The American Story

BOOK FIVE

I

Stalking a War

WHEN CONGRESSWOMAN CLARE BOOTH LUCE SAID, “PRESIDENT Roosevelt lied us into war,” people were shocked. It was a scandalous thing to say; it was more than people were willing to believe of the President of the United States.

Then later, when the evidence was overwhelming, Mr. Roosevelt’s ardent defenders shifted their ground. They no longer denied it. They said in effect: Well, suppose he did. To save the country he had to do it.

The clearest statement of what the members of Mr. Roosevelt’s cabinet learned to call the great dilemma was written by a professor of history who afterward wished not to be quoted apart from the context of his book. What he said was that during the period before Pearl Harbor the President repeatedly deceived the people. Why? Because, when he warned them against the aggressors he was branded as a sensationalist; when he pointed to the perils of storm-cellar neutrality he was branded an interventionist; when he urged adequate armaments he was branded a warmonger. He faced a terrible dilemma. If he let the people slumber in a fog of isolation they might fall prey to Hitler. If he came out unequivocally for intervention he would be defeated in 1940 or shelved for a candidate more willing to let the masses enjoy their fool’s paradise. If he was going to induce the people to act at all he would have to trick them into acting for their best interests, or what he conceived to be their best interest.

What if the people had been told the truth?

The dire thought is explored by Robert E. Sherwood, in his book, “Roosevelt and Hopkins.” Sherwood’s status was that of court historian. He was an intimate of Roosevelt’s alter ego, Harry Hopkins; he was an active member of the last brain trust and one of Mr. Roosevelt’s ghost writers. Of the early Lend-Lease days—that was while people still believed that Mr. Roosevelt was intent upon keeping them out of war—Sherwood writes: “The very existence of any American-British joint plans, however tentative, had to be kept utterly secret. It is an ironic fact that in all probability no great damage would have been done had the details of these plans fallen into the hands of the Germans or the Japanese, whereas if they had fallen into the hands of Congress and the press, American preparation for war might have been well nigh wrecked and ruined.” He defines as a common-law marriage the “alliance which existed between the United States and Great Britain,” and goes on to say: “It was certainly not recognized as such in such jurisdictions as the Congress, and if the isolationists had known the full extent of it, their demands for the impeachment of President Roosevelt would have been a great deal louder. But it was a fact of incalculable importance in the whole process of American preparedness for war.”

How to take a free nation into war against its will. That was the problem.

The people, if not resolute, were obstinate. Mr. Roosevelt himself said: “There can be no question that the people of the United States in 1939 were determined to remain neutral in fact and deed.” They had passed laws about it—laws forbidding the shipment of arms to any nation at war, and to outlaw loans and credits to belligerent nations, and to keep American citizens and American vessels from where war was. Almost they were willing to abandon the old American doctrine of freedom of the seas for neutrals. Also they were debating an amendment to the Constitution to say the country could not go to war without a vote of the people, i.e., a referendum; and that would have removed from Congress its Constitutional power to declare war.

To wend his contrary way toward war without a single false step and at the same time to keep an unwilling people with him was a feat of statecraft for which Mr. Roosevelt was peculiarly qualified in mind and character. It took daring, rare sublety, an intuition for right timing and the entirety of his power to cajole the mass mind. That was an extraordinary power, beyond reason or analysis, and almost infallible.

From this time on there was a Roosevelt nobody knew. His old brain trust melted away, some of its members feeling that he had betrayed the future of the New Deal for the role of world leadership. What succeeded it was not a new brain trust but a retinue, to whom his will was instant law. He arrived at momentous decisions by a process nobody understood and then announced them in a casual manner, as if he had just thought of them, which was not the case. He had long periods of incubation during which he might seem exasperatingly carefree and jovial.

It was as if he worked behind a one-way screen. Those inside could see out; nobody outside could see in; and within that screen another one for himself alone, so that even his retinue could not see what he was doing.

One who sat inside the first screen was Robert E. Sherwood, who writes: “Roosevelt never overlooked the fact that his actions might lead to his immediate or eventual impeachment. Having taken the oath of office as President three times, he knew it by heart, and was well aware that he was sworn not only to uphold but to defend the Constitution of the United States. It was a matter of his own judgment—and the judgment of his advisers whom he was empowered to appoint—as to where that defense should begin.”

One effect was that the sanity of communications was threatened. Simple understanding was sunk in a kind of purposeful confusion. The integrity of language was impaired when something could equal nothing and yes and no were cannibal words, self-devouring.

There was of course a war party. There always is. This one, pretending to be a peace party, created for itself a most ingenious facade. It worked as the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, under the highly respectable chairmanship of William Allen White—one of the innocents, a Kansas editor and a Republican whom no one could suspect of being a warmonger, an interventionist or an internationalist. When it was too late he became disillusioned and retired, with bitter regrets at having been involved in a “war dance.”

The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies organized chapters in every state, and drew in its wake many eminent persons who took literally and in good faith its most disarming slogan, which was—Measures Short of War. It was rich and put forth an enormous amount of propaganda, in full-page newspaper advertisements and radio broadcast, all intended, as Alciabiades said, to turn people to war by making their blood run cold.

It fairly exhausted its powers of publicity to move through Congress the Lend-Lease Act, insisting that it was designed to keep the country out of war. Later a brutally honest member of the Committee, Herbert Agar, said: “Our side kept saying in the press and in the Senate that it was a bill to keep America out of war. That is bunk. I think this failure to say exactly what a thing means is an illustration of why our democratic world is being threatened now.” Lend-Lease, he added, was exactly what Senator Wheeler had said it was, namely, an act “to enable the President to fight an undeclared war against Germany.”

(The subject of Lend-Lease is out of place here. We shall come to it further on.)

Mr. Roosevelt’s dilemma arrived at its crucial phase in 1940.

In that year he was going to defy a root-fast American tradition and run for a third term.

And in that year also came the Blitzkrieg in Europe, the pitiless mutilation of Holland and Belgium, the epic of Dunkirk, the fall of France, and all the terror that clutched the heart of the world at the spectacle of Hitler’s Germans doing in a few weeks what the Kaiser’s Germans had been unable to do in four years.

At Dunkirk, on the coast of France, the British heroically rescued a third of a million soldiers, who had been fighting with the French; but when they were home across the Channel they were not an army any more. They had left their arms behind. So, for purposes of land warfare, Great Britain was prone. She would have had to fight with clubs. Nevertheless, instead of then invading England, Hitler decided to bomb her down. Thus began the Battle of Britain in the air. At that Mussolini leaped in, with the cry of the have-nots—they take who can—and there was the Berlin-Rome Axis, which was later to be the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis.

These bodements of evil, moving on the waters of American feeling, produced a mighty turbulence; but the currents were not changed. The interventionists were for intervention still and the isolationists were for isolation still, only both much more so.

On the one hand, England down, fighting for her life and calling for help, was a lurch of history that was bound deeply to move the hearts of a people whose racial foundation was Anglo-Saxon.

More than that, sounds of terror coming from Europe with the speed of light created a sense of nearness and caused the wells of fear to rise and overflow. The war party effectively deployed the myth of a German superman who would set his heel on the neck of the world. The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies produced and widely published a cartoon that showed Hitler stepping across the Atlantic to attack the Western Hemisphere. President Roosevelt made a speech saying the aggressor could reach Omaha and Kansas City in five steps, and it would take him only 17½ hours. What if England should surrender? Would not Hitler then have the British Navy?

At this time the thesis was developed that was going to govern American foreign policy for many years—the thesis, namely, that never again would the United States be able to stand alone in the world. It had to have allies. Defense of Great Britain, therefore, was vital to the security of the United States.

On the other hand, the more horrible the war in Europe was the more resolved the isolationists were to keep this country out of it. They denied the war party’s first premise. If Hitler had been unable to cross the British Channel to finish England when she was prone on the ground, how was he going to cross the Atlantic to attack America? It was Europe’s war, not ours; we had learned our lesson in World War I.

And when, by no leave of Congress, but under the war party’s slogan, measures short of war, the President, to rearm England’s weaponless army, stripped American arsenals of half a million rifles, 30 million rounds of ammunition, eighty thousand machine guns, artillery and shells and bombs and TNT, the isolationists were frantic with alarm. Was that not getting into the war?

The President did this over the protest of many of his most intimate advisers, who said it would ruin his third term campaign.

But he went even further. War planes were diverted from the Army and Navy and sent to England.

At the same time Mr. Churchill was begging for destroyers for defense against the German submarine menace. One day the Naval Affairs Committee of the Senate heard a rumor that some American destroyers were going to be transferred to the British Navy. The Navy denied it, saying that only some motor torpedo boats and some submarine chasers had been transferred. Thereupon, to the Naval Appropriations Act of that year, a section was added forbidding the transfer of naval vessels to a foreign power.

Nevertheless, Mr. Churchill went on calling for destroyers, and in September the isolationists were stunned by the announcement that fifty destroyers were not going to be but actually had been transferred to the British Navy. At the same time it was announced that England had leased to the United States eight naval-base sites on this side of the Atlantic and had promised that the British Navy would never never be surrendered or sunk. At a press conference the President insisted that each of these three matters was separate and only happened to come all at the same time; there was no bargain at all, no quid pro quo for the destroyers. This can be understood only on the ground that an agreement or a bargain in the form of a treaty would have had to be ratified by the Senate, and Mr. Roosevelt was by-passing the Senate. He said, simply; “It is all done.”

After the business of the fifty destroyers the political signs turned against Mr. Roosevelt, indicating that he might be defeated for a third term.

His Republican opponent was Wendell Willkie, whose stock, which had been low at first, took a sudden rise when he began to play for the anti-war vote. He was saying: “If I am President I shall never lead this country into war. . . . If you elect me President I will never send an American boy to fight in any European war.” And then: “On the basis of his past performances with pledges to the people, you may expect that we will be at war by April 1941 if he [Roosevelt] is elected.”

The leaders of the Democratic party were in a panic. They implored Mr. Roosevelt to say or do something to weaken Willkie’s hold on the isolationist vote, which everybody knew was going to be large. And more than the isolationist vote was at stake. To that had to be added the radical vote—Communist and Communist-infected—because at that time Russia was allied with Hitler and for that reason the Communists were screaming that defense of England was defense of imperialism. The anti-war vote, therefore, would be both radical and conservative.

It was then, late in the campaign, that Mr. Roosevelt began to pledge himself against war.

He said: “Your President says this country is not going to war.”

He said: “I give to you this most solemn assurance: There is no secret treaty, no secret obligation, no secret commitment, no secret understanding in any way, shape or form, direct or indirect, with any other government or any other nation in any part of the world, to involve this nation in war.”

He said: “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 war.”

At that time more than half of American industry’s total production of arms and four out of every five new warplanes were going to England and officers of the American and British navies were already discussing plans for joint operations in case of war.

The popular vote was fairly close. Mr. Roosevelt got fewer votes than in the preceding campaign and the Republican vote increased nearly six million. Nevertheless, Mr. Roosevelt was the first President to be elected for a third term.

His first public utterance after election was the “arsenal” speech. American civilization, he said, was in extreme danger. If England should fall the Axis Powers would control Europe, Asia and Africa, and all the oceans, and after that Americans would be living at the point of a loaded gun. Then: “We must be the great arsenal of democracy. We have furnished the British great material support and we will furnish her far more in the future.”

A few weeks after that came Lend-Lease.

It is supposed that this immense idea began to take form in Mr. Roosevelt’s mind on the day, December 9, 1940, when a long letter from the British Prime Minister was delivered to him on board a cruising yacht in the Carribean. The letter reviewed American commitments so far,—(to equip the entire British army in 1941 and ten divisions more for the 1942 campaign)—then listed Great Britain’s further requirements, which might amount to fifteen billion dollars, and ended by saying that England was out of money. She could no longer pay. The Americans would have to think of a way out of that difficulty.

At his next press conference Mr. Roosevelt gave the first preview of his idea. England was already getting everything we could possibly spare—guns, planes, ships, food, and so forth—and she had to have a lot more, only now the trouble was that she could no longer pay for it. Imagine that your neighbor’s house was burning down and he needed your hose. Would you offer to sell it to him for a few dollars or would you just let him have it and forget the dollars? That was his new thought, something nobody had thought of before—to forget the dollars. He wanted to abolish the miserable dollar sign.

When Congress received the Lend-Lease Bill it bore the memorial numerals—1776. The American Republic was born in the year 1776.

What the Bill did was this: It obliged Congress to appropriate billions of dollars—any number of billions—and then authorized the President to use the money in his own discretion to aid any country whose defense he might deem vital to the security of the United States. Thus the President would have the power not only to fight an undeclared war against Hitler but to make war anywhere.

The debate in Congress was extremely bitter. The isolationists were making their last stand. Selling munitions to England, even under the rubric measures short of war, could somehow be defended as the right of a nation that was nominally neutral; giving or lending them to her was a very different thing.

In a post-war paper on foreign policy, years later, the State Department said: “With the passage of the Lend-Lease Act on March 11, 1941, the United States openly allied its welfare with that of the United Kingdom and other countries fighting the Axis.”

Yet those who said even as much as that at the time were cried down as non-patriots; and such was the bemusment of mind, partly from wishful thinking and partly from what had happened to the meaning of words, that many people did sincerely believe that Lend-Lease was a device for keeping the war away.

This delusion was strengthened by a perfectly timed broadcast from England. The British Prime Minister said England would not need any gallant American armies, as before, but—“Give us the tools and we will finish the job.”

The President said at a press conference that he was not anxious to receive the power that was about to be conferred upon him, yet somebody had to possess it, so that in a crisis action might be prompt.

Marginal annotation on the 1939 volume of his Public Papers.

 

II

Backing Into It

THE DAY AFTER THE PASSAGE OF THE LEND-LEASE BILL THE President proclaimed the defense of Great Britain and Greece to be vital to the security of the United States; a few hours later he added China. Thereafter events moved at goaded speed, many of them in a twilight zone, owing to a self-imposed press censorship, and some of them in total blackout for security reasons, as follows:

(1) Five minutes after the Lend-Lease Act became law the President transferred from the Army and Navy to England and her allies an undisclosed quantity of military equipment.

(2) To spend the $70 billions that Congress appropriated for National Defense and Lend-Lease together it was necessary to impose war-time conditions upon the American economy, such as price controls, priorities, allocation of materials, restraint of exports, longer hours of labor, an arbitrary division of things between the military establishment and the civilian population, i.e., between guns and butter.

(3) The President declared an “unlimited emergency,” which gave him what were in effect war-time powers over management, property and labor relations.

(4) Besides commanding the resources of private industry, the government itself undertook a vast construction program, under which in an apparitional manner appeared many new war plants and arsenals and emergency housing for war workers.

(5) The draft was stepped up; and for men already in the army the period of service was extended.

(6) Missions of military and civilian experts were dispatched abroad.

(7) An exchange of military secrets was begun with England.

(8) An undisclosed number of Army, Navy and Air Force bases were established off-shore and overseas.

(9) For strategic reasons American troops occupied Iceland, by permission. This was for better protection of the sea lanes between the United States and England.

(10) American troops were sent to British Guiana.

(11) All German and Italian ships in American ports were seized.

(12) The President called for 50,000 war planes and 8 million tons of ships to replace the ships the German submarines were sinking at sea.

(13) Ten big coast guard cutters were sent to England.

(14) In a world-wide broadcast the President announced that American aid to the “embattled democracies” would “be increased and yet increased until total victory has been won.”

(15) In June Hitler turned on his ally Russia. If Hitler and Stalin had been left to fight each other down to the knees history now might be telling a very different story. But the myth of the German superman had affected the wits of all the military experts; they agreed that Russia could last only a few weeks. Harry Hopkins, acting as the President’s viceregent, went to Moscow to see. He returned with the conviction that Russia could fight for a good while; and with the fatal opinion also that the Soviet Dictator would be a trustworthy ally. England had already embraced him. Thereupon an American mission was sent to Moscow to get a list of the things Russia needed, and thereafter to the end of the war American aid was delivered to her in prodigious quantities.

(16) In August the President and the British Prime Minister, each with a retinue of experts, met at sea, to discuss joint plans for the destruction of Hitler and what to do with the world after victory. The President came home with the Atlantic Charter, in which there was a statement of “common principles,” or war aims, namely, no territorial aggrandizement in the shape of war spoils, no territorial changes but by desire of the people concerned, and the restoration of the rights of self-government to people who had been deprived of them; and then—“after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” a beautiful peace, freedom of the seas, disarmament, and, so far as possible, free and equal access of all nations to the raw materials of the world.

That was all the American people knew of what had happened at the famous meeting until the British Prime Minister, on his return home, reported to the British House of Commons, saying:

“It was somewhere in the Atlantic. There for three days I spent my time in company, and I think I may say it comradeship, with Mr. Roosevelt, while all the time the chiefs of the staff and naval and military commanders, both of the British Empire and the United States, sat together in continual council. . . . You will perhaps have noticed that the President of the United States and the British representative in what is aptly called the Atlantic Charter have jointly pledged their countries to the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny. That is a solemn and grave undertaking. It must be made good. It will be made good. And of course many practical arrangements to fulfill that purpose have been made and are being organized and set in motion. The question has been asked, ‘How near is the United States to war?’ There is certainly one man who knows the answer to that question. If Hitler has not yet declared war on the United States it is certainly not because he could not find a pretext. He has murdered half a dozen countries for less. If he can succeed in beating the life and strength out of us . . . then he will settle his account, and it is already a long one, with the people of the United States.”

(17) But the most daring thing Mr. Roosevelt did was to move the line delimiting the territorial waters of the United States. He pushed it out to the middle of the Atlantic and then at the north bent it sharply around Iceland. All of that was proclaimed to be the “defense waters” of the United States; it would be patrolled by the United States Navy, and let German war vessels beware.

The purpose of this of course was to protect against Hitler’s submarines the Lend-Lease cargoes on their way to England. Did anybody suppose we were going to permit Ameriman aid to be sunk at sea as fast as we could send it forth?

It was well known that American patrol boats, on sighting a German submarine, reported it by radio to the nearest British naval unit and then followed it until the British could arrive for the kill. Nevertheless, for several months both the President and the Navy insisted that we were simply patrolling our own “defense waters.” From the beginning it had been stoutly denied that the United States Navy was going to convoy Lend-Lease cargoes, for if it did there might be shooting. Convoy was a scare word. But could not people patrol their own waters without going to war?

Gradually, as the sinkings increased, this verbal refinement was forgotten. Incidents did occur. Between the United States Navy and the German submarines there was shooting; but in every case there was a dispute about who started it. Did the Germans shoot in self-defense? If so, that was not attack; and it was known that Hitler had ordered his navy to shoot only in self-defense; not to attack.

Suddenly Mr. Roosevelt said in a world-wide broadcast: “These Nazi submarines are the rattle snakes of the Atlantic. They are a menace to our sovereignty. It is not an act of war on our part when we decide to protect the seas which are vital to American defense. But let this warning be clear. From now on, if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril. There will be no shooting unless the Germans continue to seek it.”

This was followed by an announcement from the Secretary of the Navy. He said: “Beginning tomorrow the American Navy will provide protection as adequate as we can make it for ships of every flag carrying Lend-Lease supplies between the American continent and waters adjacent to Iceland. These ships are ordered to capture or destroy by every means at their disposal Axis-controlled submarines or surface raiders.”

After that, more incidents, more shooting, more disputes about who started it—but no clear case of attack by the Germans.

So the year 1941 wore on. The country was at war but not in it.

Twenty days after the passage of the Lend-Lease Act, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Stark, wrote a top-secret letter, saying: “Staff conversations with the British have been completed and a joint United States-British war plan drawn up. . . . The question as to our entry into the war now seems to be when and not whether.” And in October he sent this message to all fleet commanders: “Whether the country knows it or not we are at war.”

How could a country be at war and not know it?

For the key to all this ambiguity you need only one fact. The fact was this. The dread of becoming involved in a shooting war was still so strong that Mr. Roosevelt knew he could not get a declaration of war from Congress—unless the country was actually attacked. And it would take nothing less than a declaration of war by Congress to release him from his pledges—again and again and again—not to take the country into another foreign war.

Robert E. Sherwood, in “Roosevelt and Hopkins,” says that at this time Harry Hopkins made the following note: “Both Stimson [Secretary of War] and Marshall [Chief of Staff] feel that we can’t win without getting into the war, but they have no idea how that is going to be accomplished.” And Sherwood’s own comment on the state of the dilemma at that time was this: “As the limitless peril came closer and closer to the United States, isolationist sentiment became ever more strident in expression and aggressive in action, and Roosevelt was relatively powerless to combat it. He had said everything ‘short of war’ that could be said. He had no more tricks left. The hat from which he had pulled so many rabbits was empty.”

 

III

Whence the Attack Came

ONE MUST TURN NOW TO JAPAN, FROM WHOM THE attack came; and this is a very tangled story.

Japan was the aggressor in the Pacific, pursuing conquest under the evangel, “Asia for the Asiatics,” which would mean Japanese rule and the end of the white man’s power in the East.

Americans liked the Japanese and felt a kind of paternal interest in them, from the fact that in 1853, acting on orders from the President of the United States, Commodore Perry of the United States Navy, with the first guns the Japanese had ever seen or heard, persuaded them to open their Hermit Kingdom to the blessings of Western civilization.

But for the Chinese, on the other hand, Americans had a kind of romantic affection, inherited from Colonial times; and when Japan set out to conquer China, beginning with Manchuria, American sentiment turned against her.

She seemed never to understand why. The West had exploited Asia, Japan included; and now if she were strong enough to rule Asia and to exploit it in her own way for raw materials and living room, why should the West object? On moral grounds? If Japan had been willing, as she was, to say to the United States, “You keep order in the West and we will keep order in the East and then let us exploit Asia together for mutual profit,” and if the United States had said, “That would be against our principles,” the Japanese could have believed only that the Americans were hypocrites. Had they not exploited Japan until she became strong enough to stop them and take control of her own affairs? They had, of course; and now they could hardly say, “It is true, we did, but our moral sense has been improving.”

There can be no doubt that Japan thought she was behaving in a Western manner and that Western nations now were defending, not China, but their own imperialistic interests in Asia. And how had they acquired those interests? By force, just as now Japan proposed if possible to transfer them to herself.

After the outbreak of Hitler’s war in Europe the Japanese joined the Berlin-Rome Axis, whereby they allied themselves with the European aggressor; yet they did this cautiously and with reservations, and not until the relentless hostility of the American government had made them desperate. There is no evidence that Japan ever meant to enter the war in Europe. But she did mean to take advantage of it in Asia. It was her opportunity. She could imagine expelling the British from Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya; the French from IndoChina, and the Dutch from Indonesia. Ultimately, no doubt, she would have been tempted to take the Philippines, too, but in the record there is no evidence that she would have thought them worth a war with the United States. She had the good sense, in fact, not to want a war with the United States at all.

Even so, if the war went on a collision was almost certain to occur, for if the United States was going to defend England, France and the Netherlands from Hitler in Europe it was somehow obliged to defend their Asiatic possessions against Hitler’s ally in the Pacific. That was especially true as to England. For her, the loss of Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya would be a terrific blow. Thus, the very first Anglo-American plans for joint military and naval action in the extreme case included the idea of stopping Japan, although Japan as yet was at war only with China.

From the beginning the American government regarded Japan’s adventure in China with a baleful eye, and pursued an anti-Japanese policy that was a composite of wheedlings, warnings, threatenings and economic pressure. The first step was to send military aid to China; the second was a moral embargo on war planes to Japan, by understanding between the government and the plane makers. Then the American-Japanese trade treaty was abruptly annuled, whereupon a positive embargo was laid upon sales of steel, scrap iron and oil to Japan. Oil was a vital matter. If Japan could not buy oil she was lost unless she could seize a source she could control. There was such a source in the Dutch East Indies.

Ambassador Grew telegraphed from Tokyo that war could not be averted by economic measures, for if the Japanese were pressed too far they would risk “national hara-kiri” (ritual suicide) sooner than submit to foreign pressure. The American government did not believe him; moreover the military power of Japan was greatly underestimated.

The record shows that the Japanese were diligent, even importunate, in trying somehow to mend their relations with the United States, if only by temporary patchwork, and were willing at last to go very far, if they could but save their face. They proposed a conference between the President and the Japanese Premier somewhere in the Pacific, as the President had met the British Prime Minister somewhere in the Atlantic; the American government at first entertained the idea, then put it off, and it lapsed in maybe. The Japanese kept asking the American government what it wanted. Specifically, what would it settle for?

In the State Department, Secretary Hull believed that all Japanese were congenitally perfidious. The least he wanted was an undertaking by Japan to stop expanding in Asia; the most, that it should abandon its conquest of China, make peace with the Chinese and go home. In the War Department, Secretary Stimson was allergic to the word Japan. The least he wanted was the total destruction of the Japanese menace.

Where did Mr. Roosevelt stand?

The British were begging him to hold Japan off as long as possible, even to make some concessions if necessary; they had war enough on their hands. They knew and Mr. Roosevelt knew and everybody knew that war between the United States and Japan would cause the cauldron to boil over. Japan would invoke the terms of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis pact and ask Germany and Italy to declare war on the United States. Japan would attack all British, French and Dutch possessions in Asia. The United States would be then in a very perilous military position, fighting two wars at once, one in Europe and one in Asia, nearly 15,000 miles apart.

Nevertheless it was possible that in Mr. Roosevelt’s mind the political necessity for an attack upon the United States in order to get a declaration of war out of Congress would outweigh every other consideration. In that case the thing to do was to provoke Japan to commit an overt act.

Here the record wickedly opens and closes its shutter for an uncontrolled exposure.

On the evening of November 25, 1941, the Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson, set down in his diary his recollections of a Cabinet meeting at which only the Japanese were discussed; and he wrote: “The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much damage to ourselves.”

Six days later, after a very secret meeting at the White House of Roosevelt, Hull, Stark and Harry Hopkins, the following message was sent by Admiral Stark to Admiral Hart, commander of the Asiatic Fleet in the Far East at Manila:

“President directs that the following be done as soon as possible and within two days if possible after receipt this dispatch. Charter three small vessels to form a ‘defensive information patrol.’ Minimum requirements to establish identity as U.S. men-of-war are command by a naval officer and to mount a small gun and one machine gun would suffice. Filipino crews may be employed with minimum number naval ratings to accomplish purpose, which is to observe and report by radio Japanese movements in west China Sea and Gulf of Siam. One vessel to be stationed between Hainan and Hue, one vessel off the Indo-China coast between Camranh Bay and Cape St. Jacques, and one vessel off Pointe de Camau. Use of Isabel authorized by President as one of the three but not other naval vessels. Report measures taken to carry out President’s view.”

The Isabel was not a regular naval vessel. She was a converted yacht.

The specified placement of these three defenseless, expendable, make-believe “men-of-war” was directly across the path along which the Japanse navy was supposed to be advancing. The chances for an incident, therefore, were excellent, since a navy on its war occasions will almost certainly destroy a patrol that has been set to spy out its movements. However, nothing came of it; the Japanese navy was not going that way. It was already on its way to Pearl Harbor.

The diplomatic struggle with Japan came to a deadlock in November. Before the end of the month the Secretary of State was saying that he threw up his hands and let the Army and Navy take over, all White House discussions were turning on not whether but when and where the Japanese would attack, and the President was already working on his war message to Congress.

And they were not guessing. The cryptographer had broken Japan’s most secret code. Every message from the Japanese government to its Ambassadors in Washington was intercepted and read. One has said it was like playing poker with a mirror behind your opponent’s back. They knew even how the last fatal signal would come, in the form of a wind message—war with the United States, “east wind, rain;” war with Russia, “north wind, cloudy,” and if it were the Dutch East Indies and Malaya, then “west wind, cloudy.”

For all of that, there was a serenity of fatalism in Washington, as if there was nothing now to do but to wait. The messages that went out to the Army and Navy commanders to tell them that diplomacy had failed and that anything might happen, ended in every case with the notice that “the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.” The commander of the Asiatic Fleet in the Philippines construed this to mean that he could not in any case attack, whereupon he sent his ships into hiding and saved them. The commander at Honolulu let his ships lie at anchor in Pearl Harbor, where they were as helpless as sitting ducks.

The story of the last day is like a dream in which the actors move with irrelevant and leaden gestures.

On December 6, which was Saturday, came a report from Budapest that the British government had said war in the Pacific would begin on the 7th. Nothing was done about that. Then a Japanese message was intercepted which said the 7th was the day. That message was somewhat garbled in transmission, and the cryptographers who had broken the Japanese code were two days making it out.

But by this time it was known that a very long message, one of fourteen parts, from the Japanese Foreign Office to the Japanese Ambassadors in Washington was being intercepted. When the first thirteen parts of this message had been decoded it was discussed by Secretaries Hull, Stimson and Knox, who arranged by telephone to meet at ten o’clock the next morning in the State Department.

The President had been giving a dinner party. At half past nine, in his study with Harry Hopkins, he received the long, intercepted message from the hand of a naval officer. He read it, handed it to Hopkins, and said that seemed to mean war. He supposed he ought to communicate with Admiral Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations; but when the telephone operator reported that Admiral Stark was at the theatre Mr. Roosevelt said not to call him out, for fear of creating an alarm; he would telephone the Admiral later at home, which he did. Admiral Stark said to his guests that the Japanese situation was very serious, and went to bed. Everybody went to bed. No warnings were sent out.

The next morning General Marshall, Chief of Staff, went for a horseback ride. Admiral Stark spent some time in his greenhouse. Everybody was late for the ten o’clock conference at the State Department. At the White House the President decided to give a dull morning to his stamp collection and Mr. Hopkins was lounging about in his pajamas.

The conference of the three secretaries at the State Department, beginning late, lasted an hour. Mr. Stimson’s recollection of it was that “Hull is very certain that the Japs are planning some deviltry and we are all wondering where the blow will strike.” An excited Military Intelligence officer who had been trying since nine o’clock to reach the Chief of Staff with the last of the Japanese message got to him at eleven twenty. Somebody thought the commanders ought to be warned. Somebody else thought it might confuse them. At last a message to the Honolulu commanders was written. Then a question as to how it should be sent. By a “scrambler” telephone there on the desk it could go instantly. Instead it was sent as a regular telegram and got to Honolulu while the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor.

When the news came to the Secretary of the Navy he said: “This can’t be true. It must be the Philippines.” The Secretary of War was at lunch. The President got him on the telephone, and asked: “Have you heard the news?” Mr. Stimson thought it would be the Gulf of Siam. The President said: “Oh, no. They have attacked Hawaii. They are now bombing Hawaii.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, the President’s wife, wrote: “We clustered at the radio and waited for more details, but it was far from the shock it proved to the country in general. We had been expecting something of the sort for a long time.”

And to a group of Senators and Representatives who appeared at the White House the President said: “Well, we were attacked. There is no question about that.”

An attack was expected. It was the wished-for solution. That the Japanese would cross the Pacific to commit their first overt act at Pearl Harbor was unexpected. And the loss of a mighty fleet and more than three thousand lives in one hour was perhaps much more than the war party would have been willing to pay for a declaration of war by Congress.

When later General Marshall appeared before a Joint Congressional Committee, investigating the Pearl Harbor disaster, he was asked why he had been so tardy with a warning message to the Honolulu commanders. Why, specifically, had he not used the fastest means of communication, namely, the “scrambler” telephone, instead of sending a slow telegram. His vague but astonishing explanation was that perhaps he had been thinking that if the American forces in Hawaii were alerted the Japanese might construe it as a hostile act.

The final accounting by the Army and Navy for the loss at Pearl Harbor was as follows: Destroyed or sunk—five battleships and three destroyers. Damaged—three cruisers, a seaplane tender, a mine layer, a repair vessel, a floating dry dock. Officers and men killed and missing—3,313.

 

IV

The Tools of War

CONGRESS DECLARED WAR AGAINST JAPAN ON DECEMBER 8, 1941. Great Britain did likewise on that same day.

Three days later Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

That made war practically unanimous.

By this time there were altogether seventy-seven declarations of war in the world, besides the wars that began without any declaration. Russia was not yet at war with Japan; that came later. The neutral countries were Switzerland, Sweden and Spain. Switzerland had been neutral in World War I. Neutrality had been her historic role, and both sides respected it, not for love of Switzerland but because at least one neutral nation, especially one that has no military significance, is a necessary asylum of sanity.

After having got into it directly it took the United States a little less than forty-five months to win the war.

What won it was not four million Americans overseas, nor the fighting qualities of the Army, Navy and Air Force, which were sublime, nor yet the character of American generalship which was heroic and almost without flaw; all of that will glow forever on the pages of American history. But behind that glow is the wick of a miracle that everybody took for granted and takes for granted still—everybody, that is, except the enemy, who saw it, was destroyed by it, and never quite believed it. And what was that? It was the outrageous speed with which American industry first made itself ready and then actually produced the tools of war—the planes and ships and guns and shells and a thousand and one precision instruments.

A new dimension of productivity was discovered. By the end of the first year the American production of all things essential to modern war was greater than that of Germany, Italy and Japan put together. Four-engine bombers were rolling out of a plant where on Pearl Harbor Day there was nothing but corn stubble. That was less than one year. Tanks had displaced automobiles on the assembly lines of Detroit. Merchant ships were building faster than Hitler’s submarines could sink them. One of the spectacular ship building operations—launching a ship every four days after laying the keel—was conducted by a construction outfit whose engineers had never seen a ship-yard before. Seven months from the day they started to build a yard to their own notions on a mud flat they were launching ships.

The new marvel of the American know-how was that anybody could build anything anywhere, given only the blue print and the machine tools; and the machine tool makers were building lathes by the moving line method, for the first time. Always before a lathe had stood still in one place on the floor until it was finished by hand.

A burial vault maker found that he could make bombs. A textile mill found that it could make anti-tank gun carriages. A bedding manufacturer made machine gun belts. A toy company made canisters. A refrigerator company made aircraft wings and propellors. Railroad car builders made tanks and armor plate and shells. A carousel maker turned to gun mounts, dies and jigs, and movable towers for men who serviced bombers.

Until then the makers of airplane engines thought they had a monopoly of the extreme precision work necessary to make that kind of engine and scorned the automobile engine makers as mechanical butchers; but the motor industry soon proved that it could make aircraft engines as fine as any and very much faster; and otherwise the enormous output of planes would have been impossible. Indeed, without the technical knowledge, the production genius and the time-bearding experience of the motor car industry, the miracle could not have been performed. One of its production managers dumbfounded the military authorities by laying before them one day a blue print twenty feet long. That would be the famous Willow Run plant. “If you will let me do this,” he said, “I will guarantee to slice you off one complete bomber an hour.” And before the war ended he did it.

By millions of tons American military equipment went all over the world. Never anywhere was a battle won without it. When the Russians marched through Bucharest a correspondent noticed that every moving vehicle was American-made—jeeps, amphibious vehicles, command cars, trucks, even a blue Ford sedan under camouflage.

When the war ended the amount of American equipment left over, in Europe and Asia and Africa, was embarrassing. Some of it was sold for the price of junk, a great deal of it was dumped in the sea or otherwise destroyed, and some of it was not too carefully stored. And all of it had been provided free to anybody who would use it against the enemy. It is not imaginable that the war could have been won without it. Nor was it to be unexpected that millions of people, seeing this outpouring of American aid, would get the idea that American resources not only were inexhaustible but that they were disposable in any amount for the good of mankind.

Now to follow the equipment.

In the war theatres, especially the Pacific theatre, our first five months were full of disaster. The Japanese spread fanwise over the whole southwest Pacific, taking Hong Kong, invincible Singapore, Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, Guam and the Solomon Islands on the very threshold of Australia; and in Europe Hitler was cutting through Russia as if it were cheese.

In the third month the loss of the Philippines was so probable that the War Department ordered General Douglas MacArthur to leave them and take up headquarters in Australia. With his wife and baby he made most of the journey in an open boat.

President Roosevelt said: “We have been compelled to yield ground but we will regain it.”

As he was speaking a Japanese submarine rose out of the Pacific and shelled the coast of California.

In the fourth month German guns were shelling Leningrad and German planes were bombing Moscow.

In the fifth month 35,000 embattled American-Filipino forces surrendered in the Philippines. This had been expected.

The shock was somewhat softened by the news that a squadron of American planes, led by Brigadier General Doolittle, had daringly raided the Japanese mainland, including Tokyo. It was thrilling but unimportant.

In the sixth month the Japanese reduced the last of the forts in Manila Bay and the Philippines were lost. In this month, however, occurred the battle of the Coral Sea, in which for the first time on fairly equal terms American naval and air forces met the Japanese and out-fought them. In this month also British bombs destroyed eight square miles of Cologne in Germany.

The balance of air power was shifting.

In the seventh month the repulse of two Japanese attacks, one on Midway Islands and one on Wake Island, both United States possessions, proved again that the Americans could outfight the Japanese. In Europe, on the other hand, the Russians lost Sevastopol, their citadel on the Black Sea; and across the sands of North Africa Rommel’s German army was pushing hotly toward Egypt against the British, who were in serious trouble and fearful of losing Cairo and the Suez Canal, and thus control of the Mediterranean route to the East.

In the eighth month Hitler was still claiming victory in Russia but the Russians were counting the German dead and the number of them was staggering. Fighting everywhere was intensified, especially in the air; 600 British planes bombed Hamburg for the 91st time.

In this the ninth month the Office of War Information said the nation was yet only ankle deep in the war. But from his base in Australia General MacArthur had already started to fight his way back across the Pacific, leap-frogging from island to island, beginning with the Solomons.

The Japanese had dug themselves in and fought with suicidal frenzy. They had literally to be killed in their holes. This jungle fighting was the ugliest that American soldiers had ever known. The ferocity of it may be read in a Solomon Island incident. One evening after dark the Japanese landed from speed boats 700 of their toughest men, with orders to rescue what was left of their own and to expel the Marines. Hand to hand fighting went on all night and when it ended in daylight there were 30 Japanese prisoners out of 700; all the rest were dead. The Marines’ loss was 28 killed and 78 wounded. So it was proved that even in hand to hand combat the Americans could outfight the Japanese. Thus American morale began to build up. Yet getting back the Pacific islands was a desperate business. To get the Marshall Islands back the Marines had to kill more than 8,000 Japanese. Their own casualties were 1,436. In the first 48 hours of fighting for Iwo—an extruding volcano top of less than eight square miles—the Marines lost 3,650 men, and took one Japanese prisoner. . . . In Europe Soviet planes, probably American made, bombed Berlin, Koenigsberg and Danzig.

In the tenth month there were more than half a million American fighting men and technicians overseas. On Labor Day 174 war vessels were launched and keels laid for 49 more. In Europe the battle of Stalingrad was beginning.

In the eleventh month the signs began to change. A large scale offensive by the Japanese against the Americans in the Solomons, by land and sea and air, was absorbed. It was evident that the British and Americans together were gaining air supremacy over the Germans. The siege of Stalingrad reached its 67th day and Hitler’s vaunting bulletins began for the first time to sound hollow.

In the twelfth month the enemy began to lose his first momentum. In a 2-day battle in the Solomon Islands the Japanese lost a battleship, three heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, five destroyers, eight transports with 30,000 men and four cargo vessels—altogether 26 ships—besides one battleship and six destroyers damaged. The American loss was two cruisers and six destroyers. . . . In North Africa the British had turned the Germans back from Egypt. . . . Then American forces, with 500 transports and 350 naval vessels, made amphibious landings on the Atlantic and Mediterranean shores of North Africa. Until then this was the most notable invasion from off shore in military history. The strategic idea was to take Rommel’s German army in the jaws of a pair of pincers—that is, the Americans on this side and the British on the other, and Rommel in between on the sands of Libya. Three days after the landing, Casablanca, Morocco and Algeria were in American hands. On this invasion of North Africa the British Prime Minister said: “The President of the United States is the author of this mighty undertaking. It is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning.” Mr. Roosevelt said: “It would seem that the turning point of this war has at last been reached.” . . . Meanwhile the most improbable epic of the war was enacting itself at Stalingrad.

During the thirteenth month the whole anti-Axis world held its breath. Fighting everywhere else was give and take, and nothing decisive; but at Stalingrad the Russians were refusing to embrace their doom. Day after day Hitler announced victory tomorrow; day after day a brief, non-exulting communique from Moscow simply counted the German dead—one day, 1,000; the next day, 900; and then on a good day more than 5,000. Presently it was noticed that the German communique was forgetting to mention Stalingrad, speaking instead of a submarine exploit or a little victory somewhere else, while Moscow went on counting the dead. The fighting was hand to hand in Stalingrad; gains and losses were measured by yards and doorways. Suddenly the Russians took the offensive, and the toll of dead Germans began to rise—in six weeks 175,000 Germans killed, 137,000 captured alive.

In the fourteenth month it became evident that Hitler’s invasion of Russia would turn into a Napoleonic disaster. The Russians’ Red Army lifted the siege of Leningrad, began pushing the Germans back on a very wide front and trapped the German army at Stalingrad. During the last twenty days of the fighting for Stalingrad the Russians killed 100,000 Germans. The end of it was that they captured a German field marshall, his chief-of-staff, ten lieutenant generals, two major generals, a brigadier general and 46,000 prisoners. The booty was 744 war planes, 1,517 tanks, 6,523 guns, 1,421 mortars, 7,489 machine guns, 76,887 rifles, 60,464 trucks, 734 motorcycles, 304 radio stations, 575 armored railway cars and 48 locomotives. . . .

 

V

Comrades All

THE MILITARY IMPORTANCE OF THE RUSSIANS’ TRIUMPHANT defense was of course tremendous. The political effects, especially in the United States, assumed aspects that were sometimes unreasonable and sometimes sinister. The Americans are a sentimental people. The spectacle of an heroic last-stand fight would move them deeply. They fell in love with the Russians. What wonderful allies they had turned out to be! Our Lend-Lease investment in them, when they were down, had already paid a handsome dividend. What was the purpose of Lend-Lease to begin with? It was to help those who would assist to overthrow the German aggressor. Well, certainly the Russians had assisted. Therefore you could say—or could you?—that they were fighting with us for the free world.

The logical absurdity of supposing that a dictator like Stalin would be fighting for a free world was drowned in tides of emotion. Forgotten was the fact that Stalin had been Hitler’s partner in aggression and had shared in the mutilation of Poland. Forgotten was the fact that while Stalin was Hitler’s partner every Communist and fellow traveler in the United States said it was an imperialistic war and tried in every way to sabotage it and had picketed even the White House with banners bearing disloyal slogans. One hour after Hitler attacked Russia all of those banners were out of sight and every Communist was parading himself as a loyal American, calling for a greater and greater outpouring of Lend-Lease to defeat the German aggressor, and save Russia. That made everything sweet. Communists and Americans were comrades in arms. Anyone who suggested that the Russians were fighting for Russia and had no interest in the free world—that Communists were Communists still—was denounced as a Fascist. Americans can be very maudlin. They were at this time.

The sinister thing was that American Communists, who secretly and always were Communists first, holding allegiance to an alien power, took advantage of the American’s sentimental folly to insinuate themselves into government at all levels. They got themselves into the army, into the secret intelligence services, into administrative bureaus, and rose to offices of policy-making power. This was not for the duration of the war, in which they might have been helpful and probably were; it was with foresight and with long intentions. One of the intentions was to conduct espionage for Russia, both during the war and afterward. They began at once to smuggle out military secrets with their highly privileged Lend-Lease goods—blue prints, photostats, scientific documents and fissionable material for the atom bomb. The total result was that when the war was over the government, from the White House and State Department all the way down to information bureaus, was found to be weeviled with concealed Communists, organized in cells and spy rings, all taking orders from Moscow.

For a while they were protected by the Roosevelt regime, which resisted and tried to discredit the efforts of Congress to dig them out. Mr. Roosevelt, whose most serious political error was to think he could handle Stalin, said the anti-Communist issue was a red herring, meant to embarrass him. Mr. Truman, who succeeded him, said the same thing, and added: “I like Old Joe Stalin. He is a decent fellow.”

Since the French Revolution, when there was a fanatical pro-French party, there had been nothing in all American history to equal this infatuated regard for an alien power. Two members of the Supreme Court stepped out of their robes to appear as character witnesses for a darling career man of the State Department named Alger Hiss, who at last was sent to jail for denying under oath his Communist affiliations. Gradually, as the incredible facts were squeezed out, the conspiratorial infiltration of government by Communists became a scandal that painfully divided the country. On one side were the Anti-Communists, very aggressive with blunt weapons; on the other side were the Communists, the Pro-Communists and a diluted brand called the Anti-Anti-Communists, all very adroit at invoking the very laws of freedom and immunity which at heart they despised. . . .

From this digression on Communism we return to note another fateful event in this the fourteenth month of America’s direct participation in the war. At Casablanca President Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met to discuss the war and evolved between them the formula of “unconditional surrender,” which was announced as a policy and became a shibboleth. This was a new thing in war between nations since Genghis Khan. It was certainly not calculated to shorten the war. What it meant was that every enemy government would be utterly destroyed; and since the American is not Genghis Khan—not in time of truce or peace—it meant furthermore that in the sequel he would have to lift up the vanquished people—the Germans and Italians and Japanese—brush them off, bandage their wounds and keep them alive until they were able again to provide for themselves. It was the American who would have to do this, not only because he would but because there was nobody else who could afford to do it.

 

VI

On His Feet

In the fifteenth month BERLIN ANNOUNCED: “FIGHTING AT Stalingrad has ceased.” A four-day period of mourning was ordered. More than 100 two-ton bombs and many thousands of fire bombs were dropped on Cologne. Dwight D. Eisenhower was made General of the Army and supreme commander of all Allied operations in North Africa. In a final offensive in the Solomon Islands the Marines killed 6,066 Japanese and took 127 prisoners. Stalin announced that since the beginning of the war with Hitler the Red Army had killed more than 4 million Germans in battle. The fierce fighting in North Africa began to turn against the Germans.

In the sixteenth month General MacArthur reported from the Pacific: “The battle of the Bismarck Sea has now been decided. We have achieved a victory of such completeness as to assume the proportions of a major disaster to the enemy. His naval component consisted of 12 transports and 10 warships. All are sunk or sinking. His ground forces, estimated at 15,000 destined to attack New Guinea, have been sunk or killed almost to a man.” . . . Hitler announced the loss of 540,000 men in the Russian campaign. . . . The American Ambassador in Moscow said to the American correspondents that the Soviet government had been withholding knowledge of Lend-Lease Aid from the Russian people, leaving them to believe that Russia was fighting alone. . . . Rommel’s German army was on the defensive in North Africa.

In the seventeenth month the Japanese government admitted having executed aviators who fell into their hands out of the Doolittle bombing squadron and said it would continue to punish members of aircraft crews found guilty of cruel and inhuman acts. President Roosevelt said this was a return to barbarism.

In the eighteenth month American soldiers, fighting on icy mountain slopes and in ravines, with bayonets, rifle butts, knives and bare hands, wiped out the Japanese on Attu, the most westerly of the Aleutian Islands. This was the first piece of American soil to be recovered from the enemy. . . . In North Africa the German army was cracked between the jaws of the Anglo-American pincers. Before the end Rommel had been called home. The German-Italian casualties in the North African campaign were more than 600,000. . . . Germany began to disperse her war industries and hide them underground, in flight from British and American bombers, who had them pin-pointed where they were. . . . Allied air forces began a continuous bombing of airfields in Sicily and Italy—a prelude to invasion.

In the nineteenth month, the British Prime Minister told the House of Commons: “The mellow light of victory begins to play over the entire expanse of the world war,” and indicated that an invasion of Europe was imminent. But the end was still a long way off. . . . The Italian island of Pantelleria surrendered unconditionally; also the little islands of Lamppedusa and Linosa. These were stepping stones to Sicily. . . . In an air battle over Guadalcanal 94 Japanese planes were shot down.

In the twentieth month the government announced that since Pearl Harbor Day 2 million men and 20 million tons of war cargo had been moved from the United States to fifty different countries. . . . Sicily, on the toe of Italy, was invaded and partially occupied by American and British forces, who from there would invade Italy; and the Italians were asked to surrender. If they did they would be treated gently and the Germans would be expelled from their country.

This was a complicated situation. The Germans, who had never trusted the Italians to hold Italy, had occupied it themselves and were there to keep the Allied armies out, for if once the Allied armies got in they would be on their way to reach what Winston Churchill called the soft under belly of the Axis beast. President Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister beamed messages to the Italians, asking them if they would die for Mussolini and Hitler or live for Italy and civilization. The Germans would not let the Italians surrender. Nevertheless, the Dictator Mussolini was finished. The hitherto submissive King Victor Emmanuel cast him out, and named as premier one Badoglio, who said the war would go on. Then the American Air Force began to bomb military targets in Rome, after notice and carefully trying to spare revered objects. The Germans had refused to declare Rome an open city and were entrenched there.

During the twenty-first month American and British forces were mopping up in Sicily. All the Germans who could fled from the island to the mainland, with as much equipment as they could carry, leaving their Italian allies in the lurch. American warships made the first direct attack on Italy, in the Gulf of Groia, at the toe of the Italian boot. Rome at last was declared an open city, which made it immune from further bombing. . . . Hitler still had 300 divisions to lose and went on fighting desperate battles in Russia, always giving ground. . . . In the Southwest Pacific the Japanese continued to fight fanatically; the Solomon Islands were not yet clear of them. . . . Anglo-American strategy was holding fast to the point that Hitler had to be beaten first; and all the Pacific commanders were complaining of neglect.

In this, the twenty-second month, the reduction of Sicily was completed; it surrendered unconditionally. Then by starlight British and Canadian troops crossed Messina Strait and landed on the Italian mainland. American landings followed. Hardly had the invasion begun when the Italian government, such as it was, surrendered unconditionally. Thereupon the Germans took over entirely. They rescued Mussolini, whom the Italians had impounded, and took him north, where they named him President of Fascist Italy and gave him a cabinet. The Italians began to turn against the Germans openly. Nevertheless, they were generally disarmed and surrendered to the Allied Forces 80 war vessels, including five battleships. In the north it was the Germans who disarmed the Italians, and Berlin said: “The Italian armed forces no longer exist. What however will exist for all time is the world’s contempt for traitors.” . . . The United States Navy reported that in three years it had become the greatest sea power in history. . . . On the Pacific scene MacArthur, stalking the Japanese island to island, moved his headquarters from Australia to New Guinea.

In the twenty-third month the King of Italy declared war on Germany. That made very little difference. The Germans were in possession of Italy from Rome north and deeply dug in. In a month of fighting the Allied Forces had done hardly more than to cut off the heel and sole of the Italian boot. They had taken Naples, where the retreating Germans left a delayed action bomb in the cellar of the post-office to kill civilians. . . . At a conference in Moscow the foreign ministers of the United States, Great Britain and Russia discussed the broad principles of a post-war organization of all peace-loving people—first adumbration of the United Nations.

Now the United States had been at war for two years.

In the twenty-fourth month the United States Senate resolved in favor of a post-war organization of nations to keep the peace of the world—vote eighty-five to five. At Cairo President Roosevelt, the British Prime Minister and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek met and agreed that Japan should be entirely shorn of her conquests and reduced to her prewar boundaries. In the Southwest Pacific the Marines arrived in the Gilbert Islands and bit a piece out of Japan’s fan. “An hour long parade” of British bombers (775 of them) rocked Berlin. Two days later they came again (1,000 of them) and dropped more than 1,000 tons of bombs in twenty minutes. The going in Italy was still very hard. In the North of Italy Germany’s hero Rommel was punishing the Italians who had deserted Mussolini. . . . In Washington President Roosevelt told Congress that Great Britain had agreed, in view of what she was receiving from the United States in the way of Lend-Lease, to stop charging dollars for the raw materials the Americans were getting from the British Empire.

In the twenty-fifth month President Roosevelt, the British Prime Minister and Dictator Stalin conferred at Teheran and afterward announced that they had shaped a common policy for a peace “which will banish the scourge and terror of war for many generations.” . . . More than 1,300 American aircraft bombed German rocket gun installations on the French coast—the largest single bombing mission of the war so far. American planes dropped 1,200 tons of explosives and fire bombs on Bremen. That night the British delivered 2,500 tons of the same affliction upon Frankfort and Berlin. By this time one-third of Berlin was rubble and 6 million Berliners were homeless. Hamburg, Dortmund, Cologne and Nuremberg were completely out as industrial centers.

Twenty-sixth month of America’s participation: Italians shoot Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, and others, for treason as Fascists. Germany’s military installations in Rome have to be bombed again. British, American and Greek troops wade ashore and make a beachhead on the west coast of Italy, thirty miles from Rome, beginning the nightmare of Anzio. . . . Political straws. Russia refuses to discuss the postwar boundaries of Poland and Moscow starts a rumor that Great Britain is discussing a separate peace with Germany. . . . Marines storming New Britain kill 2,917 Japanese. Battles begin for Wake and Marshall Islands on the middle periphery of the Japanese fan.

The twenty-seventh month: The British Prime Minister says victory will not come this year. Temporary stalemate in Italy. On one Russian battlefield 52,000 dead Germans are counted; 11,000 surrendered. . . . In the Pacific area the Japanese are badly beaten at Truk. Military government is established in the Marshall Islands, where the American casualties were 1,516 and the Japanese casualties more than 8,000.

The twenty-eighth month: Heavy slogging in all arenas. In the Southwest Pacific the Japanese were slowly losing their islands to MacArthur and had lost a quarter or more of their sea power, and yet at the same time they were pushing aggressively into India. The Russians in a two-weeks campaign recovered 3,500 villages and places from Hitler, and at the same time Hitler was opening a campaign in Hungary. In Italy the Allied Forces were inching toward Rome but very slowly and at harrowing cost. . . . Invisibly at this time the Allies were preparing the mightiest invasion in all the history of warfare.

Twenty-ninth month: Signs. Terrific bombing of that part of the French coast where the invasion will take place, but so widely scattered that the Germans will not be able to guess exactly where. Great Britain forbids foreign diplomats to go home or to send code messages; all overseas travel is suspended.

Thirtieth month: A lull. London has the first full month of freedom from air raids since 1942. In Italy British and Polish troops at last capture Cassino, which has been one of the principal barriers on the way to Rome. The Japanese are stopped in India.

 

VII

Might

JUNE 6, 1944 (the thirty-first month of America’s participation in the war and the fifty-seventh month since its beginning in Europe). On this day the stupendous event of military history began to unroll on the Normandy coast of France. On the tail of a storm, along sixty miles of open beach and against coastal defenses the Germans had been preparing for more than four years, moved an armada of 4,000 ships and 11,000 planes, together with things that had never been seen in warfare before, such as mechanical whales that spewed men out of their bellies into the surf, vehicles that could swim, masses of floating concrete to be towed into place and sunk to make artificial harbors.

Here a million men waded ashore, followed by their equipment, ammunition and food; and when they had secured a beachhead and cleared some landing strips their supplies began to come to them by sky-trains. On news of the invasion President Roosevelt by radio led the nation in prayer; the cracked voice of Liberty Bell was heard in Philadelphia.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower was supreme commander of the Allied Forces. Their first purpose, after having secured a beachhead, was to cut across the Cherbourg peninsula and capture the port of that name. This they accomplished in three weeks; and then they stood encircled by the Germans, as they expected to be. Their next task was to break out. The Germans fought savagely. They had been caught by surprise; they had not expected the Allies to land just there, nor in such weather. A storm came. It wrecked the artificial harbors and piled 300 ships up on the beach; but such was the power of supply and replacement behind the invaders that even this was a minor disaster. At sight of it General Eisenhower paused to marvel at the enabling miracle that he, like everybody else, had been taking for granted.

He said afterward: “There was no sight in the war that so impressed me with the industrial might of America as the wreckage on the landing beaches. For any other nation the disaster would have been almost decisive; but so great was America’s productive capacity that the great storm occasioned little more than a ripple in the development of our build-up.” . . .

In that same month the Germans began to fail in Italy; the Allied Forces took Rome. But also in that same month—six days after the invasion started—Hitler launched against England his new secret weapon, called the V-1. It was a robot plane, twenty feet long with a wing spread of sixteen feet; it travelled 300 miles an hour, directed itself, and dropped its bomb automatically. It not only did terrific damage; it put the morale of the British to its most extreme test, because somehow this was worse than the old kind of bombing, against which some defense had been found and which anyhow had recently been subsiding.

The V-1 was followed by the V-2, which was a rocket thing, moving faster than sound, so that it arrived silently.

In his book, “Crusade in Europe,” General Eisenhower afterward wrote: “It seemed likely that if the German had succeeded in perfecting and using these new weapons six months earlier, our invasion of Europe would have proved exceedingly difficult, perhaps impossible. I feel sure that if he had succeeded in using these weapons over a six-month period, and particularly if he had made the Portsmouth-Southampton area one of his principal targets, Overlord might have been written off.” (Overlord was the code name for the invasion.) . . . Meanwhile, for one more Pacific island, Saipan, 1,000 miles from Japan, the Marines paid the very dear price of 9,752 men.

Our thirty-second month: In fighting their way off the Cherbourg peninsula the Allied Forces were frustrated by the ancient French hedgerows and their ditches, which, besides affording the enemy ideal cover, caused a tank to rear up on its tail and expose its soft belly to gun fire. An American sergeant thought of fitting heavy steel cutting blades to the nose of a tank. It was tried and it worked. The idea was adopted on the spot and steel for the blades was salvaged from the Germans’ tide water defenses. After that American tanks, pushing sections of hedgerow in front of them, were a terror to the Germans. . . . In Berlin some army officers, representing a secret cabal of disaffection, tried to kill Hitler by throwing a bomb at him in a closed room. But his evil angels saved him for a more suitable end.

Our thirty-third month: Allied Forces break out of the Cherbourg peninsula. General Patton, with his mad Third Army, explores the suburbs of Paris, and then veers off toward Germany, making ten, fifteen and twenty miles a day. Paris is liberated. After the Germans had surrendered it they bombed it. Rumania quits the war. Russia has entered Poland and is killing Germans on a 1,000 mile front. . . . Southern France is invaded. This is a piece of postponed strategy, and nothing much comes of it because the Germans are going to pieces too fast. . . . Hitler’s robot bombs are knocking down 17,000 houses a day in England, any kind of houses, including hospitals. . . . In the Pacific the island of Guam, another piece of American real estate, is recovered from the Japanese.

Our thirty-fourth month (fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Europe): Now for the first time the war touches German soil, as it never did in World War I. Allied Forces cross the frontier and get to within 25 miles of Cologne, Patton’s Third Army setting the pace. They enter Belgium, rolling their tanks through Brussels and Antwerp, and begin to gouge Germans out of Holland. Where at first they had no port at all, landing on a tide beach, they now have four—Cherbourg, Brest, Havre and Antwerp; so that problem is solved. The Germans, though fighting hard when they fight, are everywhere off balance and dazed. They thought they had invented lightning war.

Thirty-fifth month:

After an absence of thirty-two months General MacArthur returned to the Philippines, wading ashore at Leyte, in the waist of the Archipelago. The portent of this event was much more than the recovery of lost ground. From the Philippines, if he could establish himself there, MacArthur would be able to cut Japan off from her stomach—that is, from her sources of food, raw materials and oil in the Dutch East Indies, Malaya and Burma. Moreover, in those regions were half a million Japanese who could then be extinguished at leisure. In MacArthur’s command on this adventure was every able bodied man who had escaped from Corregidor before that fortress in Manila had surrendered 2½ years before.

The Japanese were bound to fight desperately for the Philippines.

In a three-day battle in Leyte Bay they lost two battleships, six heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, three small cruisers, four airplane carriers and six destroyers; besides one battleship, four heavy cruisers, two light cruisers and seven destroyers badly damaged. Only two days before this the United States Navy had attacked Ryukyu Island, less than 600 miles from Japan’s doorstep—the closest point yet—and in that fight the Japanese lost fifty-eight ships, including three battleships. This was the beginning of the end of Japan’s sea power; and her vital merchant marine, already badly crippled, now would disappear very fast.

Our thirty-sixth month:

It now became evident that Germany was an animal at bay, fighting in pain and rage. There was no longer any pattern of grand strategy. The superman myth had withered at the heart, and there was nothing to take its place. The Siegfried Line was crumpling; the Faustian soul was in despair. The name of Patton’s Third Army was Nemesis. Its fury for retribution was insatiable. It reduced the great forts at Metz and handed the place back to the French. Then it moved on and was presently standing on the banks of the Rhine. Strassburg was taken by hand to hand combat in the streets. German soldiers began to surrender in large numbers of their own will. Nevertheless, as the war began to gnaw at German soil, what survived of the spirit of resistance became murderous. . . .

Stalin announced that the last German had been expelled from Russian soil; at the same time he called Japan an aggressor, which was to indicate that the Russians were about to break their incongruous non-aggression pact with Japan. Hitherto neutral as between the United States and Japan, Stalin now was anxious to take a come-lately part in the defeat of Japan, for that would enable him to claim spoils in Asia. . . .

Hitler was still launching his rocket bombs, but fewer of them, for they were dying too. The Allied Forces had destroyed some of their nests. . . .

The size of the total Allied Force in Europe could not be exactly reckoned. It had been building up too fast. The British Prime Minister estimated it at between 2½ and 3 million men; and as between the United States and Great Britain the ratio was three American soldiers for every two British.

Our thirty-seventh month (third anniversary of Pearl Harbor):

In reserve for the death struggle Germany had the vitality of a rattlesnake cornered. The news had been generally good. In the Philippines MacArthur had landed on Mindanao Island, 155 miles from Manila. In Europe Patton’s Third Army was taking the Saar Valley yard by yard and at the same time was poking holes in the Siegfried Line.

Suddenly, with three armies, which included the last of their reserves, the Germans rushed forth from their fixed defenses and attacked the Allies on a wide front. It was winter; the weather was terrible. Clouds hiding the mountain tops and fog in the valleys tied the allied air force down. The fighting was in mud and snow. Hitler’s general for this offensive was Von Rundstedt, who four years before had led the Germans this way to Paris and knew the terrain perfectly; he knew also where the Allied lines were thin. He broke through them and pushed the Americans back into Belgium and Luxembourg. In many towns that had just been liberated the Swastika went up again.

On the Allied side the generalship was fine. Instead of trying to stand rigid, thereby to risk his forces piecemeal in situations of tactical disadvantage, Eisenhower decided to roll with the punch until he could gather his strength for a maximum counter-attack. While he was doing that the Germans advanced fifty miles.

This came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. It was Hitler’s last insane throw with fate. If it had been a gamble for all or nothing it might have made some sense. But it lacked even that claim to be an intelligent act of desperation. He had lost more than could be retrieved by one lucky cast of the dice. It couldn’t be all or nothing; there was not that much on the table. He could not have saved Germany by winning the Battle of the Bulge.

Our thirty-eight month:

General Eisenhower said: “I was convinced that in the Battle of the Bulge the enemy had committed all of his remaining reserves. I counted on a greatly weakened resistance from that moment onward.”

So it turned out to be. The climax came suddenly. Never during the Battle of the Bulge did the Allies change their over-all strategy. Two weeks after the German offensive had been stopped the Allied Forces were re-entering Germany—Patton’s Third Army in three places—fighting their way through snow storms, through drifts four feet deep, across icy streams and through thick forests from tree to tree. . . .

On the other side, five Russian armies, advancing a mile an hour, were already on German soil in East Prussia and only 63 miles from Berlin. In fifteen days they had killed 195,000 Germans. Hungary quit the war and gave her armies to the Allies. Churchill called on the Germans to surrender. . . .

MacArthur arrived on Luzon, the principal island of the Philippines, and announced: “The decisive battle for the liberation of the Philippines and control of the Southwest Pacific is at hand.” He was then 50 miles from Manila.

Our thirty-ninth month:

In the west, bald eagles were wheeling in the sky; in the east, a false sun was going down. Four American armies stood on the banks of the Rhine, with a bead on Germany’s heart. The sound of marching Russian boots could be heard in Berlin. Budapest had fallen. MacArthur was back in Manila. United States warships were shelling Tokyo and Yokahoma. For Iwo Island the Americans could afford to pay the price of 19,938 casualties. Japanese naval power was at the bottom of the sea and Japanese airpower was reduced to suicide squads.

 

VIII

Suicide of Victory

WHAT NOW MUST INTERRUPT THE CHRONOLOGY IS A POLITICAL event.

The countenance of victory that had been so lovely in the dimness began to change as it came near; its alabaster mask began to slip. It was time for political considerations to impinge on military imperatives. It was time also for American diplomats to begin losing the peace. This they proceeded to do at Yalta, where in early February, 1945, the Russian Dictator, the British Prime Minister and the President of the United States, each with a retinue of advisers, met to consider the shape of the post-war world.

Is it cynical to say the Americans were there to lose the peace? Not unless you mean it to be. They did not intend to lose it. Nevertheless, it was somehow inevitable that they should and they did when they signed the Yalta Agreement, which altered the course of history more than the fall of Hitler could have altered it and plunged the whole world into darkness.

Apologists for the Yalta Agreement have said these three things about it—first, that President Roosevelt was a dying man and unable to cope with Stalin; second, that everything would have come out right if only the Russians had kept their word; and, third, that in any case Stalin got no more than he would have been able to take by force.

Underlying it all was a natural truth—the same truth that explains why the Americans were bound to lose the peace.

They wanted nothing—that is, nothing that was any more touchable than the Holy Grail.

Now considering what war is and that the rational world is incurably selfish, it is clear that if what you want to get out of war is some unattainable good, such as in World War I a world made free for democracy, or in this war, the liberation and happiness of mankind; and if your allies say, “Yes, yes, you are magnificent; only here and now are some realities to be faced,” how are you going to trade? What will you trade with? What you want cannot be delivered; it can only be framed in words that may turn out to mean nothing. What they want is specific and tangible; they can define it precisely and if they get it they can hold it. If you say no to what they want they may refuse to go along with your millenium. You cannot bring your millenium to pass without their willing cooperation.

Two more complications may be added—one psychic and one gross. The psychic fact will be that your allies either think you are a little mad or suspect you of selfish designs beyond their comprehension. The gross fact may be that your allies are afraid of your power and secretly wish to frustrate it in any way they can. That was certainly true.

What were the weights and measures at Yalta?

The Americans had won the war, not by their industrial power alone but with their manpower too. They had won it in the sense that the British Empire owed its survival to them, certainly; and the Russians probably, except that they might have taken refuge in a frozen climate that even the Germans would not covet. More than that, there was hardly a nation in the world, certainly not one in Europe, that could contemplate recovery without American aid. Briefly, at Yalta, the actualities of American might were such that the American word might have been laid down as naked law. There was none to gainsay it. Yet so far from trying to exploit the amazing realities of this situation the Americans were morbidly self-deprecating, appeasing, very mindful of the feelings of other nations, like a giant that might submit to be shackled to allay the fears of his neighbors and prove his good will.

And still the story of Yalta cannot be understood without reference again to the strange infatuation of the Roosevelt regime for Russia. It was as if Mr. Roosevelt had taken it upon himself personally to overcome the Russian Dictator’s distrust of the Western World and convert him to the cause of freedom. To do this he thought it necessary to placate Stalin, to give him, or seem to give him, everything he wanted, thereby to engage him in bonds of gratitude and win his collaboration. However, the fact cannot be omitted that one of Mr. Roosevelt’s intimate advisers at Yalta was Alger Hiss of the State Department, who years later was found out to be affiliated with a Communist spy ring in Washington and sent to jail for denying it under oath.

Lastly, at Yalta, the Americans were influenced by a military assumption that turned out to be wrong. The assumption was that the task of defeating Japan was too much for the United States and Great Britain; Russia’s help was greatly needed there. General MacArthur was saying no. He thought the United States alone could do it. His opinion was that Japan was on her knees and ready to ask for peace. Nobody at Yalta believed him and not until long afterward was it known how right he was.

The irony of it was that Stalin did not have to be bribed to enter the war against Japan. He was anxious to get into it, for his eyes were on Asia; his only worry was that the war would end before he could get there.

The Yalta Agreement was a dragon’s mouth, with teeth canted inward, that swallowed everything and disgorged nothing.

It was never honestly revealed.

The published text was a beautiful gloss. In Great Britain the Prime Minister said to the House of Commons that it laid the foundations of peace “for generations to come.” President Roosevelt, in a wheel chair, brought it to Congress and said it was exactly what it seemed to be—a three-power convenant to keep the peace of the world—and positively there was nothing up anybody’s sleeve, no secrets, no reservations of any kind. It was all there.

But there were secret protocols. Even the Secretary of State did not know what they were. They were locked up in the White House safe. They came to light after Mr. Roosevelt’s death. One of them, marked top secret, was a record of what Stalin was to be paid for coming into the war against Japan, when it had not been necessary to bribe him at all, since he was anxious to do it in order to be in at the kill.

Under this secret protocol Stalin promised to move against Japan three months after the defeat of Germany, on these conditions, namely: (1) that Russia should have special economic rights in Manchuria, including operation of the Chinese Eastern and South Manchurian railroads jointly with the Chinese, whose property they were; (2) that Port Arthur, also Chinese property, should be leased to Russia as a naval base; (3) that the Chinese port Darien be internationalized, and (4) that if it so happened that Chiang Kai-shek, who had not been consulted at all, should demur at these violations of Chinese sovereignty, the President of the United States would take measures to obtain his “concurrence.”

The last sentence of the protocol read: “The heads of the three great powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated.” They were, and Russia got some strategic island property besides; but Russia was in the war against Japan only six days. Her contribution to the defeat of Japan was immaterial.

Under the Yalta Agreement the Russians did what they pleased in Europe, and when their behaviour was complained of they seemed to enjoy writing interminable notes of injured innocence. For anything they did they could find justification in the Agreement—in the text as they understood it, in their own records of verbal agreements that nobody else could remember, or in the booby-trap phrases.

Shortly after Mr. Roosevelt’s death it seemed necessary to have another conference of the Big Three—this one in occupied Germany. The Russian Dictator, the British Prime Minister and President Truman met at Potsdam and got on very well. That was when Mr. Truman got the idea that “Uncle Joe” was a good fellow. They all went home happy. Unity had been cemented.

But after that it was worse—much worse.

The truth came out slowly—not all of it under two years. Then it was possible to say what had happened at Yalta, and what the consequences were, videlicet:

One: China, a desperately wounded and gallant ally, with a life-time history of American friendship, was secretly sold down the river to the Russians. All alone for four years, and then as an ally in the World War receiving some American Lend-Lease aid, China had been fighting the Japanese aggressor with her right hand and the Communist rebels with her left. Now she was delivered to a worse aggressor; her northern gates were thrown open to the Communists. The sequel was that the Communists, with Russian aid, over-ran China, took her behind the Iron Curtain, and alienated her from the West. Chiang Kai-shek and his loyal forces took refuge in Formosa.

Two: The Russians were permitted to take nearly one-half of pre-war Poland and Poland was partly solaced by a slice of German territory—this without any reference to the millions of Polish and German people who had either to accept a change of sovereignty or be dispossessed. Thus the Atlantic Charter, which said that no territory should change hands but with the free consent of the people concerned, became a burnt offering on the rickety altar of Unity.

Three: The Russians were left in complete military control of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and proceeded in a ruthless manner to set up their own puppet governments in those countries. When Great Britain and the United States protested and reminded the Russians that they had promised to hold free elections everywhere, all the Russians had to do was to make an ugly face and threaten to kick over the altar of Unity.

Both the British and the Americans had made a fetish of Unity; their policy was to yield to the Russians rather than let the world see that Unity’s pedestal was a two-legged stool. In his last message to the British Prime Minister, written two hours before he died, answering a request from the Prime Minister for advice on a speech he was going to make to the House of Commons, President Roosevelt said: “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible.”

So hegemony over all of Eastern Europe passed by default to the Russian Dictator, and over it all the Iron Curtain fell. Still not content with what they had got, the Russians asked for a slice of North Africa’s Mediterranean shore, a share in control of the Dardanelles and a naval base there. At that the British threatened to blow up, and Unity be damned, whereupon the Russians said they could wait. Afterward James F. Byrnes, the Secretary of State, who was there, set this down in his book: “The Atlantic Charter was a forgotten pledge. He [Stalin] wanted territory.” The Atlantic Charter bound all its adherents, including Russia, to seek “no aggrandizement, territorial or other.”

Four: The institution of human slavery was restored in the world—not political enslavement but actual physical slavery, by the agreement that reparations could be paid, in part, by the forced labor of captives in the hands of the victors. James F. Byrnes says that at Yalta the only reference he heard to forced labor was a casual remark by President Roosevelt that the United States “cannot take manpower as the Soviet Republics can.” On their own initiative the Russians wrote the use of slave labor into the Yalta Protocol and everybody signed it. Mr. Byrnes did not know it until later.

Five: Germany was divided into zones of occupation—at first three, one for the Russians, one for the British and one for the Americans, and then four, when France demanded a zone, only that the French zone had to be carved out of the American zone and the American zone before that was what was left after the Russians and the British had marked out their own. The Russian zone included Berlin, and it was agreed that Berlin also should be divided into occupational zones. So Russia, Great Britain, the United States and France each had a zone in Berlin, but for some unexplained and stupid reason (if it were only stupid) no land corridors were provided whereby the British, the Americans and the French, from their respective zones in Germany, could reach Berlin. They could not enter Berlin at all but by grace of the Russians, because from any direction they had to cross Russian occupied territory.

In the name of Unity it was agreed that Germany should be treated as one economic whole. Nevertheless, the Russians dropped the Iron Curtain around their zone, and a time came when they tried to starve the Americans, the British and the French out of Berlin by blocking all the railroad lines, highways and canals leading into it. It looked as if the Americans, the British and the French would either have to fight their way into Berlin or bring their nationals out, if the Russians would let them out—until the Americans undertook to move in food, fuel and other supplies by air. It was a fantastic idea and humiliating. Yet it was done. For several months the vital needs of the American, the British and the French zones of Berlin were entirely supplied by air. This operation came to be called the Great Air Lift. The Russians did not think it was possible—a box-car plane landing every five minutes day and night on the air strip in the American zone. When they saw it could be done the Russians opened “negotiations” for lifting the blockade. What they would have done if the Americans had attempted to fight their way into Berlin will be always a matter of speculation.

Six: At Yalta the timbers for the United Nations Organization were rough-hewn, morticed and numbered. Every nation that had declared war against Germany and Japan would be invited to the raising bee at San Francisco in April. The Americans were so moved by Stalin’s gracious endorsement of the project that when he demanded three votes to one for the United States he got them.

The United Nations Organization was to consist of a General Assembly, in which each member nation should have one seat, and above that a Security Council of eleven members, six to be rotating and five to be permanent. The five permanent members of the Security Council would be Great Britain, the United States, Russia, France and China, and each of these five would have a positive right of veto. This veto arrangement would give any one of the five permanent members the power to make the United Nations impotent, which the Russians immediately proceeded to do.

Seven: When the Yalta Agreement was signed the number of people in the Communist world was hardly more than 200 million. Five years later it was 800 million, spread over nearly one-third of the globe. Such was the speed at which the Russians moved to fill the areas of political vacuum that existed after Yalta.

The calculated effrontery with which the Russians violated the Yalta Agreement at last exhausted the innocent good will of President Truman. He said: “I went there [to Potsdam] with the kindliest feelings in the world toward Russia, and we made certain agreements. . . . I got very well acquainted with Joe Stalin. I like Old Joe; he is a decent fellow. But Joe is a prisoner of the Politboro. He makes agreements and if he could he would keep them, but the people who run the government are very specific in saying he cannot keep them.”

In a less naive mood he said: “The power of the Kremlin is more effective, more violent, more far-reaching than the power of the czars, or the power of Genghis Khan or the power of other tyrants of the past.” He added that agreements with Russia were not worth the paper they were written on.

He was in that state of mind when he announced what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine. The short story of the Truman Doctrine is as follows. With an eye still on the Dardanelles and the Mediterranean, Russia was bearing down on Greece and Turkey. Great Britain had been defending Greece. Suddenly she said to the United States: “This is your baby too and we cannot hold it any longer.” With that she rolled it onto the American lap. President Truman accepted it and got from Congress a large appropriation of money to help the governments of Greece and Turkey resist the Communist pressure, and then he said it would be America’s foreign policy from that time on to help any democratic country to defend itself. That was understood to mean that the United States undertook to stop the further spread of Communism. Russia took it that way and was of course enraged. That was the beginning of a series of badgering gestures, reprisals, excursions and alarms, called in general the Cold War between the United States and Russia. It led to the Korean war directly.

When the Communist North Koreans, backed by the Chinese Communists, invaded South Korea, Mr. Truman, according to his Doctrine, felt obliged to go to the aid of the South Koreans. Without a declaration of war, without the consent of Congress, he sent armed forces into Korea to push the Communists back. He called it a police action. It turned out to be an ugly and costly war. If the North Koreans had not had the Chinese Communists behind them they probably never would have invaded South Korea, and if the Yalta Agreement had not sold China out to Russia, China would not have been a Communist country.

One day when the Russians were maliciously absent the United Nations voted to support Mr. Truman, called the North Koreans aggressors, and formally adopted the war. When the Russians returned to their seats they were derisive and insulting. They admitted that Russia was giving the North Koreans military aid—and what did anybody wish to do about it? As a member of the United Nations, Russia then was in the position of supporting a war against the United Nations.

So much for the Yalta Agreement. We now return to the interrupted chronology.

 

IX

Chronology Continued:
The Bomb

OUR fortieth month (MARCH, 1945):

President Roosevelt said the Yalta Agreement meant the end of unilateral action (action by one nation alone), of exclusive alliances, of spheres of influence and of balances of power, and all the other expedients which had been tried for centuries and failed. . . .

Germany was on her back, fighting with her claws. Six Allied armies were over the Rhine. The Ruhr Valley was isolated. American military government was set up in Frankfort A/M. . . .

The Stars and Stripes were raised on Corregidor in Manila Bay. The rebuilding of Manila was begun. An area of fifteen square miles in the heart of Tokyo was laid waste by American bombers.

Forty-first month:

On the twelfth day of this month, April 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage. He was 63. . . .

His war against Hitler reached its climax in this same month. American and Russian troops met on the river Elbe in Germany. After a march of 1,000 miles from the gates of Moscow the Russians entered Berlin and raised their flag on the ruins of the Reichstag. Allied forces captured several prison camps in Germany and the liberation of prisoners began. Heinrich Himmler, chief of the German secret police, to whom Hitler had delegated extreme powers, surreptitiously offered to surrender Germany to Great Britain and the United States. His offer was ignored. Patton’s Third Army, having bisected Germany, marched into Czechoslovakia. In Italy one million Germans surrendered. . . .

Benito Mussolini, the deposed Fascist Dictator whom the Germans had rescued out of Italy, was captured by antiFascist Italian partisans at Dango on Lake Como. They tried him on the spot and shot him, together with his mistress and a body guard of sixteen. Mussolini’s body was taken to Milan and thrown down on the pavement to be kicked around. Then it was put on exhibition in a garage, hanging upside down by the feet like a pig. Later it was buried in a potter’s field and the grave left unmarked. . . .

Mussolini was a much more intelligent man than Hitler. He evolved in Italy a pattern of totalitarian government called the Corporate State which at one time was much admired by New Dealers in Washington. In the early days of the Rome-Berlin Axis Mussolini appears to have been Hitler’s mentor. Hitler knew very little about the theory of government. His Nazism was crude and terroristic.

Our forty-second month in the war, May 1945:

On May 1 the German radio announced that Hitler had died in the line of duty at his operational headquarters, in the Reich Chancellery. The real story, pieced together afterward from the testimony of survivors, was somewhat different. In his elaborate underground bomb-shelter at the Chancellery, Hitler was married to his mistress. After the wedding feast groom and bride retired to their bed chamber and committed suicide. Their wrapped-up bodies were carried out to the garden, soaked with gasoline and set on fire. However, the charred remains were never positively identified, and for a long time there was a rumor in the world about Hitler, like the rumor that survived Nero for a generation, namely, that he had escaped and was in hiding and would sometime reappear in the role of anti-Christ. Stalin believed this. . . .

The day after Hitler’s death Berlin surrendered. The terms of capitulation were signed in the basement of the Reich Chancellery while the top floors were burning. There was then no German government; there was hardly anything you could call Germany. Grand Admiral Doenitz announced that he was Hitler’s successor by appointment, but there was only his word for it. Anyhow, he fled at once to Copenhagen and pretended to take the German government with him. From there he called on the German people to go on fighting, for if they surrendered unconditionally German heroism would be a word of mockery forever.

Since there was no one who had any clear authority to accept the Allies’ terms of surrender the final transactions were somewhat confused. Pockets of trapped Germans did as they pleased. Some gave up and some went on fighting. At last in a little red school house in Reims, where General Eisenhower’s headquarters happened to be, the German Chief of Staff, Gustav Jodl, signed for Germany an acknowledgement of unconditional surrender. Heinrich Himmler, Germany’s infamous killer, committed suicide in the hands of his captors, by crunching a vial of poison in his mouth. On May 8, President Truman announced the end of hostilities in Europe, and that night floodlights played on the capital dome in Washington for the first time since Pearl Harbor.

Our forty-third month:

Now the United States could put both fists into the Pacific war. The army was seven million. President Truman announced that Japan’s military power would be simply annihilated and called upon the Japanese to surrender. The effect was to intensify Japan’s suicidal frenzy. Now by routine her flyers, instead of dropping their bombs, went with them and deliberately crashed on the decks of American warships. It was awesome. On Okinawa Island a Japanese force of 85,000 had been reduced to 15,000; but these fifteen thousand fought as if possessed. They encysted themselves in stone crevices on vertical cliff sides, and marines, going up ropes hand over hand with flame throwers, had literally to burn them out. When at last the battle of Okinawa was lost the Japanese commanders committed hara-kiri. The American casualties there were more than 44,000; the Japanese more than 94,000. For one island. But it was a perfect base from which to bomb Japan around the clock.

Our forty-fourth month:

There had to be another meeting of the Big Three. It took place at Potsdam in Germany—President Truman, the British Prime Minister and the Russian Dictator. Mr. Truman took with him and guardedly imparted the news that the Americans had the atomic bomb in their hands. In a Berlin speech he said: “There is not one piece of territory or one thing of a monetary nature that we want out of this war. . . . We are fighting for peace and for the welfare of mankind.”

Japan was cracking. . . .

American warships were shelling Tokyo and Yokohama. The Air Force, looking for targets, was prowling over Japan at will and calling its shots—that is, naming beforehand the cities that were marked for destruction and giving the order in which they would be visited. . . .

The Tokyo radio began to plead for leniency. If the Americans, instead of demanding unconditional surrender, would sincerely apply the Atlantic Charter, the Japanese war lords as well as the Japanese people would respond with a desire to end the conflict. Moreover, it said there was no real problem between liberal America and liberal Japan.

The answer to this was a proclamation by President Truman, the British Prime Minister and Chiang Kai-shek calling upon Japan to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction.”

Our forty-fifth month:

On the sixth day of August, 1945, Hiroshima, the seventh Japanese city, was destroyed by one atomic bomb. When President Truman announced it he said: “We have spent two billion dollars in the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won. We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and more completely every productive enterprise that the Japanese have above the ground.” . . .

What the President meant was that it had cost two billion dollars to make the atomic bomb, Congress appropriating the money secretly and blindly, with nobody sure the thing would work—and Hiroshima was the first pay-off. Later a group of scientists, engineers, doctors and trained observers was sent to Japan to study the pay-off for the information of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey—that is, to study the killing power of the bomb, its destructiveness in general, its effect on public morale (its effectiveness as an instrument of terror), and its political consequences if any. The report was published as an official document. In it you may read:

“A single atomic bomb exploded over the city of Hiroshima at 0815 on the morning of 6 August. Most of the industrial workers had already reported for work, but many workers were on route and nearly all the school children were at work in the open on a program of building removal to provide fire breaks. The surprise, the collapse of many buildings and the conflagration (a fire storm) contributed to an unprecedented casualty rate. . . .

“The exact number of dead and injured will never be known. The Survey believes the dead at Hiroshima to have been between seventy and eighty thousand, with an equal number injured. Of women in various stages of pregnancy who were within 3,000 feet of ground zero, all known cases have had miscarriages.

“Treatment of the victims by the Japanese was limited by the lack of medical facilities. Of more than 200 doctors in Hiroshima 90 per cent, were casualties. Out of 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were killed or injured. Only three out of 45 civilian hospitals could be used, and two large army hospitals were rendered unusable. Those within 3,000 feet of ground zero were totally destroyed and the mortality rate of the occupants was practically 100 per cent. Two large hospitals of reinforced concrete were located 4,900 feet from ground zero, but neither was able to resume operations for some time and the casualty rate was approximately 90 per cent. With such elimination of facilities and personnel the lack of care and rescue activities is understandable. Father Siemes reported that thirty hours elapsed before any organized rescue parties were observed.”

Father Siemes was a German born Jesuit who was teaching in Japan and happened to be in Hiroshima. He said: “Everything was lacking, doctors, assistans, dressings, drugs, etc. Iodine was applied to the wounds but they were left uncleansed. Those that were brought in were laid on the floor and no one could give them any further care.” The water failed; there was no sewage disposal. . . .

Two days later Russia declared war on Japan and on that same day a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, where all the horrors of Hiroshima were repeated on a somewhat smaller scale—smaller owing to the topography of the city. The Survey estimated the Nagasaki dead at 35,000, and again that many injured.

President Truman’s decision to loose the atomic bomb on Japan proceeded from the idea that the war could be foreshortened by terror. His military advisers were telling him that the final conquest of Japan by invasion might cost a million American casualties.

Did the use of the bomb in fact shorten the war?

The Bombing Survey Mission explored that question and could not arrive at a positive answer. It found that the morale of the Japanese people was already very low; terror of the atomic bomb did not seem to worsen it.

The report said: “It is apparent that the effect of the atomic bombings on the confidence of the Japanese civilian population was remarkably localized.”

But there was another question. What was the effect on the Japanese government? As to that the Survey Mission said: “As early as the Spring of 1944 a group of former prime ministers and others close to the Emperor had been making efforts toward bringing the war to an end. The decision to seek ways and means to terminate the war, influenced in part by the knowledge of the low state of popular morale, had been taken in May, 1945 [three months before the first bomb fell] by the Supreme War Guidance Council. . . . The bombs did not convince the military that defense of the home islands was impossible. It did permit the government to say, however, that no army without the weapon could possibly resist an enemy who had it, thus saving face for the army leaders.”

In any case, on August 10, two days after the Russians invaded Manchuria and two days after the bombing of Nagasaki, the Japanese offered to surrender according to the terms of the Potsdam declaration, if only their Emperor could stay on his throne. Four days later Mr. Truman, for the Allies, accepted their surrender—and World War II was ended.