Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (110 page)

The prime minister refused to be dissuaded. Every day the news from France grew more dire; every day the threat to Britain increased. “I understand your difficulties, but I am very sorry about the destroyers,” the prime minister wrote Roosevelt on May 20. “If they were here in six weeks they would play an invaluable part.” The planes he had requested were, if anything, even more crucial. “The battle of France is full of danger to both sides. Though we have taken heavy toll of enemy in the air and are clawing down two or three to one of their planes, they have still a formidable numerical superiority. Our most vital need is therefore the delivery at the earliest possible date of the largest possible number of Curtiss P-40 fighters now in course of delivery to your army.”

Churchill tried to impress on Roosevelt the stakes of the current struggle. It was nothing less than life or death for democracy and individual liberty. “Our intention is, whatever happens, to fight on to the end in this Island,” he asserted.

Members of the present administration would likely go down during this process should it result adversely, but in no conceivable circumstances will we consent to surrender. If members of the present administration were finished and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate, no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants.

Excuse me, Mr. President, putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors, who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will.

Roosevelt, on receiving this message, had to ask whether Churchill was serious. Would the British really surrender their fleet, the instrument of their global greatness these last two centuries? Without a navy Britain would lose its empire, and without its empire Britain would be nothing more than a small island in a cold sea.

Roosevelt couldn’t read Churchill’s mind. He could ask himself what
he
would have done in similar circumstances. As a navy man he couldn’t imagine surrendering the American fleet so long as it had fuel and friendly ports to sail to. And he had difficulty imagining Churchill—who still identified himself in correspondence with Roosevelt as a “former Naval Person”—surrendering the Royal Navy so long as Canada’s ports remained beyond the reach of the Nazis. Churchill alluded to his successors; perhaps they wouldn’t be as devoted to the fleet as he. But even Chamberlain had seen the light, finally, and was said to be backing Churchill’s determined stance.

Roosevelt had to assume that Churchill was exaggerating for effect. He knew
he
would have exaggerated, had he been in Churchill’s position. A man didn’t reach the top of the greasy pole of politics, in either Britain or America, without learning to tailor his talk to his audience. Even as Churchill held out to Roosevelt the prospect of surrender, he swore to Parliament that he would never surrender—and that neither would England. The last week of May saw the British Expeditionary Force—the army London had sent to France—caught between the German Wehrmacht and the English Channel. For several agonizing days it looked as though the entire force of nearly 200,000 might be captured or destroyed. But desperation, bravery, and fair weather allowed the army’s escape through the port of Dunkirk and its evacuation to England, where it lived to fight another day.

On June 4 Churchill vowed that it would keep fighting as long as humanly possible. “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,” he told the House of Commons.

We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France; we shall fight on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and in the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.

C
HURCHILL’S WORDS
were tremendously stirring, but they directly belied Churchill’s warning—or threat—that the fleet would be surrendered to the Germans. And what was Roosevelt to make of Churchill’s reference to a New World rescue of the Old—“in God’s good time”?

Roosevelt had his own timetable. England’s crisis coincided with the climax of the primary season in American presidential politics. The isolationists had lost to Roosevelt on the issue of the arms embargo in the autumn of 1939, but their influence revived as the elections of 1940 approached. On the thirteenth anniversary of his famous transatlantic flight, Charles Lindbergh decried what he considered outlandish descriptions of the Nazi threat to the United States. Alarmists spoke as though the Germans were on America’s doorstep. They weren’t, Lindbergh said, and wouldn’t be even if they conquered all of Europe. Assertions of American vulnerability to air raids were simply delusional. “The power of aviation has been greatly underrated in the past,” Lindbergh said, speaking as America’s aviation expert. “Now we must be careful not to overrate this power in the excitement of reaction.” If anything, the rise of air power made America more impregnable than in the past, for it allowed the extension of America’s defenses far out to sea. “Great armies must still cross oceans by ship…. And no foreign navy will dare to approach within bombing range of our coasts.” The demands for intervention were purely political, Lindbergh said. “The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda. They seize every opportunity to push us closer to the edge.” The appropriate answer to their demands was political, as well. “It is time for the underlying character of this country to rise and assert itself, to strike down these elements of personal profit and foreign influence.”

Even if Roosevelt had believed Churchill about Britain being on the brink of surrender, he would have moved forward only slowly. To rescue Britain simply to hand the American government over to the isolationists would have been folly. Roosevelt’s vision was grander than Churchill’s. His view encompassed not merely Europe but Asia, the Pacific as well as the Atlantic. And his time horizon stretched beyond the present moment, beyond the impending election, to the coming decades and generations. Roosevelt wasn’t more prone to rationalization than most other politicians in democracies, who have regularly argued to themselves and others that they couldn’t accomplish the great things they intended if they didn’t get elected. But he wasn’t conspicuously less prone, either. He would do what he could to keep England fighting, but until November it wouldn’t be nearly what Churchill wanted.

For months Italy had been threatening to enter the war on Germany’s side. For months Roosevelt had been trying to prevent Mussolini from taking that step. He wrote the Italian dictator confidentially to warn against a “further extension of the area of hostilities” and delivered his sharpest threat thus far of American intervention: “No man can today predict with assurance, should such a further extension take place, what the ultimate result might be—or foretell what nations, however determined they may today be to remain at peace, might yet eventually find it imperative in their own defense to enter the war.”

Mussolini was unmoved. “Italy has never concerned itself with the relations of the American republics with each other and with the United States (thereby respecting the Monroe Doctrine),” he replied, “and might therefore ask for reciprocity with regard to European affairs.” A second letter from Roosevelt, in which the president described himself as “a realist” and said that a broader war “would pass beyond the control of heads of state,” produced no greater effect. “There are two fundamental motives which cannot escape your spirit of political realism,” Mussolini told the president, “and those are that Italy is and intends to remain allied with Germany, and that Italy cannot remain absent at a moment in which the fate of Europe is at stake.” After tarrying a bit longer, to let the fate of Europe become that much clearer—which was to say, to let Germany roll across northern France toward Paris—Mussolini declared war on Britain and France.

Roosevelt responded with his strongest public statement yet. “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor,” he declared. Roosevelt had been planning for some weeks to address the graduates of the University of Virginia, and he intended his speech to be a riposte to Lindbergh and the isolationists. Mussolini’s war declaration, which came just as the president was getting ready to leave Washington for Charlottesville, bolstered his case. The president decried the “obvious delusion that we of the United States can safely permit the United States to become a lone island, a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.” Careful listeners caught the repetition of “lone” and the reference it made to Lindbergh, the “Lone Eagle.” An island might be the dream of the isolationists, but they could not be more wrong, Roosevelt said. “Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare of a people without freedom—the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.” American safety required simultaneous action on two fronts. “We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and, at the same time, we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency.”

A
MID THE WORSENING
news from the Continent, Roosevelt’s promise of aid to the opponents of fascism sounded to Churchill like the peal of salvation. “We all listened to you last night and were fortified by the grand scope of your declaration,” the prime minister wrote the president. “Your statement that the material aid of the United States will be given to the Allies in their struggle is a strong encouragement in a dark but not unhopeful hour.” Roosevelt’s promise encouraged Churchill to renew his request for specific American aid. Airplanes would be required to repel the air assault and possibly amphibious invasion Hitler was sure to direct at England soon. But destroyers were needed even more. “The Italian outrage makes it necessary for us to cope with a much larger number of submarines which may come out into the Atlantic and perhaps be based on Spanish ports. To this the only counter is destroyers.” Churchill had previously asked for forty or fifty; now “thirty or forty” would do. “We can fit them very rapidly with our ASCICS”—a version of sub-seeking sonar—“and they will bridge the gap of six months before our war-time new construction comes into play. We will return them or their equivalents to you without fail at six months notice if at any time you need them.” Earlier Churchill had spoken as though the fate of Europe would be decided within weeks; his chronology now expanded, but time remained of the essence. “The next six months are vital. If while we have to guard the East Coast against invasion a new heavy German-Italian submarine attack is launched against our commerce, the strain may be beyond our resources, and the ocean traffic by which we live may be strangled.
Not a day should be lost.
”