Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

  To Churchill, across the Atlantic, and for the rest of the British government the President’s hesitancy was a deep concern (though this was never expressed publicly). It was a worry, too, for those in his administration–and Stimson was not alone in this–who were coming to favour a more robustly interventionist approach. Roosevelt often sounded encouraging, but then his innate caution would prevail once again, leaving them frustrated. Yet to many within the United States, Roosevelt was going much too far. To these, he appeared to be a warmonger, intent upon dragging the country into a faraway conflict. The isolationist lobby, its chief geographical base of support located in the Midwest, and its political roots mainly but not entirely among Roosevelt’s political opponents in the Republican Party, was by this time representing no more than a sizeable minority of opinion. But it was an extremely vocal minority, and usually able to make common cause with a far wider swathe of opinion that was not outrightly isolationist, but was at the same time intensely worried about embarking upon a slippery path that would end up in war.

  Roosevelt was acutely aware of the tightrope he was treading. On the one hand he was anxious to ensure that he retained the backing of public opinion, and more directly the support of the United States Congress. This demanded a strategy of caution. But he appeared to those around him too often ready to follow, rather than lead, opinion in the country. Where he did lead, it was usually to cajole more than to direct. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest adviser, reportedly thought in May 1941 that ‘the President is loath to get into this war, and he would rather follow public opinion than lead it’.5 Stimson had put the same point in characteristically forthright terms to the President the previous month: ‘without a lead on his part it was useless to expect the people would voluntarily take the initiative in letting him know whether or not they would follow him if he did take the lead.’6

  On the other hand, in full recognition of the danger Germany posed to the United States, Roosevelt sought to pursue, with the self-interest of upholding America’s national security as a legitimate priority, a policy that supported Britain in increasingly direct fashion. This, however, ran the obvious risk of embroiling an unwilling country in precisely the ‘foreign war’ he had vowed to keep out of. This was the intense dilemma that faced the President from summer 1940 onwards.

  At the start of that summer, Great Britain stood alone in Europe against the Nazi menace, and greatly imperilled, with the danger of imminent invasion. Of course, she had the backing of her world Empire and Dominions. They could, however, have provided little practical help in the event of a German landing. To many Americans, Britain seemed as good as lost.

  One option for Roosevelt would have been to side with the isolationist lobby, which contended that, with German dominance over the European continent (including Britain) as good as certain for the indefinite future, American interest lay in upholding the strictest neutrality, refraining from any involvement whatsoever in the conflict engulfing faraway nations, and exclusively looking after the concerns of the United States. Given the reluctance witnessed in opinion polls to see America involved in the war, isolationism, had Roosevelt thrown the formidable weight of his political skills and rhetoric behind it, still retained the potential to become far more popular than it was in reality.

  Another option would have been to adopt the advice of some members of his administration to take steps which would have committed the United States to a much greater involvement in the European war, perhaps even to the point of joining it. This would, of course, have been to court serious difficulties with public opinion, and the problems in navigating the necessary legislation through the political rapids of the Congress would have been formidable indeed. In any case, the scale of American military preparedness for a major war in summer 1940 was so limited that any overt form of belligerency, even accepting the political risks, would have been highly restricted in practical terms. But, again, had Roosevelt, a profoundly experienced and skilful politician as well as a highly gifted rhetorician, chosen to do so, it is far from inconceivable that he would not have won over the country to a far more interventionist position. He was not prepared to put it to the test.

  Fears were still widespread as late as May 1941 that Germany could soon mount the attack on Britain that had not materialized the previous year. These fears only vanished when Hitler turned eastwards, with the attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. By that point, Roosevelt was well embarked upon a course of action that precluded any lingering possibility of adopting the option of keeping the United States detached from the war in Europe. By the end of spring 1941, though the United States was still months away from direct participation in the war, the Roosevelt administration had taken important steps both in Europe and, increasingly, in the Far East too, that had made it impossible to extricate the country from the spreading conflict. The options had narrowed.

  Roosevelt’s choice over the previous months had in fact proved to be an extremely cautious path between neutrality and belligerency, one of assistance to Britain through all ‘methods short of war’ (a phrase coined in January 1939 by the President himself).7 In summer 1939, Roosevelt had reportedly laid out his options. He thought there were four: ‘A, we can go to war at once, sending an expeditionary force abroad, but that’s out, of course. B, we can let ourselves be forced in later. C, we can go to war, now or later, but furnish only war supplies and naval and air aid to our allies. And D, we can stay out, following my policy of methods short of war to aid the democracies. And that’–meaning the last of these–‘is what we shall do.’8 This policy, which the President stuck to, edged, rather than swept, the United States towards involvement in the war. Even so, the steps he did authorize were irreversible. And of these, the most singular, and most important, was the decision–an initiative of the President himself–to open up America’s vast material resources to Britain’s struggling war effort at no direct financial cost. With the passing of the Lend-Lease bill in March 1941, after three months of intensive debate, the isolationists had lost their last great fight.9 To be sure, the United States was not yet in the war, and little aid could flow straight away. But America was now bound up in a most tangible fashion with Great Britain, a belligerent already engaged in the fight against Hitler in Europe, and a main adversary in the intensified threat posed by Japan in the Far East. The decision to commit American resources to the British war effort was for the immediate future of largely symbolic importance, but it would become over time the key to Britain’s continuing capacity to fight Hitler. Its significance was, therefore, immense.

  And yet, despite his unstinting public praise and gratitude for this ‘most unsordid act in the history of any nation’,10 Churchill remained frustrated, anxious and at times bleakly pessimistic at Roosevelt’s hesitancy, caution and unwillingness to commit the United States to intervention in the war.11 When he met the President for the first time since the conflict had begun, in August 1941, the British Prime Minister told him: ‘I would rather have an American declaration of war now and no supplies for six months than double the supplies and no declaration.’12 Some in Roosevelt’s Cabinet felt almost equally frustrated. The period preceding the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 has been labelled ‘a year of indecision’.13 It often indeed seemed in those months that Roosevelt’s main decision was to avoid having to decide at all.

  I

  Roosevelt had taken office, on 4 March 1933, amid a full-blown banking crisis and with around a quarter of the workforce–some thirteen or so million Americans–unemployed. His first term was almost completely taken up with an array of often contentious legislative measures that comprised the ‘New Deal’, the programme of national recovery to rebuild the shattered economy and restore confidence.14 Much of his energy was consumed in the ensuing internal political struggles.15 The President’s own popularity remained high. He was re-elected in 1936 in a landslide victory. His hold over Congress, however, weakened, especially after elections in November 1938 had
bolstered the opposition.16 And this was at a time when events abroad had started to dominate his second term in office.

  The isolationism that had taken hold in America since the end of the First World War–building on long traditions–had, in fact, become still further engrained during Roosevelt’s first term. The impact of involvement in the European war in 1917–18 on American society had been profound. Fifty thousand American soldiers had lost their lives in a conflict which, to many United States citizens, had not been their country’s concern at all. Most Americans felt this must on no account ever be allowed to happen again. Experiences of the horror of the trenches mingled with resentment at what was widely perceived as European ingratitude when America insisted upon repayment of war loans.17 There was also a widespread feeling, encouraged by anti-war literature and some histories of what Americans called ‘the European War’, then later backed by the report of a Senate committee investigating the munitions industry, that America had been inveigled into involvement by foreign financiers, bankers and arms manufacturers who stood to profit from an Allied victory.18

  The United States had chosen to keep largely aloof from European affairs, rejecting membership of the League of Nations. Certainly, American initiative was crucial in providing plans in 1924, then again five years later, to try to resolve the gnawing problem of German reparations payments, an issue of the most bitter resentment in Germany. And in 1932, the United States joined the Disarmament Conference in Geneva, belatedly (and vainly) attempting to turn another of President Woodrow Wilson’s principles for a peaceful postwar world into reality, though long after any genuine hope of doing so had evaporated. But there was little else. Behind a wall of protective tariffs, and an economic boom symbolized by the explosion of automobile production, most Americans were content to ignore the outer world and keep Europe from their minds.

  When, with Hitler in power, German assertiveness again started to manifest itself, and across the world Japanese imperialism sounded shrill, dissonant tones, a widespread American sentiment, whether from noble if illusory pacifistic leanings or from national unilateralist tendencies, was to retreat still further into isolationism. ‘Let us turn our eyes inward,’ advocated the Governor of Pennsylvania, George Earle, a liberal Democrat, in 1935. ‘If the world is to become a wilderness of waste, hatred, and bitterness, let us all the more earnestly protect and preserve our own oasis of liberty.’19 A reflection of prevailing attitudes was the Johnson Act, named after the progressive Republican Hiram Johnson and passed in 1934 to forbid the granting of credits to countries that had defaulted on their war debts to the United States.20 Then in 1935, to the backcloth of open and large-scale German remilitarization and bullying Italian threats towards Abyssinia, Roosevelt opened the door to legislation that would ensure American neutrality in any future war. The key feature was an arms embargo on the provision of armaments to all belligerents in a war ‘between, or among, two or more foreign states’, irrespective of American sympathies. Roosevelt, the State Department even more so, would have preferred powers to impose a discretionary arms embargo, discriminating against aggressors. But the President professed himself satisfied with the Neutrality Act, which he signed on 31 August 1935.21

  The neutrality legislation–renewals and amendments meant that there were five neutrality laws between 1935 and 193722–was designed to prevent any recurrence of the circumstances that had led to American intervention in the First World War. Together with the Johnson Act, the Neutrality Act would later pose obstacles to Roosevelt’s attempts to help Britain while steering clear of involvement in a second European war. Meanwhile, of course, it did nothing to hinder aggression by the European powers. Oil, not among the list of embargoed ‘implements of war’, was still shipped to Mussolini (in fact, in increased quantities), when the Italian dictator unleashed his bombers against Ethiopian tribesmen in 1935.23 But then America could point to the Europeans themselves who, divided and inept in their response to the Abyssinian crisis, failed to impose an oil embargo on Italy.

  When in March 1936 Hitler took advantage of the disarray among the western democracies to remilitarize the Rhineland, Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, rejected the French plea for an American condemnation of the action on moral grounds.24 It was a perverse application of neutrality, an unnecessary endorsement by silence of Hitler’s breach of the Versailles and Locarno treaties, the basis of the postwar settlement. But then, the British and the French had themselves simply stood by and let it happen.

  And when Italy and Germany provided military support for a rebel army, backed by Fascist sympathizers, aiming to overthrow Spain’s struggling democracy, the arms embargo in the Neutrality Acts was extended to both sides of the conflict, though in a civil, not an international war. Again, in parallel to the supine non-interventionism of the European democracies, what this did was effectively to deny arms to the Republican defenders of democracy while allowing the assailants to be supported by Fascist arms from Italy and Germany. However, the Spanish Civil War was far away, without much resonance at home. True, a minority in the United States–mainly Catholics and the Left–were activated (along different lines in the conflict) by the crisis in Spain.25 But two-thirds of Americans, in January 1937, had no opinion about events in Spain that were sounding the death knell of a sister democracy.26

  Until the later 1930s, Roosevelt had shown little inclination to demur from the prevalent isolationist and pacifist tendencies in the United States. He had witnessed the horrors of the western front at first hand during a visit in 1918, and the experience had left a lasting revulsion.27 ‘I hate war,’ he had said in a celebrated phrase of an election address in 1936.28 It struck a popular chord. ‘We are not isolationist,’ he stated, ‘except insofar as we attempt to isolate ourselves completely from war.’ He told the American people that preserving peace would depend upon the day-to-day decisions of the President and the Secretary of State. ‘We can keep out of war,’ he declared, ‘if those who watch and desire have a sufficiently detailed understanding of international affairs to make certain that the small decisions of today do not lead toward war and if at the same time they possess the courage to say no to those who selfishly or unwisely would lead us to war.’29 Campaign advisers told the President that his opposition to a possible war was the most effective issue in his return to the White House that year.30

  The rhetoric was easy. Events in Europe seemed far away and of little direct relevance to most Americans, preoccupied with making ends meet and coping with the travails of daily life as the country struggled along the path of economic recovery. The Atlantic appeared to pose a large enough cushion to protect Americans from the dangers again threatening the incorrigibly warlike continent of Europe. But they wanted to take no chances. Seven out of ten Americans believed in autumn 1937 that Congress should have the approval of the population in a referendum before issuing a declaration of war. A constitutional amendment to that effect, tying the President down, not just to a decision of Congress, but to the result of a popular referendum, was only narrowly defeated in the House of Representatives.31

  While talking peace, Roosevelt, engrossed by domestic issues, did little to prepare America either psychologically or materially for the unpleasant prospect of engagement in troubles ahead, in Europe or in east Asia, which might in reality, whatever the good intentions, prove impossible to avoid. A minimal amount was done over the next years to rearm the American navy and as good as nothing to build up the army. In fact, one of Roosevelt’s first measures to cut the budget after his inauguration in 1933 had been to reduce the size of the army, already minuscule at only 140,000 men.32 The President cherished ideals of peace, harmony, cooperation and free trade throughout the world. It was a noble dream, shared by millions less able than the President to do anything to bring it about. But for the first years of his presidency, apart from reducing US involvement in Latin America, in keeping with his ‘good neighbour’ policy, and offering future independence to the Philippines, Roosevelt was co
ntent to leave it as a distant aspiration.

  Down to 1938, he placed foreign policy largely in the hands of his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.33 Born in a Tennessee mountain cabin, tall, distinguished looking with silver hair and dark eyes, clever if somewhat unimaginative, highly experienced but often conservative to the point of being doggedly obstinate, moralistic and self-contained but ‘plain and approachable as an old shoe’,34 Hull was deeply committed to the principles that President Woodrow Wilson, chief architect of the postwar European settlement, had espoused. He firmly believed that world peace could be brought about on the basis of disarmament, self-determination, non-violent change and diminished commercial rivalry.35 Hull was watchful but not unduly concerned at this stage about Japan and saw no reason to press for a more interventionist approach to Europe’s growing problems. Europe seemed indeed to pose the greater potential danger. But the inaction of the western democracies, France and Great Britain, that led to the policies of appeasement had its counterpart across the Atlantic in the detachment of the Roosevelt administration from the growing menace in Germany.