The Rome/Berlin Axis used a revolution in Spain as a warm-up to test its weapons and armies in combat. Playing on Japan’s fears of an expansionist Soviet Union in the Far East, Hitler pulled Japan into the Axis as a de facto member with the Anti-Comintern Pact (1935). Japan thus threw her lot in with an ideological cause for which the Japanese people had no connection or affinity except for apprehension about Soviet Russia. Still, the Japanese warlords resembled the fascists in their utter brutality, and the European fascist states and Japan did have one important trait in common: a growing comfort level with totalitarianism. The United States certainly wanted nothing to do with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia—a desert war over the questionable independence of some obscure African nation. Nor were the sides clear in Spain. How to choose, for example, between Hitler (who had yet to engage in mass murder) and Stalin (where reports of millions of deaths at his hands had already leaked out)? Still, hundreds of idealistic Americans volunteered to fight in Spain against Franco, who had Fascist ties but was no ally of Hitler’s. Official noninvolvement by the United States and Britain, however, set a pattern: the democracies would not intervene, no matter who the villains were or how egregious their atrocities.
The plea by Ethiopia to the League of Nations for help against Mussolini resembled an appeal two years earlier from halfway across the globe, from China, where American interests stood out more clearly. There the Empire of Japan had expanded its foothold in Manchuria (gained in the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5). Although Manchuria, in theory, was independent, Japan occupied it as a protectorate. Then in September 1931 it ostensibly staged an attack on a Japanese railroad at Mukden as an excuse to send in the army. Within a few months, Japan had complete control over Manchuria (renaming it Manchukuo), which provided a jumping-off point for invading other areas of China, whose pleas for assistance the League ignored.
Japan’s actions came as its military was increasingly usurping civilian control of the government. Assassination of public officials began to match the levels associated with modern-day Colombia, but instead of criminal or drug gangs doing the killing, they were fanatical Japanese nationalists. In 1933 the emperor himself was nearly assassinated—a remarkable event, considering that the Japanese people viewed him as a god incarnate. Chicago-style gangsters often controlled the streets, replete with zoot-suit garb and Thompson-style submachine guns. The more dangerous gangsters, however, roamed the palace halls and the military barracks. After a temporary recovery of parliamentary government in 1936, the military staged a coup attempt during which assassination squads and regular infantry units surrounded the imperial palace and attempted to assassinate the civilian leadership of Japan. They killed the finance and education ministers, injured the chamberlain (Admiral Kantaro Suzuki), and killed several other administrators. They failed to kill the prime minister, whose wife locked him in a cupboard, but assassins shot his brother by mistake. Another prime target, the emperor, also survived, and within days order had been restored. But no civilian leaders forgot, nor did the military, which was now calling the shots. Indeed, many of Japan’s “saviors” merely looked for their own opportunity to grab power, which they saw increasingly as coming from expansion in China. It is significant that Japan—at a crossroads between expansion in China and Russia, her traditional rival to the north—chose China, which engaged Japanese forces in a quagmire.
By 1937, Japanese troops had ruthlessly destroyed Shanghai and Canton, and slaughtered 300,000 civilians in Nanking. At one point in the Rape of Nanking, as it was called in part because of the systematic atrocities against women, the Japanese marched some 20,000 young Chinese outside the city and machine-gunned them. In retrospect, the League’s refusal to intervene in China and Ethiopia proved to be a costly error. American policy was pro-China in sentiment, thanks to a large China lobby in Washington, but in action America remained steadfastly aloof from the atrocities. Even after reports that the Chinese were hunted like rabbits in Nanking and that anything that moved was shot, and despite the fact that in addition to Chiang’s pro-Western army, Mao Tse-tung had a large communist army dedicated to evicting the Japanese, the United States did not offer even token help.
As in Spain, several idealistic aviators, flying nearly obsolete P-40 War Hawks, went to China to earn enduring acclaim as the Flying Tigers, but a handful of fighter pilots simply proved inadequate against the Rising Sun. The democracies’ inaction only whetted the appetites of the dogs of war, encouraging Italy, Germany, and Japan to seek other conquests.
At one point in 1937 it appeared that the Japanese had become too brazen and careless: on December twelfth, imperial Japanese war planes strafed and bombed several ships on the Yangtze River. Three of them were Standard Oil tankers, and the fourth, a U.S. gunboat, the Panay, was sunk despite flying a large American flag and having Old Glory spread out on the awnings. Two crewmen and an Italian journalist were killed, and another eleven were wounded. Even with a deliberate attack in broad daylight, however, popular sentiment resisted any thought of war. Roosevelt only asked his aides to examine whether the Japanese could be held liable for monetary damages. Several admirals argued that Japan intended a war with the United States, but they were ignored by all except Harold Ickes, who noted, “Certainly war with Japan is inevitable sooner or later, and if we have to fight her, isn’t this the best possible time?”30 Upon reflection, the Japanese knew they had made a potentially disastrous miscalculation—one that could push them into a war with America years before they were ready. Consequently, Tokyo issued a thorough apology, promising to pay every cent in indemnities and recalling the commander of the Japanese naval forces. The measures satisfied most Americans, with newspapers such as the Christian Science Monitor urging its readers to differentiate between the Panay incident and the sinking of the Maine.
Japan further saw that Britain would be tied up with Hitler, should he press matters in Europe, opening up Malaya and, farther to the southeast, Indonesia and the rich Dutch oil fields. If the cards fell right, many strategists suggested, the Japanese might not have to deal with Great Britain at all. In this context, America’s response would prove critical. The U.S. presence in the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, and Hawaii meant that eventually Japan would have to negotiate or fight to expand her empire to the south and west. Instead, the United States compounded the disarmament mistakes of the 1920s by slumping into an isolationist funk.
Isolationism Ascendant
The very fact that the British hid behind their navy, and the French behind their massive fortifications along the German border (the Maginot Line), indicated that the major Western powers never believed their own arms control promises. As in the United States, a malaise developed in these nations out of the Great Depression, producing a helplessness and lethargy. In many circles, a perception existed that nothing could be done to stop the Italian, German, and Japanese expansionists, at least within Europe and Asia. Moreover, the U.S. Senate’s Nye Committee had investigated the munitions industry, the “merchants of death” that supposedly had driven the nation into World War I, adding to suspicions of those calling for military readiness.
Britain remained the most important trading partner for American firms in the 1930s, but overseas trade was relatively insignificant to the domestic U.S. market, and the loss of that trade, while undesirable, was not crucial except to the British, who desperately needed war goods. High tariffs remained the rule of the day, reflecting the prevailing doctrine that one nation could “tax” the work of another to its own benefit. That view changed sharply after Cordell Hull became secretary of state under Roosevelt. A free trader who favored lower tariffs, his views would have been entirely appropriate for the 1920s and might have provided a firewall against the economic collapse. But by the mid-1930s, with the dictators firmly entrenched, the circumstances had changed dramatically enough to work against the doctrine of free trade. Indeed, at that point the trade weapon had to be used, and events demanded that free nations play favorites in resisting
aggressors.
As the economic expansion of the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression, even stronger impulses toward isolation arose, as symbolized by the First Neutrality Act (1935), issued in response to Ethiopia’s plea for help. Further congressional action in early 1937 prohibited supplying arms to either side of the Spanish Civil War. Isolationists of every political stripe tended to portray all sides in a conflict as “belligerents,” thus removing any moral judgments about who might be the aggressor. The ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy, went so far as to suggest that the democracies and the Axis powers put aside their minor disagreements and, in so many words, just get along.
Cordell Hull was among the few who saw the unprecedented evil inherent in the Nazi regime. In the wake of the disastrous Munich Agreement of 1938, which ceded to Hitler the Sudetenland he got all of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Speaking off the record to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Hull bluntly warned them that the coming war would not be “another goddam piddling dispute over a boundary line,” but a full-scale assault on world order by “powerful nations, armed to the teeth, preaching a doctrine of naked force and practicing a philosophy of barbarism.”31
Hull favored a cash-and-carry policy, which he thought would allow Britain to purchase whatever war materials were needed. In reality, however, at the time that the British desperately needed arms, food, and machinery, her accounts had sunk so low that she scarcely had the hard currency needed to actually purchase the goods. Hull’s policy seemed a magnanimous gesture, but by then, much more generous terms were needed. Indeed, the neutrality acts often punished the states (Ethiopia or China) that had attempted to resist the Italian and Japanese aggressors. Such was the case with the 1937 cash-and-carry legislation, which sold American goods to any belligerent that could pay cash and ship the materials in its own vessels. Clearly, Britain, with her navy, benefited from this legislation the most; but Italy, Japan, and Germany fared well too.
The isolationist mood was encouraged by the intelligentsia, which, although supporting the procommunist Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, otherwise viewed any overseas escapades as inherently imperialistic. American leftists Walter Duranty, Upton Sinclair, Langston Hughes, E. W. Scripps, Alger Hiss, and Edmund Wilson had made excuses for Lenin’s Red terror and Stalin’s “harvest of sorrow”—despite full knowledge that millions of Soviet citizens were being exterminated—and refused to engage in any public policy debates over the morality of one side or another.
International communist movements also condemned any involvement against the Axis powers as imperialistic, at least until the Soviet Union herself became a target of Hitler’s invasion in June 1941. For example, in 1940, communist-dominated delegations to the Emergency Peace Mobilization, which met in Chicago, refused to criticize the Axis powers, but managed to scorn the “war policies” of Roosevelt.32 Only after Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi advance into Russia, did the peace groups change their tune.
Against all these forces, solid leadership from Roosevelt’s advisers—especially in the diplomatic corps—still might have convinced him and Congress that the fascists and the Japanese imperialists only understood power. Ickes, for example, lobbied for more severe sanctions against the Japanese. Other appointments proved colossally inappropriate, particularly the ambassadors to Britain and the Soviet Union. Joseph P. Kennedy, for example, the “thief” that FDR had chosen as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission “to catch a thief,” received an appointment as ambassador to Britain, despite his outspoken anti-British views. Kennedy suspected every British move, convinced that England was manipulating Germany into another war.
Joseph Davies, Roosevelt’s ambassador to Russia, on the other hand, completely refused to criticize one of the most vile regimes on the planet. He said Joseph Stalin, despite exterminating all opponents within the Communist Party, “is the ‘easy boss’ type—quiet, self-effacing, personally kindly. Like all the other Soviet leaders, Stalin works hard, lives simply, and administers his job with complete honesty.”33 The ambassador’s naive characterizations extended to Stalin’s subordinates, who, like Stalin, worked hard and lived simply, performing their tasks without corruption. “It is generally admitted that no graft exits in high places in Moscow,” he claimed.34
Even where Roosevelt appointed capable men, they were ill suited for the time. Secretary of State Hull, a former judge and congressman from Tennessee, often seemed as anti-British as Kennedy, exactly at the time that the situation required the Western powers to resist aggression together. Instead of squarely facing the Axis threat in Europe, Hull sought to erode British trading influence in the Pacific to open more markets for U.S. goods. To his credit, treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau battled to sell both France and Britain top-of-the-line aircraft, to which Roosevelt finally agreed in late 1938, although whether Morgenthau favored the sales because they genuinely helped the Allies or because, as he put it, “Our aircraft industry desperately neede[ed] a shot in the arm [and] here was the hypodermic poised.”35 Between 1937 and 1940, then, Roosevelt, prompted by Hull and Kennedy, provided only a modicum of support to Britain under exorbitant terms compared to the boatloads of materials later handed out to the Soviets at much lower costs. Yet even that small level of support enabled Britain to hold out during 1940–41.
Desperate to avoid even the appearance of forming an alliance against the fascist powers, American diplomats blamed Britain and France for refusing to stand up to Hitler and therefore, in essence for saving Americans from having to confront the evil empires as well. Kennedy argued for giving Hitler a free hand in Eastern Europe; ambassador to France William Bullitt urged a Franco-German accommodation; and Breckinridge Long, the former American ambassador to Italy, blamed Britain for treating Mussolini unfairly. Roosevelt looked for any assurance from Hitler that he would behave, in 1939 sending a message asking Hitler and Mussolini if they would promise not to attack some thirty-one nations named in the letter. Hitler responded by reading it to the Reichstag, mockingly ticking off “Finland…Lithuania…Juden,” to howls of laughter from the delegates, few of whom would have guessed that in the next few years he would seek to control or capture parts or all of these nations and peoples.36
In September 1939, Hitler’s armies rolled into one of the nations he claimed to have no interest in invading—Poland. World War II had begun in Europe. America remained steadfastly neutral as the blitzkrieg, or lightning war, swept through the Polish armies, then turned on Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, all in less than a year. Even as Nazi tanks smashed French forces and trapped nearly half a million British and French troops at Dunkirk, Cordell Hull characterized French cries for U.S. support as “hysterical appeals,” and Joseph Kennedy bluntly told the British that they could expect “zero support.”37 Hull and Kennedy had their own agendas, but they probably reflected the fact that many, if not most, Americans wanted nothing to do with war.
Just two years after Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, had returned from Munich with an agreement with Hitler that, he said, ensured “peace in our time,” all of mainland Europe was under the iron grip of the Nazis, Italian Fascists, their allies, or the Communist Soviets, whose behavior in taking half of Poland, as well as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and part of Finland somehow escaped the ire of the West.38 Britain stood alone. Nearly broke, with national reserves down to $12 million, Britain could no longer buy war materials or food. Prime Minister Winston Churchill begged Roosevelt to “lend” fifty aged World War I destroyers for antisubmarine patrols, and FDR finally came around. “I have been thinking very hard…what we should do for England…. The thing to do is to get away from a dollar sign.”39 The answer was an exchange of weapons for long-term leases for several British bases, mostly in the Caribbean, although Roosevelt turned down a suggestion that would have included British ships in the West Indies, noting that they would be antiquated. He also rejected as too big a burden, both on himself and
the nation, the suggestion that the United States take the West Indies themselves. The final legislation, which passed in March 1941, was known as the Lend-Lease Act. It assisted the British in protecting their sea-lanes.
Isolationists (more accurately, noninterventionists) claimed Lend-Lease would drag the United States into the war.40 Senator Burton K. Wheeler called it the “New Deal’s triple A foreign policy: it will plow under every fourth American boy.”41 Significantly, Roosevelt had rejected appeals from Norway and France, citing the fact that leasing ships to belligerents would violate international law. The destroyer deal reflected less a commitment to principle than an admission that the public mood was beginning to shift, and again demonstrated that far from leading from principle, FDR waited for the political winds to swing in his direction.
Those winds had a considerably stealthy boost from British agents in the United States. Believing the Nazis a menace to their very existence, the British hardly played by the rules in attempting to lure America into the conflict as an ally. The British used deception and craftily tailored propaganda to swing American public opinion into bringing the United States into the war, engaging in covert manipulation of democratic processes to achieve their ends.42
Backed by a number of American pan-Atlanticists in newspapers, Congress, and even polling organizations, British agents conducted a silent war to persuade U.S. lawmakers to enact a peacetime draft; support Lend-Lease; and, they hoped, eventually ally the United States against Hitler. The most shocking and effective aspect of British covert operations in America involved shaping public opinion through polls. It is important to note that polls, which were supposedly designed to reflect the public’s mood, in fact were used as tools to create a mandate for positions the pollsters wanted. Although this was the first documented time that polls would be used in such a way, it certainly wouldn’t be the last. British agents working for Gallup and Roper, as well as other American polling organizations, alternatively suppressed or publicized polls that supported America’s entry into the war. One American pollster, sympathetic to the British, admitted “cooking” polls by “suggesting issues and questions the vote on which I was fairly sure would be on the right side.”43 In November 1941 the Fight for Freedom Committee, an interventionist group, ran a rigged poll at the Congress of Industrial Organization’s national convention, taking “great care…beforehand to make certain the poll results would turn out as desired.”44 Another poll found 81 percent of young men facing the draft favored compulsory military service, an astoundingly high figure given that congressional mail ran “overwhelmingly” against conscription.45
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 96