A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II

Contents

Abbreviations

Preface: The Unluckiest Generation

Prologue: The World Unraveling—Again

1940: The Year of Denial

Chapter 1: The Man and the Hour

Chapter 2: The Wherewithal of War

Chapter 3: The Possibilities of Production

Chapter 4: The Onus of Organization

Chapter 5: Making Haste Slowly

1941: The Year of Turmoil

Chapter 6: A House Divided

Chapter 7: To Have and Have Not

Chapter 8: Getting Shipshape

Chapter 9: The Season of Discontent

Chapter 10: Material Gains and Losses

Chapter 11: The Business of War

Chapter 12: The Rush of Events

1942: The Year of Despair

Chapter 13: First Reactions

Chapter 14: A Sea of Troubles

Chapter 15: The Manpower Muddle

Chapter 16: Intramural Wars

Chapter 17: The Feasibility Follies

Chapter 18: Old Frank Comes to Call

Chapter 19: General Max Takes Command

Chapter 20: Mixed Signals

1943: The Year of Production

Chapter 21: City of Paper

Chapter 22: The Stuff of Victory

Chapter 23: Weapons of Mass Production

Chapter 24: The New West

Chapter 25: Ironing Out the Wrinkles

Chapter 26: Feeding Frenzies

Chapter 27: The Sliding Scale of Sacrifice

1944: The Year of Hope

Chapter 28: The Winter of Disconnect

Chapter 29: The Changing Face of War

Chapter 30: Days of Reckoning

Chapter 31: Life in the Days of

Chapter 32: The Sweet Scent of Victory

1945: The Year of Triumph

Chapter 33: The Fear of Faltering

Epilogue: The Payoff

Acknowledgments

Plate Section

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

By the Same Author

For Kim and Shannon, and Joan and Stephanie:

the bookends of my life.

Abbreviations

Preface:

The Unluckiest Generation

This book explores a dimension of World War II that is often mentioned but rarely explained in detail. It describes how Americans at home mobilized for what became the first truly global war in history. The scale of their effort was epic, their task a stupendous one. The story of how it all got done is both complex and convoluted, which is why it has been so difficult to tell. Yet it is unquestionably one of the most important stories in our history for several reasons. Most obviously, the combined effort of so many diverse Americans won this gigantic war, the stakes of which were for the nation matched only by those of the Civil War. Beyond this great achievement, the outcome of their labors, and the process by which it was accomplished, have shaped American history since 1945. Their influence still resonates deeply in our lives and institutions today.

Consider just this short list of its impact. Military spending for preparedness ended the decade-long Great Depression, and wartime outlays laid the foundation for an unprecedented period of postwar prosperity and the flowering of the consumer economy. The war created the industrial-military complex and fostered the rise of Big Science. It introduced the world to the most destructive weapons in human history and thereby set the stage for the Cold War and its lethal arms race. For the first time the military remained a large and continuing presence in American life. For the first time, too, the United States, like it or not, assumed the leading role in world affairs. Even more than in 1918 it was the only major power left standing.

Technologies developed during the war moved to the center of American life in a burgeoning consumer economy. Jet planes, radar, magnetic tape recording, early computers, and a host of electronic innovations are but a few of the military products that found their way into consumer goods. Long-range bombers morphed into a new breed of commercial airliners. The revitalized automobile industry poured out more cars than ever before, including a civilian version of the ubiquitous jeep. A new generation of appliances incorporated improvements developed originally for military use. The Space Age has deep roots in wartime developments.

Big government became a way of life much more than during the New Deal of the 1930s. The modern system of taxation, reaching down into the ranks of low incomes, made its appearance. New Deal programs such as Social Security and unemployment insurance became staples of an expanding social welfare system. The GI Bill of Rights provided education, training, and a fresh start in life to veterans instead of merely dumping them onto a shrinking job market as happened after World War I. Unions became an enduring part of the workplace. The world of Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor had arrived. Oh yes, and the democratic system of government was preserved from the gravest threat it had ever known.

The war changed the face of America. Plants, airfields, military bases, testing ranges, and other installations created new towns or enlarged existing ones beyond recognition. Sleepy villages mushroomed into dynamic towns. The war transformed the West from an economic colony of the East to a vibrant, fast-growing section with new industries that moved it toward economic self-sufficiency. Millions of Americans migrated westward to find jobs and a better life. The war also injected new energy into the long-moribund South’s economy even as tens of thousands of its people, black and white, moved to the North or West to earn the highest pay they had ever seen. In the process they rewrote the demography of their destination cities, creating social and racial tensions that sometimes exploded into violence.

Black Americans and Hispanics found some of the best job opportunities they had ever seen. The war’s urgent need for manpower helped spur the rise of a civil rights movement that began with modest gains but grew into an irresistible force over the years. Women flocked to jobs in war plants or elsewhere in record numbers, and their critical role in mobilization changed not only their individual lives but their place in American society as well. Children’s lives were shaped and often scarred by wartime deprivations and losses. Juvenile delinquency became a staple of American life, not only in cities but in fast-growing suburbs as well.

How did all of this happen? Too often America’s mobilization has been portrayed as a smoothly flowing process in which patrotic Americans rose to the challenge and performed what has often been called miracles of production. While some of the results might seem miraculous in scope, nothing about the process was smooth or flowing. It was rather an arduous, chaotic, contentious grind that exacted a high physical and psychic toll. A curious reversal of fortune took place in that more Americans died in industrial and work-related accidents at home than in combat overseas.

Three factors have blurred our understanding of what happened during those tumultuous years. The first is a tendency to forget that the war began twenty-seven months before the United States entered the fighting. During that time a fierce struggle took place over what position the country should take in the conflict and how fast it should prepare for the possibility that it might become involved. As a result, American mobilization took place in two distinct phases, preparedness (1939–41) and wartime (1942–45). The first proved the more crucial and did much to shape the direction, nature, and timing of the second. It was complicated by the fact that no one knew for certain whether we would go to war, when, where, or with whom. Asking the people to prepare for a war that might or might not involve us could not help but produce conflict and disagreement.

A second factor, easily overlooked, is the extent to which the American experience in World War I loomed over nearly every aspect of mobilization. The bitter, wholly unsatisfying outcome of that experience deeply scarred the memories of that generation, many of whom were leaders in every field of American life by 1939. Many if not most of them wanted no more of war, bailing out Europe from its eternal conflicts, or blood profits for bankers and munitions makers. Generals are far from the only ones who tend to fight the last war.

A third factor involves the way in which the nation’s response to this crisis has been portrayed in retrospect. Over the years some writers have enshrined those who lived through the depression and war period as somehow different, even better than Americans of other eras. While the sentiment is understandable, it also clouds efforts to get at a clear story of the mobilization process. The time has come to deflate the Greatest Generation myth.

Myth is a powerful force and a major obstacle in trying to understand the past. Every nation’s history is glazed with myths, and America is no exception. Apart from often being incomplete or simply wrong, they get in the way of grasping what really happened. The problem is less one of forgetting the past and its meaning than of remembering the wrong things about it and drawing the wrong lessons from it. The characterization of Greatest Generation is a good example of a myth that, in Walter Lippmann’s phrase, is well meaning but unmeaning. Tom Brokaw and others meant well in heaping such lavish tribute on this group of Americans, but the phrase is both misleading and meaningless.

To take one example, how is the generation that fought World War II any greater than the one that fought the Civil War? The Civil War lasted slightly longer than American involvement in World War II. Some 620,000 Americans died in it, more than in all other American wars combined, the large majority of them from noncombat causes. The war was fought entirely at home, on American soil, devastating large parts of the country and leaving the losing section in ruins. Southerners endured the ordeal, not experienced by any Americans since, of suffering military occupation for eleven years afterward. More than 3 million Americans were slaves who gained their freedom, if not equality. Yet that generation cannot claim the greatest title either.

A generation consists of people born in a particular span of years. It is an accident of history over which they have neither choice nor control. The difference between one generation and another lies in the situations they have to confront. Their range of responses will be similar down through the ages even though the circumstances that confront them may vary widely. The generation discussed in this book had to deal with two of the worst crises in our history: the Great Depression and World War II. As always, each crisis affected different people in a wide variety of ways. Some were deeply scarred by the experience; others scarcely knew its presence. Like it or not, many (but not all or even most) of those in the service literally invested and sacrificed their very lives to the task. Others used the crises to turn a profit or improve their fortunes or simply rode it out with as little disturbance to their lives as possible.

How is one even to know the extent or depth to which these crises affected different people? For some—who knows how many?—the basic stuff of their life, emotional, situational, and otherwise, may have far transcended or overshadowed the impact of these larger events. Most people have all they can handle just to deal with whatever is in front of them. When the larger world intrudes, many try to escape or avoid or simply deny its presence for as long as possible. A depression is no big deal to those who have always been poor. For professional soldiers war is an opportunity. When the war came, some men rushed to enlist in a burst of patriotism; many more did not or tried actively to evade military service. However great or small their sense of patriotism, thousands of people flocked to jobs in defense plants because they could earn more money than they ever had in their lives. Whatever else the war did, it lifted huge numbers of Americans out of poverty and hard times and gave them a better life than they had ever had.

No generation is greater than any other for the simple reason that there is no way to measure or define what they did in comparison with other generations. On what basis can you even compare one generation to another? What is being measured or evaluated, and how? If the criterion is accomplishment, then it is a false one because individuals and groups, not generations, get things done. Knowing the modern fetish for statistics and measurement, someone may well come along one day and claim, with elaborate charts and formulas, that 79.3 percent of the Greatest Generation made contributions compared to an average of only 52.7 percent in other generations. Don’t believe a word (or figure) of it. While you ponder that absurdity, consider also the enormous difficulty involved in defining or measuring what constitutes a contribution or accomplishment.

The generation that fought World War II set prodigious new production records in both farm and factory. While this is an undeniable achievement, how can it be compared to the accomplishments of earlier generations that lacked the tools, techniques, organizations, technology, and resources present in 1940? How do we measure it against the achievements of the Civil War generation with its radically different context? It was, after all, the work of earlier generations that created the basis for the productivity of their successors. In this sense history is a process of accretion and accumulation in which succeeding generations build upon or undo the work of their predecessors. The old cliché of standing on the shoulders of giants applies in varying degrees to every generation and its legacy.

In every war, on every battlefield, there are heroes and cowards, stalwarts and shirkers, mainstays and misfits. The same holds just as true at home as at the front. Some people did their part, others did more than their share, and some did little if anything at all or tried to get what they could personally from the times. World War II differed from other wars in scale and scope but not in its diversity of human behavior and responses. History never repeats itself but historical patterns do, especially those centered in human behavior. In radically changing contexts across the centuries the same range of basic emotions and responses can be seen: love and hate, generosity and greed, sacrifice and selfishness, openness and bigotry, vision and small-mindedness, commitment and indifference, hope and fear, patriotism and profiteering.

Does greatness refer to what people had to endure or how they responded to the crises confronting them? If measured by what they had to endure, the term becomes meaningless. No generation gets to choose its fate; its members have no choice but to face whatever circumstances await them. If measured by performance, the record is far more complex and uneven than the Tom Brokaws of the world would have you believe. A better argument can be made that this generation had more to deal with than most others, although that too cannot be measured. But if this is indeed the case, then it would be far more accurate to describe them as the unluckiest generation.

The people of this unluckiest generation, if it is that, had to face first a broken economy that threatened the very essence of the American dream, and then a broken world that threatened to destroy individual freedom. That they survived both challenges is a tribute to the grit, hardiness, and persistence of the best of them. To them, separately and as individuals, belong our hymns of praise and thanks, not to an abstraction called a generation. This book tells the stories of some of them, as well as some of those who contributed little, and tries to show how they managed to get the job done. It is a tale that, with its frustrating yet fascinating mixture of the heroic, routine, and dishonorable, could not be more American or, for that matter, more human.

Maury Klein

Saunderstown, Rhode Island

Prologue:

The World Unraveling—Again

Some day the survivors of this generation will tell their grandchildren what it meant to live through a critical week in the world’s history. They will tell of the newspapers bought, edition after edition, each with its record of new disasters. About the perfect May weather . . . the shudder as an airplane passed overhead . . . About turning the radio knob for news, and instead getting sales plugs and dance music—till a new voice broke in to announce that Antwerp had fallen, or St. Quentin, so that the war seemed to be fought in one’s living room . . . About the sense of absolute dehumanization rising from these stories of dive bombers and tanks . . . What the radio suggests is a world of machines for reducing human flesh to shreds and cinders . . . But worst of all, they will say, was the feeling of helplessness.

—Freda Kirchwey, New Republic, May 27, 1940¹

A nickel ride on the subway or a dime on the Long Island Railroad brought one to the gates of the future, that place of promise so enticing to depression-ravaged Americans in 1939. The future happened to be located in Flushing Meadows, where, on April 30, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over the opening of the New York World’s Fair with its theme, Building the World of Tomorrow. After paying 75 cents admission, the visitor stepped into a wonderland of exhibits dominated by examples of tomorrow’s technologies. The most imposing sight, the signature emblems of the fair, loomed up like the discarded toys of some giant. The 610-foot-tall Trylon connected to the 180-foot-wide Perisphere by a graceful bridge on which long lines of people waited patiently for their turn inside the huge ball.²

Once past the entrance they stepped into one of two rings revolving in opposite directions. Beneath them lay Democracity, a huge diorama depicting 11,000 square miles of a future city and suburbs interwoven with stretches of parks and farmland, all tied together with expressways and parkways. After a six-minute show the audience left by descending the Helicline, a spiraling 950-foot ramp that took them back to ground level. Impressive as it was, Democracity was not even the largest diorama at the fair. That honor belonged to the City of Light, a scale replica of New York City’s skyline that stretched a city block and stood three stories high. Shifting, brightly colored lights flashed the city through a twenty-four-hour cycle in twelve minutes with factories that hummed, subways and elevators that operated, and other machines powered by underground lines.

Another long line snaked along the General Motors building that housed the fair’s most popular exhibit, Futurama. Visitors slipped into 552 tall, plush seats, each pair with its own speakers, that revolved around a 36,000-square-foot model of a highway system in 1960 featuring seven-lane expressways monitored by radio control towers that enabled speeds as high as 100 miles an hour. The highways were the arteries of a city delightfully free of pollution and congestion, brimming with parks and civic buildings, model homes, and farms through which traffic flowed unobtrusively. Next door the Ford building offered a half-mile spiral Road of Tomorrow and a stunning 100-foot turntable with eighty-seven animated groups depicting every step in the building of an automobile from extracting ore to the finished vehicle.

Machines, the servants of tomorrow’s good life, dominated many of the exhibits. The General Electric building presented a kitchen with talking appliances; the Westinghouse building featured Elektro, a seven-foot robot, and his mechanical dog Sparko, as well as a duel between Mrs. Drudge, who washed a stack of dishes by hand, and Mrs. Modern, who did them in an electric dishwasher. The highlight of the RCA building was a fabulous new device called television, set in a handsome cabinet, its picture seen not directly but reflected off a mirror in the lid. A host of other corporations had their own wonders on display. At every turn could be found new marvels, machines that promised an easier, more gracious lifestyle if only one could afford them.

But today’s and tomorrow’s technology had another, much darker side that was about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. The first people to suffer its wrath were the Poles, one of the nations with an exhibit at the fair. Its staff would not return home at the season’s end because their home no longer existed as such.

On September 1, while the fair was still in session, tomorrow’s technology crashed down on Poland with sudden and swift brutality. Without warning German warplanes rained bombs on the town of Wielun, destroying most of it and killing more than a thousand civilians. German tanks and troops poured across the Polish border from the north, northwest, and south while more than 200 Stuka dive-bombers and other planes terrorized Polish cities, creating a panic among civilians and cutting communication lines. While the three German forces looked to converge on Warsaw and surround the valiant but fragmented Polish army, the Luftwaffe created mass confusion and destruction, driving inhabitants of attacked cities onto the roads, clogging defense efforts and escalating the sense of panic.³

Although the Poles fought stubbornly and managed small victories, they were no match for the Wehrmacht and its air cover. By September 7 lead elements of the German Tenth Army, led by the Fourth Panzer, approached Warsaw. Thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians died in the attacks; many more were executed by the advancing Germans, who had been told by Hitler to show no mercy. In Warsaw alone about 40,000 civilians died from air and artillery fire before the defenders surrendered on September 27. More than 10 percent of the city’s buildings were completely destroyed and another 40 percent heavily damaged. Polish resistance collapsed quickly after the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east on September 17.

On September 3 Great Britain and France declared war on Germany in response to the invasion but could offer no significant military help. So rapidly had the Germans overrun Poland with their juggernaut of planes, tanks, and motorized troops that shocked observers were convinced a new style of warfare had emerged. A journalist called it blitzkrieg, lightning war, but he was only half right. Only part of the attack managed to utilize the full impact of a mobile, disruptive mechanized force; much of the short campaign amounted to more conventional fighting. But Poland was an ominous harbinger of things to come, a new type of warfare that drew its inspiration and its strength from factories and scientific laboratories.

The bells that rang in the New Year on December 31, 1939, tolled a tune of celebration despite a week of cold, dreary weather across the nation. People eager to forget their cares jammed restaurants, theaters, and bars to welcome a year they hoped would be kinder to them than the departing one. Instead they would encounter what Donald Nelson, then a Sears, Roebuck executive in Chicago, called one of the saddest, most confused, and perilous years in the annals of our nation.⁴

The country was closing out a decade of the longest and worst depression in its history. A sharp recession in 1938 had crushed hopes for recovery and delivered a devastating blow to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fading New Deal. Unemployment hovered around 17 percent with more than 9 million people seeking work, and nothing on the horizon promised any improvement. Roosevelt entered the eighth and presumed final year of his presidency as the lamest of lame ducks. The depression would not go away despite every effort to banish it, Congress had turned against him, and the once bright hopes of the administration for continued social and economic reform seemed all but extinguished. The New Deal was played out and under increasing attack from its many enemies, who hoped to roll back some of its main achievements.⁵

It was small consolation that the rest of the world was in even worse shape. In August Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, the most implacable of ideological enemies, had shocked everyone by signing a nonaggression treaty. Two months after Germany’s revitalized armies rolled across the Polish border and conquered that hapless nation, Russia invaded Finland. On the other side of the globe Japan continued its undeclared but merciless invasion of China, having boasted on Christmas Day that it had killed more than 1.2 million Chinese troops with a loss of only 27,000 Japanese soldiers. More than half the world’s people were at war with no end in sight.⁶

Amid this first truly global conflict the United States remained the only major power not fighting somewhere, and most Americans were determined to keep things that way. The sour outcome of the First World War had left them bitterly disillusioned and determined never to repeat the experience. Woodrow Wilson had led the nation into the European bloodbath as a crusade for democracy that promised to be the war to end all wars. Instead it sowed the seeds for an even greater conflict that erupted only twenty-one years later. Congress tried to ensure that no future president could lead the United States on a similar fool’s errand. Between 1935 and 1939 it passed a series of Neutrality Acts that throttled any effort to lend aid or comfort to foreign combatants. The idea was to keep American companies from selling munitions to nations at war, thereby squelching the profiteers that in the public’s mind had drawn the country into the earlier war.

But the world had changed greatly since 1918. The war shattered four imperial regimes, leaving Europe in the throes of instability and revolution. In Russia the inept czarist government gave way to a Communist leadership bent on world revolution. The Ottoman Empire collapsed, leaving a troubled collection of new states struggling to define themselves. The disintegrated Austro-Hungarian Empire created a dangerous vacuum in central Europe as a number of new countries—the product of freshly drawn maps—fought to define their new identities. Then there was Germany, exhausted and starving from the war, crushed by the burden of the onerous Versailles Treaty that sought to keep it from ever posing a threat again but instead made it even more determined to do so.⁷

Germany had risen from the ashes of defeat and humiliation to become a relentlessly efficient war machine. Italy under its fascist regime had grown giddy with pretensions of power and glory. Over all of Europe loomed the huge, enigmatic shadow of the Soviet Union with its Communist ideology. In Asia Japan, the most westernized power, doggedly pursued its obsession for empire and expansion. The differences between these ambitious countries and the democracies of Europe, most notably England and France, bore little if any resemblance to the clashes leading up to World War I. A toxic element in the form of conflicting ideologies had come to infuse their thinking. While not new, never had it played so dominant and lethal a role in international relations.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood better than most the threat these beliefs posed. Eighty years earlier Abraham Lincoln had defined the American democratic republic as the last best hope of earth. The threat then had been internal, the splintering of the world’s one shining example of self-rule. It was averted by what remains the bloodiest war in American history—made so by the fact that the casualties on both sides were Americans. In Roosevelt’s time the danger had become external in the form of aggressive authoritarian governments driven not only by the ancient fuel of national or ethnic pride but also by the seductive dogmas of competing ideologies in the form of fascism, Nazism, and Communism. The age of imperial dynasties gave way to one of dictatorial and managerial dynasties.

The rise of these regimes met little resistance from the weary democracies. England and France, the supposed victors, emerged from World War I weakened, broke, and lacking the resources to support their enlarged responsibilities. One major ally, Russia, had grown hostile and isolated itself from the rest of Europe. Their key supporter, the United States, turned its back on the new order in Europe by refusing to join the League of Nations and pursuing its own brand of unilateralism. The new republics created by the war struggled to overcome ethnic, economic, and political tensions that undermined stability. In Germany the Kaiser had abdicated, but his military and administrative regime remained largely intact and influential. The new Weimar government had little chance of planting democracy in such hostile soil, especially after the ruinous inflation of 1922–23 and economic collapse of 1929–30.

Especially was it helpless against the Freikorps, the militant, right-wing veterans described by historian Michael Adams as self-appointed violent defenders of German honor. Their goals were to subvert the Versailles Treaty, destroy Communism at home, and bring all German-speaking peoples back into the motherland. The latter included some provinces ceded to France, the Polish corridor with its port of Danzig, which had been given to Poland, the Sudeten region made part of Czechoslovakia, and the Germans living in Austria. People told us that the War was over, said one veteran. That made us laugh. We ourselves are the War. Its flame burns strongly in us. It envelops our whole being and fascinates us with the urge to destroy.⁸

The rise to power of Adolf Hitler gave the Freikorps veterans the leader they craved: a strong man committed to their entire program and more. By 1939 Hitler had restored German pride through a hypnotic blend of rhetoric and pageantry coupled with sheer brutality, military strength, and the reacquisition of nearly all the coveted territories. Germany had again become the major power of Europe, partly by default but largely through its own demonic commitment to rearming and rebuilding its military. Thanks to its continued scientific and technological superiority, the new Third Reich enjoyed the finest and most advanced weaponry even though the country lacked thirty-three of thirty-five raw materials needed for industrial production.⁹

While Germany rebuilt its military at lightning speed, a similar pattern unfolded on the other side of the world. Since the late nineteenth century Japan had developed a Western-style business and industrial base handicapped by its lack of raw materials. It sought to overcome this shortcoming through creation of a new order in Asia dominated by a Japanese empire and by trade with the United States, which provided several key materials such as oil, gasoline, and scrap iron for making steel. Gradually, however, extreme elements of the Japanese military rose to power in the political system, especially after the onset of depression severely reduced the nation’s exports and lowered its standard of living. A better solution, insisted the militarists, was to achieve self-sufficiency through expansion and conquest. Moderates who opposed this policy were silenced by intimidation or assassination.

Thus did the depression, striking different nations at different times, feed the rise of extremism in both Germany and Japan even as it weakened the democracies, which let their armed forces slide into obsolescence while they struggled to solve their economic woes. In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria and converted it to a puppet state called Manchukuo. Three years later Benito Mussolini revived Italian fantasies of empire by invading Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Between 1936 and 1939 Germany and Italy helped right-wing forces led by Francisco Franco overthrow the Spanish republic in a bitter civil war that became a proving ground for newly developed weapons. In 1936, too, Hitler took his first major gamble by occupying and remilitarizing the Rhineland, the buffer zone between Germany and France. Already he had begun a campaign of intimidation to undermine the government of Austria; in 1938 German troops marched into that country.

The acquisition of Austria, with its resources and financial reserves, greatly strengthened Germany’s position. That same year Hitler demanded the return of the Sudetenland, the mountainous northern portion of Czechoslovakia that, if lost, would leave the rest of the country unprotected. This demand led in the summer of 1938 to the infamous Munich Conference at which England and France yielded to Hitler’s demand despite Czechoslovakia’s pleas. The two nations believed themselves utterly unready to fight Hitler alone, and they knew the United States had no interest in providing military support. Only the Soviet Union offered to guarantee Czech borders, but neither England nor France trusted Joseph Stalin’s intentions. Nor did Poland want Russian troops crossing its borders, lest they decide to remain in the country. Instead the Russians contented themselves with occupying the three small Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

Having gained the Sudetenland, Hitler promised yet again that it would be his last territorial demand in Europe. Six months later, in March 1939, German troops occupied the remainder of defenseless Czechoslovakia. A month later Mussolini invaded Albania. England and France responded by extending guarantees to Poland, vowing to declare war if Germany crossed its borders. Then, in August, came the stunning nonaggression treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union. With his eastern front secure for the time being, Hitler unleashed his troops on Poland. Once again Europe found itself engulfed in a war of the most desperate kind.

After the fall of Poland, however, autumn gave way to winter without any further overt moves by the Germans. Blitzkrieg turned into sitzkrieg, what observers called the phony war even as they tried to fathom Hitler’s intentions. Some hoped that his appetite for expansion had finally been satisfied; others viewed the pause as the lull before the storm.

American opinion remained divided at every level from the president and his cabinet on down. Our government has information . . . that Germany now has a total of eighty divisions on the Belgium and Holland frontier, noted Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, on January 27, 1940. This is about sixty per cent of the total of Germany’s troops. Just what this may mean, anyone may guess. Franklin Roosevelt did not like anything he was hearing, least of all the reports coming in from Poland. He told the cabinet that probably nothing in all history exceeds the sadistic cruelty that Germany is responsible for in Poland . . . The Jews are receiving the worst treatment.¹⁰

Most Americans were not privy to these reports and cared little about what was happening in Europe. The long ordeal of the depression, coupled with disillusionment over the previous war, left most people far more concerned with events at home. The belief was widespread that the so-called merchants of death had dragged the country into the war. During the 1920s reports circulated that the war had created some 23,000 new millionaires who had grown rich by selling munitions to the belligerents and then to our own government. In their bitterness many people found a convenient scapegoat in the war industries and vowed never to repeat that mistake. The crash and depression had already thrown businessmen into disrepute; war profiteering added a glaze of shame and disgrace to their image.¹¹

This determination to let Europe stew in its own malign juices fostered the revival of an old American attitude. Popularly known as isolationism, it was more accurately unilateralism. The object was not to sever contact with the rest of the globe, especially in matters of trade and commerce, but rather to ensure that only Americans decided what the nation would and would not do overseas. Opposition to the League of Nations arose from the fact that it might have the power to send American troops to fight abroad whether Americans liked it or not. No international body was going to dictate policy to the United States or decide the fate of its soldiers. On that basis the Senate rejected the League, and with it the opportunity for America to play a major role in the new organization.

During the 1920s nearly all Americans agreed that American soldiers should not be sent to fight another foreign war unless the nation was directly attacked. The growing threat of another European war during the 1930s only strengthened this attitude. As Hitler’s mounting belligerence deepened tensions, most Americans made no secret of their sympathies for England and France but stopped short of favoring any form of aid that risked involving the nation in a war. The first three Neutrality Acts, 1935–37, tried to guarantee that there would be no repeat of the process that led the United States into World War I. The acts forbade the shipment of arms to warring nations, barred American ships from carrying war materials to belligerents, prohibited all loans to belligerents, and created a National Munitions Board to put the armament industry under federal control. Some isolationists even demanded a complete embargo on trade with warring nations but failed to get their way.¹²

According to the isolationist argument, nations went to war for territorial or economic gain or to defend their boundaries, trade, or principles. None of these reasons applied to America’s position during the 1930s, so its proper course was to avoid getting entangled in foreign affairs and mind its own business. Others embraced what historian Charles A. Beard called the devil theory of war, which held that the bankers and business interests had drawn the United States into the war through their manipulations. A special Senate committee chaired by Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota held nearly two years of hearings that condemned the role of munitions makers and bankers in pushing weak-willed politicians into going to war. Of this lengthy witch hunt Senator Harry Truman later wrote, The Nye Committee did more damage to the morale and welfare of this country than any other Committee that held Hearings in the Senate.¹³

Americans would not let go of the belief that bankers and munitions makers had dragged the nation into war. Between 1918 and April 1942 no less than 170 bills and resolutions to reduce or eliminate war production profits were introduced into Congress. To many people greed was simply one more dimension to the devil theory of war.¹⁴

Congress hoped the Neutrality Acts would cage the devil before he got loose to work his mischief. It also wanted to handcuff Franklin Roosevelt, who did not share this narrow view of America’s role in the world. An obscure Indiana congressman named Louis Ludlow thrust himself into the limelight with an even more drastic proposal, sponsoring a constitutional amendment that would require a referendum of the American people before war could be declared. It changes the Constitution, said Ludlow, so that the trigger that starts the war machinery will be pulled, not by a little group subject to being cajoled and bullied by selfish special interests, but by all the people. Here was the devil theory writ large, but it failed despite the support of many prominent people and groups.¹⁵

Some Americans took the practical view that Hitler was going to win and that the United States, like it or not, had to learn to do business with him. Others marveled at the technological achievements of Hitler’s Germany and thought his leadership represented the wave of the future. Their numbers included Charles A. Lindbergh, hero of the first transatlantic flight, who became the celebrity hero of the isolationist cause. Lindbergh had lived for several years in Europe and had seen firsthand the air forces of the warring powers. He was as impressed by the strength and efficiency of Germany’s Luftwaffe as he was by the weakness of England and France. He concluded logically that the democracies were no match for the regimented power of Germany, and that the United States must avoid giving them any aid while strengthening its own military.¹⁶

The isolationists in Congress posed a special problem. They not only occupied a forum for influencing the public but could also block or delay the president’s legislative efforts. Most believed that the United States should fight a war only if attacked, and that it should do so alone by avoiding any entangling alliances. Roosevelt thought it made much more sense to fight as far from home as possible and enlist as many allies as possible to help share the burden. But the isolationists could not shake free of their hangover from the legacy of World War I. Robert Bruce Lockhart, a witty Scot lecturing in the United States early in 1939, offered his impression of the average American’s attitude toward the British:

We Americans went into the last war to save democracy. We pulled you out of a hole and we received very grudging thanks. At Versailles and after Versailles you trampled on democratic ideals. Now, largely through your own fault, you are in trouble again and you want our help. Well, we’ve learned our lesson.¹⁷

Against this tide of opposition Roosevelt made little headway. In October 1937 he had delivered what became known as the Quarantine Speech in which he portrayed a growing epidemic of world lawlessness that would spread like a contagious disease unless contained by the international community, including the United States. The very foundations of civilization were threatened, he warned, and the United States could not escape if the rest of the world plunged into war. It was a trial balloon that went nowhere and drew heavy criticism for its war mongering message. Most Americans rejected it as the wrong medicine for the wrong problem. One resident of Albany, New York, wrote the White House to voice his adamant refusal to go to war for trade or munitions makers or international bankers. Others declared that the nation had more than enough problems at home without seeking them overseas.¹⁸

The heart of those problems remained the depression. The recession of 1938 cost Roosevelt dearly, not only in his hopes for recovery but also in the off-year elections that fall. Republicans scooped up eighty-two seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and a dozen governorships. Roosevelt’s abortive attempt to purge the worst southern conservatives had boomeranged and earned him even greater opposition in the solidly Democratic South. Although Democrats still had a majority in Congress, Republicans joined with conservative southerners to oppose Roosevelt, the New Deal, and any policy that smacked of aid to England and France. The master politician seemed to have lost his touch and to be destined for the political irrelevance accorded lame duck presidents.

However, veteran politicians knew better than to underestimate Roosevelt. No other president since Andrew Jackson had aroused so broad a spectrum of primal emotions, from unrestrained love to seething, irrational hatred. He saw the need not only to strengthen the nation’s own military but even more to help those opposing Hitler’s aggressions. Most isolationists approved building up American defense but strongly objected to offering aid abroad. After the Munich Conference events increasingly thrust foreign policy onto the political table despite all efforts by the isolationists to keep it at bay. The issue, now rapidly taking shape, observed Kiplinger’s Washington Letter on January 28, 1939, is over whether we shall give active economic support to the democracies in advance of any overt and demonstrable threat to U.S. The President is definitely steering toward such a policy.¹⁹

A week later Kiplinger’s added another twist to the debate. "Now a new element appears—suspicion of President’s motives, it reported. . . . Many members of Congress, in BOTH of the parties, suspect the President of welcoming a war crisis for third-term reasons. Would Roosevelt defy the time-honored, two-term tradition established by George Washington and run again? In mid-May Kiplinger’s declared flatly that the ‘draft’ Roosevelt movement is about to start . . . Politicians who know how to interpret the intentions behind actions have no doubt that Roosevelt is a definite behind-the-scenes candidate. The president remained silent about his intentions and said repeatedly that the country would remain aloof from any European war, but none of his detractors believed him. The Executive branch . . . is putting up a front of intention-talk about staying out of the war, predicted Kiplinger’s shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, but is actually preparing to go into it."²⁰

Intervention had little public support. A Roper poll in September 1939 showed that 30 percent of Americans wanted nothing at all to do with the warring nations. Another 37 percent were willing to sell arms to belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis but also wished to take no sides and stay out of the war entirely. With two thirds of the people opposed to giving aid of any kind to the Allies, Roosevelt had no illusions about the uphill struggle facing him. It’s a terrible thing, he told Samuel Rosenman, one of his closest advisers, to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and find no one there. But lead he would because he believed the stakes were so high and the time short. Seven controversial years in office had done much to immunize him from the acrimony, insults, and slander heaped on him by those who feared and loathed him.²¹

However, an astute politician like Roosevelt also knew better than to get too far out in front. When war erupted in Europe, his public response was tame enough to satisfy even diehard isolationists. On September 8, 1939, after issuing a Proclamation of Limited Emergency, Roosevelt said during a press conference:

There is no intention and no need of doing all those things that could be done . . . There is no thought in any shape, manner or form, of putting the Nation, either in its defenses or in its internal economy, on a war basis. That is one thing we want to avoid. We are going to keep the Nation on a peace basis, in accordance with peacetime authorizations.²²

Robert Sherwood called these probably the weakest words that Roosevelt ever uttered. They outraged his supporters, and his enemies doubted that he meant them. But Roosevelt had a limited palette of choices. I am almost literally walking on eggs, he admitted. To get anything done he needed support in Congress, which had so far given him precious little. On September 21, three weeks after the war began, he called for a repeal of the arms embargo and a return to traditional American neutrality. Congress obliged by replacing the embargo with a cash-and-carry provision that allowed belligerents to buy war goods in the United States if they paid cash and hauled them away in their own ships. This was something, at least; the British and French lost no time placing orders and coordinating their purchases.²³

To gain even this concession, however, required every ounce of his political clout. He had practically begged Congress to go this modest step while calling in chits from friendly congressmen, governors, mayors, businessmen, and even sympathetic Republicans to get them to exert their influence. The debate occupied six weeks, during which the isolationists unleashed their battalions of familiar rhetoric. Old Senator William E. Borah, who had coined the phrase phony war, warned yet again in a failing voice that if the repeal passed, You will send munitions without pay, and you will send your boys back to the slaughter pens of Europe.²⁴

One modest step at a time was all the president felt he could manage. On January 12, 1939, he requested $525 million as a minimum program for the necessities of defense, which Congress granted grudgingly. In May Secretary of State Cordell Hull asked Congress to repeal the arms embargo; a bill was put forth but defeated 214–173 amid charges that munitions makers would look forward to again reaping unrestricted profits while American mothers might well shudder at the likely prospect of again sending their sons across the sea to die in the attempt to collect the debts owed these warlords. In July Roosevelt again urged Congress to act, but the Senate ignored his request.²⁵

However, in April 1939 the president did get something he wanted very badly. After a two-year struggle Congress finally passed the Administrative Reorganization Act, thanks in large part to the guiding hand of Roosevelt’s close friend and ally Senator James F. Byrnes of South Carolina. The innocuous title of this act masked its potential for revolutionizing the executive wing of the government; some later scholars called it the beginning of the modern presidency. Under its authority dozens of agencies and bureaus, including the Bureau of the Budget, the National Resources Planning Board, the Office of Government Reports, the Army-Navy Munitions Board, the Joint Economy Board, the Joint Chiefs, and the White House Office, moved from congressional oversight or semiautonomy to a newly created Executive Office of the President. The arrangement gave the president adequate machinery to administer the government. It also enlarged the Budget Bureau’s activities to include research in developing improved plans of administrative management.²⁶

Prior to the act the president had no actual executive organization. White House aides were considered part of the presidential household and not part of any administrative command. All the lines of authority that converged on the White House—cabinet members, agency heads, mission heads, and others—flowed directly to the president, and conflicts between them had to be resolved by him personally. As Robert Sherwood observed, It was a system which could not have existed in any well-ordered big business organization.²⁷

The executive order creating the internal divisions of the Executive Office also contained a provision for establishing an Office of Emergency Management (OEM), which created a legal basis for setting up any special agency the president deemed necessary for defense, war, or any other emergency. It was a logical inclusion and, as events revealed, a crucial one that Roosevelt intended to exploit to the fullest. If there was one thing the future promised, it was more emergencies.²⁸

The longer the phony war dragged on, the bolder and more shrill grew the isolationists, who insisted that the European war was of no concern to Americans. Their opponents, the so-called interventionists, insisted that a British victory over the Nazis was crucial to American security. Both camps included in their ranks improbable mixes of strange bedfellows that ignored conventional divisions such as liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican, Catholic-Protestant, and management-labor. Isolationism drew together fascists, Communists, pacifists, anti-Semites, racists, some Italian Americans, Irish Americans, Anglophobes, and a host of others who sincerely believed America should pursue its own destiny free of European influence. The interventionist camp was equally mixed, which meant that both sides disagreed among themselves on any specific issue almost as much as they did with their adversaries.²⁹

Many people in both camps agreed on one issue, albeit for different reasons: that the United States should move quickly to strengthen its own defenses. Interventionists pointed out that the contracts for armaments signed by the British and French led to the construction of new factories, which would strengthen American production. The diehards in Congress, however, remained unconvinced. On January 3, 1940, Roosevelt declared in his annual message, I am asking the Congress for Army and Navy increases which are based not on panic but on common sense. They are not as great as enthusiastic alarmists seek. They are not as small as unrealistic persons claiming superior private information would demand. The House Appropriations Committee dawdled over the request until April and imposed cuts totaling 10 percent. Where the president asked for 496 new airplanes, the committee approved only 57. By the time the Senate applied its wisdom to the measure, the phony war had ended.³⁰

When Americans awoke on the morning of April 9, Appomattox Day, they learned that Hitler’s troops had seized control of Denmark and Norway. With the conquest of Denmark came a claim to Greenland, the exercise of which would put Hitler within dangerous reach of North America. For the next month the United States and the rest of the world watched and waited for the next blow. It came on May 10 when Hitler’s legions stormed across the borders into Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Luxembourg. On that same day Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned and was replaced by Winston Churchill, who could hardly have inherited a worse situation. During the phony war Churchill said pointedly of Europe’s neutral nations that tried to avoid invasion by appeasing Hitler, Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.³¹

Now the crocodile was loose and voracious of appetite. Where Poland had been the dress rehearsal, the real blitzkrieg arrived, and it aimed for quick, devastating victories. A date would be set for launching the attack, and the target country hit with overwhelming force at a speed never before thought possible. No quarter would be given or concern shown for collateral damage to civilians. Indeed, the blitzkrieg targeted them as part of the plan to demoralize and confuse the enemy. There would be no repeat of the endless trench warfare that had turned World War I into a slaughterhouse. This would be butchery of a much different kind, featuring new, greatly improved weapons and a mobility never before seen in warfare. The Germans under Hitler, observed Robert Sherwood, had accomplished in eleven days what they had failed to do in the four years of bitter fighting in the First World War.³²

The Dutch lasted only five days before surrendering; King Leopold of Belgium managed to hold out until May 28. The German juggernaut rolled through the Belgian Ardennes, crushed the befuddled French Ninth Army at Sedan, and by May 21 had the Allied armies in full retreat across Flanders. The shattered British Expeditionary Force, having lost more than 60,000 men, piled up in a chaotic heap at Dunkirk on the coast, where more than 300,000 Allied troops awaited their doom from the onrushing Germans. Then, on May 24, for reasons never fully explained, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht’s panzerss to halt their advance for three days. During that respite the English threw together an improbable armada of every type of ship that could float, crossed the strait to Dunkirk, and for nine days heroically carried troops back to England amid air attacks, fire, and high seas. Nearly 340,000 troops escaped in a rescue that became the stuff of legend.³³

The audacity of the rescue could not conceal the harsh fact that, as Churchill admitted, what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster. In its desperate retreat the BEF had been forced to abandon virtually all its equipment, including 680 of 700 tanks, 82,000 scout cars and motorcycles, 90,000 rifles and even more machine guns, and 8,000 field telephones. During the evacuation 10 of England’s 74 destroyers had been sunk and 177 Royal Air Force planes lost, leaving it with only 283 aircraft and 362 pilots in the entire country. The scene at Dunkirk itself defied imagination. The ruined town was littered with corpses of soldiers and civilians, and clogged beyond belief with wrecked vehicles of all kinds. Over a distance of several miles, observed a reporter on the scene, the highway was lined with thousands of Allied trucks and other motorized vehicles. Immense numbers of these had been driven into ditches to prevent their use by the enemy. The docks were so jammed with trucks and other vehicles that the final jam was completely impossible to disentangle.³⁴

Nor was the nightmare over. On June 5 the German divisions turned their full fury against France. In one of the great follies of modern warfare, the French had placed their faith for defending themselves from Germany in the gigantic series of fortifications known as the Maginot Line. Evidently no French leader gave enough thought to two basic facts: German planes could simply fly over the Maginot Line, and the Wehrmacht could repeat—this time successfully—the strategy used in World War I of sweeping through the Lowland countries and attacking France from the north. As one reporter noted, the Germans were following their 1914 route but on a triple-quick timetable. Having already subdued the Lowland countries, the Wehrmacht pushed relentlessly through France as the latter’s armies crumbled in the wake of combined air and ground attacks. By June 10 the Germans were within thirty-five miles of Paris; four days later they reached the city, which was deliberately left undefended to avoid its destruction. That same day Italy declared war on France and attacked it from the south.³⁵

With its once proud and vastly overrated army shattered and demoralized, the French surrendered on June 22. A sense of terror swept through the civilized world as a result of these incredible achievements of mechanical barbarism, noted Sherwood. . . . It was the supreme triumph of what Edmond Taylor has correctly called the ‘Strategy of Terror.’ Hitler now stood astride most of western Europe, greatly increasing the resources at his disposal and giving him air bases near enough to England for sustained attacks by the Luftwaffe. England lacked almost every weapon in quantity, especially aircraft, to mount an effective defense. It was too late to save France; the question was whether England could hold out. Never, admitted Churchill, has a nation been so naked before her foes.³⁶

Even the Nazis did not know how little Britain had left, recalled Donald Nelson. There were hardly enough tanks to fight a regiment of well armed Boy Scouts. There were few small arms, and almost no ammunition. Practically the entire arsenal of the nation had been lost in the valiant effort to save France.³⁷

Nor was the crisis limited to Europe. The fall of France and the Lowland countries left their overseas colonies in a perilous state. From the Dutch West Indies the Germans could threaten the Gulf Coast of the United States and the Panama Canal. Japan might well be emboldened to seize the Dutch East Indies and British colonies in Asia, giving it huge amounts of oil, rubber, tin, and other resources while cutting off the United States from its supply of rubber and