by Lynne Olson
On December 11, Hitler appeared before the Reichstag to declare war against the United States. In response, Roosevelt sent a resolution to Congress calling for war against Germany and Italy. This time, Jeannette Rankin decided to abstain, and both chambers voted unanimously in favor.
FOR NEARLY A YEAR, many officials in the German government had been convinced that Roosevelt was poised to enter the war at any moment. Postponing a declaration of war against America at the time of Pearl Harbor, they felt, would simply be putting off the inevitable. But was that true? What would have happened if Hitler had not declared war on the United States, or if the Japanese had not attacked American soil?
President Roosevelt signs the U.S. declaration of war against Germany on December 11, 1941.
When one considers that even after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt apparently was unsure of the public’s support for a declaration of war, it’s hard to believe that a Japanese assault on British or Dutch possessions in the Pacific would have prompted the administration to push for such a declaration, at least at that point. At a White House meeting before Pearl Harbor, FDR said he doubted that the United States would go to war even if Japan ended up attacking the Philippines, a U.S. territory with a major Army presence. In that situation, Winston Churchill’s fears of facing a two-front war alone might well have been realized.
And had Hitler not decided, in a fit of anger, to go to war against the United States, the odds are high that Congress and the American people would have pressured the president to turn away from an undeclared war against Germany in the Atlantic and focus instead on defeating Japan, the only country that had actually attacked the United States. In that case, American shipment of arms to Britain and Russia might have been cut dramatically or even halted, and Germany would have had a clear shot at defeating both countries.
Happily for the Allies, none of those scenarios became reality. As Dean Acheson aptly put it, “At last our enemies, with unparalleled stupidity, resolved our dilemmas, clarified our doubts and uncertainties, and united our people for the long, hard course that the national interest required.” FDR need not have been concerned about the national mood after Pearl Harbor. Instead of demoralizing America, as the Japanese government hoped, the attack did the opposite: it brought the country together. “The war came as a great relief, like a reverse earthquake that in one terrible jerk, shook everything disjointed and distorted back into place,” Time wrote in its first issue after Pearl Harbor. “Japanese bombs had finally brought national unity to the United States.”
With Congress and the American people now solidly behind him, President Roosevelt cast off his pre–Pearl Harbor caution, shedding his deference to Capitol Hill and emerging again as the bold leader he had been in the early days of the New Deal. Demonstrating calm and a reborn sense of confidence, he told a December 9 press conference: “We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way. Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history.”
On that day, and for many days afterward, thousands of young Americans flocked to their local recruiting offices to enlist. Soldiers on leave reported back to their posts and began drilling with new urgency. In Washington, all officers were ordered to switch from civilian clothes to full military uniforms. As one amused observer noted, the corridors of the Munitions Building “were filled with officers [wearing] uniforms and parts of uniforms dating back to 1918.… Majors were in outfits they had bought when second lieutenants.… It was a rummage sale called to war.”
After months of dithering, U.S. industry shifted into high gear, working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to turn out the planes, guns, ships, tanks, and other armaments and supplies that would end up playing such a key role in winning the war. Americans were told they must do without new cars, refrigerators, and other bigticket items for the duration. Defense workers, for their part, displayed a new intensity. An employee at a bomber manufacturing plant in California observed that before Pearl Harbor, “most of the men worked no harder to turn out planes than they would have worked manufacturing ashtrays—just hard enough to satisfy the boss.” Afterward, he said, production skyrocketed.
THROUGHOUT THE THREE AND a half years of U.S. participation in the war, only one of the isolationists’ dire predictions about the country’s fate in wartime was actually realized. That was the concern, voiced chiefly by liberals, that entering the conflict would result in restrictions on civil rights and liberties, a curbing of New Deal reforms, and a resurgence of conservative sentiment.
To the dismay of liberals, the administration now paid far more attention to encouraging the defense effort than to advancing social and economic change. As Roosevelt himself said, “Dr. New Deal” had given way to “Dr. Win the War.” The government showed a new willingness to give business what it wanted, allowing defense contractors to earn huge profits. The country itself began edging to the right, sweeping progressives out of Congress in the 1942 elections and giving de facto control to conservatives. Republicans gained seven seats in the Senate and forty-four in the House. “Ordinary people were more conservative now,” noted one historian, “because they finally had something to conserve.”
Civil liberties also took a beating. Although the vast majority of Americans lived through World War II with few strictures on their constitutional freedoms, more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans on the West Coast were abruptly removed from their homes, businesses, and farms in early 1942 and confined to bleak internment camps for the duration. It was, the ACLU declared, “the worst single wholesale violation of civil rights of American citizens in our history.”
A few months later, Attorney General Francis Biddle, succumbing to pressure from the president, indicted twenty-eight American Fascists on charges of sedition. The defendants, who included Silver Shirts’ leader William Dudley Pelley and Gerald L. K. Smith, a pro-Nazi political organizer, had, even after Pearl Harbor, continued to express antiwar, antiadministration, and anti-Semitic views in hate-filled newspapers and newsletters.
In early 1942, Biddle told Roosevelt that while the ideas expressed by the publications were indeed loathsome, they and those who espoused them posed no immediate danger to America and the war effort. Biddle added that it would be extremely difficult under current law to prove the native Fascists guilty of sedition. None of them, he said, was guilty of advocating the overthrow of the government by force. Roosevelt, however, wanted them stopped, and Biddle finally gave in. The Justice Department accused the defendants of conspiring with Germany to establish a Fascist government in the United States by undermining the loyalty and morale of the armed forces.
The case was a fiasco from the beginning. Except for their hate-filled outpourings, the defendants had little in common. Indeed, most did not even know each other—an inconvenient fact when one is trying to prove conspiracy. Struggling to come up with evidence, the Justice Department did not bring the case to trial until April 1944. It dragged on for eight months—until the presiding judge died and a mistrial was declared. The government reindicted the defendants in 1945, just as the war was drawing to a close. The following year, an appeals court threw the charges out, calling them a travesty of justice.
Although the number of Americans whose civil rights were breached during the war was relatively small, such violations remain a haunting reminder of the fragility of constitutional freedoms in the face of national insecurity and fear. “The test of the protection of fundamental rights is not how they are served in times of calm but how vigilantly they are defended in times of danger,” the historian Geoffrey Perret observed. “By that test the wartime experience may be fairly described as a disaster for tens of thousands of Americans.”
MOST OF THE REST of the nation, however, had a far more positive wartime experience. “No war is ‘good,’ ” British historian David Reynolds has written, “but America’s war was about as good as one could get.”
Before Pearl Harbor, Charles Lindbergh, Burton W
heeler, and other leading isolationists had predicted the deaths of millions of young Americans in the event of U.S. involvement. The actual death toll was 417,000—a large and tragic number, to be sure, but by far the lowest casualty rate of any of the major combatant countries. Alone among the major belligerents, the U.S. civilian population was spared widespread devastation and suffering. There was no bombing of the U.S. mainland, no civilian casualties, no destruction of millions of homes.
Contrary to the fears of Robert Wood and other isolationist businessmen that war would mean the collapse of the U.S. economy and capitalism, it brought instead the end of the Depression and an infusion of real economic growth. Thanks to the defense boom, the unemployment rate dropped from 14 percent to less than 2 percent over the three and a half years of the war. The annual income of Americans rose by more than 50 percent, and many in the country were now earning wages beyond their wildest dreams. After spending time in one thriving town, a journalist reported: “If the war ended today with a victory for us, the mass of folks here could truthfully say that the war was the best thing to ever happen in their lives.”
The predictions of Lindbergh and others that U.S. entry into the war would trigger mass riots and a violent outbreak of anti-Semitism were also unfounded. While there were indeed instances of domestic unrest—the 1943 race riot in Detroit, in which thirty-four people were killed, is a prime example—they were relatively rare. And while Father Coughlin’s bullyboys continued to attack Jews in New York, Boston, and other major cities, there was no widespread upsurge in anti-Semitism. Indeed, with the revelations toward the end of the conflict of the deaths of millions of Jews in Nazi death camps, overt anti-Semitism in America began to recede.
The news of the Holocaust exposed, once and for all, the speciousness of Lindbergh’s argument that the war was a clash of rival imperialistic states, with both sides undeserving of U.S. support. But even before the Holocaust’s full extent was known, the American people found common cause in the belief they were fighting a just and necessary conflict to save Western civilization. In doing so, they coalesced as never before in history. “It was a precious thing,” Geoffrey Perret wrote, “a strong sense of genuine community.”
Much of the credit for that feeling of unity must be given to the two-year public debate over the war, which, despite its unseemly acrimony, helped educate Americans about the need to ready themselves for entry into the conflict. The pros and cons of U.S. involvement—not to mention the significance of each important step, from the destroyers-bases deal to conscription to Lend-Lease—were thoroughly explored and weighed in government offices, in the halls of Congress, on radio and in the press, and in homes and businesses across the country. Equally important were the key roles played by private citizens—from college undergraduates to housewives to denizens of Wall Street—in working to help influence their countrymen. It was a robust, if tumultuous, example of democracy in action.
The result, as The Army and Navy Journal noted in November 1945, was that “when the Japanese attacked us, and when their Axis Allies in Europe declared war on us, this nation was better prepared, spiritually as well as militarily, than it had ever been for any war in our history.”
CHAPTER 28
AFTERMATH
In the days following Pearl Harbor, Charles Lindbergh, hoping all would be forgiven, did his best to return to active duty in the Army Air Forces. Naïvely, as it turned out, he believed that his earlier opposition to Roosevelt might make him “of more value [to the administration] rather than less. It seems to me that the unity necessary for a successful war demands that all viewpoints be presented in Washington.”
Lindbergh asked Hap Arnold, with whom he had remained in close contact, what he thought of the idea. Arnold referred it to the White House. Instead of making a public comment himself, Roosevelt and his aides put Arnold at the center of the controversy that soon erupted over the question of Lindbergh’s reinstatement.
Despite his apparent culpability in leaking the Victory Program, Arnold had managed to keep his job. The Pearl Harbor disaster and America’s entry into the war brought an end to the FBI investigation into the leak, and although investigators believed Arnold to be the culprit, no further action was taken. Revealing his role would have exposed fundamental differences within the administration—a situation that the White House, determined to demonstrate wartime unity, was anxious to avoid.
U.S. officials did not learn until after the war that disclosure of the Victory Program had prompted Germany’s military high command to urge Hitler to pull back from Russia. Instead of focusing on the Eastern front, the military chiefs argued in early December 1941, Germany should establish a strong defensive line there and shift more than a hundred divisions to the tasks of conquering Britain and taking control of the entire Mediterranean area, including the Suez Canal, before an expected American invasion of Europe in mid-1943. If the high command’s recommendation had been implemented, there likely would have been no Allied landings in North Africa in 1942 and, quite possibly, no Allied victory in Europe.
Initially, Hitler had agreed to this radical shift in strategy, but after Pearl Harbor, he decided against it. A major withdrawal from Russia was unnecessary and out of the question, he declared. Tied down by Japanese forces in the Pacific, the United States, the Führer predicted, would now pose a far less significant threat to German positions in the West.
Unaware of the potentially fateful consequences of the leak, General George Marshall, in Albert Wedemeyer’s view, served as a key defender and protector of Arnold in the brouhaha that followed. Asked by Arnold biographer Murray Green if he believed Marshall would have allowed Arnold to stay in his job if proven guilty, Wedemeyer replied: “I think he would. I think he would have subordinated anything to win the war.” He added: “Many people in uniform felt that George Marshall knew who [the culprit] was and that he should have been more forthright, no matter whom it involved. And I incline that way.”
As for FDR, although he agreed to retain Arnold, he was not averse to making life uncomfortable for him from time to time. He did that now by having his aides leak to the press the news of Lindbergh’s request for reinstatement in the Air Forces and urging them to contact Arnold for comment. When they did, the startled Air Forces chief made it clear he thought Lindbergh’s offer should be accepted. It “indicates a definite change from his isolationist stand,” Arnold said, “and expresses his deep desire to help the country along the lines in which he trained himself for many years.”
Arnold’s statement garnered some support, including that of The New York Times. “There cannot be the slightest doubt that Mr. Lindbergh’s offer should be and will be accepted,” the Times editorialized. “It will be accepted not only as a symbol of our newfound unity and an effective means of burying the dead past [but] also because Mr. Lindbergh can be useful to his country.… There can be no question of his great knowledge of aircraft and his immense experience as a flier. Nor have we any doubt that he will serve in the line of duty with credit to himself and to his country.”
But many others disagreed, as FDR undoubtedly knew when he made the offer public. A torrent of anti-Lindbergh mail was delivered to the White House—and was immediately rerouted to Arnold’s office. The Air Forces chief was shocked at how venomous most of it was. A typical letter read: “Our son is in the service, and we want no Quislings behind his back.”
It became increasingly obvious that the administration had no intention of granting Lindbergh’s request. Not surprisingly, the chief naysayer turned out to be Harold Ickes, who, rather like Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, continued a relentless pursuit of his quarry. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, Ickes had signed a contract with a New York publisher to write a savagely critical book, tentatively entitled Why Hitler Sounds Like Lindbergh, about the aviator. After the United States entered the war, Ickes reluctantly agreed to the publisher’s request to put the book aside for the sake of national unity. But three years later, th
e interior secretary again urged its publication, declaring, “I am strongly of the opinion that Lindbergh ought not to be allowed to get off practically scot-free.” (The book was never published.)
Ickes was, if anything, even more vengeful in the immediate post–Pearl Harbor period. In a memo to Roosevelt in early 1942, he insisted that Lindbergh was intent on overthrowing the government and that if he were allowed to become a war hero, “this loyal friend of Hitler’s” would emerge as a rallying point for all of Roosevelt’s opponents. “It would be a tragic disservice to American democracy,” Ickes argued, “to give one of its bitterest and most ruthless enemies a chance to gain a military record.… He should be buried in merciful oblivion.” In his response, the president said he agreed “wholeheartedly” with “what you say about Lindbergh and the potential danger of the man.”
Henry Stimson was handed the assignment of giving Lindbergh the bad news. In a tense meeting in Stimson’s office, the secretary of war informed Lindbergh that he was loath to bestow a position of command on someone “who has shown … no faith in the righteousness of our cause,” adding that he didn’t believe such a person could “carry on the war with sufficient aggressiveness.” In reply, Lindbergh said he would not retract his view that entering the war was a mistake. But, he added, now that the decision for war had been made, he supported it and was eager to help in any way he could. Stimson, however, remained adamant. Nothing could or would be offered to a man whose loyalty, in the eyes of many, was still in question.
Having thus been banned from serving in the armed forces, Lindbergh talked to several old friends in the aircraft business about working for them as a civilian consultant for the development and testing of new bombers and fighters. Initially, the executives were enthusiastic—after all, Lindbergh had been involved in the design and production of aircraft since before his historic flight to Paris—but, one by one, they turned thumbs down on the idea. Juan Trippe, the head of Pan American Airways and an old friend of Lindbergh’s, told him that “obstacles had been put in the way.” The White House, Trippe explained, “was angry with him for even bringing up the subject” and told him it did not want Lindbergh “to be connected with Pan American in any capacity.” With billions of dollars in defense contracts at stake, no aircraft manufacturer could afford to offend the administration by taking Lindbergh on.