Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (75 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Roosevelt’s economic recovery program deserves a 67 percent grade as economics, an 80 percent for showmanship and morale-boosting, and 95 percent for castastrophe-avoidance. His war-preparation strategy was almost flawless genius. He subtly transferred one leg of his political support from western and midwestern liberal isolationists to southern, conservative, military preparedness advocates and quasi-Atlanticists. At the same time, he steadily strengthened hemispheric solidarity by reassuring the Canadians and outbidding Germany for the adherence of the Latin American dictators. He held the support of the one-quarter of Americans who were Roman Catholics in part by declining to support the anti-clerical Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and by other deferences, and the Roman Catholic episcopate delivered all it had for him at the end of the 1940 election campaign. Roosevelt’s draft for a third term had been based on the promise of peace through strength and all aid short of war for the democracies, as the surest way to stay out of war, while telling the British and Canadian leaders that he would make war without declaring it. With Lend-Lease, the designation of two-thirds of the North Atlantic as a “Neutrality Zone” where the U.S. Navy attacked German ships on detection, and the arming of American merchantmen, he was effectively conducting undeclared war.
Roosevelt completed the elimination of the Depression with the greatest arms build-up in world history, assisted Russia to resist Germany when it was attacked by that country, promised to do whatever was needed to keep Britain in the war, pushed the Japanese imperialists to the wall with his oil and scrap metal embargoes, and when it seemed that Russia might buckle without a sign of armed relief from the West, invited a treacherous attack by Japan.
Every element of an intricate plan for worldwide victory over Nazism and Japanese imperialism, and the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power in the world after comparatively affordable investment and sacrifice in war, had been hatched and implemented by Roosevelt without real consultation with anyone, and with consummate skill. He had already established with the British that in the event of war, priority must go to the defeat of Germany by the invasion of Europe in France. All was now in readiness for a brilliantly executed war.
In 190 years of American history, only Benjamin Franklin’s manipulation of the British and then the French while Washington conducted a successful guerrilla war and Jefferson won an epochal propaganda victory, and Lincoln’s masterly mobilization of northern opinion and arms to preserve the Union, to which he appended the emancipation of the African Americans (and in a sense the whole country) from the bondage of slavery, bore comparison with Roosevelt’s strategic triumph from 1937 to 1945.
This triumph was about to be consummated by his conduct of the war. And no other power in the world in the same period had remotely approached the accomplishment of such immense strategic victories as America’s in the Seven Years’ and Revolutionary Wars, the Civil War, and what was about to occur in the World War II, each vastly enhancing the standing of the country in the world.
CHAPTER TEN
 
The Victory of Democracy in the West, 1941–1945
 
1. DAY OF INFAMY
 
The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor the next morning just after dawn, with 353 aircraft from six aircraft carriers, in two flights. They achieved complete surprise and sank three battleships that settled upright by counter-flooding, capsized one, and grounded one. Three others were only lightly damaged and would be back in service in a couple of months. One would be back in about 15 months, two in about 18 months, and two were total losses. The American aircraft carriers were at sea and were undamaged. About 120 American planes were destroyed and approximately 2,300 Americans were killed. The United States retained nine operational battleships (plus the three that would be back in a couple of months), and had four nearing completion and four more under construction, compared with 12 Japanese, none damaged, but none on the slipways.
On December 10, the Japanese sank a British battleship (the
Prince of Wales
, which had brought Churchill to the Atlantic Conference in August) and a battle cruiser (
Repulse
), and the same week the Italians, in a bold attack by human-operated torpedoes in Alexandria, sank two other British battleships upright, in revenge for the debacle at Taranto 13 months before.
But the British retained 11 capital ships in working order, compared with nine for Germany and Italy combined, and eight aircraft carriers to none for its European enemies. The British had two battleships under construction, and the two damaged at Alexandria would return to service in a few months. The United States and Japan were approximately even in carrier forces. As the Japanese launched an ambitious offensive east and south in the Pacific, the United States would be able to move large numbers of land-based aircraft to the larger nearby islands. The naval balance was strained but not dire, though the submarine war in the Atlantic was very dangerous.
The Japanese emissaries arrived in Hull’s office at 2:05 on Sunday, December 7, about 25 minutes after the attack had begun, and Roosevelt had told Hull to give no indication of prior knowledge of the attack, in order to give no clue of the cracking of Japanese codes. Hull excoriated his visitors for the content of their message and dismissed them. Japan attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, and various other islands in the next few days. It had begun badly, and MacArthur inexplicably allowed a substantial B-17 bomber force to be destroyed on the runway at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. (He blamed it, not altogether plausibly, on his air force commander, General Lewis H. Brereton, whom he described, with some justice, as a “blundering nincompoop,” yet did not sack him.)
Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress the following day, beginning “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy . . .” Later in his brief address, he completed his strategic formula begun in his State of the Union message from the same place 11 months before, “we will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.” The United States would not be an appeasement power, would promote democratic values, and would thereafter maintain an effective deterrent power. It did so, and it was not until 60 years later that America’s enemies devised the technique of attacking it with a terrorist mission that could not be directly linked to any country. It has successfully deterred attack by any other nation since the “Day of Infamy.”
The dispute with Admiral Richardson over repositioning the Pacific battle fleet from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor created a potential vulnerability for Roosevelt, though Richardson’s insouciance about a torpedo attack and Admiral Kimmel’s feeble response to repeated warnings were serious derogations from orders. Kimmel and the local army commander were replaced and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was appointed commander of the Pacific Fleet. The theory has persisted that Roosevelt knew of the attack and did nothing to warn his local commanders. He didn’t know exactly where the attack would come and repeatedly warned all American commands throughout the Pacific. He had every reason to believe Pearl Harbor would be on high alert; he loved the navy, and was horrified as he heard the extent of the damage. He would never have been complicit in the death of American servicemen and could have stirred equal outrage against Japan even if the attack had been repulsed with minor damage, as it should have been. (Richardson, Kimmel, and Stark, who also came in for some blame, soldiered on in militant self-defense to the ages of 95, 86, and 91.)
2. EARLY MONTHS OF TOTAL WAR
 
Hitler, followed, as always, by Mussolini, declared war on the United States on December 11, in a rambling, hate-filled, and somewhat deranged fulmination. He was not obliged to under his alliance with Japan, but presumably concluded that Roosevelt was certain to find some pretext now to go to war against Germany and preferred to take the initiative. Hitler seemed to believe that the United States was a Jewish-directed country, and that Roosevelt was manipulated by Jewish doctors through “negro” orderlies. The whole theory was completely mad and, though it is irrelevant, Roosevelt’s doctors were not Jewish. (More problematical was the outright quackery of Hitler’s own medical advice.) Hitler knew nothing of America apart from what he learned reading the cowboy novels of Karl May, who had never set foot in the United States, and what May wrote was composed in prison. When war came with the United States, Hitler took this as his cue to liquidate the European Jews, as he had often threatened to do, as if this were somehow a quid pro quo for a war that he had, himself, declared on the U.S., albeit after some provocation from Roosevelt. The Wannsee Conference a month later formulated the plan to exterminate the Jews.
The Red Army beat back the Germans from Moscow and Leningrad and started a general counter-offensive. Roosevelt had entered the war at the head of an absolutely united people. He had come into the war before he had wished, and had lost some old battleships, but he had achieved the greatest consensus ever assembled for a war in the United States; the lost ships were not material to the outcome of the world struggle, and unless Germany could knock the Soviet Union out of the war in 1942, Germany and Japan were certain to be overwhelmed by the combination of the forces of the United States, the USSR, and the British Commonwealth and Empire. The vast military capability that would be required was already well-advanced in preparation, and in General Marshall, General MacArthur, and Admiral Nimitz, Roosevelt had already put in place three of his four key commanders, and on Marshall’s urging, he soon identified the last, about-to-be-promoted General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roosevelt had taken a giant step to an American-led, largely democratic world. The Axis was doomed as long as the British and the Americans incentivized Stalin adequately to stay in the war, and the key now was to occupy Germany, as well as France, Italy, and Japan, before the Soviets could, or, in the case of France and Italy, before the local Communist parties could seize control of them. Despite the losses at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, having determined that the victory of democracy depended on the continuation of Russia in the war to take most of the casualties against Germany, made a perfect entry into the conflict.
Winston Churchill came at once to America and received a generous reception when he addressed the Congress on December 26, even from former isolationists. He said, of the Japanese, to thunderous applause: “Do they not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson that they and the world will never forget?” The Atlantic Charter, agreed in Newfoundland in August, was called the Declaration of the United Nations and was signed by 26 nations, including the principal allies, in Washington on January 1. The government of Free France was not invited to sign, because Roosevelt was continuing his embassy in Vichy, a regime he despised, but that he imagined might yet furnish him some advantages. His ambassador, his old navy friend Admiral William Leahy, was relatively friendly with Pétain, and he and Roosevelt had conceived the idea that Charles de Gaulle was an anti-democratic mountebank. Subsequent events would prove otherwise.
On Christmas Day, 1941, a Free French squadron of a couple of small warships had occupied the small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, off the Newfoundland coast, which Chatham had left with the French to service their fishing fleet at the end of the Seven Years’ War (Chapter 1). Churchill and the long-serving Canadian prime minister, W.L. Mackenzie King, who were both in Washington, were completely unruffled by this, but Cordell Hull was inexplicably overwrought and demanded of them and of Roosevelt that they all chastise de Gaulle for unauthorized belligerency in the American hemisphere. Even Roosevelt, who was unreasonably skeptical about de Gaulle’s motives and aptitudes (he distrusted political generals, starting with MacArthur), couldn’t stir himself to much outrage about that. The main communication cables from the U.S. and Canada to Europe went through St. Pierre and Miquelon, and there was some suspicion that Vichy was monitoring the traffic and passing on messages to Germany. The secretary of state ricocheted around Washington in a righteous lather for the last week of 1941, but was rebuffed by all three leaders. King and Churchill were bemused by Hull’s tantrum, and de Gaulle took no notice of it at all. Roosevelt paid little attention to Hull at the best of times.
American industry and manpower were rapidly transformed to complete mobilization. Gigantic annual production schedules were decreed, including 60,000 aircraft in 1942 and a staggering 125,000 in 1943; 45,000 tanks in 1942 and 75,000 in 1943; and six million tons of merchant shipping in 1942 and 10 million in 1943. When this was revealed to the Congress by Roosevelt on January 6, 1942, to perhaps the greatest applause he had ever received in Congress, Hitler expressed total incredulity. (All targets were exceeded.) It was soon clear that the United States would wage war on a scale the world had never imagined to be possible. The armed forces swiftly grew to 12.47 million, including an army of nearly 250 divisions, an air force of 125,000 planes, and a navy of 30 fleet carriers, 70 escort carriers, and 25 capital ships (battleships and battle cruisers).

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