Kaiser, David

Peifer, Douglas

English

U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons

Naval War College ReviewVolume 68Number 4 Autumn Article 162015No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nationinto WarDouglas PeiferDavid KaiserFollow this and additional works at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-reviewThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. It has been accepted forinclusion in Naval War College Review by an authorized editor of U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons. For more information, please contactrepository.inquiries@usnwc.edu.Recommended CitationPeifer, Douglas and Kaiser, David (2015) "No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War," Naval War College Review: Vol.68 : No. 4 , Article 16.Available at: https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol68/iss4/16 1 2 2  NAVA L  WA R  C O L L E G E  R E V I E Wgunnery and the development of  continuous-aim fire� He begins to  innovate!Sims forged the Navy in preparation for World War I with his focus on naval gunnery, battleship design, and destroyer operations� Always the rebel and revolutionary, his insights were grounded on firsthand knowledge and experience� Sims was a critical thinker whose ability to evaluate technologies and platform designs was matched by his determination to fight for those changes required for military readi-ness� He abhorred risk-averse behavior and what he termed “military con-servatism,” referring to the “danger-ous reluctance to accept new ideas�”  From Sims’s perspective, the opportu-nity for officers to conduct war games served to enhance the development of critical thinking skills and innovative operational solutions� He would enjoy exploring advanced technologies, such as drones, networks of autonomous, unmanned systems, and artificial intelligence, and would integrate these technologies into military war-fighting capabilities� Sims would be the first to accept and adopt these technolo-gies to gain a military advantage� As President of the Naval War College, Sims exemplified a career dedicated to the education and development of Navy leaders� Throughout his career, Sims emphasized the need for the develop-ment of leaders with strong moral character, who were capable of strategic thinking and effective decision making�Sims continues to inspire and challenge a new generation of Navy leaders� Sims would remind us that the main objec-tive of the Navy is to prepare for war! He cautions us to be aware of our own fleet’s vulnerabilities and tasks us to remain vigilant with regard to maintaining military readiness� While I would not presume to know how he would handle each of the military crises in today’s mil-itary operational environment, I would offer that Sims would applaud the Naval War College’s commitment to excellence in education and its commitment to de-veloping revolutionary innovative naval warfare concepts through war gaming� In conclusion, Sims serves as a model for all leaders and challenges us to examine our personal and professional development� How do we compare in our dedication to duty, our commit-ment to discipline and moral courage, our ability to innovate, and our ability to challenge ourselves continuously by learning? One could argue that we need a young Lieutenant Sims today if we are to remain a world power� The question is, Would we recognize a Lieutenant Sims in the twenty-first-century Navy? This is a welcome addition to the 21st Century Foundations series from the Naval Institute Press, informative, inspiring, and a must-read for those interested in leader development� The bibliography provides further read-ing recommendations to enhance the reader’s interest in this topic�YVONNE R� MASAKOWSKIKaiser, David� No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War� New York: Basic Books, 2014� 408pp� $28David Kaiser’s No End Save Victory stands out as the best of several books published in 2014 that examine FDR’s leadership during the interlude between the fall of France and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December NWC_Autumn2015Reivew.indb   122 8/13/15   3:06 PM1Peifer and Kaiser: No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into WarPublished by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2015 B O O K  R E V I E WS  1 2 31941� In contrast to Lynne Olson’s Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight over World War II, Susan Dunn’s 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election amid the Storm, and Nicholas Wapshott’s The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II, Kaiser extends his analysis beyond the domes-tic struggle between Roosevelt and the isolationists� While his analysis includes discussions of congressional politics, neutrality legislation, the America First Committee, and the election of 1940, it encompasses additional dimensions that shaped FDR’s foreign and security policy ranging from the role of ULTRA and MAGIC intercepts to naval and military advice regarding capabilities and force development� Kaiser presents a wide-ranging analysis of policy, strat-egy, capacity, and mobilization during a period when danger loomed but much of the public opposed direct military intervention in the ongoing conflicts in Europe, China, and the Atlantic� His cast of individuals and institutions includes not only the familiar top tier of figures and committees but the military planners, labor union bosses, business leaders, and second tier of executive officials who translated FDR’s visionary ideas into tangible plans and policies�Kaiser is particularly skillful in three areas� Most strikingly, his narrative does a marvelous job of capturing the flavor of FDR’s decision making� While highly organized individuals such as Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall could be  driven to distraction by the president’s  intuitive—sometimes meandering— approach to strategy and planning, the reader gains an understanding of what Roosevelt was doing� He was exploring and creating options� He was testing ideas and concepts, sometimes dropping them and sometimes merely pocketing them for later use at the appropriate time and place� Kaiser repeatedly points out how Roosevelt prodded subordinates to provide him feedback on various germinating concepts months and sometimes years before they became policy, with Lend-Lease, the destroyers-for-bases deal, the occupation of Iceland and Greenland, and the oil embargo of Japan among the concepts he examined discreetly and informally well before he unveiled his intentions to cabinet mem-bers, congressional leaders, and allies� Second, Kaiser makes clear that FDR was thinking in terms of victory over the Axis powers even while Marshall, Hap Arnold, and others remained focused on hemispheric defense and building up American forces in 1939 and 1940� Even before the outbreak of war in Europe, Roosevelt grasped the importance of airpower, pushing for a huge air force “so that we do not need to have a huge army�” Likewise, the Two-Ocean Navy Act passed in the summer of 1940, providing the U�S� Navy with the means to mount offensives in the Pacific even while supporting Anglo-American amphibious assaults in the Mediterranean and France in 1943–44� Lastly, Kaiser takes on the latest genera-tion of literature postulating that FDR sought to find a “back door to war” against Germany by implementing an oil embargo of Japan that he knew would provoke a Japanese military response� Kaiser weighs the evidence very care-fully, and while he concludes that FDR was fully aware that implementing the embargo might lead to war with Japan, FDR was reacting to MAGIC intercepts that indicated that the Japanese occu-pation of southern French Indochina NWC_Autumn2015Reivew.indb   123 8/13/15   3:06 PM2Naval War College Review, Vol. 68 [2015], No. 4, Art. 16https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol68/iss4/16 1 2 4  NAVA L  WA R  C O L L E G E  R E V I E Wwas designed to prepare the way for the conquest of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies� FDR, aware that Japan had plans for continued expansion, sim-ply did not see why the United States should supply Japan with the means for its southward drive� Kaiser puts it as follows: “The American embargo did not lead the Japanese to decide on a southward advance� That decision had taken place before the American freeze of Japanese assets” (258)� Kaiser’s work is a must-read for those interested in strategy, policy, and the preparation for war� Kaiser rates Roosevelt’s performance very highly� While the book lacks a bibliography, the endnotes confirm that the work rests on a thorough use of both primary and secondary sources� Those seeking to understand how Roosevelt prepared the United States for a war he viewed as inevitable will find this book insight-ful, delightful, and multilayered�DOUGLAS PEIFERFisher, David� Morality and War: Can War Be Just in the Twenty-First Century? Oxford Univ� Press, 2012� 320pp� $30 (paperback) David Fisher’s recent book, Morality and War, offers an account of the philosophi-cal foundations of the just war tradition that integrates various contemporary forms of ethics into a new approach he calls “virtuous consequentialism�” He argues against moral skeptics and antifoundationalists, insisting that some account of the underpinnings of moral-ity must be given if moral prescription is to maintain its normative force and not collapse into relativism� For Fisher, thinkers as diverse as Isaiah Berlin and Michael Walzer succumb to a false dichotomy; the impoverished moral vocabulary of the twentieth century forces them to oscillate between two extremes—an infallible totalitarian-ism and a groundless liberalism� In this picture, any attempt to define what is required for all humans at all times and everywhere to flourish is seen as the attempt to subjugate one’s own choices to an irrationally inerrant worldview, which in the postmodern age is criti-cized as feigning objectivity for the interests of prevailing power structures� Countering this, Fisher adopts an Aristotelian approach to moral theory� Aristotle’s teleology allowed him to understand the life of virtue as both necessary for all human flourishing and pluralistic in its manifold expres-sion� Both the athlete and the artisan might flourish as human beings just so long as they possess the virtues, even if it is understood that courage, justice, and the rest are expressed in very different ways between the two; and a soldier’s courage is the same even when comparisons are made between drastically different times and places� Yet despite this endorsement of Ar-istotle, Fisher believes that no single moral theory—Aristotelian virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology—adequately accounts for the complexity of our contemporary moral lives� Therefore, his project combines consequential-ism with virtue ethics because he sees each as having something the other requires to make sense of contemporary morality� Fisher argues that to know what the right thing to do might be in a given situation we must reflect on how our actions conduce to human flourishing but also understand our actions’ consequences� That is, virtue NWC_Autumn2015Reivew.indb   124 8/13/15   3:06 PM3Peifer and Kaiser: No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into WarPublished by U.S. Naval War College Digital Commons, 2015

No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War

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No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War

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