Threshold of War

by Heinrichs, Waldo;

Halifax, presenting a message from Foreign Secretary Eden which he had been instructed to then burn, noted that according to his government’s information Germany and Italy had full reports of the conversations. The facts as he understood them were that the United States had initiated the talks, promising to take a purely defensive attitude toward the European war in return for a similar Japanese pledge regarding its Axis obligations, and that the United States would bring pressure to bear on China to make peace with Japan. Matsuoka was said to have assured Berlin that he would obtain Axis agreement before reaching any accord and that no accord would compromise the Axis. Eden believed Hull would want to know of the Matsuoka “gyrations.” Hull was furious at the implication that he had been taken in by the Japanese and had somehow betrayed the British. He made, as he said, a “vigorous” denial. Foreign Office officials suspected the tantrum came from a guilty conscience. They were not unhappy to turn the tables on the State Department, which never wearied of preaching against British appeasement of the Japanese.

  The trans-Atlantic squall died down May 27, when Halifax delivered a soothing message from Eden, and Hull gave assurances that no common interest or principle was in jeopardy. One satisfaction the Americans could take from the spreading word of Japanese-American talks was the “concern—even dismay” exhibited by Deputy Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky.53

  Hull came nowhere near “boggy ground,” to use Halifax’s term. He saw Nomura, more often now with assistants on both sides, every few days for the rest of May. Rather than hand over a complete American redraft promptly, one his Far Eastern experts were perfectly capable of devising, he dragged out the talks by raising points of disagreement for discussion and submitting redrafts of particular phrases and paragraphs. He suggested language that would define as self-defense American action to protect supplies shipped to Britain and limit Japan’s Axis obligation to the case of aggressive American attack. He discussed at some length the problem posed by Japan’s insistence on retaining troops in China for defense against communism, suggesting a phased withdrawal over the period of a year or so with troops in certain strategic sectors moved last. And he tried out on Nomura various formulas committing Japan to peaceful courses of action in the Southeast Asia region. Strewn along the way were warnings to Nomura that the talks had not reached the stage of negotiation and that all his remarks were unofficial and informal.54

  As the talks proceeded the Americans laid more and more stress on the issue of Japan’s relations with Germany. Not that other issues were regarded as easier to resolve or less important. Rather what preoccupied Hull was the supreme necessity of avoiding a two-front war as the United States edged toward involvement on the Atlantic. Partly, too, the conduct of Matsuoka focused attention on the issue. Receiving Ambassador Grew on May 14, for the first time since his return from abroad, Matsuoka lashed out at the American Atlantic patrols and talk of escorting convoys. Hitler’s patience and “generosity” were sorely tried he warned. If any incident occurred, America would be the aggressor. The Axis alliance would come into play and war ensue. The “manly, decent” course for the United States was “to declare war openly on Germany instead of engaging in acts of war under cover of neutrality.” The Japanese foreign minister’s rambling and insulting language on this occasion, including speculation on his own sanity, was not likely to enhance his standing in Washington, but Matsuoka had his purposes: he showed the harsh language he used on the Americans to the German ambassador in order to recover ground with the Axis. This was his “brutally frank demonstration.”55

  The Hull and Matsuoka tantrums illustrate the increasing difficulty both Japan and the United States experienced in escaping their European connections as they confronted their separate differences. Now in his conversations with Nomura, Hull singled out Matsuoka for criticism. The stormy foreign minister was himself appearing as the main obstacle to progress; the talks were coming to be seen as a means of weakening the pro-Axis camp in Japan.

  The notion that relations with Japan would improve, or at least remain tolerably bad, that issues could be set to rest for now and addressed later if only the Axis connection were broken or weakened, was mistaken. Japanese strategic policy was in process of critical change in May and June 1941, moving away from cautious southern advance sheltered by forceful Matsuoka-style diplomacy toward unabashed seizure of the western colonies in Southeast Asia not only at the risk of war but even accepting the inevitability of war with Britain and the United States. The wellsprings of Japanese aggression lay not in the German connection or in radical young military officers, as had seemed the case in the early 1930s and as American policymakers still tended to believe. The danger arose from the increasing sway of staff officers of the Japanese navy who saw Japan ever more encircled and depleted by the American-British-Dutch coalition and who argued that Japan must strike out to secure the resources, especially oil, upon which the greatness and security of the nation and the existence of the navy depended.56 For the army the situation still appeared more obscure, the choices consequently less drastic, and the priority of interests somewhat different. Lacking consensus both services prepared, waited, and looked abroad for signs.

  So did Washington, London, and Moscow. Never since Napoleon, and this time on a world scale, had one nation so dominated the currents of international life as Germany did now. In May 1941, Berlin set the beat.

  Lord Halifax, reporting his lunch with the president on May 2, said his host expected American patrolling in the Atlantic to lead to an incident, which would not be unwelcome. Roosevelt, noted the British ambassador, spoke more freely than he had yet heard him about being in the war. Interventionists such as Stimson gained a similar impression and regretted the president’s disingenuousness.57 More likely his motive was simply to be encouraging. This is not to suggest that Roosevelt framed his policy on avoiding an incident. He was determined to take whatever steps were necessary to protect the Atlantic even at the cost of war. Yet, to the extent that his purposes were served without incident and war, he would gain precious time for developing war potential, maintain broad public support, avoid war with Japan, and follow his own aversion to taking any step until he had the best possible sense of the consequences.

  In May the president was in fact less concerned about a U-boat incident than about German acquisition of Atlantic bases. His eyes were on Dakar and the Azores. The vital question was how much Admiral Darlan had conceded to Hitler at Berchtesgadan: Collaboration in Syria? North Africa as well? Even delivering up the French fleet? Some officials feared the worst. On May 14, Pétain was reported to have stated on the radio that France “must collaborate with Germany in Europe and Africa.” Sources expected the Germans to secure airfields and ports in Spain and Portugal and a submarine base at Dakar; German shock troops were said to be moving into the Hen-daye-Biarritz area close to Spain. The press was utterly pessimistic. The Darlan accord, said the New York Times, meant that France had turned its back on the United States and Britain: “Convinced that Germany will win the war, {France} is ready to throw in her lot and her colonial empire with Germany.”58

  The crisis in Franco-American relations was swift and acute. Shortwave broadcasts from Boston and Philadelphia heard across the Atlantic claimed that the Germans were already in Dakar. Roosevelt described Vichy as already “in a German cage.”59 He ordered the Coast Guard to take custody of the dozen or so French ships in American ports, including the huge and beautiful luxury liner Normandie. Pétain was to be told that his assurances of adhering to the 1940 armistice were meaningless. The president was apparently dissuaded from so strong a statement and instead warned in a shortwave broadcast to the French people that Franco-German collaboration might pose a threat to the United States and he appealed to the French people to shun the Axis. Hull told the French ambassador that the Darlan agreement gave the definite impression that Vichy had “thrown itself into the lap of Germany.” Plans for shipment of food to unoccupied France and for economic assistance to North Africa
came to an abrupt halt. Vichy responded with angry denials, warning that she would defend “every inch of her empire” against attack by Britain and the United States, Martinique and Dakar in particular, indeed that she was adding guns to the defenses of Dakar. That African port, according to the American consul there, was in a state of “frantic hysterical intoxication” over the crisis.60

  In cables of May 19 and 21, Robert Murphy, who was overseeing American interests in North Africa, tried to calm American fears and put the situation in perspective. General Weygand had assured him that North Africa was not affected by the accords, that the Germans had not infiltrated into Dakar or anywhere else in French North Africa, that they were not likely to attack Gibraltar or Morocco immediately, and that they had only two divisions in Libya. Murphy found no evidence of German moves against Spanish or French territory. A German drive to the southwest would depend on their success in the eastern Mediterranean.61

  “Leg over, leg over, the dog went to Dover”: Ambassador Mac-Veagh had quoted the old refrain in March when the Germans were still slogging through Bulgarian snowdrifts. Now it seemed they took the next-to-last step on their way to Suez: at 8:00 a.m., May 20, German parachute and glider forces descended on the island of Crete, 200 miles from Africa and dominating the eastern Mediterranean. Ultimately 22,000 German troops landed, opposing 32,000 British and Commonwealth and 10,000 Greek soldiers. The allied forces, however, were virtually bare of air defense. By the end of the second day, after vicious fighting and severe losses, the Germans had secured the island’s main airfield. On May 22 the British fleet, ordered into the Kithera Channel between southernmost Greece and Crete to destroy German seaborne invasion forces, suffered “the most severe air bombing … naval vessels have ever experienced” from some 700 German planes massed on nearby islands and the southern Peloponnesus. German dive and torpedo bombers devastated the trapped fleet. The carrier Formidable lost all but four planes.62

  For Stimson, the shadow of Crete hung over everything. To Hull, the situation seemed to be going “Hellward.” At State, the capture of Suez was “just under the horizon.” This with rumors the Russians had “succumbed” to German demands, suspicions that the French had given up North Africa, and fears that Japan would now strike for the oil of the Indies, indeed that the United States might soon be facing the world alone, led to feelings of the utmost depression.63

  On May 22 a British aircraft discovered that Germany’s most powerful battleship, the Bismarck, together with the cruiser Prinz Eugen, had disappeared from their anchorage in a fiord south of Bergen, Norway. The next day they were discovered hugging the ice edge of Greenland nearing a breakout into the Atlantic. In one of the rare capital ship engagements of the war, with shell splashes rising twice the height of masts, the “simply gigantic” Bismarck, as a Royal Navy observer described it, sank the battle cruiser Hood, damaged the battleship Prince of Wales, and shaking off pursuers, vanished into the Atlantic. On May 26 the British navy, moving in from all directions with all available aircraft and warships, found the German battleship again and the following day cornered it. British heavy shells had a “frightful” effect: “Colossal flashes inside her … and wretched men running hither and thither on the deck but she would neither surrender nor sink.” Finally she was dispatched with two torpedoes.64

  Watching the Bismarck fire at British aircraft off Greenland had been the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Modoc. Bismarck crossed the path of the American battleship patrol at its farthest extremity, but the old Texas was nearing Newport, and its sister ship New York was just departing. Undoubtedly cursing this bad luck, Churchill urged that the Americans be asked to play a part in the search for Prinz Eugen so as to provide the “incident for which the United States Government would be so thankful.” And in fact an American destroyer and planes from Argentia searched the lower Davis Strait between Canada and Greenland, and for a week the Wasp hung about a suspected tanker rendezvous point midway between Bermuda and the Cape Verdes. The Prinz Eugen made for France and arrived safely.65

  The ever worsening position of the British in the Middle East was a matter of grave concern to the American government both in terms of strategic damage done and as evidence of a general weakening of British morale with a corresponding effect on neutral nations and subjugated peoples. This concern for British morale was reflected in a Roosevelt message to Churchill on May 1 describing the intervention in Greece as a “wholly justifiable delaying action,” extending Axis and shortening British lines, though he found it necessary to add, the undercurrent of concern showing, that he was sure the British would not allow any “great debacle or surrender.” In the last analysis, wrote the president, the control of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic would decide the war.

  Churchill responded with one of the bleakest telegrams of their correspondence. He reflected the profound pessimism of Whitehall. Nothing in Roosevelt’s recent messages indicated an inclination to intervene, and the British could not help but feel that, as one Foreign Office official put it, “in their hearts the Americans expect us to be defeated.” In his message the prime minister disagreed that the loss of Egypt and the Middle East would be a “mere preliminary to the successful maintenance of a prolonged oceanic war.” He could not be sure such a loss would not be “grave” (in the original “mortal”), for a war against an Axis system controlling Europe and most of Africa and Asia was a daunting proposition. Unless the United States took “more advanced positions now or very soon, the vast balances may be tilted heavily to our disadvantage.” More precisely, said Churchill, in absolute frankness, the one counterbalance to growing pessimism in Europe and the Middle East would be American belligerency.

  In reply, May 10, Roosevelt assured Churchill that he had no intention of minimizing either the gravity of the situation or the worthiness of the British effort. But he reiterated with a slight change his argument of May 1. No defeat in the Mediterranean, he said, could destroy their mutual interests because the outcome of the war would be decided on the Atlantic: “{U}nless Hitler can win there he cannot win anywhere in the world in the end.”66 Churchill could hardly object to this reaffirmation of America’s predominant strategic conception from which flowed Lend-Lease and patrolling, but he may have sensed that this was not all the president meant in dwelling on the importance of the Atlantic. While Roosevelt unquestionably considered the Atlantic vital as a bridge to Britain and ultimately the conquest of Germany, he also regarded it as vital for protecting the safety and existence of the United States in case of British defeat. It is tempting to explain Roosevelt’s public emphasis on hemisphere security in May as a rationalization for intervention in the Battle of the Atlantic on more fundamental but publicly divisive grounds of Anglo-American mutual interest. But it was not a ploy; briefly at this low point in British fortunes but authentically and intensely, the president focused on threats to the safety of the United States in a most direct and visceral sense.

  The question was how to prevent German seizure of the Atlantic islands and Dakar, the bridgeheads for German access to the Americas. Crete was important as a demonstration that German power was not landlocked, that it could with control of the air leap across narrow waters and seize strategic focal points. No less important was the Bismarck breakout. It was a relief no longer to have to count this mammoth in capital ship balances, but the loss of the Hood and near escape of the Bismarck left Roosevelt uneasy about the Royal Navy. Above all, the rediscovery of the ship by aircraft showed that air power was critical in maintaining control of the sea, and for this bases such as Bermuda and the Azores were indispensable. Knowing the British were ready to send expeditions to the Azores and Cape Verdes in case of a German move on Portugal and Spain, Roosevelt nevertheless set out to learn whether the Portugese government in that case would accept protection of the Azores by the United States. On May 22, before learning the answer, he ordered the armed services to prepare an expeditionary force of 25,000 troops, to be ready by June 22.67

  As usual, Ame
rican capabilities fell far short of American needs. With so few troops ready for action, their disposition was a matter of the most intense concern, and with each of the islands—the Azores, Canaries, Cape Verdes, Iceland — requiring a force of at least one division, and preferably two, only one or two commitments were possible. The president was alone in his concern for the Azores. A Dakar expedition, requiring over 100,000 troops, was out of the question, but the army hoped to develop the defenses of northeastern Brazil instead and considered the Azores too distant from the Dakar-Natal bridge to justify commitment. Both services feared that tying troops down in these islands would make it impossible to fulfill the American ABC-1 pledge to send troops to Britain in case of war. No less cramping was the lack of ships. Admiral King estimated that seizure of any one island group would require two battleships, the entire reinforced cruiser strength of the Atlantic Fleet, and eighteen modern destroyers. That sort of concentration would eliminate patrolling. Furthermore, the army and navy had only enough troop transports on hand for one division. Twelve more had to be acquired and converted. Nevertheless, planning and preparations began.68

  Along with plans for defending the Atlantic outposts Roosevelt prepared a major radio speech to the American people aimed at mobilizing support for defense policies that now frankly carried some risk of war. The press and public had been eagerly awaiting a presidential lead since cancellation of the May 14 speech. Stimson was particularly anxious for the president to set forth the basic principles which must guide the nation in this “grave crisis”; indeed, to establish the foundation on which the nation might wage war. The world was divided into two camps, he wrote the president, and “you are the leader of one camp.” The American people must be led to action opposing the “evil leaders” of the other camp not by incidents involving mistake or chance but by leadership that lit the path.69 Roosevelt set out to do just that and to convey to the American people as simply as possible the strategic insights that animated his policies.