Franklin Roosevelt: Preparing for War

In 1940, Nazi Germany overran France. Britain looked to be the next target. President Franklin Roosevelt knew he had to prepare America for war. But how? Arthur Herman, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Freedom's Forge, tells the amazing story.

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Script:

In May 1940 the Nazi Blitzkrieg was overrunning France. Great Britain would be next.

British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill sent a telegram to the American President, Franklin Roosevelt.

“I trust you realize,” Churchill wrote, “the voice and the force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long.”

Roosevelt was a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and a student of naval strategy. If Hitler were to take control of Britain, he would take control of the Atlantic. This, Roosevelt knew, would pose a grave threat to America.

Roosevelt also knew America wasn’t ready for war—not psychologically (most Americans didn’t want to get involved in a conflict on the other side of the ocean) and not militarily.

The United States had the world’s eighteenth largest army. Hungary and even Holland had bigger armies, while Hitler commanded the most advanced military machine ever seen.

The Army’s Chief of Staff General George Marshall told Roosevelt that if Hitler overran Europe and landed seven divisions on the East Coast, there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

With all this staring Roosevelt in the face, it would have been irresponsible for the Commander in Chief not to arm the United States for war.

But how?

Many in his administration believed then, as many Americans believe now, that the only way to deal with an extreme crisis was to give the government as much power and authority as possible.

But FDR had the insight to realize that a massive wartime buildup during what was still peacetime wouldn’t succeed unless he harnessed the productive power of American business; that is to say, American free market capitalism.

The federal government could help coordinate industry’s efforts; it could make sure resources like steel and aluminum got to the places where they were most needed, but otherwise the government would have to back off.

To the president who had created an alphabet soup of Federal agencies to dig the country out of the Great Depression, this was about as un-Roosevelt as you could get.

But to his everlasting credit, the President realized that what he and the Democrats had tried with the Depression and failed—to manage the economy through government decree—wasn’t going to work when it came to preparing for war.

The man Roosevelt called for help was General Motors CEO William Knudsen, a Danish-born immigrant who had worked his way up from the Brooklyn shipyards to head the largest automobile company in the world.

Knudsen told the president that if he gave him 18 months, America would have more planes, tanks, and warships than it would know what to do with.

Roosevelt gave Knudsen what he wanted. In one of his most famous radio speeches in December 1940, a year before Pearl Harbor, the President told the American people that “we must be the great arsenal of democracy.” He backed up his words with action.

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