13
"Five Continents and Seven Seas"
World War II and the Rise of American Globalism, 1941–1945

"The problems which we face are so vast and so interrelated," Franklin Roosevelt explained to Ambassador Joseph Grew on January 21, 1941, "that any attempt even to state them compels one to think in terms of five continents and seven seas."¹ Thus, almost a year before Pearl Harbor, FDR came to appreciate the enormously transformative impact of World War II on U.S. foreign relations. Even prior to December 7, 1941, Americans had begun to reassess long-standing assumptions about the sources of their national security (a phrase just coming into use). While often obscuring the intent and significance of his actions, the president had taken major steps toward intervention in the European and Asian wars. What the fall of France did not accomplish in terms of reshaping American attitudes and institutions, Pearl Harbor did. The Japanese attack on Hawaii undermined as perhaps nothing else could have the cherished notion that America was secure from foreign threat. The ensuing war elevated foreign policy to the highest national priority for the first time since the early republic. By virtue of its size, its wealth, its largely untapped economic and military potential, and its distance from major war zones, the United States, along with Britain and the Soviet Union, assumed leadership of what came to be called the United Nations, a loose assemblage of some forty countries. During the war, it built a mammoth military establishment and funded a huge foreign aid program. It became involved in a host of complex and often intricately interconnected diplomatic, economic, political, and military problems across the world, requiring a sprawling foreign policy bureaucracy staffed by thousands of men and women engaged in all sorts of activities in places Americans could not previously have located on a map. This time, Americans took up the mantle of world leadership spurned in 1919. "We have tossed Washington's Farewell Address in to the discard," Michigan's isolationist senator Arthur Vandenberg lamented before Pearl Harbor. "We have thrown ourselves squarely into the power politics and power wars of Europe, Asia, and Africa. We have taken the first step upon a course from which we can never hereafter retreat."2

I

The military situation in the months after Pearl Harbor was unremittingly grim. From January to March 1942, FDR speechwriter Robert Sherwood later recalled, Japan swept across the Pacific and Southeast Asia with such stunning speed that the "pins on the walls of map rooms in Washington and London were usually far out of date."³ Singapore fell on February 15, "the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records," according to Prime Minister Winston Churchill.⁴ By mid-March, Japanese forces had conquered Malaya, Java, and Borneo, landed on New Guinea, and occupied Rangoon. For weeks, U.S. and Filipino troops valiantly held off enemy invaders. Without food, clothing, and drugs, exhausted from disease and malnutrition, they fell back to Bataan and then Corregidor and finally surrendered on May 6. From Wake Island in the Central Pacific to the Bay of Bengal, Japan reigned supreme.

In Europe, Hitler had delivered on his promise of a "world in flames." Germany retained the upper hand in the Battle of the Atlantic through much of 1942, destroying eight million tons of shipping and threatening to sever the vital trans-Atlantic lifeline. The Axis controlled continental Europe. The Red Army had stopped the Wehrmacht short of Moscow and with the help of "General Winter" had mounted a counteroffensive, but Germany remained strong enough to launch a spring 1942 offensive that once again threatened Soviet defeat. Hitler sent armies into North Africa to seize the Suez Canal and cripple British power in the Middle East. Through Gen. Erwin Rommel's brilliant generalship, the Germans nearly succeeded in the early summer of 1942. Had Spain bowed to Hitler's pressure and entered the war, Germany could have controlled Gibraltar and the Mediterranean. At the height of their power, the Axis dominated one-third of the world's population and mineral resources. The Allies most feared in these perilous months an Axis linkup in the Indian Ocean and central Asia to defeat the USSR, secure the vast oil reserves of the Middle East, and end the war.

Although nowhere near ready for a two-front war, the United States was much better prepared than in 1917. The National Guard was called to active duty, and a selective service system had been in place for more than a year, expanding the army from 174,000 in mid-1939 to nearly 1.5 million two years later. By 1945, the nation had more than 12.1 million men and women in uniform. In the months before Pearl Harbor, the army had trained with antiquated equipment and makeshift substitutes. American industry could not produce the supplies needed to rearm the United States and fill the plates of allies seated at what Churchill called "the hungry table." But Roosevelt had used the emergency of 1940–41 to set ambitious production goals, doubling the size of the combat fleet and producing 7,800 military aircraft. By removing any doubt about full U.S. involvement in the war, Pearl Harbor eliminated the last barrier to full mobilization. War production stimulated a stagnant economy, brought spare production into operation, and converted unemployment into an acute labor shortage. It would be 1943 before the miracle of U.S. war production was fully realized, but it was evident much sooner that Roosevelt's goals, seemingly fantastic at the time, would be far surpassed.

With the onset of global war, the making of foreign policy became more complex—and even more disorderly. The president's advisers were deeply divided both ideologically and on the basis of personality. Vice President Henry A. Wallace became the most vocal spokesman for a liberal internationalism that would extend the benefits of the New Deal to other peoples, provoking conservatives to denounce him and his "radical boys" as the "postwar spreaders of peace, plenty, and pulchritude."5 The State Department receded further into the background, in part from FDR's disdain for that "haven for routineers and paper shufflers."⁶ In addition, the escalating Hull-Welles feud nearly paralyzed the department until Hull's cronies forced the undersecretary's dismissal after revelations of a homosexual encounter. A crippled and demoralized department continued to shape trade policy and produced reams of paperwork on postwar issues, but the exhausted and increasingly dispirited Hull was not invited to the major Big Three conferences and did not even get minutes of the 1943 Casablanca meeting.

Others filled the vacuum. Elder statesman Henry Stimson presided over war production and played a key role in developing the atomic bomb. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. exploited his position as FDR's Hudson Valley neighbor to frame postwar economic programs and encroach on State's turf in designing policies for China and postwar Germany. Dubbed by Churchill "Lord Root of the Matter" for his incisive mind and matter-of-fact approach to problem-solving, the cadaverous former social worker and New Deal relief administrator Harry Hopkins remained the president's alter ego until chronic illness and a mysterious parting of the ways with his boss reduced his influence. The indispensable person was Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall. He "towers above everybody else in the strength of his character and in the wisdom and tactfulness of his handling of himself," Stimson observed with obvious admiration. Marshall brought stability to the chaos that was wartime Washington. An administrative genius, he was, in Churchill's words, the "true 'organizer of victory.' "7

To meet the rapidly expanding demands of a host of new global diplomatic and military problems, FDR created a huge foreign policy bureaucracy that would become a permanent fixture of American life. Even before Pearl Harbor, he concluded that the State Department could not cope with the exigencies of total war. Thus, as with New Deal domestic programs, he established emergency "alphabet soup" agencies. Some of them were given deceptively innocent names, perhaps reflecting the nation's continuing innocence, more likely to obscure their purpose. An Office of Facts and Figures, later the Office of War Information (OWI), was responsible for propaganda at home and abroad; The Coordinator of Information, precursor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—and subsequently the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—was America's first independent intelligence agency.

These new agencies assumed various wartime tasks. OWI censored the press and churned out posters, magazines, comic books, films, and cartoons to undermine enemy morale and sell the war and U.S. war aims to allies and neutrals.⁸ The Office of Lend-Lease Administration (OLLA) ran that essential wartime foreign aid program.⁹ Wallace's Board of Economic Warfare (BEW) conducted preemptive purchasing to keep vital raw materials out of enemy hands and manipulated trade to further the war effort. The Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations (OFRRO) handled relief programs in liberated areas. Headed by a World War I Medal of Honor winner, the flamboyant Col. William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the OSS at its peak employed thirteen thousand people, as many as nine thousand overseas. Bearing a distinct Ivy League hue, it brought to Washington scholars such as historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Sherman Kent, and even the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to analyze the vast amounts of information collected on enemy capabilities and operations. Clandestine operatives such as the legendary Virginia Hall slipped into North Africa and Europe to prepare the way for Allied military operations and carried out black propaganda operations and "dirty tricks" in Axis-occupied areas and enemy territory. OSS agents in various guises worked with partisan and guerrilla groups in the Balkans and East Asia. In Bern, a Secret Intelligence unit headed by Allen Dulles established contact with opponents of Hitler and gathered information about the Nazi regime.10

The emergency agencies had a mixed record. BEW had more than two thousand representatives in Brazil, provoking the foreign minister half-jokingly to tell a U.S. diplomat that if more "ambassadors of good will" were sent to his nation "Brazil would be obliged to declare war on the United States."¹¹ In best Rooseveltian fashion, there was rampant overlap of responsibility and duplication of effort. A "coordinator" in wartime Washington, Wallace joked, "was only a man trying to keep all the balls in the air without losing his own."¹² Bitter turf battles set off what one official deplored as "another war."¹³ The squabbles in Washington undoubtedly pleased a president who seemed to enjoy such things, but conflict in North Africa between civilian relief agencies grew so disruptive that the army had to take over. When an especially nasty feud between Wallace and conservative Secretary of Commerce Jesse Jones went public, the president relieved Wallace and combined the economic agencies into the Foreign Economic Administration. Despite their incessant squabbling, the agencies carried out essential wartime tasks. They were also a prolific breeding ground for postwar internationalism, providing a baptism by fire for such prominent postwar leaders as George W. Ball, Adlai E. Stevenson, and Dulles.

World War II also thrust the military into a central role in formulating U.S. foreign policy. Traditionally, the armed forces had carried out policies designed by civilian leaders, but the nation's full-scale engagement in a total and global war and its involvement with a coalition pushed them into the realm of policymaking and diplomacy. Military ascendancy also resulted from Hull's rigid insistence on the artificial distinction between political and military matters and Roosevelt's growing dependence on his uniformed advisers. FDR initiated the process in 1939 by bringing them into the Executive Office of the President, thus bypassing the war and navy secretaries. In February 1942, he created the Joint Chiefs of Staff, composed of the service chiefs. In July, he named former chief of naval operations Adm. William Leahy his personal chief of staff with the primary duty of maintaining liaison between the White House and the Joint Chiefs. In this new role, the top brass formulated strategic plans. They accompanied the president to all his summit meetings, where they coordinated with Allied counterparts plans and operations. The emergence of the military into a key policymaking position brought enduring changes in civil-military relations and the formulation of national security policy.14

The military's new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, symbolized its growing importance in the Washington power equation. Begun on September 11, 1941, and occupied in 1942, this five-sided monstrosity with its miles of baffling corridors—"vast, sprawling, almost intentionally ugly"—housed some thirty thousand employees in 7.5 million square feet of floor space. Roosevelt disliked the building's architecture and assumed at war's end it would be used for storage. In fact, it remained in full operation. The very word Pentagon in time came to represent throughout the world the enormous military power of the United States—and, in the eyes of domestic and foreign critics, the allegedly dominant and sinister influence of the military in American life.¹⁵

Responsibility ultimately rested in the firm hands of the commander in chief. By this time sixty years old, FDR was weary from the strains of eight demanding years in the White House and his long struggle with polio. But the new challenges of global war reinvigorated him. He retained the undaunted optimism that was such an essential part of his personality, as necessary in 1942 as a decade earlier. "I use the wrong end of the telescope," he wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter in March, "and it makes things easier to bear."16 He inspired Americans and others with his lofty rhetoric. He reveled in the ceremonial aspects of his job as commander in chief and delighted in the formulation of grand strategy. Always inclined toward personal diplomacy, he took special pleasure in his direct contact with world leaders such as the sinister and Sphinx-like Joseph Stalin and the bulldog Churchill. His broad circle of personal contacts provided him invaluable information outside regular channels. His chaotic administrative style supposedly left him firmly in control, but as the problems of global warfare became more numerous, more diffuse, and more complex, it also produced serious policy snafus (an acronym that grew out of bureaucratic foul-ups in World War II and stood for "situation normal, all fucked up") and gave clever subordinates the opportunity for freelancing, sometimes with baleful results. Not surprisingly, he continued to rely on obfuscation and outright deceit. "You know I am a juggler," he confessed in the spring of 1942, "and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does. . . . I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war."¹⁷

Some critics claim that Roosevelt's wartime leadership lacked guiding principles, that he drifted from crisis to crisis without a clear sense of purpose or direction. Others insist that in fighting the evils of Nazism he was blind to the dangers of Communism. Still others contend that he and his military advisers focused too much on winning the war and gave insufficient attention to crucial political issues.

In truth, FDR was in many ways a brilliant commander in chief. He effectively juggled the many dimensions of the job. He skillfully managed the war effort and doggedly defended U.S. interests. Keenly aware of the dynamics of coalition warfare, he alone among Allied leaders had what he called a "world point of view."¹⁸ He correctly gave highest priority to holding the alliance together and winning the war, essential given the desperate situation of 1942 and the vastly divergent interests and goals of the major Allies. At times he seemed to act on whim or to muddle through, but he had a coherent if not completely formulated or publicly articulated view for the peace. Like Wilson, he firmly believed in the superiority of American values and institutions. He was also certain that postwar peace and stability depended on the extension of those principles across the world and that other peoples would accept them if given a chance. By providing a middle ground between the totalitarianism of left and right, the New Deal, in his view, pointed the way to the future, and he saw in the war an opportunity to promote world reform along those lines. At the same time, as Robert Sherwood observed, "the tragedy of Wilson was always somewhere within the rim of his consciousness."19 He saw better than his mentor the limits of American power; he intuitively understood that diplomatic problems were not always susceptible to neat solutions. Roosevelt's pragmatic idealism, Warren Kimball has observed, thus "sought to accommodate the broad ideas of Woodrow Wilson to the practical realities of international relations."²⁰ Global war provided the ultimate test for his enormous political skills; the untimeliness of his death ensured for him an uncertain legacy.

II

"There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies," Churchill asserted on the eve of victory in World War II, "and that is fighting without them!"²¹ Although an exercise in Churchillian hyperbole, the observation underscores a fundamental reality of coalition warfare: Alliances are marriages of convenience formed to meet immediate, often urgent needs. They contain built-in conflicts; their usefulness rarely extends beyond achievement of the purposes for which they were formed. Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States were forced into partnership in the summer of 1941 by the mortal threat of Nazi Germany. They agreed that Hitler must be defeated. They collaborated effectively to that end. But they brought to the alliance deep-seated mutual suspicions. They disagreed sharply on how and for what goals the war should be fought.

Throughout their wartime partnership, the major Allies viewed each other with profound distrust. The Soviet leaders had gained power by conspiratorial means and were suspicious by nature. Indeed, there is ample evidence that at various points Stalin suffered from acute paranoia. Communist ideology taught hatred of capitalism and seemed validated by history: the Allied interventions of 1918–19 designed in the Soviet view to overthrow their fledgling government; the long period of diplomatic ostracism by the West; and the Munich agreement that left the Soviet Union exposed to Nazi power. They had no choice but to turn to the Western nations in June 1941 but remained wary of their allies. While traveling in the West, Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov slept with a revolver under his pillow. "Churchill is the kind who, if you don't watch him, will slip a kopek out of your pocket . . . ," Stalin told a Yugoslav Communist in 1944. "Roosevelt is not like that. He dips his hand in only for bigger coins."22 Westerners reciprocated Soviet suspicions. Churchill brought to the alliance a well-earned reputation as a Bolshevik-hater, and many Britons shared his view. The deeply emotional antipathy of Americans toward Communism was reinforced in the 1930s by Stalin's bloody purges of top party officials, his sordid 1939 pact with Hitler, and the "rape" of Poland and Finland. They only grudgingly acquiesced in Roosevelt's 1941 efforts to assist the Soviet Union. They warmed to the Russian people and even "Uncle Joe" Stalin somewhat during the war, but old fears never entirely dissipated.²³

During World War II, the United States and Britain achieved probably the closest collaboration by any allies in time of war. Top military leaders worked together through a Combined Chiefs of Staff. The nations shared economic resources. They even agreed to share vital information on such top-secret military projects as the atomic bomb (which was not given the Soviet Union), although in this area Britain repeatedly protested that its ally did not keep its promises. Roosevelt and Churchill established a rare camaraderie, communicating almost daily during much of the war. Yet these two extraordinarily close allies remained deeply suspicious of each other. An ancient strain of Anglophobia in American life manifested itself repeatedly during the war. Britons saw better than Americans, and naturally resented, that the seat of world power was passing to the trans-Atlantic upstart. The two nations fought bitterly over strategy and trade issues. Despite their genuine friendship, Roosevelt and Churchill suspected one another and clashed over sensitive questions like the future of the British Empire.²⁴

The three Allies were deeply divided on grand strategy. With much of its territory occupied by the Wehrmacht, the Soviet Union desperately needed material aid and the immediate opening of a second front in Western Europe to ease pressure on the embattled Red Army. Some U.S. Army planners agreed with the Soviet approach, if not with its timing. But U.S. Navy leaders after the humiliation of Pearl Harbor pushed for all-out war against Japan, and they gained support from Gen. Douglas MacArthur and much of the American public. The British posed a major roadblock to Stalin's demands. They vividly recalled the slaughter of 1914–18 and perceived that an early second front would necessarily be made up mainly of British troops. Thus they opposed an invasion of Western Europe until the Allies had gained overwhelming preponderance over Germany. Britain and especially Churchill also promoted operations around the periphery of Hitler's Fortress Europe to protect their imperial interests in the Middle East, southern Europe, and South Asia. For Stalin, such operations, however useful, were not enough. The U.S. brass vigorously objected to what they considered pinprick operations to pull British imperial chestnuts out of the fire.25

The Allies also disagreed sharply over war aims. Even with the Red Army reeling in the summer of 1941, Stalin made clear his determination to retain the Baltic States and those parts of Poland acquired in his deal with Hitler. His larger aims, like the man himself, remain shrouded in mystery, probably shifting with the circumstances of war. Ideology undoubtedly shaped the Soviet worldview, but Stalin's goals seem to have originated more from Russian history.²⁶ He had no master plan for world conquest. Instead, he was a cautious expansionist, improvising and exploiting opportunities. At a minimum, the Kremlin sought to prevent Germany from repeating the devastation it had inflicted on Russia in the First World War and the early stages of the Second. Stalin also wanted a buffer zone in Eastern and Central Europe made up of what he called "friendly" governments, which meant governments he could control.²⁷ The British hoped to restore a balance of power in Europe, the traditional basis of their national security, which required maintaining France and even Germany as major powers. Despite an explosion of nationalism in the colonial areas during the war, Churchill and other Britons clung to the empire. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," the prime minister once snarled.28 The war aims of the United States were less tangible but no less deeply held. Political settlements should be based on the concept of self-determination of peoples; colonies should be readied for independence; an Open Door policy should govern the world economy; and a world organization should maintain the peace.

Unlike Wilson, who had insisted that the United States fight as an "associated" power, Roosevelt assumed leadership of the United Nations—indeed, he coined the term during Churchill's late 1941–early 1942 visit to Washington, delightedly wheeling into the prime minister's quarters and informing him while he bathed.²⁹ The challenges were formidable. The president had to resist domestic political and navy pressures to scrap the Germany-first strategy and avenge Pearl Harbor. He had to deflect demands from his top military advisers to push U.S. rearmament at the expense of the Allies' immediate and urgent material needs. He had to resolve strategic disputes among the Allies and avert or resolve incipient conflicts over war aims. Above all, he had to hold the alliance together and employ its resources in ways best calculated to defeat its enemies.

To avoid divisive and possibly fatal conflict over war aims—and also the unpleasant situations he so disliked—FDR insisted that political issues not be resolved—or even for the most part discussed—until the war had ended. Such a course held great risk. The momentum and direction of the armies would likely determine, possily to U.S. detriment, the shape of territorial settlements. Roosevelt was also criticized after the war for failing to extract major political concessions from both allies while they were most dependent on the United States. Such arguments do not hold up under close scrutiny. Stalin might well have acceded to U.S. demands in 1941 only to break agreements later if it suited him. In any event, in the dark days of 1941–42, to have extorted concessions at the point of a gun might have critically set back or destroyed the Allied war effort.

Roosevelt used lend-lease to hold the alliance together and also as an integral part of what historian David Kennedy has called his "arsenal of democracy strategy."³⁰ After Pearl Harbor, his military advisers insisted on top priority for precious supplies, arguing that if the United States was ever to take the offensive, "we will have to stop sitting on our fannies giving out stuff in driblets all over the world."31 Looking at the war from a broader perspective, FDR perceived that lend-lease could assure allies of U.S. good faith and increase the fighting capabilities of armies already in the field, thus keeping maximum pressure on the enemy while his nation mobilized. He was also shrewd enough to recognize that supplying Allied armies would produce victory with less cost in U.S. lives. He thus gave Allied claims equal, in some cases higher, priority than U.S. rearmament. He used supplies with an eye to psychological as well as military impact. After Britain's devastating defeat at Tobruk in the summer of 1942, he sent three hundred of the newest Sherman tanks, a huge morale booster. He gave aid to Russia top priority among all competing claims and exerted enormous effort to deliver the goods.³² The administration rejected British proposals to pool resources. Nor did it ever completely do away with the "silly, foolish old dollar sign," and at Congress's insistence it kept detailed records of the cost of every item shipped. Under FDR's leadership, the United States provided more than $50 billion in supplies and services to fifty nations, roughly half of it to the British Empire, around one-fifth to the USSR. Aid to Britain alone included some 1,360 items, everything from aircraft to cigarettes to prefabricated housing for factory workers. Soviet leaders often complained about the paucity and slowness of U.S. lend-lease shipments, but at Yalta in February 1945 the normally laconic Stalin paid eloquent tribute to its "extraordinary contribution" to Allied victory.³³

Above all else, the questions regarding the timing, location, and priority to be given military operations divided the Allies. For the United States, the first major issue was the importance to be assigned the Pacific war. After Pearl Harbor, MacArthur and the navy insisted that they must have substantial reinforcements merely to hold the line. Large and vocal segments of public opinion demanded vengeance against Japan. A major U.S. naval victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 helped stabilize lines in the Pacific. But Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Ernest King continued to push for limited offensives to exploit Japan's overextension. MacArthur—for once—agreed with the navy. When the depth of British opposition to an immediate second front in Western Europe became clear, even General Marshall supported a shift to the Pacific.34

Roosevelt solved the issue in typical fashion. He diverted substantial supplies to MacArthur and King for limited offensives. As late as 1943, resources and manpower allocated to Europe and the Pacific were roughly equal, violating the spirit and letter of the Europe-first principle. In part, this outcome reflected the influence of King. A bad-tempered, ruthless infighter whose motto was "When the going gets rough they call on the sons of bitches," he secured Marshall's support by backing army proposals for the European theater.³⁵ In diverting resources to the Pacific, Roosevelt may also have been responding to domestic pressures. He certainly hoped to sustain the fighting spirit of forces there and to maintain maximum pressure on all fronts.

At the same time, he stuck with the principle that Germany was the major enemy and had first claim on resources for a major offensive. He rejected proposals to punish the British by shifting to the Pacific—that would be like "taking up your dishes and going away."³⁶ In 1943, when European operations began to take form and the Pacific theater demanded more and more, he put on the brakes, preventing the war against Japan from absorbing resources that would further delay cross-Channel operations. The result was a strategy that retained but modified the Germany-first principle. Europe kept top priority for a major offensive, but the United States committed itself to wage war vigorously on both fronts. This put enormous strain on relations with Britain and the USSR. MacArthur and King predictably complained they could not carry out assigned tasks. In the final analysis, however, it proved a viable strategy for a two-front war, bringing the defeat of Japan months after V-E Day.

Controversy over the time, place, and size of a second front in Europe strained the alliance to the breaking point between January 1942 and the Tehran Conference in late 1943. In part, the conflict derived from Soviet demands for an immediate Anglo-American invasion of Western Europe. But it was also a question of British versus U.S. military doctrines and the Mediterranean against Western Europe. Here too, Roosevelt made the major decisions. Again, they reflected political and psychological considerations and produced compromises, in this case, short-term commitment to the peripheral strategy, long-run commitment to a cross-Channel invasion.

The central question—and the most important and divisive issue among the Allies until late 1943—was whether to mobilize resources for an early strike across the English Channel or mount lesser offensives around the periphery of Hitler's Fortress Europe. Following principles deeply rooted in their respective military traditions, Marshall and the U.S. Army generally favored the former, the British the latter. Roosevelt in May 1942 made an ill-advised, if carefully qualified, commitment to Foreign Minister Molotov for an early second front, which the Russians appear not to have put much stock in. A month later, to the consternation of his own military advisers, he approved British proposals for Operation Torch, an immediate invasion of French North Africa. The decision arose from Britain's steadfast rejection of an immediate invasion of France. Since the British would provide the bulk of the troops for such an operation, FDR felt compelled to attack somewhere else. He was thinking of domestic politics; he desperately wanted to get U.S. troops into action against Germany in 1942. He also acted on the basis of immediate military and psychological concerns. Germany's summer offensive in Russia threatened a breakthrough into the Caucasus and Iran. Rommel's victory at Tobruk gave the Germans the upper hand in North Africa and threatened the union of two victorious German armies in an area of huge strategic importance. A U.S. offensive might tip the scales back toward the Allies.37

Roosevelt was also concerned about the immediate political and psychological needs of an ally. British morale was badly shaken by defeats in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Churchill was in political trouble. A North African offensive might bolster flagging British spirits, end at least temporarily the raging controversy over the second front, and seal the Anglo-American alliance. Roosevelt recognized that it would not appease Stalin, whose complaints had become increasingly shrill. But he apparently reasoned that action somewhere would be better than further delay. He gambled that the Russian armies would survive and sought to compensate by stepping up crucial lend-lease deliveries.³⁸

As U.S. military planners had feared, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942 was followed by agreement at an Anglo-American summit in Casablanca in January 1943 to invade Sicily and then Italy. Since operations in North Africa and the Pacific were absorbing increasing volumes of supplies, the British now argued that the Allies lacked sufficient resources to mount a successful invasion of France and insisted that they follow up victories in the Mediterranean. Divided among themselves, U.S. military planners were no match for their British counterparts. "We came, we listened, and we were conquered," one officer bitterly complained.39 The harsh reality was that as long as the British resisted a cross-Channel attack and the United States lacked the means to do it alone, there was no other way to stay on the offensive. In any event, logistical limitations likely prevented a successful invasion of France prior to 1944. As a way of palliating Stalin's Russia, the "ghost in the attic" at Casablanca, in Kimball's apt words, Roosevelt and Churchill proclaimed that they would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis. The statement also reflected FDR's determination to avoid repeating the mistakes of World War I, as well as his firm belief that Germany had been "Prussianized" and needed a complete political makeover.⁴⁰

These decisions had vital military and political consequences. The dispersion of resources, as Marshall and others repeatedly warned, delayed a cross-Channel attack until 1944. By giving the Germans time to strengthen their defenses in France, it made the task more costly. Repeated delays in the second front strained the alliance with Moscow in ways that could not be overcome by Roosevelt's soothing words, lend-lease diplomacy, or unconditional surrender. They probably encouraged Stalin to pursue the possibility of a separate peace with Germany in the spring and summer of 1943. It may be argued, on the other hand, that Roosevelt's decisions over the long run better served the Allied cause. Without a full-fledged British commitment, a cross-Channel attack in 1943 might have failed. Even if the British had been compelled to go along, an assault as early as the spring of 1943 ran huge risks. Defeat or stalemate in Western Europe, in the absence of operations elsewhere, could have had profound political and military consequences. The Torch and Casablanca decisions sealed the Anglo-American alliance at a critical point in the war. They permitted maximum use of British manpower and supplies, enabled the Allies to stay on the offensive, and kept pressure on the Germans. In time, they opened the Mediterranean to Allied shipping, knocked Italy out of the war, helped keep Turkey and Spain neutral, and strained German manpower and resources. They provided useful lessons for the cross-Channel attack. The peripheral approach was costly, but given the realities of 1942 and 1943 it seems the strategy most appropriate for coalition warfare.⁴¹

What eventually made the Mediterranean strategy work was Roosevelt's unstinting commitment to a knockout blow across the Channel. He never lost sight of its military and political significance. And as the balance of power within the alliance shifted in mid-1943 and the United States, by virtue of its vast manpower and resources, became the dominant partner, grand strategy conformed more with the American—and Russian—than the British design.

When Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met together for the first time at Tehran in early December 1943, the Allied military situation had improved dramatically. At Stalingrad in late 1942, the Red Army had turned back Hitler's drive into the Caucasus, inflicting huge losses on the Wehrmacht. In July 1943, the Soviets repulsed Germany's summer offensive against the Kursk salient in a titanic battle featuring thousands of tanks. The Reich never regained the initiative in the east. The Red Army by late 1943 had liberated much of Russia proper and was poised to drive across Eastern Europe to Berlin. The Western allies had wrapped up operations in North Africa and implemented successful, if costly, invasions of Sicily and Italy. Allied victory was assured; it was a matter of how long and at what cost.

Amidst much ceremony and pomp at Tehran, the Big Three, as they came to be called, began to discuss postwar issues and set Allied strategy for the rest of the war. The Americans found Stalin—whom one official aptly labeled a "murderous tyrant"—to be intelligent and a master of detail. The tone of the meetings was generally cordial and businesslike. Seeking to promote cooperation, FDR went out of his way to ingratiate himself with the Soviet dictator, meeting privately with him and even teasing a not-at-all amused Churchill in Stalin's presence. The conferees reached no firm political agreements. They spoke of dismembering Germany. Certain that the USSR would be the dominant power in Eastern Europe and that he could not keep U.S. troops in Europe after the war, FDR hinted to Stalin that he would not challenge Soviet domination of the Baltic States and preeminence in Poland, although he urged token concessions to quiet protest in the West. His refusal to make any commitments, on the other hand, and his failure to mention the atomic bomb project, which Stalin knew about, likely gave the suspicious Soviet leader pause.

The main decision was to confirm the cross-Channel attack. Churchill continued to promote operations in the Mediterranean. At one point, FDR appeared to agree with him. To the great relief of top U.S. military leaders, Stalin dismissed further Mediterranean operations as "diversions" and came down firmly behind an invasion of France. The conferees set the date for May 1944. Stalin agreed to time a major offensive with the invasion of France and to enter the war against Japan three months after the defeat of Germany. The discussions at Tehran decisively shaped the outcome of the war and the nature of the peace. Primarily through Roosevelt's leadership, the Allies had emerged from a period of defeat and grave internal tension and formed a successful grand strategy.42

III

Alliance diplomacy tells only part of the much larger story of U.S. foreign relations in World War II. In a total war fought across a global expanse, the United States mounted an unprecedented range of activities even in places where its prior involvement had been slight. In regions of traditional importance such as Latin America and China, it assumed a much larger role and greater responsibilities. In areas such as the Middle East and South Asia, it took a much keener interest and acquired new commitments. The overriding objective, of course, was defeating the Axis, but Americans in Washington and far from home were also alert to postwar economic and strategic advantage. Certain that greater U.S. involvement was essential for postwar peace and security and to improve the lot of other peoples, they found themselves entangled in intractable issues such as decolonization and the Jewish quest for a homeland in Palestine that would dominate the agenda of world politics for years to come. They plunged into complex local situations not easily susceptible to U.S. power and raised expectations difficult to meet. They early experienced the burdens and frustrations of world power.

Long before Pearl Harbor, the United States had moved to counter the Axis threat to the Western Hemisphere, and during the war the Roosevelt administration intensified its efforts to promote regional security. Building on the foundations of the Good Neighbor policy, U.S. officials continued to speak of a Western Hemisphere ideal and hold up the American "republics" as alternatives to fascism. Roosevelt even boosted the inter-American "system" as a model for postwar order in which great powers would maintain regional harmony and stability through wise leadership and by actively cultivating good relations among their neighbors, using police powers only when essential and then with equity and justice. The Good Neighbor policy was a "radical innovation," journalist Walter Lipp-mann proclaimed, a "true substitute for empire."⁴³

Thanks in part to the attention lavished on the hemisphere during the 1930s, the United States secured the active support of most Latin American nations after 1941. United States officials preferred that the other American "republics" merely break diplomatic relations with the Axis, since full belligerency would have compounded already daunting defense and supply problems. To curry U.S. favor—and secure economic aid—the Caribbean and Central American nations, most of them dictatorships, exceeded U.S. wishes by quickly declaring war. Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela soon broke relations. "If ever a policy paid dividends," State Department official Adolf Berle crowed, "the Good Neighbor policy has."44 The United States eventually got its way, but not as easily as Berle assumed. At a hastily convened meeting in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, Chile and Argentina blocked a U.S.-sponsored resolution requiring the breaking of relations. The best that could be secured was an alternative recommending such a step, "a pretty miserable compromise," Hull fumed. Although most nations complied before the meeting ended, Hull remained outraged, conveniently blaming his rival Welles, who headed the U.S. delegation.⁴⁵

Chile and especially Argentina held out for much of the war. With a deeply divided government and a long, indefensible coastline, Chile refused to break relations until early 1943. Far removed from the war zones, Argentina did not share U.S. preoccupation with the Axis threat. It had a large German and Italian population and Axis sympathizers within its officer corps. Traditionally, Argentines had looked more to Europe than to the United States. During the 1930s, they had repeatedly challenged U.S. leadership and resisted North American cultural hegemony. Engaged in an all-out war with enemies deemed the epitome of evil, U.S. leaders, on the other hand, had little patience with Argentina's independence, which they blamed on pro-Nazi sympathies rather than nationalism. Hull and Roosevelt resented Argentina's challenge to U.S. leadership. In Hull's mind, the dispute remained tied to the despised Welles and thus often took the form of a Tennessee mountain feud. A military takeover by Col. Juan Perón in 1944 heightened U.S. fears of fascism in Latin America. With Welles gone, Hull escalated the rhetorical warfare against Argentina and recalled his ambassador. Only Hull's retirement in late 1944 and Argentina's last-minute leap onto the Allied victory bandwagon brought a short-term resolution to the ongoing crisis. Argentina declared war just in time to secure an invitation to the 1945 United Nations conference at San Francisco.46

The United States mounted a multifaceted effort to eliminate Axis influence in the Western Hemisphere, build up defenses against the external threat, and promote hemispheric cooperation. The administration insisted that U.S. companies operating in Latin America fire German employees and cancel contracts with German agents. It blacklisted and imposed boycotts on Latin firms run by and employing Germans. With government support, U.S. businesses set out to replace the German and Italian firms driven out of business.⁴⁷ The United States sent FBI agents to assist local police in tracking subversives and create counterespionage services.⁴⁸ Nelson Rockefeller's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs funded a program to combat diseases such as malaria, dysentery, and tuberculosis, especially in regions that produced critical raw materials or where U.S. troops might be stationed. Building on programs initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Institute for Inter-American Affairs worked with local health ministries to improve sanitation and sewage, develop preventive medicine programs, and build hospitals and public health centers. This precursor to the Cold War Point Four program reflected the idealistic—as well as pragmatic—side of the wartime Good Neighbor policy. It won some goodwill for the United States in the hemisphere.⁴⁹

With a $38 million budget by 1942, the CIAA also expanded the propaganda barrage set off before Pearl Harbor. It used various means to drive Axis influence off the radio and out of the newspapers and mounted an intensive, broad-based "Sell America" campaign. In cooperation with Latin governments, it used a blacklist of Axis films to secure for the United States a near monopoly on movies shown in Latin America. It arranged for goodwill tours by Hollywood stars such as the swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and the glamorous Dorothy Lamour. Under the watchful eyes of CIAA censors, Hollywood films continued to present favorable images of North Americans to Latin America and of Latin Americans to the United States. Walt Disney's cartoon "Saludos Amigos" featured a humanized Chilean aircraft that courageously carried the mail over the Andes, and a colorful parrot, José Carioca, who outtalked and outwitted the clever and acerbic Donald Duck.50

The United States used military aid and advisory programs to eliminate European military influence and increase its own. Seeking to convert the Latin American military to U.S. weapons, the administration provided more than $300 million in military equipment. Lend-lease supplies helped equip Mexican and Brazilian units that actually fought in the war and provided assorted weapons to other hemispheric nations. In cases like tiny Ecuador, where military aid could not be justified, the U.S. Army creatively displayed its newest hardware in a "Hall of American Weapons" in the national military academy.⁵¹ Fearing coups by pro-Axis military officers, the United States before Pearl Harbor began to use a carrot-and-stick approach to replacing Axis military advisers with its own. United States officials also hoped that close military ties would inculcate their own military values and thereby promote the Good Neighbor ideal and political stability. Responding to U.S. pressures, most Latin governments eased out European military missions. By Pearl Harbor, the United States had advisers in every Latin nation. Senior officers came to the United States on goodwill tours; Latin Americans attended U.S. military educational institutions, including the service academies—the sons of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza and his Dominican counterpart, Rafael Trujillo, attended West Point.⁵²

From the standpoint of U.S. interests, wartime policies succeeded splendidly. With Europe out of the picture, trade skyrocketed. The United States purchased huge quantities of critical raw materials, which, along with Export-Import Bank loans, helped stabilize Latin economies. At the height of the war, Latin America sent 50 percent of its exports to and received 60 percent of its imports from the United States. After 1942, active military collaboration became less crucial. Latin America's main role was to furnish air and naval bases and provide raw materials. Indeed, the U.S. military spurned full-fledged cooperation because of the demands that might result. Still, Mexico provided an air squadron to fight in the Pacific. Even more important, 250,000 Mexicans served in the U.S. armed forces, and Mexico provided a majority of the more than three hundred thousand braceros workers who helped meet an acute labor shortage in the United States. Brazil sent forces to fight in Italy and made available bases for the United States on its protruding northeast corner—the "bulge" of Brazil—a critical stopping point for U.S. ships and aircraft en route to North Africa.53 By war's end, the United States had achieved hegemony in the hemisphere without imposing its will by force.

In terms of advancing the Good Neighbor ideal, wartime policies were less successful. In an ethereal sense, so much of that spirit was tied to the charismatic persona of Franklin Roosevelt, and the spirit—and policy—barely survived his death. Once the Axis threat eased, Latin America became a lesser priority for the United States. Unfulfilled expectations led to disappointment and frustration. United States officials resented Latin displays of independence and sometimes complained that they received only a small return on their considerable investment. Latin Americans expressed disappointment at what they considered meager U.S. aid. Although they profited from wartime trade, Latin nations also suffered from chronic shortages and high inflation and worried about their growing economic dependence on the United States.⁵⁴

Close contact between North Americans and Latin Americans often raised tensions. In implementing the blacklists, U.S. officials made clear they did not trust governments they considered inferior to effectively root out Axis influence. They acted unilaterally and with a heavy hand to counter a threat they grossly exaggerated. In targeting people and firms to be blacklisted, they often acted on hearsay and rumor. Latins deeply resented the infringements on their sovereignty. The Colombian foreign minister denounced the blacklist as "economic excommunication" and compared it to the Spanish Inquisition.⁵⁵ In the British Caribbean nations put under U.S. control by the 1940 destroyers-bases deal, the people originally welcomed the North American presence as a means to achieve independence and prosperity. But the demeanor of superiority manifested by the occupiers and especially their efforts to impose racial segregation quickly brought disillusionment. "Maybe the American military authorities have forgotten they are not in Alabama," a Guyanese complained.56 Good Neighbor propaganda relentlessly promoted favorable mutual images but worked no more than limited changes. While generally acceding to its wishes, Latin Americans continued to resent and fear the United States; North Americans clung doggedly to old stereotypes.⁵⁷

Despite the rhetoric of republicanism, U.S. wartime policies actually strengthened dictatorships and heightened oppression in many countries. Repressive governments exploited the counterespionage programs the FBI helped establish in Brazil and Guatemala to stifle internal dissent.⁵⁸ The refusal to intervene that was basic to the Good Neighbor policy made it expedient to tolerate dictatorships in the name of order. Clever tyrants like Trujillo hired professional lobbyists to promote their cause in Washington and skillfully exploited the Axis threat and U.S. preference for stability to increase their military power and enhance their personal power. The military aid and advisory programs helped expand the military's power in Latin American politics. Sharing a common "military culture" that favored order at the expense of democracy, U.S. officers sometimes formed close connections with their Latin counterparts and helped buffer dictators like Trujillo against internal foes and State Department critics. Salvadorean dictator Maximiliano Martinez's bloody suppression of a 1943 internal revolt made plain the tragic human consequences of a "spoonful" of U.S. weapons—six tanks and five thousand old rifles.⁵⁹ Trujillo used U.S. military aircraft and rifles to terrorize his own people and destabilize Central America. Friends of liberty in the region were "puzzled and discouraged," a State Department official reported, that the United States while fighting dictators abroad was supporting them in the hemisphere. The United States, Latin critics complained, had become a "good neighbor of tyrants."⁶⁰

Concern for the hemisphere also produced renewed interest and limited wartime commitments in Liberia, a country founded by freed American slaves. West Africa's proximity to the "bulge" on the east coast of Brazil and rising Nazi influence there brought Liberia to U.S. attention before Pearl Harbor. The loss of Southeast Asian rubber heightened the importance of the enormous Firestone plantations. The invasion of North Africa increased the value of the Brazil–West Africa air route. FDR's brief post-Casablanca visit to Liberia and his flight from there to Brazil gave presidential impetus to plans already under consideration in the government. During the war, the United States began to construct an airfield in Liberia and drew up plans for a modern port at Monrovia. To sweeten the deal, it provided Liberia a $1 million grant. To promote economic development, it dispatched technical missions to evaluate Liberia's mineral resources, increase its agricultural productivity, and improve medical facilities. Deeply concerned at the Amero-Liberian elite's exploitation of the native population, FDR was prepared to insist on reforms as a condition for further U.S. aid. He even contemplated some form of trusteeship to ensure the right kind of progress. His plans were incomplete when he died in April 1945.61

While solidifying its position close to home, the United States also took the first fateful steps toward entanglement in the Middle East, a complex and volatile region that would entice and frustrate Americans for the rest of the century and beyond. Some officials naively believed that the United States had earned the goodwill of Middle Eastern people, as Hull put it, from a "century of . . . missionary, education, and philanthropic efforts . . . never tarnished by any material motives or interests."⁶² As Hull's remark suggests, the region was not entirely terra incognita to Americans. Missionaries had been there since the 1820s, working mainly with Christian minorities but also establishing schools and hospitals open to Muslims. Missionaries and educators founded Robert College in Turkey and the American University in Beirut. They spearheaded Near East Relief, which mounted a heroic effort to ease the vast human suffering from World War I and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and has been called "one of the most notable chapters in the annals of American philanthropy abroad."⁶³ Good intentions notwithstanding, most Americans placed Arab and Jew alike near the bottom of their racial hierarchy, viewing them as backward, superstitious, and desperately in need of Westernization.64 Material interests rather than ideals drove the wartime push into the Middle East. American merchants and businessmen had long been active in the region—in the twentieth century, oilmen especially so—and by 1940 U.S. firms had acquired oil concessions in Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. The growing importance of economic interests produced a diplomatic presence. The significance of Middle Eastern oil plus increasingly insistent demands on the part of Jewish-Americans for U.S. recognition of Zionist proposals for a Jewish homeland in Palestine brought together before World War II the conflicting forces that would dominate and bedevil U.S. Middle East policy to the present.

Early in the war, the United States deferred to the British. The Middle East had traditionally been a British sphere of influence, and as long as the region was in peril militarily Americans were not disposed to challenge their ally. When the British brutally suppressed a nationalist revolt in Egypt in February 1942, the Roosevelt administration said nothing.⁶⁵ It permitted Britain to distribute American lend-lease supplies to Middle Eastern nations. Even in Saudi Arabia, where U.S. oilmen hit a gusher in 1938, FDR allowed Churchill to take the lead. "This is a little far afield for us," he conceded to one of his advisers in 1941.⁶⁶

United States policy changed dramatically in 1943. By this time the region was relatively secure, and the focus of war had shifted to new theaters, freeing Americans to challenge British colonialism. Exporters feared that Britain's domination of the region would close off vital postwar markets and insisted that the United States must liberate itself from British control. Critics like Roosevelt's personal emissary, the flamboyant and sometimes clownish former secretary of war Patrick Hurley—who also had close ties to U.S. oil interests—charged that Britain and the Soviet Union were using American supplies to curry favor with Middle Eastern nations. In response, the administration in 1943 took over distribution of lend-lease and marked all supplies with the U.S. flag and the words "Gift of the U.S.A." to make clear the source and thereby presumably gain full political benefit.⁶⁷

The main reason for the shift can be summed up in one three-letter word: oil. With the loss of Southeast Asian supplies in early 1942, the importance of Middle Eastern oil increased. World War II made quite clear that oil was the most precious commodity in modern warfare and the essential ingredient of national security and power. The U.S. war machine guzzled voracious quantities—the Fifth Fleet fighting in the Pacific consumed by itself 3.8 billion gallons of fuel in a single year. Government studies warned in alarmist—and, it would turn out, greatly exaggerated—tones that the nation could not meet its essential postwar needs from domestic sources. It must look abroad, and in "all the surveys of the situation," a State Department official recalled, "the pencil came to an awed pause at one point and place—the Middle East."68

The shift can be seen in policies toward individual nations. In Egypt, which had no oil, America's political and military presence remained limited, but its economic influence increased significantly. Minister Alexander Kirk railed against British imperialism and pushed for an Open Door policy.⁶⁹ United States investors and multinational corporations, working with conservative Egyptian elites and backed by Kirk, formed a sort of "New Deal coalition" that frustrated British neo-colonial schemes by establishing joint ventures for such projects as a huge chemical plant at Aswan on the Nile. The U.S. government helped fund the plan with a 1945 Export-Import Bank loan, marking the beginning of the retreat of British business from Egypt and the entry of U.S. firms such as Ford, Westinghouse, Kodak, and Coca-Cola.⁷⁰

The United States pursued a much more vigorously independent course in Saudi Arabia. Hull described Saudi oil as "one of the world's greatest prizes." The country's strategic location between the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf offered logistical advantages for both the European and Pacific wars.⁷¹ In April 1942, the Roosevelt administration opened a legation in Jidda and sent a technical mission to advise the government on irrigation. In February 1943, it made Saudi Arabia eligible for direct lend-lease aid. Two of King Ibn Saud's sons were invited to Washington and entertained lavishly at the White House. The United States extended a sizeable loan to the Arab kingdom and sent a military mission without consulting the British.

The U.S. entry into Saudi Arabia set off a spirited—and for Saudi leaders lucrative—competition with Britain. The desert kingdom at this time had few resources and considerable needs. A man of great physical strength and an astute warrior-statesman, the fiercely independent Ibn Saud had used divide-and-conquer tactics to unite disparate tribes into the foundation of a modern state. He sought to exploit the Anglo-American rivalry to strengthen his nation and enhance his personal power. He submitted duplicate orders. When the two rivals tried to cooperate to curb his gargantuan appetite for military hardware and personal accoutrements, he hinted to each he might turn to the other. "Without arms or resources," he complained to nervous Americans, "Saudi Arabia must not reject the hand that measures its food and drink."72 An aficionado of automobiles, he extorted luxury vehicles from both nations and still whined to Americans about the lack of spare parts and the slow delivery of an automobile promised his son.⁷³ In early 1944, Roosevelt and Churchill sought to calm rising tensions with mutual assurances about each other's stake in Middle Eastern oil. FDR averred that the United States was not casting "sheep's eyes" toward British holdings in Iran; extending the ovine metaphor, the prime minister responded that Britain would not "horn in" on U.S. interests in Saudi Arabia.⁷⁴ In Saudi Arabia, however, the competition continued and, reflecting the shifting balance of economic power, became increasingly one-sided. In early 1945, Churchill sent Ibn Saud a refurbished Rolls-Royce. FDR trumped him with a spanking new DC-3 aircraft and a crew for one year, the basis for Trans World Airlines' entry into Middle East air routes.⁷⁵ Saudi Arabia was the only nation for whom lend-lease was continued after the war. The United States solidified its control of Saudi oil and over strong British opposition developed plans to build an air base at Dhahran (completed in 1946) to protect those holdings.⁷⁶

The wartime experience in Iran best exemplifies the illusions and frustrations of America's initial move into the Middle East. Iran possessed the region's largest known oil reserves, long dominated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Threatened by the Nazis in 1941, it was jointly occupied by the British and Russians, who deposed the pro-German shah and installed his son, the twenty-two-year-old Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, a retiring and in some ways tragic figure who would be a major player in postwar Middle Eastern history. Sharing British and Soviet concern about the Nazi threat, the United States acquiesced in the occupation. Iran had long survived by playing outside powers against each other. With the British and Russians working together, it turned to the United States as a buffer.

Washington responded sympathetically. United States officials recognized the strategic importance of Iran. Some also saw an opportunity for their nation to live up to its anti-colonial ideals by protecting Iran against the rapacious Europeans. FDR conceded on one occasion that he was "thrilled with the idea of using Iran as an example of what we could do by an unselfish American policy."77 The United States thus charted an independent course, furnishing lend-lease supplies directly rather than through the British and dispatching a number of technical missions to provide the know-how to assist Iran toward independence and modernization. The United States alone, a State Department official observed, could "build up Iran to the point at which it will stand in need of neither British nor Russian assistance to maintain order in its own house."⁷⁸

This ambitious and ill-conceived experiment in nation-building failed miserably. It operated on the naive assumption that limited advice and assistance from disinterested Americans would enable Iran to develop the stability and prosperity to fend off predators like the Soviet Union and Britain. The U.S. Army did construct a vital supply route from the Persian Gulf to the USSR, but that project brought little immediate benefit to Iran, and the carousing and cultural insensitivity of some of the thirty thousand GIs working on it offended local Muslim sensibilities. A mission directed by Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who had won national notoriety as head of the New Jersey State Police during the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's child, achieved a "small miracle" by converting a "once bedraggled" gendarmerie into a respectable rural police force. The other missions were understaffed and poorly prepared. Few of the Americans knew the language or anything about the country. They squabbled among themselves and with the U.S. Army, losing credibility among their hosts. The most conspicuous failure was a finance mission headed by Arthur Millspaugh, who had enjoyed some success in Iran in a similar capacity in the 1920s. A poor administrator, he spoke no French or Farsi. He correctly pinpointed the problems to be addressed, but his proposed solutions and his imperious methods alienated those Iranians who profited most from the status quo and those nationalists eager for reform.79 "The Iranian himself is the best person to manage his house," nationalist leader Mohammad Mosaddeq proclaimed.⁸⁰ The missions undermined the positive image the United States had brought to Iran in 1941. Iranians made them a scapegoat for the nation's problems. Designed to bolster Iran's independence, they destabilized its politics and aggravated tensions with Britain and the USSR.

The failure of the missions marked the end of the idealistic phase of U.S. policy in Iran. At Tehran in December 1943, Roosevelt persuaded Churchill and Stalin to agree to a declaration pledging support for Iran's independence. Bemoaning Soviet and British imperialism and the chaos that afflicted the American effort in Iran, the voluble Hurley urged a redoubled U.S. intervention headed by a strong-willed individual—no doubt himself. High State Department officials, on the other hand, denounced Hurley's proposal as a "classic case of imperial penetration," an "innocent indulgence in messianic globaloney."⁸¹ Roosevelt seemed interested, but his attention quickly shifted to other matters and he rejected Hurley's proposal.

By this time U.S. policy in Iran was undergoing major change. The relentless push for concessions in Iran drove the major oil companies and the U.S. and British governments toward cooperative arrangements to stabilize international production and distribution. The Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement of 1944 infuriated small U.S. producers and was never approved by Congress, but it eased temporarily the fierce rivalry in Iran. More important, a Soviet move for an oil concession in northern Iran in 1944 increasingly brought two formerly bitter rivals together. Both British and U.S. diplomats viewed Moscow's ploy not as a response to U.S. efforts to gain oil concessions in Iran but as a power play to expand its influence into the Persian Gulf. If not yet working together, Britons and Americans increasingly agreed on the need to check the Soviet threat. No mere puppet, the Iranian government itself resolved the immediate crisis and protected its future interests by refusing to approve any oil concessions until the war ended.82

By 1943, that other inflammatory ingredient of an already volatile Middle Eastern mix had also come into play. The Zionist quest for a Jewish homeland in Palestine emerged late in the nineteenth century out of desperation—and hope—on the part of Europe's persecuted and dispossessed Jews. The idea gradually gained support among America's large and increasingly influential Jewish community. When World War I set off a bidding war between the Allies and the Central Powers for Jewish support, the Zionist dream first gained international recognition. The British-sponsored Balfour Resolution of 1917, perfunctorily supported by Woodrow Wilson, pledged carefully qualified backing for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. With the rise of a new wave of anti-Semitism in the 1930s, especially in Nazi Germany, immigration to Palestine soared, sparking violent resistance from native Arabs. Fearful on the eve of war of a dangerous conflict in a strategically critical area, Britain in 1939 issued a white paper drastically curtailing Jewish immigration to Palestine and then shutting it down after five years. The white paper solved little. Arabs doubted its assurances; Jews mobilized to fight it.⁸³

The drive for a Jewish homeland became linked in wartime with the unfolding horror of Hitler's Final Solution. As early as the summer of 1942, word began to filter out of Europe of the establishment of death camps and the systematic killing of European Jews. The initial reports did not begin to capture the enormity of the atrocities, but many Americans, insulated from direct contact with the war, questioned them nonetheless. Even when the magnitude of the extermination began to emerge, the administration could do little. FDR publicly condemned the killing of Jews and vowed to conduct war criminal trials to hold the perpetrators accountable. To take the matter out of the hands of an unsympathetic State Department, he created in 1943 a War Refugees Board that enjoyed some success helping Hungarian Jews escape Nazi grasp. But the president refused, with the war still far from won, to challenge Congress by seeking to ease immigration restrictions. And the War Department rejected proposals to bomb the death camp at Auschwitz on grounds that it would accomplish little and divert crucial resources from "essential" military tasks. The pragmatic U.S. response to a great moral catastrophe is somehow unsatisfying. But it is far from clear that any of the courses proposed to deal with the Holocaust could have been effectively implemented or would have saved significant numbers of lives.84

As the magnitude of Hitler's atrocities began to emerge, Zionists stepped up their agitation for a homeland, and sympathy tinged with some measure of guilt brought growing support. Many Americans also saw large-scale immigration of Jews to Palestine as preferable to swelling their already sizeable numbers in the United States. At New York's Biltmore Hotel in May 1942, Palestinian Jewish leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann inspired a gathering of Jewish-Americans to support unlimited immigration into Palestine and the creation of a "Jewish Commonwealth integrated into the structure of the new democratic world."⁸⁵ The Biltmore group mounted a massive and effective campaign to sway Congress and the American public.

Caught between Arab fears and Jewish demands, the Roosevelt administration handled a volatile issue like a ticking time bomb. The president had made Jewish-Americans an integral part of his New Deal coalition and relied on their electoral support. In the State Department and other federal agencies, on the other hand, there was virulent anti-Semitism. Most important, the question of a Jewish homeland threatened to upset the delicate political balance in a critical region. GIs had already come under fire in Palestine, and military leaders feared that Jewish agitation could spark further conflict in an important rear area. At a time when U.S. attention was focused on the Middle East to meet presumably urgent demands for oil, the Palestine issue threatened to upset the Arabs who controlled it. Ibn Saud prophetically warned Roosevelt in 1943 that if the Jews got their wish, "Palestine would forever remain a hot bed of troubles and disturbances."⁸⁶ FDR at times fantasized about going to the region after leaving the presidency and promoting economic development projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority. He expressed confidence that he could resolve the dispute in face-to-face conversations with Arab leaders. Characteristically, the administration dealt with the most pressing issues with pleas for restraint, platitudes, and vague assurances to both sides. A master of the latter, FDR, after assuring Ibn Saud in 1943 that he would do nothing without full consultation, concluded the following year—at election time—that Palestine should be for Jews alone.87 During the campaign, while fending off a congressional resolution favoring a Jewish homeland, he promised to help Jewish leaders find ways to establish a state.

For Roosevelt, the last act in the unfolding drama came in February 1945 en route home from the Yalta Conference when he met Ibn Saud at Great Bitter Lake north of the Suez Canal. The king was transported there by a U.S. destroyer, traveling in a tent pitched on deck (U.S. sailors called it the "big top") with an entourage of forty-three attendants and eight live sheep to meet requirements of Muslim laws for preparing food. Much impressed with Ibn Saud, FDR labeled him a "great whale of a man" and left a wheelchair for the battle-scarred warrior's use. The president hoped to persuade the king to acquiesce in a Jewish homeland. What he got was adamant opposition to further Jewish settlement—even to the planting of trees in Palestine. "Amends should be made by the criminal, not by the innocent bystander," he told FDR, proposing instead a Jewish homeland in Germany. Taken aback, Roosevelt pledged in typical fashion that he would "do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people." His subsequent public statement that he had learned more from Ibn Saud in five minutes than from countless exchanges of letters struck fear in Zionists allayed only in part by subsequent soothing reassurances.⁸⁸ The Middle East took a backseat to more pressing issues in the last stages of the war. By virtue of its rising power and emerging interests, however, the United States had taken a keen interest in the region and through oil and Palestine had become caught up in a hopelessly intractable dispute.

A powerful undercurrent in the Middle East, the issue of colonialism dominated U.S. involvement with South and Southeast Asia. Held in check in the 1930s by brute force and token concessions, nationalists quickly saw in the war a chance to gain their freedom. They read carefully and literally the 1941 Atlantic Charter and found in it sanction for their cause. Japan's sweep through Southeast Asia in 1942 graphically exposed the weakness of colonial regimes. In some areas, the new rulers imposed a more cruel and oppressive rule than the Europeans, but their cry of "Asia for Asians" resonated with local nationalists. Because of its power and its anti-colonial tradition, nationalist leaders looked to the United States for support. Like it or not, the Roosevelt administration found itself ensnared in the complex historical process of decolonization that would dominate world politics for years to come.

The colonial issue was among the most challenging of the myriad complex problems raised by the war. Many Americans were firmly committed to Wilson's dream of self-determination. African Americans in particular saw a direct connection between the oppression of peoples of color at home and abroad and pushed for an end to both.89 The colonial issue became in the eyes of Americans and peoples across the world a test case for the nation's commitment to its war aims. At the same time, many U.S. officials doubted, usually on the basis of racial considerations, that colonial peoples were ready for self-government and feared that premature independence could lead to chaos. They also worried that to force the issue of independence during the war could undermine crucial allies like Britain and threaten Allied cooperation when the outcome of the war remained uncertain.

Roosevelt's handling of the issue is typically difficult to decipher. He often railed against European colonialism—Britain, he once snarled, echoing John Quincy Adams, "would take land anywhere in the world even if it were only a rock or sand bar."⁹⁰ At a Casablanca conference dinner, while Churchill chomped angrily on his cigar, FDR raised with the sultan of Morocco the possibility of independence. On the other hand, he shared the assumptions of his generation that most colonial peoples were unready for independence and would need guidance from the "advanced" nations. Critics have correctly noted that his often bold rhetoric was not matched by decisive actions. He refused to demand of the colonial nations forthright pledges of independence. As Kimball has emphasized, on the other hand, he was utterly Wilsonian, and correct, in his assessment that colonialism was morally reprehensible—and doomed. Ever the pragmatist, he refused to jeopardize the alliance by mounting a frontal assault on colonialism. At the same time, he kept the issue on the front burner, bringing it up often, using various means to nudge the colonial powers in the right direction, apparently hoping that what he called the glare of "pitiless publicity" (turning Churchill's own words against him) would promote international support for independence.91

In the first years of the war, India was the most visible and emotional of decolonization issues, and it clearly reveals Roosevelt's approach. Under the leadership of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi, Indian nationalists had pushed the British toward self-government, and they seized the emergency of war to press for pledges of independence. Many British leaders, including the arch-imperialist Churchill, were not prepared to abandon the crown jewel of an empire on which it was once said the sun had never set. They in turn used military exigencies and the threat of communal warfare between Hindus and Muslims as excuses to delay, offering no more than vague promises of "dominion status" once the war had ended.⁹²

India quickly became the major irritant in the Anglo-American partnership. Even before Pearl Harbor, the United States had given symbolic support to India's appeals for independence by establishing direct diplomatic relations with the colonial regime. It insisted that lend-lease aid be sent directly to the Indian government rather than through the British. At their first wartime meeting in January 1942, Roosevelt prodded Churchill to pledge support for eventual Indian independence. By his own account, the prime minister exploded, and the president never again raised the issue with him directly. But FDR continued to needle Churchill through third parties ranging from Hopkins to Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. He insisted that the government of India sign the United Nations Declaration. At various stops on a world tour taken at the president's behest, Wendell Willkie denounced imperialism. In China, he pressed the colonial powers to set a timetable for independence. Over and over, the president offered U.S. mediation between Britain and Gandhi's nationalists.

Such efforts deeply antagonized the British. Hopkins's initiative provoked a "string of cuss words that lasted two hours into the night"; Willkie's unwelcome intrusion brought forth Churchill's famous affirmation about the liquidation of the British Empire.⁹³ In India, the standoff hardened, and when nationalists demanded that Britain get out, the authorities responded by imprisoning Gandhi and other leaders. Britons suspected the United States of horning in on their imperial interests; Indians viewed it as an accessory to British imperialism. Critics at home and abroad attacked the Roosevelt administration for doing nothing. A high State Department official warned that if the United States appeared to be "more interested in the creation of sonorous phrases than in the implementation of the principles enunciated in those phrases, we can expect a harvest of hate and contempt the like of which our imperialistically minded ally has never known."94

Roosevelt responded in 1943 by sending career diplomat William Phillips to India as his personal representative, his furthest and final intrusion into an intractable issue. An Anglophile who looked down on "lesser" peoples, Phillips typified that group of upper-class professional diplomats who manned the State Department. Viewing him as "the best type of American gentleman," some British officials expected him to sympathize with their position. Once in India, however, he traveled widely and spoke to Indians as well as Britons. He found the British stubbornly uncompromising, the Indians divided on many issues but united in their demand for independence. Seeing firsthand the rising power of Indian nationalism, he pressed the British to make concessions. They rebuffed his interference and even forbade him to see Gandhi, then engaged in a much publicized hunger strike. Phillips eventually left India in frustration, and his generally unsuccessful mission typifies Roosevelt's approach to this difficult issue. The president refused to challenge Churchill directly and thereby threaten the alliance. On the other hand, he used Phillips to keep the colonial issue alive and pressure the British. Phillips's presence in India and his growing support for the cause helped regain the trust of Indians and permitted the United States to retain a nominal commitment to the ideal of self-determination.⁹⁵

Frustrated in India, Roosevelt after 1943 shifted his attack on colonialism to French Indochina, in his view no doubt a more convenient and vulnerable target. His relentless verbal assault against French colonialism and his espousal of a trusteeship policy for Indochina manifested the then novel presumption that the United States should and could dictate solutions to global problems. It reveals much about Roosevelt's—and America's—larger views toward colonialism, nationalism, and the postwar world.

In 1943, FDR frequently expressed his wish not to permit the French to regain their Indochinese colonies, then under Japanese protectorate. His position and the adamancy with which he expressed it reflected his general dislike for the French, reinforced by their collapse in 1940, and his particular contempt for the imperious Free French leader Charles de Gaulle. Unlike the British, the Dutch, and especially the Americans, FDR averred, France had brutally exploited the Indochinese and done nothing to prepare them for self-government. It had "milked" Indochina for one hundred years, he told the British ambassador. "The people . . . are entitled to something better than that."96

Roosevelt's determination to prevent a French return did not translate into support for Vietnamese independence. In part because the French had not been responsible colonizers, he believed, the Vietnamese were not ready to govern themselves. He knew little of the nationalist movement then building in Vietnam. Like most Americans, he paternalistically looked down upon the Vietnamese as childlike and in need of guidance before being given their freedom. He thus proposed the idea of trusteeship through which an advanced nation would help backward people evolve toward full independence. His model, not surprisingly, was U.S. rule in the Philippines, through which, in his view, a benevolent Western nation had prepared a colonial people for independence over a half century. There are "many minor children among the peoples of the world who need trustees," he observed in 1941, "just as there are many adult nations or peoples who must be led back into a spirit of good conduct."⁹⁷

Roosevelt's trusteeship scheme provoked vigorous opposition abroad and at home. As a means to restore their lost glory, French citizens of all political persuasions were deeply and emotionally committed to reestablishing the empire in Indochina. To curry favor with an old ally and protect their own Southeast Asian colonies, the British backed the French. Churchill stonewalled Roosevelt on decolonization in general and the Indochina trusteeship in particular. Behind FDR's back, the British also facilitated a French return to Indochina by permitting French participation in the British-run Southeast Asia Command. Some conservative State Department officials preferred a French return to Indochina on condition the French committed themselves to eventual independence. Top military officers sought U.S. sovereignty over the Pacific islands held by Japan as mandates to permit "full control" over bases deemed vital to America's postwar security. They saw application of the trusteeship principle to liberated areas in general as a threat to U.S. security interests.⁹⁸

Roosevelt bent in the face of opposition, but he did not falter in his commitment to the idea of trusteeship for Indochina—and presumably other colonial areas as well. While admitting the need for U.S. bases in the Pacific, he adamantly insisted that sovereignty must rest with the islands themselves. Eventually and grudgingly bowing to Paris and London on Indochina, he conceded that France might be the trustee, but he insisted upon a firm and explicit French commitment to independence and accountability to international authority, presumably a new international organization. By permitting France to return, the compromise certainly weakened the trusteeship plan. On the other hand, as Kimball concludes, Roosevelt may have set a trap to force France in time to dissolve its empire in Indochina and elsewhere as well. FDR certainly underestimated French determination to return and Vietnamese determination to resist. But his instincts were right, and the result of his not following them more aggressively and his successors deviating sharply from them was thirty years of war in Indochina.99

Few wartime problems were more perplexing for the United States than what historian Herbert Feis called "the China tangle," where imperialism was also a key issue.¹⁰⁰ Japan's defeat seemed likely to end Western imperialism in China, but it was not clear what would follow. The United States and China differed sharply over how and for what purposes the war should be fought.

The two nations entered the alliance with high expectations. Chiang Kai-shek shared the intense nationalism of his generation and did not exempt the United States from those imperialist nations responsible for China's woes. But for Chiang Pearl Harbor was a godsend. The United States would now presumably take up the burden of liberating China. It would provide military and economic assistance to help eliminate rivals like Mao Zedong's Communists and solidify Nationalist control over a free China. By December 1941, Chiang had a well-lubricated influence machine operating in the United States including paid lobbyist and former New Deal insider Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran, China Defense Supplies, a purchasing agent staffed by well-connected Americans, and the powerful Time-Life publications of Henry Luce. With U.S. belligerency, Chiang's operatives sought to make China a full partner in the war.

Americans also had high expectations. Conditioned by forty years of the Open Door policy to see themselves as China's patron and more recently by Luce to view Chiang as a heroic and embattled defender of freedom against Japanese tyranny, they looked upon China as an important ally. Roosevelt sensed the power of Chinese nationalism and sought to contain it through the person of Chiang Kai-shek. He spoke of China as a fourth great power, a bastion of regional stability in East Asia after Japan's defeat, and a buffer against possible Soviet expansion. Like other Americans, he hoped a grateful China would support U.S. policies, "a faggot vote," Churchill sneered.101 Shortly after Pearl Harbor, the administration moved to cement its ties to China by extending a loan of $500 million and dispatching Gen. Joseph Stilwell to Chungking as a military adviser.

Expectations on both sides were quickly shattered. Those Americans who came into contact with Chiang's China soon discovered that popular images bore little resemblance to reality. The Nationalist government was weak, divided internally, riddled with corruption, and lacking in popular support. The heroic leader depicted by Luce, a veritable Asian George Washington, sought mainly to preserve his own power. The largely conscript army was a slightly organized rabble, by no means ready to undertake operations against the Japanese. In any event, Chiang refused to risk it in combat, counting on the Americans to liberate China while he subdued his internal rivals.¹⁰²

China was even more disappointed with the United States. Despite the president's rhetoric, China was not admitted to the Allied inner circle. It remained a second-class ally whose role was to keep Japanese troops busy until the European war was won. The wars in Europe and the Pacific continued to have top priority, and precious few supplies were allocated for China. Even when supplies were available, it took superhuman efforts to get them to Chungking. When the Japanese closed the Burma Road in 1942, supplies had to be shipped to the west coast of India, transshipped by rail across the breadth of the Indian subcontinent, and then flown over the perilous hump of the Himalayas to Chungking. Increasingly frustrated with the paucity of U.S. aid, Chiang issued only slightly veiled threats to quit the war. We are "on a raft with one sandwich between us, and the rescue ship is heading away from the scene," an equally frustrated Stilwell complained. "They are too busy elsewhere for small fry like us."¹⁰³

Stilwell and Chiang agreed on little else, and their relationship quickly soured. The acerbic general, appropriately nicknamed "Vinegar Joe," had served in China in the 1920s, knew the language, and had great affection for the people. He wanted to build an effective army to fight the Japanese, but his efforts to reform the army threatened Chiang's key power base, and the generalissimo naturally balked. Stilwell despised Chiang and filled the pages of his diary with venomous outbursts against a man he called in his more generous moments "the Peanut," at other times a "grasping, bigoted, ungrateful little rattlesnake."104 He sought full control over U.S. aid to bend Chiang to his will.

To get around Stilwell and challenge China's low place in the Allied pecking order, Chiang sent his wife—the couple had been named Time's "Man and Wife of the Year" in 1937—to the United States in 1942 on a personal lobbying mission. The daughter of a wealthy, U.S.-educated Shanghai father, the diminutive, beautiful Mayling Soong, in Barbara Tuchman's words, "combined graduation from Wellesley College with the instinct for power of the Empress Dowager."¹⁰⁵ Her delicate stature only slightly obscured an iron will and a cruel streak. She lingered in the United States for six months. Privately, she railed against Stilwell. In speeches to huge and adoring throngs in major U.S. cities and especially in a remarkable February 1943 appearance before a joint session of Congress—the first Chinese and only the second woman to address that body—she openly challenged the Europe-first strategy and the low priority assigned aid to China. She received a four-minute standing ovation. Madame Chiang "enthralled and captivated Washington as few other official visitors have ever done," the New York Herald-Tribune enthused.¹⁰⁶

Unwilling to alter the nation's strategic priorities, increasingly disillusioned with Chiang, and weary of "the missimo's" lobbying, FDR appeased his disgruntled ally with expedients.¹⁰⁷ As part of its broader assault on imperialism and to palliate Chiang, the United States in 1943 relinquished extraterritoriality, one of the most galling features of the unequal treaties imposed on China in the mid-nineteenth century. It also eliminated the immigration restrictions that had been a special irritant in Chinese-American relations since the 1880s. Roosevelt promised Chiang that territories taken from China by Japan since their war of 1895 would be returned. He boosted China as one of his Four Policemen who would assume responsibility for regional stability after the war. He did not include Chiang in Big Three summit meetings, but he met privately with the generalissimo in Cairo en route to Tehran in late 1943. Over Stilwell's vociferous objections, he approved a proposal advanced by Gen. Claire Chennault, another U.S. adviser in Chungking, to launch a major bombing campaign against Japanese positions in China.

An already tattered alliance all but came apart in 1944. Chennault's aerial attacks had disastrous consequences, provoking a massive Japanese counteroffensive that produced huge Chinese losses and strengthened Japan's position in coastal China. The more Americans saw of the Nationalist government, in the meantime, the more they complained of corruption, greed, and venality, including the embezzlement of substantial funds by Chiang's family. In contrast, the Communists based in Yenan province projected an image of efficiency and order. Their suave spokesman, Zhou En-lai, told Americans what they wanted to hear, promising to take the fight to the Japanese. The Communists also staged a huge July 4 celebration in Yenan, and Mao assured U.S. visitors that the most conservative American businessman would find nothing objectionable in his program. A frustrated Roosevelt administration demanded that Chiang put Stilwell in full command of the army and mount operations against the Japanese. More ominously, the United States insisted on sending observers to Yenan. These moves shook to their foundations the Sino-American alliance and indeed Chiang's entire approach to the war.108

The generalissimo fended off the immediate U.S. threat. He grudgingly acquiesced in the sending of Americans to Yenan. After a series of incredibly complex moves and countermoves in an intricate diplomatic chess game, he finessed U.S. demands to put his troops into action. He wangled the appointment of the peripatetic Hurley as personal U.S. representative to his government and then used the new appointee to get rid of the despised Stilwell.¹⁰⁹

Chiang's short-term successes backfired, contributing to a major shift in U.S. policy that would disastrously affect his long-run interests. His demonstrated unwillingness to fight combined with the success of General MacArthur's island-hopping campaign in the Pacific brought a top-level decision to avoid major military operations on the East Asian mainland. China would continue to be a peripheral player; its status as a second-class ally was confirmed. U.S. postwar visions also changed. The Yenan observers, who called themselves the Dixie Mission since they were in "rebel" territory, were welcomed by an orchestra and chorus performing Chinese classics and in turn hastily improvised a choral group to sing American "classics" such as "My Old Kentucky Home." They were impressed with the Communists' professionalism, efficiency, and apparent willingness to fight and viewed their hosts as "backsliders" from pure Marxist ideology. Some Americans concluded that Mao's forces would win a civil war and advocated U.S. support for them. Others feared that a Communist victory might bring Soviet control of and U.S. eviction from China.110 Most conceded that Chiang's China could not act as regional policeman. To avert a looming civil war, the Roosevelt administration set out to bring the Nationalists and Communists into a coalition that would produce some semblance of order and maintain U.S. influence in a vital region after the defeat of Japan and the demise of Western imperialism.

Such a feat would have been difficult to pull off by the most skilled of diplomats in the best of circumstances, but in the hands of the inept and opinionated Hurley in the volatile climate of wartime China it was doomed from the start. As ignorant of China as of the Middle East, Hurley assumed his customary role of buffoon. He referred to Chiang and his wife as "Mr. And Mrs. Chek," to Mao as "Moose Dung," and to Zhou as "Joe N. Lie." On one occasion, upon landing at Communist headquarters, to the shock of all present, he let out a Cherokee war whoop. His Yenan hosts soon referred to him as "the Clown."¹¹¹ His antics concealed the hard edge to his diplomacy. A virulent anti-Communist and unabashed partisan of Chiang, he set out to construct a coalition with the Communists as junior partners. When U.S. diplomats on the scene questioned the wisdom of his approach, he branded them disloyal and demanded their recall. This first clumsy effort to avert civil war in China failed miserably by late 1944, sending FDR casting about for alternatives. It set the stage for civil war in China and the postwar Red Scare in the United States. The China tangle, in turn, presaged the host of complex political problems the United States would confront as the focus shifted from winning the war to securing the peace.

IV

In the year after the Tehran Conference, the Allies sealed the Axis fate. The Red Army had liberated all of Soviet territory by early 1944, and in the summer it mounted a massive offensive across Eastern and Central Europe timed to coincide with the Western allies' invasion of France. Following their successful D-Day landing at Normandy on June 6, the United States and Britain began the liberation of France and the drive toward Germany. Hitler's defeat was assured; the only questions were the time it would take and the costs that would be incurred. Allied forces also made significant progress against Japan. After reversing the tide of battle at Midway in the summer of 1942 and Guadalcanal later in the year, U.S. forces began an arduous and bloody advance across the islands of the South and Central Pacific to Japan. Following the air and naval battle of

the Philippine Sea and the climactic battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944, the greatest and last naval engagement of the war, the United States was poised to liberate the Philippines. In the meantime, new B-29 Superfortress bombers, with vast range and a huge payload, mounted a devastating aerial campaign against the Japanese home islands.

With Axis defeat all but certain, the postwar issues that had been put on hold inevitably moved to the forefront. In the economic realm, Americans began planning early and used their economic clout to impose their will. Haunted by bitter memories of the Great Depression and fearing a postwar reprise, they set out to correct the problems they fervently believed had caused that catastrophe and the resulting war. As much as they squabbled among themselves, most U.S. officials—even Hull and Welles!—agreed that eliminating trade barriers was the key to postwar peace and prosperity. America's huge wartime productivity underscored the need for foreign markets once hostilities ended. "Commerce is the lifeblood of a free society," FDR proclaimed in 1944, and the "arteries" which carried that "blood stream" must not be "clogged again . . . by artificial barriers created through senseless economic rivalries."112 Without revealing what sort of "payment" might be expected, the administration included in the lend-lease master agreements negotiated with all recipients provisions for eliminating trade barriers. A major target was Britain's imperial preference system, and negotiations with London were especially difficult and ultimately inconclusive. At Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1944, forty-four nations agreed to establish an American-designed International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the so-called World Bank), funded at $7.6 billion, to help provide the capital to rebuild a war-torn world. To avoid the currency manipulations that had disrupted trade and provoked nasty political disputes in the early 1930s, they also created an International Monetary Fund to stabilize currencies as a basis for postwar trade expansion. The United States contributed most of the money to these important postwar institutions and thereby controlled their operations.¹¹³

While FDR held his cards close to his chest on political issues, the nation engaged in a full and often emotional discussion of its postwar role. Wilsonians used the horrors of a second world war to proclaim vindication of their hero's ideas and pressed for unqualified U.S. support for a reincarnated and reinvigorated League of Nations. In 1944, Hollywood produced a hit film entitled Wilson that portrayed its subject and his dreams as the tragic victims of personal and partisan squabbling. Responding to Luce's 1941 call for an "American Century," Vice President Wallace proclaimed the "century of the common man" and advocated a "people's revolution"—a global New Deal—to ensure that all peoples had "the privilege of drinking a quart of milk every day." Sumner Welles and contract bridge guru Ely Culbertson advocated an international police force; others proposed a world federation. Wendell Willkie's stirring account of his global tour, One World, stressed that the shrinkage of distances had brought peoples together and made peace indivisible. It enjoyed the highest sales of any book published in the United States to this time. Alarmed by the rampant idealism of Wallace and Willkie, Yale University political geographer Nicholas Spykman urged a realpolitik approach to the postwar world. Journalist and onetime Wilsonian Walter Lippmann's 1943 book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, echoed Spykman in calling for a foreign policy based on the balance of power. An instant best seller, it was excerpted in the Reader's Digest and, most remarkably, appeared in a cartoon version in the Ladies' Home Journal. Polls taken in 1942–43 indicated broad popular support for U.S. participation in an international organization. Congress jumped out ahead of the White House in late 1943 by approving separate resolutions to that effect.114

A newly empowered military establishment approached postwar planning with special urgency. In their view, the debacle at Pearl Harbor had occurred because the civilian leadership, rejecting their advice, had pursued provocative policies toward Japan not backed by force. Another war was certain, they insisted, and technological advances would leave no time for last-minute preparation. The nation must be able to deter aggression or overwhelm it at the outset. There was even discussion of preemptive war. Military leaders were deeply skeptical of international organization. In a "world in which people play for keeps," Admiral King asserted, "we have got to take care of ourselves."¹¹⁵ They insisted on being included in postwar planning and urged that the nation maintain sufficient military power to deal with any threats. Air power was especially important, and the United States must have the bases to make it workable. They began to see at least dimly the major geopolitical consequences of the war—the decline of Britain and the rise of the Soviet Union. They did not yet view the USSR as a potential enemy. Indeed, their planning through most of 1944 called for maintaining the Grand Alliance. Britain and Russia would police postwar Europe. The United States would be responsible for the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific and must have the naval and air power and overseas bases to play that role.116

While U.S. planning proceeded, the postwar world began to take form. As Allied armies swept through enemy-occupied regions, they shaped political settlements in the areas they liberated. In Italy, for example, without consulting the Soviets and to the horror of American liberals, the United States and Britain cut a deal with the fascist Marshal Badoglio for an interim government. As the Red Army drove across Eastern and Central Europe in 1944, Stalin dictated the arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. He did not initially impose Communist governments, but he did make sure that those placed in power would comply with his wishes.

The political destiny of Poland became the cause célèbre, a major reason for the breakdown of the Grand Alliance and the beginning of the Cold War. The Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 had brought France and Britain into the war, and for Churchill and to some extent Roosevelt, Poland assumed a special moral and symbolic significance. FDR also repeatedly reminded Stalin of the large bloc of Polish American voters in the United States, whose numbers he considerably exaggerated, likely as a ploy to wrest cosmetic concessions to make the inevitable outcome in Poland look better. For Russians, on the other hand, Poland historically had been the avenue for invasion by Germany, and Stalin insisted that any postwar government be "friendly." The virulently anti-Soviet Polish government-in-exile in London lobbied relentlessly for British and American backing. Stalin formed a clique of Polish Communists who accompanied the Red Army on its westward advance. He callously used the August 1944 Warsaw Uprising to solidify its position. As Soviet forces approached the capital, the Polish underground, seeking to liberate the city on its own, rose up against Nazi occupation forces. Claiming that his exhausted armies had advanced beyond their supply lines, Stalin kept them on the outskirts of Warsaw while the Nazis brutally decimated the rebels. To the shock of his allies, the Soviet dictator refused Anglo-American requests to airdrop supplies to those he dismissed as "criminals" and "adventurists."¹¹⁷

By late 1944, the brave new world Americans hoped for appeared in jeopardy. To the dismay of those few U.S. officials in the know, at an October meeting in Moscow code-named Tolstoy, Stalin and Churchill met before a warm fire in the Kremlin and after exchanging Polish jokes sketched out on paper a division of interest in Eastern and Central Europe: the Soviet Union preeminent in Bulgaria and Romania; Britain in Greece; influence to be shared in Yugoslavia and Hungary. "Let us burn the paper," Churchill said of what he later called a "naughty document," lest "it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner." "No, you keep it," Stalin responded.118 In early December 1944, British soldiers forcibly suppressed a left-wing uprising in Greece as a first step toward restoring the monarchy. Despite Roosevelt's plaintive appeals for delay, Stalin on December 31 recognized the Communist-led government he had installed in Poland.

These events caused great alarm in the United States. Both liberals and conservatives denounced British actions in Greece, warning that this war was going the same direction as the last. Polish Americans and the Catholic Church expressed grave concern about Poland. Those American officials privy to the Churchill-Stalin "deal" warned that the creation of spheres of influence would subvert essential U.S. war aims. Stunned by Stalin's handling of the Warsaw Uprising, diplomats including ambassador to Moscow W. Averell Harriman and his top aide, George F. Kennan, began to view the Soviet Union as the major threat to the peace and urged the president to stand up to Stalin, even threaten to cut off military aid unless he conformed to U.S. wishes. Some military planners such as Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal pinpointed the USSR as the new enemy upon which U.S. postwar foreign and national security policies should focus.¹¹⁹

The Allies also took conflicting positions on Germany. Thinking in traditional balance-of-power terms, Churchill saw the restoration of a de-Nazified Germany as an essential counterweight to rising Soviet might in Europe. Stalin had insisted upon a punitive peace including dismemberment and heavy reparations to help compensate for the devastation inflicted on Soviet territory during the war. Roosevelt claimed to be equally "bloodthirsty." Stereotypically viewing Germans as warlike, he insisted that they must be de-Nazified and de-Prussianized. On one occasion, speaking metaphorically, he remarked that it would be necessary to "castrate" them to keep them from reproducing their own kind.120 In the fall of 1944, he endorsed the draconian Morgenthau Plan, crafted by his secretary of the treasury, which called for awarding slices of German territory to neighbors and reducing the rest to two partitioned agricultural states. Many top Roosevelt advisers expressed horror at a plan that would require long-term U.S. occupation and have huge economic consequences for postwar Europe. A leak to the press during FDR's reelection campaign caused a furor.

Although increasingly uneasy about the direction of the alliance, Roosevelt clung to the approach he had taken early in the war. He reneged on the Morgenthau Plan. He continued to insist that discussion of postwar issues be delayed until the next Big Three meeting. He did not want conflict over Eastern Europe and Greece to jeopardize postwar great-power cooperation. Informed of the Churchill-Stalin spheres-of-influence deal, he let his allies know that there was no question in the world in which the United States did not have an interest. He was painfully aware that the Western allies needed Soviet help to end the war against Germany and defeat Japan at minimal cost. He also perceived that presence of the Red Army gave the Soviets the dominant position in Eastern Europe and there was little he could do about it.¹²¹ He continued to wrestle with the dilemma of how to win Stalin's trust without making it appear to Americans that he had abandoned self-determination. On Eastern Europe, Kimball notes, he "evaded, avoided, and ignored specifics," hoping to "insulate the more important objective—long-term collaboration."¹²² He continued to hope that by persuading Stalin the United States posed no threat he could get him to maintain an open sphere of influence that would protect vital Soviet interests but allow the free flow of information and trade and at least the semblance of basic freedom for the peoples involved. He hedged his bets by refusing to share with the Soviet leader information about work on the atomic bomb and by holding back commitments of postwar economic aid.¹²³

Roosevelt discussed these issues with Churchill and Stalin for the last time at Yalta in the Crimea in early February 1945. The very name "Yalta" has served as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of tensions with the Soviet Union. For some U.S. participants, the conference seemed, in Hopkins's words, "the first great victory for the peace," a meeting where allies with divergent interests reached reasonable agreements to end the war and establish a basis for lasting peace.124 Less than ten years later, in the tense atmosphere of the early Cold War, Yalta became synonymous with treason, fiercely partisan critics of FDR claiming that a dying president, duped by pro-Communist advisers, conceded Soviet control over Poland and Eastern Europe and sold out Chiang Kai-shek. A "great betrayal," it was labeled, "appeasement greater than Munich." Because a "sick man went to Yalta" and "gave away much of the world," Senator William Langer fumed, "our beloved country is facing ruin and destruction."¹²⁵

The Yalta Conference cannot be understood without recognizing the historical context in which it took place. By the time the Big Three met at the former tsarist retreat in the Black Sea resort town, the Red Army had "liberated" much of Eastern and Central Europe and was poised to drive toward Berlin. Meanwhile, Germany's last-ditch December 1944 counteroffensive, leading to the Battle of the Bulge, slowed the U.S. advance. The end of the European war was in view, but much hard fighting lay ahead. Uncertain whether the atomic bomb would be available in time or indeed would work, U.S. military leaders agreed with FDR that Soviet entry into the war against Japan was essential to secure victory at acceptable cost. Although the Allies differed significantly on crucial postwar issues, Roosevelt still hoped for great-power cooperation. The trip for an already ill man was exhausting. The classic photographs of a drawn and haggard president adorned in that loose-fitting black cape graphically manifest the illness that would soon kill him. But there is no evidence that his mental faculties were in any way impaired. The conference provided many dramatic moments. There was ceremony galore, including sumptuous banquets with endless rounds of toasts. On the verge of victory in Europe, the Big Three saluted each other with lavish words of praise. At times, the tensions were palpable. When Churchill insisted that Poland was for Britain a matter of honor, Stalin shot back that for the USSR it was a matter of security. When Roosevelt suggested that elections in Poland should be as "pure" as Caesar's wife, the Soviet dictator retorted that "in fact she had her sins."¹²⁶

Over five days of arduous negotiations, the Big Three hammered out broad agreements to end the war and establish the peace. The terms reflected the decisions made—or not made—at Tehran and, more important, the positions of the respective armies. Much to the satisfaction of Roosevelt, and of most Americans, Stalin agreed to take part in a United Nations organization essentially as the United States had designed it. In return for the restoration of Russia's pre-1905 position in East Asia, he agreed to enter the war against Japan three months after V-E Day, a promise that seemed to FDR and his military advisers—at this time—especially important. He also expressed "readiness" to conclude an alliance with China, a commitment Roosevelt hoped would affirm his support for Chiang Kai-shek and help avert civil war there. On the key issues involving German dismemberment and reparations, the Allies continued to disagree and deferred substantive decisions. On the even more divisive issues of Eastern Europe and Poland, they used diplomatic phraseology to gloss over numerous unsettled conflicts.127 A vague and unworkable Declaration on Liberated Europe called for elections in areas liberated from the Germans. Roosevelt had hoped for at least token concessions on Poland, but Stalin remained obdurate. The Allies agreed to an equally vague statement that the existing Polish government—the one created by Stalin—should be reorganized on a "broader democratic basis." When Admiral Leahy protested that the agreement was so elastic it could be stretched from the Crimea to Washington without breaking, the president responded with resignation: "I know, Bill. But it's the best I could do for Poland at this time."¹²⁸

In the weeks after Yalta, relations among the Allies soured. Efforts to implement the agreement on Poland foundered amidst charges and countercharges and reports from inside the country of intimidation and mass arrests. "Poland has lost her frontier," Churchill warned Roosevelt, referring to the earlier cession of territory to the USSR. "Is she now to lose her freedom?"¹²⁹ A clandestine effort by OSS operative Allen Dulles in Bern to arrange for the surrender of German troops in Italy aroused the darkest Soviet suspicions and provoked the most vitriolic exchange ever between FDR and Stalin. The Soviet dictator accused the United States, if not Roosevelt directly, of betrayal; the president expressed "bitter resentment" at the "vile misrepresentations" of Stalin's informants.130

On April 12, 1945, at Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt died. It was a crucial event at an especially critical time in the Grand Alliance, but its precise significance is difficult to gauge. The argument that Roosevelt was moving toward taking a hard line with the Soviet Union is unpersuasive.¹³¹ In his last weeks, he firmly resisted Churchill's call for such policies. He privately mused that the prime minister would like nothing better than Soviet-American conflict. His last comments to Churchill on the issue were in fact calm and characteristically upbeat. It seems doubtful, on the other hand, as has been argued, that the Yalta agreements provided a solid foundation for stable U.S.-Soviet postwar relations.¹³² Did FDR still hope that his personal influence could bridge the widening gap of suspicion that separated the two nations? Or was he simply muddling through, as in 1940–41, letting events themselves clarify his course ("when I don't know how to move, I stay put," he explained it)?¹³³ We can never know for sure. To the end, the president was what Henry Wallace called "a waterman" who "looks in one direction and rows the other with the utmost skill."¹³⁴ Like Abraham Lincoln, he died before his work was complete, shrouding his legacy in uncertainty, leaving the haunting and unanswerable question of whether history might have turned out differently had he lived.

Like Wilson, FDR cast a long shadow over twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy. He perceived earlier than most other Americans the ways that technology had shrunk the world and the interconnectedness of global issues. In the frantic months before Pearl Harbor, he began to articulate a new U.S. national security policy and toward that end to create the trappings of an "imperial presidency." His wielding of presidential power, including looseness with the truth, infringement on civil liberties, and harassment of dissenters, is often justified in terms of the magnitude of the threat he faced. In the hands of his successors, it would be perverted to cover a multitude of sins. Within the Grand Alliance, he more than anyone else determined Allied strategies, which in turn decisively shaped postwar settlements. With a huge boost from Germany and Japan, he moved his nation away from its unilateralist tradition toward international cooperation. He defined and gave voice to U.S. war aims. Like Wilson, he believed that "Americanism" offered the best means to a peaceful and prosperous world. Yet while he presided over a vast accretion of U.S. power, he retained a keen sense of its limits. He understood better than most other Americans that diplomatic problems rarely had neat, definitive solutions. His vision of postwar allied cooperation tragically, if not surprisingly, proved an illusion. In large part because of that, the United Nations would prove an ineffectual instrument for maintaining the peace. Yet the ideals he so eloquently pronounced of basic human freedoms and international cooperation remain standards for today. More than any other twentieth-century U.S. leader, he projected a compelling image across the world. "The mere fact that he could make himself as much a personal friend of the little laborer in the Brazilian streets as he did of millions of Americans is a tribute to something more than politics," his adviser Adolf Berle commented on the day of his death. "The great secret was the tremendous well-spring of vital friendship which he somehow communicated far beyond the borders of his own country."135

One of the greatest flaws in his leadership was his refusal to confide in others the contours of his policies and aspirations, even as he understood them. His death thus left a gaping vacuum. Nowhere was this more the case than in his failure, even when he must have been increasingly cognizant of his own mortality, to educate Vice President Harry S. Truman. A border-state senator of middling reputation, the Missourian Truman was selected in 1944 as a compromise candidate in lieu of the incumbent, Wallace, anathema to Democratic Party conservatives, and the conservative James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, unacceptable to liberals. The vice president was not included in Roosevelt's inner circle after the inauguration. He knew little more about the deliberations at Yalta than could be read in the newspapers. He was not briefed on the atomic bomb. Well might he exclaim upon learning of FDR's death: "I feel like I have been struck by a bolt of lightning."136

Truman was not without foreign policy views. During the 1930s, he had dutifully followed what appeared to be the national consensus by voting for the Neutrality Acts with few illusions they would keep the United States out of war. Like most Democrats, he was a confirmed Wilsonian. As the world moved toward war, he gravitated easily toward internationalism. He regularly voted for aid to Britain. Once war began, he assumed that the United States through the power of its ideals would be able to shape the new international order. Although he accepted the necessity of the wartime alliance, he despised Communism and thought Stalin as "untrustworthy as Hitler and [gangster] Al Capone."¹³⁷ He had little sense of the complexity of the issues dealt with at Yalta and the ambiguity of agreements concluded there.

Faced with rising tensions in the alliance and listening to FDR's more hard-line advisers, Truman, in the manner that would become his trademark, at first took a tough stance. On April 23, in a face-to-face meeting at the White House, he gave Soviet foreign minister Molotov (ironically then in Washington on a courtesy call en route to the United Nations conference at San Francisco) what he called "the one-two, right to the jaw," sternly insisting that the USSR abide by the Yalta agreements. When a startled Molotov protested that he had never been talked to like that before—dubious, knowing who his boss was—Truman curtly retorted: "Carry out your agreements and you won't get talked to like that." The president's ill-conceived tough talk masked profound inner doubts. "Did I do the right thing?" he asked a friend shortly after.¹³⁸ Two weeks later, in a singularly impolitic act that could not but stoke already rampant Soviet suspicions, the Truman administration on V-E Day summarily terminated lend-lease to the USSR, even turning back ships at sea. The move may have been necessary to meet congressional restrictions, as the administration insisted, but in the eyes of some of its proponents it was also intended to send a message to an ally in the process of becoming an adversary. It was handled without any consultation and in an unnecessarily crude and offensive manner.¹³⁹

These first moves did not mark Truman's abandonment of FDR's efforts to cooperate with the Soviet Union.140 In fact, through the first months of his presidency, the new president veered back and forth between confrontation and conciliation, between a Rooseveltian optimism that he could deal with Stalin and the conviction that a newly powerful nation with virtue on its side could have its way with tough talk. In mid-May, the administration reversed course on supply ships bound for the USSR and sought to work out arrangements for aid during the war against Japan. Truman dispatched to Moscow the desperately ill Hopkins, known to be as close to Stalin as any American. While there, Hopkins carefully explained the lend-lease imbroglio. He secured face-saving concessions that enabled the United States to recognize the Polish government. At this time, a colorful assemblage of 282 delegates representing fifty-two nations was meeting in San Francisco to draft a charter for the United Nations Organization. Hopkins also secured Stalin's intercession to break a deadlock over use of the veto power in the Security Council, permitting approval of the charter on June 25.¹⁴¹

Yet gradually, almost imperceptibly, attitudes toward the Soviet Union changed. Returning to Washington after FDR's death, Harriman ominously warned of a "barbarian invasion of Europe." He did not despair of accommodation with the USSR. But he insisted that it could be achieved only by taking a harder line, including the use of U.S. economic power as a bargaining weapon, a position many U.S. officials now endorsed.¹⁴² Reports poured in from Eastern and Central Europe of the Soviets' use of heavy-handed, repressive measures to impose their will on local populations. The end of the European war on May 8, 1945, removed one major reason for remaining quiet in the face of Soviet violations of self-determination. The successful July 16 testing of an atomic weapon at Alamogordo, New Mexico, during the last Big Three conference at Potsdam outside Berlin eliminated yet another reason for conciliating an increasingly difficult ally. Soviet entry into the Pacific war was now deemed not just unnecessary but undesirable. Upon receiving word of the test, Stimson observed, Truman was "tremendously pepped up" and took on "an entirely new feeling of confidence." Faced with continued disputes over Eastern Europe and Germany, he and his new secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, deferred agreements on major issues in hopes that use of the bomb against Japan, by demonstrating America's new power, would make the USSR "more manageable" in Eastern Europe.143

The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains among the most controversial actions in U.S. history. Truman and his advisers justified their decision in simple and clear-cut terms: The bombs were used to end the war quickly and spare the estimated half million to a million U.S. casualties that would be incurred in invading the Japanese home islands. Revisionist historians, on the other hand, have questioned whether the bomb was necessary to end the war. They accuse Truman of scrapping FDR's policy of cooperation and using the bomb mainly to bludgeon the Soviet Union into accepting America's postwar aims. The controversy has raged for more than a half century, producing exhaustive research, scrutiny of the most minute details, and voluminous writing. It goes to the very heart of what Americans believe about themselves and how other peoples view them.¹⁴⁴

The official explanation for using the bomb raises numerous questions. Estimates of possible casualties from an invasion were grossly inflated. The actual numbers given to Truman in the summer of 1945 were 31,000 casualties, 25,000 deaths, in the first thirty days; other estimates for the first phase run as high as 150,000 to 175,000.¹⁴⁵ The president and his advisers perceived that Japan was on the verge of defeat. They saw options to end the war other than invasion or use of the bomb. They could blockade the Japanese home islands and continue the ferocious conventional bombing campaign launched in late 1944; they could modify the unconditional surrender policy to lure Japanese moderates into suing for peace. Stalin had reaffirmed to Hopkins his determination to enter the war. The shock effect of Soviet belligerency might force a Japanese surrender.

The administration rejected these alternatives. Blockade and bombing could require as long as a year and cost as much as an invasion. Some policymakers favored modifying the unconditional surrender policy to facilitate peacemaking; others feared that a conciliatory approach might encourage diehards in the Japanese government and provoke a political backlash at home. Soviet entry might not compel a Japanese surrender. In any event, U.S. officials increasingly worried about Stalin's ambitions in East Asia and sought to end the conflict before the USSR could invade Manchuria and demand the spoils of war in Japan.

Dropping the bomb was thus an obvious choice for Truman, not even a decision in the usual sense of the word.146 He had inherited from FDR a weapon built to be used and a military strategy that emphasized winning the war at the lowest cost in American lives. In this case, far from abandoning Roosevelt's policies, Truman embraced them. Even though the casualty estimates were much lower than he and his advisers later claimed, in their eyes even the smaller figures easily justified use of what the president himself admitted was "the most terrible weapon in the history of the world."¹⁴⁷ The bomb had been built at great cost to be used. Failure to employ it might have provoked popular outrage, even calls for impeachment.

The nation to be targeted removed any moral qualms about the bomb's use. At Pearl Harbor, Japan had inflicted physical devastation and humiliation on a proud nation. The ensuing conflict was especially vicious, a "war without mercy," according to historian John Dower, a fierce, unrelenting struggle between peoples of different races with deeply entrenched stereotypes of each other. Americans considered Japanese subhuman—Truman used the word "beast." The ferocity with which the "yellow vermin" defended remote Pacific islands, the suicide air attacks on U.S. Navy ships, and the atrocities inflicted on prisoners of war fueled fear, rage, and a thirst for revenge.¹⁴⁸ Given the mentality of total war and the peculiar brutality of the Pacific war, Americans did not hesitate to use any weapon to subdue a fiendish and fanatical foe.

The bomb was not employed primarily to intimidate the Soviets, as revisionists have argued, but it did offer important collateral benefits. Stimson early recognized the huge implications of nuclear weapons for international relations in general and Soviet-American relations in particular. On several occasions, he urged consultation with Stalin, possibly even trading atomic secrets for political concessions. Truman and Byrnes, in contrast, believed such a powerful weapon could give them the upper hand in postwar negotiations with Stalin. It might end the war before the Soviets could make advances in East Asia.149 Not surprisingly, Truman's calculatedly casual mention of the bomb at Potsdam caused Stalin to speed up his timetable for entering the Pacific war and accelerate his own nuclear project. Soviet-American jockeying for position in East Asia in the last days of the war against Japan and after fueled the tensions already aroused over European issues.¹⁵⁰

Historians still vigorously debate whether the bombs or Soviet intervention were more important in Japan's decision to surrender, but there can be no doubt that the "double shock" of the two atomic bombs, along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, stunned Japan into surrender.¹⁵¹ The destruction was catastrophic. At Hiroshima on August 6, an explosion equal to 12,500 tons of TNT created a huge fireball and a flash of light three thousand times brighter than the sun. "We were struck dumb at the sight," a U.S. pilot recalled. On the ground, it produced a horrific picture of destruction and human agony.¹⁵² An area about five square miles was completely obliterated. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people (including twelve American prisoners of war) were killed instantly, another 40,000 later, and the entire toll 230,000. The less fortunate were burned beyond recognition or suffered a slow and excruciatingly painful death from radiation poisoning. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki August 9 killed 35,000 to 40,000. The bombs and Soviet intervention on August 8 sparked bitter debate between those Japanese who wanted to end the war and others who preferred to fight to the death. All the while, the United States continued to devastate Japan with conventional bombing. Finally, on August 14, even while some military leaders plotted a coup, Emperor Hirohito intervened. His influence carried the day. By giving strength to the peace forces, a cabinet minister later affirmed, the bombs and Soviet intervention were "gifts from heaven."¹⁵³ The United States' use of the bombs was inevitable, but the peculiar devastation they caused and their lasting effects leave haunting questions as to whether they were absolutely necessary and morally justifiable.

THE SECOND WORLD WAR was a "massively transformative event," David Kennedy has written.154 Globally, it shattered the old order, giving rise to a new international system. Those nations that had dominated world politics for years were either devastated by the war or, like Britain, financially and emotionally exhausted by the process of wreaking that destruction. The Soviet Union and especially the United States emerged the only nations capable of exerting great influence beyond their own borders. In part because of the circumstances of the war, in part because of the way it was fought, the United States alone among nations came out stronger than at the beginning. At war's end, it possessed the most powerful military establishment the world had ever known—plus the atomic bomb. An economy still stagnant in 1940 had shown incredible productive capacity. The U.S. homeland was scarcely touched by the war; civilian casualties were negligible. The nation's position in traditional areas of interest was stronger than ever. More important, its areas of interest had expanded exponentially. During the war, places formerly obscure to Americans became familiar.¹⁵⁵ Through various kinds of wartime service, millions of Americans were internationalized. Many leaders believed more fervently than ever that their nation had been called to world leadership. The war had demonstrated the "moral and practical bankruptcy of all forms of isolationism," Luce proclaimed in 1941. It was America's "manifest destiny" to be "the Good Samaritan of the entire world."¹⁵⁶ At war's end, the New Republic spoke for much of the nation's intellectual elite in calling Washington "the newly created World-Capital-on-the-Potomac" and proclaiming America's destiny to reorder a world destroyed.¹⁵⁷ On the day of victory, according to Churchill, the United States stood "at the summit of the world."