Penguin History of the United States of America (105 page)

Hitler’s brutality and recklessness were bringing about a great change in American opinion. People were beginning to realize that he would never stop while there was a frontier to cross or a statesman to double cross. Ambassador Messersmith held that the logic of the dictator’s career would drive him on to fight the world, so the United States should resist him at once, while it could still have some allies. Cordell Hull and other good Wilsonians who had pinned their faith on international law were outraged and frightened chiefly by Hitler’s lies, by his contempt for treaties and all the machinery of conciliation. If they were not yet ready to relinquish the dream of peace, they, and soon most other intelligent Americans, with their profound commitment to democracy and the idea of progress, found the
prospect of a world in which such a creature as Hitler was dominant so revolting that even if he had been no sort of threat to their more material interest they would still have felt it necessary to thwart and defeat him if they could. For the interests of great nations, and of that humanity of which great nations are only a part, cannot be reduced to the calculations of a balance-sheet – though some of the great corporations, which had kept Mussolini supplied with oil during the Ethiopian War and which went on trading profitably with the Nazis to the very eve of war, in the teeth of their government’s protests, seemed to think otherwise. Standard Oil, New Jersey, actually formed a cartel with IG Farben, the great Nazi petrochemical company, and refused to develop ioo-octane aviation fuel for the US army because that institution, fussily, would not let it share the secrets of its research with Farben.

Other Americans were still unconvinced. The isolationists kept up a loud chorus of denunciation and formed the America First Committee to make sure that the ‘mistake’ of 1917 was not repeated. America First had an amazing range of supporters, from proto-Nazis to socialists – even to the Communist party, which vigorously opposed all American involvement in the ‘imperialist’ war from the time of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (August 1939) to Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941). Apart from such cynical or merely deluded elements the America Firsters all seem to have believed that the war was just another power struggle, Hitler’s victory in which, though no doubt deplorable, would not seriously affect America; that intervention in the war, on the other hand, would infallibly destroy American democracy, wreck its economy, bring about a totalitarian government, lead to persecution of the Jews, the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans, or, alternatively, to a Jewish dictatorship, or to communism, or to millions dead, or anyway, to rationing; and that it was impossible that Hitler would or could attack the impregnable United States, shielded by its oceans and its huge military strength (the possibility of attack from Japan was never mentioned). In other words, the frightful consequences that the internationalists expected from further appeasement would come, the isolationists believed, from intervention in any form; and they resisted all the measures of the administration for dealing with the emergency, though they never succeeded in stopping them. They simply did not believe that, in the words they attributed to Franklin Roosevelt (not very inaccurately, in spite of his denials), America’s frontier was on the Rhine.

The President was undeterred. When, in the spring of 1940, Hitler let loose the
blitzkrieg
and the nations of Western Europe went down before him like ninepins (Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France), Roosevelt’s policy became one of all aid to the Allies short of war. The Republicans, convening in Philadelphia, nominated Wendell Willkie for the Presidency. Willkie was of German descent and had been a leading opponent of the New Deal throughout the thirties: as head of a huge electricity company he had been particularly opposed to the TVA. The nomination of such a
man, and the dominance of isolationists in the Republican party, seem to have decided Roosevelt to defy tradition and seek a third term in office. Willkie himself, a renegade Democrat, turned out to be both an internationalist and comparatively liberal domestically; he had an appealing personality, and in Roosevelt’s opinion was the strongest candidate the Republicans could have chosen. So it was necessary for the Democrats to field their own strongest man, and there could be no doubt who that was:
‘WE WANT ROOSEVELT!’
roared the galleries at the Democratic convention in Chicago. FDR had been talking wistfully for a year and more of the charms of retirement, but he did not propose to leave the field to his enemies and the enemies of the New Deal, whether within or without the Democratic party. The 1940 election thus became a referendum on the Roosevelt years. The President ensured that by choosing Henry Wallace, the most liberal member of his Cabinet, as his running-mate. He had grown weary of the antics of ‘Cactus Jack’ Garner, who had exploited the Vice-Presidency to become the unofficial leader of the opposition in the Senate; by forcing Wallace on a very reluctant convention he showed that, whatever might be the case in Congress, he was master of the Democratic party nationally, and his were the policies it would have to support. Foreign policy was not neglected. Although in his speeches Roosevelt stressed his commitment to peace (one statement, ‘Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,’ was to come back to plague him), in his actions he showed himself the staunch friend of Britain, now fighting desperately for her life, and the resolute enemy of Hitler. As the election campaign began he traded fifty old destroyers for military bases in British possessions in the western hemisphere, by-passing Congress (and thereby provoking new cries of ‘dictatorship!’ from the isolationists, and from Irish-Americans such as Senator Walsh of Massachusetts, who blindly hated Britain); and as it roared to its climax he signed the Selective Service Act, which conscripted young men in peacetime, an unheard-of breach with tradition. Willkie denounced him as a warmonger, accused him (rather inconsistently) of having neglected America’s defences, and pointed out that the Depression had not been ended by eight years of the New Deal; but he was answered by events. The new defence programmes created a huge industrial demand (Roosevelt had called for the building of 50,000 planes a year); suddenly, at last, there was work again for everybody, and every front page of every newspaper in the country could not help reporting every day the efforts that the administration was making to improve America’s security. America First was answered by the bipartisan Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and Roosevelt took two Republicans into his Cabinet: Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War and Frank Knox, who had been Landon’s Vice-Presidential candidate, as Secretary of the Navy. The landslide was not quite on the scale of 1932 and 1936; FDR’s popular vote held steady, but the Republicans gained heavily, so that his majority was no more than five million (out of fifty million voting), but he carried thirty-eight states. Meantime the staunch
resistance of the British people and the heroism of the Royal Air Force had dealt Hitler his first defeat. In October he called off his invasion plan (Operation Sea Lion) until the spring. It was never renewed.

Britain was still far from secure. The Battle of Britain might have been won, but the Battle of the Atlantic was intensifying. Vessels were being sunk far faster than British shipyards could replace them. Just as bad, money was running out: very soon Britain would be unable to pay for the supplies she needed. Roosevelt’s response was threefold. He educated the American public in some of his most dramatic speeches. At stake in this war, he said, were the four essential freedoms, of speech, of religion, from want and from fear; America must become the arsenal of democracy. He greatly increased US naval activity in the Atlantic, most of which he in effect annexed. He pushed the so-called Lend-Lease Act through Congress in the first months of 1941. It would be wrong to beggar Britain while aiding her, he explained; he wanted to ‘get away from the dollar sign’ (he remembered the damage that war-debts had done to Anglo-American relations after 1920); he intended to say to Britain, ‘We will give you the guns and ships that you need, provided that when the war is over you will return to us in kind the guns and ships that we have loaned you;’ in a press conference he compared the idea to lending a neighbour a garden hose to put out a fire. It was a pious fraud: the hose was never likely to be returned. The important thing about the Lend-Lease Act was that it authorized the President to give what military aid he liked to whom he liked ‘in the interest of national defence’. A few months earlier he had set up an Office of Production Management to shift American industry from peacetime production to military production as much as was necessary. These two actions were even more significant than they seemed at the time. They not only conferred enormous new economic and political power on the Presidency; they began the transformation of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘great, peaceful people’ into the world’s first superpower, with all that that entailed. And Britain survived.

By May 1941, Roosevelt seems to have become convinced that the United States would enter the war sooner or later; but he refused to fire the first shot, so important was it to bring a united nation to battle. Britain was left alone to fight aggression in the West. China in the East was given somewhat niggardly Lend-Lease aid; partly because of competing claims on American production, partly because Roosevelt was still hoping against hope to preserve peace of some sort in the Pacific so that all efforts could be concentrated on the Atlantic theatre. American pilots were allowed to volunteer for service with Chiang Kai-shek, however, in Colonel Claire Chennault’s so-called ‘Flying Tigers’ group.

America gave Hitler every provocation during this period; but he did not take the bait. It was his only show of prudence, if that is what it was: it seems likelier that his crazy dream of omnipotence (a common criminal fantasy) debarred him from recognizing that a war against the United States would almost certainly end in defeat. Whatever the case, he evaded serious
discussion of the matter. He was not really interested in the degenerate democracy. Besides, he had a penchant for taking risks, and it had previously served him well. Britain was the only enemy still in the field against him, and she did not look very formidable. He did not worry much about war against Russia, either, for on 22 June 1941 he invaded her, although the campaign in the West was still undecided. His flair would see him through.

None the less, he was not above an attempt to keep the United States busy outside his sphere. The Japanese and German governments had engaged in a mutually distrustful flirtation for years, the high points being the signature of an Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 and of a Tripartite Alliance in 1940 (Italy being the third signatory). Neither party was clear what this association would achieve, but both hoped that something would turn up. At one point Hitler thought he had found a useful ally for his attack on Russia: only the Japanese thereupon signed a neutrality treaty with Moscow. The Japanese, with rather more reason, thought that Germany might be of use by keeping the Western powers in check. Reckoning in this fashion they lured each other down the path to their common destruction, and America to her meeting with destiny in the Pacific.

In some respects the question of Asia’s future was more revolutionary than that of the future of Europe. In the 1930s the collapse of the Versailles system was certainly endangering the world, and the activities of Hitler and Stalin were poisoning civilization; but in Asia an even mightier rope of events was being twisted. The impact of modern industrialism on the East had been shattering. In the previous century, for example, steamboats and railways had destroyed the structure and gravely wounded the culture of that ancient China which had always previously survived and absorbed barbarian incursions, however violent. The result had been a period of complete Western hegemony, in which Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States had all acquired Eastern empires – Britain, as usual, taking the lion’s share: India, Burma, Malaya, Hong Kong, part of Borneo and a predominant position in China which her statesmen were too canny to try to turn into formal rule. In the palmy days of Edward VII it had looked as if it would all go on for ever. Europeans despised Asiatics both racially and culturally; the strength of the great empires seemed unchallengeable, except by each other. When in 1911 a revolution broke out in China it only seemed to make that country weaker than ever: after the First World War she was little more than the geographical expression one historian has called her.
²
That did not stop the Versailles powers pledging themselves to preserve China’s territorial integrity and independence: they wished to continue to plunder the helpless giant without getting in each other’s way.

But the old system was already doomed. Britain, France and Holland were, after 1918, over-stretched: they lacked the resources to defend themselves and their empires at the same time. And Japan, an Asian power, had
with astonishing speed learned everything the West had to teach, and was very well placed to apply the lessons. Japan, her rulers decided, had a mission, like other civilized states: she would be the leader of a resurrected Asia. A new empire would be carved out, superseding all the old ones, in which grateful, disciplined Koreans, Manchurians, Chinese, Filipinos, Indonesians – even, perhaps, Indians – would learn the arts of civilization from the new master race. Japanese exports, which were unable to cross such barriers as the American tariff, would instead monopolize a huge market created by conquest. Dominance in the East Indies and Malaya would ensure supplies of oil and rubber, and thus make Japan self-sufficient in raw materials at last.

Such was Japan’s imperial dream. In retrospect it is easy enough to see that it was preposterous. Left to herself, Japan might have been able to maintain her position in the East a little longer than proved possible for the European powers; but the inexorable resurrection of China would have defeated yellow imperialism in the end as it defeated white. In fact the dream had been broken before Pearl Harbor. For though the Chinese were fighting a civil war (between the Kuomintang and the communists) as well as the Japanese, the latter’s military enterprise was, by 1939, getting nowhere. Supplies were still reaching both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung; there was no sign that the ‘Chinese Incident’ (as mealy-mouthed Tokyo called it) was coming to an end; the strain on Japanese society was deepening. But the events of the thirties had at least demonstrated, for all with eyes to see, that the days of the white man’s ascendancy were over. Europeans now traded with China only on Japanese sufferance; and their colonies in Hong Kong, Indo-China, Malaya and the islands survived only while the Japanese spared them.