The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Hitler was an ideologist. In his five decades of vagrancy, and of trench life, political combat, and finally the conquest of power, he had forged a system of values, a rigid theory of change, and a strategy of political action. The values were folkish, racist, xenophobic; they assaulted everything precious to the liberal mind—egalitarianism, altruism, tolerance, religion, individual liberty, internationalism. Hitler’s theory of change was not of personal flexibility and adaptation, but of unremitting racial and national conflict and brutal violence, with the strong climbing to power over the bodies of the weak; there was no place for the flabby liberal notions of due process, minority rights, civil liberty, parliamentarianism, gradualism, accommodation. Hitler was a true ideologist in that his values, his theory of change, and his political strategy meshed perfectly. And as an ideologist he considered his adversaries not merely wrong or evil, but also mad. Roosevelt was simply crazy, he told his comrades; he behaved like a “tortuous, pettifogging Jew” because there was Jewish blood in his veins, and the “completely negroid appearance of his wife showed that she too was half-caste.”

  Hitler as a person was also beyond Roosevelt’s ken. The President was long used to politicians grasping for influence, deserting old friends, breaking promises, nourishing grudges; he himself had done that kind of thing. But in Hitler he was dealing with a man possessed of a rage for recognition and deference far beyond that of a Huey Long or a John L. Lewis. Grounded in the security of doting parents, fixed home, social class, family traditions, Roosevelt could not easily gauge this product of social void and revolutionary turmoil. Hitler had lacked a home, but he found a new home in the Nazi party, in its ideas, and comradeship. Though he knew how to use the carrot as well as the stick, he had become a terrible simplifier. While Roosevelt proceeded by a series of knight’s moves, bypassing, overleaping, encircling, Hitler went straight for his prey—opposition parties, Nazi dissidents, Jews, small nations.

  And now in the early weeks of 1941 Hitler was facing the transcendent decision of his life, and of his time. In December he had ordered his high command to prepare a massive land assault against Russia, to take place in May. “The German Armed Forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign (Operation Barbarossa) even before the conclusion of the war against England,” the Führer’s directive began. But the decision was not a final one. While his generals plotted supply routes and staging areas along the thousand-mile front, Hitler pondered his strategic situation.

  That situation was stupendous in both promise and portent. Britain was not yet finished. America was giving it increasing support. The English had routed Mussolini’s forces in Africa. The Western Front against Germany had been broken but it still existed at the Channel, and across it Anglo-Saxon power was growing. And if anything had been bred in the bone of every German statesman, strategist, even soldier, especially after 1918, it was this: never fight a two-front war. Hitler himself had stressed the point in Mein Kampf. The Führer had brilliantly mixed force and diplomacy—especially in crushing Poland before the West could intervene—to avoid this strategic vice. Such a principle could yield now to only the most overwhelming considerations. But so they seemed to Hitler.

  Russia itself, to begin with, seemed a surly and cunning ally. After the Führer’s generous invitation to Moscow to join the Tripartite Pact—along with spreading out the riches of India for Russia to feast on—Molotov had coolly demanded a free hand in Finland, Bulgaria, the Turkish straits, the Persian Gulf. Soon Hitler was calling Stalin a cold-blooded blackmailer. And what, he reasoned, did Moscow have to back up its claims? Russia was a giant with feet of clay. Its army had been weakened by a merciless purge of officers. Its frontier was vast and poorly defended. Its people, especially in the Ukraine, were eager to throw off the Bolshevik yoke.

  The Führer knew, moreover, that Russia had its own dilemma of two fronts. On the east lay Japan, an old adversary, now united with Germany and Italy in a pact of steel. Here Hitler’s surging strategic ambition conjured up global possibilities. “The purpose of the co-operation based on the Three Power Pact must be to induce Japan to take action in the Far East as soon as possible. This will tie down strong English forces and will divert the main effort of the United States of America to the Pacific. In view of the military unpreparedness of her enemies, the sooner Japan strikes, the greater her chances of success….” He instructed his soldiers to respond generously to Tokyo’s requests for military help.

  The Führer pondered the interplay of nations’ strategies. The United States in the long run was his most formidable adversary. It was big, rich, remote. He had not wanted to provoke Washington—at least not yet—but Roosevelt seemed to be girding the nation for military action. The destruction of Russia would enable Japan to turn all its strength against America. This in turn—combined with expanded U-boat warfare—would diminish Roosevelt’s support for Churchill across the Atlantic. If American aid reached England, Hitler said, it would be “too little and too late.” Britain, shorn of its present aid from America and of its potential help from Russia, would be forced to its knees. Meanwhile, he must refrain from provocative acts against American ships in the Atlantic.

  So the attack on Russia, which to many at the time seemed like a lunatic lunge in the wrong direction, from Hitler’s strategic view was the best way to break the growing global coalition against him. To turn east was really—on Hitler’s very round globe—to turn west. Finally, he reasoned, the conquest of Russia would remove any threat to his rear when he re-engaged Britain, and it would insure vast supplies of raw materials. The timing was ripe, too, he felt. All nations were rearming, including Russia, but all were lagging. If he did not act on his own grand strategy quickly, the opposition coalition would be acting on its own. Were not Moscow and London already plotting against him?

  Yet it was not an easy decision. Admiral Raeder opposed the eastern strategy and spoke of the glowing possibilities of action in the Mediterranean, in North Africa, in the Atlantic. Hitler demurred for two final reasons. One was the sheer complexity of operations in the West. Mussolini was proving more a drain than an ally; Vichy was controllable but evasive and inert; Franco was cautious as long as the British fleet dominated his coastline and meantime seemed eager only to drive a hard bargain. The Mediterranean, compared with the Russian heartland, was less a strategic entity than a collection of tactical opportunities—and pitfalls. Operations to the south and west called for consummate skill at mixing diplomacy, propaganda, pressure, and sea, air, and ground power. How much easier to mass his forces, crush Russia in a few tremendous blows, and topple the whole anti-Nazi combination.

  The other reason was ideological. The one most powerful, consistent force in Hitler’s thought had been mingled fear and loathing of the Slavic masses to the east, their “Jewish-Bolshevist leaders,” and the huge Red Army. “We must never forget that the regents of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that here is the scum of humanity,” he had raved on and on in Mein Kampf. “We must not forget that the international Jew, who today rules Russia absolutely, sees in Germany, not an ally, but a State marked for the same destiny.” Contemptuous (and envious) of Britain but full of hatred toward Russia, he had negotiated with Moscow purely for reasons of state. In the long run, he believed, there could be only a death grapple between the two ideologies.

  So Hitler confronted his sacred mission and wove his global tapestry of war as he stared out at the glistening Alps from his eyrie or bent over huge maps in his chancellery. Years later, even in the nuclear age of overkill, there was something awesome in the power of decision lodged in this one man. The actual authority of “absolute” monarchs and “totalitarian” dictators is usually exaggerated; the poor men are impeded at every step by suspicious allies, ambitious rivals, foot-dragging bureaucrats, demanding relatives, grasping wives or mistresses. But Hitler’s personal power in 1941 was almost total. Between lunch and dinner he could make a decision that would topple governments, sp
ill oceans of blood, desolate scores of cities, change the lives of literally millions of people in one quarter of the globe—and completely spare another corner. In one moment of frenzy or ideological rapture he could order a nation to die, a whole class of people to be exterminated. He was indeed the terrible simplifier.

  By this time, moreover, Hitler’s circle had been so narrowed that only a handful were privy to his fateful decisions. Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler vied with one another to carry out their Führer’s orders, even to anticipate them. Ideologically at one with their leader, they had little reason to differ with him except over trifles or about their own power and jurisdiction. The natural sources of opposition—church, trade unions, political parties, intellectuals—had long been suppressed. As for allies, Mussolini had been reduced to the most junior partner; Hitler usually told him about major actions only on the eve. The heads of satellite nations did not dare cross the man whose soaring and shifting fortunes they must now share to the end.

  Only the generals had the formal status, the esprit, the professional tradition, and the raw power to withstand him. But by this time they were almost impotent. Again and again proved wrong in their doubts about Hitler’s gambles, hectored and bullied by him, fearful that if they thwarted him he would replace them with more fanatical soldiers or storm troopers, the generals largely stayed silent. They could not even take refuge in the bureaucrat’s time-honored plea of ignorance or misunderstanding, for Hitler left nothing to chance. Hour after hour he lectured his silent generals, outlining his plans, the diplomatic parallel moves, the broader political context, their specific responsibilities.

  Only the moral fervor of an independent nation could withstand Hitler in 1941. During the late winter and spring the Führer infiltrated the Balkans to block any show of independence or threat by the British, and to protect his right flank for the drive into Russia. One by one he outflanked and isolated his victims. Bulgaria, threatened by Nazi troops in Rumania and unresponsive to Russian proffers of support, adhered to the Tripartite Pact at the end of February. Turkey, terrified by Hitler’s nearby divisions, was effectively neutralized. Greece, still beleaguered by Italian troops in the northwestern mountains, lay naked to Nazi attack from the northeast. Only Yugoslavia retained some freedom of action and will.

  For a time it seemed that this small country, too, would submit to the genteel suffocation that Hitler reserved for nations that had not unduly provoked him. Prince Paul, conscious of his political and military weakness, spurned British invitations to form a common Balkan front against Germany. This was not enough for Hitler. In mid-March he summoned Paul to a secret meeting and demanded that Belgrade adhere to the pact. A week later, facing a final Nazi ultimatum, the Regent decided to comply. Then came an event that was not on Hitler’s schedule—and would fatally alter it. Serbian army officers, outraged by Paul’s capitulation, ousted him from office. Churchill announced elatedly that Yugoslavia had “found its soul” and urged Roosevelt to give the new government his fullest support.

  The overturn in Belgrade threw Hitler into a boiling rage. Summoning the high command, he stormed that Yugoslavia must be beaten down once and for all, no matter what declaration of loyalty Belgrade might now make. Quietly and skillfully the generals regrouped their forces; then Nazi planes swooped down on the defenseless capital and almost obliterated the heart of it. Seventeen thousand people died. Nazi columns stabbed across the border from the north and east. Effective resistance was erased within ten days.

  Hitler exulted over his devastating show of strength. He had taken some risks, since attack to the south had meant postponing his invasion of Russia by a good month. He was not unduly concerned. Success, like power, ennobles some men; others it emboldens and corrupts. The struggle with Russia, Hitler told his commanders, was one of ideologies and racial differences and would have to be conducted with unprecedented and unrelenting mercilessness. In particular, Soviet commissars—“bearers of an ideology directly opposed to National Socialism—must be shot out of hand.” Schutzstaffel Chief Heinrich Himmler was given “special tasks” in the wake of the attack.

  Toward the end of March Hitler summoned his generals again to stress the ideological—and hence ruthless and final—nature of the struggle ahead. “They sat there before him,” an observer remembered, “in stubborn silence, a silence broken only twice—when the assembly rose first as he entered through a door in the rear and went up to the rostrum, and later when he departed the same way. Otherwise not a hand moved and not a word was spoken but by him.”

  At the end of April Hitler set June 22 as D day for BARBAROSSA—about five weeks later than the original plan. He was confident; so were his commanders. “We have only to kick in the door,” Hitler said, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.”

  CHURCHILL: THE GIRDLE OF DEFEAT

  Nowhere did the pause of winter 1940-41 bring graver strategic reassessments than in the command posts in Whitehall. After the traumas of 1940 the British had, of course, much to celebrate. “We were alive,” Churchill said later. “We had beaten the German Air Force. There had been no invasion of the island. The Army at home was now very powerful. London had stood triumphant through all her ordeals. Everything connected with our air mastery over our own island was improving fast….” The British were winning a brilliant victory over the Italians in the Libyan desert. And “across the Atlantic the Great Republic drew ever nearer to her duty and our aid.”

  There was a much darker side. Sinkings along the Atlantic lifeline were still appalling, and the Germans would send out many more U-boats in the coming months. Britain’s voracious war theaters were swallowing up the still-lagging war supply. Tokyo’s intentions in the Orient remained ominously inscrutable. Most troubling of all was the strategic situation in the Mediterranean. Even in the flush of desert victories, Britain could not ignore the weaknesses in the balance of its Near Eastern obligations and power. Franco was still flirting with Hitler, though with the apparent reluctance of a suspicious señorita. Pétain seemed ever subject to collapse under Nazi pressure. German air power hovered over the Balkans. Turkey and other Near Eastern countries coldly measured nearby British strength. This was meager—50,000 British, Indian, and Commonwealth troops scattered across a broad area, six battleships divided between the eastern and western Mediterranean, two hundred planes in the Nile Valley.

  What were the Germans planning? British Intelligence failed to divine Berlin’s strategic intention, partly because Hitler had not come to a final decision. All his information indicated that the Germans were still preparing to invade Britain, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt late in January; he was getting ready to give them a reception worthy of the occasion. But there was news from the East that large Nazi air and ground forces were being established in Rumania and infiltrating into Bulgaria, with Sofia’s connivance. “It would be natural for Hitler to make a strong threat against the British Isles in order to occupy us here and cover his Eastern designs.” But, Churchill added with a shade of envy, the Nazi forces were so strong that they could mount both offensives at the same time.

  Keeping Roosevelt informed and sympathetic was Churchill’s cardinal policy. The two men still had not met as President and Prime Minister, but their correspondence was becoming frequent and far-ranging. Early in 1941 the President sent Hopkins to England as his personal representative. The British were put off a bit by his unkempt state and blunt talk, but soon they caught the measure of the man. “There he sat,” Churchill remembered later, “slim, frail, ill, but absolutely glowing with refined comprehension of the Cause”—the Cause being the defeat of Hitler—“to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties, or aims.” General Ismay, stiffly noting that Hopkins was deplorably untidy, soon decided that not even Churchill was more single-minded in his conviction that Nazism must be crushed.

  Other Roosevelt men followed: W. Averell Harriman, to help expedite Lend-Lease at the British end; William J. Donovan, Roosevelt’s old Republican adve
rsary and personal friend, who conferred with Churchill’s men in the Balkans and the Mediterranean area; and a new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—John G. Winant, former Republican governor of New Hampshire, slow of speech, Lincolnesque of mien, and as committed as Hopkins to Churchill’s Cause.

  To the dispatch of such emissaries Churchill responded in kind. On the death of Lord Lothian he chose his Foreign Secretary, Halifax, as Ambassador to the United States, thus also making way for Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office. To signalize the appointment, Churchill sent Halifax across the Atlantic in his newest and mightiest battleship, the King George V, after journeying to Scapa Flow, with an ailing, shivering Hopkins in tow, to see him off. Roosevelt, at the other end, sailed out from Annapolis to greet the new Ambassador—and also got a chance to look over Churchill’s newest dreadnaught.

  But all turned on plans being shaped in London—and by March 1941 Churchill and his military chiefs were facing a dire strategic predicament. The Germans were threatening Greece from their Balkan enclaves. Britain, historically a patron of the ancient nation, was providing air support to the counterattack against the Italians. Some kind of Nazi assault was inevitable, British strategists felt, and hence it was crucial to organize an anti-Nazi bloc in the area; in this they had the support of Colonel Donovan, who went from capital to capital exhorting resistance on the natives’ part and offering American aid in the long run but little at the moment. All through the winter London feverishly marshaled diplomatic and military pressure to win the support of Yugoslavia and Turkey. But Belgrade was too exposed to Axis attack, and too divided internally, to put up a resolute front against Hitler, and Ankara feared that acceptance of British aid would simply provoke a Nazi assault on its spirited but underarmed troops.