Hitler mounts a sarcastic attack on Roosevelt
and the royal visit, Hitler invades Poland,
Chamberlain declares war on Germany.
MUSSOLINI TOOK the next step toward world war by invading Albania on April 7. The following week, “to put the dictators on the spot,” Roosevelt sent a letter to Hitler and the king of Italy (as he, not Mussolini, was head of state), asking that they pledge not to compromise the borders of thirty-one named countries for the next twenty-five years.
On the face of it, to ask for such a guarantee was a naive request, certain to be spurned. Roosevelt told Morgenthau that his appeal to the dictators’ better nature enjoyed only a one-in-five chance of success. The Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann,1 living in exile from Nazism in America, recognized it as “a calculated move for reasons of domestic politics.”2 In a note to Canada’s prime minister, Mackenzie King, the president revealed his true intent. If we are turned down,” he wrote, “the issue becomes clearer and public opinion in your country and mine will be helped.”3
Mussolini cursed the “absurd” demand and the president’s “messiah-like messages,”4 while Hitler summoned the Reichstag on April 28 to answer Roosevelt’s plea in an address heard by hundreds of millions of listeners, including in America, Britain, and France. Flanked on either side by black swastikas and overshadowed by a vast golden eagle with a swastika in its claws, Hitler began his diatribe with a well-rehearsed catalogue of complaints against the iniquities of Versailles before calling the invasion of Czechoslovakia a “service to peace.”
He accused Britain and France of trying to encircle Germany and condemned the Polish government for daring to reject his terms for Danzig and the Polish Corridor. He flatly rejected the idea that Germany was intent on invading Poland as “inventions of the international press.” “The worst is that now Poland, like Czechoslovakia a year ago, believes, under pressure of a lying international campaign, that it must call up troops, although Germany has not called up a single man and has not thought of proceeding in any way against Poland,” he said.
Then came a protracted sarcastic assault upon Roosevelt and, by association, all American citizens that caused his local audience to rock with laughter. It was not easy listening for the isolationists in Congress.
Mr. Roosevelt declares that it is clear to him that all international problems can be solved at the council table, [yet] it was America herself who gave sharpest expression to her mistrust in the effectiveness of conferences. For the greatest conference of all time was the League of Nations . . . representing all the peoples of the world, created in accordance with the will of an American President. The first State, however, that shrank from this endeavor was the United States. . . . It was not until after years of purposeless participation that I resolved to follow the example of America. The freedom of North America was not achieved at the conference table any more than the conflict between the North and the South was decided there. I will say nothing about the innumerable struggles which finally led to the subjugation of the North American continent as a whole. [At Versailles, the German delegation was] subjected to even greater degradations than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of the Sioux tribes.
For once, Roosevelt found himself agreeing with much of what Hitler was saying. Then came the response to Roosevelt’s appeal for peace.
“Mr. Roosevelt asks that assurance be given him that the German armed forces will not attack, and above all, not invade the territory or possessions of the following independent nations,” Hitler said. In a coup de théâtre, he slowly read out the president’s list of countries, causing the audience seated in front of him to roar with laughter at each successive name. Though few noticed it at the time, the nation Hitler did not read aloud was Poland. He made fun of the fact that Ireland was among the nations listed and quoted a speech by the Irish prime minister, Éamon de Valera,5 “in which, strangely enough, and contrary to Mr. Roosevelt’s opinion, he does not charge Germany with oppressing Ireland but he reproaches England with subjecting Ireland to continuous aggression. In the same way, the fact has obviously escaped Mr. Roosevelt’s notice that Palestine is at present occupied not by German troops but by the English.”
In his most mocking tone, Hitler said, “I should not like to let this opportunity pass without giving above all to the President of the United States an assurance regarding those territories which would, after all, give him most cause for apprehension, namely the United States itself and the other States of the American continent.” He described reports that Germany had set its sights on America, North or South, as “rank frauds and gross untruths” and the concoction of “a stupid imagination.”
Then came the peroration:
Mr. Roosevelt, I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, Sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere. . . . although for me it is more precious than anything else, for it is limited to my people!6
Roosevelt’s gamble had paid off. The scraping sound of Hitler’s guttural accent and the echoing jeers from his Nazi followers sounded even more terrifying to the worldwide radio audience for the lack of pictures. To most Americans of either stripe, Hitler had not only insulted their president but had failed to answer the single question Roosevelt had asked him: would he give a guarantee not to invade any of the named countries?
It was not just Hitler who had fallen into the president’s trap. Again, the isolationists were quick to misread the outcome. Senator Hiram W. Johnson, who had introduced the law forbidding foreign countries from buying arms if they owed money to the United States, wrote to his son, “Hitler had all the better of the argument. Roosevelt put his chin out and got a resounding whack. I have reached the conclusion there will be no war.” Roosevelt wanted “to knock down two dictators in Europe, so that one may be firmly implanted in America,” he wrote.7 Nye was foolish enough to offer his views on Hitler’s speech to reporters. “Nothing said by Hitler can be taken as an insult to the American people,” he said, “and it might be that a reasonable approach to Germany by our government now would invite better understanding and bring rest to the world.”8
Alarmed by Hitler’s continued bellicosity, the British belatedly began negotiating a pact with the Soviet Union. As a businessman, Chamberlain had a visceral dislike of Communism, which prevented him from doing what had been urged on him for months by Churchill and others. Still, he left it to Moscow to make the first move. On April 17, the Soviet foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov,9 proposed to the British ambassador a mutual defense pact between the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, to include guarantees for the defense of Poland, Romania, and Greece.
The British response on May 8 was tardy and tepid. They offered a counterproposal that, to Joseph Stalin,10 the dictator of the Soviet Union, appeared to put the onus of waging war against Germany more on the Soviets than on the Western democracies. A Soviet counterproposal demanding that Britain, France, and the Soviet Union give “immediately all effective assistance” in the event of an attack on themselves or on Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Hungary, or Yugoslavia was delivered on July 23. Again the British waffled. The following month Roosevelt cabled Stalin, urging him to do a deal with the British and French without delay and predicting that as soon as Hitler had invaded Poland he would attack the Soviet Union. Stalin had already come to a similar conclusion.
While London and Moscow played tag diplomacy, Joseph Kennedy and Rose, hobnobbing with King George at a weekend party at Windsor Castle on April 14, could not avoid hearing about the arrangements for their US visit from the royal couple. Kennedy asked to be allowed to return to America for the event, but the State Department turned down the request. They could not, however, prevent Rose from claiming a small place in the American entourage.
While enjoying Kennedy’s discomfort, the president did not lose sight of the goal he had set. As Black explained, “Nothing could be done to make the inept British political leadership more popular, but Roosevelt thought the young monarch and his queen might perform a public relations coup in the United States.”11 Eleanor Roosevelt was well aware of the importance of the visit. “There is always a certain amount of criticism and superficial ill feeling toward the British in this country,” she later explained in her autobiography. “Believing that we all might soon be engaged in a life-and-death struggle, in which Great Britain would be our first line of defense, [Franklin] hoped that their visit would create a bond of friendship between the peoples of the two countries.”12
King George and Queen Elizabeth crossed the Canadian border on June 7—the first reigning British monarch to visit America—and boarded a train to Washington DC. The following morning, they were welcomed at Union Station by the president and first lady. Crowds cheered as the royal couple were driven to the White House, and they continued to be welcomed by large numbers wherever they went. To show that there were no hard feelings about the unpleasantness of the War of Independence, the king and queen were ferried up the Potomac to visit Washington’s home at Mount Vernon and they laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery.
After visiting the New York World’s Fair, where the Czech and Albanian flags were flying at half-mast, they arrived by car at Springwood, where Franklin, Eleanor, and Sara Roosevelt awaited them. The president had prepared a tray of cocktails, which his mother frowned upon, suggesting that it might be more appropriate to offer something soft to drink. When the king arrived, Roosevelt said, “My mother does not approve of cocktails and thinks you should have a cup of tea.” The king said, “Neither does my mother,” and helped himself to a martini.13
From that moment the two men got on famously, with Roosevelt adopting his best avuncular tone. They compared notes on the prospect of war—Roosevelt saying he thought war inevitable, the king still hoping it could be avoided—and the president ended the day by patting the king on the knee, saying, “Young man, it’s time for you to go to bed.”14 George asked Mackenzie King, “Why don’t my ministers talk to me as the President did tonight?” The following day, Eleanor threw a picnic and invited mostly Hyde Park locals with a spattering of dignitaries to eat hot dogs cooked on a barbecue accompanied by baked beans, smoked turkey, and ham, followed by strawberries.
Roosevelt insisted on driving the queen to the picnic himself. “He was conversing more than watching the road and drove at great speed,” she recalled. “There were several times when I thought we would go right off the road and tumble down the hills. It was very frightening, but quite exhilarating.”15 The press, who were a key element in Roosevelt’s plan, made a great deal of the queen’s feigned embarrassment at plunging a hot dog into her mouth. It was the sort of absurd incident Roosevelt knew would endear the royal couple to Americans.
Eleanor concluded that “in many ways [the visit] was even more successful than [Franklin] had expected.”16 That evening, as the royal couple waved farewell from the rear platform of the train taking them back to Canada, the crowds at Poughkeepsie spontaneously broke into “Auld Lang Syne,” with the president, waving from his car, joining in. As the train pulled away, the president shouted, “Good luck to you! All the luck in the world!”17 “There was something incredibly moving about the scene—the river in the evening light, the voices of many people singing this old song, and the train slowly pulling out with the young couple waving good-by,” recalled Eleanor. “One thought of the clouds that hung over them and the worries they were going to face, and turned away and left the scene with a heavy heart.”18
The humiliation of being left out of the royal party proved too much for Kennedy. He decided he would resign in July. “I am handicapped by my position, in that I cannot say what I think and I cannot resign and say what I think until at least the situation has become more quiet,” he wrote.19 He booked one of the first flights on a new transatlantic Pan American Airways service and let it be known to friends that he would be home by midsummer. He rehearsed the reasons he would give Roosevelt for cutting his assignment short. The cost of being ambassador in London was unbearable, even for him. His business interests needed tending. His children were becoming British in their outlook and needed a good American education. He was homesick.
He kept repeating that Britain’s hope that America would come to her aid in the event of war was unrealistic. “A lot of people tell me that Britain is relying on two things today,” he told a British reporter. “One is God and the other is the United States. And recently you don’t seem to have been counting too much on the Deity.”20 He told a dinner party attended by the columnist Walter Lippmann that war was inevitable and that Britain would be beaten. Kennedy also grew reckless in his criticisms of the president. Harold Ickes, ever eager to pounce on examples of Kennedy’s disloyalty, reported to Roosevelt an account retailed by the ambassador-at-the-ready John Cudahy that Kennedy “does some pretty loud and inappropriate talking about the President. He does this before English servants, who are likely to spread the news. . . . Kennedy is vulgar and coarse and highly critical in what he says about the President. And when John cautioned him on one occasion not to talk as he was doing before the servants, Joe said that he didn’t give a damn.”21
Roosevelt was still not ready to allow Kennedy his freedom. Instead, he urged Kennedy to “put some iron up Chamberlain’s backside.” Kennedy’s response was that “putting iron up his backside did no good unless the British had some iron with which to fight and they did not.”22 Overwhelmed by Roosevelt’s charm and persuaded by his logic, Kennedy canceled his return trip and agreed to remain at his post until September.
Krock penned a piece titled “Why Ambassador Kennedy Is Not Coming Home” that blamed “young New Dealers” for Kennedy’s increasingly poor reputation back home. “They engaged in a propaganda campaign against him,” Krock wrote, suggesting that “he was in the White House disfavor because he wanted to make terms with the dictators, because he had ‘gone British,’ was a member of the Cliveden (appeasement) set in Great Britain, and spoke somewhat less than adoringly off the record of his chief.” Krock declared that “None of these statements was true,”23 despite ample evidence to the contrary.
In July, Kennedy retreated with Rose and some of the children to pass the summer in a villa near Cannes in the South of France. But even that absence from his post was short-lived. At the end of the month, he received a letter from Roosevelt. “I suppose you saw the latest ‘Krock’ in the Times about you, and I think you begin to agree with me that that particular gentleman, with his distorted ideas of how to be helpful, has done you more harm in the past few years than all of your enemies put together,” he wrote. Kennedy wrote back, “Your letter made me happy—not only what you said but the whole tone of it.” Then he made a fateful promise: “Regardless of any personal inconvenience, as long as I am of any assistance to you, I shall remain for whatever time you like.”24
Roosevelt could take comfort that the royal visit was beginning to pay dividends. By the end of August, polling revealed that the percentage of Americans who supported providing Britain and France with arms had leapt from 31 to 50. John W. Boehne, a longstanding isolationist congressman from Indiana, sent the president a telegram on August 30 saying he had changed his mind about the need to amend the neutrality legislation.
The president did not wait for war to break out before he began committing American forces to the defense of the democracies. He told the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Ronald Lindsay, that he was planning, in the event of war, to declare a neutral zone extending 500 miles into the Atlantic, and that in order to provision American warships patrolling the zone he would like to lease harbor bases in Bermuda and the British West Indies. Lindsay leapt at this hard evidence that America was prepared to back Britain with force and urged Chamberlain to take up the offer without delay. Again diffidence overcame good judgment and the prime minister hid behind Foreign Office advice that the deal was “hardly within the realm of practical politics.”25 Roosevelt left the offer on the table and in mid-August ordered the navy to lease facilities from Pan American Airways in Trinidad, St. Lucia, and Bermuda. On August 17 he secretly set up the War Resources Board, comprising the military, government officials, businesspeople, and economists, to coordinate armament production.26
Each day of the summer of 1939 brought new frightening developments. On August 21, Ribbentrop flew to Moscow, causing Kennedy to abandon his vacation and scurry back to London. On August 23, Hitler and Stalin startled the world by announcing a ten-year nonaggression pact. Simultaneously, the Soviets, who had for years been defending against the encroachment of the Japanese on the Manchurian border, signed a truce with Tokyo. Nazism and Communism were now allies and it seemed certain that Poland, lying between Germany and Russia, would be the first victim of this hellacious ideological marriage.
Halifax told Kennedy, “The jig is up,” and “England will definitely go to war if Poland starts to fight.”27 “[Chamberlain] says the futility of it all is the thing that is frightful,” Kennedy wrote to Hull. “They cannot save the Poles; they can merely carry on a war of revenge that will mean the destruction of all Europe.”28 The ambassador issued a formal warning to Americans living in Britain that they should return home without delay.
On August 22, as German pressure on the Poles to buckle became intense, Chamberlain told his cabinet, “It is unthinkable that we should not carry out our obligations to Poland.”29 Three days later, Hitler offered Chamberlain a deal. In exchange for turning a blind eye to the occupation of Danzig and the Polish Corridor, he offered a disarmament treaty and a nonaggression pact that would leave the British Empire unmolested.
Chamberlain responded to Hitler on August 28, saying that he would not “acquiesce in a settlement which put in jeopardy the independence of the state to whom they had given their guarantee”30 and proposing German–Polish negotiations. On August 29, Hitler offered Ambassador Henderson a compromise on Danzig and the Polish Corridor: he would negotiate with a Polish representative, but only if one were to arrive in Berlin the following day. The Polish government refused. The next day, Roosevelt wrote to a congressman from Missouri, “I am hoping and praying that war may be averted but if, unhappily, war comes the country will know just who is responsible for the tragic plight in which we find ourselves.”31 He blamed war on the isolationists as well as on Hitler.
On the morning of September 1, fifty-seven German divisions supported by tanks and bombers crossed the undefended Polish border. Kennedy cabled Hull, “The party is on.”32 Asked whether there was any doubt that Britain would fight, the ambassador replied, “Unquestionably none.”33 Roosevelt remarked to Bullitt, “It’s come at last. God help us all.”34 At a press conference, the president sought to reassure the American people that war in Europe need not involve America. Asked whether America could stay out of the war, he replied, “I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can. . . . Every effort will be made by the administration so to do.”35 However, Roosevelt made his position clear to Lothian. “There is certainly nothing neutral about the President’s personal attitude toward the conflict,” the British ambassador reported to Halifax.
Marshall, whom Roosevelt promoted to army chief of staff, put all American forces on alert. Two long days later, Chamberlain asked Kennedy to Downing Street and showed him the speech he intended to give in the Commons that evening. The ambassador wept as he read the prime minister’s words: “Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life has crashed in ruins.”36
Chamberlain issued an ultimatum, which was delivered by Henderson. If Germany did not withdraw from Poland by eleven o’clock that morning, Sunday, September 3, a state of war would exist between the two countries. In a broadcast to the nation, Chamberlain explained that the deadline had passed: “I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and consequently this country is at war with Germany.”37 In Berlin, on being read Chamberlain’s final demand, Hitler turned to Ribbentrop and asked, “What now?”38
Just after four in the afternoon Eastern Standard Time, a call from Kennedy woke the president. With a catch in his throat, the ambassador broke the news that Britain was at war with Germany. “It’s the end of the world,” he said. “The end of everything.”39