The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  In East Prussia the night before, in his new underground headquarters, “Wolfsschanze” (“Wolf’s Lair”), concealed in a dark forest, Hitler had dictated a letter, “DUCE! I am writing this letter to you at a moment when months of anxious deliberation and continuous nerve-wracking waiting are ending in the hardest decision of my life.” He reviewed the situation. England had lost the war. It was trying to get Russia into it. “Behind these two countries stands the North American Union goading them on” and supplying them with war materials. If he had to send his Air Force against Britain, Russia would follow a strategy of extortion. So he would “cut the noose before it can be drawn tight.” The war in the east would not be easy, but Germany and Italy would secure a common food-supply base in the Ukraine. He tried feebly to explain why he was notifying the Duce only at the last moment. The decision had been made. Now he felt spiritually free. “With hearty and comradely greetings. Your Adolf Hitler.”

  In London Churchill spoke over the radio to the people:

  “…No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies, flashes away.” He described the tranquil Russian villages, children playing, mothers and wives awaiting the return of their loved ones. “I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying-down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts…. Behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men who plan, organize, and launch this cataract of horrors upon mankind….”

  In Tokyo, officials reacted with shock and dismay. The Konoye government had had intelligence of the Nazi attack but could scarcely credit it. Now for a second time Hitler had presented a fait accompli. But Matsuoka was undaunted. Japan, he felt, now had a supreme opportunity to attack Soviet Siberia and destroy Russian power in the Far East. The man who had strolled with Stalin along the station platform exchanging felicities was ready two months later to scrap his agreement with the Soviet chief. He rushed to the Imperial Palace with his plan, but he met a cool reception. Russia was still formidable in Siberia, army chiefs contended; why not wait until it was bleeding so heavily from Nazi thrusts that its strength would be drained away from the east? Let Germans fight Russians; Japan could pursue its interests southward and later move north when the main job was done. Let Hitler undertake a two-front war; Tokyo would not.

  In Moscow, Stalin waited two weeks—in a state of near-collapse, it was said later—before he spoke to his people. “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, fighters of our Army and Navy! I am speaking to you, my friends.” He described, and understated, the German advances. “A serious threat hangs over our country.” He tried to justify the Nazi-Soviet Pact. “The enemy is cruel and merciless. He aims at grabbing our land, our wheat and oil. He wants to restore the power of the landowners, re-establish Tsarism, and destroy the national culture of the peoples of the Soviet Union…and turn them into slaves of German princes and barons.” The writer Ilya Ehrenburg, sitting by the radio at the office of Red Star, had never heard Stalin sound so moved, so close to his people. The dictator warned against panic-mongers, called on the troops and the whole Soviet people to fight for every inch of Soviet soil, and leave not a single engine or railway track or pound of bread or pint of oil for the enemy.

  “Comrades, our forces are immeasurably large….All the strength of the people must be used to smash the enemy. Onward to victory!”

  THREE Cold War in the Atlantic

  THE WEEKS OF MAY and early June 1941 had been among the most trying in Roosevelt’s life. Although he, too, had had ample warning of Hitler’s mobilization in the east, he could not be sure that this was not a massive feint for an attack on the British Isles or elsewhere. Britain’s heavy needs, China’s plaintive cries for help, Matsuoka’s continental fence-mending, Pétain’s and Franco’s vulnerability in the Mediterranean, the isolationist clamor in Congress, the pressure of the militants around him—these and a host of other scourges put the President under heavy strain. His May cold dragged on. With the press he was less open and genial as the spring neared its end, with his subordinates less tolerant and patient.

  “…I wish to God,” he wrote to Senator Josiah Bailey, of North Carolina, in regard to convoying, “I could make out what all this full-dress debate they are talking about in the Senate relates to. Why debate convoys?” Convoying was a matter for experts, not for “laymen like you or I.” A few days later he burst out in a letter to an isolationist Congressman: “…When will you Irishmen ever get over hating England? Remember that if England goes down, Ireland goes down too….” When former Congressman Bruce Barton wrote in to complain of inconsistent figures from the administration, the President replied: “…It is hard to explain technical problems either to the Congress or to the people in view of the distorted values which are promptly given to one phase or the other of a complete picture.” The master interpreter to the American people of complex problems at this point seemed to have lost his touch.

  As usual the President was trying to gauge public opinion, and as usual public opinion was blurred and drifting. Americans seemed fiercely protective of their own shores, very doubtful that Britain could survive without American aid, and very sure that American naval escort of war materials to Britain would put the country into war. In mid-May, Pa Watson got an advance tip on a Gallup Poll; the figures he gave his boss indicated that about a quarter of the respondents felt that the President had not gone far enough in helping Britain, almost a quarter thought he had gone too far, and about half answered “just about right.” During the following weeks interventionist feeling seemed to run ahead of presidential action. A majority seemed to be in favor of convoying, for example. But what kind of convoying, where, at what risk of shooting? On the specific and crucial policy questions public opinion was, as usual, hazy and volatile.

  Amid the impenetrable events of early 1941 people seemed to be waiting for some clarifying event or galvanizing incident—or at least for some clear lead from the top. Only the President could give such a lead. By late May the militants were putting heavy pressure on their chief to speak bluntly to the people and proclaim an unlimited national emergency. Stimson sensed that the President was waiting for the accidental shot of a German or American commander to move the country into war, when he should have been considering the “deep principles” underlying the question. Ickes wrote to the President that Hitler would not create an incident until he was ready, and he would strike when ready, incident or no incident. Morgenthau was still militant; Hull, still cautious of action, if not of word.

  Finally deciding on a speech, the President went about its preparation in a curious way. He would not ask Sherwood or Rosenman to put in a declaration of unlimited emergency, and he professed surprise when he found it in a draft. High officials tussled over the text of the speech as if it were a declaration of war. Stimson wanted a statement about the transfer of fleet units to the Atlantic; Hull objected. Some favored a stark presentation of shipping losses in the Atlantic; the Chiefs of Staff objected. Roosevelt was set on two matters: he would not mention Japan, for fear of provoking that country toward war; he would mention Russia, in case Germany forced it into war.

  The speech had a dramatic prelude. The German battleship Bismarck suddenly slipped through the North Sea fogs and headed into the North Atlantic. “We have reason to believe that a formidable Atlantic raid is intended,” Churchill cabled to Roosevelt. “Should we fail to catch them going out, your Navy should surely be able to mark them down for us.” The battle cruiser Hood and other mighty ships would be on its track, he added. “Give us the news and we will finish the job.” But contrary ne
ws came to the White House: the Bismarck had sunk the Hood and was now on the loose. The President got the news while sitting behind his desk in the oval study, where he was working with Sherwood and others on his speech. He wondered whether the Bismarck would head straight toward Martinique. “Suppose she does show up in the Caribbean,” he speculated almost casually. “We have some submarines down there. Suppose we order them to attack her and attempt to sink her? Do you think the people would demand to have me impeached?” Two days later the President took a call from the Navy Department. The Bismarck had been cornered by British Navy units and blasted by shells and torpedoes. Roosevelt hung up and said exultantly, “She’s sunk!”

  After this prelude and all the rumors and anticipation, the final speech, on May 27, was somewhat anticlimactic. The setting was anomalous: inside the East Room, representatives of Latin-American republics sat uncomfortably on gilt ballroom chairs; outside, Communist pickets trudged up and down the sidewalk with their antiwar placards. The President began his address boldly with a flat declaration that the Nazis were bent on world domination. He was not speculating, he insisted; it was already in the “Nazi book of world conquest.” The Nazis, he said, “plan to treat the Latin American Nations as they are now treating the Balkans. They plan then to strangle the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada.” American labor would be oppressed, unions crushed, the farmer regimented and impoverished, churches threatened, children perhaps sent off “goosestepping in search of new gods.”

  Was the President picturing a Nazi-occupied nation, or a Nazi-besieged one? The speech was not clear on this and other matters. It seemed to reflect the struggle over its composition and the President’s indecision over strategy. Roosevelt, though speaking in his usual arresting way, meandered on and on, from the geography of Nazi strategy, to the Battle of the Atlantic, to the need of responding to Hitler before he came too close—“Our Bunker Hill of tomorrow may be several thousand miles from Boston”—to a statement of national policy that offered little that was new, to a rebuttal of “sincere” pacifists and a denunciation of the “sinister” ones. He did release the alarming figures of the rate of German sinkings of merchant ships, and he made his strongest statement to date of his determination to deliver supplies to Britain by whatever means was necessary. But he did not say how he would do this beyond patrolling; he made no mention of transferring fleet units to the Atlantic, and he ignored the crucial question of actual escort of convoys. But toward the end he achieved a stirring climax:

  “As the President of a united and determined people, I say solemnly:

  “We reassert the ancient American doctrine of freedom of the seas.

  “We reassert the solidarity of the twenty-one American Republics and the Dominion of Canada in the preservation of the independence of the hemisphere….

  “We in the Americas will decide for ourselves whether, and when, and where, our American interests are attacked or our security is threatened.

  “We are placing our armed forces in strategic military positions.

  “We will not hesitate to use our armed forces to repel attack….

  “Therefore…I have tonight issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority….”

  Soon after the talk, while Roosevelt happily listened to Irving Berlin play “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and other presidential favorites, telegrams began to come to the White House. Later in the evening Sherwood found the President immensely relieved. Sitting in bed surrounded by hundreds of wires he said: “They’re ninety-five per cent favorable! And I figured I’d be lucky to get an even break in this speech.” The newspapers in the morning gave him strong editorial support.

  The militants were relieved, too; however lacking in specifics, the speech was a moving statement of national resolution and a call to vigorous action. But then came one of the Rooseveltian backtracks that had so often reduced his associates to despair. At a press conference next day, with plaudits still ringing in his ears, the President denied that he planned to use the Navy for convoying escorts, or to ask Congress to change the Neutrality Act, or to issue executive orders to effectuate his proclamation. These comments, Stimson lamented, almost undid the effect of his speech; even Hopkins was perplexed by the shift. The President’s determination was soon put to the test. On June 11 reports began to arrive from survivors landing in Brazil of the torpedoing of their ship, the American freighter Robin Moor, by a U-boat in the South Atlantic three weeks earlier. Hopkins urged his chief to use the incident as reason to escalate from naval observation patrols to a security patrol to protect American-flag ships. After his first flush of anger, the President refused to do this; he was content to report the sinking to Congress as an example of the kind of Nazi threat he had pictured in his address.

  The President still had no strategy except a strategy of no strategy. His main general policy was to wait on events—not any event, but one mighty event—to create the context for action. Such an event was Hitler’s invasion of Russia. By the end of June the world was watching the Red Army at bay—and watching London and Washington, too.

  ATLANTIC FIRST

  So quick, eloquent, and audacious was Churchill’s response to Russia’s plight that for years his words distorted peoples’ memories of the events of late June 1941. “We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime,” Churchill told the nation barely twelve hours after hearing of the invasion. “From this nothing will turn us—nothing.…It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people….” Hitler’s invasion of Russia, he said, was no more than a prelude to an assault on Britain itself.

  Such was the steely rhetoric, but actually the first days of what would become the United Nations were marked by suspicion and near-paralysis. Communication between London and Moscow had been almost nonexistent during the spring months: Stalin and Molotov had kept a frosty distance from Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Ambassador; Churchill and Eden had doubted that Soviet Ambassador Ivan M. Maisky in London had the confidence of his chiefs. The Kremlin had smoldered over Britain’s refusal to recognize its writ in the Baltic. Some Russians now wondered if Churchill had instigated the Nazi attack; certainly he wanted it, they judged, and was this the real purpose of the Rudolf Hess caper? Moscow seemed ominously quiet even after Churchill’s address.

  There were fears in London that the Red Army could not hold out for more than a few weeks. Would the Russians then surrender, or even join Hitler in an attack on Britain? A hundred Nazi divisions smashing and clawing their way east could not overcome years of mutual suspicion and hostility.

  Washington had been even cooler than London in its formal posture toward the Soviets. For some weeks Hull and Welles had been parleying about relatively minor matters with the Russian Ambassador, Constantine Oumansky, whom they found fretful and stubborn. Only a week before the invasion the State Department had formalized a position of undertaking no approach to Moscow, treating Russian approaches with reserve, offering concessions only for a strict quid pro quo, and making clear to the Russians that improved relations were more important to Moscow than to Washington. Many in the American Army, as in the British, doubted Russia’s capacity to stop the Wehrmacht.

  Roosevelt’s feelings toward Moscow were more mixed than his subordinates’. Often since the auspicious days of late 1933, when he had recognized the Bolshevik government, the President had been frustrated by Soviet policy; he positively disliked Oumansky and saw as little of him as possible. He had no illusions about the dictatorial nature of the Soviet regime, its secretiveness, rigidity, and greed for territory or satellites. On the other hand, he was somewhat optimistic about the Russians holding out—partly because of heartening words from former Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, at this time in Wisconsin. He was confident of his talent for working with any anti-Hitler government. He had a vague optimism abo
ut the Soviets’ long-run potential for neighborly relations with the democracies. Above all, he feared the possibility of Communist expansion far less than the fact of fascist aggression, and hence wanted to buck up the Soviet defenders—at least with words.

  He approved a limp State Department declaration that while fascism and Communism were both bad, fascism was so much worse that any assistance to the anti-Hitler forces, no matter what the source, would benefit American security. He told reporters that “of course we are going to give all the aid we possibly can to Russia,” but he was vague as to when and how—and Britain still had priority on American arms production. When Fulton Oursler, of Liberty, sent him the draft of his first postinvasion editorial, on the theme “To Hell with Communism” and sharply attacking the Soviet regime, Roosevelt replied that “if I were at your desk I would write an editorial condemning the Russian form of dictatorship equally with the German form of dictatorship—but at the same time, I would make it clear that the immediate menace at this time to the security of the United States lies in the threat of Hitler’s armies….”