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

  In these same weeks, nevertheless, the fighting war came a step closer, even if only at the level of contingency planning. Already in November 1940, Admiral Stark had devised a global defence strategy, known as Plan D (or, in naval parlance, ‘Plan Dog’). Its basic premiss was that, if and when the United States became involved in a war against Germany, Italy and Japan–and Stark believed that it would ultimately prove necessary to send large land and air forces to Europe and Africa232–a strong offensive in the Atlantic, allied to Britain, should take precedence over the Pacific, where a defensive posture would be adopted.233 Though he never formally adopted Plan Dog, it implicitly lay behind the conclusion Roosevelt reached at a meeting with his top defence advisers on 17 January that upholding the supply lines to Britain was the primary objective. He ordered the navy to prepare for the escort of convoys.234 It sounded promising. But, as so often, caution prevailed. Roosevelt was far from ready to take this step yet.

  Stark had recommended to the President that he authorize secret joint staff talks with the British on possible future action in both oceans.235 In January 1941 these talks began. Within two months top American and British military planners had worked out a basic agreement on strategy–a document named ABC-1–if the United States should enter the war. Of course, there was still no commitment to do so. But in the event of war, the basic strategy–following Plan Dog–would be ‘Germany First’, with a containing attritional struggle against Japan in the Pacific until Germany had been defeated. Indeed, ABC-1 informed strategic thinking in both countries in the months that followed, and actual strategy after December 1941.236 As Robert Sherwood, who helped Roosevelt write his speeches, later put it, a ‘common-law alliance’ had developed between the United States and Great Britain six months before the United States would finally enter the war. It had been ‘publicly entered into through lend-lease’, then ‘privately consummated through the Anglo-American staff conversations in Washington’.237

  Roosevelt had moved far during the winter. The hesitation that had accompanied the destroyer deal, when he had cautiously complied with the pressure from his advisers, had given way to boldness in December and January, when he instigated the lend-lease breakthrough. But the President was not yet prepared to accelerate. In the troubled spring of 1941, his boldness again deserted him. To the immense frustration of the more ‘hawkish’ elements in his Cabinet, caution once more took over.

  Britain was by now facing severe difficulties, and long before the promised American aid might start to make a difference. The advances made through lend-lease and the ABC-1 military agreement with the Americans threatened to be in vain. By May, British troops had been forced out of Greece and had lost Crete. The diversion to Greece, a vain attempt to prevent a German occupation, had weakened Britain’s tenuous hold in north Africa, and, under the new and daring General Erwin Rommel, Axis forces were now threatening to break through, and would soon do so. Worst of all, shipping losses in the Atlantic had soared to almost double their level over the winter. And now the feared new German battleship, the Bismarck, was on the loose and set to wreak further havoc among British convoys. It was a bleak outlook. Britain seemed likely to lose the ‘battle of the Atlantic’. Churchill, privately irritated and frustrated at Roosevelt’s caution, remarked that ‘quite unconsciously we are being left very much to our fate’.238

  Though Roosevelt’s isolationist opponents had been strongly in retreat over the Lend-Lease bill, it has been claimed that the President still seemed at times to suffer ‘less a fear that Hitler might suddenly attack than that isolationists in the Senate would best him’.239 Quite specifically, he could not bring himself to take a clear decision on the convoy question. In April he seemed at first in favour of the navy’s plan to provide escorts, then against. Despite pressure from the Cabinet ‘hawks’–Stimson, Knox, Ickes and Morgenthau–he continued to resist. His view, according to Morgenthau, was ‘that public opinion was not yet ready for the United States to convoy ships’. He preferred to wait and was ‘not ready to go ahead on "all out aid for England”’.240 The indications are that he could have carried public opinion on this issue if he had tried.241 He preferred not to put it to the test. For now, he agreed on 15 April only to a significant extension of the ‘security zone’ for navy patrols in the Atlantic, now widened to west of a line roughly halfway between Africa and Brazil, including Greenland and the Azores. In this broad tract of the Atlantic, they would report on the location of German submarines, but otherwise do nothing either to attack them (unless themselves threatened) or directly to defend convoys. Soon, this would lead to an American presence on Greenland and Iceland, astride the vital Atlantic route. Roosevelt also allowed around this time the transfer of a small number of warships–smaller than the navy had wanted–from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And plans were mooted (that came to nothing) to occupy the Azores.242 But Roosevelt was unwilling to go farther. Escorting was still rejected. He remained adamant that in the battle to control the seas, he was not willing to fire the first shot.243

  Throughout April and May, one of the most anxious phases of the war and among the most worrying of his presidency, Roosevelt seemed hesitant to his entourage–cautious to the point almost of immobilization.244 When William Bullitt, former ambassador to France, saw him on 23 April, the President said ‘that the problem which was troubling him most was that of public opinion. He had just had an argument with Stimson on the subject. Stimson thought that we ought to go to war now. He, the President, felt that we must await an incident and was confident that the Germans would give us an incident.’245

  Across the Atlantic, Churchill, too, was privately depressed at the President’s inactivity and procrastination. His letter to Roosevelt at the beginning of May, written in some irritation, had to be toned down by his advisers.246 He wanted bolder action. He suggested that what would make the decisive difference in tipping the balance in the war Britain’s way ‘would be if the United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent power’.247 The President ignored the plea.

  In Washington, in a state of despondency, Stimson, Knox and the Attorney General, Robert Jackson, met Ickes in mid-May to consider sending ‘some written representation to the President that we are experiencing a failure of leadership that bodes ill for the country’. They were unanimous that ‘the country was tired of words and wanted deeds’. Even the words had not been forthcoming, since Roosevelt had postponed a major speech he intended to deliver on the state of the war. He had retired to his bed, ill–though he seemed well enough to the few allowed to see him in those days. ‘Missy’ LeHand thought he was suffering from ‘a case of sheer exasperation’, torn constantly between the isolationists and the interventionists. In the event, there was little enthusiasm for the protest letter. But ‘none of us could account for the President’s failure of leadership and all of us felt disturbed by the fact that he is surrounded by a very small group and is, in effect, inaccessible to most people, including even members of the Cabinet’.248

  Given the malaise which all those at the heart of defence policy felt to have descended over the administration, expectations of the President’s forthcoming speech–his first since the enactment of lend-lease–were high. Morgenthau, musing on what he might say, ‘felt the next move was to get us into the war’. He told Harry Hopkins that he had arrived at the conclusion during the previous ten days ‘that if we were going to save England, we would have to get into this war, and that we needed England, if for no other reason, as a stepping stone to bomb Germany’.249

  Roosevelt finally gave his big speech on the evening of 27 May–the day the news arrived of the sinking of the Bismarck. Several hands had been hard at work on the six drafts of the ‘fireside chat’, which the President wanted to end, dramatically, by proclaiming a state of emergency. He cabled Churchill, a few hours before his address, to inform the British Prime Minister that his text ‘went further than I had thought possible even two weeks ago’.250

  The spee
ch was, however, not one of Roosevelt’s best. For the invited audience in the unbearably hot East Room of the White House, it was a disappointing let-down, though the telegrams that afterwards poured in were overwhelmingly positive, a better response than the President claimed to have expected.251 Much of it went over similar ground to that of his ‘fireside chat’ the previous December. In his strongest passage, he promised to ‘give every possible assistance to Britain and to all who, with Britain, are resisting Hitlerism or its equivalent with force of arms. Our patrols’, he added, ‘are helping now to ensure delivery of the needed supplies to Britain. All additional measures necessary to deliver the goods will be taken.’ He brought the speech to a climax by declaring: ‘I have tonight issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority.’252

  It sounded dramatic. Perhaps, some of those in his entourage thought, the President was finally halting the drift of previous weeks. Perhaps the urgency that had shaped the decisions at the turn of the year would now return. But what exactly did the declaration of ‘unlimited national emergency’ mean in practice? When reporters at a press conference next morning asked Roosevelt for details, he promptly undid the good work of the previous evening. He had no plans to request Congress to repeal the neutrality legislation, he said. Nor was he going to order naval escort of shipping. He waved away as ‘iffy’ a question about the difficulty in reconciling the differences between labour and management in the big armaments drive. Finally, he admitted that his proclamation of unlimited national emergency needed executive orders based upon a revival of emergency laws stretching back over fifty years to become effective. And he had no plans to issue such orders.253

  The President’s inner group were baffled and irritated. Stimson, who along with Knox had been calling in May for immediate introduction of convoy protection, was appalled. Ickes thought that ‘to declare a total emergency without acts to follow it up means little’, though he added in fairness that it provided at least the framework for significant action. Hopkins was unable to account for the President’s ‘sudden reversal from a position of strength to one of apparent insouciant weakness’. The ‘unaccountability’ of his character was all that occurred to Sherwood as an explanation.254

  But more profound reasons than Roosevelt’s impenetrable personality dictated his caution. One was the continuing problem the President saw in trying to mould opinion while not outpacing it. The slight majority in opinion polls in favour of escorting convoys suggested that Roosevelt might be able to push the issue through Congress if he wanted to apply the pressure. But escorting convoys would inevitably lead to armed clashes with German vessels–one step away from war. Would a bare majority in Congress offer the national unity needed in war? And was the country yet ready for war? Opinion polls in the run-up to his speech showed the usual contradictory traits. While 68 per cent thought it more important to help Britain than stay out of the war, a slightly higher percentage thought the President had gone either too far or far enough in his support for the British. And four-fifths of the population were still opposed outright to entry into the war.255 It was more than sufficient to persuade the President to hold back from bold initiatives. As one of those who saw him at the time in the White House later put it, he felt that as head of the nation he would be more effective if he did not cross the Rubicon.256

  Another factor was probably crucial. Roosevelt had been aware since the beginning of the year of Hitler’s directive to attack the Soviet Union in the spring. At the beginning of March, Sumner Welles had been instructed to pass on the information to the Kremlin.257 Now, the intelligence signals were pointing to an imminent invasion.258 Most likely for that reason, Roosevelt wanted to avoid any escalation of aggression in the Atlantic when news came through on 12 June that for the first time a German U-boat had sunk an American ship, the freighter Robin Moor. The American reaction was mild.259 For Roosevelt knew that an attack by Germany on the Soviet Union would put an entirely different complexion on the war in the Atlantic. Providing the Soviet Union could hold out, new prospects would open up in the west.

  On 22 June 1941, the President was awakened with the news that a massive German attack on the Soviet Union had begun.

  VII

  Roosevelt and American policy had travelled an immense distance since the bleak months between May and September had threatened the total eclipse of democracy in Europe. By the time Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union, the United States was still nowhere near ready for war–not ready militarily, psychologically or politically. But the decisions taken by Roosevelt, in particular over the destroyer deal, then especially over lend-lease, had been of the utmost importance to cementing transatlantic bonds, which within months would turn into a fully fledged military alliance against Hitler and would in time prove instrumental in his destruction. From now on, as the German dictator was only too well aware, time and resources were not on his side. He had to risk more to gain more. But the odds were–though the fortunes of war did not show it at the time–beginning to stack up against him. For Britain, it was the reverse. Militarily, she was still weak, and facing reverses in the Balkans, north Africa and, not least, the Atlantic. But for the first time there was more than a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Provided the Atlantic sea routes could be protected, the American ‘arsenal of democracy’ would soon be at her disposal. And the prospects of the United States actually joining the fighting war had increased sharply. Little wonder that Churchill ended his world broadcast on 27 April 1941 with a rhetorical flourish by citing a nineteenth-century poem to illustrate the new hope: ‘In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright.’260

  With the destroyer deal, lend-lease and the subsequent cautious steps, the President had been faced with difficult choices. He was not short of advice on all sides: go faster; go slower; don’t go at all. He had wavered, he had hesitated, he had been pressed by his advisers and by the opinion polls. But, though he had felt his way forward tentatively, his boldness over lend-lease stands out and was vital. Without that decision, even though the immediate flow of aid from it was still small-scale compared with what was later to come, Britain’s position would have rapidly and immeasurably deteriorated. As dollar reserves dwindled and losses in the Atlantic mounted, the plight would soon have begun to approach desperation. That Britain would have been forced, as some proponents of lend-lease had claimed at the time, to look for a negotiated peace with Hitler within six months is unlikely. The British government were as aware as the Roosevelt administration of German plans to fall upon the Soviet Union and of the great build-up of armed forces on the eastern front. The German–Soviet war, provided it lasted, would have brought relief for beleaguered Great Britain even in the absence of lend-lease. But how long, without lend-lease, Britain’s resources would have held out, even under the new conditions of war raging in the east, is still a moot point.

  More important than this unanswerable question is that lend-lease began a commitment with consequences. Though the path to war for the United States was anything but decided, Roosevelt’s advisers had correctly judged that, following lend-lease, it would ultimately become impossible to stay out of the conflict. Ensuring that the goods produced would not simply find their way to the bottom of the Atlantic implied that convoys would have to be escorted across the ocean. That would unquestionably lead to ‘incidents’–sinkings and shootings. As Roosevelt himself had pointed out, that sounded like war, and was certainly not far from it.261 This made him reluctant to order escorting, and he would only come to that point in the autumn. Some in his ‘war cabinet’, his inner circle on defence matters, were under no illusions about the need not simply to engage in defensive protection of convoys, but actively to participate in the battle of the Atlantic. Nor would it stop there. There were those who had thought that, should America have to become involved eventually, it would be at sea and in the air, b
ut without the need to send ground troops, as in the First World War. But Roosevelt’s military advisers did not deceive themselves. They were increasingly certain that the war would only be won through the dispatch of American troops to fight in Europe.

  We have followed the reasons why the President acted as he did. Could and should he have acted differently?262 Had he followed the path the isolationists wanted him to tread, the chances that Britain would have been forced to a negotiated peace, leaving her and the Empire greatly weakened, would have been hugely magnified. But such a path was never at any juncture likely. Nor was it feasible. Since Munich at the latest, the administration, and not just its more ‘hawkish’ elements, had taken the view that Hitler posed a direct threat to the United States, and to the whole of the western hemisphere. The looming threat across the Pacific, from Japan, added markedly to the urgency of building up defence capacity. Once the war in Europe had begun, and especially once Hitler’s troops had overrun Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, the American people rapidly began to grasp the enormity of the threat facing them. Few were ready to join in the war. But support for help to Britain (and, until her defeat, France) was strong. The purely isolationist line was supported by no more than around a third of the population, and fading. Apart from opinion polls, the overwhelmingly positive reaction to Roosevelt’s ‘fireside chats’ in December 1940 and then in May 1941 indicates that there was widespread backing for a policy of maximum aid to Britain short of war, in America’s own interest. Any attempt, in this climate of opinion (admittedly influenced by the administration, not simply responded to), to press ahead with an isolationist policy would have been folly and doomed to failure.