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

by Conrad Black

  The Germans committed horrible atrocities on the civil population, as Hitler acknowledged the campaign as a genocidal assault on the Slavic lumpenproletariat and peasant masses, and announced publicly that the entire population of Leningrad would be liquidated when the city, Peter the Great’s majestic capital on the Baltic, was captured. Apart from the moral depravity of such assertions, they had a predictably reinforcing impact on resistant Soviet morale. The barbarity of the Nazi Gestapo rule in the Ukraine swiftly turned the welcome of the Germans into enervating guerrilla war. Unspeakable brutality occurred constantly, on a general scale, on both sides. The two mighty and evil totalitarian dictators were locked in a death struggle. That did not, however, preclude a separate peace, even if it meant Stalin’s retreat across the Urals into Asia, if he could not see any prospect of a second front in the west.

  11. THE ATLANTIC CHARTER

  Churchill and Roosevelt, who had met only twice before, at the end of the previous world war, occasions from which Roosevelt retained an unpleasant memory of Churchill as a bibulous snob, and which Churchill did not remember at all, had a seaboard meeting on Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, August 9 to 12. Both leaders were accompanied by their senior military service chiefs, and the discussions took place on the USS Augusta and HMS Prince of Wales. Churchill, as he later said, courted the American president more assiduously than any woman had ever been wooed. Roosevelt had both a Yankee skepticism about British Tory imperialism and a fundamental Anglophilia, bolstered by his admiration for the eloquence and implacability of the British prime minister over the 14 months of his tenure through gravely critical times.

  Churchill, though a veteran of 40 years in Parliament and nine different cabinet posts, had not always been popular and had never led a party in a general election. As a politician, Churchill had admired Roosevelt’s mastery of the American political scene and the originality of his domestic program. And as first minister in a coalition, who had to spend much of his time keeping the king and Parliament informed and consulting with his cabinet and with the leaders of the main Commonwealth countries, especially Canada, Australia, and South Africa, Churchill envied and admired Roosevelt’s status as the thrice-chosen chief of state, head of government, and commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful country, who seemed to have a permanent majority of the people behind him, and never seemed to consult with anyone about anything. They were the two greatest political personalities and statesmen of, certainly, the democratic world of the twentieth century and had many private interests in common, as well as a complete identity of immediate strategic interests. They got on very well, and Roosevelt wrote his cousin that Churchill reminded him in temperament of the ebullient mayor of New York, Fiorello H. La Guardia.107

  Hopkins was now the head of the Lend-Lease program and had traveled back with Churchill to the conference on his battleship, having visited, and been impressed by, Stalin. It was agreed that Averell Harriman, who was helping coordinate the Lend-Lease program, and Churchill’s former minister of aircraft production during the Battle of Britain, the Canadian newspaper publisher Lord Beaverbrook, would conduct a joint mission to Russia and assess Russia’s war needs. Churchill outlined his view of the future development of the war, which emphasized maritime blockade, amphibious attacks around the perimeter of the kind Britain had conducted since Chatham’s time (rarely with success), aerial bombardment, and aid to resistance groups conducting guerrilla war. He expressed doubt that there would be any need for the deployment of large armies in Western Europe. Roosevelt and Marshall did not believe a word of it and, presumably, Churchill didn’t either, and was just trying to make participation in the war seem less onerous to the Americans.

  Marshall replied for the Americans, very deferentially, as the British “were at this business every day, all day,” but said that he believed that if America entered the war, there would be no alternative to invading France and driving on into Germany. This would be the source of considerable strategic differences between the two governments as the war unfolded. The British leadership, including Churchill himself, had all been active on the Western Front in World War I and dreaded a return to the terrible bloodbaths of France and Flanders. The Americans, not having gone all the way through that war, motivated by the advance of mechanized and air warfare creating greater mobility and giving the advantage to the offense, as Germany had often demonstrated in the last two years, and with the stupefying tank and aircraft production capacity of their country in mind, and the natural directness of the American temperament, favored a strike at the heart of Germany by the shortest route, and the assembly and concentration of the force necessary to achieve it. Churchill somewhat enjoyed being a war leader, and was imbued with the British tradition of continuing in wars for a long time, secure from invasion, and now generally in control of their own airspace. British elections could be postponed indefinitely, and there had not been one since 1935. If the Americans entered the war, they would be on a different military and political timetable.

  There was considerable discussion about Japan, as Churchill was desperate to get the United States into the war by any aperture, even the Pacific. Roosevelt was still not in any hurry to enter the war, as long as it looked like Russia could hold out. Churchill urged Roosevelt to stop all oil shipments to Japan, but Roosevelt preferred to keep some, a trickle, on a shipload-by-shipload basis, so as not to put the Japanese right to the wall. The two leaders agreed to the Atlantic Charter, which pledged them to seek a postwar world where there would be a renunciation of national aggrandizement, and of territorial changes without the consent of the populations involved. The charter advocated the right of peoples to choose their own form of government; freer trade and emphasis on the general improvement of standards of living throughout the world; freedom from want and fear and of the seas; and the disarmament of aggressive countries. It was a pretty lofty and aerated program, and it raised the question of how Churchill proposed to apply the choice-of-government provision to the constituent parts of Britain’s vast colonial empire. But it was an expression of solidarity between a country up to its eyes in war and another officially at peace, and was a sonorous program in contrast to the brute force of the Germans and Japanese (not to mention Mussolini’s brutish antics and Stalin’s subversions and aggressions, prior to being assaulted by his esteemed Nazi ally).

  12. THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN

  While Roosevelt was meeting with Churchill, the House of Representatives, despite the prodigies of the very able Speaker Sam Rayburn, renewed peacetime conscription only by 203 votes to 202. Roosevelt’s absence from the capital even for a couple of weeks caused slacknesses in the leadership. When he returned to Washington, Roosevelt discovered that, having made a great deal to Churchill of the need to retain some supply of oil to the Japanese, his under secretary of state for economic affairs, Dean Acheson, a hawk, had taken it upon himself to reject every request for an oil export permit the Japanese had made. There was, as he confidently put it, in the absence of a policy ordered by the president, a practice determined by him, Acheson (who would be one of the country’s most competent secretaries of state under Roosevelt’s successor). He had been under secretary of the Treasury, but had been fired by Roosevelt in 1934, supposedly for indiscretions, which he had not committed, but really for debating with Roosevelt about the price of gold; he had been brought back to government in 1940 after publicly asserting that the president had the right to sell Britain destroyers on his own authority without reference to the Congress. Roosevelt determined to raise Acheson’s “practice” to a thoroughgoing policy. The question of whether Japan would go to war against the United States and Britain would come to a head simultaneously with the determination of whether Stalin could hold the Germans at Moscow and Leningrad.

  In the autumn of 1941, tensions rose steadily in the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time that the battle for Russia’s greatest cities intensified. A German submarine attacked a U.S. destroyer on September 4; a week
later Roosevelt announced publicly his previously issued “shoot on sight” order against Axis ships in what he had now defined as American waters (extending two-thirds of the way across the Atlantic). In October, after two American destroyers were attacked by German submarines and one was sunk, with the loss of more than a hundred American lives, Roosevelt asked Congress, which agreed, for authority to arm merchant vessels and gave a Navy Day speech on his cousin Theodore’s birthday (October 27), in which he said that Americans “had taken their battle stations,” that Hitler had fired the first shot, but that what “matters is who fires the last shot.” What he did not say was that the American destroyers had been depth-charging the submarines that torpedoed them and had initiated hostilities.

  By this time American decrypters had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and Roosevelt and Hull routinely saw messages to the Japanese embassy in Washington when the ambassador did or even before. A special representative arrived on November 20 and demanded that the U.S. withdraw its championship of China, reopen normal commercial and credit relations with Japan, assure Japan access to Dutch East Indies oil, and reduce American naval presence in the western Pacific. Hull made the standard American demands for respect of the sovereignty and equality of all countries, and for the status quo in the Pacific and Japanese withdrawal from China and Indochina. It was obvious and confirmed by diplomatic cables from the embassy to Tokyo that the two sides were not going to agree, and the U.S. ambassador in Japan, Joseph Grew, had warned on November 17 that the United States should be prepared for a sudden Japanese attack anywhere in the Pacific.

  Roosevelt met the Japanese ambassador and special envoy on November 17, and outlined what he called a modus vivendi, which would in six-month renewable installments revive the sale of American oil and rice to Japan. The Japanese would send no more forces to Indochina or Manchuria, would leave the Thais, British, and Dutch alone, and would not join in any war between the United States and Germany. The Japanese ambasador took this seriously and asked for an outline in writing, and requested Tokyo to defer any further drift to war. The Japanese government acceded to its envoy’s request, but Britain and China both objected when advised of the state of discussions, as both sought American entry into the war at once and by any means. American intelligence showed the movement of Japanese forces away from the Soviet border, and the Soviet government was advised of this. Stalin then withdrew almost all of his 400,000 troops in the Far East for the final battles of the year for Leningrad and Moscow. (The Trans-Siberian Railway was in nearly constant use, moving nearly 20 divisions westward.)

  The Soviet government evacuated Moscow to the east but Stalin remained in the Kremlin and made sure this was known to the population. Roosevelt had to consider whether to force the issue with Japan or de-escalate and increase the risk of Stalin making peace with Hitler, whether he saved his main cities or not. Even conceding Ukraine and Belarus would afford Germany a thick cordon sanitaire and leave Hitler almost impregnable in Western and Central Europe. Roosevelt did not commit the modus vivendi to writing, and cable intercepts indicated that the countdown to war in Tokyo began again.

  On November 27, the United States warned the British government that an attack by Japan in the Pacific was imminent and repeated warnings to all U.S. Army and Navy units in the Pacific that war was probably at hand and ordered maximum vigilance and preparedness. Roosevelt had moved the Pacific battle fleet from California to Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands in May 1940, and, via the chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold Stark, had sent the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral J.O. Richardson, a description he had received from Churchill of the successful British aerial attack on the Italian battle fleet at anchor in Taranto in November 1940. It described the technique for firing aerial torpedoes successfully in the shallow waters of anchorages. Richardson had criticized Roosevelt for moving the battle fleet to a more exposed harbor, and had ignored Stark’s recommendation to put torpedo nets out to protect the battle fleet when in Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt replaced him with Admiral Husband E. Kimmel as commander of the Pacific Fleet in January 1941. It was assumed in Washington that the Hawaiian Islands were in a state of full readiness—that there were torpedo nets around anchored ships and full air patrols throughout daylight hours 250 miles out from Pearl Harbor in all directions.

  The U.S. requested an explanation for Japanese military activities, and four days later Roosevelt wrote Emperor Hirohito urging peace. That evening, December 6, he received a decryption of a message from the Japanese government to its envoys in Washington, who had requested a meeting with Hull for the following afternoon. The last paragraph was omitted until the following morning, but when Roosevelt read the cable, he gave it to Hopkins, who was with him in his study, and said: “This means war.”108

  Roosevelt’s economic recovery program deserves a 67 percent grade as economics, an 80 percent for showmanship and morale-boosting, and 95 percent for castastrophe-avoidance. His war-preparation strategy was almost flawless genius. He subtly transferred one leg of his political support from western and midwestern liberal isolationists to southern, conservative, military preparedness advocates and quasi-Atlanticists. At the same time, he steadily strengthened hemispheric solidarity by reassuring the Canadians and outbidding Germany for the adherence of the Latin American dictators. He held the support of the one-quarter of Americans who were Roman Catholics in part by declining to support the anti-clerical Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and by other deferences, and the Roman Catholic episcopate delivered all it had for him at the end of the 1940 election campaign. Roosevelt’s draft for a third term had been based on the promise of peace through strength and all aid short of war for the democracies, as the surest way to stay out of war, while telling the British and Canadian leaders that he would make war without declaring it. With Lend-Lease, the designation of two-thirds of the North Atlantic as a “Neutrality Zone” where the U.S. Navy attacked German ships on detection, and the arming of American merchantmen, he was effectively conducting undeclared war.

  Roosevelt completed the elimination of the Depression with the greatest arms build-up in world history, assisted Russia to resist Germany when it was attacked by that country, promised to do whatever was needed to keep Britain in the war, pushed the Japanese imperialists to the wall with his oil and scrap metal embargoes, and when it seemed that Russia might buckle without a sign of armed relief from the West, invited a treacherous attack by Japan.

  Every element of an intricate plan for worldwide victory over Nazism and Japanese imperialism, and the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power in the world after comparatively affordable investment and sacrifice in war, had been hatched and implemented by Roosevelt without real consultation with anyone, and with consummate skill. He had already established with the British that in the event of war, priority must go to the defeat of Germany by the invasion of Europe in France. All was now in readiness for a brilliantly executed war.

  In 190 years of American history, only Benjamin Franklin’s manipulation of the British and then the French while Washington conducted a successful guerrilla war and Jefferson won an epochal propaganda victory, and Lincoln’s masterly mobilization of northern opinion and arms to preserve the Union, to which he appended the emancipation of the African Americans (and in a sense the whole country) from the bondage of slavery, bore comparison with Roosevelt’s strategic triumph from 1937 to 1945.

  This triumph was about to be consummated by his conduct of the war. And no other power in the world in the same period had remotely approached the accomplishment of such immense strategic victories as America’s in the Seven Years’ and Revolutionary Wars, the Civil War, and what was about to occur in the World War II, each vastly enhancing the standing of the country in the world.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Victory of Democracy in the West, 1941–1945

  1. DAY OF INFAMY

  The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor the next morning just after dawn, with 353 aircraft
from six aircraft carriers, in two flights. They achieved complete surprise and sank three battleships that settled upright by counter-flooding, capsized one, and grounded one. Three others were only lightly damaged and would be back in service in a couple of months. One would be back in about 15 months, two in about 18 months, and two were total losses. The American aircraft carriers were at sea and were undamaged. About 120 American planes were destroyed and approximately 2,300 Americans were killed. The United States retained nine operational battleships (plus the three that would be back in a couple of months), and had four nearing completion and four more under construction, compared with 12 Japanese, none damaged, but none on the slipways.

  On December 10, the Japanese sank a British battleship (the Prince of Wales, which had brought Churchill to the Atlantic Conference in August) and a battle cruiser (Repulse), and the same week the Italians, in a bold attack by human-operated torpedoes in Alexandria, sank two other British battleships upright, in revenge for the debacle at Taranto 13 months before.