FDR - Jean Edward Smith [271]
Roosevelt told the senators it didn’t matter whether Treasury or the War Department authorized the bomber sale. “I am frankly hoping that the French will be able to get the fastest pursuit planes we can turn out. I hope they will get the best heavy and medium bombers they can buy in this country. And I hope to God they get the planes and get them fast.… That is the foreign policy of the United States.”67
Gallup Polls taken at the time indicated that 65 percent of the respondents supported the sale of warplanes to Britain and France, while 44 percent favored legislation prohibiting such sales to Germany. In the event of war in Europe, 69 percent advocated providing the Allies all the aid possible short of entering the conflict. When Gallup asked whether the United States would be next on Hitler’s list, 62 percent answered yes; 38 percent said no.68
With every month the possibility of war heightened. On March 15, 1939, Hitler annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia, not only breaking the pledge he had made at Munich but negating the principle of self-determination. The Czechs and Slovaks, unlike the residents of the Sudetenland, were not German. The rationale—Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer—regardless of how self-serving it had been, did not apply. When German troops marched into Prague, Hitler destroyed the last remaining illusion that his ambitions were limited. One week later, on March 23, the government of Lithuania surrendered the port city of Memel to Germany. Hitler arrived on the battleship Deutschland to preside at the takeover. Within the month, Mussolini occupied Albania, General Francisco Franco captured Madrid, and Japan claimed sovereignty over the Spratly Islands, seven hundred miles southwest of Manila.
Roosevelt moved to meet the crisis on two fronts: revision of the Neutrality Act to permit the sale of war materiel to Britain and France in case of war and a long overdue change of command in the Army. General Malin Craig, whose four-year term as chief of staff was about to expire, had served the administration faithfully but was eager to retire, a spent force worn down by incessant feuding between Woodring and Johnson.69 To replace Craig, FDR turned to Brigadier General George C. Marshall, thirty-fourth on the Army seniority list, former chief of war plans at the War Department and Craig’s deputy since October.* Marshall, who had attended Virginia Military Institute, not West Point, was a meticulously organized, self-controlled, no-nonsense soldier with a well-established reputation for generously rewarding success and ruthlessly punishing failure—exactly the leader the Army needed on the threshold of war. Frosty to the point of incivility in personal relations (only Mrs. Marshall called him “George”—and there were some who doubted that even she did), Marshall enjoyed the support of both Harry Hopkins and General Pershing, the nation’s hero from World War I. Of the two, Marshall believed that Hopkins had the greater influence in his selection.70 He assumed office on July 1, 1939.
Roosevelt fared less well in his effort to repeal the Neutrality Act. The administration bill, introduced by Congressman Sol Bloom of New York, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, passed the House 200–188, but with a crippling isolationist amendment that would continue the embargo on “arms and ammunition” while permitting the sale of airplanes and other war materiel.71 In the Senate, the Foreign Relations Committee, despite frantic administration