World War II

A president giving a commencement address is commonplace. A president giving a commencement address when his child is a member of the graduating class is pretty rare. Rarer still is a president speaking at his child’s graduation and saying something memorable enough to make it into the history books. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt accomplished just that feat on the evening of June 10, 1940 in his “stab-in-the-back” speech at the University of Virginia. FDR had agreed to speak at UVA because his son, Franklin Jr., was graduating with a law degree. Early that morning as he prepared to depart from Washington, FDR learned that Italy had declared war on France, thereby entering World War II on the side of Nazi Germany. He had already planned to give a speech on the events in Europe. Now he would have more to say. His aides reworked his remarks on the train ride down to Charlottesville, adding five pages of text detailing the duplicity of Italy’s leader, Benito Mussolini. The five hundred graduates and their families who gathered in UVA’s Memorial Gymnasium to escape the rain heard a president on a mission. As the New York Times later described FDR’s delivery, “there could be no missing the depth of his feeling, since he put into the words all the emphasis at his command.” FDR began by saying that the United States faced questions “not about the future of an individual or even of a generation, but about the future of the country, the future of the American people.” Without ever mentioning the war in Europe but fully confident that his audience understood the events he left implicit, Roosevelt argued that America could not retreat from the world: Some indeed still hold to the now somewhat obvious delusion that we of the United States can safely permit the United States to become a lone island, a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force. Such an island may be the dream of those who still talk and vote as isolationists. Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare of a people without freedom—the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents. FDR then turned to Mussolini’s duplicity. Italy had entered the war that morning, with France tottering on the brink of collapse, in manifest “disregard for the rights and security of other nations, [and] disregard for the lives of the peoples of those nations which are directly threatened by this spread of the war.” FDR then uttered a line he had scrawled on his typewritten text: On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor. A variant of that line had been in an earlier version of the speech. FDR had taken it from a letter the French premier Paul Reynaud had sent that morning saying that “This very hour, another dictatorship has stabbed France in the back.’’ Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles argued, however, that the stab-in-the-back metaphor was inflammatory and should be dropped. FDR agreed—a least for a time. On the train ride down to Charlottesville he and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt discussed the merits of observing diplomatic niceties versus speaking candidly. In the end, FDR opted for candor. Even more significant than FDR’s willingness to ruffle diplomatic feathers was what came next. The president pledged to: pursue two obvious and simultaneous courses; we will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and, at the same time, we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and every defense. FDR’s denunciation of the champions of “the philosophy of force” (Hitler and his allies) and his pledge to aid their opponents (Great Britain) drew cheers from the audience. The New York Times wrote the next day: When Mr. Roosevelt gave deliberate emphasis to this nation’s sympathies with those who were staking their lives in the fight for freedom overseas, they broke into the wildest applause, cheering, and rebel yells. As the President neared the end of his speech the cheering became general and members of the faculty stamped their feet and applauded. Whenever Mr. Roosevelt mentioned this nation’s determination to preserve free institutions and liberties and to perpetuate democracy within our borders, those on the platform and in the audience forgot academic decorum in spontaneous approbation. The country as a whole hardly reacted in the same way. Some Democratic officials worried that the speech would alienate Italian-American voters and thereby hurt Roosevelt and the rest of the Democratic ticket with national elections less than five months off. (FDR would be running for an unprecedented third term.) And the country’s vocal isolationists saw the speech as more evidence that FDR intended to plunge the country into a war that it should not fight and would not win. Yet as the UVA graduates filed out of their gymnasium that rainy June evening to cheers of Wahoo Wah!, the die had been cast. As Time magazine put it, with the speech “the U.S. had taken sides. Ended was the myth of U.S. neutrality.” Within a week, FDR nominated Henry Stimson to be secretary of war and Frank Knox to be secretary of the navy. Both men were Republicans. More significantly, both men staunchly favored aiding Britain. Many epic political battles were yet to be fought, over a peacetime draft, the trading of old destroyers for bases, and letting Britain buy weapons from the United States. But as FDR returned to Washington that night having given what would be remembered as his stab-in-the-back speech, even though he never used those precise words, he was intent on ensuring that the United States did not become “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.”

You finally land the job you have long coveted. But many of your colleagues dislike you, and the task you have been given may be undoable. That’s the situation that Winston Churchill found himself in on May 13, 1940. He responded with what is regarded as one of the greatest speeches ever delivered in the English language—and one that helped rally Great Britain at one of its darkest moments. Churchill was offered the prime ministership on May 10, 1940. His predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, had resigned after it became clear that he had lost the confidence of his fellow Conservative Party members. Chamberlain had championed the appeasement policy that was supposed to preserve peace in Europe. It had the opposite effect, emboldening rather than satisfying Adolf Hitler. Churchill had been a biting critic of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, even though he too was a Conservative. Churchill’s unrelenting criticism had angered many of his fellow Tories. They were not celebrating his elevation to prime minister; some privately expected (and perhaps hoped) to see him fail. But Churchill’s domestic political difficulties paled in comparison to Britain’s foreign policy problems. The so-called Phony War that had prevailed in Europe since Germany invaded Poland the previous September had ended in April. Denmark and Norway had fallen to the Nazis. On May 10 the German army invaded France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Faced with this peril, Churchill addressed Parliament for the first time as prime minister on May 13. He spoke for just five minutes. His speech included these riveting lines: I would say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs - Victory in spite of all terrors - Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival. Let that be realized. No survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge, the impulse of the ages, that mankind shall move forward toward his goal. If Hollywood had staged the scene, Churchill’s defiant words would have been met with thunderous applause. But life seldom follows Hollywood scripts. Few MPs clapped. Many of Churchill’s fellow Tories grumbled. They still preferred Chamberlain. No one outside of Parliament heard the speech live; BBC reports merely summarized it. Churchill’s first radio address to the nation would not come until May 19. It would take days for word of the speech to seep out into the broader public. A version of the speech was eventually recorded for broadcast. Disagreement exists as to whether Churchill recorded the speech himself. Some experts argue that Norman Shelley, a BBC actor, taped the speech because Churchill was too busy to do it himself. Historians note that the line about “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” wasn’t entirely original. Churchill likely took it from Giuseppe Garibaldi, the nineteenth century Italian revolutionary who once rallied his troops by saying he could only offer them “hunger, forced marches, battles and death." But genius often lies in borrowing from the past and reinventing it for today. That gift may be why Churchill remains the only politician ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Churchill’s promise that he could offer only “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” was sadly accurate. As he was speaking, the German army was crossing the River Meuse into Sedan. France fell just six weeks later. With the United States still clinging to its neutrality, Britain was left to battle Nazi Germany alone. In the Battle of Britain that lasted throughout the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe devastated many British cities. Blood and tears flowed freely. But Britain survived its darkest hour, in good part because of Churchill’s determination. So it is fitting that in April 2013 the Bank of England announced that the “blood, toil, tears and sweat” quote will appear alongside the portrait of Winston Churchill on Britain’s new five pound notes.

Ask Americans to name World War II battles in the Pacific and you will likely to hear places such as Pearl Harbor, Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. You aren’t likely to hear anyone mention Attu. But it was the only land battle fought on U.S. soil during World War II. And in proportional terms, it also was one of the bloodiest battles of the entire Pacific theater. You’ve never heard of Attu? It’s the westernmost island in the Aleutian Islands chain. It lies closer to Russia than to the U.S. mainland. It is 1,100 miles off the Alaskan coast and nearly 5,000 miles from Washington, DC. It’s about 20 miles by 35 miles in size, making it the twenty-third largest American island. Japanese troops captured Attu on June 7, 1942, exactly six months to the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. The U.S. military wasn’t defending the island, so it was there for the taking. Japanese military leaders didn’t order the attack because of Attu’s strategic value. It didn’t have any. They instead hoped to entice the U.S. Navy into diverting its forces away from the southern Pacific to Alaska, thereby weakening the American ability to win the war in the South Pacific. Washington didn’t bite. Almost a year elapsed before it decided to retake Attu. On May 11, 1943, the first of 15,000 U.S. soldiers landed on the island. They squared off against roughly 2,500 Japanese. Although the Japanese were badly outnumbered, they fought tenaciously in grim, arctic weather conditions. The American troops slowly gained ground. On May 29, the Japanese commander recognized that the end was near. He ordered that all Japanese soldiers too wounded to continue fighting be killed. He then led a banzai charge, one of the largest of the entire war. Some 1,000 surviving Japanese troops attacked the surprised U.S. forces and nearly overran their positions. The headline that the Saturday Evening Post gave its story on the battle highlighted the viciousness of the fighting: “Mad-Dog Hunt on Attu.” Fewer than thirty Japanese soldiers survived the Battle of Attu. On the American side, 549 soldiers died, 1,148 were wounded, and more than 2,000 suffered exposure-related injuries. When the overall number of soldiers who fought in the battle is taken into account, only Iwo Jima surpasses Attu in terms of U.S. casualties. A soldier who fought at Attu summed up the experience of trying to retake 346 square miles of frozen terrain: It maybe wasn’t such a big battle as battles go nowadays, but, brother, everything about it was done in a big way, including the way them Japs knocked themselves off. Believe me, that was the biggest, awfulest damned mess I ever saw in my life, so help me. Today Attu is known as a birder’s paradise. If you ever visit Attu, and few people do, you might see a whiskered auklet, a red-legged Kittiwake, a solitary snipe, a red-flanked bluetail, or even a hawfinch. But if your eyes turn from the heavens to the earth, you’ll also see a collapsed church and few trees. They are pretty much all that remains of the presence of the Americans who fought on a distant island seven decades ago.