From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (90 page)

Above all else, the questions regarding the timing, location, and priority to be given military operations divided the Allies. For the United States, the first major issue was the importance to be assigned the Pacific war. After Pearl Harbor, MacArthur and the navy insisted that they must have substantial reinforcements merely to hold the line. Large and vocal segments of public opinion demanded vengeance against Japan. A major U.S. naval victory at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 helped stabilize lines in the Pacific. But Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Ernest King continued to push for limited offensives to exploit Japan's overextension. MacArthur—for once—agreed with the navy. When the depth of British
opposition to an immediate second front in Western Europe became clear, even General Marshall supported a shift to the Pacific.
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Roosevelt solved the issue in typical fashion. He diverted substantial supplies to MacArthur and King for limited offensives. As late as 1943, resources and manpower allocated to Europe and the Pacific were roughly equal, violating the spirit and letter of the Europe-first principle. In part, this outcome reflected the influence of King. A bad-tempered, ruthless infighter whose motto was "When the going gets rough they call on the sons of bitches," he secured Marshall's support by backing army proposals for the European theater.
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In diverting resources to the Pacific, Roosevelt may also have been responding to domestic pressures. He certainly hoped to sustain the fighting spirit of forces there and to maintain maximum pressure on all fronts.

At the same time, he stuck with the principle that Germany was the major enemy and had first claim on resources for a major offensive. He rejected proposals to punish the British by shifting to the Pacific—that would be like "taking up your dishes and going away."
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In 1943, when European operations began to take form and the Pacific theater demanded more and more, he put on the brakes, preventing the war against Japan from absorbing resources that would further delay cross-Channel operations. The result was a strategy that retained but modified the Germany-first principle. Europe kept top priority for a major offensive, but the United States committed itself to wage war vigorously on both fronts. This put enormous strain on relations with Britain and the USSR. MacArthur and King predictably complained they could not carry out assigned tasks. In the final analysis, however, it proved a viable strategy for a two-front war, bringing the defeat of Japan months after V-E Day.

Controversy over the time, place, and size of a second front in Europe strained the alliance to the breaking point between January 1942 and the Tehran Conference in late 1943. In part, the conflict derived from Soviet demands for an immediate Anglo-American invasion of Western Europe. But it was also a question of British versus U.S. military doctrines and the Mediterranean against Western Europe. Here too, Roosevelt made the major decisions. Again, they reflected political and psychological considerations and produced compromises, in this case, short-term commitment to the peripheral strategy, long-run commitment to a cross-Channel invasion.

The central question—and the most important and divisive issue among the Allies until late 1943—was whether to mobilize resources for an early strike across the English Channel or mount lesser offensives around the periphery of Hitler's Fortress Europe. Following principles deeply rooted in their respective military traditions, Marshall and the U.S. Army generally favored the former, the British the latter. Roosevelt in May 1942 made an ill-advised, if carefully qualified, commitment to Foreign Minister Molotov for an early second front, which the Russians appear not to have put much stock in. A month later, to the consternation of his own military advisers, he approved British proposals for Operation Torch, an immediate invasion of French North Africa. The decision arose from Britain's steadfast rejection of an immediate invasion of France. Since the British would provide the bulk of the troops for such an operation, FDR felt compelled to attack somewhere else. He was thinking of domestic politics; he desperately wanted to get U.S. troops into action against Germany in 1942. He also acted on the basis of immediate military and psychological concerns. Germany's summer offensive in Russia threatened a breakthrough into the Caucasus and Iran. Rommel's victory at Tobruk gave the Germans the upper hand in North Africa and threatened the union of two victorious German armies in an area of huge strategic importance. A U.S. offensive might tip the scales back toward the Allies.
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Roosevelt was also concerned about the immediate political and psychological needs of an ally. British morale was badly shaken by defeats in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Churchill was in political trouble. A North African offensive might bolster flagging British spirits, end at least temporarily the raging controversy over the second front, and seal the Anglo-American alliance. Roosevelt recognized that it would not appease Stalin, whose complaints had become increasingly shrill. But he apparently reasoned that action somewhere would be better than further delay. He gambled that the Russian armies would survive and sought to compensate by stepping up crucial lend-lease deliveries.
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As U.S. military planners had feared, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942 was followed by agreement at an Anglo-American summit in Casablanca in January 1943 to invade Sicily and then Italy. Since operations in North Africa and the Pacific were absorbing increasing volumes of supplies, the British now argued that the Allies lacked sufficient resources to mount a successful invasion of France and insisted that they follow up victories
in the Mediterranean. Divided among themselves, U.S. military planners were no match for their British counterparts. "We came, we listened, and we were conquered," one officer bitterly complained.
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The harsh reality was that as long as the British resisted a cross-Channel attack and the United States lacked the means to do it alone, there was no other way to stay on the offensive. In any event, logistical limitations likely prevented a successful invasion of France prior to 1944. As a way of palliating Stalin's Russia, the "ghost in the attic" at Casablanca, in Kimball's apt words, Roosevelt and Churchill proclaimed that they would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis. The statement also reflected FDR's determination to avoid repeating the mistakes of World War I, as well as his firm belief that Germany had been "Prussianized" and needed a complete political makeover.
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These decisions had vital military and political consequences. The dispersion of resources, as Marshall and others repeatedly warned, delayed a cross-Channel attack until 1944. By giving the Germans time to strengthen their defenses in France, it made the task more costly. Repeated delays in the second front strained the alliance with Moscow in ways that could not be overcome by Roosevelt's soothing words, lend-lease diplomacy, or unconditional surrender. They probably encouraged Stalin to pursue the possibility of a separate peace with Germany in the spring and summer of 1943. It may be argued, on the other hand, that Roosevelt's decisions over the long run better served the Allied cause. Without a full-fledged British commitment, a cross-Channel attack in 1943 might have failed. Even if the British had been compelled to go along, an assault as early as the spring of 1943 ran huge risks. Defeat or stalemate in Western Europe, in the absence of operations elsewhere, could have had profound political and military consequences. The Torch and Casablanca decisions sealed the Anglo-American alliance at a critical point in the war. They permitted maximum use of British manpower and supplies, enabled the Allies to stay on the offensive, and kept pressure on the Germans. In time, they opened the Mediterranean to Allied shipping, knocked Italy out of the war, helped keep Turkey and Spain neutral, and strained German manpower and resources. They provided useful lessons for the cross-Channel attack. The peripheral approach was costly, but given the realities of 1942 and 1943 it seems the strategy most appropriate for coalition warfare.
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What eventually made the Mediterranean strategy work was Roosevelt's unstinting commitment to a knockout blow across the Channel. He never lost sight of its military and political significance. And as the balance of power within the alliance shifted in mid-1943 and the United States, by virtue of its vast manpower and resources, became the dominant partner, grand strategy conformed more with the American—and Russian—than the British design.

When Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met together for the first time at Tehran in early December 1943, the Allied military situation had improved dramatically. At Stalingrad in late 1942, the Red Army had turned back Hitler's drive into the Caucasus, inflicting huge losses on the Wehrmacht. In July 1943, the Soviets repulsed Germany's summer offensive against the Kursk salient in a titanic battle featuring thousands of tanks. The Reich never regained the initiative in the east. The Red Army by late 1943 had liberated much of Russia proper and was poised to drive across Eastern Europe to Berlin. The Western allies had wrapped up operations in North Africa and implemented successful, if costly, invasions of Sicily and Italy. Allied victory was assured; it was a matter of how long and at what cost.

Amidst much ceremony and pomp at Tehran, the Big Three, as they came to be called, began to discuss postwar issues and set Allied strategy for the rest of the war. The Americans found Stalin—whom one official aptly labeled a "murderous tyrant"—to be intelligent and a master of detail. The tone of the meetings was generally cordial and businesslike. Seeking to promote cooperation, FDR went out of his way to ingratiate himself with the Soviet dictator, meeting privately with him and even teasing a not-at-all amused Churchill in Stalin's presence. The conferees reached no firm political agreements. They spoke of dismembering Germany. Certain that the USSR would be the dominant power in Eastern Europe and that he could not keep U.S. troops in Europe after the war, FDR hinted to Stalin that he would not challenge Soviet domination of the Baltic States and preeminence in Poland, although he urged token concessions to quiet protest in the West. His refusal to make any commitments, on the other hand, and his failure to mention the atomic bomb project, which Stalin knew about, likely gave the suspicious Soviet leader pause.

The main decision was to confirm the cross-Channel attack. Churchill continued to promote operations in the Mediterranean. At one point, FDR appeared to agree with him. To the great relief of top U.S. military leaders, Stalin dismissed further Mediterranean operations as "diversions" and came down firmly behind an invasion of France. The conferees set the date for May 1944. Stalin agreed to time a major offensive with the invasion of France and to enter the war against Japan three months after the
defeat of Germany. The discussions at Tehran decisively shaped the outcome of the war and the nature of the peace. Primarily through Roosevelt's leadership, the Allies had emerged from a period of defeat and grave internal tension and formed a successful grand strategy.
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Alliance diplomacy tells only part of the much larger story of U.S. foreign relations in World War II. In a total war fought across a global expanse, the United States mounted an unprecedented range of activities even in places where its prior involvement had been slight. In regions of traditional importance such as Latin America and China, it assumed a much larger role and greater responsibilities. In areas such as the Middle East and South Asia, it took a much keener interest and acquired new commitments. The overriding objective, of course, was defeating the Axis, but Americans in Washington and far from home were also alert to postwar economic and strategic advantage. Certain that greater U.S. involvement was essential for postwar peace and security and to improve the lot of other peoples, they found themselves entangled in intractable issues such as decolonization and the Jewish quest for a homeland in Palestine that would dominate the agenda of world politics for years to come. They plunged into complex local situations not easily susceptible to U.S. power and raised expectations difficult to meet. They early experienced the burdens and frustrations of world power.

Long before Pearl Harbor, the United States had moved to counter the Axis threat to the Western Hemisphere, and during the war the Roosevelt administration intensified its efforts to promote regional security. Building on the foundations of the Good Neighbor policy, U.S. officials continued to speak of a Western Hemisphere ideal and hold up the American "republics" as alternatives to fascism. Roosevelt even boosted the inter-American "system" as a model for postwar order in which great powers would maintain regional harmony and stability through wise leadership and by actively cultivating good relations among their neighbors, using police powers only when essential and then with equity and justice. The Good Neighbor policy was a "radical innovation," journalist Walter Lipp-mann proclaimed, a "true substitute for empire."
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Thanks in part to the attention lavished on the hemisphere during the 1930s, the United States secured the active support of most Latin American nations after 1941. United States officials preferred that the other American "republics" merely break diplomatic relations with the Axis, since full belligerency would have compounded already daunting defense and supply problems. To curry U.S. favor—and secure economic aid—the Caribbean and Central American nations, most of them dictatorships, exceeded U.S. wishes by quickly declaring war. Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela soon broke relations. "If ever a policy paid dividends," State Department official Adolf Berle crowed, "the Good Neighbor policy has."
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The United States eventually got its way, but not as easily as Berle assumed. At a hastily convened meeting in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, Chile and Argentina blocked a U.S.-sponsored resolution requiring the breaking of relations. The best that could be secured was an alternative recommending such a step, "a pretty miserable compromise," Hull fumed. Although most nations complied before the meeting ended, Hull remained outraged, conveniently blaming his rival Welles, who headed the U.S. delegation.
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