Sobered by the critical reports of the army maneuvers in May, Roosevelt understood only too well how little Americans had in the way of weapons to send to the Allies. But he was determined nonetheless to send whatever he could, even if it meant putting America’s own short-term security in jeopardy. “If Great Britain goes down,” Roosevelt reasoned, “all of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun.” The only answer, he believed, in direct contrast to the opinion of his military chiefs, was to bet on the prospect that, if the U.S. did everything in its power to help, the Allies would somehow survive until such time as America could get itself into shape to enter the war.
It was a daring decision. At lunch with Harold Ickes, Roosevelt admitted that he might be wrong in his estimate of Allied strength. “And if I should guess wrong,” he said, “the results might be serious.” If Britain and France were to fall, the precious American supplies would be taken over by Germany, and the U.S. would be even further diminished in strength. On the other hand, he agreed with the Allied High Command that “one airplane sent to the Allies now will be worth more than ten sent in six weeks and more than 100 sent in six months.”
With each day, as the Germans continued their triumphant march through France, the president’s bet looked worse and worse. The daily telegrams from Ambassador William Bullitt in Paris reflected an almost hysterical state of mind. “At this moment there is nothing between those German tanks and Paris,” Bullitt reported, predicting that there would be communist uprisings and mass butcheries in the city of Paris as the German army drew near. “The Paris police have no weapons except antiquated single shot rifles,” he advised on May 28. “Incidentally, we have exactly two revolvers in this entire Mission with only 40 bullets and I should like a few for ourselves.”
“This may be the last letter that I shall have a chance to send you,” Bullitt wrote Roosevelt on May 30. “In case I should get blown up before I see you again, I want you to know that it has been marvelous to work for you and that I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your friendship.”
Bullitt tended by nature to pessimism, but his fears in this instance were fully warranted. After only two weeks of fighting, the French army was disintegrating before the eyes of the British. More than ninety-two thousand soldiers were already dead, and it was clear that the French could not stay in the fight much longer. Meanwhile, the British Expeditionary Force, considered by Churchill “the whole root and core and brain of the British army,” was trapped on the beaches at Dunkirk in northern France, its back to the sea. More than sixty thousand British soldiers lay dead, captured, or wounded, and the remaining 350,000, many of them dying from starvation, appeared doomed.
By the morning of May 24, German panzer units were only fifteen miles from Dunkirk. The towering belfry of St. Eloi Church, in the center of the city, was already visible to the German troops. Dunkirk, and the British Expeditionary Force, appeared to be Hitler’s for the asking. But then, before the final blow could be struck, the advance of the German panzer troops was suddenly called off. This strange, totally unexpected halt remains incomprehensible—Hitler’s first great mistake of the war. Believing it would be best to recover and regroup before bringing the campaign to a final victory, Hitler ordered a three-day rest, just enough time for the Allies to put in place the massive evacuation that became known as the “miracle of Dunkirk.”
From Harwich and Margate, from the Narrow Seas to North Foreland, from dozens of little ports on the southern coast of England, a singular armada, made up of every ship known to man, including yachts and trawlers, gunboats and destroyers, motorboats and lifeboats, sailed across the strait to Dunkirk. From there, over a nine-day period, amid blazing ruins, firebombs, and high seas, nearly 340,000 men escaped to England.
As the last of the Allied troops reached the safety of British soil, Churchill delivered a fervent speech to the British Parliament that stirred the souls of the British people and excited the admiration and support of all their Allies. “We shall not flag or fail,” Churchill promised. “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans . . . we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
Churchill’s rousing words bestowed a mythical meaning on Dunkirk that would live in the hearts of Englishmen for generations to come. “So hypnotic was the force of his words,” British philosopher Isaiah Berlin has written, “so strong his faith, that by the sheer intensity of his eloquence he bound his spell upon [the British people] until it seemed to them that he was indeed speaking what was in their hearts and minds.” If they possessed the courage and determination he perpetually saw in them, it was because he had helped to create it by the intensity of his belief in their qualities. “They conceived a new idea of themselves. They went forward into battle transformed by his words.”
The miraculous evacuation produced an upsurge of hope in the American people as well, a renewal of belief that Britain, with the aid of American supplies, might yet defeat Germany. An opinion poll taken the week after Churchill’s speech revealed a 43-percent increase in the numbers who favored the sale of planes to the Allies.
But the prime minister understood that wars were not won by evacuations. The nation’s gratitude for the army’s stunning escape, he cautioned, “must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster.” Indeed, the men who returned to England were scarcely an army. In the chaos of the retreat, the BEF had been forced to leave virtually all its heavy equipment behind, including 680 of the 700 tanks it had sent to France, 82,000 scout cars and motorcycles, 8,000 field telephones, 90,000 rifles, and an even greater number of machine guns. In the 9 days of the evacuation, 10 of the nation’s 74 destroyers had been sunk and 177 RAF planes had been downed, leaving only 238 aircraft in all of England.
Left in ruins, with a thousand civilians killed, the town of Dunkirk had become a junkyard, with wrecked vehicles, discarded weapons, and abandoned bodies everywhere. A reporter for the Herald Tribune described the gruesome scene: “Over a distance of several miles the highway was lined with thousands of Allied trucks and other motorized vehicles. Immense numbers of these had been driven into ditches to prevent their use by the enemy.” Along the quays, the chaos was even greater, as motorcycles and trucks and cars were jammed together in every conceivable fashion. “The final jam was completely impossible to disentangle.”
These had been Britain’s best troops. To these troops, Churchill observed, “all the first fruits of our factories had hitherto been given”—the product of hundreds of thousands of men and women working round the clock. The loss was so calamitous for Britain that it was almost like starting all over again. At that moment, in all of Britain, there were only 600,000 rifles and 500 cannons, many of them borrowed from museums—nowhere near enough to mount an adequate defense against the expected German invasion, much less a second attempt to push the Germans back. “Never,” Churchill admitted, “has a nation been so naked before her foes.”
• • •
In all the world, only the United States had the ability to resupply the British military. In the middle of May, Churchill sent a “most secret” letter to Roosevelt, promising that, no matter what happened in France, Britain would continue the war alone, and “we are not afraid of that.” But in order to keep going, Britain needed help. His immediate needs, Churchill outlined, were forty or fifty destroyers, several hundred airplanes, anti-aircraft equipment, ammunition, and steel.
Roosevelt responded th
e following day, promising Churchill that he was doing everything in his power to make it possible for the Allied governments to obtain all the munitions on his list, including “the latest type of aircraft.” Only the destroyers presented a significant problem, Roosevelt advised, for “a step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of the Congress,” and this was not the right time to make such a move.
In the days that followed, Roosevelt directed his military chiefs to examine Churchill’s list of urgent needs and do whatever was needed to send Britain everything they possibly could. He justified his decision on the basis of his own six-month scenario. In this remarkably prescient document, Roosevelt predicted against all odds that by the winter of 1940-41, with the help of the U.S. in supplying munitions, Britain would still be intact, the French government would be resisting in North Africa, and Russia and Japan would still be inactive.
On each of these points, the army and navy chiefs violently disagreed. They doubted that France could survive past the summer; they feared the French could not put up much opposition in North Africa; and they foresaw an invasion of Great Britain in the near future. To their minds, the only answer for the United States was to admit its inability to furnish weapons in quantity sufficient to alter the situation, acknowledge that we were next on the list of victims of the Axis powers, and devote every means to preparing to meet that threat at home.
The army chiefs were particularly disturbed by the president’s intention to furnish planes to Britain. Considering the sorry state of the army air force, they believed that virtually anything sent abroad would jeopardize America’s national security. “I regret to tell you,” Marshall told Morgenthau, whom the president had designated as his representative in securing aid for the Allies, “I do not think we can afford . . . to accommodate the British government.” To send even a hundred planes to the Allies, Marshall argued, a mere three days’ supply, would set the pilot-training program in America back at least six months. “We have a school at Shreveport,” General George H. Brett noted cynically, “instructors, schedules, students, everything except planes.”
An even more serious strain was created when the president agreed to send twelve B-17 bombers to Britain. Without mincing words, Marshall pointed out that the B-17 was the only efficient bomber the United States possessed and that we had on hand only fifty-two of them. Releasing twelve would mean losing nearly one-quarter of the United States’ supply and “would be seriously prejudicial to our own defensive situation.”
Allied requests for guns and ammunition provoked another round of opposition. No further 75mm guns should be released, the chief of army intelligence cautioned. “It would take two years for production to catch up with requirements.” Speaking more bluntly, General Walter Bedell Smith warned that if we were required to mobilize after having released guns necessary to this mobilization “and were found to be short in artillery materiel,” then “everyone who was a party to the deal might hope to be found hanging from a lamp post.”
Still, Roosevelt insisted on sending munitions to Britain, standing firm against the unanimous opinion of his military advisers, key legislative leaders, and his own secretary of war, who continued “to absolutely disapprove of the sale of any US military property.” On the Senate floor, Senator Nye of North Dakota called for the president’s resignation, charging that the Roosevelt policy of aid to the Allies was “nothing but the most dangerous adventurism.” That same week, Navy Secretary Charles Edison reported to Roosevelt that Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts was “in a towering rage about the sale of Navy stuff to allies. He is threatening to force legislation prohibiting sale of anything . . . . Whole committee in a lather.”
“I say it is too risky,” Walsh told his colleagues, “too dangerous, to try to determine how far we can go in tapping the resources of our own Government and furnishing naval vessels, airplanes, powder and bombs. It is trampling on dangerous ground. It is moving toward the edge of a precipice—a precipice of stupendous and horrifying depths . . . . I do not want our forces deprived of one gun, or one bomb or one ship which can aid that American boy whom you and I may some day have to draft. I want every instrument. I want every bomb, I want every shell, I want every plane, I want every boat ready and available, so that I can say when and if it becomes necessary to draft him, ‘Young man, you have every possible weapon of defense your Government can give you.’”
• • •
“All of Mr. Roosevelt’s authority was needed to bludgeon the army officers into quiescence,” The New Republic reported. At the president’s insistence, the War Department searched long-forgotten statutes and determined that, so long as the arms were considered “surplus,” it would be legal to sell them to a private corporation, which in turn could sell them to the British. Once this legal device was figured out, and once U.S. Steel was selected as the middleman, Marshall reluctantly agreed, under intense presidential pressure, to approve a long list of equipment for transfer, including 93 bomber planes, 500,000 Enfield rifles, 184 tanks, 76,000 machine guns, 25,000 Browning automatic rifles, 895 75mm guns, and 100 million rounds of ammunition. As he initialed the list, Marshall somewhat righteously observed that he could only define these weapons as surplus after going to church to pray for forgiveness. “It was the only time that I recall that I did something that there was a certain amount of duplicity in it.”
At every step, the president’s intervention was needed. “I am delighted to have that list of surplus materials,” Roosevelt told Morgenthau on June 6. “Give it an extra push every morning and every night until it is on the ships.” Since the equipment was scattered in army depots and arsenals across the country, with some tanks and guns at Rock Island, Illinois, others at Schenectady, New York, and still others at San Francisco, California, emergency telegrams had to be dispatched to each of these places, telling the commanding officers to move the selected equipment to a central loading station in Raritan, New Jersey.
Working night and day under strict secrecy, soldiers at each arsenal loaded huge crates of rifles and guns into more than six hundred freight cars headed for Raritan. All along the line, word was flashed to give these freight trains the right of way. In the meantime, a dozen empty British freighters were standing by at Raritan, waiting to take the precious cargo home. By June 11, everything was ready to be loaded, but the transfer could not take place until the contracts had been signed, and Secretary Woodring refused to sign them. Only when the president directly ordered him to sign did Woodring finally execute the documents. Five minutes later, army headquarters called Raritan to say the transfer had been made. “Go ahead and load.”
All through that night, hundreds of longshoremen, three huge derricks, and more than twenty barges worked to unload the trains and put the cargo aboard the British ships. The next day, the first British ship, The Eastern Prince, sailed to England. So hurried had the loading process been, with stores of weapons simply dumped wherever they could fit, that the unloading process was a nightmare. But Britain assigned its best technical workers to match the right handbooks, and the right range tables to the right field guns, to link the 75mm’s with the correct horse poles and straps, to unite the spares with the guns to which they belonged. By the end of June, all twelve ships had sailed to England, carrying seventy thousand tons of equipment which, when new, had been worth over $300 million.
“For weeks,” Edward Stettinius later observed, “while England’s war factories worked night and day to make up the losses . . . there were few guns in all of Britain that could stop a tank besides the 900 75’s from America. The 80,000 Lewis, Marlin, Browning and Vickers machine guns strengthened the defenses of every threatened beachhead and every road leading in from the coast . . . . They went to men who almost literally had no arms at all in the most critical hour of Britain’s history since the Spanish armada sailed into the English Channel.”
• • •
Surely the negotiations involving the shipment of such massive
amounts of equipment could not actually be kept secret, but since nothing had been said officially, no one knew exactly what was going on. The time had come for the president to tell the American people what he was doing. By good fortune, Roosevelt had received an invitation to speak at the commencement exercises at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on June 10. Since his son FDR, Jr., was graduating from the Virginia Law School that day, the school officials hoped that the president might be enticed to accept their offer. Roosevelt had said he could make no commitment until the last minute, but now, at midnight the night before, he accepted their invitation, intending to use the forum to discuss his commitment to aid the Allies.
As Franklin and Eleanor were getting ready to leave for the train that would take them to Charlottesville that Monday, June 10, the news reached the White House that Italy was entering the war on the side of the Germans. After a week of tense maneuvering in which Roosevelt had tried to keep Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, from this explosive expansion of the war, Mussolini had taken the impetuous plunge. If he waited any longer, the Italian dictator feared, France would surrender without his help, and he would lose his chance to share in the spoils.
As Roosevelt perused the State Department’s draft of his commencement address, he added a caustic phrase he had seen in a letter from French Premier Paul Reynaud about stabbing one’s neighbor in the back. To Roosevelt, it seemed an accurate description of Italy’s action. But undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who had been trying to keep Italy out of the war, argued against using the stab-in-the-back metaphor, claiming it was inflammatory. The president finally agreed; the colorful phrase was deleted from the draft.
No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Page 9