Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941

by Lynne Olson

  Harold Ickes presented the president with a letter from an old friend who pointed out that while only Congress had the power to declare war, Roosevelt as commander in chief had the authority to wage war defensively. An interesting point, FDR said, but what Ickes’s friend didn’t understand was that “it was simply a question of timing.” The interior secretary glumly wrote in his diary: “Apparently the president is going to wait.… God knows for how long and for what.” Admiral Stark, meanwhile, complained to a friend: “The Navy is already in the war in the Atlantic, but the country doesn’t seem to realize it.” Instead of a popular outcry in the United States, demanding that Roosevelt avenge “our boys,” the predominant reaction seemed to be one of apathy. Yet, in its mood of fatalistic resignation, the American public seems simply to have been following the lead of its president.

  Upset that no one seemed to care about the hundred-plus young sailors who had lost their lives, the folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote a song called “The Sinking of the Reuben James” and recorded it with Pete Seeger. The song became a folk classic, and millions of Americans came to know its stirring refrain:

  Tell me what were their names, tell me what were their names,

  Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?

  IN LONDON, WINSTON CHURCHILL was near the end of his emotional tether. He railed to his subordinates about America’s paralysis and Roosevelt’s unwillingness to do anything about it. In a speech to the House of Commons, he declared: “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of Gallup polls or of feeling one’s pulse or taking one’s temperature.… There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right.”

  Roosevelt, who once described himself as a “juggler,” had always taken great pride in his mastery of improvisation and manipulation. But, as Robert Sherwood later wrote, “he had no more tricks left. The bag from which he had pulled so many rabbits was empty.” In America’s quietude, Sherwood observed, was seen “the awful picture of a great nation which had surrendered all powers of initiative and therefore must wait in a state of flabby impotence for its potential enemies to decide where, when and how action would be taken.”

  Like several others close to the president, Sherwood had long suspected that Roosevelt’s failure to take the initiative was largely due to his resolve that “whatever the peril, he was not going to lead the country into war.” Echoing that view, Samuel Rosenman later wrote that “the last thing [FDR] wanted then, or any time before Pearl Harbor, was a formal declaration of war either against, or by, Hitler or the Japanese.” Former attorney general Robert Jackson, who had known Roosevelt since he was governor of New York, told an interviewer that FDR had always had “a great confidence that something would happen to bring things out right. He felt that by some stroke of diplomacy, or some other stroke, it will come out all right.” According to Herbert Agar, “the historians who insist that Roosevelt always knew where he was heading … were either not present during those dark months or they have forgotten the ambiguities of democratic politics.”

  For the previous two years, Roosevelt had been juggling threats from both Japan and Germany, trying to avert a showdown with the two for as long as possible. With his attention focused on the German offensive, particularly in the Atlantic, Roosevelt intended, he told his advisers, to “baby the Japs along.” As he saw it, a fight with Japan would be “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.”

  What Roosevelt apparently didn’t bargain for was that the Japanese, unlike their German allies, were quite open to the idea of confrontation with the United States—on their own terms and as soon as possible.

  * Bolté would later lose a leg while fighting with the British at El Alamein, and two of his Ivy League comrades would die in combat shortly before the 1943 Allied victory in North Africa.

  CHAPTER 26

  “THE GREATEST SCOOP IN HISTORY”

  Ever since the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931, tensions between Japan and the United States had been ratcheting up. The Japanese, determined to expand their empire, had launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937, bombing cities, massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians, and seizing control of Shanghai and other major ports along the coast. Clearly on a mission to establish hegemony over the Far East, Japan now posed a direct threat to vital American, British, and Dutch interests in the area.

  From the beginning, the United States had condemned Japan’s aggression but, like other Western powers, did nothing to stop it. The Roosevelt administration was caught in a dilemma. While recognizing the mounting danger posed by the Japanese to the United States, Washington concluded that the peril of Nazi Germany was far greater and more immediate. Because America at that point was incapable of defending both the Atlantic and the Pacific, it was thought best to keep Japan at bay while helping Britain fend off Germany.

  Japan depended on the United States for many of its most important strategic materials, so the administration turned to economic sanctions as its primary tool for restraining Tokyo and pressuring it to modify or renounce its expansionist program. The Japanese, however, had no intention of yielding on issues they considered vital for their country’s future.

  It was clear that the two countries were headed for a confrontation. In the spring of 1940, Washington allowed its fifty-year-old trade agreement with Japan to expire—for Tokyo, an ominous portent. A few months later, the administration declared an embargo on all shipments of premium-grade scrap iron and steel, as well as high-octane aviation gas, to the Japanese.

  Japan responded by signing a Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940, all the signatories agreeing that if any one of them were attacked, the others would come to its aid. Washington reacted to that provocation by barring the export of all scrap metals to Japan. Three months later, it stopped the shipment of additional exports, including machine tools.

  Oil—the most essential of all strategic materials for the Japanese—was the only major export left untouched. More than 80 percent of Japan’s fuel supplies came from America, and an embargo would be devastating to the country’s military operations as well as its economy. For months, the Roosevelt administration had kept its final and most potent economic weapon in reserve, not only for leverage but also because both the president and Cordell Hull feared that a ban on oil would prompt the Japanese to seize oil-rich territories in Asia, including the Dutch East Indies, the string of islands in the Pacific that is now Indonesia.

  Yet in trying to “baby the Japs along,” as FDR put it, he and his government ran into opposition from the American people, a growing number of whom wanted the administration to put the screws once and for all to the Japanese. “There seems to be no fierce emotional resistance to war in the Pacific as there is among many people to war in Europe,” Life noted in early 1941. A conflict with the vaunted German army was something to be feared because, in the minds of many Americans, it would mean millions of U.S. casualties. War with Japan, on the other hand, was seen as a tidier conflict, likely to be confined to the seas, and one that the U.S. Navy would easily win.

  Such confidence—quite misplaced, as it turned out—stemmed in large part from the racist idea that the Japanese “yellow peril” could easily be vanquished by the morally and physically superior white race. Among those who favored a tougher U.S. policy against Japan were the country’s leading isolationists, including Charles Lindbergh and Senator Burton Wheeler. Americans made their assumptions about Japan with little or no knowledge of the country and its people. They were given scant help by the U.S. press, which, focused as it was on the war in Europe, had all but ignored developments in Asia and the Pacific over the previous two years.

  The American government, particularly the military, also underestimated the Japanese, discounting the strength of their navy and belittling the ability of their army, which in four years of undeclared war had not been able to take complete co
ntrol of China. Administration officials persuaded themselves that the U.S. Pacific fleet, based at Pearl Harbor, would have no trouble denying the western Pacific to Japan.

  For Tokyo, the implicit threat of a U.S. oil embargo was a sword of Damocles suspended over its head. Japan’s oil reserves would last barely two more years; by then, the United States would be close to its goal of building a two-ocean navy. Japan saw only two choices: imminent war or reversing its foreign and military policy. The latter option was, for the country’s leaders, unacceptable.

  In the summer of 1941, Japanese forces occupied Indochina, a major source of rubber, and demanded army bases from strategically situated Siam (now Thailand). There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that British and Dutch possessions in the Far East—Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Dutch East Indies—were all in peril. In response, Roosevelt announced an immediate freeze on all Japanese assets in the United States. Under the order, further Japanese purchases of American goods, including oil, had to be cleared by a government committee. Although the freeze did not involve a direct embargo on oil, its dire implications for Japan were clear.

  Having lobbied hard for an oil embargo, many U.S. newspapers applauded what they saw as the end of the administration’s “appeasement” of Tokyo. “Let there be no mistake,” the New York Post declared. “The United States must relentlessly apply its crushing strength.” PM, meanwhile, rejoiced that “the noose is around Japan’s neck at last.… For a time it may bluster and retaliate, but in the end it can only whimper and capitulate.”

  The president, however, had not intended his order to signal an automatic cutoff of oil. He wanted to keep his options open and the Japanese at the negotiating table. Nonetheless, State Department officials applied the freeze in such a way that no further exports of any consequence, including oil, were released to Japan. U.S.-Japanese trade was brought to an abrupt halt, and the crisis that Roosevelt hoped to put off for as long as possible was now on his doorstep.

  By the end of November 1941, both the U.S. and British governments expected a major Japanese attack at any moment, with the betting on Siam or Malaya as the probable targets. At their meeting in Newfoundland, Churchill had appealed to Roosevelt to join him in warning Japan that any future incursions in Asia would be met with British and American force. But Roosevelt declined to issue such a blunt ultimatum. If the blow fell on non-U.S. territory, as most observers expected it would, the British prime minister feared that the American president and people would refrain from entering the conflict, leaving Britain alone to face two mighty enemies, Germany and Japan.

  The American public, meanwhile, seemed blasé about the entire situation. “No one worried,” one journalist wrote. “Nobody talked about the Japanese or the Pacific. All this indicated just one thing: that Americans were not frightened by the Japanese.” That may have been true. But Americans’ lack of concentration could also be explained by the fact that another major news event had, at least momentarily, captured their attention.

  ON DECEMBER 4, ROBERT McCormick’s Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, published by McCormick’s cousin, Cissy Patterson, sent shock waves of seismic proportions throughout official Washington. Under an enormous headline screaming FDR’S SECRET WAR PLANS REVEALED!, the Tribune’s front page, like that of the Times-Herald, was devoted to an exposé of an alleged government “blueprint for total war”—a top-secret administration document outlining plans for an all-out confrontation with Germany.

  According to the story, written by the Tribune’s Capitol Hill correspondent, Chesly Manly, the plans called for an American expeditionary force of some five million men to launch, in the “final supreme effort,” a full-scale invasion of German-occupied Europe by July 1943. Eventually, the article said, U.S. armed forces would total more than ten million men. Manly wrote that the report on which he based his story “represents decisions and commitments affecting the destinies of peoples throughout the civilized world.” If accurate, it also showed the president of the United States to be a liar.

  Washington was in a frenzy. The Times-Herald sold out all its copies that day within an hour or two, and work in many government departments came to a standstill. Reporters flocked to the White House clamoring for an explanation and were immediately shunted over to the War Department. There, a livid Henry Stimson declared that while the document leaked to Manly was genuine, the reporter had completely and perhaps deliberately misinterpreted its purpose. It was, Stimson said, a set of unfinished staff studies that had “never been constituted and authorized as a program of government.” In short, it was a contingency plan, evaluating the state of U.S. military preparedness and the various options open to America in the event of its involvement in the war.

  The war secretary, as angry as anyone had ever seen him, railed against McCormick and his cousin for publishing such extraordinarily sensitive material. “What do you think of the patriotism of a man or a newspaper,” he snapped, “which would take these confidential studies and make them public to the enemies of the country?”

  What Stimson did not disclose was that the plans had been drawn up only a couple of months before. That fact—that there was no detailed assessment of what the United States needed to do to defeat the Axis until just before Pearl Harbor—was, in a sense, just as stunning as the contents of the document itself.

  For more than a year, Stimson, Frank Knox, George Marshall, Harold Stark, and other government officials involved in defense mobilization had been pressing the president to set clear, specific policy guidelines for America’s objectives in the war. What role was the country to have in the conflict? Should it plan simply for the defense of its own borders and those of its Latin American neighbors? Or should it come up with a blueprint for all-out intervention, including the buildup of a massive expeditionary force?

  Over the years, the U.S. military had devised a series of contingency plans for possible future conflicts. In early 1940, Admiral Stark had formulated a blueprint of his own, known as Plan Dog, which focused on the possibility of a two-front war in Europe and the Pacific. Stark’s plan advocated fighting a limited defensive war against Japan while giving first priority to defeating Germany and Italy. It formed the basis for the U.S.-British military discussions held in Washington in March of that year. Roosevelt, however, declined to commit himself to Plan Dog, just as he refused to sign off on any other comprehensive, long-term proposal. “This is a period of flux,” he told Frank Knox. “I want no authorization for what may happen beyond July 1, 1941.”

  FDR’s reluctance to issue clear-cut directives, along with his habit of changing his mind about production priorities, drove his service chiefs crazy. “First the President wants 500 bombers a month and that dislocates the program,” Marshall grumbled. “Then he says he wants so many tanks and that dislocates the program. The President will never sit down and talk about a complete program and have the whole thing move forward at the same time.”

  With no concrete plan to meet, U.S. defense production remained slow and erratic; the flow of munitions to Britain was still a relative trickle, and the delivery of arms to the Soviet Union not much more than a promise. In a toughly worded memo to Stimson, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, who was in charge of military mobilization, asked how on earth the United States could hope to arm itself and fulfill its commitments to other nations without a detailed, well-thought-out plan for doing so.

  Armed with Patterson’s memo, Stimson finally persuaded the president to act. On July 9, Roosevelt instructed Stimson and Knox to come up with a plan for the “overall production requirements required to defeat our potential enemies.” Finally, very late in the game, the Army and Navy were given the authority to draw up comprehensive estimates of likely enemies and battle theaters, the size and composition of U.S. armed forces, and the financial and industrial means required to meet the defense needs of America and its potential allies.

  In a supreme irony, the man chosen to direct this extraordinarily c
omplex study, dubbed the Victory Program, was none other than Major Albert Wedemeyer, one of the most isolationist officers in the Army. Recently assigned to the War Plans Division by Marshall, Wedemeyer thus became, as he wrote in his memoirs, “the planner of a war I did not want.” In the late 1930s, he had spent two years at the German war college in Berlin and acknowledged he had “come to see Germany in a different light from most of my contemporaries.” He fully accepted the Third Reich’s view that a “worldwide Communist conspiracy centered in Moscow” was the major cause of world tensions and conflict and that “the German search for Lebensraum did not menace the Western World to anything like the same degree” as Communism. Dismissing the Nazis’ brutal treatment of the countries they vanquished, he described Lebensraum as simply “a national movement to win living space [from] more backward peoples.”

  General Albert Wedemeyer after World War II.

  Wedemeyer’s pro-German views were considered extreme even in an environment that was decidedly uncritical of the German military. He wrote years later that “some of my fellow officers and friends [at the War Department] considered me sympathetic to Nazism.… I had perhaps at times been too outspoken or indiscreet in expressing my conviction that we should not become involved in the war.”

  Despite all this, he undertook the planning assignment. As a professional soldier, he noted, he had no right to make decisions regarding war and peace. “It was my job to anticipate developments and continuously make plans so that my country would be prepared for any contingency which fate, politicians, or power-drunk leaders [i.e., Roosevelt] might precipitate.” It was also his job, he said, to come up with a plan “calculated to bring our enemies to their knees in the shortest possible time.”