The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  The air attack on Darwin would at least wake up the sleepyheads in Australia, the President consoled himself. No landings had taken place, at least. In taking full responsibility for the protection of Australia and New Zealand, however, the United States would now expect a quid pro quo. Roosevelt would insist that the British use the forces released by this new southern Pacific strategy to defend Burma, in the north—which offered the only overland supply route for U.S. munitions to Chiang Kai-shek.

  Would the British prove any more robust in fighting for Burma than they had in Malaya, though? Roosevelt had cause to wonder. And beyond Burma, could Britain’s forces stop the Japanese from invading the Indian Subcontinent? If not, Japan would control too much of the Far East to be evicted.

  In the President’s eyes it was thus a thousand pities that Churchill had so set his heart and mind—year after year, month after month, week after week—against Indian self-government: self-government that could ensure the willing cooperation of India’s own political leaders and population—as it had in the Philippines with respect to Quezon and his forces.

  Somehow, the President reasoned, Churchill must be bucked up—and urged to embrace the future, not the past.

  From London Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease administrator and special envoy, reported confidentially that the “surrender of their troops at Singapore has shattered confidence to the core” in the English capital—so much so, in fact, that the British were losing confidence “even in themselves but, more particularly, in their leaders.”

  Churchill, according to Harriman, looked as if he had lost the thread. “Unfortunately Singapore shook the Prime Minister to such an extent that he has not been able to stand up to this adversity with his old vigor”—leading “astute people, both friends and opponents” to say it was “a question of only a few months before his Government falls.”20

  For President Roosevelt, attempting to lead the United Nations at a critical moment in the history of humanity, the collapse of British imperial armed forces on the field of battle presented a new and potentially fatal threat to the Allied effort.

  Rarely in the history of war had the connection between moral and military goals been more vividly demonstrated than in the cascading collapse of the British Empire in the spring and summer of 1942. The British seemed finished as a martial race. They had no genuine map for the future, only the past. Yet somehow, with a centuries-old network of foreign bases and its island fortress off the coast of Northwest Europe, as well as its not inconsiderable industrial capacity, Britain had to be saved—not only from its enemies but from itself.

  Churchill had looked to American military industrial production as a panacea that would rescue Britain. In reality it was American moral leadership that would ensure the survival of the democracies.

  It was to this challenge, the President recognized in late February 1942, that America must now rise.

  10

  The Battleground for Civilization

  IT IS A SMALL ROOM, as such rooms go—say, about the length of an ordinary Pullman car and four times as wide,” Judge Samuel Rosenman recalled. A portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, Roosevelt’s former boss, hung over the fireplace, and paintings of Presidents Jefferson and Jackson stared down from the otherwise bare white walls. Red damask drapes framed the French windows overlooking the Rose Garden and South Lawn. Andrew Jackson’s huge but leafless magnolia tree still rose above the pillared, curving balcony of the presidential residence itself.

  Sitting in the Cabinet Room in the West Wing of the White House, Judge Rosenman watched as the President suddenly came into view, careening “along the covered walk at a speed which made you fear he could not possibly continue to hold on to his armless little wheel chair. In his hand there was always some document he had been reading. In his mouth was his cigarette holder tilted at the usual jaunty angle. Fala, his Scottie dog, ran along his side. A Secret Service agent raced alongside also; and a messenger followed, holding a large basket containing the mail and memoranda on which the President had worked in his bedroom the night before or that morning. A bell had rung three times to alert the White House police that the President was on his way; and officers were stationed at several different points along the path.”1

  Clearly, the President meant business. Starting with his own thirteen-page copy of the address, they were on the fifth draft by the morning of February 21, 1942. For his part, Harry Hopkins had “stopped in the map room on the way over,” and had reported that the news from the Pacific was “going to get worse instead of better,” Rosenman recalled.2

  The President had not spoken to the nation since Pearl Harbor. For several weeks he’d wanted to deliver another Fireside Chat, but the press of work had made it impossible—preparations for such an important broadcast requiring days of research and rhetorical iteration.

  “I’m going to ask the American people to take out their maps,” the President had told Rosenman when summoning him to help draft the talk. “I’m going to speak about strange places that many of them have never heard of—places that are now the battleground for civilization. I’m going to ask the newspapers to print maps of the whole world. I want to explain to the people something about geography—what our problem is and what the over-all strategy of this war has to be. I want to tell it to them in simple terms of A B C so that they will understand what is going on and how each battle fits into the picture. I want to explain this war in laymen’s language; if they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure that they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.”3

  The cascade of reverses in the Far East, climaxing with the fall of Singapore, had produced an increasing “atmosphere of defeat and despair,” as Rosenman called it4—an atmosphere that Churchill’s oratory, full of pain and suffering, had done little to dispel; in fact, other than appealing for a new display of British “genius,” Churchill had made it clear in his February 15 broadcast that he was bereft of ideas beyond passing the buck for winning the war to the United States—financially, productively, and militarily.

  The President’s new Fireside Chat would thus be of critical import—not only his first since December 9, 1941, but his most significant since “the dark days of 1933 during the banking crisis,” when as incoming president, Roosevelt had had to “inform the people of the complicated facts of finance and to reassure them that their government was taking any action,” no matter how radical, “necessary to protect them.”5

  It would be a talk “encouraging Americans—and people all over the world—to the belief,” as the President explained to Judge Rosenman, “that victory and liberation could be won.”6

  Churchill, in his Singapore speech, had lambasted the men who, in the 1930s, had failed to nip the Nazi menace in the bud, but Hopkins thought the President wrong to trash, in similar fashion, American isolationists like Senator Wheeler and Colonel Lindbergh. “That kind of vindictiveness about the old isolationists is out of place now,” Hopkins warned7—and Roosevelt heeded his advice.

  Out went the President’s “I told you so” reference.

  The President had also wanted to say something magnanimous about the British misfortune in the English Channel, hoping thereby to “stiffen the morale of the British people,” he made clear.

  Both Rosenman and his fellow speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, were dead set against the inclusion, however—not because they were in any way unsympathetic to the British, but because they felt it veered off message. As “we read what he had written, it seemed to us too apologetic; none of us liked it,” Judge Rosenman recalled. “We spent some time that night rounding up our arguments—and our nerve—to go after him on it, although he had already told us several times that he wanted it in.”8

  Out, in the course of the next draft, went that reference, too.

  The fact was, as the speechwriters spread their papers and drafts across the great Cabinet Room mahogany table and the old clock chimed every quarter of the hour, all were awa
re that this talk, given to the people of the free world, would make history, on Washington’s Birthday.9

  So concerned were the Japanese by President Roosevelt’s widely announced forthcoming broadcast—which led to huge sales of maps and atlases across America—that a Japanese submarine was ordered to approach the coast of California and fire some shells ashore, in the hope of stealing the headlines in what was, after all, a war of public relations as well as military prowess.

  The submarine’s salvo did, indeed, garner attention—if not the kind the Japanese were hoping for.10 More than a hundred thousand Japanese and Japanese American citizens had been taken into custody in California, in order to shield the huge aircraft and shipbuilding plants on the West Coast from potential sabotage or spying; these citizens were now moved out of state to special internment camps inland, and what remained of American sympathy toward individual Japanese Americans in their midst eroded still further.

  The Japanese military had good cause to fear Roosevelt’s oratory on February 23. Drawing an analogy with General Washington’s winter of survival at Valley Forge, the President proceeded to sketch the lines of communication across the world by which the United States would take the war to the enemy—an enemy that had already passed its maximum war production, whereas the United States was only truly beginning to unveil its manufacturing potential. Axis hopes of isolating the constituent countries of the United Nations were thus doomed, the President maintained, not only because of America’s war-making arsenal, but because the enemy’s aims were nihilistic and despotic. “Conquered Nations in Europe know what the yoke of the Nazis is like. And the people of Korea and Manchuria know in their flesh the harsh despotism of Japan. All of the people of Asia know that if there is to be an honorable and decent future for any of them or any of us, that future depends on victory by the United Nations over the forces of Axis enslavement. If a just and durable peace is to be attained, or even if all of us are merely to save our own skins, there is one thought for us here at home to keep uppermost—the fulfillment of our special task of production.” Existing plants were being extended, and new ones created. “We know that if we lose this war it will be generations or even centuries before our conception of democracy can live again. And we can lose this war only if we slow up our effort, or if we waste our ammunition sniping at each other.”

  “This generation of Americans has come to realize,” the President declared, “that there is something larger and more important than the life of any individual or of any individual group—something for which a man will sacrifice, and gladly sacrifice, not only his pleasures, not only his goods, not only his associations with those he loves, but his life itself. In time of crisis when the future is in the balance, we come to understand, with full recognition and devotion, what this Nation is, and what we owe to it.

  “The Axis propagandists have tried in various evil ways to destroy our determination and our morale. Failing in that, they are now trying to destroy our confidence in our own allies. They say that the British are finished—that the Russians and the Chinese are about to quit. Patriotic and sensible Americans will reject these absurdities”—as well as those directed at the United States. “From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo we have been described as a Nation of weaklings—‘playboys’—who would hire British soldiers, or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us.

  “Let them repeat that now!

  “Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men.

  “Let them tell that to sailors who today are hitting hard in the far waters of the Pacific.

  “Let them tell that to the boys in the Flying Fortresses.

  “Let them tell that to the Marines!”11

  Simple, homey, and inspiring, the President took listeners on a tour of the world and the “battlefield for civilization”—a historic example of patient but firm presidential exposition. By the end nobody could doubt the President’s confidence in the eventual outcome, or his mastery of the situation, however temporarily bleak. Pointing to the difference between the United Nations and the Axis powers, he again emphasized how the coalition or alliance of twenty-six constituent countries would inevitably prevail. “We have unified command and cooperation and comradeship,” he reminded listeners. “We Americans will contribute unified production and unified acceptance of sacrifice and effort. That means a national unity that can know no limitations of race or creed or selfish politics. The American people expect that much from themselves. And the American people will find ways and means of expressing their determination to their enemies, including the Japanese Admiral who has said that he will dictate the terms of peace here in the White House.

  “We of the United Nations are agreed on certain broad principles in the kind of peace we seek,” he went on. “The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of Nations and peoples, and the four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religions, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.” As a final flourish, the President quoted Thomas Paine’s words that General Washington had ordered “to be read to the men of every regiment in the Continental Army,” distinguishing between the “summer patriot” and the true patriot. “‘Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the sacrifice, the more glorious the triumph.’

  “So spoke Americans in the year 1776.

  “So speak Americans today!”

  The President’s 10:00 P.M. “Fireside Chat on Progress of the War” was listened to by sixty-one million Americans. The New York Times dubbed it “one of the greatest of Roosevelt’s career.”12

  Ironically, of course, the homily General Washington had ordered to be read to his troops, two centuries before, concerned British tyranny. Nevertheless the broadcast elicited admiration even in Italy, where Mussolini’s foreign minister, Count Ciano, noted the difference between his father-in-law, the Duce, and the American president. Mussolini had told him, sententiously, “Wars are necessary in order to see and appraise the true internal composition of a people, because during a war the various classes are revealed: the heroes, the profiteers, the indolent.”13

  Ciano worried that Italian heroes were now dead—leaving only the profiteers and the indolent. Roosevelt’s speech, by contrast, impressed him. “A calm, measured, but nonetheless determined speech. It doesn’t sound like the speech of a man who is thinking of suing for peace soon,” despite popular Italian beliefs and Japanese claims to that effect. Given the failure of Barbarossa to defeat the Russians in 1941, President Roosevelt’s predicted outcome of the war sounded, on reflection, all too likely. Certainly in Germany—in private at least—“they all believe that another winter of war would be unbearable. Everyone is convinced of this, from the supreme heads of the army to the men close to Hitler.”14

  Italy, Ciano confided to his diary (which would eventually lead to his execution by his former fellow Fascists several years later), ought really to begin to sue for peace, or at least offer to act as “peacemaker” between the combatant nations, before the conflagration got out of hand.

  “But no one dares tell Hitler,” Ciano added.15 Moreover, it was too late—Italy a puppet partner of the Führer, who was hell-bent on a German fight to the death, if necessary; the Japanese likewise.

  PART SIX

  INDIA

  11

  No Hand on the Wheel

  PLEASE TREAT IT AS SOMETHING I would say to you if you and I were alone,” the President wrote to Winston Churchill, two days after his widely praised Fireside Chat. He was struggling with the first draft of an urgent but rather delicate message he wanted to send the Prime Minister. Before encoding and dispatching it, however, he wanted Ambassador Winant and Averell Harriman in London to offer advice on his draft. “As you may guess,” he signaled to Winant at 11:40 P.M., on February 25, 1942, “I am somewhat concerned over the situation in India, especially in view of the po
ssibility of the necessity of a slow retirement through Burma itself.”1

  “From all I can gather the British defense will not have sufficiently enthusiastic support from the people of India themselves,” the President confided. “In the greatest confidence could you or Harriman or both let me have a slant on what the Prime Minister thinks about new relationships between Britain and India? I hesitate to send him a direct message because, in a strict sense, it is not our business. It is, however, of great interest to us from the point of view of the war.”2

  The two American envoys did their best to press Churchill about Indian self-government, but the response was not encouraging. Still smarting over the abject surrender at Singapore and the prospects of another disaster in Burma, the Prime Minister was so livid at the mention of India, he would scarcely speak to them when they arrived in his office. For some days, therefore, there was little or no signals traffic between the White House and Churchill’s War Rooms—the very alliance darkened by disagreement over Britain’s colonial rights.

  If Burma fell, Roosevelt reflected, the northern bastion of his whole Pacific defense strategy would be compromised. Thus, as reports of the deteriorating situation in Burma continued to come in to the White House Map Room, the President became more and more concerned lest the defense of India, too, be at risk—Roosevelt certain that Indians, if only they were given self-government by the British, would fight for their country against the Japanese, as the Filipinos were doing.