A World at Arms (50 page)

Lord Lothian, the British ambassador to the United States, was one of the few who understood the desire of Roosevelt to help England within the limits of the politically and legally feasible but to stay out of the war if at all possible. As Britain’s ability to pay for supplies was nearing its end, he persuaded a reluctant Churchill to lay the financial facts openly before the President, and Lothian himself in public exposed the fact that England was running out of money.
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Out of this approach came Roosevelt’s call for the Lend-Lease program, a massive system of Congressional appropriations for the purpose of providing assistance to Britain in wartime which was subsequently extended to other countries.
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Following great pressure by Roosevelt, Hull, and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau–the administration’s key figure on the issue–for Britain to come up with as much gold and dollars from the sale of investments as possible,
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and a very noisy debate in the public arena as well as in Congress, the bill, cleverly labelled H.R. 1776 to reassure House Majority Leader John McCormack’s Irish constituents, became law on March 11, 1941. The first appropriation of seven billion dollars had been voted before the month was out.

Passage of this legislation in intense and widely reported debate signalled the American public’s belief that the threat posed by Germany was great enough to merit drastic American support of Germany’s enemies. Most still hoped to stay out of hostilities, but by contrast with the identical Soviet hopes of those months, the way to realize that hope was seen to be the massive shipment of supplies to Hitler’s enemies rather than to Hitler. Simultaneously, this process assisted in the more efficient and effective building up of America’s own rearmament program.

The administration also took other steps to deal with the dangerous world situation. Relations with Britain were improved when Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, who did not have the confidence of either the Churchill government or President Roosevelt, was replaced by John Winant who was trusted by both.
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Earlier, the sudden death of Lord Lothian, the British ambassador in Washington, had led to the appointment of
Lord Halifax, who proved to be in his own way as successful as his predecessor.
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Perhaps even more important was the evolution of personal ties between Roosevelt and Churchill, first through Harry Hopkins whom Roosevelt sent to London in January 1941
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and then when they met in person at Placentia Bay in August.
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Still alarmed about the security of its codes, the United States took new steps to tighten up in this field.
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Internal security was also enhanced by the closing of German and Italian consulates in the United States and the confiscation of German and Italian ships in American harbors.
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By pressure on Vichy, exerted through a most distinguished ambassador, Admiral Leahy, when General Pershing had to decline, the Roosevelt administration tried to restrain the policy of collaborating with Germany.
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The special Takoradi air route across Africa, already alluded to, was built up with direct American participation.
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In April 1941, the United States signed an agreement with the Danish Minister in Washington on the joint defense of Greenland which allowed American bases there, maintained Danish sovereignty, and caused hysterics in Berlin.
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Perhaps of greatest long-term importance was the elaboration of new or revised contingency war plans, both within the United States government and jointly with the British, the Canadians, and eventually the Dutch and Australians. In lengthy and repeated discussions, high-ranking American and British officers came together to work out the strategic dispositions which they would follow if the initiative of Germany or later also of Japan precipitated the United States into the war.
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These plans, fitted together with American ones, came to set a priority on defeating Germany first while holding Japan in check as well as possible, preferably without war at all, with major offensives against Japan if she did go to war to follow upon Germany’s defeat. President Roosevelt never officially approved these contingency plans, but he knew of them, allowed American officers to work on them, and authorized the strictly American planning to be guided by the framework they provided. He did not agree to projects for sending American warships to Singapore as the British suggested, but he was prepared to cooperate in other ways.
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Of these, the most significant was the increased use of the American navy to protect shipping in the Atlantic. In February 1941, the force in the Atlantic attained fleet status and its commander, Ernest J. King, became vice admiral. In view of his later role, it is important to recall that King’s first major assignment in the war was in cooperation with the British. That cooperation came to include the repair of British warships in United States ports, a matter of special urgency in 1941.
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The American aircraft carrier
Yorktown
and several destroyers, followed by
three battleships, were transferred from the Pacific to the Atlantic; it appears that only the personal arguments of the Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet Admiral Kimmel, persuaded Roosevelt not to order additional transfers.
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The British disasters in the Mediterranean in the spring of 1941 led to anguished debates in Washington as to what to do.
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The most important new step to aid Britain that the United States took was the result of Roosevelt’s shift in favor of sending American troops to Iceland to replace the British garrison there, a step he had earlier refrained from taking in the face of a request from Iceland.
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The Americans, furthermore, drew for themselves the conclusion that part of the British military trouble had been caused by their divided command structure, with a resulting American emphasis on the power of theater commanders.
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In the immediate situation, they worried about what would happen if the Germans were now to seize the Spanish and Portuguese islands in the Atlantic the way they had taken Crete and thereby shift the battle in that theater decisively to their advantage.
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The Germans, however, moved east, not west, with the result that the new puzzle facing Washington was whether to extend aid to the Soviet Union and how to divide the scarce available supplies between the British and the Soviets while still building up America’s own military power.

The American military thought in the final days before the German attack on the Soviet Union that this might indeed happen but that the Russians might well hold out if they staged a fighting retreat. Unlike the Germans, who had failed to understand the relevant evidence, the Americans had a real appreciation for the quality of Soviet armor.
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Economically, American intelligence correctly estimated, the Germans would not only lose the Transsiberian route’s access to East Asia but would do less well from any occupied territory than they were doing already by trade with Russia. There could be a respite for England but encouragement for Japan to move south.

The President quickly determined to send the Soviet Union whatever help could be provided; the fact that he placed his closest confidant, Harry Hopkins, in charge of this endeavor testifies to the importance he attached to it. Hopkins was sent to Moscow to get the whole project moving and took along Colonel Philip Faymonville, a strong believer in the ability of the Red Army to hold out, to handle aid at the Russian end.
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Knowing of popular opposition to aid to the Soviet Union, Roosevelt worked hard to try to have people see that this dictatorship was less threatening than the immediate menace of the German dictatorship, and he was especially concerned about calming the widespread concern over the lack of religious freedom in the Soviet Union.
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There were great
worries and enormous difficulties, some growing out of the fact that there had been such vast differences between United States and Soviet policies in the preceding years.
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The Moscow conferences of early August 1941 produced an agreement on major shipments of military supplies in the face of the preference of United States and British military leaders who preferred to keep what weapons were coming off the assembly lines for their own forces.
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In the face of the German advances in the East, which if victorious would then free them for a renewed push in the Atlantic, Roosevelt pressed his associates to get the materials moving.
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In a way, he understood better than many contemporaries and most subsequent observers the anti-American component in Hitler’s planning and hoped to preclude its success by making the German search for victory in the East as hard as possible.
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Difficulties in the production process and the problem of reconciling United States and British needs with those of the Soviet Union kept down actual shipments in 1941, but the fall of that year saw the beginnings of a vast flow.
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All the measures advocated by the administration were accompanied by bitter public controversy. The extension of the term of those drafted into the army was carried by only one vote in the House of Representatives in August 1941;
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and Secretary of War Stimson, when asked whether the army was now large enough for defense, had to explain that it was almost as large as the Belgian and Dutch armies combined in May 1940.
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Hidden from public view at the time but of fateful import eventually was Roosevelt’s decision of October 9, 1941, in the presence of Vice-President Henry Wallace and on the advice of Vannevar Bush, to move forward in a substantial way with the effort to make an atomic bomb and to place this vast new scientific and industrial project under the control of the army.
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The American government’s greatest concern was that the advance of Japan in Asia would threaten both itself and the British and thereby simultaneously aid Germany and possibly precipitate the United States into war. In the fall of 1940 and the winter of 1940–41 the United States government, under the prodding of Chiang Kai-shek and with Henry Morgenthau as the main advocate of assistance, took new steps to provide credits to China. The hope was that such support would restrain Chiang from making a settlement with the Japanese, because such a settlement would release Japanese forces for adventures elsewhere. It was not a coincidence that on November 30, 1940, the same day that the Japanese recognized the puppet government of Wang Ching-wei, Roosevelt announced plans for a one hundred million dollar credit for
Chiang, and Hull explained that the United States recognized only his government.
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In February–March 1941 Laughlin Currie was in China on a special mission for the President. His recommendations that the United States should strengthen Chiang, urge reform on him, try to prevent civil war in China and look to China as a great power in the war and in the future, either fitted in with Roosevelt’s own views or influenced them; these certainly came to be the main points of the President’s and hence United States policy in regard to China thereafter.
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The hope was that a stronger China could contain and restrain Japan;
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whether that would be possible depended on other factors as well.

All through 1940 and 1941 the Roosevelt administration tried to find ways to hold off Japan while the United States rearmed itself, aided Britain, and, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, aided the latter. Concentrating primary attention on the Atlantic and the dangers there, the administration hoped to restrain Japan, possibly pry her loose from the Tripartite Pact, and figure out ways to keep her from expanding the war she had already started in China. The assistance provided to the Chinese Nationalists was one element in this policy. The end of the US-Japan trade agreement, which left the Japanese guessing as to the next American step, was another.
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Roosevelt did not want to take steps which might drive Japan to take radical action,
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but he was being pushed by a public opinion which objected to the United States selling Japan the materials it needed for the war against China; on this subject the same people who objected to aid for Britain for fear of war were among the most vociferous advocates of a forward policy in East Asia.
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The hope of the administration that some accommodation could be reached with Japan which would restrain the latter by a combination of patient negotiations, continued American rearmament, and a passive stance in the Pacific, was dashed by the insistence of the Japanese government on a sweeping offensive in Southeast Asia; but for months there at least appeared to be a prospect of success. That prospect turned out to be a deliberately manufactured illusion created by a few private individuals, who pretended to the Americans that a project they had concocted had the approval of some elements in Japan, at the same time pretending to the Japanese that it had American approval–when in reality neither assertion was true.
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That this fakery could go on for so long and be the focus of months of
anguished diplomatic talks can be explained only by two factors, both of which shed more light on the 1941 situation than any detailed reviews of those negotiations themselves. On the Japanese side, the ambassador to the United States, Nomura Kichisaburo, really wanted peace with the United States. The Americans correctly believed this to be the case, and since several of the key figures in Washington, including the President and Secretary of State, knew and respected him, they did their best to accommodate him. Nomura, however, was not an experienced and skilful diplomat, frequently failed to inform his government accurately, and never recognized that the whole negotiating project was a fraud perpetuated with the best of motives but the poorest judgement by private persons. The hopeless confusion within the Japanese government, in which some elements did indeed still want peace with the United States, only confirmed Nomura’s mistaken impressions.
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