The Disarmament Dividend of 1939 : THE BORROWED YEARS 1938-1941 America on the Way to War<i> by Richard M. Ketchum (Random House: $29.95; 896 pp.) </i> : HOW WAR CAME The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938-1939<i> by Donald Cameron Watt (Pantheon: $29.95; 736 pp.) </i>
As Europe in the late 1930s slid inexorably toward war the American people were deepening their resolve to remain aloof from the Old World’s coming battles. The isolationism that had bloomed in the United States just a few months after the end of World War I had taken steadily deeper root in the following two decades. The once-mighty U.S. Army, pauperized by budget cuts and held in low esteem by Congress and the public alike, had shrunk to a mere 174,000 men, ranking it in size between the armed forces of Portugal and Bulgaria. On the very eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Walter Lippmann, regarded by many as the era’s most thoughtful political commentator, was writing about “The Case for a Smaller Army.” So intense was anti-war sentiment that members of the military were forbidden to wear their uniforms in the nation’s capital, lest they provoke incidents. Even chief of staff Gen. George C. Marshall donned civilian clothes when he testified before Congress.
American isolationism was the product of bitter memories over the unprecedented battlefield slaughter of “The Great War,” of disillusionment over the conflict’s equivocal political results, and of wounded pride over what was seen as ingratitude on the part of Europeans for the American help they had received. Fueling it as well were fears about what a deeper involvement in world affairs might do to an economy still struggling to emerge from the nation’s worst depression. Finally, it was a product of a nativist impulse that had been given powerful official recognition in the discriminatory immigration laws of the 1920s. Foreigners were seen as suspect, and too-close relations with foreigners were held to be corrupting.
Nativism was most flagrantly expressed in a widespread anti-Semitism that a number of influential demagogues of the day profitably exploited. Even as late as February, 1939, as the shadow of the impending Holocaust began to spread across Europe, broadly supported legislation to admit 20,000 threatened Jewish children from Germany and Austria died under strong lobbying pressures from various so-called patriotic organizations. Similar organizations had tried earlier to prevent Albert Einstein from immigrating to the United States, arguing among other things that no one could understand his theories anyway. The American people didn’t know a lot about what was going on in the rest of the world. Well into the 1930s, for example, New York City’s main radio station found it unnecessary to broadcast more than 10 minutes of news a day. What people did know of the outer world often made them even more uneasy and glad of their insularity.
As Richard Ketchum shows in this richly anecdotal narrative history, change did come, of course, but only slowly and in response to the challenges presented by the triumphant aggressions of Germany, Japan and Italy. In late 1938 a poll found that 59% of Americans approved the betrayal of democratic Czechoslovakia that had just been agreed to at Munich by Britain, France, Germany and Italy. By the summer of 1940, Ketchum writes, it was clear that the country was living on borrowed time, that before long U.S. interests in Asia and Europe would be directly put at risk by the dictators. Yet, even as late as August of 1941, as Britain waged its lonely battle for survival, 74% of Americans still strongly opposed direct U. S. participaion in the war against Germany.
It is the figure of President Franklin Roosevelt who dominates this sweeping account of the time when America finally lost its innocence. Ketchum’s FDR is a man at once devious, far-seeing and subtle, a politician prudent to the point of timidity not to get ahead of public opinion, but too often unsure of how to mobilize the public to support what he knew had to be done in the nation’s interests. Ultimately, through such creative devices as Lend-Lease and intensified naval patrols in aid of British shipping, Roosevelt was able to get around the constraints of the Neutrality Acts and the blocking actions of congressional isolationists to help Britain in its hour of peril. By the end of 1941 the strategic blunders of Japan and Germany had made the question of American involvement in the war moot, and America’s rise to international leadership inevitable.
As Americans argued among themselves over their country’s place in world affairs, European leaders were waging an intense diplomatic and political struggle whose outcome would determine the fate of their continent. Donald Cameron Watt’s “How War Began” is an authoritative, enormously--at times excruciatingly--detailed account of the sometimes courageous, often cynical, sometimes astonishingly craven efforts by Europe’s national leaders to prevent a recurrence of the conflict that less than a generation earlier had produced such nightmarish devastation.
Hitler, as Watt shows in scrupulous detail, was implacably determined to rule Europe by military conquest; no possible amount of appeasement by foreign leaders would have deterred him from using force. Where he might have been stopped was at home, through the efforts of the same German military that was soon to become the primary instrument of his aggression.
In the summer of 1938, Watt writes, Hitler faced a “spirit of defeatism, near mutiny and, though he never knew it, conspiracy among sections of the German military to arrest him and declare him insane, if he should actually involve Germany in war with Britain.” But Britain, and France, which had the largest army in Western Europe, held back from sending any clear signal that they were ready to resist Hitler’s ambitions. Time and again he was proved right in his predictions that the Western leaders were weak and stupid men who could be bullied into bowing to his demands and accepting his successive betrayals and aggressions. As the leaders of the democracies steadily retreated, until finally, having committed themselve to come to Poland’s aid they could retreat no more, Hitler’s credibility with his military steadily rose.
It was a sordid time, with few heroes--the Finns and, interestingly, the Turks come off best in Watt’s account--but with an almost Shakespearean cast of fools, posturers and cowards in high places. Not many contemporaries, though, saw it that way. Watt quotes the headmaster of his school saying of Neville Chamberlain, after the British prime minister returned from signing the infamous Munich agreement, that “he had been sent by God to preserve the peace of the world. What he had done was noble and Christian and we were never to forget that.” Watt’s own mature judgment is rather more critical.
The 20 years of immersion in the archives of Europe that went into the writing of this book have produced stimulating insights and some wonderfully sharp writing. Thus Watt describes a negotiation between Hitler’s contemptible foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his unfortunate Italian counterpart, writing of the German that “he had harried (Count Galeazzo) Ciano through the five-day visit with successive drafts of a military alliance, producing them from his pockets with the relentless dexterity of a third-rate conjurer at a holiday show on a seaside pier.” The image, like so many others in this compelling account, is deft, precise, memorable. Watt has given us an enduring account of a vital period in this century’s history.