Countdown
TUESDAY, 4 JULY 1939, and a hot, humid Independence Day in New York City. Far away, across the Atlantic, Europe appeared once more to be cantering towards all-out war for the second time in a generation, but here in America, the land of the free, the growing crisis seemed remote. Most in the United States had quite enough worries of their own after ten long years of bitter depression. True, there were signs of recovery, but there had been similar signs three years earlier and then there had been another dip. The first concern of Americans was to have a job and put bread on the table, not to get embroiled in what was happening back in the old countries. In any case, while many in the US might only have been first- or second-generation Americans, they had made the trip across the Atlantic for a reason, and for the majority that was to escape to a better life. America promised to be a land of opportunity, and a land of peace, and even with the pain of depression it stood unrivalled as the most modern and forward-thinking country in the world. Europe, with its history of despots and wars, famine and plague, was a world away . . .
And so now there was another round of bickering on the other side of the Atlantic. Let them fight it out for themselves; there were other things to think about than a madman, with a dodgy moustache, called Adolf Hitler.
Things to think about like baseball, and, on that sticky summer day in New York, one ball player in particular. The game was the country’s national sport, an obsession for many millions, and Lou Gehrig was not only one of the greatest hitters ever to have played the game, but a household name across the United States – as famous as any man alive in America. In a career with the New York Yankees that had spanned seventeen seasons, he had hit more than forty home runs six times, had dipped below thirty only once since 1927, was one of the highest run-producers in history and consistently had one of the highest batting averages. His record of a staggering 2,130 consecutive games was one that would stand for over fifty years, which was why, when his form had so dramatically collapsed at the start of the 1939 season, it had seemed unfathomable. Clearly, there was something wrong. He’d noticed himself that he had begun feeling tired midway through the previous season, but during spring training he appeared to have lost all his strength, such a feature of the Iron Horse’s game. At one point, he had even collapsed on the field. He struggled badly on the opening day, then benched himself. His career was over.
Sent to the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, he was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, on his thirty-sixth birthday, 19 June. This was a terminal wasting disease that would lead to paralysis, difficulty in speaking and, in due course, death. Life expectancy was around three years, if he was lucky.
The Yankees and the baseball world were in shock. Lou Gehrig was not so colourful a character as his former team-mate Babe Ruth, but he was respected for his quiet humility and for his amazing strength and agility. He had always let his batting do the talking, but on this 4 July, 1939, ‘Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day’, he was to make one of the most famous speeches in sporting history. Nearly 62,000 fans had crammed into the Yankee Stadium to see a double-header against the Washington Senators, and between the games the great slugger would make his final appearance on the plate in a ceremony attended by Babe Ruth and New York’s mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia.
Among those watching was John E. Skinner, a fourteen-year-old from New Brunswick, across the Hudson in New Jersey. A keen and promising young ball player himself, he was a Yankees fan and had been taken to see Gehrig for the last time by a friend of his father’s. What had shocked him most was the change in the great slugger’s appearance. Gehrig had been a big man, but he looked shrunken now, his famous Number 4 jersey hanging off his shoulders and his pants bunched badly at his waist. ‘Before the ceremonies began,’ says Skinner, ‘you’d picture Gehrig belting a ball out of the park, but then, when you have to see him pull himself up by his hands to get out of the dugout, it was a very sad thing.’
As speeches were made and gifts handed over, Gehrig stood, twisting his cap in his hand and looking awkward. Eventually, it was time for the quiet man to say a few words. The crowd was chanting and applauding as he stepped up to the microphone. As he cleared his throat, he stopped, hands awkwardly planted on his sides and head stooped. ‘For the past two weeks,’ he said, ‘you’ve been reading about a bad break.’ He paused, then added, ‘Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.’ The times he’d had, the players he’d played with, the family he had. ‘Sure I’m lucky,’ he said.
Behind John Skinner, two huge men were bawling like babies. ‘They were . . . really moved,’ says Skinner. ‘It was a moving experience.’ It was a speech of humility and bravery, from a sporting hero who was demonstrating astonishing courage in the face of cruel adversity. Before the coming war was out, John Skinner would need some of that courage himself. So would millions of other Americans, not that they could know it that hot summer afternoon in New York.
A few hundred miles south of New York, just a day later, the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was floating down the Patuxent River in Maryland on the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, a vessel he liked to call the ‘floating White House’. He had come to visit his close friend and advisor, Harry Hopkins, who was laid low and convalescing at Delabroke, a beautiful pre-Revolution house on the river loaned to him for the summer. Hopkins had organized, overseen and run many of the key projects of Roosevelt’s New Deal – relief agencies in which the government invested heavily in an attempt to provide jobs and public works projects and help the country crawl out of depression. The biggest of these jobs programmes, the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, had been the centrepiece of the New Deal from 1935 and had been run by Hopkins until the previous summer, when he’d been recovering from a vicious bout of cancer that had seen two-thirds of his stomach removed. Now, eighteen months after his treatment, he could no longer ingest properly. Like Lou Gehrig, it seemed that Hopkins was dying.
His death would be a huge blow to the President, who had developed a close bond with this thin, sickly man with the rapier wit, dynamic organizational skills and shrewd judgement. More recently, FDR – as the President was widely known – had started using Hopkins in a different role. The imminent war in Europe may not have been foremost on the mind of most Americans but it certainly was now centre stage in the President’s thoughts, and had been for some time, the more so because of the events in Munich the previous autumn. Back then, war had threatened to engulf Europe, but both France and Britain had stepped back from the brink; they had allowed Hitler, the German Chancellor, to annex the German-speaking Sudetenland from the rest of Czechoslovakia unopposed. The Czechs had had their country sliced up, and war had been averted, but then in March that year, just six months after the Munich agreement, Hitler’s troops had marched into the rest of Czechoslovakia, and in so doing the German leader had flagrantly gone back on his promise. Now he wanted part of Poland too. A pattern was clearly emerging: bully, threaten, watch the rest of the world step aside, and then walk in. Land grabs had never been so easy. The issue, as Britain, France and Roosevelt were all too aware, was that Hitler was unlikely to stop unless made to by military force. And that meant war.
Thus a European conflict seemed to the President to be increasingly likely, but while many in Washington assumed that a future European conflict had little to do with them, FDR was not so sure. He had also begun to realize that the Atlantic was no longer the barrier it had once been. Air power was growing rapidly, as was naval power. Charles Lindbergh, an American, had famously flown across the Atlantic in a single flight back in 1927; it was only a matter of time before fleets of bombers could do the same. And, in any case, there were now aircraft carriers, floating airstrips that could deliver air power to all corners of the globe. Technology was advancing rapidly. The world was becoming a smaller place.
Be that as it may, it was not a view that was widely shared within the United States. Americans were quite aware of the emergence of Hitler and the Nazis, the suppression of civil rights in Germany, and the rising persecution of Jews and other minorities, and yet the overwhelming view was that these were problems for Europe to resolve not the United States. Americans had reluctantly become drawn into the last war and had been given, in the eyes of many in the US, precious little thanks for it.
Yet they had entered the war in 1917 on the back of idealism – an idealism that had long since been exposed for its naivety and resentfully cast aside. It had been Woodrow Wilson, the US president at the time, who had been the architect of this American world-view, outlining his vision for a future world peace early in 1918 with his ‘Fourteen Points’ speech. He had attended the subsequent Paris Peace Conference with lofty ideals for global free trade and a future League of Nations, in which he saw the United States playing a central and progressive role – the New World showing the Old Order how to create a better, fairer globe. The subsequent Treaty of Versailles, however, had fallen some way short of such ideals; the peace terms revealed no utopian future but rather exposed deep-rooted national mistrust and hatred, made worse by four years of slaughter – much of it on French soil and in the heart of Europe.
One of those who had observed the Paris Peace Conference first hand had been Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, although perhaps his most significant conversation was not at the conference itself, but with Woodrow Wilson on the return crossing afterwards, when the President was still fired with enthusiasm for his proposed League of Nations. ‘The United States must go in,’ he told FDR, ‘or it will break the heart of the world, for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.’
It was not to be, however. When Wilson returned to the United States, he was unable to persuade the Senate to ratify the treaty and with it American membership of the President’s proposed League of Nations. The appetite for playing a leading role in world affairs had gone. Few wanted a large military either; after all, what was the point? What’s more, it appeared to many that the Old Order had prevailed in Europe after all, with Britain and France the major beneficiaries. The New World had tried to help but had had that offer thrown back in its face. Well, if that was the way they wanted it, then fine.
None the less, this new isolationist stance had short-term consequences. Four million men in uniform had to be demobilized and sent home, while the booming wartime armaments industry was to be equally rapidly reduced. It was inevitable that the economy consequently took a dip.
It was hardly any surprise, then, that at the next elections the Democrats were out and the Republicans came to power with the promise of a return to a more inward-looking future. Far from promoting free trade, they increased import tariffs, reduced taxes and encouraged spending. A more laissez-faire approach ensued, in which central government was reduced. The brief dip turned swiftly to boom. Americans were free to enjoy the time of plenty in this young, vibrant and liberal country. The Roaring Twenties and the Jazz Age had arrived.
But while the US had turned its back on leading the world into a progressive modern age, this did not mean America was keeping out of European affairs altogether. Far from it, and throughout much of the 1920s it was the United States which played the most significant part in getting Germany back on to its feet. When the severity of the reparations led to hyperinflation and wheelbarrows of printed money, it was the Dawes Committee that oversaw a dramatic reduction in the payments. Led by General Charles G. Dawes, a Chicago banker and industrialist, and with another American industrialist, Owen Young, the chairman of General Electric, driving the scheme, they also brought in increased foreign investment, re-established the Reichsmark on gold at its pre-war level against the dollar, and helped stabilize the German economy. The New York bankers J. P. Morgan then backed these changes with a massive loan of $100 million.
A further measure was the establishment of a Reparations Agent – in this case a rising Wall Street financier, Parker Gilbert – who had the power to halt any reparations payments if they looked set to endanger the stability of the German economy. Suddenly, the flow of foreign capital – and particularly dollars – was enough to not only get the Reichsmark back on its feet, but also for Germany to easily pay its reparations to Britain and France without default. This money was then ploughed back into the US, which was insisting France and Britain honour their wartime debts. Thus, the money was effectively going round and round, but in the process Germany was climbing back out of the abyss and emerging once more as the modern, industrial economy at the centre of Europe that it had been before the war.
This was all very well until suddenly America, and then the rest of the first world, was mired by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The loans to Germany dramatically dried up, while in the US the days of boom were for the time being over. By the time FDR became the thirty-second President of the United States and brought the Democrats back to power for the first time in twelve years, America was in the grip of the worst depression in its history, with unemployment soaring to 25 per cent and the economy in a nosedive. Roosevelt had got into power on the back of greater isolationism and on the promise of relief, recovery and reform: relief for the poor and unemployed, recovery of the economy, and reform of many of the US’s financial institutions. These pledges were almost entirely domestic and continued America’s inward-looking progress. There was now little room for Germany.
Another central tenet shared by both sides of the American political divide had been the need to reduce the military. It had been Roosevelt, for example, who, as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had overseen much of the demobilization of that part of the services. A strong military, the theory went, did not act as a deterrent but as a provocation. And for America, now pursuing an isolationist stance, there was simply no need to spend billions on large armed forces.
It was a very different world now, however. The democratic Weimar Republic had gone, the German policy of the 1920s had been cast aside, and in its place there ruled an absolute dictator in Adolf Hitler, and a Nazi party that let no opportunity to rattle sabres and display its martial strength slip by.
Roosevelt had not forgotten that conversation with Wilson on the ship back to America after the Paris Peace Conference, however, and no matter how inward-looking he had pledged to be on taking office in 1933, he had become convinced that Hitler was a madman bent on world domination, and that should Germany crush France and Britain, then it would most likely turn on the USA. He still hoped to prevent war, but believed the best way of doing that was to discard the policy of the past two decades and rapidly rearm, and particularly in terms of aircraft. The Germans were known to have more aircraft than Britain and France, and, in the summer of 1939, greater ability to maintain that advantage.
Late in 1938, FDR had sent his friend Hopkins on an undisclosed mission to the West Coast of America to assess the capacity there to build aircraft and how to increase production urgently. Hopkins had reported back favourably. FDR had hoped to sell aircraft, especially, to France and Britain. Perhaps if Germany knew this, it would think twice about taking on the two biggest powers in Europe; he viewed Britain and France as America’s front line, where the critical struggle would take place in the air. American aircraft might make all the difference.
There were two stumbling blocks, however. The first was that this represented a major political volte-face and would require some incredibly deft public relations to pull off, even though there were signs in the polls that increasing numbers of Americans accepted rearmament as a policy. The second was legal – namely, the Neutrality Act of 1937, which placed an embargo on the sale and shipment of arms to any belligerent, whether aggressive dictatorships or friendly democracies. Britain, for example, could get round this by using existing funds in the USA and shipping arms in its own vessels from Canada, but there was no doubt a repeal of the act would show intent and represent a warning shot to Nazi Germany.
A bill to repeal the Neutrality Act had gone before the House of Representatives the previous month, and a fudged, half-baked, amended version of this had been passed on 30 June, 1939. Now, as Harry Hopkins and his daughter, Diana, and sons, Robert and Stephen, joined the President on his yacht, they were awaiting the verdict of the Senate.
Its answer came a few days later on 11 July. The embargo would remain, but the cash-and-carry provisions were removed. From now on, American ships could trade freely if it came to war. As for full repeal of the Act, well, that was deferred until the next session – in 1940. It was what one commentator called ‘a negative compromise between isolationism, collective security, Washington heat, and partisan politics’.
What was certainly true, however, was that the United States, for all its isolationism, had played a major part in the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. There is no question at all that it was the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles that had fired Hitler and his sympathizers. Nevertheless, until 1929, his Nazi party had been largely insignificant. Germany, until then, had been pursuing a democratic course, in which a policy of international co-operation and growing industrial strength was perceived to be the quickest and most effective way of restoring the French-occupied Rhineland and returning the country to the premier stage. Only once Germany began to collapse again following the Great Depression did Hitler and the Nazis start clawing their way into mainstream politics.
In other words, it was Versailles that caused the emergence of the Nazis, but it was the Wall Street Crash that helped get the Nazis into power.
Far across the sea, in Rome, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Galeazzo Ciano, Count of Cortellazzo and Buccari, was struggling to come to terms with the fact that one of those closest to him was dead. His father, Amiragglio Costanzo Ciano, a highly decorated First World War hero, had died on 26 June, somewhat unexpectedly and at only sixty-three years old. His son was desolate. The news, he wrote in the single longest entry in his diary, shocked him deeply. ‘It was a great blow to me, physically and mentally,’ he scribbled. ‘I felt that something was torn away from my physical being. Only at that moment, after thirty-six years of life, did I come to realize how real and deep and indestructible are the ties of blood.’
Ciano’s father had also been at the forefront of the rise of Fascism, which had been more directly attributable to the effects of the last war than had the emergence of Nazism. Italy may have ended up on the winning side, but it had been a pyrrhic victory. Like Germany, Italy was a new country, and was still, for all its rich history, music and arts, a fragmented nation, underdeveloped and struggling to emerge into the modern age. War had exposed one of its greatest weaknesses: a lack of the kind of natural resources needed to drive development and modernity. Italy may have been one of the big five – along with Britain, France, the USA and Japan – to have thrashed out the Treaty of Versailles, but its influence had been minimal, its ambitions unfulfilled, and the country had been left broke. In 1920, the lira crashed and inflation rocketed. Weak governments tumbled one after another.
It was into this maelstrom that Benito Mussolini, a journalist with a fiery and bombastic charisma, emerged. Copying much of the liturgy of the right-wing poet-prince, Count Gabriele d’Annunzio, Mussolini developed a new political movement. Fascism was a belief in the bond of nationhood – the Patria – encapsulated in the spirit and personality of a common leader. Fractious, weak and democratic politics were replaced with strong leadership and plenty of theatre to help unite that sense of a common bond. Thus, in came blackshirts, Roman salutes, banners, slogans – and militarism.
And Amiragglio Ciano, known as ‘Ganascia’ – ‘the Jaw’ – the famous war hero and celebrated in poetry by d’Annunzio, was quick to declare himself for Fascism. The admiral was also there beside Mussolini in October 1922 when the Fascist leader and some 30,000 of his paramilitary squads left their northern strongholds in Milan and the Po Valley and began marching on Rome. Fearing civil war, the King, Vittorio Emanuele III, handed power to Mussolini and his National Fascist Party. Mussolini declared it a revolution, and the March on Rome became part of the mythologizing of Fascism. At any rate, his dictatorship had begun.
The admiral continued to play a major role in Mussolini’s ministry, eventually taking over as President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1934. Being an ennobled war hero in the heart of the new regime brought plenty of riches; the admiral was nothing if not corrupt. At any rate, it was into this world of power and new-found wealth that his son, Galeazzo, emerged. Clever and ambitious, he married Mussolini’s daughter, Edda, in 1930 and swiftly rose through the political ranks. After a posting as Consul in Shanghai, he returned to Italy in 1935 to become Minister of Press and Propaganda. This put him at the heart of Mussolini’s government, although he left Rome to command a squadron of the Regia Aeronautica – the Royal Air Force – during the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. On his triumphant return he was appointed Foreign Minister. Young, suave, handsome and an aviatore, as well as a known womanizer, he was the very embodiment of Mussolini’s new Italy.
A few days after his father’s death, however, the new and second Count Ciano was trying to immerse himself in work – as good an antidote as any for grief. His office, the Palazzo Chigi in the heart of Rome, was suitably grand and luxurious, but these were difficult times for the Foreign Minister. Just a couple of months earlier, Mussolini – Il Duce – had concluded a formal alliance with Nazi Germany, known as the ‘Pact of Steel’. Together, Italy and Germany were now collectively known as the ‘Axis’. The pact had been drawn up almost entirely in Berlin and bound Italy to support Germany in any foreign affairs, including war. During the negotiations, in which Ciano had played a leading part, there had been much discussion about buying time for Italy to properly rearm, but he had been reassured that Germany was planning nothing soon – and certainly not an imminent attack on Poland. Ciano had been reassured and had returned to Berlin on 21 May to sign the following day. He had thought Hitler looked well, although he heard from Frau Goebbels, wife of the Führer’s propaganda chief, that she was tiring of their leader’s monologues. ‘He can be Führer as much as he likes,’ Ciano had written in his diary, ‘but he always repeats himself and bores his guests.’
At the signing ceremony, senior Nazis had crowded around Ciano and the Italian delegation. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, had been given a special Collar of the Annunziata; Göring, Hitler’s deputy and head of the Luftwaffe as well as the leading industrialist in Germany, had looked on enviously. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was also there to witness the removal of any threat to Germany’s ambition from the south. The following day, Ciano had arrived back in Rome to be greeted by a considerable crowd. ‘However, it is clear to me,’ he noted later, ‘that the pact is more popular in Germany than in Italy.’
Seven weeks on, however, it seemed their German allies were not showing them the kind of respect the Italians had expected. Rather, Germany was flagrantly keeping them in the dark; in fact, the Germans had lied to Italy about their intentions towards Poland. Ciano was greatly disturbed.
Openly, the main bone of contention was the Danzig Corridor, a narrow passageway to around seventy miles of the Baltic coastline and including the port of Danzig. Beyond this to the east lay East Prussia, separated from the rest of Germany. The creation of the Second Republic of Poland had been part of the Versailles Treaty and proposed by President Wilson in one of his Fourteen Points. Poland had been an independent country once before but by the end of the eighteenth century had been partitioned three ways by Prussia, Russia and Austria. In other words, it had been part of these countries and with German and Russian peoples living there for almost as long as the United States had been an independent country.
When these lands had been handed back to the Poles in 1919, there had been further war with the Soviet Union, which they had won, but it was unsurprising that both Russia and Nazi Germany wanted these lands back. The Poles felt they had won a historic new independence, free from the yoke of their neighbours; Russia and Germany felt part of their respective countries had been unfairly carved up.
In the intervening years, Poland had managed to fuse these territories into a nation state, but, politically, it had become increasingly authoritarian. A military coup in 1926 was followed by the gradual erosion of parliamentary politics. By 1935, Poland was, to all intents and purposes, a dictatorship. None the less, so long as they toed the political line, most Poles lived freely enough, and while many would have preferred a return to democracy, at least they were independent. The Poles were nothing if not a proud people.
Meanwhile, although non-aggression pacts had been signed with both Germany and the Soviet Union, it was clear Poland was extremely vulnerable to attack from its antipathetic neighbours. Little, however, was done to build up much by way of defences; defence plans were based on the assumption that its armed forces would not be called upon to fight before 1942. The Army was small and poorly trained. It did have a tank that was superior to both the German Panzer Mk I and II, but had only 140 of these 7TPs and in all just two armoured brigades – that is, around one division. Its Air Force had only about six hundred aircraft of all types and most were inferior to those in the Luftwaffe. It wasn’t remotely strong enough to take on Germany; and certainly not the Soviet Union as well.
Germany’s claims, while not justified, were certainly understandable; much of Poland had been German in living memory, and there were plenty of Germans still living in Poland who twenty years earlier had been living in territory that had been Prussian, then German, for more than 125 years. Prior to 1919, Poland had not been an independent country since the eighteenth century – in other words, well beyond living memory. Hitler was well aware, however, that the Poles had no intention of handing over any of this new-found independence. Therefore the only alternative was to take it by force.
Neither Britain nor France was particularly bothered about what happened to Poland, but they were concerned that Hitler should not be allowed to keep land-grabbing. After all, where would it stop? All of Europe? The entire world? After they had backed down at Munich the previous October over the Sudetenland, it was clear that the buck now had to stop. They had to stand up to the ambitions of Hitler and his Nazis.
Equally uninterested in the fate of the Poles was Count Ciano. He didn’t give a fig about Danzig, but he did care about being drawn into a war for which Italy was clearly not ready. It had not been ready in 1914, and, although it had backed the winning side, the war had been a catastrophe for Italy. Mussolini had since claimed he would create a new Italian empire and one that rivalled Ancient Rome, but the wars of conquest in East Africa had not solved the resources problem. What’s more, it was one thing taking on native Africans, as they had done in Abyssinia – and that had been harder than might have been imagined – and another storming into a backward and crumbling Albania, as the Italians had done in April that year; but it was quite a different matter altogether ending up in a full-blown European war against Britain and France. Industrially, economically and materially, Italy could not compete – not unless it had a very huge amount of help from its newest ally.