Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Roosevelt sent Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, for whose talents (unlike Hull’s) he had considerable regard, on a mission to Rome, Berlin, Paris, and London in February and March 1940, to see if there were any prospects for peace. He found Mussolini full of bluster, Hitler disingenuously professing preparedness to make peace or war, the French sullen and demoralized, and the British grimly determined, but with no idea of how to win a war, and no prospects of an early peace. Roosevelt had long been convinced that Hitler was a compulsive warmonger who was determined to provoke war, and he doubted that Britain and France, without Russia, could contain Germany as they had, by the narrowest margin, until Russia collapsed, in World War I. In these circumstances, there is little likelihood and no evidence that Roosevelt had any intention of retiring after two terms, as his distinguished predecessors had done. He had written that France could not tolerate remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, and that Germany would soon be stronger than France. He had warned Stalin about facilitating Germany’s initiation of war, and he had no confidence in the ability of Chamberlain or any French leader in sight to wage war successfully against such a satanic war leader as Hitler at the head of such a military machine as he had built. He doubted the ability of any discernible coalition to defeat Germany without the eventual participation of the United States.

  7. THE GERMAN BLITZKRIEG, WINSTON CHURCHILL, AND THE FALL OF FRANCE

  Roosevelt was considering these facts and how, if he were to seek a third term, he would engineer it without scandalizing American concerns about too long an incumbency, when Hitler seized Denmark and invaded Norway, in April 1940. An Anglo-French expeditionary force landed in Norway in mid-April but was forced to evacuate after 10 days. The British would return to Narvik at the end of May, but would again be forced to withdraw 10 days later. It was another snappy, professional German military operation, and it precipitated a confidence debate in the British House of Commons that revealed too many defections from Chamberlain’s Conservative Party for him to continue. Though the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, was considered for the succession, he was tainted by appeasement and did not feel he could govern from the unelected House of Lords. Winston Churchill was the obvious choice, and on May 10, 1940, King George VI invested him with practically unlimited power as head of an all-party national unity government, in what, with the invasion of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France that morning, was now an unlimited emergency.

  The German campaign plan, called “Sickle-sweep,” devised chiefly by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, but with Hitler’s personal collaboration, was brilliantly conceived and executed. The Germans struck through what had been thought to be the impassable Ardennes Forest with swift-moving mechanized units, and wheeled right, opposite to the World War I Schlieffen Plan, and drove to the sea, completely separating the British, Belgians, and northern French armies from the main French army around Paris and along the Rhine, in the heavily fortified and underground Maginot Line. The Belgians capitulated on May 28, and 338,000 British and French soldiers were evacuated by hundreds of craft of all kinds between May 28 and June 4, from Dunkirk across the English Channel, as the retreating armies tenaciously defended the perimeter and the Royal Navy and Air Force retained air and sea superiority in the Channel. They left their equipment behind, and Roosevelt immediately (and without consultation in the midst of the intense run-up to presidential elections) sent Britain a full shipment of rifles and machine guns and munitions to rearm the evacuated forces and enable them to defend the home islands if necessary.104

  The German army outnumbered and outgunned the remaining French by more than two to one and on June 5 launched a general offensive southward to sweep France out of the war. Italy declared war on France and Britain on June 10, an event that Roosevelt described as striking “a dagger into the back of its neighbor.” Churchill and the French premier, Paul Reynaud, made increasingly urgent appeals to Roosevelt to announce that the U.S. would enter the war (which Churchill knew, certainly, to be completely out of the question), as Reynaud was now wrestling with a defeatist faction that wished peace at any price. His government evacuated to Bordeaux, and Paris, declared an open city, was occupied by the German army on June 14. The 84-year-old Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, succeeded Reynaud as premier on June 17 and asked for German peace terms.

  France surrendered in Marshal Foch’s railway car where the 1918 Armistice was signed, at Compiègne, on June 22. The long battle between the French and the Germans was apparently over, in Germany’s favor, as it crushed and humiliated and disarmed France and occupied more than half the country, including Paris. The Third Republic, which had presided over the greatest cultural flowering in French history and had seen the country victoriously through the agony of the World War I, ignominiously voted itself out of existence at the Vichy casino on July 10, 1940. The fascist sympathizer Pierre Laval would govern in the German interest in the unoccupied zone, in the name of the senescent marshal. Virtually all France, initially, knelt in submission before the Teutonic conquerors, as they marched in perfect precision down the main boulevards of all occupied cities, resplendent in their shiny boots, full breeches, shortish, tight-waisted tunics, and coal-scuttle helmets. Not since Napoleon crushed Prussia in 1806 had one Great European Power so swiftly and overwhelmingly defeated another. And in this case, the occupier intended to stay, and most of France was annexed to Germany, including Paris. Appearances were deceiving, however.

  A pioneering advocate of mechanized and air warfare and junior minister in the Reynaud government, General Charles de Gaulle, with practically no support, and representing only the vestiges of France’s national spirit and interests, flew to England on June 18, and declared by radio to his countrymen: “France has lost a battle; France has not lost the war.” He announced the formation of the Free French movement, which would continue the war. As Churchill said, he carried “with him, in his little aircraft, the honour of France.” The major players of the greatest drama in modern history were all in place: Stalin, Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, and now de Gaulle.

  WWII Pacific. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

  As the tide of war swept over Europe, Roosevelt kept requesting and receiving increased allocations for military preparedness. As the war began, he installed General George C. Marshall, over many senior officers, to be chief of staff of the United States Army. Marshall urged Roosevelt to mobilize opinion for an increased defense budget and he assured the general that Hitler would take care of that. This was what happened, as Roosevelt ordered eight battleships, 24 aircraft carriers (there were only 24 afloat in the world, almost all in the British, Japanese, and U.S. navies), and an annual aircraft production of 50,000 (five times German production). The remaining workfare programs were entirely given over to defense production. It was the strategic coup of completing victory in one arena (elimination of unemployment) by focusing on the next target (arming America until it was an incomparable military superpower). Unemployment declined by 500,000 per month for the balance of the year and into 1941; that battle was over and won at last. Among the workfare projects were the two soon-to-be historic aircraft carriers, Enterprise and Yorktown. Unemployment had vanished completely, even in the relief programs, by the autumn of 1941.

  8. THE THIRD TERM

  Roosevelt had kept his countrymen entirely in the dark about his political intentions, and there was teeming curiosity about whether he would break a tradition as old as the Republic and seek a third term. As the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, bringing to 14 the number of countries that had been occupied, starting with Ethiopia, Roosevelt staged another of his political masterstrokes, by firing his isolationist war secretary, Harry Woodring, and bringing into his administration preparedness advocate and former Republican secretary of war and state Colonel Henry Stimson and, as navy secretary, the previous Republican candidate for vice president and comrade in arms of Theodore Roosevelt, Colonel Frank K
nox. The enlistment of these two prominent Republicans gave the administration the character of a coalition. Eight days later, the Republicans met at Philadelphia and nominated dark-horse utilities executive, Wall Street lawyer, and public intellectual Wendell L. Willkie, originally from Indiana, for president, and Senator Charles L. McNary of Oregon for vice president. The Republicans attacked the New Deal without proposing to disband any of it and pledged to stay out of war, but supported aid to the democracies and resistance to any European intrusions in the Western Hemisphere.

  Still Roosevelt kept his own counsel, though it is now obvious that he was planning to seek reelection. The Democrats met on July 15 at Chicago, and Roosevelt gave the convention keynote speaker, Senate majority leader Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky, a message to read in his address. It contained the usual references to Roosevelt’s fervent ambition to return to his “home on the Hudson” (which is bunk, because if that is what he had wished to do, he would have done it), and said that he had no desire for a third term and that the delegates should feel free to vote for anyone they wished. Anyone obviously included him, and by prearrangement, a barrel-chested official of the Chicago Democratic municipal machine, which had packed the convention, bellowed into a microphone in the basement that was connected to every loudspeaker in the convention hall: “We want Roosevelt!” The convention erupted in Roosevelt demonstrations, singing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones,” and other Roosevelt songs, while the voice from the basement recounted every state and large city in the country as a place that did “want Roosevelt.”

  As a spontaneous move against the wishes and without the knowledge of the incumbent, it was a fraud, of course, and was largely perceived to be so, but it did reflect the party’s wishes and was a reasonable facsimile of a draft. Roosevelt addressed the convention by special hook-up from the White House, after he inflicted on the convention the mad choice of the mystical leftist Henry A. Wallace, agriculture secretary, as his vice presidential candidate. Roosevelt said that the war emergency would prevent him from campaigning, but that he reserved the right to intervene in the electioneering to correct “campaign falsehoods,” with little doubt that he would purport to find some. With that he embarked on a country-wide tour of defense installations that was publicized as much as campaign appearances and had most of the characteristics of them.

  The Battle of Britain for the air superiority that would be necessary for any German invasion of England, given the overwhelming strength of the Royal Navy and the certainty that it would fight with desperate courage to defend the home islands, began on August 8 and continued to late October. Roosevelt would replace British aircraft losses, but the U.S. did not have a fighter plane that was competitive with Britain’s superb Spitfire and Hurricane or Germany’s Messerschmitt 109. In the course of the battle, Goering shifted targets from aircraft factories and airfields to night bombing of cities, especially London, in order to reduce the number of German planes being downed. This tactic brought German losses beneath the level of their aircraft production but assured the replacement of British losses also, and while bombing civil populations shook British morale, it did not crack and the attacks outraged world, and especially American opinion.

  In the three months ending October 31, the British lost 915 aircraft but recovered most of the air crews, and the Germans lost 1,733 aircraft and lost all the aircrews over Britain. With their aircraft production holding and unlimited resupply from the U.S., it was clear that Britain had won the great air battle and would not be invaded. Churchill, a mighty orator, repeatedly roused his countrymen and stirred the whole world with Demosthenean tours de force on world broadcasts, including his immortal exhortation as France quit the war: “Let us so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire should last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’” They did and it was. He concluded a broadcast in October: “We are still awaiting the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.” This was not an idle challenge; the capital ships of the Home Fleet were deployed to southern ports, and without air superiority a German invasion force would have gone to a watery grave and any shore parties that landed would have met a reception unlike any that the German army had had since 1918.

  Roosevelt sent the British 50 aged destroyers in mid-campaign, and began extending American territorial waters from three miles to 1,800 miles, and ordered the navy to reveal the presence of any German ship to the British and the Canadians. He also secured the first peacetime conscription in the country’s history, of a million men, which he called, taking a word from the Revolutionary War, “a muster.” Willkie campaigned with great energy and focused on his claim that Roosevelt would lead the country into war. The young men of America, he said, “are already, almost at the boats.” In fact, in retrospect, it appears that Roosevelt’s idea was to do whatever was necessary to keep Britain in the war, arm America to the teeth, and intervene when the Germans had been enervated by attrition, somewhat as had happened in 1917. Toward the end of the campaign, Roosevelt emerged and gave some memorable campaign speeches. On October 28 in New York’s Madison Square Garden, he added the names of Republican congressmen “Martin, Barton and Fish” to a recitation of reactionary opponents and the crowd, after the first instance, shouted out their names as he got to them. “I have said again and again and again that your sons will not be sent into any foreign wars” (Boston, October 30). His defeatist ambassador in London, Kennedy, returned late in the campaign, to, it was widely thought, endorse Willkie, but Roosevelt had him intercepted when his Clipper flying boat landed at New York and brought directly to the White House with his wife, where Roosevelt persuaded him, allegedly by promising to further the political careers of Kennedy’s sons, to endorse him, which Kennedy did in a national radio broadcast a few days later (which Kennedy insisted on paying for himself).

  Roosevelt solemnly promised to stay out of war, advocated peace through strength, was supported by Willkie in calling for assistance to Britain and Canada, and smeared the isolationists as, in effect, Nazi sympathizers. His courtship of the Roman Catholics (and particularly his refusal to buckle to the prevailing enthusiasm to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War) produced a handsome reward as New York’s Archbishop Francis J. Spellman, who replaced the deceased Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago as America’s most powerful clergyman, issued a statement that was read in every Roman Catholic church in America, asserting that “It is better to have strength and not need it than to need it and not have it. We seek peace, but not a peace that consists in a choice between slavery and death.” It was a clear endorsement of Roosevelt’s policy, without naming him. At the decisive moment, the leadership of that Church delivered all it had for the president.

  On election day, Roosevelt won, 27.2 million (54.5 percent) and 449 electoral votes, to 22.3 million (44.5 percent) and 89 electoral votes for Willkie. The Democrats made modest gains in the congressional elections. On December 29, 1940, in one of the most famous of all his fireside chats, Roosevelt addressed more than 70 percent of the country, and said that “No dictator, no combination of dictators” would deter America from being “the great arsenal of democracy.” Messages to the White House ran 100 to one in support of the president and he moved into his unprecedented third term with an approval rating of over 70 percent.

  His sure-footed strategic agility had been an astounding tour de force through a complete political cycle. He had recruited the western isolationists to assist him in adopting programs to put the people back to work, renovate the nation’s infrastructure, stabilize agriculture, assure the foundations of contented agrarian and working classes, and inspirit the nation. There were, from the Quarantine speech in October 1937 through his reelection, a series of almost faultless sequential steps toward the fulfillment of his grand strategy for America, the world, and, incidentally, himself. The war emergency ended the Depression as he ditched the Progressive isolationists upon whom the New Deal had depended and r
eplaced them with the southern advocates of massive defense and aid to the British and the French, attracted prominent Republicans to the administration, and brought in the greatest armament program in world history.

  The fall of France made the United States central, even more than in 1917, in the triumph of democratic government and the free enterprise economy, in the world. Roosevelt would assure Britain’s survival and await in hopefulness a German immersion in Russia (which he had predicted to Stalin) and a deepening Japanese immersion in China, until the time was right for a mightily armed America to assert itself. In the supreme crisis of modern times, as in the supreme crisis of the Union 80 years before, and at the contentious birth of the republic 85 years before that, the head of the American people and state was a leader of surpassing political and strategic genius. The best was yet to come.

  9. THE FOUR FREEDOMS AND LEND-LEASE

  Now installed for an indefinite duration at the head of the nation, Roosevelt, in his State of the Union message on January 6, 1941, staked out much of the country’s future international strategy. He outlined Four Freedoms as America’s goals, implicitly for the whole world: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. And in describing the world crisis, he uttered the defining words: “We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and tinkling cymbal would preach the ‘ism’ of appeasement”; the United States must never be (and has not been) an appeasement power, and must escalate its promotion of democratic values.