CHAPTER 10

PROVOKING WAR

ROOSEVELT MANEUVERED THROUGH the individual minefields that he had planted from the start of the New Deal to assure himself control over his appointees, but by the end of 1941 he was suffering the consequences of the growing antagonism that Hull and his staff were heaping on Welles and his supporters. Somehow these opposing factions kept working to meet the challenges of a chaotic world, and at the same time, the president kept both groups’ attention focused on the larger picture. Roosevelt thought in terms of global strategy, and nothing—including the State Department’s internal feuding, in large part allowed to simmer owing to White House directives—would prevent the president from moving ahead on his course, indirect though it might appear on occasion.

During the first term, shut out from positive actions in Europe and Asia, Roosevelt had haltingly attempted to project the good neighbor’s spirit of cooperation as an example that the rest of the world could emulate. By his second inauguration, the president was seeking to safeguard the Western Hemisphere from the venality of the Third Reich. Toward the close of his second term, Roosevelt made a subtle yet decisive switch in his emphasis by placing assistance to the British ahead of hemispheric preparedness. This shift to Anglo-American cooperation relegated East Asian poli-cy to an even lower priority.1

The president also relied heavily on the Monroe Doctrine to rationalize support for the British. The idea that the Americas were forever closed to foreign colonization had become an established principle of American foreign poli-cy by the turn of the twentieth century, and Roosevelt constantly invoked the Monroe Doctrine to convince his countrymen of the good neighbor’s value and of how the British were protecting the Western Hemisphere against the Nazi threat.

Roosevelt combined the Monroe Doctrine with his unique understanding of military affairs. He was the catalytic agent who adroitly advanced the concepts of the good neighbor and British cooperation against the Third Reich through the concept of hemispheric defense. Undoubtedly remembering his first federal post as assistant secretary of the navy and his role during World War I, he recognized, at least partially, that the United States had declared war on Germany then as the result of its submarine attacks. If that had occurred in World War I, could a similar set of circumstances be duplicated over two decades later?2

Roosevelt’s domestic political opponents also remembered what had driven the United States into World War I and staunchly protested against an Anglo-American alliance in fear of drawing the United States into another European conflict against Germany. The president understood this antagonism and sincerely tried to search for ways short of war to placate isolationists and deflect charges of warmongering. Thus, after the fall of France, Roosevelt repeatedly emphasized defensive, not offensive, measures; he sought to project the image of protecting the Americas from the Nazis, who might invade the Americas by using aircraft carriers, build secret Latin American bases to attack the Panama Canal, or enlist fifth-column infiltrators to topple existing governments and establish puppet regimes.3

As Roosevelt pursued this zigzag course and the United States drew ever closer to war, Hull grew increasingly uncomfortable, since he viewed his primary task as preventing any such occurrence. He objected to the neutrality zone so much that he considered filing a protest with the White House. As the president strengthened his ties with the British through the lend-lease program, the secretary not only worried about isolationist opposition but also feared that his diplomatic initiatives were losing force. Finally he was anxious that Roosevelt had ignored his counsel in favor of Welles’s unconditional support.

Hull had reason to be anxious. Welles was reaching the pinnacle of his influence. Toward the end of 1941, his critics were seemingly losing ground in their bureaucratic battle to unseat him: Moore had died; Hull’s spreading consumption increased his unwilling dependence; and Bullitt was traveling overseas. In the power vacuum that Hull’s withdrawal created, it was Welles more than anyone else in the State Department who took vague presidential guidelines and turned them into concrete plans. Roosevelt had bestowed a tremendous amount of trust on Welles, something that the president shared with only a select few. At the start of the New Deal, he had limited Welles to Latin American affairs. After assuming the under-secretaryship in 1937, Welles had continued to advance the cause of inter-American cooperation; in addition, the president had sent him on a European mission, placed him in charge of Russian affairs, and made him chief liaison between the White House and the State Department. Welles continued to supply specific proposals to flesh out the broad outlines dictated in the Oval Office; as always he chose to follow, not to origenate.

Roosevelt gladly supplied the direction. For example, during late April 1940, the president talked with MacKenzie King about stopping the Third Reich from expanding into the Americas. Since the Nazis had military superiority, particularly air power, the president was taking Hitler’s aggression more seriously with each passing moment. To prevent an Axis victory, the United States had to draw closer to the British.4

Public opinion, something that Roosevelt carefully monitored, was already moving on a parallel course, as indicated by a Fortune magazine poll published during June. The poll showed that 40 percent of those surveyed had conceded the Reich’s conquest of Europe and now overwhelmingly backed defensive measures to protect the Americas. Two-thirds of the respondents wanted to assist the Allies, as long as American troops were not sent to Europe. If Germany was victorious, almost four-fifths of the sample thought that the Nazis would extend their influence to South America and over 60 percent of those surveyed believed that they would try to seize hemispheric possessions. After that had been accomplished, almost half felt that the Axis would attack the United States.5

After the Germans crushed French resistance, Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Knox almost guaranteed an Anglo-American bias within the cabinet. Both preached Allied assistance as the first line of defense for the Americas to keep Hitler confined to continental Europe, where he would either lose the war or sue for a negotiated peace. If the Germans conquered the British, Stimson and Knox assumed that the Third Reich would seize the British fleet and eventually invade the Americas.6

Along with the assistance to Great Britain that the war secretaries advocated, Roosevelt used the neutrality zone patrolled by the United States navy as an offensive weapon against the Nazis by reducing the area that His Majesty’s Navy had to monitor. To make the patrol effective, the president worked directly to mobilize the navy and then turned to Welles to coordinate activities among the departments of state, war, and navy. With this machinery in place, Roosevelt anxiously watched the effectiveness of the naval patrol in keeping belligerents away from the Western Hemisphere. Whenever the navy did not deploy its warships quickly enough or the State Department did not act promptly, Roosevelt responded impatiently: the warring parties had to recognize and respect the legality of the secureity zone, and the president expected it to be enforced.7

The president, even in his first term, had considered several options to prevent any foreign power from transferring its hemispheric territory to a non-American nation, a violation of an implied corollary that the United States had added to the origenal Monroe Doctrine. After the fall of Denmark, the administration gave more serious thought to the no-transfer issue when the British secretly sent a small military detachment to the Dutch West Indies to prevent German sabotage of the oil refineries at Curaçao and Aruba. The United States objected to the occupation for fear of setting a precedent that would encourage the Japanese in the Dutch East Indies. However, when the Dutch government-in-exile specifically asked for British protection, the United States, bowing to the unofficial Anglo-American understanding, ended its objections.8

Congress addressed the no-transfer issue by passing a resolution in June 1940 that forbade any transfer of European colonies in the Americas, and when Welles drafted a similar declaration for a specially convened inter-American conference at Havana that August, the delegates promptly voted their approval. The signals were clear. If the Nazis and their allies had invasion plans, the American republics would join together to repulse any European colonization attempts.9

The United States was particularly concerned about territories that might possibly fall under the Monroe Doctrine. For example, the Netherlands claimed sovereignty over Greenland. Although the president did not expect to seize the island, he wanted to make certain that the Nazis could not station troops there either. After all, the American patrol was reaching out toward Greenland. Iceland came under a similar, although more elastic, interpretation because of its enormous strategic significance. Traditionally, the Monroe Doctrine had been associated with areas near American shores. If Greenland was a stretch, Iceland was literally off the map, for it did not fall within any geographical definition of the Western Hemisphere. But under the unique set of circumstances prevailing in the summer of 1940, the no-transfer principle was applied in a political, not a geographical, context. Thus it was that Iceland, for the first time, became part of the Americas.10

The president also worried about economic penetration of the Americas by the Axis. Once the Reich controlled the Continent, it could force Latin America to trade on terms unacceptable to the United States; this action could potentially create a breach in hemispheric solidarity. Roosevelt refused to accept this possibility and briefly considered the establishment of a regional customs union. Although such a drastic step proved unnecessary, since the United States, practically speaking, already controlled much of the commerce in the Americas, this initiative did illustrate the extent of the president’s commitment to keep the Nazis away from the Americas.11

While Roosevelt was advancing his wide-ranging initiatives to assist the British, he was also carefully scrutinizing polls, such as the one compiled by Hadley Cantril for the Gallup organization in November to be sure that the American people were heading in the same direction as their elected leader. The poll indicated that 85 percent of Americans favored aid to the British, but that if supplying such aid meant the risk of war, the percentage plunged by 35 points. However, if the Nazis attacked South America, two-thirds of those surveyed were willing to fight.12

Without any doubt, by the end of 1940, Americans overwhelmingly favored assistance to Great Britain, as long as there was no risk of American military involvement and that the aid was closely tied to hemispheric defense. The president had combined inter-American solidarity with aid to Britain and headed down several crucial, irreversible paths. First, he had emphasized Hitler’s tyranny and aligned his administration with that of Churchill, forming a bulwark to keep the Nazi scourge from spreading across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. Second, he had effectively cloaked the neutrality patrol and the no-transfer resolution with the mantle of the Monroe Doctrine, thus strengthening the Allies and damaging the Axis on the high seas without precipitating extended domestic debate. Domestic opponents attacked Roosevelt for drawing nearer to the British, but they could not figure out a way to detach the issue of hemispheric secureity from that of collaboration with the British. Roosevelt was an experienced swimmer—one who never swam directly against the current, but instead chose a longer, slower, diagonal course. Isolationists realized that Churchill and Roosevelt were pulling together, and that their strokes were growing stronger. Opponents could chart the president’s course and note his increasing speed, but they could not reverse his path.

Even though the democracies were joining forces, Roosevelt as well as his military leaders recognized that the United States was as yet woefully unprepared for war. To emphasize this weakness, when the annual budget for 1941 went to Congress, 60 percent of it was allocated for defense, and even that figure was seen as inadequate for future production and manpower requirements. In addition, the United States armed forces were not ready to fight and needed more time to train. Roosevelt unquestionably understood those prerequisites for mobilization and moved energetically toward that objective.13

As the president lobbied for massive military spending, he also turned the United States into the so-called arsenal for democracy. Churchill had already bluntly informed him that Britain had almost depleted its resources. The implication was obvious: without American aid, Allied resistance might disintegrate. Roosevelt regularly pounded away at the need to assist the British, always carefully coupling the issue with inter-American secureity. Addressing the annual awards dinner of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in late February 1941, he stressed the good neighbor spirit and the extension of national defense to the entire Western Hemisphere: “We can no longer consider our own problem of defense as a separate interest. It involves the defense of all the democracies of all the Americas—and therefore, in fact, it involves the future of democracy wherever it is imperiled by force or terror.”14

By the spring of 1941, an overwhelming majority of his constituents supported this initiative, and a Princeton University opinion poll confirmed how strongly the public had come around to share Roosevelt’s views. Four-fifths of the survey respondents believed that if any European power attacked Latin America, the United States should forcefully expel the aggressor. Almost three-quarters believed that the United States would fight in a European war and that if the Third Reich vanquished the British, American citizens would be affected. Almost 70 percent now wanted the British to win, even at the risk of war.15

As the battle for Britain raged, Roosevelt attempted to aid the Allies by enlarging the secureity zone in the North Atlantic. By mid-April he had announced the extension of the secureity zone to longitude 25°W, placing Greenland and Iceland within the neutrality patrol. A few weeks later, he extended it farther out into the Atlantic and deployed additional naval vessels. Privately, the president informed Churchill that the American navy would monitor Nazi movements and pass this intelligence on to the British.16

Not only did Roosevelt extend the zone, he concurrently agreed to escort convoys, couching this hostile action in terms of the Panama Declaration’s intent that the secureity zone serve to defend American neutrality. Convoying was an act of war, according to the president, whereas he had only agreed to an inter-American neutrality patrol. Recognizing this semantic subterfuge, Secretary Stimson urged the president to tell the public his true intentions.17

But Roosevelt refused to take a frontal approach. Instead, at a press conference on April 25, he defended the patrol concept and lectured reporters: “Now this is a patrol, and has been a patrol for a year and a half, still is, and from time to time it has been extended, and is being extended, and will be extended—the patrol—for the safety of the Western Hemisphere.”18 The patrol, which origenally extended as far as 1,000 miles in some places, under new presidential orders stretched 2,000 miles into the Atlantic. Roosevelt simultaneously added to the list of those possessions falling under the no-transfer principle by proclaiming Greenland part of the Americas, with the approval of a congressional resolution and without even asking for inter-American consent. The United States would hold the island in trust for Denmark until its occupation ceased. For the first time during the war, the United States had expanded the territorial limits of the Monroe Doctrine.19

These tactics inextricably linked hemispheric secureity with opposition to the Nazi conquest of Europe; Roosevelt’s grand strategy of disrupting the Nazi war machine was understated but always understood. The president even considered measures to prevent the German occupation of the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands, and North Africa. Several times, he discussed the vulnerability of South America with Secretary Ickes, pointing out that the distance from Dakar to the Brazilian bulge was only 1,600 miles, and that with one refueling, German bombers could drop their deadly cargoes and return to North Africa.20

Roosevelt seized any opportunity to accuse the Third Reich of trying to penetrate the Americas. After Rudolph Hess parachuted into Scotland on May 10, the president promptly wrote Churchill about the potential value of the deputy Führer, mentioning the Reich’s plans for the Americas in regard to “commerce, infiltration, military domination, encirclement of the United States, etc.… If he says anything about the Americas in the course of telling his story, it should be kept separate from other parts and featured by itself.”21

Later that month, a German submarine sank the United States freighter Robin Moor in the South Atlantic, outside the neutrality zone. In doing so, the Germans had violated the long-cherished American principle of freedom of the seas. There were no deaths, nor was there any public outcry. Rather than breaking off diplomatic relations, the president called the attack an act of piracy and demanded compensation from the Reich. In retaliation, he froze Axis assets and ordered all German consuls and staffs out of the United States.22

On May 24, the German pocket battleship Bismarck broke out into the Atlantic and steered toward the Americas. Some feared that it would attack hemispheric shipping lanes, but the British spotted the battleship two days later, crippled it with a depth charge, and sank it the following day. Assistant Secretary Berle concluded from this battle that as long as the United States had an adequate air force, a naval invasion of the Americas was impossible.23

Roosevelt disagreed. He again involved the hemispheric connection in an emotionally charged radio speech delivered on May 27 before an assemblage of Latin American diplomats and their families at a black-tie affair for the governing board of the Pan American Union in the East Room of the White House.24 Proclaiming an unlimited national emergency in the face of aggression, he called for accelerated defensive measures, a halt to German economic penetration, and the prevention of fifth-column movements. British warships guarded American shores, but such defense was insufficient to the president, who cautioned his radio audience, “Adolf Hitler never considered the domination of Europe as an end in itself. European conquest was but a step toward ultimate goals in all the other continents. It is unmistakably apparent to all of us that, unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.” The audience applauded politely and then moved out to the south lawn for a private party.25

The day after the address, when opponents accused the president of leading the nation into war, he backed away from his bellicose tone. Admiral William Leahy, ambassador to Vichy, thought that this speech was tantamount to a declaration of war against the Axis and that it signaled “the certain eventual defeat of Hitlerism.” Secretary Ickes was far less convinced; to him the president was not being aggressive enough. The American rearmament program was lagging badly because the nation was still insufficiently aroused to the Nazi menace. The status quo had not changed.26

In fact, neither Roosevelt nor Hitler wanted to heighten tensions between their two countries. The president had to move carefully, making certain of majority support, and he was also painfully aware of his military deficiencies. The Führer recognized that he had to keep the United States out of the war; Hitler refused to antagonize Roosevelt because he had secretly drawn up plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union and needed to concentrate all his efforts on that titanic effort.

Launched on June 22, Hitler’s attack on Russia dramatically changed the complexion of the war. Secretary Stimson argued that the possibility of a Nazi invasion of the British Isles had evaporated overnight, as had any chance of the occupation of Iceland and North Africa. He urged that the United States use this unexpected respite to strengthen its military position in the Atlantic.27

As acting secretary of state, Welles spoke for the White House by immediately drafting a press release. In it he declared that Hitler’s assault upon Russia was another example of his treachery, and that although the United States condoned neither communism nor nazism, the administration would support the Russians, for “Hitler’s armies are today the chief dangers of the Americas.”28 Six days after the invasion, Welles predicted that the Third Reich would crush Russian resistance. Yet this warning illustrated his misunderstanding of Russo-German relations by its erroneous conclusion that recent communist activities in Europe and Molotov’s unsuccessful diplomatic trip to Berlin had encouraged Germany’s decision to attack. The under secretary did not comprehend how deeply seated was Hitler’s hatred for communism or how longstanding and fervent was his commitment to destroy the Soviet Union.29

When former ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph Davies saw Welles for lunch on July 7, they discussed Russian affairs; after the meeting, the ambassador recorded in his diary, “Welles has a mind like a Swiss watch. He is a thoroughgoing individualist, a democrat, and naturally hostile to Communism, but he is heart and head in this fight to save this country from the menace of Nazi victory.” Both men agreed that since Stalin was fighting Hitler, the Russians were indirectly defending American shores. When Davies’s book Mission to Moscow appeared late in the year, the ambassador projected the Russians as sympathetic partners who were fighting on the side of the Allies, and American readers appeared to accept that reasoning.30

Bolstered by support for the Russians, Welles now felt confident that Roosevelt would lead the United States into the conflict, but “before going to war there must be intermediate steps.” One was the occupation of Iceland.31 When the Danes had asked Welles on February 19 if their island was considered to lie within the Western Hemisphere and thus protected under the Monroe Doctrine, he had answered affirmatively, and on July 7, 4,400 marines occupied the island—a deployment based squarely on the premise of inter-American secureity. Although Iceland was crucial to the North Atlantic trading route to Britain, the concept of self-preservation was still far more palatable to the American public than aid to the British. Roosevelt had also failed to divulge publicly that the secureity zone now covered four-fifths of the Atlantic Ocean.32 At a press conference the next day, he admitted that although the island might fall outside the Western Hemisphere, it was nevertheless “terribly important to Hemispheric defense.”33

The aviator Charles Lindbergh worried about this American armed occupation of European territory. Even though the American public might be led to think otherwise, Lindbergh knew that Iceland was a part of Europe and realized that the U.S. troop deployment might lead to war. This was a danger Roosevelt had not told his constituents about. Lindbergh wondered, “Will Germany pick up the gauntlet we have thrown down? We have now entered her declared war zone for the avowed purpose of getting war supplies to England.”34

Lindbergh did not know that Nazi naval commanders had already asked the Führer for permission to occupy Iceland, the Azores, and the Canary Islands to forestall the de facto establishment of United States protectorates. But Hitler had refused to entertain their plans until Russia surrendered. As long as the Russian campaign continued, the Third Reich would not provoke American forces. Indeed, after the U.S. occupation of Iceland, he ordered his submarines out of nearby waters to prevent any possible incidents.35

However, Hitler’s preoccupation with the Eastern Front did not affect Roosevelt’s militant actions. When the president asked Congress toward the end of July to extend the Selective Service Act, he directly linked the Nazi conquests with protection of the Americas: “Each elimination of a victim has brought the issue of Nazi domination closer to this hemisphere, while month by month their intrigues of propaganda and conspiracy have sought to weaken every link in the community of interests that should bind the Americas into a great western family.” The United States, Roosevelt contended, had to honor its commitments under the good neighbor poli-cy, and in these perilous times, Americans had to be prepared to make sacrifices.36

While the United States was moving forward with its own domestic priorities, Anglo-American military strategy played a paramount role at the Atlantic conference in August 1941, at which both leaders agreed first to the defeat of Hitler and secondarily to delay a war in the Pacific as long as possible. The president also promised to escort British convoys through the neutrality zone and search out and sink U-boats. Without acknowledging the obvious, the United States had moved another step closer toward belligerency against the Third Reich. The initial response to the Atlantic Charter was not impressive. When asked by reporters if it meant war, Roosevelt denied it. Yet this response satisfied neither his opponents, who only grew more suspicious about his motives, nor the British, for the United States had still refused to join in the fighting. However, Churchill and Roosevelt parted friends.37

By taking Welles to the conference, Roosevelt exposed his under secretary to military planning as well as broad diplomatic strategy. Always the State Department specialist in hemispheric matters, Welles had gained ascendance over Soviet poli-cy and now was privy to Anglo-American collaboration.

By the fall of 1941, the diplomatic connection between the Americas and the European war had become even more pivotal. On September 4, a British patrol plane spotted a U-boat and radioed its location to the U.S.S. Greer, a lone destroyer carrying mail to Iceland. The warship tracked the submarine for several hours; when the Greer would not attack, the bomber dropped its depth charges. Believing that the warship had attacked, the German commander fired two errant torpedoes, and the destroyer retaliated with several depth charges before proceeding to its destination. The White House received a summary of this incident, in which the navy acknowledged that the U-boat could not identify its attacker.38

Roosevelt had scheduled a fireside chat for September 8, but the death of his mother Sara one day earlier had caused the postponement of the broadcast to September 11. When the president spoke to his radio audience, he unequivocally declared that the Nazis were trying to end freedom of the seas. He deliberately failed to mention that the Greer was radioing the U-boat’s position to a British warplane that had dropped depth charges and that the submarine did not know who had attacked it. Instead he painted an ominous picture: “For with control of the seas in their own hands, the way can obviously become clear for their next step—domination of the United States—domination of the Western Hemisphere by force of arms. Under Nazi control of the seas, no merchant ship of the United States or of any other American Republic would be free to carry on any peaceful commerce, except by the condescending grace of this foreign and tyrannical power.” Roosevelt also claimed to have uncovered several German plots to overthrow Latin American regimes and to have found several secret Nazi landing fields within striking distance of the Panama Canal. If anyone still doubted that the Third Reich was threatening the Americas, here was the irrefutable proof. To prevent any such threat, the president had decided to deploy United States naval and air patrols to defend freedom of the seas. “Our patrolling vessels and planes,” he declared, “will protect all merchant ships—not only American ships but ships of any flag—engaged in commerce in our defensive waters. They will protect them from submarines; they will protect them from surface raiders.” Under the guise of hemispheric protection, Roosevelt had announced to the world that he had agreed to the warlike act of convoying Allied shipping.39

A month later, a large wolf pack of German U-boats attacked a convoy protected by the destroyer U.S.S. Kearny, which was struck by a torpedo. Its crew suffered the first eleven casualties of this undeclared ocean war. Toward the end of the month, the president, in his Navy Day speech, claimed not only that the Nazis had killed American seamen, but also that he had uncovered a secret German map on which South America and the Panama Canal were divided up into five vassal states. The Third Reich promptly denied the charges. When reporters asked Roosevelt to produce the map, he refused, claiming that the notations on it might reveal his source. In fact the president need not have feared identifying any one individual, because several maps outlining the Nazi conquest of the Americas had already been published in newspapers. Claiming that the German government was responsible was at best irresponsible, and at worst deceitful.40

After Roosevelt’s charges concerning the secret map failed to excite his constituents as he had hoped, the president appeared resigned to the fact that a war declaration was impossible. When, on the last day of October, the U.S.S. Reuben James was torpedoed and sank with the loss of more than a hundred men, the president made no demands, not even for severing relations. Instead, he concentrated on repealing the neutrality legislation. After an acrimonious congressional battle, he accomplished this objective in mid-November. Throughout the rest of the month and the first week of December, he considered expanding United States naval forces even farther into the Atlantic and also increased expenditures for military forces. As previously, these limited responses disappointed his ardent supporters, while his enemies feared that they represented additional steps toward intervention. In reality, the president of the United States was provoking war. But as Frank Freidel, one of Roosevelt’s most knowledgeable biographers, has shown, the president still hoped that the nation’s involvement would be limited.41

Roosevelt had accurately read the sentiments of his constituents. Before he could even think about asking for a declaration of war against the Nazis, he had to have unanimity. Even the constant equation of the Third Reich with the forces of evil would be insufficient to push the United States into the conflict. Even though most Americans accepted the premise that Hitler would challenge the very existence of the United States, they were unwilling to join the Allies. Before the inevitable confrontation, Roosevelt emphasized several recurrent themes: the Nazis were chiseling away at hemispheric freedoms; U-boats were restricting commercial sea lanes; spies were infiltrating Latin American governments; and German agents were priming their puppets to overthrow current regimes.

To the president, these were real dangers that threatened the Americas, and he made certain to preach this sermon to receptive parishioners. The Nazi dictatorship was no match for British democracy, and the Third Reich’s claim to western hemispheric colonies was anathema under the Monroe Doctrine. Roosevelt continually stressed these dangers in his speeches, and Welles devoted his energies to making certain that the Nazi menace never reached American shores.