For All Time Pt. 4

For All Time Pt. 4
-In mid-February of 1942, President Wallace politely but firmly turns down British plans for a commission of mutual cooperation in the Caribbean. He's still determined to set right whatever went wrong in Latin America, and he doesn't trust the British not to come in and gum things up. Not intentionally, mind, but their diplomacy comes across as a bull in a china shop. He acknowledges a need for Anglo-American cooperation in the area, though, and so turns the matter over to the Commander of the United States Navy: Ernest King, who attacks the matter with his usual Anglophobia. (After all, Singapore has just fallen and the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen have escaped, how competent can the Limeys be?) With Latin America messed with for no particular reason yet again, a young Under-Secretary of State named Nelson Rockefeller, already uncomfortable in the less-than-bipartisan Wallace administration, hands in his resignation.

-Cordell Hull comes near to resigning, yet again, when President Wallace (though not publicly, thank God, he thinks as he throws an empty bottle across the room) puts strong pressure on the British government, along with Chiang Kai-shek, to simply grant India the independence they want, and not horse around with the Cripps offer extended earlier in the year. But, Hull is a stubborn man, and he won't go down without being pushed. He knows full well that Wallace wants him gone, too, and is grooming White House Chief of Staff Alger Hiss for his job.

-Acting under direct orders from Secretary of War Henry Stimson (who, with his long experience of Presidents, knows the key to dealing with them is just not telling them things), General Douglas MacArthur leaves Bataan Island and surrenders his role as commanding officer there.

-Wallace takes the opportunity of the disastrous Battle of Java Sea (February 27-March 1) to do some house cleaning. The United States lost five ships sunk to a damaged Japanese destroyer; clearly, something is seriously rotten in the civilian parts of the Navy Department. This is good for Wallace on a personal level as well as a political one; he despises Frank Knox, the Secretary of the Navy. Knox is a deeply, deeply conservative Republican, the wealthy head of a major newspaper chain in Chicago (in fact, he was Landon's running mate in 1936), and he and the arch-liberal Wallace have butted heads on more than one occasion. Knox isn't exactly happy about being ordered to resign, but hey, if he criticized FDR in his papers, he can do three times worse to Wallace...To replace him, Wallace opts to go outside the Department altogether; to Paul McNutt, former Governor of Indiana and High Commissioner of the Philippines, current director of the Federal Security Administration.

In the shuffle as the new Secretary comes into power, a terrible paperwork malfunction loses all the plans for a planned B-25 strike against Tokyo and Yokohama in late April. McNutt is a very, very good administrator, (his enemies called him "The Hoosier Hitler" for his organization abilities) though, and he quickly helps rebuild the plans, so the strike is postponed until the first week of May, when the Hornet and Enterprise will launch the planes of General James Doolittle.