When Admiral Raeder protested to Hitler that the U.S. presence in Iceland should be regarded as an act of war, the Führer replied that he was “most anxious to postpone the United States’s entry into war” until German forces had vanquished Russia, which he said should only take another month or two. Once that was accomplished, he “reserved the right to take severe action against the United States as well.”
ALTHOUGH PLEASED WITH FDR’S decision to station troops in Iceland, Henry Stimson, Frank Knox, and the other interventionists in the administration were deeply disappointed by what they considered his dithering on the use of naval convoy escorts. Yet as it turned out, landing troops on Iceland provided a back door to the introduction of limited convoy protection in the Atlantic.
The American forces on Iceland would clearly have to be supplied with food, weapons, and other necessities ferried from the United States by American and Icelandic merchant ships. These ships, in turn, would need U.S. naval escorts, which would be authorized to destroy any “hostile forces which threaten such shipping.” As it happened, the American convoys supplying bases in Iceland and the convoys heading to Britain left from the same ports in Canada and used the same route—a coincidence on which Admiral Stark capitalized. With Roosevelt’s permission, the chief of naval operations arranged the schedule of American convoys so that some would leave Canada at the same time as British or Canadian convoys heading for the United Kingdom. By sailing together, they all would come under the protection of the U.S. Navy.
As of mid-July, all friendly ships sailing to and from Iceland were accompanied by American naval escorts. Stark told his subordinates and the British that “the whole thing must be kept as quiet as possible.” Yet, as the Navy chief knew, that situation likely would not last for long. In weeks if not days, U.S. and German naval forces were bound to clash.
THE STEEPLY ESCALATING RISK of war, however, was not matched by an equally dramatic growth in defense mobilization. While industrial production had risen about 30 percent in the past year, with aircraft manufacturing climbing 158 percent and shipbuilding 120 percent, these were paltry figures compared to the vast demands and needs of the American military, the British, and now the Russians. As the columnist Raymond Clapper noted, “Ours is still a popgun arsenal.”
Of the $7 billion allocated for Lend-Lease assistance to Britain, only about 2 percent of that amount had actually reached the British in the form of supplies, most of it dried eggs, canned meat, beans, and other food. So dismal was the situation that in July 1941, William Whitney, an American Lend-Lease official in London, quit in protest over America’s failure to do more. “We are deceiving the people on both sides of the Atlantic by allowing them to think that there is today a stream of lease-lend war materiels crossing the Atlantic, when in fact there is little or none,” Whitney wrote in his letter of resignation. “My view is that the Administration … should show Congress and the people that, while we are boasting that we are at enmity with Hitler alongside Britain, we are doing a disgracefully small share of the job.”
America’s booming economy was still largely devoted to satisfying civilian needs; the sales of cars and other big-ticket items were at an all-time high, and most Americans were living better than they ever had in their lives. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry neatly summed up the problem when asked at a New York dinner party what America could do for the war effort. “As things stand,” the French writer responded, “your country devotes 90 percent of its industrial potential to making consumer goods that Americans want—in other words cars and chewing gum—and 10 percent to stopping Hitler. Only when those figures are reversed—10 percent to cars and chewing gum and 90 percent to stopping Hitler—will there be any hope.”
Saint-Exupéry was exaggerating—but not by much. Reluctant to give up their high profits from consumer goods, many companies continued to resist converting their factories and other facilities to defense production. While eager to make more money for themselves, they declined to share the bounty with their workers in the form of better wages and other benefits, which resulted in widespread walkouts in key industries such as aircraft manufacturing. Shortages of machine tools and essential materials like aluminum and steel rose sharply; in some places, shipyards lay idle for lack of steel.
In March 1941, Harry Truman launched a Senate investigation that revealed extensive bungling of the defense program, including fraud, overcharging, and shoddy workmanship by private business and industry. “We are advertising to the world … that we are in a mess,” Senator Tom Connally, a member of Truman’s investigating committee, said in disgust. Unless the United States intensified its mobilization, a government report warned, its war production would be outstripped by Britain and Canada within the year.
In the view of many, the only way to straighten out the mess would be the appointment of a single government official with the authority to set priorities and prices and to coerce obedience from manufacturers. But the president was having none of that. Loath as always to yield power, he insisted on retaining administrative control of the defense effort, even though he was too busy with other pressing matters to provide any real leadership or direction.
Pushed hard by Stimson and others, FDR finally agreed in July 1941 to replace the faltering Office of Production Management with yet another new agency, the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board (SPAB). Although Roosevelt retained ultimate authority over the defense program, SPAB was given the power to set priorities and allocations of raw materials in regard to defense and civilian production. In short order, the agency announced plans to ration rubber and to cut the production of cars, refrigerators, and washing machines by 50 percent.
Very gradually, defense production began to improve. Tanks were rolling off assembly lines at a greater rate, and shipbuilding and aircraft manufacturing were picking up speed. Yet, as SPAB chairman Donald Nelson acknowledged years later, “1941 will go down in history as the year we almost lost the war before we finally got into it.”
Contributing to that nightmarish scenario was the distinct possibility that the U.S. Army might soon collapse.
WHEN CONGRESS PASSED CONSCRIPTION legislation in September 1940, it limited the draftees’ tour of duty to twelve months—a compromise to which General Marshall had reluctantly agreed. As a result, his 1.4-million-man service was set to lose about 70 percent of its soldiers in the early fall of 1941. With war drawing ever closer to the United States, the Army would all but disintegrate at a time when the country needed it most.
The legislation, however, did contain an escape clause: the term of service could be extended if Congress found that the national interest was imperiled. In July, Marshall declared bluntly that “such an emergency now exists.” For members of Congress, it was the worst possible news. For weeks, they had been deluged by letters and telegrams from angry, resentful draftees and their parents, who insisted that the young men, at great financial and other personal sacrifice, had lived up to the terms of their yearlong contract and now must be allowed to return to their homes and jobs.
After interviewing draftees in one camp, a Life journalist reported in August 1941 that 50 percent had threatened to desert if they were not discharged when their year was up. Wherever he looked, the correspondent noted, he saw the chalked letters OHIO, standing for “Over the Hill in October.” As the Life article put it, the men “do not want to fight because they do not see any reason for fighting. Accordingly they see little point in their being in an Army camp at all. There is a very strong anti-Roosevelt feeling.”
Bored and restless, draftees complained about rudimentary or nonexistent combat training, as well as the lack of modern weapons. In training exercises, trucks with the word TANK painted on their sides took the place of real tanks, pieces of drainpipe substituted for antitank guns, and wooden tripods acted as 60 mm mortars. “The boys here hate the Army,” noted one private. “They have no fighting spirit, except among themselves when they get stinking drunk.” Another private snarled, “To hell w
ith Roosevelt and Marshall and the Army and especially this goddamn hole!”
Life’s study of crumbling Army morale caused a considerable stir in Washington and across the country. War Department officials claimed it was greatly exaggerated—a belief shared by New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who ordered his own investigation into the situation. For two months, Hilton Howell Railey, an experienced military correspondent and close friend of Sulzberger’s, interviewed more than a thousand soldiers at seven Army forts and camps. When he started the probe, Railey, like Sulzberger, was sure the Life piece was grossly overblown. When he finished, he thought it had greatly underestimated the problem.
Appalled by the conduct of soldiers on weekend passes outside Louisiana’s Camp Polk, Railey described them as “an undisciplined mob,” adding that if he had been a military policeman, “I might have arrested 5,000 men, including many of their officers … for flagrant violations of the articles of war.” Virtually all the soldiers he interviewed expressed great hostility to their officers and the Roosevelt administration, with “more than 90 percent having lost faith in the government’s word.” One soldier told Railey that “the government isn’t fooling us.… We are being jockeyed into a war that we ought to damned well keep out of.”
Instead of publishing Railey’s alarming report, Sulzberger ordered that it be kept quiet—a decision that, when later revealed, prompted a cascade of criticism about what many saw as the Times’s self-censoring, cozy relationship with the government. The publisher was unrepentant, declaring that he had acted “in the public interest.” He personally delivered copies of Railey’s findings to Roosevelt and Marshall, assuring them that “I, for one, did not propose to make Hitler a present of the fact that there was bad morale in the armed forces.” After reading the Times report, Henry Stimson noted in his diary that the cause of the morale problem was clear: “We have been trying to train an army for war without a declaration of war by Congress and with the country not facing the dangers before it.”
Exacerbating the situation was the widespread feeling that the administration was reneging on its commitment to send draftees home after their year of service. In the congressional debate preceding passage of the conscription bill, advocates of the legislation had placed little emphasis on the provision allowing for an extension of service. In any case, members of Congress, already focusing on the 1942 elections, clearly wanted nothing to do with it now. House Speaker Sam Rayburn and majority leader John McCormack told Stimson that a bill extending the draft would never pass their chamber. Even the administration’s staunchest supporters in Congress, they said, viewed such legislation as breaching a moral contract between the government and draftees. In the words of Rep. James Wadsworth, the New York Republican who sponsored the original conscription measure and supported its extension, “The whole thing was portrayed as an outrage, a breaking of faith. Everyone said there was no necessity for it, we were still at peace.”
When Marshall and Stimson first urged Roosevelt in the early spring of 1941 to propose a draft extension bill, the president, aware of the passionate public outcry that would ensue, hesitated. Finally, in late June, he reluctantly signed off on the measure but did not publicly endorse it. It was left to Marshall to shoulder the burden of pushing it through Congress.
As the administration’s point man, the Army chief of staff made frequent trips to Capitol Hill to sell the extension to lawmakers. Insisting that the danger to the country was real and imminent, he bluntly remarked to one committee: “I cannot for the life of me see how anyone can read what has happened … and not agree that we have to take such measures as I have recommended.” Privately, he told aides that if the draft were not extended, it “would be the greatest of tragedies.… We [are] in a very desperate situation.” When legislators brought up draftees’ complaints of discomforts and inconveniences, Marshall snapped back that these men were soldiers and could not expect to be treated as if they were at home. “We cannot have a political club and call it an army,” he said.
Although Marshall’s arguments swayed some members of Congress, many still resisted. One veteran congressional aide told the Army chief that never in his forty years on Capitol Hill had he seen such fear of a bill. Pressured by Marshall and Stimson, Roosevelt finally agreed to explain to the public and Congress why the legislation was so desperately needed.
In a forceful radio broadcast on July 21, the president declared that the danger to the country was “infinitely greater today” than it had been a year before, when the conscription measure was passed. “We Americans cannot afford to speculate with the security of America,” he said. While he realized that extending the term of service involved “personal sacrifices,” he flatly warned that the consequences of not doing so would be the disintegration of the U.S. armed forces.
As had happened frequently in the past, the public responded positively to the president’s call for action. According to public opinion polls conducted shortly after FDR’s speech, slightly more than 50 percent of Americans now favored lengthening the term of service for draftees. Word came that some congressmen were rethinking their opposition. “The current,” Stimson crowed, “is running strongly in our favor.”
The administration’s isolationist opponents, meanwhile, were working feverishly to resist that current. Although America First did not take an official position on extending the draft—as a West Point graduate and retired general, Robert Wood was conflicted about the issue—other officials and staffers in the organization privately advised their members to fight it. “I suggest personally that you push every single effort to stop passage of this extension of service proposal,” one staff member wrote to local America First chapters. “I think we can win this fight, and if we do, it will be a terrific blow against the administration forces.”
As both houses of Congress prepared to debate the bill, the ubiquitous mothers’ groups descended on Washington once more. Women in black dresses and veils did their customary weeping and moaning on benches in a reception room just off the Senate chamber, making life uncomfortable for any senators who happened by. At night, holding lighted candles, they continued their crying outside the homes of the extension’s congressional supporters. Such tactics had little effect. On August 7, the Senate, by a vote of 45 to 30, passed the legislation.
In the House, thanks to Marshall’s arguments, both Sam Rayburn and John McCormack had finally thrown their support behind the extension measure, but many of their Democratic colleagues failed to join them. In early August, McCormack reported that of the 267 Democrats in the House, about 60 were opposed to the bill, while several dozen more were undecided.
On both sides of the aisle, there was growing enthusiasm for a Republican amendment that would place all draftees on reserve status at the end of the year and give Roosevelt the authority to call them back to duty if he believed it was necessary. As Stimson noted, the amendment’s aim was obvious—to shift the responsibility of an unpopular action from Congress to FDR and then, if he should indeed take action, “to be the first ones to jump on him.” In his diary, Stimson denounced the amendment’s sponsors as “cowards,” an accusation with which it is hard to argue. For years, Roosevelt’s congressional critics had denounced him as dictatorial. But when given the opportunity to exert their own authority, they shrank from taking it.
Rayburn, who had been Speaker of the House for less than a year, assumed responsibility for shepherding the bill through the lower chamber. Short and bald with a broad, powerful frame, the fifty-nine-year-old bachelor had served twenty-nine years in the House, four of them as majority leader. The House was the love of his life, and he knew its workings far better than any other member. As White House aide James Landis noted, Rayburn “was an expert in procedure—and sizing up the motives of what made human beings tick.” With his fierce integrity and hot temper, the Speaker was an intimidating figure to many of his colleagues—according to the House sergeant-at-arms, some congressmen were “literally afraid to star
t talking to him”—but he also evoked deep respect and, in some members, great affection.
As chairman of the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee in the early and mid 1930s, he had played a major role in the passage of New Deal legislation, sponsoring five key administration measures, including the Securities Exchange Act and Public Utilities Act, and ramrodding them through the House. Yet for all the president’s reliance on him, the two men had long had a problematic relationship. Like other congressional leaders, Rayburn had never been included in FDR’s inner circle of advisers and was allowed little input in the formation of administration policy. A product of rural Texas, he was scorned by the young, Ivy League–educated intellectuals of the New Deal as not “one of us.” To Henry Wallace, Rayburn complained that “the President didn’t take him sufficiently into his confidence.” He felt, said White House aide Jonathan Daniels, that “his advice was not wanted.”
Nonetheless, he remained intensely loyal to Roosevelt—an allegiance that extended to FDR’s foreign policy. Although he had left the United States only twice in his life, for short trips to the Panama Canal and Mexico, Rayburn had always been a stalwart internationalist, convinced that America’s fate was inextricably entwined with those of other nations. Now, having been convinced by Marshall that an extension of the draft was vitally important to U.S. security, he devoted all his formidable talents to the job of getting it passed.
During three days of bitter House debate, Rayburn relinquished his Speaker’s chair to others. He strolled through Capitol meeting rooms and corridors, buttonholing colleagues to tell them: “I need your vote. I wish you’d stand by me because it means a lot to me.” It was a request that many heeded, in large part because they owed Rayburn a great deal; as majority leader, he had showered Democratic lawmakers with a cornucopia of favors, including good committee assignments and favorable treatment of legislation. Now, they understood, it was payback time.