He had been negotiating  with FDR since the previous December, but not until June 19, 1940 did Frank Knox agree to become secretary of the navy. A few weeks later, around the time Japan was concluding a defensive alliance with Germany and Italy, designed to discourage the United States from entering the war, he made the long, weary trip to Hawaii in a flying boat to visit Richardson, his most important, and obstreperous, admiral. Accompanying him was his mentor, William J. Donovan, "Wild Bill," the war hero FDR had sent to Britain to gauge its chances of holding out. On Donovan's return from England, newspaperman Knox had arranged for him to publish a series of articles on the Fifth Column's part in the German victories in Europe, echoing warnings the president had sounded in a speech in late May.

Richardson laid on a strenuous program for the visitors, even to flying them off the carrier Enterprise--Donovan lost his wallet, watch, and four hundred dollars when his coat blew out of the cockpit. Knox, who had been appointed for his political ties but also to help tame the admirals, took up the argument with Richardson, who was still unhappy about keeping the fleet at Pearl. The secretary thought the fleet wasn't war-minded enough, and the visit wasn't a success. Afterwards the unrepentant Richardson even complained to Knox that he had omitted the usual courtesy of thanking the fleet for its welcome.(1)

Three months later, Richardson brought a detachment of the fleet into Los Angeles. No sooner had he arrived than he was waited upon by Ellis Zacharias, the intelligence officer for the Eleventh Naval District. Zacharias had flown up from San Diego to tell Richardson about a report that the Japanese were poised for a sneak attack on four American battleships. The story originated with a retired naval officer from San Jacinto, who had it from a reliable source in Mexico, quoting a source high on the Eleventh District's suspect list. The raid would employ sixteen aircraft, flying from submarines or secret Mexican bases. Afterwards the Japanese planned to offer apologies, as in the Panay incident.

There were no battleships in San Diego. In fact, those with Richardson were the only ones around. The admiral took no chances and weighed anchor for San Francisco. The episode probably did nothing to improve his temper. He had been involved in a bitter argument in Washington. FDR was mulling an oil embargo and maybe intercepting Japanese commerce, and Stark was endeavoring to kill another  Rooseveltian brainstorm--sending a one-carrier task force to Manila. At this point Richardson had finally had it with Knox and Roosevelt. On October 8th he took his complaints to lunch at the White House. To the astonishment and consternation of former CNO Bill Leahy, who happened to be eating with FDR, he ruined the president's lunch by deliberately telling him that senior naval officers lacked the trust and confidence in  their civilian leaders  necessary to wage  a successful war in the Pacific. FDR was reluctant to announce an increase in  the Navy's enlisted ranks on the eve of election: "Joe, you just don't understand that this is an election year . . . " In the previous June FDR had declined to ask Congress for more warships because he didn't wish to alarm the country unduly in an election year.

A few months later, in February, a  procession of admirals' barges was cutting across the Pearl Harbor lagoon, heading for the flagship. There, under the battleship's guns, Husband Kimmel read his orders to take over from Richardson. Stark had tried to hang onto J.O., but only succeeded in postponing his relief. The other candidate to succeed Richardson was Ernest King, but Kimmel was already with the fleet (2)

The admirals' battles with the president precipitated a clarification of  American strategy, of which the root was to preserve Britain as a buffer against German mastery of the Atlantic world. Winston Churchill rejected any accommodation with Hitler; consequently he needed a scenario explaining how Britain could win the war, alone, if need be. He envisioned encouraging the conquered peoples of Europe to harass the German occupiers while British commandos struck unexpectedly from the sea. Massive bombing by the RAF would break German morale and cripple the economy. Then, at a moment of crescendo, élite British armored units would be landed to blitz the Wehrmacht, leaving patriotic forces to "mop up" and recover the national territory.

It sounded great, not least because it was meant to be inspirational. The American Army planners from Marshall on down thought it was moonshine. To return to the Continent, they saw no substitute for American belligerency and an invasion in force. Their plans were based on this premise. The American Army's chief of staff would proceed to Europe at the head of a mighty expeditionary force, as had Black Jack Pershing. True, FDR was leery of the popular appeal of a big army and another A.E.F., and  American admirals were less interested professionally in a European campaign, where they would be outshone by the Army. The Navy had spotted its enemy across the Pacific, and its Marine Corps had been practicing subduing the Japanese garrisons in the Mandates.

But head admiral Betty Stark had served with the British in the Great War and favored  giving priority to the Atlantic. Besides, he probably  needed an agreed strategy to suppress FDR's brainstorming. In November 1940 he personally drafted the school solution in the so-called Plan Dog memorandum--so-called because the solution fell under paragraph D,  Dog in military jargont. Paragraph Dog said that Britain must be sustained at all costs because the Atlantic was the most dangerous area, and to facilitate this, earnest thought should be given to keeping Japan out of the war. Particularly to be avoided was any thought of investing major units in the defense of southeast Asia, or allowing the fleet to be risked unnecessarily against a more powerful Japanese Navy, no matter how often the British dangled the empty Singapore base. The most the Navy should concede was to allow the small Asiatic Fleet to join the local British and Dutch. Of course this didn't solve the conundrum: How much of the Pacific Fleet, which was thought to restrain the Japanese, should be diverted to the Atlantic, to prevent a German breakout and battle the U-boats? ‘Take half,' said Knox, Stimson, and Marshall. ‘Not so much,' said the State Department and Betty Stark. Eventually in June 1941 Roosevelt was to decide on a quarter: three battleships, a carrier, four cruisers and sixteen destroyers. Cagey to the end, FDR never signed off on Plan Dog, allowing it to become law, so to speak, without his signature.(3)

The president irritated his armed services with his willingness to raid their scanty stock of weapons to help the British, French, or Chinese He wanted a big air force to back up his influence abroad, but he also hoped that by sending weapons to Europe he might avoid sending troops. Over the years a lot of frustration had built up in the Army Air Corps because, while the Army had been the Navy's poor relation, the Air Corps had been stinted by the reigning ground force officers. But in the late thirties, the airmen believed that the new heavy bombers becoming available would demonstrate the truth of their contention that fleets of well-armed daylight "precision" bombers could collapse an enemy's industrial structure and bring him to his knees without the inconvenience of major land and sea campaigns. Also, there were always a number of legislators on the Hill who thought that the Air Corps deserved to be independent, like Britain's Royal Air Force. Stimson's diary reveals that this congressional bloc worried him. Apparently, the Chief of Staff, George Marshall was helpful in keeping them at bay.(4)

Army and Navy opinion was dismissive of the Air Corps claims, and Army officers thought that the air people should spend more time trying to evolve ways of helping out on the battlefield. But the airmen saw a tremendous opportunity being squandered--squandered by FDR's prodigal habit of sending everything abroad to aid the British, including heavy bombers. George Marshall sympathized with the Air Corps. He was trying to give it more influence in the War Department. Realistically, how could pilots prepare for war or get on with training, without aircraft!

As far as Marshall was concerned, Roosevelt fecklessness carried a sense of déja vu, a replay of Allied appetite for Americans as cannon fodder in World War I. He made no bones about it: " This whole thing [has] a tragic similarity to the pressure for American men in 1917.They  [the Allies] wanted men in their outfits and they didn't want us in the divisions . . . it  accentuates the ineffectiveness of the air force. It is a drop in the bucket on the other side  [in England] and it is a very vital necessity on this side and that is that. Tragic as it is, that is it.(5)

The problem had surfaced even before the war. One January day in 1939 at an airfield near the Douglas plant in Los Angeles,  a hot new bomber streaked low over the field, feathered an engine, tried a snap roll and crashed, injuring several bystanders and demolishing parked autos. The pilot bailed out but his chute failed him. The wreck yielded a mechanic and an observer whose leg had been broken, who was identified as a Mr. Smithins.But Mr. Smithins had a rich Gallic accent and it was soon  figured out that he was Paul Chemedlin, a French test pilot. What was a Frenchman doing in a bomber being developed for the Army? To find out, General Henry Arnold was grilled before a Senate committee. Who had authorized it? Arnold was caught in the middle. He had been opposed to allowing access, but had been overruled by the president, who desperately wanted to help the French. FDR had sat up late into the night listening to one of his intimates, his freewheeling ambassador in Paris, Bill Bullitt, tell how the French had been bullied into the disastrous Munich agreement by the threat of the German air force. The German air force had been touted by Berlin as vastly superior in numbers and equipment, a masterly deception foisted on western intelligence. The White House had been quietly facilitating the work of  Chemedlin's colleagues in a French mission which had arrived in the States to buy  American planes. FDR's intention was simply to get more planes into the hands of the French, and he threatened to fire any obstructionist.

Later on, after the war started,  he was to make Morgenthau at the Treasury  coordinator of Allied purchases to keep the services, and particularly Harry Woodring, from blocking them.  Even so, on one notable occasion he had to rebuke Hap Arnold. "Oh boy! Did General Arnold get it," crowed Morgenthau in his diary in March 1941. The president threatened to send Arnold to Guam, the equivalent of Siberia, and told Woodring that he wanted an end to the obstruction of aid to the Allies and of leaking to the isolationist press. Many of these leaks originated with a group of officers who, like Charles Lindbergh,  were impressed, or rather overimpressed, with the aerial rearmament of the Germans, and were worried about American unpreparedness.(6)

Roosevelt hoped that the prospect of American warplanes would encourage the French and the British to stand up to the ranting of Adolf Hitler, but the crash in Los Angeles caused him all sorts of political trouble with Congressional isolationists. When he tried to educate and mollify members of the Senate Military Affairs Committee at a White House conference, he was accused of having remarked in the meeting that America's frontier was on the Rhine. He denied it, but this damaging allegation enraged him sufficiently so that he installed  a microphone in his desk lamp

In the autumn of 1940 a few B-17s finally became available, the long-range bombers that were the darlings of the Air Corps, and what did FDR do but decree that they should be split fifty-fifty with the British. Damn any legal quibbles! Twenty aircraft were subsequently sent to England, on an "experimental" basis. It was not only a piddling force but a singularly ill-conceived experiment which rained disappointment and trouble on all parties.(7)

Obstacles to sending weapons abroad diminished after the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. Inspired by British inability to pay for American arms, the act's benefits were later extended to the USSR and China. The intense national debate over the issue signaled that, if necessary, the United States would enter the war. "A most unneutral act," a grateful Churchill called it.

In October 1940, not long after Knox's visit to the Pacific, the British Navy gave the American Navy a fright by pulling off a daring night aerial torpedo raid against the Italian fleet in the protected harbor of Taranto. The torpedoes, launched from obsolescent biplanes, damaged more Italian warship tonnage than the Royal Navy's surface ships ever did. The strike sent the American and Japanese naval attachés scurrying to the Admiralty to find out how it had been done. Subsequently, Washington experts decided that the water in the Pearl lagoon was too shallow even for the specially rigged torpedoes the British had used. Nevertheless, Richardson and Kimmel reevaluated the threat from a Japanese carrier raid and asked the Army for help in air defense. Marshall arranged for dozens of Army fighter planes to be flown off carriers to fields on Oahu and promised the newfangled radar sets when available. Besides, a whole squadron of B-17s flew en masse from California to Oahu. The 2,000-odd mile mass flight  was something unprecedented and the authorities were encouraged by  being able to reinforce Hawaii quickly with the new bombers. With their radius of action it was possible to intercept an enemy carrier force long before it was in range of Pearl.(8)

The greater security being provided Hawaii furnished arguments for those, particularly, Stimson, Knox, and Marshall, who wished to move more of the fleet to the Atlantic. An optimistic Army paper that was handed to the president on April 23rd 1941 argued that with the fleet present and the ongoing reinforcements, Oahu was really secure against a raid or an attempt at its capture. That left sabotage as the only threat.

According to Marshall, sabotage was the thing. He wrote:" In point of sequence, sabotage is first to be expected and may, within a very limited time, cause great damage. On this account, and in order to assure strong control it would be highly desirable to set up a military control of the islands prior to the time of our involvement in the Far East."

The paper called for a decision, and the president may have approved the ‘military control.' But not everyone was sold on a sabotage threat.

On Election Day, 1940, while FDR's neighbors were gathering on his lawn to congratulate him on his victory over Wendell Willkie, the Hawaiians were voting in a referendum on statehood, in which the totals came out two to one in favor. During the campaign, the issue of Japanese loyalty had been ventilated once more. Reporter Jim Marshall, who had taken a bullet in the neck aboard the Panay, obtained the views of General Charles Herron, commanding the Hawaiian Department. He quoted the general as saying:" The Army is not worried about the Japanese in Hawaii. Among them may be a small hostile group, but we can handle that situation. It seems people who know least about Hawaii and live farthest away are most disturbed about this matter. People who know the Islands are not disturbed about possible sabotage."(9)

If so--well--there was really no big threat at all to Oahu. In the Army's mind.

General Walter Short, who relieved Herron in February 1941, had quickly pressed the War Department to establish military control. The Hawaiian Department had no enthusiasm for the mass concentration camps the president had talked about. Rather, it decided that since it would be governing the Islands, it would be more economical and convenient to cultivate the loyalty of the Japanese. One of Short's counterintelligence officers who was an amateur magician was presently doing his tricks before audiences of Japanese, Chinese and Filipinos, entertaining them while exhorting them to keep the peace among themselves in Hawaii, while the Japanese were being specifically promised protection in return for loyalty. Meanwhile, in an attempt to avoid the military takeover it saw coming, the Hawaiian legislature agreed on an "M-Day" bill, granting Poindexter wide powers during an emergency. The bill failed of passage during the spring 1941 session only because the speaker of the House suddenly became ill and in the confusion allowed the House to adjourn. A bad hamburger, he said.(10)

The federal authorities in Hawaii embarrassed themselves when Treasury agents seized several of the fishing sampans in a hunt for spies, only to come up empty-handed. Then U.S. Attorney Angus Taylor prepared to prosecute the so-called consular agents, ethnic Japanese who acted as go-betweens for the Japanese community and the consulate in matters of citizenship, inheritances, and the like. When he was ready to move, he checked with General Short, only to be told to lay off. The general wasn't about to have his credibility with the Japanese community ruined. The issue was taken to Washington, where Stimson backed his general.(11)

FDR certainly favored military control of Hawaii, for his Budget Bureau was soon circulating a draft bill empowering the president to order the military or naval authorities to supersede the territorial government. But Attorney General Francis Biddle was objecting, pointing out that legally military government could only be applied to foreign territory, and that martial law could be applied only when the civil courts were physically unable to function. The Supreme Court had laid it down long ago in the Milligan case. Congress was in a no-nonsense mood; it had recently reenacted the Espionage Act with greatly increased penalties and provided for a nationwide registration of aliens. Roosevelt began to find Biddle and his civil rights conscience a little tiresome. Ickes recorded that the president and his confidant Harry Hopkins liked to tease the young attorney general with talk of outrageous and arbitrary arrests.(12)

Robert Jackson, Biddle's predecessor as attorney general, had been a sturdier customer.  FDR had offered Jackson the secretary of state post, if Cordell Hull could be persuaded to run for vice-president. Jackson pleaded ignorance of foreign affairs, but FDR said that he would have a good number two in Sumner Welles. Before he was appointed to the Supreme Court in the summer of 1941, Jackson had let some of the air out of the Fifth Column bogeyman, which had been blown up  by the British and which Donovan and Army intelligence seemed to be obsessed with. Part of the problem was conceptual. A Fifth Columnist could be anyone, particularly a person of substance and influence who would decide to collaborate with a victorious Axis.  Helping to sort it out was John McCloy, appointed to Stimson's staff on the strength of knowledge of German sabotage during the First World War. McCloy naturally worried about sabotage and subversion. After a good deal of bickering, the War and Justice departments signed off on an agreement on how to handle the internment of enemy aliens. Justice would operate the program in the forty-eight states, while the Army drew Hawaii and the Canal Zone, where military governors might be in power.(13)

Also according to the agreement, a military governor might be operating in the Philippines. The Army's Philippine Department, which competed with MacArthur for resources, always harped on the possibility of Filipino disaffection. There was a Plan BROWN to deal with it. MacArthur naturally pooh-poohed the whole idea of  Filipino disloyalty. Unlike Sayre, he had shown that he could cope with the wily Quezon, at least some of the time. He treated Filipinos as social equals when they were discriminated against as ‘natives' in their own capital. His influence with Quezon was probably seen as an anchor against the winds of clerical fascism and Francoism that seemed to blow in the Islands. Not to speak of the big Japanese colony at Davao in Mindanao. FDR may have  put one of his many confidential investigators on the job of evaluating Quezon. This was John Franklin Carter, a New Deal columnist, who wrote under the name Jay Franklin and worked out of the National Press building a few minutes from the White House. After the 1940 election Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles and Carter had got together over lunch and agreed that FDR needed a really good intelligence service, meaning Carter. Carter was paid out of the president's secret funds, did a variety of hush-hush jobs including evaluating the loyalty of FDR's political enemies, and even managed to keep his operations from coming to the notice of such people as the director of ONI. (14)

From the Filipino point of view, indeed from any rational point of view, the American plans for defending the Philippines, which amounted to holding the Bataan peninsula and the fortified islands at the mouth of Manila Bay, promised to impose unreasonable hardships and suffering. The invaders would flood into the rest of the Islands, speedily free any interned Japanese, and look unfavorably on persons too prominently identified with the Americans. American officials weren't indifferent to such considerations. The plans for Guam, for instance, called for only token resistance, to spare the Guamanians.The governor of Guam, Navy Captain George McMillin, had resigned himself to spending the war in a Japanese internment camp. Besides settlers in Mindanao, the Japanese had at least one prominent Filipino politician on their payroll, and expected to use the popular Quezon régime to help govern the country. Unless Washington came up with the forces for a serious defense of the Islands, there wasn't much enthusiasm in American quarters for upgrading Quezon's Commonwealth  troops.  Quezon continued to weaken MacArthur's influence in the Filipino defense program.  When the legislature granted Quezon emergency powers in the summer of 1940, Sayre managed to portray this to FDR as dictatorial. Quezon subsequently charged that thereby he had been prevented from preparing his people for war.(15)

To cushion the effect of independence, Congress had authorized an excise tax on Philippine sugar. Nevertheless, Sayre and the Philippine Department balked at granting the funds to Quezon on the grounds that he couldn't be trusted to spend them on defense, as he promised. The nervous summer of 1940 wasn't the time to have a Congressional debate on  making the monies available, and the argument went on for more than a year. The Joint Board finally recommended that any expenditures be made under the supervision of the local Army and Navy, but the necessary legislation was still before Congress in December 1941.(16)

The previous spring Sayre and the Army and Navy commands had worked out detailed plans for an American military government in the Islands. But FDR wasn't happy with Sayre. American visitors to the Islands complained about the lack of cooperation between MacArthur's people and the Philippine Department.  FDR made up his mind to recall to duty MacArthur, the man who could handle Quezon. In August, engineers began enlarging the tunnels of Corregidor to accommodate, among others, the Filipino president, his family and his staff.(17)

Meanwhile, across the China Sea, the pressure of events was driving the Chungking government and the Roosevelt administration closer together. Neither the Germans nor the Russians were any longer friends of China. No longer sources of weapons. Chiang had never lacked for friends in America, for American advisers, or American-educated officials, including his wife. But there hadn't been much in the way of munitions available in the United States. After the defeat of France, the Japanese moved into Indo-China and cut off supplies that had moved into China via a  narrow-gauge railroad with rubber-tired rolling stock known as the "Michelin." Tokyo also bullied the British into shutting down for a time traffic on the unpaved, breakneck track to China rather grandly known as the Burma Road. At this point Chiang Kai-shek felt that a crisis had arrived and he made an eloquent appeal to the American ambassador. He wanted no less than a five-hundred plane air force in China, to be operated by Americans.

Claire Chennault had been sent to Washington by the Chinese and he worked up the details and sold the project to Roosevelt, who wanted something done to encourage Chungking. At one point there was a proposal that B-17s be sent, and used to attack the "paper cities" of Japan, a suggestion that aroused the enthusiasm not only of  FDR,  but Morgenthau and Secretary Hull as well! The Army and Air Corps blanched at the prospect of sending B-17s. What emerged was much less ambitious, but a formidable undertaking nonetheless: a hundred P-40 fighters to be flown and maintained by American volunteers--mercenaries-- the object being to defend the Burma Road and afford some degree of protection to Chinese cities. Chennault made converts in the presidential circle, but encountered skeptics among his former brother officers, who were themselves a little short on aircraft and pilots. But henceforth FDR relied  on his private circle as much as on the professionals in the State and War departments for advice on military aid to China Besides Harry Hopkins, these "experts" included an economist, and secret Russian agent, Lauchlin Currie, on the White House staff; and Joseph Alsop, a journalist and Roosevelt kinsman, who became assistant to Chennault. Added to this recipe for trouble was their connection with T V. Soong, Chiang's rival and brother-in-law, the principal Chinese representative in Washington, who,  in the way of diplomats,  regularly told FDR and Chiang Kai-shek not what they were trying to say to one another, but what Soong wanted them to hear.

Whether they liked it or not, and they didn't like it, the Army and Navy were really the only sources of pilots and mechanics for Chennault. The British cooperated by making available the P-40s and allowed the use of a training field in Burma. To organize, train, and deploy such a force in China was a tremendous enterprise; on paper it was performed by a civilian entity, the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company. In June 1941 the first contingent of pilots, some with passports identifying  them as missionaries, sailed for Rangoon in a Dutch vessel. The Navy gave the ship a cruiser escort while it was in the vicinity of the Mandates.

Lend Lease was relied on for other Chinese requirements: equipment for thirty divisions; a highway and a railroad to be constructed from India to China to replace the Burma Road--, tremendous engineering feats, if they could be done at all-- and large numbers of trucks and transport aircraft. Often the Chinese didn't really know what they wanted, or could use; and when supplies were produced they were bottlenecked at the port of Rangoon by the corrupt and incompetent management of the Burma Road and the trackless mountains that barred the way to Chiang Kai-shek's China.(18)

FDR thought it worthwhile to keep China in the war to tie down Japanese forces, although he played with the idea of  mediating a peace. He thought China would be a platform from which to bomb the Japanese homeland. He sometimes saw China through rose-colored glasses and despite abundant evidence to the contrary, as potentially a Great Power! An American ally! A partner to organize the postwar world! Lauchlin Currie reported after a few weeks in China that Chiang Kai-shek might be induced, after the example of the New Deal, to reform his government and mend relations with the Chinese Communists by the promise of American bounty. FDR appears to have shared the longstanding American delusion that China might be a fertile field for American business and missionary efforts. There was room for the opposite and dim view of Chinese prospects, namely, that held by the British.(19)

FDR was certainly impressed with the craggy, charismatic Chennault, although he was at first somewhat dubious about his claims. Once a member of the Air Corps' acrobatic team, Chennault was an authentic expert on fighter tactics and had worked out the essentials of a warning net and how to punish the Japanese fighters and bombers. His planes in the sky were  good for Chinese morale. If he laid it on a little thick for his Washington listeners, it was only what they were eager to hear. He could, he claimed, sink the Japanese Navy at its bases, bomb the Japanese homeland; and generally run the Japanese out of China. A salesman, maybe a visionary,  but competent. He could deliver a percentage of what he promised.(20)

Adventurous by nature, but sadly wheelchair-bound, FDR was unable to go where the action was. He voyaged vicariously on clouds of ‘unofficial observers,' who could provide a useful corrective to information served up by the bureaucrats.  His wife was one of the better observers; Ickes referred to one as "perhaps not well balanced." Harry Hopkins, himself an amateur,  complained that the boss would take military advice from anyone who turned up at the White House. When Harry Truman succeeded in 1945, he was flabbergasted by the piles of reports from unofficial observers that crossed the presidential desk. Covertly aiding Chiang with a ‘volunteer' air contingent was the sort of thing that appealed to FDR. If the Army and its Air Corps had reservations, no matter!(21)