Roosevelt (40 page)

Roosevelt had raised the question of India with Churchill in Washington after Pearl Harbor; the Prime Minister had reacted so hotly that the President never—or so Churchill later claimed—dared raise the matter to his face again. By late February the President was concerned with India more for military than ideological reasons. Along with influential Senators and administration officials he feared that the Indians would not rally in support of the British defenders. He asked his embassy in London to sound out Churchill anew, but the Prime Minister had not changed his views a whit. Most of the Indian troops, he said, were Moslems. The fighting people were mainly from the northern areas antagonistic to Congress party leaders. The big population of the low-lying center did not have the vigor to fight anybody. He would not risk alienating the Moslems or the princes.

Undaunted, the President now tried a different gambit. “With much diffidence,” he wrote to Churchill, in making any suggestions on a subject which “of course, all of you good people know far
more about than I do,” he suggested that the American experience with the Articles of Confederation might be a helpful precedent. He presented in detail the idea that a temporary government in India, headed by a small group representing different castes, occupations, religions, regions, and princes, might direct the public services during the war, and at the same time plan for a more permanent government. “Perhaps the analogy of some such method to the travails and problems of the United States from 1783 to 1789 might give a new slant in India itself, and it might cause the people there to forget hard feelings, to become more loyal to the British Empire, and to stress the danger of Japanese domination, together with the advantage of peaceful evolution as against chaotic revolution….

“For the love of Heaven don’t bring me into this, though I do want to be of help. It is, strictly speaking, none of my business, except insofar as it is a part and parcel of the successful fight that you and I are making.”

The President might well be diffident. Churchill rejected both the analogy and the proposal. He and George III, the Prime Minister felt, were facing altogether different problems. There was no time for a constitutional experiment and a period of trial and error. But because he was under intense pressure to try
to break the developing deadlock in New Delhi, he decided to send Sir Stafford Cripps, now back from Moscow and a member of the War Cabinet, to India to make a last effort. Earlier the President had dispatched Louis Johnson, his former Assistant Secretary of War, to New Delhi on a vaguely defined military mission as his personal representative. The choice of Johnson seemed a curious one. A prosperous West Virginia lawyer and politico, he was a founder and onetime national commander of the American Legion, with no known views, if indeed he had any, on the great issues of colonialism, nationalism, and race that racked India.

For a brief moment events played a sardonic game of ducks and drakes with the visitors to New Delhi. Cripps, left-wing Labourite, vegetarian, anti-imperialist, friend of Nehru, acted essentially as an agent of Churchill’s Cabinet and found the Congress leaders adamant. The Indians demanded a greater share in the conduct of the war than London would grant them, and they wanted at the end of the war a unified nation that would not be pulled to pieces by secessionist groups. The British feared that control of defense by Congress leaders would inflame the Moslem troops, fragmentize the conduct of the war, and convert Indian defense against the Japanese into a paltry guerrilla war at best. They would not renege on their old pledge to Moslems and princes; but neither would Nehru permit the Balkanization of India.

It was not Cripps the British radical but Johnson the West Virginia politician who for an intoxicating moment seemed about to break the deadlock. Undiscouraged by word from Welles that the President was now keeping hands off, Johnson hurried from Cripps to Nehru to Wavell and around the circle again to keep negotiations alive. Agreement seemed all the more imperative when word reached Delhi that the Japanese Navy in one foray had sunk 100,000 tons of shipping along India’s east coast and was preparing to rout the small British fleet. Indians and British alike were turning to Washington for help.

“The magic name over here is Roosevelt,” Johnson cabled to Hull, “the land, the people would follow and love, America.”

Two days later Johnson’s efforts collapsed. He suspected that Churchill was curbing Cripps. He was half right; Churchill was also curbing Johnson. Hopkins, in London, exposed to the Prime Minister’s wrath, had urged Roosevelt to play down Johnson’s mediatory role. In New Delhi, Cripps saw little hope; he cabled to Churchill that he was coming home. The Prime Minister replied that Cripps would be cordially welcomed for proving how great was the British desire to reach a settlement; the effect in Britain and America had been “wholly beneficial.”

Roosevelt made a final effort. In one of the bluntest messages he ever sent to Churchill he urged him to postpone Cripps’s departure to allow a final effort at negotiations. American public opinion was almost unanimous, he said, “that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government” and could not understand why Britain was delaying it. The cable reached Churchill at Chequers at three in the morning, Sunday, April 12; Hopkins was still with him, despite Roosevelt’s constant urging that his aide get his sleep. It was too late, Churchill cabled back; Cripps had already left, and, anyway, everything could not be thrown into the melting pot again.

“Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart…” Churchill concluded. Privately he was bitter. He indicated to Hopkins that he would be ready to resign on the issue—but that if he did, the War Cabinet would continue his policy. Roosevelt had nothing more to say. In appealing to Churchill on the ground of American public opinion rather than of higher political, military, or even moral considerations, he had weakened his position, for Churchill must have known that in fact the American press, at least, broadly supported London’s position. Roosevelt’s next message was not to Churchill but to Marshall, who was in London:

“Please put Hopkins to bed and keep him there under 24-hour guard by Army or Marine Corps. Ask the King for additional assistance if required on this job.”

A message arrived at the White House from Nehru. He only
wanted the President to know, he said, “how anxious and eager we were, and still are, to do our utmost for the defense of India and to associate ourselves with the larger causes of freedom and democracy. To us it is a tragedy that we cannot do so in the way and in the measure we would like to.” Yet, he went on, India would not submit to Japanese aggression. “We, who have struggled for so long for freedom and against an old aggression, would prefer to perish rather than submit to a new invader.” He concluded with a tribute to the President, “on whom so many all over the world look for leadership in the cause of freedom.…” The President did not reply directly; he had Welles ask Johnson to tell Nehru that the President was gratified by the pledge to resist Japan.

By mid-April the Japanese Navy had occupied India’s Andaman Islands, smashed the harbor of Colombo, in Ceylon, and chased the crippled British fleet out of the Bay of Bengal and into East African waters.

For a century white rule had been symbolized and enforced by awesome battleships and gunboat diplomacy. Where was the United States Navy now? In hiding, said the Japanese. Rumors circulated that naval losses were much higher than reported. Willkie proclaimed that “we want our Navy seeking out the enemy, not hugging our shores….”

In fact, most of the Pacific fleet was intact and by no means in hiding. On December 7 two forces had been out on mundane missions: the
Lexington,
with eight heavy cruisers and destroyers, delivering Marine bombers to Midway Island; the
Enterprise,
with twelve heavy cruisers and destroyers, returning to Pearl Harbor after ferrying a Marine fighter squadron to Wake Island. The carrier
Saratoga
was about to enter San Diego. After the jolting news from Hawaii, the
Lexington
and
Enterprise
task forces went hunting for the Japanese, but missed them in a tragicomedy of false alarms, erroneous intelligence, misidentification, and lesser blunders. Vice Admiral Chuchi Nagumo’s striking force got away without a single encounter at sea by plane or ship—an outcome that was probably fortunate for the Americans, who might well have been annihilated by Nagumo’s six carriers in a straight fight. A week later three carrier task forces were dispatched to the relief of beleaguered Wake, but this expedition withdrew as a result of more errors, stormy weather, undue caution, and bad luck.

For a Commander in Chief with a special pride and proprietary interest in the Navy he had built up during the previous decade, the President was remarkably calm about these setbacks. He grumbled at the Navy’s lack of enterprise, but as an old mariner he knew the vagaries of wind and wave. Knox was less forbearing. The
day Wake fell he complained to Churchill at the White House that the fleet had been ordered to fight the Japanese and after a few hours of steaming had turned back. “What would you do with your Admiral in a case like this?” Churchill replied mildly that it was “dangerous to meddle with Admirals when they say they can’t do things. They have always got the weather or fuel or something to argue about.” One thing Roosevelt and Knox could do was to reshuffle the shaken Navy command, making Admiral King Commander in Chief of the United States fleet. For some weeks King had an uneasy administrative relationship with Chief of Naval Operations Stark; then the President transferred Stark to London and gave King both jobs.

Far out in the central Pacific, fast American carrier forces were conducting hit-and-run raids during these early weeks of 1942. But the pivot of naval action had shifted west, as Japanese forces converged on the Malay Barrier. Defending the East Indies was a pick-up collection of Dutch, British, and American warships. To the continuing problems of inexperience were added those of a multinational command lacking in common training and even communications, and plagued by shortages of all kinds and by a sinking realization that the Allies could put up only a holding action at best. Despite small tactical victories and individual gallantry, the little Asiatic fleet was virtually destroyed and the Malay Barrier completely breached by early March. The Japanese were especially effective in protecting their ships and invasion forces with land- or carrier-based air power, while the American effort on this score was desperate. The Air Force actually had several hundred fighters accumulating in Australia, but ferrying them to Java via defenseless and unfamiliar fields was risky. One flight was smashed by the enemy over Bali. Another ran into foul weather, and all the planes crashed. Another turned back because of weather and was then destroyed in a heavy Japanese attack on Port Darwin. The aircraft tender
Langley
went down off Java with thirty-two P-40’s on board; a cargo ship came through with twenty-seven crated fighters, but these had to be dumped, still crated, into the sea during the evacuation of Java.

“The Pacific situation is now very grave,” Roosevelt cabled to Churchill after the fall of Java. It is doubtful, though, that, except for the few hours when the Pearl Harbor losses were coming in, he ever felt any sense of despair over the Pacific defeats. As he wrote to Churchill after the fall of Singapore, no matter how serious the setbacks “we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.” The sharper the challenge, indeed, the more direct the President’s response, for feeling was rising in the administration that the people needed some dramatic feat of arms, even if the strategic value was small.

Such a feat was already in the works. In Florida, on an airstrip the size of a carrier’s deck, army airmen under Colonel James Doolittle were practicing take-offs with fully loaded medium bombers. On April Fool’s Day, sixteen of these B-25’s were loaded onto the carrier
Hornet
and lashed down on the flight deck. Thirteen days later the
Hornet
rendezvoused in the northern Pacific with the
Enterprise,
flying the flag of Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey. The small fleet then sped west through heavy seas. These operations were carried out in the strictest secrecy; although this had been a pet project of the President, even he did not know the full details.

The plan was daring, almost foolhardy—to launch the bombers, which had a far longer range than carrier aircraft, about five hundred miles off the coast of Japan for raids on major cities, after which the planes would have barely enough fuel to fly on across the Sea of Japan and land on friendly Chinese airfields. The risk intensified when, about six hundred miles out from Japan, Halsey was discovered by Japanese picket boats; he chose to launch the bombers early instead of either retiring or running his carriers into a hornet’s nest.

The army pilots had never flown off a flattop. Green water was breaking over the carrier’s ramps. But Doolittle and all his men got off, and within four hours were dropping bombs on a surprised Tokyo and other cities. Not a plane was lost over Japan. One crew landed at Vladivostok and was interned by the neutral Russians; the Japanese captured two crews who went down short of China, and later executed three men for attacking civilian targets; three planes made crash landings; the other crews bailed out in the night over China. There were only five deaths. Behind them they left a mortified Imperial Headquarters and two exultant carriers streaking east.

“What’s the news?” Roosevelt innocently asked Hassett the next morning in his Hyde Park bedroom. Hassett mentioned rumors of the bombing. “You know,” Roosevelt said, “we have an airplane base in the Himalayas.” Hassett looked skeptical. “The base is Shangri-La.” The President got no rise from his aide, who had never read James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon,
but Roosevelt liked his little joke and soon was telling reporters about the mythical base. The news of the bombing electrified the nation. Few cared that the bombers had done little damage, or that vengeance might be wreaked on the Chinese, or that the Japanese might even retaliate against the West Coast. At last something had been done to “remember Pearl.”