XPost: soc.history
From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net
On Thu, 6 Jan 2022 14:12:25 -0800 (PST), Jeffrey Rubard
wrote:
[...]
Franklin Roosevelt’s Sunday morning began as most of his Sundays
began: with a cigarette and the Sunday papers in bed. He wasn’t a
regular churchgoer, con?ning his attendance mainly to special
occasions: weddings, funerals, his three inaugurations. In his youth
and young adulthood he had often spent Sundays on the golf course, but
his gol?ng days were long over, to his lasting regret. This Sunday
morning–the ?rst Sunday of December 1941–he read about himself in the
papers. The New York Times gave him the top head, explaining how he
had sent a personal appeal for peace to the Japanese emperor. Neither
the Times nor the Washington Post, which provided similar coverage,
included the substance of his appeal, as he had directed the State
Department to release only the fact of his having approached the
emperor. This way he got credit for his efforts on behalf of peace
without having to acknowledge how hopeless those efforts were. The
papers put the burden of warmongering on Japan; the government in
Tokyo declared that its “patience” with the Western powers was at an
end. Heavy movements of Japanese troops in occupied
Indochina–movements about which Roosevelt had quietly released
corroborating information–suggested an imminent thrust against
Thailand or Malaya.
Sharing the headlines with the prospect of war in the Pacific was the
reality of war in the Atlantic and Europe. The German offensive
against the Soviet Union, begun the previous June, seemed to have
stalled just short of Moscow. Temperatures of twenty below zero were
punishing the German attackers, searing their flesh and freezing their
crankcases. The Germans were forced to find shelter from the cold; the
front apparently had locked into place for the winter. On the
Atlantic, the British had just sunk a German commerce raider, or so
they claimed. The report from the war zone was sketchy and
unconfirmed. The admiralty in London volunteered that its cruiser
Dorsetshire had declined to look for survivors, as it feared German
submarines in the area.
Roosevelt supposed he’d get the details from Winston Churchill. The
president and the prime minister shared a love of the sea, and
Churchill, since assuming his current of?ce eighteen months ago, had
made a point of apprising Roosevelt of aspects of the naval war kept
secret from others outside the British government. Churchill and
Roosevelt wrote each other several times a week; they spoke by
telephone less often but still regularly.
An inside account of the war was the least the prime minister could
provide, as Roosevelt was furnishing Churchill and the British the
arms and equipment that kept their struggle against Germany alive.
Until now Roosevelt had left the actual ?ghting to the British, but he
made certain they got what they needed to remain in the battle.
The situation might change at any moment, though, the Sunday papers
implied. The Navy Department–which was to say, Roosevelt–had just
ordered the seizure of Finnish vessels in American ports, on the
ground that Finland had become a de facto member of the Axis alliance.
Navy secretary Frank Knox, reporting to Congress on the war readiness
of the American ?eet, assured the legislators that it was “second to
none.” Yet it still wasn’t strong enough, Knox said. “The
international situation is such that we must arm as rapidly as
possible to meet our naval defense requirements simultaneously in both
oceans against any possible combination of powers concerting against
us.”
Roosevelt read these remarks with satisfaction. The president had long
prided himself on clever appointments, but no appointment had tickled
him more than his tapping of Knox, a Republican from the stronghold of
American isolationism, Chicago. By reaching out to the Republicans–not
once but twice: at the same time that he chose Knox, Roosevelt named
Republican Henry Stimson secretary of war–the president signaled a
desire for a bipartisan foreign policy. By picking a Chicagoan,
Roosevelt poked a ?nger in the eye of the arch- isolationist Chicago
Tribune, a poke that hurt the more as Knox was the publisher of the
rival Chicago Daily News.
Roosevelt might have chuckled to himself again, re?ecting on how he
had cut the ground from under the isolationists, one square foot at a
time; but the recent developments were no laughing matter. Four years
had passed since his “quarantine” speech in Chicago, which had warned
against German and Japanese aggression. The strength of the
isolationists had prevented him from following up at that time, or for
many months thereafter. But by reiterating his message again and
again–and with the help of Hitler and the Japanese, who repeatedly
proved him right–he gradually brought the American people around to
his way of thinking. He persuaded Congress to amend America’s
neutrality laws and to let the democracies purchase American weapons
for use against the fascists. He sent American destroyers to Britain
to keep the sea lanes open. His greatest coup was Lend- Lease, the
program that made America the armory of the anti- fascist alliance.
He had done everything but ask Congress to declare war. The Sunday
papers thought this ?nal step might come soon. He knew more than the
papers did, and he thought so, too.
***
But there was something he didn’t know, or even imagine. Roosevelt was
still reading the papers when an American minesweeper on a predawn
patrol two miles off the southern coast of the Hawaiian island of
Oahu, near the entrance to Pearl Harbor, spotted what looked like a
periscope. No American submarines were supposed to be in the area,
and the minesweeper reported the sighting to its backup, the destroyer
Ward. The report provoked little alarm, partly because Hawaii was so
far from Japan and partly because Pearl Harbor’s shallow bottom seemed
suf?cient protection against enemy subs. Some of?cers on the Ward
questioned the sighting; eyes play tricks in the dark. Perhaps there
was an American sub in the area; this wouldn’t have been the ?rst time
overzealous security or a simple screwup had prevented information
from reaching the patrols. In any event, the Ward responded slowly to
the asserted sighting and spent most of the next two hours cruising
the area and discovering nothing.
[continued in next message]
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