War Without Fighting
War Without Fighting
Never before in World War II had Franklin Roosevelt acted so vigorously as last week, when the earth moved and the shock was felt in the White House.
In the Balkans, after a week of war, Yugoslavia, whose determination to fight had been applauded by the President, was already cut off from her allies. In Africa the British lost the whole of Libya except for the encircled port of Tobruch. In the Atlantic the British still continued slowly to lose the battle of shipping.
To a President whose Lend-Lease Act had financially underwritten the war of all democracies against the Axis, these things were serious news, but possibly not so serious as the fact that in Moscow a non-aggression pact was signed which freed Japan of Russian fears, freed her to sail against the East Indies (see p. 34}. If Japan chooses to move, the President can hardly escape an ugly choice: to abandon the cause of the democracies in half the world, or take the U.S. to war.
In Washington, Franklin Roosevelt sat at his desk while the earth moved. But the U.S. was not so weak that it could not act. Franklin Roosevelt exercised his will against the fulcrum of a nation which, although still only half armed, had immense latent power. Although the U.S.
could not move the earth, at least the U.S. could and did perceptibly shake it in reply to the Axis.
To strengthen the British in the Battle of the Atlantic, the President gave ten 2 50-ft. Coast Guard cutters of the Chelan Class, 1,979-tonners, built between 1928-32 to chase rum-runners--a small gift but, short of convoying, as big a shipping present as he evidently felt that the U.S. could afford.
Far more important to that battle was an agreement made Math Danish Minister Henrik de Kauffmann allowing the U.S. to build bases in Greenland (see p. 22) whence planes can spot German submarines and surface raiders, to protect U.S. lent or leased war materials bound for Britain. If Minister de Kauffmann had a questionable legal right to sign such a paper, at least the moral justification of it was sound. The President was getting tough; and everyone, even Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, liked it.
He moved again. To help the British defense of Egypt he declared the Red Sea--previously out of bounds by proclamation under the Neutrality Act--open to U.S. shipping so that arms could be taken to ports of technically neutral Egypt.
The American Export Lines prepared to move some of its 21 India freighters at once into the new route--and perhaps the Germans prepared to sink them en route.
The President moved again: he asked Congress for a seize-and-pay authority over all foreign shipping in U.S. harbors.
The President could thus add 39 Danish ships to the U.S.-British merchant marine; later he could commandeer some 20 or 30 Belgian, Netherlands, Rumanian and French ships, including the 83,423-ton Normandie, now quietly rusting at her 48th Street pier in Manhattan.
At the pace with which Franklin Roosevelt moved in 1940, each of these decisions would have taken a month to develop. But in 1941 they all took place in one week.
How deeply he was stirred by the need for action was perhaps even better gauged by the action he took in domestic affairs.
For ten months, while the President maintained his optimism, the wheels of the defense program had ground and groaned. The National Defense Advisory Commission had been succeeded by the Office of Production Management, and shortages of materials grew more serious, prices began to mount and priorities multiplied. Last week the President finally took drastic action, facing the fact that shortages and prices might otherwise soon get out of hand, set up an Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply (OPACS) under Leon Henderson to tackle, not little bottlenecks, but the whole problem of giving the U.S. a working war economy (see p. 81).
Last week there was no doubt that in Franklin Roosevelt's hands the U.S. had seriously got down to the business of making-war-short-of-fighting. Moreover, there was another step that everyone, in the Administration and out, was waiting hopefully or angrily for the U.S. to take, a step that would almost inevitably involve some fighting: to send U.S. convoys to take U.S. materials to those who are supposed to get them. Last week there was good ground for believing, despite denial, that on the President's desk were drafts of a plan for convoying war materials to Halifax, N.S., thereby cutting off 599 miles of the 3,084-mile haul to British ports.
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