HEN war broke out in Europe, American politics remained a paradox. A stronger groundswell of opinion still favored a sacrosanct neutrality, even if tempered with sympathy for the opponents of Hitler. A second, and growing, movement began to promote the notion of more active aid to the western Allies and the necessity of eventual intervention. President Franklin Roosevelt played to both sides of this phenomenon. In his first public pronouncements, he promised to remain neutral1 after Britain and France declared war on Germany on September 3.2 Concurrently with his legally required declaration of American neutrality on September 5, Roosevelt began marshaling forces for the repeal of the arms embargo clauses of earlier neutrality legislation. The president's carefully orchestrated campaign resulted in the revised law of 1939. Though it nodded to isolationist principle by forbidding American ships to enter the war zone, the new enactment also overturned the embargo on arms sales to belligerents in wartime as long as they carried the goods away in their own or hired bottoms. Ambivalent in purpose, the legislation more than vaguely favored the European democracies with their fair-sized merchant fleets and better access to the Atlantic, while German merchant ships were prey to the more numerous British fleet. The American public saw no particular inconsistency in the 300-mile neutrality zone drawn around the American hemisphere in September at the Panama Conference with the attendant notices that the American navy would patrol those seas.3 Even from these only moderately active American responses to war in Europe, it was clear that Hitler had reached
The end of his string of diplomatic successes and was confronting new conditions involving far more complex risks for Germany.4 One historian remarks that the German attack on Poland was "the great failure of his [Hitler's] statesmanship that was inseparable from the faults of his character." His miscalculation about British and French resolve stemmed not from ideological fanaticism but from his haste to achieve an impregnable German position in Europe by 1943.5
German suspicions of the American president's intention to interpret neutrality in wartime one-sidedly and to seek every means to change existing neutrality law filled the exchanges between the Wilhelmstrasse and Thomsen's embassy through the outbreak of the war. In agreeing with the contents of von Boetticher's views on the weaknesses of the American army evident in late August, Thomsen nevertheless predicted a number of conditions affecting American behavior in the event of war. Roosevelt, he argued, considered neutrality despicable and would ruthlessly bring the country to a state of mind ready for intervention when the time came. Again reflecting von Boetticher's opinion, he said that the appearance of an American military force in Europe in less than a year was impossi-ble.6 Though the Foreign Office in the person of Hans Dieckhoff agreed with Thomsen's analysis, neither could rest assured that they had perceived Roosevelt's inmost thoughts correctly.7
One of Hitler's fundamental policies of the moment was to keep the United States neutral so that he could confine the war to European battlefields and waters.8 Overt anti-American, but especially anti-Roosevelt, propaganda descended to a whisper. On September 3, with the torpedoing of the liner Athenia and the loss of twenty-eight American lives, he specifically forbade German submarines to attack American shipping even if it were found in the war zones around the Continent. As time progressed, he increased the stringency of his restrictions on his U-boat crews, though the Roosevelt administration's "measures short of war" gave him ever less reason to observe any restraint at all. Supplementary to the policy of extreme caution toward the United States, Germany later pursued an elusive Japanese connection that would occupy American minds and sap British power in the Far East.9 Any great achievement in this area lay a year in the future. As the war in Europe began, Japan took a distinctly independent stance toward it.10 The Rising Sun ignored Hitler's entreaties to move on Singapore.11
In Washington, the German diplomatic mission had a quietly active supporting role in this strategy. Once the Senate passed the new neutrality bill on October 24, Thomsen assessed again the mood of the country as fundamentally anti-Nazi.12 On November 4, when Roosevelt signed the bill into law, German diplomacy in America was "hamstrung and without real initiative."13 But this circumstance did not prevent Thomsen from raising the level of propaganda activities directed from the embassy. With the war just two months old, he replied to a Foreign Office query as to his propaganda work with an impressive list. The German Transozean (TO) news agency was having unexpected if indirect success in getting German viewpoints into American wire service nets; a new German-subsidized English language weekly, Facts in Review, had begun publication with 20,000 subscribers; and the German Library of Information in New York had become a "propaganda institute," with German-sponsored material being disseminated through all German consular offices, the German Railway Office, and tourist bureaus throughout the country. He urged Berlin to make the greatest use of American newsmen in the German capital to pass on desired interpretations through the pens of American journalists.14 Thomsen geared up the German mission and various subordinate offices in the country for the support of the scattered forces favoring isolation. Not the least of his efforts was directed at keeping Franklin Roosevelt from a third term as president.15 Inexplicably left out of this catalog of his preparations were the activities of Thomsen's military attache.
Von Boetticher unquestionably performed valiantly to further the ends of the embassy, at least as he interpreted them. In an evident quickening of pace, much of the German military reporting switched to a more rapid cable dispatch in place of the pouch, no doubt at the insistence of military authorities at home. Once again the attache subordinated his personal feelings to the business at hand, and official reports show none of his obvious concern for his wife and daughter, caught on the high seas aboard a German liner less than a week before war began.16 To American friends, he presented a sober, objective, and businesslike mien. Douglas Freeman, who visited him at the embassy on September 19, saw a "very unhappy" man.17 In later statements to American officers, von Boet-ticher found the 40,000 German casualties during the Polish campaign unconscionable.18 Yet, at the same time, the tone and the mood of his reports remained quietly reassuring to readers in Berlin.
In "propagandizing" the American military echelons closest to him, von Boetticher had another advantage over the charge d'affaires. Unlike the diplomat, the attache had an audience obviously impressed with German military performance, and he could let German successes speak for themselves. As Warsaw fell to German forces on September 27, he repeated his requests for detailed material to pass on to the American General Staff:
My visits are all the more welcome since the Allied Powers inform them only from the propaganda standpoint and therefore very inadequately from the military standpoint and since my previous statements have been confirmed by the outcome of the Polish campaign.19
All the senior German troop commanders then active in Poland were von Boetticher's contemporaries, and his nearly daily discussions with American officers had the appeal that his closeness to those officers could add. Still, he wanted more than the usual communiques intended for German press and radio. The more confidential revelations would enhance his own prestige in his cultivation of the influential staff. He expected his words to reach the hostile State Department and even the president himself.20 In this he was not entirely mistaken, for as Sumner Welles noted later, the Intelligence Division in the War Department prepared continual situation briefings for diplomats in this period, and the G-2 summary conferences in Cordell Hull's offices were daily occurrences in the desperate days of the following spring.21 With immediate and detailed orientations from home, von Boetticher felt he could effectively help the American staff prevail over the politicians. In late November, when the war in western Europe had settled into desultory air actions and small raiding operations on the ground, he continued to beg the Luftwaffe Operations Staff at home for Leica projection slides of aerial engagements and any other advance material he could hand directly to his contacts.22 The first of many demands upon the Luftwaffe, this request got him excellent and detailed pictures. He also knew what appealed to Americans. When he received footlockers full of books and magazines more suited to the German temperament than to the American, he made bonfires of the lot in the courtyard behind the embassy.23 Oddly enough, developments in this reciprocal system had von Boetticher trafficking in some of the same refuse arriving through unexpected channels later in the year.
In the interests of preserving this system once war had overtaken Europe, von Boetticher repeatedly tried to enhance a faltering German cooperation with American officers in Berlin. On September 7, 1939, he learned that Maj. Percy Black, Truman Smith's interim successor in Berlin, would ask the German government to approve the dispatch of an American military field team to study the war firsthand. In lobbying for the acceptance of this idea, von Boet-ticher cited the American staff's continued relationship of trust with him in spite of English hate propaganda. For the newly appointed American attache, Col. Bernard Peyton, arriving in Berlin the same day, he recommended "a similar accommodation. . ., as I find here."24 Von Boetticher's entreaties wrung no concessions from the German High Command for the American officers in Berlin. Peyton received the same treatment as did the other military attaches there, including the Japanese. All of them were first restricted to the territory within fifty miles of the capital, but later, when the German Army had organized things and established tours to show off its accomplishments, foreign attaches could visit the eastern battlefields. Air attaches were an especially suspect group and could not visit installations even within the Berlin suburbs. Peyton reported that the flow of information had declined due to the war, that no technical news was available at all, and that the few remaining valuable German contacts not on field duty had become "absolutely noncommunicative" due to the espionage laws.25 He later learned that Hitler himself had forbidden attache visits to the West Wall. The Air Ministry stopped regular briefings for foreign attaches; the War Ministry gave out only trivia.26 While this seemed to limit the free and informal trade of military information for American attaches in Germany, von Boetticher retained his channels in Washington and was also the beneficiary of other largesse at the hands of Colonel Peyton.
Peyton's office routinely received German promotional literature through Col. Horst von Mellenthin, still chief of the German Army's Attacheabteilung. The American attache deemed much of the material useful despite its propaganda value to Germany. Since he was shipping wholesale lots of it home under diplomatic auspices, he saw no reason not to include consignments for General von Boetticher in his own packing cases. The system occasioned no complaint as long as the boxes went direct from Berlin to the G-2 offices in Washington via German ports, but in April 1940, a furor arose when Peyton routed one of these huge loads through the American attache in Paris, Lt. Col. Sumner Waite. Waite immediately brought it to the attention of Ambassador William Bullitt. An ardent champion of the European democracies, Bullitt was at that moment sharing the French government's distress at the lightning German stroke that had fallen on Denmark and Norway. Despite his protests, the shipment proceeded to the United States, where the State Department's Undersecretary Sumner Welles argued so hard with Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall that the War Department dispatched an officer who returned to Paris with the entire shipment a month later.27 War Department apologies offered suitable contrition for the fact that the material included highly flammable cellulose nitrate motion picture film, and Peyton eventually received a slap on the wrist for contravening regulations.28 If this ended the American transmission of propaganda material to von Boetticher, the foreclosure of the service did little to limit his ability to advertise his cause. With the exception of the sound films delivered, the cargoes usually consisted of the heavy-handed stuff he discarded summarily. The episode thus serves only as an indication of the degree of cooperation a now one-sided quid-pro-quo system produced before an active American involvement in the war. Peyton continued to send such material home despite the State Department's protest. In September 1940, he was arranging for the shipment of 500 pounds of it through American agencies in Lisbon.29 Even with this sort of help, though, there was already evidence of some limits to von Boetticher's influence on the uppermost strata of the U. S. Army.
These limits were evident on social and official levels. Albert Wedemeyer, who had returned from his Kriegsakademie tour in 1938, remembered that it became impolitic to entertain too close a relationship with the German attache after his own assignment to the General Staff War Plans Division.30 Wedemeyer's case might seem special in that he did occupy a sensitive position in a highly secretive planning office, but the von Boetticher family also noticed that other regular social contacts among American officers began slacking off.31 Even more telling perhaps was the lack of mention of a strong and confidential relationship with the American chief of staff that von Boetticher had always claimed in the past. General Marshall had taken over as acting chief on the departure of the ailing Malin Craig on July 1, 1939. Wedemeyer remembered that Marshall, who met routinely with von Boetticher, if only because the latter was dean of attaches, liked and admired the German officer. Yet, in all of the hundreds of messages he sent to the German staff between September 1939 and December 1941, many dealing with the great influence of the American staff on politics in America and his own influence upon it, von Boetticher only rarely mentioned Marshall by name.
Another incident in late 1939 indicated the tightening ambiance in which German officialdom in the United States was now operating. Peter Riedel's aerial exploits in the country continued to make him new acquaintances, and his soaring activities based at Washington's smaller airports were widely supported by American friends. On November 14, he drove to a garage on Washington's 10th Street, NE, owned by a Father Paul Shulte, billed as "The Flying Priest." Riedel's object was to borrow Shulte's automobile, equipped with a tow hook and trailer, with which to retrieve a glider from a soaring site in central Virginia. While about this legitimate business, Riedel was accosted by a neighbor for reasons uncertain. The police blotter described a Frank Werner, his wife, and a "Mexican lad" as variously involved in a physical altercation that left Riedel with visible bruises on his face and a nasty cut above one eye. The report mentioned that he was temporarily unfit for duty at the embassy. Three days later the German legation was still considering legal action with a city police increasingly disinterested, because there was to be no court appearance for Riedel.32 The Washington press corps in September had taken special notice of Thomsen's wife, Bebe, in her voluble but transparent utterances of sympathy on the capital's cocktail circuit for the recently vanquished Poles. By the next spring, the Germans were diplomatically and socially isolated in the
American capital.33 In this atmosphere, Riedel's plight would only have offered more unfavorable news copy, and the case quietly dropped.
The same Brig. Gen. George C. Marshall who met von Boet-ticher as a matter of formal course was now presiding over plans for the continued reconstruction of the American army and the new strategic planning efforts of the General Staff. While the president began his campaign for the revision of the neutrality act, he also issued an executive order on September 8, 1939, declaring a limited national emergency and authorizing an increase of the American army from 210,000 to 227,000 men and the purchase of $12 million in motor vehicles. Authorized National Guard strengths likewise increased from 200,000 to 235,000 men, and paid drill sessions went from forty-eight to sixty in a year.34 But the stated raw numbers were illusory. Executive orders could not call men and equipment into being overnight. The active Regular Army only grew from 187,983 officers and men on June 30, 1939, to 200,893 on November 30 of the same year, an expansion of a meager 6 percent.35 Obsolete equipment still abounded among the ranks, though orders on industry were introducing new material at a growing pace. The authorized 17,000-man increase for the ground forces permitted the General Staff a number of new programs, among them the reorganization of additional infantry divisions along the modern "triangular" lines,36 but grave errors in developing equipment offset some of the progress in other areas. The Ordnance Department, in one glaring example, continued to push an American near-copy of the German Rheinmetall 37-mm antitank gun in the face of warnings from observers in Europe that the piece was already incapable of penetrating some of the tanks then in use in European armies.37 The executive order seemed to some to be the point at which American rearmament became a mobilization,38 but Marshall was still inclined to see the American army as a third-rate force.39
None of this changed Friedrich von Boetticher's assessments of American readiness. He knew that the 227,000-man authorization had disappointed the War Department, which had set its sights on a strength of 280,000, the figure mentioned as the minimum emergency strength in the revised divisional organizations. He scarcely analyzed at all the triangular concept that promised to give at least five American regular units the flexibility demanded in blitzkrieg, or maneuver, warfare. The changeover would be gradual, he noted, and no completion date was set. Recruiting for all forces was slow, he decided in October 1939. "The youth is little inclined to war service," was his comment of the moment, and in the absence of an American conscription law, still a year in the future, his remark was quite accurate.40
Von Boetticher's statistics on industrial expansion at this time were a broad selection to show the gradual expansion of the nation's production base. He drew no conclusions on the weak, advisory Office of Emergency Management that Roosevelt's executive order had also established on the White House Staff. Developments under the "limited" emergency still proceeded without the organizational elements envisaged in the last Industrial Mobilization Plan, and Roosevelt's ad hoc creations made it less likely that the plan would go into effect in the near future. Bernard Baruch implored the president to begin emplacing the projected managerial machinery for war production. Roosevelt only angered his longtime friend by erecting new interim agencies that would only compete with the ones called for in the grand mobilization plans.41 Von Boetticher nevertheless found that in mid-September, visitors were barred from certain plants and that heavy orders for tool and die machines, to say nothing of demands for finished warplanes, had come from the French, and, to a much lesser extent, from the British, who were anticipating the repeal of the embargo.42 The demand for steel alone fired up so many cold ovens that the proportion of total American steel capacity in use rose from 62 percent to 79 percent in a single month.43 Yet in mid-October, von Boetticher reassured his readers in Berlin that the General Staff had again admitted American weaknesses to him. The procurement of weapons for five new divisions to bring the army to a strength of 280,000 in the future would take at least until the beginning of 1941 at the current pace, and a mobilization of existing forces would still require an industrial lead time of eight or nine months. Some entertained hopes of equipping the five divisions by May 1940; the 8,000 trucks for this could be delivered in the next six months, but even the infamous 37-mm antitank gun was still not in the hands of the troops. Getting 165,000 of the M-1 Garand rifles and 329 modern 12-ton tanks for the Regular Army alone was a process that would run at least into the year 1941 at present rates of delivery.44
Even as Roosevelt prepared to sign the Neutrality Law of 1939, von Boetticher reflected the uncertainty and the great secrecy surrounding deliveries on actual orders coming from England and France. By November 3, he reported that a six - to eight-month expansion program would produce a marked increase in output, but that already the combined orders of the U. S. Army Air Forces and the Allies exceeded the capacity of American industry at that moment. "A heavy delivery of. . . production to the allies will not enter the scales unless the American armed forces cut back their orders," he wrote. On just this issue, the decision on the priorities for Allied purchases versus the requirements of the American air forces, the bitterest intramural battle of the Woodring-Johnson duel was to be fought over the next few months. After the expiration of the specified lead time, von Boetticher yet cautioned his OKW addressees, "You may expect constantly increasing and very highly rated accomplishments."45
As 1939 drew to a close, von Boetticher took some pride in the fact that his educated estimates of the prewar period had proven accurate in the first three months of the war. On December 1, he ticked off the reasons for his continued belief that America would not intervene in the war in the foreseeable future. There were still not enough American military and air units to make intervention feasible. The American fleet was still tied to the Pacific, and a fear of becoming an opponent of Japan forced even the "warmongers" to wait and see what the situation in the Far East would bring. The United States had no formal alliances with the European Allies and even had begun doubting the validity of the British program of starving Germany economically with a naval blockade. His host country, he reasoned, was coming to an understanding of the limits of its own power. He based his attitudes on the men of the American General Staff, who in their collective professional opinion, stood against involvement and therefore opposed the "sterile politics of hate of the State Department"46 in its understanding for Germany and its appreciation of German military leadership. Von Boetticher had also reversed completely his former agreement with Hans Dieckhoff in 1938 that the United States would certainly act if England's fate were at stake. He now saw the American buildup as support only for a hemispheric defense policy. As a final proof of his contention, he cited the apparent lack of aircraft orders from the
Allies at the end of the year.47 Though the French were prepared to buy large stocks, the lackadaisical transmittal of British purchase orders thus far led von Boetticher to the premature conclusion that the repeal of the embargo had not had its desired effect. By the first of 1940, French orders for 2,095 planes had resulted in 617 deliveries, "and British demands for 1,450 machines had netted them 650."48 The French government was already writing orders for
10,000 planes in November,49 but von Boetticher was confidently betting that the demand would exceed the American ability to produce planes for the more than year-long grace period he continued to emphasize. In his best judgment, no real American strategic weight would enter the international arena before the late summer of 1940, if then.
Von Boetticher's view also coincided with that of a large number of American officers in Washington headquarters. In his world of interlocking strategic conceptions, von Boetticher had plumbed a central element in the secret series of advance American war plans in train in early 1939. The American series now reached its last variation, Rainbow 5, approved in mid-1939, which envisaged the dispatch of American armed forces to Europe or to North Africa to defeat Germany or Italy (or both) in concert with French and British military efforts.50 The most ambitious statement of American strategic intent, the plan required, as did the four earlier versions, the absolute security of the American hemisphere as a precondition to projects further afield. Von Boetticher correctly asserted that these could not be supported for another year and a half. Freely available to the German attache, open admissions of material weaknesses that prevented such plans from being at all feasible in the near future were common even in military professional digests of the time. One aging hero, Brig. Gen. Henry J. Reilly, wrote somberly that the country could not even resist the type of war that the Germans had mastered and that it was actually possible for a lesser industrial power to overcome a larger one if the latter were ill prepared.51 Aside from political sentiment, the yawning gulf between American obligations accepted in the strategic plans and the current condition of the American army formed the basis for the opinion among a sizeable proportion of even General Staff officers that the United States should stay clear of war in Europe. Many of von Boetticher's confidants in the War Department G-2, but especially
Truman Smith, shared the outlook Reilly enunciated here. By the fall of 1940, it left many officers in sympathy with the aims of the new and vocal opposition to the Roosevelt administration, the America First Committee.52 Smith had in fact taken a more active role in resisting the gradual movement toward an interventionist opinion. By late 1939, he had begun publishing articles under the pseudonym Strategicus, something the White House inevitably noted with due displeasure. Though these columns appeared in such quasi-official serials as the Army and Navy Journal, he also lent his military acumen to the editorial board of Reader's Digest, itself a vocal proponent of nonintervention.
Japan fitted into this complicated framework as another counterbalance to American intervention in Europe. Japanese behavior through the course of 1939 aggravated American fears and prompted countermeasures. Thrusting in a new direction, Japan had taken Hainan Island, off China's south coast, and then moved to the Spratly Islands, within easy striking distance of Manila. In July 1939, the United States government unilaterally gave notice of intent to abrogate its long-standing commercial and navigation treaty with Japan by January 1940, a step that made a wide-ranging embargo seem likely. When von Boetticher reviewed American relations with Japan in early October 1939, the Japanese menace had occasioned American action to reinforce Pacific defenses "in deep echelon." With some fanfare, fourteen B-17 bombers went to Manila, and the vanguard of the U. S. Navy battle fleet had stayed at Hawaii instead of returning to the American west coast after its maneuvers in April. Air base construction began at Fairbanks, Alaska. The five new divisions mentioned in the latest news of army expansions would remain on the west coast.53 Despite tensions over administration initiatives to embargo strategic materials going to Japan through August, the Japanese announced their resolve to stay out of the European conflict on September 3. Von Boetticher reported that the American General Staff was counseling a "sense of understanding" with Japan. He predicted that even a success in American-Japanese contacts over commercial affairs would not permit an American policy against Germany until at least mid-1940.54 That any success in this direction would be forthcoming was doubtful, for any American inclination to compromise with Japan was low, despite voices in the State Department that were as cautionary as those von Boetticher reported in the General Staff.55
In an unexpected occurrence at this point, von Boetticher found himself briefly discussing German-Japanese cooperation with one of the more influential Japanese figures of the period. Hiroshi Oshima left his post as Japanese ambassador in Berlin in early November and traveled home via the United States, where he spent several weeks.56 Upon Oshima's arrival in Washington, the normally very reserved Japanese attache in the city organized a private banquet so that Oshima could consult with von Boetticher. Although the two discussed the necessity for cooperation and the importance to Germany of keeping the American fleet in Pacific waters, von Boetticher's report noted that Oshima gave no further details as to how to accomplish this. Of more concern, apparently, were the possibilities of an American naval attack on Japan and of the threat of embargoes against Japan once the commercial treaty expired in January 1940. Beyond this, Oshima made only general remarks about his tours of Polish battlefields and a single sanctioned visit to the West Wall fortifications in Germany.57 Inconclusive as it was, the Oshima-von Boetticher conversation of November 21, 1939, mirrored well the condition of German-Japanese relations in this interim: approaches and exchanges with little substantive result between two supposed allies.
With the outbreak of war in Europe, von Boetticher focused on the host of strategic and moral factors that would govern eventual German success. Chief among these were conditions affecting the American ability to deliver munitions, but especially aircraft, to the Allies, and a concurrent propaganda campaign that the attache repeatedly sought to counterbalance with his personal ministrations to his contacts among the General Staff. It is also through his performance from this time forward that he is critically represented in historical literature.
By this point, it is certain that von Boetticher had some effect on Hitler's war plans. With the outbreak of war, the attache's cabled reports were proceeding not only to the German Army staff offices as before, but also to the OKW and its chief of staff, Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, who laid them, at least in abstracted form, before the fuhrer. It would be extreme to blame the initiation of the hostilities in some measure on von Boetticher's direct advice, but his reports can be seen as influencing timetables in Berlin. While echoing distinctly Nazi phraseology designed to appeal to Hitler and his coterie,58 von Boet-ticher seemed captivated by the possibility that Hitler would indeed fulfill German aspirations of the past twenty years, a matter confirmed by men in positions to observe him at the time.59 Estimates in von Boetticher's reports after September 1939, however, contributed heavily to the conclusions of a major staff study compiled by the OKW Defense Economics Staff (OKW Wehrwirtschaftsstab) under Gen. Georg Thomas by December of that year. The United States would need a year to retool its industry for mobilization, but in another six months thereafter would far outstrip the output of any other countries.60 His reports are too consistent on this same time element to support the idea of such a radical change in his mood toward a pessimism simplistically depicted in him by one leading German historian.61 Rather, a detectable buoyancy in his cables arose from the way events tended so strikingly to confirm his earlier analyses. This passes too for the Herculean calm that a General Staff officer was supposed to exhibit in the midst of crisis. Hitler, at this moment, also spoke his praise for von Boetticher's understanding of the American mentality.62 Still, the expert on the United States within the German Foreign Office at the time, Hans Dieckhoff, continued penning assessments to counter von Boetticher's forecasts: the United States would do everything to circumvent the neutrality acts and send material especially through Canada.63 Hitler preferred reading his attache's commentaries instead.64
The essence of the situation by the beginning of 1940 still hinged on the answer to the same question Hitler had purportedly put to von Boetticher in February 1939: How soon would the United States provide a measure of support to England and France that would forestall a decisive German stroke in Europe? Even if American output began to portend a shift in the balance for the two western European allies, the necessity under the Neutrality Law of 1939 for paying cash for munitions forced England and France to husband their dwindling liquid reserves. Only fifteen months later, with France already occupied, did Lend Lease relax for embattled Britain the financial requirements for the delivery of war goods.65
If von Boetticher never assayed the financial problems involved in Allied orders, he fully appreciated the dilemma of American policy. The captains of industry and some military planners regarded the larger overseas bids as a welcome substitute for the minimal educational orders subsidized by American government funds. The American General Staff found, however, that they also cut heavily into attempts to build the 5,500-plane air force for the army and run a coherent ground-force buildup. Roosevelt after January 1940 pushed deliveries to the Allies of the latest types of aircraft, regardless of the sensitive new equipment they carried, and he wanted spare engines in quantity to accompany them. The president and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau ran into such heavy resistance from Woodring, Johnson, and General Arnold, chief of the Army Air Corps, that on March 12, Roosevelt swore that he would tolerate no more leaks to the isolationist press on the subject from this trio. He threatened Arnold with extended duty on the island of Guam if he did not change his attitude.66
Von Boetticher easily took the measure of contradictions in the program of aircraft production for American forces and for the Allied powers in Europe. Basing his reports on Riedel's exhaustive research, he leveled his own often sardonic conclusions. He portrayed the acrimony among senior American officials over the division of production. There were no immediately usable reserves of aircraft, he reported on March 20, and the country could not at the moment equip squadrons meant to defend Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal. Any deliveries to France and England would correspondingly diminish American rearmament. In light of these realities, he scoffed at British claims he found current in the American press that German aerial supremacy would be overcome in mid-1940 with American help.67 By early April, he was discounting Louis Johnson's predictions in military appropriations hearings before Congress that the United States would produce at year's end as many as 3,300 planes a month, an annual production of 40,000. Secretary of War Woodring, on the other hand, named a more realistic total of 2,200 aircraft expected in American inventories by early 1941. The expansion of a balanced air force was one of three concerns that the latter had written into his annual report to the president for 1939. His program for the entire army, laid before Congress in the spring of 1940, asked for $835 million, about half the $1.5 billion his military chiefs had requested for the fiscal year from July 1940 to June 1941. Under the complacency that had set in once the war had settled into what looked like a standoff, the House cut the figure in the first week in April to $735 million.68 Armed with this information, von Boetticher, though admitting the likelihood of a 30 percent increase in aircraft production by the end of 1940, could nevertheless label Johnson's testimony pure propaganda.69 By now he could also approximate the maximum help to the Allies from American sources as 1,250 bombers from a production of 2,150 and 900 fighter aircraft from a total of 2,000 constructed in the current year. As of January and February, as Riedel could ascertain from open sources, the European allies had received only 242 bombers and 12 trainers, but no fighters. Von Boet-ticher wanted this obviously critical revelation kept out of the German news organs. "Jewish propaganda" in America would use any German exposures of this sort as a spur to the domestic competitive spirit in the aircraft industry and contribute to rapid settlement of thorny price negotiations then in progress.70 A mere six days after he dispatched this, von Boetticher received news that demonstrated for him the continued superiority of German armed forces.
On April 9, on the pretext of protecting Scandinavian neutrality,71 Germany secured its northern flank in preparation for operations in western Europe by occupying Denmark and Norway in Operation Weserubung, an undertaking of some three weeks.72 The effect of these events was equally profound for von Boetticher and his audience among the General Staff in Washington. His conference with American officers on the Tuesday morning of the invasion yielded
A notably insightful and basic evaluation which follows the German viewpoint.
They spoke especially with great understanding of the necessity for Germany to insure a continued import of ore. England will be heavily struck by the cut-off of wood and ore. Again the warmest admiration for the accomplishments of the German Wehrmacht. . . . Generally there was little sympathy for England. Very coolly they weighed the way in which the war situation changed in favor of Germany and what chances now exist for a decisive stroke against the British Isles themselves. In the American General Staff, no preparations for the purpose of helping England have been entered into.73
American military policy still centers on hemispheric defense, and he could change nothing in his earlier reports, declared the attache.
By the opening of Weserubung, the German staff was also convinced of the value of informing the American military fully and freely of German successes, precisely to defuse the possibility that British misstatements would gain credence among American officers. Not only descriptions of Luftwaffe operations in detail came to von Boetticher, but now the most elementary maneuvers of the German forces in Norway filled the cables to Washington. During the campaign, Gen. Franz Halder, German chief of staff, specifically ordered the German attache section in Berlin to give top priority to notifying von Boetticher even of such minor tactical events as the fall of individual villages and towns.74
The interpretive consistency of von Boetticher's reports persisted into the next phase of the war, in which the Wehrmacht knifed through the Netherlands and Belgium, smashing the French Army and the British Expeditionary Force in six weeks. Suddenly all the assumptions of even the moderate isolationist position in the United States fell in shambles.
The Maginot Line, which had been basic to the argument that this war could not be fought out to a decision, was swept away and became no more germane than the Macedonian phalanx. The war was going to a decision, and it was going with unbelievable speed and the decision looked as if it would be one we could not live with.75
On the morrow of the German assault into Holland, von Boet-ticher learned from the responsible commanders of the army and navy who advise the State Department and the President that "an early entry into the war by the United States.. . can be ruled out as long as the western hemisphere is not directly threatened," confirming for him again that England's fate was secondary; American statements on England were merely slogans to affect policy. Conceding that his American advisors feared a "substantial deterioration in the general attitude toward Germany," he nevertheless cited the American assumption of England's imminent downfall.76 When Franklin Roosevelt stood before Congress on May 16 to ask for $1 billion in military appropriations for equipment and an aircraft program producing 50,000 machines a year, von Boetticher dispatched two cables in which he reduced all of the president's words to propaganda. The facts had not changed, and the May 16 address did nothing to alter his opinion. Americans were even then admitting to themselves that they could not hope to intervene anywhere overseas until mid-1941, and any American adventures in Europe would be held in check by Japan.77 Any expansion of the air industry on the scale Roosevelt proposed would entail employing five times as many skilled technical workers as it now had and a tenfold increase in the number of aviators and ground maintenance crews in the army and the navy.78 This assessment, too, came from Riedel's by now intimate knowledge of factory capacity in the American aviation industry.
In the roughly two months between the capture of Denmark and Norway and the collapse of all French resistance in June 1940, the continuing themes in von Boetticher's reporting became all the more sharply defined. His impressive knowledge of the American army enabled him to recount repeatedly and accurately the inconsistencies of the burgeoning rearmament program and the period required for its realization. On the other hand, his reliance on the vague circle of friends, many of Anglophobic conviction, in the War Department was the last vestige of the missionary persuasion that he had carried with him to the United States. That he took whole the private political opinion of the members of this group along with their aptly realistic professional and technical evaluations infused his cables with a prophetic reality on technical subjects but a narrow political myopia. He believed that their viewpoint would be the one the American government would perforce adopt in the face of German faits accomplis in Europe. As the German campaign in France continued its breathtaking course, von Boetticher's "military-political" summations exuded the confidence that Roosevelt would not drag his country into the war even if the Anglo-French coalition could not stop Germany: "In coming decisions, the representatives of the General Staff will influence the President toward an independent attitude toward the Allies, as long as they think that Germany has no plans up her sleeve against the United States."79
His caveat about plan-filled sleeves addressed the sensitivity about another problem of moment in German diplomacy in America: the Abwehr and its agents in the country. For his adamant refusal to countenance their presence in the United States, von Boet-ticher had already received a telegram on March 15, 1940, accusing him of failing to further Reich interests at his post. Struck to the quick, he sent back a handwritten letter to General Halder begging the chief of staff's intercession and protesting the slur on his performance.80 He followed this with a series of warnings against subversive activities.81 Now, in another synopsis, he seconded Thomsen's urgent pleas for restraint upon the latter's discovery of one of these shadowy creatures in New York, who supposedly worked under a Maj. Ulrich von der Osten, one of Abwehr's five main spy-masters in the United States. The man was turning to the embassy for funds and claimed to have a network of subagents and to have sunk a steamship in Baltimore harbor.82 While the Abwehr played innocent with Foreign Office officials at home,83 von Boetticher added his voice to Thomsen's. The balance of opinion in Germany's favor among the General Staff was delicate enough that this sort of behavior would destroy everything he had been able to rebuild since the American Congress had begun investigations into German espionage in 1938, he wrote. Even American news media asserted that these German efforts damaged German interests in America more than American property. Citing the long list of German technicians that had visited secret American arms and aircraft factories through his intervention since 1934, he argued that this was possible only through his frank and aboveboard personal contacts, not through subterfuge. Trust had returned only through his efforts:
I personally warned about this during my visits in Germany in 1936 and 1937 and am doing so again. The Jews and Freemasons [sic] who used the trial of 1938 against Germany are again at work to create a rift, and with that to play as a tool for the re-election of Roosevelt and for the destruction of the influence of Americans valuable to us.84
These valuable Americans now included not only his contacts on the General Staff, but new names. Alford J. Williams, an ex-Marine Corps pilot who wrote aviation columns for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, came to von Boetticher's attention for his frankness on British and American weaknesses. Baldwin hammered against foreign propaganda on a lack of German oil reserves, and last, Charles Lindbergh had emerged since the past September as a magnetic orator85 who had destroyed the administration's position on the German threat to the Americas. Even slight agent activities, when revealed, would "dash from out of the hands" the moral weapons these men held."86 More than that, they would cripple von Boetticher's influence with the American army, which, because of the Wehrmacht's victories in Europe, had grown accordingly: "It is just as if a fresh wind of German spirit has blown over from the battlefields of northern France and Belgium to America."87
In attempting to preserve their own room for maneuver and a sense of confidence in their contacts, Thomsen and von Boetticher were at one in demanding a halt to Abwehr activities within their own preserve, but the "fresh wind" of von Boetticher's imagery blew through a notable rift between the interpretive positions of the two men on other matters. The strong, tonic impression made by German victories on American professional soldiers had a reverse effect in the State Department, and Thomsen's statements there drew anything but warmth. On April 10, Thomsen took a view of the effect of the German operations in Scandinavia that was the exact opposite of von Boetticher's. Roosevelt's chances for re-election were thereby heightened, and the isolationists would "see part of their argument shattered."88 The German Foreign Office, corroborating Thomsen's reports with news from other sources, accepted the charge's version of the situation in America. State Secretary Ernst von Weizsacker sent a testy, "eyes-only" cable to Thomsen directing him to ensure that attache reports touching on political affairs were thoroughly coordinated with the charge d'affaires.89
Thomsen's somewhat plaintive response to this on April 24 shows how delicate his position was. Protesting that he had only harmonious relations with von Boetticher, Thomsen admitted to differences of opinion that were heightened by the attache's "extraordinarily sensitive personality." Von Boetticher was inclined to evaluate highly his sources and their effect on the formation of American policy, and although he accurately reflected the mood of the General Staff, he ignored more decisive factors in American politics. Thomsen explained to von Weizsacker that he attempted to counterbalance this in his own reports. His lesser rank became a limitation in this, insisted Thomsen; were he von Boetticher's equal, he would risk a conflict. The general regarded his position as greatly increased since the war broke out, Thomsen said, and Hitler indirectly sustained von Boetticher in this by sending a personal congratulatory telegram to mark the general's fortieth year in the army. Despite this, Thomsen also acknowledged that the attache upheld him in everything, including embassy routine. He retained relations with American soldiers "as excellent as one can possibly imagine," which was "a political asset whose significance is not to be underestimated."90 Five years later, amid the wreckage of the Reich, other Foreign Office members would be far more critical of von Boetticher.
Despite Thomsen's apt criticism of von Boetticher's fixation with the influence of American military officers, the logistical and technical aspects of the attache's opinion were overwhelmingly borne out by the summer of 1940. The thought no doubt sustained him as it did Adolf Hitler on June 22 after receiving the French surrender that the war had been won before American intervention was feasible. The Russo-German alliance still intact, Germany was supreme on the Continent, and England stood alone, albeit with the minor triumph of the evacuation of Dunkirk behind it. With little hope of American help before the year was out, the British could either accept a peace bid or continue a suicidal battle for survival. Roosevelt was already gravely worried over the fate not only of the British people, but also of the British fleet, now that the French Navy was under German control at Toulon. The president despaired briefly at the possibility that the German Luftwaffe would hold the British civilian population hostage to demand the return of any ships that took refuge in British dominions around the world or in American harbors.91
Von Boetticher in these circumstances countered each development in the United States that would give hope for England with hard strategic and logistical truths. Congressional reaction to Roosevelt's speech of May 16 produced $500 million more than the president had asked for, and supplementary appropriations at the end of June had raised the total of regular and special funds in 1941 to nearly $3 million.92 Von Boetticher applied his practiced eye to the possibilities ahead and changed nothing in his estimates. The army's projected expansion to 280,000 men was an old plan, he remarked on June 1, and the million-man host rumored in the press could not arise until mid-1941. Aircraft production would create 3,609 front-line craft and 4,310 trainers by the end of 1940. Most significant was his examination of the large-scale shortages in machine tools and skilled men to operate them that became apparent at this time. No amount of sudden defense appropriations could produce trained mechanics overnight. Yet, he warned, even with Roosevelt's "laughable and misleading" talk of an attack on the hemisphere, the majority of the nation was now behind the president's armament plans.93 Aid for the Allies at this point confined itself to shipments of World War I British Lee-Enfield rifles from American arsenals and French 75-mm field guns scheduled for the French Army.94 Despite a "hysterical willingness" to help, von Boetticher wrote on June 9, "they see that they can vote money in a few minutes, but can create weapons and arms only in months and years."95 And on June 13, after reviewing again a catalog of material promised to the fighting fronts in Europe, von Boetticher relayed the news that even in the American War Department it was common knowledge that French officers were talking about a just peace. The Americans could make no decisive contribution to the war in 1940; their arms program would bear fruit only in the first half of 1941. With a certain finality, he added: "Miracles cannot happen."96
There were still, at this point, ominous signs that the United States, for the existence of an increasingly vocal isolationist faction, was ready to gird for war, and that the political will of the country was considerably more cosmopolitan in the summer of 1940. The Republican Party's national convention in late June chose an internationally minded candidate for the presidency in Wendell Willkie, enabling the Roosevelt administration to continue subtly pushing for aid to England without fear that it would become the decisive issue of the fall campaign.97 In England, the new prime minister since May 10, Winston Churchill, refused even to make plans to evacuate the British government and, on June 8, spoke movingly of fighting on the beaches, in fields, and in streets to defend his "beloved Island." Roosevelt courted political suicide in the minds of some of his advisors by replying in similar vein on June 10 at Charlottesville, Virginia, when he castigated the stab in the back Mussolini delivered to the already defeated French nation two days earlier by declaring war against France. He further acted to speed the delivery from American sources of a half million Lee-Enfields, 800,000 machine guns, 130 million cartridges, 900 75-mm guns, over a million shells, bombs, and powder, all rushed to defensive positions when they reached England later in the summer and fall.98
More to von Boetticher's alarm was Roosevelt's dismissal of Harry Woodring on June 20 and the succession to the post of Secretary of War of Henry L. Stimson, a lifelong Republican, but a man of pronounced international outlook and sympathy for England.99 Roosevelt at the same time installed a man of similar outlook, Frank Knox, at the Navy Department. After Stimson's confirmation hearings ended in late July, von Boetticher resigned himself to the fact that
The Jewish element now controls key positions in the American armed forces, . . . having in the last weeks filled the posts of Secretary of War, Assistant Secretary of War, and Secretary of the Navy with subservient individuals and attached a leading and very influential Jew, "Colonel" Julius Ochs Adler, as secretary to the Secretary of War.100
The general purge of isolationists from the Roosevelt cabinet in June 1940 nearly caught up Truman Smith as well. Smith had remained close to Lindbergh and now found that Treasury Secretary Morgenthau was calling for his head.101 Von Boetticher cryptically reported home on June 11 that Roosevelt, not shrinking from any means to silence his enemies, had succeeded in eliminating an influential friend of Lindbergh from the General Staff.102 Marshall, protecting the most knowledgeable analyst of German military affairs he had in the G-2, sent Smith out of town for several weeks until the storm blew over. Thus, von Boetticher's chief contact in the War Department went into temporary and troubled exile at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he and his wife stayed in a house owned by the Wedemeyers in an enforced hiding.103
All in all, Britain stood on the brink of defeat in those days, and von Boetticher's personal triumph was of nearly full measure.
World History
