THE SPRING SUN WAS rising earlier now, climbing higher, burnishing the compacted snow in Moscow streets, washing away the grimy slush of Berlin, starting freshets down the mountains of Greece and Yugoslavia, drawing up poppies in the London ruins and blossoms in the chestnut trees along the Seine, bringing cherry trees to bud along the Washington Tidal Basin and peonies to bloom in the Emperor’s gardens in Tokyo. To soldiers this was fighting weather; along the endless war fronts and coastlines they redoubled their guard and lengthened their watches. Above all, this was Hitler’s time, when he liked to prod and bully and attack. All through the early spring, rumors flashed from capital to capital about the Führer’s next move.
It was a measure of Hitler’s genius, as well as of his power, that in the spring of 1941 he seemed capable of striking in any or all of four directions. The British were still bracing themselves for the possibility of a tremendous onslaught across the Channel. The Spanish were wary; Hitler had been pressuring Franco to allow him to launch a blitz on Gibraltar and then sweep into Africa. The Caudillo had refused, but now it was rumored that the Nazis would invade Spain and stage their blitz anyway. Meanwhile, Hitler kept Vichy France on a tight bit. Then there were reports that the Nazis were concentrating armor and air power in Sicily in order to help the beaten Italians in Libya. And the Balkans, divided by ancient quarrels and racked by internal turmoil, were taut under Nazi pressure.
Roosevelt followed Hitler’s chess moves with deepening anxiety. Encumbered by congressional resistance, inadequate arms, and by his own uncertainties, he tried nevertheless to throw his country’s meager weight into the scales. When Churchill cabled him late in March that the battleship Malaya had been torpedoed while escorting a convoy and he would be “much obliged” if she could be repaired in American yards, the President replied that he would be delighted. When Hitler put pressure on Pétain to line up with the Axis, Roosevelt had his Ambassador in Vichy, Admiral William D. Leahy, reaffirm America’s faith in ultimate British victory. When Churchill warned the President that Vichy was planning to send the battleship Dunkerque from Oran to Toulon for repairs, and thus almost into the Nazi embrace, Roosevelt had Leahy lodge an emphatic and successful protest with Pétain. When the Greeks, fearful of Nazi invasion, begged the President to send thirty modern combat planes that he had long promised, the Commander in Chief pressed his Navy to provide the craft (but Greece would be overrun before they arrived). When Prince Paul, of Yugoslavia, showed signs of succcumbing to Nazi threats, Washington tried to persuade the Regent that the southern Balkans could be held against Hitler.
The President variously tried threats, bribes in the form of Lend-Lease goods, moral exhortation, and friendly counsel. But both his words and his actions had a hollow ring—for here was the most powerful democracy on earth urging small nations to resist the Nazi tide while it sat safely behind its Atlantic moat thousands of miles from the danger zone.
Amid these troubles the two great democracies occasionally found themselves at odds. The White House generally preferred to follow a conciliatory policy toward Pétain and a tough one toward Franco; the British tended to do the reverse. Churchill wanted Roosevelt to stage naval demonstrations in the East Atlantic to impress Portugal and other neutrals; the President was fearful of antagonizing Lisbon and reluctant to divert any of his fleet units from the Pacific. Churchill cabled that he would seize the Azores if Spain yielded to the Nazis or was overrun; Roosevelt cautioned him against such action unless Portugal was attacked, adding that if the British did seize the Azores they must make clear that it was not for permanent occupation. “We are far from wishing to add to our territory,” the Prime Minister answered with hurt pride, “but only to preserve our life and perhaps yours.”
If Washington at times was divided from London, it was also divided within itself. With Atlantic sinkings continuing at a horrifying rate, Stimson prodded the President early in the spring to seize the nettle and order the escorting of Allied ships by American warships and planes. His chief wanted to proceed more slowly—so slowly that some militants yearned for a scapegoat such as Hull, who also seemed cautious in both his Atlantic and his Pacific policy. Ickes barked into his diary: “Once again I say ‘Goddamn the Department of State.’ ”
But most people close to the administration saw the main lack of leadership in Roosevelt himself. Frances Perkins and Frank Walker found alarming lethargy and ignorance about foreign policy in their trips across the country. Frankfurter told Ickes he was at a loss to understand the President’s failure to take the initiative. Stimson bluntly warned his chief late in April that the political situation was deteriorating and that the administration must lead.
Roosevelt would lead—but not by more than a step. He seemed beguiled by public opinion, by its strange combinations of fickleness and rigidity, ignorance and comprehension, by rapidly shifting optimism and pessimism. If the reading and radio-listening public, he told reporters one day, “read history, they ought not to go up on a pinnacle of hope one day because of a sea battle off Italy, and go down to the depths of despair the next day because of an Axis advance in Greece.” The war would be won, he went on, not by one sea fight “but by keeping the existence of the main defense of the democracies going—and, that is England—the British Empire.”
The President was dismayed by the defeatism and fatalism in the country. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s The Wave of the Future had created a minor sensation with its picture of relentless—and seemingly authoritarian—forces at work. “These people,” the President told reporters, “say out of one side of the mouth, ‘No, I don’t like it, I don’t like dictatorship,’ and then out of the other side of the mouth, ‘Well, it’s going to beat democracy, it’s going to defeat democracy, therefore I might just as well accept it.’ Now, I don’t call that good Americanism….”
Yet Roosevelt himself seemed irresolute. When Norman Thomas wrote that convoys would bring total war, Roosevelt sent him a rather wary reply: “…I wish you could be here for a week sitting invisibly at my side. It would not be a pleasant experience for you because you would get a shock every ten minutes.
“You and I are, I think, about the same age and certainly we had hoped to live out our own lives under conditions at least somewhat similar to the past. Today I am not sure that even you and I can do that.”
But Roosevelt was facing an adversary who did understand the “complete change from older methods”—who, indeed, had helped produce the change. In the spring of 1941 Hitler was putting the final touches on his world strategy.
“Who was I before the Great War?” Adolf Hitler had demanded of the workers assembled before him at the Rheinmetall-Borsig Works in December. “An unknown, nameless individual.” But who was Hitler in the spring of 1941? To his people he had become both messiah and miracle worker—a man who had somehow pulled off the great deeds he had promised. To Churchill he was a guttersnipe, a gangster, a “monstrous abortion of hatred and defeat,” and while these epithets were for public consumption they did not much exaggerate Churchill’s private view. To the Russians, despite the pact with Germany, Hitler personalized the final convulsions of capitalism and militarism. To millions of Americans and Britons he was a madman who went into frenzies, foamed at the mouth, fell to the floor, and chewed carpets.
To Roosevelt he was simply an enigma. There were odd resemblances between the two: both liked to talk, to dwell on old times with old friends, to act out roles, to be flattered, to play off friends as well as enemies against one another; they had both come to power at the same time. But the resemblances were superficial; the two men had emerged from different worlds, held almost opposite values.
Hitler as a boy had hated and feared his father and loved his mother, had moved repeatedly from place to place and from school to school, had a sense of self that was at once overblown and empty; Roosevelt loved his parents, had a strong feeling of family, place, identity. Hitler showed little ability to change and adjust; Roosevelt was growing and adapting throughout his life. Roosevelt had an average interest in sex and was restricted in part by lack of opportunity; Hitler had plenty of opportunity with women but was frustrated by his own inhibitions. Roosevelt loved to laugh; Hitler emitted at most a sort of barking gurgle. Roosevelt loved sun, water, and snow; Hitler hated them except at a distance. Roosevelt liked moderate amounts of tobacco, liquor, and meat; Hitler spurned all three. Hitler loved the grandiose, the morbid, the apocalyptic; Roosevelt, the tangible, the proximate, the concrete. Hitler was fascinated by blood, decapitation, by death in all its simplicity and finality; Roosevelt conducted a long love affair with life, with its endless complexity, surprises, and open-endedness.
Hitler was an ideologist. In his five decades of vagrancy, and of trench life, political combat, and finally the conquest of power, he had forged a system of values, a rigid theory of change, and a strategy of political action. The values were folkish, racist, xenophobic; they assaulted everything precious to the liberal mind—egalitarianism, altruism, tolerance, religion, individual liberty, internationalism. Hitler’s theory of change was not of personal flexibility and adaptation, but of unremitting racial and national conflict and brutal violence, with the strong climbing to power over the bodies of the weak; there was no place for the flabby liberal notions of due process, minority rights, civil liberty, parliamentarianism, gradualism, accommodation. Hitler was a true ideologist in that his values, his theory of change, and his political strategy meshed perfectly. And as an ideologist he considered his adversaries not merely wrong or evil, but also mad. Roosevelt was simply crazy, he told his comrades; he behaved like a “tortuous, pettifogging Jew” because there was Jewish blood in his veins, and the “completely negroid appearance of his wife showed that she too was half-caste.”
Hitler as a person was also beyond Roosevelt’s ken. The President was long used to politicians grasping for influence, deserting old friends, breaking promises, nourishing grudges; he himself had done that kind of thing. But in Hitler he was dealing with a man possessed of a rage for recognition and deference far beyond that of a Huey Long or a John L. Lewis. Grounded in the security of doting parents, fixed home, social class, family traditions, Roosevelt could not easily gauge this product of social void and revolutionary turmoil. Hitler had lacked a home, but he found a new home in the Nazi party, in its ideas, and comradeship. Though he knew how to use the carrot as well as the stick, he had become a terrible simplifier. While Roosevelt proceeded by a series of knight’s moves, bypassing, overleaping, encircling, Hitler went straight for his prey—opposition parties, Nazi dissidents, Jews, small nations.
And now in the early weeks of 1941 Hitler was facing the transcendent decision of his life, and of his time. In December he had ordered his high command to prepare a massive land assault against Russia, to take place in May. “The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign (Operation Barbarossa) even before the conclusion of the war against England,” the Führer’s directive began. But the decision was not a final one. While his generals plotted supply routes and staging areas along the thousand-mile front, Hitler pondered his strategic situation.
That situation was stupendous in both promise and portent. Britain was not yet finished. America was giving it increasing support. The English had routed Mussolini’s forces in Africa. The Western Front against Germany had been broken but it still existed at the Channel, and across it Anglo-Saxon power was growing. And if anything had been bred in the bone of every German statesman, strategist, even soldier, especially after 1918, it was this: never fight a two-front war. Hitler himself had stressed the point in Mein Kampf. The Führer had brilliantly mixed force and diplomacy—especially in crushing Poland before the West could intervene—to avoid this strategic vice. Such a principle could yield now to only the most overwhelming considerations. But so they seemed to Hitler.
Russia itself, to begin with, seemed a surly and cunning ally. After the Führer’s generous invitation to Moscow to join the Tripartite Pact—along with spreading out the riches of India for Russia to feast on—Molotov had coolly demanded a free hand in Finland, Bulgaria, the Turkish straits, the Persian Gulf. Soon Hitler was calling Stalin a cold-blooded blackmailer. And what, he reasoned, did Moscow have to back up its claims? Russia was a giant with feet of clay. Its army had been weakened by a merciless purge of officers. Its frontier was vast and poorly defended. Its people, especially in the Ukraine, were eager to throw off the Bolshevik yoke.
The Führer knew, moreover, that Russia had its own dilemma of two fronts. On the east lay Japan, an old adversary, now united with Germany and Italy in a pact of steel. Here Hitler’s surging strategic ambition conjured up global possibilities. “The purpose of the co-operation based on the Three Power Pact must be to induce Japan to take action in the Far East as soon as possible. This will tie down strong English forces and will divert the main effort of the United States of America to the Pacific. In view of the military unpreparedness of her enemies, the sooner Japan strikes, the greater her chances of success….” He instructed his soldiers to respond generously to Tokyo’s requests for military help.
The Führer pondered the interplay of nations’ strategies. The United States in the long run was his most formidable adversary. It was big, rich, remote. He had not wanted to provoke Washington—at least not yet—but Roosevelt seemed to be girding the nation for military action. The destruction of Russia would enable Japan to turn all its strength against America. This in turn—combined with expanded U-boat warfare—would diminish Roosevelt’s support for Churchill across the Atlantic. If American aid reached England, Hitler said, it would be “too little and too late.” Britain, shorn of its present aid from America and of its potential help from Russia, would be forced to its knees. Meanwhile, he must refrain from provocative acts against American ships in the Atlantic.
So the attack on Russia, which to many at the time seemed like a lunatic lunge in the wrong direction, from Hitler’s strategic view was the best way to break the growing global coalition against him. To turn east was really—on Hitler’s very round globe—to turn west. Finally, he reasoned, the conquest of Russia would remove any threat to his rear when he re-engaged Britain, and it would insure vast supplies of raw materials. The timing was ripe, too, he felt. All nations were rearming, including Russia, but all were lagging. If he did not act on his own grand strategy quickly, the opposition coalition would be acting on its own. Were not Moscow and London already plotting against him?
Yet it was not an easy decision. Admiral Raeder opposed the eastern strategy and spoke of the glowing possibilities of action in the Mediterranean, in North Africa, in the Atlantic. Hitler demurred for two final reasons. One was the sheer complexity of operations in the West. Mussolini was proving more a drain than an ally; Vichy was controllable but evasive and inert; Franco was cautious as long as the British fleet dominated his coastline and meantime seemed eager only to drive a hard bargain. The Mediterranean, compared with the Russian heartland, was less a strategic entity than a collection of tactical opportunities—and pitfalls. Operations to the south and west called for consummate skill at mixing diplomacy, propaganda, pressure, and sea, air, and ground power. How much easier to mass his forces, crush Russia in a few tremendous blows, and topple the whole anti-Nazi combination.
The other reason was ideological. The one most powerful, consistent force in Hitler’s thought had been mingled fear and loathing of the Slavic masses to the east, their “Jewish-Bolshevist leaders,” and the huge Red Army. “We must never forget that the regents of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that here is the scum of humanity,” he had raved on and on in Mein Kampf. “We must not forget that the international Jew, who today rules Russia absolutely, sees in Germany, not an ally, but a State marked for the same destiny.” Contemptuous (and envious) of Britain but full of hatred toward Russia, he had negotiated with Moscow purely for reasons of state. In the long run, he believed, there could be only a death grapple between the two ideologies.
So Hitler confronted his sacred mission and wove his global tapestry of war as he stared out at the glistening Alps from his eyrie or bent over huge maps in his chancellery. Years later, even in the nuclear age of overkill, there was something awesome in the power of decision lodged in this one man. The actual authority of “absolute” monarchs and “totalitarian” dictators is usually exaggerated; the poor men are impeded at every step by suspicious allies, ambitious rivals, foot-dragging bureaucrats, demanding relatives, grasping wives or mistresses. But Hitler’s personal power in 1941 was almost total. Between lunch and dinner he could make a decision that would topple governments, spill oceans of blood, desolate scores of cities, change the lives of literally millions of people in one quarter of the globe—and completely spare another corner. In one moment of frenzy or ideological rapture he could order a nation to die, a whole class of people to be exterminated. He was indeed the terrible simplifier.
By this time, moreover, Hitler’s circle had been so narrowed that only a handful were privy to his fateful decisions. Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler vied with one another to carry out their Führer’s orders, even to anticipate them. Ideologically at one with their leader, they had little reason to differ with him except over trifles or about their own power and jurisdiction. The natural sources of opposition—church, trade unions, political parties, intellectuals—had long been suppressed. As for allies, Mussolini had been reduced to the most junior partner; Hitler usually told him about major actions only on the eve. The heads of satellite nations did not dare cross the man whose soaring and shifting fortunes they must now share to the end.
Only the generals had the formal status, the esprit, the professional tradition, and the raw power to withstand him. But by this time they were almost impotent. Again and again proved wrong in their doubts about Hitler’s gambles, hectored and bullied by him, fearful that if they thwarted him he would replace them with more fanatical soldiers or storm troopers, the generals largely stayed silent. They could not even take refuge in the bureaucrat’s time-honored plea of ignorance or misunderstanding, for Hitler left nothing to chance. Hour after hour he lectured his silent generals, outlining his plans, the diplomatic parallel moves, the broader political context, their specific responsibilities.
Only the moral fervor of an independent nation could withstand Hitler in 1941. During the late winter and spring the Führer infiltrated the Balkans to block any show of independence or threat by the British, and to protect his right flank for the drive into Russia. One by one he outflanked and isolated his victims. Bulgaria, threatened by Nazi troops in Rumania and unresponsive to Russian proffers of support, adhered to the Tripartite Pact at the end of February. Turkey, terrified by Hitler’s nearby divisions, was effectively neutralized. Greece, still beleaguered by Italian troops in the northwestern mountains, lay naked to Nazi attack from the northeast. Only Yugoslavia retained some freedom of action and will.
For a time it seemed that this small country, too, would submit to the genteel suffocation that Hitler reserved for nations that had not unduly provoked him. Prince Paul, conscious of his political and military weakness, spurned British invitations to form a common Balkan front against Germany. This was not enough for Hitler. In mid-March he summoned Paul to a secret meeting and demanded that Belgrade adhere to the pact. A week later, facing a final Nazi ultimatum, the Regent decided to comply. Then came an event that was not on Hitler’s schedule—and would fatally alter it. Serbian army officers, outraged by Paul’s capitulation, ousted him from office. Churchill announced elatedly that Yugoslavia had “found its soul” and urged Roosevelt to give the new government his fullest support.
The overturn in Belgrade threw Hitler into a boiling rage. Summoning the high command, he stormed that Yugoslavia must be beaten down once and for all, no matter what declaration of loyalty Belgrade might now make. Quietly and skillfully the generals regrouped their forces; then Nazi planes swooped down on the defenseless capital and almost obliterated the heart of it. Seventeen thousand people died. Nazi columns stabbed across the border from the north and east. Effective resistance was erased within ten days.
Hitler exulted over his devastating show of strength. He had taken some risks, since attack to the south had meant postponing his invasion of Russia by a good month. He was not unduly concerned. Success, like power, ennobles some men; others it emboldens and corrupts. The struggle with Russia, Hitler told his commanders, was one of ideologies and racial differences and would have to be conducted with unprecedented and unrelenting mercilessness. In particular, Soviet commissars—“bearers of an ideology directly opposed to National Socialism—must be shot out of hand.” Schutzstaffel Chief Heinrich Himmler was given “special tasks” in the wake of the attack.
Toward the end of March Hitler summoned his generals again to stress the ideological—and hence ruthless and final—nature of the struggle ahead. “They sat there before him,” an observer remembered, “in stubborn silence, a silence broken only twice—when the assembly rose first as he entered through a door in the rear and went up to the rostrum, and later when he departed the same way. Otherwise not a hand moved and not a word was spoken but by him.”
At the end of April Hitler set June 22 as D day for BARBAROSSA—about five weeks later than the original plan. He was confident; so were his commanders. “We have only to kick in the door,” Hitler said, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”
Nowhere did the pause of winter 1940-41 bring graver strategic reassessments than in the command posts in Whitehall. After the traumas of 1940 the British had, of course, much to celebrate. “We were alive,” Churchill said later. “We had beaten the German Air Force. There had been no invasion of the island. The Army at home was now very powerful. London had stood triumphant through all her ordeals. Everything connected with our air mastery over our own island was improving fast….” The British were winning a brilliant victory over the Italians in the Libyan desert. And “across the Atlantic the Great Republic drew ever nearer to her duty and our aid.”
There was a much darker side. Sinkings along the Atlantic lifeline were still appalling, and the Germans would send out many more U-boats in the coming months. Britain’s voracious war theaters were swallowing up the still-lagging war supply. Tokyo’s intentions in the Orient remained ominously inscrutable. Most troubling of all was the strategic situation in the Mediterranean. Even in the flush of desert victories, Britain could not ignore the weaknesses in the balance of its Near Eastern obligations and power. Franco was still flirting with Hitler, though with the apparent reluctance of a suspicious señorita. Pétain seemed ever subject to collapse under Nazi pressure. German air power hovered over the Balkans. Turkey and other Near Eastern countries coldly measured nearby British strength. This was meager—50,000 British, Indian, and Commonwealth troops scattered across a broad area, six battleships divided between the eastern and western Mediterranean, two hundred planes in the Nile Valley.
What were the Germans planning? British Intelligence failed to divine Berlin’s strategic intention, partly because Hitler had not come to a final decision. All his information indicated that the Germans were still preparing to invade Britain, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt late in January; he was getting ready to give them a reception worthy of the occasion. But there was news from the East that large Nazi air and ground forces were being established in Rumania and infiltrating into Bulgaria, with Sofia’s connivance. “It would be natural for Hitler to make a strong threat against the British Isles in order to occupy us here and cover his Eastern designs.” But, Churchill added with a shade of envy, the Nazi forces were so strong that they could mount both offensives at the same time.
Keeping Roosevelt informed and sympathetic was Churchill’s cardinal policy. The two men still had not met as President and Prime Minister, but their correspondence was becoming frequent and far-ranging. Early in 1941 the President sent Hopkins to England as his personal representative. The British were put off a bit by his unkempt state and blunt talk, but soon they caught the measure of the man. “There he sat,” Churchill remembered later, “slim, frail, ill, but absolutely glowing with refined comprehension of the Cause”—the Cause being the defeat of Hitler—“to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties, or aims.” General Ismay, stiffly noting that Hopkins was deplorably untidy, soon decided that not even Churchill was more single-minded in his conviction that Nazism must be crushed.
Other Roosevelt men followed: W. Averell Harriman, to help expedite Lend-Lease at the British end; William J. Donovan, Roosevelt’s old Republican adversary and personal friend, who conferred with Churchill’s men in the Balkans and the Mediterranean area; and a new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—John G. Winant, former Republican governor of New Hampshire, slow of speech, Lincolnesque of mien, and as committed as Hopkins to Churchill’s Cause.
To the dispatch of such emissaries Churchill responded in kind. On the death of Lord Lothian he chose his Foreign Secretary, Halifax, as Ambassador to the United States, thus also making way for Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office. To signalize the appointment, Churchill sent Halifax across the Atlantic in his newest and mightiest battleship, the King George V, after journeying to Scapa Flow, with an ailing, shivering Hopkins in tow, to see him off. Roosevelt, at the other end, sailed out from Annapolis to greet the new Ambassador—and also got a chance to look over Churchill’s newest dreadnaught.
But all turned on plans being shaped in London—and by March 1941 Churchill and his military chiefs were facing a dire strategic predicament. The Germans were threatening Greece from their Balkan enclaves. Britain, historically a patron of the ancient nation, was providing air support to the counterattack against the Italians. Some kind of Nazi assault was inevitable, British strategists felt, and hence it was crucial to organize an anti-Nazi bloc in the area; in this they had the support of Colonel Donovan, who went from capital to capital exhorting resistance on the natives’ part and offering American aid in the long run but little at the moment. All through the winter London feverishly marshaled diplomatic and military pressure to win the support of Yugoslavia and Turkey. But Belgrade was too exposed to Axis attack, and too divided internally, to put up a resolute front against Hitler, and Ankara feared that acceptance of British aid would simply provoke a Nazi assault on its spirited but underarmed troops.
Amid all the murk and doubt only one nation seemed fixed in its purpose. Athens informed London categorically that it would resist German invasion, as it had Italian. Would the British help them?
Such a question was bound to excite Churchill’s passion, sympathy, and proclivity toward certain strategies. He admired Greek courage; he wanted to set an example—especially for the United States—of British willingness to succor a besieged ally; and the Balkans had long seemed a likely avenue for an ultimate re-entry into the Continent. All this made his dilemma sharper: to send troops to Greece meant taking them away from his North African front. General Archibald Wavell had trounced the Italians; but how soon would Hitler send reinforcements down the Italian boot, across Sicily, and into Africa? Would Greece turn out to be a trap? But could Britain stand by idly, as Eden said, and see Hitler win a bloodless victory?
Some of Churchill’s military men flatly opposed any drain from North Africa, which they viewed as second in importance only to the home islands themselves. “Why will politicians never learn the simple principle of concentration of force at the vital point and the avoidance of dispersal of effort?” General Alan Brooke wondered. Unlike Roosevelt, Churchill was not simply and neatly commander in chief. Unlike Hitler, he could not easily override his generals. He had assumed the post of Minister of Defence so that no intermediary would dilute his direct influence on generals and planners. He deluged them with politely worded minutes and chits that could cut like a lash. Hour by hour his orders, reminders, requests poured out of his office urging “action this day,” overriding excuses, demanding reports. But his sheer vitality betrayed a basic lack of authority and control; he had to deal with professional soldiers who admired his strategic versatility and imagination but deplored his amateurism; he had to clear major decisions with his War Cabinet, which included Labourites as well as Tories; he was answerable to Parliament, which at any time could question his policies, express lack of confidence, and even—though it would be almost un-British—vote him out of office. Within this ancient constitutional system Churchill influenced men less by his formal authority than by his inexhaustible energy, sweeping imagination, popular standing, capacity to cajole, flatter, manipulate, and overwhelm.
And now the soldiers awaited the politicians’ decision on Greece. For a time even Churchill drew back. Military co-ordination with the Greeks was faltering; the Balkan common front seemed less likely than ever; a German general named Erwin Rommel was building up striking power in Libya. “Do not consider yourselves obligated to a Greek enterprise if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco,” Churchill wired to Eden in Cairo. But Eden, Dill, and Waved favored standing by Greece, no matter how hazardous the course.
It was less Churchillian strategy than Churchillian temperament that decided the issue. For months his febrile eye had been sweeping the shores of Europe for openings. He had a leaning toward quick, daring assaults that would exploit Britain’s sea power, keep the enemy off balance, minimize losses, and widen the role of heroism and dash. With all his bent for modern arms, he had a distaste for mass armies, for their heavy apparatus of mechanics, signalmen, lorries, supply depots, laundries, motor pools. War for him was still an enterprise for bravery and brawn, for mobile forces darting and feeling and jabbing. And behind his strategy and temperament was a sense of history—of the role of character and courage, of contingency and chance. One vast effort might fail and all would be lost. Many efforts by unflinching men along a broad periphery might fail, too, but one force might get through and open up a host of new opportunities.
So London stayed committed to Greece, and on April 6—the same day they invaded Yugoslavia—the Germans smashed into the little country from the northeast.
There was something magnificent about a nation, itself beleagured, that stood by its commitment to a small ally despite a sinking realization of the hazards. It was magnificent—but it was not war. Hitler, as usual, followed the soldier’s strategy of massing overwhelming force at the crucial points, and his strategic initiative gave him tactical flexibility. He marshaled fourteen divisions—four armored—for a quick assault. Gallantry and dash on the other side were not enough. Soon the British troops with their Greek comrades were streaming south in a nightmare of shrieking Stukas, burned-out vehicles, blocked one-lane mountain roads, dust, and mud. The British Navy rescued the survivors off the southern coasts of the Peloponnesus; 12,000 dead, wounded, and prisoners were left behind.
Meantime, in North Africa the other pincer was turning. Hitler had not planned a major offensive toward Cairo, but once again he was in the right place with the biggest battalions. Testing the British and Australian defenses, Rommel soon felt out the weaknesses resulting from the diversion to Greece. Then, in a series of nicely executed strokes, he turned Wavell’s left flank, drove the British out of Benghazi, and put Tobruk under siege. Wavell’s great turn-of-the-year victory over Italy was canceled out.
The third and crudest chapter was to come: Crete. With Greece and Yugoslavia secured, Hermann Goering planned an audacious exercise for his pilots, glider men, and paratroops—the first large-scale air-borne attack in history. The Germans mobilized 16,000 paratroopers and mountain soldiers and about 1,200 planes. The blow fell on May 20. The defenders killed hundreds of Germans in the air and on the ground; the British Navy in one night destroyed a convoy, drowning 4,000 men. But the Germans kept coming by air. Within a week the British were performing another miracle of evacuation—and Hitler was celebrating his most daring victory of all.
By now Churchill’s strategy was under heavy fire. Old David Lloyd George, his chief in World War I, rose in the House of Commons to flay the conduct of the war. He remembered passing through discouraging days in the first war. “But we have had our third, our fourth great defeat and retreat.” There was no question about Churchill’s brilliance, he went on. But he needed some “ordinary persons” around him—” men against whom he can check his ideas, who are independent, who will stand up to him and tell him really what they think.…” A dozen other members joined in the attack. Before a rapt house Churchill responded with spirit to Lloyd George’s “not particularly exhilarating talk.” So the former Premier wanted the present one to “be surrounded by people who would stand up to me and say, ‘No, No, No,’ ” Churchill declaimed. “Why, good gracious, has he no idea how strong the negative principle is in the constitution and working of the British war-making machine?” The problem was not more brakes, but more speed. “At one moment we are asked to emulate the Germans in their audacity and vigour, and the next moment the Prime Minister is to be assisted by being surrounded by a number of ‘No-men’.”
Only three Members voted against the government, but recriminations swelled after the debacle in Crete. Churchill grumbled in the House that neither Hitler nor Mussolini had been summoned before their parliaments to account for their mistakes. He reminded the Members that the Germans could readily shift air power along the interior railroads and airways of Europe, while Britain had to send aircraft “packed in crates, then put on ships and sent on the great ocean spaces until they reach the Cape of Good Hope, then taken to Egypt, set up again, trued up and put in the air when they arrive….” He would not go into tactical details. “Defeat is bitter.” The only answer to defeat was victory.
In Parliament Churchill overcame his foes; it was his friends who puzzled him. After Greece, Roosevelt wired him condolences on the loss, congratulations on British heroism in the “wholly justified delaying action,” but added ominously: “Furthermore, if additional withdrawals become necessary, they will all be a part of the plan which at this stage of the war shortens British lines, greatly extends the Axis lines, and compels the enemy to expend great quantities of men and equipment. I am satisfied that both here and in Great Britain public opinion is growing to realize that even if you have to withdraw farther in the Eastern Mediterranean, you will not allow any great debacle or surrender, and that in the last analysis the naval control of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean will in time win the war.”
Churchill bridled at what seemed to be Roosevelt’s counsel of despair. The loss of Egypt and the Middle East would be grave, he warned Roosevelt. In this war every post was a winning-post, “and how many more are we going to lose?” He would be frank. “The one decisive counterweight I can see to balance the growing pessimism in Turkey, the Near East, and in Spain would be if United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent Power.”
Defeat is bitter. After the loss of the Balkans, Churchill faced strategic bankruptcy. Where could he stop Hitler? During these anxious weeks his soldiers had mopped up Italians in East Africa and bested Vichy Frenchmen in Syria; but they had not beaten Nazis. By June he was reduced to the tactics of desperation: to bolster the defense against Rommel he took the terrible risk of sending ships loaded with tanks directly through Gibraltar to Wavell, depleting tank strength at home and risking sinkings in the Mediterranean. The gamble succeeded, but Wavell still could not force Rommel back. Reluctantly Churchill decided to shift Wavell out of the Mideast command. Nothing seemed to be going well. In May the Germans gave London its worst bombing yet and destroyed much of the House of Commons; Churchill stood in the wreckage and cried.
It was clearer to him than ever: America was his only hope. So far, he told the House of Commons in his May 7 speech, his government had made no serious mistakes in dealing with Washington. “Neither by boasting nor by begging have we offended them.” Now must be awaited the full deployment of that mighty democracy of 130 million people. But everyone knew that time was getting short, and the mighty democracy was moving with awful deliberation. Churchill concluded a broadcast to his people:
“For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
“And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.”
Eastward the land was dark and disquieting. During the lull of 1940-41, London and Washington tried to divine Tokyo’s next moves. Would the Japanese expand their drive into China, or turn north toward Soviet Siberia, or south toward the exposed colonies of France and Holland, or east toward the Philippines or even Hawaii? Step by step the soldiers and diplomats of Tokyo had been building the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; they had occupied Hainan, poured troops into northern French Indochina, signed the Tripartite Pact, set up a puppet government in Nanking, demanded oil and trade in the Dutch East Indies. What next?
Rumors drifted through Tokyo. “…There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor,” Ambassador Grew noted in his diary late in January 1941. “I rather guess the boys in Hawaii are not precisely asleep.”
In fact the Japanese had no master plan, no global strategy, to guide their expansionist thrust. Hopes that had bloomed in mid-1940, after the fall of France and the air blitz on Britain, were ebbing. Tokyo had calculated that Axis power and unity might discourage British and American aid to China, attract Russia to the Tripartite Pact, and persuade Chiang to accept a settlement dictated by Japan. Instead, Russia, as well as Great Britain and the United States, was still giving aid and comfort to Chungking. Now the Japanese were waiting on the next move abroad—on Hitler’s strategic decisions, Britain’s capacity to survive, America’s response to Axis moves.
No co-ordinated strategy at this point could have emerged from the unstable equilibrium over which Premier Konoye presided. Every week or so, in a small room at his residence, a “liaison conference” was held to link diplomatic and military policy. The meetings were dominated by the military—by Army and Navy Chiefs of Staff, and by young staff officers in close touch with extremist elements in the General Staff. But the division in Tokyo was not simply between the soldiers and the civilians. The military leaders, too, were divided—especially the Navy and the Army—and some of the civilians were more militant than some of the military. Foreign Minister Matsuoka startled even the saber-rattlers with his grandiose dreams of expansion.
Unsure of their strategy, divided in their councils, the Japanese tried to divine the inscrutable Occident. Would their German ally launch an invasion of Britain, or turn south, or even attack Russia? Could Britain maintain its power in the Pacific—in India, Singapore, Hong Kong—if the Nazis stepped up their pressure on the home islands, in Africa, or in the Atlantic? Above all, what about the United States? To Tokyo planners Roosevelt seemed the most baffling of Western leaders. He appeared to shift overnight from conciliation to threats to high-blown preaching to invitations to parley. But item by item—so gradually as to rob Tokyo of a dramatic issue—he was restricting the export of war materials to Japan.
In February Matsuoka left Tokyo on a good-will mission to Moscow and Berlin. He had a vaulting ambition—endorsed by many of his colleagues in the liaison conferences—both to tighten Japan’s bonds with its Axis partners and to bargain for Soviet recognition of Japan’s role in northern China, Manchuria, and the whole Co-Prosperity Sphere. Thus Japan’s northern flank would be protected while its soldiers drove deeper toward Chungking—protected, too, in the event that its Navy and Army turned south.
In Washington, Roosevelt viewed the journey with wry detachment. “When it is announced that a certain gentleman starts for Berlin and Rome,” he wrote to Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, “it might be possible for the Secretary or you to express a slight raising of the eyebrows in surprise that he is not also planning to visit Washington on his way home!”
Matsuoka’s first stop after taking the slow train across Siberia was Moscow, where he offered Stalin a nonaggression pact. The Russians were cautious. Then on to Berlin, where Matsuoka was received with pomp and punctilio. Soon he was closeted with Hitler, who concentrated on impressing his visitor even though he was in the midst of the Yugoslav crisis. To his silent guest the Führer boasted of his war successes: how he had crushed sixty Polish divisions, six Norwegian, eighteen Dutch, and twenty-two Belgian, one hundred and thirty-eight French, all in a year and a half; how he had routed the British Army in France; how he was winning the Battle of the Atlantic and bailing out the unlucky Italians in North Africa. England had already lost the war and was now simply looking for any straw to grasp. It had only two—America and Russia.
He did not want to provoke Roosevelt into war, he went on, at least for the time being. America had three choices: it could arm itself, or it could assist England, or it could fight on another front. If it helped England it could not arm itself. If it abandoned England, the latter would be destroyed and America would be left isolated and facing the Axis. But in no case could America wage war on another front. As for Russia, the Reich had made treaties with that country, but far more important were the 160 to 180 German divisions for “defense” against Russia. Hitler said not a word to Matsuoka about his plans for its invasion.
Then Hitler dangled the bait before the Foreign Minister’s gold spectacles. This, he said, was the perfect moment—indeed, it was unique in history—for Japanese action against Britain. Of course there was risk, but it was small now, with Russia immobilized by German divisions on its western border, Britain weak in the East, and America in only the early stages of rearming. The Axis, moreover, would suffer no division of interests; Germany, whose interest lay in Africa, was as little concerned with East Asia as Japan was with Europe. America would not dare move west of Hawaii.
At last Hitler stopped talking and looked challengingly at the Foreign Minister. Matsuoka spoke guardedly. He agreed with the Führer in principle, he said. He himself wanted to follow such a strategy—he had specifically favored an attack on Singapore—but he could not overcome the weak intellectuals, businessmen, court circles, and all the others who were balking him. He could make no commitment, but he would personally work for the goals he and the Führer shared. Hitler was visibly disappointed, and he decided to show his hand a bit. Bidding Matsuoka good-by, he said: “When you get back to Japan, you cannot report to your Emperor that a conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union is out of the question.” But the Foreign Minister left Berlin, as Hitler carefully planned, without any definite knowledge of Nazi plans for Russia.
If Hitler deceived his Japanese ally on the most crucial question of the day, Matsuoka had an agreeable opportunity to turn the tables when he returned to Moscow. Not only had Hitler made clear that Russia would not be invited to join the Tripartite Pact, but Ribbentrop had advised Matsuoka not to get too involved with the Russians. Matsuoka still had his own game: settling his nation’s differences with the Russians. Those differences were acute: Soviet aid to China, Japanese threats to Moscow’s Far Eastern borders, and Russian demands that Japan sell the southern part of Sakhalin as against Tokyo’s insistence on its oil and coal rights in the Soviet northern half. In several days of hard bargaining, Matsuoka won Stalin’s approval of a simple neutrality agreement that avoided the basic issues. Stalin merely dropped his demand for southern Sakhalin in response to Matsuoka’s promise that he would urge his government to ease its objectives in northern Sakhalin. The cardinal point was an agreement to maintain neutrality in case either party was attacked by a third.
Konoye welcomed Matsuoka home with his pact. The Japanese rejoiced; their Foreign Minister had managed—seemingly—to strengthen ties with Berlin and at the same time narrow the danger of Soviet pressure in Asia. There was some grumbling. The diplomatic and military situation in the southern seas was as awkward as ever. But now Tokyo could turn to its main goal: the final conquest of China through war and diplomacy. Now Chiang would see the futility of his efforts; now Washington would reconsider its aid to Chungking. All other considerations of strategy were subordinated to this transcendental goal. Japan’s prestige and honor were too exposed, the military too entangled, the people too psychologically committed, the losses already suffered too great, the political repercussions of a withdrawal from China too dire, for Japan now to compromise its long struggle on the mainland.
In Chungking, a thousand miles up the Yangtze from the coast, the Nationalist government experienced neither the luxury nor the quandary of strategic choice. At the end of 1940, after three years of resistance, the Chinese faced a bellicose enemy holding almost all his seaports and the richer sections of the country. With insouciance, Japanese aircraft rained bombs on the capital; the Nationalists had neither planes nor guns to drive them away. People huddled in deep dugouts in the high cliffs of the city; any day correspondents could see bloated human corpses floating down the river, drifting against junks, and being pushed away by boatmen with long spiked poles.
In an unpretentious mansion called “Ying Wo” (“Eagle’s Nest”) lived Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek and a small staff of servants and guards. With his wiry frame and lean chiseled features, the Generalissimo looked like the ascetic he was; he dressed in simple khaki uniforms, ate lightly, drank little, and smoked not at all. But in early 1941 he presided over a country with a horrifying contrast between rich and poor, even in wartime; a country becoming slowly more disorganized, demoralized, and even defeatist. Chiang was still the public symbol of national revolution, but by now he was as anti-Communist as he was anti-Japanese. His army, underfed and badly cared for, was barely able to stabilize the front; and the old admiration for the Nationalist leader was changing in some quarters to suspicion that he was far more anxious to protect his postwar position and bleed the Americans than to withstand the Japanese.
China’s situation was in fact critical. Tokyo had set up a puppet regime in Nanking under Wang Ching-wei, and however much the Kuomintang railed at the “arch-traitor,” he obviously presided over a widening suzerainty. In the northwest the Chinese Communists maintained a state within a state and an army within an army; while committed to the struggle against Japan, the Communists were demanding from Chungking concessions that could only bolster their position in the long run. With the Burma Road cut off for months, Nationalist China was almost isolated, and it was caught in a soaring inflation. The Army was vast but inefficient and under-equipped, the generals often incompetent, the old war lords still un-dependable. Japan’s Axis partner was trying to bully Chungking into accepting Tokyo’s terms. Germany had won the war in Europe, Ribbentrop told the Chinese Ambassador in Berlin; clearly China could not hope for succor from Britain, or from the United States either.
In its extremity China had redoubled its appeals to Roosevelt. His nation was nearing collapse, Chiang had warned the President through the American Ambassador, Nelson Johnson. He particularly needed dollars and planes. His pleas brought a sympathetic answer from the President and a flurry of activity in Washington, but tangible aid was still low. The War Department opposed any more diversions of weapons from its already deprived forces, or from Britain’s. By the end of 1940—after all the fervent appeals and fine responses—the United States had sent only nine million dollars in arms and munitions to the Nationalists.
In January 1941 Chiang did receive from Roosevelt an important emissary in the person of Lauchlin Currie, an administrative assistant to the President. Looking at China through an economist’s eyes, Currie was pessimistic about helping Chungking overcome inflation, but he returned to Washington more sensitive to China’s desperate needs. During the spring, while Matsuoka was known to be urging Moscow to abandon its aid to China, Chungking received promises from Washington that it would be eligible for aid under Lend-Lease, and that Currie himself would be in charge. The Generalissimo had a persuasive representative in Washington in his brother-in-law, T. V. Soong. By now Chiang was asking for over half a billion in aid, including over a thousand fighting planes and bombers.
And Russia? News of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact fell like a thunderbolt in Chungking. At first Chiang was convinced that Moscow would abandon him; surely Matsuoka must have exacted this as part of the bargain. But the mysterious Russians promptly got word to Chungking that the new pact did not affect the Chinese. The Soviets would help them as long as they kept on fighting the invaders. At the same time Washington, jarred by the pact, renewed its promises of assistance. Plans were quickly made to speed money and supplies. In mid-April Roosevelt signed an executive order, which he left unpublicized, authorizing American airmen to resign from their services for the specific purpose of forming a volunteer and “civilian” group in China. This was the beginning of the Flying Tigers, under Colonel Claire L. Chennault, who had been Chiang’s adviser for air since leaving the United States Army. And the President, in response to Chiang’s request for help in getting a political adviser, suggested a scholar named Owen Lattimore, who would soon be on his way to Chungking.
In May, as China approached its fifth year of struggle against invasion, Chiang was still lecturing his friends from his moral pinnacle as the first victim of aggression. At a farewell dinner for Ambassador Johnson he threw down his challenge to Washington. “We believe our ultimate victory can be secured on the mainland of Eastern Asia alone provided the American people second their government’s policy without reserve and bring their full weight to bear in support of Chinese resistance. If, on the other hand, the nations of the Pacific are careless of their responsibilities, each waiting for others to move first, exhibiting afresh the laissez-faire and slothful conduct of the past, ignoring Japanese designs and ambitions and failing positively to assist Chinese resistance—then a great war involving the whole Pacific area will ensue with consequences that do not bear thinking about.”
While soldiers and statesmen around the world were calling in their final credits, making or renewing commitments, and finally choosing sides during the early months of 1941, Franklin Roosevelt remained the strategic enigma in the swaying balances of global power and purpose. His December 29 broadcast and the Lend-Lease Act had made clear his commitment to the survival of Great Britain. But what was his purpose beyond material aid to America’s old partner? Some foreigners assumed that Roosevelt’s wavering course actually cloaked a firm global strategy. At home the isolationists suspected that the President, despite his artless ways, was directing a Grand Conspiracy designed to plunge the country into war. Even some presidential subordinates, operating in their tiny enclaves, assumed that the Commander in Chief, with his spacious White House perspective, was forging some master plan.
They did not know their man. At this juncture Roosevelt was unable to pierce the fog of world battle, was still shying away from final commitments. “…We cannot lay down hard-and-fast plans,” he wrote to Grew. Not only did he evade strategic decisions, but he refused to let his military chiefs commit themselves on the most compelling matters. When late in 1940 Knox submitted Navy estimates covering several years ahead, Roosevelt wrote to him: “The dear, delightful officers of the regular Navy are doing to you today just what other officers were trying to do to me a quarter of a century ago. If you and I were regular officers of the Navy, you and I would do the same thing!” The Navy was asking for too many men, he went on.
“This is a period of flux. I want no authorization for what may happen beyond July 1, 1941.
“All of us may be dead when that time comes!”
The admirals and the generals could not be so noncommittal. They had to plan across a longer span of time, for the decisions they made at any one point—about construction, supplies, equipment, training stations—would affect operational decisions for years. It was part of their doctrine that tactical decisions were feckless and self-defeating unless shaped by broad strategy. For years the military had been drawing up elaborate plans to vanquish all possible foes—including Britain—and combinations of foes. Dramatically labeled Red, Orange, Blue, and so on, these plans were tactically impressive but strategically almost worthless, for they existed in a political void that the Commander in Chief had no interest in filling. The fall of France and the investment of Britain had shaken the military men out of their abstractions. Two things were now imperative: closer liaison with the British and more realistic strategic assessments. Roosevelt, despite his distaste for planning—especially with the election coming up—late in June 1940 had presented a “hypothesis” that six months later Britain would still be intact, the British and French still holding in the Middle East, and the United States “active in the war” but with naval and air forces only. It was a brilliant projection—and one that the President of course kept secret.
In mid-November, with the President safely re-elected, Admiral Harold (“Betty”) Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, sent him a strategic appreciation outlining four basic alternatives in the event of United States involvement in the war: A. concentrate on hemisphere defense; B. concentrate on Japan, and only secondarily in the Atlantic; C. make an equal effort in both oceans; D. maintain the offensive in the Atlantic, culminating in a British-American land offensive, with the Pacific secondary. Alternative D—”Plan Dog”—assumed that even if “forced into” a war with Japan, the United States would avoid major operations in the Pacific until Britain was at least secure. Plan Dog—the “first attempt to deal with American military strategy as a whole”—called clearly for an “Atlantic First” policy that would cast a long shadow over later American strategy.
Roosevelt neither approved nor disapproved Plan Dog and its portentous order of priorities. He merely endorsed Stark’s proposal of military conversations with a British staff group, provided, of course, that they were secret, purely exploratory, and without commitment. Under the pressure of having to present the British with agreed-on positions, the Army and Navy by 1941 were lined up solidly behind Plan Dog. The American choice of Atlantic First—which practically meant Britain First—would be hardly unwelcome to the visitors from London, who were to arrive in Washington late in January disguised as members of the civilian British Purchasing Commission.
The man most in need of a clear lead from the President was the Army’s Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall. Sworn in on September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland, Marshall was a protégé of General Pershing and a product of the Army’s command and staff system. Quietly assured, stiff, courtly in a standoffish way, he was a planner and organizer who had managed to bring his own strong temper under control and was trying to apply logic and order to the building of an army in a context of unstable domestic politics and unpredictable global turmoil. Toward the President he was reserved even to the point of not laughing at his jokes; his passion for prudent planning and administrative order, as Forrest Pogue has noted, ran counter to Roosevelt’s ways, but the two men got along well in their work, partly because of Hopkins’s mediation.
By mid-January the President was willing to give some lead to Marshall and the other planners. In a long meeting with Hull, Stimson, Knox, Marshall, and Stark he estimated that there was one chance in five that Germany and Japan might jointly launch a sudden attack on the United States. In that event Washington would notify London immediately that it would not curtail supplies to Britain. The British could survive for six months, the President estimated, and with another two months before the Axis could turn west, the United States would have eight months to gather strength. Roosevelt warned the group, however, that long-range military plans were unrealistic; the Navy and Army must be ready to act with what was available. He concluded the meeting with some cautious directives, as summarized by Marshall:
“That we would stand on the defensive in the Pacific with the fleet based on Hawaii; that the Commander of the Asiatic Fleet would have discretionary authority as to how long he could remain based in the Philippines and as to his direction of withdrawal—to the east or to Singapore; that there would be no naval reinforcement of the Philippines; that the Navy should have under consideration the possibility of bombing attacks against Japanese cities.
“That the Navy should be prepared to convoy shipping in the Atlantic to England, and to maintain a patrol off-shore from Maine to the Virginia Capes.
“That the Army should not be committed to any aggressive action until it was fully prepared to undertake it; that our military course must be very conservative until our strength had developed….
“That we should make every effort to go on the basis of continuing the supply of materiel to Great Britain, primarily in order to disappoint what he thought would be Hitler’s principal objective in involving us in a war at this particular time, and also to buck up England.”
The President also took a hand in revising the formal American position to be presented to the parley. For the words “should the United States desire to resort to war” he carefully substituted “should the United States be compelled to resort to war.” He also replaced the term “Allies” with “Associates.”
In the two months of meetings that followed, the American and British staffs agreed that Britain’s security must be maintained “in all circumstances,” that the British Commonwealth must be ultimately secure, that the “Atlantic and European areas” were considered the decisive theater, though the “great importance of the Mediterranean and North African areas” was duly noted, and that the Associated Powers would “conduct a sustained air offensive to destroy Axis military power,” eliminate Italy early, carry out raids, support underground groups, and, finally, capture positions from which to launch “the eventual offensive against Germany.” Detailed plans were laid for full American participation in escorting convoys in the North Atlantic, for mobilizing heavy units of the American Navy in the eastern Atlantic, and even for deploying twenty-five or thirty American submarines “for operations against enemy shipping in the Bay of Biscay and the Western Mediterranean.” Recognizing some of the global implications, the planners agreed that American concentration in Europe required augmented British effort in the Far East.
The staff meetings ended on March 29, 1941; the Commander in Chief took no formal position on the agreements then or for months afterward. In contrast to Hitler’s penchant for seizing the strategic initiative and carefully indoctrinating his generals, Roosevelt had a strangely passive role. By spring 1941 his Navy and Army were all but committed to a strategy that had emerged largely from military leaders, many of whom deliberately tried to exclude political and diplomatic questions on the ground that they were questions for civilians. Military and civilian planners did not work closely together in the fragmentized system the President ran. There is little indication that the strategic possibilities of a “Pacific First” emphasis were ever fully confronted—for example, the importance of heavily bolstering the shaky Chinese defenses. Something could have been said for a decision to beat the weaker nation first and then close in on Germany. Atlantic First was adopted for compelling but essentially military reasons.
Roosevelt was following a simple policy: all aid to Britain short of war. This policy was part of a long heritage of Anglo-American friendship; it was a practical way of blocking Hitler’s aspirations in the west; it could easily be implemented by two nations used to working with each other; it suited Roosevelt’s temperament, met the needs and pressures of the British, and was achieving a momentum of its own. But it was not a grand strategy embracing the full range of world-wide diplomatic, political, and economic as well as military power, potential as well as existing. It did not emerge from clear-cut confrontation of political and military alternatives; and it concentrated on practical ways of winning military victory—or at least preventing Axis victories—rather than on the long-run war and postwar security needs of the United States.
Above all, this strategy was a negative one in that it could achieve full effect—that is, joint military and political action with Britain—only if the Axis took action that would force the United States into war. It was a strategy neither of war nor of peace, but a strategy to take effect (aside from war supply to Britain and a few defensive actions in the Atlantic) only in the event of war. Unless the President was willing and able to lead the nation into war—and he was not—the strategy was inoperative. All this Hitler understood—and hence it was largely his decision as to whether Roosevelt’s strategy would come into operation at all.
Hitler’s thunderous April blows in Greece, Yugoslavia, and North Africa resounded like a fire bell in Washington. There was a shiver of apprehension over Britain’s capacity to wage war at all. Once again that country seemed to be showing military skill only in retreat and evacuation. Old differences surfaced; some of the military urged all-out war; others, withdrawal to the hemisphere; others remembered their troubles with the British in World War I. Many now doubted Britain’s capacity to survive. London seemed at the end of its rope. “It has been as if living in a nightmare,” Harriman later wrote to Hopkins, “with some calamity hanging constantly over one’s head.”
The President seized on every immediate means of helping Britain. He authorized British ships to be repaired in American docks, British pilots to be trained on American airfields. He transferred ten Coast Guard cutters to the Royal Navy. He widened the American neutrality patrol zone, putting Greenland and the bulge of Africa under Navy surveillance. And he announced the long-brewing agreement with the Danish Minister placing Greenland under the temporary guardianship of the United States and authorizing the construction of bases there.
Outwardly Roosevelt maintained his usual cheerful demeanor. On April 15—in the midst of gloomy conferences on Britain’s crisis—he held an uproarious press conference. He opened by noting the “nice little coincidence” that on the first actual Lend-Lease list there really had been garden hose—actually fire hose, he admitted, after the laughter subsided. Would Hopkins be paid for his new Lend-Lease role? “Yes, sure. He’s a Democrat! What a foolish question.”
The President went on: “That was what I said to Bill Knudsen the other day. In about the fourth or fifth list of these dollar-a-year men, they were all listed as Republicans except a boy who had graduated from Yale last June and never voted, and I said, ‘Bill, couldn’t you find a Democrat to go on this dollar-a-year list anywhere in the country?’ He said, ‘I have searched the whole country over. There’s no Democrat rich enough to take a job at a dollar a year.’ ” Again and again the reporters burst into laughter at Roosevelt’s sallies—and then stood impressed while he went into the detailed historical background of Denmark and Greenland.
Actually the President was deeply concerned about Britain’s position—even more so because he felt helpless to intervene with decisive effect. He asked Marshall and Stark to reassess the situation in the Middle East in the event of a British withdrawal from the eastern Mediterranean. And inexplicably he sent Churchill the long cable that upset the Prime Minister but that was evidently intended to solace Churchill if he had to pull out of the Middle East.
Of all the spikes of the global crisis the sharpest was in the North Atlantic. As the days lengthened, shipping losses mounted sharply again. The German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were terrorizing the Atlantic, and the U-boats were perfecting new wolf-pack tactics. During one frightful night in early April a convoy lost ten of its twenty-two ships. The Atlantic was the one pivotal arena in which American intervention could be quick and crucial. Churchill was pleading for help. What could Roosevelt do?
For months the President had been tacking back and forth on the question of protecting British convoys. The administration had long before established patrols to observe and report on the movements of Axis raiders; they had even reported movements to the British. But naval escorts of convoys were a far more serious matter; such escorts would presumably attack nearby Axis ships or submarines on sight—and that was precisely why Churchill wanted Roosevelt to escalate from patrolling to escorting. The President fully saw the implications. In January he had said to reporters, as if to disarm his critics: “Obviously, when a nation convoys ships, either its own flag or another flag, through a hostile zone, just on the doctrine of chance there is apt to be some shooting—pretty sure that there will be shooting—and shooting comes awfully close to war, doesn’t it?” The reporters agreed. The President continued: “You can see that that is about the last thing we have in our minds. If we did anything, it might almost compel shooting to start.” In the following weeks Stimson, Knox, and Stark pressed Roosevelt to give British shipping the protection it needed; the President had been evasive and noncommittal. During this same period he was insisting publicly that Lend-Lease would help keep the nation out of war.
After the spring crises it seemed to many that the decision to escort convoys could no longer be put off. At a White House meeting Stimson, Knox, and now Hopkins urged the President to act. If the Navy was turned loose, Knox said, it “would clean up the Atlantic in thirty days.” But forthright action in the Atlantic required in advance the transfer of a fleet from the Pacific, and the President quailed at this global redisposition. Here Hull affected the problem. For weeks he had been holding interminable discussions with Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura, who had been presenting the more pacific face of Japan. Hull feared that Tokyo would misinterpret withdrawal of fleet units from the Pacific as a sign of weakness. Stimson and Marshall tried to convince their chief that Hawaii was impregnable; but the President feared that Singapore, Australia, and the Dutch East Indies would be vulnerable without the American Navy. In vain Stimson urged on him that Britain could protect Singapore if the United States would reinforce the Atlantic. The President, backed by Hull and aware that the military itself was divided, would not move the fleet—and he would not order Atlantic escorts.
Harold Carlisle, The Des Moines Register and Tribune Syndicate, from the Washington Post, April 29, 1941
May 5, 1941, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York Post
Roosevelt hoped that stepped-up patrolling would help in the Atlantic. Then, he told Stimson and Knox late in April, he could inform Latin-American capitals about Axis raiders. Stimson bridled. “But you are not going to report the presence of the German Fleet to the Americas. You are going to report it to the British Fleet.” With his simplicity and directness and his narrower military responsibilities, he wanted Roosevelt to be honest with himself. The President must take the lead and also the risk, Stimson felt, for the public would not tell him ahead of time if they would follow him. But the President would not lead.
Was Roosevelt hoping that patrolling would trigger an incident that would dramatize Hitler’s threat to the hemisphere and unite Americans behind a bolder strategy? Ickes and others were convinced that he was. But evidently no ordinary incident would do. On April 10 the American destroyer Niblack, while picking up survivors from a torpedoed Dutch merchantman, had made sound contact with a submarine and had driven it off with depth charges. This episode—the first military encounter between American and German armed forces—Roosevelt had not used to dramatize the emergency. What was he waiting for?
A deepening crisis of confidence enveloped the administration in May. No one knew what was going to be done, Stimson complained. Morgenthau, who had now concluded that the United States must go to war to save Britain, felt that both Roosevelt and Hopkins were groping as to what to do. Wallace wrote that the farm people of Iowa were ready for a “more forceful and definite leadership.” Hopkins at one moment defended the President and in the next urged the military leaders to press their chief harder. In a tragicomic moment Stimson actually interrupted Hull’s croquet game to enlist support for a changed policy. The croquet player continued his game. Roosevelt’s personal friends—MacLeish, Frankfurter, William C. Bullitt—were deeply troubled. Ickes met secretly with Stimson, Knox, and Jackson to discuss ways of putting pressure on the President; all agreed that Roosevelt was failing to lead, that the country wanted more action and less talk, that something dramatic was needed to seize the attention of the world. It was Stimson who finally belled the cat. The people, he told the President to his face, must not be brought to combat evil through some accident or mistake, but through Roosevelt’s moral leadership.
Why was Roosevelt so passive? His lieutenants searched for clues. He was in and out of bed with an enervating fever during much of May, but he seemed no more militant during his ups than his downs. He was watching Congress and public opinion warily—especially an anticonvoy resolution in the Senate—but he seemed no more purposeful after the resolution was blocked. Clearly he felt constrained by his peace pledges—to Stimson, he seemed “tangled up in the coils of his former hasty speeches on possible war and convoying as was Laocoön in the coils of the boa constrictors”—but the militants were not urging a declaration of war, but simply more drastic action. Bullitt perhaps came closest to understanding Roosevelt’s mind at this point. The President realized that the United States would stand alone and vulnerable if Britain went down, Bullitt reported to Ickes after a long talk with Roosevelt, but he could not bring himself to go in simply and directly. He was still waiting for a major provocation from Hitler even while recognizing that it might not come at all. Above all, he was trusting to luck, to his long-tested flair for timing, and to the fortunes of war. He had no plans. “I am waiting to be pushed into the situation,” he told Morgenthau in mid-May—and clearly it had to be a strong shove.
So the crisis of confidence was also a crisis of strategy. Roosevelt was still waiting on events. When he and Hull caviled at shifting fleet units from the Pacific, he was ultimately responding to Hitler’s strategy of bolstering Tokyo in order to divert America from Europe. But the President had the virtues of his strategic defects; at least he would stay flexible, loose, ready to seize the opportunity. During May he agreed to shift about a quarter of the Hawaiian fleet to the Atlantic. And under pressure from the militants he considered making a major speech in which he would declare an unlimited national emergency—but then to their despair he delayed the speech.
The President wanted to move foot by foot. At a Cabinet meeting he had contended that patrolling was a step forward. Stimson burst out: “Well, I hope you will keep on walking, Mr. President. Keep on walking!”
Half a world away from Roosevelt—and a world away in mind and outlook—Joseph Stalin, too, was watching Adolf Hitler, playing for time, hoping for the best. If Hitler and Roosevelt were near-opposites in ideology and temperament, the Soviet dictator and the American President seemed almost polar opposites in personal style: the one hard, stolid, patient, granitic; the other dexterous, articulate, supple, noncommitted. Both were outlanders—Roosevelt the product of a graceful Hudson River culture; Stalin, of the violent, poverty-ridden, hate-seared land of Georgia—and both had moved into the political heartland and mastered it. But while Roosevelt had risen through the loose, fragmented politics of an open society, Stalin had played a different game, slowly amassing influence in a monolithic party structure, effacing himself to avoid the ripostes of Trotsky and other Bolshevik luminaries, building alliances, jockeying for key posts, and then, after acquiring the party leadership, coldly isolating and destroying his political adversaries.
Stalin was the supreme ideologue, calculating and acting within a closed logical system, viewing the world through vulgate-Marxist prisms. Roosevelt was the supreme opportunist, eschewing dogma, avoiding final commitments. They spoke different political languages. Stalin preferred the “practical arithmetic” of agreements to the “algebra” of declarations, as he once remarked to Eden, but Roosevelt preferred political algebra—the forms, symbols, devices that facilitated day-to-day compromise even at the risk of disagreement and misunderstanding.
Now, by a hard twist of fate, the ideologue was not controlling history, and the opportunist could not long evade it. Hitler had not only forced these disparate men into the same camp, but also forced them into a similar global stance. Strategically they were both marching to the Nazi drum beat.
As a strategist, Stalin had sought to combine ideology and Realpolitik in the service of Bolshevism and the motherland. His armies were to stand clear of the long-expected death struggle of fascist and bourgeois states; meanwhile they would prevent hostile encirclement of Mother Russia and avoid a two-front war. During the 1930’s he had tried warily and sporadically through Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to join Western nations in efforts at collective security. The West, its leaders irresolute and divided, fearful of both fascism and Bolshevism, had temporized too long. Stalin’s ideological radar picked up, amplified, and distorted the complex forces at work in the West, exaggerating the influence of Russophobes and Red baiters in Western chancelleries, assuming that “monopoly capitalism” would be bound by the ineluctable logic of history to attack Bolshevism, perceiving every conciliatory move toward Hitler as a capitalist plot to deflect Nazi expansion to the east. Munich was not only a surrender to Hitler but also a catalyst of fear and mutual suspicion between Moscow and the West. Within a year Stalin had replaced Litvinov with the glacial Molotov, signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler, and stunned the world with his ideological and military flip-flop.
Molotov rubbed the salt of Realpolitik into Western wounds. Only recently, he conceded before the Supreme Soviet, Germany and Russia had been enemies. “The situation has now changed,” he went on blandly, “and we have stopped being enemies. The political art in foreign affairs is…to reduce the number of enemies of one’s country, and to turn yesterday’s enemies into good neighbors.”
But how good were the good neighbors, now hundreds of miles closer to Moscow after the partition of Poland? Stalin had played the diplomatic game with Hitler, bargaining, pressuring, protesting, appeasing, and always hoping that Axis and Allies would bleed each other to debility if not death. As a strategist Stalin faced a dilemma like Roosevelt’s. He led a people conditioned to wanting to stay out of other people’s wars, namely “European” wars. Stalin knew that Russian soldiers would fight badly in the attack but defend their motherland tenaciously if invaded. He was almost as restricted as Roosevelt in seizing the strategic initiative; hence Hitler held it.
The fall of France, the siege of Britain, the accession of Japan to the Axis upset the balance of power and hostility on which Stalin had been counting. If Britain should go down and America stay neutral, Moscow would face the peril of isolation on a Nazi-dominated continent. A logical strategy might have been to build a global counter-coalition to the Axis, but the anti-Hitler leaders were crippled by suspicion and history. Britain had been cool to Moscow, especially over the Soviet attack on Finland and the Bear’s swallowing up of the little Baltic states. The United States, remote and unfriendly, still maintained in 1940 the “moral embargo” placed on aircraft exports to Russia after the Soviet bombing of Finnish towns. “I shall not dwell on our relations with the U.S.A. If only because there is nothing good to report,” Molotov told the Supreme Soviet, amid laughter, in August 1940.
Such was the course of affairs when Molotov journeyed to Berlin in November 1940. He returned with Hitler’s vague proposals that Russia adhere to the Axis, be guaranteed existing frontiers, and receive a free hand in the south—toward the Indian Ocean. Stalin saw his chance to bargain. He would not join the Axis unless Hitler withdrew his troops from Finland, recognized Bulgaria as part of the Soviet sphere of influence, and supported Moscow’s historic ambition to gain bases in the Dardanelles. Probably Stalin knew that these were impossible conditions for the Führer. At this juncture there was still a small possibility that Hitler would turn west rather than east. But during early 1941 events in the Balkans seemed to gather a momentum of their own. Helplessly Stalin watched the Germans infiltrate Bulgaria and crush Yugoslavia and Greece.
It was the eleventh hour for a counter-coalition to stop the surging Nazis. In January 1941 Roosevelt lifted the moral embargo against the Soviets; in February and March Welles informed the Kremlin of reports that Hitler planned to attack east. But Soviet ideology and narrow Realpolitik and American ideology and isolationism made a unified stand impossible. Britain remained hostile, partly because Moscow was still sending raw materials to Germany. By mid-June 1941 Washington was still sharply curbing economic intercourse with the Russians.
During the spring, rumors and reports of Hitler’s intentions reached the Kremlin from many sources. Stalin did not ignore them or necessarily disbelieve them; he processed them through his ideological, Realpolitik mind. He was wary. Were the Nazis building up their eastern frontier and letting out rumors simply to camouflage their spring assault on England? Was Churchill—who had sent him an inconclusive warning that was delayed in the delivery—trying once again, like a typical imperialist and warmonger, to let Russia pull his chestnuts out of the fire? Was Hitler simply securing a position of strength from which he hoped to bargain harder with Moscow? Or could Hitler possibly be contemplating a war on two fronts?
At least Stalin could avert a second front against himself. The neutrality pact that he and Matsuoka had negotiated gave him a rare moment of relief—along with a moment of humor when the Japanese Foreign Minister said that the better elements in Japan were originally “moral Communists.” In one stroke Stalin had minimized the chance of an eastern front and hence—presumably—a western one. In a surprise visit to Matsuoka’s alcoholic, back-slapping send-off at the station, he embraced his guest, remarking, “We are Asiatics, too, and we’ve got to stick together.” He went on: “Now that Japan and Russia have fixed their problems, Japan can straighten out the Far East; Russia and Germany will handle Europe. Later together all of them will deal with America.” Seeking out the German Ambassador, he threw his arm around his shoulder and exclaimed: “We must remain friends and you must now do everything to that end.”
For such friends time was running out. Early in May, Stalin spoke in the Kremlin to young officers just graduated from military academies. He told them bluntly that the situation was extremely serious, a German attack was possible; but that the Red Army was not strong enough to smash the Germans easily because of inadequate training, equipment, and defense lines. The government, he said, would try by all diplomatic means to put off a German attack until the fall; but even if this succeeded, almost inevitably there would be war with Germany in 1942, but under more favorable conditions for Russia. “Depending on the international situation, the Red Army will either wait for a German attack,” Stalin went on, “or it may have to take the initiative, since the perpetuation of Nazi Germany as the dominant power in Europe is ‘not normal.’ ”
Two days later Stalin made himself Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and thus the formal head of government. By now he seemed to be fighting for time, hoping Hitler would still turn west. He tried to appease Berlin by closing down embassies and legations of Nazi-occupied nations. He kept Russian oil and other supplies moving to Germany. He had TASS deny rumors that Berlin was putting pressure on Moscow—a denial that in fact was correct, because Hitler was now bound on annihilation, not bargaining—and imply that London was still trying to foment war between Russia and Germany.
Seven nights later the German Ambassador drove to the Kremlin shortly before dawn and read to Molotov a cable just received from Berlin. It was the same pack of Nazi lies and accusations a dozen nations had heard just before their doom.
“This is war,” Molotov said. “Do you believe that we deserved that?”
At that moment—dawn of June 22, 1941—a tide of German troops, tanks, and guns was flooding across the open plains. The Wehrmacht struck with its usual deception, surprise, efficiency, and stunning force. In the north three Panzer divisions, with over six hundred tanks, simply swarmed over a weak Russian rifle division. In the center the Nazi spearhead—two Panzer groups comprising seven divisions and almost 1,500 tanks—burst through understrength Russian divisions. In the south another German army brushed aside Russian defenses—they might have been a row of glass houses, a German lieutenant observed—and soon was rolling along hard and intact roads with the sound of guns fading behind. By evening the leading Panzer divisions, stretched out over seven to ten miles-motorcyclists and armored cars scouting ahead, massed tanks following, and a “sandwich” of infantry and artillery in between-had pierced the Soviet border by almost twice their own length.
In East Prussia the night before, in his new underground headquarters, “Wolfsschanze” (“Wolf’s Lair”), concealed in a dark forest, Hitler had dictated a letter, “DUCE! I am writing this letter to you at a moment when months of anxious deliberation and continuous nerve-wracking waiting are ending in the hardest decision of my life.” He reviewed the situation. England had lost the war. It was trying to get Russia into it. “Behind these two countries stands the North American Union goading them on” and supplying them with war materials. If he had to send his Air Force against Britain, Russia would follow a strategy of extortion. So he would “cut the noose before it can be drawn tight.” The war in the east would not be easy, but Germany and Italy would secure a common food-supply base in the Ukraine. He tried feebly to explain why he was notifying the Duce only at the last moment. The decision had been made. Now he felt spiritually free. “With hearty and comradely greetings. Your Adolf Hitler.”
In London Churchill spoke over the radio to the people:
“…No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies, flashes away.” He described the tranquil Russian villages, children playing, mothers and wives awaiting the return of their loved ones. “I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying-down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts…. Behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who plan, organize, and launch this cataract of horrors upon mankind….”
In Tokyo, officials reacted with shock and dismay. The Konoye government had had intelligence of the Nazi attack but could scarcely credit it. Now for a second time Hitler had presented a fait accompli. But Matsuoka was undaunted. Japan, he felt, now had a supreme opportunity to attack Soviet Siberia and destroy Russian power in the Far East. The man who had strolled with Stalin along the station platform exchanging felicities was ready two months later to scrap his agreement with the Soviet chief. He rushed to the Imperial Palace with his plan, but he met a cool reception. Russia was still formidable in Siberia, army chiefs contended; why not wait until it was bleeding so heavily from Nazi thrusts that its strength would be drained away from the east? Let Germans fight Russians; Japan could pursue its interests southward and later move north when the main job was done. Let Hitler undertake a two-front war; Tokyo would not.
In Moscow, Stalin waited two weeks—in a state of near-collapse, it was said later—before he spoke to his people. “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Army and Navy! I am speaking to you, my friends.” He described, and understated, the German advances. “A serious threat hangs over our country.” He tried to justify the Nazi-Soviet Pact. “The enemy is cruel and merciless. He aims at grabbing our land, our wheat and oil. He wants to restore the power of the landowners, re-establish Tsarism, and destroy the national culture of the peoples of the Soviet Union…and turn them into slaves of German princes and barons.” The writer Ilya Ehrenburg, sitting by the radio at the office of Red Star, had never heard Stalin sound so moved, so close to his people. The dictator warned against panic-mongers, called on the troops and the whole Soviet people to fight for every inch of Soviet soil, and leave not a single engine or railway track or pound of bread or pint of oil for the enemy.
“Comrades, our forces are immeasurably large….All the strength of the people must be used to smash the enemy. Onward to victory!”