Inferno - Max Hastings [123]
Though Winston Churchill strained every sinew to induce the U.S. president to lead his nation into belligerence before Pearl Harbor, it was fortunate that his efforts failed. In the unlikely event that Roosevelt could have forced a declaration of war on Germany through the U.S. Congress, thereafter he would have led a divided nation. Until December 1941, public opinion remained stubbornly opposed to fighting Hitler. A much higher proportion of people favoured stern action against the Japanese, a policy most conspicuously manifested in the July 1941 freeze on Japanese assets and embargo on all exports, which was decisive in committing Tokyo to fight, since 80 percent of its oil supplies came from the United States and the Dutch East Indies. The embargo was far more popular at home than Roosevelt’s escalation of the U.S. Navy’s role in the Battle of the Atlantic—escorting convoys to Britain progressively farther east, and sporadically exchanging fire with U-boats.
Whatever the president’s personal wishes, Congress remained a critical check upon American policy until Tokyo and Berlin put an end to argument. Historian David Kennedy has suggested that, since Germany was always the principal enemy of the democracies, Roosevelt would have better served his nation’s interests by averting war with Japan in order to concentrate upon the destruction of Nazism: “a little appeasement—another name for diplomacy—might have yielded rich rewards.” Once Hitler was beaten, Kennedy argues, the ambitions of Japan’s militarists could have been frustrated with vastly less expenditure of life and treasure, by the threat or application of irresistible Allied power. But this argument raises a larger question: whether Roosevelt could ever have persuaded his people to fight the Germans, in the absence of overwhelming aggression such as Hitler refused to initiate.
Even after war was declared in December 1941, and indeed until the end of hostilities, few Americans felt anything like the animosity towards Germans that they displayed against the Japanese. This was not merely a matter of racial sentiment. There was also passionate sympathy for the horrors China had experienced, and continued to experience, at Japanese hands. Most Americans deplored what the Nazis were doing to the world, but would have remained unenthusiastic or indeed implacably hostile about sending armies to Europe, had not Hitler forced the issue.
On 27 May 1941, following the fall of Greece and Crete, 85 million Americans listened to Roosevelt’s national radio broadcast, in which he warned of the perils of Nazi victory. The nation was, in one historian’s words, “afraid, unhappy and bewildered.” The president concluded by declaring a “state of unlimited national emergency.” No one was sure what this meant, save that it brought war closer and increased the powers of the executive. Many towns, especially in the South, began to experience economic booms on the back of military and naval construction programmes. Yet labour disputes dogged the nation: some industrial workers felt as alienated from America’s national purposes, and from their employers, as their counterparts in Britain did. Unregulated mining killed nearly 1,300 U.S. underground workers in 1940 and maimed many more; passions ran so high that strikes were often violent. Four men died and twelve more were badly injured during a 1941 dispute in Harlan County, Kentucky.
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 United States. 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, Representative James O’Connor of Montana, an extreme isolationist: “Dear Jim, When will you Irishmen ever get over hating England? Remember that if England goes down, Ireland goes down too. Ireland has