President Roosevelt has a word with the irascible Admiral King, while General Marshall gazes offstage, eager to get on with the war effort which these three ran unevenly, but, on balance, very well. At one point Marshall taught King an important lesson in sea power.
task force that would later destroy a Japanese four-carrier force bent on following up the triumph at Pearl Harbor by rolling on to take the island of Midway six months later (see SH 102, pp8-l 2). The Battle of Midway, which broke the spearhead of Japanese aggression, thus depended on these two ships and their valiant crews. The ships were there because of the foresight of the second President Roosevelt, who like his cousin Teddy had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and had worked with Sims. Roosevelt's vision of national security in a troubled world inspired other measures critical to the outcome of the war which was soon to engulf the world. As war clouds darkened in both Europe and Asia, he announced a program to develop a "Two-Ocean Navy." This resonated well with the emphasis on guarding US coasts. But in fact it was to enable the US at once to contest the seas with Japan-which had been chewing away at China, having conquered all its seaport cities and built an airsea navy of formidable striking powerand simultaneously to weigh in on the vital Atlantic lifeline to the European alliance resisting Hider. When Britain and France went to war with Germany over its invasion of Poland in 1939, FDR established contact with Winston Churchill, then First Sea Lord. In the spring of 1940 Churchill was summoned as Prime Minister in Britain's hour of need. Following the fall of France, at Churchill's behest FDR transferred 50 World War I destroyers to the Royal Navy. He presented this to the nation as a fair exchange for bases in British-ruled islands off America's East Coast. It was greatly to
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Britain's interest in the Battle of the Atlantic to have those bases in US hands, though this was presented by FDR as a prudent step in defending the US coast. Public opinion sympathized with Britain, undergoing all-out bombing of its cities as it stood alone against a conquered Europe occupied by the most powerful war machine in the world. In his year-end talk to the American people President Roosevelt said that freedom was at stake in this struggle and he announced the Four Freedoms America stood for: freedom ofspeech and religion, freedom from fear and want. And he called openly for America to become "the arsenal of the democracies. " Early in 1941 he put teeth in this by proposing Lend-Lease, under which war supplies would be loaned to Britain free of charge. This measure, he said, was like lending a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire, so the fire wouldn't spread to yours. In March 1941 this became law, and a flow of war orders got American factories and shipyards busy on a massive arms buildup. Also in March, US and British planners completed secret conferences for joint operations in case of war. The resulting Plan ABC-1 called for maximum effort to sustain the British in the European war, and for forces to be built up in the Pacific as a counterpoise to contain Japan. (The Japanese, meantime, having had observers on the scene when the Royal Navy devastated the Italian Navy with an air-sea attack on their base at Taranto, were developingshallow-drafr aerial torpedoes for their own attack on the US Navyat Pearl Harbor. Bur of course the planners didn't know this.)
An Oceanic Response These steps, revolutionary as they were, were only a beginning to FDR's response to evident peril. Roosevelt had engineered a Pan-American Security Zone beyond 60°W, roughly 200-500 miles offshore, from which Axis warships were banned. In April he extended the Security Z one from 60°W to 26°W, thereby claiming most of the North Atlantic and bringing America's oceanic border to within less than 500 miles of Britain and Britain's war. Three divisions of destroyers were assigned to the Neutrality Patrol guarding this far-flung sea frontier, and US troops landed in Greenland and later Iceland, much closer to Europe than the Americas. In the boldest step of all, Roosevelt and Churchill met in August aboard ship in Newfoundland to issue the Atlantic Charter, the foundation stone of the United Nations. This charter pledged liberation of captive peoples, foreswore all conquest and promised freedom and economic opportunity to friend and enemy alike. The generous terms of this brief document were not propaganda; they were the terms of engagement for a terrible but necessary war. A few weeks earlier, this war had been transformed when, on 22 June 1941, Hider launched his long-planned invasion of Russia. He said this would make the world hold its breath. And indeed the German Wehrmacht began sweeping all before it. But Britain and the US did not hold their breath. Instead both announced their support of Soviet Russia. Churchill led in this, though he had vigorously opposed the Soviet regime from its outset. The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who had conceived a great admiration for Hider and his slaughterous ways, went into something like a catatonic state, as the shattered Soviet armies reeled back from the frontier. Stalin had executed over half the top Red Army leadership in recent years-and when he first recovered his grip, he again started executing generals who had succeeded in escaping the German juggernaut. He soon learned, however, to build new armies around those generals who practiced survival warfare, and did himself and Russ ia a great service by shedding his
SEA HISTORY 104, SPRING/SUMMER 2003