and your wife and family to come to dinner with us. Just a little quiet dinner. Mrs. Roosevelt often speaks of you .”
“Thank you, Mr. President. I’m very honored.”
“Good-night, old top.”
The red cigarette end went out in an ashtray. As Victor Henry put his hand on the doorknob, the President suddenly said, “Pug, the best men I have around me keep urging me to declare war. They say it’s inevitable, and that it’s the only way to unite the people and get them to put their backs into the war effort. I suppose you agree with them?”
The Navy captain said after a pause, looking at the bulky shadow in blue light, “Yes, Mr. President, I do.”
“It’s a bad thing to go to war,” said the President. “A very bad thing. If the moment is coming, it isn’t here. Meantime I shall just have to go on being called a warmonger, a coward, and a shillyshallyer, all rolled in one. That’s how I earn my salary. Get a good rest, Pug.”
Chapter 41 — The Negative Front
(from WORLD EMPIRE LOST)
Provocation in the Atlantic
As our U-boat campaign in 1941 began to show better results, Franklin Roosevelt stepped up his countermoves. Each month brought a new story, undramatic to the newspaper reader but ominous to our staff, of bolder and bolder moves by Roosevelt to deny us freedom of the seas. He occupied Greenland, putting the United States Navy astride the convoy routes in the gap between Canadian escorting and British escorting, just where our U-boats were making their best scores. The American admiral, King, arrogantly declared that the “Western hemisphere began at the twenty-sixth line of western longitude.” This line took in all the best hunting grounds of the U-boats, including the Bahamas, the Caribbean, and the Azores. The American Navy, in addition to its “neutrality patrol,” did some surreptitious convoying, relying on German forbearance and congressional ignorance to get away with such flagrant acts of war. Finally in May the President proclaimed “an unlimited national emergency,” coming out with sly hints that if things kept going so badly, his countrymen might actually have to shed a little blood. This was his public justification for the ever increasing interference on the side of England.
But long before that, in January, full-scale military staff conferences of the British and United States forces, exceeding in scope anything between Germany and Italy, had already take place in Washington, in great secrecy. There it was agreed that when global war broke out, “Germany first” would be the policy. Such was American neutrality in 1941, and such was Roosevelt’s candor with his countrymen. All would not have to fight, if only England received enough help. Churchill abetted this deception with the famous speech ending, “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job,” a completely empty and fatuous boast, as he well knew. The American President’s worst interference at this time, however, was in the Balkans. The Balkan campaign of 1941 need never have occurred. Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt fanned a manageable political problem into a cruel armed conflict.
Yugoslavia’s Treachery: The Donovan Mission
It is well known that Roosevelt often used informal emissaries to bypass established diplomatic channels and regular government structures. In this way he could perform machinations without responsibility if they miscarried, and without leaving a trail of records. He could also make probes and inquiries without committing himself. The most celebrated of these emissaries was, of course, Harry Hopkins, who helped to form the fateful policy of all-out aid to the Bolsheviks. Lesser known was Colonel William Donovan, who later in the war created the notorious OSS spy ring. In March 1941, Donovan paid a visit to Yugoslavia that brought disaster to that country. For an American President to meddle in Balkan politics when war was flaming in Greece, in order to pull other countries into the conflict against Germany, was nothing but a war crime. Yet that was Donovan’s mission, and it was successful.
The war in Greece was not of our doing; it was a miscarried adventure of our cardboard ally, Benito Mussolini. During the summer of 1940, Mussolini had ordered his Libyan troops to invade Egypt, for England was fighting for her life at home, and he thought Italy could grab off her Mediterranean empire cheaply. In October he had also laid on an invasion of Greece, and with typical theatricality he scheduled it for a day when he met with Adolf Hitler in Florence. He told Hitler nothing about this in advance. Mussolini itched to show the Fuhrer that he was not just a hanger-on, but another daring military conqueror.
Unfortunately for him, within a few weeks the small Greek army routed the Italians, chased them in to Albania, and captured their army base at Port Edda. With the politico-military disaster, Hitler’s fellow dictator stood exposed as an incompetent loudmouthed fool. The English in Egypt took heart and also fought back, and at the first hint of British pluck, Mussolini’s “indomitable legions” either ran away with unbelievable speed, or surrendered in the finest of holiday spirits. It was a disgraceful display seldom seen in modern warfare. The Italian army plainly had no heart for the war and counted for nothing. Most of the Italian navy had already been knocked out at anchor in Taranto, back in November. (This fine surprise attack by torpedo planes from the British aircraft carriers was successfully imitated later by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.) Our southern flank therefore stood exposed.
Hitler was deeply loyal to Mussolini, his one real ally, and for political reasons he felt the Italian had to be shored up. Also, with our invasion of the Soviet Union imminent, the neutralizing of the Balkans on our southern flank was important. The Fuhrer embarked on skillful political moves to keep the conflagration in Greece localized, planning to snuff it out with a few good German divisions. He wisely seized the Rumanian oil fields and forced an accommodation with Hungary. He also dictated friendly pacts with Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and despite Russian complaints, he moved troops into Bulgaria for the Greek action. All was in readiness for the pacification of the Balkans, when Roosevelt’s emissary came to Belgrade.
The Simovic Cabal
Winston Churchill had a farfetched vision of drawing neutral Yugoslavia and Turkey into the Greek mess, thus creating a major Balkan front against us, where as usual other people would fight and die for England. Donovan had tried in January to interest the Yugoslav government in Churchill’s scheme, but the Prince Regent Paul had shrugged off the American meddler. Donovan had managed, however, to make contact with a conspiracy of Serbian military men, led by an air force general, one Simovic. A patchwork creation of the Versailles settlement, Yugoslavia was torn by antagonism between the Croats, who were friendly to the Reich, and the Serbians, our fierce enemies. These Serbian officers were quite receptive to the harebrained Churchill plan; it was Serbian hotheads, it will be recalled, who touched off the First World War at Sarajevo.
On his visit in March, Donovan found the British scheme in collapse; for, under severe pressure from the Fuhrer, Yugoslavia was joining the Axis. Roosevelt now sent a stiff message to the Yugoslav government, which history records: “The United States is looking not merely to the present but to the future, and any nation which tamely submits on the grounds of being quickly overrun would receive less sympathy from the world than a nation which resists, even if this resistance continues for only a few weeks.”
Here, in effect, was a command to Yugoslavia from the American President almost five thousand miles away, to embroil itself in war with Germany, on pain of being punished at some future peace treaty if it did not! There are few instances of more callous effrontery in the chronicles of mankind. The government returned a noble negative reply to the American ambassador, through Prince Paul: “You big nations are hard. You talk of our honor,
