Hitler attacks the Soviet Union,
the isolationists struggle to remain united,
Ickes attacks Lindbergh, Roosevelt extends protection
to British shipping crossing the Atlantic.
THE DATE June 22 was notable in Hitler’s diary. It was the day in 1940 he accepted the French surrender in the train carriage at Compiègne. It was the day in 1812 his hero Napoleon crossed the river Niemen on his way to conquer Russia. And it was the day in 1941 he launched his surprise attack on the Soviet Union.
Stalin did not see it coming. Although he had received repeated warnings that a German attack was imminent, including a message from Welles and a long personal letter from Churchill, the evening before the invasion, the Communist despot set off to his dacha for a relaxing weekend. “I am certain Hitler will not risk creating a second front,” he said on June 11. “Hitler is not such an idiot.”1
Stalin was woken in the early hours of Sunday, June 22, with news that a massive German force had crossed the border into the Ukraine and was heading fast for Moscow. The invasion should not have come as a surprise. As early as 1925, Hitler had written in his prison diary, Mein Kampf, “When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states.”2
The invasion was a gamble. “I had no more difficult decision to make than the attack on Russia,” Hitler said. “I had always maintained that we ought at all costs to avoid waging war on two fronts, and you may rest assured that I pondered long and anxiously over Napoleon and his experiences in Russia. Why, then, you may ask, this war against Russia?”3 The answer was the prospect of gaining the vast grain-growing lands of the Ukraine, the rich oil fields of the Caucasus, and the verdant land on which Hitler wished to settle his people in an expanded German homeland. “What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us,” he said.4
The invasion also marked the clash between the twin tyrannies of Fascism and Communism. “This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness,” Hitler told his high command.5 Hitler was aware, too, that by the following year, when America had fully rearmed, Roosevelt would in all likelihood supply the Soviet Union and invade the European mainland from Britain. Which is why Hitler told Mussolini, “Whether or not America enters the war is a matter of indifference.”6 America would fight anyway.
Hitler thought that defeating the Soviet Union with a Blitzkrieg would not take long. He had been assured by his generals that Operation Barbarossa, named after the charismatic king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, “would last four to six weeks.”7 Churchill took a different view, telling colleagues, “I’ll bet you a Monkey [£500] to a Mousetrap [£1] that the Russians are still fighting, and fighting victoriously, two years from now.”8 Roosevelt was convinced that Hitler had made an error. “Now comes this Russian diversion,” he wrote. “If it is more than just that it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination.”9
At 3 a.m. on June 22, Hitler had hurled four million men, including seventeen panzer tank divisions and thirteen motorized divisions, across a 2,000-mile border in what his biographer Alan Bullock called “the most powerful military force ever concentrated for a single operation.”10 Barbarossa completely changed the outcome of the war. Roosevelt and Churchill saw the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union coming, even if Stalin did not, but they did not know what its consequences would be. In the event, Hitler made a fatal miscalculation. As the historian of Hitler’s rise and fall, William L. Shirer, put it, “For Hitler, the die was cast, and, though he did not know it, his ultimate fate sealed, by this decision.”11
Hitler’s new direction of conquest called for a change in Allied strategy. Roosevelt was now set the tricky problem of having to help the Communist leadership of the Soviet Union, which was likely to prove a hard sell in free-enterprise America. The president maintained his silence, unfroze Soviet assets in America, but otherwise refused to be drawn on when or even whether he would help Stalin. He chose to shelter behind Churchill, whose broadcasts were popular in America and whose theatrical turns of phrase provided useful cover.
Explaining why he felt comfortable with backing Stalin, Churchill argued in a broadcast widely heard in America on June 22, “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,” he said, but, “Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.”12 That applied “to all representatives of that vile race of quislings who make themselves the tools and agents of the Nazi regime against their fellow-countrymen and the lands of their birth.” Many Americans were left in no doubt that Churchill was referring to appeasers, Nazi sympathizers, fellow travelers, and isolationists.
On July 7, Stalin asked for $1.8 billion in aid from America. Three days later, Gallup reported that 72 percent of Americans favored a Soviet victory compared to 4 percent wanting a Hitler victory. Roosevelt agreed in principle to the Russian request and sent Hopkins to Moscow to do for Stalin what he had done for Churchill. The view of many Americans was summed up by Senator Harry S. Truman from Missouri: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany. . . . although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.”13
The isolationists were doubly pressed by Hitler’s strike eastward. They not only lost their loyal ultra-left-wing pacifist base overnight, they were left with an organization tilting noticeably rightward, a state of affairs that played into the hands of those who dismissed isolationists as Nazi dupes. Lindbergh said he was “thankful to be rid of the Communist support which we never wanted.”14
The escalation of the war in Europe drove a sharp increase in membership of America First. It had 300,000 members at the start of 1941; by year’s end, 800,000. The New York branch of America First operated out of a small office at 515 Madison Avenue with a staff of about forty, of which half were volunteers. It was led jointly by Edwin S. Webster Jr., a young New York investment banker, and John T. Flynn, a left-liberal New Republic journalist, but the marriage was not happy. At first, Lindbergh appeared oblivious of the disagreements, reporting that “in spite of all the difference in their viewpoints, they somehow manage to get along together.”15 Beneath the surface, however, the tensions, heightened by the Nazi assault upon the Soviet Union, were becoming untenable. The Baltimore and San Francisco branches of America First were also in disarray and witnessed acrid battles between competing factions.
At national level, however, the isolationist leaders were working more or less in concert. Hoover, Lindbergh, Wood, and the isolationists in Congress were determined to keep up pressure on the administration. Lindbergh flew between sympathetic Midwestern cities to speak. He had become a hugely popular if polarizing figure, reflected in the vast audiences his speeches attracted.
There was, however, also considerable opposition to his message. In Oklahoma City he was subject to threats of “shooting, of cutting light and telephone (radio) wires, eggs, stones, etc.”16 Lindbergh cancelled a rally in Washington DC because, he was told, “the government is in such a strong position there that the success of our meeting would be doubtful” and “we cannot afford to hold an unsuccessful meeting in the nation’s capital.”17
Lindbergh paid a call on anyone who could fund or support the isolationist view, including Hearst, though “the Hearst press has done things to me in the past which I cannot forgive,” and Ford, though he avoided raising the car maker’s abrupt and unexplained cancellation of a coast-to-coast America First ad campaign. Ford’s factories were completing hugely profitable government contracts producing warplanes, tanks, and gun sights, yet Ford still expressed his desire to make financial contributions to America First. Lindbergh was irritated by the lack of courage of most businesspeople. “Few of them are willing to expose their own position enough to take part in opposing that which they believe is wrong,” he complained.18
Over time, perhaps sensing a losing battle, Lindbergh began to despair of his own country. On May 4, in San Francisco, he bemoaned the fact that “a refugee who steps from the gang-planks and advocates war is acclaimed as a defender of freedom. A native born American who opposes war is called a fifth-columnist.”19 On May 9, in Minneapolis, Lindbergh prophesied that war would make America “a military nation . . . that surpasses Germany herself in totalitarian efficiency” and that “our way of life [would become] a thing of the past, that our children will be fortunate if they live long enough to see it again.”
After Lindbergh denied he was advocating “anything but constitutional methods,” America First issued its own dream isolationist cabinet: Farley as war secretary, the former president’s son Charles P. Taft II20 as navy secretary, the New York district attorney Thomas E. Dewey as attorney general, the mineworkers’ union leader John L. Lewis as secretary of labor, and Lindbergh as secretary of the air.
Ickes, who kept “a complete indexed collection” of Lindbergh’s speeches and writings, thought he was jeopardizing the president’s delicate balancing act between peace and war and took delight in reminding everyone of Lindbergh’s Nazi connections, calling him by the name of his Nazi medal, “Knight of the German Eagle.” “In preaching defeatism and helping to bring about disunity he was doing what . . . Germany wanted done,” Ickes declared. As for the Nazi medal, “He should have returned it long ago.”21
Ickes told Roosevelt that Lindbergh was “a ruthless and conscious fascist. Motivated by hatred for you personally and for democracy in general, his speeches show an astonishing identity with those of Berlin.”22 In a speech on July 14, Ickes went to the heart of the matter. “No one has ever heard Lindbergh utter a word of horror at, or even aversion to, the bloody career that the Nazis are following, nor a word of pity for the innocent men, women and children who have been deliberately murdered by the Nazis,” he said.23 He accused Lindbergh of wanting to depose the president and put himself in the White House.
Lindbergh became so agitated by Ickes’s accusations that he wrote an open letter to Roosevelt asking him to call his dog off. “Is it too much to ask that you inform your Secretary of the interior that I was decorated by the German Government while I was carrying out the request of your Ambassador?” he asked. “I have no connection with any foreign government. I have had no communication, directly or indirectly, with anyone in Germany or Italy since I was last in Europe, in the spring of 1939.”24
Ickes was ecstatic at having scored a direct hit. “I had begun to think that no one could get under his skin enough to make him squeal,” he wrote in his diary. “At last I have succeeded.”25 The president did not respond, Early telling Lindbergh that an open letter was not a piece of correspondence but a press release. Ickes turned the knife. “Why doesn’t he send back the disgraceful decoration and be done with it?” he asked. “Americans remember that he had no hesitation about sending back to the President his commission in the United States Army Air Corps Reserve.”26
Roosevelt continued steadily to redefine where the western hemisphere began and ended, on July 7 sending troops to occupy Iceland on the grounds that America could not allow “the occupation by Germany of strategic outposts in the Atlantic to be used as air or naval bases for eventual attack against the Western Hemisphere.”27 This freed British ships and troops for more urgent duties. Four days later, the president issued a secret order to “protect United States and Iceland shipping against hostile attacks by escorting, covering, and patrolling, as required by circumstances, and by destroying hostile forces which threaten such shipping” and to “escort convoys of United States and Iceland flag shipping, including the shipping of any nationality which may join such convoys between United States ports and bases and Iceland.”28 Convoying to and from Iceland and sinking German vessels was now official administration policy, and British ships were welcome to join any American convoy. British losses continued to mount, though the number of tons sunk in the North Atlantic during 1941 was less than the previous year.
Unaware of Roosevelt’s secret command, the isolationists persisted in trying to embarrass Roosevelt by attempting to discover whether American patrols were in fact protecting convoys. On July 11, the Senate opened an investigation into newspaper reports “that naval units were convoying or escorting ships at sea or dropping depth charges on German naval units.”29
Alsop and Kintner contended in the Washington Post that the first American act in the shooting war against Germany took place some time in May. The pair concluded, “Although the President is waiting for the Germans to shoot first, the truth is that there has been shooting already.”30 Some time in the previous month, an American destroyer was picking up sixty survivors of a British steamer sunk by a U-boat near Greenland when its sonar detection system reported a German submarine circling nearby, they wrote. Fearing attack, the commander of the destroyer dropped three depth charges.
Knox told the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, “There isn’t a particle of truth in [the story],” and while he admitted depth charges had been dropped during the incident, “it is quite possible no submarine was there. The equipment echo might have been received from a whale or large fish.”31
A detailed account of the operation of an American-led convoy was reported in the syndicated column “Washington Merry-Go-Round” by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen. “A group of American naval vessels has just returned from its first experience at Atlantic patrol, or convoying, whatever it is called—they helped to get about 80 British merchantmen safely most of the way to the west coast of Africa,” they wrote. The pair reported the convoy was made up of three aircraft carriers, posted on three sides of the convoy, with two destroyers protecting each carrier, planes from the carriers scouting for U-boats, and three battle cruisers. Perhaps to ensure they were not accused of convoying, the American flotilla maintained a discreet distance from the British vessels.
Again Knox told the committee that the report was a “fabrication. There isn’t a word of truth in it.” Asked by the chairman, “We can assure the American people that there is no undeclared war, a hidden war, or a naval war as far as we are concerned?” Knox replied, “That is right.” The committee concluded that it “did not consider it necessary to do more at this time” than to report to the Senate that it found no evidence of shooting or convoying.32
The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June was uncomfortable for the Japanese, who since April 1941 had been enjoying the benefits of a nonaggression pact with Stalin and with whom they were reluctant to reignite hostilities. Roosevelt biographer Black’s belief is that Hitler’s “failure to secure the collaboration of the Japanese against the Soviet Union must rank as one of Hitler’s most serious errors.” Coming so soon after his decision to invade the Soviet Union, Hitler’s flawed judgment at this time set Germany firmly on the road to defeat.
Japan was already in bad odor with America, from which it traditionally bought three-quarters of its oil, because of its decade-long occupation of large tracts of China. In early July 1941, as a preliminary to conquering the whole of Southeast Asia, Japan had invaded French Indochina. Roosevelt froze Japanese assets in America in response. Soon after, America imposed a total oil embargo against Japan. In search of new fuel supplies, the Japanese coveted the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. In August 1941, all licenses for the export of American petroleum products to Japan were rescinded. Scrap metal exports to Japan were banned.
These punitive acts were pushing Japan into the war, as Roosevelt almost acknowledged when, on freezing Japanese assets, he defended the failure to impose an oil embargo upon Japan earlier. “Now, if we cut the oil off, they probably would have gone down to the Dutch East Indies a year ago, and you would have had war,” he said. “Therefore, there was—you might call—a method in letting this oil go to Japan, with the hope—and it has worked for two years—of keeping war out of the South Pacific.”33
As a precaution against the threat of a Japanese assault on American interests in East Asia, in July 1941 the president recalled General Douglas MacArthur from retirement and put him in charge of the defense of the Philippines, an American quasi-colony. MacArthur demanded and received half of the Flying Fortress bombers coming off the assembly line, arguing that air power alone would deter a Japanese invasion while putting the Japanese mainland within range of American bombs.
After moving the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, the previous year, the president felt confident that his back was well protected from Japanese attack, allowing him to concentrate on the defeat of Hitler in Europe. On August 3, Roosevelt set out for the submarine base at New London, Connecticut, to join the Potomac for a restorative few days’ sailing up the New England coast. From the shore, he could be seen on deck, cigarette holder at a jaunty angle, sipping martinis. Each day a press release confirmed that “all on board” were having a good time.
It was one of the most entertaining subterfuges of the war. A member of Roosevelt’s Secret Service detail donned the president’s trademark metal-framed spectacles, puffed smoke from his trademark cigarette holder, drank his trademark martinis, and sat bolt upright in his wheelchair on deck to throw spectators with binoculars off the scent. After surreptitiously switching to the USS Augusta in the Menemsha Bight, Vineyard Sound, Massachusetts, Roosevelt had steamed off to confer with Churchill, the first meeting since their glancing encounter in 1918, which had left no trace at all with the former First Lord of the Admiralty but an abiding memory of having been snubbed with the former assistant secretary of the US Navy. The Atlantic summit was a strange combination of a kiss and make-up, a first date, and the long-delayed honeymoon of a well-established marriage of convenience.
Notwithstanding the glowing report of Churchill from Hopkins, the president felt he should get to know his fellow warlord better. He needed to take the measure of this by all accounts brilliant, colorful, eloquent, and amusing force of nature. Churchill, too, was looking forward to meeting his co-conspirator and savior. The rendezvous point was Placentia Bay in the southwest corner of Newfoundland, where the Augusta met up with the King George V, newly restored after its battering at the hands of the Bismarck.
Roosevelt had with him Welles, generals Marshall and Arnold, admirals Stark and King, and the banker and railroad heir W. Averell Harriman;34 Churchill was accompanied by the chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, vice air chief Sir Wilfred Freeman, and the under secretary of state in the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan. Also in Churchill’s party was Hopkins, returning from Moscow via London. The military chiefs continued where the ABC talks left off. Well out of sight of the isolationists, Roosevelt and Churchill embarked upon a council of war.
Both men were somewhat in awe of each other. Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins, who knew Churchill a little, to brief him on what to expect. Hopkins, who was tapped by the prime minister for the president’s every last detail, recalled, “You’d have thought Winston was being carried up into the heavens to meet God Almighty!”
The first day, Churchill was the president’s sole lunch guest aboard the Aurora, after which Roosevelt wrote to his cousin Margaret Suckley, “He is a tremendously vital person.” That evening, Hopkins encouraged Churchill after dinner to embark on one of his rambling tours d’horizon. Without the lubrication of alcohol, which was forbidden on US Navy ships, the prime minister’s performance was perhaps less commanding than usual.
He continued to promote his belief that Hitler could be defeated in a long war made up of small assaults on the periphery and massive bomb raids on industrial cities that would sap German morale and encourage insurrection. On the third day of the summit, Marshall and Hull let Churchill know that America had little interest in postponing the only way they believed Nazism could be defeated: a full-scale invasion of the European mainland.
Churchill was preoccupied with the increasing Japanese threat to the British colonies in Asia, in particular Singapore, the commercial capital of Britain’s Asian empire, and urged Roosevelt to issue a demand that Japan should unconditionally withdraw from French Indo-China and that any attack upon British territories would be considered an attack on America. Roosevelt said he would consider it. Welles let it be known that the State Department believed that the devastating American economic sanctions would in any case soon lead to war with Japan.
Roosevelt was uncertain whether it was best to try to delay the inevitable conflict with Japan, the better to concentrate on the European front, or whether an early confrontation in the east would not be an easy way for America to be drawn into the war. By the summer of 1941, after the Japanese invasion of Vichy-controlled Indo-China the previous year, the embargo on the passage of Japanese ships through the Panama Canal, and the freezing of Japanese assets in the US, two-thirds of Americans were prepared to go to war with Japan. At the floating summit, Churchill, too, began to think that Japan rather than Germany might drag America into war.
The following day, Sunday, August 10, the British hosted their American partners aboard the King George V and Churchill led the singing in a Christian service of Anglo-Saxon hymns with a sea theme, to emphasize the cultural bonds between the two nations. The president’s primary goal of the Newfoundland summit was to define the Allied war aims, and he sent some sketched suggestions for Churchill to work up into a draft.
The emerging Atlantic Charter would come to articulate the most permanently interventionist American foreign policy since Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” envisioned the League of Nations. Roosevelt wanted to replace the exclusive system of preferential trade that Britain enjoyed with its colonies and dominions and replace it with a worldwide free trade system. He also wanted to establish that the Allied victory would result in “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” an anticolonial aspiration which the imperialist Churchill found hard to swallow.
Further, the Charter hoped to provide a means whereby German-occupied nations would be restored to freedom, the freedom of the high seas, an international program of disarmament “pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security,” and, for Roosevelt’s benefit, a nod to the New Deal’s aims of “improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security.”35
It was not the president’s intention at this stage to promote a system of world government in the postwar world, as he thought it too politically difficult to arrange. The isolationists would be sure to oppose anything that suggested a world governing body as surely as the Irreconcilables had doomed the Treaty of Versailles. “The establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security” was therefore left vague.
Other decisions were made at Placentia Bay that, had they been made known, would also have alarmed the isolationists. Roosevelt pledged to help the Soviet Union “on a gigantic scale.” He promised to increase the numbers of American ships ferrying supplies to Britain. He agreed that every transatlantic convoy would be protected by an American cruiser, or a similar capital ship such as an aircraft carrier, and five destroyers. Trained American pilots would deliver warplanes to Britain and West Africa and would stay on to train British pilots.
Fearful that the British, French, and Russians would outmaneuver America when the war ended, as they had done in 1918 to Wilson’s embarrassment, Roosevelt had asked Churchill on July 15 to promise that he would make “no secret commitments to any of its Allies” without “the agreement of the United States.” He had received no answer. In Placentia Bay, therefore, the prime minister was made to promise that no “secret deals” had been or would be made. Most explosive of all, Roosevelt made a remark to Churchill that, had it been reported, would have been certain to set off impeachment proceedings. “I may never declare war. I may make war,” the president said. “If I were to ask Congress to declare war they might argue about it for three months.”36
The Atlantic Charter, which was announced in a joint statement on August 14, 1941, set a sure course for the Allies, bound America and Britain together in a set of inspirational war aims, and began to hint at the new world organizations that would regulate the postwar world. The return of Wilsonian thinking in the White House was not lost on the New York Times, which wrote, “No mention is made in the eight-point declaration of a new League of Nations or any association like it. But in every line of the document . . . is implied the creation of a post-war organization to maintain peace, with the United States a full partner in this effort.”
Roosevelt and Churchill concluded, “This is the end of isolation. It is the beginning of a new era in which the United States assumes the responsibilities which fall naturally to a great World Power.”37 Louis I. Newman, a prominent rabbi on the east side of Manhattan, described the Charter as a restatement of the principles “for which America fought under Woodrow Wilson.” “It may well be that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill can bring to pass in reality the principles which Mr. Wilson enunciated, but could not implement,” he said.38
As ever, having struck out in a new direction, as soon as he was on dry land Roosevelt played down the importance of Placentia Bay and the Atlantic Charter, referring to the meeting as an “interchange of views, that’s all. Nothing else.” Asked whether America was any closer to war as a result of the summit, he replied, “I should say, no.”39
Support for the war in Congress remained fragile. On August 12, a measure to extend the draft sailed through the Senate but squeaked past the House by a single vote, 203 to 202. As Black notes, the vote showed “that the isolationist dragon, though consistently confounded and defeated by the President, was not dead.”40 Roosevelt decided to let Congress calm itself with a long period in which he said and did little about the war, a display of inaction that did not play well with Churchill.
The president failed to make the announcement agreed at Placentia, that if Japan continued her conquests “the United States Government would be compelled to take counter-measures, even though these might lead to war between the United States and Japan.”41 Churchill felt he had been let down over guarantees about British territories threatened by Japan and blindsided into agreeing the Charter, which had not been mentioned before the face-to-face meeting. He felt “bitterly disappointed to return, almost like Neville Chamberlain, with little more than a piece of paper.”42
He was alarmed by the anticolonial tone of the Charter and was obliged to tell Parliament that “we had in mind, primarily, the restoration of the sovereignty, self-government and national life of the States and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke” which was “a quite separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in regions [like India and the African colonies] whose peoples owe allegiance to the British Crown.”43
The prime minister was becoming impatient at Roosevelt’s continuing failure to commit to the war. Churchill cabled Hopkins, “There has been a wave of depression through Cabinet and other informed circles here about President’s many assurances about no commitments and no closer to war, etc.”44 And he wrote to his son, Randolph, “One is deeply perplexed to know how the deadlock is to be broken and the United States brought boldly and honorably into the war.”45