Freedom's Forge (2 page)

Roosevelt drummed his fingers and thought. For years his political instincts had told him to stay away from what was happening in Europe. He had come into office in 1933 to deal with a domestic crisis, the economic depression left unsolved by Herbert Hoover. Unemployment had stood at 25 percent. Industrial production had fallen by a third; one-half of the nation’s wealth had been wiped out. His job had been tackling breadlines, closed factories, and a budget out of balance by $2.5 billion. Dabbling in foreign affairs had seemed a distraction.

In addition, the Democratic Party he headed had been badly burned by European entanglements under Woodrow Wilson. It was led by men disillusioned by the failure of Wilson’s promises regarding the First World War, “the war to end all wars,” and what had seemed then to be a Carthaginian peace imposed on Germany at Versailles. Having once been determined to save the world, American progressives were now just as determined to turn their backs on it.

Contrary to later myth, the Republican years of the twenties were not the heyday of isolationism. Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had remained actively engaged in European affairs. Their representatives attended disarmament conferences, mediated disputes over war reparations, helped to rebuild a broken Germany, and provided famine relief to a starving Soviet Union.

Roosevelt and New Deal Democrats rejected this legacy of engagement. It was a Democratic Congress that passed two Neutrality Acts in 1935 and 1936, prohibiting American companies from selling any war
equipment to any belligerent in an armed conflict, and a Democratic president—Franklin Roosevelt—who signed them both.
⁵

Roosevelt had also encouraged Senator Gerald Nye (a Republican) and his young legal counsel Alger Hiss in their sensational investigations into the conduct of American armaments manufacturers in the First World War. The Nye Committee blasted companies like DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, Colt Arms, Electric Boat (makers of submarines), Curtiss, Boeing, and Sperry Gyroscope as “merchants of death.” It even blamed their “lies, deceit, hypocrisy, greed, and graft” for getting the United States into the war in the first place.
⁶

Nye’s proposed solution was nationalizing the armaments industry. That didn’t happen, but companies like DuPont got the message. The Wilmington, Delaware, firm had supplied America’s armed forces with gunpowder since the American Revolution. Now it slashed its munitions-making division to less than 2 percent of operations.
⁷
Other companies drew the same lesson: Supplying America with arms was business you did
not
want.
^*

That didn’t matter much, because the defense budget was moribund. Cuts President Hoover had imposed on the War and Navy departments with the onset of the Depression became self-sustaining. “Niggardly appropriations for the operation and maintenance of the Navy put naval operations in a veritable straitjacket,” one historian would write of those bleak years.
⁸
Ships were scrapped or mothballed; fleet exercises were curtailed by a lack of fuel and support vessels. Building and fortifying facilities ceased, especially in the western Pacific. The naval base at Pearl Harbor, which was supposed to anchor a chain of fortified
Pacific naval stations stretching from Midway to Guam and the Philippines, became a lonely outpost in a vast and empty sea.

From the fourth-biggest military force in the world in 1918, the United States Army shrank to number eighteen, just ahead of tiny Holland. By 1939 the Army Air Corps, forerunner of the U.S. Air Force, consisted of some seventeen hundred planes, all fighters and trainers, and fewer than 20,000 officers and enlisted men.
⁹

In the late thirties, as tensions grew in Europe between the totalitarian powers and the liberal democracies, the United States remained reluctant to break its neutrality and take sides. Roosevelt and his special White House aide Harry Hopkins did not admire men like Hitler and Mussolini; quite the opposite. But their overriding goal was peace in Europe, in order to keep America out of war. If that meant appeasement of Hitler’s incessant demands, then so be it. When Roosevelt learned in October 1938 that Neville Chamberlain had handed over a large chunk of Czechoslovakia to the Third Reich, he sent a congratulatory telegram: “Good man.”
¹⁰

But soon after the surrender at Munich, Roosevelt’s mood began to change. He realized Hitler’s thirst for power was not going to be assuaged, ever. This would inevitably mean war, and once again America would find itself one ocean away from a Europe in flames. “If the Rhine frontiers are threatened,” he told friends in January 1939, “the rest of the world is too”—including the United States.
¹¹

So after years of avoiding foreign affairs, Roosevelt began taking small, cautious steps, like a man feeling his way along in the dark.

In 1936 the Washington Naval Treaty, which had sharply limited the future growth of the U.S. Navy in the name of arms control, expired. Roosevelt let it lapse. He then ordered the Navy to launch its first major shipbuilding program in more than twelve years (one of the ships to come out of it was the aircraft carrier USS
Enterprise
). In 1938 the Army Air Corps got the biggest authorization for buying planes in its history.
¹²
Roosevelt began talking about an American air force on a par with those of Britain, France, and Germany.

The Army and Navy Munitions Board, which decided what kinds of weaponry America would make, became an executive office of the
president—a bureaucratic consolidation that showed the commander-in-chiefs new interest in military matters. He also authorized the transfer of American capital ships from the Pacific to the Atlantic, the first significant shift in the country’s naval dispositions since the close of World War I.

Then when Europe went to war in September 1939, Roosevelt joined forces with Nevada senator Key Pittman to call for a bill modifying the Neutrality Act. Starting in November, the United Kingdom and France were free to purchase munitions from American companies on a “cash-and-carry” basis.

All well and good for Britain and France. But what about munitions for
America
? Reports that summer had it that Hitler’s Luftwaffe had reached a combined strength of nearly 8,500 fighters and bombers—most of them advanced types less than three years old. The Army Air Corps had barely a fifth of that number, and most were out of date. When it came to the other ingredients of modern mechanized warfare—tanks, armored cars, antiaircraft guns, and troop-carrying trucks—Americans were even more hopelessly behind.

Brigadier General George Patton learned this when he took charge of the Army’s Second Armored Brigade at Fort Benning, Georgia, the summer of 1939. Patton had 325 tanks—at a time when the Germans had more than 2,000—but no reliable nuts and bolts to hold them together. Patton asked the quartermaster for the necessary nuts and bolts; they never reached him. In desperation he ordered them at his own expense from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.
¹³

All of this is hardly surprising, considering that the Army had just six working arsenals for manufacturing weapons. Eighty-five percent of the machinery in those arsenals was over ten years old, and much of it predated the start of the century. Some went back all the way to Gettysburg and Antietam.

Then in August 1939, on the eve of war in Europe, the Army held major war games at Plattsburgh, New York, to find out what it could do. Fifty thousand men were put on the field—but more than two-thirds were part-time National Guardsmen. They quickly lost their direction as units haplessly bumped into each other. Without radios to issue orders, soldiers began wandering in search of officers to give them. Some
stumbled on lines of Good Humor trucks parked in a field: The Army had been forced to hire them to serve as decoy tanks because there weren’t enough real tanks or armored cars to go around. “The U.S. Army,”
Time
magazine said, summing up, “looked like a few nice boys with BB guns.”
¹⁴

No wonder, then, that on September 1, when Ambassador to Russia William Bullitt called the White House to say that Germany had invaded Poland, Roosevelt’s response was, “God help us all.”

Neither the collapse of Poland nineteen days later nor Germany’s unleashing of its U-boats to prowl the Atlantic nor the fall of Norway and Denmark in April 1940 had roused the rest of the country to thinking about its own defense. After Poland fell, Roosevelt dared to appoint a War Resources Board of industrial leaders to consider what might be needed if America did have to prepare for a modern war. The board sat for six weeks before public outrage forced him to disband it.
¹⁵

Right up to May 13, 1940, Roosevelt was still unwilling to challenge a Congress, and a vast majority of Americans, who were deeply opposed to getting involved in another shooting war, anywhere and under any circumstances. He began thinking about retirement. Two terms as president were enough, he was telling friends; time to retire to Hyde Park and write his memoirs. In January he told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau he didn’t want to run again, “unless things get very, very much worse in Europe.”
¹⁶

On May 14 they very much did. Roosevelt realized he had to act.

Less than twenty-four hours after getting Churchill’s telegram, Roosevelt summoned Morgenthau and Army Chief of Staff General George Catlett Marshall to his office. For the past months, the pair had been locked in a brutal battle over the Army budget. In 1939 defense spending topped $1 billion for the first time since 1918. The armed forces had grown to 334,000 men from 291,000. Still, Marshall knew that was barely a quarter of the 1.2 million the British and French had mobilized to stop the German invasion—and
they
were losing the war.

All the same, the Treasury secretary wanted another $6 million cut
out of the Army’s appropriations for 1940. He was worried about the United States reaching its debt limit. Marshall was worried about the United States’ survival. He had pleaded and begged to have the money restored.

Now Roosevelt wanted some answers. What were they finally going to do about the 1940 Army appropriation?

Morgenthau weighed in again with his arguments about fiscal prudence, hammering again and again on the point of the debt limit. Then Marshall stood up and said, “Mr. President, can I have three minutes?”

Roosevelt nodded yes.
¹⁷

From Virginia Military Institute to West Point to General Pershing’s staff during the Great War, George Marshall had dedicated his life to the Army. He was a soft-spoken, taciturn man, known to be smart and serious but hardly eloquent. Now he gave the speech of his life. France was about to collapse. Then it might be Britain’s turn. The United States would be facing the Nazi empire alone.

America simply didn’t have enough planes, enough soldiers, enough tanks or artillery or machine guns, he said, to fight a war with Germany.

“If five German divisions landed anywhere on the coast,” Marshall told the president, “they could go anywhere they wished.”
¹⁸
If, meanwhile, trouble heated up in the Pacific over Japan’s ambitions there, the situation would be even more hopeless.

It was time, Marshall concluded, for the president to get serious about arming America for war. He had to get together a group of industrialists to draw up a plan for defense preparation and production. There was not a day to spare. They should be brought to Washington that same week.

“If you don’t do something,” Marshall concluded, “and do it right away, I don’t know what’s going to happen to the country.”
¹⁹

Roosevelt was convinced. Within hours he sent an urgent message to Congress, asking that the $24 million appropriation for the Army be expanded to $700 million. He said, “This nation should plan at this time a program that will provide us with 50,000 military and naval planes…. I should like to see this nation geared up to the ability to turn out at least 50,000 planes a year.”

The country was stunned. Charles Lindbergh, a key figure in the
opposition to getting entangled in Europe and self-appointed guru on all things relating to aviation, dismissed the numbers as “hysterical chatter.” Republican leader Senator Vandenberg of Michigan warned that “it would take more than appropriations to make a national defense.” The president of the Air Transport Association of America said it was “fooling the people” to raise unrealistic hopes about how many planes could be made and when they could be delivered.
²⁰

Meanwhile, Secretary Morgenthau called a meeting of American airplane executives at the White House for May 18. He wanted to know what
they
thought they could produce in terms of warplanes, and how many.

Morgenthau’s visitors included executives from Glenn Martin of Baltimore and Lockheed of California, as well as Douglas, North American, and Consolidated. They had taken one kick after another from Roosevelt’s administration, from stripping away their airmail contracts to divesting them of their civilian airline routes, the so-called big breakup of 1934. With the Depression in full swing, they had only a thin trickle of military orders, fifty or sixty planes at a time; it was all that kept them alive. In 1938 they had barely supplied the Army Air Corps with ninety planes a month.
²¹
Now the White House was telling them they wanted planes by the thousands.

What kind of planes do you want? they asked. Morgenthau could not tell them. They wanted to know exactly how many were needed and when the delivery date would be. Again the Treasury secretary drew a blank. The executives went home, more confused than ever.
²²

Meanwhile, news from Europe grew steadily worse. On May 20 the Germans reached the Channel. The British army in France was cut off. Unless they were able to retreat to the closest port still not in German hands, Dunkirk, they would have to surrender. Churchill began to plan for a German invasion. Britain’s odds of surviving, which Roosevelt had privately set at fifty-fifty, now looked like running to zero.