelt made sure the Manhattan Project lacked for nothing, although Roosevelt himself died before seeing the terrible fruition of the Manhattan Project’s deadly labors.

War Strategy: Casablanca

The intense concern both Roosevelt and the British displayed over producing the bomb reflected their deepest fear that Hitler’s Germany would soon develop its own weapon of mass destruction. They did not know that Germany would soon begin plans for the A-9/A-10 100–ton intercontinental rocket. In retrospect, if the intercontinental rocket had been mated to atomic warheads, the war might have ended much differently. Allied spies were unaware of other potential threats to the U.S. mainland: Germany flew the four-engine Me-264 Amerika bomber in 1942, which later was converted into a jet bomber capable of 500-miles-per-hour speeds. The Nazis had already flown a Ju-290 reconnaissance plane to New York and back, taking pictures and proving that a bomber could attack New York. With their fears of known German technology combined with Stalin’s pleas for a second front, Churchill and Roosevelt knew that they had to focus on defeating Germany, not Japan, first.

On New Year’s Day, 1942, the representatives of twenty-six nations at war with the Axis powers signed a Declaration of the United Nations based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter. They promised not to make a separate peace with any of the Axis powers and agreed to defeat Germany first. That decision only formalized what British prime minister Winston Churchill and Roosevelt had already concluded in private talks. Churchill, one of the few Western leaders to fully appreciate the barbarity and evil of Soviet communism, repeatedly expressed his concerns to FDR. But the president, based in part on the naïve reports of his ambassador, Joseph Davies, trusted Stalin to behave rationally; thus Churchill, who desperately needed American war matériel, could do little to talk Roosevelt into a more sober assessment of Russia’s overall aims. In January 1943, Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff met at Casablanca to discuss war strategy. Stalin did not attend. The meeting produced the defeat-Germany-first decision and directed the resources to the European war. It also resulted in a commitment on the part of the Allies to demand unconditional surrender from all Axis parties.
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Consequently, the Anglo-American leaders agreed that nearly 80 percent of America’s war capacity would go toward the European theater and, especially in the early days, the bombing campaign aimed to soften up Germany for the necessary amphibious invasion. Churchill saw bombing as a way to draw in the United States and use her massive economic output, but at the same time minimize the loss of American lives and avoid early public hostility.

Since the prospects for invading the European mainland in 1942 were remote, about all Britain and America could do while building up was launch devastating air strikes on German manufacturing, especially on those industries related to aircraft production. The goal was to ensure total domination of the skies over whatever landing area the Allies would choose at some future point. Much debate has ensued over the supposed ineffectiveness of the air campaign that dropped between 1.5 and 2.6 million tons of bombs (depending on which aircraft are included in the survey) on Germany and related European targets. Many analysts have labeled strategic bombing a failure. It is true that Germany’s production actually increased between 1942 and 1944, and bombing was costly, in both lives and money. Several factors must be weighed, however. Nazi production increased because until late in the war Hitler had ordered his production chief Albert Speer to keep German civilian life as normal as possible. This meant that Germany retained excess capacity in her factories until near the end, having never put the nation on a total-war footing. Some of the continued buildup during the bombing reflected not a failure of bombing, but of Germany’s unwillingness to fully mobilize earlier.

Second, in the early stages of the bombing campaign, neither Great Britain nor the United States had fighter planes with enough range to escort the bombers, so raids were conducted over enemy skies amid swarms of Luftwaffe aircraft, resulting in substantial losses. The United States agreed to fly missions during the day, based in part on the availability of the superior (and secret) Norden bombsight, which allowed the Americans to engage in pinpoint bombing as opposed to area or carpet bombing.
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That meant the loss of American aircraft and life would be higher than that of the British, who bombed at night. B-17 Flying Fortress bombers began regular raids on European targets in August 1942, striking targets in France. Then, in January 1943, the Eighth Army Air Force began missions against Germany itself.
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Even when flying in tight box formations, B-17s suffered tremendous losses, especially when out of escort range. Nevertheless, Germany had to commit increasingly greater resources to countering the bombers, thus diverting crucial resources from antitank tactical aircraft for the Eastern Front.

Despite the high cost in men and planes, the strategic bombing campaign achieved a decisive victory almost from its inception. Surprisingly, even the U.S. government’s own “Strategic Bombing Survey” after the war tended to obscure the overwhelming success in the skies. In retrospect the devastation caused by Allied bombing, and its key role in the war, is clear. First, German aircraft were siphoned away from the Eastern Front, where they could have made the difference against Russian tanks. Second, the bombing hindered the Third Reich’s war production, especially of transport and oil, and there is no way of telling how many more aircraft, submarines, or tanks could have been produced without the bombing. Germany tied up nearly 20 percent of its nonagricultural workforce in air defense activities, and bombing reduced reserves of aviation gas by 90 percent. This represented millions of combat troops and civilians, not to mention pilots, who were pinned down by part-time defense duty. Existing statistics may even substantially understate the percentage of workers absorbed by the bombing because many were foreign slaves and POWs. Rail transportation—absolutely critical for getting larger Tiger tanks to the Russian front—plummeted by 75 percent in a five-month period because of the impact of air power.
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