American Warlords
Page 7
In the NDAC, Roosevelt established a board charged with forging the tools of war. But he was careful not to take too great a step at one time. He knew the public would be torn between arms production and consumer goods, and at his press conference announcing the NDAC’s formation, he was quick to reassure voters that rearmament would not force Americans to sacrifice too much butter for guns.
“I think the people should realize that we are not going to upset, any more than we have to, a great many of the normal processes of life,” he told a group of journalists. American women, he promised, “will not have to forgo cosmetics, lipsticks, ice cream sodas. . . . In other words, we do not want to upset the normal trend of things any more than we possibly can help.”6
•
Women might not have to forgo lipsticks, but young, able-bodied men would give up a great deal more than that before America would be ready to fight. In late May, FDR asked Congress to approve a contingency plan for calling up the National Guard, and in early June War Department planners urged Marshall to ask Congress to increase the size of the Regular Army to 530,000 men. Those men, they suggested, would form a cadre to train Guardsmen and draftees when the time was right.
Into this lion’s den Roosevelt trod with caution. As Camel butts piled in his desk ashtray, he plotted his course with the eye of an old sailor scanning the clouds for squalls. An early push for conscription, he concluded, would derail aid to Britain, because a draft in mid-1940 would exaggerate the Army’s shortage of rifles, planes, and ammunition. Isolationists like Walsh, Wheeler, and Lindbergh would wail that British aid was leaving the new draftees without the tools they needed to do their jobs.
Roosevelt disagreed. Better, he thought, to send those weapons overseas to fight Hitler now, rather than have them worn out or broken during basic training.7
Weighing on Roosevelt’s mind was a fog of fear settling over the public. A coalition of isolationists, liberals, academics, and pacifists had rapidly coalesced against the draft, believing a draft would necessarily lead to war. Women calling themselves “Mothers of the USA” donned black veils and marched before the Capitol to oppose compulsory service.
For now, FDR backed down. His problem, he admitted, was “to get the American people to think of conceivable consequences without thinking that they are going to be dragged into this war.” He explained to one diplomat, “American mothers don’t want their boys to be soldiers.”* He quietly ordered his military advisers to plan for expansion, but cautioned them to say nothing that might alarm the public.8
• • •
As Hitler tightened his grip on Western Europe, FDR’s public silence about the draft threw Stimson and Stark into fits. It might take a year to turn a schoolteacher into a tanker or boatswain—longer for some specialists—and America needed those men now. Believing the public would follow its leader, Admiral Stark candidly told Roosevelt, “You could do so much more if you would strike out and lead.”9
But as Roosevelt told his speechwriter, Sam Rosenman, “It is a terrible thing to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there.”10
General Marshall, a veteran of the Civilian Conservation Corps mobilization, was in no hurry to strike out and lead. A giant conscripted army in the summer of 1940 would be unmanageable because the bewildered draftees would have no place to sleep, no chow to eat, and no one to salute. Marshall needed to train more sergeants and build more training camps before he could absorb a mass of conscripts. He was pressing every officer, congressman, and contractor to lay this foundation, but even with his officers moving at full speed, he knew the Army would not be ready for some months.
Politically, Marshall saw conscription as a glass of milk that would sour if left on the table too long. No one could know when war would come; it might be in late 1940, perhaps next year—or perhaps never. But once the president called out the National Guard or conscripted civilians, the Army would have a treacherously short window in which to train and deploy those men. Before long, politically connected Guardsmen and their families would begin pressuring congressmen to send their sons and husbands home. If Congress gave way and released the draftees, the Army might become a gutted shell just as the crisis hit American shores.
Marshall also knew a political danger awaited an army drafting its citizens. Muckraker journalists waited in the wings to break stories of a palace coup at the first sign of military expansion, and isolationists in the heartland would make a receptive audience. So Marshall insisted that any move to boost the Army’s size must originate with Congress, not the War Department. The Army, he insisted, would play the role of reluctant bride led to the altar.
“You might say,” he mused later, “that the Army played politics in this period. That is a crude expression. Actually, we had a high regard for politics. We had regard for the fact that the president did not feel assured he would get the backing of the people generally and in the Middle West particularly and had to move with great caution.”11
At the end of June, a Democratic senator and a Republican congressman introduced a bill instituting a peacetime draft. The public was now willing to talk about conscription. With Congress taking the lead, Marshall and Stark felt they could safely encourage passage of a selective service bill, coupled with a twelve-month federalization of the National Guard and appropriations for barracks, uniforms, and vehicles for the new draftees.12
The next step was to get a cautious president to strike out and lead.
• • •
After six weeks of prodding by Marshall, Stark, Stimson, and others, FDR publicly threw his weight behind the selective service bill. Sitting before a bank of reporters crowding his Oval Office on August 2, he took a question about the draft from the Baltimore Sun’s Fred Essary.
“Mr. President,” said Essary, “there is a very definite feeling in congressional circles that you are not very hot about this conscription legislation and as a result, it is really languishing.”
Roosevelt jumped on Essary’s question with both feet. Declaring that selective service was essential to national defense, he said he hoped war would not come, but if it did come, the nation must be ready. “We figured out in 1917 that the selective training or selective draft was the fairest and in all ways the most efficient way of conducting a war if we had to go to war,” he said. “I still think so, and I think a majority of the people in this country think so, when they understand it.”13
He hoped they did. A peacetime draft was a supreme gamble in an election year. His traditional allies—youth organizations, New Dealers, organized labor—found military service repugnant. Conscription might provide the best hope for America’s defense, but it also provided the best hope for Republicans looking to unseat their nemesis in the next election, should he run again.14
•
It had gone almost without saying that Roosevelt would decline to run for a third term, a venerated custom observed by George Washington and respected by every president since 1796. Conservatives, including Stimson, felt it would be a mistake for him to run again. At times FDR considered progressive stalwarts like Cordell Hull, Harry Hopkins, South Carolina Senator James Byrnes, and others as possible successors. But by the summer of 1940, Roosevelt had no disciple with the right combination of skills for a wartime presidency. The fall of France had brought war closer to American shores, and as FDR saw it, the country couldn’t afford to change horses in the middle of a rapidly filling stream.15
There was also the lure of the office, though Roosevelt wouldn’t admit it. He had been at the center of power for nearly eight years, and he had enjoyed almost every minute at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So in the wee morning hours of July 19, speaking from the White House broadcast room, Franklin Roosevelt explained his reasons for breaking Washington’s sacred custom:
Lying awake, as I have on many nights, I have asked myself whether I have the right, as commander-
in-chief of the Army and Navy, to call on men and women to serve their country or to train themselves to serve and, at the same time, decline to serve my country in my own personal capacity if I am called upon to do so by the people. . . .
Like most men of my age, I had made plans for myself, plans for a private life of my own choice and for my own satisfactions to begin in January 1941. These plans, like so many other plans, had been made in a world which now seems as distant as another planet. Today all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger. In the face of that public danger all those who can be of service to the Republic have no choice but to offer themselves for service in those capacities for which they may be fitted.16
There was at least one other man who felt he could be of service to the republic. While Roosevelt’s subalterns were building the case for conscription, Republicans meeting in Philadelphia nominated Indiana businessman Wendell Willkie for president. The war in general, and the draft specifically, would be the election’s great issue. The Republican candidate could take that issue off the table by endorsing conscription, or he could use it as a political blackjack.
To FDR’s relief, Willkie took it off the table. In his acceptance speech he declared, “I cannot ask any American to put their faith in me without recording my conviction that some form of selective service is the only democratic way in which to assure the trained and competent manpower we need in our national defense.” Willkie went even further, telling his audience he agreed with Roosevelt: The full material might of America must be brought to support the western democracies.17
Willkie was a political outsider with the horse sense to agree with a good idea, even if that idea came from his opponent. But horse sense and political sense are two different things, and Willkie’s endorsement of the draft couldn’t help his electoral prospects. He was failing to distinguish himself from his opponent, and he would be left playing “me, too” on two of the election’s most important foreign policy issues.
Reading a transcript of his challenger’s speech that night, Roosevelt beamed. “Willkie is lost.”18
• • •
While the Republican nominee supported the draft, his fellow conservatives, Democratic isolationists, and pacifists fought a rearguard action to halt selective service. As the bill wound through both houses of Congress, they launched hit-and-run attacks with crippling amendments and procedural objections. The Senate came within one vote of prohibiting the use of the National Guard outside U.S. territorial limits, while Representative Hamilton Fish of New York, Roosevelt’s implacable foe from Dutchess County, persuaded colleagues to defer the draft’s implementation until after the election. Two congressmen became so bitter they exchanged curse words and blows in the House chamber.19
Marshall and Stimson spent long hours brokering compromises to defeat killer amendments, and they watched anxiously as the bill worked its way to the House and Senate floors in September. The deadlock was finally broken on the fourteenth, when the House and Senate passed a bill that Roosevelt, Stimson, Marshall, and Stark could support. Two days later, Roosevelt signed the bill in the Oval Office as Stimson, Marshall, and the chairmen of the House and Senate military affairs committees looked on, unsure whether to appear supremely pleased or stately and solemn.20
When Roosevelt lifted his fountain pen, sixteen and a half million men became eligible for military service. Marshall was now authorized to call up to 900,000 men annually to fill nine Regular Army infantry divisions, four armored and two cavalry divisions, and eighteen National Guard divisions. In the event the country needed a dramatic expansion—say, to five million or more—it was Marshall’s hope to use these first draftees as the backbone of a larger force.21
That evening, General Marshall appeared on the CBS radio network. He announced, “For the first time in our history we are beginning in time of peace to train an army of citizen-soldiers which may save us from the tragedy of war.”22
But to train that army of citizen-soldiers, Marshall would have to rein in a president intent on giving away his army’s weapons. He was about to learn how hard that would be.
SIX
“ONE-FIFTY-EIGHT”
ON SEPTEMBER 7, 1940, REICHSMARSCHALL HERMANN GÖRING LAUNCHED his long-awaited bombing campaign to shatter British will to resist. For two months, swarms of Junkers and Heinkel bombers gathered nightly to drop ton after ton of incendiaries on London and other major cities. Civilians burned to death, or were crushed beneath the rubble of flats, cathedrals and storefronts. Air wardens directed terrified Londoners into Underground tunnels and fought blazes that lit the night sky. Ambulance drivers negotiated debris-choked streets in the dark, and flak gunners threw everything in their limbers at the bombers.
Though Roosevelt ordered Stimson and Marshall to send England every weapon they could spare, Stimson doubted there was much left to give. “This is going to be a rather agonizing affair, because we have so little that we can give them, if anything,” he told his diary.1
Three weeks into the Blitz, Roosevelt summoned his military advisers and Morgenthau to discuss weapons shipments to Britain. One item high on his list was Boeing’s new B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber. He wanted bombs dropping on Berlin, and he asked Marshall when he would ship those Fortresses to England.
An uncomfortable pause. Marshall replied that the Army Air Corps had forty-nine bombers fit for duty on the continental United States.
Forty-nine. “The President’s head went back as if someone had hit him in the chest,” wrote Stimson.2
But FDR recovered quickly, and he would not be put off by mere numbers, even if those numbers came from generals. Military men sometimes had to be pushed, or they would wait and wait until they had everything just right. Since everything would never be just right, Roosevelt wanted someone he trusted, someone like Morgenthau or Hopkins, doing the pushing.
To Stimson and Marshall, the president was pushing the wrong way. An orderly plan for allocating weapons was needed, wrote Stimson, “so that we will not make the decisions, these vital decisions, as to what we give or do not give to the British, too haphazardly and under the emotion of a single moment.” Frustrated with Roosevelt’s extemporaneous donations, in early 1940 the Army’s air chief, “Hap” Arnold, testified before Congress that Air Corps effectiveness was being adversely affected by arms shipments to Britain.
When a furious Henry Morgenthau learned of Arnold’s testimony, he went straight to FDR, who blew his stack. At his next meeting with Marshall and his staff, Roosevelt warned Arnold that there were places to which officers who did not “play ball” might be sent, “such as Guam.” For the next nine months, Arnold was persona non grata at the White House.3
Roosevelt would make his generals play ball. When he learned the Army had no existing planes to spare for Britain, he turned his attention to aircraft still in production. Before year’s end, he announced that the United States would split production of new warplanes with the United Kingdom on an “even-Steven” basis.4
Marshall held the line against Roosevelt’s largesse. In a follow-up meeting, he had his aides show the president a chart indicating that only a third of the planes scheduled for production that month had actually been produced. He dryly asked whether the British would get half the number the Americans intended to produce or half the number they actually produced.
Stung by the implication that he was selling every available plane to Britain, FDR looked sharply at Marshall.
“Don’t let me see that chart again,” he growled.
Unruffled, Marshall merely nodded. He had made his point.5
• • •
The chart disappeared, but Congress did not. Churchill wasn’t giving away more bases, and the Justice Department concluded that bombers could not be sold to Britain without congressional authorization. That required Marshall to certify that B-17 Flying Fortress bombers were unnecessary
to U.S. defense, a patently absurd proposition.
Running out of room to maneuver, Roosevelt suggested giving Britain a limited number of Forts to test under combat conditions. It would provide useful information for future design modifications, he claimed, which would enhance the nation’s defense. In his diary that night, Stimson called it “the only peg on which we could hang the proposition legally.” 6
The peg gave way when Justice Department lawyers concluded that Roosevelt could not part with U.S. property without congressional permission, even for “testing” purposes. Stimson, a more experienced lawyer than anyone at Justice, then came up with another creative solution. Perhaps, he suggested, Marshall could certify that B-17 bombers were unnecessary if they were traded for B-24 Liberator bombers still on production lines but allocated to England under the “even-Steven” rule.
This peg was nearly as shaky as the last one, but a sheepish Marshall complied. Like Admiral Stark, he had personal misgivings about using contorted legalisms to send weapons to London. Marshall later confessed, “I was a little ashamed of this because I felt that I was straining at the subject in order to get around the resolution of Congress.”7
• • •
Coming off the selective service victory, Henry Stimson trudged through the pains of an army in adolescent growth. Labor issues, housing shortages, production delays, and organizational flaws up and down the Army’s structure consumed his working days and never seemed to be resolved.