The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Nagano spoke next. Vital supplies—especially oil—were dwindling. Time was vital. He sketched the necessary strategy if war broke out. If the enemy aimed for a quick war and early decisions and dispatched their fleet, “this would be the very thing we hope for.” With aircraft “and other elements” he could beat them in the Pacific. More likely, though, “America will attempt to prolong the war, utilizing her impregnable position, her superior industrial power, and her abundant resources.” In a long war Japan’s only chance, after the first quick strikes, was to seize the enemy’s major military areas, establish an impregnable position, and develop military resources. Sugiyama then spoke up. He expressed the Army’s complete agreement with Nagano. Japan must not mark time and be trapped by Anglo-American intrigue and delays. Intensive troop movements were required. If negotiations failed, a decision for war must be made within ten days of the failure at the latest. Others spoke, but there was no break in the united front.

  The Emperor became flushed as Hara went through set questions and received set replies. A hush fell on the room. His Majesty was not satisfied with the assurances about diplomacy first. He drew a slip from his pocket and in his high voice read a poem composed by his grandfather the Emperor Meiji:

  “All the seas, in every quarter, are as

  brothers to one another,

  Why, then, do the winds and waves of strife

  rage so turbulently throughout the world?”

  The Emperor’s meaning was clear. All present were struck with awe, Konoye remembered, and there was silence throughout the hall. Nagano assured the Emperor that the whole Cabinet favored diplomacy first. The meeting adjourned in an atmosphere of unprecedented tension.

  At just about this moment, on the other side of the world, the American destroyer Greer was speeding through North Atlantic waters on a mail run to Iceland. These waters were in both the German war zone and the American defense zone. A British patrol plane signaled her that a submerged U-boat lay athwart her course ten miles ahead. The Greer speeded up, sounded general quarters, zigzagged toward the submarine, made sound contact, and began trailing the U-boat and reporting its exact position to the plane, but with no intention of attacking it. After an hour the plane dropped four depth charges without effect and turned back to refuel; the Greer hung on her quarry’s trail. After two hours of this the submarine suddenly launched a torpedo at the Greer, and then one or two more. The Greer dodged them and began dropping a circle of depth charges, meantime losing contact. Over two hours later the Greer made contact again and dropped eleven more depth charges. The Greer trailed the U-boat a while longer, then broke off the pursuit, leaving it in the hands of British destroyers and planes in the area.

  At last Roosevelt had his incident. It was not much of an incident, since the Greer had sought out the submarine and had jeopardized it by broadcasting its position; moreover, there was no indication (as the White House was informed) that the Germans even knew whether the destroyer was British or American. But shots had been exchanged in anger, and Roosevelt felt that here was his chance to dramatize the Nazi menace that he had long been picturing. He found Hull in an equally stern and even aggressive mood; the Secretary waxed so indignant about the situation that the President asked him to put it all in writing for a White House address. It was announced that the President would make a major statement the following Monday. Churchill wired that all were awaiting his speech with profound interest. The President went to Hyde Park for the weekend.

  While he was there, on Saturday, September 6, his mother died, suddenly and peacefully, in her pleasant corner room looking out toward the Albany Post Road. What private grief Roosevelt felt at this loss, breaking his main link with his childhood, no one could tell, for he said little. But perhaps Mackenzie Ring was uttering Roosevelt’s own thoughts when the Prime Minister wrote him later that one could not see “the main theatre of all one’s actions since childhood’s days” suddenly removed, “as Mrs. Roosevelt’s passing must have been to you, without experiencing a sorrow much too great to express in words.”

  The President instructed Rosenman and Hopkins to continue work on his speech, which was now postponed to the eleventh. Back in Washington he read a draft of it to his Cabinet; all approved but Hull, who was now arguing for a strongly moralistic speech, though without threat of action. Roosevelt refused to tone it down.

  “The Navy Department of the United States,” he began his fireside chat, “has reported to me that on the morning of September fourth the United States destroyer Greer, proceeding in full daylight toward Iceland, had reached a point southeast of Greenland. She was carrying American mail to Iceland. She was flying the American flag. Her identity as an American ship was unmistakable.

  “She was then and there attacked by a submarine. Germany admits that it was a German submarine. The submarine deliberately fired a torpedo at the Greer, followed later by another torpedo attack. In spite of what Hitler’s propaganda bureau has invented, and in spite of what any American obstructionist organization may prefer to believe, I tell you the blunt fact that the German submarine fired first upon this American destroyer without warning, and with deliberate design to sink her.

  “Our destroyer, at the time, was in waters which the Government of the United States had declared to be waters of self-defense—surrounding outposts of American protection in the Atlantic.”

  The President described these outposts and their role in protecting the lifelines to Britain. To people in the room with him, the mourning band for his mother showed somberly against his light-gray seersucker suit.

  “This was piracy—piracy legally and morally.” The President then reviewed a series of earlier incidents in the Atlantic, beginning with the Robin Moor. “In the face of all this, we Americans are keeping our feet on the ground.…It would be unworthy of a great Nation to exaggerate an isolated incident, or to become inflamed by some one act of violence. But it would be inexcusable folly to minimize such incidents in the face of evidence which makes it clear that the incident is not isolated, but is part of a general plan….Hitler’s advance guards—not only his avowed agents but also his dupes among us—have sought to make ready for him footholds and bridgeheads in the New World, to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans.” Hitler was seeking world mastery, and Americans of all the Americas must give up the romantic delusion that they could go on living peacefully in a Nazi-dominated world.

  “We have sought no shooting war with Hitler. We do not seek it now. But…when you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him….

  “Do not let us be hair-splitters. Let us not ask ourselves whether the Americas should begin to defend themselves after the first attack, or the fifth attack, or the tenth attack, or the twentieth attack.

  “The time for active defense is now.” The President called the roll of early Presidents who had defended the freedom of the seas.

  “My obligation as President is historic; it is clear. It is inescapable.

  “It is no act of war on our part when we decide to protect the seas that are vital to American defense. The aggression is not ours. Ours is solely defense.

  “But let this warning be clear. From now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril….

  “The sole responsibility rests upon Germany. There will be no shooting unless Germany continues to seek it….

  “I have no illusions about the gravity of this step. I have not taken it hurriedly or lightly. It is the result of months and months of constant thought and anxiety and prayer….”

  Shoot on sight. Roosevelt was in effect declaring naval war on Germany, in response to the war of aggression he believed Germany was waging against his nation. The Atlantic cold war was over; now it was a hot war, limited only by America’s neutrality laws and by Hitler’s restraints on his submarine fleet. It was war nonetheless, and Roosevelt proc
eeded to act in those terms. Two days after his speech he ordered Admiral King officially to protect not only American convoys to Iceland but also shipping of any nationality that might join such convoys. A delighted Churchill at once diverted about forty destroyers and corvettes from the convoy area to duty elsewhere. If any doubt remained, Secretary Knox cleared it up at the American Legion convention in Milwaukee on September 15: “Beginning tomorrow…the Navy is ordered to capture or destroy by every means at its disposal Axis-controlled submarines or surface raiders in these waters.

  “That is our answer to Mr. Hitler.”

  Mr. Hitler was infuriated by Roosevelt’s escalation, but he was still playing it cool. Raeder made the long trip to the Führer’s Wolfsschanze headquarters on the Eastern Front to protest that the United States had declared war, that his U-boats either must be allowed to attack American warships or must be withdrawn, but Hitler insisted on no incidents—at least before about the middle of October. By that time the “great decision in the Russian campaign” would have been reached; and then, Hitler implied, he and Raeder could deal with the Americans. Glumly Raeder withdrew his proposal.

  Roosevelt’s fireside chat seemed to win wide support at home. In mid-September people favored “shoot on sight” by roughly two to one. The President had acted, indeed, on a foundation of public support; by even stronger ratios, polled Americans had favored American convoys for war goods at least as far as Iceland. But these polls could not measure intensity of feeling, and observers sensed a good deal of apathy among the public, or at least a feeling of fatalism. Opinion seemed to be volatile and moody, except when a question touched on the possibility of outright war. Then the people shrank from action. Clearly many Americans were still accepting at face value Roosevelt’s promise that his defense measures would help America keep out of war.

  The President judged opinion ripe for the next step—modification of the Neutrality Act, which was still barring the arming of American merchantmen and excluding them entirely from proclaimed combat zones. Interventionist newspapers were now in full cry against the act: it was worth a thousand submarines to the foe, declared the New York Times; it was a “hoary and decrepit antique,” according to the New York Post; it had become a “stench in the nostrils” of the editors of the New York Herald Tribune. But the isolationists in Congress were not prepared to discard a measure that had been both an emblem of American virginity among world predators and a chastity belt to foil them. Senator Taft and others contended that repeal of the Neutrality Act would be equivalent to a declaration of war.

  Remembering his one-vote margin on the draft-extension bill of August, the President decided against challenging the whole isolationist bloc. He would call for modification of neutrality rather than total repeal—above all, for authorization to arm American merchant ships. Soon his speech writers were at work on his proposals to Congress. The message was a direct and hard-hitting plea that Congress stop playing into Hitler’s hands and that it untie Roosevelt’s. But the President was adamant on the main tactic. Modification of neutrality must be presented to Congress not as any kind of challenge to the enemy but as a simple matter of the defense of American rights.

  THE CALL TO BATTLE STATIONS

  One could sense at the end of summer 1941 that the war was rushing toward another series of stupendous climacterics. German troops had isolated Leningrad and broken through Smolensk on the road to Moscow, had surrounded and overwhelmed four Russian armies in the Kiev sector; through the two-hundred-mile gap they had torn in the south the Nazis could see the grain of the eastern Ukraine and the oil of the Caucasus. Churchill was preparing a strong blow in North Africa and pressing for a bolder policy in Southeast Asia. Tokyo was vacillating between peace and war, under a dire timetable. Chungking’s morale seemed to be ebbing away. Washington and London were stepping up the Battle of the Atlantic. And in Moscow, around the end of September, the first flakes of snow fell silently on the Kremlin walls.

  Pressure from all these sectors converged on the man in the White House. Allies were stepping up their demands; enemies, their thrusts. His Cabinet war hawks battered him with conflicting advice. But Roosevelt under stress seemed only to grow calmer, steadier, more deliberate and even cautious. He joshed and jousted with the reporters even while artfully withholding news. He listened patiently while Ickes for the tenth time—or was it the hundredth?—maneuvered for the transfer of Forestry from Agriculture to Interior—an effort that the President might have found exquisitely irrelevant to the war except that he himself seemed excited by a plan to establish roe deer in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

  But Roosevelt was not impervious to the strain. More than ever before he seemed to retreat into his private world. He spent many weekends at Hyde Park, partly in settling his mother’s estate. He devoted hours to planning a Key West fishing retreat for Hopkins and himself; he even roughed out a sketch for a hurricane-proof house. He found time to talk to the Roosevelt Home Club in Hyde Park, to Dutchess County schoolteachers, to a local grange. And always there were the long anecdotes about Washington during World War I days, about Campobello and Hyde Park.

  Physically, too, the President was beginning to show the strain. Systolic hypertension had been noted four years earlier and not considered cause for concern; but—far more serious—diastolic hypertension was diagnosed during 1941. Dr. McIntire was no longer so rosily optimistic, though he said nothing publicly to temper his earlier statements. His patient was eating, exercising, and relaxing less, showing more strain, and carrying more worries to bed, than he had during the earlier years in the White House. But the President rarely complained and never seemed very curious about his health. Doubtless he felt that he had enough to worry about abroad.

  Tension was rising, especially in the Far East. The imperial rebuke spurred Konoye to redoubled efforts at diplomacy even as the imperative timetable compelled generals and admirals to step up their war planning. The government seemed schizophrenic. All great powers employ military and diplomatic tactics at the same time; but in Japan the two thrusts were competitive and disjointed, with the diplomats trapped by a military schedule.

  Subtly, almost imperceptibly, Konoye and the diplomats beat a retreat in the face of Washington’s firm stand. Signals were confused: Nomura acted sometimes on his own; messages were also coming in via Grew and a number of unofficial channels; and Konoye and Toyoda had to veil possible concessions for fear extremists would hear of them and inflame the jingoes. The Japanese military continued to follow its own policies; amid the delicate negotiations, Washington learned that the Japanese Army was putting more troops into Indochina. The political chiefs in Tokyo, however, seemed willing to negotiate. On the three major issues Tokyo would: agree to follow an “independent” course under the Tripartite Pact—a crucial concession at this point, because America’s widening confrontation with Germany raised the fateful possibility that Tokyo would automatically side with Berlin if a hot war broke out; follow co-operative, nondiscriminatory economic policies, a concession that was as salve to Hull’s breast; and be willing to let Washington mediate a settlement between Japan and China.

  Day after day Hull listened to these proposals courteously, discussed them gravely—and refused to budge. He insisted that Tokyo be even more specific and make concessions in advance of a summit conference. By now the Secretary and his staff conceded that Konoye was “sincere.” They simply doubted the Premier’s capacity to bring the military into line. That doubt did not end after the war when historians looked at the evidence, which reflected such a shaky balance of power in Tokyo that Konoye’s parley might have precipitated a crisis rather than have averted it. Konoye had neither the nerve nor the muscle for a supreme stroke. Much would have depended on the Emperor, and the administration did not fully appreciate in September either his desire for effective negotiations or his ability to make his soldiers accept their outcome.

  The mystery lay not with Hull, who was sticking to his principles, but with Roose
velt, who was bent on Realpolitik as well as morality. The President still had one simple approach to Japan—to play for time—while he conducted the cold war with Germany. Why, then, did he not insist on a Pacific conference as an easy way to gain time? Partly because such a conference might bring a showdown too quickly; better, Roosevelt calculated, to let Hull do the thing he was so good at—talk and talk, without letting negotiations either lapse or come to a head. And partly because Roosevelt was succumbing to his own tendency to string things out. He had infinite time in the Far East; he did not realize that in Tokyo a different clock was ticking.

  Amid the confusion and miscalculation there was one hard, unshakable issue: China. In all their sweeping proposals to pull out of China, the Japanese insisted, except toward the end, on leaving some troops as security, ostensibly at least, against the Chinese Communists. Even the Japanese diplomats’ definite promises on China seemed idle; it was as clear in Washington as in Tokyo that a withdrawal from a war to which Japan had given so much blood and treasure would cause a convulsion.

  Washington was in almost as tight a bind on China as was Tokyo. During this period the administration was fearful of a Chinese collapse. Chungking was complaining about the paucity of American aid; some Kuomintang officials charged that Washington was interested only in Europe and hoped to leave China to deal with Japan. Madame Chiang at a dinner party accused Roosevelt and Churchill of ignoring China at their Atlantic meeting and trying to appease Japan; the Generalissimo chided his wife for her impulsive outburst but did not disagree. Every fragment of a report of a Japanese-American détente set off a paroxysm of fear in Chungking. Through all their myriad channels into the administration the Nationalists were maintaining steady pressure against compromise with Tokyo and for an immensely enlarged and hastened aid program to China.