Churchill sought to repair Anglo-American discord with a gracious speech in the Commons. “United States troops have done almost all the fighting and have suffered almost all the losses,” he said. “They have lost sixty to eighty men for every one of ours.” The Bulge “is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever-famous American victory.” To his secretary, the prime minister later remarked that there was “no greater exhibition of power in history than that of the American Army fighting the battle of the Ardennes with its left hand and advancing from island to island toward Japan with its right.” Montgomery also showed unwonted courtesy in notes to Eisenhower and “my dear Brad,” telling the latter, “What a great honour it has been for me to command such fine troops.” But honeyed words hardly mollified those determined to resent the continued British control of an American field army under Eisenhower’s reconfiguration. “Why isn’t Ike a man?” Patton wrote in his diary on January 24. “We will attack and win, in spite of Ike and Monty.”
Eisenhower claimed that the German offensive “had in no sense achieved anything decisive.” In fact, HERBSTNEBEL had hastened the Third Reich’s demise. Hitler’s preoccupation with the west in late 1944—and the diversion of supplies, armor, and reserves from the east—proved a “godsend for the Red Army,” in the estimate of one German historian. Half of the Reich’s fuel production in November and December had supported the Ardennes offensive, and now hundreds of German tanks and assault guns fighting the Russians were immobilized on the Eastern Front for lack of gasoline. By January 20, the Soviet juggernaut of two million men had torn a hole nearly 350 miles wide from East Prussia to the Carpathian foothills, bypassing or annihilating German defenses. Bound for the Oder River, Stalin’s armies would be within fifty miles of Berlin at a time when the Anglo-Americans had yet to reach the Rhine. Here, a thousand kilometers from the Ardennes, was the greatest consequence of the Battle of the Bulge.
* * *
With the German tide receding, Eisenhower resumed sketching big arrows on the map. His timetable had been disrupted by six weeks or so, but his basic scheme for ending the war remained unaltered: Allied forces would continue destroying enemy forces west of the Rhine; they would seize bridgeheads over the river “when the ice menace is over” in March; and then they would advance into the German heartland. In a long message to the Combined Chiefs on January 20, he reiterated that Montgomery’s attack north of the Ruhr was “our principal purpose,” but believed “this area will be most strongly held by the enemy.” SHAEF victualers also reckoned that no more than thirty-five Allied divisions could be supported above the Ruhr until new rail bridges spanned the Rhine. All the more reason then, in Eisenhower’s calculation, for a second axis: he envisioned the bulk of Bradley’s army group attacking from Mainz and Karlsruhe toward Frankfurt and Kassel—a corridor whose use Patton had long touted.
At present the Western Allies mustered 3.7 million soldiers in 73 divisions along a 729-mile front, with U.S. forces providing more than two-thirds of that strength. Eisenhower also had almost 18,000 combat aircraft—complemented by air fleets in Italy—and overwhelming dominance in artillery, armor, intelligence, supply, transportation, and the other sinews of modern combat. The Pentagon accelerated the sailing dates of seven U.S. divisions, diverted two others not previously earmarked for Europe, and combed out units in Alaska, Panama, and other quiescent theaters, where Marshall believed “plenty of fat meat” could be found. So desperate was the need for rifle-platoon leaders that an emergency school for new lieutenants opened in the Louis XV wing of the Château de Fontainebleau, with classes in map-reading, patrolling, and camouflage. Many of these students were among the almost 30,000 U.S. enlisted men who received battlefield commissions during the war. Army draft levies, which had just increased from 60,000 to 90,000 men a month, would jump again in March to 100,000. SHAEF expected the western armies to grow to 85 divisions by May.
That would have to suffice. Britain had nearly run out of men and the American replacement pool was described as “almost depleted,” with much hard fighting still to come against Germany and Japan. Eisenhower asked for a hundred thousand Marines; he would get none. Patton calculated that victory in western Europe required “twenty more divisions of infantry”; that was a pipe dream. Eisenhower would have to win with the forces now committed to his theater, and no more.
The Battle of the Bulge had affirmed once again that war is never linear, but rather a chaotic, desultory enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and élan, despair and elation. Valor, cowardice, courage—each had been displayed in this spectacle of a marching world. For magnitude and unalloyed violence, the battle in the Ardennes was unlike any seen before in American history, nor like any to be seen again. Yet as always, even as armies and army groups collided, it was the fates of individual soldiers that drew the eye.
“Everybody shares the same universals—hope, love, humor, faith,” Private First Class Richard E. Cowan of the 2nd Infantry Division had written his family in Kansas on December 5, his twenty-second birthday. Two weeks later he was dead, killed near Krinkelt after holding off German attackers with a machine gun long enough to cover his comrades’ escape. “It is such a bitter dose to have to take,” his mother confessed after hearing the news, “and I am not a bit brave about it.” Cowan would be awarded the Medal of Honor, one of thirty-two recognizing heroics in the Bulge. Like so many thousands of others, he would be interred in one of those two-by-five-by-six-and-a-half-foot graves, along with his last full measure of hope, love, humor, and faith. The marching world marched on.
Affixed to a wall in Montgomery’s caravan, amid the photos of Rommel and Rundstedt and the field marshal himself, was a copy of Sir Francis Drake’s meditation before his attack on Cádiz in 1587. “There must be a beginning of any great matter,” Drake had written, “but the continuing unto the end until it is thoroughly finished yields the true glory.” So too in this great matter, this struggle for civilization itself. The moment had come to seize the true glory.
Part Four
10. ARGONAUTS
Citizens of the World
MORNING sun and a tranquil breeze carried hints of an early Mediterranean spring across Grand Harbour, where strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” could be heard from a Royal Navy band practicing aboard H.M.S. Sirius on Friday, February 2. Not since Eisenhower’s arrival with his headquarters in July 1943, just before the invasion of Sicily, had the little island of Malta seethed with such excitement. Hundreds of Allied officers now swarmed through the capital, Valletta, where an Anglo-American strategy conference code-named CRICKET had convened to consider the weightiest matters of war and peace.
Sixteen thousand tons of Axis bombs had pulverized Malta from 1940 to 1943, clogging every street with drifted rubble and giving Valletta the gaunt, haunted mien of the Maltese themselves. Difficulties in finding enough intact buildings to house the CRICKET legations had exasperated conference planners, who warned that “a certain amount of inconvenience must be expected.” (They also cautioned that “spreading of rumors and gossip in Malta is a national pastime, so please discuss nothing in public.”) The Americans alone occupied sixteen barracks, palazzi, and improvised hostels, including the local YWCA and the Lascaris Bastion, a dank warren excavated eons ago by the Knights of St. John, a monastic order founded during the First Crusade. The honey-hued sandstone long favored by Maltese builders was so porous that even buildings unbruised by enemy bombs were said by one airman to resemble “ventilated cold-storage vaults.” Allied officers took their meals in winter garb, and an admiral described trying to sleep while wrapped in a dressing gown, raincoat, overcoat, and several blankets. To provide more billets, nine U.S. Navy ships had berthed in Grand Harbour, lauded by a visitor as “perhaps the most astonishing natural anchorage in the world.” An LST from Naples served as a floating garage for staff cars.
To compensate for any discomfort, every officer was permitted seventy pounds o
f luggage, and CRICKET’s British hosts assigned each a batman to fetch the daily newspaper. “The shine he put on my shoes lasted for weeks,” an American delegate marveled. An efficient valet service pressed uniforms overnight, and bars opened punctually at six P.M. A twenty-piece orchestra played until midnight in Admiralty House, once home to the Captain of the Galleys; marble scrolls on the wide staircase listed the name of every British sea dog to command the Mediterranean fleet for the past century and a half, Lord Nelson among them. A local librarian gave walking tours to explain Malta’s exotic history, beginning with the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians: how shipwrecked Saint Paul converted the Maltese to Christianity with proselytizing fervor and perhaps a miracle or two; how the knights in the sixteenth century paid the Holy Roman emperor Charles V an annual rent of one falcon, due on All Souls’ Day, a curiosity used by Dashiell Hammett in his novel The Maltese Falcon; how Turkish brigands captured Fort St. Elmo in 1565, nailing defenders to wooden crosses that were floated across Grand Harbour; how the Maltese retaliated by decapitating Turkish prisoners and ramming the severed heads into cannon breeches, then firing them at the enemy redoubt. Malta clearly was a place of no quarter.
At 9:30 A.M. on Friday, the pugnacious gray prow of the cruiser U.S.S. Quincy glided past that same Fort St. Elmo, escorted by U.S.S. Savannah, revived and refitted after nearly being sunk by a German glide bomb off Salerno seventeen months earlier. A half-dozen Spitfires wheeled overhead like osprey, and whooping crowds lined the rooftops and the beetling seawalls around the quays. “The entrance to the harbor is so small that it seemed impossible for our big ship to get through,” a passenger on Quincy wrote.
As the cruiser crept at four knots along the stone embankment, a solitary figure could be seen sitting on the wing bridge, wrapped in a boat cloak with a tweed tam-o’-shanter atop his leonine head and a cigarette holder clenched between his teeth. For this journey he had been assigned a sequence of code names—BRONZE, GARNET, STEEL, and, from the British, ADMIRAL Q—but now there was no hiding his identity. Tars and swabs came to attention on weather decks across the anchorage. A field piece at the fort boomed a slow salute of twenty-one rounds, and that band aboard Sirius tootled through the much-rehearsed American anthem to herald the arrival of Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States. The diplomat Charles E. Bohlen described the moment:
The sun was glistening on the waves and a light breeze was snapping the flags flying from the British warships and walls of the city.… Roosevelt sat on deck, his black cape around his shoulders, acknowledging salutes from the British man-of-war and the rolling cheers of spectators crowding the quays. He was very much a historical figure.
Across the harbor, on the quarterdeck of H.M.S. Orion, another historical figure stood in a naval uniform, puffing a cigar and waving his yachtsman’s cap until the American president spotted Winston Churchill and waved back. An abrupt hush fell across the harbor. “It was one of those moments,” another witness wrote, “when all seems to stand still and one is conscious of a mark in history.” Quincy eased her starboard flank against Berth 9. Thick hawsers lassoed the bollards, and the harbor pilot signaled belowdecks: “Through with engines.”
Since leaving Washington eleven days earlier, Roosevelt had traveled just under five thousand miles. Sea voyages always enchanted him and this trip had been no different, despite an annoying cold that confined him to his cabin for part of the passage. He devoted little time to the briefing books and studies prepared by the State Department, preferring to sleep or watch movies—Laura, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, To Have and Have Not—or thumb through pulp mysteries packed for the trip, with portentous titles like Death Defies the Doctor and Blood upon the Snow. A special elevator hoisted him to the flag bridge, where he liked to sit in an admiral’s swivel chair, staring at the pewter sea and the destroyers darting fore and aft. A strong-swimming Secret Service agent stood near, prepared to leap overboard with the president in his arms should Quincy be torpedoed or mined. But two suspected submarine contacts proved to be fish, and the only peril encountered was a nasty swell two days out of Newport News that caused the destroyer Satterlee to roll sixty-one degrees. After supper, Roosevelt often played poker or gin rummy for half a penny a point, ruminating on the recent election—he had just won a fourth term, by 432 electoral votes to 99—and on the subsequent inauguration, held not at the Capitol but on the White House portico, with thirteen of his grandchildren capering about.
To celebrate the president’s sixty-third birthday on January 30, his traveling companions had wheeled four cakes into his cabin—one for each term—followed by a fifth that displayed a big question mark etched in frosting. Quincy’s crew gave him a brass ashtray fashioned from a shell casing fired at Normandy on D-Day.
With Quincy made fast, the tweet of a bosun’s whistle shortly after ten A.M. announced the first visitors, and George Marshall trooped up the gangplank accompanied by Admiral Ernest J. King, the U.S. Navy chief. They found the president basking topside in a wicker chair near a port gun mount. The officers exchanged silent looks of dismay at Roosevelt’s appearance: he was haggard and ashen, with violet circles beneath his eyes. Bohlen, who also boarded the cruiser, later wrote:
I was shocked by Roosevelt’s physical appearance.… He was not only frail and desperately tired, he looked ill. I never saw Roosevelt look as bad as he did then, despite a week’s leisurely voyage at sea.
Time magazine had catalogued the many rumors about the president’s health: that he had been secretly rushed to the Mayo Clinic, that three psychiatrists attended him when he traveled, that he was anemic. The truth was worse. Not for decades would it be revealed that his blood pressure had climbed from 128 over 82, in 1930, to 260 over 150, in December 1944. In the past year he had shed nearly thirty pounds. (“Can’t eat,” he had complained in December. “Cannot taste food.”) An examination by a cardiologist disclosed “a bluish discoloration of his skin, lips, and nail beds,” with labored breathing, “bouts of abdominal distress,” and symptoms of an enlarged heart and fluid in the lungs—all leading to a diagnosis of congestive heart failure. He had indeed been anemic, from chronic bleeding hemorrhoids exacerbated by his inability to stand or walk, and he had suffered symptoms of a mild heart attack in August while giving a speech in Washington State. For various ailments he was periodically treated with phenobarbital and injections of codeine. His personal physician ordered that as little as possible be revealed to Roosevelt, who took the prescribed green digitalis pills without asking what they were and made fitful efforts to halve his daily smoking and drinking to ten cigarettes and one and a half cocktails, as recommended. “Lots of sleep & still need more,” he would write his secretary from Valletta later on Friday. Each day the White House press office leafed through official photographs in search of images to show the public that did not suggest a decrepit, dying man. That task had become almost impossible.
Yet if the body was frail, the inner man remained steadfast. To the end of his days Roosevelt would be, as the scholar James MacGregor Burns later wrote, an “improviser, a practical man, a dreamer and a sermonizer, a soldier of the faith, a prince of the state.” Today he was eager to hear of Allied progress on the Western Front, and since Eisenhower had chosen not to attend CRICKET—he pled the demands of battle—Marshall and King spent more than half an hour describing to Roosevelt the SHAEF plan for reaching the Rhine, seizing bridgeheads, and advancing by two complementary avenues toward the Ruhr. They also outlined Montgomery’s alternative single-prong thrust in the north. Calling for a map, the president reminisced about bicycling through the Rhineland as a young man, green and carefree. He knew that terrain, knew it well, he said, and Eisenhower’s scheme made perfect sense. As commander-in-chief, he approved.
Another trill of the bosun’s pipe announced Churchill’s arrival on the quarterdeck, beaming and natty in his tailored blue uniform with a handkerchief peeking from the breast pocket. He too was traveling under various noms de guerre—Colonel
Warden, Colonel Kent, TUNGSTEN, CHROME—and, at age seventy, he too had been ill, arriving by plane in Valletta three days earlier febrile and out of sorts. “His work has deteriorated a lot in the last few months,” his physician, Charles Moran, noted in his diary on Wednesday. “He has become very wordy.” Sunshine, whiskey, and a few winning hands of bezique seemed to restore him, and for an hour over lunch he prattled to Roosevelt about his “complete devotion to the principles enunciated in America’s Declaration of Independence.” The president smiled indulgently; he often complained of “pushing Winston uphill in a wheelbarrow” when it came to applying those principles to Britain’s imperial possessions. The war in Europe would likely end this year, Roosevelt said, although the defeat of Japan might not come until 1947. Peace would bring a chance to remake a principled world.
Churchill retrieved an eight-inch cigar, firing it with a small candle on a tobacco tray at his elbow. Citizens in too many countries feared their own governments, he said, and they must be freed from such fear. “As long as blood flows from my veins,” he added with a theatrical flourish, “I will stand for this.” Roosevelt could only agree; together they would spread the Four Freedoms around the globe, including freedom from fear. But for now the president intended to see a bit of Malta before they reconvened for dinner. As Churchill turned to go, Roosevelt confided that he had slept ten hours every night since leaving Washington, but had yet to feel “slept out.”
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 282