Threshold of War

by Heinrichs, Waldo;

  Then, however, the secretary of state proceeded to move the talks forward by collapsing his stages. He acknowledged that if the Japanese government approved the draft and proposed it, he “individually” would accept it as a basis for “negotiations,” not simply discussions. His government could readily accept some of the proposals, he said, but of course would have to modify and reject others, and would want to offer some of its own. Nevertheless, if Japan were “in real earnest about changing its course,” Hull concluded, he “could see no good reason why ways could not be found to reach a fairly mutually satisfactory settlement.” He did not follow the advice of his experts and tell Nomura that before any agreement was signed the United States would wish to consult the British and Chinese.56

  No evidence exists that Hull and his advisers had a strategy of settlement, a set of rank-ordered priorities and conceivable concessions. The United States remained entirely opposed to Japan on the key issues of China, the Axis alliance, and the southward advance. Of course it was anxious to take advantage of any possible shift in Japanese policy. More practically, however, by conveying a positive attitude toward the Drought draft, Hull was enticing the Japanese into diplomacy as a means of searching out the Japanese position, weakening Axis ties, and delaying a southward advance. He was not without hope of settlement but was more interested in the process than the results.

  Nomura advised his government that it must now authorize him to negotiate on the draft proposal, adding that he had definitely ascertained that Hull on the whole favored it. Desiring to give the Drought plan the best possible send-off and avoid complications raised by the American preconditions, he withheld Hull’s four principles. Thus, as the authority on the subject has said, the Hull-Nomura talks commenced upon a “fundamental misconception.” The Japanese government gained a much more positive impression of Hull’s attitude toward the Drought plan and the possibilities of settlement than was warranted. That misconception arose from ama teurish diplomacy by Drought, Nomura, and their cohorts, not from deception by Hull.57 Even so, in a moment of intense anxiety and weakness, the United States desired to get diplomacy started and succeeded.

  Given the central importance of Germany in the world politics of 1941 and general uncertainty as to Hitler’s intentions, the great neutrals—the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan—were bound to keep several irons in the fire. So Japanese-American talks complemented Japanese-Soviet talks, and Soviet-American talks complemented both. Of all these dialogues the most refractory and, at this stage, unproductive was the Soviet-American.

  Relations between the two nations had reached a nadir in the autumn-winter of 1939–40 with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Soviet absorption of the Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and the Soviet “Winter War” on little Finland, including the bombing of Helsinki. On December 2, 1939, the United States invoked a “moral embargo,” urging American companies not to sell to the Soviet Union airplanes or the materials, including key metals, that went into their manufacture.

  Yet the fundamental congruity of Soviet and American interests could not be ignored. Parallel with the developing German-American confrontation in 1940 were German-Soviet tensions in eastern Europe and in the Balkans and the Soviet need of American war supplies in its drive to rearm. The United States placed no little emphasis on Soviet aid to China and the Soviet role in restraining Japanese expansion from the north. In July 1940, Welles began talks with the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Constantin Oumansky, to see what progress could be made in removing the obstacles to better relations. Given the “many dangers which would affect the Soviet Union” in coming months, he told Oumansky, the logical course for the Soviets seemed to be to improve relations with the United States, from which it had nothing to fear, rather than to push those relations further downhill.58

  The talks proved a great trial for Welles. Soviet complaint and vituperation were constant; Oumansky was almost invariably nasty and sarcastic. He stayed in close touch with the German embassy in Washington.59 The United States had no intention of recognizing a Soviet takeover of the Baltic states, or of releasing the ships and assets of those states, which it had impounded. In responding to Soviet protests over the difficulty of purchasing American goods, it complained of the continued and indeed increasing Soviet supply of goods to Germany. Especially irritating was the fact that the Soviet Union was buying more cotton in the United States and promising more to Germany.60 Nevertheless American officials made efforts to ease some trade difficulties and on January 21, 1941 lifted the moral embargo. In February, Welles urged that when problems appeared irresolvable, they be “left standing for the time being in the midst of the stream” while the two of them addressed issues that seemed more yielding.61

  Particularly the United States sought to establish the identity of Soviet and American interests against Germany. On March 1, Welles passed on to Oumansky the forecast of Erwin Respondek of a possible German attack on the Soviet Union, qualified as it was. The United States, he said, had authentic information “clearly indicating” such an attack in the “not distant future.” The plan was, however, contingent on “the extent to which England, supported by American endeavor, will be able to oppose not only the military strength but also the economic efforts of Germany.”62 The implication was that Russia, by supplying Germany, was only bringing down on its own head the force of German arms. Welles noticed, undoubtedly with some satisfaction, that Oumansky “turned very white.”63 On March 20 he gave Oumansky his Swedish information about German plans for attack. On this occasion Welles also stressed the common interest of the two nations in the maintenance of peace in the Pacific and the territorial integrity and independence of China.64

  Soviet apprehension over the German forward movement in the Balkans beginning in March provided further opportunity of identifying common interests. The Soviet government expressed its displeasure on March 4 to the Bulgarian government for permitting passage of German troops. On March 11 it publicly reaffirmed its non-aggression pact with Turkey, and on March 26 the United States publicly expressed satisfaction. Then on the eve of the Nazi attack on Yugoslavia the Soviets signed a pact of friendship and non-aggression with that country.65 In an authorized statement to Welles on March 27, Oumansky agreed that when they came to an “unsur-mountable obstacle” it should be left aside. “{M}any common denominators,” he said, “can be found in the long-range policy of both … Governments.” On April 9, Welles noted for Oumansky the identity of opinion of both governments regarding Yugoslavia, and they agreed on how “profoundly disquieting” the German blitzkrieg in the Balkans was. On April 18, Oumansky made what an American official regarded as the “extremely interesting” comment that American attempts to influence Soviet policy by trade restrictions seemed especially pointless since the two nations would “eventually be on the same side anyway.”66

  These were, however, hypothetical exercises. Stalin was determined to avoid provoking Germany. His support for a Balkan front, like the American, was only by gestures. In arriving at a pact of the most limited nature with Japan, the Soviet Union undoubtedly hoped to keep open the possibility of a rapprochement with the United States. On April 18, Oumansky expressed Soviet satisfaction with Hull’s statement that the significance of the pact could be overestimated and assured an American official that it did not concern China at all. However, the Soviets also counted on a Japanese move southward and on rival Japanese and American “imperialisms” to protect Russia’s back door in Asia while it faced the threat from Germany.67

  With German divisions whipping through the Balkans, Stalin’s attitude toward Germany became positively supine. After signature of the neutrality pact, he took the extraordinary step of going to the station himself to send off the Matsuoka party. Amid much boozy merriment and bear-hugging, Stalin threw his arm around the shoulders of the German ambassador, Count von der Schulenberg, and said, “We must remain friends …,” and to the German military attaché, clasping both hands of that surprised of
ficer, “friends—in any event.”68

  The sharpened danger presented by the Soviet-Japanese Pact made it all the more important to maintain existing deterrence in the Pacific. Almost as important was to avoid any seeming weakening as diplomatic conversations with Japan began. On April 17, Roosevelt decided to postpone the transfer of warships from the Pacific except for the carrier Yorktown and five destroyers. With these ships the president could at least sustain the carrier searches east of Bermuda, as he had promised Churchill, and the patrols into the Africa-Brazil gap.69 Postponement of the Pacific reinforcement, did, however, force Roosevelt to restrict his plans for the Atlantic. On the weekend of April 19–21, Admiral King worked with the president at Hyde Park to revise patrol plans. The result was Western Hemisphere Defense Plan Two, which was the same as Plan One except that use of force in proximity to American territory was denied. With only two battleships available now, patrols northward toward Iceland would be few and far between, and, as Roosevelt confessed to Stimson, not much help to the British. But for now he simply could not risk war in the Atlantic, nor weaken deterrence in the Pacific. Using Admiral King’s words, the president said he simply did not have enough butter to cover the bread.70

  Chapter 3

  May Guarding the Atlantic Line

  At dawn on April 6 the German army burst from Bulgaria into Yugoslavia and Greece, preceded by air attacks that destroyed the command and communication center of the Yugoslav army in Belgrade and 41,000 tons of shipping at Piraeus. This was blitzkrieg in its most stunning form carried on by fast, powerful, elite units—no less than six armored divisions, the Adolf Hitler and Das Reich SS Divisions, two other motorized divisions, and two mountain divisions—besides infantry, Checked briefly here and there by stout defense or shortage of gas, the Panzer columns probed, circled and punched, then gathered speed as the will to resist dissolved. Attacking April 6, 8, and 10 from southeast, north, and northwest, the Germans captured Belgrade on Easter Sunday, April 13, and the next day began pulling forces out of the Balkans. Two right hooks through the southern tip of Yugoslavia, wheeling southward into Greece through the Vardar Valley and the Monastir gap, captured Salonika and uncovered the left flank of the British-Greek defenses before Mount Olympus. By April 16 the British were in full retreat across the plains of Thessaly. Outflanked every time they stopped to form a line of defense, they withdrew from Greece across beaches in the south in the last days of April. But Hitler had victory in the palm of his hand in scarcely more than a week of fighting.1

  April and May was a time of disaster for Britain, not just in the Balkans but in the Middle East as well. On March 31 at Mersa Brega, where the coastline of Libya turns from a southerly direction, leaving Cyrenaica, to a westerly one toward Tripoli, a single German division under General Erwin Rommel had tested British defenses, pressed forward and by April 3 so disorganized the British desert force that it began a harried retreat all the way back to the Egyptian border, leaving behind a besieged Tobruk. On April 3 at the other end of the Middle East, in Baghdad, a coup brought to power Rashid Ali el-Gailani and a junta of anti-British, pro-Axis Iraqi army officers who called themselves the Golden Square. Desperate for troops, the British rushed forces from India to Basra, but before they arrived Iraqi insurgents surrounded the principal British base and airfield in Iraq at Habbaniya. By the second week of May, German planes were stopping in Vichy-held Syria en route to Iraq with supplies for Rashid Ali. Meanwhile mines dropped from airplanes interrupted traffic in the Suez Canal. Everywhere, from the Danube to the Euphrates, Tri-politania to Egypt, German power advanced; everywhere British forces were encircled, routed, or held at bay.

  “Possible Axis Moves in the Quest for Victory”: New York Times, June 15, 1941.

  The shadow of the German army raced ahead of it. At a time when Rommel had one division and another moving up, the American embassy in Rome, struck by the number of troops and sand-colored tanks embarking at Naples, estimated twenty-five German divisions in Africa and another ten ready to go, with 2,000 tanks and 2,000 more to come.2 The tendency was to exaggerate, both regarding German intentions and capabilities. Indeed the mood verged on panic. American officials in the region foresaw a German drive on Cairo, possibly by a deep encirclement through the desert to the Nile.3 In that event and unless British tank and aircraft reinforcements arrived in time, warned the military attaché in Cairo, a disaster was “almost inevitable.”4 Americans in Cairo were warned to leave if possible; British children, it was said, were quietly being sent to Turkey. In Washington the navy’s War Plans Division began considering the strategic consequences of a British defeat in Egypt and withdrawal of the Mediterranean fleet. From London came warning of a coordinated German attack on Suez and Japanese attack on Singapore. Brigadier General Miles, chief of American army intelligence, concluded that the principal theater of German operations would now be the Mediterranean.5

  Observers saw the drive on Suez as one claw of a vast German pincer movement, the other claw striking through the northern tier of the Middle East — Turkey, Iraq, and Iran — toward India, possibly in cooperation with the Japanese. Strengthening that view was German assistance to the revolt in Iraq. It would not be unlike Germany, of course, to blackmail Turkey or Russia into permitting passage of German troops into the further reaches of the Middle East.

  Washington felt growing discouragement with British military performance. So extensive and stinging was criticism among military intelligence officers that Stimson complained to Marshall. He considered them too admiring of German efficiency. The safety of the United States, he pointed out, depended on the British fleet, which in turn depended on the preservation of the Churchill government “and the life of the promise made by Churchill last summer to keep the fleet at all odds.…” However, even the president was troubled by the British retreat in the desert. Symbolic of this nadir of ill fortune, this “torment of mankind,” as Churchill put it that month, was the wrecking of the House of Commons by German bombs on May 11.6

  Germany was a “military colossus” of immeasurable capabilities. General Sir John Dill, chief of the Imperial General Staff, believed nothing could “prevent the Germans from going anywhere they wish on the Continent, and this might include overrunning the Russian Caucasus.” Ambassador William Phillips in Rome was impressed with how smoothly the Germans moved troops and matériel to Africa: it took only one hour to empty a ship, “and during that hour not one order was given by word of mouth!” The seemingly effortless and crushing German blitz in the Balkans was mesmerizing. Admiral Leahy noted “bitter gloom” at Vichy. Because of the rapidity of the German advances, he wrote, French hopes of a British victory had sunk to their lowest since the armistice of 1940. The Spanish press featured speeches by Charles Lindbergh, indicating the popularity of coming to terms with “conquerors,” according to the American embassy at Madrid. The Swedes seemed less inclined than a month earlier to resist German demands to join the Axis.7 A sense of impending German triumph gripped Europe. No evidence existed of American intervention in time.

  In fact, the German army, so many ways impressive, was by no means superhuman and faultless. German capabilities were not unlimited. Hitler had large but sequential goals for 1941. Nevertheless, to the world he seemed headed anywhere and everywhere.

  Overshadowing speculation about German designs in the Middle East were multiplying signs of a German attack on the Soviet Union. As snows melted and the campaign season approached, talk of war in the East intensified. The New York Times took up the possibility on three occasions in the first half of May. The London Times on April 20 noted Churchill’s hint of German designs on “the granary of the Ukraine and the oilfields of the Caucasus.” That prediction, it claimed, was confirmed by many sources in central Europe. Germany, reported the Times, was sending a “great army to the Russian frontier”: “Trainloads of infantry and artillery equipment are rolling eastward.” Factories were producing railway cars with the Russian gauge. Forced labor gangs were building r
oads and air bases near the frontier. Hitler, it was said in the London Times on May 4, would march because he required the resources of Russia and knew he could not obtain world domin on “without first {consolidating} … his European conquests.”

  By mid-May it was clear from reports of American military attachés that Germany was gathering sufficient force for an attack on Russia. The attaché in Berlin placed most armored divisions in the east. Germany was training administrators for Russia, printing money for use in Russia, conducting aerial reconnaissance of the border, building military hospitals, and setting up army group commands. The illustrious Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt was taking a command in the east.8

  Indeed, by May preparations were impossible to disguise, for by then 300 trains a day moved eastward. German military basing in Rumania, noted the attaché in Bucharest, was aimed eastward toward Russia, not southward toward the Balkans. Motorized columns were “wending their way … covertly by night” toward Moldavia and the Russian frontier. Trains passed due eastward from Hungary through Cluj rather than southeastward toward Bulgaria. After the Balkan blitz, attachés noted heavy traffic northwestward, especially by armored and motorized divisions, through Budapest and Vienna and then northeastward through Czechoslovakia to southern Poland. German mechanized forces were passing through the key Czech railroad junction of Bratislava night and day toward the Russian border.9

  American estimates of the number of German divisions arrayed against the Soviet Union were close to the mark. The military attaché in Berlin arrived at a total of 89 on April 17, excluding Rumania; on May 1 there were in fact 103, including that sector. He estimated 120 on May 23, the number reached on May 20. The Russian military attaché in Berlin put the number somewhat higher. On April 21 he doubted an immediate attack, but confessed to his American counterpart that “all indications point to such an attack.”10