A World at Arms (20 page)

The Japanese had some quite realistic views on such subjects as Soviet strength and the likelihood of the European war lasting for several years.
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They were, furthermore, not prepared to cut off their ties with the Polish government and maintained diplomatic relations with it.
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They would for a while be very cautious in their economic dealings with Germany; in fact, they were quite willing to take advantage of the Third Reich’s desperate need for soybeans from Manchuria to drive a hard bargain.
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Such tactics would continually introduce friction into
German-japanese relations throughout the war. In the early part of the conflict, there were particularly aggravating difficulties as the Japanese refused to help the Germans as much as the latter hoped and expected in arranging for the shipment of rubber and other important goods to the railheads of the Transsiberian railway for dispatch to Germany. The Japanese measures had the effect of reducing the extent to which Germany, with the approval and assistance of the Soviet Union, could benefit from this gap in the blockade.
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There were, however, elements in Japan pushing for a vastly more adventurous policy. Led by such individuals as Shiratori Toshio, until the fall of 1939 Japanese ambassador in Rome, they looked forward to a full alliance with Germany, hoping to end the war in China by partitioning it with the Soviet Union (and incidentally turning over to the Soviet Union those districts of China controlled by the Communists), and heading for war with Britain, France, and the United States.
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As yet these elements were restrained by others, first in the Abe government and then in that of his successor, Yonai Mitsumasa, but any turn of the war in Europe favoring the Germans would enable them to carry the day.
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The United States had played a major part in the outcome of World War I. Its munitions and other supplies had helped the Allies conduct the war; its soldiers and credits had played a key role in halting the final German offensive in the summer of 1918 and in turning the desperate situation of Britain and France of the spring and summer of that year into victory in the fall.
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In the same post-war years as more and more Germans convinced themselves that they had been defeated by a stab in the back, with America’s role in deciding the issue of war being a legend, increasing numbers of Americans became persuaded that entry into the conflict had been a terrible mistake. German belief in the stab-in-the-back legend–with its implication for underrating the importance of American involvement in the war-would lead to a grotesque under–estimation of United States military potential, a subject which will be reexamined repeatedly.
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The Americans, on the other hand, had tried to insulate themselves against war by neutrality legislation.

When World War II began in September 1939, those who had urged American support of the peace settlement of 1919, and, in particular, believed that the United States should join the League of Nations, could now point to the accuracy of their prophecies that only a full share in the maintenance of world order could prevent another war. Their advice had been ignored–and here was the second world war within a generation. This argument, that American abstention from an active role in maintaining the peace settlement of 1919 had contributed heavily to making the second war possible, would eventually come to be accepted
by a large proportion of the American electorate and lead them and a majority in both political parties to approve of a very different policy in the post-World War II era. But this acceptance of a “lesson” from the past came slowly and did not become a dominant strain in American thinking for some time.
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The initial reaction of both the leadership and the public in the United States to the outbreak of war in Europe was essentially similar and uniform. The overwhelming majority blamed Germany for starting the war; the overwhelming majority hoped that Britain and France would win; the overwhelming majority wanted to stay out of the war.
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The near unanimity on these three basic issues did not extend, however, to two other subsidiary but in practice critical matters: the real prospects of the Allies and the policy to be followed by the United States toward them.

There were those in the United States who thought it made no difference who won, but for many, the prospect of the victory of the Allies was not only the preferred but the most likely outcome of the conflict. As German victory in Poland was followed by a quiet winter, more of the public began to doubt the ability of Britain and France to defeat her; and their doubt, not surprisingly, increased with German victories in Scandinavia and the West in the spring of 1940. President Roosevelt’s views on this subject appear to have been somewhat different–and in retrospect a great deal more far-sighted-than those of many others. He certainly always hoped for an Allied victory over Germany, but he was very skeptical of Western power. In the years before the war, he had been very conscious of the deficiency in French air power and had attempted to assist her air rearmament.
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While the weakness of French air power was generally recognized at the time, that of the French army was not perceived by most. It was widely assumed that the army which had played the predominant part among the Allies in World War I, and one of whose marshals had led them to victory in 1918, remained the strongest in the world–and if not the strongest, certainly powerful enough to withstand any attack on France.

There is substantial evidence to show that Roosevelt did not share this optimistic assessment of French military strength. He had regularly read with care the reports of his two ambassadors to France in the 1930s, Jesse I. Strauss and William C. Bullitt. Both had excellent contacts in France, both were clear-sighted observers, and both were extremely dubious about French strength.
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The picture they conveyed of a nation divided and diffident, terrified of war and uncertain about the course to follow in the face of its approach, was not always accurate in its details but sound in its general import. The enormous literature on Franklin
Roosevelt as yet contains no studies which systematically examine the evidence on his views of either France or Germany, the two major continental nations whose languages he knew, but one thing seems to be clear. Perhaps because of his own predilection for naval matters he appears never to have been affected by the aura of strength surrounding the French army in the interwar years. Certainly his warning to Stalin in the summer of 1939, that the Soviet Union would be well advised to align itself with the Western Powers rather than Hitler because a German victory in Western Europe would menace all other nations, implied a perception of German strength and French military weakness and a belief in the possibility of a German victory over France on land, which few shared in the pre-war world. On the other hand, as would become apparent in the terrible crisis of the summer of 1940, President Roosevelt would think it likely that first Britain and subsequently the Soviet Union could hold out when most thought otherwise.

These perceptions of the President must be kept in mind in assessing and understanding the practical steps Roosevelt urged on Congress and the American people. He believed that Nazi Germany and its allies threatened the whole world, including the Western Hemisphere, and he very much hoped to keep the United States out of the war. Unlike Stalin, who believed that the best way to avert war from the Soviet Union was to help the Germans fight the Western Powers, Roosevelt thought that the most likely prospect for continual avoidance of war was to assist Britain and France in defeating Germany. Because he believed, correctly as we now know, that the Western Powers were deficient in weapons of war, he considered the prohibition on the sale of weapons to them in the neutrality laws a bonus for the early rearmament of the aggressors and a major handicap for the Allies. He would, therefore, try again to have the neutrality laws changed.

Roosevelt hoped that this could be done on a non-partisan or bipartisan basis, and in the initial stages tried to involve the 1936 Republican Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates, Alfred Landon and Frank Knox, in the process.
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In the Congress, however, a bitter debate, largely though not entirely on partisan lines, ensued. The issue divided the country. What came to be a standard pattern over the next two years emerged. On the one side were those who believed that, both to stay out of war and to assist Britain and France, neutrality law revision was in the country’s interest. A few took this side because they expected or wanted the United States to join the Allies. Against this position were those, generally called isolationists and later strongly identified with the America First Committee, who believed that the best way to stay out of the war was to do nothing to assist Britain and France or to help them
to help themselves; and some took this side because they thought that it might be just as well if Germany won or at least that it made little difference to the United States if she did so.
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In the weeks before the outbreak of war, the isolationists had won on the issue of allowing others to buy arms in the United States, when Roosevelt had proposed it as a way of warning Germany that American arsenals would be open to those certain to control the seas if Germany started a war. Now that the Germans had started it, the isolationists lost. After a lengthy and bitter struggle, during which Roosevelt, as he put it, was “walking on eggs,”
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the Congress approved what had come to be called “cash and carry” early in November; the President signed the bill on November 4.
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The Germans, who were watching this struggle with great interest,
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were no more in agreement among themselves than the Americans, only in Germany there was a dictator who decided on policy. The navy could hardly wait to bring the United States into the war by repeating its World War I procedure. On October 10, at the same meeting that he advocated a German seizure of bases in Norway, Admiral Raeder urged on Hitler a completely ruthless submarine campaign to throttle England, if necessary at risk of war with the United States.
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The head of the navy could see no way for Germany to crush England except to destroy her seaborne commerce, whatever the risk of other complications, a repetition of the German navy leadership’s argument of 1916 unaffected by the experience of 1917-18.
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Though at first sounding agreeable, Hitler in fact set limits to the projects of his naval Commander-in-Chief.

Hitler’s view of the United States was based on an assessment that this was a weak country, incapable because of its racial mixture and feeble democratic government of organizing and maintaining strong military forces.
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The antagonism of Americans, both in government and among the public, toward Germany was therefore no cause for worry. Certain that Allied victory in World War I was the result of Germany’s having been stabbed in the back by the home front, he was never interested in the American military effort in that conflict or any possible renewal of it. He had long assumed that Germany would have to fight the United States after conquering Eurasia, and he had begun preparations toward that end both in airplane and naval construction.
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The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, however, forced a temporary postponement in the program to construct a big navy of huge battleships and numerous other surface ships. Although it is not clear when Hitler learned the facts, the project for building planes which could reach the American east coast was also not going well.

Under these circumstances, Hitler preferred to defer war with the
United States, not because he was greatly worried about that prospect, but because he saw no reason to rush into premature hostilities when he had not completed his blue-water navy, and the navy actually at his disposal did not yet have the number of submarines which might really seal off the British Isles. Nothing that had happened in 1939 changed his basic views of the United States. When he saw the German military attaché to Washington in February 1939, the only topic on which he queried the latter was the alleged Jewish ancestry of President Roosevelt.
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He had dismissed Roosevelt’s peace appeal of April 1939 with derision; the very fact that in September the United States had proclaimed its neutrality showed what incompetents the Americans were, as, in his judgement, strong and determined nations took sides and acted in wartime.
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Not surprisingly, Hitler preferred the Soviet Union’s policy of assisting Germany while neutral to the Americans’ inclination to assist Britain and France while neutral; and it hardly needs to be pointed out that Germany was as eager to have neutrals like the Soviet Union and Spain provide assistance to her as she was to denounce as violations of international law any actions by a neutral that aided her opponents. Such antics, however, shed no light on German policy which was guided by entirely different considerations.

One of the elements in Hitler’s low assessment of the United States’ military potential was, reasonably enough, the weakness of the American army and the near total absence of any air force. When the war started, there were 190,000 men in the American army with no real divisions, corps, or armies as yet; most of the equipment was of World War I vintage and wearing out.
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The air force was too small even to provide the Germans with target practice. Roosevelt, whose view of American military potential was informed by an entirely different perspective from Hitler’s on the role of the United States in helping the Allies defeat Germany in World War I,
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had been trying to build up forces since before the war. He had begun the rebuilding of the navy in the 1930S; authorized in 1934, the battleship
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was begun in October 1937; additional new battleships as well as other vessels would follow.
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Although it has been observed quite correctly that the President, who had been the second man in the Navy Department under President Wilson and was an avid sailor and collector of ship models, always kept a special place in his heart for the navy, the major push he actually made in the drive to rearm the country concerned the air.
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It was his hope after the obvious signs of German unhappiness with the Munich agreement that a massive program of air rearmament might impress the German government in an earlier version of what would later be called “deterrence,” somewhat the way the fear of German air superiority–
real or imagined–had cowed Britain and France in the 1938 crisis. Given the near absence of any substantial American military aircraft industry, foreign orders for military planes obviously would be of great help in building up that vital element in any future American armaments program. Finally, Britain and France could not be expected to continue to invest in the American aircraft industry if they were not allowed to purchase its products precisely when they most needed them. Although for domestic political reasons the President never stressed this aspect of neutrality law revision in public, there can be little question that the matter was very much in his mind. Gearing up American military production facilities was going to be a huge task, and any and all help would speed the process.
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