Pearl Harbor (3 page)

Reading the headlines on the morning of December 7 may have only aggravated his discomfort. Clearly, Japan was going to strike somewhere in the Pacific. The
Washington Post
reported that Tokyo's patience was coming to an end, while the
New York Times
predicted that an attack on Thailand was “imminent.” There seemed little reason for Americans to worry. The
Times
reassured readers that the United States Navy, in the midst of a three-year expansion, was first-rate. It quoted Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox who, in his annual report released on December 6, announced the U.S. Navy “has at this time no superior in the world.”
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It was ironic that Roosevelt's attention was focused on the Pacific this morning because for the previous two years he had used all of his juggling skills to nudge the nation closer to war in Europe. Since coming to office in 1933, Adolf Hitler had been consolidating power at home by asserting it abroad. Tapping into a deep well of resentment that Germans felt toward the West for imposing a punitive peace following World War I, he had repudiated the Versailles Treaty of 1919,
withdrawn from the League of Nations in 1933, and unilaterally announced in 1935 that Germany would rearm. His Nazi Party had suspended constitutional rights and initiated systematic persecution of Jews living in Germany. One of Hitler's lieutenants, Alfred Rosenberg, announced that he wanted to see the head of a Jew impaled upon every telephone pole along a railroad line between Berlin and the North Sea.
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The events in Europe were clearly troubling to Roosevelt. An internationalist at heart, he recognized that the modern technology of warfare meant that America could no longer count on the vast geographic separation provided by two oceans to isolate the nation from events elsewhere in the world. His internationalist roots traced back to his earliest years. As a child, Roosevelt had traveled extensively throughout Europe, making his first trip at the age of three. He had also read the influential works of Alfred T. Mahan, who extolled the importance of sea power. During the Spanish-American War in 1898, FDR conspired with a few friends to run away to Boston and enlist in the navy. A bad case of scarlet fever foiled his plans, however. While a student at the prestigious Groton School and later at Harvard, he debated international issues and gloated in his cousin Theodore's exploits.

His fascination with world affairs and his love of the sea made him an ideal choice to serve as assistant secretary of the navy during the Wilson administration. His new job instilled in him a strong belief that a great power such as the United States should play an important role in world affairs. He lobbied for a dramatic expansion of the navy, argued for military intervention in nearly every crisis, and pushed the administration to enter World War I. After the war, he strongly supported Wilson's plan for a League of Nations, believing that collective security provided the best protection against future wars.

In 1920, Democrats chose Roosevelt as their vice presidential nominee. Although the country had turned against Wilson's idealism, and the Senate had rejected American participation in the League of Nations, Roosevelt refused to bend to public opinion. In his acceptance address, he warned that the United States must accept the fact that
“modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with the lives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and not of it.”
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Roosevelt watched with alarm as Hitler consolidated power in Europe and began threatening his neighbors. FDR harbored no illusions about Hitler, or his intentions. “The situation is alarming,” Roosevelt told diplomats shortly after Hitler assumed power. “Hitler is a madman and his counsellors, some of whom I personally know, are even madder than he is.” Roosevelt, fluent in German, had read the original version of Hitler's
Mein Kampf
, which contained virulent anti-Jewish comments that were purged from later editions. On the flyleaf of an American edition of the book, published in 1933, FDR wrote, “This translation is so expurgated as to give a wholly false view of what Hitler really is or says. The German original would make a different story.”
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But while events in Europe alarmed the president, the Great Depression had monopolized his attention throughout much of the 1930s. When he took office in March 1933, one in four Americans was without a job. Each month, thousands of farmers and business owners went bankrupt. By March 3, the day before Roosevelt took office, thirty-eight states had shut down all of their banks, and the remaining ten states were moving to close theirs. Normal business and commerce ground to a halt. A Roosevelt adviser, Rexford Guy Tugwell, wrote in his diary, “Never in modern times, I should think, has there been so widespread unemployment and such moving distress from cold and hunger.” By 1937, even after launching an aggressive program to combat unemployment and revive America's industrial engine, Roosevelt was still lamenting that a third of the nation was “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Confronting such overwhelming economic problems, Roosevelt had little time to dwell on the growing crisis in Europe.

Hitler, in the meantime, spent the '30s expanding his reach within Europe. In March 1936, the Nazi leader ordered German troops into the Rhineland, the strategic buffer that lay between France and Germany. And Hitler was not the only fascist leader threatening world stability
during the 1930s. In 1935, Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini launched an invasion of the independent African state of Ethiopia. In 1936, both leaders directly intervened in Spain's civil war, allowing General Francisco Franco to come to power.

Hitler accurately predicted that the distracted West would respond feebly to his aggression. In 1938, he pressed Europe to the brink of war. In March, he forced Austria into
Anschluss
(union) with Germany. Later that fall, the Nazi dictator threatened to invade Czechoslovakia when it refused to give him its Sudetenland, a mountainous region bordering Germany inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. Hoping to avoid confrontation, the West sacrificed the Sudetenland on the altar of appeasement, agreeing to a gradual transfer to German control. Abandoned, the Czechs surrendered, demobilized their army, and allowed Germany to shear off the Sudetenland.

Six months later, German troops completed their rape of Czechoslovakia. Armed columns poured over the Czech border, smashing Western illusions that Hitler could be appeased. Within weeks, the British government reversed course, announcing that it was committed to the defense of Poland.

It became increasingly difficult for Roosevelt to ignore the growing crisis in Europe. He recognized that Hitler presented a long-term threat to America, and he believed the best way to restrain further aggression was for the United States to participate in collective security arrangements with the Western democracies. But in the United States, disillusion with World War I and concern about jobs at home intensified deeply entrenched isolationist sentiment. Popular writers, who claimed that selfish business interests had conspired to lead the United States into World War I, whipped popular disenchantment with World War I into a frenzy.

Congress reinforced the isolationist sentiment by passing restrictive neutrality legislation. In 1935, Congress imposed an automatic embargo on American arms and ammunition to all parties at war. The following year, Democrats and Republicans joined together to add a ban
on loans to belligerents. Two years later, lawmakers banned American ships from war zones, prohibited Americans from traveling on belligerent ships, and extended the embargo to include not just armaments but also the oil, steel, and rubber needed for war machines. Foreign belligerents could buy such goods only if they paid for them in cash and carried them in their own ships.

For the next few years, Roosevelt struggled to find a way to work with the Western democracies to restrain Hitler without arousing isolationist sentiment. It was not an easy task. In October 1937, FDR had tested the depth of isolationist sentiment in a speech denouncing the “reign of terror and international lawlessness” that threatened the peace. “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community.” But public reaction to the speech proved mixed, and Roosevelt quickly backed away from the internationalist implications of his “quarantine” message. “It's a terrible thing,” he said, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.”

Even if he wanted to influence events in Europe, FDR had little tangible support to offer. At the time of the Munich agreement, the U.S. Army consisted of 185,000 men and ranked eighteenth in the world. Not only was it no match for Hitler's Germany, but it was smaller than the armed forces of Sweden and Switzerland.

 

 

T
he limits of FDR's influence on events in Europe became obvious when the Germans and Russians concluded a nonaggression pact on August 23, 1939. The agreement provided for the partition of Poland and for Soviet absorption of the Baltic states, as well as territory in Finland and Bessarabia. With his eastern flank now secured, Hitler unleashed his fire and steel on the Polish people on September 1, 1939. In a potent display of military skill and power, the Germans conducted a
Blitzkrieg
(lightning war), as 1.5 million men streamed
into Polish territory. “Close your hearts to pity,” Hitler told his generals. “Act brutally.” Two days later, honoring their commitments to Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II in Europe had begun.

Ambassador to France William Bullitt called Roosevelt at 2:50 a.m. Washington time to tell him the news. “Well, Bill, it has come at last,” FDR said. “God help us all.” Roosevelt propped himself on his pillow, lit a cigarette, and telephoned his secretaries of state, war, and the navy. They rushed to their offices. “I think a good many of us had a somewhat sleepless night,” Roosevelt remarked to reporters the following morning.
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By late 1939, American sympathy was clearly with Great Britain and France, but most people continued to believe the Allies could defend Europe without U.S. assistance. The British, who claimed the largest navy in the world, would strangle the German economy. France's 800,000-man standing army was considered the most powerful in Europe. Many military strategists believed the French Maginot Line, an extremely well-developed chain of fortifications along the French-German border, could resist any invasion. The calm that settled over Europe during the winter of 1939–1940 only added to the detachment. For six months after the fall of Poland, Hitler's armies remained largely silent. Many Americans believed that Hitler's thirst for conquest had been satisfied and a larger war averted. Isolationist senator William Borah snorted, “There's something phony about this war.”

Roosevelt, however, was convinced that Hitler and his generals were determined to conquer the democracies in Europe before the United States could build its defenses. “My problem,” he wrote editor William Allen White in December 1939, “is to get the American people to think of conceivable consequences without scaring [them] into thinking that they are going to be dragged into this war.” In November 1939, Roosevelt achieved a partial victory when he convinced Congress to pass a revised Neutrality Act that lifted the arms embargo against belligerents. It retained a cash-and-carry provision and stipulated that shipments
could move only in foreign vessels. The new law also forbade American merchant ships from entering a broad “danger zone” that included most of the major shipping lanes to Europe.
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A German offensive in April 1940 shattered the false confidence that Hitler's appetite for expansion had been appeased. On April 9, the Nazi
Blitzkrieg
overran Denmark, and German troops swarmed over Norway. A month later, Hitler's armies swept over the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. On May 13, German panzers bypassed the Maginot Line, crossed the Meuse River, and entered French territory.

The once-powerful French army crumbled after six weeks of fighting. On June 15, the French premier called Winston Churchill, who had been chosen British prime minister just ten days earlier. “We have been defeated,” he said. “The Battle of France is over,” Churchill told a somber Parliament. “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.”

Churchill was right. Beginning in the summer of 1940, Hitler hurled his Luftwaffe (air force) at the British, hoping to destroy coastal installations in preparation for a cross-Channel invasion. The Royal Air Force fought back, managing to keep the Germans at bay. Frustrated, Hitler ordered the bombing of RAF bases and the terror bombing of London. From September to November, nearly 250 German bombers dropped their deadly cargo over London every night. The British people, though badly battered, refused to break.

Over the course of the summer, American isolationism was diminishing. The fall of France had changed the military calculus in Washington. The images of Hitler's brutality, combined with Roosevelt's warnings about the dangers of isolationism, started to turn public opinion at home. In May, only 35 percent of Americans favored aiding the Allies. By August, the figure had risen to 60 percent.

Taking advantage of the shift in public mood, Roosevelt pushed through Congress an extension of the Selective Service Act and a dramatic increase in military spending. Total appropriations for the army and navy topped $17 billion, more than nine times the figure for 1939.
By the fall of 1940, the navy had 210 ships committed for construction, including 12 aircraft carriers. Congress also supported the president's proposal for 50,000 airplanes.
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