Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [59]
Through the winter of 1939-40, the European scene was relatively quiet. Correspondents groused about the “phoney war,” and there was a surge of interest in and sympathy for Finland. All Americans remembered, and were frequently reminded, that Finland alone had paid off her war debts to the United States. It was not until the spring of 1940 that the war came home with a jolt. The stunning German victories in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and above all, France, raised the specter that the Allies might not win after all.
On June 22, as the French government was surrendering to the Germans, Congress passed a National Defense Tax Bill; they raised the ceiling on the national debt to what was then an unprecedented $49 billion and introduced taxes to produce almost $1 billion a year. A month later Congress voted $37 billion to produce a “two-ocean navy,” guns and tanks for the army, and planes for the army air force and the navy. It was more money than the entire American cost of World War I. Meanwhile, Roosevelt was nominated for an unheard of third term as President.
Critics charged that Roosevelt wanted to be President forever, and rather more realistically, that he was dragging the country into war. Yet the hard facts were on the side of the growing number of interventionists. Americans watched fearfully as the Luftwaffe took on the Royal Air Force, and the support for Britain grew apace in the United States. Organizations sprang up to help the British, and the British government itself carefully played on American popular opinion. Both those who wanted to get involved in the war and those who wanted to keep out of it now agreed that the best way to achieve their ends was to bolster Great Britain. Thus, when Roosevelt traded Britain fifty overage destroyers for ninety-nine-year leases on base sites in the Western Hemisphere—an act that was technically illegal—there was not as great opposition as might have been expected.
It became increasingly obvious that just helping Britain might not be enough. In September of 1940, after lengthy and acrimonious debate, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States. “Selective Service” was just what the name implied; it was not a universal conscription such as was known in France or Germany. The act called for the registration of all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six, and the training, for one year, of 1,200,000 soldiers plus another 800,000 reserves. In October, 16,000,000 men registered, and at the end of the month the first draftees were inducted. For a while the army was short of everything but bodies, but slowly the gears began to mesh. The Americans were slow to arm, but once they hit their stride, there would not be another country in the world capable of touching them, and American industrial and military might became one of the key elements in the entire war.
Roosevelt was re-elected in November. In January, he presented his annual State of the Union message to Congress, and it was at this point that he enunciated the famous “four freedoms”—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want—that were ultimately to become the guiding principles for which the still-neutral United States and its future allies would fight the war. Like most Utopian ideals, they were neither fully honored nor attained, yet that made them no less worth fighting for, and Roosevelt, like Churchill, was concerned that the war be perceived not as another sordid game of power politics, but as a struggle between good and evil. Only later on, when the victorious Allies got to the concentration camps, would they fully realize just how evil that evil had