All Hell Let Loose (32 page)

Pares applauded a new account of Soviet society published by an American admirer: ‘It is a picture of … fallible human beings, ready to learn from their mistakes, amidst enormous difficulties … trying to build up in one of the most backward countries in Europe a new human society in which the chief consideration of the State goes to … the great mass of the population.’ Many people happily swallowed such nonsense, nodding that the war proved the superiority of the Soviet system. A friend told British soldier Henry Novy, ‘It hasn’t half shown up Communism … no other country could have done it, only a Communist country, with the people really behind it.’

It was probably true that only Russians could have borne and achieved what they did in the face of the 1941 catastrophe. It was less plausible to attribute this to the nobility of communist society. Until
Barbarossa
, Stalin sought to make common cause with Hitler, albeit to attain different objectives. Even when Russia became joined with the democracies to achieve the defeat of Nazism, Stalin pursued his quest for a Soviet empire, domination and oppression of hundreds of millions of people, with absolute single-mindedness and ultimate success. Whatever the merits of the Russian people’s struggle to expel the invaders from their country, Stalin’s war aims were as selfish and inimical to human liberty as those of Hitler. Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the Western Allies were obliged to declare their gratitude, because Russia’s suffering and sacrifice saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of young British and American soldiers. Even if no exalted assertion of principle – instead, only a grapple between rival monsters – caused Russia to become the principal battleground of the war, it was there that the Third Reich encountered the forces that would contrive its nemesis.

The people of the United States observed the first twenty-seven months of the struggle in Europe with mingled fascination, horror and disdain. The chief character in J.P. Marquand’s contemporary novel
So Little Time
says: ‘You could get away from the war for a little while, but not for long, because it was everywhere, even in the sunlight. It lay behind everything you said or did. You could taste it in your food, you could hear it in music.’ Many saw the conflict, and the triumphs of Nazism, as reflecting a collective European degeneracy. There was limited animosity towards the Axis, and some active support for Hitler in German ethnic communities. A Princeton poll on 30 August 1939 found that while 68 per cent of Americans thought that US citizens should not be permitted to enlist in the Wehrmacht, 26 per cent believed they should retain that option. Very few wanted to see their nation join either side in a bloodbath an ocean apart from their own continent. A Roper poll in September 1939 asked how the US should frame policy towards the warring nations. Among respondents, 37.5 per cent favoured eschewing partisanship, but continuing to sell goods to all parties on a cash-and-carry basis; some 23.6 per cent opposed any commercial traffic with any combatant; just 16.1 per cent favoured a modification of neutrality to offer aid to Britain and France if they were threatened with defeat. Interventionism enjoyed most support in the southern and western states.

For half the previous decade, President Franklin Roosevelt had been expressing dismay about his people’s reluctance to acknowledge their own peril. On 30 October 1939, he wrote to US London ambassador Joseph Kennedy: ‘We over here, in spite of the great strides towards national unity during the past six years, still have much to learn of the “relativity” of world geography and the rapid annihilation of distance and purely local economics.’ Given the strength of isolationism, however, between 1939 and 1941 he felt obliged to act with circumspection in aiding Britain. In many respects a cautious politician, he had to manage what one of his supporters called ‘the most volatile public opinion in the world’. White House familiar Robert Sherwood wrote: ‘Before the advent of calamity in Western Europe and of Winston Churchill, the Allied cause did not have a good smell even in the nostrils of those who hated Fascism and all its evil works.’

The writer John Steinbeck spent some weeks in the spring of 1940 sailing down the Pacific coast of South America, from whence he wrote to a friend on 26 March: ‘We haven’t heard any news of Europe since we left and don’t much want to. And the people we meet on the shore have never heard of Europe and they seem to be the better for it. This whole trip is doing what we had hoped it might, given us a world picture not dominated by Hitler and Moscow, but something more vital and surviving than either.’ Like many liberals, Steinbeck was convinced America would eventually have to fight, but viewed the prospect without enthusiasm. ‘If it weren’t for the coming war, I could look forward to a good quiet life for a few years,’ he wrote on 9 July.

The morning after Hitler invaded Norway in April 1940, reporters crowded into FDR’s office and asked if this brought the US closer to war. The president chose his words as carefully as ever: ‘You can put it this way: that the events of the past forty-eight hours will undoubtedly cause a great many more Americans to think about the potentialities of war.’ Roosevelt avowed reluctance to run for a third presidential term in 1940, and intimated that only world crisis, and explicitly the fall of France, persuaded him to do so. ‘The question of whether Roosevelt would run,’ wrote Adolf Berle, one of the president’s intimates, on 15 May that year, ‘is being settled somewhere on the banks of the Meuse River.’ The president’s equivocation was probably disingenuous since, like most national leaders, he loved power. Posterity is assured that no American was better qualified to direct the nation through the greatest emergency in world history, but an insistent minority of Roosevelt’s countrymen, notably including the business community, rejected this proposition at the time. Donald Nelson, who later became overlord of America’s industrial mobilisation, wrote: ‘Who among us except the President of the United States really saw the magnitude of the job ahead? … All the people I met and talked to, including members of the General Staff, the Army and Navy’s highest ranking officers, distinguished statesmen and legislators, thought of the defensive program only as a means of equipping ourselves to keep the enemy away from the shores of the United States.’

Rearmament had begun in May 1938, with Roosevelt’s $1.15 billion Naval Expansion Bill, followed by the November 1939 Cash-and-Carry Bill, modifying the Neutrality Act to allow belligerents – effectively, the French and British – to purchase American weapons. Roosevelt presided at a meeting of service chiefs at the White House, during which he instructed them to prepare for war and a large expansion of the armed forces. In 1940 he pushed through Congress a Selective Service Act imposing military conscription, and a $15 billion domestic rearmament programme. He delivered a personal message to the legislature declaring that he wanted the US to build 50,000 planes a year. This prompted a terse note from his chiefs of staff signed by the navy’s Admiral Harold ‘Betty’ Stark: ‘Dear Mr President, – GREAT – Betty (for all of us).’ The US Army expanded from 140,000 men in September 1939 to 1.25 million two years later, but all three chiefs of staff knew that their services remained lamentably ill-prepared to fight a big war. Many members of the armed forces as well as of the civilian community remained unconvinced either that their nation should engage, or that it would.

Young Americans conscripted under the Selective Service Act sulked in their camps: ‘An army post in peacetime is a dull place,’ wrote Carson McCullers in a 1941 novel. ‘Things happen, but then they happen over and over again … Perhaps the dullness of a post is caused most of all by insularity and by a surfeit of leisure and safety, for once a man enters the Army, he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him.’ Journalist Eric Sevareid described how Roosevelt was ‘slowly gathering together a reluctant, bewildered and resentful army. No civil leaders dared call them “soldiers” – as though there were something shameful in the word … Few made so bold as to suggest that their job was to learn to kill.’

The hesitant military build-up included purchase of an additional 20,000 horses. ‘The US Army started far too late to prepare seriously for World War II,’ wrote Martin Blumenson. ‘As a result, the training program, the procurement of weapons, and virtually all else were hasty, largely improvised, almost chaotic, and painfully inadequate throughout the intensely short period of mobilization and organization before and after Pearl Harbor.’ Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower, commanding an infantry battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington, told his men: ‘We’re going to war. This country is going to war, and I want people who are prepared to fight that war.’ But such rhetoric merely earned him the derisive nickname ‘Alarmist Ike’.

Many intellectuals disdained Europe’s war because they perceived it as a struggle between rival imperialisms, a view reflected in Quincy Howe’s 1937 tract
England Expects Every American to do His Duty
. They found it easier to contemplate an explicitly American crusade against fascism than one that allied them with the old European nations, recoiling from association with the preservation of the British, and for that matter French and Dutch, empires. They disliked the notion that the honour and virtue of the United States should be contaminated by association. They questioned whether a war fought in harness with old Tories could be dignified as a moral undertaking. The left-wing
Partisan Review
asserted: ‘Our entry into the war, under the slogan of “Stop Hitler!” would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here.’

The treasurer of Harvard, William Claflin, told the university’s president: ‘Hitler’s going to win. Let’s be friends with him.’ Robert Sherwood noted the number of businessmen such as Gen. Robert Wood, Jay Hormel and James Mooney likewise convinced of Hitler’s impending triumph, and thus ‘that the United States had better plan to “do business” with him’. At a meeting at the US Embassy in London on 22 July, senior diplomats agreed there was an even chance that Britain might still be unconquered by 30 September, but this tepid vote of confidence implicitly acknowledged a similarly plausible prospect that Churchill’s island might by that date be occupied. In the September 1940
Atlantic Monthly
, Kingman Brewster and Spencer Klaw, editors respectively of the Yale and Harvard student papers, published a manifesto asserting students’ determination not to save Europe from Hitler.

The British read such declarations with understandable dismay. While their prime minister pinned all his hopes of ultimate victory on US belligerence, in the summer of 1940 his exasperation at the paucity of American aid was matched by scepticism about whether some Washington decision-makers could even be entrusted with British confidences. Churchill wrote on 17 July, opposing disclosure of sensitive defence information: ‘I am not in a hurry to give our secrets until the United States is much nearer to the war than she is now. I expect that anything given to the United States Services, in which there are necessarily so many Germans, goes pretty quickly to Berlin.’ He modified this view only when it became plain that frankness was indispensable to secure American supplies.

Roosevelt gained domestic support for both aid to Britain and US rearmament by adopting the argument advanced by Gen. John Pershing, his nation’s most famous soldier of World War I: his policies would not hasten engagement in the conflict, but instead push it away from America’s shores. The British were obliged to pay cash on the nail for every weapon shipped to them until their cash and gold reserves were exhausted, and Lend-Lease became effective, late in 1941. It was as a defensive measure that Roosevelt reconciled the American people to the September 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain, which even the isolationist
Chicago Tribune
welcomed: ‘Any arrangement which gives the US naval and air bases in regions which must be brought within the American defense zone is to be accepted as a triumph.’ Churchill heeded urgent and frequent warnings from Washington, that he should say nothing publicly before the 1940 US election which suggested an expectation that America would fight in Europe.

The Luftwaffe’s defeat in the Battle of Britain significantly shifted American sentiment not in favour of joining the fight, but towards a belief that Churchill’s people might hold out. That September, secretary for war Henry Stimson wrote in his diary: ‘It is very interesting to see how the tide of opinion has swung in favour of the eventual victory of G[reat] B[ritain]. The air of pessimism which prevailed two months ago has gone. The reports of our observers on the other side have changed and are now quite optimistic.’ Meanwhile, the Tripartite Pact signed by Germany, Italy and Japan strengthened American public perceptions of a common evil threatening the world: the United States and Britain now found themselves two among only a dozen surviving democracies. An October opinion poll showed 59 per cent American support for material aid to Churchill’s people, even at the risk of war.

But isolationism remained a critical force in the 1940 presidential race. Though Republican candidate Wendell Willkie was at heart an interventionist, during the campaign his rhetoric was stridently hostile to belligerence. Roosevelt became alarmed that, as a supposed advocate of war, he was threatened with defeat. Gen. Hugh Johnson, a Scripps-Howard syndicated columnist, wrote: ‘I know of no well-informed Washington observer who isn’t convinced that if Mr R is elected he will drag us into war at the first opportunity, and that if none presents itself he will make one.’ A
Fortune
poll on 4 November 1940 showed that 70 per cent of Americans saw at least an even chance of America getting into the war; but while 41 per cent favoured giving Britain all possible material aid, only 15.9 per cent advocated sending Americans to fight. Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic Congressman close to the administration on almost all domestic issues, secured big pork-barrel funding for Texas from the surge in defence spending. Johnson nonetheless spoke out against US involvement in Europe, telling his constituents in June 1940: ‘The ability of the American people to think calmly and act wisely during a crisis is going to keep us out of a war.’ He changed his mind only in the summer of 1941, when British defeats in the Mediterranean persuaded him that the threat of an Axis triumph was unacceptable to the United States.

The strength of isolationism caused FDR to make a declaration during a 1940 campaign broadcast which became one of the most controversial of his life: ‘And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ The president’s wife Eleanor was among those dismayed by this remark. In her newspaper column ‘My Day’, she qualified it importantly: ‘No one can honestly promise you today peace at home or abroad. All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent this country being involved in war.’ The president’s penchant for opacity, indeed deceit, was well recognised. But the enigma which so troubled Winston Churchill as well as the American people in 1940–41 will never be susceptible to resolution: whether Roosevelt could ever have made the United States a full fighting partner in the war, had not the Axis precipitated such an outcome.

On polling day, 5 November 1940, the president secured 55 per cent support for his re-election, 27.2 million votes to 22.3 million. The US minister to Ireland, who was Roosevelt’s uncle, described British reaction to the result: ‘The gentlemanly announcer on the BBC this morning at eight o’clock began “Roosevelt is in!” His voice betrayed relief and some exultation’. But the election outcome emphasised the strength of continuing opposition to the president. Many millions shared the views of George Fisk of Cornell University, who argued that ‘no war ever accomplished what it was intended to’. In December, Roosevelt emphasised to the British government the need for absolute secrecy about the details of arms purchases – for his own domestic political reasons, not those of security.