Still, no groundswell developed for a declaration of war. Interventionist Republicans, now reliably led by Wendell Willkie, supported the administration, but a majority of the GOP did not. Vermont senator George Aiken was in line with the bulk of his party when he asserted that the president had broken promises about neutrality and was “personally responsible” for the deaths of American sailors.46
Yet the public continued to support the step-by-step measures leading inexorably toward conflict. The administration pressed hard for repeal of the ban on the use of American flag vessels to transport goods to warring nations. In mid-November, Congress complied and also authorized the arming of US merchant ships. Whether the undeclared naval conflict that the nation was willing to fight would lead to full-scale war with Germany remained uncertain.47
Nazi Germany had been the main object of US-British discussion at Argentia, but Japan was also on the agenda. That nation’s ultimate goal of dominance, in not only China but the Philippines, French Indochina, British Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies, was no secret.
The administration maintained its support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese government as a means of keeping Japan bogged down. In the spring of 1941, Roosevelt quietly sanctioned the formation of an American Volunteer Group, recruited from the US Army Air Force and commanded by retired Captain Claire Chennault. By the beginning of December, Chennault had at least a hundred pilots training in South China and Burma. They would become famous as the Flying Tigers.
Both a sense of national destiny and a severe paucity of natural resources on its home islands motivated Japan’s drive to the south. The war in Europe had given the Roosevelt administration an excuse to dry up or severely limit militarily important exports ranging from sophisticated optical equipment to scrap iron and steel. The sanctions failed to deter Tokyo. At the end of July 1941, Japanese forces occupied southern Indochina, establishing a jumping-off point for operations against other targets in the region.
The administration responded sharply, freezing Japanese assets in the United States, subjecting all commercial transactions between American companies and Japan to government license, and barring Japanese flag vessels from the Panama Canal. The government’s refusal to approve sales of strategic resources to Japan quickly became apparent; foremost on the list was the oil that fueled the Japanese war effort. A possible alternative source, the Dutch East Indies, also refused future petroleum sales. The policy was hard to fault as a moral matter. But in practice it meant that peace was now hostage to the ever-falling level of the national Japanese fuel stockpile.
Roosevelt, most of his lieutenants, and a majority of the American people simply did not take Japan seriously. Its civilian industry, in stark contrast to Germany’s, seemed capable of producing only textiles, trinkets, and cheap pottery. Its bullying of a weak nation like China and its occupation of defeated France’s colony of Indochina were repugnant. Its army, although intensively trained, was equipped mostly with second-rate weaponry. From the perspective of Washington, Japan seemed a nuisance rather than a major threat.
Such estimates were not dead wrong, but they were incomplete. They did not take into account the nation’s fanatical sense of solidarity and determination, and they especially underestimated its sea power. The Japanese navy was well equipped, superbly trained, and probably more attuned to the emerging importance of aviation than any other in the world. Its aircraft carrier strength was roughly equivalent to that of the US Navy. Unlike the United States, which had to police both the Atlantic and the Pacific, Japan could concentrate on one ocean. The true two-ocean navy for which Roosevelt had secured appropriations was in the early stages of construction. Although no doubt formidable, the American fleet at Pearl Harbor was less than a sure victor in any encounter, however well prepared it might be for one.
In August, Japanese premier prince Konoye Fumimaro floated the idea of a face-to-face meeting with Roosevelt somewhere in the Pacific, but the proposal lacked specifics, and the administration stalled. Diplomatic contacts continued through the fall, with the president focused on the Atlantic. Japanese leaders fixed on declining oil reserves and the ongoing US naval expansion program that in a year or two would ensure American supremacy in the Pacific.
On October 18, Konoye’s government fell. General Tojo Hideki, a militant expansionist, replaced him. Soon American intelligence discerned extensive military preparations for a Japanese offensive toward Southeast Asia. Both Britain and the United States diverted what military assets they could deploy into the Pacific. Churchill ostentatiously sent Prince of Wales to Singapore as the flagship of a cobbled-together defensive fleet. The United States began to deploy heavy bombers to the Philippines.
Discussions continued in Washington between the administration and Japanese representatives. Secretary of State Hull floated a proposed three-month modus vivendi that would have resumed limited trade in oil and other commodities. But any arrangement acceptable to the Japanese would look like rank appeasement. Harold Ickes confided to his diary on November 30 that if such an agreement were reached, “I would have promptly resigned from the Cabinet with a ringing statement attacking the arrangement and raising hell generally with the State Department. . . . I believe that the President would have lost the country on this issue.” A wide public probably would have agreed with Ickes’s reaction. The British and Chinese opposed any such accord. Roosevelt rejected it.48
On November 25, in a meeting with Hull, Henry Stimson, Frank Knox, General Marshall, and Admiral Stark, FDR said, as Stimson recorded in his diary, “We are likely to be attacked perhaps as soon as next Monday because the Japanese are notorious for attacking without warning. The question is how to maneuver them into firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves.” It is unclear whether Stimson reproduced Roosevelt’s exact words. The fairest interpretation is that the president wanted to avoid any accusation of American aggression.49
Hull, receiving the Japanese ambassador on November 26, formally rejected Japanese demands for American abandonment of China, resumption of normal trade relations in all commodities, and facilitation of Japanese designs in Asia. Acting with the president’s approval, he responded with a set of equally categorical requirements: Japanese withdrawal from China and Indochina and renunciation of all expansionism. On November 27, the War and Navy Departments sent notices to their commanders in the Philippines (General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Thomas Hart) and Hawaii (Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short) to be on alert for a Japanese attack. The messages were explicit war warnings, admonishing the commanders to avoid firing a first shot if possible but to do nothing that might compromise their security.50
By the time Hull delivered his demands to Japan, a powerful Japanese task force containing all six of the Imperial Navy’s fleet aircraft carriers had left Hitokappu Bay in the Kurile Islands on a circuitous 4,000-mile course that would take it to within 250 miles of Honolulu, Hawaii, and the naval base at Pearl Harbor.
US and British intelligence focused on firm reports of a strong Japanese military buildup in southern Indochina and an attack flotilla moving southward toward Thailand or Malaya. On December 1, Roosevelt instructed Secretary of State Hull and Undersecretary Welles to quiz Japanese ambassador Nomura Kichisaburo on these developments. Meeting with British ambassador Lord Halifax that same day and again on December 3, Roosevelt promised full military support if British possessions came under attack—with the understanding that he might need a few days “to get things into political shape.”51
He might well have managed it; Gallup polls taken in September and November showed about two-thirds of the electorate willing to risk war with Japan in order to maintain the independence of the Dutch East Indies and Singapore. In any case, aid to Britain against Germany would inevitably spill over into a war in which Britain was fighting Germany’s treaty ally, Japan. Revisionist historians would later assert that Roosevelt saw the defense of British interests in
Southeast Asia against Japan as a “back door to war,” but how could one back Britain in the Atlantic and not in the Pacific? Would Roosevelt have asked for a declaration of war or simply added another undeclared naval war to the one already under way? How valid was the apparent revisionist assumption that a victorious Japan and a crushed Britain would present no significant threat to vital American interests around the world? If George Gallup and his pollsters were correct, a majority of the American people had long since rejected such thinking.52
As it was, the president, Winston Churchill, and numerous leading US and British officials retired on the evening of December 6 knowing that war was almost certainly on the horizon.
Sunday, December 7, was a chilly and pleasant late-autumn day in Washington. Many government officials arose looking forward to attending the last professional football game of the season, the local Redskins versus the Philadelphia Eagles. Those who spent some time with the morning newspapers, however, found them filled with war news and a sense of impending crisis.
Roosevelt faced the day with apprehension. His cousins Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Adams and their children were visiting the White House, but he told Eleanor that he did not see how he possibly could join them for their predeparture lunch. At 12:30 p.m., he met for a half hour or so with the Chinese ambassador. Then he ordered a midday meal for himself and Harry Hopkins in the upstairs study. He and Hopkins were there when the phone rang at 1:40. Secretary of the Navy Knox relayed the report he had just received: Pearl Harbor was under attack.53
Chapter 22
Commander in Chief of the United Nations
December 1941–January 1943
Eleanor delivered the first public White House response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. At 6:45 p.m., she read a hastily drafted statement on her regular Sunday NBC radio program:
I should like to say just a word to the women in the country tonight. I have a boy at sea on a destroyer. For all I know he may be on his way to the Pacific. Two of my children are in coast cities on the Pacific. Many of you all over this country have boys in the services. . . . [Y]ou cannot escape a clutch of fear at your heart, and yet I hope that the certainty of what we have to meet will make you rise above these fears. We must go about our daily business more determined than ever to do the ordinary things as well as we can. . . . Whatever is asked of us, I am sure we can accomplish it. We are the free and unconquerable people of the United States of America.1
Franklin delivered his war message to Congress the following afternoon. It called December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy.” Emphasizing the “dastardly” nature of the attack on Pearl Harbor and enumerating other Japanese assaults throughout the Pacific, he declared,
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. . . .
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.2
Both the president and the first lady had made ringing statements designed to unite the American people against a treacherous foe. Eleanor had declared her own children at risk, just like those of Mr. and Mrs. Everybody. Franklin had proclaimed an all-out fight to the finish. A few die-hard isolationists tried to lay blame on Roosevelt, but even Senator Gerald Nye had to admit, “If the facts are as presented, there is only one thing for Congress to do—declare war.”3
Before the day was out on December 8, Congress had passed a war resolution against Japan with one dissent in the House and a unanimous vote in the Senate. On December 9, Roosevelt delivered a radio address to the nation. He promised an immense war effort fueled by national unity and sacrifice. Reminding the nation that Germany and Italy were Japan’s allies, he asserted that those two countries, “regardless of any formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment.” On December 11, Hitler took the bait and announced that Germany was at war with the United States. Mussolini promptly followed him. Congress quickly reciprocated.4
After more than two years of cautious, step-by-step involvement, the United States was finally all-in.
Two battleships destroyed, two more heavily damaged, one moderately damaged, two requiring light repair, only one immediately serviceable, 188 aircraft destroyed, 2,400 Americans dead: the toll at Pearl Harbor was stunning. The news from Manila was at least equally dispiriting. General MacArthur had ignored standing orders to launch a bombing raid against Japanese bases on Formosa if war broke out. Japanese planes caught his B-17 bomber fleet on the ground ten hours after the Pearl Harbor raid and wiped it out.5
In both cases, commanders—Admiral Kimmel and General Short in Hawaii, General MacArthur in the Philippines—had seemingly ignored, or taken very lightly, explicit war warnings. Roosevelt’s enemies would spare no effort to pin the blame on him, but he could hardly be faulted for the complacency of his Pacific admirals and generals. At most, he bore some measure of responsibility for having approved their assignments.
The raid on Pearl Harbor was the spear tip of a far-flung Japanese offensive mainly directed at Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines. The Japanese also attacked two American island bases in the Aleutians and three in the western Pacific: Guam, Wake, and Midway. Only Midway managed to beat back the enemy.
The attack hit the British defense of Malaya hard. On December 10, Prince of Wales and the World War I–era battle cruiser Repulse had sortied in search of a Japanese attack fleet only to meet a hail of bombs and torpedoes from the air. Both sank with massive loss of life, demonstrating that battle fleets without air support faced disaster. Singapore, the last holdout on the Malay Peninsula, would surrender on February 15, 1942. The British would lose, in all, 130,000 troops killed, wounded, or captured.
There were at least two consolations: the three US aircraft carriers assigned to the Pacific fleet had all been away from Pearl Harbor, and the harbor facilities themselves remained essentially undamaged and instantly useable. Against that, however, was the certainty that the Philippines were in a hopeless position. An attack on Australia was possible. In Russia, the Germans were stalled, but by no means defeated, in front of Moscow and still pushing eastward in the South. The British were at best holding their own in a seesaw North African campaign.
On February 23, a week after the fall of Singapore, with American and Filipino troops retreating in the Philippines, Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat, the first of four that year. The talk was not among his best. At thirty-six and a half minutes, it was too long; for a few minutes a pesky cough marred the delivery. Nevertheless, it effectively summed up the nature and purpose of the war. The president reminded his listeners that the American Revolution too had begun with reverses and been fought through to victory. Asserting that American freedom rested on the establishment of liberty and justice “everywhere in the world,” he asked his audience to consult a map of the “whole earth” in order to follow the course of a global war. Millions of Americans would obtain such maps, many of them simple foldouts tacked to the wall of a living room or den.
Roosevelt declared that with peak industrial production, military strength, and the alliance with Britain and the Soviet Union, America could prevail. He correctly denied the destruction of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor while soberly admitting the loss of three battleships; he also claimed, with gross inaccuracy, that the United States had inflicted more aircraft losses on the Japanese than vice versa. Above all, he asserted, the nation needed unity and sacrifice in the common cause. No defeatism! No work stoppages! No special gains or privileges! Quoting Thomas Paine, he affirmed that “tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the sacrifice, the more glorious the triumph.”6
The talk marked the turning of a historical page. The New Deal and the politics it brought forth—bashing the wealthy, talking redistributionism, aligning the administration with organized labor—were on the shelf. The president was now a semiauthoritarian war leader demanding national unity and a single-minded focus on defeating a mortal challenge from abroad.
Determined to be commander in chief in every sense of the phrase, Roosevelt used the title in official directives to his generals and admirals and expected them to employ it when referring to him. He would be the nation’s grand strategist, controlling the large outlines of both military and diplomatic operations.
On the military side, he operated in direct contact with his service chiefs of staff: Admiral Ernest J. King, Army General George Marshall, and Army Air Force General Harold (“Hap”) Arnold. Marshall was a superb staff officer of great dignity and rectitude, with a penchant for telling truth to power. King was temperamental and something of a bully, but Roosevelt liked his belligerent spirit. Arnold presided over an effectively independent air force with firm authority. All three were capable of saying no to their president, who was in turn willing to accept the response if it could be justified.
In July 1942, Roosevelt would appoint as his personal military chief of staff Admiral William D. Leahy, who had served as chief of naval operations from 1937 to 1939, retired, then been brought back to serve as US ambassador to Vichy France. (The president, none too subtly, had sent him to France on a navy cruiser.) Leahy, equally adept at assuming the persona of a gruff commander or that of a suave diplomat, would effectively act as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before the official creation of that post after the war.
Harry Hopkins continued to be Roosevelt’s most important advisor without portfolio. His common sense, sound instincts, and undivided personal loyalty overrode his lack of formal qualifications for diplomatic activity. Roosevelt also increasingly relied on William Averell Harriman, a wealthy industrialist and financier who had traveled extensively in the Soviet Union on business ventures during the 1920s and lined up behind the National Recovery Administration during the New Deal. (It did not hurt that, like Roosevelt’s man in the State Department, Sumner Welles, Harriman was a Groton product.) From Argentia to Yalta, Harriman would be present at each of the major wartime conferences Roosevelt attended. Appointed Lend-Lease administrator in Britain in 1941, he was also effectively a “special envoy” to Churchill. In late 1943, the president would make him ambassador to the Soviet Union with a mandate to communicate directly with the White House. He was exhibit A in evidence of Roosevelt’s determination to bypass the Department of State and especially to exclude Cordell Hull, whom the president increasingly considered a fusty old relic.7
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 46