Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (127 page)

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

For months Roosevelt had lavished words on the looming threat; now that the threat had taken the form of bombs, torpedoes, and fiery death, he didn’t need to. “The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves.” A mere six minutes after he began, he ended:

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger…. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

T
HE COMBINATION
of Roosevelt’s words and Japan’s actions got the president what he wanted. In 1917 Congress had debated Wilson’s war request for four days, and more than fifty members had finally voted against the war declaration. This time there was no debate and almost no opposition. The Senate approved the war resolution twenty-five minutes after Roosevelt finished speaking, the House ten minutes later. The Senate vote was unanimous; in the House the sole dissenter was Republican Jeanette Rankin, who, in her one previous term in Congress, had voted against war in 1917. (Her Montana constituents would respond in 1942 as they had in 1918, retiring her again to private life.)

Roosevelt signed the war resolution at ten minutes past four in a sober ceremony attended by leaders of both parties. He made no further statement and took no questions. His silence reflected his continuing wish to let Japan’s crimes speak for themselves, but it also acknowledged the fact that he had no answer to a crucial question on everyone’s mind. Did war with Japan mean war with Germany?

More precisely, he had no answer he could share with the American people. Roosevelt had wanted war with Germany; instead he got war with Japan. He still wanted war with Germany, and he expected it. His Magic eavesdroppers had intercepted a cable from Berlin to Tokyo, dated November 29, assuring the Japanese that if they “became engaged in a war against the United States, Germany would of course join in the war immediately.” But Roosevelt couldn’t share his knowledge without revealing his source, which he definitely would not do.

Anyway, he couldn’t be absolutely certain Hitler would fulfill his pledge to Tokyo. The German dictator had lied before. Roosevelt spent the first twenty-four hours after Pearl Harbor making sure Congress declared war on Japan; he spent the next seventy-two hours ensuring that Germany declared war on the United States. On the evening of Tuesday, December 9, the president delivered his first war message to the American people. The central theme of this Fireside Chat was the unity of aggression. “The sudden criminal attacks perpetrated by the Japanese in the Pacific provide the climax of a decade of international immorality,” the president said. He traced the ten-year arc of aggression, from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, through Italy’s rape of Ethiopia, Germany’s serial assaults on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, France, and Russia, and culminating in Japan’s attack at Pearl Harbor. “It is all of one pattern.”

Japan had attacked the United States, Roosevelt acknowledged, but Hitler had put the Japanese up to it. “For weeks Germany has been telling Japan that if Japan did not attack the United States, Japan would not share in dividing the spoils with Germany when peace came. She was promised by Germany that if she came in she would receive the complete and perpetual control of the whole of the Pacific area.” The Germans and Japanese conducted their military and naval operations according to a single global plan, one that treated any victory for an Axis nation as a victory for all. Japan had struck the United States more openly than Germany and Italy had thus far, but the danger from those countries was no less. “Germany and Italy, regardless of any formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain or Russia.” Americans must recognize the global challenge and confront it. “We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini.”

The struggle would test the courage and endurance of the American people. “It will not only be a long war, it will be a hard war,” Roosevelt said. The conflict had begun for America in the Pacific, but it would not end there. “The United States can accept no result save victory, final and complete. Not only must the shame of Japanese treachery be wiped out, but the sources of international brutality, wherever they exist, must be absolutely and finally broken.”

H
ITLER DIDN’T SHARE
much with Roosevelt, but he accepted the president’s conclusion that the struggle between fascism and democracy was a fight to the death. And on December 11 he did precisely what Roosevelt wanted him to do. He notified the American embassy that Germany was declaring war on the United States. “Our patience is ended,” Hitler told the Reichstag, by way of explanation. “The American president and his plutocratic clique have always in the past considered us a poor people. They were right! But this poor people wishes to live…. It wishes to ensure that it will never again be robbed by the rich nations of the earth, who refuse it its rightful place in the sun.”

“The long known and the long expected has thus taken place,” Roosevelt asserted in a new message to Congress. This time the president sent his words by courier for the clerks of the Senate and House to read to their chambers, but his relief was palpable nonetheless. After years of warning Americans against the fascist threat, after months of stretching his authority and bending the truth in an effort to educate the American people, even while striving to prevent Hitler from completing his conquest of Europe, Roosevelt would receive his mandate to wage the fight in full earnest. “The forces endeavoring to enslave the entire world now are moving toward this hemisphere,” he said. “Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty, and civilization…. I therefore request the Congress to recognize a state of war between the United States and Germany.”

Not even Montana’s Rankin could bring herself to oppose the president (although she did abstain). The Senate voted 88 to 0 for war against Germany, the House 393 to 0. The approving tallies were a bit larger on a companion war declaration against Italy, as straggling members arrived late. The signing ceremony was as subdued as the votes. “I’ve always heard things came in threes,” Roosevelt remarked. “Here they are.”

45.

“S
O WE HAD WON AFTER ALL
,” W
INSTON
C
HURCHILL EXULTED
. “T
HE
United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.”

With Roosevelt the prime minister adopted a slightly less celebratory tone. “Now that we are, as you say, ‘in the same boat,’ would it not be wise for us to have another conference?” he cabled Roosevelt on December 9. “We could review the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts, as well as the problems of production and distribution. I feel that all these matters, some of which are causing me concern, can best be settled on the highest executive level. It would also be a very great pleasure to me to meet you again, and the sooner the better.”

Roosevelt was willing to meet Churchill, but not at once. He assumed that Churchill’s team of soldiers and diplomats had thoroughly prepared an Anglo-American war plan, and he wanted time to develop America’s own version. He drafted a reply putting Churchill off. “In August it was easy to agree on obvious main items—Russian aid, Near East aid, and new form Atlantic convoy,” he said. “But I question whether situation in Pacific area is yet clear enough to make determination of that character. Delay of even a few weeks might be advantageous.”

But before he could send this message shocking news arrived from Southeast Asia. The Japanese attack on British Malaya was no hit-and-run affair, like the raid on Pearl Harbor, but the opening of an amphibious invasion. Britain’s naval command dispatched the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, both recently deployed to Singapore, against the invaders. A Japanese submarine reported their approach, and on the morning of December 10 the Japanese sent a large force of bombers and torpedo planes against the British ships. In a lopsided battle—the British lacked air cover—the Prince of Wales and the Repulse suffered multiple heavy blows from bombs and torpedoes before capsizing and sinking. Several hundred officers and men went down with their ships.

The news of the sinking stunned British and Americans alike. The Japanese success at Pearl Harbor had been attributed to surprise, but there was nothing surprising—except the outcome—in the attack on the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse.
Suddenly the Pacific war seemed far more serious than it had just hours before. Roosevelt scrapped his draft message to Churchill and sent another message in its place. “Delighted to have you here at the White House,” Roosevelt said. “Naval situation and other matters of strategy require discussion…. The news is bad but it will be better.”

I
T HADN’T IMPROVED
much by the time Churchill arrived. He came by battleship, the newly commissioned
Duke of York,
which conducted its shakedown cruise carrying the prime minister and his advisers west. Like the voyage of Roosevelt to Britain in 1918—aboard a vessel similarly being shaken down—Churchill’s transit was alternatively tedious and harrowing. At first it slowed to the speed of the most laggard of its escort, but Churchill’s navy minister, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, grew impatient, declaring that the
Duke of York
was more likely to ram a U-boat than be torpedoed by one. With Churchill’s assent Pound gave the order for the ship to cut loose from the escort and dash ahead on its own. The wintry North Atlantic lived up to its reputation; so many waves crashed over the deck of the battleship that Max Beaverbrook groused that he might as well have traveled by submarine.

The American navy and coast guard expected the
Duke of York
to steam up the Potomac to Washington, but Churchill, wishing to speak with Roosevelt as soon as possible, disembarked at Hampton Roads on December 22 and took a plane the rest of the way. He found Roosevelt waiting at Washington’s airport. “I clasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” Churchill recalled. Darkness had descended over the capital, and the president’s car took the two statesmen swiftly to the White House, where an informal dinner awaited them. Roosevelt, as always, mixed the drinks; Churchill imbibed appreciatively. When the dinner was called, the prime minister wheeled the president into the dining room—thinking, by his own recollection, “of Sir Walter Raleigh spreading his cloak before Queen Elizabeth.”