Roosevelt (44 page)

China simply had a low priority in Washington compared with other fronts. But Chiang at least had comrades in adversity. By a twist of fate Roosevelt, within the span of a few weeks, was the target of direct and moving appeals from the leaders of a billion people—Stalin and Molotov for a second front, Gandhi and Nehru for aid in their campaign for independence, Chiang for expanded military support to China and for moral support of Indian nationalists. Roosevelt had found it necessary to deny all these appeals.

There was a brief moment when the American military, galled by British rebuffs over the second front and other issues, flirted with the notion of repudiating Atlantic First and giving the Pacific top priority. MacArthur and King, both Pacific-oriented, favored heavy commitments to their respective theaters. The idea might have contained a bit of bluff; still, Marshall formally proposed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that if the British prevailed on cross-channel postponement, “the U.S. should turn to the Pacific for decisive action against Japan.” This would be a popular step with the
American public, he added, and the Chinese and Russians would be in accord.

Roosevelt would have none of it. To draw back from the Atlantic, he told Stimson, would be a little like taking up your dishes and going away. He stood fast for the basic plan of defeating Germany first, on the continuing assumption that trying to defeat Japan first would increase the chance of complete German domination of Europe and Africa. Defeat of Germany first, on the other hand, meant the defeat of Japan, probably without “firing a shot or losing a life.”

So it was still Atlantic First—but of all the Commander in Chief’s battle efforts in the early months of the war, the most ineffective and humiliating occurred in the Atlantic itself. By spring 1942 the German submarine offensive against coastal shipping was scoring stunning triumphs. Within a day of declaring war Hitler had summoned Admiral Raeder to plan the offensive. Gone were the days when the Führer had to order his Navy to avoid provoking the Americans in the Atlantic. Now he could take the offensive. Raeder’s and Karl Doenitz’s U-boats were scattered from the Arctic to the South Atlantic, including a sizable fleet in the Mediterranean, but six large submarines were dispatched to the western Atlantic, with more to follow.

The German commanders found a U-boat paradise. Hundreds of Allied ships were beating along the great lanes that ran from off the coast of Nova Scotia down to Nantucket Shoals, to New York City, to the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, to Florida, and thence to the rich oil ports of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Few of the ships were armed; they did not sail in convoys; often they were silhouetted, a perfect target for German torpedoes, against the glowing shore lights of tourist cities like Miami and Atlantic City, whose neon signs were not doused until mid-April. The U-boats would strike without warning, sometimes blowing a tanker or cargo ship in two with one torpedo, usually rescuing survivors or letting them get away in lifeboats, sometimes offering provisions to survivors—“send the bill to Roosevelt”—but occasionally machine-gunning them. The young U-boat commanders sometimes had so many targets they would coolly let a ship in ballast pass by and wait for a laden freighter. In March the over-all toll was 788,000 tons of dry cargo shipping, 375,000 tons in tankers, mostly along the coast and in the Gulf. The loss in tankers was so severe they had to be withdrawn from the Atlantic coastal trade.

The Nazis were exultant. Raeder calculated that total Allied
shipbuilding in 1942 would be seven million tons and that the Navy need sink only 600,000 tons a month to keep ahead; it was doing far better than that. Hitler, once so parsimonious with his Navy, played with the enticing hope that the offensive could slow down all Allied operations across the Atlantic or even stop them completely.

For a man who had dealt with a somewhat similar though far less critical problem during World War I, Roosevelt commanded a Navy that was surprisingly unprepared to cope with the fury and scope of the U-boat offensive. In part the problem was the usual one of scant equipment. Three months after Pearl Harbor the Navy had only eighty-six planes, sixty-seven Coast Guard cutters, and a motley collection of converted yachts and trawlers to cover the whole East Coast. The President had complained that it was hard to interest the Bureau of Ships in small vessels, but he merely ruffled the independent-minded admirals instead of commanding them. For a time the Navy tried aggressive patrolling, but as the sinkings mounted and ships had to run in and hole up in sheltered bays at night, King turned to ingenious combinations of convoys.

Not only was the Navy ill prepared and equipped when the U-boats first struck the coast in force; it also had virtually no plans to enlist, and co-operate with, the Army Air Force. The admirals became so desperate, however, that they turned to the Army as a temporary expedient. The Army Air Force was eager to help. It had been unable to close with the enemy in the Pacific, and its grandiose plans for the strategic bombing of Germany were still mere plans. Now it could fight Germans. By early spring a few score army bombers of any type that could be scratched up—one observer was reminded of Joffre’s taxicab army—were running patrols out over the sea. The whole operation was gallant but amateurish. The pilots had not been trained for their work; indeed, under an old Army-Navy treaty, the Army controlled land-based and the Navy sea-based aviation. Army pilots had had little training in the fine art of hunting the U-boat; some of them first went out with demolition rather than depth bombs, ship identification was poor, and there was always the problem of co-ordinating with the Navy under harrowing conditions of shortages, faulty intelligence, and the constantly growing and moving packs of submarines.

The President was annoyed by the Navy’s slow mobilization against the Nazi attack, Sherwood said later, but he took little direct hand, aside from suggesting to King on one occasion that a PBY be fit with a searchlight for night-hunting of submarines. In mid-April Hopkins cabled from London that losses were now running at more than half a million tons a month and that the need for ships over the next few months would be desperate. It was
clear to the White House that the antisubmarine campaign would not succeed in time. The best way to overcome shipping losses was to outbuild them.

If there were any miracles in World War II, the shipbuilding spurt of 1942 would qualify. The President had set astronomical goals in January; he boosted these again the next month, and then again a few months later. Admiral Land and his Maritime Commission were aghast at these figures, which seemed to have been plucked out of nowhere. The commission had to compete for supplies against the Navy and Army, and the shipyards were plagued by machine-tool shortages, strikes, and poor planning of their own. Land demanded steel and more steel; he also urged the President to freeze labor-management relations in the industry so that the workers would not be distracted by union issues. During the first nine months of 1942, shipbuilding fell behind schedule and seemed unable either to meet Roosevelt’s final goal or to offset Allied losses. But it was evident even during the output troughs that the curve of production would rise so high that by the end of 1942 the Commander in Chief’s initial objective of eight million tons would be met. It was.

The near-miracle would become an American legend. It was achieved as much by flouting the rules as by observing them. Henry J. Kaiser, in particular, grabbed all the tools and materials he could lay his hands on, hired untrained workers recklessly on the theory that he could teach them, and was denounced for pirating labor and priority supplies. But he depended on American experience in standardization, prefabrication, and mass production, plus the happy protection of cost-plus. He had instinctively grasped Roosevelt’s rule, Eliot Janeway noted, that energy was more efficient than efficiency. By spring of 1942 Kaiser’s and other shipyards that had begun to build only the year before were breaking records by completing ships in sixty to seventy days rather than the anticipated 105. Deliveries rose from twenty-six in March to sixty-seven in June. Most of the credit for the feat went to the builders and doers. But the dreamer in the White House who had set the “impossible” goals in 1942 was also the signer of the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 and the launcher of a long-range shipbuilding program; he had stepped up the shipbuilding effort after the fall of France; he had put men like Land and Vickery in charge; and—perhaps hardest of all despite his love for small graceful ships he had approved the design of a simple cargo vessel called the “Liberty ship” but known to Roosevelt and other sailors as the “Ugly Duckling.”

Five months after Pearl Harbor war production had been lagging so badly that Roosevelt warned Nelson and others that his great
goals for 1942 were not being met. War supply improved markedly during the spring, however, and by midsummer the toughest problem facing the administration was not so much production as planning the allocation of war supply to different services at home and to beseeching Allies abroad, in the face of ever-shifting strategic needs, as the fortunes of war rose and fell in distant battle theaters. This planning, of incredible magnitude and complexity, was putting heavy pressure on Roosevelt’s war agencies and on his and Churchill’s allied boards by late spring of 1942.

Part of the trouble lay in the sudden transition from cold to all-out war. Before Pearl Harbor the President had been cautious in his public projection of spending and in his requests to Congress, and Congress had been irresolute and at times niggardly. On December 7 everything instantly changed: Roosevelt set seemingly fantastic production goals, and Congress simply opened the floodgates, appropriating almost a hundred billion dollars in the first six months and adding another sixty billion in the next four.

Such was the case with fighting manpower, too. The Congress that had almost voted out the draft endorsed sudden huge expansions after Pearl Harbor. In January 1942 the President authorized an increase in army strength to 3.6 million by the end of the year. Four months later he boosted this goal to well over five million, but he would not approve Marshall’s proposal to go to almost nine million by the end of 1943. To Marshall’s chagrin, the President preferred to plan six months to a year ahead—and he made no secret of that preference. Roosevelt was sensitive to charges that more equipment was being bought than could be used or could be sent overseas—for example, a newspaper report that enough uniforms were on hand or on order for fifty million men.

Struggling to hold the colossal sums in some kind of balance was Donald Nelson and his WPB. In early spring he had to inform the President that the forty billion dollars’ worth of production considered feasible for 1942 right after Pearl Harbor had become inflated to sixty-two billion, and the sixty billion for 1943 had swollen to 110 billion—and that the increases were physically not possible. Nelson was in an unhappy position of being the “production czar” without a czar’s powers. The President had placed on him, he insisted to the War Department and other rivals, the duty of exercising direction over the entire war
procurement and production program. But in fact he had to compete with General Brehon Somervell’s huge new Services of Supply, with the Navy, with the international raw materials and allocations boards, and with a cluster of shipping and other czars. And Nelson himself was too much the conciliator and the negotiator to give driving leadership to the whole mobilization and allocation effort. The result was a procurement free-for-all. Merchant ships took steel from the Navy, the Navy took aluminum from aircraft, rubber took valves from escort vessels and from petroleum, the pipelines took steel from ships, new tools, and the railroads. “All semblance of balance in the production program disappeared,” a Budget Bureau study revealed, “because of the different rates of contracting and of production that resulted from the scramble to place orders.”

Roosevelt was still being urged to set up an integrated super-agency under a real superczar, as Baruch had proposed long before the war, and he was still resisting. In the spring of 1942 strategic plans were still open; whether or not Russia could survive the gathering German offensive was still a burning question. The President still did not want to plan ahead more than six months or a year; he wanted, as always, to protect other options in case of a collapse in Russia or North Africa or the Pacific. He could not forget that the very strength of a production and allocation superczar might tie his hands in granting aid to other nations, especially Russia.

Always there were the frantic demands of Allied nations for supplies, and no one in authority in Washington was more sensitive to those demands than Roosevelt. The pressure from abroad itself was institutionalized; uneasily coexisting with United States agencies by this time were a host of international organizations for allocation. At the
ARCADIA
Conference Roosevelt and Churchill had set up the Combined Munitions Assignments Board (MAB) in Washington and London, operating under the Combined Chiefs of Staff; other combined boards were established for raw materials, production, shipping, and food during the first half of 1942. Despite some misgivings in Washington that the British would have an undue influence over the MAB pool of arms while making much the smaller contribution, the board worked reasonably well as a means of Anglo-American consultation and adjustment. But it was by no means a global agency. Its members were required only to “confer” with Russia, China, and other United Nations; when Chungking put out feelers for membership it was denied on the ground that only nations with disposable surpluses should be admitted.

Lend-Lease, now one of the veteran programs after a year of expansion and hard experience, had become a potent instrument of American foreign policy. It could set broad policy for programs in support of the civilian economy of beneficiary nations, but after Pearl Harbor it gave up to the War Department most of its control of military Lend-Lease. Military and civilian goods that could easily be segregated in theory could not be in practice—for example, when it came to shipping military equipment and nonmilitary
supplies in one cargo vessel. For months after Pearl Harbor, military Lend-Lease was snarled by interagency conflict, administrative confusion, and innumerable crises.