Senator Vandenberg, a leading isolationist, had already offered a resolution to abrogate the Trade Treaty. Two other Senators had submitted resolutions favoring some form of arms embargo against Japan (the Neutrality Act not having been invoked for the Far East). Ambassador Grew on returning from Tokyo to Washington for consultation was struck by the sentiment and thought “Pressure for an embargo against Japan is going to be great…and Congress may demand it.” By January 1940 five bills or resolutions for embargoing trade with Japan in one form or another awaited action by the new Congress. They were a measure of the change in public opinion in the two years since Congress scuttled under the Ludlow Resolution at the time of the Panay incident. The terror bombings of Chinese cities and especially the sense that America was contributing to them by selling scrap to Japan had had their effect. The medical missionary, Dr. Walter Judd, made the connection vivid when he told of his work as a doctor in Shansi removing “these things” from the bodies of Chinese wounded. His listeners could imagine their own scrapped automobiles converted into Japanese bombs. Although church groups on the whole opposed an embargo against Japan as likely to lead to war, many missionaries campaigned for it, “resolutely backed up by naval force if necessary.” Seventy percent of the public favored it according to polls. It was the “American people,” Ambassador Grew said in an unusual public speech in Tokyo—another of the cautionary efforts—who objected to Japan’s efforts to establish a “closed economy” in Asia and to the “bombings, the indignities, the manifold interference with American rights.”
In the matter of the Far East Roosevelt lagged behind public opinion for compelling strategic reasons. Strongly advised by the War and State Departments, he hung back from the embargo for fear of provoking Japan—which was dependent on the United States for oil—into southward expansion to obtain alternate sources in the Netherlands Indies. Southeast Asia, with the oil of the Indies, the rubber of Malaya and the rice of Indochina, held the resources the Japanese needed; in the power vacuum caused by the war in Europe lay their opportunity. Japan’s militarists, riding the tide of empire, were urging the adventure. It was the one thing that would be casus belli for everyone, excluding Russia. It would threaten all the Western positions from Hong Kong to Singapore including the Philippines, possibly even India. It would mean a two-ocean war for which the British fleet was not adequate and the United States not ready. To avoid it if possible, but in any case to postpone it, was essential.
Use of the American Army overseas was still not contemplated. “It is simply unthinkable,” stated Colonel Frank Knox, no isolationist but publisher of the internationally minded Chicago Daily News, in a speech on April 3, 1940, “that we will ever again send overseas a great expeditionary force of armed men.” Though warning that the Allies had only a 50 percent chance of winning and urging an increase in American air and naval strength, he dismissed “all grandiose plans for a whole nation making war with millions of soldiers in the field…as unnecessary for our defense.” Six days later the German invasion of Norway and Denmark brought the static period of “phony war” to an end.
At this time the American Army had reached a strength of 241,000 of which only five divisions were organized, though not fully equipped, for the field. The arms and equipment and above all the airplanes for the envisaged emergency force of 500,000, much less for 1,200,000, did not exist. To produce them for the larger number, the War Department informed the President, would require from 18 months to two years. By now the Germans had swept into the Low Countries heading for France. Roosevelt asked for new defense appropriations of a billion dollars and stunned the country with a call for production of the astounding figure, multiplied beyond anything ever before suggested, of 50,000 planes a year.
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On May 10—the day the Germans invaded Holland and Belgium—the first genuine corps maneuvers in United States history, engaging 70,000 troops of the Third Army, began in Louisiana. Commanding the “Red” invaders, Stilwell made a reputation that placed him in the front rank of American combat infantry commanders and was to earn him his second star within a year of the first. Because of the impending decision on whether to adopt the triangular division, and the opportunity to observe a demonstration of the Third Army’s blitzkrieg tactics, all the Army’s important figures were watching. The plan presumed that the Red nation was invading the United States with an army of 30,000 and pushing eastward from Texas across the border marked by the Sabine River into Louisiana. The Reds were to drive upon Alexandria, capital of the “Blue” nation, whose army of 40,000 (the defenders being given the benefit of the larger force) was based 700 miles away at Fort Benning. Represented by the IXth Corps, which included the 2nd Division, the Reds achieved surprise by jumping off ahead of schedule, a breaking of the rules that was almost certainly Stilwell-inspired. It reflected his theory that the way to achieve a successful offensive was to “spoil things as planned.”
The Red air force attacking with vigor seized command of the air enabling its ground force to roll back the Blues, capture several key places and forge ahead. Stilwell’s specialty was night movements to accomplish envelopment by a wide-end run, bringing him up to hit the enemy on flank and rear. His troops attached Natchitoches “after one of the most amazing encirclements ever undertaken in the history of the Army,” according to an enthusiastic press report. From the takeoff point at the Sabine River his scout cars two abreast dashed across the bridge at 3 A.M., followed by demolition parties despatched to every bridge and crossroads to destroy the possibility of the Blues gaining a flank position. By daylight his advance units had traveled 70 miles in a long dash that “was like a series of crises in a melodrama….Stilwell’s invasion was Blitzkrieg at its apogee.” At nightfall its movements were lost in the “fog of war” and the question everywhere was “Where is the 2nd Division?”
As the battle expanded his surprises continued. At morning he would appear in the wrong place, that is, where he was not expected, and at one point, infuriating General Krueger, he captured the Headquarters of the First Cavalry then commanded by Jonathan Wainright who was soon to suffer a harder defeat at Bataan. The action was ruled fair by the umpires. Observers were impressed because Stilwell was penetrating and generally winning while most officers appeared to be still mentally fighting the last war.
In sinister accompaniment to the American war games the Panzer divisions were smashing through Holland and Belgium, pointing up in their advance many of the faults revealed in Louisiana. In addition to poor reconnaissance, lack of liaison between units and “painful” lack of artillery support, the chief umpire noted an “extreme disinclination of troops to de-truck” and of the trucks themselves to leave the roads and move across country. Roadbound trucks were sitting ducks and infantry in trucks were “completely helpless.” Stilwell too was far from satisfied. In Europe, he noted, “a revolutionary form of attack has been developed. Reconnaissance aviation, scout cars, dive bombers, heavy tanks, motorized infantry, bombing aviation, parachuters, all tied, strike and fan out. Attempt to paralyze enemy rear areas. Do we pay any attention? No.”
The difficulty was that many of the officers, like the public at large, still felt no sense of the urgency that Stilwell had acquired after two years of war in China. As the German sickle sliced into northern France trapping the Allies against the Channel, one American divisional commander offered to bet, as casually as if it concerned next day’s weather, that if France fell Great Britain would not last six weeks longer.
By mid-June the fall of France was an awful reality. The Germans were actually in Paris. In six weeks they had accomplished what four years of gigantic struggle in 1914–18 had never attained. The comparison was a sudden appalling measure of the democracies’ weakness. The British saved their Army at the evacuation of Dunkirk but with loss of all their heavy weapons. Short of rifles and ammunition, almost naked in aircraft, they were left with the Channel and Winston Churchill who spoke the famous words, “We shall fight on the beaches
…in the streets…we shall never surrender…”
The fall of France staggered America; suddenly anything seemed possible and the invulnerability of the United States no longer safe to assume. If Britain were defeated, the President admitted privately, the United States would be living “at the point of a Nazi gun.” Military opinion was not sanguine. General George Strong, Chief of the War Plans Division, who had been one of Stilwell’s anathemas at MID during the reign of McCabe, predicted on June 17 “the early defeat of the Allies.” The public having comfortably assumed during the “phony war” that the Allies must win, now assumed the contrary and was moved to panic over the poverty of American defenses. Both President Roosevelt and former President Hoover made national radio speeches to calm what Roosevelt called the “calamity-howlers” and direct the fear toward useful ends. “There is no occasion for panic,” said Hoover; “there is need for speed.”
The following months boiled with defense programs. The War Department drew plans for an Army of a million by October 1941 and two million a year later which would depend on enactment—in an election year—of that repugnant un-Americanism, compulsory military service in peacetime. The President in a startling move named to his Cabinet as Secretary of War and of the Navy, respectively, two Republicans, former Secretary Stimson, now seventy-three, and Colonel Knox, both outspoken advocates of the Draft. Meanwhile Congress in a rush had voted increased men for the Army and tonnage for the Navy and an extra billion and a half dollars to pay for them. But this was piecemeal. In July the President laid before Congress a “total defense” program of production requirements for an Army of 1,200,000, a matching Air Force and a two-ocean Navy strong enough to meet any combination of powers at a cost of just under $5 billion. Congress was in a mood to vote anything for national defense except the compulsory draft of men to implement it. The country was not ready to face the implication that history was again presenting a bill for foreign war. Through the summer the debate on conscription raged.
In the hope of deterring Japan from taking advantage of the crisis in Europe it was decided to keep the Pacific Fleet based at Hawaii to where it had already been moved from San Diego in April. Deterring Japan was now the most urgent task, next to making ready herself, that America faced. The task contained an inherently insoluble problem: any action that could effectively deter Japan from expansion would be bound to stimulate action by Japan to forestall it—would, in short, stimulate the aggression it was supposed to deter. This difficulty was to haunt coming developments.
The Japanese Government, unwilling to cut its last moorings to caution, had so far been resisting the pressure of its military members to join the Axis. In alliance with the triumphant Reich the militarists saw themselves freed for action. Germany would keep Russia neutral, freeing Japan to expand southward without worrying about the north. German-Japanese alliance would also, they believed, deter the United States from actively supporting China, allowing Japan finally to conclude the “Incident.” “The more effectively we restrain the United States,” explained the aggressive War Minister, General Hideki Tojo, to his colleagues, “the more quickly we shall be able to dispose of the Sino-Japanese conflict.” Japanese blockade of the British and French Concessions at Tientsin, provocations and pressure on the International Settlement at Shanghai, attacks on American property and the close-shave bombing of another gunboat in the Yangtze were designed to exhibit the democracies’ weakness and so eliminate the Government’s hesitancy about the Axis alliance.
For Japan too the German triumph over France was a turning point, proving as it seemed that this really was the wave of the future. Behind the scenes negotiations with Germany began; publicly the Japanese Foreign Office now associated itself with the militarists’ program for a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and agreed that “the uniting of all these regions” was national destiny. The occasion of the Allied extremity in Europe was seized on for a definitive effort to achieve a settlement in China by sealing off China’s last avenues of supply from the West.
After three years the end of the “Incident” still eluded the Japanese. Further penetration, bombings, terrorism, overtures, collaborationists—nothing had succeeded. They had intended to control the country by enforced collaboration, but as long as a National Government maintained resistance they had to remain in military occupation. Now in the final hours of the French collapse a Japanese ultimatum required the French to close the railroad from Hanoi into China and to accept a Japanese military base for inspection purposes inside Indochina. At the same time the British were virtually ordered by Japan, to the accompaniment of threats of war, to close the Hong Kong frontier and the Burma Road. The Chinese were not bringing in supplies in any very important amount over that clogged and mismanaged highway, but the Road, scratched out of the mountainsides by the hand labor of 200,000 men, women and children, was now their last channel to the West. The act of closing by a friendly state would be certain to turn sentiment against the democracies and lend weight to the arguments of those advocating a settlement with Japan.
The British Empire and the United States between them could not summon the collective strength to withstand the demand. Britain, now alone against the Axis, asked the United States for joint action in the event that war with Japan followed refusal. The United States, having scraped the bottom of her military warehouse to send arms to Britain in her naked emergency after Dunkirk, was in poor shape to fight, and in any case could not commit herself to belligerency if the casus belli were attack on European imperial possessions. She could give no promise of joint action. Britain submitted and on July 12 closed the Burma Road, though with the proviso that it was to be for three months to allow for a further effort to conclude peace between Japan and China.
A wave of pessimism did indeed sweep through Chungking but not enough to recommend peace terms with Japan. The Pan-Asian, anti-Western theme of the Co-Prosperity Sphere appealed to many Chinese but the aroused spirit of patriotism rejected its Japanese sponsors. Wang Ching-wei’s puppet government in Nanking failed to win popular support because the Japanese hand pulling its strings was too visible and because Japanese efforts to “pacify” the countryside by force did nothing to make Co-Prosperity attractive.
Chiang Kai-shek did not succumb to the overtures of various emissaries. He had acted all along in the belief that he would be bailed out when the Western powers inevitably became involved in war with Japan and he was never a man to change his mind, even when the cause of the democracies looked black. Besides, if he dealt with Japan, as one of his countrymen said, “he would be ruined in any case.” But from this time forward, his increasingly exigent demands for American aid were accompanied by hints that he might have to come to terms with Japan because Chinese morale was at the point of collapse or because resistance could not be sustained. China did not conceal her bitterness at the powers’ failure either to help her or more actively to restrain Japan. The desperate query that Stilwell shared—why cannot America see that the time to stop Japan is now?—sounded through the flow of Chinese demands for loans, arms, credit, planes, sanctions or declarations of war and other advice offered by the Generalissimo to Washington.
The President feared that an embargo would have the effect of pushing Japan into the rumored alliance with the Axis, adding to Britain’s danger. Yet some gesture to encourage China and warn Japan was essential: on July 26 the United States proclaimed a limited embargo on scrap iron and steel and certain grades of aviation fuel, but not on oil for fear of touching off a Japanese advance to the Indies.
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On July 1, 1940, Stilwell attained the goal of every officer’s desire—command of a division. He was named Commanding General of the 7th Division and of its base, Camp Ord at Monterey, close by his home at Carmel. The 7th was a new triangular division requiring training in every element. The camp, soon renamed Fort Ord, was in a fever of preparation for the influx of draftees expected in October if the Draft Bill should become law. Men lived in tents whi
le barracks, mess halls, administration buildings and all the quarters for 15,000 men were being hammered together within a few weeks.
Stilwell was busy 16 hours a day, planning, supervising, inspecting, training men, training officers and training officers to train the men. He at once established a school under the command of Colonel Thomas Arms for company officers coming in from the Reserves and National Guard. “Be ready to start a week from today,” he told Arms, to give a short course in tactics, demonstration and practice, and a field problem every morning and afternoon. Stilwell spent three or four days a week watching the school exercises with squad and platoon, often himself coaching green officers through an attack problem. Carefully and patiently he would explain the five-paragraph field order and the reason for orders in fixed sequence so that in the heat of action none would be forgotten. He had a habit of appearing from behind a bush and making a critique on the spot; no one knew where he might turn up. He drove his senior officers without let-up, allowing wide freedom of action but expecting dedication and performance at his own level. “If you didn’t deliver you didn’t last long,” said Arms; “he was cold-blooded, very cold-blooded.” Stilwell’s leadership was exciting because it was not “book-bound,” but it was unsparing of the officers. Some were antagonized; the majority admired and some worshipped him. “You had to,” according to one 7th Division colonel, “he had it.”