9/11 and the Invasion of Mexico, I

Controversy is roiling in the Tasty Bits Comments section over my analysis of why we entered into WW2 against Nazi Germany and the connection (or lack thereof) to Pearl Harbor.

Here's what I wrote last night:

Kerry mentioned our attacking Iraq after 9/11 would have been like FDR attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor.

Now here's a question: what exactly did Nazi Germany have to do with Pearl Harbor?

Absofreakinglutely nothing.

If you go and read FDR's "Day of Infamy" speech, there is not one single reference to Nazi Germany or a role for America in the war in Europe. Not one.

Zippo.

Yet, within months, FDR decided to pursue a "Europe First" strategy which involved our putting the core of the United States Army into North Africa and then into Europe, on the other side of the planet from the perpetrators of the Pearl Harbor attack in Japan.

Why did he do this? Partly in response to the belief that Nazi Germany was developing a nuclear weapon.

Can you imagine what would have happened to Tom Dewey if he had tried to rip into FDR in the campaign of 1944 on this issue? He would have been crucified, and rightly so.

And of course, fifty nine years later we still have two US Army heavy divisions stationed in Germany.

First of all, the erudite and classically trained rhetoritician "BUSHIT" writes in "LEARN YUR HERSTORY BEFORE YOU VOMIT FOR THE CHIMPEROR!" Well, I punched it up a bit, but you get the drift. Another writer quite soberly asks if that in fact came later.

The web being what it is, here's a copy of Einstein's letter to FDR dated August 2, 1939. (Link goes to the Argonne National Laboratory operated by the Department of Energy and the University of Chicago) Unlike CBS's documents, these are copies of the real thing:

Was the perception and belief that the Nazis were building an atomic bomb the only motivating factor behind the Europe First strategy? Absolutely not. But it was an important factor among a large group of important factors. FDR recognized that the larger war was against fascism, and that meant attacking Germany and Italy as much as the Empire of Japan. Of course, we experienced quite a Blowback from our support of the Soviet Empire---the Cold War and their ultimate invasion of Afgahnistan, source of so many of our current woes.

The National D-Day Museum in New Orleans has a compelling exhibit on the strategic motivations that drove the Manhattan Project, juxtaposed with the planning for Operation Olympic, the invasion of the Japanese home islands. (I wrote about this on the old blog back in January).

As to the development of the "Europe First" strategy, the key set of meetings led up to the Arcadia Conference in Washington soon after Pearl Harbor. Military historian and retired Army General Charles F. Brower describes the plan succinctly:

First, there is the question as to just what was the agreed upon American strategy for the defeat of Germany. The Japanese attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and the subsequent declaration of war on the United States by Germany thrust the United States into a global and total war. At the hurriedly-called Arcadia Conference in Washington two weeks later, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs of staff reaffirmed the strategic decision to defeat Germany first and agreed upon the general strategic concept for victory in Europe.

The five-phased Arcadia Strategy involved the mobilization and build-up of Allied forces and resources; the maintenance and extension of Allied lines of communications; the erosion of Axis strength through a strategic air campaign; the isolation of Axis powers by "closing the ring" around Germany; and the eventual invasion of the European continent and the final destruction of Germany. This strategic framework largely describes the course of American military involvement in the European Theater of World War II.

FDR and Churchill at the Arcadia Conference

For an interesting and thorough analysis of the Arcadia Conference, this piece at the FDR Library has some prescient analogies for the situation today (particularly in light of Sully's one-note appropriation of all things Churchill)

Here's the key passage:

It is well known that cardinal strategic principle guiding Anglo-American war planners was to defeat Germany, the strongest Axis Power, first. But opinion polls in the United States showed that Americans were interested more in beating the Japanese than the Germans and Italians, an attitude clearly reflected on Capitol Hill. Winning a peripheral victory in North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean or the Middle East might be good for the British Empire, but it was clearly not hastening the final victory in Europe and it was definitely delaying the comeback fight in the Pacific for which the American public was clamoring. It was only by a considerable intellectual effort that Americans had been persuaded that Germany not Japan was the most dangerous enemy, Secretary of War Stimson reminded Churchill. "The enemy whom the American people really hated, if they hated anyone, was Japan which had dealt them the foul blow." From the perspective of most Americans, therefore, the Mediterranean road was not the shortest way to victory, and Marshall and the Joint Chiefs believed it would be even slower that it ultimately proved to be. This specter of a long, plodding, costly war that would stretch out for years to come while testing the patience of the American people of a long tortuous approach that would stretch out for years haunted Marshall and the Chiefs and prompted their fierce arguments for an early cross-channel attack. "A democracy," Marshall told his biographer Forrest Pogue after the war, "cannot fight a Seven Years War."

...

It seems to me that FDR's awareness of the need to devise a strategy that delivered incremental dividends to sustain the nation's investment of blood and treasure helps us to better understand his rationale for overruling Marshall and opting for the North African invasions in 1942.

FDR instinctively appreciated the imperative need to arrest the public's pull to the Pacific, for he believed that the defeat of Japan did not mean the defeat of Germany and that American concentration against Japan in 1942 or 1943 would increase the chance of a complete German domination of Europe and greatly complicate the final task of defeating Germany. On the other hand, he believed that holding Germany in 1942 or 1943 meant the probable, eventual defeat of Germany, and that Germany's defeat would mean the defeat of Japan in short order afterwards. "The necessities of the case call for action in 1942-not 1943," FDR told his military advisers. "I regard it as essential that active operations be conducted against Germany in 1942."

FDR also believed that continued prolonged inaction against Germany until 1943 as the Allies geared up for a cross-channel attack could create enough congressional and domestic pressure to force a shift of strategy toward the Pacific. To sustain support for the Germany First strategy, FDR worried about "finding a place where the soldiers thought they could fight" and concluded that only bloodying American soldiers in combat against the Germans would solve the problem.

Marshall later recalled that he learned an important lesson from the debate over TORCH: "The leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. (This may seem like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought.) The people demanded action. We couldn't wait to be completely ready. Churchill was always getting into sideshows and if we had gone as far as he did we would have never gotten out. But I could see that the president had to have something."

Others in the Joint Chiefs, casting an eye toward the November off-year elections, saw more crass political purposes motivating FDR's TORCH decision. Even the stilted bureaucratic style of the JCS minutes of the meeting following the president's decision fails to fully obscure their sentiments and resigned air: "There was an acceptance that apparently our political system would require major operations this year in Africa."

But Clausewitz reminds us that policy must be the guiding intelligence for war and that purely military considerations cannot be determinant in strategic calculations. Marshall may have been right that a 1943 invasion of Europe, made impossible by TORCH, might have shortened the war-though evidence is very strong that a 1943 attack would have been a badly premature and risky venture. Moreover, there remains the question of whether American strategists could have successfully resisted the powerful pull of the Pacific suction pump if major operations were delayed against Germany well into 1943.

As the Commander-in-Chief, FDR understood well that political considerations-especially the nature of his postwar relationship with Great Britain and the Soviet Union and the leadership role he envisioned for the United States in continuing that Grand Alliance into the postwar world and careful attention to considerations of national morale, the will and temper of the American people-must take priority over strictly military considerations. If he failed to arrest the public pressure to turn to the Pacific, if the United States left its European allies and turned to the Pacific, how could FDR hope to position the United States to lead in the postwar world?

These grand strategic political considerations weighed on the president's mind and guided his decisions. Partisan political benefits were to be viewed as a bonus, not as a principal objective. Recall that when military considerations led Eisenhower to set the date of the landings on 8 November, five days after the midterm elections, FDR remained mute. When Steve Early, FDR's press secretary, heard the announcement of the invasion five days after the Democrats had lost 44 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate, he exclaimed: "Jesus Christ! Why couldn't the Army have dome this before the election!" The Commander-in-Chief understood, however.

Nine months later in August 1944, after a successful Normandy invasion and breakout and the German army thought to have been mortally wounded, FDR could not resist crowing a bit to Marshall. "Just between ourselves (a phase we historians know cannot be realistic), if I had not considered the European and African fields of action in their broadest geographic sense, you and I know we would not be in North Africa today-in fact we would not landed in either Africa or Europe." Marshall did not respond. In fact, he never changed his mind about TORCH. But Eisenhower later acknowledged that it was probably the correct decision. The choice to go to North Africa rather than France in 1942 was "the great decision of the European war."

That it was, and one made by a grand strategist par excellence, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Commander-in-Chief.

Read the whole thing, as they say: it is a learned and sophisticated analysis of strategic development in WW2. However, skip it if you enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan, because you'll see through the fraudulent partisan uses to which Sully uses the great man's ghost. The piece focuses in on FDR's decision to aim at Europe First, and how he reshaped public opinion away from immediate vengenance against Imperial Japan. It also details the controversy among the Chiefs of Staff over the decision to invade North Africa right before the congressional elections of 1942, an action General Marshall and other stridently opposed at first as a strategic distraction.

The point here is NOT to chastise FDR but to praise him: he saw the big picture, and realized that the proper course of action was not necessarily the popular or easy one. There is a sense that all Americans--with the exceptions of the nutbags in the German American Bund, and old hacks like old man Kennedy--were united in knowing what we needed to do and how to do it. Nothing could be further from the truth. The road seems linear because we know the decisions that were made and we know their ultimate success. But it is well to understand the context of the decisions and to understand their unpopularity. Europe First was not what FDR called for in the Day of Infamy speech, and was not popular at first among a public bent on getting even with Japan. Invading North Africa before the elections of 1942 was even more unpopular among the general staff, and was seen as a political distraction from the goal of landing in France.

But FDR was right on both counts, in the same way as that country hick who stood up to the war hero in the election of 1864.

My point in all this at first was to point out one mistake that was tossed off during the debate, but the reaction from "BUSHIT" and others points to a larger issue I'm going to explore in greater depth over the coming weeks.