Pearl Harbor Read online

  A German offensive in April 1940 shattered the false confidence that Hitler’s appetite for expansion had been appeased. On April 9, the Nazi Blitzkrieg overran Denmark, and German troops swarmed over Norway. A month later, Hitler’s armies swept over the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium. On May 13, German panzers bypassed the Maginot Line, crossed the Meuse River, and entered French territory.

  The once-powerful French army crumbled after six weeks of fighting. On June 15, the French premier called Winston Churchill, who had been chosen British prime minister just ten days earlier. “We have been defeated,” he said. “The Battle of France is over,” Churchill told a somber Parliament. “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.”

  Churchill was right. Beginning in the summer of 1940, Hitler hurled his Luftwaffe (air force) at the British, hoping to destroy coastal installations in preparation for a cross-Channel invasion. The Royal Air Force fought back, managing to keep the Germans at bay. Frustrated, Hitler ordered the bombing of RAF bases and the terror bombing of London. From September to November, nearly 250 German bombers dropped their deadly cargo over London every night. The British people, though badly battered, refused to break.

  Over the course of the summer, American isolationism was diminishing. The fall of France had changed the military calculus in Washington. The images of Hitler’s brutality, combined with Roosevelt’s warnings about the dangers of isolationism, started to turn public opinion at home. In May, only 35 percent of Americans favored aiding the Allies. By August, the figure had risen to 60 percent.

  Taking advantage of the shift in public mood, Roosevelt pushed through Congress an extension of the Selective Service Act and a dramatic increase in military spending. Total appropriations for the army and navy topped $17 billion, more than nine times the figure for 1939. By the fall of 1940, the navy had 210 ships committed for construction, including 12 aircraft carriers. Congress also supported the president’s proposal for 50,000 airplanes.13

  Roosevelt was convinced that America’s survival was directly linked to the fate of Britain. “If Great Britain goes down,” he said, “all of us in the Americas would be living at the point of a gun.” Roosevelt understood that if Britain fell, Hitler would soon direct his fury against the United States. Over the next few months, Roosevelt publicly announced his support for a series of controversial measures that pushed the nation closer to war. He supported a plan to exchange U.S. Navy destroyers for access to British military bases in the Western Hemisphere. FDR understood the importance of sending America’s limited resources to help Britain, especially since most people believed that it could not survive for long with or without American aid.14

  Realizing that most members of his administration disagreed with his ardent internationalism, Roosevelt decided to shake up his cabinet in an effort to recruit like-minded men who shared his view of the European crisis and who, ideally, could also forge bipartisan support for his policies. He looked to the progressive wing of the Republican Party and found two aging disciples of his cousin Theodore Roosevelt’s muscular view of American foreign policy. During the summer of 1940, Roosevelt named the seventy-two-year-old Henry L. Stimson as the new secretary of war. Stimson was joined by another aging pillar of the Republican establishment, publisher Frank Knox, sixty-seven, who became FDR’s new secretary of the navy.

  Stimson was perhaps the most influential member of the Republican foreign policy establishment. This would be his second tour of duty as secretary of war—he had served in the same capacity under William Howard Taft. After the United States entered World War I, Stimson, nearing fifty, joined the military with the rank of colonel. He was so proud of his service that afterward he preferred that people refer to him as “the Colonel.” Upon returning from the war, he served in the Coolidge administration before Herbert Hoover named him secretary of state in 1929.

  An unabashed internationalist, Stimson believed the world would be a better place if the United States assumed the responsibilities of a global superpower. American business interests should expand around the world, government policy should be designed to further those interests, and the power to shape foreign policy should be vested in the presidency.15

  Roosevelt also named to his cabinet another stalwart Republican leader, Frank Knox, who had fought alongside Theodore Roosevelt as a Rough Rider during the Spanish-American War. One of his most treasured possessions was a bullet-ridden sombrero, which he claimed to have worn as he charged up San Juan Hill. Like Stimson, he volunteered during World War I and, at the age of forty-three, enlisted in the army as a colonel. During the 1930s, he emerged as a tough critic of FDR’s New Deal programs, dismissing them as “alien and un-American.” His strong opposition earned him a place on the Republican ticket as the vice presidential nominee in 1936. Although he had been critical of Roosevelt’s domestic reforms, he shared TR’s bullish views of America’s role in the world and supported FDR’s policy of aiding the Allies. 16

  Roosevelt could count on Knox and Stimson to support his efforts to aid Britain; moreover, as prominent Republicans, they provided him with political cover. As he nudged America toward providing aid to Britain, Roosevelt realized he needed to build support across the political aisle and garner as many congressional votes as possible.

  Complicating the situation, 1940 was an election year, and Roosevelt faced the difficult decision of whether to seek an unprecedented third term in office. Had it been a typical year, Roosevelt likely would have retired from politics at the end of his second term. Instead, he decided to campaign for a third term. He believed that the global situation was too precarious, and the need to defeat Hitler too important, for him to simply step aside.

  It became clear early on in the campaign that issues of war and peace would decide the outcome. Growing concern about the deteriorating situation in Europe pushed the Republican Party to abandon its isolationist moorings and nominate little-known Wendell Willkie, a forty-eight-year-old Wall Street lawyer and utilities executive. Initially, Willkie expressed support for Roosevelt’s defense policies and focused his attacks on the perceived failures of the New Deal. But in August, trailing badly in the polls, Willkie shifted gears. Three days after publicly supporting Roosevelt’s destroyers-for-bases deal, Willkie condemned the move as “the most arbitrary and dictatorial action ever taken by a president in the history of the United States.” Over the next few months, he sharpened his attacks. Early in October, charging the president was leading the country into war, Willkie warned that a Roosevelt reelection would mean “wooden crosses for sons and brothers and sweethearts.” The Republican promised that he would not send “one American boy into the shambles of another war.”

  By mid-October, polls showed Willkie gaining ground in key states with large electoral votes, including Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. The president decided to douse the flames with deception. In late October, in what became the most quoted statement of the campaign, Roosevelt told a crowd in Boston, “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.” In the past he had always qualified the statement by saying, “except in cases of attack.” He now said the disclaimer was not necessary. “It’s implied, clearly. If we’re attacked, it’s no longer a foreign war.”17

  However disingenuous, Roosevelt’s reassurances worked. He fended off Willkie’s late surge and won reelection handily.

  The president interpreted the election as an endorsement of his pro-British policies, and he responded by pushing for more aid. Churchill privately warned Roosevelt that the war was draining money from the British Treasury and that the “moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.” A few days after Christmas, Roosevelt responded by unveiling a “Lend-Lease” proposal, which would allow the United States to provide Britain with valuable war matériel. After the war, Britain would repay the United States in kind. Roosevelt compared Lend-Lease to a garden hose one lends
to a neighbor whose house is on fire. Urging the United States to “be the great arsenal of democracy,” Roosevelt insisted that aiding the British was the best way to keep America out of the war.

  Isolationists in Congress battled to defeat Lend-Lease. “Lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum,” Senator Robert Taft grumbled. Isolationists formed the America First Committee to organize opposition to Roosevelt’s actions. Led by a diverse group that included Taft, aviator hero Charles Lindbergh, and socialist Norman Thomas, committee members rejected the idea that Hitler posed a threat to American security.

  However, the momentum of war was influencing American attitudes about the nation’s role in the struggle for Europe. Polls showed more than 60 percent of the American public supporting Lend-Lease. Internationalists organized the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Headed by Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White, the group called for unlimited aid to Britain. “Every time Hitler bombed London, we got a couple of votes,” declared a congressional Lend-Lease supporter. The proposal quickly passed in both the House and the Senate. Both houses also passed legislation approving Roosevelt’s request for $8 billion in additional funds to rearm the nation, while authorizing a one-year draft—the first peacetime conscription in American history.

  Roosevelt was clearly maneuvering the nation into a war with Germany. He allowed the American navy to provide support for British ships, knowing that the policy would provoke lethal confrontations with the German U-boats that patrolled the Atlantic. The policy represented an escalation of what had already become an undeclared naval war in the North Atlantic. Three months earlier, in September 1941, a U-boat had attacked the USS Greer, an American destroyer that had been chasing the German submarine for hours. The president used the Greer incident to denounce the Germans as the “rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.” The following month, a U-boat torpedoed the destroyer Kearny, killing eleven. “America has been attacked,” Roosevelt blustered. “The U.S.S. Kearny is not just a Navy ship. She belongs to every man, woman and child in this nation.” On October 30, an attack on the Reuben James resulted in the loss of ninety-six men. In response, Roosevelt ordered all ships engaged in escort duty to “shoot on sight” any German submarines appearing in waters west of Iceland.

  Public anger at the sinking of American ships provided Roosevelt with the support he needed to repeal the neutrality legislation. On November 13, 1941, Congress voted by a narrow margin to permit American merchant ships to sail through war zones to British and Russian ports. The last remaining restrictions on American actions had been removed. As a New York Times editorial declared, “The Battle of the Atlantic is on.”

  Sitting in the privacy of his study on Sunday morning, December 7, FDR could take satisfaction in having moved public opinion closer to his internationalist view of the war in Europe. Most Americans wanted to avoid getting involved in the conflict, but at least they now realized that America had a stake in the outcome. Meanwhile, as Roosevelt pushed the nation to the brink of war in Europe, the first bombs were about to fall in the Pacific.

  2

  “Do not let the talks deteriorate”

  ON SUNDAY morning, December 7, it was events in the Pacific, not Europe, that were weighing heavily on FDR. Tensions between Washington and Tokyo had mounted through the 1930s as Japan took advantage of the situation in Europe to expand its influence in Asia. Preoccupied with their own survival, European colonial powers could spare few resources to protect their Asian possessions.

  By the 1930s, Japan had emerged as a major military power in Asia. Bragging the third-largest navy in the world, Japan’s leaders were determined to establish a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” by seizing control of large areas of Siberia, Manchuria, and eastern China. Acting on its ambitions, Tokyo captured Manchuria in 1931, established a puppet government, and dispatched colonists to settle the land. In 1937, Japan intensified and broadened its invasion, bombing Chinese cities and killing thousands of civilians. In Nanking, Japanese troops slaughtered 100,000 Chinese. In December, in the midst of a full-scale military attack against China, Japanese war planes sank the American gunboat Panay, killing two American sailors and wounding thirty. Though Roosevelt privately considered responding with economic sanctions, he did nothing once Japan apologized.

  During the 1930s, the United States criticized Japanese aggression in the Far East and refused to recognize their claim to territory in China. But Roosevelt always stopped short of taking any action. Henry Stimson had set the course of American policy in the region when he served as secretary of state in the Hoover administration. The so-called Stimson Doctrine stated that the United States would not recognize any arrangements imposed on China by force. Even before he took the oath of office in March 1933, Roosevelt had endorsed the main principles of the doctrine. Like many Americans, Roosevelt clung to a romantic image of the Chinese—an image reinforced by his ancestors’ ties to the China trade. “I always had the deepest sympathy for the Chinese,” adviser Raymond Moley recalled FDR saying. “How could you expect me not to go along with Stimson on Japan?”1

  Regardless of his personal feelings, the reality was that the United States lacked the power to challenge Japanese predominance in East Asia. Economic power was the only effective weapon in the American arsenal. Japan depended on the United States for a long list of strategic materials, especially oil—80 percent of Japanese oil came from the United States. But Roosevelt stopped short of using that leverage, consumed as he was with Europe, and dismissed the idea that Japan represented any real threat to American interests.

  That changed in 1940 when, encouraged by Hitler’s conquests, a new Japanese government headed by Premier Fumimaro Konoye decided it could solve its problem of dependence on imports by seizing oil fields in the Dutch East Indies, British rubber plants in Malaya, and tin mines in French-controlled Indochina. Tokyo’s new military government pressured London to close supply routes through Hong Kong and Burma and to remove the British garrison from Shanghai. It also pressed France to shut the Indochina border. Suddenly, what had been a largely regional problem had the potential of exploding into a global conflict.

  In response to the growing Japanese threat, Roosevelt decided to relocate the American Pacific Fleet from California to Pearl Harbor on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The British had been pressuring FDR to deter the Japanese, and his military advisers hoped that the fleet’s presence would send a strong message to the Japanese to tame their aggression. In reality, the fleet was never strong enough to undertake offensive operations, and its presence was largely symbolic.2

  The more pressing question was whether to impose economic sanctions on Japan, especially an embargo on oil shipments. Hard-liners, including Stimson, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, lobbied for a total embargo on oil shipments. Roosevelt, however, was engaged in a delicate balancing act: He wanted to use economic leverage to temper Japanese aggression, but he did not want to trigger a confrontation that would draw attention and resources away from the European theater. “It is terribly important for the control of the Atlantic,” Roosevelt told Harold Ickes in early July, “for us to keep peace in the Pacific. I simply have not got enough Navy to go around—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.” He never lost sight that Germany posed a greater threat to American interests than Japan. As he cautioned an adviser, war with Japan would mean “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.”3

  Roosevelt felt he had to take some action, so on July 26, 1940, he agreed to a limited embargo on the export of high-octane aviation gasoline and premium grades of iron and steel. Both Stimson and Ickes felt the limited embargo did not go far enough. They wanted a ban on all gasoline, but FDR preferred a go-slow approach, saying that he wanted “to slip the noose around Japan’s neck, and give it a jerk now and then.”4

  The two nations were trapped in a cycle of escalation. Japan responded to the limited embargo by
occupying the northern portion of Indochina. In September, Roosevelt upped the ante by signing an order banning the export of all iron and steel. He also announced a $100 million loan to China on September 27. Two days later, Japan countered by signing a treaty with Germany and Italy, the so-called Tripartite Pact, in which the three nations pledged to come to one another’s help in the event of an attack “by a power not already engaged in war.” Japan designed the treaty to prevent the United States from either aiding Britain in its battle against Germany or opposing its plans to dominate Asia. Japan hoped that the threat of a two-front war would deter the United States from taking further steps toward confrontation.5

  Yet despite Japanese escalation throughout the winter and spring of 1940–1941, FDR largely left the problems in the Pacific on the back burner. Although he liked to think of himself as his own secretary of state, he allowed his foreign policy team to deal with the Japan problem. His civilian and military advisers, however, were deeply divided. Administration hawks continued to press for an embargo on all oil shipments, not just the high-octane oil needed for airplanes. Some military leaders urged caution, warning that cutting off oil would only force Japan to seek it somewhere else, possibly threatening the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and even the Philippines. More worrisome, the military realized that the United States was not prepared to fight a war in Asia and feared a confrontation would drain needed armaments from the European theater.6