a "windbag," while Walter Lippmann suggested that "the trouble with Franklin D. Roosevelt is that his mind is not very clear, his purposes are not simple and his methods are not direct."³ The consensus among those who knew him well was that he was secretive and made solitary decisions, even though he was surrounded by advisers who constituted a kind of medieval court.

Roosevelt identified with his cousin Theodore Roosevelt and, to a lesser degree, with Woodrow Wilson. Historians often compare FDR to Wilson, noting that Roosevelt was a junior member of the Wilson administration as assistant secretary of the navy and that he studied Wilson a great deal. There is something of Wilson in Roosevelt's United Nations organization, a resurrection of Wilson's League of Nations; and Wilson's moralistic international outlook is echoed in Roosevelt's approach to world affairs. Both shared a certain internationalist naiveté.

But Franklin Roosevelt resembles his great uncle Teddy the most. The resemblance is not just one of family, although this surely must have entered Franklin's mind when he compared himself to his illustrious predecessor in the presidency. FDR was born into the age of navalism, of the strategic theories of sea power and its influence upon history. America's coming of age did not at first mean that it would spread its power over the Atlantic and challenge the Old World in Europe. Power for America first meant the Far East, China, Japan, and the Pacific; and this meant sea power, a navalist orientation. China, Japan, and the Pacific caught Franklin Roosevelt's mind when he became interested in international matters; cultural nationalism, Anglo-Saxon and Pacific imperialism informed the young Roosevelt. The new American spirit was in the air that he breathed.

In 1890, Captain Alfred T. Mahan, an American naval historian, published The Influence of Seapower in History, emphasizing the importance of naval strategy for a continent bounded by two oceans. He viewed the oceans as strategic highways for the advancing industrial state America was becoming. Theodore Roosevelt was an enthusiastic convert to navalism, as were Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams, and others.⁴ Theodore also possessed an irrepressible personality, which, along with his enthusiasm for navalism and Americanism, became a tacit legacy for the young Franklin. Teddy was larger than life, even if he sometimes appeared juvenile in his poses. He was a voracious reader, a thinker, and a writer from whom FDR learned the importance of the sense of power and the relationship between power and responsibility. But Franklin never understood Theodore Roosevelt's concept of the balance of power.

It is not clear why Franklin Roosevelt joined the Democratic party, breaking family and class tradition. The influence of Wilsonianism on Roosevelt is also a subject worthy of some discussion. "Roosevelt's first administration was much less a Wilsonian restoration than might have been expected."⁵ He took on only two of the party's Wilsonians, Cordell Hull and Daniel C. Roper, both of whom had little influence in his administration. Louis Brandeis, one of the old architects of Wilson's "New Freedom," was skeptical of FDR, while Wilson's critic William Bullitt became a close friend. Harold Ickes and Henry Wallace represented Republican and progressive factions, and leading New Dealer Donald Richberg also came from this group. Roosevelt remembered well Wilson's dilemma in attempting to get the American people to intervene in the Great War in Europe, and the subsequent struggle for the peace treaty that broke Wilson's spirit. With the experience of Wilson to guide him, Roosevelt became more circumspect when faced with the same dilemma in the late 1930s.

Roosevelt's legacy of the imperial presidency was "derived from a genuinely imperialist source."⁶ Projecting Wilsonian idealism, Roosevelt was the offspring of the old expansionists. The Calvinist origins of Wilsonian idealism were congenial with Roosevelt's own strain of protestantism; but his instincts governed his foreign policy, and those instincts were patrician and expansionist. Roosevelt was not a disappointed Wilsonian, but rather a combination of both Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. FDR, not Henry Luce, authored the American century; and Roosevelt's vision, centered on the Far East rather than the decaying Old World, was hardly humanitarian. It was the vision of the American mercantilists, the expansionists of the Gilded Age, the Mahans, Lodges, and Theodore Roosevelt. In the words of Protestant clergyman Josiah Strong, author of the best selling Our Country, God was "preparing mankind to receive our impress."⁷

FDR had had considerable administrative experience in his four years as governor of the most populous state in the Union between 1928 and 1932, and then nine years as president before the war. His administrative style combined confidence in himself and an unorthodox method of operations that shunned daily routines and detailed work. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., claimed that "little fascinated Franklin Roosevelt more than the tasks of presidential administration,"⁸ but the opposite was the case. Roosevelt believed in executive reorganization and improving management, but his style was antithetical to all the accepted norms of classical administration. He created many agencies and bureaucracies, but his unorthodox management style prevailed, at the expense of efficient administrative practices. The president's efforts to achieve greater government efficiency were compromised by the inherent inertia of the American political system and by his own work habits.

White House decision-making was characterized by confusion and the presence of many aides who believed they had the president's ear. He received little intelligence on the development of the Munich crisis and on the events leading up to Pearl Harbor.⁹ He had unfounded anxieties about the Soviet Union's loyalty to the alliance, worried needlessly about Nazi and Fascist penetrations into Latin America, and allocated military resources that were needed elsewhere to that area.¹⁰ He overreacted to Japanese expansion without understanding that country's needs. While pursuing the war, he also pressured the British and the French to relinquish their empires. The result was chaos, indirectness, and constant overlapping of authority.¹¹ Friendly historians have seen touches of political genius in Roosevelt's famous habit of assigning "overlapping and competing authority and jurisdiction to his subordinates."¹² But Roosevelt's method could just as easily be seen as carelessly inefficient. It assured only that, in the end, despite the influence of others, the president made the final decision.

This method had succeeded in domestic politics, but it was not suited for the conduct of the war. Wartime decision-making suffered from a plurality of channels of information from which key advisers and assistants were at least partially blocked. Seeing himself as the ultimate poker player, Roosevelt felt that he could hold all the cards and always produce a hand that would win the game. "These methods led to frustration among his subordinates and to complaints of a lack of coordination."¹³

The conduct of the war constantly demanded that important decisions, determining crucial operations and affecting the outcome of battles, be made. Roosevelt's inclination was to wait and see, to vacillate before reaching critical decisions that required action with unpredictable outcomes. He abhorred unpredictability, and as a result avoided as much as possible making decisions on issues about which he knew little. Instinct repeatedly prevailed over long-term planning.

With Churchill and Stalin, FDR's instinct was to use his powerfully persuasive personal charm and engaging manner, hoping that his rhetoric would persuade or hypnotize. He sought to convey an image of himself as the arbitrator, the conciliator, so that he could by turns placate Stalin and mollify the increasingly despairing Churchill. Instead, what he did was engender confusion and doubt about the strength of his commitment and the direction of his strategy. Both Churchill and Stalin saw Roosevelt as indecisive, and Stalin thus believed he could use Roosevelt to advance Stalin's ends.

Internationalist, Isolationist, Reformer, or Appeaser?

Franklin Roosevelt has been portrayed as an early foe of Hitler, prevented from combating the evil that Hitler represented by an isolationist Congress. Roosevelt's rhetoric at the time may have given this impression, but his actions sought to mollify the isolationists and, in the process, sent mixed signals to European leaders. This is not surprising, as Roosevelt had essentially a nineteenthcentury outlook, with no understanding of what fueled modern mass movements outside the United States, no conception of their impact on international stability. The consolidation of Nazi power in Germany and the increasing anti-Semitic legislation had little effect on Roosevelt.

He remained silent when, on April 1, 1933, the Nazis boycotted all Jewish establishments, the first of many steps that would lead to the Final Solution.¹⁴ In 1933, Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank, met with Roosevelt, but Roosevelt's admonitions about the Nazi treatment of the Jews struck Schacht as mild.

After dinner, exactly half an hour remained for a private conversation between the President and me. He began with the Jewish question, which had undoubtedly done a great deal of harm, probably not out of particular sympathy for the Jews, but from the old Anglo-Saxon sense of chivalry toward the weak. But he did not elaborate on this theme and said that this hurdle would be cleared even if its importance should not be underestimated.¹⁵

The president's early policy toward Nazi Germany amounted to appeasement, though he did not pursue it with the enthusiasm of European appeasers. Indeed, Roosevelt's slowness in formulating a realistic and effective response to Hitler was not unusual for a time when many Western political leaders pursued a policy of appeasement. Roosevelt's intentions in the early and middle 1930s were to restore prosperity and protect threatened nations from military aggression, yet not upset his domestic recovery or frighten isolationists.¹⁶ Historian Wayne Cole is right to conclude that Roosevelt needed the support of the isolationists in Congress to realize his domestic New Deal. They generally supported his domestic policy but were firmly opposed to developing an internationalist, let alone an interventionist, policy.¹⁷ The recurrent military and political crises in Europe and elsewhere were secondary to FDR's domestic reforms. He found no contradictions between his commitment to economic nationalism and mild internationalism which spilled over into foreign affairs.

The New Deal entailed an internationalist view of American interests. A global New Deal meant exporting the great American domestic experiment abroad to inspire the yearning for a "universal democracy, [and] for the abolition of colonialism."¹⁸ Some of these ideas would find their way into the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and the United Nations charter in 1945, and be voiced strongly at Yalta. But in the mid-1930s, Roosevelt's pronouncements about the Good Neighbor policy and calls for international disarmament were not followed by action. European diplomats, comparing Roosevelt's rhetoric to his actions, concluded that he was a closet appeaser. "To the British government," D. C. Watt writes, "especially to Premier Neville Chamberlain, he seemed to have appeared as an unreliable windbag in charge of a country whose friendship and support Britain simply had to have."¹⁹

Intellectual Roots of the New Deal and Other Domestic Policies

Cole notes that "Roosevelt's relations with American isolationists from 1932 to 1945 had enduring significance for the history of American foreign policy." He also writes that "[Roosevelt] decisively triumphed over the isolationists" and that "his victory over them marked a watershed in the history of American foreign policy."²⁰ The issue, however, is not who won—Roosevelt or the isolationists—but when Roosevelt finally prevailed. How much support for his domestic programs was Roosevelt willing to sacrifice for his interventionist foreign policy? This persuasive politician could have found a way to minimize such loss of support, but instead, he vacillated, procrastinated, and wavered. The combination of interventionist rhetoric and delay that amounted to inaction failed to prepare the nation for the war. It fostered a material and psychological unpreparedness which led to the prolongation of the war and to unequal postwar arrangements between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Professor Cole writes that isolationists opposed American intervention in European wars, but not necessarily in Asia, the Pacific, or Latin America, areas they considered natural American spheres of interest. They believed "the United States could more effectively lead the world to the good life by building and sustaining democracy, freedom, and prosperity at home."²¹ By Cole's definition, Roosevelt was a functional isolationist. Like the isolationists, he believed in a defensive foreign policy and opposed significant military preparation. It was not until the late 1930s that Roosevelt actually supported a gradual and entirely insufficient form of military preparedness.

Historians have stressed the differences between Roosevelt and the isolationists, their differing viewpoints over legislation that created overseas entanglements. But these differences didn't show until near the end of the decade, when Roosevelt pushed legislation to help the beleaguered British.

European appeasement was motivated by the wish to satisfy Hitler in order to prevent immediate war, even if it meant the sacrifice of small Central European states. The American form of appeasement was the result of isolationism. Europeans never understood the distinction, not grasping that isolationism, which they detested, was tantamount to appeasement, which they pursued. British and German statesmen thought Roosevelt an isolationist, and, to a degree, so did the French. The policies of one's allies and potential enemies are based on such perceptions. Appeasers like Chamberlain and Lord Halifax thought they saw in the president a kindred spirit.

Differing Goals for Appeasement

The president's policy of aid short of war, projecting "positive and active roles in efforts to preserve the peace and guard security in international affairs,"²² may have been good enough to overcome the isolationists at home. But his calls for disarmament, trade reciprocity, and conference diplomacy, along with supporting Britain's balance of trade and industrial growth, were insufficient to deter Chamberlain from his policy of appeasement. Without repealing the Neutrality Act, such talk left Chamberlain with little confidence in the president and reassured him in his impression that Roosevelt favored appeasement.

If Roosevelt intended for the British and the French to stand up to Hitler, the effect of his policies was the opposite. British historian C. A. MacDonald writes, "The United States began to use its influence to stimulate appeasement in Europe."²³ The president's globalist New Deal and his interventionist rhetoric were contributing to appeasement, not discouraging it. Washington was hoping for a final settlement of European problems through the rule of law in international affairs, through "the liberalization of world trade."²⁴ But the Roosevelt-Hull policy of free trade, disarmament, and the rule of law was unrealistic given the climate of the times. Somehow, Roosevelt hoped that the aggressors would be quarantined in this way. "The president was neither well informed nor very well equipped to understand what was happening in Europe."²⁵ Roosevelt's and Hull's idealistic and anti-imperialist views meant that both men were almost naturally hostile to the British conservative ruling class in the cabinet.²⁶

Although both the United States and Great Britain were inclined toward a policy of appeasement, they operated at cross purposes because they saw appeasement as a way to achieve different ends. Chamberlain hoped to rearm Great Britain by buying time, while Secretary of State Cordell Hull was simultaneously calling for a disarmament conference. The American version of appeasement was crafted by Sumner Welles who, in July of 1937, called for a revision of Versailles. "In effect, this was an implicit statement of American support for German revisionist demands."²⁷ It also had the effect of weakening Chamberlain's strategy of achieving appeasement with Hitler.

Roosevelt's famous 1937 Quarantine speech, hailed as the beginning of the end of American isolationism, was received with dismay in England, where it was seen as another obstacle to appeasement. The speech, according to Prime Minister Chamberlain, "by condemning the aggressors, threatened to lock the democracies into confrontation with all three 'dissatisfied' powers, Germany, Italy and Japan." Chamberlain's policy was to divide them. The speech, however, was hailed by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who saw in it evidence that America was finally abandoning its "psychological withdrawal" from world affairs. This served only to irritate Chamberlain.²⁸

After the speech, the Roosevelt administration continued to sound like an appeaser, with Welles, in 1938, offering an even more elaborate plan for world peace, a plan that called for an international conference to discuss new rules of international conduct, arms limitations, and tariff reductions. Welles saw the plan as providing "valuable parallel action"²⁹ for Anglo-German negotiations, and the president accepted Welles's recommendations. Chamberlain rejected the plan without consulting Eden, who would soon resign from the government. To the Americans, MacDonald writes, Chamberlain's rejection, which shocked Welles and the White House, meant "exclusion from all participation in European settlement."³⁰ But Reynolds suggests something closer to the truth when he says that Chamberlain's rejection didn't "sorely disappoint Roosevelt." The president, he argues, had never really been "very enthusiastic about Welles's plan" in the first place, and had only been giving it lip service.³¹ To fill a diplomatic vacuum was one thing, but actually to coordinate a plan of action with the British was quite another. It was not the president's style to work with people he did not personally know, and he would hardly have relished the prospect of having to coordinate with Chamberlain a mutually agreeable policy.

And so, the two leaders, both favoring appeasement, failed to coordinate their policies. "Whatever F.D.R.'s private scruples, he had no alternative policy to offer, and he waited to see if Chamberlain's would succeed."³² Chamberlain personally disliked Roosevelt, but what governed his attitude toward the president was the president's inability to match rhetoric with action. He was, as he confided to one of his trusted ministers, deeply suspicious "not indeed of American good intentions, but of American readiness to follow up inspiring words with any practical action."³³

The Munich or Czech-Sudeten crisis, from March through September of 1938, underlined the lack of understanding or cooperation between the two men. To the active prime minister, the president was an observer who provided commentary. The president failed to articulate his concepts of deterrence or appeasement. Though disturbed about the turn of events in Czechoslovakia, he would not violate the Neutrality Act. As Chamberlain saw it, Roosevelt had adopted a position of benevolent neutrality, which constituted neither appeasement nor determined support for Chamberlain's policy. This strengthened the prime minister's view that in the absence of a clear American policy toward Europe, he must conclude a deal with Hitler himself, which meant handing Czechoslovakia over to him. Hitler's threat to Great Britain was immediate, whereas to the United States Hitler seemed removed, almost unreal. The asymmetry between the two nations, their leaders, and peoples strengthened the aggressive powers.

In retrospect the Munich crisis marked the last phase of one American policy and the beginnings of another. Roosevelt's intervention in the final stages of the crisis was a final attempt to pursue the appeasement line which had characterized policy before the anschluss, a line based on the assumption that Hitler's aims were limited and that Germany could be reintegrated into the international system by a policy of judicious concessions. When it was revealed later in October that Hitler did not regard Munich as a final settlement, the President abandoned the policy. The failure of appeasement brought him back to the idea first evolved during the Czech crisis, of containing further German expansion by placing the economic resources of the United States behind Britain and France. This approach was based on the assumption that Hitler's aims were unlimited and that Germany could only be restrained by the threat of force. The conception of the United States as the "arsenal of democracy," a limited liability role which envisaged the deployment of American economic rather than military power against the axis, was to characterize American policy until 1941.³⁴

The object of American intervention in European affairs thereafter "would be to precipitate a movement for a general political and economic settlement which would obviate the necessity for Germany to strike out to obtain sources of raw materials in markets deemed by the German leaders necessary to maintain the living standard of the German people."³⁵

ROOSEVELT AND HIS WAR STRATEGY

President Roosevelt brought to the war America's immense economic energy together with considerable naiveté about the implications of the task involved. He had a single purpose: to win the war. But he had no grand strategy to apply to that effort.

To evaluate Roosevelt's strengths and weaknesses as a strategist, we must first understand what strategy is. It is not the management of specific military campaigns. Strategy is not the civilian management of the military, nor is it political leaders managing military leaders. No matter how destructive or sophisticated weapons become, strategy has remained the same since Machiavelli and Clausewitz defined the term. Strategy is grand strategy; it is the rationale for a nation going to war, the motives behind engaging in violent struggle and/or using diplomatic means to resolve conflicts. The conduct of warfare is not the ultimate goal of grand strategy. Rather, as Machiavelli and Clausewitz have taught us, strategy encompasses the political and diplomatic struggle to resolve conflict and fulfill national aspirations. Grand strategy is not a military skill, but a political one. It speaks of both aims and reasons for diplomacy and war. It is the planning of what one intends to achieve in the execution of warfare. Grand strategy requires a set of clear goals rather than mere beliefs. The grand strategist must have a gift for timing.

The qualities required in a peacetime coalition are intensified in wartime, during which the maintenance of coalitions demands constant assessment of the changing purposes of allies and enemies. Success requires staying ahead of both rivals and allies, taking the lead in critical situations, but also exercising patience in order not to precipitate events unnecessarily. Coalition partners are likely to be more cooperative at the beginning of a crisis. But in the course of the war, alliances tend to weaken as circumstances change. Maintaining alliances requires a strategist able to perceive problems before they result in disaster or missed opportunities.

Roosevelt failed in that task because of his work habits and his disinterest in world politics before 1937 and 1938. He was further hampered by the traditions, institutions, and ideology of the country he led. The society Roosevelt represented was unsuited to negotiate the great power alliances necessitated by World War II. The United States, even as it expanded, had remained instinctively isolationist. It distrusted the Old World, subscribing to the theory that, in World War I, it had saved Europe from itself. The checks and balances inherent in the American political system, the unrestrained press, frequent elections, and the force of public opinion made it difficult for any president to adopt great strategies. Roosevelt, although the senior partner in the alliance because of his country's power, was at a disadvantage from the start when dealing with Stalin and Churchill.

Unlike Churchill, FDR was not by inclination or experience a seasoned strategist. Churchill's accomplishments as a war leader were considerable. He fought the war with the limited resources of a declining empire, an army that failed more often than it succeeded; and yet, until 1943, he was the primary mover behind the Anglo-American alliance. He prevailed over the American generals and sometimes over the president himself. But Roosevelt's relationship with Churchill was complicated by the fact that the two countries faced different problems and saw the war in different terms. England faced the threat of invasion and occupation, whereas the United States felt no such urgency and in fact did not become fully mobilized until the latter part of the war.

Stalin was different from Churchill. His country had been invaded, his regime faced with annihilation. He was deeply involved before the war, and much more so during it, with grand strategy; even though the strategy of the first years of the war, 1941 to 1943, was simply survival for his country and his regime. In domestic and party politics he was very different from either Churchill or Roosevelt. To Stalin, politics meant total political control, achieved by eliminating or exiling his political opponents. He was not hampered by an electorate, by checks and balances, or by powerful political rivals. His only restraint was the prospect of total failure. Nothing in Roosevelt's limited study of history or in his personal experience prepared him for Stalin's practice of politics. Churchill, with more experience but with less power in the alliance, took a more realistic stance toward Stalin.

When Japan attacked in 1941, the nation did not have any grand strategy to guide it in the war. The military had begun to seek policy guidance from the president only in May, 1940, after watching Germany's easy victories in France.¹ When preparations began, New Dealers headed the War Resources Board, Export Control, the Selective Services System, and some three hundred other emergency agencies run by civilians or joint civilian militaryofficials.

Before 1940, Roosevelt had appeared committed to using his influence in Europe without having to resort to force. The United States was not a belligerent and was prevented from becoming one by the Neutrality Act. However, after Great Britain and France declared war in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Poland, the United States was perceived as a de facto belligerent by the Germans.

As the threat to Great Britain became imminent, a strategy evolved. Between 1937 and 1940, President Roosevelt's goals remained unclear, except for his articulation of a search for alternatives.² This vagueness and vacillation over choices continued until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.³

Roosevelt's failure of leadership might be explained by multiple factors, according to Utley: FDR was "deeply suspicious of Japanese intention"; he faced pressing matters in Europe; and he "did not have time to devote to Asian Affairs." Furthermore, "he liked to think in terms of a quarantine, naval blockades, and simple economic sanctions; the stuff of which the negotiations with Japan were made did not suit him."⁴

An examination of President Roosevelt's decision-making style and strategy formulation after 1941 requires a look at the process that led to Lend-Lease and, later, to the Allied policy of "Unconditional Surrender."

Lend-Lease: Generosity or Reciprocity?

During the summer of 1940, events forced the U.S. to consider action. The fall of France, Great Britain's isolation and the possibility of its being invaded and defeated, and the threat against the Atlantic by German U-Boats, all of these matters made the question of what to do about the war urgent for Roosevelt. Churchill looked to the United States for help. In the U.S., however, the debate was about aid to Britain, not entry into the war. This debate was a "unique crisis in the American experience."⁵

The underpinnings of America's security policy—its separation from the European and Asian powers by two oceans; the balance of power in Europe and Asia; and American free markets—were being threatened. The debate over what to do about "Britain standing alone" stirred questions about the policy of isolation that had been forged during the 1930s. America was unprepared for war and now feared what would happen if Britain should fall to the Nazis. The privileged position of the U.S. in the world seemed vulnerable.

Roosevelt understood that he could not bring America directly into the war, especially not in an election year. He moved slowly, unenthusiastically; he was reluctant to be forced into decisions by events he could not control. The debate centered on how to help Great Britain, even though it was known that an intensification of support to any extent would make the United States a de facto belligerent. The initial step on May 10, 1940, was to have American military equipment released to Great Britain and France. Roosevelt circumvented the Neutrality Act by selling the equipment back to its manufacturers, who then sold it to the Allies.

The next step, after the fall of France in June, was a strategic decision to increase aid to England to keep it from losing. The president moved to respond to Churchill's almost desperate plea for a "loan" of forty or fifty old destroyers, striking a deal by August. Churchill later wrote that he thought the transaction brought the two countries closer together, but there, he misread the president. "These were not the president's intentions, for the president was still hedging his bets, responding pragmatically to events and probably still hoping to avoid American belligerency if he could achieve his ends by less extreme means."⁶ With the Atlantic threatened, Great Britain under attack, and Europe under Hitler's domination, it was a late date to hedge; but there simply was no American strategy for war.

In 1940, the president, without a policy or sense of direction, was being slowly and reluctantly pushed into the war. The turning point would be Lend-Lease, prompted by a carefully crafted letter from Churchill to Roosevelt. Churchill and Roosevelt biographer, Warren Kimball, says it "may have been the most carefully drafted and redrafted message in the entire Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence."⁷ In a plea which Churchill called one of "the most important [letters] I ever wrote," he asked Roosevelt for immediate aid in cash and sizable military supplies to offset British losses in shipping to U-Boats in the Atlantic.⁸ The president never answered the letter directly,⁹ but communicated his decision to help Britain through a press conference on December 17, 1940.

Lend-Lease was a characteristically Rooseveltian New Deal idea, an untraditional form of financing "to devise a give-away program that did not look like one."¹⁰ The negotiations with Congress over the bill saw Roosevelt at his best, circumventing the isolationists and mobilizing public support. On March 11, 1941, the president signed into law the Lend-Lease Act. Lend-Lease was a key event of the war, marking the first institutionalization of the Anglo-American relationship. The subsidy was also taken by Hitler as a U.S. declaration of war against the Axis powers. Kimball is right when he asserts that "more than any other single event prior to the declaration of war against Germany, the Lend-Lease Act signalled that participation."¹¹

Before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was unwilling to go beyond Lend-Lease. Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, was frustrated, writing that dealing with Roosevelt "seems like hitting wads of cotton wool." The president remained reluctant to use his powers as Commander-in-Chief "so long as national security is not imperatively compromised." The president "was attempting to work within the democratic structure as fully as he could without endangering American national security."¹²

Lend-Lease's approval by Congress demonstrated that Roosevelt could employ his political skills to great effect. "His legislative tactics in and around congress proved virtually errorless." But the short-of-war approach represented by Lend-Lease backfired. "Anyone could see that the Act (Lend-Lease) gave Hitler an excuse to declare war on the United States,"¹³ but Roosevelt did not, leaving America unprepared for war.

Nevertheless, Lend-Lease helped forge one of the most enduring and successful war alliances in history, making it one of the singular achievements of the war. The Anglo-American alliance was strengthened in a series of conferences in Washington and in the Atlantic, creating a military instrument that would defeat the Axis powers by the end of 1945.

The August, 1941, Atlantic Conference typified Roosevelt's methods of operation, involving the deception and maneuverings in which he delighted. He deceived the press by appearing to go off on his pleasure yacht, the Potomac, then returned to the White House to board a special train at Union Station; the train took him to New London, Connecticut, where the Potomac was anchored, waiting to take him to the USS Augusta, the flagship of the U.S. Atlantic fleet. He met Churchill in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland.

The Placentia Bay conference between Churchill and Roosevelt produced what is known to history as the Atlantic Charter, which shaped the course of the war. The Charter, offering Roosevelt a forum for idealistic pronouncements, was not a plan for grand strategy.¹⁴ In the Wilsonian tradition, it proclaimed the purpose of the war, stressing that no secret diplomacy would be conducted and that territorial arrangements and "other political bargains should await a universal peace conference."¹⁵

The State Department campaigned to include the abolition of "imperial preferences," a slap at the British, and the creation of a general international organization. Churchill was not too keen on a joint declaration of lofty principles, which were difficult to uphold during the course of a lengthy war; but in August, 1941, he was not in a position to argue too strongly. For the high-minded Roosevelt, though, this was not much of a concern; and he would later try, mostly unsuccessfully, committing Stalin to the Charter's "universal" principles.

The proposal that emerged from the conference came from a British working draft, and, as a result, had an "Old World outlook." The Charter was a hindrance to the successful conduct of the war, and it poisoned the Anglo-American-Soviet relationship. Its influence was "severely limited,"¹⁶ especially when it came to Stalin, who treated the Charter with hostility. It did not serve the Grand Alliance.

Yet, the Anglo-American summits produced some remarkable results. Churchill's grand strategy undergirded the military alliance between partners unequal in strength, military capacity, and economic resources. The greatest accomplishment was the creation of a U.S.-British Combined Chiefs of Staff, headquartered in Washington, D.C., thus coming under the control of the president, but still crucial for winning the war.

The Allies remained firmly committed to a policy. Although constantly challenged, this policy was strictly adhered to throughout the war, much to the anger of American military chiefs operating in the Pacific theater, especially General Douglas MacArthur and the naval chiefs, Ernest J. King and William Leahy. But Roosevelt never wavered. He remained constant to the Europe First policy to the end of his life. The Europe First policy should not be confused with a grand strategy, though any number of historians have treated it as such.¹⁷

The Unconditional Surrender Formula

The Allied policy of unconditional surrender, proclaimed at Casablanca in January, 1943, applied to all the Axis belligerents, but was seen and applied differently by the Americans, British, and Soviets. The policy, an American innovation, was embraced by Stalin and supported rather indifferently by the British. It was first and foremost a typical Rooseveltian proclamation, simultaneously vague and inflexible. "The announcement," Professor Howard is quoted by A. E. Campbell as saying, "was made without any of the forethought and careful consideration which should have gone to the framing of so major an act of Allied policy."¹⁸

Roosevelt was motivated by memories of the outcome of World War I, when parties rushed to negotiate with each other and make secret arrangements and territorial concessions even as the war was still going on, plaguing postwar relationships. Unconditional surrender, giving the war the appearance of a moral crusade, calling the nation to a total war against enemies not deserving the usual diplomatic considerations, would avoid a repetition of post-World War I intrawar diplomacy, while offering the generals no specific strategic guidance. Unconditional surrender was successful as an inspiration, mobilizing the peoples' energies for a war of the democracies against the forces of totalitarianism. It was less successful as a strategic concept. It did not terrorize the enemy; instead it served Joseph Goebbels's propaganda machine as the massive bombings of civilian population centers stiffened German resistance. It also hampered the anti-Nazi resistance within the German military, which, faced with the Allied policy, could hope for little public support for its actions against Hitler.

As a practical policy, unconditional surrender yielded inconsistent results, often handcuffing military commanders and restricting their flexibility. The policy of not dealing with the enemy on any level was violated by Churchill, for example, when he came up with the "percentages formula" for a division of Eastern Europe between the West and the Soviets in 1944. Unconditional surrender was not applied to Italy. Churchill insisted that it apply only to Germany in order to secure the support of the Italian people, some still under German occupation after the 1943 Italian surrender.

The principal merit of unconditional surrender was that it had the president's absolute commitment even though it lacked any attention to specifics or possible consequences. As a policy, it reverberated through the postwar world, but it may have had little effect on the eventual outcome of the war itself. "With the advantage of hindsight, it may appear that the policy made little difference to the future of Italy or Japan."¹⁹

In my view, it also had little effect on Germany during the war. Churchill had clearly stated that he was fighting against Hitler and Hitlerism, not against Germany and Germans; but the policy of unconditional surrender did not allow for such distinctions. It aimed to punish an entire population and to destroy a country. Massive bombing did not distinguish between soldiers and civilians, Nazis and anti-Nazis, the actively ideological and the war-weary. All were killed indiscriminately, and there is no evidence that such a policy helped end the war a day sooner.

The failure to develop a policy for dealing with Germany after surrender created an occupation nightmare. As late as 1944, when the war's outcome was no longer in doubt, Roosevelt still had not made up his mind about how to deal with a defeated Germany. Policy, he suggested, depended "on what we and the allies find when we get into Germany—and we are not there yet."²⁰ This was just another example of Roosevelt's penchant for not making decisions, and it was not challenged by Churchill or Stalin. It was another instance of the policy of muddling through, of conceiving strategy as he went along.

The Commander in Chief and the Concept of Coalition Warfare

More than anything, Roosevelt liked to be called the Commander in Chief.²¹ His military staff, including Chief of the Army General George C. Marshall, acted as presidential advisers. Marshall initially had doubts about the president's unorthodox ways and secretive decision-making, but he came to trust and respect Roosevelt, a trust and respect that was mutual. Marshall believed that however undisciplined the president's methods were, he was a man of considerable political acumen.

In the crucial years of 1942 and 1943, Roosevelt was deeply involved in strategic military issues. According to Kent Roberts Greenfield, who edited many of the official U.S. war series, including the famous Green Books, the president made close to fifty crucial decisions against the advice or over the protests of his senior military advisers. Yet, as Greenfield notes, military historians and others, including, for example, Robert Sherwood and General Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, had conflicting impressions as to whether it was Roosevelt or Marshall who conducted strategy.²²

Strategic conduct should not be confused with strategic thinking. The chief American strategic thinker was Marshall, but it was Roosevelt who conducted the coalition. In that sense, he was the supreme commander in the Lincoln tradition; but unlike Abraham Lincoln, he never carefully followed the military campaign.²³

Roosevelt's singular contribution to the Allied war effort was adherence to the concept of a Joint Chiefs of Staff and the coordination between the American and British Joint Chiefs. But Marshall had been the originator of the Joint Chiefs concept and its guiding light. The role played by Marshall conformed to the president's preferred style. In addition to his specific command authority, Marshall acted as chief of the Joint Chiefs, a presidential surrogate in a manner similar to Harry Hopkins and other presidential staff members who acted as surrogate diplomats.

When it came to alliance strategy, Marshall, in early 1942, tried unsuccessfully to defeat the British preferred strategy in the Mediterranean. The Joint Chiefs and Marshall advocated opening a second front in Europe as early as that year, but Roosevelt at first forced Marshall to accept the British staff strategy. In April, 1942, Marshall changed his mind and persuaded Churchill to do so, a testimony to Marshall's persistence. Plans went ahead for the Second Front to alleviate pressure on the Soviets. As it turned out, this proved unnecessary after the Soviet counteroffensive late in 1942, but it showed Roosevelt's tendency to listen to his chief military adviser.

Overall, however, Roosevelt offered almost no specific strategic guidance. The president ran the war as a coalition strategist, but it was a very strange coalition, with members of unequal status and two distinct parts. One alliance was the Anglo-American, another was the American-Anglo-Soviet. The first was highly institutionalized, with a permanent military advisory body, the Anglo-American Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, to coordinate military effort. Stalin fought his own war, independent of his allies, not sharing military intelligence or strategic thinking with them.

Not surprisingly, most historians have taken for granted that World War II was a great coalition war against fascism and Japanese expansionism. If we keep to the loose meaning of coalition as an alliance of distinct parties combining to fight a common foe, then World War II was an example of coalition warfare. But if coalition warfare means that the parties unite their efforts into a coordinated strategy as represented in the summits, then the coalition was fragile. At best, the World War II coalition was an entente cordiale between Great Britain, the USSR, and America. All three participants had a common goal of defeating Germany, Italy, and Japan, but this did not amount to a Grand Alliance. The two alliances were each pursuing separate policies, and certainly Stalin never truly coordinated them. Even their separate military offensives never became a triangular military effort. For Churchill, the goal, after assuring Britain's survival, was to save the British Empire and bargain the Russians out of parts of Eastern Europe through his "percentage" deal with Stalin. Roosevelt's eye was on the Pacific, and he hoped to establish a liberal international order in Europe with Stalin's help. Stalin's larger goal was expansion into Eastern Europe at the expense of the wartime alliance. The three did not alter these basic goals at any point.

The experience of war was also different for each participant. The United States certainly suffered in the Pacific, but events such as the loss of the Philippines did not threaten U.S. survival. The territorial integrity of the United States was never at risk during any part of the war. Great Britain and the Soviet Union, however, fought for their very existence. Both desperately needed American military, political, and material support, while Roosevelt never needed his allies for material aid.

The alliance was subject to changes by developments in the military situation. Stalin was generally accommodating in 1941 and 1942, when Hitler still occupied most of European Russia. Beginning with his counteroffensive in Moscow and especially after Stalingrad, with the defeat of Hitler a given, Stalin's concept of the relationship began to change. The Soviet army's march into Eastern and Central Europe reshaped his strategy into an expansionist one.

The Churchill-Roosevelt relationship also changed after 1943, with Churchill increasingly becoming the weaker partner, a change reflected in their letters. After 1943, Churchill would, on the average, send Roosevelt twopage letters, and Roosevelt would reply by cable or through Hopkins or Harriman.²⁴ David Kaiser writes that "many important military questions hardly found their way into their exchanges at all."²⁵ In the summer of 1943, Roosevelt flatly lied to Churchill rather than admit that he had hoped to see Stalin alone before he and Churchill met.

The politics of the alliance was conducted at the great summits of Casablanca, Cairo, Teheran, and Yalta. Roosevelt and Churchill continued to pursue a global war, whereas Stalin's participation remained limited to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Roosevelt did not have a strategy beyond the defeat of Germany and Japan. Roosevelt and his generals confined themselves to winning the war and did not consider the political consequences of specific military operations in their deliberations. Stalin, especially after Stalingrad, operated on two tracks—defeating Hitler and expanding the boundaries of the Soviet Union.

NOTES

The President's Style and World View

¹ John M. Lewis, "Franklin Roosevelt and the United States Strategy in World War II," 134.

²Ibid.

³Ibid., 158-59.

⁴ Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams, vol. 4.

⁵ Lewis, "Roosevelt and World War II," 345.

⁶Ibid., 361.

⁷ Quoted in David F. Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890's, 38.

⁸ Quoted in Lewis, "Roosevelt and World War II," 136.

⁹ See Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-1939, 193-96.

¹⁰ Donald Watt, "Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain: Two Appeasers," 201-3; and David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937-41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation, 69-72.

¹¹ Lewis, "Roosevelt and World War II," 135, 137.

¹²Ibid., 159.

¹³Ibid., 234, 235.

¹⁴Ibid., 235.

¹⁵ Schacht report to the German Foreign Ministry quoted in Frank Friedel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 4, Launching the New Deal, 396.

¹⁶ Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-45, 10-11, 298-300.

¹⁷Ibid., 8-11.

¹⁸ Willard Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt's World Order, 137.

¹⁹ Watt, "Roosevelt and Chamberlain," 203.

²⁰ Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 3.

²¹Ibid., 7.

²²Ibid., 297.

²³ C. A. MacDonald, The United States, Britain, and Appeasement, 1936-1939, 1.

²⁴Ibid.

²⁵ Watt, "Roosevelt and Chamberlain," 185.

²⁶Ibid., 186-87.

²⁷Ibid.

²⁸ MacDonald, United States, Britain, and Appeasement, 43, 48.

²⁹ Quoted Ibid., 66.

³⁰Ibid., 62-65, 69.

³¹ Reynolds, The Creation, 32.

³²Ibid., 33.

³³ Quoted in William R. Rock, Chamberlain and Roosevelt: British Foreign Policy and the United States, 19371940, 69.

³⁴ MacDonald, United States, Britain, and Appeasement, 105.

³⁵Ibid.

Roosevelt and His War Strategy

¹ Maurice Matloff and Edwin Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941-1942, 11-31.

² Mark M. Lowenthal, "Roosevelt and the Coming of the War: The Search for United States Policy, 1937-1942," 433.

³ For FDR's Japanese-Far Eastern policy, see the excellent analysis by Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 3-42.

⁴Ibid., 181.

⁵ Reynolds, The Creation, 105.

⁶Ibid., 132.

⁷ Letter from Churchill to FDR, 12/8/40, in Warren F. Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 1:88.

⁸ Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, 1:101; see also Reynolds, The Creation, 150-68.

⁹ Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, 1:102.

¹⁰ Warren F. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939-1941, 124.

¹¹Ibid., vi.

¹²Ibid., 231, 240.

¹³Ibid., 233.

¹⁴ The best American study is Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning, 1941-1942.

¹⁵ Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941, 174-76.

¹⁶Ibid., 187, 202.

¹⁷ See Matloff and Snell, Strategic Planning, 1941-1942, and others.

¹⁸ Quoted in A. E. Campbell, "Franklin Roosevelt and Unconditional Surrender," 219.

¹⁹Ibid., 231.

²⁰ Quoted Ibid., 238.

²¹ Author's interview with Joseph Alsop, Washington, D.C., 1986.

²² Kent Roberts Greenfield, American Strategy in World War II: A Reconsideration, 80-84, 50-51.

²³ See the outstanding classic study by General Colin Ballard, The Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), which argues that Lincoln had a tremendous sense of grand strategy.

²⁴ See Kimball, Churchill and Roosevelt, vol. 3.

²⁵ David E. Kaiser, "Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Limits of Power," 204.