In Chungking, a thousand miles up the Yangtze from the coast, the Nationalist government experienced neither the luxury nor the quandary of strategic choice. At the end of 1940, after three years of resistance, the Chinese faced a bellicose enemy holding almost all his seaports and the richer sections of the country. With insouciance, Japanese aircraft rained bombs on the capital; the Nationalists had neither planes nor guns to drive them away. People huddled in deep dugouts in the high cliffs of the city; any day correspondents could see bloated human corpses floating down the river, drifting against junks, and being pushed away by boatmen with long spiked poles.
In an unpretentious mansion called “Ying Wo” (“Eagle’s Nest”) lived Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek and a small staff of servants and guards. With his wiry frame and lean chiseled features, the Generalissimo looked like the ascetic he was; he dressed in simple khaki uniforms, ate lightly, drank little, and smoked not at all. But in early 1941 he presided over a country with a horrifying contrast between rich and poor, even in wartime; a country becoming slowly more disorganized, demoralized, and even defeatist. Chiang was still the public symbol of national revolution, but by now he was as anti-Communist as he was anti-Japanese. His army, underfed and badly cared for, was barely able to stabilize the front; and the old admiration for the Nationalist leader was changing in some quarters to suspicion that he was far more anxious to protect his postwar position and bleed the Americans than to withstand the Japanese.
China’s situation was in fact critical. Tokyo had set up a puppet regime in Nanking under Wang Ching-wei, and however much the Kuomintang railed at the “arch-traitor,” he obviously presided over a widening suzerainty. In the northwest the Chinese Communists maintained a state within a state and an army within an army; while committed to the struggle against Japan, the Communists were demanding from Chungking concessions that could only bolster their position in the long run. With the Burma Road cut off for months, Nationalist China was almost isolated, and it was caught in a soaring inflation. The Army was vast but inefficient and under-equipped, the generals often incompetent, the old war lords still un-dependable. Japan’s Axis partner was trying to bully Chungking into accepting Tokyo’s terms. Germany had won the war in Europe, Ribbentrop told the Chinese Ambassador in Berlin; clearly China could not hope for succor from Britain, or from the United States either.
In its extremity China had redoubled its appeals to Roosevelt. His nation was nearing collapse, Chiang had warned the President through the American Ambassador, Nelson Johnson. He particularly needed dollars and planes. His pleas brought a sympathetic answer from the President and a flurry of activity in Washington, but tangible aid was still low. The War Department opposed any more diversions of weapons from its already deprived forces, or from Britain’s. By the end of 1940—after all the fervent appeals and fine responses—the United States had sent only nine million dollars in arms and munitions to the Nationalists.
In January 1941 Chiang did receive from Roosevelt an important emissary in the person of Lauchlin Currie, an administrative assistant to the President. Looking at China through an economist’s eyes, Currie was pessimistic about helping Chungking overcome inflation, but he returned to Washington more sensitive to China’s desperate needs. During the spring, while Matsuoka was known to be urging Moscow to abandon its aid to China, Chungking received promises from Washington that it would be eligible for aid under Lend-Lease, and that Currie himself would be in charge. The Generalissimo had a persuasive representative in Washington in his brother-in-law, T. V. Soong. By now Chiang was asking for over half a billion in aid, including over a thousand fighting planes and bombers.
And Russia? News of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact fell like a thunderbolt in Chungking. At first Chiang was convinced that Moscow would abandon him; surely Matsuoka must have exacted this as part of the bargain. But the mysterious Russians promptly got word to Chungking that the new pact did not affect the Chinese. The Soviets would help them as long as they kept on fighting the invaders. At the same time Washington, jarred by the pact, renewed its promises of assistance. Plans were quickly made to speed money and supplies. In mid-April Roosevelt signed an executive order, which he left unpublicized, authorizing American airmen to resign from their services for the specific purpose of forming a volunteer and “civilian” group in China. This was the beginning of the Flying Tigers, under Colonel Claire L. Chennault, who had been Chiang’s adviser for air since leaving the United States Army. And the President, in response to Chiang’s request for help in getting a political adviser, suggested a scholar named Owen Lattimore, who would soon be on his way to Chungking.
In May, as China approached its fifth year of struggle against invasion, Chiang was still lecturing his friends from his moral pinnacle as the first victim of aggression. At a farewell dinner for Ambassador Johnson he threw down his challenge to Washington. “We believe our ultimate victory can be secured on the mainland of Eastern Asia alone provided the American people second their government’s policy without reserve and bring their full weight to bear in support of Chinese resistance. If, on the other hand, the nations of the Pacific are careless of their responsibilities, each waiting for others to move first, exhibiting afresh the laissez-faire and slothful conduct of the past, ignoring Japanese designs and ambitions and failing positively to assist Chinese resistance—then a great war involving the whole Pacific area will ensue with consequences that do not bear thinking about.”
ROOSEVELT: THE CRISIS OF STRATEGY
While soldiers and statesmen around the world were calling in their final credits, making or renewing commitments, and finally choosing sides during the early months of 1941, Franklin Roosevelt remained the strategic enigma in the swaying balances of global power and purpose. His December 29 broadcast and the Lend-Lease Act had made clear his commitment to the survival of Great Britain. But what was his purpose beyond material aid to America’s old partner? Some foreigners assumed that Roosevelt’s wavering course actually cloaked a firm global strategy. At home the isolationists suspected that the President, despite his artless ways, was directing a Grand Conspiracy designed to plunge the country into war. Even some presidential subordinates, operating in their tiny enclaves, assumed that the Commander in Chief, with his spacious White House perspective, was forging some master plan.
They did not know their man. At this juncture Roosevelt was unable to pierce the fog of world battle, was still shying away from final commitments. “…We cannot lay down hard-and-fast plans,” he wrote to Grew. Not only did he evade strategic decisions, but he refused to let his military chiefs commit themselves on the most compelling matters. When late in 1940 Knox submitted Navy estimates covering several years ahead, Roosevelt wrote to him: “The dear, delightful officers of the regular Navy are doing to you today just what other officers were trying to do to me a quarter of a century ago. If you and I were regular officers of the Navy, you and I would do the same thing!” The Navy was asking for too many men, he went on.
“This is a period of flux. I want no authorization for what may happen beyond July 1, 1941.
“All of us may be dead when that time comes!”
The admirals and the generals could not be so noncommittal. They had to plan across a longer span of time, for the decisions they made at any one point—about construction, supplies, equipment, training stations—would affect operational decisions for years. It was part of their doctrine that tactical decisions were feckless and self-defeating unless shaped by broad strategy. For years the military had been drawing up elaborate plans to vanquish all possible foes—including Britain—and combinations of foes. Dramatically labeled Red, Orange, Blue, and so on, these plans were tactically impressive but strategically almost worthless, for they existed in a political void that the Commander in Chief had no interest in filling. The fall of France and the investment of Britain had shaken the military men out of their abstractions. Two things were now imperative: closer liaison with the British and m
ore realistic strategic assessments. Roosevelt, despite his distaste for planning—especially with the election coming up—late in June 1940 had presented a “hypothesis” that six months later Britain would still be intact, the British and French still holding in the Middle East, and the United States “active in the war” but with naval and air forces only. It was a brilliant projection—and one that the President of course kept secret.
In mid-November, with the President safely re-elected, Admiral Harold (“Betty”) Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, sent him a strategic appreciation outlining four basic alternatives in the event of United States involvement in the war: A. concentrate on hemisphere defense; B. concentrate on Japan, and only secondarily in the Atlantic; C. make an equal effort in both oceans; D. maintain the offensive in the Atlantic, culminating in a British-American land offensive, with the Pacific secondary. Alternative D—”Plan Dog”—assumed that even if “forced into” a war with Japan, the United States would avoid major operations in the Pacific until Britain was at least secure. Plan Dog—the “first attempt to deal with American military strategy as a whole”—called clearly for an “Atlantic First” policy that would cast a long shadow over later American strategy.
Roosevelt neither approved nor disapproved Plan Dog and its portentous order of priorities. He merely endorsed Stark’s proposal of military conversations with a British staff group, provided, of course, that they were secret, purely exploratory, and without commitment. Under the pressure of having to present the British with agreed-on positions, the Army and Navy by 1941 were lined up solidly behind Plan Dog. The American choice of Atlantic First—which practically meant Britain First—would be hardly unwelcome to the visitors from London, who were to arrive in Washington late in January disguised as members of the civilian British Purchasing Commission.
The man most in need of a clear lead from the President was the Army’s Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall. Sworn in on September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland, Marshall was a protégé of General Pershing and a product of the Army’s command and staff system. Quietly assured, stiff, courtly in a standoffish way, he was a planner and organizer who had managed to bring his own strong temper under control and was trying to apply logic and order to the building of an army in a context of unstable domestic politics and unpredictable global turmoil. Toward the President he was reserved even to the point of not laughing at his jokes; his passion for prudent planning and administrative order, as Forrest Pogue has noted, ran counter to Roosevelt’s ways, but the two men got along well in their work, partly because of Hopkins’s mediation.
By mid-January the President was willing to give some lead to Marshall and the other planners. In a long meeting with Hull, Stimson, Knox, Marshall, and Stark he estimated that there was one chance in five that Germany and Japan might jointly launch a sudden attack on the United States. In that event Washington would notify London immediately that it would not curtail supplies to Britain. The British could survive for six months, the President estimated, and with another two months before the Axis could turn west, the United States would have eight months to gather strength. Roosevelt warned the group, however, that long-range military plans were unrealistic; the Navy and Army must be ready to act with what was available. He concluded the meeting with some cautious directives, as summarized by Marshall:
“That we would stand on the defensive in the Pacific with the fleet based on Hawaii; that the Commander of the Asiatic Fleet would have discretionary authority as to how long he could remain based in the Philippines and as to his direction of withdrawal—to the east or to Singapore; that there would be no naval reinforcement of the Philippines; that the Navy should have under consideration the possibility of bombing attacks against Japanese cities.
“That the Navy should be prepared to convoy shipping in the Atlantic to England, and to maintain a patrol off-shore from Maine to the Virginia Capes.
“That the Army should not be committed to any aggressive action until it was fully prepared to undertake it; that our military course must be very conservative until our strength had developed….
“That we should make every effort to go on the basis of continuing the supply of materiel to Great Britain, primarily in order to disappoint what he thought would be Hitler’s principal objective in involving us in a war at this particular time, and also to buck up England.”
The President also took a hand in revising the formal American position to be presented to the parley. For the words “should the United States desire to resort to war” he carefully substituted “should the United States be compelled to resort to war.” He also replaced the term “Allies” with “Associates.”
In the two months of meetings that followed, the American and British staffs agreed that Britain’s security must be maintained “in all circumstances,” that the British Commonwealth must be ultimately secure, that the “Atlantic and European areas” were considered the decisive theater, though the “great importance of the Mediterranean and North African areas” was duly noted, and that the Associated Powers would “conduct a sustained air offensive to destroy Axis military power,” eliminate Italy early, carry out raids, support underground groups, and, finally, capture positions from which to launch “the eventual offensive against Germany.” Detailed plans were laid for full American participation in escorting convoys in the North Atlantic, for mobilizing heavy units of the American Navy in the eastern Atlantic, and even for deploying twenty-five or thirty American submarines “for operations against enemy shipping in the Bay of Biscay and the Western Mediterranean.” Recognizing some of the global implications, the planners agreed that American concentration in Europe required augmented British effort in the Far East.
The staff meetings ended on March 29, 1941; the Commander in Chief took no formal position on the agreements then or for months afterward. In contrast to Hitler’s penchant for seizing the strategic initiative and carefully indoctrinating his generals, Roosevelt had a strangely passive role. By spring 1941 his Navy and Army were all but committed to a strategy that had emerged largely from military leaders, many of whom deliberately tried to exclude political and diplomatic questions on the ground that they were questions for civilians. Military and civilian planners did not work closely together in the fragmentized system the President ran. There is little indication that the strategic possibilities of a “Pacific First” emphasis were ever fully confronted—for example, the importance of heavily bolstering the shaky Chinese defenses. Something could have been said for a decision to beat the weaker nation first and then close in on Germany. Atlantic First was adopted for compelling but essentially military reasons.
Roosevelt was following a simple policy: all aid to Britain short of war. This policy was part of a long heritage of Anglo-American friendship; it was a practical way of blocking Hitler’s aspirations in the west; it could easily be implemented by two nations used to working with each other; it suited Roosevelt’s temperament, met the needs and pressures of the British, and was achieving a momentum of its own. But it was not a grand strategy embracing the full range of world-wide diplomatic, political, and economic as well as military power, potential as well as existing. It did not emerge from clear-cut confrontation of political and military alternatives; and it concentrated on practical ways of winning military victory—or at least preventing Axis victories—rather than on the long-run war and postwar security needs of the United States.
Above all, this strategy was a negative one in that it could achieve full effect—that is, joint military and political action with Britain—only if the Axis took action that would force the United States into war. It was a strategy neither of war nor of peace, but a strategy to take effect (aside from war supply to Britain and a few defensive actions in the Atlantic) only in the event of war. Unless the President was willing and able to lead the nation into war—and he was not—the strategy was inoperative. All this Hitler understood—and hence it was largely his decision as to whether Roosevelt’s strategy
would come into operation at all.
Hitler’s thunderous April blows in Greece, Yugoslavia, and North Africa resounded like a fire bell in Washington. There was a shiver of apprehension over Britain’s capacity to wage war at all. Once again that country seemed to be showing military skill only in retreat and evacuation. Old differences surfaced; some of the military urged all-out war; others, withdrawal to the hemisphere; others remembered their troubles with the British in World War I. Many now doubted Britain’s capacity to survive. London seemed at the end of its rope. “It has been as if living in a nightmare,” Harriman later wrote to Hopkins, “with some calamity hanging constantly over one’s head.”
The President seized on every immediate means of helping Britain. He authorized British ships to be repaired in American docks, British pilots to be trained on American airfields. He transferred ten Coast Guard cutters to the Royal Navy. He widened the American neutrality patrol zone, putting Greenland and the bulge of Africa under Navy surveillance. And he announced the long-brewing agreement with the Danish Minister placing Greenland under the temporary guardianship of the United States and authorizing the construction of bases there.
Outwardly Roosevelt maintained his usual cheerful demeanor. On April 15—in the midst of gloomy conferences on Britain’s crisis—he held an uproarious press conference. He opened by noting the “nice little coincidence” that on the first actual Lend-Lease list there really had been garden hose—actually fire hose, he admitted, after the laughter subsided. Would Hopkins be paid for his new Lend-Lease role? “Yes, sure. He’s a Democrat! What a foolish question.”
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