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

by Conrad Black

  The massive defense build-up continued apace, and secret staff talks began in Washington with the British, in the eventuality of both countries being at war with Germany and Japan. The principal conclusion in the early phase was that Germany was the more powerful and dangerous adversary and that whatever the circumstances of the issue being joined, primary concentration would have to be on the defeat of Germany. With the territory and populations Germany had now occupied, the Greater Reich had an ostensible population as great as that of the United States, 130 million, and an industrial capacity not greatly inferior. Only 60 percent of these people spoke German, but if Germany were allowed undisturbed possession of most of France and Poland and its other neighbors for two generations, its position would be irreversibly solidified. Such an expanded Germany, under totalitarian Nazi direction, was a menace to all civilization. Japan was a formidable nuisance but had little capacity seriously to discommode the West beyond the Central Pacific and the borders of India, apart from whatever it might attempt in Asiatic Russia.

  In the year ending March 31, 1941, Allied merchant shipping losses to German submarine warfare had totaled about 2.3 million tons, which exceeded British shipbuilding capacity and strained food and some war supplies. Roosevelt transferred some naval units from the Pacific to the Atlantic and publicly designated almost two-thirds of the North Atlantic as America’s “sea frontier” and a “Neutrality Zone,” by which he meant that the U.S. Navy would attack any German or Italian warship on detection, and advise the Royal and Canadian navies of their position.

  Roosevelt’s closest collaborator, Harry Hopkins, former director of his workfare programs and now the secretary of commerce, and his friendly opponent in 1940, Wendell Willkie, both visited Britain in February 1941, and both made an excellent impression in Britain and took an excellent impression back with them. Hopkins told Churchill that Roosevelt was determined “at all costs and by all means, to carry you through” the war,105 and described the American voters as 10 to 15 percent Nazi or Soviet sympathizers, who sheltered behind Lindbergh and professed neutrality but wanted a German victory; 10 to 15 percent, represented by Kennedy, who wanted to help Britain but were pessimistic and didn’t want any risk of America entering the war; 10 to 15 percent, including Knox and Stimson, who thought war with Germany inevitable and wanted to get on with it; and 60 percent who favored all aid short of war, even if it risked war. He said Roosevelt had all the last two groups and some of the Kennedy faction, about 75 percent of the people, and was essentially in the war faction himself but knew the value of a united public opinion in wartime. Just before he left Britain, Hopkins, implicitly speaking for his leader, told Churchill, in the presence of a number of dinner companions: “Whither thou goest, I shall go; where thou lodgest, I will lodge; your people are my people and your God my God, even to the end.”

  And Willkie delivered to Churchill a hand-written message from Roosevelt that included a verse from Longfellow that, he wrote, “applies to you people as it does to us.” Churchill read it on a world broadcast: “Sail on O ship of state; Sail on O Union strong and great; Humanity, with all its fears, with all its hopes for future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate.” Churchill responded with Clough’s poem, beginning “Say not the struggle naught availeth,” and ending “Westward look, the land is bright.” The Western world was fortunate to be led at this decisive hour by two men who well represented, by their culture and beliefs and personalities, the civilization they were defending. And both countries were fortunate to have leaders so unusually conversant with the history and geography of the world’s principal powers, and to have a background in directing a large navy in wartime.

  The president’s notions of neutrality were given a new and even more elastic definition with the Lend-Lease Act, presented in February as a result of Churchill’s urgent advice to Roosevelt that Britain would not be able to pay cash for military purchases much longer. Roosevelt took one of his restorative sea cruises, on the USS Tuscaloosa (he had been an avid sailor all his life), and conceived the idea of “lending” Britain and Canada whatever they needed, in exchange for the United States taking out leases on various locations in Newfoundland and Bermuda and the Caribbean to establish bases. Obviously, the concept of “lending” ammunition and warplanes and such in the midst of a world war, with any hope of having them returned, as borrowers are expected to do, was far-fetched, but Roosevelt defended it with his customary panache. He explained to the press that it was like lending “your neighbor your garden hose if his house is on fire.” This was nonsense, of course, but when questioned further, Roosevelt asked the reporter if he knew the difference between a horse and a cow, and claimed that the distinction between a loan and a gift was just as obvious.

  With heavy-duty arm-twisting from the White House, the measure passed both houses (skillfully floor-managed in the Senate by Foreign Relations Committee chairman Walter George, whom Roosevelt had tried to purge in 1938) on March 11. Most Republicans voted against, which makes it clear that if Willkie had won the 1940 election, though he would have favored aid to Britain, it is unlikely he would have devised such an imaginative scheme, and unlikely that he would have succeeded in passing it. The one occasion when someone sought a third presidential term in the United States was one when it was uniquely essential to Western civilization that he succeed. As often happens in its most dire moments, fortune smiled, consistent with the American traditional belief that when it matters most, God does bless America.

  Lend-Lease assistance over the next four years would total over $50 billion. It was a brilliant scheme, and was proclaimed to be so even by Stalin, and the British Parliament voted a resolution of unreserved gratitude to the United States for what Churchill described as “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.” It made it clear that what Hitler had already described (accurately) as the “moral aggression” of American assistance to Britain, on the Atlantic and in its supply role, meant that Germany and the United States were already, in all respects except a general exchange of fire, at war. Hitler had to face that he had no chance of suppressing Britain by invasion, any more than Philip II in 1588, Choiseul in 1760, or Napoleon in 1804 (Introduction and Chapters 1 and 3). The Royal Navy was insuperable without air superiority, which was unattainable with the strength of the Royal Air Force backed by a blank check from America’s immense aircraft production industry. British determination and courage, and American industrial might, would keep Britain durably in the war.

  10. THE RUSSO-GERMAN WAR

  If he was going to face the British and the Americans, Hitler began to shift from an offensive to a tenacious mode, and considered the thought that his best move would be to knock Russia out of the war now, to ensure that Germany controlled all of the European mainland. He would then be sure of not having to fight a two-front war, and the British and the Americans, to launch a successful attack on a Europe entirely dominated by Hitler, would probably need as many as 50,000 warplanes, 500 divisions, and the amphibious forces to land them, and would then have to slog from their starting point to Berlin to win. To Hitler’s mind, which did not permit any moral considerations at all, a completely unprovoked and unannounced attack on Russia had its merits. It would be an immense gamble, but Hitler had taken those all his career, and had always succeeded.

  If Hitler had followed up his peace overtures of October 1939 and July 1940 with placatory actions and the unilateral suspension of acts of war, he might have made it impossible for Roosevelt to rouse the American public from its isolationist torpor, and might even have lulled the British back into acquiescence. Had he had any of the moderate judgment of a Richelieu or Bismarck, he would have done that, but it would have deprived him of the fanaticism, the rigid totalitarianism, and the preparedness to risk all that were his strength and appeal, as well as, ultimately, his undoing. It was not in Hitler’s character. An invasion of the USSR, by his standards of strategic calculation, made some sense, but not at that time and not the way he did it
. It would have made much more sense to pour forces into North Africa, instead of the paltry four divisions he gave the brilliant Afrika Korps commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (to add to seven less serviceable Italian divisions), in order to take the Suez Canal and occupy the oil-producing areas of the Middle East. He could thus have supplied Japan with oil, which would have eliminated the coercive aspect of the oil and scrap metal embargo Roosevelt imposed on Japan. It would have enabled Japan to ignore America and join a German attack on Russia. Roosevelt could not have secured, and would not have wished, a declaration of war to defend Stalin.

  And since he had an alliance with Japan, Hitler could have coordinated actions against Russia with Japan. Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka visited Berlin and Moscow in March and April 1941, proposing a four-power pact, including Italy. Hitler, for his own reasons, not only ignored that but failed to give him any indication of his thinking about the USSR, and lost the opportunity to concert a Japanese attack on the Russian Far East. By this time, the key strategic ingredient for Japan was Roosevelt’s embargo of aircraft and aircraft parts and aviation fuel, and his reduction of oil sales to Japan, as Japan imported 85 percent of its oil—80 percent from the United States. Roosevelt was not prepared to reopen supplies unless Japan showed some disposition to withdraw from China and Indochina (which it began occupying after the fall of France, and formally absorbed in July 1941). With the United States shutting down as a supplier of oil, Japan had to be supplied from either the Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia), which were also closed to it by Roosevelt’s intervention, or the Middle East, where supplies were controlled by Britain, or the Caucasus fields of the USSR. Neither Churchill nor Stalin was prepared to lubricate Japanese expansionism, any more than Roosevelt was.

  If Hitler was not prepared to make a serious effort to seize the Middle Eastern oil fields and close the Suez Canal to Britain, he should at least have promised the Japanese that if they joined him in an attack on the USSR, and avoided war with the United States, which would have occurred if Japan had seized the Dutch East Indies, he would open up the Caucasus oil fields to them. Matsuoka would personally have been well-disposed to any of this. He was quite outraged at American obduracy, even though he had been raised in Portland, Oregon, and Oakland, California, and was a Christian (and ostentatiously disagreed with Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies). Thus unalerted, Matsuoka went on to Moscow and signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, though neither party could be trusted to adhere for one day to any pact it made.

  Instead, Hitler kept his allies completely in the dark and prepared for the supreme gamble in the east, with some uncertainty, given the scale of the undertaking. He compared Russia to Wagner’s Flying Dutchman—it was impossible to know exactly what would happen. As Hitler prepared for the onslaught against Russia, British and American intelligence reported great activity indicating such a move, which was duly handed on to the Soviet government by the British and American embassies in Moscow. Stalin ignored all of it.

  Hitler had prepared by reducing all the Balkans to client states, but his plans were interrupted in March by Mussolini’s ill-considered invasion of Greece, a mad enterprise for no good object, which enabled the fierce Greeks to give the ill-assured Fascist invaders a bloody nose reminiscent of the Finnish response to Stalin. Then, under the influence of British and American intelligence, a coup in Belgrade overthrew the pro-German government and abrogated the rather subservient treaty that had just been signed with the Reich. Hitler invaded Yugoslavia and then Greece, as Churchill had withdrawn 60,000 soldiers from North Africa to assist the Greeks against the Italians. The Germans overwhelmed the Yugoslavs and the Greeks and pushed the British into the boats, first in Greece and then by paratroop attack in Crete, as they had the year before at Dunkirk. Rommel had been enabled to launch an offensive that drove the British back into Egypt, but Hitler’s timetable for an invasion of Russia was delayed by almost two months, as it took to the end of April to secure Greece. This would prove crucial. (It must be said that no outsider had had such success in quelling the endless conflicts of the Balkans as Hitler did. Bismarck had warned that “The Great Powers must not become involved in the quarrels of these sheep-stealers.” Yet in the ensuing four years, Yugoslavia suffered 1.6 million war dead, 600,000 fighting the Germans and the Italians, and the other million fighting each other.)

  Roosevelt occupied Greenland, with the approval of the junior-level Danish government in exile (a former consul was the most authoritative free Dane that could be found), as the U.S. would occupy Iceland, with the approval of that country, in July, and on May 27 Roosevelt declared a state of unlimited national emergency and closed all German and Italian consulates in the United States. He was behaving exactly as Hitler’s last ambassador to Washington, Hans Dieckhoff, had predicted, and as Hitler had come to expect. It all confirmed him in his view that in order to be secure in his gains, he had to remove Russia from Europe and obliterate it as a threat to his rear, before Roosevelt came all the way into the war and he and Churchill concerted a three-way attack on the Reich with Stalin. It had a certain logic, but as is notorious, it was a catastrophic error. But if Hitler’s calculations went awry, Roosevelt’s did not. A Russo-German war, if it could be kept going, and an early German victory prevented, could open a German artery in the east and cause a war of attrition that would facilitate a decisive British-American stroke in the west.

  The former chief of staff of the U.S. Army, now the commander of the armed forces of the Philippines (which Roosevelt nationalized into U.S. forces in July 1941), General Douglas MacArthur, had visited the Soviet general staff in 1932, and told Stimson (then Hoover’s secretary of state and now Roosevelt’s secretary of war) that Stalin had got rid of most of his best officers in his purges and replaced them with “Jewish commissars without the brains or requirement for command.”106 The Russians had done well against the Japanese in “border incidents” that involved up to 10 divisions, but had fared poorly against the Finns. But it was a vast and populous country and the Russian masses had never been easy to defeat when defending the motherland. Now, as Western intelligence, including the Vatican, was abuzz with reports of an imminent German assault, everyone except Stalin, who clung to his alliance with Hitler to the end, and the Japanese, who were kept in the dark by everyone, knew that everything hung in the balance as Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa on June 22, and invaded the USSR with 180 divisions, with the Finns and Romanians, along a 2,000-mile front.

  As always, the Germans enjoyed complete surprise and made rapid advances, encircling Russian armies in the Ukraine and Belarus in the first six weeks of the war and bagging about 1.3 million prisoners. Stalin was immobilized for the first few days, and his armies fell back everywhere, badly battered. In the Ukraine there was considerable initial enthusiasm for the Germans. But the Red Army did not crack entirely and showed no disposition to stop fighting. Its retreat continued into Russia, but slowed and remained orderly. Stalin had no difficulty replacing dead, wounded, and captured soldiers from the vast pool of the USSR’s manpower. He took to the radio—a much rarer occasion for him than for Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt, who were, unlike Stalin, great natural orators—and invoked the traditions of Holy Mother Russia, having, to encourage traditional patriotic incitements, exhumed the Russian Orthodox Church that he had been trying to obliterate for the past 15 years. He spoke for the Russian masses (although a Georgian himself) when he avowed in his radio address: “The Germans are inundating our motherland like a plague of grey-green slugs. We will kill them, kill them all, and plough them under the sod.” Roosevelt promised assistance to the Soviet Union on June 24, and on July 12 Britain and the USSR signed a mutual-defense agreement that included arms supplies to the Russians and a joint promise of no separate peace with Germany. (Britain had learned from France that such a pledge did not necessarily mean much.)

  As Roosevelt edged toward war, the state of relations with Japan began to have a bearing on relations wi
th Russia. When Japan completed its takeover of Indochina in July 1941, Roosevelt imposed a complete embargo on sales of scrap iron (the basis of much Japanese steel production, as it had access to little iron ore) and oil, including from the Dutch East Indies (which he effectively controlled because the Dutch government in exile, including the Queen, Wilhelmina, knew that they would never see the Netherlands again without the involvement of the United States). The oil embargo would only be lifted on the basis of specific export permits, tanker by tanker. This was going to force Japan either to scale back its continuing invasion of China and vacate Indochina, or attack to the south to obtain sure oil supplies from the Dutch East Indies, which the United States had already warned would be an act of war. (Roosevelt would not have had a united country declaring such a war, but giving Japan that ultimatum increased the likelihood that if it attacked the Dutch East Indies, it would attack the United States, too, which would unite American opinion.) The relevance of this to Russia was that if there were no sign of an American entry into the war, and the Germans overran Moscow and Leningrad, the temptation of Stalin to make a separate peace as Lenin and Trotsky had done in 1917, and to retire to Asia and await a favorable moment to return to Europe, would be great. He was not prepared to go on taking up to 10,000 casualties a day just to please Churchill and Roosevelt, not that he was much concerned about casualties for humanitarian reasons, but if he was going to quit the war, he wanted to salvage as much of the sinews of war, including his army, as he could. All aspects, and almost all major protagonists in the world struggle, were treacherous, except Churchill and Roosevelt, and they were not Eagle Scouts either (fortunately).

  The Germans had all the Ukraine underfoot by mid-August, and had arrived at the gates of Leningrad by late September, as they drove into the Crimea. Hitler moved his central army group to the south and then back to the central front against Moscow, whose outskirts the German army approached as the winter took hold in mid-November. This was an impressive advance, but the German General Staff had anticipated even faster progress and assumed the disintegration of the Red Army, as the French, who had fought so valiantly in World War I, crumbled under the mechanized and aerial assaults of the German war machine in 1940. Instead, Russian resistance stiffened. It was a barbarous war, as German violations of the Geneva Convention, in the east, were ignored, and millions of prisoners of war, including one of Stalin’s sons, were murdered on both sides.