The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Churchill had won his main goal. “I have no doubt,” he told the House of Commons, “that Herr Hitler will not like this transfer of destroyers, and I have no doubt that he will pay the United States out, if he ever gets the chance.”

  But now, with Roosevelt’s trial by votes over, there was a curious lull and resistance in Washington. Where were the stepped-up actions and bold new departures that the election returns seemed to warrant? The Roosevelt administration seemed to be following a clear policy of “America First.” Washington was still demanding “cash and carry”; increasingly, London was finding it hard to supply either.

  A month after the election Churchill wrote perhaps the most important letter of his life. “My Dear Mr. President,” it began. “As we reach the end of this year, I feel you will expect me to lay before you the prospects for 1941. I do so with candour and confidence, because it seems to me that the vast majority of American citizens have recorded their conviction that the safety of the United States, as well as the future of our two Democracies and the kind of civilisation for which they stand, is bound up with the survival and independence of the British Commonwealth of Nations. Only thus can those bastions of sea-power, upon which the control of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans depend, be preserved in faithful and friendly hands….”

  He went on to assess the strategic situation. Britain could not match the immense armies of the Germans, but through air and sea power it could meet the Nazis where only comparatively small forces could be brought into action. To defend Africa and southern Asia, as well as the home islands, Britain was forming between fifty and sixty divisions. “Even if the United States were our ally, instead of our friend and indispensable partner, we should not ask for a large American expeditionary army.” Shipping was the limiting factor. “The decision for 1941 lies upon the seas.” Here Churchill revealed recent shipping losses: over 400,000 tons in the five weeks ending November 3. “The enemy commands the ports all around the northern and western coasts of France. He is increasingly basing his submarines, flying-boats, and combat planes on these ports and on the islands off the French coast. We are denied the use of the ports or territory of Eire in which to organize our coastal patrols by air and sea. In fact, we have now only one effective route of entry to the British Isles, namely, the northern approaches, against which the enemy is increasingly concentrating, reaching ever farther out by U-boat action and long-distance aircraft bombing.” Britain’s battleship strength, even with the King George V and the Prince of Wales coming into action, provided a dangerously small margin of safety.

  Churchill touched on the fields of danger. At any point Vichy could go over to Hitler; if the French Navy were to join the Axis, “the control of West Africa would pass immediately into their hands, with the gravest consequences to our communications between the Northern and Southern Atlantic, and also affecting Dakar and of course thereafter South America.” It seemed clear that in the Far East Japan was thrusting southward through Indochina to Saigon and other naval and air bases, thus threatening Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.

  What did Churchill ask the United States to do? Item by item he laid out his requests: 1. reassertion by the United States of the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, so that American ships could trade with countries against which there was not an effective legal blockade; 2. protection of this lawful trading by American warships (“I think it is improbable that such protection would provoke a declaration of war by Germany upon the United States, though probably sea incidents of a dangerous character would from time to time occur. Herr Hitler has shown himself inclined to avoid the Kaiser’s mistake….His maxim is ‘One at a time’ ”); 3. failing these the gift, loan, or supply of a large number of American warships, especially destroyers, to help maintain the Atlantic route, and extension by the United States Navy of its sea control of the American side of the Atlantic; 4. “good offices” to induce Eire to co-operate on such matters. A shopping list of specific needs followed. Then finance: “The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies….I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.” Such a course, he said, would not be in the moral or the postwar economic interest of either country.

  “If, as I believe, you are convinced, Mr. President, that the defeat of the Nazi and Fascist tyranny is a matter of high consequence to the people of the United States and to the Western Hemisphere, you will regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose.”

  BERLIN

  News of Roosevelt’s re-election came to Adolf Hitler in his modern Reichskanzler’s palace on the Wilhelmstrasse. The Führer made no public statement; he allowed no provocative remarks. But two days later he gave an answer of sorts—to Roosevelt, to Churchill, to all his enemies—in Munich, on the seventeenth anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch.

  “I am one of the hardest men Germany has had for decades, perhaps for centuries, equipped with the greatest authority of any German leader,” Hitler gasconaded to his old comrades, jammed around him in the swastika-bedecked hall. “But above all, I believe in my success. I believe in it unconditionally….” He evoked his comrades’ memories of World War I. Germany had been poorly armed when war broke out, but it had held for four years. For four years the Allies strained themselves, “and then they had to get the American magician-priest, who found a formula that took in the German nation, trusting in the word of honor of a foreign President.”

  He had wanted the closest friendship with England, Hitler went on. “If England had agreed, good. They did not agree. Also good.”

  He turned to Britain’s ally—and made a curious concession. “As far as American production figures are concerned, they cannot even be formulated in astronomical figures. In this field, therefore, I do not want to be a competitor. But I can assure you of one thing: German production capacity is the highest in the world….Germany today, in any case, is, together with her Allies, strong enough to oppose any combination of powers in the world….”

  The world listened; this was the man who, between one summer and the next, had overwhelmed six nations; the man who was now threatening to invade Britain, seize Gibraltar, and overrun the Balkans. Yet November 1940 was a time of frustration and indecision for Hitler, just as it was for Churchill. The conqueror of Europe had journeyed across France to persuade Spain’s Francisco Franco to allow Nazi troops to take Gibraltar and other strategic outposts in the western Mediterranean. Impressed by Britain’s survival and pressed by Churchill, the Caudillo had bickered and shilly-shallied through nine hours of tortuous talk with Hitler; rather than go through that again, Hitler said later, he would prefer to have four or five teeth taken out. Vichy was also an irritation. On the way back to Berlin, Hitler had met with Marshal Henri Pétain; the old man had been courteous and reserved, but made only vague promises about collaborating with the New Order.

  But it was Mussolini—Hitler’s old comrade in arms—who had been most vexing of all. Il Duce was one of the few persons Hitler really admired; even so he had not been willing to take his junior partner into his full confidence. Piqued in turn by Hitler’s coups and faits accomplis, Mussolini had ordered his troops to invade Greece on October 28, with the least and latest possible notice to Berlin. The Führer got the news on the way back from his talks with Franco and Pétain. He was almost beside himself. Fall was the wrong time to attack through the mountains; the fragile balance of power in the Balkans would be upset; Mussolini was supposed to conserve his troops for his main thrust against the British in North Africa. Abruptly, Hitler ordered his train south to Florence to meet and deter the Duce. Too late; Mussolini greeted
him on the platform with the announcement—almost as though mimicking Goebbels in Berlin—“Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian frontier at dawn today.”

  And then—most galling of all—the invasion had floundered. Greek soldiers, waiting in mountain recesses, had routed the Italians and sent them back into Albania. The British took the opportunity to occupy Crete and Lemnos, greatly strengthening their position in the eastern Mediterranean. Now the Rumanian oil fields were threatened by the RAF. Now Hitler would have to send divisions south. Was Mussolini an ally or an embarrassment?

  Yet, all these were pinpricks compared with Hitler’s main concern during the dark November days of 1940. He was approaching a momentous strategic decision: whether to risk a two-front war.

  Nothing had proved Hitler’s military genius more strikingly than his capacity to isolate his foe diplomatically and militarily and then dispose of him: thus Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France. Was Britain next? If things had gone according to tentative plan, German forces would have been invading Britain by the fall of 1940, while Russia stood by, wary but inactive, and the United States looked on, concerned but impotent. Britain, however, had refused to co-operate. It would be spring before a heavy invasion smash could be mounted, but by then British resistance would be tougher, and the German admirals were still dubious about the operation. Aside from the tactical risks of a cross-channel invasion, there was always the enigma of Roosevelt. What would the meddlesome President do? He had sent destroyers and munitions at the height of an election campaign; was it conceivable that he would let his Navy stand by idle while German troops poured across the Channel?

  Then there was Russia. Hitler had long planned to crush the despised Bolshevik-Slav-Jewish regime to the east; this was probably the most fixed part of his world plan. But when? The non-aggression pact of 1939 had been merely a device to gain time and leverage. Stalin had not only taken every jot of his share of the booty while Hitler was busy attacking Frenchmen and Englishmen in the west, but he had calmly occupied the Rumanian lands of northern Bukovina and Bessarabia and seized Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as well. Russian behavior was unbearable. But it posed a harsh dilemma. Should Hitler turn east before disposing of Britain? Could he manage a two-front war—with the ever-increasing likelihood of massive American aid to the English? At a conference in mid-November Admiral Erich Raeder, Commander in Chief of the Navy and a more maritime-minded strategist than the Führer, once again warned him against a showdown with Russia before Britain was finished off.

  Hitler looked yearningly east, but he paused. Was an alternative possible—a repetition of the strategy of 1939, but on a continental scale? The Tripartite Pact, signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan in September 1940 in the great Hall of Ambassadors, had been aimed mainly at facing Roosevelt with the prospect of a strengthened Japan and diverting him from aid to Britain. What if Moscow could now be induced to join the pact? Would this not discourage Roosevelt and demolish Churchill’s last hope of aid from either Washington or Moscow? With this heady aim in mind Hitler had invited the Russian Foreign Minister to Berlin.

  Vyacheslav Molotov arrived on November 12. A band played the march of welcome; an honor guard strutted; there were even Russian flags, with the long-hated hammer and sickle. But surrounding everything was a glacial atmosphere, which seemed to deepen as Molotov was driven through silent crowds under leaden skies to his apartment in the Tiergarten.

  Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop lost no time in confronting his guest with the cardinal issue. Britain was beaten, he declared flatly, and would be begging for peace. Churchill, to be sure, was depending on aid from America, but, he proclaimed, “the entry of the United States into the war is of no consequence at all for Germany.” Germany would never again allow an Anglo-Saxon to land on the European Continent. While Molotov listened with poker face, Ribbentrop pumped up his trial balloon. The British Empire would be carved up. “Everything turns to the south”—Germany to its former colonies in central Africa; Italy to the African Mediterranean coast; Japan to Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. What about Russia? Would not Moscow want access to the open seas through the Dardanelles? Molotov was silent, except to ask about specifics with an annoying literalness of mind.

  Molotov was just as cool and reserved when he met with Hitler later in the day. The Führer rambled, in his talk, across the face of the globe, dividing real estate. Britain was through. The United States could not be a threat for decades—“not in 1945 but at the earliest in 1970 or 1980.” Molotov patiently waited out Hitler’s harangue; then he again turned to specifics. The questions were steady and remorseless. Just what would the New Order mean? What part would the Soviet Union play? Exactly what areas was Japan promised? What about Moscow’s interest in Turkey and the Balkans? “The questions rained down upon Hitler,” his interpreter later remembered. “No foreign visitor had ever spoken to him in this way in my presence.”

  Hitler could barely keep his temper in the presence of this icy Bolshevik with old-fashioned pince-nez perched below a bulging forehead and with his jabbing questions. The Führer suggested that the talks be recessed, since an air raid was possible. The next day’s discussion was even more strained. The two men jousted over the same issues: Finland, the Baltic, the Balkans, Turkey. In vain the Führer tried to divert Molotov from Europe and toward the south with vague suggestions of a “purely Asiatic territory in the South”—presumably India. During the afternoon the talks degenerated into a spate of petty broils.

  Hitler gave up. He again turned Molotov over to Ribbentrop, who, in diplomatic line of duty, had to attend a gala banquet at the Russian Embassy. Winston Churchill, lacking an invitation to the Berlin festivities, sent his greetings in the form of RAF bombers. Ribbentrop was just about to reply to Molotov’s toast when the air-raid sirens wailed and the guests fled. He escorted Molotov to a shelter, where he made another effort to convince him to seize this last chance to remount the Nazi world band wagon. Again and again, while the explosions rumbled, Ribbentrop asserted that Britain was through. Molotov looked at him. “If that is so, why are we in this shelter, and whose are those bombs that fall?”

  The thwarted Führer still did not make a final decision to turn against Russia. He ordered planning and preparations against the East to continue, but for a while kept open various alternatives to the foreboding prospect of a second front.

  In December he set off a propaganda barrage aimed at arousing the workers of the world against the plutocrats in Britain and America. Standing on a platform in the Rheinmetall-Borsig Works of Berlin, with a bristling artillery piece as a backdrop, he proclaimed that the stakes were far greater than the fate of one nation: “It is rather a war of two opposing worlds.” Britain, he said, had seized control of sixteen million square miles of the surface of the earth.

  “All my life I have been a ‘have-not.’ At home I was a ‘have-not.’ ” He rambled on, flaying the capitalists of the world, their kept press and political parties. “If in this world everything points to the fact that gold is fighting against work, capitalism against peoples, and reaction against the progress of humanity, then work, the peoples, and progress will be victorious. Even the support of the Jewish race will not avail the others….

  “Who was I before the Great War? An unknown, nameless individual. What was I during the war? A quite inconspicuous, ordinary soldier. I was in no way responsible for the Great War. However, who are the rulers of Britain today? They are the same people who were warmongering before the Great War, the same Churchill who was the vilest agitator among them during the Great War….” Hitler was now in his second hour of oratory. He roamed further through history and across the globe—but with no mention of America or Russia. He pictured the New Order of which he dreamed—a new order of peace, reconstruction, the supremacy of work over capitalism—“the Great German Reich of which great poets have dreamed….

  “Should anyone say to me: ‘These are mere fantastic dreams, mere visions,’ I ca
n only reply that when I set out on my course in 1919 as an unknown, nameless soldier I built my hopes of the future upon a most vivid imagination. Yet all has come true….”

  TOKYO

  Official Japan feigned a posture of indifference toward Roosevelt’s re-election; hostility was allowed to show only in the lower echelons. The President must now reorient his Far Eastern policy, said a Foreign Office spokesman; his present attitude was “unfeasible and too far-fetched.” A newspaper recalled Roosevelt once saying “I hate war,” but now he seemed to be leading his country directly into one. The only hope was that Americans would overcome their misunderstanding of Japan’s New Order. Comment soon died away; a more pleasing event was at hand in Tokyo—two days of celebrating the founding of the Japanese Empire twenty-six centuries before.

  The ceremony fused ancient and modern Japan. In dead silence a huge crowd awaited the Emperor beneath the gray walls of the ancient military camp that had become the Imperial Palace. Chrysanthemums stood in martial rows around dazzling floral designs. Precisely on time, the imperial standard could be seen moving slowly through the trees, followed by a crimson Rolls-Royce. The caravan crept across the double bridge spanning the moat; bands played the national anthem; the Emperor and Empress disembarked and seated themselves behind a table covered with brocade.