“Unless things going on in the conduct of the war are corrected very quickly, we are going to lose.”

By William K. Klingaman

IN THE DAYS immediately following the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor on Dec.7, 1941, few Americans expressed any serious doubts that the United States would win the war against the Axis powers.

Across the nation, man-on-the-street interviews elicited confident predictions that “we’ll whip ‘em in two weeks,” or “the job of beating the Japs won’t take long”; others insisted that “one American can lick ten Japs or five Germans and that is all there is to it.”

“Everyone thinks this is going to be a short picnic,” noted Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle in his diary. “It is not going to be anything of the kind. It is going to be a long, dirty, painful, bloody business.”

Over the next several weeks, a series of American military defeats in the Pacific confirmed Berle’s judgment. Guam fell first, then Wake Island in late December; on Jan. 2, Japanese troops captured Manila. On the Bataan peninsula, General Douglas MacArthur’s troops were poised to begin a desperate defensive action against a far superior Japanese invasion force.

“This was not the way things were supposed to happen at all,” declared The New Yorker, as the first wave of doubts began to appear.

“We have lost the first round,” wrote columnist Barnet Nover in the Washington Post. “There must be no sidestepping the tragic fact that we have recently suffered the greatest succession of military and naval disasters in our entire history.”

The journalist Walter Lippmann agreed.

“The soft talkative times are gone,” Lippmann advised his readers. “And the hardest days we have ever known since Valley Forge have begun.”

On Jan, 3, 1942, the New York Times published a commentary entitled “A War We Can Lose,” written by Hanson Baldwin, the newspaper’s foremost military analyst. Charging that most Americans remained much too sanguine about the outcome of the conflict, Baldwin called upon President Franklin D. Roosevelt to awaken the public “to the fact — which to too many of them seems fantasy — that we can lose this war, that nothing is foregone, except struggle.”

William Batt, director of the War Production Board’s materials division, shared Baldwin’s assessment.

“I find all around me a smugness and satisfaction which to my mind are entirely unjustified,” observed Batt. “Not since the days of the Revolution have we ever had much of a chance to lose a war. And we have a chance to lose this one.”

Then the news got worse. In late February, a joint American-British-Dutch-Australian naval force attempted to slow the Japanese invasion of Java; the campaign ended in disaster and the decimation of the Allied fleet.

“At present,” concluded Charles Lindbergh, “we are losing the war about as rapidly as we can.”

Five weeks later, the American resistance on Bataan collapsed, and on May 6, the American-Filipino garrison on Corregidor surrendered.

Meanwhile in the Atlantic, German U-boat commanders were waging an increasingly successful campaign against American and Allied shipping along the U.S. East Coast. By the end of April, nearly 200 ships had been sunk, and more than 4,000 sailors and passengers killed.

In fact, American ships were being sunk faster than the nation’s shipyards could replace them, although the numbers were obscured by the government’s refusal to acknowledge the extent of American losses.

Precise statistics about arms production also were hidden from the public throughout the first six months of 1942; instead, Americans were treated to reassuring (albeit misleading) statements by administration spokesmen about the “tremendous” and “magnificent” achievements of the nation’s war industries.

Newspaper and magazine stories claimed that American factories would win the war simply by out-producing the enemy.

“We here in the United States,” observed journalist Alistair Cooke, “studied our own production story and assumed the victory.”

But a host of problems plagued the American war production program from the start. There was no coordinated procurement plan; instead of deciding which types of weapons (and how many) American troops needed most urgently, military officials essentially ordered as much of everything as they could. So many contracts were issued that competing defense plants spent the first few months of the war scrambling to obtain and then hoard all the scarce resources they could find, leaving a range of strategic materials — especially steel and copper — in chronically short supply.

Dwindling supplies of rubber — virtually all imports had been cut off by Japanese conquests in East Asia — posed an especially serious threat.  A blue-ribbon presidential panel headed by Bernard Baruch warned in September 1942 that war plants faced the very real possibility of having “no rubber in the fourth quarter of 1943 with which to equip a modern mechanized army.”

“We find the existing situation to be so dangerous,” concluded Baruch’s commission, “that unless corrective measures are taken immediately this country will face both military and civilian collapse.”

Labor, too, was becoming harder to find. Many defense firms engaged in “labor piracy” — stealing skilled workers from their competitors — and then stockpiled labor for future contracts. Selective Service officials withdrew thousands more skilled workers from the labor supply by drafting men based on marital status rather than occupation; by September, War Manpower Commission director Paul McNutt warned that severe shortages of skilled manpower existed in war plants in Philadelphia, Detroit, Seattle, and Baltimore.

In the fall, absenteeism in war plants began to rise to alarming levels — reaching nine per cent nationwide and as much as 18 per cent in some shipyards — as workers took time off to spend their rapidly-increasing paychecks or search for even better-paying jobs. Factories were forced to either curtail operations or shut down altogether, leaving production even further behind forecasts.

“America thinks that it has got a production machine in high gear. Actually, it is just crawling along,” charged labor leader Walter Reuther. “Unless things going on in the conduct of the war are corrected very quickly, we are going to lose the war.”

A number of high-ranking government officials deemed these difficulties severe enough to outweigh the nation’s improving military fortunes in the Pacific (including a draw in the naval battle of the Coral Sea in May, and the clear-cut American victory at Midway in June). “We are still losing this war, period. And we should damn well understand it, period,” declared Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard three months after Midway. “We’ve lost all our rubber, most of our tin, our hemp, our silk,” acknowledged Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, chief of the Army’s Special Forces. “We’ve lost ships by the hundreds, men by the thousands. We’ve lost the freedom of the seas. We’ve lost everything except a smug sense of complacency.”

“We could lose this war,” admitted Elmer Davis, the director of the Office of War Information. “We have never lost a war; but it has been remarked that this means only that our ancestors never lost a war, and our ancestors were never up against a war like this.”

Paul McNutt concurred.

“The tide of war is still running against us,” observed McNutt in late September. “We are beginning to understand that we can still lose.”

On the first anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the New York Times’ Hanson Baldwin noted: “It has been a year in which the American people have come to realize that no nation is unbeatable, that liberty is purchased only at the price of pain, that even the resources of the United States are limited.” By the end of 1942, however, American offensives in the Solomon Islands and North Africa — combined with a more coordinated and efficient arms production process on the home front — had quieted talk of potential defeat. Nearly five months of increasingly savage fighting at Guadalcanal provided the United States with its first clear-cut victory on land in the Pacific theater, although American troops were still more than 3,400 miles from Tokyo. And while the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa had bogged down in western Tunisia, the prospect of Allied soldiers finally carrying the fight to the enemy lifted American morale.

“However long and hard the road that lies ahead,” declared the New York Times, “we know now that we are no longer merely hitting back on the defensive.”

William K. Klingaman is the author of The Darkest Year: The American Home Front 1941-1942 He holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Virginia and has taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland. He is the author of several books, including The Year Without Summer, The First Century, and histories of the years 1816, 1918, 1929, and 1941.

(Originally published on February 19, 2019)