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March, 1939 - April, 1945 March 9, 1939 Britain: Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain tells a summoned group of political journalists that he intends to call a disarmament conference before the end of the year. The journalists are incredulous; is Chamberlain unaware that German troops are mobilizing at the Czech border? [He had read the reports; he just didn't believe them.] Olson, pp. 187-188. March 10, 1939 USSR: In a speech at the celebration of the 18th anniversary of the Communist Party, Stalin sends a signal to Hitler: The Soviet Union has no desire for a conflict with Germany. [Ernst Topitsch
has interpreted this statement and subsequent signals as part of
a scheme by Stalin to nurture Hitler's aggressive intentions and
also his false assumption that the western powers would back off
from any confrontation about Poland as they had with Austria and
Czechoslovakia. The Commissar for Foreign Relations, Maxim Litvinov—
March 12, 1939 The Papacy: Eugenio Pacelli is crowned Pope Pius XII in an elaborate ceremony broadcast to the entire world and filmed in its entirety. Cornwell, pp. 210-218. March 13, 1939 Japan: The Japanese claim sovereignty over the Spratly Islands, a scattering of small, mostly uninhabited coral islands southwest of the Philippines, located halfway between Hainan Island and Singapore. [The islands offered good anchorages for light naval forces and aircraft, but were too far south to be of use in the war with China. Together with the occupation of Hainan it was an indication that Japan was considering a move to the southwest Pacific— French Indo-China, the Netherlands East Indies, or the British colony of Malaya. Feis, Road, p. 18. *** *** The "Spratly Islands" are a collection of more than 30,000 reefs, atolls and islets totaling less than two square miles spread over 150,000 square miles of the central South China Sea. Japan lost sovereignty of the Spratlys with the 1951 San Francisco Peace treaty; since then six nations- China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei- have claimed all or a portion of the group. This barely
imhabited area is of geopolitical importance because: Richard Clarke suggests that any future conflict between China and the US might well occur over the South China Sea. Clarke, pp. 61-62; Wikipedia.] March 15, 1939 Czechoslovakia: German troops invade Czechoslovakia in violation of the Munich Agreement of 9/29/38. In the evening Hitler makes his long-anticipated triumphal entrance into Prague. [There was no resistance as Hitler had bulldozed the aged President Hácha into signing a petition in which he asked the German Reich to take the Czech people under its protection. He then telephoned Prague to advise surrender. Hitler's forces quickly occupied the Czech lands— Bohemia and Moravia. The occupation
would not be a kind one; Hitler considered Slavs to be a lower race.
Chamberlain used the announcement of an independent Slovakia to say that His Majesty's Government is no longer bound to protect Czechoslovakia's boundaries since they no longer exist! Ambassador Coulondre did lodge an immediate protest and accused Germany of violating the Munich Agreement. The public and the press were quick to disagree with Chamberlain and condemn the German aggression. Half of his cabinet had revolted against any further appeasement. Chamberlain then made a speech lamenting his deception by Hitler and outlining his various false assurances, including the one that he "wanted no Czechs." Hitler's ambassador to London would warn him that "a fundamental change" has taken place in Britain's attitude to Germany. Shirer, Rise, pp. 428-454.] March 17, 1939 Neutrality:
In his press conference FDR calls on Congress to revise the
Neutrality Act: March 20, 1939 Germany: The United States recalls its ambassador from Berlin as a protest of the invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia. [The US government refused to recognize the annexation and imposed duties on imports from Germany. www.indiana.edu/~league/1939.htm.] March 21, 1939 Germany: Hitler demands and Lithuania relinquishes the district of Memel on the Baltic Sea which Germany had lost under the Treaty of Versailles. (After the war it was restored to Lithuania and renamed Klaipeda.) March 26, 1939 Transportation: With First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt present for the dedication ceremony, Pan American Airways begins a trial run across the Atlantic in its newly-commissioned Boeing 314 flying boat. The plane is a double-decker and carries 74 passengers— the largest commercial airplane for several decades. The route was Baltimore- Foyne, Ireland. March 28, 1939 Germany:
Hitler demands the return of the German-inhabited Free City of Danzig March 29, 1939 Britain: More than thirty MPs issue an open challenge to the Prime Minister, calling for the formation of a new national all-party government to mobilize the country for possible war. The rebels include Winston Churchill, Leo Amery, Harold Macmillan, Robert Boothby, Ronald Cartland, Anthony Eden, Richard Law, Harold Nicolson, and Robert Cranborne. Chamberlain is warned by his foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, that this resolution could ignite the country and that his government was in danger if he did not change course. Olson, p. 189. March 31, 1939 Britain: Prime Minister Chamberlain tells the House of Commons: "In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I may add that the French Government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter." Shirer, Rise, p. 454. [Mr. Appeasement had changed his tune. His pledge, made against the advice of his top military leaders who knew the country was not equipped to defend Poland, essentially gave that country the power to decide when Britain would go to war. With the seizure of Czechoslovakia Germany was now poised at Poland's northern, western and southern borders. And London was 900 miles from Warsaw. A month later Chamberlain announced mandatory military training for Britain's 20-year-old men— who numbered 200,000— despite a lack of training camps, instructors, arms and other equipment. Olson, pp. 189-190.] April 1, 1939 Spain:
The US recognizes the government of General Francisco Franco. April 3, 1939 Germany
- Case White: Hitler issues a top-secret directive to the armed
forces. April 6, 1939 The British and French governments sign a mutual assistance pact with the Polish government, promising to send military aid in the event of a German attack. April 7, 1939 Good Friday in Italy: Albania is invaded by Mussolini's armies who occupy the entire country within twenty-four hours. [Albania had long been dominated economically and politically by Italy, so there was no need to drive out King Zog and formally annex the country. Mussolini had not told Hitler in advance of his plans. This, perhaps, put Hitler on notice that the Balkans should be Italy's preserve. It has been suggested that this invasion was a tit-for-tat since Mussolini had been surprised by Hitler's occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. Ridley thinks it is more likely that Mussolini wished to demonstrate yet again to the western democracies that they were unable to maintain the peace and preserve international law. Victor Emmanuel's new title: King of Italy and Albania, Emperor of Ethiopia. Ridley, p. 305.] April 7, 1939 Spain: The Spanish dictator Franco joins the German-Italian-Japanese anti-Comintern pact. April 9, 1939 Easter Sunday at the Vatican: The newly-crowned Pope, Pius XII, delivers his first homily. He speaks to the text, "Glory be to God on high and peace on earth to men of good will," without mentioning or condemning Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia or Mussolini's invasion of Albania. [One of his earliest acts as Pope was to send a telegram to General Franco congratulating him on Spain's "Catholic victory." Cornwell, Hitler's Pope, p. 223.] April 9, 1939 Easter Sunday in Washington, DC: African-American contralto Marian Anderson gives a concert at the Lincoln Memorial sponsored by leading diplomats, Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen and major cultural organizations and universities to an interracial audience of 75,000. [The internationally acclaimed singer had been denied the use of Constitution Hall by its owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution, because of her race. This triggered First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's resignation from the DAR (an action approved by two-thirds in a Gallup poll) and a massive reaction against racism. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, pp. 326-327.] April 14, 1939 FDR denounces recent Italian and German aggressions and makes a public appeal to Hitler and Mussolini: Give assurances that your armed forces will not attack the territory or possessions of 31 named nations for at least ten years and the US will arrange a conference on disarmament and trade. [His proposal was ridiculed in Italy and Germany. In an angry response on the 28th Hitler bragged about the economic miracle that he had accomplished in Germany while the US economy was still depressed. He justified his territorial acquisitions as exercises in Wilsonian "self-determination" and those of Italy as the need for Lebensraum . He later—April 28th— abrogated the 1935 Anglo-German naval limitation agreement and renewed his demands on Poland for the return of the Free City of Danzig (later Gdansk) and the granting of an extra-territorial road through the Polish Corridor to link East Prussia with the main part of Germany. FDR continued to urge the House and Senate to reform the Neutrality Act. Dallek, Roosevelt, pp. 184-188.; Bailey and Ryan, pp. 22-25; New York Times, April 29, 1939; Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 469-475.] April 14, 1939 The Grapes of Wrath: Viking publishes John Steinbeck's novel, a heartbreaking story of the Joad family of Oklahoma in the heart of the Dust Bowl. Their crops destroyed and their farm repossessed, the group of 12 piles into an old truck for an arduous trip along Route 66 to California's Central Valley where their hopes for jobs and a new life are shattered. [The book
was an eye-opener for urban Easterners about the extent of poverty
and oppression of migrant workers. It was an instant success critically
and commercially. The book was immediately controversial and banned in some areas. Some criticized the leftist, anti-capitalist slant. California and the agricultural monopolies felt maligned as did the "Okies." It was deemed pornographic by some religious groups, partly for the language but mainly for the final scene in which Rose of Sharon whose baby had been stillborn breastfeeds a starving and dying man. The film omitted that scene. It differed from the book in other ways. The film was more overtly political and had an upbeat ending. It received seven Academy Award nominations and won awards in two categories— directing, John Ford— and best supporting actress, Jane Darwell. In 1989 it was one of the first 25 films to be selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry. Wikipedia; Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck.] April 15, 1939 US Navy: FDR very publicly announces that the fleet will be transferred from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This enables the British to cancel their planned transfer of a portion of their Mediterranean fleet to Singapore and reassures the Australians who are feeling threatened by the Japanese moves southward. Utley, pp.57-58. April 17, 1939 USSR: Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov proposes a Triple Alliance to Great Britain and France. [This was in response to a more timid proposal made by the West that the USSR should agree to defend Poland and Rumania against any German aggression as the two western democracies had done. The French agreed despite the furore from the Rightists who insisted that the "Jews and the British" were trying to drag France into war. The British haggled over details, and Stalin lost patience. (He had mistrusted the Allies since Munich anyway.) On May 3rd Litvinov was replaced as Foreign Minister by Vyacheslav Molotov, no friend of the West. Germany began the secret feelers to the USSR that culminated in the August 23rd Molotov-von Ribbentrop Agreement, yet the Anglo-French-Soviet talks continued until mid-August. Astute observers of the German press might have noticed that the derogatory mentions of Slavs— who in Mein Kampf had been accorded a status only slightly higher than that of Jews— and Bolshevism had almost ceased; FDR was the new devil. Shirer, Collapse, pp. 426-429.] April 28, 1939 Germany: In another of his interminable speeches in the Reichstag Hitler renounces the Anglo-German Naval Treaty of 1935 which had limited the German fleet to one-third the size of the British fleet. He also terminates the German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact of 1934, accusing the British and the Polish of trying to "encircle" Germany! He repeats his demands for Danzig and Posen. [Yet in Britain the Times was redefining the pledge to Poland: Great Britain was not bound to "defend every inch of the present frontiers of Poland" (April 4) and Horace Wilson urged BBC not to broadcast Hitler's speeches as they "create a war mentality." The German ambassador to London assured Hitler that while "hostility to Germany is growing" among the public, "Chamberlain's personality is a certain guarantee that British policy will not be placed in the hands of unscrupulous adventurers." War Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha lamented that Chamberlain had no real intention of doing anything: "Neville still believes he can control Hitler and Mussolini and that they heed him." As Hitler increased his demands to Poland, the Chamberlain government urged the Poles to negotiate with Hitler over Danzig and the Polish Corridor. Secretly, Horace Wilson attempted to negotiate a pact with Germany that would enable Britain to "rid herself of her commitments vis-à-vis Poland"— massive loans to German industry, possible return of former African colonies, etc. in exchange for a German hands-off on Poland. There was a leak and a public furor; Chamberlain denied the allegations and quietly ended the negotiations; Hitler was further assured that Britain would not go to war for Poland. Olson, pp. 192-195.] May 3, 1939 The Far
East War: The Japanese bomb the new Chinese capital of Chunking. Japanese soldiers mistreat US citizens; non-interventionist Senator Vandenburg (R-MI) proposes that the 1911 US-Japan trade treaty be abrogated; FDR asks for further reductions in American commerce with Japan and US Steel and Alcoa comply. Ford, Flying Tigers, pp. 35-36; La Feber, p. 189. [A poll taken this month indicated that only 16% of Americans foresaw war with Japan in the next ten years. A June poll indicated that 72% of the American public favored an embargo on war materials shipped to Japan. Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1991, H2; Utley, p. 39.] May 13, 1939 The S.S. St. Louis of the Hamburg-American line embarks from Hamburg for Havana, Cuba. Most of the 937 passengers are German Jews who are on the waiting list for immigration to the United States; they are going to Cuba to wait for their numbers to come up. [The Nazi propaganda machine used the trip as evidence that Germany was allowing Jews to leave the county— albeit fleeced of most of their material possessions. The Abwehr planned to use the trip to smuggle plans for the sabotage of the Panama Canal— the ship's steward would go ashore in Havana and pick up the plans from the assistant manager of the steamship office. But, unbeknownst to the captain of the ship or the passengers, Josef Goebbels had inserted fourteen propaganda agents onto the island to stir up anti-Semitism. Their newspaper campaign had been so successful that the Cuban president felt obliged to issue a decree forbidding the immigration of any more refugees. When the St. Louis arrived in Havana on May 27th, it was allowed to anchor in the harbor, but no passengers— with a few exceptions— could disembark. By June 2, when the ship was ordered to leave the harbor, there had been front page stories in the New York Times about the plight of the Jews and the two unsuccessful suicide attempts. The captain slowly cruised the Florida coast— with Coast Guard cutters alerted to prevent any landings by ship or stalwart swimmers— while the Joint Distribution Committee dickered with the Cubans over how much money would be required to house the refugees at the Isle of Pines. After these negotiations collapsed, the captain was ordered to sail the St. Louis back to Hamburg. FDR had not responded to any of the many letters sent him, referring the matter to his Secretary of State. The captain assured his passengers that he was not returning them to Germany; in fact, he had a contingency plan to beach the ship on the Sussex coast and set it on fire, thus insuring evacuation ashore into England. However, while the ship was still in the Atlantic, Belgium, Holland, France and Britain agreed to accept the ship's passengers. The 288 who were selected for England won the jackpot; most of those who went to the continental countries met with the Final Solution. Thomas, Voyage of the Damned.] May 17, 1939 MacDonald White Paper on Palestine: The British government, in declaring for the establishment of a Palestinian (Arab) state within ten years, essentially reneges on the Balfour Declaration. Jewish emigration is limited to 75,000 for the next five years; after that Jewish emigration will be only with the consent of the Arab authorities. Major restrictions are placed on Jewish purchase of Arab lands. The quota was never filled. The British felt it necessary to appease the Arabs once the war started; ship after ship of desperate Jews was turned away from Palestine. Those who managed to make it to shore were interned in camps. After the sinking of the Struma in February 1942, the British secretly modified their restrictions and allowed ships to land in Palestine. Since few people were aware of this development, not many Jews were able to take advantage of it. The ill-fated Struma, loaded with 769 Rumanian Jews bound for Palestine, landed at Istanbul with an engine that could not be repaired. For two months the refugees waited off shore while Turkey haggled with Britain over whether or not the passengers would be allowed to enter Palestine. Finally the Turkish authorities towed the unseaworthy ship out to sea. There a Russian submarine exploded the ship on the pretext that it was carrying German agents to infiltrate the Middle East. All those who survived the explosion died of drowning or hypothermia save one, David Stollar, who managed to construct a makeshift raft. The Turks waited two days to send a rescue team from the nearby lighthouse; Stollar believes they waited until there would likely be no survivors. Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2001; Wyman, Abandonment, pp. 157-160. Jews worldwide denounced the MacDonald White Paper; it passed in the House of Commons by a slim majority. The Arabs didn't like it either and there were clashes throughout the mandate. The Jewish underground in Palestine, principally the Irgun and the Stern Gang, launched vicious attacks against the British, making the Mandate, in Bregman's words, "unworkable." Bregman, pp. 9-10.] May 20, 1939 Transportation: Pan-American Airways begins regular flights to Europe, as the first plane takes off from Port Washington, New York. May 22, 1939 The "Pact
of Steel" is signed in Berlin by Foreign Ministers Ciano and
Ribbentrop. [Ten days earlier Pope Pius XII had withdrawn from a peace conference which he himself had proposed, claiming there was no longer any danger of war. After the Pact of Steel was announced, he offered to be the sole mediator between Germany and Poland, at the same time intimating that Britain was making mediation difficult because of her guarantee to defend Poland and suggesting that Poland should provide a rail or road through the Polish Corridor to Danzig. Western diplomats were astounded at his chutzpah and suggested that Mussolini was pulling his strings; the British Foreign Office speculated that the pope had "abdicated his moral authority." Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 482-483; Cornwell, pp. 224-229.] June, 1939 Unconstitutional
Surveillance of US Citizens: In a secret directive to the FBI, [In September he further instructed all law enforcement agencies and their officers to give the FBI any information concerning espionage, sabotage, and subversive activities. By all accounts the FBI did a splendid job in preventing any of these foreign-inspired activities. However, practices were authorized which, however justified in wartime, were clearly an unconstitutional abridgment of citizens' rights: wiretapping and other electronic surveillance, mail openings and surreptitious entries. By 1945 the FBI's budget was nearly half that of the whole Justice Department. Davis, Assault on the Left, pp. 2-3.] June 5, 1939 Labor - Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations: Labor's ability to organize and the people's freedom of speech both receive a significant boost in the Supreme Court's 5-2 decision. [Mayor Fred ("I am the Law") Hague of Jersey City was very hostile to organized labor, banning distribution of literature on the streets and refusing permits for outdoor meetings in parks. His police frequently hustled labor organizers onto ferries and sent them back to New York City. Justice Owen Roberts wrote that the streets and parks "have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions" and cited the First Amendment. Justice Harlan Stone, concurring, invoked the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment which guaranteed the rights of citizens to assemble. This was the first enunciation of the legally-protected right to free speech which we now take for granted and many assume has always been true. In 1897 the Court had unanimously upheld Davis v. Massachusetts, a statute which forbade any "public address" on public property without an official permit: "For the legislature absolutely or conditionally to forbid public speaking in a highway or public park is no more an infringement of the rights of a member of the public than for the owner of a private house to forbid it in his house." Kairys, With Liberty and Justice for Some, pp. 42-46.] June 7-11, 1939 King George
VI of England and Queen Elizabeth visit the United States June, 1939 France: When polled, 76 % of the French public say they would favor opposing Germany by force in the event of armed aggression against Danzig. Topitsch, p. 36. June 28, 1939 Transportation: Regular weekly transatlantic passenger air service begins with the first trip of the Pan American Airways Dixie Clipper from New York to Marseilles. On July 8 service would begin New York - Southampton. [After the war began, Clipper flights would terminate in Lisbon, Portugal which became a very busy route.] July, 1939 France: The Daladier government institutes a number of anti-Semitic laws. Verrier, p. 34. July 7, 1939 France: Pope Pius XII lifts the ban on the Action Française which the previous pope had instituted in the 1920s due to its antipathy to certain tenets of the Catholic Church. [This was a strange move, as this royalist, anti-republican, anti-Semitic group had been trying for years to move France toward fascism. In February, 1936 its thugs, the Camelots, had beaten the Socialist leader, Léon Blum, nearly to death. Charles Maurras, the leader of Action Française, was arrested and spent a brief time in jail. Yet in June, 1939 poet Maurras was received into the French Academy, possibly the most prestigious honor in France. Cornwell, p. 172; Shirer, Collapse, pp.285-286, 442.] July 10, 1939 France: Marcel Déat, a prominent Neo-Socialist in France's Third Republic, publishes an editorial, "Why Die for Danzig?," that becomes a rallying cry for French isolationists who oppose war against Germany in support of Poland. [Déat and most isolationists would later become eager collaborationists in occupied France. Shirer, Collapse, p. 440.] July 11, 1939 Neutrality: The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations votes 12-11 to postpone consideration of an amendment to the Neutrality Act until the next session of Congress in January. Feis, Road, p. 21. July 17, 1939 Britain: London's Daily Telegraph asks in an editorial for the broadening of the cabinet with the specific inclusion of Winston Churchill: "It is quite certain that no step would more profoundly impress the Axis powers with the conviction that this country means business." [Following the Sunday Pictorial's headline: 'Why Isn't Winston Churchill in the Cabinet?— which generated 2400 favorable letters in response— a group of MP rebels had visited the editorial offices of other British newspapers, asking that they campaign for the inclusion of Churchill, Anthony Eden, Leo Amery and Alfred Duff Cooper in the cabinet. After this editorial most of the other newspapers joined in with many asking for Amery and Eden also. Only The Times and the Beaverbrook papers remained subservient to the government. Chamberlain ignored this appeal, as well as a poll indicating that 60% of the public wanted Churchill in the cabinet. Time magazine observed: "Nothing could be calculated to go against the grain more than to have to ask Mr. Churchill to join the cabinet. . . . There is perhaps no man in Parliament whom Mr. Chamberlain likes less than Mr. Churchill." Chamberlain told friends that inclusion of Churchill would be a "message of open warfare to Berlin." Despite the increasing international tension, on August 2nd he rammed through the traditional two-month recess of Parliament and headed for Scotland for a bit of fishing. Olson, pp. 197-199.] July 18, 1939 Neutrality: When the Senate refuses to consider a repeal of the arms embargo, FDR releases this statement: "The President and the Secretary of State maintained the definite position that failure by the Senate to take action now would weaken the leadership of the United States in exercising a potent influence in the cause of preserving peace . . . in the event of a new crisis in Europe between now and next January." [This came
after a last-ditch evening meeting in the Oval Room with the key
senators. Congress adjourned on August 5th and the Second World
War began on September 1st. July 26, 1939 US vs. Japan: The Roosevelt administration notifies Japan that the commercial treaty signed in 1911 will be abrogated in six months, the required warning period. [Two days earlier the British had caved in to Japanese demands and signed an agreement in which they agreed to respect Japan's "special requirements" in China, meaning the foreign enclaves in China would no longer be sacrosanct and British subjects could expect harassment. The State Department had been mulling over some sort of action short of sanctions for several months; this action was taken at this time to forestall action on Senator Pittman's Senate resolution to end all trade with Japan. Feis, Road, pp. 21-22; Utley, pp. 59-63.] August 11, 1939 Germany:
Ribbentrop tells Count Ciano that Hitler is planning to invade Poland.
[Hitler wanted
to go to war against Poland and the West right away before the British
had fully rearmed. Mussolini wanted the war postponed until at least
1942; Italy was not yet prepared for war and he had announced an
international exhibition in Rome for 1942. August 22, 1939 Enigma: A German "Enigma" decoding machine arrives at Victoria Station, London. [The German Army had modified a Dutch "secret writing machine," an invention originally intended as a device to protect business secrets, into an instrument to encode all of their military communications. Poland, a country trapped between German and Russian enemies, was the principal country to attempt to decipher the German code and by 1938 was able to decode 75% of received transmissions. With war imminent,
the Polish intelligence service gave one of their two Enigma machines
to the British along with much useful cryptoanalytic information.
This gift had been facilitated by the American spy "Cynthia" (Amy
Thorpe Pack). Brinkley, Washington, pp.
40-41. In April, 1940 the first Enigma ciphers were broken; the resulting intelligence, code-named ULTRA, was closely guarded and known to only a very few people in England. Churchill called the Station X people "the geese who laid the golden eggs but never cackled;" each morning he asked for the latest ULTRA intercepts: "Where are my eggs?" Lewin, Ultra Goes to War, pp. 25-72. Another Enigma machine along with a list of Enigma keys was presented to Rudolf Rössler, a publisher of anti-Nazi literature in Lucerne, Switzerland, by two high-ranking German officers, Lieutenant General Fritz Thiele and Baron Colonel Rudolf von Gersdorff, some months before the start of the war. They proposed to send regular transmissions of highly sensitive military intelligence which Rössler was to use in any way to defeat Hitler. Initially the information was passed on to Swiss Military Intelligence (which was ever alert for the expected German invasion of Switzerland.) The Swiss occasionally sent summaries to the British. Then in the Spring of 1941 the information was anonymously passed to the Geneva branch of the Soviet spy network, or "Red Orchestra." Rössler was code-named "Lucy," as his residence in Lucerne was all that they knew about him. The Lucy transmissions would make a significant contribution to the defeat of the Germans on the Eastern Front. Tarrant, Red Orchestra, pp. 158-177.] August 22, 1939 Germany: Hitler meets with all of his military commanders and tells them that he has decided to strike at Poland immediately: "Poland is now right where I wanted to have it . . . . Our opponents [Britain and France] are little worms. I saw them in Munich." His only fear, he says, is that "at the last minute, some bastard will produce a mediation plan." He hints that a pact with Stalin will be forthcoming and sets the invasion date for August 26th. [But "some bastard" did come forward to delay his plans. Britain, observing war preparations, made a formal pact with Poland. Mussolini sent a telegram to Hitler reminding him that their agreement called for war at a later date and stating that Italy was not prepared for hostilities at this time. Hitler rescinded the attack order, and Heinz cancelled the re-instituted plan for storming Hitler's residence to arrest and kill him. Fest, pp. 108-112.] August 23, 1939 Germany and the USSR sign a five-year non-aggression pact which contains a secret agreement in which they fix their two spheres of interest in Eastern Europe including the partition of Poland. (Lithuania was to go to Germany; Finland, Estonia and Latvia would go to the Soviet Union. Stalin violated the agreement in 1940 by swallowing Lithuania along with the other two Baltic republics, Estonia and Latvia. ) In an accompanying commercial agreement Germany extended the Soviets a credit of 200 million marks and Stalin guaranteed to ship huge quantities of grain, oil and metals. [The world was stunned; Britain was especially surprised by this von Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact as Stalin had approached the British to make a defensive alliance with them and the French against Nazi Germany and negotiations had continued all summer. That possibility foundered because of British lack of enthusiasm and Polish antipathy for the Russians. (For instance, the Poles refused to permit Russian troops to transit Poland to attack Germany on their behalf.) France and Great Britain mobilized in expectation of war. Japan had not been consulted and now felt vulnerable to her old enemy, Russia. (Japanese officials were also anxious about what the US had in mind for January when the trade treaty would expire.) Chamberlain repeated his offer to mediate the German-Polish dispute about the alleged mistreatment of ethnic Germans living in Poland and the possible return of the Polish Corridor to Germany. There were rumors that von Ribbentrop insured the final agreement by playing a tape of Chamberlain (or possibly a good actor?) allegedly urging Germany to annihilate the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. Shirer, Collapse, pp. 462-478. Ernst Topitsch maintains that the pact was a trap that Stalin set for Hitler, hoping to encourage him to bring about the "second imperialist war" that would pit two opposing imperialist factions against one another. The Soviet Union could then wait in a safely neutral position and achieve the greatest advantage with the least possible risk, as Lenin had advised. [See entry for December 6, 1920.] Topitsch, Stalin's War, pp. 7, 15. It is instructive that the final boundary lines included two significantly large bulges into the west; one around Bialystok in Poland, the other in East Galicia near Lemberg. These bulges were excellent areas for troop deployments in advance of an attack, and, indeed, the Soviet Union mobilized large numbers of tank units in these bulges in March, 1941. Topitsch. pp. 42, 106.] August 24, 1939 Criminal Prosecution, Public Relations Style: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover personally accepts the surrender of one of America's "most wanted" criminals, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, the head of Murder, Inc. [The "surrender" had been arranged by columnist Walter Winchell and mobster Frankie Costello under orders from Mafia boss Lucky Luciano from his prison cell. The New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey had been on a campaign against organized crime; Luciano figured that one major bust would take the heat off. Hoover had his own reasons for wanting a respite from public pressure for law enforcement: there is considerable hearsay evidence that Meyer Lansky, sometime in the late '30s, obtained some blackmail-perfect photographs of Hoover engaged in homosexual activity and bragged to his colleagues that they had "nothing to fear from the FBI." Costello and Hoover had many other contacts throughout the years; Costello used to tip off Hoover, an inveterate gambler, about the prospective winners in races that were rigged. Summers, Official, pp. 225-240, 247-259.] August 27, 1939 Transportation: The world's first jet plane, the Heinkel 178, is tested near Rostock, Germany. [Another flight, a few weeks later, demonstrated this revolutionary engine for Hitler who was not impressed: "Why do we need a new engine? Why is it necessary to fly faster than the speed of sound?" However, in 1942 its developer, Hans von Obain, was ordered by the Air Ministry to develop a more complicated jet engine due for delivery in May, 1945— about the time the US Sixth Army arrived at Heinkel headquarters in southern Germany. After the war von Obain went to the US where he became chief scientist at the US Army's Wright Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio. Frank Whittle of Great Britain had been the first to patent a design for a jet engine— in 1930. The first British jet plane, the Gloster E28/29, made its maiden flight 20 months after the Heinkel 178. Von Obain obituary, The Guardian, March 17, 1998.] August 29, 1939 Atomic Energy: Physics Review carries an article by Niels Bohr of Denmark and J. A. Wheeler which outlines the principles of atomic fission. Late August, 1939 US and Britain: FDR concludes a very secret agreement with Great Britain (known to "no more than six or eight officials") to lease air and naval bases on the three British West Indies islands of Trinidad, Santa Lucia and Bermuda. [FDR thought these bases would help a neutral US patrol the western Atlantic in case of war. The agreement, obviously in violation of both international law and the US constitution, was not known to the public for many years mainly because the Navy lacked the money and men to develop the new bases. Shogan, p. 59-61.] August 31, 1939 USSR: The Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union ratifies the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany; Hitler orders the invasion to start the next day. September 1, 1939 Germany invades Poland under the phony pretext that their border forces were attacked by Poles. Krakow is bombed; Danzig is seized and incorporated into the Reich. [The alleged "Polish army troops" were German concentration camp inmates who were forced to put on stolen Polish uniforms, then trucked to the border, given lethal injections, placed in the position of "attackers," and then shot. This was Operation Canned Goods, conceived and directed by Reinhard Heydrich. The ruse succeeded
in initially confusing the world as to which country had fired first.
At the penultimate moment Pope Pius XII had made an appeal for peace to the Nazis and Communists: "Nothing is lost by peace. Everything is lost by war." At the same time he again counseled Poland to cease its opposition to the return of Danzig to Germany. Once the war began, he never spoke out against the horrendous slaughter- tanks and planes vs. cavalry. Cornwell, pp. 230-232 Following close behind the tanks and the troops were Heinrich Himmler's Einsatzgruppen, mobile forces who made "summary executions of Poles and Jews, arbitrary harassment, and indiscriminate arrests" under quasi-judicial orders. Reinhard Heydrich complained that the operation was going too slowly: "These people have to be shot or hanged immediately without any sort of trial— aristocrats, clergy and Jews." Fest, pp. 112-119.] September 1, 1939 England: Chamberlain offers Churchill a ministership without portfolio in the War Cabinet; he knows he must swallow this bitter pill if he is to remain prime minister. The House of Commons meets in the evening; it is anticipated that Chamberlain will announce that Britain is at war with Germany and is coming to the aid of besieged Poland. Instead, Chamberlain tells the House that he is awaiting assurance from Germany that they are withdrawing their troops from Poland. Most members are aghast, but no one makes a rejoinder. Churchill, having accepted a position in the government, has been muted. [The evacuation of children from London, secretly planned for months, began that afternoon. Compulsory blackout began that first evening. The next day House staffers were packing for the planned evacuation of the House to some unknown destination. There were desperate calls for aid from Poland; there were now nearly two million German troops in the country and the Luftwaffe was bombing airfields, cities, bridges and roads, and strafing everything that moved. The Prime Minister
announced that although he has received no response from his note
to Germany, Mussolini had offered to act as an intermediary. His
audience was stunned at this further dithering. Arthur Greenwood,
speaking for the Opposition in Atlee's absence: September 2, 1939 Mussolini urges British Prime Minister Chamberlain to open negotiations with Hitler. Chamberlain replies that there can be no negotiations unless Hitler withdraws his troops from Poland. Ridley, p. 307. September 3, 1939 Great Britain and France declare war on Germany. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain asks Winston Churchill to join his government as First Lord of the Admiralty. A German air raid on Warsaw kills 21 civilians, a casualty which rates an above-the-fold headline on the front page of the New York Times. Mussolini declares that Italy is adopting a policy of "non-belligerency" and not entering the war with her ally, Germany. [Hitler had not expected that Britain would declare war. According to Paul Schmidt, who interpreted the ultimatum to him, Hitler "remained sitting there as if petrified and stared into space. After a while, . . . he turned to Ribbentrop . . . "What do we do now?" Ribbentrop replied in a quiet voice: "I assume the French will hand over to us a similar ultimatum within the next hour. . ." Topitsch, pp. 38-39. Hitler tried to send Reichsmarschall Göring to London to negotiate some sort of an agreement, but the British Foreign Office refused. Kilzer, pp. 149-152. To have enough troops to invade Poland, most of the troops on Germany's western border had to be transferred. Therefore, the small complement of invading French troops met with little or no resistance on the night of September 7-8. However, they stopped their advance on the 12th and began withdrawing back to France on the 30th. Other than an inconclusive bombing of the German naval facilities at Wilhelmhaven, the British did nothing. When an MP asked why the RAF was not bombing the Black Forest— where large supplies of ammunition and military equipment were known to be stored— in response to the German aerial bombardment of Polish cities, the Air Secretary replied: "Are you aware that it is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next." (Essen was the location of the Krupp armament factories.) A German general
said later that if the Allies had mounted a real offensive at this
time, Ten hours after Britain's declaration of war, the German submarine U-30 torpedoed and sank the 1400-passenger liner Athenia without warning. It was 200 miles west of the Hebrides on its journey from Liverpool to Montreal; 112 people died, 28 were Americans. Germany immediately denied responsibility, saying that there had been no U-boats in the vicinity. The Nazi press accused the British of torpedoing their own ship in order to provoke the United States into entering the war. When the U-30 returned to port, it was met by Admiral Doenitz who expunged all record of the Athenia attack from the ship's log and swore all the crew to secrecy. Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 622, 636-638; Duffy, Hitler, pp. 13-17; Ridley, p. 307. FDR reacted
to the declarations of war in a fireside chat to the American people:
September 4, 1939 Poland: With the Polish air force now destroyed, the Luftwaffe is indiscriminately machine-gunning civilians: women picking potatoes in a field, mourners at a funeral in a cemetery, toddlers being herded to another shelter after the destruction of their nursery school. Sir Cyril Newell, British air chief of staff, opposes sending the RAF to assist the Poles. He tells the war cabinet that the RAF must be held in reserve to protect against attacks against England or France. [Churchill urged that the RAF and the French Army immediately attack Germany's Siegfried Line of fortifications. Instead the RAF dropped propaganda leaflets over Germany, telling the people that Germany was on the verge of bankruptcy and did not have the means for "protracted warfare." This was ridiculed in the United States as "the Leaflet-of-the-Month Club for the Third Reich. Olson, pp. 220-221. ] September 5, 1939 The United States proclaims neutrality in this new world war. German troops enter Krakow, Poland. [Twenty-eight Americans had died when the Germans torpedoed the British passenger liner Athenia two days earlier. Secretary of State Hull had responded by limiting American travel to Europe to "imperative necessity." Hitler issued orders to his U-boat commanders forbidding them to attack passenger ships "even when under escort." Remembering that it was the U-boats that had brought Americans into World War I, Hitler would continue to remind them of these orders for the next two years. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 48, 53-58.] September 8, 1939 FDR proclaims a state of "limited national emergency" and increases the National Guard by 35,000 men and the Army by 17,000. [Americans were polled: Should we declare war and send our army and navy to fight Germany? "NO" was the answer given by 94%. Barnet, The Rockets' Red Glare, pp. 197-198.] September 10, 1939 The inadequately-equipped
British Expeditionary Force lands in France. [But they were to see no action for months. As Major Montgomery wrote later: "France and Britain stood still while Germany swallowed Poland; we stood still while the German armies moved over to the West, obviously to attack us; we waited patiently to be attacked; and during this time we occasionally bombed Germany with leaflets. If this was war, I did not understand it." Olson, pp. 223-225.] September 11, 1939 International Correspondence: A confidential exchange of information begins between FDR and Winston Churchill, who has recently been made First Lord of the Admiralty (a post he held during World War I when FDR was Assistant Secretary of the Navy.) FDR: "My dear
Churchill: It is because you and I occupied similar positions in
the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are
back again in the Admiralty.... September 15, 1939 Charles Lindbergh makes his first radio address about Germany: "As long as we maintain an army, a navy and an air force worthy of the name, as long as America does not decay within, we need fear no invasion of this country." [FDR, realizing Lindbergh's celebrity status and fearing his speech might jeopardize congressional repeal of the arms embargo, had offered to create a cabinet position for him— Secretary of Air— if he would not give the talk. Lindbergh refused the deal. Shogan, p. 144. Dorothy Thompson did not mince words, calling Lindbergh a fascist who was possibly hoping to become America's dictator. Kurth, p. 312.] September 17, 1939 The Soviet Union invades eastern Poland with 40 divisions: Some troops carry white flags and claim to be coming to help their Slavic brothers fight the Germans. [Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland but not exactly along the lines agreed upon in the von Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty of the previous month. Stalin gave Hitler additional Polish territory, the provinces of Lublin and Eastern Warsaw, in exchange for the three Baltic nations that had once belonged to the Tsars— Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia— plus a free hand in Finland. Again he promised
access to Russia's material resources— oil, grain, iron, manganese
and cotton. This was announced publicly on September 28th as the
German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty. Shirer,
Rise and Fall, pp. 626-632. With Finland and the
Baltics under his control, Stalin was now poised to threaten the
transport of Swedish ore to Germany. September 18, 1939 A German
submarine sinks the Courageous, one of Britain's
first aircraft carriers, [Churchill had been fruitlessly urging attacks on German ships in the Baltic. The Prime Minister had also vetoed other offensive proposals made by Churchill who suggested laying mines along the Norwegian coast to prevent the shipping of iron ore from Sweden that was desperately needed for Germany's war industry. Churchill also wanted to drop magnetic mines into the Rhine; as retaliation for the magnetic mines dropped by parachute into British harbours; this "aggressive action" was vetoed by France for fear it would "draw reprisals against France." Churchill had been intensively active since his first day at the Admiralty. He ordered naval vessels to convoy merchant ships to protect them from subs. Learning that no naval ships were equipped with radar, he ordered it done immediately. He realized that the sea anchorage of Britain's Home Fleet— Scapa Flow— was inadequately protected and ordered those improvements that senior officers had asked for six months earlier. Unfortunately, before the defenses had been completed, a sub sneaked through the porous anti-submarine net and sank the destroyer Royal Oak, killing 800 men including a rear admiral. Olson, pp. 225-227.] September 21, 1939 Neutrality: FDR calls a special joint session of Congress in which he asks that the Neutrality Act of 1937 be amended to allow belligerents to buy American weapons on a cash-and-carry basis. American merchant ships, regardless of cargo, would be prohibited from sailing in European combat waters. [This was a patently "unneutral" amendment, as Britain, not Germany, controlled the seas and had the ships in which to carry away the goods.] September 24, 1939 Britain: Prime Minister Chamberlain makes a tepid address to the House on the war, reciting figures like "the secretary of a firm of undertakers reading the minutes of the last meeting"— as Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary. [Winston Churchill
then detailed the successes of the Royal Navy with gusto and enthusiasm,
At his conclusion the MPs were on their feet with shouts and cheers.
September 26, 1939 Aimed at both Germany and Japan, FDR asks all private interests to stop exporting eleven named raw materials, such as rubber, tin, quinine and Manila fiber which come from the Southwest Pacific. Feis, Rise, p. 40. September 27, 1939 Poland
surrenders. Stalin ordered the death of 11,000 Polish officers who were prisoners and had their bodies secretly buried in the Katyn Forest. For years the Soviet Union tried to blame the Nazis for these murders. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 632.] September 27, 1939 Germany: Hitler summons the commanders in chief of the three branches of the armed forces and tells them to start working on plans for a western offensive to begin between November 15 and November 20. [The generals protested— their troops were too tired to turn around and take on the West, stores of munitions and other materials were depleted, and winter campaigns are fraught with difficulties. Hitler could not be dissuaded; in fact, he advanced the launch date to November 12. The army conspirators of the 1938 plot combined with a new group that had formed among junior officers within the high command, Action Group Zossen, to resurrect the old scheme. Heinz was again willing to lead the raiding/assassination party, and the date was set for November 11. On the 5th
General Brauchitsch went to see Hitler, ostensibly to make a last-ditch
effort to get Hitler to change his plans, but really to get confirmation
that the war date was set. Oster and Heinz were determined to carry out their part anyway, but Hitler had another one of his lucky breaks. On November 8th he cut short a speech in the Munich Bürgerbräukeller on a hunch, leaving shortly before an assassination attempt. After that security was greatly tightened and Oster was unable to procure a special detonating device. Kordt and Heinz were still willing to proceed, but Oster got cold feet. And so ended the November, 1939 plot. Fest has pointed out that a major flaw in both the 1938 and 1939 plots had been the attachment of the plot to an event over which they had no control— Hitler's declaration of a war that would be unpopular with the German people. And indeed Hitler did make successive postponements— twenty-nine of them— until the Spring of 1940. Fest, pp. 119-136. ] October 3, 1939 The Declaration of Panama is issued by the Inter-American Conference of all the 21 American republics. It establishes a "security zone" around the Americas south of Canada where naval activities are forbidden to belligerent powers. The zone extends 300 to 1000 miles out from shore, enlarging the zone that FDR had proclaimed on September 5th for US Navy warships to patrol. [On October 9th FDR directed US patrol ships to report "in plain English" the sighting of any submarines or suspicious surface ships and to remain in contact with these ships as long as possible. This enabled British warships and airplanes to learn the positions of enemy ships and attack them. Many German ships were handed over to the British for destruction in this manner, including the passenger liner Columbus which, when it failed to evade a waiting British destroyer, was scuttled off the New Jersey coast just outside the security zone. (The escorting US destroyer picked up the survivors from their lifeboats; they were then lodged in a former CCC camp until Hitler declared war on the US, at which time they became prisoners of war.) Bailey and Ryan, pp. 38-43.] October 6, 1939 Germany: In a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler makes a very public peace offer to Britain and France: He will allow the formation of a rump Poland minus the Polish Corridor (despite the fact that he and Stalin had just erased Poland from the world map); he would not insist on the return of the German colonies forfeited by the Versailles Treaty, and negotiations to end the war could include "a solution and settlement of the Jewish problem." [Hitler was
considering moving Germany's Jews to this rump Poland or to Madagascar.
Chamberlain, addressing the House of Commons on October 12th, called Hitler's proposals "vague and uncertain." They said nothing about "righting the wrongs done to Czechoslovakia and Poland" and promises of "the present German Government" could not be relied on. "The peace which we are determined to secure must be a real and settled peace, not an uneasy truce interrupted by constant alarms and repeated threats. What stands in the way of such a peace? It is the German government and the German government alone." This was probably what Hitler needed to hear; on the 13th the German government declared that Chamberlain had deliberately chosen war by turning down Hitler's proposals. Hitler could now blame Britain as the aggressor. Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 638-643; Kilzer, pp. 160-172.] October 8, 1939 Oster's "Treachery": Oster gives Hitler's date for start of the hostilities with the West to his friend, Colonel Gijsbertus Jacobus Sas, a military attaché in the Dutch embassy in Berlin. [This action caused much debate in postwar Germany. Was it ever moral to betray one's country and put the country's troops in danger? For Oster it was an intensely moral decision— the responsibility he felt for the millions who would die in another world war. However, it was a futile gesture, as neither the Dutch nor the Belgians to whom the warning was also passed took the information seriously. Oster passed Sas additional dates that were canceled, thus losing any shred of credibility. The Norwegian ambassador in Berlin, warned by Oster of Hitler's decision to invade Denmark and Norway in April, didn't bother to forward the information to Oslo. Fest, pp. 138-142.] October 11, 1939 Atomic Bomb: President Roosevelt receives a letter from physicist Albert Einstein 30 describing the successful atomic research in Germany and warning that Germany has the potential to build bombs containing the powerful Uranium-235. ( See March 25, 1945.) [Roosevelt immediately began a secret research program under military auspices, the Advisory Committee on Uranium, that would result in the Manhattan Project, the Trinity test in New Mexico, and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Moss, Klaus Fuchs, pp. 28-29.] 30
Einstein and his wife were traveling abroad when the Nazis came
into power in 1933. (The Institute, funded by philanthropist Louis Bamberger, had been established partly as a home for prominent refugee Jewish scientists that other institutions, such as nearby Princeton University, would not employ because of their institutionalized anti-Semitism.) Many other outstanding Jewish scientists, intellectuals and artists fled Germany and German-occupied countries in the 30s to escape the anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime, thus providing much enrichment to the artistic and academic life of the US. October 30, 1939 Black Tom Case is Settled: An international tribunal awards $50 million to the United States— $21 million for damages in the 1916 explosion and $29 million for interest accrued during the three decades in which successive German governments stonewalled, withheld documents, and attempted to deny responsibility. This is the largest award ever made by an international tribunal; it came at a time when Americans were particularly delighted that American lawyers had outsmarted the duplicitous Germans. Millman, The Detonators, p. 273. [See entry for July 30, 1916.] November 4, 1939 The US Neutrality Act of 1939 becomes law.The vote was 243-181 in the House and 63-30 in the Senate, roughly paralleling public sentiment in the opinion polls. Bailey and Ryan, p. 35. Following FDR's recommendations, it repeals the arms embargo of the previous law and allows for cash sales of arms to belligerent nations when transported in non-American ships. American merchant ships were not allowed to sail into zones surrounding the belligerent nations that extended far out into the Atlantic. [For the two years that this prohibition existed, no American merchant ship was sunk by a submarine. Bailey and Ryan argue that if this had been the law in 1917, America might not have entered World War I. p.36. FDR had presented the lifting of the arms embargo as a safety provision for Americans. Economic needs— the munitions factories kept busy earlier in 1939 by Britain's increasing orders were now falling idle— overcame the isolationist objections. A Gallup poll taken in October revealed that 85 % of Americans wanted Britain and France to win the war, but only 15 % favored entering the war even if the Allies were losing. Shogan, p. 22.] November 8, 1939 A Near-Miss: Adolf Hitler addresses a Munich beer hall reunion of the veterans of the failed 1923 putsch. Minutes after he and Rudolf Hess leave the hall, a bomb explodes killing seven and wounding more than sixty people. Hitler is certain that the German generals who have been pretending to the British intelligence that they were planning a coup to overthrow him are actually behind this bombing along with the British SIS and "the Jews." [Prime Minister Chamberlain, loath to fight a war, had instructed the SIS to make contact with those German generals who were rumored to be opposed to both Hitler and the war against Poland. So Majors Best and Stevens made contact with Dr. Franz Fischer, a German expatriate in exile in Paris who, unknown to them, was also an agent for Hitler. The "German opposition generals" whom Fischer arranged for Best and Stevens to meet then reported back to Hitler on their several talks. Hitler encouraged these meetings as he wished to know what peace terms England would make with a new German government. (On October 20 the British agents had indicated that Chamberlain was willing to settle for the removal of Adolf Hitler from power and the status quo before Munich, e.g. the restoration of Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland. The Chamberlain government wished to establish a "European League of States under the leadership of England and with a front against progressive bolshevism." The fake German conspirators stated they were willing to take Hitler prisoner, but would want him to serve as "titular head" of the government until the army was firmly in power, at which time Hitler would be liquidated. They asked for a pledge that neither France nor England would attack Germany while this coup was in progress.) Kilzer, pp. 172-181, Cave Brown, "C", pp. 208-223.] November 9, 1939 The "Venlo Incident": German SS agents storm across the German-Dutch border, kill a Dutch intelligence officer and kidnap the two British intelligence officers, Best and Stevens, who are arriving for a rendezvous with Walter Schellenberg, the head of German counter-intelligence [Adolf Hitler
ordered this operation in retaliation for his near-escape the night
before. Under interrogation Stevens revealed the identities of all the Dutch, Belgian, French and British secret service agents operating against Germany and described the structure of the SIS. With this end of the back-channel peace negotiations, Hitler went forward with his plans for an extension of the war that would force Britain to the peace table: an attack to "defeat as strong a part of the French operational army as possible, . . . and at the same time to gain as large an area as possible in Holland, Belgium and Northern France as a base for conducting a promising air and sea war against England." Kilzer, pp. 170-172, 181-183; Cave Brown, "C", pp. 219-220.] November 30, 1939 The Russians invade Finland to gain territory to protect the approaches to Leningrad. [The fascist government of Baron Mannerheim had been colluding with the Germans to fortify the Aland Islands located in the Gulf of Finland, islands which they were treaty-bound not to fortify. World opinion was immediately on the side of Finland, especially when news was received that Stalin's air force had bombed civilian centers and then machine-gunned the fleeing citizens FDR called for a world embargo on the sale of military planes to countries that bombed civilians. The League of Nations, which had refused to take any action on either Japan's invasion of China or Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, condemned the Soviet Union's action and expelled the country from the League. The Russians had expected to subdue Finland within a month. However, Swedish cryptologists were able to decode the Soviet Union's military messages and forwarded the results immediately to Field Marshal Mannerheim who was thus able to anticipate every military move. Stevenson, p. 59. Many Americans felt more sympathy for "gallant little Finland" in its three-month struggle than for the combatants in the Sino-Japanese War or the conflict in Europe, as Finland had fully paid its World War I debts to the US, unlike the British and the French. In February, 1940 the House of Representatives came close to refusing to allocate funds for the US Embassy in Moscow which would have caused de facto severance of relations with the Soviet Union. Bailey and Ryan, p. 66. Dr. W.E.B. duBois expressed a minority reaction: "The world is astonished, aghast, and angry! But why? . . . . England has been seizing land all over the earth for centuries with and without a shadow of rightful claim: India, South Africa, Uganda, Egypt, Nigeria, not to mention Ireland. The United States seized Mexico from a weak and helpless nation in order to bolster slavery . . . This is the world that has grown suddenly righteous in defense of Finland." Katznelson, p. 87.] December 4, 1939 The British
institute a blockade of all exports from Germany. Chamberlain felt certain that this blockade would "bring Hitler to his knees" and the war would be over by the spring of 1940. While the blockade was definitely felt in Germany, there were imports from the USSR to make up the difference. Germany had been on a strict war footing for months, rationing food and consumer products. In contrast, there was no rationing of food in Britain until January, 1940. England made little effort to mobilize the domestic economy for production of war materials. The Chancellor of the Exchequer felt that it was important to keep British industry on a peacetime footing so that the nation could return to normal economic conditions as soon as possible after the war was over. Chamberlain, reviewing the British troops on the Belgian border, privately queried General Montgomery: "I don't think the Germans have any intention of attacking us. Do you?" Montgomery, appalled by Chamberlain's obtuseness retorted that he expected the trouble to start as soon as the cold weather was over. The anti-appeasement rebels had now formed an all-party group of more than fifty MPs who called themselves the Vigilantes, calling for a more aggressive approach to the war. They had succeeded in thwarting the planned evacuation of Parliament but were forced to compromise on a curtailed three days a week schedule for Parliament. Olson, pp. 228-239.] December 14, 1939 Atlanta,
Georgia is turned into a Civil War theme park for the première
of the film December 17, 1939 British Naval Victory: The German pocket battleship, the Graf Spee, is scuttled in Uruguayan waters by its captain after being fatally crippled a few days earlier by British cruisers who had tracked it down in the South Atlantic after it had sunk a number of British merchant ships. January 1940 Premature Anti-Fascism: FBI agents in Detroit and Milwaukee arrest twelve radical leaders (after first breaking down the doors of their homes at dawn, strip-searching them and ransacking their houses) because they had recruited volunteers to fight for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War four years before! [Although the attorney general quickly dropped the charges, there was wide public protest with parallels drawn between the FBI and the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Summers, Official, pp. 109-110.] January 10, 1940 Anti-Lynching Legislation: Congressman John Rankin (D-MS) rises to oppose an anti-lynching bill and reminds Northern liberals who is ruling the roost: "Remember that southern Democrats now have the balance of power in both Houses of Congress. By your conduct you may make it impossible for us to support many of you for important committee assignments, and other positions to which you aspire. . . . You Democrats who are pushing this vicious measure are destroying your usefulness here . . . The Republicans would be delighted to see you cut President Roosevelt's throat politically, and are therefore voting with you on this vicious measure. . . . They know if he signs it, it will ruin him in the Southern states; and that if he vetoes it, they can get the benefit of the Negro votes this vicious measure would inflict in the North." Katznelson, p. 21. January 23, 1940 Great Britain: The Daily Mail calls attention to the lack of war enthusiasm in the Chamberlain cabinet and remarks on Leo Amery's stirring appeals to action: "Amery remains the most powerful Conservative [not in the war cabinet.] Why has he been excluded in all the years of the National Government? . . . He is more able than many raised to office, both in intellect and in energy." [Amery was
the most pugnacious of the rebels in this do-nothing period of the
war. January 26, 1940 US vs Japan:
The 1911 trade treaty with Japan ends. The US has decided to neither
renew nor replace the treaty, Ambassador Joseph Grew tells Foreign
Minister Nomura. However, the US remains free at any time to end
the export of materials vital to Japan. February 9, 1940 FDR announces that he is sending Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on a fact-finding tour of Europe, with stops in London, Paris, Berlin and Rome [The British correctly suspected that FDR hoped to negotiate a peace that would improve his own domestic situation in an election year. Welles returned in late March to report: Italian mistrust of Germany, France's defeatist mood, Hitler's conviction that the triumph of Germany was "inevitable," and Britain's determination to carry on the fight regardless.] March 12, 1940 Finland capitulates. The country is forced to cede the area close to Leningrad— the Karelian Isthmus, the city of Vyborg and several islands—, but is not absorbed into the Soviet Union. The transfer involves a territory of 16,000 square miles and 450,000 people. Most of the Finns in the ceded territories will be resettled in Finland. March 18, 1940 Hitler and Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass between Italy and Austria. Mussolini explains that he intends to bring Italy into the war at the appropriate moment. Knowing that Germany could crush the Poles without any help from Italy, he feels he has been more useful to Germany as a "non-belligerent." Hitler accepts this explanation. [There had earlier been an exchange of letters. In January Mussolini took Hitler to task for the German-Soviet pact and reminded Hitler that their long-term objective was the defeat of Bolshevism for which they had fought side by side in Spain. Hitler responded that he thought the Jewish influence in Bolshevism was lessening with the dismissal of Maxim Litvinov from the Foreign Office and that it would be possible for the Soviet Union and Germany to work together in friendship. Opinion in Italy, even in Fascist circles, had been highly critical of Germany, especially after the Russians invaded Finland. Mussolini broke off relations with the Soviet Union and sent forty planes to help the Finns. Ridley, pp. 310-311.] March 21, 1940 Paul Reynaud
replaces Edouard Daladier as Premier of France. April 4, 1940 Britain:
Prime Minister Chamberlain, in a speech before the Conservative
Party's governing board, jubilantly declares that Britain has nothing
to fear from Germany. [Much of his confidence came from his decision, on March 28th, to finally approve of Churchill's plan to lay mines along the Norwegian coast to prevent the Swedish iron ore from reaching Germany. The mine-laying is due to begin on April 8th. Olson, pp. 274-276. All winter Churchill had pushed Prime Minister Chamberlain unsuccessfully for the mining of Norwegian harbors, Narvik in particular, to prevent the Germans from obtaining Swedish iron ore. With the onset of the Russo-Finnish War an invasion of Norway at Narvik had been added to the proposed Operation Wilfred as a way to send British troops to reach and secure the Swedish iron ore mines and then join up with the Finnish forces fighting the Russians. The capitulation of the Finns in March, of course, ended the consideration of that phase of the expedition.] April 9, 1940 Scandinavia: The "phony war" or sitzkrieg ends when German troops invade Denmark and Norway simultaneously. The Norwegians are told that they are being taken under German protection against an imminent Allied invasion. [Denmark offered no formal resistance. Pockets of resistance continued in Norway for three weeks. Hitler's purpose was to insure that the iron ore needed for his munitions continued to arrive from neutral Sweden and that he controlled the Norwegian source of "heavy water," important for atomic bomb development. Duffy, Hitler, pp. 21-23. One reason for the speedy defeat of Norway was the several German merchant ships who had, undetected by British intelligence, ferried soldiers and supplies in their holds. The ships remained anchored in Norwegian harbors awaiting the day of the invasion. Olson, pp. 276-278. Another reason was the cooperation of a Nazi-like party in Norway, headed by Vidkun Quisling whose perfidy would add a new word to the English language. Hitler had insured Quisling's participation as early as mid-December. Leland Stowe, one of the only three foreign correspondents in Oslo that day, watched as less than fifteen hundred German soldiers took over the city without firing a shot or---indeed--- having a gun in hand ready to shoot. Their parade through the main street of the capital from the airport had been led by six mounted Norwegian policemen. For the first time a nation's capital had been captured by airborne troops. Stowe, pp. 91-95, 113. The Norwegian King Haakon VII , his family and his cabinet escaped to the north and then to exile in England. The sizable Norwegian merchant marine escaped and was of considerable use to Britain in the Battle of the Atlantic. FDR extended the area forbidden to American merchant ships to include the waters around Norway, Sweden and Finland and froze Norwegian and Danish assets in the United States- about $267 million. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 69-70.] April 9, 1940 Wendell Willkie is a guest on the immensely popular and erudite radio program, "Information, Please" where he captivates listeners with his wit, charm, quick response time and large fund of information. [Willkie, the anti-TVA utilities lawyer and president of Commonwealth and Southern, had caught the eye of significant members of the eastern establishment as a potential Republican presidential nominee. Prominent among these was Henry Luce, the publisher of Time-Life-Fortune. The Fortune issue of April (which came out in late March) was devoted to Willkie and his career. Willkie's article, "We, the People" was reprinted in Reader's Digest, then the magazine with the largest circulation in the US and the darling of the middle class. He blasted
the isolationists for blocking the sale of weapons to gallant little
Finland: Willkie had
been a delegate to the Democratic conventions in 1924 and 1932.
He did not change his registration to "Republican" until late 1939
or early 1940. Peters, pp. 22-25. April 9, 1940 Gang-buster Thomas Dewey defeats Senator Vandenberg in the Nebraska Republican primary, gaining 60% of the votes. [A few days earlier Dewey had garnered all 24 of the Wisconsin delegates, leading the New York Herald-Tribune to write on the 4th that "it would be exceedingly hard to head off Mr. Dewey from the Republican nomination." An early 1940 poll of leading newspaper editors had predicted that Vandenberg would be the nominee. Vandenberg had not campaigned in either primary. Perhaps he expected to be drafted? Or, as Charles Peters suggests, possibly he was ambivalent about his isolationist stance due to the influence of his mistress, the wife of a British diplomat? Peters, pp. 18-20. Dewey had started
his whirlwind campaign in January, with the strategy of sewing up
the nomination in the primaries. He excoriated the New Deal's "report
card"— national income down $8 billion, dividends down $5 billion,
exports down $12 billion and take-home pay for industrial workers
down 11% since 1933. Eighteen of twenty industrial nations had recovered
from the Depression better than the United States. "The New Deal
not only doesn't get a passing grade, it is at the foot of the class."
April 13, 1940 British-French-Polish Forces Land at Narvik, Norway in a hastily-assembled and poorly-equipped operation. Smaller British units also land at two small fishing ports further south, Namsos and Andalsnes. They lack sufficient quantities of just about everything an expeditionary force would need: artillery, antiaircraft weapons, transport, communications gear, white capes for snow camouflage, medical equipment, food, maps of the territory. [British pilots were not given permission to attack German-held airports until April 11 and then only machine guns were permitted, not bombs. A request to bomb a Danish airport that was loaded with German transport planes took three days to get approval; by that time the planes had unloaded their troops in Norway. Leonard Stowe recounted for the Chicago Daily News how the troops had been "dumped into Norway's deep snows . . . without a single anti-aircraft gun, without one squadron of supporting planes, without a single piece of field artillery." A lieutenant told him: ""We've got no proper clothes for these mountains. We've got no white capes. The Jerries could see us everywhere in the snow. They just mowed our men down. I tell you. . . it's that bloody Chamberlain." Stowe's dispatches were reprinted throughout the US, reinforcing the belief of many to stay out of the war, especially under the current leadership. Meanwhile the BBC was painting quite a different picture: "British forces are pressing forward steadily from all points where they have landed in Norway. Resistance has been shattered . . ." The Daily Mail: "Hitler is shaken by the hammer blows of our sailors and airmen." Olson, pp. 278-282.] April 18, 1940 In a feat of creative geography, FDR announces that Greenland (a Danish territory located in the far northern Atlantic) is in the Western Hemisphere and thus subject to the Monroe Doctrine. Mid-April, 1940 Churchill sends William Stephenson (code-named "Intrepid") on a secret visit to FDR. [Intrepid
confides details of the British progress towards decoding the Enigma
machine, suggests Anglo-American cooperation on atomic research,
and describes the resistance network being established in Europe
and plans for guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. May 2, 1940 British
Evacuation from Norway: Chamberlain is forced to announce that
the troops sent to Andalsnes and Namsos had been forced to retreat
and were being evacuated. [Unknown at the time was the number of men killed, including those unable to reach the evacuation point in time. Michael Dobbs in his historically accurate novel, Winston's War, of the last twenty months of Chamberlain's rule as Prime Minister, uses a fictitious character to describe the inadequate training for the Namsos expedition as well as the scenario that awaited their arrival.] May 3, 1940 Pope Pius XII sends coded messages to his nuncios in Holland and Belgium that Germany is poised to invade those two countries. He also allows the Vatican ambassadors from France and Great Britain to alert their governments. Plus he passes the news on to Crown Prince Umberto who immediately tells Mussolini. [This ended any influence Pacelli might have had as a neutral peacemaker. Owen Chadwick, an authority on British relations with the Vatican, believes that Pacelli's "imprudence" served to hasten Italy's entrance into the war: "Mussolini could not do other than prove to the Germans that he totally rejected the Pope." Cornwell, pp.242-243.] May 4, 1940 National Defense: FDR asks for an expenditure of a billion dollars for defense during the next fiscal year. [Six days later, with the first news of the blitzkrieg, the figure started rising. One billion became two billions, then four billions. On May 28 FDR appointed the National Defense Advisory Committee to supervise the spending of $40 billion. Stone, Business as Usual, pp 13-14.] May 7, 1940 Debate
in the House of Commons: Chamberlain rises to speak amid catcalls
of [Leo Amery
was the last speaker. He mocked Chamberlain's excuses for failure. He ended with a 1653 quote of Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament— reluctantly, he said, "because I am speaking of those who are old friends and associates of mine." Then, gazing sternly at the cabinet members on the front bench: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!" Olson, pp. 290-295.] May 8, 1940 Second Day of Debate: Labour calls for a Division. There are angry debates throughout the day. When the Division votes are tallied, Chamberlain is still technically Prime Minister with the count at 281-200. But what has happened to his normal 250+ plurality? There are shouts of "Resign!" and "In the name of God, go!" [Normally, Chamberlain should have gone to Buckingham Palace the next day and handed in his resignation. But he decided to hang in there—"like a dirty old piece of chewing gum on the leg of a chair," according to one Tory dissident. But by the end of May 9 Chamberlain had become reconciled to resignation in favor of a government headed by Winston Churchill. However when the morning of the 10th brought news of the blitzkrieg tanks slicing through Belgium and Holland, Chamberlain decided that he must stay on, that a change of government would be too difficult in the midst of a national crisis. But Labour refused to continue in a Chamberlain government. So Neville was off to Buckingham Palace where George VI reluctantly accepted his resignation and then, even more reluctantly, summoned Winston Churchill to ask him to form a new government. Olson, pp. 295-312.] May 10, 1940 The Blitzkrieg Begins: Hitler invades Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg in what is now being called the Blitzkrieg — lightning war— of masses of tanks that are able to bypass stationary defenses. His excuse this time: the British and French are preparing to use Belgium and Holland as a springboard for invading Germany. First come the airplanes that bomb airfields in Belgium, Holland and northern France; then 16,000 airborne troops who parachute into Rotterdam, Leiden and The Hague, seizing control of vital locations. Other German troops landing in gliders seize strategic Belgian bridges across the Albert Canal while others land on the supposedly impregnable fortress of Eben-Emael. [Hans Oster had given his Dutch friend the exact time of the invasion and the code name, "Danzig," but The Hague was reluctant to mobilize on the basis of this information and, therefore, Holland was taken by surprise. Fest , p. 141. In Great Britain,
Chamberlain's Tory government deserted him. Winston Churchill, who
had long warned of the danger of Hitler's Germany, became Prime
Minister; a British force occupied the former Danish dominion of
Iceland. Gilbert, The Second World War, pp. 61-68.
A few days after becoming Prime Minister, Churchill was asked by his son if England could possibly win the war. "Of course," his father replied. "I shall drag the United States in." Kilzer, p. 20.] May 13, 1940 German
Forces Enter France: From the center of the German line the
German 19th Panzer Corps, having pushed through Southern Belgium
and Luxembourg and the Ardennes Forest— which the French military
had considered impenetrable by tanks—, crosses the Meuse River
at Sedan, thus reaching five miles into France. May 14, 1940 The Dutch army surrenders "to avoid the complete destruction of the country." May 15, 1940 Prime Minister Churchill telegraphs FDR: "The scene has darkened swiftly" and asks FDR for material aid. "Immediate needs are first of all the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers . . . several hundred of the latest types of aircraft, . . . anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition, . . . steel . . . and the visit of a United States squadron to Irish ports"— where German parachutists were feared. Loewenheim, pp. 94-95. [The United States had nearly 100 destroyers that had been built in World War I but had never seen service. However, FDR initially turned Churchill down, saying that the ships were needed for America's defense and her Pacific commitments and he doubted that Congress would authorize such a loan. Churchill persisted with his destroyer request on the 19th and warned FDR that if Churchill were driven from office by a wartime defeat, the next government might well use the British fleet as a "bargaining counter" with Germany, rather than sailing the fleet to the Western Hemisphere. FDR asked the new Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, to determine what other items on Churchill's wish list could be declared surplus and released to the British. Shogan, pp. 74-75.] May 16, 1940 Defense: FDR in a special address to Congress asks for a large appropriation for "elemental defense." If Bermuda should be captured by "hostile hands," bombers could reach the US mainland in less than three hours. American plane production needs to reach "at least 50,000 planes a year" to meet this threat. He also asks Congress "not to take any action which would in any way hamper or delay the delivery of American-made planes to foreign nations which have ordered them." [He repeats the appeal on the 31st as the British army was scrambling to get off the continent at Dunkirk. Congress responded with an appropriation of $1.75 billion, a huge amount for that time. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 72-73; Shogan, p. 73.] May 17, 1940 German Advances on the Continent: German armies capture the Belgian capital of Brussels and attack France on a 62-mile front, claiming that the Allies are now "in full retreat." New York Times, May 18, 1940. May 18, 1940 BEF Isolated: The German tank units, having veered west after their Meuse crossing rather than heading for Paris— (as expected by the French military command—, reach Abbeville, thus cutting off the British Expeditionary Force from the French Army and from their supply base. Gilbert, p. 69. May 18, 1940 Japan presents a list of demands to the official in charge of trade in the Dutch East Indies— a written promise that Japan be allowed to import thirteen basic raw materials, such as manganese, nickel, tin, wolfram, scrap iron, rubber, chrome and molybdenum, from the Indies, some— bauxite and oil— in far greater quantities than before. [Secretary of State Hull gave the Japanese Foreign Minister statistics showing that the United States' trade with the Dutch East Indies was significantly greater than Japan's and stated that the US would brook no change in the economic status quo. Significantly, 90% of US rubber and tin came from the East Indies. Feis, pp. 58-59; Hull, Memoirs, I, pp. 895-896; Utley, pp. 84-86.] May 20, 1940 Espionage: Tyler Kent, a cipher clerk in the US Embassy in London, is apprehended for transmitting top secret messages to Germany, including the very secret correspondence between FDR and Churchill-"POTUS" and "Naval Person". [Ambassador Kennedy waived diplomatic immunity. In the unpublicized hearings that followed, Kent said he wanted to obstruct FDR's "secret and unconstitutional plot with Churchill to sneak the United States into war." He also believed that "international Jewry" was pushing the war in order to come to power in the ruins. He confessed and served seven years in Dartmoor prison. Cave Brown, Bodyguard, pp. 66-68; Stevenson, p. 80.] May 21, 1940 German troops reach the Atlantic coast, cutting France in two and trapping Allied forces in Belgium. The Germans are now 60 miles from Paris. FDR pleads for national unity in the country's "preparedness program;" the Navy asks for 10,000 planes, 16,000 pilots and a 48-hour work week in navy yards; the War Department Appropriation Bill in the Senate is increased to $1.5 billion. May 24, 1940 German troops are close to encircling the British army at the French port of Dunkirk. Hitler, against the advice of all of his generals, twice orders a retreat. The British are thereby able to evacuate 365,000 men, but are forced to leave behind over 500,000 tons of ammunition and over 64,000 vehicles. [Britain now
had most of her army intact, but was left with only 238 war planes,
200 light and obsolete tanks, 500 cannons, and 600,000 rifles for
the defense of the island. Early in May the government ordered the owners of all motor craft of between 30 and 100 feet in length to register their boats with the Small Vessels Pool. Stevenson, pp.102-103. Michael Dobbs' novel, Never Surrender, covers the first three weeks of the Churchill government and the amazing evacuation of troops at Dunkirk. Churchill, in what Fenby describes as a "spectacular piece of disinformation," tells the nation and the world that "the British Expeditionary Force has been completely and successfully evacuated from France." Not so. There were 150,000 soldiers— mostly support troops, bakers, engineers, pay clerks, etc.— left stranded in the western part of France. Fenby, pp. 1-28. The congratulatory announcement was not well received by the French who were now seeing the British as an disloyal ally who would cut and run, leaving France holding the bag. The war could have ended for Britain had Hitler invaded in the first months after Dunkirk, but he didn't, either because he was a poor military tactician or because he believed he could get Britain to side with him against the Soviet Union or because he believed the Luftwaffe would finish off Britain. Duffy, Hitler, pp. 25-38; Goodwin, p.64; Fenby, p. 16. The Vatican sent gold bars valued at $7,665,000 to the United States, a portion of which was immediately sold for dollars for the cash reserves Pope Pius XII would need during the war. Cornwell, p, 245. Judge Sam Rosenman, FDR's speechwriter and confidant, believes that Dunkirk was the moment when FDR decided to run for a third term. Before that he had been looking forward to retirement and had signed a $75,000 a year contract to write for Collier's magazine. However, he refused to reveal his decision so as to allow himself to be "drafted" at the convention in July. Peters, pp. 123-124.] May 30, 1940 First Material Aid from US to its Overseas Cousin: Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau notifies the British that they may have 20 of the 23 torpedo boats under construction for the US Navy. [The Navy was slated to receive 20 later models with larger torpedoes and improvements based on the performance of the British 20. Navy Secretary Charles Edison objected, as his Advocate General had said the sale was illegal. FDR told Edison to send the man on vacation and "do what I told you to." A Gallup poll taken at this time indicated that 93% of the public was opposed to a declaration of war against Germany. Shogan, pp. 87-88, 150.] May 30, 1940 Cantwell v. Connecticut: The Supreme Court unanimously sustains the free speech rights of Jehovah's Witnesses, saying that the Bill of Rights is binding upon the states and, therefore, no state may infringe on a citizen's freedom to speak, believe and act— although the state may regulate the times, places and manner of soliciting contributions or holding public meetings on its streets. June 3, 1940 Minersville School District v. Gobitis: The Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision upholds the school expulsion of two Pennsylvania Jehovah's Witness children despite their contention that salute of the American flag is a violation of their religious beliefs and their free exercise guaranteed by the First Amendment. [National unity is the basis of national security, said Justice Felix Frankfurter, in the majority decision. That Frankfurter, one of the most famous upholders of civil liberties in America and a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union, should deny religious freedom for Jehovah's Witnesses in this case was astounding to the public and embarrassing to many of his friends. The Gobitis decision prompted mob violence against Jehovah's Witnesses in five states with beatings and destruction of property. Three years later the decision was overturned in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. Simon, pp. 106-114.] June 4, 1940 The evacuation at Dunkirk is completed and Prime Minister Winston Churchill addresses the House of Commons: "We shall fight in France, we shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air; we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, . . . " [Hitler continued to send peace feelers to Britain.] June 6, 1940 Bombers for Britain: The US Navy announces that it is returning fifty Hell Diver scout bombers (which are "temporarily in excess of requirements") to Curtiss-Wright for resale to Great Britain. Shogan, p. 83. June 10, 1940 Italy declares
war on France and Britain, as German tanks enter the Paris region.
Premier Paul Reynaud, his mistress, and the French government flee
Paris for Bordeaux. FDR in his commencement address at the University
of Virginia: "On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held
the dagger has stuck it into the back of its neighbor." [FDR extended the zone forbidden to American shipping to the Mediterranean, and froze the $1.6 billion French assets held in American banks. Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent notes to the German and Italian governments warning them that the US would not tolerate the transfer of "any geographic region of the Western Hemisphere from one non-American power to another non-American power." The regions he referred to were French and Dutch Guiana and the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Curaçao. By the end of July the foreign ministers of the American republics had reacted to this threat, issuing the Act of Havana by which any of these territories in danger of being captured by a hostile power would be taken over and administered by a consortium of the republics until the end of the war. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 73-75. Germany's
rapid success in France had forced Mussolini's hand; he entered
the war His announcement of war in a speech from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia met with thunderous applause from the people. On the second day of the war the RAF bombed Torino, killing fourteen civilians and wounding thirty. The Italian army invaded France, occupying Menton and other cities on the French Riviera; operations began in Libya against British forces in Egypt. Ridley, pp. 312-315.] June 11, 1940 "STOP HITLER
NOW!" is the headline in full-page ads in major US newspapers.
[The ad was
paid for by a group called the Committee to Defend America by Aiding
the Allies, more commonly known as the "White Committee" after its
chairman, William Allen White, the renowned editor of the Kansas
Emporia Gazette. Other notables on the board Dorothy Thompson was using her column and her frequent public lectures to urge all-out aid to Britain. She was sufficiently effective that several isolationist senators, including Wheeler (R-MT), Nye (R-ND) and Borah (R-ID) discussed having her investigated as a "British agent." Kurth, p. 318.] June 11, 1940 Congress appropriates $1.5 billion for naval defense. [Two days
later the Military Supply Act provided $1.8 billion for military
defense projects. Together, this was an unprecedented amount of
money for peacetime defense. June 12, 1940 Aspirins and Headaches: An ULTRA intercept enables Bletchley Park to understand the mechanics of Knickebein, the navigational guidance system the Luftwaffe had been using to bomb English cities. [Countermeasures were created to blanket the dot-dash waves, sometimes even using commandeered diathermy machines from hospitals. Thus they were dubbed the "Aspirins" to counteract the Knickebein "headaches." These Aspirins plus ULTRA were indispensable in the forthcoming Battle of Britain. Lewin, pp. 75-99.] June 14, 1940 Paris Falls to the Germans: "In order to avoid that Paris becomes a theater of combat," the Parisian commander surrenders the city intact with its citizens still remaining there ordered to stay indoors for the first two days. German troops then enter Paris, goose-stepping through the Arc de Triomphe, and hang the swastika from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Two million Parisians have already fled the city. General Guderian's panzer units reach the Swiss border and break into the Maginot Line from the rear. This fortification upon which France has rested its strategic thinking has turned out to be a rather expensive and useless structure. Fest, p. 142. [It was the American ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt, who had arranged the Open City declaration and obtained the agreement with the Reich. He had ignored the orders from the State Department to leave Paris with the tattered French government. Winston Churchill (and also Colonel Charles de Gaulle) would have preferred a "suicidal resistance." Churchill hoped that the Germans would bomb Paris and cause so much devastation that Americans, angered by the destruction of the beloved "City of Light", would encourage FDR to declare war on Germany. Vaughan, pp. 3-4.] June 14, 1940 German Propaganda Ploy: The Hearst newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, publish an interview with Hitler purportedly conducted by the Hearst chief foreign correspondent in which Hitler is quoted as saying that he has no intention of invading America and that American fears of him are "flattering but grotesque." He pledges to respect the Monroe Doctrine: "The Americas to Americans, Europe to the Europeans." [A German
agent persuaded a naive Montana congressman to have the story inserted
in June 14, 1940 FDR signs the bill authorizing an 11 % expansion of combatant ships. June 14, 1940 Heavy water and nuclear scientists rescued: The British are able to evacuate two nuclear scientists from Bordeaux along with twenty-six cans— then most of the world's supply— of heavy water as well as a large quantity of industrial diamonds and machine tools. Gilbert, Second World War, pp. 95-96. June 15, 1940 Charles Lindbergh, in another radio address, warns that America "risks catastrophe" if she gives help to Britain and France. [Previously he had claimed that the United States was in no danger of invasion unless she provoked it by interfering in the affairs of other nations. FDR made no public comments to any of Lindbergh's speeches, but privately he was furious and confided to his good friend Morgenthau: "I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi." Shogan, pp. 144-145.] June 15, 1940 The British and French governments make last-minute appeals to FDR to enter the war. Churchill explains that he is not asking for an expeditionary force "which I know is out of the question" but for a declaration that would have a "tremendous moral effect." June 16-24, 1940 Operation Ariel: In a sequel to the evacuation from Dunkirk ships of all sizes are semt to Cherbourg, St. Malo and ports on France's Atlantic coast to rescue those civilians and members of the British Expeditionary Force who had become stranded in the west. [Of the nearly 165,000 who were evacuated to England anout one-fourth were Canadians and Poles. Gilbert, Second, p. 98.] June 16, 1940 Great Britain: At 5 PM the War Cabinet approves a most revolutionary proposition to the French— a Franco- British Union— with joint defence, foreign, military and economic policies. And a single war cabinet. [The plan was the brainchild of international banker Jean Monnet. He persuaded Colonel Charles de Gaulle to join him in persuading Churchill, who managed to persuade Lord Halifax and the leaders of the Labour Party. De Gaulle had kept Premier Reynaud partially informed by frequent phone conversations throughout the day, telling Reynaud to hang in there, something momentous was about to happen. Reynaud was surprised and exhilarated by the offer and full of hope when he entered his Cabinet meeting that evening. The defeatists
were not surprised; Commander-in Chief Maxime Weygand had wiretapped
Reynaud's phone line and Reynaud's pro-fascist mistress, Comtesse
de Portes, had read the written copy that de Gaulle had just brought
from Britain. There was instant and virulent criticism from the
defeatists at the 7:30 meeting. Pétain described the unity proposal
as "fusion with a corpse." Only de Gaulle and Interior Minister
George Mandel supported Reynaud. (For a week Weygand had been urging
that the goverment seek an armistice. ) June 16, 1940 The Germans enter Dijon and the French get a new Premier. Aging (85) Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain is quickly chosen as premier after Paul Reynaud resigned— since he could not convince the cabinet and generals to move the government to French North Africa and continue the war from there as part of an "Anglo-French Union." Within hours Pétain asks the Germans for an armistice. Gilbert, Second, p. 97. [Pétain would
later order Reynaud's arrest. In February, 1942 Reynaud was tried
in a kangaroo court, along with Léon Blum and Edouard Daladier,
for "betraying" France. June 17, 1940 FDR's reaction
to the news of the new Pétain government: June 17, 1940 Pétain:
Without having heard from the Germans about their terms for an armistice, [With this
speech whole regiments laid down their arms and simply walked away.
June 17, 1940 A Two-Ocean Navy: Admiral Harold R. Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, visits Capitol Hill with a request for a $4 billion appropriation for a "two-ocean navy." This would provide for a 70% expansion in the Navy above and beyond the increase voted in a few days earlier and would include several battleships and twenty-seven Essex-class aircraft carriers. Miller, p.448. June 17, 1940 The Sinking
of HMT Lancastria - Britain's Greatest Maritime Disaster:
Beginning at dawn, from 6000 to 8000 soldiers plus a few civilians
are ferried out to [The ship was
more than fully loaded and the captain had been given the order
to sail for Britain. But he preferred to wait for a destroyer escort
as he feard a submarine attack. Within minutes the ship started to list, first to starboard and then to port, and then rolled over. Twenty-two minutes later, she sank. Many died instantly in the explosion, many drowned. Many jumped from the ship not knowing how to manage their life jackets and broke their necks. Many of those attempting to survive in the sea were strafed by returning planes, or choked to death on the oil that soon covered the area to a depth of several inches, or burned to death in flaming patches of oil. Miraculously there were around 2500 survivors who were rescued by other ships and who made it back to England. Fenby uses the first-person accounts of Lancastria survivors to weave a compelling story of the horror and heroism of the day. Fenby, pp. 128-185. Churchill, upon learning of the"frightful incident," decided that the public had had enough bad war news for one week and so ordered censorship of any mention of the sinking in the media "for the time being." The returning survicors were forbidden to discuss their experience; it would be a breach of King's Regulations and a violation of the Official Secrets Act. Their families were ntified that they were "missing in action" with no further details forthcoming. The story broke six weeks later in the New York Sun with photos taken by a sailor on one of the rescue ships. So there was a brief acknowledgement by the Ministry of Information and one-day stories by the Times, the BBC and two other papers. Then it dropped into the Black Hole of History. Churchill makes a very brief mention of the sinking in his memoirs. He says he had intended to lift the ban in a few days, but "forgot" to do so with all the events that "crowded upon us so black and so quickly." I would suggest that he didn't want people connecting the dots and realizing that he had lied when he told them that the BEF had been completely evacuated at Dunkirk. Fenby, pp. 7, 222-223, 237-238. The true casualty number is unknown, since the stewards stopped counting the arriving passengers at 6000. Using the lowest estimate gives a death toll of 3500. Many Lancastria survivors have declared that the figure was much higher. Even so, Fenby notes that the figure adds up to considerably more than the well-publicized deaths on the Lusitania (1195) and the Titanic (1522) combined. Fenby, p. 8. Today the Lancastria sinking is virtually unknown and the myth of the complete rescue at Dunkirk continues. Liddell Hart in his 713-page History of the Second World War (1970) fails to mention either the Lancastria or Operation Ariel, while giving ten pages to the "complete" evacuation at Dunkirk. Operation Ariel and the Lancastria rate twenty lines in Gilbert's even longer book— The Second World War— but his figures are too low: 5000 aboard the ship and "nearly three thousand" were "drowned." p. 98. June 19, 1940 Indochina: Capitalizing on France's defeat, the Japanese demand that the French Indochinese border with China be closed, with Japanese military observers stationed there to enforce the closure. [The French
Ambassador in Washington asked the United States for assistance
in resisting this demand; Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles
refused, saying that the US wished to avoid war with Japan and advised
the French to accede to the Japanese demands. Japan demanded that Britain withdraw troops from Shanghai and close the Burma Road and the Hong Kong frontier, hoping to deprive China of supplies from the West and possibly end the war. England capitulated and on July 17 stopped transport of all war materials via Hong Kong and Burma. Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War, pp. 9-15; Feis, Road, 66-71; Cooper, The Long Crusade, pp. 18-19.] June 20, 1940 The Alien Registration Act or Smith Act requires all aliens to register at periodic intervals; another clause makes it illegal for any individual or organization to advocate the overthrow of the US government by force. This is the first legislation since the repudiated Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to make the advocacy of ideas a federal crime. [This legislation,
originally designed to combat fascism, lay dormant until 1948 when
The Supreme Court initially upheld the first eleven convictions in Dennis v. United States in 1951. Six years and another 130 indictments later, the Supreme Court would restrict application of the Act to actual participation in or verbal encouragement of very specific insurrectionary acts. Yates v. United States. The author of the Smith Act was Howard Smith, the anti-labor, poll tax supporter representative from Virginia. In 1935 Representative Martin Dies had introduced legislation to exclude and deport alien Fascists and Communists. It and subsequent similar later bills failed to pass. The fall of France and Norway and the concern about the "fifth columnists" that had assisted these defeats greased the way for the passage of the Smith Act. A month earlier FDR had transferred the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) from the Labor Department to the Department of Justice. While this transfer could be seen as a protection for non-citizens from the harassment of state and local laws, the legal implications of registration and enforcement by the Department of Justice were obvious to all. Daniels, Decision to Relocate, p. 5; Divine, American Immigration Policy, pp. 104-107.] June 20, 1940 The first
peace-time conscription bill is introduced into the Senate. The Burke-Wadsworth bill was the brainchild of Harvard's President Conant, Grenville Clark of the Military Training Camps Association, Thomas Lamont of J. P. Morgan Company, Julius Ochs Adler of The New York Times, Colonel Bill Donovan and attorney Elihu Root, Jr. The idea had been discussed in a secret meeting of Willkie and other prominent men with a retired British diplomat on April 29th. [See the George Seldes note # 90.] The bill was held up in the Military Affairs committee for over a month. James L. Martin, "Peacetime Registration for Conscription," Journal of Historical Review, Spring 1982. June 20, 1940 FDR announces the appointment of two Republicans to his cabinet: Henry Stimson to be Secretary of War and Frank Knox to be Secretary of the Navy— just a few days before the opening of the Republican convention. These men were no second-string Republicans. Stimson had been Herbert Hoover's Secretary of Commerce and Knox was the vice-presidential candidate in 1936 and the owner of the Chicago Daily News. [The reason,
FDR said, "was the overwhelming sentiment of the nation for national
solidarity in a time of world crisis and on behalf of national defense,
and nothing else." June 21, 1940 FDR signs
the Bloom-Van Nuys bill which gives the president and the State
Department greater power in controlling immigration and granting
visas. This larger number alarmed Long who believed that Germany was coercing refugees to become agents by holding their relatives hostage. He sent a memo to all consulates denying them any discretion in granting visas; all must be approved in Washington. (This was a fairly transparent device to eliminate virtually all Jewish immigration.) On July 15 all US consulate offices in occupied Europe were closed. Only The Nation and The New Republic followed and criticized Long's exclusionary policies. Attorney General
Biddle fought Long to have a fair judicial review board for visa
denials, June 22, 1940 France surrenders to the Germans and is divided into two zones: the occupied— Paris and northern France— and the unoccupied— the pro-German Vichy France. To further humiliate the French, Hitler has the peace agreement signed in the same historic railway car where the 1918 armistice had been signed, first breaking down the wall of the museum where the railway car was exhibited and hauling it to Compiègne. General Charles de Gaulle, "speaking in the name of France," but with no authority from the French government, establishes the Free French government in London and pledges to continue the struggle against the Nazis. Italian planes bomb Alexandria, Egypt. June 23, 1940. The United States recognizes the Vichy government. The German public is enthralled by this rapid and total victory. Realizing that now it will be impossible to organize a broad-based coup against Hitler, the conspirators begin plotting assassination attempts. Goerdeler becomes the de facto leader of the civilian opposition. Fest, pp. 142-148. June 23, 1940 The Soviet Union completes the takeover of the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, territory that had belonged to the czars and became sovereign states after World War I. [FDR froze their financial assets. Bailey and Ryan, p. 77.] June 24, 1940 Philadelphia - the Republican Convention: On the opening day a conservative columnist writes that Governor Dewey "peaked in March." Liberal columnist Drew Pearson states his belief that Dewey is "washed up" and predicts that the race will be between Senator Taft and Wendell Willkie. [The next day columnist Walter Lippman described Dewey as a man who "changes his views from hour to hour" and dismissed Taft as another Neville Chamberlain—"The same complacence, the same incapacity to foresee . . . to nominate and elect him would be to invite for the nation a disaster of unpreparedness." Peters, pp. 73, 77.] June 24, 1940 FDR is
forced to cancel the sale of 20 torpedo boats to the British. Some New Deal legal scholars found an obscure 1917 statute that permitted the federal government to turn in outmoded equipment to private manufacturers when buying new and more efficient models. FDR seized on this provision, allowing Great Britain to buy the old equipment on a cash-and-carry basis. In June 50-100 attack planes and 80 bombers were made available after being certified as "surplus." The next items were 500,000 Enfield rifles, nearly 1000 75-millimeter field guns, mortars and 100 million rounds of ammunition. A legal ruling was obtained to permit the surplus planes to be flown into Canada; until then the planes had been flown to the border where tractors towed them across the line! Bailey and Ryan, pp. 79-80. By the end of June twelve ships had sailed to England bearing seventy thousand tons of equipment which originally had been worth over $300 million. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, pp. 66-67.] June 25, 1940 The Revenue Act of 1940 is rushed through Congress in the wake of the French defeat. The ceiling on the national debt is raised; a multi-billion dollar defense bond issue is authorized; income tax exemptions are cut by 25 percent; and the gasoline excise tax is raised from one cent to 1.5 cents per gallon. [The bond issue
was a pretty regressive measure, as it was the wealthy who could
afford to buy the interest-paying bonds. There was no provision
for an excess profits tax; American business was appalled at the
100 % excess profits tax that Britain had declared. Seventy percent of the country, however, thought that any company that refused defense orders should be seized by the government. By the end of October Attorney General Jackson had stopped enforcing NLRB restrictions in government contracts. Perrett, Days of Sadness, pp. 71-73.] June 26, 1940 Turkey announces that it is a "non-belligerent." The Soviet Union demands that Rumania cede the province of Bessarabia to them. [It became the Republic of Moldova within the USSR. Gilbert, p. 104.] June 26, 1940 Soviet Union: To accelerate their rearmament program, the Soviet Union orders an eight-hour work day and a seven-day work week with a prohibition on unauthorized absences from work. Topitsch, p. 67. June 28, 1940 Ex-Democrat
Wendell L. Willkie wins the Republican nomination for President
on the sixth ballot. His strength had increased with successive polls and Germany's victories; at the opening of the convention the preferences were Dewey-Willkie, 47-29. As the convention began, Dewey predicted his win on the third ballot. And, indeed, he came in first on the opening ballot— 360 votes to Taft's 189 and Willkie's 105. (501 votes were needed to win.) But by the fourth ballot the contest was between Willkie and Taft. (Senator Robert Taft, the son of William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States, had said that he preferred a German victory to US involvement in the war.) The galleries were packed with chanters of "We Want Willkie." (Two months before the convention the Chairman of Arrangements, a Taft man, suffered a stroke. He was succeeded by the Vice Chairman, Sam Pryor, a Willkie enthusiast from Connecticut, who showed extreme partiality in the ticket distribution. Peters, p. 51.) Publishers of some of the major newspapers and magazines— Henry Luce of Time-Life-Fortune, the Cowles brothers with their newspapers and Look magazine, Ogden and Helen Reid of the New York Herald-Tribune—.had been clamoring for his nomination, and the folks back home in the Willkie clubs were not shy about sending tens of thousands of telegrams to the delegates. This was the first, and definitely not the last, use of Madison Avenue techniques to market a political nominee. (Delegate Alf Landon attempted to answer the blizzard of correspondence he received. Eighteen sacks of notes to pro-Willkie correspondents were returned marked "addressee unknown.") Smith, Dewey, p.309. On the fifth
ballot Dewey had sent his delegates to Taft. Willkie had moved slightly
ahead George Seldes, the publisher of the fortnightly newsletter, In Fact, was virtually the only newspaperman to disclose the background of Willkie's candidacy. On April 29th eighteen prominent men, including Willkie and Thomas W. Lamont, a partner in the Morgan Bank, met secretly with a past legal advisor to the British Embassy, Frederic Coudert. Their purpose was to secure legislation to overturn the existing neutrality laws, to give all aid including soldiers to Britain and France and to prevent the Republicans from nominating a peace candidate. Willkie secured his selection as their candidate with an off-the-record speech at the National Press Club in which he advocated an industrial dictatorship for the United States— Big Business ruling with no government interference, regulation or controls. Seldes, Never Tire of Protesting, pp. 21-25. In an effort to recapture the black vote, the platform contained a strong civil rights plank— anti-lynching legislation, protection of voting rights, and abolition of discrimination in the civil service, all the armed forces and all branches of government. The foreign affairs plank straddled the isolationist-internationalist fence. "We favor the extension of aid to all people fighting for liberty or whose liberty is threatened as long as such aid is not in violation of international law or inconsistent with the requirements of our national defense." H.L. Mencken said the plank would fit both sending arms to England or sending only flowers. The plank was taken verbatim from an ad written by George Sylvester Viereck, a German agent, in the office of Congressman Hamilton Fish. The ad was signed by Fish and other isolationist congressmen and appeared in the New York Times and a dozen other papers. Germany paid the expenses of 50 isolationist congressmen to go to Philadelphia to "work with the delegates of the Republican Party in favor of the isolationist foreign policy." Peters, pp. 91-92. Davis, Into the Storm, pp. 576-583; Sitkoff, pp. 303-304; Peters, pp.74-115.] June 28, 1940 The Democratic governor of New York, Herbert Lehman, comes out in favor of a military draft. A newspaper story the same day reveals that the regular army stands at only 250,000 men despite vigorous recruitment efforts and the still large pool of unemployed men. [There had never been a peacetime draft and the issue was far too volatile politically for FDR to espouse military conscription, especially in an election year. FDR had persuaded Lehman to run for Lieutenant Governor on the ticket with him in 1928; Lehman succeeded FDR as governor and was now in his third term. It seems likely that FDR was calling in a favor from an old friend and that an equally friendly newspaper man placed the empty-army story on the same day.] June 30, 1940 Germany - Euthanasia of the 'Useless Eaters': The German Ministry of the Interior orders psychiatrists to begin the extermination of schizophrenics, the mentally defective, and other patients long hospitalized or unable to work. [The first
killings were by injection, but later gassing became the method
of choice. July 1, 1940 Willkie
challenges FDR to run for a third term because "I want to beat
him." July 1, 1940 The Germans
occupy England's Channel Islands located off the coast of France—
Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney and Sark. July 2, 1940 Operation Sea Lion: Hitler orders his military command to draw up plans for the invasion of Britain code-named Operation Sea Lion. Pétain moves his government from Bordeaux to the new capital of the unoccupied zone, Vichy. [Hitler's
military command told him: 155 transports will be needed for the
invasion which should not be undertaken until the Luftwaffe
has full control of the skies over Britain. July 2, 1940 FDR signs the National Defense Act and then places forty specific items under license. They include: all arms and ammunition, all raw materials listed as "critical and strategic" including aluminum and magnesium, airplane parts and equipment, optical instruments and metal working machinery. [One clause in the act gave the president the power to designate those materials needed for defense that could not then be exported without a specific license. It was anticipated that in his first Presidential Order under this act he would include oil and scrap iron, two commodities urgently needed by Japan that the China Lobby had been campaigning to have embargoed. Hull and FDR, wishing to avoid any confrontation with Japan that could lead to war, had refused the demands of the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression for an embargo against Japan. Within a year there would be 259 items under license, most of them exports to "friendly nations." Feis, Road, pp. 72-75; LaFeber, p.192; Utley, pp. 93-95.] July 3, 1940 Operation Catapult: Great Britain's Royal Navy attacks the French fleet- now controlled by the Vichy government- at Oran in North Africa, killing 1250 sailors, sinking the battleship Bretagne and beaching two other capital ships. [This operation, which was to cause lasting hard feeling between the two nations, could have been avoided if the French had kept their earlier promise and either sailed the ships to a British port, sent them across the Atlantic where they would be disarmed, or scuttled them. Other units of the French fleet were neutralized more harmlessly: ships in British ports were seized and those at Alexandria disabled. The aggressive action at Oran served to convince FDR that Britain indeed had the will to carry on the war alone. Gilbert, pp. 106-107; Shirer, Collapse, pp. 911-917.] July 4, 1940 Isolationist Joseph Kennedy, the US Ambassador to Great Britain, advises FDR that Britain cannot hope to win the war and cautions against the US being left "holding the bag." July 10, 1940 The French
National Assembly votes 569-80 to end the Third Republic and
give the country over to a dictatorship run by Pétain and Pierre
Laval. Laval had started his political career in 1914 as an extreme left-wing Socialist and pacifist who opposed the 1914-1918 war and welcomed the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. He soon began his journey to the far Right, serving in conservative cabinets and several times as premier in the early 1930s. Ousted as premier in 1936 after public indignation about the Hoare-Laval plan which would have given Mussolini more than half of Abyssinia— and the richest part— Laval became increasingly bitter about parliamentary democracy and started plotting with Pétain to bring about a totalitarian government. He was Time's Man of the Year in 1931. At the end of the war Pétain and Laval were tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Pétain's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Provisional President Charles de Gaulle; he lived for another six years, dying at age 96. Laval was executed in October, 1945. Shirer, Collapse, pp. 903-948.] July 10, 1940 The Battle of Britain, an air war designed to wipe out Britain's airfields, airplane factories, fighter planes and their pilots, begins. Bombers from the German Luftwaffe attack shipping in the English Channel and their fighter escorts tangle with RAF fighter planes. July 10, 1940 FDR asks Congress for another $4.8 billion for defense. July 16, 1940 Adolf Hitler radios his battle commanders: "I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England," adding that the Royal Air Force must be destroyed to prepare for the invasion. ULTRA technicians decode this directive from a Luftwaffe radio message. Lewin, p. 82.] July 17, 1940 Franklin Delano Roosevelt is nominated for an unprecedented third term by the Democratic Party; his running mate will be Secretary of Agriculture Henry Agard Wallace of Iowa. [Despite the
Gallup Poll that had 92% of the Democrats wanting FDR for a third
term, However, FDR
out-maneuvered them by having Chairman Alben Barkley read a message
in which he declared he did not want the nomination. Immediately,
loudspeaker voices throughout the hall orchestrated by the Chicago
superintendent of sewers clamored, The nomination
of Henry Wallace, FDR's choice for Vice-President, was opposed by
the southerners and the party machinery. They favored the Speaker
of the House William Bankhead. (Bankhead would die less than three
months after the convention.) FDR gave differing
reasons for his choice depending upon the audience. A likely reason
was the assumption that Wallace would garner black voters—
who held the balance of power in five northern and midwestern states,
or a total of 188 electoral votes. However FDR told Frances Perkins,
a favorite confidante, that he thought Wallace was the best man
for the job and "would be a good man if something happened to the
President. He is no isolationist. The isolationists succeeded in the inclusion of a platform plank that promised the United States would not participate in foreign wars or send troops to fight in foreign lands. FDR prevailed upon them to accept an escape clause- "except in case of attack." Morgan, pp. 529-530; Shogan, p. 115; Burns, Lion and the Fox, pp. 426-428; Friedel, p. 344; O'Reilly, pp.128-129; Peters, p. 144; Markowitz, pp. 28-30.] July 19, 1940 FDR signs the "Two-Ocean Navy" Bill, designed to continue holding off Japan in the Pacific without ceding the Atlantic to Germany. [At this time
the Navy was equipped to defend only the Pacific Ocean; the country
had depended on the British Royal Navy to defend the Atlantic. The
bill called for a more than doubling of the tonnage of the navy-
1,325,000 tons, by far the largest naval expansion authorized to
that date. It passed the House with less than two hours' debate.
Perrett, Days of Sadness, p. 36; Feis,
p. 91. Izzy Stone noted rather caustically that the Senate Naval Affairs Committee had stated— five days after the Blitzkrieg had begun— that it saw no reason to increase naval appropriations. Congress did not act on Admiral Stark's request for an increase of 25% in tonnage until six days before the French surrender, and then they cut the increase to 11%. Stone further lamented what he called "shipbuilding at leisure". In January, 1941 there were 34 shipyards, 21 of which were building naval vessels. In 1940 there were 83 shipways of 300 feet or more as compared with the 1099 shipways that were available in shipyards in the last war. Ships were even more crucial now, he said, and not just to deliver supplies such as food to the British, but also to bring tin, rubber, tungsten and hemp from the Far East, chrome and manganese from Africa, bauxite from Dutch Guiana, and copper anmd nitrate from Chile- all vital to the war effort and in extremely short supply. Stone, Business as Usual, pp. 18, 23-26.] July 25, 1940 The US puts
controls on aviation gasoline (87 octane and higher) and lubricants
and #1 heavy melting iron and steel scrap. [Morgenthau
had trued to pull a fast one and make the embargo order for all
oil and all scrap metal. This attempt at an end run around
the State Department was caught in time; In the weeks
before the announcement Japan was attempting to buy huge quantities
of oil not only in tanker loads but also in steel drums for delivery
to southern ports of China. July 30, 1940 BETWEEN
US AND HITLER STANDS THE BRITISH FLEET! — is the headline
of large ads run by the White Committee in major newspapers. The
text declares that Britain's most urgent need is destroyers and
that the United States has a surplus. July 31, 1940 Limits on US Export of Aviation Gasoline: In a ruling aimed at Japan, FDR announces: "In the interests of national defense the export of aviation gasoline is being limited to nations of the Western Hemisphere, except where such gasoline is required elsewhere for the operations of American-owned companies." (Great Britain continued to receive such supplies via Canada.) Feis, Rise, p. 93; Bailey and Ryan, p. 93. August 1, 1940 The new Konoye government in Japan issues a "Proclamation of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." ["East Asia" used to mean Japan, northern China, Manchuria and Mongolia. At a press conference Foreign Minister Matsuoka defined "Greater East Asia" as including Indochina and Indonesia. A secret paper revealed the sphere would encompass Indochina, Thailand, Malaya, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, India, Australia, and New Zealand. LaFeber, pp. 192-193. The "sphere" would turn out to be more of a pyramid with the Japanese being the masters at the top, as the Japanese considered the other peoples of Asia to be racially inferior. Initially the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and others would cheer "Asia for the Asians" and applaud when the white colonial powers met defeat. They would soon learn that the Japanese were a more brutal occupying power. Bess, pp.30-31.] August 2, 1940 FDR calls for enactment of the first peacetime draft in the nation's history. [The public hearings on the Burke-Wadsworth bill were acrimonious. A fistfight broke out in the House of Representatives; heavily-veiled women calling themselves the Death Watch sat in the gallery; Senator Pepper, an ardent supporter of conscription, was hanged in effigy on Capitol Hill by the "Mothers of America" group. Potential draftees rushed to the altar; marriage license applications rose by 40% in Los Angeles. Part of the opposition to the draft was based on memories of the kind of army that had fought in the Great War— vicious MPs, petty despotism, class distinctions, even murder, torture and wanton cruelty on the part of some officers, such as Lieutenant "Hard-Boiled" Smith. After a three-day debate the Senate passed the bill, 58-31. Perrett, Days of Sadness, pp. 30-33.] August 4, 1940 Colonel William Donovan returns to the United States after a three-week fact-finding tour of Britain undertaken on behalf of FDR and Secretary of the Navy Knox. [His secret mission had been to interview all the British leaders, inspect their military facilities, and then assess both England's determination to fight and her chances of success. He was briefed on British strategies and new instruments of war— fighter planes, radar network, floating mines to protect the coastline against invasion, the resistance network in occupied Europe, and the operation to "turn" captured German spies. When shown Hitler's decoded July 16th order, he realized the British had broken the "Enigma" code. Equally impressive to him was the fact the British had dispersed their fighter planes throughout England, making the destruction of the Royal Air Force— Hitler's stated precursor of an invasion— a most difficult, if not impossible, task. As a result Donovan reported to FDR that Britain under Churchill's leadership would not surrender to either "ruthless air raids or to an invasion," and he gave them a 2-to-1 chance of victory. He then lobbied the cabinet and selected members of Congress to give Britain the destroyers and all other aid that they needed. Shogan, pp. 117-136. Privately he urged FDR to establish a propaganda office to counter the Nazi "fifth column" in America. Laurie, pp.75-77.] August 4, 1940 Two nationwide radio speeches address the implications for America of the war in Europe. General John "Black Jack" Pershing, the revered head of the military in World War I, now 80, urges that "at least fifty of the over-age destroyers which are left from the days of the World War" be made available to the British or Canadian governments. "I am telling you tonight before it is too late that the British navy needs destroyers to convoy merchant ships, hunt submarines, and repel invasion." Colonel Lindbergh's speech entitled "Keeping America Out of War" advocates "cooperation" with Germany if Hitler should win the war. [FDR had sent an indirect message to Pershing asking him to make the public stand in favor of the destroyer transfer that FDR felt politically afraid to make, despite another plea from Churchill a few days earlier in which he named the eleven destroyers recently sunk and warned that if the British did not receive a substantial replacement "the whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor." Editorial response to Pershing's speech was mostly favorable. Gallup polls during the summer had indicated a growing confidence in Britain's ability to defeat Germany and willingness to ship arms, food and planes to Britain even if that delayed America's defense preparedness. Shogan, pp. 155-160.] August 6, 1940 Harry S Truman wins the Democratic primary for Senator by a scant 8000 votes. Truman had campaigned on his record of support for FDR's New Deal measures, despite no endorsement from FDR. [In those days winning the Democratic primary in Missouri virtually assured the election in November. Truman's principal rival was Governor Lloyd Stark who had attempted to smear Truman with his connection to the Pendergast machine of Kansas City; Tom Pendergast had gone to prison in May for evasion of income tax.] August 8, 1940 Hitler's Luftwaffe begins "Eagle Attack", a month-long aerial assault on England's airfields, aircraft factories and radar facilities to soften up the island kingdom for "Sea Lion," the invasion half-heartedly planned for September. Churchill repeats his request to FDR for destroyers. [This second phase of the "Battle of Britain" was more costly to Britain than to Germany. Even though Britain was manufacturing more planes than Germany, her percentage of planes and pilots lost each week was greater.] August 11, 1940 "No Legal Bar Seen to Transfer of Destroyers; Ample Authority for Sale of Overage Naval Vessels to Great Britain Exists in Present Laws, According to Opinion by Legal Experts" reads the three-column headline in The New York Times of a letter drafted by Ben Cohen and Dean Acheson and co-signed by several prominent Republican attorneys. [The principal target of the letter was FDR who had insisted to his advisors that he could not proceed on the destroyers without Congressional approval. FDR was most adept at orchestrating public opinion for measures which he seemed reluctant to undertake. Shogan, pp. 177-191.] August 17, 1940 The Germans proclaim their "sphere of operation" around Britain; this is the beginning of the U-boat War. A Gallup poll reveals that 62 percent of Americans approve of selling destroyers to the British. Shogan, p. 231. August 17, 1940 Wendell Willkie essentially endorses FDR's foreign policy in his acceptance speech and calls for military conscription, saying, "some sort of selective service is the only democratic way." [This speech smoothed the way for FDR to gain acceptance for his overage destroyer exchange and for the Burke-Wadsworth peacetime conscription bill. Peters, p. 173.] August 20, 1940 Great Britain: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill pays tribute to the Royal Air Force: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." August 24, 1940 A Fortuitous Accident: A German bomber crew, hopelessly lost, drops its load of bombs and heads for home. Unbeknownst to them they have hit London, violating Hitler's edict to avoid civilian targets. [In retaliation
Churchill sent bombers which hit German cities several times the
next week. This enraged Hitler so much that he changed his strategy
and attempted to bomb the citizens of London and other English cities
into capitulation. This, of course, didn't work. Military historians believe that another twenty-four hours or "one more immense raid" could have changed the course of the war— if Hitler had maintained the plan of bombing airfields and radar installations, he could have indeed finished off the RAF.] September 2, 1940 The Destroyers-for-Bases deal: By executive order FDR agrees to give England fifty "outdated" naval destroyers in exchange for the outright gift of bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda and 99-year leases of sites for military bases on numerous British islands— the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Antigua— and British Guiana. The destroyers have recently been reconditioned at a cost of nearly $50 million. Part of the deal is a commitment from Churchill that the British fleet would be neither surrendered nor scuttled in the event of a German victory but rather transferred to Canada or Australia to continue the battle. [This action abandoned any pretense at neutrality: FDR felt the destroyers were crucial for Britain's survival and knew that the isolationists would delay or defeat any enabling legislation. Major news media such as the New York Times, New York Herald-Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Time and even the Chicago Tribune praised the action, describing it as "epochal" and "a triumph." The Atlanta Constitution: "one of the greatest defense strokes made in behalf of the protection of this country." The Baltimore Sun: "a bargain in which the United States gets far and away the better of the deal." New Orleans Times-Picayune: "Second only in importance to the Louisiana Purchase." Peters, p. 171 .Outrage was immediate from the usual quarters. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Roosevelt today committed an act of war.... became America's first dictator." The New York Daily News: "The United States has one foot in the war, and one foot on a banana peel." Republican Candidate Wendell Willkie, who had called for aid to Britain, condemned the bypassing of Congress as "the most arbitrary and dictatorial act of any President in the history of the United States." In the years since, constitutional scholars have been severely critical of FDR's failure to get a congressional endorsement. Senator Moynihan (D-NY) argues that FDR was "clearly subject to impeachment" for this subversion of the law. Robert Shogan, a student of the presidency, believes that this action set the precedent for future presidential arrogations of power: Truman's "police action" in Korea, Eisenhower's dispatch of Marines to Lebanon, Kennedy's blockade of Cuba, Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam, Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, and the massive military buildup in the Persian Gulf by Bush père , for example. Shogan, chapter 14. (Shogan's book was written in 1995 before the outrages of Bush fils.) The destroyers-for-bases swap was a most non-neutral act; Hitler would have been justified by international law in declaring war on the United States— something he was determined to avoid in this period. The destroyers would be very useful to the British and the Newfoundland base became invaluable in protecting the convoys in the North Atlantic from Nazi submarines. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 94-95. Construction of the Naval Base at Argentia, Newfoundland was accomplished in record time. It was there that the USS Augusta and HMS Prince of Wales dropped anchor for the historic "Atlantic Charter" meeting of FDR and Winston Churchill. [See entry for August 14, 1941] During the Cold War nuclear weapons were secretly stored at bases at Goose Bay and Argentia, Newfoundland, as part of the strategic "forward deployment" program from 1950 to 1971. The CBC aired a program in 2005 about an American veteran, Almon Scott, who claimed that his cancer was a result of his exposure to nuclear material during his 1963-1965 station at Argentia. The US government denied that he had been exposed to any nuclear weapons and refused to give him his service records. CBC News, May 10, 2005; Duane Brett, "Canada's Nuclear Schizophremis," Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, March/April 2002. ] September 4, 1940 The first three destroyers leave Boston on their way to England; the next eight would leave the next day. Peters, p. 172. September 5, 1940 Prelude to Operation Torch: Robert Daniel Murphy, the US chargé d'affaires at Vichy, arrives in New York in response to a super-secret cable from the State Department. [He was then ordered by FDR to return to Vichy and get permits for travel in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia and also Dakar, the port on the bulge of West Africa. He was to prepare a secret report for FDR's eyes only on economic conditions in North Africa as well as the attitudes and opinions of the French bureaucracy there, the business community and the Arab and Berber peoples and their leaders. No record was made of this meeting. Vaughan, pp. 21-32; Murphy, pp. 55-76.] September 7, 1940 Battle for Britain: Hitler's Luftwaffe begins the massive bombing of London, Plymouth, and other British cities. [In a massive daylight attack on London 300 bombers, accompanied by 600 fighters, set the London docks and their explosive contents on fire. The flames then served as a beacon to guide the night bombers. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy retreated most evenings to a country estate 25 miles away from the bombers' targets— which he had rented after the fall of France. In contrast, the royal family refused to leave London's Buckingham Palace thus endearing themselves to the British public in the same measure that Kennedy was reviled for his "cowardice" and defeatism. Koskoff, Joseph P. Kennedy, pp. 256-259.] September 10, 1940 Wendell Willkie makes a strong statement opposing an amendment that would delay passage of the Burke-Wadsworth conscription bill. [He also persuaded numerous Republicans, including the House Minority leader, Joe Martin, to oppose the delaying amendment and vote for the bill. After its passage, Senator Hiram Johnson said that Willkie had "broken the back" of the opposition. Peters, p. 173.] September 15, 1940 Battle of Britain Day, in which the Luftwaffe makes 1786 sorties against British airfields and radio stations in a pattern designed to lure the majority of RAF squadrons into a losing battle which would destroy the RAF. [Alerted to the strategy by ULTRA's decodes, the plan failed; the Germans lost 75 aircraft, the British, 34. This day is considered to be the turning point of the Battle of Britain. Lewin, pp. 86-87.] September 16, 1940 The Draft: FDR signs the Burke-Wadsworth Selective Training and Service Act which has been considerably modified since its introduction three months before. It now requires men only 21-35 to register for military training. A maximum of nine hundred thousand may be drafted into the military to serve for a one-year term beginning in October. [The bill had been stalled in Congress all summer despite its endorsement by both presidential candidates in their acceptance speeches. The major opposition came from Taft, Vandenberg, Wheeler and Hiram Johnson in the Senate and Hamilton Fish in the House. Burns, Lion, p. 439; Freidel, p. 347: Peters, p. 173. Ex-President Hoover had earlier warned that "it is fairly certain that capitalism cannot survive American participation in this war." Carroll and Noble, p. 347.] September 17, 1940 Battle for Britain: Hitler gives orders that Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain, is indefinitely postponed. [The orders, decoded by ULTRA, indicated that Hitler realized he could not successfully invade before winter since the RAF had not been destroyed. Lewin, p. 95. Ten per cent of the invasion fleet in various Channel ports had been destroyed by RAF bombers. Liddell Hart, p. 107. Also, Hitler hoped to make a peace treaty with Great Britain that would give him a free hand for his "great, true mission- the struggle against Bolshevism." Fest, p. 170.] September 20, 1940 Gallup Poll: FDR has taken a decisive lead over Willkie since the announcement of the exchange of destroyers for sea bases. The poll predicts an electoral win of 453-78. Shogan, p. 245. [Columnist Dorothy Thompson came out for FDR after Willkie, fighting his decline in the polls, abandoned his support of FDR's foreign policy and started making isolationist speeches—"we shall not fight anyone else's war." Her paper, the New York Herald Tribune, had been a major promoter of Willkie's candidacy; the owner and staff were fiercely pro-Willkie. 1 When Thompson refused to retract, she was fired and took her column to the liberal New York Post. Kurth, pp. 320-327.] 1 As was well-known to all journalists, the Herald-Tribune book review editor, Irita Van Doren, was having an affair with the married Willkie. Kurth, p. 320. But this was before the days of Gary Hart and Bill Clinton! Willkie saw to it that the Republican National Committee did not use the "guru letters" that Henry Wallace had written to Nicholas Roerich in the early '30s as he feared a tit-for-tat from the Democrats, a political dirty trick that FDR was quite prepared to use. Morgan, FDR, pp. 531-534. September 21, 1940 The US certifies that 250,000 Enfield rifles are not essential for defense and sends them to England. Shogan, p. 247. September 22, 1940 Japan invades northern Indo-China and occupies the province of Tonkin. [The new bases in Hanoi put their bombers within range of Kunming, the Chinese terminus of the "Burma Road," the tortuous mountain mule track from Burma over which supplies came for Chiang's army. The first raid occurred September 30th. It also gave Japan greater access to Indochina's rice, rubber, manganese, zinc, tin, antimony and other products. Feis, Road, pp. 98-104; Ford, p. 40.] September 25, 1940 Japanese Diplomatic Code Cracked: The Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) of the US Army deciphers the code that the Japanese use for their secret diplomatic messages. [Chief William F. Friedman labels the code PURPLE. The raw messages were sent to the Chief of Staff without any analysis or interpretation. After Pearl Harbor Secretary of War Stimson organized a team that would provide background information and summarize the "magic" messages. These MAGIC Summaries were sent to ten people in Washington: Stimson, Chief of Staff George C. Marshall and two other men in the Army; the secretary of the Navy and Admiral Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations; FDR and his military Advisor, Admiral William D. Leahy; the secretary of state and the assistant secretary of state in charge of signals intelligence. The United States gave the British the information necessary for them to build their own PURPLE Code decrypting machine; in reciprocity, the US was given similar data for decrypting the German Enigma code. These two sets of messages, nicknamed MAGIC and ULTRA, enabled the Allies to have details of shipping and German army maneuvers and thereby make strategic moves that, according to MacArthur's operations officer "shortened the war by two years" and saved "many thousands of lives." Lee. Marching Orders, pp. 1-18. According to Robert Stinnett, some of the Japanese naval codes were broken during this same period, providing critical intelligence that authors frequently attribute to PURPLE, the diplomatic code. Stinnett, pp.21-23. ] September 26, 1940 The United States places an embargo on shipments of all grades of steel and iron scrap outside the Western Hemisphere- except for Great Britain. [This was
aimed at Japan as a response to her invasion of French Indochina
and the Secretary of the Interior Ickes had been urging FDR to embargo all oil since December, 1939 on the moral grounds that US oil and gasoline made Japan's war on China possible. Ickes, Secret Diary, III, p. 96. Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau thought that if both scrap metal and oil had been embargoed months before, Japan would not have dared to invade northern French Indo-China nor would she have entered into a military alliance with Germany. Historian Herbert Feis believes the opposite: that an earlier embargo would have caused Japan to "move farther and faster" and that the war might have begun a year earlier than it did. (Feis was chief of the Economic Affairs Division within the State Department during this period.) Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor, pp. 105-107.] September 27, 1940 Japan, Germany and Italy sign the Tri-Partite Pact. Japan is recognized as dominant in "Greater East Asia" and Germany and Italy in Europe. (The Germans are unaware of Japan's ambitions for "Greater East Asia" and believe the area to be limited to Indochina, Indonesia and British Malaya.) The three nations agree to come to one another's aid if attacked by a country "at present not involved in the European War or the Sino-Japanese Conflict" meaning, of course, the United States. (This ten-year military and economic pact does not obligate the members to join in a war that any one of them starts.) [Foreign Minister
Matsuoka stated the purpose of the pact to the Imperial Conference
Matsuoka believed he could use the US to force China to sign a peace agreement on Japan's terms. This would then free Japan to move south, seize the oil facilities of Southeast Asia, thus breaking its dependence on US oil. Feis, Road, pp. 110-121; LaFeber , pp. 194-195.] 2 In a Gallup poll of September 30 only 32% were willing to let Japan control China as compared to 47% on July 20th. 39% were willing to risk war to prevent Japan's control as compared to 12 % two months earlier. 88% approved of FDR's embargo on scrap iron and 57% favored taking steps "to keep Japan from becoming more powerful even if this means risking war." Feis, Road, p. 122. September 28, 1940 Transportation: FDR dedicates the Washington National Airport which will open officially on June 16, 1941. [From the beginning of his first administration FDR had agitated for a modern airport to replace the hazardous "Washington-Hoover" private airport at the base of the 14th Street Bridge. The airport's one runway was bisected by heavily traveled Military Road; guards were posted to flag down traffic during takeoffs and landings. Pilots had to time their landings for breaks in the traffic. When Congress delayed acting, FDR declared by fiat that the area of the Potomac at Gravelly Point would be filled and four runways constructed. The funds for construction were cobbled together from PWA and WPA moneys. Without FDR's initiative, his Solicitor General Robert H. Jackson noted Washington would have entered World War II without an adequate airport. The airport was renamed for Ronald Reagan in 1998. Jackson, That Man, pp. 47-48, 232; www.mwaa.com/national/history.htm; Brinkley, Washington, p. 74.] October 4, 1940 Hitler and Mussolini meet at the Brenner Pass: The New York Times' bureau chief in Rome reports that the two agree to do all in their power to defeat FDR in the coming election because of his foreign policy. New York Times, October 4, 1940. Hitler is en route to meet with Pétain and Franco. He hopes to persuade the former to collaborate with Germany and the latter to enter the war as a payback for the Axis' contribution to Franco's victory. Mussolini tries to persuade Hitler not to trust Pétain— a close partnership there would prevent Italy from gaining the spoils Mussolini has asked for: Nice, Corsica, Tunisia, and Djibouti. Hitler says that such decisions, including all French colonies, must wait until the end of the war. Ridley, pp. 315-318. October 4, 1940 Another US Cryptographic Victory: Naval cryptographers begin to decipher Japanese ship transmissions that use the 5-num code that had been successfully broken by the navy's veteran civilian cryptographer, Agnes Meyer Driscoll. [In the months preceding the attack on Pearl Harbor thousands of messages were received at the twenty-two Pacific Rim radio intercept stations and decrypted in the four cryptographic centers and then sent on to FDR and a few key military leaders. This was called the "splendid arrangement" by FDR. It would reveal the Japanese plans for an attack on Pearl Harbor and the daily progress of the First Air Fleet across the North Pacific. Beginning in April, 1941 Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short at Pearl Harbor were cut off the list of recipients. Yet the results of this "splendid arrangement" were shared with Churchill, with General MacArthur in the Philippines, with Admiral Thomas Hart, commander of the small Asiatic Fleet, and with the Dutch Army and Navy in Batavia. The bypass of Admiral Kimmel was apparently ordered by Captain Joseph Redman, Assistant Director of Naval Communications and orchestrated by Rear Admiral Royal Ingersoll, Assistant Chief of Naval Operations. In none of the several post-war investigations of Pearl Harbor was it revealed that the Japanese naval codes had been broken. The boards were allowed to believe that the ships had maintained complete radio silence in their trip across the North Pacific from Hitokappu Bay, something that was patently untrue. Stinnett, pp. 57, 60-82.] October 6, 1940 Gallup Poll: FDR has increased his popular lead over Willkie to 12 points. It is predicted that Willkie will get only 32 electoral votes. [Willkie began taking the advice of the isolationists like publisher Robert McCormick, accusing FDR of a secret agreement to enter the war. He pledged that "if you elect me," no servicemen would be sent overseas. Peters conjectures that the enforced absence of Irita Van Doren from his life had much to do with his isolationist rhetoric, as her influence had been great in the formation of his internationalist views. Peters, pp. 176-177.] October 7, 1940 The McCollum
Eight-Point Memo: Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, head
of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence, believing
that war with Japan is inevitable, advocates certain measures that
the US might take to insure that Japan strikes first: With the ten-day-old Tri-Partite Pact in place, war with Japan would also mean war with Germany, a circumstance favored by many in Washington in addition to McCollum. [According to historian Robert Stinnett the memo was sent to two of FDR's most trusted military advisors— Captain Dudley Knox and Captain Walter Anderson, the latter also being McCollum's boss, the head of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). While there is no paper trail for the memo arriving on FDR's desk, Stinnett notes that all of McCollum's suggestions were eventually undertaken by FDR. The memo had wide circulation in government circles; for instance, Under Secretary of State Breckinridge Long made mention of it in his diary for this date. Stinnett, pp. 6-10, 14, 321-322.] October 8, 1940 FDR describes his plan to keep the US Fleet based in Hawaiian waters at a luncheon with the commander of the fleet, Admiral James Richardson, and Admiral William D. Leahy, his trusted military advisor. [According to Richardson, FDR said: "Sooner or later the Japanese would commit an overt act against the United States and the nation would be willing to enter the war." Richardson was indignant that FDR would be willing to put the fleet in harm's way and was prepared to sacrifice a ship to provoke a Japanese "mistake." In February FDR reassigned positions for his emerging two-ocean navy; Richardson was relieved of his command and sent to a desk job; Admiral Husband Kimmel was placed in command of the Pacific Fleet permanently based in Hawaii. And so Item F of the McCollum memo was implemented. Stinnett, pp. 10-12.] October 8, 1940 The State Department advises Americans to evacuate Far East countries as soon as possible. New York Times, October 9, 1940, p. 1. October 16, 1940 The Draft:
This is the first day of registration under the Selective Service
Act. October 22, 1940 Isolationism: Ambassador Joseph Kennedy leaves England for the US. [He had been asking to be called home for many weeks, but FDR and his advisors wanted "that troublemaker" kept safely out of the country. Finally he circulated rumors that he had sent an article which was highly critical of FDR to US newspapers to appear on November 1st "if by accident" he was not able to leave London, which would be "of considerable importance appearing five days before the Presidential election." The blackmail worked; he got his "recall for consultation." The British were not unhappy to see him go. He and his family had been enthusiastically received when he was first appointed in 1937, but his widespread comments about the certain defeat of England and his departure from London when the bombing raids began earned him enmity and the label of "coward." It was widely believed in the Republican leadership that he would resign the ambassadorship, accuse FDR of secret agreements with the British and endorse Willkie for the presidency. However, he was met by a phalanx of Foreign Service officers and policemen who escorted him and his wife, Rose, onto a plane for Washington and dinner with the president. FDR poured on the charm and succeeded in persuading Kennedy to make a speech endorsing him for president. Many years later Kennedy confided the other half of the deal to Clare Boothe Luce: If he endorsed FDR in 1940, FDR would support son Joe Jr. for the Massachusetts governorship in 1942. Kennedy kept his side of the bargain, possibly sealing the election for FDR with these words: "Unfortunately, during this political campaign, there has arisen the charge that the President of the United States is trying to involve this country in the world war. Such a charge is false. . . . I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt should be re-elected President of the United States." Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt, pp. 212-221.] October 23, 1940 Campaign Promises: Willkie, who has been barnstorming the country with his charges that FDR is a "war-monger," yells to the crowd in St. Louis: "We do not want to send our boys over there again and we do not intend to." [FDR's aides became alarmed at the slippage in the polls and persuaded FDR to make some speeches in the final two weeks of the campaign. In Madison Square Garden on October 30 he said the words that would come back to haunt him: "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into foreign wars," quite forgetting to use the weasel words "except in case of attack." Willkie, hearing him on the radio, told his brother: "That hypocritical son of a bitch! This is going to beat me." Freidel, pp 354-355; Morgan, p. 539.] October 25, 1940 African-American Concerns: Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, the only African-American line officer, is promoted to brigadier general in an effort to defuse anger among blacks and white liberals over the refusal of the Air Corps to accept applications from "colored persons." Perrett, Days of Sadness, p. 37. [The Baltimore
Afro-American refused to endorse FDR for a third term, saying
that Southern power had made the President keep silence on any anti-lynching
legislation. The Pittsburgh-Courier, which had enthusiastically championed FDR in 1932 and 1936, had endorsed Willkie as a response to the exclusion of African-Americans from the benefits of New Deal legislation: "With perhaps the best intentions in the world and with a Northern president in the White House, Washington has become overrun with Southerners and from the time of the NRA we have seen ample evidence of their attitude and handiwork where colored people are concerned. . . . the Southern-dominated administration has worked assiduously to establish color discrimination and segregation as a policy of the Federal government, and to a distressing extent it has succeeded." Katznelson, When Affirmative Action was White, pp. 26-27.] October 25, 1940 Japanese Pressure on Dutch East Indies: Through a PURPLE intercept, FDR and Arthur McCollum learn more about the mission of Japanese minister of commerce Kobayashi to the Dutch East Indies. In addition to the increased delivery of oil and petroleum products over a five-year period, the Japanese are seeking a ground lease to establish a "technical base" to be manned by "disguised troops." [McCollum and Dutch naval attaché Captain Johann Ranneft consulted, the Dutch government in exile in London was warned, and both the ground lease and the augmented delivery of oil were denied. Action Item G of McCollum's October 7th memo was now in place. Stinnett, pp. 39-43.] October 25, 1940 Labor: CIO head, John L. Lewis, calls for FDR's defeat in a radio broadcast heard by twenty-five to thirty million Americans: "Personal craving for power, the overweening abnormal and selfish craving for increased power is a thing to alarm and dismay. . . . America needs no Superman. . . . America wants no royal family." Instead he calls for labor to vote for Willkie: "He is not an aristocrat. He has the common touch. He has worked with his hands, and has known the pangs of hunger." Lewis then threatens to resign as president of the CIO should its members support FDR. [A public break from Roosevelt had been building since the 1936 election. As early as March, 1937 Lewis proclaimed a strong non-interventionist stance against the incipient war in Europe. Speaking at an anti-Nazi rally, he said: "Europe is on the brink of disaster and it must be our care that she does not drag us into the abyss after her." The security of the United States would be" better served by domestic economic reform than by overseas entanglements." When the "Roosevelt depression" hit in 1937-1938, Lewis was very critical of FDR's half-measures. He demanded and continued to demand through 1939 that the federal government find jobs for the 13 million unemployed workers, that billions (rather than millions) be spent on public housing, and that the elderly be provided with an adequate and dignified retirement by some increased form of Social Security. Labor failed to obey Lewis' edict; workers voted overwhelmingly for FDR. At the CIO convention two weeks after the election, Lewis resigned as president. He was succeeded by Philip Murray. Lewis remained the president of the United Mine Workers, but he would never again wield the kind of influence he had in the decade of the '30s. Dubovsky and Van Tine, pp.243-267. ] October 28, 1940 Mussolini's
troops invade Greece. [The invasion was a foolhardy venture—
4 divisions sent against 15 Greek divisions; the Italians were soon
driven out with 85,000 casualties. Possibly Mussolini did it out
of pique that Hitler had invaded Romania on the 7th without telling
him in advance: "Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli! This
time I am going to pay him back in his own coin. He will find out
in the papers that I have occupied Greece. October 29, 1940 The Draft: The first peacetime conscription law goes into effect in the United States as a lottery draws numbers for the first draftees. A blind-folded Secretary of War Stimson draws the numbers from a huge goldfish bowl as FDR watches. "This is a most solemn ceremony," he tells the radio audience. "It is accompanied by no fanfare— no blowing of bugles or beating of drums. There should be none." [His political advisors had urged FDR to postpone the drawing or at least not to preside over it. Willkie's tone had changed with the closeness of the election; in addition to calling FDR a "war monger," he was now predicting war within six months should he be re-elected. Davis, Storm, p. 620; Burns, Lion, p. 448.] November 5, 1940 Presidential Election: For the first time in history, an American president wins a third term. FDR defeats Republican Wendell Willkie by 449-82 electoral votes. Prior to 1940 two-term presidents had followed the unwritten law- the precedent of George Washington- not to seek a third term. The Democrats gain six seats in the House, lose three in the Senate. [At the beginning
of the campaign Willkie's policies had differed little from FDR's.
He had supported the New Deal and preparations for war— political
commentators called them "Tweedledum and Tweedledee." At least three
things contributed to FDR's victory: November 11-12, 1940 British
naval planes destroy the Italian fleet at Taranto. November 12, 1940 Sabotage in the US: Three arms factories in Pennsylvania and New Jersey explode within a fifty-minute period, killing thirty-two people. There have been other arsenal explosions and ships mysteriously sunk in New York harbor; German espionage is generally suspected, remembering the Black Tom incident. Secretary of War Stimson is reminded of John McCloy's painstaking investigation of Black Tom and brings him into the department as his aide. Millman, pp. 275-276. November 12-14, 1940 Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov visits Berlin for talks regarding the Soviet Union's possible entry into the Three-Power Pact. [His behavior was arrogant and his demands excessive: the Germans should pull out of Finland, the Soviet Union should have a military base in the Dardanelles and Bulgaria must be included in the Soviet safety zone. (Ribbentrop had unsuccessfully tried to direct Soviet military moves south toward the Indian Ocean.) Hitler refused these demands which would have made Germany a Russian satellite. Topitsch believes that this meeting was part of Stalin's strategy to provoke Hitler into invading the Soviet Union, thus incurring blame from the rest of the world and instilling the Soviet people with war fever to protect the Motherland against the treaty-breaking invader. The timing was important: Stalin had delayed the meeting until after the election in the USA. It was clear that Hitler's position had weakened considerably since the summer. He had lost the air warfare with England and had failed to obtain military support from Pétain and Franco. Economically, Germany was dependent on raw materials from the Soviet Union. Topitsch, pp. 8, 84-91.] November 14, 1940 Luftwaffe planes fire-bomb and destroy the venerable English city of Coventry. [After the war the government was criticized, claiming that Coventry had been "sacrificed" to prevent the Germans from knowing that their intelligence messages had been decoded. Actually the ULTRA intercepts warned of a major incendiary bombing that night- "Moonlight Sonata"- but the destination was unclear and presumed to be London. Lewin, pp. 99-103.] November 16, 1940 The Warsaw Ghetto: The last of the 138,000 Jews not already resident in the ghetto move in. The 113,000 gentiles who lived in this space before the announcement of the ghetto on the Day of Atonement, October 12, have already moved out. There are now 450,000 Jews— 30% of Warsaw's population-living in an enclosed area that represents 2.4% of the land area of the city of Warsaw. This is the largest population of Jews in Europe and the second in the world after New York City. [The walls were 3.5 meters high and topped with barbed wire. The construction company, Schmidt and M?nstermann, had been at work since April. One of their next projects would be the Treblinka death camp. Food rations for Jews were 253 kcal a day, as compared to 669 kcal for gentile Poles and 2613 kcal for Germans. By February 2, 1942 an estimated 20% of the original population had starved to death. The ghetto population, however, continued to be augmented by Jews brought there from other cities and from the countryside. There were also many deaths from typhus and other diseases. Operation Reinhard was the first phase of the Final Solution devised in the Wannsee Conference— the extermination of the Polish Jews. In July, 1941 the deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka began. The head of the Jewish council, Adam Czerniakow, committed suicide on July 23 rather than fulfill the order of supplying the names for the 6000 daily quota. The Jewish Underground met, but decided against resistance, as it was originally believed that people were destined for a slave labor camp where conditions would be preferable to those in the ghetto. By September, 1942 350,000 Jews had been sent to Treblinka, most of whom were gassed to death. The remaining Jews in the ghetto, around 35,000, were considered "essential workers" and allowed to remain to work in German factories both inside and outside the ghetto and, later, to demolish the ghetto walls. On January 18, 1943 the Germans attempted to resume the deportations to Treblinka and the Jews resisted. After four days, the Germans halted the deportations; the resistance fighters built fighting posts and exacted justice against the collaborators in their midst in preparation for the final struggle. That came on the eve of Passover, April 19. The Germans did not fare well with the urban guerrilla warfare and finally resorted to shelling the entire ghetto. It was over by May 16; those not shot or gassed or burnt alive in their bunkers were transported to Treblinka and other extermination camps. Wikipedia; www.deathcamps.org/occupation/warsaw%20ghetto.html.] Wladyslaw Szpilman was one of the very few Jews to survive the ghetto, the threat of deportation and life in hiding while the Germans systematically destroyed Warsaw before their retreat in 1945. His haunting memoir of six years of his life, 1939-1945, The Pianist, was made into a film by Roman Polanski.] November 20, 1940 Hungary
is persuaded to join the Tri-Partite Pact. Nazi propagandists and salesmen had persuaded the upper classes. "If they could line up two or three per cent of the élite, taking care that these were in the right places and had sufficient power, the bloodless conquest of any of these countries could be assured. These tactics worked out perfectly in all four of the above-named Balkan countries except Yugoslavia; and they might have worked there if the public had not learned too much too quickly." Stowe, p. 212.] November 22, 1940 War in the Balkans: The Greeks, having pushed Mussolini's "parade to Athens" army out of Greece and into mountainous Albania, capture Koritsa in western Albania. They are poised to push the Italians into the Adriatic when winter sets in. Stowe, p. 233. November 22, 1940 Bailout Needed: Lord Lothian, Great Britain's ambassador to the United States, greets reporters upon his return from England: "Well, boys, Britain's broke. It's your money we need now." [There were immediate editorials on the need to sustain Britain. The New Republic: ". . . it is unthinkable that financial circumstances should be allowed to endanger the movement across the Atlantic of a huge and increasing quantity of war materials." (Arming Britain had ended both unemployment and the Depression in the United States.) And Willkie, in a speech in New York, after offering a toast to the President of the United States, said that "we must continue to help the fighting men of Britain to preserve that realm of freedom which is gradually shrinking, which if we continue to let it shrink, will shrink to the edge of our shores." Peters, pp. 179-180. ] December 10, 1940 Germany: Hitler, speaking to workers in a munitions factory, declares that the totalitarian and democratic worlds are engaged in a death struggle in which only one world will survive. December 17, 1940 Lend-Lease: In a press conference FDR notes how beneficial the war orders from Britain have been to the United States in putting people back to work and in the creation of factories that the US has needed for her own neglected defense. He proposes an arrangement for getting more weapons and military equipment to Great Britain, something that will come to be known as "lend-lease." He wishes to avoid the controversy over debts (as after World War I) and "get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign" and yet avoid outright charity which a proud Britain might refuse. Instead, let's lend them whatever they need to win the war. For instance, if your neighbor's house is on fire, you lend him your garden hose. When the fire is out, he gives it back. Or if it's damaged, he replaces it. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 101-102. [He was proposing a repeal of the "cash only" clause of the Neutrality Act and neglecting to tell the audience that the British were running out of funds.] December 18, 1940 Hitler issues Directive #21: "The German Army must be ready, even before the end of the war with England, to crush Russia in a rapid campaign." Topitsch, p. 87. December 18, 1940 Prelude to Operation Torch: Robert Murphy, FDR's secret emissary to Vichy-controlled North Africa, [see September 5, 1940 entry] arrives in Algiers and is tracked immediately by agents of the Gestapo and the Italian OVRA— legally in North Africa as members of the German and Italian Armistice Commission. [His first stop was Dakar where he met with General Maxime Weygand, the commander of the 100,000 French forces stationed in North Africa. The general assured Murphy that he and his government were prepared to resist any Nazi attempt to occupy North Africa- an invasion that was widely expected for the Spring of 1941. (This was successful disinformation from Hitler who had already given orders to his generals for the invasion of the Soviet Union.) Weygand asked
for petroleum and armaments from the United States. General Weygand also promised Murphy that the gold bullion (cached in the French Sudan) and the remaining French fleet would never fall into Nazi hands. Vichy gave permission for 12 US vice-consuls to supervise the unloading of supply ships in North African ports. They would be allowed to send coded messages and use the diplomatic pouch. This would be the genesis of a wide information-gathering network and the identification of persons and groups who could be useful in the half-conceived Allied invasion of North Africa, later to be named Operation Torch. Vaughan, pp. 37-41; Murphy, pp. 73-83. The resultant spying was successful, but the economic supply program was a failure: only ten cargo ships and three tankers ever sailed the distance, thanks to inter-agency bickering in the Roosevelt administration and initial hostility from Churchill. E. Litsky, 1986 Fordham dissertation. http://fordhan.bepress/dissertations/AA18615698. Both FDR and Murphy believed that in the event of an Allied invasion of North Africa that Weygand would overcome his intense Anglophobia and that France would rejoin the war against the Nazis. Wishful thinking there: Weygand was loyal to his oath to Pétain, his former mentor. Both believed that the future of France lay in preserving their demography and staying out of a war that France should never have entered. (Weygand had been the architect of the June, 1940 armistice.) Vaughan, pp. 38-39; 272. December 19, 1940 CO Camps: The first Civilian Public Service camps open for those men who have been qualified as "conscientious objectors to military service" under the terms of the Selective Service Act. [There were ultimately about 12,000 men in these camps most of which were run by the historic peace churches— the Mennonites, the Brethren and the Quakers. The men were required to work at various jobs— building parks and hiking trails, fire-fighting, serving as aides in mental hospitals and institutions for the developmentally disabled— and paid $30 a month for their upkeep. Around 500 were guinea pigs for medical experiments: some wore lice-infested clothes for typhus research; others were involved in research into jaundice and malaria. About 25,000 other COs chose to enter the army in a non-combatant status with most of them serving as medics on the front lines.] December 23, 1940 FDR approves a covert operation: One hundred and fifty fighter planes— Curtiss-Wright Tomahawks” will be sent to China with American pilots allowed to fly them in the employ of the Chinese government. This is a further implementation of McCollum's item C. [The commander of the squadron was Claire Chennault, a retired US Army major and China's air advisor since 1937. Known as the "Flying Tigers," the group received its first publicity in December, 1941 when the US, disheartened by the disaster at Pearl Harbor, would be cheered by the exploits of the volunteer American fliers defending Burma and the Burma Road. The Tigers would destroy nearly 300 Japanese planes in 1941-42; the United States government denied any official connection with the operation until many years after the war's end. Ford, p. 48; Time, December 29, 1941.] December 29, 1940 "We must be the great arsenal of democracy…" FDR in his fireside chat cautions that the Axis powers will control four continents and their oceans if Britain goes under, and Americans and the Western hemisphere will be vulnerable to Hitler's guns and bombers. The past years have demonstrated that "a nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender. Such a dictated peace would be no peace at all. It would only be another armistice . . . [we] in all the Americas would be living at the point of a Nazi gun." However, "there is far less chance of the United States getting in to war, if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of an attack. . . . We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war." [A poll taken after the speech showed that of those who had heard the speech or read about it, 61% agreed with Roosevelt but only 24% were opposed. Interestingly, the poll revealed that 59% of those questioned had listened to the speech and another 16% had read about it. Peters, pp. 182-183. That evening London suffered one of the heaviest bombings of the war. A large part of the city was destroyed by the resulting fires. The Germans frequently scheduled major raids to coincide with FDR's fireside chats and thus deflect attention from them in Britain's morning newspapers. Sherwood, p. 228.] December 30, 1940 First Freeway in US: California's Governor Olson and the 1941 Rose Queen preside over the opening of the six-mile Arroyo Seco Parkway that goes all the way from Los Angeles to Pasadena. [In 1954 it was renamed the Pasadena Freeway.] January 5, 1941 Harry Hopkins: FDR announces that he is sending Harry Hopkins to England to confer with Churchill. [There had
been no US ambassador in Britain since Joseph Kennedy's departure.
At their first meeting Churchill, mindful of Hopkins' social worker
past, allegedly began their talk by telling of his plans to insure
a better life for the "cottagers" after the war. Hopkins replied, January 6, 1941 FDR enunciates
the "Four Essential Freedoms" in his State of the Union address:
" January 10, 1941 Lend-Lease: FDR asks Congress for a "Lend-Lease" program to supply Britain and anyone else fighting Hitler with needed supplies. [Isolationist Senator Burton Wheeler intoned that "the result of Lend-lease will be to plow under every fourth American boy." Churchill broadcast a plea to Congress on the eve of the vote: "Give us the tools, and we will finish the job." Despite the large numbers of isolationists in Congress, the bill passed both houses by wide margins. It was limited to two years. Perrett, pp. 75-76.] January 18, 1941 Republican Response to Lend-Lease: Willkie endorses FDR's Lend-Lease program and warns his party that "if the Republican Party makes a blind opposition to this ball and allows itself to be presented . . . . as the isolationist party, it will never again gain control of the American government." [Alf Landon exploded, saying the Republicans would never have nominated him if they had known where he really stood. McCormick's paper, the Chicago Tribune, excommunicated him from the party. But the other main newspapers and the Luce publications applauded his remarks. FDR invited him to come to the White House for a briefing before his departure for England on the 22nd and suggested that he get together with Harry Hopkins and Averill Harriman, both of whom were in England. He also gave him a letter to be delivered to Churchill who would entertain Willkie both at 10 Downing Street and at his country residence. Barnard, p. 275; Peters, pp. 184-185]. January 24, 1941 Lindbergh: The New York Times quotes Lindbergh as saying that "any negotiated peace to end the European War as soon as possible was preferable in the interest of the United States to prolonging the present conflict." In other words, let Hitler remain in control of most of the European continent. Peters, p. 191. January 27, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Secretary of State Cordell Hull receives an encrypted telegram from Ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo: The embassy had learned from a Peruvian colleague that the Japanese military forces were planning a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor "in the event of trouble with the United States." [The message
was sent to Arthur McCollum of ONI for analysis. Despite his childhood
in Japan, his knowledge of the culture, his memory of the 1904 Japanese
surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, he would cable
the new commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Husband Kimmel,
that ONI placed "no credence in these rumors . . . no move against
Pearl Harbor appears imminent or planned for in the foreseeable
future." January 30, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: FDR receives his first Japanese military intelligence from the 5-num code: The Navy's cryptographic center CAST on Corregidor in the Philippines informs him that there is a large build-up of Japanese warships in the South China Sea off French Indochina. Stinnett, p. 23. January 30, 1941 Pacifism USA: A Gallup poll indicates that while 79% of the nation oppose Charles Lindbergh's proposal for a negotiated peace with Hitler, 88% oppose an American entry into the war in Europe. New York Times, January 31, 1941 cited in Stinnett, p. 33. February 6, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: The HMS King George V, one of Britain's major battleships, arrives back in England after a trip to the US to deliver the new ambassador, Lord Halifax, and his wife. (Lord Lothian had died in December.) Unknown to all but a very select few, the ship is carrying a most precious secret cargo: two PURPLE decrypting machines and their operating instructions plus the solutions to the Japanese naval codes, including the vital 5-num code. Churchill can now enjoy the "splendid arrangement" along with FDR. Stinnett, pp. 78-79 February 10, 1941 Truman Committee: Senator Truman (D-MO) proposes the establishment of a special committee to investigate waste and possible corruption in the awarding of defense contracts. [The Truman Committee, as it came to be called, started work in April, inspecting war plants, army camps under construction, gasoline rationing, the loss of American shipping to U-boats, etc. This "watchdog" committee exposed the manufacture of inferior steel plate by US Steel (after a newly-launched tanker broke in half) and revealed the manufacture of faulty airplane engines for combat planes by Curtiss-Wright. It discovered the cause of the magnesium shortage to be Alcoa's cartel agreement with Germany's I.G. Farben Company. It insisted on the production of a landing craft superior to the one proposed by the Navy. Described as the "most successful investigative effort in American history," the Truman Committee saved the country many billions of dollars, placed its chairman on the cover of Time -March 8, 1943- and positioned him as one of several men to be considered for the vice-presidential nomination in 1944. McCullough, Truman, pp. 257-288.] February 11, 1941 Lend-Lease: Willkie testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of the Lend-Lease Bill: "The powers asked for are extraordinary but in my judgment this is an extraordinary situation." And it's "the last, best chance" to keep America out of the war. [Willkie's testimony possibly saved the bill. It was reported out of the committee the next day and passed both houses rather quickly. The bill had been in trouble, so Cordell Hull cabled Willkie and asked him to come home to testify. Peters, pp. 191-192. ] February 12, 1941 North Africa: General Rommel arrives in Tripoli to stiffen the resistance of the Italians who are being steadily pushed westward across North Africa by the less numerous British forces. Gilbert, pp. 156-157. February 16, 1941 Pacifism USA: A Gallup poll indicates that 61% of the American public would be opposed to war with Germany even if the Germans sank an American merchant vessel. Kilzer, p. 24. February 17, 1941 "American Century": In an editorial in his Life magazine, Henry Luce urges United States entrance into the war and lays out a program for a postwar peace in which the United States will be the dominant power, controlling other nations not through occupation— the British Empire model— but by an expansion of the American private enterprise system throughout the world. His motive is not anti-fascism or the wish to rid the world of Hitler, but a pragmatic move to insure American post-war dominance. He cautions against any continuation of New Deal policies; they have served to weaken the nation just as Léon Blum's Front Populaire had damaged France. Markowitz, pp. 50-51; Culver, p.277. March 1, 1941 Progress on German Naval Enigma: Lieutenant Warmington, the signals officer on the HMS Somali on a commando mission to the northern coast of Norway, appeals to his captain's sense of compassion and asks permission to board the destroyed German patrol vessel Krebs to rescue any sailors who had survived. Once aboard he finds a locked drawer in the dead captain's cabin and finds two Enigma rotors and the keys for February. [Once in the hands of Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park these finds would enable the cryptographers to decipher the naval messages for February and provide clues for the eventual deciphering of German naval traffic in real time. In 1940 the Bletchley Park cryptographers had obtained regular ability to read the transmissions of the Luftwaffe. Kahn, Seizing the Enigma, pp. 127-136.] March 8, 1941 Japanese-US Talks: Based on a proposal brought to him by two unnamed Japanese "moderates" and two Maryknoll priests who had visited Japan, Secretary of State Hull embarks on a series of talks with Ambassador Nomura that will last until June 17th. [In retrospect there was no chance of these fifty or so talks succeeding, as Hull could not persuade the Japanese to withdraw from China and forego further conquests in return for the benefits of free trade. Both sides were bargaining for time— the US for clarification of the war in Europe and the construction of defenses in the Philippines; the Japanese for their training for the Pearl Harbor venture which had begun in January. Feis, Road, pp. 171-207.] March 11, 1941 FDR signs the Lend Lease Bill which enables the president to supply war materials without immediate payment to "any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States." This is the most "sweeping delegation of legislative power" made to date to an American president. Corwin, The President, p. 237. [With this
act FDR was able to send the British the twenty-eight torpedo boats
that they had anticipated receiving at the same time as the fifty
destroyers. Shogan, p. 247. March 15-21, 1941 US Provocation in the Pacific: Four US cruisers accompanied by twelve destroyers sail around the Central and South Pacific in the first of at least three of FDR's "pop-up cruises." [Admiral Kimmel objected to the cruises, saying they were "ill-advised and will result in war . . ." but FDR persisted. "I just want them to keep popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing. I don't mind losing one or two cruisers, but do not take a chance on losing five or six." This of course was McCollum's provocation item D. Action E had been implemented before New Year's when 24 US submarines were sent to Manila. Stinnett, pp. 9-10, 28, 323.] March 22, 1941 Yugoslavia: Hitler demands that the government of Yugoslavia allow 700,000 German troops to pass through the country on their way to Albania to rescue the Italian armies which had been driven out of Greece. [The Prince-Regent was prepared to capitulate; a group of officers led a revolt and Prince Paul was overthrown and the Nazi demand refused. A furious Hitler spent the next three weeks subjugating the Yugoslavs for this "stab in the back" and occupying Greece, thus delaying the invasion of the Soviet Union for a month, a delay that would prove fatal. Duffy, Hitler, pp. 83-84. For the previous year since his return from the Soviet Union on a British passport issued in Canada, Tito and his Communist comrades had been preparing for a guerilla war backed by assurances of assistance from US Colonel "Wild Bill" Donovan. Stevenson, pp. 201-211.] March 27, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Tadashi Morimura, also known to US Naval Intelligence as Ensign Takeo Yoshikawa, arrives in Honolulu take up his post as chancellor in the Japanese Consulate. [He was immediately pegged by naval intelligence as a spy— at 27, too young for someone in this position, and not listed in the Japanese Diplomatic registry. Admiral Yamamoto had sent Morimura, a naval officer, to replace the previous "outside man" who had mistaken patrol boats for minesweepers. It soon became evident that Morimura was reporting on the number of warships in the harbor and their positions. Between his arrival and August 21st he sent 22 messages to Tokyo; Army and Navy intercept stations picked up nineteen of these. It took only a day for his messages to be intercepted, decoded, translated and sent to officials in the Roosevelt administration. Soon after the McCollum memo of October 7, 1940, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI had been given stand-aside orders for the Japanese consulate in Honolulu; naval intelligence would be in charge. Despite this there was a certain amount of FBI loose surveillance of Morimura, including a wiretap on his phone, all of which would be concealed from the Pearl Harbor investigations. Stinnett, pp. 83-97]. March 30, 1941 The Commissar Order: Hitler addresses 250 senior officers about the quality of the new war he is planning for the East. This will not be a blumenkrieg, but "a struggle of two ideologies— a struggle of annihilation. . . Commissars and GPU men are criminals and must be treated as such. The fight will be very different from the fight in the West . . . The leaders must demand of themselves the sacrifice of overcoming their scruples." [Later orders made it clear what Hitler had in mind: Military courts would no longer be responsible for the punishment of crimes against enemy civilians; the Commissar Order would require army division commanders to segregate Red Army political commissars upon capture who would then be shot immediately for "instituting barbaric Asian methods of warfare." Einsatzgruppen would accompany the army groups for these and other "special tasks." General Henning von Tresckow tried to organize a mass resignation of the senior commanders, most of whom were revolted by the prospects of this new kind of war, but he was unsuccessful. Fest, pp. 170-178.] April 6, 1941 Operation Punishment: Hitler's Luftwaffe bombs the Yugoslav capital Belgrade4—- a city with no anti-aircraft defense— for three days and nights, reducing the city to rubble and killing 17,000 civilians, strafing some as they were fleeing the city. The day is Good Friday in the Orthodox Church calendar. Davis, War President, p.150. [The VIII Air Corps was led by Baron Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of the First World War's "Red Baron." The current Richthofen had commanded the Condor Legion in Spain where he was responsible for the bombing of Guernica and invented the technique of carpet bombing. A month later his planes destroyed the historic cities of Crete. Beevor, p. 69. His commander, General Alexander Loehr, was hanged as a war criminal by Yugoslavia in 1947. A commemoratory plaque to Loehr installed at an Austrian military academy in 1986 would lead to the discovery that Kurt Waldheim, the former Secretary General of the United Nations, had also been a Nazi war criminal. Rosenbaum, Betrayal. Despite this revelation, Waldheim would be given a papal knighthood by Pope John Paul II in July, 1994.] April 11, 1941 The Office of Price Administration (OPA) is established to control prices. April 11, 1941 Expansion
of the Naval War in the Atlantic: FDR announces that US patrols
to protect American shipping in the Atlantic will be extended to
West longitude 261. April 12, 1941 Hitler's Partition of Yugoslavia: Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria receive small slices. The western part— Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and part of Dalmatia— is designated as the Independent State of Croatia and is given to Ante Pavelic and the Ustashi, the fascist Croats, to run. The Wehrmacht is forced to maintain a number of divisions in eastern Yugoslavia to combat the Partisan guerrillas of Tito and the Chetniks of the royalist Draza Mihailovic. [For the next four years Pavelic's very oppressive regime cooperated with the Nazis and murdered nearly half a million Serb Orthodox Christians and a lesser number of Jews, Gypsies, and Communists. In the first two months use of the Cyrillic alphabet was banned, Nuremberg-type anti-Semitic legislation was passed, and Orthodox Serb schools were closed. The murders were barbaric ones: people buried alive, others hacked to death with axes, and still others forced to watch the torture death of loved ones before their own tortured end. Priests, especially Franciscans, participated in and even led the massacres. Pavelic had said of the Serbs: convert one-third, force one-third to emigrate, kill one-third. The Roman Catholic Church was happy to increase its ranks, but the bishops were instructed by the government not to accept Orthodox priests, school teachers and other members of the intelligentsia, or rich Orthodox tradesmen. Cornwell, pp. 248-260.] April 13, 1941 Japanese-Soviet "Neutrality" Pact: Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke, on a whirlwind trip to Berlin, Rome and Moscow, persuades Stalin and Molotov to sign a five-year neutrality pact. If either country is attacked, the other is pledged to observe "strict neutrality throughout the entire duration of the conflict." Japan agrees to give up oil concessions in northern Sakhalin as a condition of the agreement. [The next day Stalin and Molotov unexpectedly appear at the train station to see off Matsuoka. Stalin takes this opportunity to ostentatiously hug and kiss the Japanese foreign minister in the presence of the German ambassador, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. This unprecedented and photographed drama was intended to demonstrate the importance of the Neutrality Pact to both the Germans and the Japanese. (Schulenberg had been one of the diplomats responsible for the August 1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and later opposed the June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union. After a brief internship in the Soviet Union he was returned to Germany; there he joined with those plotting against Hitler's life. After the failure of the July 20, 1944 plot, he was arrested, accused of high treason and executed.) The Neutrality Pact left the USSR free to deal with Hitler, and Japan now felt that its northern flank was protected for the move south. The USSR, however, secretly told Chiang they would continue to send aid and encouraged him to continue his war with Japan. Foreign Minister Matsuoka had visited Berlin before going to Moscow, hoping to get Hitler's agreement to include Stalin in the Tripartite Pact. He seemed quite oblivious to hints that Russo-German relations were not too smooth, and never noticed the multitude of German troops moving to the border, plainly visible from his train window. Less than two months later the Germans invaded Russia, causing a dilemma for the Japanese military: move north and join Germany in a war against the Soviet Union, or move south and ultimately engage the United States? Matsuoka vigorously advocated war against the Soviet Union and told the Soviet ambassador that the Neutrality Pact was subordinate to the Tripartite Agreement of 1941 with Germany and Italy. Hasegawa, pp. 7, 14-18; LaFeber, pp. 195-196; Feis, Road, pp. 182-187.] April 19, 1941 British Disinformation to Stalin: Sir Stafford Cripps, the British ambassador to the Soviet Union, hands a memo to Andrey Vyshinsky, the USSR Commissar for Foreign Affairs. It contains a warning to Stalin that "if the war between England and Germany lasted too long, Great Britain would be tempted to conclude an agreement to end the war" and such an agreement is under discussion. [This was pure disinformation, of course, a word that had only recently been coined. Churchill was not about to do such a thing; the purpose of the memo was to scare Stalin into attacking Germany before Hitler, his armies freed in the West, could attack the Soviet Union. It was imperative to destroy the German-Soviet alliance before Stalin allowed Hitler's troops to pass through the Soviet Union to attack India from the rear or before Stalin joined the war against England and the two dictators conspired to divide the world between them as they had carved up Poland. Thanks to Kim Philby, a Soviet spy high in the ranks of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Stalin was certain that this was disinformation. So he refused to believe the genuine warnings about a Nazi invasion that came later, including the actual date of June 22. Churchill had been just too clever for his own good! Borovik, p. 183.] April 22, 1941 Pre-Pearl
Harbor Intelligence: Chief Radioman Leroy Langford at Station
CAST decrypts naval messages that reveal: April 27, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: In Singapore British, US and Dutch military officers complete their plan for strategic operations against Japan in case of war. [There was constant exchange of naval intelligence between the British in Singapore, the Dutch in Java and the US in the weeks and months prior to December 7th. Feis, Road, p. 190; Stinnett, pp. 39-45.] April 29, 1941 Soviet Union: The chief of Soviet intelligence, Lavrenti Beria, is informed that three groups of spies with radio sets have been caught crossing the German-Soviet border. Beevor, pp.18-19. May 7, 1941 More Progress on Naval Enigma Messages: Three cruisers and four destroyers of the Royal Navy spaced ten miles apart search a grid east of Iceland where the isolated German weather ship München is believed to be stationed. The ship was found, successfully boarded, and valuable cryptographic documents seized, including the Short Weather cipher and Enigma keys for June. [Meteorological data was carefully guarded information in England. Germany needed to know about future weather patterns in their planning for land operations and for air operations over Britain. Beginning in the summer of 1940, several reconditioned whaling ships had been positioned in the North Atlantic; they sent regular weather observations on their Enigmas. Their approximate locations were known to the Submarine Tracking Room by direction-finding: the convergence of signals obtained from eight listening posts stretching from the northern Shetland Islands to Land's End and to Gibraltar would give a proximate location for a specific ship. In the Spring of 1941 Admiral Dönitz had increased the number of U-boats in the North Atlantic by 1/3; operating in wolf packs, they were sinking a distressingly large number of merchantmen that were conveying vital supplies to England. The cryptographers of Bletchley Park needed up-to-date keys to make any further progress on decoding naval Enigma, so they had asked the Royal Navy to seize another Krebs for them. Two days after the capture of the München, the U-110 was fortuitously captured and even more valuable loot secured: an Enigma machine, key tables for officer grade messages, and the U-Boat Short Signal Book. With the increased information from these two hauls, the interception-transcript time went from eleven days to six hours. Kahn, Seizing the Enigma, pp. 144-169.] May 10, 1941 Rudolf
Hess: During one of the heaviest bombing raids on London, Rudolf
Hess, the number three man in the Nazi hierarchy, flies to Scotland
in full uniform and parachutes to a landing near the home of the
Duke of Hamilton. (Seven hundred acres of central London were set
afire, and the fires went unchecked because the water mains had
been hit. [On interrogation, Hess said that he hoped to persuade the British of the hopelessness of their position and have them negotiate a peace with Germany. The offer he proposed would be acceptable to Hitler, he said, although Hitler knew nothing of his flight. Back home the Nazis issued a statement that Hess was suffering a nervous breakdown and Hitler had no prior knowledge of his trip. His offer: England should give Germany "a free hand" in Europe; Germany would support England's Empire requiring only the return of Germany's former colonies. However, England would have to get a new prime minister, as Hitler would refuse to negotiate with Winston Churchill. Eight days after Hess' arrival two SS men in plain clothes parachuted into England with a map to the Duke of Hamilton's home. They were captured, interrogated and executed amidst great secrecy. Menzies, the new chief of British intelligence, concluded from the interrogation and other intelligence that Hitler intended to attack Russia soon and had sent Hess to arrange a peace so that his generals, who were opposing the Russian attack, would then acquiesce. Once Russia was conquered, Hitler would then turn his full might on England. There was much
speculation at the time that Menzies had lured Hess to England in
order to obtain intelligence. Kilzer's book goes further, claiming
that Churchill and Menzies ("C") fabricated the existence of a Peace
Party in England in order to lure Hess to England. The most startling assertion in Kilzer's book is that the prisoner Hess who died in Spandau prison in 1987 did not have the same medical history as the genuine Rudolf Hess and was possibly a substitute sent by Britain when the Soviet Union demanded that Hess stand trial at Nuremberg with the other high Nazi officials. Prisoner Hess refused to see any of his family for 28 years. Cave Brown, "C", pp. 343-350; Kilzer, Churchill's Deception, pp. 11-17, 28-78, 226-290.] May 14, 1941 Pre-June 22 Activity: Stalin, fearing that the Hess flight to England signaled a possible Anglo-German peace and alliance against the Soviet Union, orders seven armies to move secretly to the west. Kilzer, p. 47. [He had heard from spy Kim Philby that Hitler had sent Hess, hoping that he could conclude an Anglo-German peace agreement that would allow him to attack the Soviet Union without complaints from his generals about a two-front war. Borovik, pp. 183-184.] May 15, 1941 Nylon stockings go on sale in the United States. [Immediately popular, production never satisfied more than 15% of the demand and nylons became a hot black-market item. In August the sale of silk stockings was rationed- no more than three pairs to a customer. Soon, especially after the advent of patriotically raised hemlines, women resorted to "bottled stockings." Perrett, Days of Sadness, pp. 134-135.] May 17, 1941 Pre-June 22 Activity: Richard Sorge, the KGB's man in Tokyo, warns Stalin that Hitler is preparing to invade the Soviet Union with 170 to 190 divisions. Deakin and Storry, The Case of Richard Sorge, p. 230. May 19, 1941 Croatia and the Vatican: Pope Pius XII receives Ante Pavelic and gives de facto recognition to the barbaric Independent State of Croatia. [Pacelli knew that the Ustashi had passed racist and anti-Semitic laws, and that Pavelic was a dictator and a puppet of Hitler and Mussolini. Whether or not he knew of the atrocities at this time is not known. However Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac was totally aware of what was happening and made no effort to stop them. And there was no thought of excommunicating Pavelic, a devout Catholic. On the same day that 250 Serbs, including a schoolteacher and an Orthodox priest, were buried alive in the Bjelovar district, the archbishop had a pastoral letter read from all Catholic pulpits instructing the faithful to collaborate with the Ustashi. At war's end the archives of the Ustashi and the $80 million treasure they had collected were stored in the Vatican's College of San Girolamo degli Ittirici and in the Vatican itself. Cornwell, pp. 252- 267.] (Archbishop
(later, Cardinal) Stepinac (1898-1960) was tried after the war and
found guilty of treason for his recognition of the Independent State
of Croatia two days before the Yugoslav army had surrendered. He
was also accused of coordinating his office with that of the notorious
Father Krunoslav Draganovic and their guerrilla operations through
1947. During the
Cold War he was made a cardinal by Pope Pius XII and celebrated
as an May 21, 1941 War in the Atlantic: The US freighter Robin Moor is sunk by a German submarine 700 miles off the west coast of Africa. [The ship was unarmed and was carrying no military cargo. The crew drifted in their lifeboats for two weeks before being rescued by passing vessels. There was little public outrage over this incident; however, there was definite approval of the administration's response— the closing of all German consulates and the freezing of all assets of Axis and Axis-controlled countries. Perrett, pp. 79-80.] May 22, 1941 The Hess Affair: An announcement is made in the House of Commons that the Duke of Hamilton has been cleared of all wrongdoing in the Hess matter. [Kilzer believes
that Hitler interpreted this as a signal from the "Peace Party"
in Britain that the peace proposals are accepted; otherwise the
affair "would not have been so systematically killed by silence."
from Goebbels' diary, quoted in Kilzer, pp. 51-53. May 27, 1941 An "unlimited national emergency" is declared by FDR to an international radio audience, including 85 million Americans. The Nazis are intent on world domination, he says. He stresses that the US aid to the democracies (and he names the different programs) is based on "concern for our own security" and is not selfless help to a friend in desperate need. He warns that the present rate of sinkings in the Atlantic is twice the current output of British and American ships. And if Hitler should conquer England and get control of the British Navy, he could then "strangle the United States of America and the Dominion of Canada." With a tempo that could have been leading to a demand for a declaration of war, FDR concluded his speech with reassertion of the American doctrine of freedom of the seas, a pledge to continue material aid to the democracies, the announcement that "we are placing our armed forces in strategic positions" and "we will not hesitate to use our armed forces to repel attack." [The national response was overwhelmingly favorable. The New York Times editorialized that "President Roosevelt struck a mighty blow last night for freedom." Yet in the days that followed FDR offered no legislative suggestions or executive orders to implement this "emergency" and downplayed the significance of his speech to the consternation of his interventionist advisers. Davis, War President, pp. 183-190; Perrett, Days of Sadness, p. 79.] May 30, 1941 Independent German Peace Feeler to Britain: The former mayor of Leipzig, Carl Gordeler, sends a secret message to London suggesting a negotiated peace on the following terms: Germany to keep Alsace-Lorraine, Austria, the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor and Danzig. All other territories were to return to their prewar status. June 3, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Adolf Berle, jr.— the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security— records in his diary his difficulties with FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, who is miffed that he has not been included on the list for the secret interception-decoding-translation of Japanese naval messages. The FBI Honolulu bureau has amassed enough evidence against Morimura, that questionable character in the Japanese consulate, and Hoover wants him arrested or recalled to Japan. [See March 27, 1941.] Berle tells him firmly that only the president can expel consular personnel engaged in espionage and "No expulsion is possible as any charge leading to ouster would reveal American cryptographic success to Japan." Stinnett, p. 97. June 14, 1941 Assets Frozen: By executive order all German and Italian assets in the United States are frozen, as well as the assets of all countries occupied by the Axis nations. [Two days later all of their consulates were closed. Davis, War President, p. 191.] June, 1941 Prelude to Operation Torch: The first group of Robert Murphy's vice-consuls arrives in North Africa. [See September 5 and December 18, 1940.] Their month-long journey had begun with a luxurious flight to Lisbon on the Pan Am Clipper, followed by individually different and difficult routes to Algiers on decrepit planes and hard-seat trains. [They were, of course, immediately identified by intelligence agents of the German and Italian Armistice Commission, and dismissed by the Gestapo to Berlin: "The vice-consuls whom Murphy directs represent a perfect picture of the mixture of races and characteristics in that wild conglomeration called the United States of America. We can only congratulate ourselves on the selection of this group of enemy agents who will give us no trouble. In view of the fact that they are totally lacking in method, organization and discipline, the danger presented by their arrival is nil. It would be merely a waste of paper to describe their personal idiosyncrasies and characteristics." Murphy, p. 91. An unusual crew they were, indeed: a banker, an antiques dealer, two infantry officers from the World War eager to get back into action, a former Marseilles Coca-Cola distributor, a liquor salesman, an ex-Legionnaire, a lawyer. Army and Navy Intelligence had no maps or telephone directories of North Africa! The new recruits were instructed to obtain these, make sketches of port facilities and take photos of everything of importance. Military Intelligence Services (MIS) wanted detailed reports on all elements of the infrastructure— roads, bridges, railroads, telegraph facilities, etc. MIS also wanted the vice-consuls to monitor the movements of agents of the German and Italian Armistice Commission. And, of course, to perform their very public inspection, audit, and distribution of the goods on the infrequently-arriving supply ship. Although the US was not yet at war, the vice-consuls were told that there were plans for a possible Allied invasion of North Africa. Their spy craft training had been accomplished in a very few days; it consisted mostly in how to code and decode messages. So it was left to the ingenuity of this very bright and enthusiastic corps of Americans to accomplish these directives— in addition to attracting and assessing people who could aid if such an invasion should occur. After the initial rendezvous with Murphy in Algiers, the vice-consuls were posted to Casablanca, Marrakech, Oran, Algiers and Tunis, usually in pairs. On November 18 the Nazis forced Pétain to recall General Weygand from North Africa; they threatened to occupy all of France and allow the French population to starve while the Germans lived off the land. Washington's first impulse was to close out the supply program. Only pleas from Robert Murphy and Admiral William Leahy, Bullitt's successor as ambassador to France, saved the Murphy-Weygand economic supply program and the framework for the spying of Murphy's "12 Apostles"- who by this time were working cooperatively with Bill Donovan's men of the OSS. Murphy, pp. 92-95; Vaughan, pp. 45-118. June 20, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: The first intercepts are made of Admiral Nagumo on the Atagi in direct radio communication with HIJMS Katori, the flagship of the submarine force that will travel a different route to Pearl Harbor. Stinnett, p. 265. June 22, 1941 Operation Barbarossa: 3:15 AM: Three German armies— 3.3 million soldiers— pour across the Bug and Niemen Rivers to invade the Soviet Union in violation of their "Peace and Friendship" treaty. Hitler tells his people (who are not happy about extending the war to another front) that there were "approximately 160 Russian divisions massed on our frontier." German bombers attack 66 Soviet airfields, destroying one-fourth of all Soviet airplanes. The ones that manage to get airborne are easily destroyed by the more experienced Luftwaffe pilots who call it "infanticide." Brest-Litovsk is surrounded in the first few hours. Beevor, pp. 19-20. [Within six days five Russian armies were destroyed. In the first three weeks the Soviet Union lost 3500 tanks, more than 6000 planes and more than two million men including a significant number of officers. Beevor, p. 28. Operation Barbarossa's success was partly due to Stalin's initial paralysis and to the fact that he had decimated the upper ranks of the military with his political purges in the previous decade. (Documents forged by Hitler's spymaster, Reinhard Heydrich, had caused Stalin to believe that these men were German agents. As a consequence, Stalin executed more than half of the Soviet officers— 35,000 men— all the top admirals and three out of four marshals. Stevenson, p. 34.) Three days
after the start of the invasion Hitler confided to Baron Oshima,
the Japanese Ambassador to Germany: "I knew that if I left Russia
alone and continued my fight against England, [Russia] would stab
us in the back when we were least able to resist." For three years,
until mid 1944, 95% of the German ground forces were engaged on
the Eastern Front. Three fourths of all German casualties were suffered
there. Four years of bitter fighting and Hitler's scorched earth
retreat caused the destruction of: Stalin had been amply warned that the invasion was coming. Die Rote Kapell (Red Orchestra), the Soviet spy network in Western Europe, had sent intelligence as early as January that the Germans had canceled preparations for a Channel invasion of England and were moving troops to the east. Later the Brussels, German and Swiss branches of the Red Orchestra had each sent the exact date of the invasion— May 15 and then its postponement to 3:15 AM of June 22. Also he had received warnings from the US and British governments that were even more detailed than the May 17th warning from Richard Sorge. Stalin believed that the German build-up in the East was designed to pressure him into delivering more supplies to Germany and to conceal Hitler's real plan— to invade England. He also suspected the British of sending phony warnings designed to get Stalin to mobilize his troops, thereby provoking Hitler to attack him and so avert an invasion of Britain. Tarrant, p. 131, 162-163. The front line German troops were followed immediately by the Einsatzgruppen, special mobile forces that rounded up the Jews in the area, forced them to strip naked, and then killed them in mass shootings. 500,000 Jews were murdered in eastern Poland and Russia between June and December, 1941; another 900,000 were murdered in a second sweep of the area in 1942. This and similar stories of atrocities in Minsk, Lvov, Brest-Litovsk, etc. received wide coverage in the Jewish press but little mention in the mainstream press. Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews, pp. 3-5, 20. The atrocities produced many more conspirators among the army officers. "Poland was nothing by comparison," wrote one colonel. He felt that he had become the "tool of a despotic will to destroy without regard for humanity and simple decency." Fest, pp. 179-182.] June 24, 1941 FDR promises to give aid to USSR. Senator Harry S Truman (D-MO): "If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany. And that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances. Neither of them thinks anything of their pledged word." [At this point
in time the country was mostly unaware of the 17-22 million deaths
in the Soviet Union caused by Stalin's policies of forced collectivization
of farms and purges of his "enemies" in the '30s. The New
York Times and its Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty,
were largely to blame for this ignorance. Duranty aided Stalin's
cover-up of the famine and later would accept the 1937-37 Moscow
Trials of the original 1917 revolutionists as just: June 25, 1941 Anti-Discrimination Order: FDR issues Executive Order 8802 which orders employers, government agencies and labor unions "to provide for the full and equitable participation of all workers in defense industries, without discrimination because of race, creed, color, or national origin." It includes a "whereas" admission that "available and needed workers have been barred from employment in industries engaged in defense production solely because of race, color." [There had been growing resentment in the black community over the blatant hiring discrimination in the industries with government defense contracts and also in federally sponsored training programs. FDR's order was reluctantly issued only to forestall the threatened Negro March on Washington to be led by A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—called "the most dangerous Negro in America" by a Nebraska congressman—, supported by Walter White and the NAACP. FDR feared that such a large-scale demonstration— 100,000— would undermine his preparedness program and strengthen the isolationists at this very crucial time. A young staff lawyer was given a few short hours to write the executive order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC.) Randolph was
persuaded to cancel the July 1st march even though the other demands
of the March on Washington had not been met: The FEPC was set up to oversee the anti-discrimination clause which would be mandated in defense contracts, but it had no policing powers. Yet it was the start of a federal interest in economic justice for minorities; many more African-Americans found work in defense factories. Iin October 1944, while campaigning for re-election, FDR would ask that the FEPC be made permanent after war's end. Randolph disbanded the March, but not the movement or the pressure for political and economic equality. The FBI continued its surveillance of him which had been started at FDR's request. Burns, Soldier of Freedom, pp. 123-124, 528;Davis, War President, pp. 199-206; Sitkoff, pp. 314-325; Brinkley, Washington, p. 81.] June 26, 1941 Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania": Nazi troops arrive in this seat of Jewish learning and scholarship. (Now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania.) Home to a community of 60,000 Jews, it has been designated by the architects of the Holocaust to be the trial city for the most efficient extermination of the Jewish population. [First a group of Lithuanians was selected— the Ipatingas, or Elected— and trained in how to conduct pogroms. (Many needed no special instructions.) After the Jews were sufficiently harassed, with many having gone into hiding, the Nazi authorities announced that they had assigned an area of five hundred homes to be a ghetto where Jews— required since early July to wear identifying badges, and forbidden to use public transportation or to be on the streets after 6 PM— would be safe from the Ipatingas. At one point in the September 4 march to the ghetto, there was a diversion into two separate streams with the Jews free to choose which direction. One group reached the ghetto; the other arrived at Ponar, originally believed to be a work camp. Over a space of several days they — men, women and children — were lined up in front of a ditch at the edge of the forest and each Jew was dispatched with a single bullet to the back of the neck, the bodies then tumbling into the ditch. Those in the ghetto felt fortunate despite their miserably cramped quarters and refused to believe the rumor that Ponar was a death camp and not a work camp.. "The Germans need us for workers, so why would they kill us?" they asked themselves. Yet when there was the occasional raid or recruitment of workers to work in the east, all attempted to make the "safe" choice that would keep them in the ghetto. In Ponar, the time-honored method of the firing squad, with its advantage of collective but no individual guilt, had been abandoned as being too costly. However, many soldiers to their credit were squeamish about the close contact required to kill Jews individually, so other methods were tried. First they used a van with carbon monoxide piped into the carefully sealed enclosure that was filled with Jews. German precision had calculated how many Jews driven a given distance at a specified speed would guarantee a peaceful and semi-dignified end. But the drivers, in a hurry to end their odious task, drove too rapidly. So the deaths were agonized ones and the resulting bodies gruesome to the eyes of those tasked to remove them. Thus was born the idea of the stationary van, built of concrete on a much larger scale where the victims could be invited to take a shower. In the Spring of 1942 construction was begun on the death camp at Treblinka (July 24,1942 - August 2, 1943) to be ready for the evacuation of the far more numerous Warsaw ghetto — 400,000 people. That was scheduled for the ninth month of Ab, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, or July 22, 1942. By the end of December 1941 the Vilna ghetto had been reduced to about 20,000 souls. Several hundred of the younger men organized a resistance, preferring to die fighting the Germans than to be led away "like sheep to the slaughter." Some escaped through the sewers to join partisans in the forests. The faithful Hasids protested the resistance, saying that their situation and their fate was God's will. In early 1943 the Germans learned the name of the resistance leader, Itzak Wittenberg, and demanded that the ghetto produce him or the ghetto would be destroyed. And indeed the majority of the community was ready to sacrifice him. Wittenberg surrendered himself and was heard to bite down on the glass capsule in his mouth as he stepped into the Gestapo car. The ghetto was liquidated a few months later. Steiner, Treblinka, pp. ix-60.] June 28, 1941 Special Election in Texas: Pappy O'Daniel, the colorful and controversial governor of Texas, is declared the winner by a very slim margin in a special election for the Senate. [Lyndon Johnson
was the front runner in the election, and the probable actual winner.
Johnson's campaign expenditures were a half million dollars, considerably over the legal limit. Much of the funds came from Brown and Root, a construction company that Johnson had helped procure some immensely profitable government contracts, such as the Naval Air Training Base at Corpus Christi. When the IRS was about to take criminal action against the company for the tricks they had pulled to circumvent the law, FDR intervened at Johnson's request. Steinberg, Sam Johnson's Boy, pp. 170-171, 208-209.] June 28, 1941 Minsk, the capital of White Russia, falls to the German armies. June 28, 1941 Another Seizure of Naval Enigma Documents: Current keys are needed to continue the speedy decryption, so a cruiser and three destroyers are sent by the Royal Navy to scour a grid in the North Atlantic considerably north of where the München was boarded. The converted fishing trawler Lauenberg, also a weather station, is located and boarded, its sailors taken prisoner. After scooping up thirteen mail sacks of paper, the sailors scuttle the ship. [Possession
of the keys for July reduced the solution time to three hours. The
Royal Navy was now able to divert most convoys from known concentrations
of U-Boats. The wolf packs were now sighting only 1 in 10 of the
convoys; it is estimated that Enigma solutions saved 1.5-2 million
tons of shipping in the last half of 1941 and, of course, countless
lives. June 29, 1941 The Hess Affair: A New York Times writer postulates that "Rudolf Hess flew to England with the full consent of Adolf Hitler . . . to bring peace between Germany and England . . . For the important thing from England's standpoint was that Germany should march against Russia." New York Times, 29 June 1941, p. 6E July 1, 1941 The Germans take Riga, the capital of Latvia. July 1, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Eight Japanese merchant vessels are ordered to leave American East Coast ports at once, to transit the Panama Canal, and to be in the Pacific Ocean headed home by July 22. [FDR received
the decrypted transmissions on the 4th and ordered the Panama Canal
closed effective the 5th, using the story that there were water
leaks that required repair. Admiral Stark sent war warnings to Admirals Kimmel and Hart: "Japan's policy probably involves war in the near future. They have ordered all Jap vessels in the Atlantic ports to be west of the Panama Canal by August 1." The merchant ships would be converted into troop transports for the invasions of the Philippines, the Kra Isthmus of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Malaya and Borneo. Stinnett, pp. 129-130.] July 2, 1941 Japan Will Head South: In the presence of the Emperor the decision is made to "advance into the Southern Regions"— Indochina and Thailand— and "the use of armed forces will be carried out in such a way as to place no serious obstacles in the path of our basic military preparations for a war with England and America." Entry into the German-Soviet war and settlement of the "Soviet question" are postponed to a later date. [Japan called up nearly two million reservists and draftees, and laid down travel restrictions for foreigners within Japan. Tokyo news agencies charged that the United States was attempting to "encircle" Japan. MAGIC intercepts kept Washington informed of all these events including messages to the Washington Embassy: "There is more reason than ever before to arm ourselves to the teeth for all-out war," and "The Cabinet shake-up * was necessary to expedite matters in connection with national affairs and has no further significance. Japan's policy will not be changed and she will remain faithful to the principles of the Tripartite Pact." At the same
time the Imperial Army carried out a mobilization of the Kwantung
Army * Matsuoka was forced out of the cabinet on July 16th for his lack of perception about Hitler's plans to invade the Soviet Union, his desire to form a military alliance with Germany and attack the USSR despite the neutrality pact that he had signed with them less than two months before, and, lastly, his sabotage of the Hull-Nomura talks. Admiral Toyoda became the new Foreign Minister. Feis, Road, pp. 224-225. Matsuoka was indicted as a Class A war criminal after the war ended. He pleaded innocent, and was then sent to a hospital where he died of tuberculosis during the first months of the trial, Brackman, pp. 100-101, 409. July 7, 1941 Iceland: Four thousand US Marines land in Iceland as part of an agreement with that government to protect it from the possibility of attack by the Germans. [American troops would ultimately replace the British troops who were urgently needed elsewhere. This highly secret landing of the first contingent of Marines was made public at Churchill's request— to give hope to the British public and to send a message to Vichy France and Spain. There was the predictable outrage from the isolationists, but no reaction from Berlin. Most Americans applauded the action. Davis, War President, pp. 190-191.] July 9, 1941 Secret Planning for War: FDR directs Secretary of War Stimson and Secretary of the Navy to draw up a secret estimate of the "over-all production requirements to defeat our potential enemies." [The task was passed on to Major Albert C. Wedemeyer of the War Plans Division.] Wedemeyer,Wedemeyer Reports!, pp. 16-17. July 9, 1941 Henry Wallace Gets a Job: Unlike Garner, his two-term predecessor who had spent his time presiding over the Senate, entertaining his drinking buddies in the vice president's suite of offices, and nothing more— Wallace becomes an integral part of the war preparation effort when FDR signs Executive Order 8839 which establishes the Economic Defense Board and appoints Henry Wallace as chairman. [This "policy and advisory agency" dealt with exports and imports, "preclusive buying," foreign exchange transactions, control of foreign-owned properties and other international economic issues. Never before had a vice president been given this kind of responsibility. Culver, pp. 252-257. ] July 11, 1941 Office of Coordinator of Intelligence: By executive order FDR establishes the Office of Coordinator of Information and appoints Bill Donovan as its head, to the dismay of the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the G-2 section of the US Army and other smaller intelligence units of the government, all of which had been fighting for a larger share of the intelligence turf. Hersh, The Old Boys, p. 84. [In addition to collecting intelligence and passing it on to the president and federal agencies, Donovan was also empowered to do something new in American warfare: to send propaganda to countries outside of America, the sort of "psychological warfare" that Germany had used so effectively against France and the Low Countries since 1933. Laurie, pp. 67-68.] July 24, 1941 Japan begins its occupation of the southern part of French Indo-China after a deal with the Vichy government. This includes eight airfields and the naval facilities at Saigon and Camranh Bay. [FDR had warned the Japanese Ambassador the day before that the Dutch and British would resist any invasion of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. He offered that if Japan would withdraw from Indo-China, that region and Thailand would be declared neutral and Japan given free access to its rice, minerals, and other raw materials. Two weeks later Japan responded that Japanese troops would be removed only after a settlement of the Sino-Japanese War which the US should help arrange. Additionally the US should suspend all military activity in the Southwest Pacific and all trade restrictions against Japan. This, of course, was not acceptable. The US had been following the diplomatic and military developments through MAGIC and had its response ready. Feis, Road, 223-239, 249; LaFeber, p. 200; Cooper, pp. 19-20.] July 25, 1941 Freeze of Japanese Assets and Essential End to US-Japan Commerce: FDR issues an executive order freezing all Japanese assets in the United States in retaliation for the invasion of southern French Indochina. Japan is now required to obtain a license from the State Department to purchase any goods needed for their war and then another license at the Treasury Department to unfreeze the necessary funds. [The man at State in charge of defrosting was Dean Acheson, a fervent interventionist, who managed to delay or refuse all requests. This "silent embargo" essentially ended all trade between the two countries, including 60-80% of Japanese oil imports— a commodity essential to their war effort. Great Britain and the Dominions similarly froze Japanese assets and terminated trade treaties. Thus item H of the McCollum memo was implemented. Feis, Road, pp. 242-254; Fleming, The New Dealers' War, pp. 18-19.] July 26, 1941 The Philippines: FDR, as Commander-in-Chief, places the Philippine Army in American service and under an American commander. Feis, Road, p. 245. July 31, 1941 Another "Pop-up" Cruise: Japanese ships at anchor in Sukumo Bay off of their island of Shikoku pick up the sound of propellers approaching from the East. Destroyers give chase and sight two darkened cruisers that disappear in a southerly direction behind a smoke screen. [In a protest lodged by the naval ministry with US Ambassador Joseph Grew: "Japanese naval officers believe the vessels were United States cruisers." Which they were; this was probably the most provocative of FDR's "pop-up cruises." Stinnett, p. 10.] August 11, 1941 European War in the East: From German General Halder's Diary: "At the outset of the war we reckoned about 200 enemy [Soviet] divisions. Now we have already counted 360." [In the first three weeks of the war the Soviet Union had lost over two million men, and yet they kept coming. Beevor, pp. 28-31.] August 12, 1941 The Draft: An eighteen-month extension of the draft— due to end in October— is railroaded through Congress by Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. The vote, which the Republicans had mistakenly believed was only a preliminary vote, is 203-202. [Rayburn called for the vote after reading the representatives an emotional appeal from Secretary of State Cordell Hull stating that the great and glorious American republic must be ready to defend itself regardless of the outcome in Europe. "The American flag is too precious to endanger." Brinkley, Washington, p. 28. Nationally,
as well as in the Congress, there was widespread opposition to the
draft. However, there was more support in Congress for the measure than this vote revealed. Many of the 65 Democrats who voted against the bill actually favored it (and had voted for Lend-Lease), but believed there were enough votes to secure passage and were protecting themselves for re-election in 1942. Langer and Gleason, p. 574.] August 14, 1941 Pre-Pearl
Harbor Intelligence: Admiral Stark advises his Pacific commands:
August 14, 1941 Historic
Meeting in Newfoundland Harbor: FDR and Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, after a meeting August 8-10 on their warships in Placentia
Bay, announce their "Atlantic Charter" for the world: [Nothing was said about self-determination for people in the colonies of France and Great Britain! And, more fatefully, nothing was decided about Stalin's determination to retain the territories of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romanian Bessarabia and eastern Poland and southern Finland— which had been absorbed into the USSR since September, 1939 and had been part of Russia's empire under the Tsars. Stalin considered control of these areas to be vital to the Soviet Union's security.] August 21, 1941 Bomb Plot Map of Pearl Harbor: Morimura, Admiral Yamamoto's spy in the Japanese consulate, sends a map to Tokyo via the Japanese Embassy in Washington in which he designates fifty-three docks, piers and anchorage areas with a letter code. (The USS Arizona is Ho Ho.) He gives the coordinates for each based on a US Coast and Geodetic Survey map purchased earlier that year in a Honolulu book store. [The map reached
FDR's desk but was withheld from both the commanders in Oahu. August 25, 1941 Iran: British and Soviet forces begin a joint occupation of Iran to protect that country's oil production from the Nazis. There is a written agreement that they will withdraw within six months after the end of hostilities. [The Soviets were not told of the British plan to destroy Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus if it should be necessary to keep them out of the hands of the Germans. Smith, Sharing Secrets, pp. 18-20.] August 28, 1941 Japan Suggests a Summit Meeting: The Japanese Ambassador repeats the offer of Prince Konoe, Japan's Prime Minister, for a Summit meeting with FDR somewhere in the Pacific. The note further suggests a willingness to withdraw from French Indo-China and to refrain from attacking anyone else, north or south, once the "China Incident" is settled. [The meeting never took place, largely due to Secretary of State Cordell Hull's objections. FDR was interested, even suggesting Juneau to the Japanese as a venue. Ambassador Joseph Grew endorsed the summit meeting, warning that if the two did not meet, the Konoe government would fall, and the new hardliners would bring about a war with the United States. Postwar scholars have concluded that FDR should have met with Prince Konoe: he represented a sincere desire to find a peaceful solution, and the Summit would have delayed the concurrent military plan for the bombing of Pearl Harbor for several weeks— in which time the Japanese would have realized that the Germans were stalled in Russia and were ultimately going to lose the war and that, therefore, it would not be in Japan's best interests to start a war with the Allies. Miller, Intimate, p. 472. Burns, Soldier, pp. 134-137.] September 1, 1941 Holocaust: The code-breakers at Bletchley pick up the first of many messages indicating the fate of the Jews in the Nazi path toward Moscow: "Jews shot, 1246." Smith, Sharing Secrets, p. 58. September 1, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Station HYPO (at the Pearl Harbor Naval Yard) learns that the Japanese Navy has issued a recall of all of its ships from China. HYPO commander Joseph Rochefort informs Admiral Kimmel of the mass arrival at Sasebo and other Japanese home ports expected September 4 to 8. Stinnett, p. 125. September 3, 1941 Practice Run at Auschwitz: Six hundred Soviet prisoners of war are gassed at Auschwitz in an experiment to see how well the new Zyklon B works. Beevor, p. 59. September 4, 1941 German sub attacks USS Greer: The United States destroyer USS Greer on a mail run to Iceland is attacked by a German submarine southeast of Greenland, but is able to reach port safely. [Alerted by a British patrol plane that a German submarine lay ahead, the Greer had speeded up, caught up with the sub and followed it, relaying its exact position to the British plane which dropped four depth charges that missed their target. The Greer continued to dog the sub without firing on it for two hours until the sub finally launched its torpedoes at the Greer. Only then did the destroyer fire back. FDR now had his excuse to escalate the unofficial war in the North Atlantic. Burns, Soldier of Freedom, p. 139.] September 6, 1941 Supreme
War Council, Japan: The war plans are enunciated: September 8, 1941 The 900 Day Siege of Leningrad begins. Half of the population will die — three million — the majority from starvation and exposure. Salisbury, 900 Days. September 11, 1941 Charles Lindbergh speaks to an America First audience: "The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jews and the Roosevelt administration. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still does not. The greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." [This blast of anti-Semitism won him more boos than cheers from this blatantly partisan crowd; the country and the press were quick to denounce his speech; Lindbergh was dropped from the board of directors of Pan Am, and the decline of the America First group began. Behn, pp. 417-418; Volkman, Legacy of Hate, p. 41.] September 11, 1941 Naval War
in the Atlantic: FDR in his fireside chat describes the USS
Greer episode and reviews the earlier incidents in the North
Atlantic. "This was piracy . . . It would be unworthy of a great
Nation to exaggerate an isolated incident, . . . but it is part
of a general plan. . . . Hitler's advance guards — not only
his avowed agents but also his dupes among [With these words the undeclared naval war in the Atlantic began within the "sea frontier" that had been established in April. Five days later the zone was extended east to Iceland. Gilbert, Second World War, p. 230; Burns, Soldier of Freedom, pp. 140-141.] September 15, 1941 Naval War in the Atlantic: Secretary Knox orders the Navy to "capture or destroy by every means at its disposal Axis-controlled submarines or raiders" in the American "defense zone" of the Atlantic. [Churchill took advantage of this "shoot on sight" order to divert about forty vessels from the convoy area to duty elsewhere.] September 18, 1941 European War in the East: The British tip off the Soviets that the Germans were breaking the Russian code and reading the Red Army's operational orders. [The information came from ULTRA. In the closing months of the war American and British cryptographers would race to the continent to capture their German counterparts and their successful cipher machines before the Russians could get there. Bamford, Body of Secrets, pp. 8-18.] September 20, 1941 The Revenue Act of 1941 passes. The act lowers the top income tax bracket from $5,000,000 to $200,000 and increases their rate from 81% to 88%. The rate for the lowest bracket (over $2000) is raised from 10% to 19%. September 21, 1941 European War in the East: The German encirclement of Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, is completed. 665,000 Soviet soldiers are captured. [In August Hitler had ordered the majority of his troops south to take the Ukraine and the Caucasus, rather than pressing on to Moscow which his generals had originally assured him they could take by the end of August. This decision undoubtedly saved the Soviet Union. When the advance on Moscow was resumed at the end of September, winter had come with snow and muddy roads — and a German army in summer uniforms with no antifreeze for their tanks and trucks. (If Hitler had maintained the original drive to the South and captured the Soviet oil fields, he again would probably have defeated the Russians.) General Zhukov had warned Stalin that Kiev would be encircled and advised pulling back. But Stalin refused to abandon Kiev until the bitter end, as he had bragged to Churchill that he would never relinquish Moscow, Leningrad or Kiev. Hitler called the Kiev capture "the greatest battle in world history." His Chief of the General Staff General Halder described it as the greatest strategic mistake of the eastern campaign. Beevor, p. 29; Duffy, Hitler, pp. 74-91.] September 22, 1941 Oil and the Silent Embargo: Time magazine quotes Ambassador Nomura, "All over Tokyo, no taxicab" and editorializes: "Japan is desperately hard up for oil and gasoline, which means Japan must say uncle to Uncle Sam or else fight for oil." The "silent embargo" is working, and the American public is aware of Japan's critical shortage. Fleming, The New Dealers' War, p.19. [A further irritant to Japan was the knowledge that tankers loaded with American oil were steaming past Japan to Vladivostok. Feis, Road, p. 262.] September 24, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Tokyo directs Morimura to divide Pearl Harbor into five grid areas and locate more precisely the location of all warships, according to an intercept from station SAIL in Seattle. [Morimura spent two days scouting the fleet and preparing his map. Battleship Row, for instance, was designated as bombing area FG. He wired it to Tokyo with a copy to the embassy in Washington on September 29th. It was intercepted by four monitor stations: SAIL, CAST, Station TWO and Station SEVEN. Additionally the message to the embassy was photographed by officials at Mackay's Station X in Washington. According to testimony at the Pearl Harbor investigations, the decoded and translated messages were dismissed by Army and Navy intelligence officials in Washington as "chitter chat." And again the intelligence was not passed on to Admiral Kimmel or General Short. FDR took the map seriously enough to ask David Sarnoff, the president of RCA, to direct that copies of all Japanese consulate messages filed with RCA in Honolulu be delivered to Joseph Rochefort's Station HYPO. Stinnett, pp. 102-107.] September 25, 1941 Pre-Planning for War: Secretary of War Stimson delivers the combined Army-Navy estimate of requirements for war against the Axis powers to FDR. Its code name is Rainbow Five, or the "Victory Program." Wedemeyer, p. 23. September 29-30, 1941 Babi Yar: The Sonderkommando 4a and two police battalions of the German Sixth Army round up 33,771 Jews in Kiev who have been told to bring "identity papers, money and valuables as well as warm clothing." They are transported to a ravine outside the city where they are slaughtered and their bodies covered. [Through the
years another hundred thousand bodies were buried here at Babi Yar.
September 30, 1941 The Germans launch Operation Typhoon, a massive assault on the center of the Russian line designed to break the Red Army and capture Moscow before the start of winter. [By October 5 the lead panzers were 100 miles from Moscow. Despite a heavy snowfall on the 6th with its subsequent mud that made travel almost impossible, by October 14 one division had reached Borodino, 70 miles west of Moscow and another panzer division had captured Kalinin and cut the Moscow-Leningrad rail line. Beevor, pp. 34-36. The German general staff learned of Hitler's plan for a "preparatory commando unit" designed to slip through the lines after Moscow was surrounded and then raze Moscow to the ground. It was Hitler's intention to extend the eastern boundary of the Reich to the Baku-Stalingrad-Moscow-Leningrad line; beyond that a devastated "firebreak" would extend to the Urals. Fest, pp. 184-185.] October 2, 1941 Secretary of State Hull rejects the Konoe proposals. [As Ambassador Grew had predicted, the Konoe government fell. On October 16 Prince Konoe submitted his resignation and Emperor Hirohito appointed his War Minister, General Tojo Hideki, to head the new government.] October --, 1941 All Jews are forbidden exit from German-held territory. October 15, 1941 European War in the East: Foreign embassies in Moscow are told to move to Kuibyshev on the Volga. Lavrenti Beria starts moving the NKVD headquarters east. He first executes 300 prisoners in the Lubyanka. Beevor, p. 36. October 15, 1941 European War in the East: Richard Sorge informs Stalin that there is "no question of a Japanese attack against the Soviet Union until Germany wins a decisive victory on the Eastern front." [Based on this assurance, Stalin ordered large numbers of troops from the Far East to the Moscow front. Three days later Sorge was arrested in Tokyo along with thirty-five members of his spy ring, including two Japanese informants. Tarrant, pp. 165-166; Gilbert, p. 246.] October 16, 1941 The first
American military lives of World War II are lost when German
submarines attack an armed Canadian convoy about four hundred miles
south of Iceland. Five American destroyers based in Iceland come
to the rescue and drop depth charges. [The next day the House passed a bill repealing the ban against the arming of merchant ships, 259-138. When Secretary of State Hull was asked if a protest had been sent to Berlin, he replied, "One does not very often send diplomatic notes to an international highwayman." Burns, Soldier of Freedom, p. 147; Bailey and Ryan, pp. 197-98.] October 21, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Commander Rochefort of the HYPO cryptographic center in Hawaii tells Admiral Kimmel that Japan seems to be developing a two-pronged military strategy. One part of the Navy seems headed for an invasion of Southeast Asia; another involves air carriers staged from the Kurile Islands. Kimmel asks Rochefort to keep him informed on the location of the carriers. [He doesn't; in fact, this is the last substantive intelligence that Kimmel receives from Rochefort. The Communications Summary that Station HYPO sends to Washington and FDR predicts that Japan is planning a large-scale maneuver involving air forces staged from the Kurile Islands. Carrier Divisions Three and Four are associated with this action. Stinnett, pp, 57, 142, 154.] October 26, 1941 Holocaust: Buried on page six of the New York Times is a short article about the mass killing of ten to fifteen thousand Jews by the Nazis according to Hungarian army officers who witnessed the atrocities. Wyman, Abandonment, p. 20. October 27, 1941 FDR responds
to the Greer and Kearny incidents: "We have wished
to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has
recorded who fired the first shot. . . . America has been attacked.
. . . I say that we do not propose to take this lying down." One is a map which divides Central and South America into five fiefdoms. The other is Hitler's plan to abolish "all existing religions" and substitute the "International Nazi Church. In the place of the cross of Christ will be put two symbols— the swastika and the naked sword." He urges "total national defense," increased production of war materials, the arming of merchant vessels in order to "stop Hitler." The orders issued after the Greer incident to "shoot on sight" still stand. [Despite this speech, the Senate continued to haggle over the proposed amendment to the Neutrality Act. The next day Hitler issued a statement declaring the map and the document to be "forgeries" and that America had attacked Germany, i.e., the Kearny had fired on the U-boats. This caused great consternation among the isolationists who feared that Germany might invoke the Tri-Partite Pact and call upon Japan and Italy to join the "attacked" Germany in war against the United States. Bailey and Ryan, pp. 199-204; Burns, Soldier of Freedom, pp. 147-149; Dallek, Roosevelt, pp.290-292. FDR never produced the actual documents, saying that the handwriting in the margin could reveal the leaker and endanger that person. Isolationist Senator Wheeler discovered that William Stephenson— "Intrepid" of the British Security Coordination— had given the map to FDR, so he denounced both as British forgeries designed to secure the US entry into the war. Actually they were genuine. The map was given to British agents by an attaché in the German Embassy in Argentina who was later executed. The "International Nazi Church" document was a seven-page cablegram sent to the State Department by an agent in Switzerland. Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid, pp. 297-298; Bailey and Ryan, p.204.] October 31, 1941 War in the North Atlantic: The destroyer Reuben James, in the Atlantic protecting a British convoy out of Halifax, is sunk by a Nazi U-boat with the loss of 115 American lives, including all of the officers. This loss of the first American fighting ship in World War II causes little official comment. [Robert Sherwood describes the American mood: "There was a sort of tacit understanding among Americans that nobody was to get excited if ships were sunk by U-boats, because that's what got us into war the other time. It has been said that in 1914 the French were prepared for the war of 1870, and in 1939 they were prepared for the war of 1914. It could also be said with equal truth that in 1941 the Americans were fully prepared to keep out of the war of 1917." Davis, FDR: War President, p. 325; Sherwood, p. 382.] November 5, 1941 The Hess Affair: The American military attaché in London cables his head of military intelligence that Hess said he flew to England to tell the Duke that Germany was about to attack Russia. He proposed peace with England, otherwise "we would have to destroy England after we destroyed Russia." He expected to be taken to the head of the British Peace Party, King George himself. A further revelation: Germany "is obliterating the Jews." Kilzer, pp. 55-63. November 5, 1941 Emperor Hirohito Gives Admiral Yamamoto the Go-Ahead for the Attack on Pearl Harbor, the destruction of the Pacific Fleet and the invasion and occupation of the Southeast Asia targets. [These results of an Imperial Conference were reported the next day by Ambassador Grew, who had an informant at the meeting, to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. "War with the United States may come with dramatic and dangerous suddenness." Stinnett, pp. 142-143.] November 5, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Admiral Nagano Osami, Chief of the Naval General Staff, sends radio messages to his fleet commanders that Japan intends to attack America, Great Britain and the Netherlands in the first part of December. Stinnett. pp. 262-263. November 7, 1941 European
War in the East: The traditional army parade on Revolution Day
is held in Moscow's Red Square despite the state of siege which
had been declared on October 19. [The embalmed Lenin had already been evacuated east! Stiff Russian resistance and the weather forced the Germans to halt their offensive by the end of November. Beevor, pp. 38-39.] November 13, 1941 The Neutrality Act is amended to permit the arming of merchant ships. The votes are close — 212-194 in the House and 50-37 in the Senate — despite the loss of American lives in the Kearny and the Reuben James. November 15, 1941 A Strictly Secret Press Briefing at the Munitions Building: Army Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall tells a very select group of seven newspaper correspondents that the "United States is on the brink of war with Japan" and that hostilities are expected the "first ten days of December." He further reveals that the US can read Japan's encrypted messages. "We know what they know and they don't know we know it." [The newspapers kept the secret from their readers, some of whom included officers and men at Pearl Harbor. According to the memo written by Robert Sherrod of Time,* Marshall said he called them together because "there were some things he had to tell key press correspondents in order that their interpretations of current and forthcoming events did not upset key military strategy of the United States." Stinnett questions Marshall's ethics in confiding to the press rather that alerting General Short, a question which General Short would later raise to the Joint Congressional Investigation Committee. Stinnett, pp. 157-158, 361.] *The other six were representatives of the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Newsweek, UP, AP and INS. November 17, 1941 Ambassador Grew sends an even stronger warning to Washington, predicting a sudden military or naval action by Japan. [This followed a "vacation and sightseeing" trip of his naval attaché and his wife to Inland Sea areas where air carrier training exercises were being held. Stinnett, pp. 143-144.] November 18-25, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Stations CAST and HYPO intercept radio messages that reveal the northward transit and arrival at Hitokappu Bay of the rest of the six aircraft carriers and supporting warships that comprise Japan's First Air Fleet. On the 25th Admiral Yamamoto gives the departing task force the command to "attack the main force of the United States Fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow." The time will be dawn of X-day, a date to be sent later. However, if negotiations should succeed, the attack will be cancelled and the ships should turn around and go home. Stinnett, pp. 57, 154, 269, 302 November 23, 1941 Naval Exercise in the North Pacific: Admiral Kimmel orders 46 warships of the Pacific Fleet including the carrier USS Lexington to the North Pacific to look for those Japanese carriers that Rochefort had spotted in the Kurile Islands on October 21. [Officially the sortie was designated as Exercise 191, but the operation was carried on with radio silence, using blinkers and flag signals for communication. If hostile warships were encountered, the flag signal EASY CAST EASY would be given and appropriate action taken. The launch area for Force Black (Japan) was presumed to be Prokofiev Seamount, an extinct underwater volcano about 200 miles north of Oahu. This would be the same launch area that Admiral Yamamoto would use two weeks later— and the same launch time, dawn on Sunday. Admiral Kimmel had planned to undertake long-range aerial reconnaissance, but when naval headquarters in Washington read the plans, that part was overruled. So a curtailed exercise was held on the 23rd and 24th until Admiral Kimmel suddenly called it off fifteen hours before its scheduled conclusion. He had received a message from Rear Admiral Ingersoll which said that "a surprise aggressive movement in any direction including attack on Philippines or Guam is a possibility. . . . Utmost secrecy is necessary in order not to complicate an already tense situation or precipitate Japanese action." Kimmel interpreted
this as an order not to take any provocative actions against Japan.
November 24, 1941 Kimmel to Rochefort: Find the Carriers. Stinnett, p. 154. November 25, 1941 Departure from Japan: Six Japanese aircraft carriers— bearing the 183 planes which will attack the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor— leave Hitokappu Bay. They carry instructions to proceed with the mission unless notified to the contrary by November 29th. [A poll taken at this time indicated that 52% of Americans believed that they would be at war with Japan in the "near future." Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1991. H2.] November 25, 1941 The "Vacant Sea:" Washington's response to the two warnings from Ambassador Grew is to declare the North Pacific to be a "Vacant Sea" and to order all US and allied shipping to leave those waters. Ships should instead take a trans-Pacific route through the Torres Strait in the South Pacific between Australia and New Guinea. [The order
was issued one hour after Yamamoto's First Air Fleet had departed
Japan. November 25, 1941 Jews in Germany: Nazi Germany decrees that all Jews who have left Germany to live abroad will no longer be considered German subjects and all of their assets are now forfeit to the state. [The goal of this Eleventh Decree to the Reich Citizenship Law was the expropriation of property; they had lost their citizenship in 1935.] November 25, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Admiral Kimmel learns from Rochefort's communications summary that there is a large Japanese force of fleet submarines, including the commander of the Sixth (Submarine) Fleet, and long-range patrol aircraft heading eastward toward Hawaii. Since the presence of enemy subs is a good predictor of an attack from an air carrier, Kimmel and Admiral Claude Bloch drive to Station Hypo where they demand more information from Commander Rochefort. Learning that the "two-pronged military operation" which Rochefort had discovered in October is now in operation, they order Rochefort to send a priority message to Washington. Both Rochefort's alert and his information to Kimmel, however, omit mention of the six carriers that have already departed from Hitokappu Bay. Stinnett, pp. 164-168. November 25, 1941 Precautionary Moves: Admiral Hart is ordered by Washington to go to Australia with ten of his submarines that have been guarding the entrance to Manila's harbor. Stinnett, p. 174, 365. November 26, 1941 Precautionary Moves: Admiral Stark orders Admiral Kimmel to send the carriers Lexington and Enterprise out to sea to deliver some planes to Wake Island, thus thwarting another "look for the carriers" exercise that Kimmel was planning. [Twenty-one modern warships accompanied them. By December 7th the warships remaining in Pearl Harbor were mostly old relics of World War I. Stinnett, pp. 151-154.] November 26, 1941 The "Ten-Point
Note" is sent from the US State Department to Japan. No one in Washington
expected Japan to accept this proposal; FDR, Secretary of State
Cordell Hull and Secretary of War Henry Stimson are on record as
believing that Japan would respond with a sneak attack somewhere.
Commander Rochefort said later: November 27, 1941 War Warning: By FDR's order four naval commands including Admiral Kimmel receive the following message from Rear Admiral Ingersoll, substituting for Admiral Stark who was down with the flu: "This dispatch is to be considered a war warning . . . negotiations with Japan . . . have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days . . . organization of naval task forces indicates an amphibious expedition against either the Philippines or Kra Peninsula or possibly Borneo . . . take appropriate measures against sabotage." [A similar message was sent to Army commands, including General Short by Secretary of State Stimson, substituting for General Marshall who was away on maneuvers. Pearl Harbor was not mentioned as a possible target. Stinnett, pp. 170-171; Toland, Infamy, pp. 6-7.] November 28, 1941 Priority
Messages: Admiral Stark, back at his desk, amends Ingersoll's
message: Similarly General Marshall steers General Short towards sabotage precautions and away from a full alert: "Critical situation demands that all precautions be taken immediately against subversive activities . . . avoiding unnecessary publicity and alarm." [These messages rather tied the hands of the two commanders. Too many people had a hillside view of everything that happened in the harbor and at the army posts. Putting the troops on a full-time alert or conducting large-scale reconnaissance would immediately have been front-page news in the two daily newspapers. Stinnett, pp. 173-175.] November 28, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Vice Admiral Nagumo, the commander of the First Air Fleet now three days out from the Kuriles, receives a warning that he may encounter two Soviet merchant ships, the Uritski and the Azerbaijan, which have departed from San Francisco. [Not to worry! San Francisco's Naval District had ordered the Uritski to proceed to Astoria, Oregon where it was required to stay in harbor until December 5th before proceeding on to Petropavlovsk. The Azerbaijan, headed for Vladivostok, was diverted to the southern route. Stinnett, pp. 160-161. 362.] November 29, 1941 European War in the East: The Germans meet their first defeat of the war when the Russians regain the city of Rostov. November 30, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Foreign Minister Togo to his ambassador in Berlin, Baron Oshima: "Say very secretly to them [Hitler and von Ribbentrop] there is extreme danger that war may suddenly break out between the Anglo-Saxon nations and Japan through some clash of arms. This may come quicker than anyone dreams." [FDR asked for a copy of this particular message for his personal files. Oshima also gave the Nazis the information that Japan would not attack the Soviet Union. This was communicated to Stalin who was then able to send some highly trained divisions east for the defense of Moscow. Feis, Road, p. 336; Stinnett, pp. 181-182; Hasegawa, p. 18.] November 30-December 4, 1941 Pre-Pearl
Harbor Intelligence: Lieutenant Ellsworth Hosmer of the Twelfth
Naval District obtains radio direction finder bearings on the ships
of the First Air Fleet. [This information was delivered to Washington and to FDR, but not to the two commanders at Pearl Harbor. These North Pacific intercepts were not mentioned in any of the Pearl Harbor investigations, and Ogg was never called to testify. In 1984 the Navy classified all the original Japanese intercepts TOP SECRET CODEWORD, but Stinnett was able to verify Ogg's testimony to John Toland and to himself through some unclassified intercepts in the Dutch Harbor reports. Stinnett, pp. 189-195.] December 1, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: "It has been decided to enter into a state of war between the Imperial Government on one side and the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands on the other during the first part of December."----- a radio dispatch from Admiral Nagumo, the Japanese Chief of Naval General Staff to the commanders-in-chief of the Combined Fleet and the China Fleet which was intercepted and decoded at Station H. Stinnett, p. 270. December 1, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Togo to Ambassador Nomura in Washington: "To keep United States from becoming unduly suspicious say negotiations are continuing." Stinnett, p. 366. December 2, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Admiral Nagano informs the other ships of the First Air Fleet that X-day will be December 8, Tokyo time (December 7, Hawaii time.) Stinnett, p. 263. December 3, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: US Naval Intelligence intercepts messages from Tokyo instructing embassies and consulates to burn their code papers and destroy the code machines. Only the embassy in Washington and the Honolulu consulate may retain their PURPLE machines. [This should have been a definite warning that war was imminent and Hawaii the likely target of a sneak attack. However, Admiral Kimmel's two war-plans officers, Captain Charles McMorris and Commander Vincent Murphy, assured Admiral Kimmel that a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was unlikely. Murphy had accompanied Admiral Richardson to Washington for the stormy meeting with FDR in October, 1940 and was well aware of FDR's "let Japan strike the first blow" policy and the McCollum memo. Stinnett, pp.38, 112-113, 182.] December 4, 1941 F.D.R.'S
WAR PLANS! GOAL IS 10 MILLION ARMED MEN; These are the banner headlines of the Chicago Tribune and its sister newspaper, the Washington Times-Herald. The details are those of the top-secret Rainbow Five war plan, including the statements that Germany, not Japan, would be the primary target and that military preparations for war were far from ready. [Reactions were immediate. The Attorney-General wanted to indict the newspaper publishers for treason. The isolationists screamed that this proved that FDR was lying all along about "not sending your sons to war." The FBI started an investigation to discover who had leaked the material. Suspicion first fell upon Major Albert Wedemeyer who had primary responsibility for devising the Army estimate. (Also, he had spent 1936-1938 at the German War College and was known to be anti-intervention.) He was cleared, however, and remained close to General Marshall and ended up the war as a full general. In 1962 eighty-year-old ex-Senator Burton Wheeler admitted in his memoir that it was he who had submitted the plans to the Chicago Tribune reporter. They had been given to him by an unnamed Army Air captain who had visited him several times previously to complain about the country's lack of preparedness and that officials were "lying to the American people." Since the copy he was loaned was one of five numbered and registered copies, Wheeler felt sure that the delivery had been authorized by someone much higher up. Wheeler, Yankee from the West, pp. 21, 32-36. The leaker was never discovered, but Thomas Fleming theorizes that the leak came from FDR himself. His reasoning: FDR knew from the PURPLE decrypts that Japan was about to start war with a sneak attack somewhere, probably, he thought, in the Dutch East Indies or Siam. The American public would be focused on war with Japan and unwilling to fight Hitler also, unless— Hitler could be induced to declare war. Publication of the Victory Program— with its admissions that Hitler would be the #1 enemy but the US was not yet materially prepared to fight— might just do the trick. Fleming, New Dealers' War, Chapter 2. Fleming was evidently unaware of the decrypts of Japanese naval operations or that FDR knew there was a task force headed for Pearl Harbor. These more recently-known facts only reinforce his reasoning.] December 5, 1941 European War in the East: From three directions Marshal Georgi Zhukov launches a massive counter-offensive that forces the German army into a rapid retreat on the Moscow front. [This time the Russians had air superiority; the Germans on their makeshift air fields had to defrost their planes by lighting fires beneath the engines. The Soviet soldiers were dressed for the -25° Centigrade weather; the Germans were suffering frostbite and scrounging winter wear from the peasants. Partisans attacked the Germans from the rear and ski troops appeared on all sides without warning. The demoralized Germans, threatened with encirclement, were forced to pull back a hundred miles. Moscow was saved. Obvious only in hindsight, the power balance shifted decisively against the Germans in December, 1941 with the Nazi failure to take Moscow and the American entry into the war. Beevor, pp. 41-48.] December 6, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Tokyo orders its Honolulu consulate to report on the current status of the anti-aircraft defenses at the naval base and the army field. Morimura wires back: "There are no barrage balloons up and there is an opportunity left for a surprise attack against these places." [Of the 27 messages from the consulate to Tokyo between December 1 and December 6, only two failed to be decoded and translated in a timely fashion by Lieutenant Commander Joseph Rochefort's Station HYPO in Hawaii. This was one. The other was a December 2 message from Morimura which indicated that the naval base was operating normally and was not on an alert. In the postwar Pearl Harbor investigations Rochefort and his assistant, Chief Yeoman Farnsley Woodward told conflicting stories about this failure. Stinnett accuses these two men of being part of the team that deliberately withheld vital intelligence information from the two Hawaiian commanders, Kimmel and Short, who would later be scapegoated for the Pearl Harbor disaster. In his oral history (1970) Rochefort, who had been a close friend of Arthur McCollum, said that the carnage at Pearl Harbor on December 7 was a "cheap price" to pay for the "unification of America." Stinnett, pp. 113-118, 353. Station TWO in San Francisco sent the message to Washington by teleprinter, but the Army and Navy intelligence people there ignored it. Stinnett, p. 118.] December 6, 1941 Pre-Pearl Harbor Intelligence: Foreign Minister Togo sends Ambassador Nomura in PURPLE code the first thirteen parts of memorandum that he should prepare for delivery to the US Secretary of State, replying to the ten-point note of November 26. Japan is breaking relations with the United States and declaring war. The fourteenth part will come later and will indicate the time of delivery. [By 3 PM EST all thirteen parts were intercepted at Station SAIL and sent to Station US by teleprinter for decoding. By 4 PM it had all been decoded and translated except for a few minor details and the White House was notified. (This was accomplished even before Ambassador Nomura received his message.) The package was delivered to FDR at 9:30 PM. He read it and said to Harry Hopkins, "This means war." Admiral Stark was at the theater, but the courier, Lieutenant Commander Alwin Kramer, was able to show the package to the director of Naval Intelligence at his home in Arlington where he was hosting a party. Stinnett, pp. 228-231.]
More to Come!
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