The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Yet at home, where the productive capacity of the American industrial base approached full mobilization, the process was more advanced. The country had heaved itself from the ways of peace to the ways of war, galvanized as never before and perhaps never again. A final automobile had emerged from American production lines on February 10, 1942; supplanting it in 1943 would be thirty thousand tanks—more than three per hour around the clock, and more in a year than Germany would build from 1939 to 1945. The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company now made compasses and deicers instead of pianos and accordions, International Silver turned out Browning Automatic Rifles rather than tableware, and various lipstick, typewriter, and hubcap manufacturers produced, respectively, cartridge cases, machine guns, and helmets. Similar conversions occurred throughout the economy, which this year would also make 6 million rifles, 98,000 bazookas, 648,000 trucks, 33 million sets of soldiers’ cotton drawers, 61 million pairs of wool socks. And on, and on, and on.

  So, too, had the war infiltrated every kitchen, every closet, every medicine cabinet. Sugar, tires, and gasoline had been rationed first, followed by nearly everything else, from shoes to coffee. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” became a consumer mantra. Plastic buttons replaced brass; zinc pennies supplanted copper. To save fifty million tons of wool annually, the government outlawed vests, cuffs, patch pockets, and wide lapels; hemlines rose, pleated skirts vanished, and an edict requiring a 10 percent reduction in the cloth used for women’s bathing suits led to the bikini. Regulation L-85, issued by the War Production Board, not only rationed natural fibers but also limited fabric colors to those approved by the Dyestuff Advisory Committee, including honor gold, valor red, and gallant blue.

  German prisoners might order curtains from Sears, Roebuck but the catalogue no longer offered saxophones, copper kettles, or plows. A bobby pin shortage forced hairdressers to improvise with toothpicks, while paint-on hosiery replaced vanished silk with the likes of “Velva Leg Film Liquid Stockings.” Nationwide, the speed limit was thirty-five miles per hour, known as “victory speed.” A government campaign to salvage toothpaste tubes—sixty tubes contained enough tin to solder all the electrical connections in a B-17 bomber—resulted in 200 million collected in sixteen months. “Bury a Jap with scrap,” posters urged, and elaborate charts informed Americans that 10 old pails held sufficient steel for a mortar, 10 old stoves equaled 1 scout car, and 252 lawn mowers would make an antiaircraft gun.

  But all those recycled mowers and toothpaste tubes, all the warships and planes and wool socks, would pay off only if they were flung into the proper battles, in the proper campaigns, guided by a proper, war-winning strategy. And such a strategy did not yet exist.

  No place in America had been more transformed by war than Washington, which the Ferdinand Magellan entered from the northeast with a hypnotic clack-clack-clacking shortly after six P.M. “The once sleepy southern city of charm and grace on the Potomac has burgeoned into the frenzied capital of the world,” fumed the Washington Times-Herald. “Lobbyists, propagandists, experts of every species, wealthy industrialists, social climbers, inventors, ladies of uneasy virtue and pickpockets infest the city.”

  To this panoply now were added a prime minister and his retinue of more than a hundred generals, admirals, clerks, bodyguard detectives, and Royal Marines. At 6:45 P.M., a convoy of limousines rolled from the White House grounds and turned south. Seven Secret Service agents sat in squad cars along the route, including an agent posted at the top of an inconspicuous ramp on Fourteenth Street, which sloped to a subterranean rail spur under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. As the train lurched to a stop in a squeal of brakes, the limousines pulled onto the platform. Lifted from the lead vehicle and placed in a waiting wheelchair, Franklin Roosevelt scanned the Magellan’s rear passenger compartment. His gray pallor, the wattled neck, the bagged and hazy eyes, all the fretful symptoms of stress and age seemed to vanish at the sight of Churchill clumping forward in his improbable yacht squadron uniform. The president beamed, the prime minister beamed, and the conclave that would search for that war-winning strategy to save the world was under way.

  But first the visitors must be settled, and this was no simple task. “If the war lasts much longer, Washington is going to bust right out of its pants,” Life magazine had warned in January. Five months later, the busting was well advanced. The city’s twelve thousand hotel rooms were always booked, forcing some visitors to find shelter as far away as Philadelphia. Houseboat colonies sprouted on the Potomac River, and sprawling hamlets of shabby temporary houses, known as demolishables, spread through the District of Columbia and its suburbs. There would be no houseboats or demolishables for the British delegation, of course: Churchill took a suite at the White House, and the rest of the delegation was shoehorned into the Statler Hotel, the Wardman Park, the British embassy, and various other hostels and private houses. Sixteen Royal Marines marched off to a U.S. Army barracks, sweating miserably in the clinging humidity that entitled British diplomats in Washington to “tropical post pay.”

  Churchill could sense that the country had indeed changed since his previous visit eleven months earlier, and so had its capital. The Pentagon, which in 1942 was still under construction across the river in Hell’s Bottom, now stood complete as not only the world’s largest office building, but also “the largest feeding operation under one roof in the world” (55,000 meals a day for 35 cents each). All those well-fed, poorly housed War Department bureaucrats were busier than ever. One wit proposed a new government motto—“Exhaustion is not enough”—and on Pennsylvania Avenue a makeshift information center for visiting contractors and businessmen was known as “the Madhouse.” This month, the War Manpower Commission had announced plans to induct twelve thousand men into the military every day for the rest of the year, with childless married men called to the colors for the first time and those with children certain to be drafted soon. Perhaps not coincidentally, the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, disclosed that his agents had arrested more than five hundred draft dodgers in twenty cities, with warrants outstanding on three thousand others.

  Among other signs of these frenzied times: thirty-five “rumor clinics” had been established across the country “to investigate malicious and meaningless rumors,” which would be vetted by college professors—apparently immune to scuttlebutt—whose findings would be reported in local newspapers. There was such a crying need for lathe operators, machinists, and leather workers that some help-wanted ads even solicited “White or Colored”; a government press release urgently seeking skilled typists for the war effort contained forty-six errors on a single page. The Office of War Information reported that a recent plea for fine blond hair—used in weather instruments and optical equipment—had resulted in such a cascade of golden tresses that no further donations were needed.

  Amid the mania and the melodrama, one notable addition had been made to the Washington landscape four weeks before Churchill’s arrival. He could have seen it from his White House digs, looking past the fading azaleas and beyond the Washington Monument to a grove of cherry trees framing the Tidal Basin. There, the memorial to Thomas Jefferson had been dedicated, an elegant neoclassical temple sheltering a nineteen-foot statue of the third president—temporarily cast in plaster, because the War Production Board needed the bronze. Jefferson’s manifesto, chiseled in marble, summarized perfectly the animating sentiment of the men who would begin meeting tomorrow in search of a path that could carry them to war’s end: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

  They got to work at 2:30 P.M. on Wednesday, May 12, in Roosevelt’s oval study, a snug hideaway above the Blue Room. Nautical paintings and etchings decorated the walls, and a bearskin covered the floor. The president sat in his armless wheelchair greeting Churchill and the ten other men—mostly from the Combined Chiefs—who joined that first session. Roosevelt’s massive desk, positioned away from the windows by the Secret
Service, held a blue lamp, four cloth toy donkeys, a stack of books, an inkpot, a medicine bottle, a small clock shaped like a ship’s wheel, and a bronze bust of the First Lady, which had somehow escaped the scrap collectors.

  Five months earlier, American strategists had left the Casablanca conference convinced they had been outfoxed by the British, who were better prepared and had been unified in their determination to continue the Mediterranean strategy begun with the invasion of North Africa. To avoid another humiliation, the Yanks before TRIDENT had bombarded the British with position papers; they also drafted more than thirty studies on various war policies and doubled the size of the U.S. delegation. In searching for “a grand design by which to reach the heartland of Europe” in decisive battle, American planners scrutinized potential portals to the continent, from the Iberian Peninsula and southern France to Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Still, almost to a man they favored the most direct route across the English Channel.

  The president’s brain trust also worked hard to overcome what many considered the biggest obstacle to American strategic hegemony: Roosevelt himself, and his evident willingness to be swayed by Churchill’s honeyed oratory. “The man from London…will have his way with our Chief, and the careful and deliberate plans of our staff will be overridden,” the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told his diary on May 10. “I feel very troubled about it.” The U.S. Joint Chiefs had conferred with Roosevelt at the White House three days earlier and had wrung from him a vow to press the British for commitment to a cross-Channel invasion of Europe. Driving home the point, a Joint Chiefs memo reiterated the Pentagon’s “antipathy to an invasion of the Italian mainland,” while warning that the British “are traditionally expert at meeting the letter while avoiding the spirit of commitments.” Roosevelt replied with a three-word scribble across the margin that echoed Churchill’s minute on the Queen Mary: “No closed minds.”

  In this charged milieu, “the man from London” spoke. North Africa was done, Operation HUSKY in Sicily was near. “What should come next?” Churchill asked. The Allies had “the authority and prestige of victory” and must “grasp the fruits of our success.” Following his typed notes, he laid out his arguments: Russia fighting 185 German divisions; Allies currently fighting none; Italy ripe for the plucking.

  The prime minister had used the phrase “soft underbelly” in a cable to Roosevelt in November 1942, meaning the supposedly vulnerable southern flank of Axis Europe. Privately, to his military advisers this week, Churchill added, “We want them to agree to the exploitation of HUSKY and the attack on the underbelly taking priority.” Now he pressed the point. “Need we invade the soil of Italy, or could we crush her by air attack? Would Germany defend Italy?” Answering himself, Churchill said it was imperative “to use our great armies to attack Italy” rather than leave them idle after Sicily. If Hitler rallied to defend his Fascist partner, Benito Mussolini, that many fewer German troops could fight the Russians. The prime minister did not believe a defeated Italy would present an economic burden to the Allies, nor did he even concede “that an occupation of Italy would be necessary.”

  There it was, the British strategy in a Mediterranean nutshell. Roosevelt replied immediately. Churchill’s argument was vivid but unpersuasive. “Where do we go from Sicily?” the president asked, again echoing the prime minister. Some twenty-five Allied divisions—with roughly fifteen thousand men each—would muster in the Mediterranean by the end of Operation HUSKY and “these must be kept employed.” But he had “always shrunk from the thought of putting large armies in Italy,” a diversion that could “result in attrition for the United Nations and play into Germany’s hands.” Better to continue staging a mighty host in Britain. The subsequent invasion, a knockout punch aimed at the German homeland, “should be decided upon definitely as an operation for the spring of 1944.” Finishing, the president smiled and gave the casual toss of the head that one admirer called his “cigarette-holder gesture.”

  This impasse persisted the next morning when the Combined Chiefs—the half dozen heads of the American and British armies, navies, and air forces—met without Roosevelt and Churchill in the Federal Reserve Building, a severe rectilinear edifice with a pillared portico facing Constitution Avenue. The scent of roses and fresh cut grass seeped past the rigid sentries into the wainscoted room used by the board of governors; here, the U.S. delegation presented an eleven-paragraph memo entitled “Global Strategy of the War.” Point 3 held the crux: “It is the opinion of the United States chiefs of staff that a cross-Channel invasion of Europe is necessary to an early conclusion of the war with Germany.”

  A tall, austere man with sandy hair gone gray carried forward the American argument. General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, knew his mind on this issue even as he fretted over the president’s susceptibility to British blandishments. Marshall was a clean-desk man, famously convinced that “no one ever had an original idea after three o’clock in the afternoon,” and he disdained orthodoxy, sycophants, and the telephone. To Churchill he was “the greatest Roman of them all”; a British general described him as “a little aloof, dignified, above the battle, unbuyable…. I never saw him show his feelings in any way.” In fact, Marshall possessed a molten temper. He demanded that subordinates “expunge the bunk, complications, and ponderosities” from the nation’s war effort, and his signature query, accompanied by the unblinking gaze of those ice-blue eyes, could terrify lieutenants and lieutenant generals alike: “Are you confident that you’ve thought this through?” Aside from horseback riding, gardening was his sole civil diversion; “the pride of his heart,” according to his wife, remained the compost pile outside his Virginia home.

  Invading Italy, Marshall said, “would establish a vacuum in the Mediterranean” that would suck troops and matériel away from a cross-Channel attack. Operations after Sicily “should be limited to the air offensive” or risk “a prolonged struggle” in the Mediterranean, which was “not acceptable to the United States.”

  Arguments spilled from those thirty War Department studies: eliminating Italy from the war could bring more burden than benefit, since precious Allied shipping would be needed to feed the Italian civilian population. Germany would recoup the twelve million tons of coal currently provided Rome each year, as well as the rolling stock now needed to supply Italy. The “soft underbelly” in general lacked sufficient ports to support the huge Allied armies needed to plunge into central Europe. American planners considered the British beguiled by “side-shows,” “periphery-pecking,” and “unremunerative scatterization.” (That last must have disheartened every lover of the language regardless of strategic creed.) Privately, the Yanks suspected that Britain’s fixation on the Mediterranean reflected both traditional imperial interests and fainthearted reluctance to again risk the horrific casualties incurred on the Western Front a generation earlier.

  “Mediterranean operations,” Marshall added, “are highly speculative as far as ending the war is concerned.”

  Listening attentively was General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, whose sharp-featured countenance did not betray his private assessment of Marshall: “a big man and a very great gentleman who inspired trust, but did not impress me by the ability of his brain.” Brooke’s brain was able enough, though he tended to dismiss as purblind those uncommitted to his own vision. At fifty-nine, with round shoulders and dark, pomaded hair, he could be petulant—“very liverish,” in his phrase; this state was perhaps the handmaiden to exhaustion after four years of war with the Germans and, not infrequently, with Churchill. “When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do?” the prime minister said. “Thumps the table harder and glares back at me.” Brooke calculated that each month battling Churchill “is a year off my life”; in a letter to a friend he added, “It is the night work after dinner till 1 a.m. with him that kills me.” The ninth and youngest child of an expatriate Anglo-Irish baronet, Brooke had been born and raised in France, a history
that bestowed on him both a native fluency and a lifelong dread of the nickname Froggie. He nurtured homely passions for birds and for wildlife photography, in which he was a pioneer. If Marshall had his compost pile, Brooke had Southeran’s shop on Sackville Street, where he would sit transfixed in his red uniform braces, scrutinizing ornithological plates. On the Queen Mary he had put aside Birds of the Ocean long enough to note in his diary, with handwriting as vertical and jagged as the Irish coastline: “Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that all those destined to carry [them] out don’t quarrel with each other instead of the enemy.”

  Now he quarreled with Marshall, albeit without raising his voice. The eleven-paragraph U.S. strategic memo was answered with a thirty-one-paragraph British countersalvo. Point 5 encapsulated Britain’s thesis: “The main task which lies before us this year in the European theatre is the elimination of Italy. If we could achieve this, it is our opinion that we should have gone a very long way towards defeating Germany.”

  Brooke pressed the point with staccato precision. Germany currently kept thirty-five divisions in France and the Low Countries, with another ten, available as reinforcements, in the Fatherland; attacking Italy would divert some of these German troops and weaken defenses against an eventual Allied cross-Channel attack, which might not be feasible until 1945 or 1946 anyway. If Italy collapsed, German soldiers would have to replace the forty-three Italian divisions occupying the Balkans and the seven others bivouacked in southern France. Without Italian allies, Berlin was unlikely to fight south of the Po Valley in northern Italy. “Our total commitment on the Italian mainland in the event of a collapse,” a British staff memo estimated, “will not exceed nine divisions.”