The 1937 act corrected this oversight by extending coverage to include civil wars, and U.S ships were now also prohibited from carrying passengers and war materiel to belligerents. American citizens were banned from traveling on vessels belonging to belligerent nations, but there were loopholes. A civil war or an outright war was only such a conflict if “the President shall proclaim such as a fact.” If he did not so proclaim, then the conflict was something else that may or may not allow commerce. This worked with aid for China following Japan’s 1937 invasion since Tokyo never formally declared war. Another significant loophole was a “cash and carry” provision permitting the sale of arms to those who could immediately pay, with cash, for such materiel, and if they arranged their own transport on non-U.S.-flagged vessels. This was a clever way of circumventing opposition and aiding Britain and France, since their navies controlled the seas over which such materiel would travel.
By October 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army had taken Beijing and was engaged in a vicious battle for Shanghai. In Chicago, Roosevelt freed a metaphoric trial balloon against isolationism by giving a speech designed to weaken domestic opposition for American involvement in the worsening situations overseas. Superficially, this was about China, but the president was attempting to lay the groundwork for intervention in Europe.
“Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air,” Roosevelt said. His intent was to appeal to inherent American sympathy for an underdog and, perhaps, to focus on halting Imperial Japan’s aggression in Asia. “If those things come to pass in other parts of the world,” he continued, “let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization.” Plainly a warning, the president sought to weaken the isolationist’s position by revealing war would come to the United States regardless of efforts to remain neutral.
“I am compelled and you are compelled, nevertheless, to look ahead. The peace, the freedom, and the security of ninety percent of the population of the world is being jeopardized by the remaining ten percent who are threatening a breakdown of all international order and law. Surely the ninety percent who want to live in peace under law and in accordance with moral standards that have received almost universal acceptance through the centuries, can and must find some way to make their will prevail,” he asserted. Couching the speech in moral terms, Roosevelt hoped to convey that the shadow slowly darkening the world must be fought to preserve civilization, the rule of law, and basic human decency. This was not an overseas adventure bent on expansionism or economic colonialism but a righteous struggle of good against evil, as he put it:
It seems to be unfortunately true that the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading. When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease. War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared. It can engulf states and peoples remote from the original scene of hostilities. We are determined to keep out of war, yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement.
Most important of all, the will for peace on the part of peace-loving nations must express itself to the end that nations that may be tempted to violate their agreements and the rights of others will desist from such a course.
Unfortunately, as a catalyst for a more robust foreign policy, the speech backfired. Leading newspapers mocked the content, and opinion polls suggested even more Americans now identified with isolationism. Washington’s reluctance was noted in Tokyo, and the Chinese capital of Nanjing fell just two months after Roosevelt’s speech. Emboldened by America’s apparent indifference and Britain’s appeasement, Hitler continued unchecked in his quest for a “Greater Germany,” and smoldering events in Europe rapidly fanned the flame of war.
On March 12, 1938, the German 8th Army crossed the border into Austria, followed by a triumphant Adolf Hitler, ostensibly to liberate ethnic Germans who were being “oppressed.” Austrian himself by birth, the forty-nine-year-old chancellor and führer of Germany entered the country through Braunau am Inn, his birthplace, and three days later announced the Anschluss, or “Union,” from the Heldenplatz in Vienna. Long coveting the Sudeten regions of northern Czechoslovakia, for some time Hitler had been sowing internal discontent, hoping to create a pretext for annexation. However, with a modern army of forty-seven divisions and alliances with France, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, the Czechs were in no mood to be bullied.
Ultimately, neither London nor Paris was inclined to actually fight for a region that was predominately German and inhabited by many who considered themselves German and wished to join Nazi Germany. Hitler approved the final version of Case Green, his invasion of Czechoslovakia, but was persuaded to join Mussolini, French premier Édouard Daladier of France, and Britain’s Neville Chamberlain for a last-ditch effort at peace. Meeting in Munich on September 29, 1938, it was agreed that the Wehrmacht would occupy the Sudetenland and that Prague could either acquiesce or fight Germany alone. With little choice, Czech president Edvard Beneš agreed. Six months later, Hitler violated the accord and annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia.
At 0445 on the morning of September 1, 1939, the Dirschau Bridge over the Vistula River vanished in a roaring explosion as pieces of its Polish defenders cartwheeled through the gray dawn. Flushed with success and emboldened by the perceived weakness of his adversaries, Hitler initiated Case White—the invasion of Poland and the total destruction of its army. From newly acquired Slovakia, East Prussia, and Pomerania, four German army groups thrust eastward into Poland, and by September 3, both Britain and France declared war on Germany—for the second time in two decades Europe was again at war. Roosevelt, shrewd politician and opportunist that he was, used the worsening situation to revoke the 1935 and 1937 Neutrality Acts. Victorious over the isolationists on November 4, he signed the 1939 Neutrality Act, which permitted the open sale of arms to belligerent nations, meaning France and Great Britain, but again on a cash-and-carry basis. Selling arms without a government-issued license also now became a federal offense.
Within days of Hitler’s Polish invasion, France declared itself fully mobilized and, in a little-heralded campaign, invaded Germany. Eleven divisions left the Maginot Line, and advanced north into the Warndt Forest toward the Westwall, the 390-mile fortified line stretching between the Netherlands and the Swiss border. Believing the Wehrmacht too heavily engaged in Poland to threaten them, the French insisted on Great War tactics and crawled forward relatively slowly under heavy artillery cover. Managing to occupy the Warndt Forest but advancing only five miles into Germany after six days, the French panicked as Poland collapsed and, on September 21, retreated back to the Maginot Line.
A period somewhat inaccurately dubbed “the Phony War” now ensued in Europe—inaccurate because, while war did not officially exist for the western powers, it was real enough in the east and north. The Soviet Union took advantage of the confusion and signed a nonaggression pact with Germany in order to bully Finland. Always wary of its huge and deceitful southern neighbor, the Finns had refused claims against several of their offshore islands, as well as the extension of Soviet territory westward though the Karelian Isthmus. Helsinki also rebuffed Moscow’s attempts to gain a thirty-year lease for a naval base at Hanko.
On November 26, 1939, in a typically clumsy “false flag” operation, the Red Army shelled the Russian border village of Mainila northwest of Leningrad, then claimed an attack by Finland.* On the last day of November 1939, with no declaration of war, four Soviet armies crossed into Finland. In violation of the 1920 Treaty of Tartu, the 1932 Soviet-Finnish Non-Aggression Pact and the 1934 Covenant of the League of Nations, a half million Russian soldiers surged over the border along an eight-hundred-mile front stretching from Murmansk to Lake Ladoga.
Overestimating their own capabilities, the Soviets planned for a two-week war, and even commissioned Dmitri Shostakovich to compose his Suite on Finnish Themes to be played as the Red Army marched triumphantly through Helsinki.† Redoubtable winter fighters that they were, the Finns stopped them cold. To Stalin’s fury, his army lost five times the men, eight times the aircraft, and one hundred times the tanks as did the Finns, and for its duplicity and aggression, the Soviet Union was expelled from the League of Nations in December 1939. Humiliated, the Russians made little progress until February 1940, when they were finally able to bring heavy artillery to bear and breach the Finnish Mannerheim Line. With no aid from France or Britain, the Finns agreed to cease hostilities and signed the Treaty of Moscow in March 1940.
Hitler used this time to redeploy the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe back to the west in time to execute Case Green, the assault on Scandinavia, during April 1940. Denmark surrendered in a single day, but Norway held out until June 9, 1940. Sweden’s prime minister, Per Albin Hansson, declared neutrality the day Poland was invaded and continued supplying all sides, even signing a trade agreement with Berlin in December. With a 55–67 percent iron content, Swedish ore was the purest in Europe, and ten million tons were imported to the Third Reich in 1940 alone. This composed over half of Germany’s stock, and was so prevalent that industrial giants such as Thyssen and Krupp had adapted their machinery to accommodate the high-grade Swedish ore. Thyssen later stated that “without the ore from Sweden it is possible to calculate the date upon which Germany must capitulate.”
Sweden’s other ace in the hole, at least as far as insurance against invasion went, came from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded thirty-two years earlier in Gothenburg, Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF) was the largest global manufacturer of ball bearings, the finely engineered metallic balls used to reduce loads and minimize friction between moving parts in engines, machine guns, tanks, and especially aircraft. The Luftwaffe alone required a continuous supply of over two million bearings per month, and between its Gothenburg and Schweinfurt plants, SKF supplied 80 percent of all European demands. Even after the United States entered the war, SKF Philadelphia made up production shortfalls and shipped over six hundred thousand bearings per year to Axis countries via South American ports. Germany could not survive without Sweden, so as Allied soldiers fought and died for freedom, Stockholm remained free to conduct business as usual in return for its iron ore and ball bearings.*
A month following Denmark’s surrender, the Phony War erupted into real war for the West as Hitler launched Case Yellow—the invasion of France. Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich and Allied failure to halt his conquests of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Scandinavia, convinced Hitler that with France gone, Britain would have no alternative but to sue for peace. Then, with his western front secure, he could turn back east again and fulfill his lifelong dream of eradicating communism by facing his real enemy—the Soviet Union. But first, France had to be destroyed and, if possible, the entire British Expeditionary Force, which represented the bulk of England’s regular army.
On May 10, 1940, the German panzer spearhead commanded by General Heinz Guderian crossed the Luxembourg border, then turned in to the Ardennes, following trails, paths, and especially rail lines. Plowing through the forest, which French Marshal Philippe Pétain declared “impenetrable,” Guderian’s immediate aim was to capture Sedan. Strategically situated on the Meuse, Sedan was the key link between the top of the Maginot Line and fortifications along the Belgian border. If taken, the French line would be shattered, and a wedge driven between the Allied armies. Two days later the 10th, 2nd, and 1st Panzer Divisions appeared out of the Ardennes north of Sedan, and by nightfall Guderian’s tanks were rumbling through the city.
Poor communications, complacency, and, most damning, a defensive mind-set that obviated any meaningful tactical response doomed the French. German forces had taken the bridge across the Ardennes Canal west of Sedan, and now, with three bridgeheads over the Meuse, the panzers were a sword clearly aimed at the heart of France. General Alphonse Georges, commander of the entire North East Front facing the German onslaught, “flung himself into a chair and burst into tears.” Shattered, demoralized, and obviously lacking effective leadership, the French military began collapsing. To the north the Dutch surrendered on May 15, and the Belgians were buckling. Caught in the middle, with its flanks now exposed, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had no choice but to fall back west toward the English Channel.
At great cost, fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force covered the withdrawal, and London ordered the BEF commander to attack south into the German advance to aid the French. Fortunately, John Vereker, Viscount Gort, a Victoria Cross holder from the Great War, was too able a tactician to comply. He knew it was futile. The French were surrendering faster than he could intervene, so on May 25, Gort initiated his breakout to the only remaining port from which an evacuation had any chance at all—Dunkirk. Three days later, Belgium surrendered, and Britain’s new prime minster, Winston Churchill, initiated Operation Dynamo to save as many fighting men as possible from France. In this he was aided by Hitler himself, who, overly concerned about tank losses and perhaps hoping to make peace with Britain, ordered his panzers to halt ten miles outside Dunkirk on the east side of the Gravelines–Saint Omer Canal. Guderian, Rommel, and the other generals watched furiously, but impotently, as Hitler’s pause gave the British the opportunity to evacuate a total of 338,226 soldiers by June 4, 1940.
The cost was enormous.
A quarter of the RAF fighters sent to cover the evacuation never returned, and hundreds of highly trained, irreplaceable pilots were lost. Nearly 2,500 artillery pieces were left behind, along with 63,000 vehicles and a half million rounds of ammunition. Though now alone, England was still in the war. Equipment could be replaced, but it took eighteen years to grow a soldier, and those saved from the beach would now fight another day. Cold, often wounded, and hungry, they represented one desperate sliver of hope as the United Kingdom now stood against the Axis. The other hope lay with the United States, 3,700 miles west across the Atlantic Ocean, and deeply divided about participating in, as many viewed it, just another European war. Beyond strategic concerns, beyond common ties with Britain, and even beyond humanity, in the summer of 1940 it appeared nothing could stir America into action. Nothing short of some horrific event would rouse the anger and might of the United States.
Timing was also quite bad for Franklin Roosevelt. In office now for eight years, Roosevelt believed he was the only man with the knowledge and experience to see America through the next war, which meant breaking tradition to run for a third term.* He had two overarching domestic issues to face: isolationism and criticism for New Deal entitlements, which his political opponents labeled socialism. Navigating difficult politics was nothing new to FDR, but his real concern was fickle public opinion regarding another conflict in Europe. As many Americans viewed the Great War, 53,402 U.S. soldiers died and another 204,002 were wounded on the Western Front simply to prop up British and French colonial empires, or to profit American industrialists. Entering into this latest conflict had nothing to do with the security of the United States, and approximately $11 billion of debt by those same erstwhile allies remained unpaid.† Popular sentiment retorted that if they had not learned their lesson from the Great War, then this next conflagration was their own fault. Europe could solve it, or perish, on its own.
Yet there were significant differences between the 1914–18 Great War and the current situation. Adolf Hitler was not Kaiser Wilhelm; Hitler intended to rule a global reich controlled by Nazi Germany, and to “purify” the world from, as he saw them, impure subhumans—nothing less than worldwide genocide for those who did not fit his vision. Roosevelt knew if the Axis took Europe and most of the Far East, then it would eventually come for America, and with the rest of the world subdued, the United States would have to fight alone. However, that very likely scenario was dismissed by prominent isolationists such as Senator Gerald Ney (R-ND) and Smedley Butler, a retired Marine major general, two-time Medal of Honor recipient, and combat veteran of multiple conflicts up to and through the Great War, whose views were particularly hard to refute given his background.
“War is a racket,” Butler wrote in a pamphlet of the same name. “It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
Yet it was Charles Lindbergh, worldwide flying sensation and U.S. national hero, who irritated Franklin Roosevelt the most. Easily the most famous member of the America First Committee (AFC) and also its public face, Lindbergh was an outspoken critic of any policy or sentiment that would lead the United States into war. This was so strong in 1940 that less than half of Americans would vote for aid if Germany invaded neighboring Mexico. Lindbergh was certainly not alone in his views, but he had badly crossed Roosevelt during the 1934 Army Air Corps mail scandal, and for that the president would never forgive him.
So with public opinion firmly against war in the fall of 1940, the president had to tread carefully, and nowhere was this more critical or contentious than the issue of foreign aid. With his November defeat of Republican challenger Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt could now face the threat posed by Hitler’s legions staring across the Channel at their single remaining foe. By December 1940, all of western Europe had fallen except the United Kingdom, which was literally hanging on by coupling newly developed radar with the skill and courage of a thousand fighter pilots. Britain was alone now, and approaching her credit limit with the United States. At the close of a letter, Churchill writes, “Last of all, I come to the question of Finance. The more rapid and abundant the flow of munitions and ships which you are able to send us, the sooner will our dollar credits be exhausted. They are already, as you know, very heavily drawn upon by the payments we have made to date … the moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.”
Essentially, Churchill was asking for free war materiel and, with the Royal Navy stretched to its breaking point, he wanted the United States to deliver the goods to Britain. This would mean a repeal of the Neutrality Act and a public firestorm from those Americans who did not support war. Supplying Britain with arms could also lead to a declaration of war from the Axis, though such an act from Berlin or Rome was not expected—yet.
Tokyo was another problem altogether. Responding to Tokyo’s actions in China during July 1940, Roosevelt cut off the export of hundred-octane aviation fuel, aircraft parts, and machine tools to Japan, though he continued to permit shipments of scrap metal and oil. As some 90 percent of the Empire’s supply of scrap metal came from the United States, the president’s actions were intended as a warning and to incentivize mediation over China. In fact, the United States supplied over 50 percent of all materiel Japan required to wage war, and the Imperial General Staff was deeply concerned by this dependency. A dependency that included 82 percent of ferroalloys for steelmaking: over 90 percent of copper imports, heavy machinery, and combustion engines, and about 80 percent of the Empire’s oil.
Roosevelt’s embargo had the opposite effect that he intended.
With the fall of France in June, its colonial holdings, including Indochina, passed to the collaborationist Vichy government, which was itself controlled by a Germany now allied to Japan. Tokyo demanded naval and air bases, transit rights for imperial troops, and the closure of all routes into China. Vichy cried for help from Berlin, and was ignored. While the diplomats attempted to satisfy Tokyo, on September 22 units of the Imperial 22nd Army crossed the Indochinese border into what is now northern Vietnam and secured Haiphong Harbor four days later. This cut the Allied supply line into southern China, where the Imperial Army was heavily engaged, and put another Japanese-controlled territory within bomber range of American bases in the Philippines. The action also opened a route into British Malaya.
Though lukewarm to an alliance with Hitler, the strategic situation with Washington contributed to Japan’s entry into the Tripartite Alliance on September 27, 1940, following the conquest of French Indochina. Roosevelt responded by now placing a total embargo on all shipments of scrap metal from the United States to Japan, which further motivated Tokyo to decrease its dependance and procure, by force if necessary, other sources for its war machine. Consequently, Tokyo increasingly looked south toward Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, but two factors gave them pause: the Soviet Union’s Far Eastern Army, and the United States Pacific Fleet.
Four days after Christmas 1940, Roosevelt, seeking to crack the domestic isolationist wall, gave a fireside radio chat, stating:
Some of our people like to believe that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us. But it is a matter of most vital concern to us that European and Asiatic war-makers should not gain control of the oceans which lead to this hemisphere.
If Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun.
There are those who say that the Axis powers would never have any desire to attack the Western Hemisphere. That [this] is the same dangerous form of wishful thinking which has destroyed the powers of resistance of so many conquered peoples. The plain facts are that the Nazis have proclaimed, time and again, that all other races are their inferiors and therefore subject to their orders. And most important of all, the vast resources and wealth of this American Hemisphere constitute the most tempting loot in all of the round world.
The experience of the past two years has proven beyond doubt that no nation can appease the Nazis. No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness.
We must be the great arsenal of democracy.
Roosevelt and more prescient members of Congress, along with the majority of military professionals, could see the war clouds thickening. They did not agree on the timing or even where the sword would fall, but it was coming—and 1941 appeared to be the year of catching up on decades of slashed defense budgets and also, of addressing the atrophying of military technology and capabilities and, most frightening, the decay of the industrial base such that it could no longer build sufficient amounts of war materiel. Not a single operational-level tank had been produced in 1940, and just 1,771 combat aircraft, of which only 46 were heavy bombers. The Army Air Corps had gone from a 1918 complement of 195,023 men to less than 10,000 a few years later, which would remain fairly constant throughout the Roaring Twenties. During the Depression years, manning would creep slowly upward to a 1940 peak of 51,165 officers and men. Now, with war looming and the panic on, an additional 100,000 men would join in 1941.*
Across the country, over 780 new factories were being constructed and existing civilian production slowly switched over to military uses. Not just automobile and aircraft manufacturers, but jewelers were making fuses; washing machine companies made machine guns; appliance makers switched to antitank mines; pipe and valve makers now made hand grenades; and those who made razors a year earlier now produced percussion caps. But the real challenge was constructing the machine tools that physically produced the designs. These precision tools drill, cut, press, and bore; they are the beating heart of the process, and without them there is nothing for assembly lines to assemble. For example, eighty-seven tools were required to build a single propeller shaft, and in 1940 virtually all such tools came from just two hundred companies, most in New England with fewer than one hundred employees. Vermont’s Black River Valley was home to the three largest firms, and by the late 1930s Stalin’s Soviet Union and Imperial Japan were their best foreign customers.† Retooling for war took up the first half of 1941, but by the end of the year firms ramped up production—like Cincinnati Milling Machine, which was fabricating a new tool every seventeen minutes.
