Before leaving for London, Churchill sent a warm telegram to Eleanor in the South Pacific, telling her that he was sorry she’d been unable to join the presidential party in Quebec but realized that her journey was “of high importance to our common interests and causes.”
• • •
In truth, Eleanor was finding her days in the South Pacific grimly depressing. To start, she was traveling without Tommy for the first time in years, having decided that the twenty-thousand-mile trip would be too strenuous for her faithful secretary. But without someone to share the experience, Eleanor was overcome with loneliness. “I feel a hundred years away as though I were moving in a different and totally unattached world,” she admitted to Tommy. “I don’t like it much.”
Everywhere she went that first week, she met with resistance on the part of the top brass, who regarded her trip as a nuisance and insisted on surrounding her with so much protection that she felt cut off from the ordinary soldiers she had come to see. When she landed in New Caledonia and presented Admiral Halsey with the president’s letter supporting her desire to go to Guadalcanal, Halsey was blunt: “Guadalcanal is no place for you, Ma’am!” he said. “If you fly to Guadalcanal, I’ll have to provide a fighter escort for you, and I haven’t got one to spare.” Crushed at the thought of having come so far and not being able to see Joe Lash, Eleanor refused to give up, getting Halsey to agree that he would put off his final decision until she returned from New Zealand and Australia.
“In some ways,” Eleanor cabled Franklin from Noumea, “I wish I had not come on this trip. I think the trouble I give far outweighs the momentary interest it may give the boys to see me. I do think when I tell them I bring a message from you to them, they like it but anyone else could have done it as well and caused less commotion!”
In a letter to Hick, she revealed her feelings more completely. “I have no zest for travel any more,” she admitted. “If it does any good I’ll be satisfied. I can’t judge at all whether it will accomplish what FDR hoped for or not.”
As anxiety crowded in on her, Eleanor stepped up her schedule. On the go from dawn till dusk, virtually without a break, she toured one hospital after another, drove hundreds of miles in an open jeep to talk with soldiers at their camps, gave dozens of speeches to tremendous crowds, pinned her name on the wall maps of Red Cross clubs in every part of Australia and New Zealand, attended large receptions at night, and still managed to write and type a four-hundred-word column every day.
Everywhere she went, wearing the crisp blue-gray summer suit of the Red Cross, Eleanor assured the soldiers she met that they were not forgotten at home. “When I left,” she told them, “my husband asked me to give you a message. He said to tell you that every day he goes down to the map room in the White House and notes on the maps where you are and what you are doing. He said to tell you that you have done and are doing a wonderful job. He wants me to give you his deepest admiration and gratitude . . . and now that I have given his message let me add mine . . . .”
“We liked this speech,” one soldier said. “Her sincerity permeated every word. I can tell you that after a year of listening to nothing but bassooning top sergeants and officers, it was good to hear a kind lady saying nice things.”
Realizing that many of these men would never see their homes and their families again, Eleanor had a hard time concealing her emotions. Every time she grabbed a new hand, one reporter noted, her eyes lit up with a resolute effort to make contact, to project “a genuine impulse of friendship towards the person she is greeting.”
Traveling in Queensland, she saw in the distance a convoy of army trucks loaded with troops headed for the battlefront. She insisted that she catch up with them to tell them goodbye and wish them luck. Trudging down the rough road, the Times reporter observed, “her shoes dusty and scarred by rocks,” she stopped at each truck and spoke to each soldier in full battle dress. “At one point her voice quavered but she quickly recovered and continued on down the line.”
Eleanor’s indomitable energy staggered the mind of everyone who followed her. “Mrs. Roosevelt literally took New Zealand by storm,” wrote Major George Durno, a former newspaperman who had been assigned to her by Air Transport Command. “She did a magnificent job, saying the right thing at the right time and doing 101 little things that endeared her to the people.” A friend of Hopkins witnessed an impromptu visit to a Red Cross club with Eleanor leading the way, “followed by a brace of generals and admirals manfully teetering on the edge of collapse.” As Eleanor’s party swept in, two privates were standing by an electric heater without benefit of trousers. “While management gasped for shame and the entourage gasped for breath, she coolly and graciously chatted with the two boys both paralyzed with amazement and chagrin but thrilled through and through.” Everyone in the club was charmed by Eleanor’s simplicity and graciousness, Hopkins’ friend confirmed, though he himself could not get his mind off the two boys without any pants. “The talk over, Eleanor departed, the management collapsed and the two boys grasped their scorched legs and burst into all sorts of excited exclamation.”
As Eleanor’s visit continued, Admiral Halsey found himself yielding to her charm, professing total admiration of her dedication and commitment. “When I say that she inspected those hospitals,” he reported, “I don’t mean that she shook hands with the chief medical officer, glanced into a sun parlor, and left. I mean that she went into every ward, stopped at every bed, and spoke to every patient: What was his name? How did he feel? Was there anything he needed? Could she take a message home for him?” And a promise made was a promise kept. When Sergeant Al Lewis asked her to call his girlfriend, Helen Carl, she would later follow through, provoking the young girl’s breathless astonishment on hearing the White House was calling!
Beneath her cheerful exterior, Eleanor found these hospital visits excruciating. Apparently, as soon as she arrived at a hospital or a military base, the word went out that a woman was coming. For reasons of security, it could not be said that this woman was the first lady. Certain that the young men were expecting a beauty queen, Eleanor feared she would be a woeful disappointment. Each time she entered a new ward, she wished she could be changed “in some magic way” from Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady, into “the sweetheart or the wife or sister the men were longing to see.” Her anxiety was such that she failed to see what Halsey immediately saw—the joyous impact she made on everyone she met. “Over here,” one soldier said, “she was something . . . none of us had seen in over a year, an American mother.” Standing beside her, Halsey witnessed the expressions on the faces of the gruesomely wounded boys as she leaned over them, a warm smile on her face. “It was a sight I will never forget.”
From Washington, the president cabled Eleanor every few days, letting her know how he was and assuring her that her trip was making “a fine impression” at home, with absolutely “no disagreeable notes.” Worried that she was taking on too much, he suggested she cut back a bit. “If I wasn’t busy,” she replied, “I’d go crazy.” When Admiral Jones invited her to spend a relaxing day at his cottage by the sea, she explained that as soon she got home she would rest but she had no right to do so while she was in the war zone.
In her cables to her husband, Eleanor described the spirit of the soldiers, the scourge of malaria, and the stultifying overprotection of the top brass toward her. “I’ve had so many Generals and Admirals and MPs to protect me that I remind myself of you,” she joked.
As her days in Australia wound to a close, Eleanor journeyed to the seaside town of Cairns, where she spent a long evening talking to a group of soldiers. The one thought on the minds of all these boys, she found, was the desire to finish the struggle so they could go “home.” Halfway round the world, home had become the goal for which they were all living.
The rich conversations, the soft air, and the sound of the waves breaking against the beach stirred memories of courtship days at Campobello, when she and Franklin walked along the shore, relishi
ng the chance to be alone, sharing their hopes for the future. “How little I ever thought,” she mused, “when I wandered on the moonlit beaches on the coast of Maine that I would one day see one in Australia and sit all evening listening to the waves while we talked of America with American men who wanted to know what was going on at home while they fought a war thousands of miles away.”
The next day, to her unbounded delight, Eleanor learned that Admiral Halsey had finally agreed she could go to Guadalcanal. A round of official duties was arranged, including a visit to the cemetery where thousands of American soldiers were buried, a tour through several island hospitals, lunch with General Nathan Twining, commanding officer of the Thirteenth Air Force, and dinner with Admiral Halsey. But for Eleanor, the shining moment of the day came at two-thirty in the afternoon, when a note was slipped to her saying that a young man named Joe Lash was waiting for her outside the tent. Ignoring army protocol, she embraced him warmly, an excited smile on her face. They talked for a while and then arranged to meet again in the late afternoon, after her second hospital tour was done. After dinner, Lash came back once more, and they sat on a screened porch and talked until eleven-thirty.
“How I hated to have you leave last night,” Eleanor wrote the next morning, and told him that she was reliving every moment they had had together. “When the war is over I hope I never have to be long away from you. It was so wonderful to be with you, the whole trip now seems to me worthwhile. It is bad to be so personal but I care first for those few people I love deeply and then for the rest of the world I fear.”
Now that she had covered seventeen islands, New Zealand, and Australia, the time had come to begin her journey home. Admiral Halsey came to say goodbye. “I was ashamed of my original surliness,” he admitted later. “She alone had accomplished more good than any other person, or any group of civilians, who had passed through my area.”
The Central Solomons campaign was nearly completed by the time Eleanor left, bringing U.S. forces 350 miles nearer Rabaul on the way to the Philippines and, ultimately, to Japan. But, as naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison has observed, the arduous campaign had brought the Americans only one-tenth of the way to Tokyo. If the United States continued hopping from island to island at this pace, it would take almost ten years to reach Japan. It was just at this point, Morison notes, that “leapfrogging” was substituted for “island hopping.” Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Nimitz had provided the first demonstration of the advantages of leapfrogging by skipping inadvertently over Kiska to take Attu. When the Japanese decided to evacuate Kiska a few weeks later, the United States had secured two victories for the price of one. Henceforth, the Combined Chiefs decided, American forces would leapfrog their way to Japan.
As Eleanor settled into her seat for the flight to San Francisco, she thought of all the things she wanted to tell Franklin. Bone-tired but unable to sleep, obsessed with the thought that somehow there must be a way, through fundamental change in the postwar era, to make sense out of all the carnage she had witnessed, she took out her pad and scribbled a series of notes. Her first note took up labor leader Walter Reuther’s suggestion about a Peace Production Board. “FDR, should there not be a call on men like those now in the WPB . . . to remain through transition period” to guide the process of converting from war to peace. “FDR, isn’t resumption of peacetime industry largely dependent on bank loan policy and possible guarantees by government in same way as was done for conversion to war industry.” Other memos urged that legislation providing for jobs and education for veterans should be passed as soon as possible and made known to every American soldier in every part of the world. For, as it was, “men not chief concern anywhere. Officers have too much, men too little.”
The president was in Hyde Park with Princess Martha, her children, and Empress Zita of Austria-Hungary when Eleanor reached San Francisco. At a lunch with Martha and Margaret Suckley, Empress Zita suggested that Eleanor would be very tired when she got home. “No,” Roosevelt joked, “but she will tire everybody else.” His joking aside, Roosevelt was anxious to see his wife. “Hope you come Washington where I arrive Sat. morning or HP if you get to NY early Friday,” he cabled her.
Yet, when she called him from the airport in San Francisco, he could not resist teasing her about the extraordinary lengths she had gone to see her friend Joe Lash. “Did you have fun, darling,” he asked in a jocular and perhaps slightly jealous tone, “as if she had been on a pleasure jaunt which he had been big-hearted enough to fix up for her.” Eleanor was devastated.
The only thing that had kept her going through her long and tiring days was the thought that she was accomplishing what the president had asked her to do. And now he seemed uninterested and unconcerned. As soon as she hung up the phone, she called Anna in Seattle and poured out her disappointments, remarking that “she had never worked harder in her life.” Eleanor said she was going to ask her Pacific escort, Major George Durno, to report to the “OM” on the trip, in the hope that he’d tell him how successful it was. “Poor LL,” Anna commented to John. (“OM,” “Old Man,” “Oscar Mann,” “LL,” and “Lovely Lady” were the codes Anna and John used for the president and the first lady.)
Eleanor arrived back in Washington on September 25. “Pa asked me more questions than I expected,” she told Anna, “and actually came over to lunch with me on Saturday [September 25] and spent two hours.” In her husband’s presence, Eleanor lightened up, telling entertaining stories of her travels, even poking fun at herself. When she first entered the Pacific area, she joked, she overheard an anguished cry. “Oh, no, Eleanor Roosevelt is on the move again.” That evening, she continued her tales at a small dinner with the president, Tommy, and Hick. When asked by reporters on Monday if his wife had told him about her trip, Roosevelt laughed. “Yes, she has been talking ever since she got back.”
In the days that followed, reporters noted that the first lady seemed exhausted. “They missed her usual warmhearted gusto. Lines of weariness were traced on her face, netting her friendly blue eyes in a delicate web of fatigue. They were eyes that had seen much—perhaps too much.” With rest, they assumed, the exhaustion would dissipate. But as September turned to October, her fatigue deepened, accompanied by an escalating sense of anxiety and dread. A paralyzing depression was setting in.
Eleanor’s gloom thickened as she found herself subjected to a new round of criticism for her costly “junkets.” When Representative Harold Knutsen of Minnesota complained that Eleanor was gallivanting around the world, “while the farmers in my neighborhood can’t even get gasoline to work with their farms,” dozens of Republicans followed suit. “The outcry in Congress is so great,” Eleanor confided in Joe Lash, “that FDR feels I should not use Government transportation or even go on any far trips for awhile.”
Imprisoned in the White House, Eleanor moped to the point where her friends became concerned. “[Tommy] is worried about Mrs. Roosevelt,” Trude reported to Lash, “and I feel uneasy too. Mrs. R. is strange, often sits and looks absent mindedly into space and then realizes she has not heard a word . . . . Even the President said something after he had in the presence of [Crown Princess of the Netherlands] Juliana tried to get Mrs. R. to invite Juliana to Washington—and only met complete lack of response.”
In their letters to each other that fall, Joe and Trude tried to understand what was wrong. Trude attributed Eleanor’s depression to “her deep horror at what she saw and the great sadness at the continuing bloodshed and dying.” For all her belief in the Allied cause, Eleanor was appalled when she observed firsthand the horror and the ruin which war entails. Nothing in her previous experience had prepared her for the misery she encountered in the hospitals—the mangled bodies, the stomachs ripped by shells, the amputated limbs, the crushed spirits. Only a few photographs of dead American soldiers had appeared in magazines and newspapers since the war began. The bodies shown were always clothed and intact, as if they were sleeping. The Office of War Information, established
by Roosevelt in the spring of 1942 to coordinate the dissemination of war information, had so sanitized the war experience that few people on the home front understood what the war was really about.
At home, traveling from one factory to the next, Eleanor had seen the best face of war—the productivity, the camaraderie, the pride of accomplishment. On the assembly line, planes, tanks, and guns stood as shining emblems of American democracy. In the South Pacific, the emblematic quality was gone, and these same planes and tanks assumed their real shape as lethal weapons of destruction. Slowly, Eleanor began to absorb the terrible reality that all that productive genius which her husband’s leadership had helped to call forth was directed toward a single, brutal goal—that of killing and maiming the enemy.
For weeks after she returned, Eleanor kept picturing the cemetery in Guadalcanal, “the crosses row on row,” the thousands of young men who had died in that faraway place cut off from the world of their family and friends, the poignant way the living troops had countered the anonymity of the dead by hanging their buddies’ mess kits on their crosses and carving personal tributes on each one: “A swell pal,” “a good guy,” “best friends forever.”
By the end of 1943, American casualties, though few in number in comparison with the rest of the nations at war, were beginning to mount. The army and army air force counted 117,142 killed, wounded, or missing in action. For the navy and Marine Corps, each engagement carried its own list of casualties: Pearl Harbor, 2,554; fall of the Philippines, 1,383; Battle of Coral Sea, 705; Battle of Midway, 547; Guadalcanal, Tulagi landings, 6,040; Battle of Savo Island, 1,691; Battle of Guadalcanal, 1,460; Sicilian landings, 1,064; Italian landings, 1,688; Battle of the Atlantic, 3,314.
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