War Again in Asia and Europe 705Germany, and when Mussolini invaded Albania,
Roosevelt urged Congress to repeal the 1937
neutrality act so that the United States could sell
arms to Britain and France in the event of war.
Congress refused. “Captain,” Vice President
Garner told Roosevelt after counting noses in the
Senate, “you haven’t got the votes,” and the pres-
ident did not press the issue.
In August 1939 Germany and the Soviet
Union signed a nonaggression pact, prelude to
their joint assault on Poland. On September 1
Hitler’s troops invaded Poland, at last provok-
ing Great Britain and France to declare war.
Roosevelt immediately asked Congress to repeal
the arms embargo. In November, in a vote that
followed party lines closely, the Democratic
majority pushed through a law permitting the
sale of arms and other contraband on a cash-
and-carry basis. Short-term loans were autho-
rized, but American vessels were forbidden to
carry any products to the belligerents. Since the
Allies controlled the seas, cash-and-carry gave
them a tremendous advantage.
The German attack on Poland effected a basic
change in American thinking. Keeping out of the
war remained an almost universal hope, but pre-
venting a Nazi victory became the ultimate, if not
always conscious, objective of many citizens. In
Roosevelt’s case it was perfectly conscious,
although he dared not express his feelings candidly
because of isolationist strength in Congress and
the country. He moved slowly, responding to
rather than directing the course of events.
Cash-and-carry did not stop the Nazis.
Poland fell in less than a month; then, after a win-
ter lull that cynics called the “phony war,” Hitler
loosed his armored divisions. Between April 9 and
June 22 he taught the world the awful meaning of
Blitzkrieg—lightning war, spearheaded by tanks and
supporting aircraft. Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands,
Belgium, and France were successively overwhelmed.
The British army, pinned against the sea at Dunkirk,
saved itself from annihilation only by fleeing across the
English Channel. After the French submitted to his
harsh terms on June 22, Hitler controlled nearly all of
western Europe.
Roosevelt responded to these disasters in a num-
ber of ways. In the fall of 1939, reacting to warnings
from Albert Einstein and other scientists that the
Germans were trying to develop an atomic bomb, he
committed federal funds to a top-secret atomic bomb
program, which came to be known as the Manhattan
Project. Even as the British and French were falling
back, he sold them, without legal authority, surplus
government arms. When Italy entered the war against
France, the president called the invasion a stab in theIn 1939 Hitler reviews goose-stepping troops during a celebration of his
50th birthday.
from schools, and otherwise mistreating innocent
people, he said that he “could scarcely believe that
such things could occur.” But public opinion opposed
changing the immigration law so that more refugees
could be admitted, and the president did nothing.
In September 1938 Hitler demanded that
Czechoslovakia cede the German-speaking Sudetenland
to the Reich. British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier,
in a conference with Hitler at Munich, yielded to
Hitler’s threats and promises and persuaded the
Czechs to surrender the region. Roosevelt failed
again to speak out. But when the Nazis seized the rest
of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Roosevelt called
for “methods short of war” to demonstrate America’s
determination to check the fascists.
When Hitler threatened Poland in the spring of
1939, demanding the free city of Danzig and the Polish
Corridor separating East Prussia from the rest of