FDR - Jean Edward Smith [279]
FDR did not ask Eleanor’s advice, nor did she offer it. “I never questioned Franklin about his political intentions. The fact that I myself never wanted him to be in Washington made me doubly careful not to intimate that I had the slightest preference.”39
The calm in Europe was shattered on April 9, 1940, at precisely 4:20 A.M., an hour before dawn, when German troops moved unopposed across Schleswig-Holstein’s unfortified border with Denmark. Simultaneously, combat-ready Nazi landing parties went ashore all along the Norwegian coast from Oslo to Narvik. The British and French were caught flat-footed. Danish independence was snuffed out by the time most Danes finished breakfast. Norway resisted for two weeks. In strategic terms the occupation of Denmark gave Germany a stranglehold on the Baltic. The audacious defeat of Norway provided Hitler a valuable psychological victory. But the long-term military impact was questionable. Norway’s ports proved less useful than the Kriegsmarine had anticipated; iron ore from Lorraine later diminished the importance of Swedish sources, and for the remainder of the war the occupation of Norway consumed vast numbers of German soldiers who could have been better deployed elsewhere.40
Norway’s defeat became Chamberlain’s. On May 10, rather than face the inevitable vote of no confidence in the House, Chamberlain resigned.* He was succeeded by Winston Churchill. “I felt as if I were walking with Destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial,” wrote Churchill.41 Roosevelt was less sanguine. “I suppose Churchill was the best man England had,” he told his cabinet, “even if he was drunk half of his time.”42
That same day, German forces stormed across the Belgian and Dutch frontiers. In the north, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group B smashed through Holland’s defenses, paratroopers seized bridges, and motorized infantry followed on, while the Luftwaffe paralyzed Dutch resistance. The main German thrust was mounted by von Rundstedt’s Army Group A in the Ardennes. Rundstedt would repeat the maneuver in December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge. In 1940 the Ardennes forest was the pivot between the Maginot Line to the south and the bulk of the French Army strung out along the Belgian border; in 1944 it was the hinge between Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s British and Canadian force in the north and General Omar Bradley’s American army group in the south. Because of the hilly, heavily wooded terrain, the Allies deemed it impenetrable to enemy armor and it was lightly held. Three German panzer corps, some two thousand tanks, slashed through in five days, opened a fifty-mile gap in the French lines, and were streaking toward the English Channel. At seven-thirty in the morning of May 15, French premier Paul Reynaud telephoned Churchill with the bad news. Speaking in English, Reynaud said, “We are defeated. We have lost the battle.”43
Later that day, Churchill cabled Roosevelt, his first message to the president since becoming prime minister: “The scene has darkened swiftly. The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood. We expect to be attacked ourselves in the near future. If necessary, we shall continue the war alone.… But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long.”
Churchill proceeded to ask Roosevelt for immediate assistance: “forty or fifty of your older destroyers,” several hundred late-model aircraft, antiaircraft weapons, and ammunition, plus steel and other raw materials.44 The following day FDR made a dramatic appearance before a joint session of Congress to ask for a supplemental defense appropriation of $1.2 billion. The proposal had been in the works for some time, but the news from France gave it increased urgency. Roosevelt’s face was