7.11 notes

The road to war

Despite its failure to join the League of Nations, the United States did not withdraw from international affairs in the 1920s. It participated in arms control negotiations; signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy but proved unenforceable; and expanded its foreign investments in Central and Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and western Europe. In 1933, a new possibility for trade emerged when the Roosevelt administration extended diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union (USSR). Overall, the country did not retreat from foreign affairs so much as it refused to enter into collective security agreements that would restrain its freedom of action. To the extent that American leaders practiced isolationism, they did so mainly in the political sense of rejecting internationalist organizations such as the League of Nations, institutions that might require the United States to use military force to implement their decisions. The experience of World War I had reinforced this brand of political isolationism, which was reflected in an outpouring of antiwar sentiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Best-selling novels like Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun (1939) presented vivid depictions of the horror and futility of war. Beginning in 1934, Senate investigations chaired by Gerald Nye of North Dakota inaccurately concluded that bankers and munitions makers — “merchants of death,” as one contemporary writer labeled them — had conspired to push the United States into the Great War in 1917. Nye’s hearings appealed to popular antibusiness sentiment in Depression-era America. Following the Nye Committee hearings, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts, each designed to make it more difficult for the United States to become entangled in future European armed hostilities. In 1935, Congress prohibited the sale of munitions to either warring side and authorized the president to warn Americans against traveling on passenger liners of belligerent nations. The following year, lawmakers added private loans to the ban, and in 1937, they required belligerents to pay cash for nonmilitary purchases and ship them on their own vessels — so-called cash-and-carry provisions. Each of these provisions was based on preventing a repeat of the factors that were believed to have pulled the United States into World War I. Events in Europe, however, made U.S. neutrality ever more difficult to maintain. After rising to power as chancellor of Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler revived Germany’s economic and military strength despite the Great Depression. Hitler installed National Socialism (Nazism) at home and established the empire of the Third Reich abroad. The Führer (leader) whipped up patriotic fervor by scapegoating and persecuting communists and Jews. To garner support for his actions, Hitler manipulated German feelings of humiliation for losing World War I and having been forced to sign the “war guilt” clause and pointed to the disastrous effects of the country’s inflation-ridden economy. In 1936, Hitler sent troops to occupy the Rhineland between Germany and France in blatant violation of the Treaty of Versailles and without reprisal from the League of Nations or from Great Britain and France. Hitler did not stop there. Citing the need for more space for the Germanic people to live, he pushed for German expansion into eastern Europe. In March 1938, he forced Austria to unite with Germany. German troops were greeted as heroes by many Austrians as they marched unopposed into Austria. After falsely claiming that German people were being mistreated in the Sudetenland, the mainly German-speaking, western region of Czechoslovakia, Hitler signed the Munich Accord with Great Britain and France, allowing Germany to annex the territory in September of that year. Hitler still wanted more land and was convinced that his western European rivals would not stop him, so in March 1939, he sent German troops to invade and occupy what remained of Czechoslovakia. Hitler proved correct; Britain and France did nothing in response. The policy critics called appeasement, making concessions to avoid conflict, had failed to stop Nazi Germany’s aggressive expansion in Europe. Hitler’s Italian ally, Benito Mussolini, joined him in war and conquest. In 1935, Italian troops invaded Ethiopia with the support of Germany. The following year, both Germany and Italy intervened in the Spanish civil war, providing military support for General Francisco Franco in his effort to overthrow the democratically elected, socialist government of Spain. While the United States and Great Britain remained on the sidelines, only the Soviet Union officially assisted the Loyalist defenders of the Spanish republic. In violation of American law, private citizens, many of whom were communists, volunteered to serve on the side of the Spanish Loyalists and fought on the battlefield as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Other sympathetic Americans, such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, provided financial assistance for the anti-Franco government. Despite these efforts, Franco’s forces seized control of Spain in early 1939, another victory for Hitler and Mussolini.

The Challenge to Isolationism

As Europe drifted toward war, public opinion polls revealed that most Americans wanted to stay out of any European conflict. The president, however, thought it likely that, to protect its own economic and political interests, the United States would eventually need to assist the Western democracies. Still, Roosevelt had to tread lightly in the face of the Neutrality Acts that Congress had passed between 1935 and 1937 and overwhelming public opposition to American involvement in Europe. Germany’s aggression in Europe eventually led to full-scale war. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Just before the invasion, the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression agreement with Germany, which carved up Poland between the two nations and permitted the U.S.S.R. to occupy the neighboring Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had few illusions about Hitler’s design on his own nation, but he concluded that by signing this pact, he could secure his country’s western borders and buy additional time. In June 1940, Italy declared war on France and Britain. (The next year, Germans broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union.) Roosevelt responded to the outbreak of war by reaffirming U.S. neutrality. Despite his sympathy for the Allies (mainly Great Britain and France), which most Americans had come to share, the president stated his hope that the United States could stay out of the war: “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.” With the United States on the sidelines, German forces marched toward victory. By the spring of 1940, German armies had launched a Blitzkrieg (lightning war) across Europe, defeating and occupying Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. With German victories mounting, committed opponents of American involvement in foreign wars organized the America First Committee. America First tapped into the feeling of isolationism and concern among a diverse group of Americans who did not want to get dragged into another foreign war. The greatest challenge to isolationism occurred in June 1940, when France fell to the German onslaught and Nazi troops marched into Paris. Britain now stood virtually alone, and its position seemed tenuous. The British had barely succeeded in evacuating their forces from France by sea when the German Luftwaffe (air force) began bombing London and other targets in the Battle of Britain. The surrender of France and the Battle of Britain drastically changed Americans’ attitude toward entering the war. Before Germany invaded France, 82 percent of Americans thought that the United States should not aid the Allies. After France’s defeat, in a complete turnaround, some 80 percent of Americans favored assisting Great Britain in some way. However, four of five Americans polled still opposed immediate entry into the war. As a result, the politically astute Roosevelt portrayed all U.S. assistance to Britain as a way to prevent American military intervention by allowing Great Britain to defeat the Germans on its own.Nevertheless, the Roosevelt administration found acceptable ways of helping Britain. On September 2, 1940, the president sent fifty obsolete destroyers to the British in return for leases on British naval bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the British West Indies. Two weeks later, on September 16, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, the first peacetime military draft in U.S. history, which quickly registered more than 16 million men. This political maneuvering came as Roosevelt campaigned for an unprecedented third term in 1940. He defeated the Republican Wendell Willkie, a Wall Street lawyer who shared Roosevelt’s anti-isolationist views, although by a smaller margin than in his previous two electoral victories. However, both candidates accommodated voters’ desire to stay out of the European war. Roosevelt went so far as to promise American parents: “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.” Roosevelt’s campaign promises did not halt the march to war. Roosevelt succeeded in pushing Congress to pass the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. With Britain running out of money and its shipping devastated by German submarine attacks, this measure circumvented the cash-and-carry provisions of the Neutrality Acts. The United States would lend or lease equipment, but no one expected the recipients to return the used weapons and other commodities. To protect British ships carrying American supplies, the president extended naval and air patrols in the North Atlantic. In response, German submarines began sinking U.S. ships. By May 1941, Germany and the United States were engaged in an undeclared naval war.

The United States Enters the War

Financially, militarily, and ideologically, the United States had aligned itself with Britain, and Roosevelt expected that the nation would soon be formally at war. As Germany and Italy successfully expanded their empires, they endangered U.S. economic interests and democratic values. President Roosevelt believed that American security abroad was threatened by the German Nazis and Italian fascists. After passage of the Lend-Lease Act, American and British military planners agreed that defeating Germany would become the top priority if the United States entered the war. In August 1941, Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill met in Newfoundland, where they signed the Atlantic Charter, a lofty statement of war aims that included principles of freedom of the seas, self-determination, free trade, and “freedom from fear and want” — ideals that laid the groundwork for the establishment of a postwar United Nations. At the same meeting, Roosevelt promised Churchill that the United States would protect British convoys in the North Atlantic as far as Iceland while the nation waited for a confrontation with Germany that would rally the American public in support of war. The president got what he wanted. After several attacks on American ships by German submarines in September and October, the president persuaded Congress to repeal the neutrality legislation of the 1930s and allow American ships to sail across the Atlantic to supply Great Britain. By December, the nation was close to open war with Germany.The event that finally prompted the United States to enter the war, however, occurred not in the Atlantic but in the Pacific Ocean. For nearly a decade, U.S. relations with Japan had deteriorated over the issue of China’s independence and maintaining the Open Door to Chinese markets. The United States did little to challenge the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria in 1931, but after Japanese armed forces moved farther into China in 1937, the United States supplied arms to China. Relations worsened in 1940 when the Japanese government signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy, which created a mutual defense agreement among the three. That same year, Japanese troops invaded northern Indochina, and Roosevelt responded by embargoing sales of products that Japan needed for war. This embargo did not deter the Japanese. In July, they occupied the remainder of Indochina to gain access to the region’s natural resources. The Roosevelt administration retaliated by freezing Japanese assets and cutting off all trade with Japan. On the quiet Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii. This surprise air and naval assault killed more than 2,400 Americans and badly damaged or destroyed 300 aircraft and 19 U.S. warships, including all eight battleships stationed there. The attack on Pearl Harbor abruptly ended isolationism and rallied the American public behind President Roosevelt, who pronounced December 7 “a date which will live in infamy.” The next day, Congress overwhelmingly voted to go to war with Japan, and on December 11, Germany and Italy, upholding the Tripartite Pact, declared war on the United States in response. In little more than a year after his reelection pledge to keep the country out of war, Roosevelt sent American men to fight overseas. Still, an overwhelming majority of Americans now considered entry into the war as necessary to preserve freedom and democracy against assaults from fascist and militaristic nations.