Roosevelt calls for rearmament

On 10 July 1940 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent Congress a message asking for further, extraordinary appropriations for national defence. He requested a total of $4,848,171,957: just under $2.2 billion in cash to be spent before 1 July 1941 and almost $2.7 billion in contract authorisations, to be paid for later. It was the third such request in two months, and the largest. “The principal lesson of the war up to the present time is that partial defense is inadequate defense,” the President wrote. “If the United States is to have any defense, it must have total defense.”

The message was part of a summer surge in which neutral America, shaken by the fall of France, began to build forces worthy of a great power. On the same day the Republican Henry Stimson was sworn in as Secretary of War, and the War Department created the Armored Force, the nucleus of the future American armoured divisions. In the weeks that followed Congress passed a programme to build a navy capable of fighting on two oceans and began debating the first peacetime conscription in the country’s history, while the army set up a headquarters that was to train a force of a million men.

An army unready for war

When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, the United States Army was small even for a neutral country. It numbered fewer than 200,000 regulars, supported by a National Guard only slightly larger, and it had just a few under-strength divisions, obsolete weapons and very few tanks. The Navy was stronger – Roosevelt, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had been expanding it since the mid-1930s – but it too kept most of its strength in the Pacific, facing Japan. The Neutrality Act that the President had pushed through in November 1939 allowed Britain and France to buy arms in America for cash, but it did nothing to change the fact that the United States itself was not ready for any serious war.

The spring of 1940 shattered the sense of security behind two oceans. On 16 May, as German armoured divisions were breaking through France, Roosevelt went before Congress, asked for just under $1.2 billion for defence and called for an industry capable of producing at least 50,000 aircraft a year. At the time the figure seemed fantastic. On 31 May, during the evacuation from Dunkirk, came a second request for almost $1.3 billion. On 10 June, at Charlottesville, the President announced that America would extend its material resources to the opponents of force while speeding up its own rearmament. Two weeks later France signed the Armistice of Compiègne.

In Washington the worst-case scenario began to be taken seriously: Britain capitulates, its fleet, like the French one, falls into German hands, and America is left alone facing Germany and Italy in the Atlantic and Japan in the Pacific. Roosevelt chose to aid the British and to rearm at the same time. On 20 June, on the eve of the Republican convention, he announced that two Republicans would join the government: Stimson as Secretary of War and the newspaper publisher Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy. The Senate confirmed them on 9 and 10 July over the opposition of the isolationists. On 2 July the President signed an act to expedite the strengthening of national defence, which among other things allowed him to restrict the export of materials needed for rearmament.

The message of 10 July

The message listed five purposes for the new money. The first was to expand the Navy so that it could meet “any possible combination of hostile naval strength”. The second was to equip an army with a peacetime strength of 1.2 million men. The third was to build up reserves of weapons and equipment for a further 800,000, two million soldiers in all. The fourth was to build plants capable of arming such a force and producing ammunition continuously. The fifth was to buy 15,000 aircraft for the Army and 4,000 for the Navy, with spare engines and modern equipment.

Roosevelt recalled his earlier requests: the minimum programme of January 1939 and the messages of 16 and 31 May. He stressed that the pace of change in Europe called for planning years ahead, since factories and shipyards could not be built in a few weeks. He also insisted that his aims were purely defensive: “We will not use our arms in a war of aggression; we will not send our men to take part in European wars.” America would, however, repel aggression against the United States or the Western Hemisphere. Such words appealed to almost the whole of Congress. Isolationists such as Senator Robert A. Taft and the aviator Charles Lindbergh opposed aid to Britain and any step towards war, but most of them supported the defence of the hemisphere. The dispute was not about whether to rearm, but about whether the weapons should stay in America or be shipped across the ocean.

Congress took up the request at once, and at the beginning of September passed another supplemental defence appropriations act approving funds on that scale. In all, in 1940, before formally entering the war, the United States allotted well over ten billion dollars to its armed forces, many times more than in any peacetime year.

A two-ocean navy

The most spectacular result of that summer was the Two-Ocean Navy Act, known after its authors as the Vinson–Walsh Act. It rested on the conviction that America could no longer count on the Royal Navy to guard the Atlantic, and that a single fleet could not defend both coasts at once. As early as 14 June the President had signed an act increasing the fleet’s tonnage by 11 per cent. Three days later, on 17 June, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark, asked Congress for around $4 billion to enlarge the combat fleet by 257 ships totalling some 1,325,000 tons, an increase of roughly 70 per cent. The bill was drafted by the chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee, Carl Vinson, for years the Navy’s chief advocate in Congress, together with the chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, David I. Walsh. The House of Representatives passed it almost without debate and without a dissenting vote, and on 19 July 1940 Roosevelt signed it into law.

It was the largest naval procurement act in the history of the United States up to that time. According to tallies based on a 1944 Senate report, it provided among other things for 8 Essex-class aircraft carriers, 2 Iowa-class battleships and 5 even larger Montana-class ones, 6 Alaska-class large cruisers, 27 other cruisers, 115 destroyers and 43 submarines, as well as 15,000 aircraft for naval aviation and money for auxiliary vessels, shipyards, armament and ammunition. Some studies give different numbers of carriers because they include ships authorised earlier. The programme was expected to take five to six years, and the press already doubted whether the shipyards would manage it.

The act altered the balance of power in the Pacific. The Japanese navy had long assumed that it could fight the American navy if it maintained around 70 per cent of its strength. If the Vinson–Walsh programme were carried out, by the mid-1940s Japan would have at most half its opponent’s tonnage. For some Japanese admirals this was an argument that, if war with America was inevitable, it was better to start it sooner, while the new ships were still on the slipways.

The conscription debate

Manpower was a harder matter. Ships and aircraft could be ordered, but an army of 1.2 million could not be built from volunteers. Since May a group of influential New Yorkers, veterans of the First World War military training movement, gathered around the lawyer Grenville Clark, had been preparing a bill for universal service. On 20 June it was introduced in the Senate by the Democrat Edward R. Burke of Nebraska, and the next day in the House of Representatives by the Republican James Wadsworth of New York. The Burke–Wadsworth bill was the first attempt in the history of the United States to introduce conscription in peacetime. In July the military affairs committees of both houses held hearings. The Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, argued that without a draft it would be impossible to fill even the existing units.

Opponents, ranging from isolationists of both parties to pacifist organisations, some churches and trade unions, warned that conscription was a step towards sending Americans to war in Europe and towards the militarisation of the country. Roosevelt, who was seeking a third term, long remained cautious. But after the Democratic Party convention in Chicago nominated him for the third time on 17 July, and the next day chose Henry Wallace as its vice-presidential candidate, the President openly endorsed conscription in a radio address from the White House delivered on the night of 18–19 July: “Most right-thinking persons are agreed that some form of selection by draft is as necessary and fair today as it was in 1917 and 1918.” In the same address he explained that, at a time when he was calling on citizens to serve, he could not himself refuse to serve his country.

The decisive moment came with a speech by the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, who on 17 August also came out in favour of the draft, which took the issue out of party politics. On 28 August the Senate passed the bill by 58 votes to 31, and on 7 September the House of Representatives by 263 to 149. On 16 September Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act. Men aged 21 to 35 were required to register, service lasted 12 months, no more than 900,000 draftees could be in training at any one time in peacetime, and they could be used only in the Western Hemisphere and in American possessions. The first registration took place on 16 October 1940.

A headquarters for a million-man army

On 26 July 1940 the US Army activated General Headquarters, United States Army (GHQ). Some accounts state that its area of operations bore the “code name” Zone of the Interior. In fact this was not a code name but an ordinary term of American doctrine: the zone of the interior meant the continental territory of the United States, as distinct from theatres of war abroad.

The idea of a GHQ went back to General Pershing’s experience in 1917–1918, when the American army in France had its own general headquarters, and to the interwar mobilisation plans, which provided for a field command for all ground forces in the event of war. In July 1940 it was activated only in part and with a single task: to direct the organisation and training of the field forces at home, that is, the four field armies, corps and divisions that were growing as money, volunteers and, from the autumn, draftees poured in. GHQ was housed in the buildings of the Army War College in Washington. Its commander was formally General Marshall, but he, busy running the entire army, was rarely there. In practice GHQ was run by his chief of staff, Brigadier General Lesley McNair, until then commandant of the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. Administration and supply of the troops at home remained in the hands of the War Department and the corps area commands, so GHQ never became a full command of the forces in the United States.

McNair, an artilleryman and an outstanding organiser, gave training the shape it would keep for the rest of the war: from the individual soldier through regiments and divisions up to great manoeuvres, the best known of which were held in 1941 in Louisiana and the Carolinas. Their purpose was not only to train the troops but also to test the commanders, and many future generals owed their promotion to them. In 1941 GHQ was also given operational tasks, including planning the defence of Iceland, Greenland and Alaska. In March 1942, after America had entered the war, it was transformed into the Army Ground Forces under McNair, who by 1944 had trained most of the American divisions that fought in Europe and the Pacific. He was killed on 25 July 1944 in Normandy, under bombs dropped by his own side’s aircraft.

Significance

The summer of 1940 was the moment when the United States, still formally neutral, began to prepare for war on a global scale. The message of 10 July, the Two-Ocean Navy Act, conscription and the activation of GHQ added up to a programme that Roosevelt called total defence. In the same spirit, on 25 and 26 July the President placed exports of oil and scrap iron under a licensing system, and on 31 July banned the sale of aviation fuel outside the Western Hemisphere, a step seen in Tokyo, where a new government had just taken office, as aimed at Japan.

The consequences followed swiftly. In September America transferred fifty old destroyers to Britain in exchange for bases (the Destroyers-for-Bases Agreement), and the National Guard was called into active federal service. In November Roosevelt won the presidential election, becoming the first president in history to do so for a third time. In March 1941 the Lend-Lease Act made America the “arsenal of democracy”, and in August 1941 the House of Representatives extended the draftees’ service by a majority of a single vote. By mid-1941 the US Army had grown to nearly one and a half million men.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the United States was not yet ready for a great war, but it already had the skeleton of an army, a draft system and ships on order. The Essex-class carriers, ordered from 1940 onwards, entered service from the turn of 1942 and 1943 and became the core of the fleet that defeated Japan in the Pacific. The Montana-class battleships were never built: the war showed that the future belonged to naval aviation. By 1947 more than 10 million men had been inducted into the armed forces through the draft. The decisions taken in July 1940, just as the air battle for Britain was beginning over the English Channel, ensured that within a few years America could become the greatest military power in the world.