All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [122]
Popular sentiment strongly resisted admitting foreign refugees, victims of Nazi persecution: in June 1941 it was decreed that no one with relatives in Germany could enter the US. The isolationists never quit. There was a powerful Irish lobby, most stridently represented by Father Charles Coughlin, a pamphleteer and radio star. Roosevelt wrote on 19 May 1941 to one of Coughlin’s supporters, James O’Connor of Montana, an extreme isolationist congressman: ‘Dear Jim, When will you Irishmen ever get over hating England? Remember that if England goes down, Ireland goes down too. Ireland has a better chance for complete independence if democracy survives in the world than if Hitlerism supersedes it. Come down and talk to me about it some day – but do stop thinking in terms of ancient hatreds and think of the future. Always sincerely.’
Senator D. Worth Clarke of Idaho, another isolationist, suggested in July 1941 that the US should draw a line across the ocean behind which Americans would stand, taking peaceful control of their entire hemisphere, South America and Canada included: ‘We could make some kind of an arrangement to set up puppet governments which we could trust to put American interests ahead of those of Germany or any other nation of the world.’ His remarks were gleefully reported in the Axis media as evidence of Yankee imperialism. Informed Germans assumed US participation in the war much more confidently than did the British, or indeed many Americans. Back in 1938, Reich finance minister Schwerin von Krosigk anticipated a struggle that ‘will be fought not only with military means but also will be an economic war of the greatest scope’. Von Krosigk was deeply troubled by the contrast between Germany’s economic weakness and the enormous resources available to its prospective enemies. Hitler believed that these would include America from 1942. He preferred not to hasten US belligerency, but was untroubled by its prospect, partly because his own grasp of economics was so weak. Amid so many American domestic divisions, so much equivocation and hesitation, it was fortunate for the Allied cause that the decisions which brought the United States into the war were made in Tokyo rather than Washington, DC.
Japan’s military leaders made their critical commitment in 1937, when they embarked upon the conquest of China. This provoked widespread international hostility, and proved a strategic error of the first magnitude. Amid the vastness of the country, their military successes and seizures of territory were meaningless. A despairing Japanese soldier scrawled on the wall of a wrecked building: ‘Fighting and death everywhere and now I am also wounded. China is limitless and we are like drops of water in an ocean. There is no purpose in this war. I shall never see my home again.’ Though the Japanese dominated the China war against the corrupt regime and ill-equipped armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, they suffered debilitating attrition: 185,000 dead by the end of 1941. Even a huge deployment of manpower – a million Japanese soldiers remained in China until 1945 – proved unable to force a decisive outcome upon either Chiang’s Nationalists or the communists of Mao Zhedong, whose forces they confronted and sometimes engaged across a front of 2,000 miles.
Western perceptions of the war with Japan are dominated by the Pacific and South-East Asian campaigns. Yet China, and Tokyo’s refusal to abandon its ambitions there, were central to Japan’s ultimate failure. Between 1937 and 1939, major war-fighting took place, largely unrecognised in the West, in which Japanese forces prevailed, but at the cost of heavy losses. Japan’s withdrawal from the mainland in 1940