by James Johns
Roosevelt went on to explain the dangers of Hitler and to remind Americans that the time had come to choose the lifestyle they wanted, freedom and democracy or the oppression of Hitlerism. He went on to say, “Our determination not to take it lying down has been expressed in the orders to the American Navy to shoot on sight. Those orders stand. Furthermore, the House of Representatives has already voted to amend part of the Neutrality Act of 1937, today outmoded by force of violent circumstances. The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations has also recommended elimination of other hamstringing provisions of that act. That is the course of honesty and of realism.”77
Referring again to Germany’s navy as the rattlesnakes of the ocean, Roosevelt emphasized the need to protect American merchant ships which, in turn, needed protection by the U.S. Navy. “It can never be doubted that the goods will be delivered by this Nation, whose Navy believes in the traditions of ‘Damn the torpedoes; full speed ahead!’”78 And after summarizing all the challenges the country had faced since its birth, he closed with, “Today in the face of this newest and greatest challenge of them all we Americans have cleared our decks and taken our battle stations.”79
On the following day, October 28, national opinion supporting the president for war was eight to one (in favor of) according to Press Secretary Stephen Early.80 FDR’s argument for war finally seemed to capture the nation with the repeated phrase, “America has been attacked.” But again, the facts weren’t in. On October 29, Navy Secretary Frank Knox delivered his official report to the American people of the circumstances surrounding the Kearny attack:
On the night of October 16–17 the U.S.S. Kearny while escorting a convoy of merchant ships received distress signals from another convoy which was under attack from several submarines. The U.S.S. Kearny proceeded to the aid of the attacked convoy. On arriving at the scene of the attack the U.S.S. Kearny dropped depth bombs when she sighted a merchant ship under attack by a submarine. Sometime afterward three torpedo tracks were observed approaching the U.S.S. Kearny. One passed ahead of the ship, one astern, and the third struck the U.S.S. Kearny on the starboard side in the vicinity of the forward fire room…. The U.S.S. Kearny was forced out of action by the explosion.81
Did Roosevelt’s recent declarations to protect war goods in transit and his comments about the attack on the Kearny finally mean that American ships were actually convoying? When asked this question at a Senate committee hearing on October 27, members of FDR’s State Department were supplying different answers. Secretary of State Hull responded, “That is my guess,”82 and Navy Secretary Knox responded “That statement is not true,”83 leaving Americans again with no legitimate answer they could count on. Yet Senate hearing information was being released to the public.
On the night of October 30 at Madison Square Garden in New York City, at an America First party rally, Charles Lindbergh accused the president of using dictatorial powers to gamble with American safety. He said, “There is no danger to this nation from without. Our only danger lies from within.”84 The mere mention of the president’s name was booed throughout the evening.
That same night in the Atlantic near Iceland, an incident took place involving two American ships. The USS Salinas (AO-19) was one of four American tankers in a convoy with thirty-eight British ships protected by five American destroyers. The destroyers had just assumed the protection of the convoy at a point where the British warships turned back. The Salinas was torpedoed with no loss of life. The USS Reuben James (DD-245), an old destroyer veteran of the type traded to Britain in the destroyer deal of 1940, came to her aid. A number of German submarines attacked the entire convoy with the five destroyers defending the best that they could. At about dawn on October 31, the Reuben James was hit and sunk by the German U-boat U-562. She had taken a torpedo amidship on the port side. The abandon-ship order was given, but before she went under, her depth charges exploded, adding to the loss of life of those already in the life rafts. Only forty-five were rescued with 115 officers and men killed out of a crew of 160, and only eight suffered no wounds at all.85 The unanswered question after a three-hour battle was whether or not the U-562 captain knew, in the semidarkness and with the bulk of the convoy being British, that the Reuben James was American.
The president was slow to react to these losses because he had cried wolf so many times that the country was becoming skeptical. In each incident, his logic for going to war was that America had been attacked. Yet in each instance, it was the American ships that were the aggressors, pursuant to his orders to shoot on sight. By now, even an event like the first sinking of a U.S. merchant ship, the Robin Moor, back in May, wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.
To this day, the question remains, could Britain have survived until America came into the war without Lend-Lease? During the cash-and-carry period of 1939, when Britain was short of armed escorts, seventy-nine Allied and neutral ships were destroyed by mines. An additional 114 merchant ships were sunk by U-boats. On the credit side, fifty-five hundred convoyed vessels did make British ports, but Germany lost only nine U-boats.86
The fall of France and Norway in 1940 gave Germany additional bases from which to operate and extended their range into the Atlantic. By this time, Britain was stretched to the limit, withdrawing ships and planes to repel the forecasted invasion, while the existing convoys had escorts only to two hundred miles west of Ireland, whose ports were closed to Britain. In just six months during 1940, from June through December, Allied shipping losses rose to nearly three million tons.87
By early 1941, the Germans had been manufacturing as many as twenty U-boats per month, mastering their Wolfpack tactics (submarine warfare strategies). Adding to their conquests were the disguised surface raiders that accounted for the loss of thirty-four ships from January through March alone.88 Early Lend-Lease shipments to Britain included consolidated PBY Catalina long-range patrol bombers that she desperately needed to provide air cover for the convoys that were otherwise at the mercy of these raiders and Wolfpacks.
Shipping losses at the hands of the Germans would eventually turn around, aided by the British when they captured the German submarine U-110 on May 9, 1941, and retrieved a perfectly intact Enigma machine. These code devices were the key to passing information to their sub commands on British convoys and ship locations. Confiscating this equipment not only prompted new breakthroughs with Britain’s Ultra code-breaking efforts, but it also warned British convoys when to reroute to avoid the Wolfpacks.
But even with Lend-Lease, 1941 was not a good year. A total of 875 “Allied ships [or approximately 3.3 million tons] were lost in the Atlantic.”89 Lend-Lease deliveries to Britain, however, were not the only concern. How would the Americans get their shipments through to China?
Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader whom the Americans were morally committed to support, had been reduced to two supply routes, one through the seaport of Haiphong, French Indochina, and the other by way of the Burma Road.
Material shipped into Haiphong had to be offloaded to a single-track railroad, which was often under attack, and ran two thousand miles northwest all the way to Kunming, China. In June of 1940, when France fell to Germany, the Japanese used this as the perfect time to demand from the French Vichy (German collaborationist) government of French Indochina the use of airfields and railroads from which to support their war in China itself. The French government vainly appealed to the United States for military aid that the Americans turned down for fear of getting involved. Yet, the United States was already heavily involved on both sides, by sending material to Japan that she was using to support her war in China, and by sending war materials to Chiang Kai-shek that he was using to fight the Japanese. But with Japan’s occupation of Indochina, using the seaport of Haiphong was now history. The only other means of supplying Chiang was through the so-called back door of China using the Burma Road.
Going through the back door, supplies were unloaded from ships in Rangoon, Burma, and then trucked north to Lashio,
where they made a right turn to Kunming, Chiang Kai-shek’s headquarters. The distance from Lashio to Kunming was three hundred twenty straight miles. But the trucking route was over a mountainous, treacherous, single-lane road that was also often under attack. And due to lack of improvements, average speed was only about 10 miles per hour. To drive the Burma Road, the three hundred twenty air miles became over seven hundred twenty miles.
In a concession to the Japanese, the British had closed the Burma Road from July to October 1940, and while fighting for their own survival at home, they could not justify supporting it. A second closure was forced by the Japanese when they invaded Burma in 1942. After this closure, the Allies were forced to fly supplies into China from India. Flying over the Himalayan Mountains, the ferrying operation became known as “flying the hump,” and by the end of the war, China received approximately six hundred fifty thousand tons of supplies via this route.90
In the meantime, Chiang Kai-Shek was making desperate appeals to Washington and London to help keep the Burma Road open. Since FDR had included China in Lend-Lease, the problem now lay in getting the supplies to Chiang. FDR’s dilemma was that if the United States was committed to Lend-Lease for China, how could the Americans accept the closing of the only route into China without direct confrontation with the Japanese? Would the voting public support him?
Perhaps Arthur Hays-Sulzberger, president and publisher of the New York Times, in a speech in New York City on January 31, 1944, said it best:
I happen to be among those who believe that we did not go to war because we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. I hold rather that we were attacked at Pearl Harbor because we had gone to war when we made the Lend-Lease declaration. And we took the fateful step because we knew that all we hold dear in the world was under attack and that we could not let it perish. That declaration was an affirmative act on our part and a warlike act, and we made it because we knew that freedom must be defended wherever it is attacked or we who possess it will lose it.91
And in another address that Sulzberger made on June 19, he again referred to the impact of passing Lend-Lease with: “I believe that we willed our participation in this war—that we went into it affirmatively when we signed the Lease-Lend Act; that we chose our course deliberately because we knew that our future could not be as we mapped it unless we halted the aggressor as quickly as we could.”92
In the event, Lend-Lease over the course of World War II would cost the American taxpayers an estimated fifty billion dollars in 1940s values.93
Chapter 6
* * *
Spy Warnings
Shortly before Congress passed Lend-Lease, Bulgaria officially joined the Axis on March 1, 1941, one more cog in a very complicated scenario. Hitler’s Tripartite partner, Mussolini, had been eyeing Greece for some time and had decided to launch an invasion from neighboring Albania, which he had occupied since 1939. But the outnumbered and ill-equipped Greek Army, with local British help, not only stopped the Italians, but pushed them well back into Albania. It was apparent to Hitler that whoever controls Greece controls the Eastern Mediterranean, and based on that, he decided to occupy it himself. Controlling the land passage into Greece, which was surrounded on two sides by water, were Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Unlike Germany’s previous invasions in Europe, Hitler offered the Balkan countries an opportunity to join the Axis with the incentive of getting a piece of the action in occupied Greece.
In early March, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia met with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, where the Fuhrer leaned on him to join the Axis Alliance. This would secure Germany’s southern flank for the upcoming invasion of Russia. The prince made no commitment, but on returning home, he became convinced that neither England nor the weakened British forces presently in Greece could offer any guarantees. As Turkey had already signed a friendship treaty with Germany, and other countries had officially joined the Axis Alliance (Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia) on March 25, he, too, signed.
Then suddenly on March 27, the Yugoslav people rose and threw out Prince Paul’s government and his contract with Hitler. It would now be necessary for Germany to invade Yugoslavia to have clear passage into Greece. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s scheduled invasion of Russia, would have to be delayed while troops massing near the Russian border in Poland and eastern Germany were transferred south to occupy Yugoslavia. But with only ten days of preparation, and in spite of their abhorrence for Hitler, the Royal Yugoslav Army was ill prepared for war. The invasion of Yugoslavia was launched on April 6, 1941, and in a quick victory, the defenders surrendered three hundred thousand men at a cost to Germany of only 558.1
In 1945, at the Nuremberg Trials, it was testified that the Yugoslav rebellion delayed by about five weeks the scheduled invasion of Russia, with German troops not reaching the outskirts of Moscow until the dead of the winter cold. A blessing for the Russians, thanks to the Yugoslavs.
The German march through Yugoslavia and Greece took but a couple of weeks. Toward the end of April, the British were committed to a second Dunkirk: they had to abandon equipment and weapons while being rescued by the British Navy. But this time the ships, in doing so, took a merciless pounding by the Luftwaffe.
The island of Crete in the Mediterranean, commanding the approach to Greece, would be of strategic importance. The island was occupied by the Greek Army and the newly arrived British evacuees from Greece. Equipment and weapons that could not be spared were rushed from British forces in Egypt for the defense of the island.
On May 20, the Germans mounted an airborne invasion with five hundred aircraft, some of which towed eighty gliders. Historically, this would be a first for an airborne invasion, dropping thirteen thousand troops on the island.2 The defenders saw them coming but had little time to prepare. The Germans were able to send reinforcements by air, where neither the Greeks nor the British could provide support. By May 31, it was over. Although the Germans were victorious, the entire invasion had cost them four thousand killed and two thousand wounded. As a result, Hitler now decided to discontinue large airborne operations, as they were too costly in troop attrition. Again, the Royal Navy slipped in and rescued about sixteen thousand of the same troops they had rescued one month earlier, but about twelve thousand were left behind.3
It was on April 13, 1941, that the world learned that Russia and Japan had just signed the Russo-Japanese Non-Aggression Pact. It was the result of a courtesy call by Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka and was supposedly concluded in the record time of ten minutes. A key clause stated that “if either nation should ‘become the object of hostilities’ by a third party, the other would ‘observe neutrality throughout the duration of the conflict.’”4 Hypothetically, this freed up Japan to concentrate on the British, Dutch, and Americans without having to worry about her back door.
On June 22, Germany started its invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, on a front stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Included were 117 infantry and seventeen panzer divisions, plus many supporting organizations.5 Then, four days later on June 26, Finland joined with the Germans with an attack on Leningrad.
The German invasion of Russia raised many educated controversies. It opened some optimism in the Free World that perhaps Adolf Hitler had bitten off more than he could chew. Within hours, Winston Churchill changed his rhetoric on the vagaries of Communism and offered unconditional support to Russia.
In the United States, the extremes of every possibility were all voiced, and FDR found himself in the middle. He had recently associated Communism, Fascism, and Nazism as all “enemies of Democracy.”6 Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was quoted as saying that the “principles and doctrines of communistic dictatorship are as intolerable and as alien to their own [Americans’] beliefs as are the principles and doctrines of Nazi dictatorship.”7 After Hitler’s invasion, Welles changed his tune: “Any rallying of the forces opposing Hitlerism, from whatever source these forces may spring, will hasten the eventual downfall of th
e present German leaders, and will therefore redound to the benefit of our own defense and security. Hitler’s armies are today the chief dangers of the Americas.”8
Not everyone saw it that way. Senator Taft told an audience that the “victory of Communism in the world would be far more dangerous than a victory of Fascism.”9 Progressive Party Senator Robert LaFollette, Jr., of Wisconsin, another isolationist who had supported Roosevelt until it came time to pass the naval expansion bills, warned that soon Americans “would be told to forget the purges by the OGPU [Russia’s state security organization], the persecution of religion, and the confiscation of property.”10 Another member of the Wheeler-Nye-Taft camp was America Firster Senator Bennett Champ Clark (D–MO). Clark asked his constituents, “What profit is it … in helping one system of heathenism against another?”11 Former President Hoover suggested that now American worries were over because the two totalitarians would destroy each other without American help, which might have been the case without American Lend-Lease.
In reference to two nations at war that were not God-fearing, the Rev. Dr. John O’Brien, best-selling author and educator at Notre Dame University, evangelized, “The American people cannot be driven by propaganda, trickery, or deceit into fighting to maintain the Christ-hating despot, Stalin, in his tyranny over one hundred million enslaved people. The propaganda that we must eventually enter the war in order to save Democracy and Christianity has now received its death blow.”12 Although the political influence of the Catholic Church had always been recognized, the opinions of most Americans fell somewhere within these statements.
The professional military opinions of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff held somewhat less water. Their official estimate gave the Russians six weeks at the most, in which case any aid wouldn’t get there in time anyway. The Joint Chiefs had good reason to be concerned. Lend-Lease had been at the expense of the army and the air corps. Of the four hundred combat aircraft manufactured in a one-month period, all were sent abroad.13 Not one stayed in the United States. If FDR extended Lend-Lease to Russia, it would only increase the hardship on the U.S. armed forces.