Threshold of War Read online

  By 1938 the United States faced a very different and dangerous world. Japan seemed well on the way to East Asian dominance. Hitler, having gobbled up Austria, prepared for the next victim, Czechoslovakia. The democracies lacked the will and capability to stop the aggressors.

  Three attitudes dominated American world policy in the mid-thirties: isolationism, preoccupation with internal affairs, and complacency. American practice had been to stand aloof from Europe’s quarrels. The exception had been the World War and Wilson’s crusade for permanent peace. Historical accounts in the thirties, blaming the victors as well as the vanquished for World War I, the apparent injustices of the peace settlement, and the rising clouds of another war, confirmed Americans in their traditional belief and passionate determination to stay out of the next conflict. In 1934–36 an investigation led by Senator Gerald Nye into war profiteering by munitions-makers and bankers propelled legislation through Congress to prohibit the transactions with belligerents which seemed to have brought the United States into war in 1917. By 1938 the United States was strongly committed to isolationism. However deep American sympathy for China and its future, for example, little disposition existed to assist it and provoke Japan.

  What did seem critical to the American people was the devastating economic depression of the early thirties, followed by slow recovery and a sharp recession in 1937. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected on a platform of recovery and reform, spent his energies and influence on enacting the New Deal, raising prices, and putting people back to work. Reformers were often isolationist, recognizing that preparedness and intervention abroad strengthened existing elites and precluded social spending. Radical change wrought by the New Deal plunged the country into heated political conflict, absorbing American public awareness. Roosevelt’s efforts of 1937–38 to perpetuate the New Deal by enlarging the Supreme Court and purging conservative Democrats failed, leaving him a weakened, presumably lame-duck president. Politics was central to American concerns; Ethiopia, Austria, and Manchuria were at the margins.3

  Finally, it was very hard for Americans to conceive of Hitler or the Japanese as posing a direct threat to the United States. True, the German army was outstripping any single potential foe, but the French army ensconced in the Maginot Line with its allies and putative allies—Britain, Poland, Czechoslovakia—far outnumbered the Wehrmacht. Italy’s alignment with Germany was by no means definitive, and a German-Soviet pact hard to imagine. Above all, between the United States and Germany stood, as always, the British navy. Too many steps would have to succeed, too many questions be answered in a certain way, to envision a physical threat to the United States from Germany.

  The threat of Japan seemed confined to East Asia. Prolonged conflict in China seemed more and more likely. Powerful Soviet forces lay to the north, the bulk of the American fleet—including twelve battleships and four aircraft carriers—operated in the Pacific, and while British Commonwealth, French, and Dutch naval forces in East Asia were negligible, the great base at Singapore provided a port of reentry for European naval power. Above all it seemed unlikely that Japan, so lacking in war resources, would dare challenge the United States, from which it imported 80 percent of its oil products, 90 percent of its gasoline, 74 percent of its scrap iron, and 60 percent of its machine tools.4

  Franklin Roosevelt, who entirely lacked an isolationist mentality, worried about the drift of world affairs, but not to the point of sacrificing his domestic objectives. He supported in spirit League sanctions against Italy by calling for a moral embargo against export of oil to Italy, and he repeatedly spoke for peace, disarmament, and international mediation of disputes. He encouraged Britain’s and France’s efforts to limit and prevent European conflict. At no time, however, did he offer guarantees or alliances to deter aggressors. Quite apart from the difficulty of imagining public support for such a move, it was by no means clear how American power might be brought to bear and how welcome it might be to Europeans in the era of appeasement. Thus American policy toward the rising threat in Europe had a nebulous, indecisive quality. It did nothing to slow Hitler.

  East Asian policy was not quite the same. The United States never condoned Japanese aggression. It regularly protested Japan’s treaty violations and injury to American interests and rights in China. However, it always sought to avoid provoking Japan. In these respects American East Asian policy was as cautious and passive as its European counterpart. But it had more active implications. Recognition of the Soviet Union in 1934 suggested the possibility of a North Pacific alignment against Japan. Throughout the thirties Roosevelt built up the United States Navy, first to treaty strength and afterwards well beyond it. He kept open the possibility of retaining a naval base in the Philippines after independence, and in naval treaty negotiations rejected an increase in Japanese strength relative to the British and American navies. Secret British-American naval conversations at London in January 1938 led to agreement that in case of a Japanese threat the American fleet would move to Pearl Harbor and a British fleet to Singapore. In the background of American restraint toward Japan lay a disposition to use power that was absent from policy toward Europe.

  The Munich agreement of September 30, 1938, conceding to Hitler strategic portions of Czechoslovakia, brought about a basic shift in American foreign policy. Vast relief that war had been averted was followed by a deepening realization that Hitler’s ambitions made war inevitable sooner or later — indeed sooner, for the following March he took the rest of Czechoslovakia. Munich spurred American rearmament, especially in warplanes. Roosevelt sought an increase in aircraft production capacity not only for defense but also to help build up British and French air power and deter Germany. Further to convince Hitler he would have to reckon ultimately with American economic might, the president sought revision of the neutrality laws, including repeal of the arms embargo. So strong was isolationist sentiment in Congress, however, that he failed, so the United States remained a helpless onlooker when Hitler, after reaching an accommodation with the Soviet Union in August 1939, attacked Poland on September 1, Great Britain and France stood by Poland, and once again Europe went to war.

  Coincidentally American policy toward Japan stiffened. In November 1938, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro of Japan, encouraged by Hitler’s challenge to the status quo, issued a statement proclaiming a “New Order in East Asia” under Japan’s leadership, directly contradicting America’s traditional Open Door policy for China and dismissing the Washington treaty system. The United States protested and, more significantly, provided its first direct assistance to China, small as it was, a credit for twenty-five million dollars. In July 1939 the United States gave the required six months’ notice for terminating its commercial treaty with Japan, opening the way for its most rigorous form of pressure, the trade embargo.

  Seven shadowy months of “phony war” passed from the conquest of Poland to the next German venture, the invasion of Denmark and Norway on April 9, 1940. The administration finally succeeded in repealing the arms embargo; now Britain and France had access to American arms production but would have to take title in American ports and ship the goods themselves. Almost all American intercourse with the belligerents—shipping, travel, loans—remained prohibited. Appeasement was discredited, but American interest in peacemaking persisted. To keep Italy out of the war if possible and to delay if not prevent the coming fury, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles journeyed to Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London without result. At Tokyo the American ambassador, Joseph C. Grew, gingerly investigated the possibility of easing tensions over China in return for extension of the trade treaty, but Washington preferred to hold the threat of trade restriction over Japan, and the treaty duly expired.

  Blitzkrieg began in the west on May 10, 1940, and by the end of June the Low Countries were overrun, France was defeated, Italy was at war at the side of Germany, and Britain was a lonely outpost of democracy at the edge of a virtually totalitarian continent. By the end of the summer, air battl
es raged over southern England, and invasion was expected any day. Taking advantage of the collapse of Western power, Japan moved southward. It applied pressure on the successor regime in France, that of Marshall Philippe Pétain at Vichy, to permit the stationing of Japanese troops in northern Indochina, further encircling free China; on the British to close the Burma supply route to China; and on the Dutch East Indies for huge supplies of oil. In September, Japan joined the Axis.

  Almost overnight the “free security” enjoyed by the United States since the Napoleonic Wars disappeared.5 The Atlantic was no longer a friendly ocean: Hitler controlled the far shore. The French navy was neutralized, while the British were struggling desperately to keep open sea lanes to the Western Hemisphere and the empire. A very real possibility existed that the Americas would find themselves an island in a world dominated by the Axis.

  President Roosevelt’s immediate response was an exponential increase in American armament. In the balance of 1940 the United States Navy ordered nine new battleships, compared with eight ordered in the years 1937–40, eleven aircraft carriers, three battle cruisers, and eight heavy cruisers, compared with none of these types in the earlier period, as well as thirty-one light cruisers and 181 destroyers.6 The president set an annual production target of 50,000 airplanes; Congress raised the authorized strength of the army from 280,000 to 1,200,000 and more when feasible. The problem was no longer money but time and capacity. Congress enacted required military service, and the president called the National Guard into federal service and tightened defense ties with Latin America and Canada.

  Defense of the Americas did not mean writing off Britain. On the contrary the survival of the beleaguered island seemed even more vital as the threat of Hitler to American security grew and his ultimate defeat became more important. As Britain battled on and the summer passed without invasion, American assistance seemed more realistic as well. The British desperately needed destroyers for defense against an invasion fleet and German submarines, the U-boat, so in September, Roosevelt agreed to provide fifty of World War I vintage. In return the United States received leases to certain British bases in the Western Hemisphere. The most valuable of these, in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and Trinidad, would provide Atlantic outposts for American naval and air power. Prime Minister Winston Churchill also gave public assurance that the Royal Navy would never be scuttled or surrendered.

  Toward Japan the United States showed ever increasing firmness. To guard against Tokyo’s taking advantage of Western vulnerability, Roosevelt moved the Pacific Fleet, which had been based on the West Coast, to Pearl Harbor, where it would lie on the flank of any Japanese advance southward. Pressure rose for more forceful measures. In July heavy Japanese orders for American iron and steel scrap, which according to administration statistics supplied 40 percent of Japanese iron production, and for aviation gasoline led the president to begin applying economic pressure.7 Under a new law permitting restriction of the export of defense materials, he placed curbs on high-octane gas and high-grade scrap. In September, after Japan’s move into Indochina, he turned the screw again, banning the export of all scrap, and each month thereafter a new list of restricted materials appeared. But he stopped short of an oil embargo, fearing the Japanese would attack to seize the Dutch supply. The president and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, recognizing the greater and more immediate threat posed by Germany, were determined so far as possible to avoid provoking Japan.

  The destroyers-for-bases agreement was a matter of dire necessity at a time when Roosevelt feared that any departure from traditional policy might defeat his bid for an unprecedented third term as president. The 1940 election had a numbing effect on policy. Under attack as a warmonger and would-be dictator, Roosevelt stressed the theme of defense and in his speeches dealt most deviously with the implications of aid to Britain and the strategic imperatives the nation faced. As it was, his margin of victory over the Republican contender Wendell Willkie was substantial, twenty-seven million to twenty-two million votes, but not the overwhelming triumph of 1936.

  Aid to Britain, postponed by election politics, became a matter of urgency thereafter: Britain was running low on funds to pay for American arms. Ruminating on the problem during a post-election cruise in the Caribbean, Roosevelt hit on the brilliant notion of lending American goods to Britain, thereby circumventing instead of assaulting neutrality laws, loans, and the American horror of repeating 1917. Lend-Lease would give Britain assured access to the American arsenal while enhancing American production capability. In January 1941, on the wings of powerful messages to the people and Congress, he asked for appropriate legislation, and behind the scenes he carefully guided presentation of the administration’s case.

  The Lend-Lease debate in Congress was the last great fight of the isolationists. Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Arthur H. Vandenberg, Hiram Johnson, Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., Bennett Champ Clark, their allies in the House of Representatives, and their spokesmen outside, in particular Charles Lindbergh, were on the defensive, themselves increasingly isolated. Public sentiment as measured in polls was overwhelmingly against a declaration of war, to be sure, but a growing majority favored aid to Britain short of war even at the risk of war. The isolationist aggregation of Republicans, Roosevelt haters, New Deal activists, midwest Progressives, and spokesmen of an earlier, simpler, safer America no longer represented the mainstream. On March 11, 1941, the Lend-Lease bill, skillfully amended to enlarge the majorities but safeguard the intent, passed the Senate by a vote of 60 to 31 and the House by 317 to 71.

  From May 10, 1940, until March 11, 1941, during these ten months of unprecedented peril for the United States, the American people struggled through their presidential election and Lend-Lease debate to achieve a new foreign policy consensus. Aid to Britain was a new departure, establishing as it did a deep-set congruence of interest, though not an alliance, with one of the European belligerents. Roosevelt achieved a powerful mandate in his election and the Lend-Lease law. Nevertheless traditional forces of aloofness and separate-ness could not be dismissed, so it was impossible to say how far down the road that risked war the American people were prepared to go, or how far they could be led.

  Meanwhile the world did not wait merely upon American consensus. Japan needed time to gain security in the north by some sort of accommodation with the Soviet Union before it could pursue the southward advance. Europe waited for spring, and, as the first months of 1941 passed, speculation intensified as to which way the German war machine would turn. Germany and Japan were reaching the limits of regional expansion. Any further aggression would have global reverberations. The Soviet Union, the United States, and Japan, though by no means neutral, had yet to cast their lots. The tendency as the sun arched northward was toward a global alignment of forces, and the question was what sort of balance might be struck, tipped which way, with what result.

  Chapter 1

  March 1941 The Aura of German Power

  On March 1, 1941, leading elements of the German Twelfth Army crossed the Danube from Rumania to Bulgaria on pontoon bridges. Soon, under a warming, drying sun, German infantry, armored, mountain, and anti-aircraft troops were streaming south through Bulgaria toward the passes of the Rhodope Mountains, the Greek frontier, and the Mediterranean. Hitler, as the New York Times said, was “on the march again.” Trains from Istanbul to Belgrade experienced delays of up to a full day; even the crack Simplon Express was running hours behind schedule.1 The Nazi buildup to seventeen divisions for Operation MARITA, the conquest of Greece, had begun. The 1941 campaigning season was under way.

  Hitler’s foremost objective in 1941 was to crush the Soviet Union. That had always been his underlying purpose, an ambition deriving more from fundamental ideological preconceptions than from strategic realities. Subjugation of Russia would go far to fulfill the central aims and values of the Nazi state. The Fuehrer considered absolute control of the resources of the Soviet Union, particularly the oil of the Caucasus and the grain of the Ukraine,
essential to the sustenance of a Nazi Europe. His intent to attack at the first opportunity in 1941 hardened when the Soviets disclosed ambitions in eastern Europe and the Balkans late in 1940. On December 21, 1940, Hitler issued his directive for the Russian campaign, known now by its code name, BARBAROSSA, after Frederick Barbarossa, the twelfth-century German empire-builder.2

  By March the eastward movement of troops was under way. The German General Staff was gathering the largest military force ever concentrated on a single front: 75 percent of its army, or 3.3 million men in 142 divisions. This vast array would form three groups of armies on a front of one thousand miles, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, each with a powerful spearpoint of Panzer and motorized divisions, the largest group aimed at Moscow. In fact two kinds of army were involved, the fast or schnell forces and the marching infantry, using 625,000 horses for transport. Berlin estimated that most of the Red Army was stationed forward, near the frontiers. It aimed to drive armored wedges through Soviet lines, then encircle and crush the enemy within roughly 300 miles of the border, in easy reach of the German supply system. Hitler and his generals were determined to avoid getting lost in Russian space and bogging down in a war of attrition. The final objective, a line from the Caspian to the White Sea, would place the heart of Russia in terms of food, resources, and production in the Nazi grip. The attack was planned for mid-May or as soon thereafter as the roads dried.

  German-controlled Territory in the Balkans: New York Times, March 2, 1941.

  In contrast to the plan against the Soviet Union, Hitler’s aims in the Balkans were distinctly limited. He wanted to secure the north coast of the Aegean and, if necessary, the Greek mainland to protect the right flank of BARBAROSSA. Ulterior objectives in the Mediterranean would have to wait. The Luftwaffe until redeployed to the east and the German navy would heavily attack Britain and its supply lifelines, but invasion of Britain would also have to wait for completion of the Russian campaign.