Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (133 page)

Given the collapse of Singapore, Roosevelt had to weigh the prospect that India would put up hardly more of a fight, especially if the Japanese could credibly cast themselves as liberators. Roosevelt didn’t like being called a hypocrite any more than most people do, but what really worried him about the Indian situation was the damage it was doing to American prestige and, through American prestige, to American power. America’s power was military and economic, but it was also moral. The peoples of the world looked not to Britain and Churchill for hope and guidance but to America and Roosevelt. And Roosevelt intended to keep it that way.

The president knew what a reactionary Churchill was on imperial issues, and he feared that the prime minister’s determination to crush the independence movement would get the better of his strategic sense. Besides, the course Churchill had charted might fail on its own terms. By refusing even to consider independence, the prime minister might render independence inevitable—on terms that simultaneously ensured the alienation of India from the Allied cause. Roosevelt understood as well as Churchill that the Indian army was what made Britain a world power. The Royal Navy was important, to be sure. But what allowed Britain to fight far above its weight in international affairs was the Indian army. Without India, Britain would shrink to a mere shadow of its current self. And that shadow wouldn’t be of much help to Roosevelt in defeating the Axis.

The president decided to risk Churchill’s wrath. “I have given much thought to the problem of India,” he wrote the prime minister in March 1942. “As you can well realize, I have felt much diffidence in making any suggestions, and it is a subject which, of course, all of you good people know far more about than I do.” But he had to speak his mind. “I have tried to approach the problem from the point of view of history and with a hope that the injection of a new thought to be used in India might be of assistance to you.” The president reminded Churchill how the American colonies, upon breaking away from Britain, had established thirteen separate and sovereign governments. The Articles of Confederation had guided the states to victory in the Revolutionary War but had been replaced by the federal Constitution of 1787. “It is merely a thought of mine,” Roosevelt said, “to suggest the setting up of what might be called a temporary government in India, headed by a small representative group, covering different castes, occupations, religions, and geographies.” This group would be recognized by London as a Dominion government, albeit a temporary one. It would last for the duration of the war and for a year or two afterward. It would give way to a permanent successor, to be established by Indians much as the federal government of the United States had been established by Americans after the Revolutionary War. Roosevelt didn’t claim this was a perfect solution, but he thought it offered a path forward. “It might cause the people there to forget hard feelings, to become more loyal to the British Empire, and to stress the danger of Japanese domination.” He assured Churchill he didn’t wish to impose any solution to the India problem. “It is, strictly speaking, none of my business,” he said—before concluding, significantly, “except insofar as it is a part and parcel of the successful fight that you and I are making.”

Churchill liked Roosevelt, and he admired the president’s gifts of leadership. But he considered him dangerously naïve about issues relating to the British empire. Churchill replied that the president failed to appreciate that the nationalists in India hardly spoke for the whole population. For Britain to grant independence—which Churchill did not for one second propose to do—would be politically immoral as well as militarily imprudent. “We must not on any account break with the Moslems, who represent a hundred million people and the main army elements on which we must rely for the immediate fighting. We have also to consider our duty towards thirty to forty million Untouchables and our treaties with the princes’ states of India, perhaps eighty millions.” Japan was almost at India’s eastern border. “Naturally we do not want to throw India into chaos on the eve of invasion.”

Churchill had a point about the Muslims—the “martial races,” he often called them—being the backbone of the Indian army. The Congress party was a Hindu league, and the Hindus had never enlisted in the army in large numbers. Yet Roosevelt realized that, as important as India’s soldiers were to the Allied war effort, the credibility of the Atlantic Charter was equally important. For Churchill simply to ignore the Indian demands for self-determination risked grave damage to American interests.

In fact Churchill did not simply
ignore
the Indian demands; he punished their authors. During the summer of 1942 Gandhi proclaimed the “Quit India” movement, a campaign of civil disobedience designed to force the British to grant independence. Churchill responded within days by jailing Gandhi, Nehru, and some hundred thousand of the rank and file of the Congress party.

Roosevelt responded to the mass jailing by forwarding to Churchill a letter from Chiang Kai-shek conveying the Chinese leader’s dismay at the “disastrous effect” of the British action on pro-Allied morale in Asia. “At all costs the United Nations should demonstrate to the world by their action the sincerity of their professed principle of ensuring freedom and justice for men of all races,” Chiang wrote Roosevelt. Over Chiang’s words, Roosevelt asked Churchill: “What do you think?”

Churchill thought as little of Chiang’s meddling as he had of Roosevelt’s. By chance or design, the Quit India campaign nearly coincided with the first anniversary of the Atlantic Charter. The American Office of War Information had indicated its intention of commemorating the occasion with a robust reiteration of the charter’s principles. Churchill warned Roosevelt against anything that might create problems for the British government. “Its proposed application to Asia and Africa requires much thought,” Churchill asserted. “Great embarrassment would be caused to the defence of India at the present time by such a statement as the Office of War Information has been forecasting.” The prime minister expressed confidence that he could rely on the president. “I am sure you will consider my difficulties with the kindness you always show me.”

Roosevelt did consider Churchill’s difficulties, although kindness had little to do with it. The attitude of Asians counted in Roosevelt’s thinking about the world, but the cooperation of Britain counted more. The president ordered the OWI to back off, and he issued an innocuously vague reaffirmation of the Atlantic Charter’s general principles. “I am sure you will have no objection to a single line,” he wrote Churchill. “It omits wholly anything which would raise questions or controversy.”

47.

“
I
REALIZE HOW THE FALL OF
S
INGAPORE HAS AFFECTED YOU AND THE
British people,” Roosevelt wrote Churchill amid the disasters of early 1942. “It gives the back-seat drivers a field day. But no matter how serious our setbacks have been, and I do not for a moment underrate them, we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.”

How to hit the enemy—this was the question that pushed all others to the rear. The enemy kept hitting America, and not simply in the far Pacific. The formal outbreak of war between the United States and Germany brought the Battle of the Atlantic right up to America’s shore. American merchantmen hugged the East Coast and dimmed their running lights for safety, but America’s coastal communities negligently left their building lights on, allowing German U-boats to silhouette the vessels against skylines of Miami, Atlantic City, and other urban areas. The ensuing torpedo strikes and sinkings, within easy viewing distance of the beaches, frightened and dismayed Americans. For six months the Germans decimated American transatlantic shipping, destroying nearly four hundred vessels totaling two million tons.

Roosevelt sorely wanted to respond, but he couldn’t figure out how. For all that he had prepared America for war prior to Pearl Harbor, much more needed to be done before American forces could engage the Germans or Japan. The administration needed to expand the army dramatically and train and equip the soldiers. It needed to enlarge the navy to defend American shipping and transport the army to where the soldiers would fight. It needed to construct an air force that would cover the ships and soldiers in transit and in combat and destroy the enemy’s ability to retaliate. All this was in the works, but it took time. And time wasn’t something Roosevelt could wholly count on. America’s war effort would never be stronger than the willingness of the American people to make war. After Pearl Harbor they were hot to fight, but with each month that Pearl Harbor receded into the past, their temperature declined. Unless the administration could show progress—unless it could demonstrate that the evil-doers were being punished for their sins—Roosevelt risked the dissipation of the pro-war sentiment he had spent so much time and effort summoning. The autumn would bring elections. Roosevelt wouldn’t be on the ballot, but the voters would speak. They would certainly have something to say about the war.

Roosevelt’s impatience to hit the enemy prompted a daring raid on Japan’s home islands—the riposte, as it were, to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack had revealed the feasibility of launching light aircraft from ships, bearing small loads of bombs or torpedoes. But almost no one believed that large bombers with substantial payloads could take off from ships. Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle of the army air forces was one of the rare optimists, and in early 1942 he proposed to lead a squadron of modified B-25 bombers launched from aircraft carriers against Japan. Roosevelt approved the plan, and on April 1 sixteen B-25s were loaded onto the
Hornet
in San Francisco Bay. The
Hornet
steamed west and rendezvoused north of Hawaii with the
Enterprise,
another carrier, which provided air protection for the
Hornet.
The two ships and their escorts proceeded toward the projected launch point, some six hundred miles east of Japan. But at seven hundred miles they encountered a Japanese patrol boat, which radioed their presence to Japan before being sunk by American fire. Doolittle decided to launch at once lest they lose any more of the element of surprise. The planes got off safely, despite heaving seas, and skimmed the waves single file before fanning out as they crossed the Japanese coast. “Thirteen B-25s effectively bombed Tokyo’s oil refineries, oil reservoirs, steel and munitions plants, naval docks and other military objectives,” Doolittle reported, in a message forwarded from Hap Arnold to Roosevelt. “One bomber attacked the Mitsubishi airplane factory and other military objectives at Nagoya with incendiary bombs. Two other bombers also attacked Osaka and Kobe with incendiaries. We all took care to avoid bombing schools, hospitals, churches and other non-military objectives.” The bombers encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire, barrage balloons, and pursuit from Japanese fighters. Yet they got away, continuing toward China and, in one case, toward Russia. They had hoped to reach friendly territory, but the early launch and other adverse factors caused them to run out of fuel. Most crash-landed, yet only five crewmen were killed. Arnold took pleasure in telling Roosevelt that the American bombs began falling over Tokyo in the middle of a propaganda broadcast by the Japanese government in which a woman speaking in English (one of a type Americans would learn to call “Tokyo Rose”) was explaining how secure Japan was from air attack. Of the aftermath of the attack, Arnold added wryly: “With the fifteen planes reported located in East China, one interned in Siberia, and one which the Japanese claim is on exhibition, there is a total of seventeen accounted for—which is one more than we sent over.”

The report of the mission put Roosevelt in high spirits, though he declined to confirm details. “How about the story about the bombing of Tokyo?” a reporter asked at the president’s next news conference.

“You know occasionally I have a few people in to dinner,” Roosevelt replied. “And generally in the middle of dinner some—it isn’t an individual, it’s just a generic term—some ‘sweet young thing’ says, ‘Mr. President, couldn’t you tell us about so and so?’ Well, the other night this sweet young thing in the middle of supper said, ‘Mr. President, couldn’t you tell us about that bombing? Where did those planes start from and go to?’ And I said, ‘Yes. I think the time has now come to tell you. They came from our new secret base at Shangri-La!’”

The reporters laughed appreciatively.

“And she believed it!”

Y
ET THE
D
OOLITTLE
raid, while better than nothing, was a pinprick. It got Tokyo’s attention but did nothing to diminish Japan’s war-making capacity.