media of all discussion of Soviet barbarities, intellectual apologists extolled the virtues of Stalin’s society. The Republicans’ 1940 US presidential candidate Wendell Willkie wrote in his contemporary book One World: ‘First, Russia is an effective society. It works. It has survival value…Second, Russia is our ally in this war. The Russians, more sorely tested by Hitler’s might even than the British, have met the test magnificently…Third, we must work with Russia after the war…There can be no continued peace unless we learn to do so.’ British academic Sir Bernard Pares wrote in the Spectator about his nation’s ‘grateful recognition of the immense burden shouldered by a great and gallant people in our common struggle against the forces of evil, together with the earnest wish that after the war there should be a continuation of this close friendship, without which no peace in Europe is possible’.
Pares applauded a new account of Soviet society published by an American admirer: ‘It is a picture of…fallible human beings, ready to learn from their mistakes, amidst enormous difficulties…trying to build up in one of the most backward countries in Europe a new human society in which the chief consideration of the State goes to…the great mass of the population.’ Many people happily swallowed such nonsense, nodding that the war proved the superiority of the Soviet system. A friend told British soldier Henry Novy, ‘It hasn’t half shown up Communism…no other country could have done it, only a Communist country, with the people really behind it.’
It was probably true that only Russians could have borne and achieved what they did in the face of the 1941 catastrophe. It was less plausible to attribute this to the nobility of communist society. Until Barbarossa, Stalin sought to make common cause with Hitler, albeit to attain different objectives. Even when Russia became joined with the democracies to achieve the defeat of Nazism, Stalin pursued his quest for a Soviet empire, domination and oppression of hundreds of millions of people, with absolute single-mindedness and ultimate success. Whatever the merits of the Russian people’s struggle to expel the invaders from their country, Stalin’s war aims were as selfish and inimical to human liberty as those of Hitler. Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust. Nonetheless, the Western Allies were obliged to declare their gratitude, because Russia’s suffering and sacrifice saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of young British and American soldiers. Even if no exalted assertion of principle – instead, only a grapple between rival monsters – caused Russia to become the principal battleground of the war, it was there that the Third Reich encountered the forces that would contrive its nemesis.
8
America Embattled
The people of the United States observed the first twenty-seven months of the struggle in Europe with mingled fascination, horror and disdain. The chief character in J.P. Marquand’s contemporary novel So Little Time says: ‘You could get away from the war for a little while, but not for long, because it was everywhere, even in the sunlight. It lay behind everything you said or did. You could taste it in your food, you could hear it in music.’ Many saw the conflict, and the triumphs of Nazism, as reflecting a collective European degeneracy. There was limited animosity towards the Axis, and some active support for Hitler in German ethnic communities. A Princeton poll on 30 August 1939 found that while 68 per cent of Americans thought that US citizens should not be permitted to enlist in the Wehrmacht, 26 per cent believed they should retain that option. Very few wanted to see their nation join either side in a bloodbath an ocean apart from their own continent. A Roper poll in September 1939 asked how the US should frame policy towards the warring nations. Among respondents, 37.5 per cent favoured eschewing partisanship, but continuing to sell goods to all parties on a cash-and-carry basis; some 23.6 per cent opposed any commercial traffic with any combatant; just 16.1 per cent favoured a modification of neutrality to offer aid to Britain and France if they were threatened with defeat. Interventionism enjoyed most support in the southern and western states.
For half the previous decade, President Franklin Roosevelt had been expressing dismay about his people’s reluctance to acknowledge their own peril. On 30 October 1939, he wrote to US London ambassador Joseph Kennedy: ‘We over here, in spite of the great strides towards national unity during the past six years, still have much to learn of the “relativity” of world geography and the rapid annihilation of distance and purely local economics.’ Given the strength of isolationism, however, between 1939 and 1941 he felt obliged to act with circumspection in aiding Britain. In many respects a cautious politician, he had to manage what one of his supporters called ‘the most volatile public opinion in the world’. White House familiar Robert Sherwood wrote: ‘Before the advent of calamity in Western Europe and of Winston Churchill, the Allied cause did not have a good smell even in the nostrils of those who hated Fascism and all its evil works.’
The writer John Steinbeck spent some weeks in the spring of 1940 sailing down the Pacific coast of South America, from whence he wrote to a friend on 26 March: ‘We haven’t heard any news of Europe since we left and don’t much want to. And the people we meet on the shore have never heard of Europe and they seem to be the better for it. This whole trip is doing what we had hoped it might, given us a world picture not dominated by Hitler and Moscow, but something more vital and surviving than either.’ Like many liberals, Steinbeck was convinced America would eventually have to fight, but viewed the prospect without enthusiasm. ‘If it weren’t for the coming war, I could look forward to a good quiet life for a few years,’ he wrote on 9 July.
The morning after Hitler invaded Norway in April 1940, reporters crowded into FDR’s office and asked if this brought the US closer to war. The president chose his words as carefully as ever: ‘You can put it this way: that the events of the past forty-eight hours will undoubtedly cause a great many more Americans to think about the potentialities of war.’ Roosevelt avowed reluctance to run for a third presidential term in 1940, and intimated that only world crisis, and explicitly the fall of France, persuaded him to do so. ‘The question of whether Roosevelt would run,’ wrote Adolf Berle, one of the president’s intimates, on 15 May that year, ‘is being settled somewhere on the banks of the Meuse River.’ The president’s equivocation was probably disingenuous since, like most national leaders, he loved power. Posterity is assured that no American was better qualified to direct the nation through the greatest emergency in world history, but an insistent minority of Roosevelt’s countrymen, notably including the business community, rejected this proposition at the time. Donald Nelson, who later became overlord of America’s industrial mobilisation, wrote: ‘Who among us except the President of the United States really saw the magnitude of the job ahead?…All the people I met and talked to, including members of the General Staff, the Army and Navy’s highest ranking officers, distinguished statesmen and legislators, thought of the defensive program only as a means of equipping ourselves to keep the enemy away from the shores of the United States.’
Rearmament had begun in May 1938, with Roosevelt’s $1.15 billion Naval Expansion Bill, followed by the November 1939 Cash-and-Carry Bill, modifying the Neutrality Act to allow belligerents – effectively, the French and British – to purchase American weapons. Roosevelt presided at a meeting of service chiefs at the White House, during which he instructed them to prepare for war and a large expansion of the armed forces. In 1940 he pushed through Congress a Selective Service Act imposing military conscription, and a $15 billion domestic rearmament programme. He delivered a personal message to the legislature declaring that he wanted the US to build 50,000 planes a year. This prompted a terse note from his chiefs of staff signed by the navy’s Admiral Harold ‘Betty’ Stark: ‘Dear Mr. President, – GREAT – Betty (for all of us).’ The US Army expanded from 140,000 men in September 1939 to 1.25 million two years later, but all three chiefs of staff knew that their services remained lamentably ill-prepared to fight a big war. Many members of the armed forces as well as of the civilian community remained unconvinced either that their nation should engage, or that it would.
Young Americans conscripted under the Selective Service Act sulked in their camps: ‘An army post in peacetime is a dull place,’ wrote Carson McCullers in a
