The United States declares neutrality

On 5 September 1939 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed two proclamations by which the United States officially stood aside from the war in Europe. The first proclaimed the country’s neutrality under international law and reminded Americans of what they were forbidden to do: enlist in the forces of the belligerents, recruit volunteers for them, arm warships in American ports, or allow the territory and waters of the United States to serve the war aims of either side. The second, issued under the Neutrality Act of 1937, declared that “a state of war unhappily exists between Germany and France; Poland; and the United Kingdom, India, Australia and New Zealand”, and imposed an embargo on the export of arms, ammunition and implements of war to all these countries. The law drew no distinction between aggressor and victim, so neither the Reich nor the invaded Poland and its allies could buy arms in America.

On the same day the administration announced that navy ships and aircraft were patrolling the waters off the country’s coasts to observe the movements of the belligerents’ warships. Thus was born the Neutrality Patrol. Three days later, on 8 September, Roosevelt proclaimed a “limited” national emergency and ordered the expansion of the army, the navy, the Marine Corps and the National Guard.

America and the war

News of the German attack on Poland reached the White House in the early hours of 1 September. The president was woken by a telephone call from the ambassador in Paris, William Bullitt, and that same day Roosevelt appealed to the belligerents not to bomb civilians. He could do little more. Since the mid-1930s American policy towards wars overseas had been shackled by the Neutrality Acts, passed under the influence of the conviction that participation in the First World War had been a mistake into which the country had been dragged by bankers and arms manufacturers. As early as 1937, in his Quarantine Speech, the president had called for aggressors to be isolated, but the speech had met with a cool reception. In the spring and summer of 1939, after the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, he tried to persuade Congress to lift the arms embargo. The House of Representatives watered down his bill, and on 11 July the Senate Foreign Relations Committee postponed the matter to the next session. On 1 May the “cash and carry” provision, which had allowed belligerents to buy other goods for cash and carry them away in their own ships, had also lapsed.

American sympathies were in no doubt. In polls taken in the autumn of 1939 an overwhelming majority of respondents, more than 80 per cent, wanted Britain and France to win, and only a tiny fraction Germany. An equally decisive majority, however, did not want the United States to enter the war. It was on this discrepancy that Roosevelt had to build his policy for the next two years.

The fireside chat of 3 September

On the evening of Sunday 3 September, the day on which Britain and France declared war on Germany and, off the coast of Ireland, U-30 sank the Athenia with more than three hundred Americans on board, Roosevelt gave a radio “fireside chat”. He said that until the last moment, until 4.30 that morning, he had hoped that some miracle would prevent the war. He warned that when peace is broken anywhere, the peace of all countries is in danger, and that every battle and every ship at sea bears on the future of America. He announced a proclamation of neutrality in accordance with international law, and a second one required by the Neutrality Act.

The most famous passage of the speech ran: “This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.” This was a deliberate departure from the precedent of 1914, when President Woodrow Wilson had called on his compatriots to be impartial “in thought as well as in action”. At the same time Roosevelt assured his listeners: “I have seen war and I hate war”; he expressed the hope that the United States would stay out of it, and promised that as long as it remained within his power, “there will be no black-out of peace in the United States”.

The proclamations of 5 September

The two proclamations of 5 September differed in their legal basis. The first was a traditional declaration of neutrality of the kind the United States had issued during earlier wars, including in 1914. It listed the forbidden acts on the basis of the Criminal Code of 1909 and an act of 1917: accepting commissions from belligerents, recruitment, fitting out ships for belligerents, and organising military expeditions from United States territory. On the same day an executive order divided the duties of enforcing neutrality among the War, Navy, Treasury and Commerce Departments, and a separate proclamation laid down rules of neutrality in the Panama Canal Zone.

The second proclamation set in motion the machinery of the 1937 Act. From that moment the export of arms, ammunition and implements of war from the United States to the belligerents, and to neutrals for onward transfer to belligerents, was an offence punishable by a fine of up to 10,000 dollars and up to five years’ imprisonment. A ban on loans and credits to belligerents and a ban on Americans travelling on belligerent ships also came into force. As further dominions entered the war, Roosevelt extended the list: on 8 September to include the Union of South Africa, and on 10 September Canada.

The embargo hit the Western Allies, who controlled the seas and could have shipped American arms, rather than Germany, which was cut off by the British blockade. Shipments of aircraft and other equipment previously ordered by France and Britain were halted. For Poland the embargo was of largely symbolic significance. It had neither the credits nor a route by which American arms could reach it before the end of the campaign. The paradox was that other goods, such as oil, steel, cotton or food, could flow to the belligerents without restriction, even in American ships, because the “cash and carry” provision had lapsed. It was precisely this paradox that Roosevelt pointed to when he demanded a change in the law.

The Neutrality Patrol

As early as 4 September the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold Stark, instructed the Atlantic Squadron to organise a combined patrol of ships and aircraft. It was to observe and report the movements of belligerent warships within an area bounded by a line running east from Boston to longitude 65° West, then south to latitude 19° North, and onwards around the Windward and Leeward Islands. On 5 September, with the proclamation of neutrality, the patrol officially became the Neutrality Patrol. Chronologies usually state that Roosevelt ordered the patrol to be set up after the declaration of neutrality. More precisely, the military orders were issued a day earlier, and on 5 September the president gave the patrol political standing.

Destroyers, cruisers and seaplanes were assigned to the service, while three old battleships and the aircraft carrier USS Ranger were held in reserve at Hampton Roads. The patrols, from Newfoundland to the Caribbean, were meant to show that the waters off America’s coasts would not become a battlefield, as they had in 1916, when a German submarine sank several ships just outside American territorial waters. Formally the patrol was impartial. In practice its reports on German ships and warships, which from October were broadcast in plain language, helped the Royal Navy, since only the Royal Navy could act on them. A few days earlier the United States had proposed to the states of Latin America a joint conference on neutrality, and the idea of a zone free of hostilities was to become its main theme.

The “limited national emergency”

On 8 September Roosevelt proclaimed that a national emergency existed “in connection with and to the extent necessary for the proper observance, safeguarding, and enforcing of the neutrality of the United States and the strengthening of our national defense within the limits of peacetime authorizations”. At a press conference he explained that this was a “limited” emergency which gave him only a small part of the powers provided for in times of danger, and assured reporters that there was no question of war. On the same day executive orders directed that the strength of the regular army be increased as quickly as possible by voluntary enlistment to 227,000 men, the National Guard to 235,000, the navy to 145,000 and the Marine Corps to 25,000. They also allowed reserve and retired officers to be called to active duty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, to which the president had entrusted the pursuit of espionage and sabotage a few days earlier, was enlarged.

These numbers were modest. In 1939 the regular US Army numbered fewer than 200,000 men – smaller than the peacetime army of Poland, which the Germans were at that moment destroying – and it was poorly equipped. The emergency was nevertheless the first step towards preparing the country for a war that Roosevelt did not publicly foresee, but which he feared.

The battle over the embargo

On 13 September the president summoned Congress to a special session, and on 21 September he addressed both houses. He called the embargo provisions “wholly inconsistent with ancient precepts of the law of nations” and the most dangerous to American peace. He argued that a nation at war needed wheat, lard and cotton just as much as anti-aircraft guns, and that the existing law banned the sale of a finished aircraft but not of an engine or parts. He proposed a return to international law: sales to anyone who paid cash and carried the goods away in their own ships, with American ships barred from entering combat zones.

The isolationists, among them Senators Hiram Johnson, William Borah, Gerald Nye and Arthur Vandenberg, announced that they would fight. As early as 15 September the aviator Charles Lindbergh, a national hero, urged in a radio address that America should not become involved in Europe’s wars. The debate lasted more than a month, but the administration had a majority in both houses, and public opinion, watching Poland’s defeat and the Soviet invasion, increasingly favoured lifting the embargo.

Significance

The declaration of neutrality surprised no one, but the manner in which Roosevelt made it signalled where he was heading. Neutrality “in action, not in thought” meant a policy increasingly openly favourable to Hitler’s enemies, pursued step by step so as not to get ahead of public opinion. On 4 November 1939 the president signed a new Neutrality Act, which lifted the embargo and allowed belligerents to buy arms for cash and carry them away in their own ships. In practice only Britain and France could take advantage of this. In exchange, American ships were barred from entering the combat zones around the British Isles and off the coasts of Europe. Earlier, in October, Americans themselves had felt the war at sea: the freighter City of Flint, which had rescued survivors of the Athenia, was seized by the German “pocket battleship” Deutschland.

In time the Neutrality Patrol developed into an undeclared war in the Atlantic. The fall of France was followed by the exchange of fifty old destroyers for British bases (September 1940), the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941, and in the summer of 1941 American warships began to escort convoys. In September of that year Roosevelt ordered German submarines to be fired on, and in October a U-boat sank the destroyer USS Reuben James. In November 1941 Congress repealed the most important provisions of the Neutrality Acts. The limited emergency of 8 September 1939 became an “unlimited” one in May 1941, and the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 brought American neutrality to an end.