The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  The great man shuffled out in slippers and led them to his study. According to Szilard, “the possibility of a chain reaction in uranium had not occurred” to Einstein. “But almost as soon as I began to tell him about it he realized what the consequences might be and immediately signified his readiness to help us and if necessary ‘stick his neck out,’ as the saying goes.” They proposed the Belgian solution—which might have altered the outcome of the whole war, since Hitler would be in Brussels by spring—with Einstein writing the queen. Unsure of the protocol, they decided after leaving him that a copy should go to the State Department; the original would be held for two weeks, to give the State Department a chance to protest. But during the following week, as they discussed the mission with friends, the question of another approach was raised. Gustav Stolper, former editor of Der deutsche Volksvirt (The German Economist), was acquainted with Alexander Sachs, a financier and adviser to President Roosevelt. Why not go straight to the White House? Sachs thought the idea excellent, and on August 2 Szilard returned to Long Island with Teller. Einstein dictated a letter to the President in German; Teller translated it. Hitler’s embargo on Czech uranium was cited, and the work in Berlin. The key passage explained the possible implications of a nuclear chain reaction: “…extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port, together with some of the surrounding territory.”

  Sachs handed the letter to Roosevelt on October 11, and to make certain that it wasn’t lost in a shuffle of other papers, he read it to him aloud. That was a mistake. The letter was too long. Roosevelt became bored and said at the end that he thought government intervention might be premature at this stage. Sachs begged for another meeting, at breakfast the following day, and the President nodded. The financier couldn’t sleep that night. Repeatedly he left his room at the Carlton Hotel and walked the two blocks to Lafayette Park, directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. He was trying to think of a way to dramatize the issue. The way he chose at breakfast was to remind FDR that Robert Fulton had taken his steamship invention to Napoleon, who had dismissed it as impractical, thus losing the vessel which might have permitted an invasion of England and victory. The President thought a moment, then produced a bottle of Napoleon brandy and two glasses.

  Filling them and lifting his to Sachs, he said, “Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.”

  “Precisely.”

  Roosevelt summoned his military aide, General Edwin “Pa” Watson, and handed him Einstein’s letter, together with supporting documents Sachs had brought. The President said, “Pa, this requires action!”

  So began the secret war, or S-1, as it was known to a few selected Americans—a very few, not even including the Vice President. Like the other war, this one had its triumphs and heroes, not all of them in laboratories. Seven months after Roosevelt and Sachs toasted their new understanding, France’s nuclear physicists carried out a daring plan to thwart the Nazi scientists at No. 69 Unter den Linden. The Germans knew that the French owned virtually all the heavy water in Europe—185 kilograms in twelve sealed aluminum containers, bought in March 1940 from a Norwegian firm, Norsk Hydro. Led by Frédéric Joliot-Curie, and with enemy troops all around them, the French scientists concealed their cache in the death cell of the Riom prison. Although the Nazis knew it was nearby and were looking for it, the French smuggled it out of Bordeaux aboard a British collier while Joliot-Curie duped his German interrogators into believing the heavy water was on another ship.

  ***

  Senator Borah died in January 1940, and his phony war died three months later when the Wehrmacht invaded Denmark and Norway, but the seismic shock of 1940 was Hitler’s campaign in the west. It was like a seven-week Halloween broadcast by Orson Welles. Daily, hourly, the armchair strategists moved their colored pins while commentators described panzer thrusts far behind the Allied lines, the slaughter of refugees by Stuka dive bombers, and endless lines of blond Aryan youths who hurtled into the Lowlands and France shouting, “Heil Hitler!” Apart from the relentless advance of the field-gray columns, it was hard to tell exactly what was happening. Europe was obscured by a haze of conflicting reports. In this mist men like Joliot-Curie and Pierre Laval forged their separate destinies, while other figures, new leaders, tried to rally the demoralized Allied troops. Premier Paul Reynaud replaced Premier Edouard Daladier, Generalissimo Maxime Weygand succeeded Generalissimo Maurice Gamelin, and in London Chamberlain stepped down for Churchill, whose magnificent prose began to roll across the Atlantic.

  Every American now knew what blitzkriegs were, and this was the greatest of them all. The German offensive opened on May 10. Four days later Holland surrendered. On the sixteenth day Belgium quit, and over the following weekend the British Army conducted its desperate, heroic evacuation from the beaches of Dunkerque. That left the French Army. It had been accounted the best in the world, but now in this seventh and last week of the Nazi coup de main, shortwave sets in Washington were picking up an impassioned but vain plea for Roosevelt to intervene, delivered by Reynaud himself.

  On June 22 France capitulated. Paris was German, and a new fascistic government was established in the resort city of Vichy under Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and Laval.1 One of its first acts was to try in absentia a French tank general who had flown to England, sentencing him to death. Scornful of the men of Vichy, Charles de Gaulle sat in a Chelsea flat writing his first broadcasts to the people with whom he felt a mystical union, and whose destiny he would share. Like Reynaud, he was counting on the United States. So was Churchill, though he was too adroit a politician to beg. Instead he made grand references to the time when “the New World, with all its power and might,” would step forth “to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”

  Now came the Battle of Britain, the RAF struggling with the Luftwaffe for mastery of the skies over England. The city of Coventry was destroyed and thousands of Londoners were slain in the streets as a lesson to British stubbornness. The lesson did not take. The people huddled in bomb shelters and subway tubes—in one of them, four-year-old Julie Andrews was learning to sing—while their prime minister told Hitler that England would rather die than submit: “…we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

  Now the mass media began to show their real power. In retrospect the Martian broadcast appeared to have been a kind of shakedown cruise, to steady the nerves of the high-strung. But this war was real, it was happening in Europe as listeners heard about it, and there was no way to avoid emotional alliances. Not many Americans favored the Nazis. The Germans were displaying a genius for bad public relations. They not only committed atrocities; they advertised them. They had been shooting hostages from the outset, and there was hardly an ethnic group in the United States whom they had not alienated. And there was worse to come. Nazi offenses against Italy, their present ally, lay in the future; so did conquest of Greece, with that unforgettable moment when a Wehrmacht officer ordered a Greek soldier to lower the blue-and-white colors of Greece from the Acropolis. The soldier did it. Then he wrapped the flag around him and stepped off the edge of the Acropolis parapet, falling silently to his death three hundred feet below.

  You didn’t have to be an American of Greek descent to be moved by that, and those who were praying for England in 1940 weren’t all anglophiles. Just before the French collapse, Edna St. Vincent Millay had written in the New York Times:

  Oh, build, assemble, transport, give,

  That England, France and we may live

  Lest we be left to fight alone.


  Now night had fallen over France, and about all that England had left that summer were RAF courage, Churchill’s voice, and the legacy of Shakespeare: This England never did, nor ever shall/ Lie at the proud feet of a conquerer. But since Shakespeare’s language was also America’s, it could rouse some Americans to extraordinary pitches of emotion. In the late summer of 1940 the American writer Alice Duer Miller published from England a slim volume of verse—that least popular of art forms. It was entitled The White Cliffs, and in three months it went through eleven printings. There were people who could recite long passages from it, including the closing quatrain, which so eloquently expressed the anglophilia of the author—and millions of her readers:

  I am American bred,

  I have seen much to hate here—much to forgive,

  But in a world where England is finished and dead,

  I do not wish to live.

  The destiny of Britain had become a national obsession for the multitudes of interventionists; now, for the first time, many realized how much they owed England, and how closely they were bound to England’s fate. Radio addicts—and there were those who hardly ventured more than a few feet from a loudspeaker that summer—could hear the tramp of jackboots as German soldiers inarched into the Channel ports, could hear the troops singing “Wir Fahren Gegen England” (We’re Sailing Against England). It sounded hopeless. There was no way of knowing then that the Spitfires and Hurricanes were winning their dogfights over the Channel. On one September night a Luftwaffe air fleet of 1,500 planes dropped 4,400,000 pounds of high explosives on London. It was the city’s greatest catastrophe since the Great Fire of 1666. The priceless windows of St. Mary le Bow were lost; the House of Lords was hit by one bomb; Buckingham Palace by five. In her tube little Julie Andrews joined the other children in chanting:

  Now come the incendiaries to light you to bed,

  Bring out the sandbags and kill them all dead.

  Over 32,000 British children had been evacuated to the United States. In the way of things that year, the children had to have a song. The fall of France had inspired “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” the Battle of Britain “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” and so, in honor of America’s young guests, Tin Pan Alley turned out a haunting tune for the lyrics:

  My sister and I recall the day

  We left our friends and we sailed away

  And we think of the ones who had to stay—

  But we don’t talk about that.

  This went on until men were willing to leave perfectly good drinks in bars not to hear the voices not talking about that. But there really was no escape. Kate Smith seemed to be singing “God Bless America” everywhere. The movies needed a longer lead time; it would be many months before the premiere of Mrs. Miniver, with Walter Pidgeon sailing out in his little boat to do his bit in picking up the Tommies at Dunkerque, but already Edward G. Robinson was the FBI man in Confessions of a Nazi Spy, listening to such hissed threats as, “I vill get efen mit you for zis zometime, Mister G-Mann!” It made you squirm but was ineluctable; every great moment in history has its sleazy exploiters and souvenir salesmen. This propaganda campaign turned out some classic films—including Casablanca, which some regard as the greatest movie of all time—and one immortal stratagem, which was so successful that it has been used by political movements ever since.

  It was invented by a Belgian refugee named Victor de Laveleye. Like Charles de Gaulle, de Laveleye made daily shortwave broadcasts to his countrymen telling them to keep stiff upper lips. One evening late in 1940 he suggested that they chalk the letter V (for victoire) in public places to show their confidence in an ultimate Allied triumph and create a nuisance for the Nazis. It became the most popular symbol since the introduction of the crucifix. V was an astonishingly versatile letter. In Serbian it stood for vitestvo (heroism), in Czech vitzstvi (victory), and in Dutch vrÿheid (freedom). The BBC began introducing its programs beamed to the continent with the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, three dots and a dash—the Morse code symbol for V. In the occupied countries the did-dit-dit-dah was used to knock on doors, blow train whistles, honk car horns, and fetch waiters. People waved to one another with two stretched fingers of the hand. In restaurants, cutlery was arranged in Vs. Stopped clocks were set at five minutes past eleven, and crayoned Vs were everywhere, even in the private toilets of German officers. Goebbels tried to steal the thunder by insisting the symbols all represented Viktoria, complete triumph for Hitler, but no one, not even Germans, believed him. Then the craze leaped the Atlantic. Rhinestone V brooches were on sale in department stores, and at Tiffany’s you could get a quite good one, set in diamonds, for $5,000.

  ***

  “Don’t think you will win the war by making silly noises in restaurants,” jeered one of Quisling’s Norwegian henchmen. He was right, of course. Hitler’s empire was now larger than Napoleon’s, and his power was as absolute. On land he was strong enough to launch offensives in four directions simultaneously; at sea his three hundred U-boats were strangling Britain’s lifelines. Only the consecration of embattled Britain stood between him and absolute mastery of Europe—unless the United States intervened.

  In the United States nearly everyone was now either an isolationist or an interventionist, and while there were degrees to both, all interventionists believed that something ought to be done. In the dazed aftermath of the French armistice, their gestures, like their V brooches, were rather ineffectual. In Jeannette, Pennsylvania, a gun club practiced marksmanship so they would be ready to pick off descending Nazi parachutists. A coffee shop in Kirkland, Washington, changed “hamburger” on its menu to “liberty steak.” The American Legion, hot for war, booed from its platform Senator Bennett Champ Clark and Congressman Fish, who had come to state the case for isolationism. There was a lot of nonsense about America’s “going soft,” as though the country’s youth had lain around eating banana splits during the Depression; even Ed Murrow wrote his parents, “The price for soft living must be paid, and we may soon be paying that price.” For all interventionists the arch villain was Charles A. Lindbergh. Charlotte, North Carolina, changed the name of Lindbergh Drive to Avon Terrace, the New York Times said he was “a blind young man,” liberal columnists referred to him as “Herr von Lindbergh,” and President Roosevelt mildly insulted him (he called him “a Copperhead”)—whereupon Lindbergh angrily resigned his reserve commission as an Air Corps colonel.

  A surprising number of people believed Lindy was a traitor. It seems fair to suggest that they felt betrayed because they had adored him when he flew the Atlantic alone, and now his feet had turned to clay. In the beginning, at least, he was one of the less abrasive isolationists. “Let us not delude ourselves,” he said in the first month of the war. “If we enter the quarrels of Europe during war, we must stay in them in peace as well,” and “This war is the climax of all political failure.” As Nazi spearheads were knifing through France in May 1940, he said, “We are in danger of war today not because European people have attempted to interfere in America, but because we American people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe. Our danger in America is an internal danger. We need not fear a foreign invasion unless American people bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad.” He saw interventionists as men seizing “every opportunity to push us closer to the edge.”

  That was above the belt; some interventionists could accept the charge and even exult in it. But Lindbergh was being driven to excesses by some of his supporters, who unlike him were pro-German, and by his briery relationship with the press. He was neither the first nor the last public figure to become persuaded that the news media hated him. On several counts one must sympathize with him; their behavior during the kidnapping and death of his child had been shocking. All the same, he was fighting a war of words—at a New York rally he addressed himself to “that silent majority of Americans who have no newspaper, or newsreel, or radio station at their command,
” but who believed in isolation—and he was beginning to choose the wrong words. In Des Moines, with Senator Nye beside him, he all but destroyed the America First movement. He actually warned American Jews to shut up—or else. Because of Jewish “ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” he said, if war came “they will be blamed for it.” In a stroke he lost all Jewish support and, among others, Thomas E. Dewey, who called the speech “inexcusable.”

  But then, all isolationist rhetoric had become scorching. The favorite adjective of the season was “tantamount”; every Roosevelt order was “tantamount to a declaration of war.” Key Pittman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, proposed that the British give up their home islands and retreat to Canada; that, he thought, would satisfy Hitler. Pittman was even agreeable to letting the Nazis control the Atlantic. Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota recommended American seizure of all British and French possessions in the western hemisphere. Senator Vandenberg thought cash-and-carry was “like the first drink of whiskey.” Joseph P. Kennedy, back from London, said talk that Britain was fighting for democracy was “bunk.” Ironpants Johnson accused his old chief in the White House of “a reckless shooting craps with destiny.” John Foster Dulles, who would be contributing to America First groups as late as November 1941, said, “Only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy, or Japan contemplates war upon us.” Burton K. Wheeler told the Senate that Roosevelt’s “new triple-A plan” was “to plow under every fourth American boy.” (“Dastardly,” said the President, and Wheeler took it back.) Perhaps the most interesting remark in the Senate came from Robert A. Taft. He noted White House displeasure over a growing Japanese presence in Vietnam. Taft said no American mother was ready to have her son die “for some place with an unpronounceable name in Indochina.”