The Second World War (86 page)

The news of Roosevelt’s death on 12 April 1945 had stirred a flicker of optimism in the Berlin bunker. Hitler had sustained his spirits during the last year of the war by two beliefs: that his secret weapons would break the will of the British; and that the contradictions of an alliance between a decadent capitalist republic, a moribund empire and a Marxist dictatorship must inevitably lead to the disintegration of that alliance. By March 1945, when his V-2 had been driven beyond the last sites from which Britain could be hit, he knew that his secret weapons had failed. Thereafter he clung all the more desperately to the hope of dissension among the Allies. Goebbels, the political philosopher of his court, had explained to some intimates in early April how such a falling-out might occur. According to the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, he had ‘developed his thesis that, for reasons of Historical Necessity and Justice, a change of fortune was inevitable, like the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg in the Seven Years War.’ When Frederick the Great of Prussia faced defeat by the combined armies of Russia, Austria and France in the Seven Years War, the tsarina Elisabeth had unexpectedly died, to be succeeded by a tsar who was Frederick’s admirer; the alliance then collapsed and Frederick’s Prussia survived. In April 1945, on hearing the news of the President’s passing, Goebbels exclaimed, ‘the tsarina is dead’, and telephoned Hitler ‘in an ecstasy’ to ‘congratulate’ him. ‘It is the turning-point,’ he said, ‘it is written in the stars.’

Hitler himself was briefly moved to share Goebbels’s euphoria. Throughout the latter years of the war he had come to identify closely with Frederick the Great and was even ready to believe that the evolution of his fortunes might mirror those of the Prussian king. He was particularly ready to believe that Roosevelt’s death would produce the disabling crack in the alliance that he predicted, since one of his fundamental misappreciations was that the American people were unwarlike and had been drawn into the conflict by the machinations of their President. ‘The arch-culprit for this war’, he had told a Spanish diplomat in August 1941, ‘is Roosevelt, with his freemasons, Jews and general Jewish-Bolshevism.’ He said, whether he believed it or not, that he had proof of Roosevelt’s ‘Jewish ancestry’. He was certainly obsessed by the number of Jews in American government, including Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury, whose plan to reduce defeated Germany to a nation of cultivators and pastoralists had been leaked and republished in the German press in September 1944, to the great benefit of Goebbels’s propaganda for a ‘total war’ effort.

Hitler’s understanding of America’s commitment to the war was almost exactly contrary to the truth. Isolationism was certainly a powerful force in American politics before December 1941, while America’s parents remained naturally reluctant to see their sons depart to a foreign war up to the moment of Pearl Harbor. Few Americans, however, objected to the measures of rearmament enacted in 1940, which doubled the size of the fleet, allocated funds for an air force of 7800 combat aircraft – three times the size of the Luftwaffe – and increased the size of the army from 200,000 to one million men, to be raised by conscription. When war came, moreover, the nation reacted enthusiastically. The sense of being ‘out of things’ had waxed powerfully in the United States during the eighteen months of the Blitz and the Battle of the Atlantic; so too had hostility to Hitler, as a paradigm of everything against which American civilisation stood. As in Europe in 1914, the coming of war was ultimately almost a relief, since Americans had been oppressed by indecision and inactivity and were untainted by any fear of defeat.

Roosevelt too saw Hitler as a tyrant and a malefactor. However, Hitler’s belief that Roosevelt dragged his people to war reluctantly behind him is at variance with the facts; more accurately, the facts of Roosevelt’s war policy, in the months before Pearl Harbor, defy objective arrangement or analysis. Roosevelt’s attitude to United States entry into the Second World War remains profoundly ambiguous, as do the aims and objectives of his war-making in the three and a half years in which he acted as commander-in-chief of the United States forces.

Roosevelt is by far the most enigmatic of the major figures of 1939-45. Stalin, though devious, double-dealing and treacherous in his methods, steadfastly pursued a quite limited set of aims: while determined to sustain his position as head of government, party and army, whomever he had to dismiss or even kill to maintain his power, he wanted, first, to save the Soviet Union from defeat, second, to expel the Wehrmacht from Soviet territory and, third, to extract the largest possible benefit – territorial, diplomatic, military and economic – from the Red Army’s eventual victory. Hitler, however mysterious the workings of his psyche, also held to a clear-cut if wildly over-ambitious strategy: he wanted revenge for Versailles, then German mastery of the continent, followed by the subjugation of Russia and the eventual exclusion of the Anglo-Saxon powers from any influence in European affairs. Churchill was transparently a patriot, a romantic and an imperialist: victory was his first and last desire; only secondarily did he consider how victory might be gained in a way that secured British interests in Europe and the survival of the British Empire overseas. His ‘naturally open and unsuspicious nature’, as his wife described it, automatically revealed his motives to all who treated with him during the war. Captious and contrary though he often was, he had no capacity for sustained dissimulation, grasped eagerly at the semblance of generosity in the statements of others and was as powerfully swayed as his listeners by the force and nobility of his own oratory.

Roosevelt too was a magnificent speaker; his range, indeed, was far greater than Churchill’s, for he was the master of not only the high-flown set-piece – his proclamation of the ‘Four Freedoms’ to Congress in January 1941, for example, or his ‘Day of Infamy’ speech after Pearl Harbor – but also the intimate radio appeal to families and individuals in his ‘fireside chats’, a medium of political communication which he himself invented, the
ad hominem
stump speech of the political campaign, subtly varied from place to place and audience to audience, the disingenuously frank news conference, the personal telephone call, above all the face-to-face conversation, flattering, funny, discursive, beguiling and ultimately almost wholly baffling to the interlocutor who sat mesmerised by the flow of words. Roosevelt was a magician with words. According to his biographer James McGregor Burns, he sent visitors away from the Oval Office entranced by his ‘expansiveness, openness, geniality’; but they rarely took back with them any answer to the problems or questions they had brought. For Roosevelt talked perhaps above all ‘to find bearings and moorings in his own experiences and recollections’. Roosevelt had dozens of attitudes and a few deeply held values, which were precisely those of Americans of his class and time: he believed in human dignity and freedom, in economic opportunity, in political compromise, he felt deeply for the hardships of the poor, and he detested recourse to violence; but he had few policies, either for peace or for war, while war itself he found utterly distasteful.

Hence his profoundly ambiguous attitude towards American involvement. Churchill had sustained his own spirits during the darkest hours of 1940 and 1941 by the belief that the New World would eventually come forth to redress the balance of the Old. Roosevelt had given him every reason to believe that such would be the outcome. He had erected an American armed neutrality against the Axis almost from the moment of Hitler’s opening of the war, selling arms to Britain and France which would certainly have been refused to Germany, then authorising unrestricted ‘cash and carry’ arms shipments and progressively extending American protection to Britain-bound convoys in the Atlantic. He first defined a neutrality zone which effectively denied the U-boats access to American waters, then in April 1941 extended the zone to the mid-ocean line and allowed American warships to act as convoy escorts, while in July he dispatched American Marines to replace British troops in the garrison of Iceland, which Britain had summarily occupied after the fall of Denmark in 1940. On 11 March 1941 Congress, at his persuasion, passed the Lend-Lease Act, which effectively allowed Britain to borrow war supplies from the United States against the promise of later repayment; in February he had sponsored Anglo-American staff talks in Washington (the ABC-1 conference) which agreed on most of the strategic fundamentals, including ‘Germany First’, which would in practice be implemented after December.

By every outward sign, therefore, Churchill had reason to believe that the President was leading his nation to intervention on Britain’s side; certainly Hitler was acutely aware of that danger and laid his U-boat commanders under strict orders not to provoke the Americans in any way at all – even after Roosevelt authorised the freezing of all German assets in the United States in June 1941. Churchill, in his private conversations with the President on the transatlantic scrambler telephone (erratically intercepted by the Germans), was given even more strongly to understand the warmth of the President’s commitment, while from the Placentia Bay meeting of August 1941 he brought back the agreement that the United States Navy would protect all ships in a convoy which included one American ship, in effect a means of defying Dönitz to sink an American warship. On his return from Placentia Bay, Churchill told the war cabinet that Roosevelt was ‘obviously determined that they should come in’; his concluding message had been that ‘he would wage war but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative’. If the Germans ‘did not like it’, Roosevelt said, ‘they could attack American forces.’

Churchill’s Chiefs of Staff were more suspicious and formed a different impression. A staff officer, Ian Jacob, noted in his diary that the United States Navy ‘seem to think that the war can be won by our simply not losing it at sea’, and that the army ‘sees no prospect of being able to do anything for a year or two’. He observed that not ‘a single American officer had shown the slightest keenness to be in the war on our side. They are a charming lot of individuals but they appear to be living in a different world from ourselves.’ Moreover, when on 31 October the Germans committed the ultimate provocation by sinking the destroyer USS
Reuben James
in the Atlantic with the loss of 115 American lives, Roosevelt chose not to regard it as a
casus belli
– though it was a far more flagrant act of aggression than, for example, the ‘Gulf of Tonkin’ incident used by President Johnson to authorise American military intervention in Vietnam in 1964.

Roosevelt’s inaction over the sinking of the
Reuben James
may be taken as the key to the ‘strategic enigma’ he remained during 1941, as his biographer James MacGregor Burns has characterised him.

Roosevelt was following a simple policy: all aid to Britain short of war. This policy was part of a long heritage of Anglo-American friendship; it was a practical way of blocking Hitler’s aspirations in the west; it could easily be implemented by two nations used to working with one another; it suited Roosevelt’s temperament, met the needs and pressures of the British, and was achieving a momentum of its own. But it was not a grand strategy . . . it did not emerge from clear-cut confrontation of political and military alternatives. . . . Above all this strategy was a negative one in that it could achieve its full effect – that is, joint military and political action with Britain – only if the Axis took action that would force the United States into war. It was a strategy neither of war nor of peace, but a strategy to take effect (aside from war supply to Britain and a few defensive actions in the Atlantic) only in the event of war. . . . [Roosevelt] was still waiting for a major provocation from Hitler even while recognising that it might not come at all. Above all, he was trusting to luck, to his long-tested flair for timing. . . . He had no plans. ‘I am waiting to be pushed into the situation,’ he told Morgenthau in May – and clearly it had to be a strong shove.

Trusting to luck and waiting to be shoved were to characterise Roosevelt’s conduct as commander-in-chief from Pearl Harbor almost to the very end of his life. Revisionist historians have argued that he was playing a deep game both before the United States entry into the war and during the years thereafter: that he saw in Britain’s isolation and desperate need for arms on any terms a means of liquidating her overseas investments (as they were indeed liquidated by ‘cash and carry’ sales), and thus of reducing the mistress of the world’s greatest empire – an institution he disliked as strongly as he did industrial trusts and financial cartels within his own country – to a state where she could not resist American pressure to divest herself of her colonies. This is surely to endow Roosevelt with a Machiavellianism he did not possess. War, Machiavelli said, is the only proper study for a prince; and Roosevelt was indeed princely in a distinctively Renaissance style, transacting much of his business through a court favourite, Harry Hopkins, permitting no official – not even the implacable Marshall – to establish himself as indispensable to him, dispensing charm and empty flattery with lordly largesse, operating a political oubliette for those who incurred his displeasure, maintaining a private country palace as a refuge from the heats and longueurs of Washington (no Camp David for FDR), even formally maintaining a mistress in the White House and treating his cousin-wife of thirty years as the honoured spouse of a dynastic marriage of convenience. None the less Roosevelt was not Machiavellian in strategy, for the simple reason that the wealth, power and ethos of the New World had liberated its rulers from the Old World’s narrow needs to dissemble and traduce. The United States had been founded on the principle of ‘no entangling alliances’; it had grown up to riches which absolved it from the temptation to pursue cheap and temporary advantages over weaker states.