In the last year and a half of General von Boetticher's service in the United States, events increasingly crowded him. The English made their will to resist unmistakable to American officials and the world in early July 1940 when Churchill ordered the capture or destruction of French fleet units at Oran. The exasperated German attache freely railed at the willful American political minds that seemed to encourage England's fruitless struggle with grandiose promises. He championed the isolationist cause even as German victories made it the more untenable. He perceived subtle shifts in the role England was to play in a self-serving American strategy that sought to prolong the war rather than concede a German victory. Yet, the longer England held on, the closer approached the midpoint of 1941, at which, by his own analysis, American defense production would begin to match the mobilization demands of the army and the navy. The possibility of an American entry would then increase accordingly, and von Boetticher divined Roosevelt's behavior as meant to introduce the will to combat into the American people who otherwise rejected the prospect of American boys in a foreign war.
Von Boetticher's representations to his Berlin readers in early summer 1940 came amid a marked upswing of vocal opinion, some of it hysterical enough even to endanger civil rights in the United States.1 On a calmer plane was the rapidly successful establishment of more than 600 local chapters of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, headed by the editor of the Emporia Gazette, William Allen White. Under the committee's loose auspices, a wide-
Spread campaign began to complement Roosevelt's careful cultivation of American awareness of the country's peril, and through August 1940, a variety of talent, civilian and uniformed (but mostly naval officers), argued for all possible succor for England. They lobbied especially for the release of fifty overage American destroyers to replace those Britain had already lost to sustain the Royal Navy in antisubmarine warfare and convoy escort duties.2
Without analyzing the constituents of this burgeoning popular movement, von Boetticher placed his faith in its opponents, who he insisted would prevail. In the tension of the period, he also hotly defended Charles Lindbergh, whom the attache unquestionably regarded as the most intelligent and effective spokesman for common sense in America. Lindbergh conceded that he might have met von Boetticher at some formal function in the United States or Germany,3 but the two never had any more informal contact. Von Boetticher in fact recorded only a brief encounter with Lindbergh as both of them were being introduced to Orville Wright in 1938.4 The discovery of any close cooperation between them would have confirmed an ill-founded public criticism and private suspicion of Nazi sympathies on Lindbergh's part and identified the attache publicly as a supporter of American isolationism. For von Boetticher, the moral value of Lindbergh's message lay in his independent reflection of Hitler's policy statements on America contradicting Roosevelt's projection of the German threat. While Hans Thomsen pursued his own audience in 1940 and 1941 with subsidized copies of carefully selected Polish diplomatic and military documents recovered from Warsaw's ruined government quarter, liberal bribes to American politicians, and extensive support for books favoring the isolationist viewpoint, von Boetticher concentrated on his more narrowly defined group for which the hero became in his eyes the purest and best spokesman:
Persons close to me and in close contact with Lindbergh believe that Lindbergh's influence can be very significant for the future. He will be evaluated as a person of the greatest importance, is independent of the Freemasons and Jews. Therefore the circle around Roosevelt hates and fears him.5
Roosevelt's system, von Boetticher decided in mid-July, echoing a "close friend of mine and a mortal enemy of Roosevelt," now consisted in letting other countries, namely England, fight for his cause.6 The intervention-minded movement had in fact made England the first line of American defense since May.7 Von Boetticher maintained that the strategy was dictated not out of a concern for American safety, but purely out of Roosevelt's refusal to admit a German triumph. According to him, the president even scorned the will of his own party, expressed in the platform of 1940. His acceptance of the Democratic nomination for a third term, broadcast from the White House,8 breathed his opposition to a peaceable understanding with Hitler. Von Boetticher found Lindbergh trying to impede this fatal "Jewish control" of American policy and hoping that Wendell Willkie as the Republican candidate could avoid the same bondage that Roosevelt, the "exponent of the Jews," had fallen into. He had been asked to tell his superiors that Mrs. Paul E. Pihl, Willkie's sister and the wife of the American naval attache in Berlin, had definite pro-German sympathies and could influence her brother.9
At the height of the summer, von Boetticher further described the effect of Lindbergh's speech at Soldier Field in Chicago on August 4.10 He quoted from the talk at length to reaffirm his judgment of Lindbergh's spiritual superiority and purity. Among other things, the speech ridiculed the possibility of the establishment of German air bases on Greenland, but it also struck themes of cooperation with a triumphant Germany that invited attack on him as a fifth columnist. Even the aged General Pershing had swung into the administration's camp, reported von Boetticher, and had advocated the dispatch of the disputed fifty destroyers to England and the adoption of universal military training. On the latter issue, von Boetticher also noted that the old general had spoken for the General Staff, which favored a conscription law, but that the "war-hysterical" element sought to use a large standing army as a means of controlling the people.11
Von Boetticher approximated very well the galvanic role that Lindbergh played among the often dispirited isolationists and captured the essence of the Roosevelt campaigns against the flier. Lindbergh frequently bolstered the morale especially of American isolationist legislators in the summer of 1940, before a counterweight to the White Committee to Aid the Allies finally coalesced as the America First Committee in September. His effect with the public was such that Roosevelt began an attempt to appease him with a vague promise of a cabinet-level secretaryship for aviation matters, then followed with genteel reminders that he could lift Lindbergh's reserve colonelcy in the Air Corps. He later harassed his opponent with income tax return audits as well.12
None of this dissuaded Lindbergh from regularly contradicting the president's published statements on world affairs. Von Boet-ticher usually followed with glowing commendations on the flier's "commanding spirit" and his growing influence on the country. His continued and perfervid recommendations of Lindbergh led at last to another of Ernst von Weizsacker's icy warnings to Thomsen to "see that the precedence of the Embassy is maintained" when the attache's analysis strayed into political areas.13
If the Foreign Office faulted von Boetticher for his frequent zeal, the counterespionage agencies in his host countries could not. He continually begged Berlin to keep his revelations on Lindbergh out of official pronouncements and the German press, a rule that governed Nazi propaganda in any case.14 In June 1940, he rejected the offer of another assistant to work under him at the German consulate in Mexico City and put off firmly the requests from the German Consul there for him to visit the Mexican capital. No hint of scandal attached to his name to the end of his service. In fact, the informants of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation could report no evidence of wrongdoing by von Boetticher or Robert Wit-thoeft, the naval attache. Both were "conducting their affairs above board."15 But this did not preclude efforts to add whatever weight he could to the isolationist argument in another way.
For a full year, from August 1940 to August 1941, von Boetticher supplied the War Department with detailed reports on German air operations, aircraft strengths, and bomb damage assessments. In the week after August 15, the date of the so-called Adlerangriff signaling the opening of the aerial Battle of Britain, cables from the Luftwaffe Operations Staff reached the German attache in a steady stream. Each of them summarized German aerial operations of one or two days at a time, giving the targeted cities, individual installations hit, and meteorological conditions affecting the operations. Also important from von Boetticher's point of view was the accurate count of German planes lost or damaged and German claims of English planes destroyed. He took the cables to the War Department as he received them, and Truman Smith abstracted them himself, producing a thick file entitled "Digest of Telegrams Sent by the Air Ministry in Berlin to the German Military Attache in Washington."16
The arrangement had a diverse effect. It certainly added to von Boetticher's reputation among American officers. He became so valuable an informant to American intelligence work that the bundles of wall maps and cables he carried in and out of the G-2 offices in the old Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue eventually were exempted from security searches.17 The material he handed over balanced from the German side the daily war situation dispatches that Churchill furnished the White House through the British Embassy after May 19, 1940.18 As his cabled dispatches make clear, the German attache retained his position of confidence with G-2 in partial return for these services, and he received confirmation and elaboration on what he could read about American preparedness in open newspaper sources. The collection gave further bureaucratic weight as well to the G-2, which, though growing rapidly at this time, still had a sour reputation.19 The exchange also confirmed Truman Smith's value and General Marshall's trust in him.20
At the same time, von Boetticher's relayed Luftwaffe cables cast doubt on those reports sent in from two American military attaches in London, especially when they cited estimates of German air strength in the winter of 1940-1941. Of the two men there, Lt. Col. Martin Scanlon, the air attache, and Col. (later Brig. Gen.) Raymond E. Lee, the senior man at the London Embassy, Lee was by far the more engaging. Urbane, cultured, and handsome, Lee raised morale among his English friends by his jaunty appearances in a straw boater in the streets of London at the height of the blitz. A thorough Anglophile, he had the same privilege and free access to the offices of British intelligence as did von Boetticher in the realm of the American G-2.21 If British intelligence was inclined to overestimate German air strength after some of Lindbergh's pronouncements on the subject in 1938,22 the staff of the Military Intelligence Division found by comparing Lee's submissions with von Boetticher's that their British counterparts were seriously underestimating German air resources in 1940. Whether senior G-2 officers suspected this as purposeful or not in attempts to influence American official decisions by projecting better odds for Britain is unclear, but Scanlon added his own conviction that "the strength of the German Air
Force has been greatly exaggerated."23 Through the following spring there was a running exchange between General Miles and Lee. American military attache reports from Berlin estimated German production at 2,600 planes a month in early 1941, while the London attaches would only admit 1,800. In March 1941, Miles directed Lee to report on what bases the British were making their estimates since Gen. Sir John Slessor, head of R. A.F. Coastal Command, had already allowed that British intelligence on German airpower was little more than guesswork based on the units identified over England. Miles cited his own sources, one of them being von Boetticher, as indicating figures almost double those the British Air Ministry was handing Lee and Scanlon.24
Unusual as von Boetticher's trade-off was insofar as its content was ordinarily secret operational material,25 the arguments it generated showed merit and error on both sides. Lee and Scanlon were obviously accepting at face value British statements on German losses. Yet they also knew that under Lord Beaverbrook's whip cracking, British plants were producing up to 490 aircraft a month by September and showed signs of continued improvement. The Luftwaffe, on the other hand, began the battle with 2,287 aircraft of all types against a Royal Air Force (RAF) of 704 fighters.26 German production, itself not fully mobilized at this stage of the war, was actually even with British output as the aerial engagements be-gan.27 The opening skirmishes also revealed some glaring German technological weaknesses. Certainly not the least of the factors operating against the Germans was the ULTRA intelligence system that provided Britain with access to German radio messages passing from higher German headquarters to the field. With this advantage, the British defenders could often divine the Luftwaffe's strategy for the air battle and for the projected but aborted Operation Sea Lion, which called for an invasion of the British Isles once the R. A.F. was destroyed.28 The argument over statistics von Boetticher contributed to served his purpose in keeping German strengths before his listeners, but it was a poor reflection of the ebb and flow of the close-run battle. Among German aircraft, the heretofore feared but slow Ju 87 Stuka was easy prey for the RAF and was withdrawn early, to see only intermittent service thereafter over Britain. The standard first-line German fighter, the Bf 109, with a slight edge over the standard British Spitfire in combat, still lacked the range for escorting German bombers to targets in England. British radar developments, the central tactical control of forces, and the ability of British science to deflect German radio beams used to guide Luftwaffe planes at night all reduced the odds against Churchill's famous "few."29 The comprehensive British radar network also proved a crucial element of the battle, since the relative size and direction of the attacking German waves were evident as they assembled in the air over the French coast. The RAF could hold its forces on the ground, conserving fuel, until the targets were clear, then counterattack with economy and effect. Moreover, any German pilot bailing out of a crippled aircraft over England or surviving a forced landing went into the prisoners' bag, lost to the German war effort,
Von Boetticher, though duly assigning some weight to these observable tactical factors,30 never ceased to regard Great Britain as a dead man who refused to lie down and act the role. Most of his reporting in the year before the Wehrmacht's attack on the Soviet Union carries the often stated assumption that Britain's downfall was a mere matter of time, time in which it was impossible for American aid to have any effect. His considerable familiarity with American difficulties in industrial mobilization therefore produced in his reports of the time a not necessarily unwarranted predilection to regard the signal events of the year as less than helpful. The famous but decidedly unneutral destroyer deal of September 2, 1940, in which Roosevelt finally, after overcoming nearly insuperable odds and political and naval opposition, traded fifty old destroyers for several British bases in the Western Hemisphere, drew predictions of a Roosevelt dictatorship from charge d'affaires Thomsen to match the outraged American reaction against the "executive agreement" forged without congressional approval.31 Though the exchange made the United States the virtual ally of England, von Boetticher confined himself to remarking that it was all in the realm of the official propaganda deluding the American public into thinking that Britain could hold out a long time.32 Calling attention to the wide divergence between British orders, amounting to over $2 billion in the second half of 1940 alone, and the slow American delivery of the purchases,33 von Boetticher characterized well the fact that American supply, after the dispatch of the existing stocks of World War I ammunition and the fifty destroyers, was very limited. As one study put it:
The six months from October to March were spent in marking time, at least as regards any serious expansion of supply from the United States. The six months were spent—as the preceding six months had more or less been spent—in piling programme on programme, with seemingly endless revisions.34
By late May 1940, von Boetticher's reports were read at home as being more optimistic on Germany's chances, since most American staff officers observing the incipient French collapse were predicting an imminent British one as well.35 By September, when Hitler was still considering an optimal date for an invasion of Britain, von Boetticher's reports on the prospects of England's survival added to the fuhrer's deliberations. Altogether, concluded German historian Andreas Hillgruber, von Boetticher, though well informed, failed to integrate his acquired information with political realities, an imbalance that Thomsen could not rectify in Washington.36
Through summer and fall 1940, the attache continued in the same vein on the arrival of the desperately needed supplies. On November 7, von Boetticher further reported that American export to England suffered the lack of cargo vessels to carry it to its destination. British losses, 430,000 tons of shipping the victim of German submarines in the North Atlantic in September and October alone, made shipbuilding the decisive issue of the moment after muni-tions.37 On the same day, in fact, Roosevelt was discussing with Lord Lothian, the British ambassador, an American program to build 60 cargo vessels immediately, to recondition 70 older ones, and eventually to construct 300 additional ships to offset German U-boat destruction of British transports. Yet American yards were just beginning to expand; production in 1939 was twenty-nine ships; in 1940, fifty-three bottoms slid down the ways. British orders for ocean transports in 1940 netted five ships that year, with the sixty new ones expected only at the end of 1941. The two yards that the British financed to build the ships did not yet exist.38 The shipbuilding question further exacerbated the financial drain for England, and testy words passed between Lothian and Roosevelt on the subject.39
A series of visits by American officers to London during the blitz lent weight to the administration's faith in Britain's viability in the long term, despite some private misgivings. Among these men was von Boetticher's old friend from Geneva days in 1926, George V. Strong, now a brigadier general and chief of the War Plans Division of the General Staff.40 A week before the German Adlertag, he led a mission to London ostensibly to survey the effects of Luftwaffe bombing.
In reality, the party, which included Navy and Air Corps members, furthered Anglo-American cooperation by discussing the standardization of American and British munitions production and by presaging the full combined staff conversations that took place in Washington the following spring.41 Von Boetticher had fairly exulted when he learned of Strong's presence in the group: he "has stood close to me for fifteen years and will report independently."42 When Strong returned to New York on September 19, he destroyed the attache's faith in him by publicly asserting that the Luftwaffe had made "no serious inroad in the strength of the R. A.F., that the military damage done by air bombardment has been relatively small, and that British claims of German aircraft losses were 'on the conservative side.'"43
Appalled at this, von Boetticher could only say that the Strong statement was universally doubted and that his former friend had "behaved and negotiated basically on orders from and as an organ of Roosevelt, his superior."44 He similarly dismissed the public statements of the next head of a formalized observer mission, Maj. Gen. James E. Chaney, on November 23.45
Strong, in fact, had gone far beyond the advertised purpose of the observer mission to London. With no clear authority for doing so, but most probably prompted by the White House, he offered his British counterparts access to U. S. deciphering methods and accomplishments in penetrating Japanese coded message traffic thus far under the cover names Magic and Purple. His uncertain U. S. Navy fellow observer seconded the proposed exchange, which placed the Japanese JN-25 codes on the table as well. On September 5, Strong cabled the War Department inquiring whether American authorities were ready to exchange "full information on all German, italian, and Japanese code and cryptographic information. . . ."46 This initiative marked the beginning of the unlimited sharing of signals data by British and American intelligence operatives and brought American military and naval establishments into the British ULTRA system of interception and decryption of German strategic radio traffic.
Von Boetticher retained his credibility in other small accomplishments in which he was the sole source of information for his hearers. Among the more humanitarian of these was his part in the German High Command's proposal of a Christmas truce in 1940. Though the embassy in Washington was only the recipient of the plan made in Berlin, Thomsen permitted von Boetticher to carry the announcement to the American General Staff. The attache added a touch of drama to his tidings by dispatching a small white heather tree to Truman Smith's home on the evening of December 24 with a cryptic note to the effect that he had important news. At the same time, he and Thomsen composed the gist of a radio announcement, which went to a local station and was broadcast on Christmas Day.47 Perhaps of only slightly more lasting effect was the advantage that the attache and the embassy euchred from the sudden appearance in the United States of a flamboyant German hero of the moment.
Luftwaffe Oberleutnant (Sr. Lieut.) Franz von Werra was one of the knights of the air whose exploits made the battle of Britain such a gripping contest. On September 5, three weeks into the Luftwaffe's full-scale attempt to force a British defeat solely from the air, he rode a crippled Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter to a belly landing on English soil. The yeomen of the Home Guard ushered him off to interrogation and captivity, but he would not be held. After two colorful escapades that came close to his getaway, the British shipped von Werra off to internment in Canada, where he could be battened down for good.48 On a slowly moving train carrying more than 200 captive German airmen from Nova Scotia to the Canadian west, von Werra prized open a frozen double-paned rail car window and dove out head first into a subzero night. Hitchhiking south by dead reckoning, he reached the St. Lawrence River. A stolen rowboat got him across the current to Ogdensburg, New York, in late January 1941. Only days later in New York, he was an instant celebrity.
The subject of German prisoners in Canada had already entered von Boetticher's cables even as von Werra made his break.49 In his case, embassy officials were immediately concerned with controlling the flow of military information and wildly ebullient war stories von Werra gave out in press conferences as they were with preventing the United States from extraditing or deporting the man. Once he was safely in the home of a German vice consul in New York, von Werra's statements were momentarily more guarded, but he remained a press sensation and much in demand in New York City's society. Hitler awarded him the Knight's Cross, Nazi Germany's highest decoration for combat valor, while the pilot was in the city, the announcement of which occasioned a victory party for him.50 Von Boetticher shuttled this hero to Washington several times to meet leading American General Staff members and army fliers "in order to present them a living impression of a German flying hero, but caution him on what to say beforehand."51 At von Boetticher's request, von Werra also wrote a preliminary report on British interrogation techniques that proved to be of value to the Luftwaffe.52 The attache sent the entire reminiscence home in the pouch, and the Luftwaffe used it to tighten up security among its aircrews and inform them on what to expect if they were captured.
What looked here like a relatively low-level German intelligence coup was actually more of a trial for von Boetticher. If his reports on the matter showed him the efficient intelligence operative he had been in the early 1920s, he still found the extrovertive fighter pilot a cross to bear. While the attache sought to dampen the enthusiastic von Werra, who continued to feed the American press vastly exaggerated versions of his Canadian escape, the flier clearly happened on a much more kindred soul in Peter Riedel. Riedel found an instant resonance with his fellow airman and a common reaction against von Boetticher's caution in handling the case. Rather than stay under tight control in Washington, von Werra preferred the lights of New York; the carefree life and the proffers of marriage from smitten women there were more to his liking than the constraints of his nominal superior officer in the American capital. Completely oblivious to the legal and diplomatic procedures involved, the holder of the Knight's Cross now made peremptory demands on Thomsen and von Boetticher to arrange his direct and immediate return to Germany. As U. S. government officials began moving to extradite von Werra to Canada, Riedel quietly advised his colleague on his last "escape." The air attache sent von Werra back to New York to collect as much as $2,000 from his newfound admirers there and to arrange with them for an airline flight under a false name to El Paso, Texas. Riedel warned the brash pilot against attracting attention with any overt behavior, but to pay for a hotel room in El Paso, then simply join the throngs of tourists crossing the bridge without visas to Juarez, in Mexico. This done, von Werra had only to get to the German legation in Mexico City. Aboard a southbound train, a uniformed Mexican unexpectedly thrust his head into the pilot's private compartment to demand a passport; von Werra instead passed the official a crisp American hundred-dollar note and heard no more. On April 18, 1941, he was back in Berlin to a festive welcome, only to be killed on October 25 that year in a flying accident.53
Minor though these affairs of the Christmas truce and the von Werra case were as propaganda victories, they gained importance in the context of earlier German triumphs. From his vantage point in the United States, von Boetticher saw far more clearly the limits of American power in its attempts to aid embattled England than he could perceive German failures of the moment. In his postponement of Operation Sea Lion—the cross-channel invasion of England—on October 12, Hitler left unsettled the problem of Britain's defeat; he had already decided that the way to a resolution with London lay in the conquest of Moscow. Still, military necessity forced him to maintain the threat of an invasion of England while he made ready for operations eastward, and to prepare for carrying it out after the expected defeat of the Soviet Union. He had further to garrison the coasts of France and Norway and provide for an increased U-boat blockade of England as long as Churchill refused to submit.54 As it was, Hitler left in place an unsinkable base from which the Allies launched their own invasion of the German-occupied Continent nearly four years later.
The passage of the American Lend Lease Act on March 11, 1941, highly touted as the most generous measure of the period, moved von Boetticher to no reversal of his evaluations either. He reassured his home office that the industrial bottlenecks clearly evident in American industry would preclude its meeting demands for aid to China, the Netherlands Indies, Latin America, and Greece, to say nothing of continuing aid to Britain.55 Even so basic an item as small-arms ammunition was in such short supply in late 1940 that the American General Staff wrestled with revised troop training schedules to permit at least 60 percent of requirements to be on hand. Yet in February 1941, British purchasing agents placed an order for 900 million rounds with American manufacturers.56
Through the massive interventionist-isolationist debate that brewed in December 1940 over the possibility of a Lend-Lease bill, von Boetticher rejected the idea that Roosevelt's famous "garden hose" would put out his neighbor's fire. Referring again to the problems discussed in his cable of December 7, he said:
The solution of the financial difficulties is without meaning for England's prosecution of the war. What it needs over the next 90 to 120 days is masses of weapons deliveries, aircraft, and ships. These cannot be made in this time period, even if they put all the money in the world
He pictured General Marshall as convinced of the limitations of the American army and capable of only limited sacrifices to aid England.58 Thomsen, while striving to muddy the American debate where he could by subsidizing isolationist elements and organizing protests,59 was in complete agreement with his military attache on the inevitable delay necessary before the goods would be forthcoming. The two drew similar conclusions on the long-term implications of Lend Lease for Britain that have rung strangely true with the passage of time since the war. In late February, von Boetticher, in a lengthy analysis of the effects of the bill whose passage he expected momentarily, summarized the situation. Jewish ideology prevailed to a considerable extent, and Lindbergh feared Roosevelt would use the law to drive the country into war. The legislation relieved the American government of a dependence on the faltering British finance and permitted direct American subsidy of the arms program. He dwelt on the vast expansion of presidential power that the projected measure entailed, explaining that the executive could now dictate the entire economic policy of the United States. With the conditions attaching to Lend Lease and its $7 billion outlay of goods ($1.3 billion from existing army and navy stocks), von Boetticher reflected that Roosevelt could ask in return for "whatever he considered proper in the interest of the United States" in warships, oil, territory, or money.
Thus, the English are at the mercy of the Americans and will be all the more dependent on them the more their financial situation deteriorates and their armaments industry is further destroyed by the German air attacks; and the more in consequence the [task of] supplying goods and of supplying all parts and states of the British Empire,. . . passes over fully to the United States.60
In his eyes, Britain had become a "vassal" state to American interest, a characterization in which von Boetticher presaged the long-term fate of England and the conclusions of even British historians about the role of Lend-Lease in the waning of the British im-perium.61 The passage of the bill at first brought no dramatic increase in supply, which still lagged far behind the combined demands of American defense establishments and the embattled British. Deliveries under Lend Lease by the end of 1941 totaled only $173 million of the projected $7 billion, and the first shipments were largely foodstuffs.62 To all appearances, then, though he insisted still on the expected American industrial performance after mid-1941, von Boetticher was not far wrong when he called Roosevelt's promises of Lend-Lease aid "golden bullets" that could not be fired from field guns or rifles.63 His characterization of an incipient imperial presidency reflects a theme that appeared more frequently during the American involvement in Southeast Asia more than twenty-five years later.64
Lend Lease could not prevent British disaster in the Balkans and the Mediterranean that spring. Reduced to harassing actions on the fringes of Europe, British arms had enjoyed some successes in 1940 in that general region, especially in keeping control of the 2,000-mile sea lifeline between Gibraltar and the naval base of Alexandria, Egypt. Marred only by the fiasco at Dakar in September 1940,65 the British cause advanced further when the Greeks threw back an Italian invasion of their country in October, the same month that Spanish dictator Francisco Franco deftly sidestepped Hitler's attempts to involve him in German operations, especially in designs on Gibraltar, despite his moral debt to Hitler.66 On the night of November 11-12, a brilliant British naval foray against the Italian fleet anchorage at Taranto put five Italian capital ships out of action. With Mussolini's humiliation, the British had transformed the Mediterranean balance of forces, and in December, the British
Eighth Army threw Italian forces out of Egypt and back into their Libyan colony. The following month, English and Commonwealth divisions also began a decisive campaign that utterly destroyed the Italian garrison in Ethiopia by mid-May, leaving only holdout towns that surrendered one by one until November 1941.67
All this brought a German response in January. German air units operating from Sicily cut the Mediterranean lifeline between Gibraltar and Alexandria, dive bombing and sinking one cruiser and so damaging the armored aircraft carrier Illustrious that she spent a year in the United States for repairs.68 By February, the Eighth Army ran into far more proficient German troops of the Afrika Korps under Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel, whose tactical genius and chivalry wrung praise even from Churchill him-self.69 The prime minister's decision to aid the Greeks in renewed fighting against Italian forces and against the threatened invasion by German troops massing in the docile German satrapies of Rumania, Hungary, and Bulgaria is presented as a principled measure in the elevated prose of his account of the war,70 but his military commanders saw disaster ahead.71 The gesture was "morally sublime, but militarily ridiculous."72 When in late March a military coup in Yugoslavia changed earlier tolerance for German enticements, Hitler launched Operation Marita on April 6, a campaign that reduced Yugoslavia and Greece to occupied countries and sent British forces reeling out of the Balkans, their last foothold on the Continent. In May, another German move took the island of Crete in a spectacular but costly airborne assault, completing the German mastery of that outpost by June 2.
Von Boetticher drew continued sustenance for his own frame of reference from these events. He wrote off the Italian garrison in East Africa as it became apparent that its plight was hopeless. Through mid-April, when he noted the surrender of 40,000 Italians in the area,73 there was none of the enthusiasm that marked his summations of news reports on German operations. The Luftwaffe's intervention in the Mediterranean had made a great impression on American military onlookers, and Hanson Baldwin had declared to von Boetticher in January that a new chapter had opened there. The attache later approvingly reported on the argument in the American press that the Luftwaffe had reversed the usual guarantees that seapower had given to British expeditionary efforts in the past.74 On March 26, he reported on the dubious British figures of 150,000 troops supposedly sent from Eighth Army rosters to Greece; there were in fact only 58,000, most of whom never got to their defensive positions before German forces struck.75 Once the rapid German mop-up of the Balkans was over, von Boetticher fairly gloated over the confusion that the stroke produced in British leadership over subsequent German moves. This uncertainty spread to American leaders. Both governments, he testified, feared that Spain would now join the Axis, and that the German Luftwaffe had proved that it could spare forces for war in the Balkans and sustain the nightly raids over southern England as well. The German initiative also endangered American strategy since all appearances pointed to an imminent British collapse, and another wave of alarm arose at the possibility of a German takeover of the strategic post of Dakar from Hitler's Vichy French captives.76 American intelligence officers, in a verifiable instance behaving as von Boetticher usually portrayed them, issued such loud and long criticisms of Churchill's political meddling in military affairs that Marshall finally ordered them to be silent on the subject.77
For all this, von Boetticher could not predict from his post what the Balkan diversion had done to the German schedules for Operation BARBAROSSA. The five-week delay in the opening of the attack on Russia and the inevitable equipment losses in the Balkans boded ill for the German divisions striving to take Moscow later in the year. His reports also reveal his own lack of information on German plans. When the Wehrmacht began massing in Bulgaria, he had only newspaper sources to rely on and begged Berlin for an "orientation."78 No one informed him either that his dispatch of unit designations and strengths of British troops in Greece was a waste of time and cable traffic. In one of the improbabilities of the campaign, the British and ANZAC troops disembarking at the docks of Pireaus confronted the figure of the German military attache in Athens, Maj. Christian Clemm von Hohenberg, who stood in full view among their ranks, counting them as they left their ships.79
In the first half of 1941, other indications of American resolve to preserve a British bastion became ever more numerous. The first of these, and kept so secret that no inkling of it appeared in the German attache's reports, was the two-month-long series of staff conversations between American and British military and naval staffs
That produced the so-called ABC-1 agreement. The combined American and British staffs met to determine joint methods to defeat Germany and its minions if the United States entered the war; to coordinate the use of Allied forces, and to map strategy, force structures, and command arrangements.80 Unmistakably directed against Germany as the principal enemy, the conversations enunciated the strategy of defeating Hitler first.81 The two parties were now in an undeniable de facto military alliance, making it ever less likely that von Boetticher's circle of confidants would bring Roosevelt around to an isolationist viewpoint. More visible cooperation arising from the staff conversations came in the form of U. S. Navy plans to protect convoys on the way to Britain. A logical extension of the Lend-Lease program since the goods were valueless if they did not reach Britain whole, the measures made incidents with German naval units unavoidable, especially after Hitler announced on March 1 that submarines would attack neutral shipping in the war zone he declared to exist around Iceland.82 American bases extended outward from Newfoundland to Greenland by April. Von Boetticher, on his part, dubiously greeted the navy's reinterpretation of its neutral zone as including the Azores Islands and Iceland as beyond American capabilities and part of the campaign of bluff after the British disaster in the Balkans and the collapse of British control of the Mediterranean.83 He took Roosevelt's declaration of unlimited emergency on May 27 in the same light. Von Boetticher read the declaration as another admission of American official reservations on the survival of England that were prominent since the past September. Roosevelt, he reiterated, wanted to take the British fleet after England's collapse and sail it against Japan. Once he had reduced that threat, he would return the reinforced American navy to the Atlantic, transferring the main effort there. Preliminary American strategy therefore was to seize the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Dakar to safeguard these outposts beforehand: "The speech shows in what a high degree the initiative lies with Germany and how much America is in the defensive under the uncertainty over coming German measures and the concern for a rapid decision forced by the Axis. In my reporting nothing has changed."84
In his misinterpretation of American strategic priorities after the ABC-1 conversations, von Boetticher still fathomed American designs on the Atlantic islands and Dakar. Three days before the unlimited emergency speech, Roosevelt had ordered the preparation of a preemptive army and Marine Corps expedition to take the Azores. Once the urgency of that operation faded with Hitler's assault on the Soviet Union in June, the same lst Marine Brigade and army elements relieved the British garrison in Iceland in July.85 Instead of conceding that the Americans had now managed to stymie German naval strategy in the western north Atlantic with a chain extending from Argentia through Greenland to Iceland,86 von Boet-ticher returned to the continued difficulties of providing American shipping to support the force already on the island and to transport reinforcements to it if the need arose. With his eye on the consequences of the occupation of Iceland for Britain in the future, he suggested that it was merely a portent of the eventual American control of all prewar British trade routes.87 As so often in the past, he accurately reflected the state of American readiness of the moment; American army planners had perforce rejected as unfeasible until November or later an expedition to Dakar and the Cape Verdes Islands for the same logistical reasons von Boetticher was citing to support his statements on the slim means of resupply for American forces in Iceland.88
Concurrent with the shift of strategic weight in the North Atlantic, von Boetticher's entree into official circles survived intact the sudden American elimination of all German consular offices, the German Library of Information in New York City, the German Tourist and Railway Agencies, and the Transozean news agency on June 16.89 Thomsen's hitherto serviceable propaganda net collapsed at one blow, though he could still subsidize isolationist groups and American legislators. Von Boetticher's importance to him as a source of information and a transmitter of the German viewpoint gained accordingly. By now, though, the world's attention had shifted to the scene of Hitler's newest triumphs in eastern Europe.
A review of the attache's reports on American reaction to Operation BARBAROSSA reveals that it was for their author another opportunity to kindle the flame of respect for German arms among his American listeners, but other themes recur here. Far removed from the German staff planning for the undertaking, von Boetticher may have known of a general intent to attack Russia, but of the scheduling of the invasion, he knew little in detail. Whispers of the impending German attack were as widespread in the United States as they were in Europe,90 but von Boetticher scorned the rumors91 in late April. He further reported on news accounts predicting a German assault to secure wheat and oil supply from Russia as absurd: "as if such things would not permit of an easier and less bloody solution with Russia through treaties."92 Yet there was no hint of surprise or chagrin in his dispatch of June 22, when the German onslaught against Russia began. The circles close to him were hoping for a rapid and decisive German victory and a simultaneous collapse of the British defenses in the Middle East, he said. No real Lend-Lease help was possible for Russia in the near future, he predicted, since any shipments to Stalin robbed the British pipeline, just starting to flow with goods, and the American army as well.93 Marshall was grousing two months later, when Lend-Lease aid had already started to Russia and arrogant Russian demands beset him, that the Air Corps had planes grounded because there were no spare parts to repair and maintain them. By October 1941, Roosevelt was prepared to send not only equipment, but "volunteer" officers to accompany shipments of aircraft to ensure that they would operate on the Russian front.94
The G-2 argument with General Lee in London flared again. Eleven days after Lee reported a total of 4,420 operational planes in the entire Luftwaffe, Germany flew 3,272 against the Russians, General Miles told Marshall. Since the common wisdom was that the Luftwaffe always kept a 100 percent reserve behind an active front, British estimates were woefully low. With the latter figures coming from "the German attache here, whose information so far has proved to be absolutely reliable.. .," Miles deduced that the Germans had on the Russian front alone in June 1941 a force greater than Lee's estimate for the whole Luftwaffe.95 Proferred in all probability in good faith, the aircraft figures von Boetticher gave were false. Postwar revelations of Luftwaffe records show that the German Air Force operated 2,770 planes on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, or 61 percent of the entire Luftwaffe strength.96 Miles's inclination to believe the higher figures was also consistent with the common sentiment of the moment that Hitler actually would crush his newest victim in a matter of six to eight weeks and the equally widespread opinion that bade Red Russia good riddance.97 Roosevelt at this point encountered "the strongest opposition since the beginning of the war."98 The opinion was also strong that once Hitler had dealt with Russia, he would finish Britain once and for all.99
While representing these advances for his mission, von Boet-ticher suffered yet other personal affronts. The first of these, in the weeks after Barbarossa began, again involved his assistant attache for air, Peter Riedel. Finally overcoming his chief's opposition to his connection with an American, Riedel married Helen Klug on June 30, 1941, in Alexandria, Virginia. Von Boetticher in fact staged an elaborate reception for the newlyweds at his home above Georgetown and presented the couple with a large silver plate inscribed with the names of all of Riedel's embassy coworkers as a memento. The guest list included most of the German Embassy staff, several Japanese guests, and many of the Americans he usually listed as close to him, Lt. Col. Truman Smith and Maj. Albert C. Wedemeyer evident among the celebrants.100
Setting out on a honeymoon trip through his wife's home town of Terre Haute in Indiana and then west to Arizona, Riedel soon noticed odd traffic patterns behind his vehicle. As he passed through each state along the way, local FBI agents were following him. The resourceful Riedel noted the license plate numbers of each of the shadowing vehicles. He came to enjoy the game once he understood what was happening and actually befriended some of the agents who tracked him to a remote resort ranch in Arizona. Agents from the Colorado regional office were taking their task more seriously. on the way through the state and again on the way back, these G-men harassed the couple and entered into confrontations on the road and in hotel parking lots. Riedel took sudden turns and doubled back on his surprised pursuers. Helen kept a detailed chronology of events,101 and Riedel cabled the list of license plates and his summary of events to von Boetticher from Tucson on July 9. The attache immediately lodged an impassioned protest with the State Department, but American officers who tried to intervene for him met adamant rebuffs from Assistant secretary of state Adolf Berle, who personally ordered the surveillance, as retribution for similar treatment of an American air attache in Berlin.102 On the way home, Riedel and his new bride parted company in St. Louis, whence Riedel intended to fly to Washington. In the airport traffic, the FBI team lost the couple, and Riedel, perceiving this, stopped to call the city's FBI office to report his whereabouts and his flight plans to a very nonplussed senior-agent-in-charge.103 Riedel's processed 8-mm motion picture later continued to embarrass the FBI. Footage of bureau cars and agents trying to avoid showing up in the frames was later intercepted by the FBI, which was screening all the mail headed into the German Embassy.104
The second sobering event was the end of von Boetticher's practice of turning over actual telegrams from the Luftwaffe to Smith as of August 18, 1941. Insofar as the exchange benefited both sides so handsomely, it is difficult to surmise the reasons for the halt. Albert C. Wedemeyer, who also knew of the trade-offs, remembered that General Marshall ordered its cessation because it had become impolitic to continue it.105 On the German side, however, a more overriding reason seems also to have contributed to the demise of the arrangement. A month after the "Digest of Telegrams" at the War Department drew to an abrupt close, the German Foreign Office sent out a circular letter to all military attaches except those in Washington, Santiago de Chile, and Rio de Janeiro warning that a reliable source had confirmed that all American attaches around the world were giving every scrap of information they collected to the British.106 Because the last of von Boetticher's transmittals contained statistics on German losses in the east as well as those over the English homeland, the intelligence was of untold value to Britain.
Of even more value to Britain in the long run was the fact that the attack on Russia forged the first links in the wartime coalition that eventually defeated Hitler. Churchill's willingness to forget Stalin's late "indifference to our survival" and his forbearance of the Russian demands for an immediate creation of a second front in western Europe were matched by Roosevelt's extension of Lend Lease to the Soviet Union.107 Von Boetticher viewed askance the mission of Harry Hopkins to Moscow in July. The American staff had completed an evaluation of the Russian campaign based on materials that he had supplied, and the American military did not share Hopkins's enthusiasm for Russia's survival until the following spring. Hopkins, he asserted, had "as little grasp of the Russian reserve situation as the American attache in Moscow."108 The United States advanced its first billion dollars (of eleven billion by 1945) to Russia on November 6, which prompted von Boetticher to repeat for the Russian case the judgments that he had made when
Lend Lease became available to Britain in March: loans of billions would change nothing, since the situation did not hinge upon money for the immediate future but upon the delivery of a ready supply of munitions to the front, where they were needed.109 He placed a similar construction on the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting of August 9-12 at Argentia Bay off Newfoundland that resulted in the Atlantic Charter, a broad statement of purpose in opposing fascism. Despite the president's elaborate measures to screen his journey from the press, it was no secret to von Boetticher, who divined the meaning of the departure of all the military and naval chiefs from Washington on August 7.110
As the president and the prime minister issued their communique of ideals on the twelfth, von Boetticher contended that no meeting could change power relationships. The occupation of Iceland was a favor to Germany because it further tied American fleet units to the area and drew ships from the American Pacific Fleet and hence away from Japan. The posting of 8,000 men on the island was only sensible if Japan stayed quiescent and if a Russian victory were guaranteed. The same strategic considerations hobbled any further American aspirations and designs on the Atlantic islands. These realities summed up, he said, the "contradictions of the Jewish world view and that of true Americans."111 Thus, he addressed the unspoken and unanswered question that hung over the Atlantic Conference with its statement of ideals: How soon would America enter the war?112
By now the German attache had also passed another milestone in American military preparedness, one that he himself had erected. In July 1941, the point at which von Boetticher consistently predicted that the American military industrial economy would begin performing prodigies, the U. S. Army had surpassed a strength of 1,400,000 after Roosevelt called the National Guard to the colors and a Selective Service Act passed on September 16, 1940.113 He applied a very sanguine judgment to the American army's mobilization thus far. The active regular army and the Air Corps would be fully equipped by spring 1942. Only five divisions were then ready, two of those completely equipped with new weapons. The entire army, including the National Guard, would receive modern gear by spring 1943, and special task forces were being prepared for amphibious assaults. A solemn caution followed:
In my reports I have regularly noted the development of American armaments and the armament industry, also their weaknesses. I urgently warn against overestimating the weaknesses and underestimating American efficiency and the American determination to perform. It is easy to draw incorrect conclusions from statements and criticism in the American press. In cases of doubt, I recommend that my evaluation be used as a basis.
As I have done for years, I repeat in particular my report that the American officers' corps of the Army and the Air Corps in general meets high requirements and that the influence of the tradition going back to Washington and Steuben, and thereby to Frederick the Great, supports the structure of the American armed forces. They are... giving the greatest attention to the problem of modern warfare.114
Von Boetticher was in fact being generous. The American establishment dealing with war production at that moment wrestled not only with the allocation of British orders, the demands of Lend Lease, and the equally contending demands of the army and navy, but also with its own unwieldy structure and the lack of basic strategic assumptions on which to base plans. Since the inception of the War Production Board (WPB) in August 1939 and its successor, the Office of Emergency Management, the high-level civilian agencies Bernard Baruch pressed Roosevelt for followed each other in quick order, but without ever achieving the appointment of a single civilian manager for the whole mobilization. The evolutionary history of the agencies under the executive branch before the American entry into the war is well recorded elsewhere, but it remains to be emphasized that in their proliferation they mirrored the willful confusion of the president's administrative style. Keeping the reins in his own hands, Roosevelt permitted the overlapping civilian agencies to compete with each other in setting priorities but left the actual procurement and contracting powers in the hands of the military and naval services. Initiated on January 7, 1941, the Office of Production Management (OPM) had two co-equal heads, an anomaly the president spent some awkward moments trying to ex-plain.115 On April 11, 1941, the purely advisory Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply (OPACS), which was to operate only in the civilian sector, could not in practice stay out of OPM's jurisdiction, though the latter operated strictly in the realm of defense contracts. Another provision on August 28 split OPACS into an advisory Office of Price Administration and a coordinating Supply Priorities and Allocations Board. None of it was lasting, and the whole structure underwent additional hasty metamorphosis when war came to the United States.116 Von Boetticher's analysis of these organizational changes probably appeared in a subseries of his reports entitled Rustung und Wirtschaft, now lost to the record except for vestiges.117 In addition, the General Staff itself was showing the strains of merely expanding existing peacetime staff echelons and was in evident need of reorganization, something that only came about in March 1942.118
The army after mid-1940 governed procurement operations by the so-called Munitions Program of June 30, 1940. This scheme called for an increasing production capability to support a graduated growth of the army through progressive stages to four million men, and the structures von Boetticher recounted in his cable of July 11, 1941, were the visible and growing result of this program. Still a defensive blueprint in keeping with the early RAINBOW 2 Plan calling only for hemispheric defense, its specifics and its problems were well known to the German attache since they were duly publicized.119 Marshall himself had doubts that the strength of 2,800,000 could be exceeded at the industrial capacity then in full use.120 The passage of the Lend Lease Act and the events in the Balkans, to say nothing of the implications of the ABC-1 talks, led to totally new reappraisals of the strategy, the strength, and the materiel necessary to make war by July 1943 under the new assumptions of the Rain bow 5 Plan: offensive operations in Europe against Nazi Germany with the probability of war on a second front in the Pacific. Under the hand of Maj. Albert C. Wedemeyer, the whole program took shape as a contingency plan through the summer, finally naming a total of 8,795,658 men and 215 divisions for the army.121 For von Boetticher, the salient point about this Victory Program was that he was absolutely in the dark about it. His normally talkative contacts breathed not a word of the new plan to him. He had only some vague notice of it and cited it by name after its mention in the press in October and November 1941.122 He discovered its actual content in December, when an Air Corps captain, unnamed to this day, delivered a copy of the plan to isolationist Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who in turn handed to a Chicago Tribune correspondent his handwritten notes summarizing the program. On December 4, the
Tribune, the New York Daily News, and the Washington Times-Herald, three isolationist papers, ran expository articles under headlines screaming of "F. D.R.'s War Plans." Though Ladislas Farago claims that von Boetticher received a copy of Wheeler's notes as well and transmitted them to Germany by courier, the attache's analysis of the news articles, the only apparent basis for his discussion of the revelations, gives no indication that he had come into possession of either a copy of the plan or Wheeler's notes.123 The attache concluded that the revelation showed that "America is the wirepuller of this war," and is only playing for time. He could not predict, he said, where the offensive of 1943 would come but speculated that it would be where a suitable land front already existed such as in Russia, the Middle East, or Africa. In addition, he warned that Norway and Sweden were also likely candidates for American designs against Germany. The affair might have done the Roosevelt administration permanent damage had not the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor three days later intervened to halt suddenly the isolationist-interventionist argument.
Von Boetticher's observance of events prior to that attack continued to emphasize the restraint exercised on American strategies by Japan's forward policy in the Pacific. The attache reports in this period rarely considered developments in Europe without raising the specter of Japan for American military and naval authorities. Emboldened by the lightning German victory in western Europe in spring 1940, Japan moved into the northern half of the Vichy-controlled Indochina with "observers" as a prelude to a later military takeover and less successfully sought concessions on oil in the Netherlands East Indies. Undergirding the Japanese strategy of the moment was the necessity for advancing southward toward the riches of raw materials that Japan did not naturally possess, but that it desperately needed to sustain its aspirations as the center of a so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Countervailing American behavior after mid-1940 shifted from protests against specific violations of American interest to a broader program of restricting Japanese expansion.124 The unpreparedness of the United States left it only one path in this endeavor, that of diplomacy—diplomacy, in Herbert Feis's phrase, with a "shadowy border on which silhouettes of future American armies and navies were dimly etched."125
World History
