Roosevelt's Feat
In his successful waging of the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt made no major military mistakes. That is a record not matched by any world conqueror since Julius Caesar. His slogan of "unconditional surrender" was widely called a blunder, by commentators as diverse as Goebbels and Eisenhower. I do not agree, and in its place, I will take up that stricture and challenge it.
Our propaganda office called him a tool of the Jews, but of course that was the silliest bosh. Roosevelt did nothing to save the Jews.
He knew that any such action would annoy Congress and interfere with winning the war. Under his clever facade of a Christian humanitarian liberal, he was one of the coldest, most ruthless calculators in history. He sensed that the Americans liked the Jews no more than we did; and they omply confirmed this all through the war in their immigration policies, and at the Evian and Bermuda conferences, where they simply abandoned the Jews to their fate.
This author is no admirer of Roosevelt as a person, but the aim of my work is to set down the facts as military history should view them.
On such a valuation, Franklin Roosevelt was the mastermind of the war.
Even such a powerful, energetic, and brilliant figure as Adolf Hitler was in the end no more than a foil for him. Adventuristic conquerors often pave the way, in this fashion, for the dominion of their enemies.
The adventurer sees the opportunity, and with meager means tries to capture it. He does the destroying and the bulldozing. His iceblooded successor then crushes him and builds on the ruins.
Napoleon in the last analysis merely put Wellington's England in the saddle for a century. Charles XII hardly has a place in history, except as a foil for Peter the Great. And the German people under Adolf Hitler accomplished nothing in the long run except to hand the British succession to the United States under Roosevelt.
Roosevelt's Difficulty
Franklin Roosevelt's problem was that at this great turning point in history he did not lead a warlike nation, whereas Adolf Hitler did.
The American people are not cowardly. But, living in prosperous isolation, they have been the spoiled children of modern history.
Spoiled children do not bear well the rigors of the field. Once they entered the war, the Americans fought with a logistic train of luxury and self-protection that to the warriors of Germany, the Soviet Union, and even England, was laughable. Nevertheless they had the riches and the will for this. The strong can fight any kind of fight, they please.
The Americans have a tradition of militia-like fighting.
Presented with a threat, they drop their pleasures, take up arms, and fight amateurishly but bravely to get the thing over with. They formed this pattern in their revolution, and confirmed it in their civil war and the First World War. Roosevelt understood this.
He had to hold Germany at bay until he could present the chance for world conquest to his people in the guise of a threat to their safety. This, with a masterly exhibition of patient, spiderlike waiting, he did. Meantime, he robbed Germany of two certain victories-over Great Britain and over the Soviet Union-by an inspired instrument of indirect war-making, a genuine new thing in military history, the so-called Lend-Lease Act.
A Cunning Trick
By the end of 1940, despite her narrow escapes at Dunkirk and in the air battle, Britain was sinking to her knees. She had only one recourse left on the planet to save her: the United States. But the Neutrality Act threatened to cut the English off from the American farms and factories that were keeping them alive. They were running out of dollars to pay even for grain and oil, let alone the ships, planes, guns, and bullets which they could no longer manufacture for themselves in the necessary quantities. For they lacked labor, materials, and plant, and they kept falling further behind under air attack.
The Neutrality Act forced belligerents to pay dollars for United States goods, and to come and fetch them. The Act posed more of a dilemma for Roosevelt than for the British. For them, one clear wise course lay open: negotiated peace with Germany. As this writer has often pointed out, had England made such a peace the British Empire would exist today. The Soviet Union would have been crushed in a one-front war, and instead of a rampant Bolshevism we would see in Russia at worst some pacific, disarmed form of social democracy. But none of this fitted in with Roosevelt's ideas. He had no intention of allowing Germany to gain ascendancy over the Euro-Asian heartland in a world-dominating partnership with the sea lords of Britannia.
And so, to circumvent the Neutrality Act, Franklin Roosevelt devised LendLease, which was nothing more or less than a Policy to give the British free of charge-and later the Russians too-all the war materials they needed to fight us! The audacity of the trick was breathtaking; the disguise was cunning. And while the record shows that Roosevelt's clever advisers did much to push this unprecedented proposal through the stunned, balky Congress, it also clearly shows that the revolutionary idea sprang, in the phrase of Sherwood, straight from Roosevelt's "forested mind.Roosevelt sold this scheme to the simpleminded, inattentive American people with a typical bit of Augustan demagoguery, the famous comparison to a garden hose. When a neighbor's house is on fire, he said at a press conference, one does not bargain with him over the sale or renting of the garden hose he needs to put it out. One gladly lends him the hose, so as to keep the fire from one's own house. Once the fire is out, the neighbor returns the hose; or if he has damaged it, there is time enough then to settle the account.
This was, of course, shameless and hollow Poppycock. Warships, warPlanes, war materials are not garden hoses. To take Roosevelt's comparison at its face value, if your neighbor's house is on fire, what you really do is rush over there and fight the fire with him. You do not lend him your hose, and then stand idly by watching him try to cope with the flames. That this silly stuff was swallowed whole by the Americans simply shows how uncannily shrewd Roosevelt was in managing them. During his successful 1940 election campaign for an unprecedented third term, he had declared in a famous speech, "I tell you again, and again, and again, you boys are not going to be sent into foreign wars." He Was eagerly awaiting a chance to go back on this clear pledge. Meantime he had to use tricks and guile to oppose Germany, The Real Meaning of Lend-Lease it was impossible for himnci this he knew-to present the case to his People in realistic terms.
Otherwise he could have told them in effect, "My friends, this war is for the mastery of the world. Our aim should be to achieve thot mastery ourselves, but with a minimum of blood. Let us encourage others to do our fighting for us. Let us give them all the stuff they need to keep fighting.
What do we care? In developing the industries to produce this Lend-Lease stuff, we will be preparing ourselves, industrially and militarily, for world leadership.
They will use up all our early models, our discardable stuff, killing Germans for us. Maybe they will do the whole job for us, but that is doubtful. We will have to step in at the end, but mopping up will be easy. We will have gained a world victory with the expenditure of a lot of hardware, which we can turn out faster, and in greater quantities, than all the world put together, without even feeling the pinch. The others will shed the blood, and we will take the rule."
That was what Lend-Lease meant and that was how it worked.
First the British, and then the Russians, were induced by Lend-Lease to keep on with extremely bloody,. almost hopeless struggles, when the easier, safer, more profitable alternative of negotiated peace always lay open to them. There is reason to think that Stalin's low point late in 1941, when his armies and his air force had virtually ceased to exist as coherent battle formations and we were smashing toward Moscow, that supreme realist would have proposed peace again, if not for the encouragement in words and supplies-not in livesf the United States. As it was, the Russian people made sacrifices in blood never matched in all history, to transfer world hegemony from one Anglo-Saxon power to another.
And Franklin Roosevelt so maneuvered matters that the British
had to beg for this bloodletting help! They were put in the position of being abjectly grateful for the chance to fight Roosevelt's battles On December 8, 1940, Churchill wrote the American President a very long letter, which deserves a bolder place in history than it now holds.
Churchill once said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the Empire, but with this letter he dissolved it. Churchill in this document frankly stated that England had come to the end of her rope, in the matter of ships, planes, materials, and dollars; and he asked the President to "f,nrJ w.-jvs and. mpans" to heir) England in the common cause. This was what Roosevelt had been icily waiting for in his wheelchair: this written confession by the British Prime ,Ainister that without American aid the Empire was finished. Within two weeks he had proposed Lend-Lease to his advisers, and within a month he had laid it before Congress.
Empire means rule, and sufficient armed power to enforce the rule.
In Churchill's letter, he acknowledged that his country and his Empire had become powerless to enforce their rule, and begged for succor.
Roosevelt leaped to comply. Even if England was finished as an imperial power, she remained a country of forty millions with a good navy and air force, at war with Roosevelt's archrival; a splendid island base just off the coast of Europe, moreover, from which to attack Germany in the future. The first order of business was to keep her fighting.
Bargain War-Making
Despite all the quack language in the act about lending and leasing, the transfer of American weapons and materials throughout the war was a gift. No formal accounting was even kept. The President asked, and the Congress granted him, power to send arms and war goods wherever he pleased, in whatever quantities he pleased. Certainly the Congress when they passed the low would have balked at including Bolshevist countries. But at that time the Soviet Union was supposedly Hitler's friend. Later, when war broke out on the eastern front, Roosevelt poured a flood of supplies to the Bolsheviks without consulting Congress. The Americans complain that the Russians have never shown proper gratitude. The attitude of the Russians is more realistic. Having spilled the blood of perhaps eleven million of their sons to help the United States to its present world position, they tend to feel that the tanks and planes were paid for.
The Yankees love a bargain. Lend-Lease was bargain war-making.
For the big corporations, and for millions of workers, it merely meant a tremendous increase of prosperity. The price was painlessly postponed to the future by means of defense bonds. Others did the actual fighting and dying.
Roosevelt and his advisers did discuss the risk that Germany would take Lend-Lease as an act of war-which it certainly was-and would formally declare war on the United States. Since this was just what he wanted, he was prepared to run the risk. America would have responded with a militia-like surge.
Little as Adolf Hitler understood the United States, he did understand that. He had no intention of taking on the United States until he had finished with the Soviet Union, an operation which was already in an advanced planning stage.
So Germany swallowed Lend-Lease with some harsh words, and the "arsenal of democracy" tooled up to help British plutocracy and Russian Bolshevism destroy the Reich, the last bastion in Europe against the Red Slav tide.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Most broad statistics of the war are approximations, and the Pigures on total deaths vary widely from one source to another. The low rate of eventual American losses is a fact.
We planned and fought that kind of war, expending money and machines instead of human lives where possible.
Roon seems to think this indicates a deficiency in American valor.
We had enough valor to beat the Germans wherever we took them on.
That was all the valor we needed.-V.H.
Traveling to his new post in mid-january, Leslie Slote found himTself staged in Lisbon by a shortage of Lufthansa accommodations to Berlin.
He checked into the Palace Hotel in Estoril, Lisbon's palm-lined seaside resort, where diplomats, wealthy refugees, Gestapo, and other foreign agents congregated. He thought he might pick up some information there while he waited for an air reservation to open up.
Actually, he found Estoril in January an exceedingly chilly and boring place. The Germans abounded, but they kept in aloof clusters, regarding other people with supercilious eyes.
He sat in the crowded lobby of the hotel one afternoon gnawing at his pipe, and reading in a Swiss newspaper about British successes against the Italians in Abyssinia and North Africa, faint rays in the gloom.
The neutral newspaper had been hard to come by. Fascist and Nazi journals now blanketed Portuguese newsstands, with a few scrawny, disgustingly servile periodicals from Vichy France. British and American publications had vanished. It was a fair barometric reading of the way the war was going, at least in the judgment of Portugal's rulers. A year ago, on Lisbon newsstands, papers of both sides had been equally available.
"Meestair Slotel Meestair Leslie Slotel' He jumped up and followed the small pink-cheeked page to a telephone near the reception desk.
"Leslie? Hello, it's Bunky. How goes it by the old seaside?"
Bunker Wendel! Thurston, Jr had attended the Foreign Service school with Slote, and now held the post of second secretary in the American legation in Lisbon.
"Mighty dull, Bunky. What's up?" 'Oh, nothing much." Thurston sounded amused. 'It's just that you've spoken to me now and then, I believe, about a girl named Natalie Jastrow."
Slote said sharply, "Yes, I have. What about her?"
"A girl by that name is sitting across the desk from me."
"Who is? Natalie?" "Like to talk to her? When I told her you were here she jumped a ip foot.
"Christ, yes."
Natalie came on the phone laughing, and Slote's heart throbbed at the familiar lovely sound. "Hello, old Slote," she said.
"Natalie! This is so staggering, and wonderful. What are you doing here?"
"Well, how about you?" Natalie said. "I'm as surprised as you are.
Why aren't you in Moscow?"
"I got hung up, in Washington and then here. Is Aaron with you?"
"I wish he were. He's in Siena."
"What! Aren't you on your way back to the States?"
Natalie took a moment to answer. 'Yes and no. Leslie, as long as you're here, can I see you for a while?" "Naturally! Wonderful!
Immediately! I'll come in to the legation."
"Wait, wait. You're at the Palace Hotel, aren't you? I'll come out and meet you. I'd rather do that." Bunky Thurston came on the line. "Look, Leslie, I'll put her on the bus. She'll arrive in half an hour or so. If I may, I'll join you two in the Palace lobby at five."
She still had a fondness for big dark hats. He could see her through the dusty bus window, moving down the aisle in a jam of descending Passengers. She ran to him, threw her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. 'Hi! I'm freezing. I could have worn my ratty beaver coat, but who'd think it would be this cold and gray in Lisbon?
Brrr! It's even colder out here by the sea, isn't it?" She clapped her hand to her hat as the wind flapped it. "Let's look at you. Well! No change. If anything, you look rested."
She said all this very fast, her eyes wide and shiny, her manner peculiarly excited. The old spell worked at once. In the months since he had last seen Natalie, Slote had started up a romance with a girl from Kansas named Nora Jamison. Nora was tall, brunette, and dark-eyed like this one, but otherwise as different as a doe from a bobcat: eventempered, affectionate, bright enough to be in her third year as a senator's secretary, and pretty enough to play leads with a semiprofessional Washington theatre group. Her father was a rich farmer; she drove a Buick convertible. She was altogether a find, and Slote was thinking seriously of marrying her on his return from Moscow.
Nora worshipped and she was better looking than Natalie Jastrow and much easier to manage. But this Jewish girl in the big hat put her arm around him and brushed his face with h
er lips; he experienced a stabbing remembrance of what her love was like, and the snare closed on him again.
He said, "Well, you know how I admire you, but you do look slightly beat up."
"Do I ever! I've had hell's own time getting here. Let's get out of this wind. Where's the Palace Hotel? I've been to Estoril twice, but I forget."
He said, taking her arm and starting to walk, "It isn't far.
What's the story? Why didn't Aaron come? What are you doing here?"
"Byron's arriving tomorrow on a submarine." He halted in astonishment. She looked up at him, hugged his arm, and laughed, her face alive with joy. "That's it. That's why I'm here." "He made it through that school?"
"You sound surprised." "I thought he might find it too much work."
Herman Wouk - The Winds Of War Page 67