From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (84 page)

Even the Japanese sinking of a U.S. Navy vessel failed to provoke the United States into action. On December 11, 1937, during the height of the rape of Nanking, Japanese aircraft bombed and strafed the USS
Panay
, a gunboat in the Yangtze River engaged in evacuating civilians. The pilots cruelly attacked survivors seeking to escape in lifeboats. The
Panay
was sunk; forty-three sailors and five civilians were injured, three Americans killed. FDR and other top officials were furious and contemplated a punitive response. But this shockingly brutal and unprovoked attack sparked little of the rage of the
Maine
or
Lusitania
. Indeed, Americans seemed to go out of their way to keep a war spirit from building. Some even demanded that U.S. ships be pulled out of China. Apparently as shocked as the United States, the Japanese government quickly apologized, promised indemnities for the families of the dead and injured, and provided assurances against future attacks. Even more telling, and revealing a different side of Japanese society, thousands of ordinary citizens, in keeping with an ancient custom, sent expressions of regret and small donations of money that were used to care for the graves of American sailors buried in Japan.
⁷²

As the Sino-Japanese War settled into a stalemate, the situation in Europe dramatically worsened. Continuing his step-by-step dismantling of the despised Versailles settlement, Hitler in March 1936 sent troops into the demilitarized zones of the Rhineland. He stepped up rearmament, ominously focusing on offensive weapons such as tanks, planes, and U-boats, and also
began to form alliances, signing with Italy in October 1936 the Rome-Berlin Axis and with Japan the following month an Anti-Comintern Pact. Fulfilling a long-standing personal dream, the Austrian-born dictator in March 1938 through propaganda and intimidation, and again in violation of the Versailles treaty, forged a union with Austria, sealing the arrangement with a rigged plebiscite in which a resounding 99.75 percent of the voters approved the
Anschluss
.

Hitler's threats against Czechoslovakia provoked a full-fledged war scare in 1938, what has come to be known as the Munich crisis. Cynically taking up the Wilsonian banner of self-determination, he first demanded autonomy for the 1.5 million German speakers in the Sudeten region of western Czechoslovakia and then cession of the entire Sudetenland to Germany. Fearing that the loss of this mountainous region would deprive it of a natural barrier against a resurgent Germany, the Czech government balked. When troop and ship movements across Europe and even plans for the evacuation of Paris signaled the likelihood of war, Britain and France stepped in to resolve the dispute—at any cost. Accepting at face value Hitler's pledge that "this is the last territorial claim I have to make in Europe," they pushed for a negotiated settlement. When their representatives met with Italy and Germany at Munich in September 1938, they agreed in two short hours to turn over much of the Sudeten territory to Germany in exchange for a four-power guarantee of Czechoslovakia's new borders. The Czechs had little choice but to concede. For much of Europe, the fate of relatively few people and a small slice of territory seemed an acceptable price to avert war. The West relaxed and took comfort from Chamberlain's claims to have achieved "peace in our time." The words would take on a cruelly ironic ring the following year when Nazi troops stormed into Czechoslovakia.
⁷³

The United States' role in the crisis was secondary but still significant. Like Europeans, Americans feared the crisis might lead to war—"Munich hangs over our heads, like a thundercloud," journalist Heywood Broun observed.
⁷⁴
They also fervently hoped it could be settled by negotiation, irrespective of the merits of the case. Roosevelt was of mixed mind. Privately he fretted about the sacrifice of principle and the danger of encouraging the appetite of aggressors. Without acknowledging that U.S. inaction had discouraged British and French firmness, he also privately
lamented that the Allies had left Czechoslovakia to "paddle its own canoe" and predicted they would "wash the blood from their Judas Iscariot hands."
⁷⁵
At first, he contemplated the possibility of war with equanimity, gratuitously advising a British diplomat in that contingency that the Allies should pursue a defensive strategy and adding customarily vague and qualified assurances of U.S. support. When war seemed imminent, however, he was moved to act. Still painfully aware that public opinion sharply limited his freedom of action, he carefully avoided offers of mediation or arbitration. He actively promoted negotiations without taking a position on the issues. He made clear to Britain and France—and Hitler—that the United States "has no political involvements in Europe, and will assume no obligations in the conduct of the present negotiation." When he learned that negotiations would take place, he tersely and enthusiastically cabled Chamberlain: "Good Man." Like most Americans and Europeans, he was relieved by the Munich settlement and shared Chamberlain's hopes for a "new order based on justice and on law." The United States was not directly complicit in the Munich settlement, but it abetted the policies of Britain and France.
⁷⁶

From the outbreak of war in Europe into the next century, Munich would be the synonym for appeasement, its inviolable lesson the folly of negotiating with aggressors. Like all historical events, its circumstances were unique, its lessons of limited applicability. An angry and frustrated Hitler viewed Munich not as victory but defeat. He had wanted war in 1938 but was maneuvered into negotiations. Unable to wriggle out, he ultimately demurred from war because of the hesitance of his advisers and allies.
⁷⁷
For Britain and France, Munich, however unpalatable, was probably necessary. Both were weak militarily and in no position to fight. British public opinion strongly opposed war, and the dominions were not willing to fight for Czechoslovakia. The Western allies could not depend on the United States or put much faith in Czech resistance. Munich bought them a year to prepare for war. It was also made clear to the Western allies—belatedly to be sure—the full extent of Hitler's ambition and deceitfulness.
⁷⁸

For all parties concerned, Munich was the turning point of the pre–World War II era. Frustrated in 1938, Hitler made sure the next time
he got the war he wanted. Certain that the Western powers would not stop Hitler, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin began to contemplate a deal with his archenemy. Having assumed they had bought peace at Munich, the British and French could not but be humiliated by Hitler's subsequent occupation of Czechoslovakia and invasion of Poland and felt compelled to act. In both Britain and France, Munich created a clarity that had not existed before.
⁷⁹

Munich was also a watershed for Roosevelt. Hitler's "truculent and unyielding" response to his appeals for equitable negotiations along with reports from U.S. diplomats in Europe persuaded him that the Nazi dictator could be neither trusted nor appeased.
⁸⁰
He was a "wild man," the president mused, a "nut." Munich also convinced FDR that Hitler was responsible for Europe's drift toward war and might be bent on world domination. The president was no longer casually confident of a British and French victory in the event of war. The Italian prophet of air power, Guilio Douhet, had argued that by terrorizing civilian populations, bombing could win wars. The fear of German air power—put on such brutal display in Spain—paralyzed Europe during the Munich crisis. Roosevelt's exaggerated but very real concerns about German air superiority, in his own words, "completely reinvented our own international relations." For the first time since the days of the Monroe Doctrine, he concluded, the United States was vulnerable to foreign attack. Already alarmed by Germany's penetration of Latin America, he also feared that it might get air bases from which it could threaten the southern United States. "It's a very small world," he cautioned. The best way to prevent Germany and Italy from threatening the United States and keep the United States out of war, he reasoned, was to bolster Britain and France through air power. In the months after Munich, Roosevelt sought a policy of "unneutral rearmament" by securing massive increases in the production of aircraft and repealing the arms embargo to make them available to Britain and France.
⁸¹

Once again, he failed to get the legislation he wanted. He had suffered a major political defeat in the 1937 Court fight, and his effort to save the New Deal by purging conservative Democrats in the 1938 elections backfired. Those legislators he sought to get rid of survived; the Republicans scored major gains. As a presumed lame duck, he was not in a strong position to move Congress. Now facing even greater opposition, he was loath to risk the prestige of his office on foreign policy legislation he badly
needed. Remaining in the background, he entrusted the task to the inebriated, infirm, and inept Senator Key Pittman, who predictably bungled it. Subsequent efforts to secure compromise legislation narrowly failed. In a last-ditch effort to salvage something, Roosevelt and Hull met with legislators at the White House on July 18. The secretary warned that the arms embargo "conferred gratuitous benefit on the probable aggressors." Admonishing that war in Europe was imminent, FDR averred that "I've fired my last shot. I think I ought to have another round in my belt." After a lengthy discussion and informal polling of the group, Vice President John Nance Garner advised the president, "Well, Captain, we may as well face the facts. You haven't got the votes, and that's all there is to it." It would take the harsh reality of war rather than the mere threat of it to push Congress and the nation beyond the position assumed in the mid-1930s.
⁸²

Roosevelt was similarly hamstrung in dealing with the tragic plight of German Jews. Upon taking power in 1933, the Nazi regime began systematic persecution, imposing boycotts on businesses, proscribing Jews from certain jobs, and restricting their civil rights. Using as a pretext the shooting of a German diplomat in Paris by a young German-Jewish refugee, it launched after Munich a full-scale campaign of terror. On November 9, 1938, while police did nothing, hooligans pillaged, looted, burned synagogues, and destroyed Jewish homes. A dozen Jews were killed, twenty thousand arrested, and much property destroyed. The shattered glass littering the streets gave the name
Kristallnacht
(the night of broken glass) to the officially authorized rampage. To compound the injury, the government decreed that the damage be paid for by a tax levied on Jews. Revealing its deeper intentions, it closed Jewish-owned stores and confiscated personal assets. In the wake of
Kristallnacht,
as many as 140,000 Jews sought to flee Germany.
⁸³

The Roosevelt administration could do little to help the victims of this forced diaspora. Although anti-Semitism remained a potent force in the United States, many Americans expressed outrage at Hitler's vicious assault and sympathy for its victims. FDR recalled his ambassador from Berlin for "consultation." He would not return. In numerous speeches, the president highlighted Hitler's treatment of Jews to make sharp moral distinctions between Nazi Germany and other states. But he could do nothing to stop the atrocities short of war. More poignantly, the United States was neither willing nor able to provide refuge for more than a
handful of those fleeing Nazi persecution. The 1924 law permitted a total of only 150,000 immigrants a year, of which the Jewish quota was a small percentage. Germany permitted departing Jews to take only about four dollars with them, while U.S. law denied entry to those who might be a charge on the state, tightening the limits still further. Roosevelt stretched the law as best he could to admit more refugees. But the only real answer was a basic modification of policy, and at a time of continuing high unemployment there was little inclination to do that. Thousands of Jews were stranded at transit points across Europe. Some made it on ships to the Americas only to be denied permission to land. Returned to Europe, they fell under Hitler's sway again after the fall of France.
⁸⁴

The war Hitler wanted at Munich came in 1939. In March, he scrapped the agreement negotiated there by invading Czechoslovakia. Mortified by this obvious contempt for their good-faith effort at accommodation, British and French leaders extended military commitments to Poland, Romania, Greece, and Turkey. Eager to act while he still had the military advantage and to avoid the mistakes of Napoleon and Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler secured his eastern flank in late August by cutting a non-aggression deal with archenemy Stalin, adding a secret protocol that divided Eastern Europe into spheres of influence. Certain now that he had "the world in my pocket," he invaded Poland on September 1. Stunned by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Western allies declared war on Germany. It was now possible to speak of a Second World War.

Roosevelt's response differed sharply from Wilson's in 1914. In a radio address on September 3, he expressed hope that the United States could remain out of the war and vowed to do what he could to ensure that end. At the same time, he made clear that war in Europe could not but affect the United States. "When peace has been broken anywhere, peace of all countries everywhere is in danger," he averred, a statement that broke sharply with traditional U.S. thinking on national security. "I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought . . . ," he added, an oblique reference to Wilson's affirmation that Americans remain neutral in thought and deed. "Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or conscience." On September 5, he dutifully invoked the Neutrality Acts, thereby shutting off the belligerents from access to war materials.
⁸⁵

As always, Roosevelt accurately gauged the public mood. Many Americans were horrified by Hitler's persecution of the Jews, the full extent and ultimate aims of which were by no means clear at this point. They were shocked by his cynical disregard for an agreement presumably negotiated in good faith at Munich and angered by his sordid pact with Stalin. Germany's easy conquest of Czechoslovakia and Poland aroused vague but mounting concern that Hitler's ambitions and growing military power might threaten U.S. security and economic well-being. Thus while minority groups such as Irish, German, and Italian Americans harbored at least mild sympathies for the Axis, most Americans (84 percent in one poll) and especially the elites concerned about international issues favored an Allied victory. Still hopeful at the outbreak of war that this could be accomplished without direct U.S. intervention, they backed modest steps to aid the Allies while seeking to minimize the risks of war.