GRADUALLY THE WHITE HOUSE changed into a military command post during the early weeks of 1942. Soldiers and heavy chains barred the gates. Listening devices lay in the grounds. Artillerymen manned antiaircraft guns on the roof of the mansion and behind false terraces on the lawns. The long line of tourists passing through the first-floor rooms came to an end by order of the Secret Service. Employees had to have passes; visitors had to be listed in advance and carefully checked through the gates. The President could no longer dine out at a hotel; the annual Cabinet dinner given to him and the First Lady had to be held at the White House.
The President was half-amused, half-exasperated by the precautions. What a wonderful opportunity, he speculated at the Cabinet dinner, for Hitler to drop a bomb and catch so many important people at one gathering. “If all of us except Frances were killed we would have a woman President!”
In his oval study on the second floor and in his oval office in the executive wing Roosevelt’s routine was much the same as before. Now, however, he had a map room like Churchill’s, and on his way to and from the office he liked to look in at the large charts with task forces and convoys clearly indicated, scan the latest bulletins, and chat with the young officer in charge. But the White House was a somewhat cheerless place, especially after Churchill left. Roosevelt had no family there. Eleanor was busier than ever with her work in the Office of Civilian Defense and in countless other activities. The burden of events—now most of it of a crisis nature—pressed harder than ever on staff and President alike. Evenings were less relaxed; there were more telephone calls, more messages and queries that could not wait.
He had occasional relief from pressure. At some point during the harrowing months just before or after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt began seeing Lucy Mercer again. Their romance had seemed to be finished forever in 1920 when she had married Winthrop Rutherfurd, a well-to-do widower almost thirty years her senior, and even more the next year when Roosevelt had become an invalid and the ward of his mother and his wife. But some time later he managed to get back in touch with her, and she had shown up in Washington occasionally for official ceremonies during the first two terms. Her husband had recently suffered a stroke and was slowly dying, and the White House had become a lonelier place for Roosevelt than before. He found her the same poignant, diverting woman he had known a quarter-century earlier.
The revival of this affaire de coeur was well known to some in the White House but not to Eleanor Roosevelt. He would meet Lucy on a road beyond Georgetown and they would drive for a couple of hours; very occasionally friends arranged other meetings. When he once asked Anna whether she would mind if “an old friend” came to dinner, his daughter hesitated for two or three seconds, then said of course she would not. Doubtless the relationship was essentially temperamental rather than physical. Lucy Mercer still epitomized Roosevelt’s ideal of womanliness. She had a charming smile, almost bittersweet features, and graceful, statuesque figure; she attracted him, too, with her relaxed vivacity, complete absorption in his talk of politics, people, and olden times, and her lack of demands on him—except to see him again.
But even more than Lucy’s diversions, Roosevelt felt the pull to Hyde Park, to the place where he could throw off some of his cares and escape some of his burden, especially the burden of appointments. He firmly opposed his wife’s suggestion that the big house there be turned into a convalescent home; he reminded her that he would not be able to cruise at sea and doubted that he could even use the Potomac because of the target she would make for planes from a hostile carrier. “O.K. My conscience is free,” she wrote on the memo. So every two or three weeks during the winter and spring the President took the long slow train to Hyde Park for stays of five to ten days.
These trips were unpublicized, by the President’s emphatic instructions. With his small party—Hassett, Grace Tully, one or two secretaries, a doctor, sometimes Hopkins, and always some Secret Service men—he would drive from the White House behind an army truck carrying his luggage and papers and board the presidential train at a secluded siding. On the B&O he slept, talked, sipped cocktails with his staff, watched the passing people and foliage, occasionally went over reports and signed executive orders.
From Manhattan a New York Central locomotive would take him to Highland, across the river from Poughkeepsie and seven miles from Hyde Park. Soon the President would be happily installed in what was now his own home, with his staff in the Vanderbilt mansion three miles up the river. He had an intense interest in that mansion, its former owners, and present appointments; he quizzed Hassett and the others about their rooms and laughed with them over the Vanderbilts’ effort to copy the decor of French royalty. He contrasted the artificial grandeur of the mansion with the plainer and simpler houses of the old Hudson Valley families; he was maintaining his own home as his mother had, he told Hassett, and as his family had for a century or more. What he really meant, Hassett concluded, was that old-fashioned families did not show off.
During these trips Hassett became in effect Roosevelt’s first secretary. While sitting with the President on the train, or meeting him in the morning in the bedroom or even the bathroom—“Have a seat on the can, and remember your pants are up,” Roosevelt told him once—or spreading documents out in the little study while the President’s heavy signature dried, he and his chief talked about their common interests: old books and authors, old family friends and national personages, birds, trees—above all, Dutchess County politicians, places, and happenings. Roosevelt had a comfortable sense of ownership of the place; he happily listed for the authorities his possession of a farm truck, dump truck, station wagon, and his little Ford, though he was not sure whether he also owned a little garden truck. And he never lost his feeling for the local flora and fauna. He timed one of his Hyde Park visits to see his dogwood in bloom, and later the same May he left the house at four in the morning to go bird watching at Thompson’s Pond in Pine Plains. His face lighted up later when he told how at daybreak he heard the note of a marsh wren, then a red-winged blackbird, then a bittern. He claimed to have identified the notes of twenty-two birds in all.
Roosevelt probably never had a “typical day” in his life, but a Saturday at Hyde Park late in March impressed people around him with the range of his interests and the continual flux of his mind. In the morning he chatted with Hassett about a variety of matters, including Sir Basil Zaharoff and American munitions makers who dealt with the Nazis. He then told Hassett of his plans to make a quick, unpublicized visit to New York City, without escort (a plan that failed). Later he discussed Pacific command problems with Hopkins. Then he motored over to the Vanderbilt mansion, called down Hackie (Louise Hackmeister, White House head telephone operator) and Hassett, whom he addressed as Empress Josephine and Cardinal Richelieu, and exchanged more Vanderbilt lore with them. Later he worked on antitrust matters and other affairs of state. In the evening he drove his old Ford, with its special hand levers, over to Eleanor’s Val-Kill cottage for dinner, bringing with him Grace Tully, Hopkins, and Hopkins’s daughter, Diana. In front of the fireplace there was much talk of cousins, grandchildren, and friends. At dinner Eleanor peppered her husband with questions she had picked up in her travels—questions about destroyers being sent out without detectors, a rumored lack of incendiaries, the fall in bomb output resulting from a strike. Roosevelt dismissed the reports as “scuttlebutt.” He talked about the clamor for a unified command but said Marshall knew nothing about ships and King nothing about the Army. He waxed indignant about isolationist newspapers that would not keep military secrets—and the failure of the Justice Department to crack down on them. He then admitted a certain affection for Arthur Krock and Mark Sullivan as ancient but dependable fixtures, claimed that he got along better with Stalin than the British did—this was only a hunch, he admitted, when challenged by his wife—discussed new methods of dental treatment in the Army, remembered the time he gave his dentist a “haymaker” by mistake when coming out of laughing gas, defended Walter Winchell, teased Grace Tully for allegedly snitching a piece of ham on Friday, then wondered what would be substituted for rubber girdles during the war shortage and was assured by the ladies that the problem had been solved. The President left for the big house about ten. It was a godsend that he could relax this way, Mrs. Roosevelt said to her guests afterward; otherwise he could not have stood three terms in office, especially this last one.
It was in these familiar and cheerful surroundings, in the serenity of Hyde Park, that the Commander in Chief received much of the shocking news from the Pacific.
Rarely has a hemispheric strategy functioned so strikingly as did the Japanese grand offensive in the Pacific in the early months of 1942. The plan was audacious. Once the heavy units of America’s Pacific fleet had been destroyed or neutralized at Pearl Harbor and westward, a task force would cut the Navy’s line of communications across the Pacific by capturing Wake and Guam. Secured on their eastern flank, naval and army forces would then sweep south in a series of carefully phased movements.
In the first phase, lasting about seven weeks, one division from the army in South China would capture Hong Kong; two and a half divisions and one air division would assault the Philippines from Formosa; and in the southwest one army would occupy Thailand and then move into southern Burma, thus cutting the vital communications link between India and Malaya, while a larger army seized a bridgehead in northern Malaya and then drove south toward Singapore. In the second phase, taking another seven weeks, reinforced troops would advance south from the Philippines to capture key points in Borneo, the Celebes, and Timor, while the Guam-Wake task force moved on New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago. In the third phase, operations against Java and Sumatra would be completed, and in the fourth, the occupation of Burma and the seizure of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. By this time Tokyo would have attained its strategic objective—a vast defense perimeter stretching from the India-Burma frontier, through the Bay of Bengal, Sumatra, Java, Timor, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, and Wake, to the Kuriles.
That was the plan and that was what happened, though at different tempos. Seven hundred Japanese landed on the beaches of Agaña, in Guam, on December 10 and forced the tiny garrison’s surrender after a half-hour fire fight. Wake took longer. A “fixed aircraft carrier” moored over a thousand miles from Midway, the little atoll was manned by about five hundred Marines, who had a few small artillery pieces and a dozen Grumman Wildcats lacking both armor and self-sealing fuel tanks. The first air attack knocked out most of the Wildcats on the ground. Bombing continued for three days, after which the Japanese tried a landing—only to be miraculously driven off by Wake’s gun crews, with the loss of two destroyers. A relief expedition of carriers and support vessels was dispatched from Pearl Harbor but retired faintheartedly after a series of mishaps. After more air strikes had worn the defenders down, Japanese warships and transports returned on December 23 and overwhelmed the garrison in bloody fighting.
In the Philippines the Japanese planned to destroy America’s Far East Air Force and then capture Luzon with a five-pronged ground assault, and that is what they did. Faulty communications and bad luck marked MacArthur’s air defense. When the Zeroes roared down on Clark Field ten hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, they saw with surprise and relief B-17’s and fighters nicely lined up, evidently preparing to take off.
In hardly more than an hour the Japanese knocked out thirty-five of the exposed planes and crippled American air power in the Philippines. MacArthur, who a day or two before had told military colleagues that he was absolutely secure against air attack, reported that the Japanese planes had been brilliantly handled and thought that some of them were perhaps handled by white pilots. Three hundred miles north, the Japanese, under Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, were beginning their first landings on Luzon; in the next two weeks, in the face of harassment from the United States Navy, foul weather, and occasional communications failures of their own, they put thousands of troops on the northwestern, northern, and southeastern coasts of the long sprawl of Luzon, with the main concentration in Lingayen Gulf. In a final thrust—from the sea just before Christmas—twenty-four transports landed an infantry division in Lamon Bay, at the “rear entrance” to Manila.
For China, Tokyo planned a quick seizure of the foreign concessions in Shanghai and Tientsin as well as Hong Kong. The former had no chance to hold out; the crew of the river gunboat Wake had to surrender after failing to scuttle her—the only American ship to surrender in the whole war. The British and Canadian forces in Hong Kong put up unexpectedly strong resistance, but the increasingly familiar Japanese pattern—heavy bombing followed by overwhelming ground power—brought the surrender of the garrison on Christmas Day.
It was in Malaya, however, that Japanese Imperial Headquarters concentrated its main power. A naval force with nineteen transports headed up the Gulf of Siam, made a feint toward Bangkok, and then thrust its main force into the undefended port of Singora before dawn on December 8. The Japanese quickly won air command over the combat area and over the adjacent seas. In sinking the Prince of Wales and the Repulse they destroyed the only Allied battleship and battle cruiser west of Hawaii. Soon the ground forces were pushing down the length of Malaya and displaying the skill and versatility that would become a legend in the Pacific: turning strong points by quick amphibious hops, infiltrating the jungle, deftly employing light tanks and mobile forces, and always pressing the attack. By New Year’s Day several columns were converging north of Singapore.
So quickly did the Japanese fan out across the South Pacific and knock their adversaries off balance that the Allies not only were unable to establish counterstrategy, but they were unable to set up effective command machinery to make such strategy. The new ABDA command under Wavell, embracing American, British, Dutch, and Australian forces spread out over vast areas of Burma, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines, was disintegrating even as Wavell was trying to take control. Instructed to hold the Malay Barrier, Burma, and Australia, and even “to take the offensive at the earliest opportunity” against Japan, the British General found that even on paper he had no power to relieve subordinate commanders, who retained the right to appeal to their governments. It was a jerry-built structure that could not survive defeat, and perhaps not even victory.
Already Roosevelt’s high goal of the militarily united nations was facing the splintering impact of defeat. As the Japanese drove south, Australia became more alarmed about its cities lying along the exposed seacoasts. Prime Minister John Curtin feared that the British would not be able to reinforce the defense of Malaya, which included Australian infantry units and air squadrons. Under heavy pressure, he communicated directly with Roosevelt, bypassing Churchill. “The army in Malaya must be provided with air support,” he cabled to Washington the day after Christmas, “otherwise there will be a repetition of Greece and Crete, and Singapore will be grievously threatened.” The fall of Singapore would leave Australia isolated from the mother country. Reinforcements marked by London for Malaya, he complained to Roosevelt, seemed utterly inadequate.
The next day Curtin made a declaration of military independence from Great Britain—and did so publicly. “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links with the United Kingdom.”
Curtin’s declaration put Roosevelt in a political vise between London and Canberra, but militarily he was able to reassure the apprehensive Australians. A week after Pearl Harbor, Marshall had called a fifty-one-year-old staff officer, Dwight D. Eisenhower, to Washington and asked him to work out a general plan of action for the Pacific. After a quick assessment Eisenhower concluded that while every effort should be made to help MacArthur on Luzon, the United States must keep open the Pacific line of communication with Australia and establish a base there. Stimson welcomed the plan, partly because he feared that the Navy was all too ready to abandon the Far East entirely while the admirals built up their battle power. If the Allies were driven out of the Philippines and Singapore, he calculated, they could fall back on the East Indies and Australia, “and with the cooperation of China—if we can keep that going—we can strike good counterblows at Japan.” Roosevelt approved this plan, and soon was able to promise Curtin sizable reinforcements.
If we can keep China going—this was the cardinal problem in the Allied plan. Chungking emerged as both a demanding and a divisive factor in the United Nations within days of Pearl Harbor. Churchill found in Washington what he felt to be an exaggerated view of China’s importance. Roosevelt, he sensed, believed that Chinese fighting power rivaled that of Britain and even of Russia. He warned Roosevelt that American opinion overestimated the contributions that China could make to the global war. The President strongly disagreed, Churchill remembered later. What would happen, Roosevelt asked him, if China’s five hundred million population developed in the same way as Japan had and got hold of modern weapons? Churchill responded that he was more concerned with the present war. He assured Roosevelt that he would “of course always be helpful and polite to the Chinese, whom I admired and liked as a race”—but he still disagreed. If he could sum up in one word the lesson he had learned in the United States, he said later, it was “China.”
Relations in the field between the Chinese and the British were already deteriorating. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Chiang had grandly offered to hand over all Chinese resources unreservedly to the common cause, and he was disturbed that the British, even in their direst moment, seemed standoffish. Wavell would accept only two Chinese divisions for the defense of Burma—which was the defense also of the Burma Road, the only remaining supply route to Chungking. Chiang also suspected that in their extremity the British were filching supplies promised to China. But Wavell preferred to defend Burma with imperial troops, partly because the Burmese themselves, he felt, feared too many Chinese troops in their country. He asked Churchill to correct Roosevelt’s erroneous impression of his attitude.
“I am aware of American sentiment about the Chinese,” he added tartly, “but democracies are apt to think with their hearts rather than with their heads, and a general’s business is, or should be, to use his head for planning.”
By late January, American eyes riveted on Luzon. The ordeal of the jungle fighting was rivaled only by the bleakness of the choices facing the high command in Washington, and by the drama of the men caught in a huge trap from which they could not free themselves.
A more fitting hero for the drama could hardly have been contrived. By 1942 Douglas MacArthur’s years stretched back over the great military events of the first half-century and a career of rare military virtuosity: observer with the Japanese Army in the Russo-Japanese War, aide-de-camp to President Theodore Roosevelt, assistant to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, engineer officer in the Vera Cruz expedition, Chief of Staff of the 42nd (Rainbow) Division by the end of World War I, superintendent of West Point at the age of thirty-nine, Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1929 to 1935, the third year of Roosevelt’s first term, Field Marshal of the Philippine Army, recalled to active duty in 1941.
MacArthur and Roosevelt had long had the amicable, wary, and defensive relationship of two seasoned leaders who saw in each other something of the prima donna, the rival, and the expert in his own trade. Their relationship was now dominated by the dynamics of war. In wartime each military echelon tends to be generous and forgiving of the next echelon below, which is nearer the field of danger and heroism, and demanding and critical of the next echelon above. This was the case in the Philippines, but it was exacerbated by special conditions. MacArthur loved the Philippines like a second homeland. He had long been a personal friend as well as subordinate of Manuel Quezon, first President of the Philippine Commonwealth and a leader in its long fight for independence. Both men believed that Washington starved the Far East and Pacific commands in general and had neglected Philippine defenses in particular. Both saw the archipelago as the bastion of the Southwest Pacific.
MacArthur had worked out a plan for the best use of his limited strength. As the giant Japanese pincers converged on Manila from north and south, he declared the capital an open city and deftly sidestepped his forces, in a risky double retrograde movement, to the Bataan Peninsula. Homma now closed in for the siege of Bataan. With limited troops of his own, since Imperial Headquarters considered the Philippines a secondary objective, for six days he drove again and again at the improvised line of Americans and Filipinos across the northern part of the peninsula. Finding an opening, he forced MacArthur’s troops down to the waist of Bataan. By now the main foe of both armies was not each other, but malaria, beriberi, dysentery, and deepening fatigue. Reluctantly Homma realized that he would have to call on Tokyo for more troops.
MacArthur by now was deep in another campaign—enlisting help from Washington. From the start he had rallied his forces with the promise that help was coming. The President’s message of December 28 cheered the defenders, and the New York Times report of it even more: ALL AID PROMISED / PRESIDENT PLEDGES PROTECTION. Even in January MacArthur was assuring his forces that “thousands of troops and hundreds of planes” were on the way. But the hoped-for flood of supplies was actually a driblet. The embattled General had to deal not only with Washington but also with the United States Asiatic fleet, which was under the separate command of Admiral Thomas C. Hart. MacArthur wanted him to use his small fleet to protect the line of supply up the long string of islands, and even to ferry planes and supplies. Hart, with inadequate air cover, with a handful of ships all “old enough to vote,” and with a new-found respect for Japanese striking power, would not risk his main strength; he agreed to commit only his large submarine fleet, but this was to prove inadequate. Commercial ships were hired to run the ever-tightening blockade, but only three small ships finally got through.
Unceasingly MacArthur called for a more aggressive strategy in the Southwest Pacific. “The Japanese are sweeping southward in a great offensive,” he radioed to Marshall on February 4, “and the Allies are attempting merely to stop them by building up forces in their front.” This method always failed in war and would be “a fatal mistake on the part of the Democratic Allies.” The enemy could be defeated only by closing with him—and this meant striking with naval power at his 2,000 miles of weakly protected communications. A sea threat would at once relieve the pressure in the south. “I unhesitatingly predict that if this is not done the plan upon which we are now working, based upon the building up of air supremacy in the Southwest Pacific, will fail, the war will be indefinitely prolonged and its final outcome will be jeopardized. Counsels of timidity based upon theories of safety first will not win against such an aggressive and audacious adversary as Japan….” United States High Commissioner Francis Sayre sent a similar plea.
Part of MacArthur’s frustration was caused by the fear that his pleas and proposals were not getting through to the “highest authority.” Marshall had to assure him that they were.
The Commander in Chief was indeed closely following MacArthur’s plight and was eager to help him. But a difference of perspective and interest had separated the War Department and MacArthur from the start. MacArthur took—or professed to take—Stimson’s and Marshall’s decision to give him emergency support and to show loyalty to the Filipinos, and, above all, to slow down the enemy, as a willingness to make a major commitment in the Philippines. In fact, Marshall and Eisenhower did not propose to make this a strategic commitment; on the contrary, once they saw the weight of the Japanese assault in Luzon, assessed the full damage to the fleet after Pearl Harbor, and felt the sting of Japanese air power against warships and merchantmen, they prepared to write the archipelago off.
Well before Christmas, Stimson and the military leaders were expecting the loss of Luzon and the retreat into Bataan and even to Corregidor. By January 3 the army planners concluded that an offensive northward from Australia to Mindanao would require a fleet so huge that Navy units would have to be transferred from the Atlantic, and that this would constitute “an entirely unjustifiable diversion of forces from the principal theatre—the Atlantic.” MacArthur kept up his pleas. As late as mid-February he was urging that time was growing short and that a “determined effort in force made now would probably attract the assistance of Russia.” In vain. Deep in the jungles of Luzon, he was running into the citadel of Atlantic First.
Roosevelt’s position was more ambiguous. His warm message to the Philippine people of December 28 had been reassuring about long-run protection of the Commonwealth but studiedly ambiguous as to immediate, all-out support. Fearing that both friend and foe might interpret his message as predicting a temporary loss of the archipelago, he had Hassett and Early deny that this was any kind of valedictory. But the more he stressed that he was not writing off MacArthur’s forces, the more he aroused false expectations.
Now Quezon tried a desperate maneuver. Agonized by the Japanese advance, crippled by tuberculosis, enfuriated by Washington’s refusal to act decisively, he proposed to Roosevelt that if the Philippines could not be saved, Washington should grant the country immediate independence and agree with Tokyo on a joint withdrawal of both forces; then the Philippines would be neutralized and spared the scourge of war and defeat. MacArthur had demurred at the step until Quezon told him that this was not a serious proposal; he hoped it might shock Washington into seeing the importance of the Far East.
Shock Washington it did. To Eisenhower it was a “bombshell.” Stimson and Marshall were disturbed that MacArthur, in his accompanying message, did not disown the neutralization proposal; rather, he treated it seriously as an alternative. They took the message to Roosevelt. Standing before the President as if in a court, Stimson denounced the idea as a moral abdication. Roosevelt, far more than the War Department, had to think of all the political implications of allowing to die the commonwealth that his nation had promised independence.
But he did not hesitate to veto the plan. Watching him, Marshall decided that all his doubts about the President were negated—that here was a great man. Soon on the way from Roosevelt to MacArthur was a message free of reproach but clear in its summons:
“American forces will continue to keep our flag flying in the Philippines so long as there remains any possibility of resistance. I have made these decisions in complete understanding of your military estimate that accompanied President Quezon’s message to me. The duty and necessity of resisting Japanese aggression to the last transcends in importance any other obligation now facing us in the Philippines.
“There has gradually been welded into a common front a globe encircling opposition to the predatory powers that are seeking the destruction of individual liberty and freedom of government. We cannot afford to have this line broken in any particular theatre. As the most powerful member of this coalition we cannot display weakness in fact or in spirit anywhere….
“I therefore give you this most difficult mission in full understanding of the desperate situation to which you may shortly be reduced….”
An accompanying message to Quezon struck the same note—and pledged ultimate liberation of the islands and independence for the Commonwealth.
Roosevelt could not save the Philippines, but he would save its President and its commander. On February 20, Quezon, his family, and his War Cabinet slipped away from Corregidor in a submarine. Three days later the President directed MacArthur to proceed to Mindanao, arrange for the prolonged defense of the southern Philippines, and then proceed to Australia, “where you will assume command of all United States troops.” MacArthur stayed with his command at Corregidor for another two weeks; then he, his wife, his son, and a small staff left on a dark evening in four torpedo boats. Through hazards they made their way to Mindanao and then by plane and train to Melbourne, arriving to a hero’s welcome and to the award by the Commander in Chief of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
“The President of the United States,” MacArthur announced, “ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary object of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.”
By now, late March 1942, the whole Southwest Pacific defense was in disarray. Relying more on speed, surprise, and skill than massed strength, the Japanese had moved south and easily overpowered Singapore by mid-February; forced the British out of Rangoon and turned back the Chinese reinforcements; enveloped Borneo; and overrun the great Malay Barrier—4,000 miles long—stretching from northern Sumatra through Java and Timor to New Guinea, New Britain, and the Solomons. The Japanese claimed almost 100,000 prisoners, and their Navy took a heavy toll of cruisers and destroyers in the Java Sea. At the end of March, ABDA was in ruins; India and Australia lay open to invasion.
During the early months of 1942 the President had to deal at home with one towering fact: for the first time in a century and a quarter Americans were experiencing wide and sustained military defeat at the hands of foreigners.
At first, even with the shocking news of Pearl Harbor and the other disasters, people had been excited and even titillated by the war, as with a new fad. The air-raid scares, the war rallies and bond drives, the exciting reports of Axis raiders off the coasts, the blossoming uniforms, the air-raid shelters and instructions, the first war jingles (“We’re going to have to slap—the cheeky little Japs”), the roundup of aliens, the exhilarating sense of being part of a great national and world effort—all these, plus inexhaustible American optimism and the unquenchable sense of military superiority over all comers, seemed to obliterate the early bad news from the war fronts. Even the nuisances and shortages—cancellation of football games and other national ceremonies, tire rationing, endless lines—were submerged in the national mood of militancy, solidarity, purpose.
But as the weeks passed and the Japanese seemed to accelerate, rather than bog down, the mood changed. People seemed to be more querulous; they hunted for scapegoats; old differences burst through the screen of national unity; there was gambling, hoarding, profiteering. Roosevelt at this point was not much concerned about his personal popularity, which, indeed—in terms of answers to the query “Would you vote for Roosevelt today?”—spurted from the low 70 percentile in November 1941 to 84 in early January 1942, and then leveled off in the high seventies over the next six months. He was more concerned about the people’s sense of confidence in their nation’s effort and in themselves. The first three or four months of the war saw a steady decline in popular confidence that the nation was doing all it could to win the war, though there was little agreement about alternatives. Favorable press support of the President dropped on domestic affairs to 35 per cent, according to one February survey, and on his handling of foreign affairs to 52 per cent.
The President had helped create the early euphoria and he had to cope with the ensuing letdown. He had expressed the nation’s optimism about victory, without the harsh warning of early defeats and blood and tears that Churchill had sounded; he had sent an ambiguously optimistic message to the Philippines; he had honored the fallen pilot Colin P. Kelly—by asking the President of 1956 to grant his son appointment as a West Point cadet—for a feat that was widely understood to be the sinking of a Japanese battleship, which in fact had been untouched. He could not overcome his invincible optimism about victory in the long run; and doubtless would not if he could—for that kind of optimism had helped unite and invigorate the nation in the dark days of 1933.
The most galling development for the President was that the isolationists of 1941 had become the guardhouse strategists of 1942. The war cry was no longer “Stay out of war,” but “Pacific First.” SEND SHIPS TO M’ARTHUR NOW was the banner headline across the front page of the New York Journal-American on March 10. Why were war supplies still going to the Russians and British when American boys were desperately short in the Far East? Why weren’t people like Colonel Lindbergh and Joseph P. Kennedy being used in the war administration? The Commander in Chief was rarely attacked personally, but, rather, through people close to him, including Eleanor Roosevelt. Time reported with a straight face a rumored “White House showdown” in which war chiefs said that Hopkins must quit or they would. Hugh Johnson said that nobody ever elected Harry Hopkins to any office and blamed him and his “palace janissariat” for the failure of war production.
All this was orthodox politics, however unpleasant. A more ominous note was struck by the radical right. Father Charles Coughlin was sticking to his old line as though Pearl Harbor had never happened. His journal, Social Justice, attacked Russia for not bombing Japan; charged that MacArthur was “thrown to the dogs”; implied that the battle for Malaya was really a battle for investment brokers holding tin and rubber interests there; and asked whether the common people’s most dangerous enemies resided in Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo, or in Washington, New York City, London, and Moscow. During early 1942 the nation was reminded of the pre-Pearl Harbor connections between pro-Nazi isolationists and right-wing Congressmen by the conviction of one of Congressman Fish’s secretaries for perjury in testifying about the franking of Nazi-inspired speeches by members of Congress.
The President was not in a wholly forgiving mood toward his old adversaries. He failed to acknowledge a Pearl Harbor day telegram from Joe Kennedy—“Name the battlefront. I’m yours to command”—and when Kennedy reminded him of it eight weeks later, the President answered him cordially, but Kennedy was never offered a major war post. The President and Stimson denied Lindbergh a combat post on the grounds that he had not wholly given up some of his old defeatist, or at least isolationist, views, and “evidently lacked faith,” as the Secretary of War put it, “in the righteousness of our cause.” Roosevelt was especially incensed by anti-British and anti-Russian criticism in the capital. “Washington is the worst rumor factory, and therefore the source of more lies that are spoken and printed throughout the United States, than any other community,” he complained to reporters.
He was intrigued by Thomas E. Dewey’s charge that an “American Cliveden set in Washington and other cities” was scheming to use the Republican party to achieve a negotiated peace with the Axis. “Who in the name of all that is mysterious are the members of the American ‘Cliveden Set’ in Washington or elsewhere?” he asked Myron Taylor. Politically he would have been delighted to have a Cliveden Set as a foil. Soon he decided that there was indeed a Cliveden Set—or a “Dower House Set,” named for the country home of Eleanor (“Cissy”) Patterson, publisher of the Washington Times Herald, and composed of Cissy, Joseph Patterson, of the New York Daily News, and Colonel McCormick, of the Chicago Tribune, with William Randolph Hearst and Roy Howard as associate members. The Commander in Chief laughed at McCormick’s claim of having introduced ROTC into the schools and mechanization into the Army, and when Morris Ernst wrote to him that he was seeing Eleanor Patterson on behalf of his client Walter Winchell and proposed to “examine Cissy down to her undies,” Roosevelt asked not to be present on that occasion—“I have a weak stomach.”
To counter attitudes that he felt bordered on defeatism and disunity, the President decided late in February to make a major address on Washington’s Birthday. He asked in advance that people listen with a world map in hand.
He began by reminding Americans of the formidable odds that Washington and his Continental Army had faced. “In a sense, every winter was a Valley Forge.” Everywhere there had been fifth columnists, and selfish, jealous, fearful men who had proclaimed Washington’s cause hopeless and demanded a negotiated peace.
“Washington’s conduct in those hard times has provided the model for all Americans since then—a model of moral stamina.”
The President stumbled a bit at the start of his talk, but soon reached his smooth, measured cadence.
“This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars in the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air lane in the world.” He asked his listeners to take out their maps and follow with him the references to the world-encircling battlelines of the war.
He then launched into a blunt defense of his strategy. He warned against Axis efforts to isolate the United States, Britain, Russia, and China from one another through the old divide-and-conquer technique.
“There are those who still think in terms of sailing ships. They advise us to pull our warships and our planes and our merchant ships into our own home waters and concentrate solely on last-ditch defense. Look at your map.…It is obvious what would happen if all these great reservoirs of power were cut off from each other either by enemy action or by self-imposed isolation.”
He then went into a detailed explanation of the interdependence of the reservoirs of power, beginning with China.
“From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo we have been described as a Nation of weaklings—‘playboys’—who would hire British soldiers, or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us.”
Now he spoke slowly and dramatically, with great pauses and emphases for effect.
“Let them repeat that now!
“Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men.
“Let them tell that to the sailors who today are hitting hard in the far waters of the Pacific.
“Let them tell that to the boys in the Flying Fortresses.
“Let them”—a long pause—“tell that to the Marines….”
Up in the oval study after the speech the President learned that the Japanese had provided a dramatic accompaniment to his speech: while he was talking, a Japanese submarine surfaced off the coast near Santa Barbara and fired some shells, which landed on a ranch, inflicting no casualties or real damage. The shelling produced huge headlines next day—and taught Roosevelt, Sherwood said later, never again to announce his speeches more than two or three days ahead of time.
Even though the President was pleased by the reaction to his fireside chat, he realized that words, no matter how evocative, were idle unless backed by deeds, and that if he went on the air too often his talks would lose their impact. He felt that Churchill had suffered from too much personal leadership. The real trouble, he believed, lay not in the people or their elected leaders but in the former isolationists, who wanted disunity and even a negotiated peace—the publishers, columnists, radio commentators, the “KKK crowd” and “some of the wild Irish.” But the only effective answer to them was victory—and victories were slow in coming in the winter and spring of 1942.
He could still exhibit a soldier’s wry humor under fire. He enjoyed telling friends about Elmer Davis’s comment following the Washington’s Birthday speech:
“Some people want the United States to win so long as England loses. Some people want the United States to win so long as Russia loses. And some people want the United States to win so long as Roosevelt loses.”
During these weeks of stinging defeat the President ratified an action that was widely accepted at the time but came to be viewed in later years as one of the sorriest episodes in American history. This was the uprooting of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast and their incarceration in concentration camps hundreds of miles away.
Few Americans had paid more glowing homage than had Roosevelt to the democratic idea of individual liberty. A week after Pearl Harbor he had proclaimed Bill of Rights Day, on the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and had taken the trouble, during those first harrowing days of war, to renew his and the nation’s allegiance to the ancient liberties. After flaying Hitler for crushing individual liberty, he said: “We Americans know that the determination of this generation of our people to preserve liberty is as fixed and certain as the determination of those early generations of Americans to win it.
“We will not, under any threat, or in the face of any danger, surrender the guarantees of liberty our forefathers framed for us in the Bill of Rights.
“We hold with all the passion of our hearts and minds to those commitments of the human spirit….”
The Bill of Rights seemed in little jeopardy at the time. Americans were treating German, Italian, and Japanese aliens in their midst with admirable restraint. There were only a few incidents, such as the sawing down by some fool or fanatic of four Japanese cherry trees in Washington’s Tidal Basin. Oddly, one of the most tolerant areas with a large “foreign” population seemed to be California. The press there was restrained, even generous, as were letters to the editor. “The roundup of Japanese citizens in various parts of the country,” declared the San Francisco Chronicle, “…is not a call for volunteer spy hunters to go into action.” Other papers called for fairness toward Japanese aliens as well as toward Nisei—American-born citizens of Japanese parentage. “Let’s not repeat our mistakes of the last war” was a refrain.
The new Attorney General, Francis Biddle, wished to avoid mass internment and any repetition of the persecution of aliens that occurred during World War I. Roosevelt’s attitude was less clear. When Biddle brought him the proclamation to intern German aliens, Roosevelt asked him how many Germans there were in the country. Biddle thought about 600,000. “And you’re going to intern all of them?” Roosevelt asked, as Biddle remembered later. Not quite all, Biddle said. “I don’t care so much about the Italians,” Roosevelt went on. “They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are different, they may be dangerous.” Admiral McIntire was swabbing the President’s nose during this colloquium, and Biddle hastily withdrew, with the impression that his chief was reacting more to his sinuses than to subversives.
During January the climate of opinion in California turned harshly toward fear, suspicion, intolerance. Clamor arose for mass evacuation and other drastic action. The causes of the change have long been studied and defy easy explanation. Partly it was the endless Japanese advance in the Pacific, combined with a spate of false alarms—aside from the Santa Barbara episode—of attacks on the coast, stories of secret broadcasting equipment, flashing signals, strange lights, and the like. In part it was a growing feeling that the Justice Department was pursuing half-measures; paradoxically, as the federal authorities became more energetic in sealing off sensitive zones and taking other precautions, the popular demand for drastic measures seemed to grow. But the main ingredient that fired and fueled the demand for “cleaning out the Japs” was starkly obvious. The old racism—economic, social, and pathological—toward Japanese on the West Coast simmered for a few weeks after Pearl Harbor and then burst into flames.
“Personally, I hate the Japanese,” declared a prominent West Coast columnist on January 29, “and that goes for all of them.” He called for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to the interior. “I don’t mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room in the badlands….”
More and more, Washington felt the heat. California officials—notably Governor Culbert L. Olson and Attorney General Earl Warren, working in close touch with sheriffs and district attorneys-threw their weight behind the campaign for evacuation. In Washington the West Coast congressional delegations put unrelenting pressure on the Justice and War Departments and on their regional officials. Congressmen denounced as “jackasses” those who had failed to deal with sabotage and espionage at Pearl Harbor and would fail again.
It was the old story of a determined and vocal minority group of regional politicians and spokesmen with a definite plan united against an array of federal officials who were divided, irresolute, and not committed against racism. General John De Witt, the Army’s West Coast commander, after much vacillation finally gave his support to a general evacuation. For a while Stimson demurred on constitutional grounds. But during the first weeks of February—a time of frightful news from the war fronts—he gave way, partly because he had concluded that “their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese.”
Biddle held out longer. An aristocratic Philadelphian and Grotonian, proudly conscious of his inheritance from the Randolphs of Virginia and full of a fastidious noblesse oblige, he was not one to be swept off his feet by generals and regional politicians. But his political resources were small. He was a new member of the Cabinet, highly impressed by Stimson and somewhat mystified by Roosevelt. He did not enlist his potential Cabinet allies, Ickes and Morgenthau; indeed, there was no Cabinet discussion. Finding himself almost alone, he resorted to expedients and technicalities and was lost. Only a great outcry of protest on the highest moral grounds could have stopped the drift toward evacuation, and Biddle was neither temperamentally nor politically capable of it.
So the fate of 110,000 aliens and citizens was bucked over to the White House—and into a void. Because there had been no clarion call of protest the President was never faced with a compelling set of alternatives and arguments. He confronted on February 11 a War Department memo that tried simply to put the onus of decision on him. The President would not have it. This was the same day he was answering Quezon’s query about neutralization; Singapore was on the verge of surrendering. The evacuation may have seemed to him a tricky and second-level question. He told Stimson and McCloy to do whatever they thought necessary, and asked only that they be as reasonable as they could. Eight days later the President signed an order for evacuation prepared by Biddle and Stimson and their men. A month later Congress passed a bill supporting the President’s action. During the debate Representative John Rankin, of Mississippi, demanded that Japanese in concentration camps be segregated by sex so that they would not multiply twenty-five times in two generations.
Hindsight would prove that there was little military necessity for mass evacuation. The American Civil Liberties Union would call it “the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history.” Hindsight would also put responsibility not only on the obvious factors of racism and frustration, but also on a great negative factor—the opposition that never showed up. The liberal dailies and weeklies were largely silent. Walter Lippmann, so zealous of individual liberties back in New Deal days, urged strong measures because, he said, the Pacific Coast was officially a combat zone and no one had a constitutional right to “do business on a battlefield.” Westbrook Pegler, citing Lippmann’s argument, cried that every Japanese in California should be under guard, “and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.” A few Congressmen protested—most notably Senator Taft, in querying the congressional validation—but they were ineffectual. Doubting administration officials did not carry their protests to the Chief Executive.
Only a strong civil-libertarian President could have faced down all these forces, and Roosevelt was not a strong civil libertarian. Like Jefferson in earlier days, he was all for civil liberties in general but easily found exceptions in particular. He related to friends that at a Cabinet meeting (in March 1942) he had told Biddle that civil liberties were okay for 99 per cent but he ought to bear down on the rest. When Biddle pleaded that it was hard to get convictions, Roosevelt answered that when Lincoln’s Attorney General would not proceed against Vallandigham, Lincoln declared martial law in that county and then had Vallandigham tried by a drumhead court-martial. Earlier he had treated Biddle’s earnest support of civil liberties as a joking matter—in fact, had solemnly told him that he was planning to abrogate freedom of speech during the war and then he let Biddle declaim against the idea at length before telling him he was joking.
Indeed, Roosevelt seemed to enjoy shocking the shy Philadelphian. Once, when J. Edgar Hoover confessed to the President, in the Attorney General’s presence, that an FBI agent had tried to tap the telephone wire of left-wing union leader Harry Bridges, and had been caught in the act, Roosevelt roared with laughter, slapped Hoover on the back, and shouted gleefully, “By God, Edgar, that’s the first time you’ve been caught with your pants down!”
The President assumed that the German saboteurs who landed on the East Coast in June 1942 were guilty and should be executed. He liked the idea of quick drumhead courts in wartime. To be sure, Roosevelt’s civil-liberties derelictions were not numerous, but certainly the wartime White House was not dependably a source of strong and sustained support for civil liberties in specific situations.
This expedient departure from principle was nothing new in American history, but it had a dangerous edge in 1942. The supreme irony of the evacuation was that while Germans and Italians offered the same alleged threats to military security as the Nisei and Issei, their guilt was established on an individual basis, not a racial basis. Roosevelt was quite aware of the distinction and supported it. Nor did he seem concerned that his friends the Chinese were part of the same yellow race against which he was discriminating. He was following unconsciously a kind of Atlantic First policy in civil liberties as well as military strategy. By allowing his subordinates to treat aliens and citizens on a racial basis, he was unwittingly validating the political strategy that Tokyo was directing during the early months of 1942.
While Washington was interning over 100,000 American citizens and aliens mainly on racial grounds, Tokyo was conducting its main political offensive in Southeast Asia on largely the same basis.
The aims of the war, proclaimed the Imperial Rescript in December, were to insure the peace and stability of East Asia and to defend that region against Anglo-American exploitation. The struggle was named the Greater East Asia War; its aim was to build the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Late in January 1942 Premier Tojo told the Diet that Japan would grant independence to South Pacific peoples who undertook to help build the new sphere. These plans were hoisted on a wave of popular exultation. Propagandists attacked white Western rule, its individualism, materialism, class and group strife. Soon newspapers were gleefully picturing white Europeans, naked to the waist, forced to do the physical labor once reserved for Asiatics. “Remember December Eighth!” proclaimed a Japanese poet:
“This day world history has begun anew
This day Occidental domination is shattered All through Asia’s lands and seas.
Japan, with the help of the gods
Bravely faces white superiority.”
The Japanese were shrewd enough to adapt their anti-Western strategy to specific situations. Tokyo signed an alliance with Thailand granting it sovereignty, independence, extensive assistance, and the return of lost territories; and promised Burma independence within the year. The Japanese interned the Dutch officials of Java, dismantled the colonial administrative system, rewrote the textbooks to champion anti-Western and pan-Asiatic doctrines, freed nationalist leaders, including Achmed Sukarno, who had been imprisoned by the Dutch, and promised political concessions.
But it was in the Philippines that the invaders found their most auspicious state of affairs. Proclaiming that they had come to emancipate the Filipinos from America’s oppressive domination, they promised to set up the “Philippines for the Filipinos” as part of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Collaborators were quickly found to adorn the new Japanese-controlled regime. American influence was denounced as hedonistic, materialistic, corrupting of the family. The local Japanese Commander in Chief admonished the Filipinos: “As a leopard cannot change its spots you cannot alter the fact that you are Orientals.”
This imperious summons to an antiwhite, pan-Asiatic, nationalist crusade could not cloak potential weaknesses and divisions. Extremists in Tokyo made clear that while all the nations would be equal in the new Asia, Japan would be more so, as “center and leader.” Indiscriminate cruelty was inflicted on native populations. Japan’s long-term strategic stake in liberating colonial nations ran counter to the short-run needs of the Japanese military, which wanted to control and exploit local populations for immediate war needs. Still, the potential of an antiwhite, pan-Asiatic movement seemed almost limitless in the early months of 1942. Even more, the Japanese showed their skill in appealing to Moslem elements in Southeast Asia and thus raised the specter of an ultimate appeal to Islam and to antiwhite feeling in the Middle East.
Long critical of white colonial policies in Asia, Roosevelt did not underestimate the threat of Tokyo’s war against the whites. With the Philippines and the other countries clamped firmly in the Japanese vise, there was little that he could do. But there was one potential battleground where he could try to wield influence—India. With the fall of Singapore in February and the impending overrunning of Rangoon, the subcontinent would soon lie almost naked before a Japanese advance.
Only a President with Rooseveltian self-confidence would have even dared touch the Indian cauldron in the early months of 1942. The looming threat from the east seemed to be sharpening all the old hopes, fears, and antagonisms in that steaming subcontinent. Indian nationalists saw their chance to win freedom from British rule, but they ranged from bitter pan-Asiatics willing to fight along with the Japanese against the whites to those who feared Japanese conquest even more than they hated British rule. Moslems dreaded a grant of independence that would inundate them in Hindu rule; a host of local princes depended on the British to help protect their accustomed prerogatives; separatist interests and sects throughout the country clamored for recognition; in the endless villages millions labored for their daily rice with only the haziest idea of the decisions of far-off London, Tokyo, or even Delhi.
Proud and powerful personalities stood amid the tumult: Jawaharlal Nehru, both a Western intellectual and an Indian patriot, anticolonial and antifascist, leader of Indian nationalists but also their agent; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, wary chief of the Moslem League; Subhas Chandra Bose, eager to form an Indian national army to help the Japanese throw the British out of India. And brooding over the scene was the gnarled, loinclothed figure of Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the Congress party, pacifist, vegetarian, the most powerful man in India, because of his ability to grip the attention of the masses.
Roosevelt had raised the question of India with Churchill in Washington after Pearl Harbor; the Prime Minister had reacted so hotly that the President never—or so Churchill later claimed—dared raise the matter to his face again. By late February the President was concerned with India more for military than ideological reasons. Along with influential Senators and administration officials he feared that the Indians would not rally in support of the British defenders. He asked his embassy in London to sound out Churchill anew, but the Prime Minister had not changed his views a whit. Most of the Indian troops, he said, were Moslems. The fighting people were mainly from the northern areas antagonistic to Congress party leaders. The big population of the low-lying center did not have the vigor to fight anybody. He would not risk alienating the Moslems or the princes.
Undaunted, the President now tried a different gambit. “With much diffidence,” he wrote to Churchill, in making any suggestions on a subject which “of course, all of you good people know far more about than I do,” he suggested that the American experience with the Articles of Confederation might be a helpful precedent. He presented in detail the idea that a temporary government in India, headed by a small group representing different castes, occupations, religions, regions, and princes, might direct the public services during the war, and at the same time plan for a more permanent government. “Perhaps the analogy of some such method to the travails and problems of the United States from 1783 to 1789 might give a new slant in India itself, and it might cause the people there to forget hard feelings, to become more loyal to the British Empire, and to stress the danger of Japanese domination, together with the advantage of peaceful evolution as against chaotic revolution….
“For the love of Heaven don’t bring me into this, though I do want to be of help. It is, strictly speaking, none of my business, except insofar as it is a part and parcel of the successful fight that you and I are making.”
The President might well be diffident. Churchill rejected both the analogy and the proposal. He and George III, the Prime Minister felt, were facing altogether different problems. There was no time for a constitutional experiment and a period of trial and error. But because he was under intense pressure to try to break the developing deadlock in New Delhi, he decided to send Sir Stafford Cripps, now back from Moscow and a member of the War Cabinet, to India to make a last effort. Earlier the President had dispatched Louis Johnson, his former Assistant Secretary of War, to New Delhi on a vaguely defined military mission as his personal representative. The choice of Johnson seemed a curious one. A prosperous West Virginia lawyer and politico, he was a founder and onetime national commander of the American Legion, with no known views, if indeed he had any, on the great issues of colonialism, nationalism, and race that racked India.
For a brief moment events played a sardonic game of ducks and drakes with the visitors to New Delhi. Cripps, left-wing Labourite, vegetarian, anti-imperialist, friend of Nehru, acted essentially as an agent of Churchill’s Cabinet and found the Congress leaders adamant. The Indians demanded a greater share in the conduct of the war than London would grant them, and they wanted at the end of the war a unified nation that would not be pulled to pieces by secessionist groups. The British feared that control of defense by Congress leaders would inflame the Moslem troops, fragmentize the conduct of the war, and convert Indian defense against the Japanese into a paltry guerrilla war at best. They would not renege on their old pledge to Moslems and princes; but neither would Nehru permit the Balkanization of India.
It was not Cripps the British radical but Johnson the West Virginia politician who for an intoxicating moment seemed about to break the deadlock. Undiscouraged by word from Welles that the President was now keeping hands off, Johnson hurried from Cripps to Nehru to Wavell and around the circle again to keep negotiations alive. Agreement seemed all the more imperative when word reached Delhi that the Japanese Navy in one foray had sunk 100,000 tons of shipping along India’s east coast and was preparing to rout the small British fleet. Indians and British alike were turning to Washington for help.
“The magic name over here is Roosevelt,” Johnson cabled to Hull, “the land, the people would follow and love, America.”
Two days later Johnson’s efforts collapsed. He suspected that Churchill was curbing Cripps. He was half right; Churchill was also curbing Johnson. Hopkins, in London, exposed to the Prime Minister’s wrath, had urged Roosevelt to play down Johnson’s mediatory role. In New Delhi, Cripps saw little hope; he cabled to Churchill that he was coming home. The Prime Minister replied that Cripps would be cordially welcomed for proving how great was the British desire to reach a settlement; the effect in Britain and America had been “wholly beneficial.”
Roosevelt made a final effort. In one of the bluntest messages he ever sent to Churchill he urged him to postpone Cripps’s departure to allow a final effort at negotiations. American public opinion was almost unanimous, he said, “that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government” and could not understand why Britain was delaying it. The cable reached Churchill at Chequers at three in the morning, Sunday, April 12; Hopkins was still with him, despite Roosevelt’s constant urging that his aide get his sleep. It was too late, Churchill cabled back; Cripps had already left, and, anyway, everything could not be thrown into the melting pot again.
“Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart…” Churchill concluded. Privately he was bitter. He indicated to Hopkins that he would be ready to resign on the issue—but that if he did, the War Cabinet would continue his policy. Roosevelt had nothing more to say. In appealing to Churchill on the ground of American public opinion rather than of higher political, military, or even moral considerations, he had weakened his position, for Churchill must have known that in fact the American press, at least, broadly supported London’s position. Roosevelt’s next message was not to Churchill but to Marshall, who was in London:
“Please put Hopkins to bed and keep him there under 24-hour guard by Army or Marine Corps. Ask the King for additional assistance if required on this job.”
A message arrived at the White House from Nehru. He only wanted the President to know, he said, “how anxious and eager we were, and still are, to do our utmost for the defense of India and to associate ourselves with the larger causes of freedom and democracy. To us it is a tragedy that we cannot do so in the way and in the measure we would like to.” Yet, he went on, India would not submit to Japanese aggression. “We, who have struggled for so long for freedom and against an old aggression, would prefer to perish rather than submit to a new invader.” He concluded with a tribute to the President, “on whom so many all over the world look for leadership in the cause of freedom.…” The President did not reply directly; he had Welles ask Johnson to tell Nehru that the President was gratified by the pledge to resist Japan.
By mid-April the Japanese Navy had occupied India’s Andaman Islands, smashed the harbor of Colombo, in Ceylon, and chased the crippled British fleet out of the Bay of Bengal and into East African waters.
For a century white rule had been symbolized and enforced by awesome battleships and gunboat diplomacy. Where was the United States Navy now? In hiding, said the Japanese. Rumors circulated that naval losses were much higher than reported. Willkie proclaimed that “we want our Navy seeking out the enemy, not hugging our shores….”
In fact, most of the Pacific fleet was intact and by no means in hiding. On December 7 two forces had been out on mundane missions: the Lexington, with eight heavy cruisers and destroyers, delivering Marine bombers to Midway Island; the Enterprise, with twelve heavy cruisers and destroyers, returning to Pearl Harbor after ferrying a Marine fighter squadron to Wake Island. The carrier Saratoga was about to enter San Diego. After the jolting news from Hawaii, the Lexington and Enterprise task forces went hunting for the Japanese, but missed them in a tragicomedy of false alarms, erroneous intelligence, misidentification, and lesser blunders. Vice Admiral Chuchi Nagumo’s striking force got away without a single encounter at sea by plane or ship—an outcome that was probably fortunate for the Americans, who might well have been annihilated by Nagumo’s six carriers in a straight fight. A week later three carrier task forces were dispatched to the relief of beleaguered Wake, but this expedition withdrew as a result of more errors, stormy weather, undue caution, and bad luck.
For a Commander in Chief with a special pride and proprietary interest in the Navy he had built up during the previous decade, the President was remarkably calm about these setbacks. He grumbled at the Navy’s lack of enterprise, but as an old mariner he knew the vagaries of wind and wave. Knox was less forbearing. The day Wake fell he complained to Churchill at the White House that the fleet had been ordered to fight the Japanese and after a few hours of steaming had turned back. “What would you do with your Admiral in a case like this?” Churchill replied mildly that it was “dangerous to meddle with Admirals when they say they can’t do things. They have always got the weather or fuel or something to argue about.” One thing Roosevelt and Knox could do was to reshuffle the shaken Navy command, making Admiral King Commander in Chief of the United States fleet. For some weeks King had an uneasy administrative relationship with Chief of Naval Operations Stark; then the President transferred Stark to London and gave King both jobs.
Far out in the central Pacific, fast American carrier forces were conducting hit-and-run raids during these early weeks of 1942. But the pivot of naval action had shifted west, as Japanese forces converged on the Malay Barrier. Defending the East Indies was a pick-up collection of Dutch, British, and American warships. To the continuing problems of inexperience were added those of a multinational command lacking in common training and even communications, and plagued by shortages of all kinds and by a sinking realization that the Allies could put up only a holding action at best. Despite small tactical victories and individual gallantry, the little Asiatic fleet was virtually destroyed and the Malay Barrier completely breached by early March. The Japanese were especially effective in protecting their ships and invasion forces with land- or carrier-based air power, while the American effort on this score was desperate. The Air Force actually had several hundred fighters accumulating in Australia, but ferrying them to Java via defenseless and unfamiliar fields was risky. One flight was smashed by the enemy over Bali. Another ran into foul weather, and all the planes crashed. Another turned back because of weather and was then destroyed in a heavy Japanese attack on Port Darwin. The aircraft tender Langley went down off Java with thirty-two P-40’s on board; a cargo ship came through with twenty-seven crated fighters, but these had to be dumped, still crated, into the sea during the evacuation of Java.
“The Pacific situation is now very grave,” Roosevelt cabled to Churchill after the fall of Java. It is doubtful, though, that, except for the few hours when the Pearl Harbor losses were coming in, he ever felt any sense of despair over the Pacific defeats. As he wrote to Churchill after the fall of Singapore, no matter how serious the setbacks “we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.” The sharper the challenge, indeed, the more direct the President’s response, for feeling was rising in the administration that the people needed some dramatic feat of arms, even if the strategic value was small.
Such a feat was already in the works. In Florida, on an airstrip the size of a carrier’s deck, army airmen under Colonel James Doolittle were practicing take-offs with fully loaded medium bombers. On April Fool’s Day, sixteen of these B-25’s were loaded onto the carrier Hornet and lashed down on the flight deck. Thirteen days later the Hornet rendezvoused in the northern Pacific with the Enterprise, flying the flag of Admiral William F. (“Bull”) Halsey. The small fleet then sped west through heavy seas. These operations were carried out in the strictest secrecy; although this had been a pet project of the President, even he did not know the full details.
The plan was daring, almost foolhardy—to launch the bombers, which had a far longer range than carrier aircraft, about five hundred miles off the coast of Japan for raids on major cities, after which the planes would have barely enough fuel to fly on across the Sea of Japan and land on friendly Chinese airfields. The risk intensified when, about six hundred miles out from Japan, Halsey was discovered by Japanese picket boats; he chose to launch the bombers early instead of either retiring or running his carriers into a hornet’s nest.
The army pilots had never flown off a flattop. Green water was breaking over the carrier’s ramps. But Doolittle and all his men got off, and within four hours were dropping bombs on a surprised Tokyo and other cities. Not a plane was lost over Japan. One crew landed at Vladivostok and was interned by the neutral Russians; the Japanese captured two crews who went down short of China, and later executed three men for attacking civilian targets; three planes made crash landings; the other crews bailed out in the night over China. There were only five deaths. Behind them they left a mortified Imperial Headquarters and two exultant carriers streaking east.
“What’s the news?” Roosevelt innocently asked Hassett the next morning in his Hyde Park bedroom. Hassett mentioned rumors of the bombing. “You know,” Roosevelt said, “we have an airplane base in the Himalayas.” Hassett looked skeptical. “The base is Shangri-La.” The President got no rise from his aide, who had never read James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, but Roosevelt liked his little joke and soon was telling reporters about the mythical base. The news of the bombing electrified the nation. Few cared that the bombers had done little damage, or that vengeance might be wreaked on the Chinese, or that the Japanese might even retaliate against the West Coast. At last something had been done to “remember Pearl.”
The surprise raid, indeed, had a big and unexpected payoff. In the few months after Pearl Harbor the Japanese had destroyed five enemy battleships, one carrier, two cruisers, seven destroyers, and a host of merchant ships, all at the cost of twenty-three small ships—the largest a destroyer—and a sizable number of valuable but expendable planes. The Imperial Navy was riding high; where to turn next? To many in the high command, Australia and India were the most inviting targets. But Yamamoto was still insisting on the old strategy of crushing the American Navy and thus gaining time to build a western Pacific bastion. Pearl Harbor had failed to do the trick. Since the American bombers had obviously come from Midway, Yamamoto argued, the Japanese fleet must now turn east and capture both Midway and the western Aleutians—and draw into combat the carriers of Pacific fleet commander Admiral Chester W. Nimitz. With some doubt the high command approved this plan and began to assemble a huge fleet.
The Japanese at this point were still pressing their advance to the southwest, toward the Solomon Islands and into the Coral Sea. A clash here early in May gave a foretaste of the new kind of naval war—aerial combat at long distances, without direct engagements between surface vessels. The Americans drew first blood on May 7, sinking a small carrier. After much groping in the dark by both sides, planes next day from the Lexington and the Yorktown and from the Shokaku and the Zuikaki pummeled each other’s carriers. The Shokaku was badly damaged, while the grand old Lexington caught fire and later went down, but not before every man was saved, and even the captain’s dog. While the Japanese won the Battle of the Coral Sea, they pulled back from their drive on Port Moresby, and neither the Shokaku nor the Zuikaki was able to take part in the approaching showdown in the central Pacific.
But the Japanese felt that they had plenty of power left for the grand sortie against Midway. On May 27, anniversary of Admiral Togo’s rout of the Russians in the Battle of Tsushima, the main striking force began to move out—first the screen of destroyers, then the cruisers, the battleships, headed by Admiral Yamamoto’s flagship, the superdreadnaught Yamato, transports with troops for the seizure of Midway, a large covering force of submarines, and a great striking force of four carriers. To the northeast another attack group was heading toward the Aleutians. Yamamoto’s design was bold and ambitious: to attack Dutch Harbor, in the eastern Aleutians, and to occupy the western islands in the chain; then to capture Midway, with the hope of drawing the American fleet to its defense and into a decisive battle. He did not plan to go on to Hawaii, at least for a time. These “Oriental disciples of Mahan,” as Samuel Eliot Morison called them, knew that they could seize the military bastion of Oahu only by smashing America’s Pacific fleet; if they failed, they could not even hold Midway.
Yamamoto’s tactic depended on surprise as well as power, and surprise was denied him from the start. From early May 1942, the broken code and other sources had given Nimitz extensive intelligence of enemy plans. He had time to pack tiny Midway full of planes, to dispatch a small fleet of cruisers and destroyers off toward Alaska, and to mobilize his carriers for the main strike. The Enterprise and the Hornet sortied out of Pearl on May 28, under the command of Admiral Raymond A. Spruance. The heavily damaged Yorktown, patched up at Pearl Harbor in less than two days, pulled out on the thirtieth. The Japanese main fleet was now bearing down on its target.
The President followed the moves closely. “It looks, at this moment,” he wrote to MacArthur on June 2, “as if the Japanese Fleet is heading toward the Aleutian Islands or Midway and Hawaii, with a remote possibility it may attack Southern California or Seattle by air.”
Early on June 4 over one hundred planes soared off the four Japanese carriers and descended on Midway, while the Enterprise and the Hornet, unknown to the enemy, waited to pounce. So valiant was the island’s defense that Nagumo, commanding the Japanese carrier forces, decided that a second softening-up was necessary before the invasion. Spruance’s torpedo bombers caught him as he was busy recovering planes from the first strike and preparing planes for the second. By mischance the American torpedo bombers came in without fighter protection, and Zeroes knocked them down in a terrible slaughter; not a single torpedo reached the enemy flattops. But the intrepid torpedo bombers drew so much attention that American dive bombers were able to make their long plunges and rain their missiles on cluttered flight decks. In a few minutes three Japanese carriers were infernos of explosions and fire. Dive bombers got the fourth carrier later in the day. The Yorktown, too, was set afire in a counterstrike, and heeled badly; it was abandoned, then reboarded, and was being towed to safety when a Japanese submarine penetrated the screening warships and sank her and a destroyer with three torpedoes.
During the night, with his carriers burning or sunk, and his battleships never brought into play, Yamamoto ordered a withdrawal. Spruance considered pursuit but he feared running into the enemy’s vastly superior gunpower and perhaps even more carriers. Each side had had enough. The Navy had made mistakes and enjoyed a good deal of luck in the encounter; yet in one carrier thrust Nimitz had broken the backbone of Japanese naval air power, turned the tide of battle in the central Pacific, and incidentally revealed, in Spruance, a commander with a fine balance of boldness and caution, intuition and realism.
The nation was elated by the victory, but Roosevelt did not exaggerate its effect. The Japanese had won two footholds, Attu and Kiska, in the western Aleutians while Nimitz was occupied to the south, and all around its vast rim of advance and victory Japan was consolidating its grip. Bataan had long since fallen, and early in May the island fortress of Corregidor, pounded by massed artillery from only two miles across the water, had surrendered. The last message to the President from its commander, General Jonathan M. Wainwright, had epitomized the long string of defeats in the Southwest Pacific:
“With broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame, with continued pride in my gallant troops, I go to meet the Japanese commander.”