Roosevelt (21 page)

Ultimately these unlike fronts would become linked by the imperatives of global war, but for the moment all eyes were riveted on the Russian convulsion. By early July the military in both London and Washington were ready to write off the Red Army; it was only a matter of time, the experts said, and of how the West could exploit that time. There was fear that Stalin would quit—or even make another deal with Hitler. Churchill’s position was one of pure expediency. He would never forget or excuse Russia’s unconcern during the long months that the British alone were manning the ramparts against Germany. When Maisky pressed him for more aid Churchill burst out: “We never thought our survival was dependent on your action either way…. You have no right to make reproaches to us!” But there was no question of his immediate position; he would walk with the devil to beat Hitler.

Most Americans were less willing to walk with Satan. The isolationists were having a field day; frustrated by growing support for co-operation with Britain, they eagerly seized on a potent new reason to reject intervention in general and aid to Bolshevik, godless Russia in particular. “The heat is off,” proclaimed the Chicago
Tribune
jubilantly. A Communist victory, said Senator Taft flatly, would be far more dangerous than a fascist one. John T. Flynn, columnist for the
New Republic,
demanded: “Are we going to fight to make Europe safe for Communism?” Herbert Hoover opposed any aid to the Soviets because it would simply help Russia seize more land and would make a “gargantuan jest” of fighting Hitler to save democracy. Senator Harry Truman struck a common note: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way
let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances….”

Interventionists fell back on expediency. It was not time, warned the Committee to Defend America, to let ideology blind Americans to the need to counter Nazism. Walter Lippmann wrote that Americans should react to the new war as adult men, not as children quarreling over ideology. Many interventionists were pessimistic about Russia’s chances of survival and urged that America seize the opportunity to redouble aid to Britain. It was argued, indeed, that such aid would prolong Soviet resistance, for American planes could enable the British to step up their bombing offensive against Germany. The single most important impact of the Nazi invasion, at least in the interventionist press, was to enhance the importance of the Atlantic Alliance and Atlantic First.

And Roosevelt? He had no yen to clash with the militant anti-Communists, the church groups, Polish-Americans, Finnish-Americans, patriotic societies, and a host of other ideological groups. He was trying to see through the clamor of the articulate groups on both sides and divine the feelings of a wider public. Within ten days of the invasion he had received from Hadley Cantril, a noted public-opinion analyst at Princeton, the summary results of recent polls. The Nazi attempt to enlist moral support for a holy war against Russia had so far completely failed with Americans, Cantril reported. The overwhelming majority of Americans wanted Russia to win the war against Germany. But most people opposed helping Russia to as great an extent as Britain; if the invasion produced any change in opinion it was toward more aid to
Britain.
For Roosevelt the policy implication must have been clear: he could aid Russia, but not at the expense of Atlantic First.

Everything depended, Roosevelt felt, on Russia’s ability to hold out until winter, and hence on the masses of soldiers manning the long and precarious front, on their officers, on their leaders in the Kremlin—and on the long supply lines to Russia from outside. Could the Soviets hang on? As the Germans plunged deeper into Russia, the President received conflicting advice. The military were still dubious; Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt, in Moscow, was pessimistic at first; former Ambassador Davies remained more hopeful. Late in July a cable arrived from Hopkins, who had returned to London to iron out strategic and logistical questions. Would the President like him to go to Moscow? Stalin could be influenced to maintain a permanent front despite his losses, Hopkins suggested, and a personal envoy might convince him “that we mean business on a long term supply job.” Roosevelt jumped at the chance to get his direct line into the Kremlin.

Hopkins, gaunt and ailing, traveled in a Catalina flying boat
on the long route north of Norway to the Soviet port of Archangel. After a four-hour banquet and two hours’ sleep, he flew on to Moscow, where Steinhardt briefed him on the situation there, grumbled about the Kremlin’s secretiveness, and took him to see Stalin.

“I told Mr. Stalin that I came as personal representative of the President,” Hopkins reported back to Roosevelt. “…I expressed to him the President’s belief that the most important thing to be done in the world today was to defeat Hitler and Hitlerism. I impressed upon him the determination of the President and our Government to extend all possible aid to the Soviet Union at the earliest possible time.” What did Russia need immediately, Hopkins asked, and what would it require for a long war? Immediately, antiaircraft guns, large machine guns, and rifles, Stalin said; later, high-octane aviation gas and aluminum. “Give us anti-aircraft guns and the aluminum and we can fight for three or four years.”

After talks with Molotov and Cripps, Hopkins saw Stalin again. The President, he told Stalin, was anxious to have his analysis of the war. Stalin estimated that the German Army had 175 divisions on Russia’s front when the invasion started, had increased this number to 232, and could mobilize a total of three hundred divisions. “…Mr. Stalin stated that he can mobilize 350 divisions and will have that many divisions under arms by the time the spring campaign begins in May 1942.”

On and on Stalin had talked—about the need to blood his troops so they would realize Germans were not supermen; how Russians still kept fighting even when cut off and left far behind the lines; the impression he had of a slight decrease in German pressure; the quality—in great detail—of the opposing tanks and aircraft; how the Red Army discounted all divisions, whether Finnish, Rumanian, Italian, or Spanish, other than the German. Toward the end he asked Hopkins to give the President the following personal message: “…Hitler’s greatest weakness was found in the vast numbers of oppressed people who hated Hitler and the immoral ways of his Government.” These people could receive the kind of encouragement and moral strength they needed to resist Hitler from only one source, and that was the United States. “He stated that the world influence of the President and the Government of the United States was enormous.”

It was inevitable, Stalin had gone on, that the United States “should finally come to grips with Hitler on some battlefield. The might of Germany was so great that, even though Russia might defend herself, it would be very difficult for Britain and Russia combined to crush the German military machine. He said that the one thing that could defeat Hitler, and perhaps without ever firing a shot, would be the announcement that the United States was going
to war with Germany. Stalin said that he believed, however, that the war would be bitter and perhaps long; that if we did get in the war he believed the American people would insist on their armies coming to grips with German soldiers; and he wanted me to tell the President that he would welcome the American troops on any part of the Russian front under the complete command of the American Army.” This last proffer was an astonishing concession from the ruler of Russia.

There had been no waste of word, gesture, or mannerism, Hopkins remembered later. “It was like talking to a perfectly coordinated machine, an intelligent machine. Joseph Stalin knew what he wanted, knew what Russia wanted, and he assumed that you knew….”

Actually Stalin gave Hopkins a far more hopeful picture of Soviet resistance than the situation then warranted. But Hopkins’s reports steeled Roosevelt’s determination to speed all possible aid to Russia. During July that aid had been dismayingly low—less than seven million tons of materials—compared to Russia’s enormous need. Aid had been caught in a quagmire of problems: the Russians were not exact as to what they needed; each Washington agency, anxious to hoard supplies for its own mission, passed the buck to other “shops”; State, Treasury, and the RFC bickered over measures to buy Russian gold and to extend credits to Moscow; Stimson hated to part with planes already assigned to Britain or to his own forces. Roosevelt had to admit that he could not spare some items—notably antiaircraft guns—because he did not have any himself. But he always had to worry that Stalin, feeling deserted by the perfidious West, might simply quit—or even go over to Hitler’s side. And his enemies were becoming noisier at home.

“If somebody kidnaps Wheeler and shanghais him on board an outgoing steamer for the Congo,” he wrote to Frankfurter, “can a habeas corpus follow him thither? You need not answer, if you don’t want to because it would never get as far as the Supreme Court! Wheeler or I would be dead, first!”

Roosevelt’s exasperation came to a head at a Cabinet meeting on August l. He opened it with a pointed remonstrance on the “runaround” given the Russians during the previous month. “I am sick and tired of hearing that they are going to get this and they are going to get that.” He did not want to hear what was on order; he wanted to hear what was on the water. The Cabinet sat agape at their chief’s unusual performance; after half an hour of the lecture they tried to reply. Stimson, much annoyed, complained that he had not been informed as to Russia’s actual needs. Morgenthau pointed out that with Hopkins away no one in town had authority to get the aid under way. Ickes had a helpful suggestion,
too—that one of the newest bombers be sent to Russia by way of Japan, adding that it could set fire to Tokyo on the way by dropping a few incendiary bombs.

The President was not to be put off. He wanted a hundred or more fighters to go to the Soviets right away. “Get the planes right off with a bang next week,” he told Stimson, even if they had to be taken from the American Army. He said that he would put one of the best administrators in Washington in charge of the Russian order. The President chose Wayne Coy right after the meeting and instructed him “with my full authority use a heavy hand and act as a burr under the saddle….Step on it.”

Coy tried to step on it, but he had a poor engine and a meager gas supply. It was weeks before total exports to Russia reached even thirty million dollars’ worth. An air of expediency and feverish improvisation hung over the whole operation. Roosevelt could not make a clear moral issue of aid to Russia because of anti-Soviet attitudes; he could not make a strategic reformulation because he could not bank on Russian survival. His main goal was still simply to prolong Russian resistance. He was committed to a strategy of giving top priority to Britain and the Atlantic nations—a strategy shaped with his military chieftains over a long period and now encased in legislative, bureaucratic, financial, and political channels, interests, and expectations.

Hitler’s lunge into Russia and the developing Soviet resistance were rapidly altering power balances around the world, with enormous implications for grand strategy; but the United States was still adhering to a strategy of Atlantic First.

Speed, and speed now, the President had ordered in March, but neither the economy nor the ship of state responded briskly to this call from the bridge. Two months later, war supply was in a state of crisis in the face of voracious demands from Britain for its home defense, from the vast Middle East theater, from Roosevelt’s generals and admirals for their own dire needs. In early summer the decision to aid Russia boosted demand once again. Outwardly the President seemed as confident as ever, even debonair, about his mobilization arrangements. Actually the delays and emergencies must have helped cause his occasional sullenness of the spring. No matter how much he improvised he could not overcome the deadly imbalance: war supply was increasing by small increments and break-throughs; war demand, by huge leaps and bounds.

The President put the best face on things even when he knew that progress was unsatisfactory. After giving out some hopeful
defense-spending figures at a press conference in early April he jousted with the press.

Reporter: “How much do you think that this should be accelerated in your own mind? You say it is much too slow.”

The President: “More.”

“What is being done?”

“I can’t give you a figure on that.”

“What is being done to do that?”

“Well, we will just keep on using ‘chestnut burs’ all the time. You are familiar with the use of ‘chestnut burs’ to make a mule go.”

“Can you identify the mule?”…

“You ought to, you come from Missouri, Frank.”

“I came from Minnesota, sir.” (By now much laughter)

“Mr. President, what are the main reasons why the progress is, as you say, much too slow?”

“Oh, thousands, thousands of reasons.”

“I say the main.”

“Individuals—mostly human beings.”

“Can you break that down?”

“No.”

“Mr. President, do you agree…that the next hundred days are going to be crucial in our production program?”

“Yes, and the next hundred after that”—laughing—“and the next hundred after that probably. I can’t see as far ahead as that….”

The President created some momentum simply by setting up new agencies. In March, faced with a doubling of strikes since December, he established a National Defense Mediation Board, of three members for the public and four each for labor and industry, to help keep labor peace through conciliation, voluntary arbitration, and fact-finding. In April he set up the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply—he had rather liked the term “price
adjustment
”—under Leon Henderson, who had become an increasingly vocal champion of the consumer. In May he created the Office of Civilian Defense, under an even shriller New Dealer and dynamic city administrator, Fiorello La Guardia, of New York, to serve as the co-ordination point for federal, state, and local efforts to protect civilians in emergencies. None of these agencies had much formal authority. The OPA held its breath waiting for its maximum price “schedule” to be challenged in the courts, but the threat of publicity and of denying government contracts enabled Henderson to improvise day by day until a price-control law could be passed. Roosevelt chose La Guardia for civilian defense more for his speech-making and promotional than his executive abilities.