A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  Stephenson’s meetings with Roosevelt were, therefore, discreet and kept to a minimum. His recollection of the first encounters was impressionistic: the speed and efficiency of the White House staff, the sudden meeting in the Oval Room with the familiar figure; hearing the warm, aristocratic voice; seeing the heavy head cocked to one side before a tray of half-consumed scrambled eggs and coffee placed beside the President’s swivel chair; the cluttered desk alongside; and the adjacent door leading into the small private bedroom. FDR had the presence of a man in great office. Since Stephenson carried within himself another kind of authority, which Roosevelt acknowledged, there was none of the usual lighthearted banter. The President, his large frame informally clad, his sunken eyes sharp and inquiring, towered, even in the chair. Sometimes the eyes twinkled, and a bleak smile broke through.

  Roosevelt wished to be given the flavor of Churchill the War Lord. Stephenson said: “There has never been such a rapid transformation of opinion as in the first twenty-three days between Winston’s appointment and Dunkirk, nor such a swift acceleration in the tempo of business. The whole machinery of government is working at a pace and with an intensity of purpose unlike anything before. His leadership produces a new sense of unbeatability as well as urgency. Decisions taken in these first few days are of utmost consequence to the free world. They are supported only by the most slender resources spread all over the map. The War Cabinet is under terrific strain. The paperwork alone requires each minister to read the equivalent to two Victorian novels a day. There’s no time for clashes of personality within this small group.”

  Roosevelt, sounding wistful, quoted from Shakespeare’s King Henry V: “He which hath no stomach to this fight, Let him depart. . . . But we in it shall be remembered; We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother. . . .” A few weeks later, he heard the words echoed in Churchill’s tribute to RAF pilots who fought the Battle of Britain.

  When ULTRA retrieved Hitler’s invasion plans and their cover name, SEALION, Churchill prepared a speech. The penciled notes were shown to Roosevelt. As usual, Churchill had broken down key sentences into blank verse, and one phrase was this:

  . . . essence of defence

  is to attack the enemy upon us

  leap at his throat

  and keep the grip until the life is out of him.

  In this way, offering the President glimpses of the War Lord at work, knowing that Big Bill Donovan would see the realities and state his own novel arguments, Stephenson opposed conventional American military detachment. Britain needed the fifty mothballed destroyers. Stephenson argued that they would at least assure the survival of the British Isles as bases for launching guerrilla raids against Hitler, even if the islanders were forced to retreat into caves and underground battle stations.

  The notion of Churchill’s followers leaping at an invader’s throat and keeping the grip “until the life is out of him” captured the President’s imagination. So, too, the picture of The Hole, which Stephenson described as resembling the quarters of a battleship, where Churchill met with his War Cabinet. For a Navy buff like Roosevelt, appeals from Former Naval Person in such surroundings were hard to resist.

  And appeals there were. “If we are cut off, if we lose the war at sea, nothing else will count!” Churchill cried. The Battle of the Atlantic, the cruelest and most long-drawn-out of any campaign, was crucial. After France fell, the Germans had been able to throw into that battle even their small short-range 250-ton U-boats, usually confined to the Baltic and the North Sea. French ports now serviced the submarines; torpedoes were trucked to them from Paris. French naval officers had let slip the secrets of asdic (named after an Allied Anti-Submarine Detection Investigation Committee). U-boat commanders, now knowing asdic’s limitations, became bolder. Italy’s declaration of war against Britain on June 10, when the defeat of France was inevitable, had jeopardized the Mediterranean shipping routes to Britain’s eastern bases and added to the U-boats’ over-all mobility. The number of German submarines and raiders in the Atlantic rose dramatically, twenty-two percent, in that month of June, and the numbers of British ships sunk rose tenfold. Furthermore, the Germans had broken the British naval codes; it would be another two months before London found out why the enemy betrayed such an uncanny foreknowledge of naval dispositions. ULTRA had not yet broken the German U-boat codes for their Enigma cipher machines.

  American seamen were moved by the spectacle of a seagoing nation’s lifeblood draining into the cold gray wastes. Out of 145,000 British merchant seamen who sailed the Atlantic in this perilous time, 32,000 died. They were civilians who went back to sea because they were sailors and thought they should. Others in Washington might fret over legalities, but British seamen recorded acts of American generosity that often went far beyond the frontiers of friendly neutrality. Royal Navy war diaries were full of stories reflecting the U.S. Navy’s unofficial readiness to help.

  Among the Americans who saw themselves as War-Wagers was the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Sherwood, destined to collaborate closely with Stephenson. Sherwood had gained fame as an antiwar writer. But with the evidence of Nazi evil before him, he confessed sadly that war was not the worst tragedy. In that grim summer of 1940, he was promoting aid for Britain when he was tackled by Harry Hopkins, who was to become the President’s ambassador-at-large.

  “What are you warmongers plotting now?” Hopkins demanded.

  Sherwood replied that he was helping Stephenson get fifty old American destroyers. Hopkins protested that, with an election coming up, such public demands embarrassed Roosevelt. The playwright shrugged and said some of his colleagues were persuading Roosevelt’s rivals to adopt the proposal, too. Anyway, it was in line with the President’s general policy.

  “What do you know about his policy?” snapped Hopkins. “You know this country is neutral.”

  Sherwood told Stephenson later that he was shaken by evidence that someone so close to the President should be a narrow-minded isolationist.

  Hopkins remarked further, in curt terms, “The whole country’s isolationist except for a few pro-British fanatics like you. If the President gave up fifty destroyers, how d’you suppose he’d keep the confidence of the people?”

  Sherwood answered hotly: “You don’t give the people credit for sense. They’re a damn-sight more anti-Nazi than you think. It’s time Roosevelt plucked up courage to speak frankly the way he’s done before.”

  A sudden grin spread over Hopkins’s lean face. “Then why waste your breath shouting at me? Say these things to the people yourself.”

  President Roosevelt was afraid he might defeat his own ends by outstripping public opinion. Tom Driberg, a British journalist and politician, saw this when he reported on “a notoriously pro-Nazi outfit called America First. . . . I went to a rally at which Charles Lindbergh spoke, in Madison Square Garden. It was as hysterical as any Hitler mob, but much more unpleasant. They sang America First, Last and Always but could not sing God Bless America because it was written by a Jew. . . . Reading the full text of Lindbergh’s speech, I realized that—the war having been on for a year, France and much else of civilization enslaved, London bombed, the march to the death camps underway—it contained no word of even mild disapproval of Hitler.”

  Other Americans held firmly to an opposite view. Admiral William Standley, who had been Chief of Naval Operations during Roosevelt’s first term, put his name to a manifesto recognizing “the fact and the logic of the situation by declaring that a state of war exists between this country and Germany.” Groups that supported Churchill were attacked by isolationist leaders with large followings. Father Coughlin said: “Sneakingly, subversively and un-Americanly hiding behind sanctimonious stuffed shirts, these men form the most dangerous fifth column. . . . They are the Judas Iscariots within the Apostolic college of our nation.” Coughlin had sometimes used Joseph P. Kennedy as a channel to the President before Kennedy went to London as am
bassador. Now Coughlin had drifted into fascism, enthusiasm for the corporate state, and a noisy anti-Semitism that so worried some influential American Jewish leaders that they feared to voice pro-British sentiments. In contrast, it was the son of a prominent Jewish banker who did more than almost any single man to further Stephenson’s campaign for help, especially for the fifty destroyers. He was Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who joined the War-Wagers with gusto.

  Morgenthau, a long-time neighbor of Roosevelt, had been unswervingly loyal to him since the outbreak of World War I. He worked in the state administration when Roosevelt became governor of New York, then followed his friend to the White House. As Secretary of the Treasury, he was the best ally Stephenson could have found, for he wielded direct power as an official and greater indirect influence as a trusted counselor to the President. He did his best to make sure that the Stephenson-Roosevelt relationship was never exposed, directing formal arrangements through the proper diplomatic channels or by way of a British Purchasing Mission run by another Canadian within the growing complex of Stephenson’s organization in New York.

  “After the Purchasing Mission opened shop at 15 Broad Street,” Morgenthau said later, “swarms of salesmen from the garment district flocked to it, offering samples of women’s underwear. It did no harm and reinforced the impression of open buying.” The head of the mission was Arthur Purvis, “the leading Canadian industrialist, a man of the highest integrity, with no enemies and indeed no critics,” in the words of John Buchan, then Governor-General of Canada. Purvis was to provide the surface gloss on Stephenson’s economic endeavors until he was killed the following year in an air crash on the transatlantic run, which had become the unpublicized means of shuttling important cargoes quickly between the secret allies.

  Morgenthau discussed with Stephenson the dire implications of the delay in getting help to Finland during the Russian invasion. The President had described the Soviet attack as “this dreadful rape,” and it was estimated that ninety-eight percent of the American people shared his outrage. But the legality of transferring or selling surplus arms to the Finns had been argued between the State, War, Navy, and Treasury departments until the day the Russians finally broke the Mannerheim Line, when the Senate finally passed a totally useless bill for nonmilitary financial help.

  Direct sales to Britain were regarded as illegal although Stephenson’s American friends unearthed old bits of legislation to show how to circumvent the Neutrality Law, originally passed in 1936 to prevent the United States getting into war as it had in 1917. “It was purely retroactive,” commented Stephenson, “but it effectively tied Roosevelt’s hands.” On the morning that the evacuation of Dunkirk was finished, Edward Stettinius had resigned as chairman of United States Steel to begin work on a plan to get the most urgently required arms to Britain. He was an old and trusted friend of Stephenson. Though he might be faulted for his impetuous declarations in public, he had a flair for dramatic action and anticipated Churchill’s so-called beer-bottle speech. The new Prime Minister, promising to fight the German invaders with everything to hand, added in an aside what sounded like “with bloody beer bottles if necessary.” Stettinius wrote later: “As the Prime Minister spoke, stack after stack of guns for the defenders of Britain were being moved from America’s arsenals. . . . Word had been flashed all along the line to give them right of way.” The legality that cleared the line was Attorney General Robert Jackson’s opinion that arms owned by the U.S. government could be sold without advertisement by the Secretary of War under a 1919 statute still in force.

  The fifty destroyers presented a different problem, and Churchill, unwilling to acknowledge the constitutional difficulties of handing them over, maintained an unrelenting pressure. He was worried, too, by propaganda that Germany would find collaborators in Britain. This could persuade Americans that the loan of destroyers might benefit the Germans in the long run. The stories of pro-Nazi forces in Britain came from all sides, including the Communists. The Russian Ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, was always looking for evidence of pro-Nazi sentiment. Stephenson recalled a scene shortly after Dunkirk when the Soviet Union had been once again critical of Britain for prolonging the war.

  “Now that France has fallen,” said Maisky, “what will be your general strategy?”

  Churchill drew on his cigar. “My general strategy, sir? My general strategy will be to last out the next three months.”

  The Russian Ambassador had caught whispers of doubt among gossiping London diplomats. Charles Ritchie, a future Canadian ambassador to Washington, wrote at this time in his diary, later published as The Siren Years: Undiplomatic Diaries 1937-1945: “Winston Churchill is an old pirate and if things go wrong people will find out and will turn on him and he will end in disgrace and they will forget that he is the only thing that kept England—so far—from a Vichy Government.” Ritchie, serving in London, admired Churchill’s dismissal of defeatists in high places.

  Behind the bold front, Churchill himself had misgivings. “In the event of a Nazi conquest,” he wrote to Mackenzie King, “I cannot tell what policy might be adopted by a pro-German administration such as would be undoubtedly set up.” He suggested King impress this upon the President and all Americans who had not considered what would happen if the British Navy were captured.

  The British fleet would be the “sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany” available to British collaborators who might take control, Churchill warned in another message to Roosevelt. “Excuse me, Mr. President, for putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors, who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will.” He argued that the loan of the fifty American destroyers would enable the British Navy to prevent such a capitulation.

  After three more British destroyers were badly damaged, Churchill put the case in the most despairing terms. The sympathetic U.S. Naval Attaché, Alan Kirk, had already reported from London that the situation was growing desperate as German invasion troops assembled in the newly captured ports, “amassing every kind of small craft and ship. . . . The urgent need for destroyers to combat invasion is obvious. . . . The Royal Navy is down to about one hundred destroyers on all stations.” Churchill voiced a possibility that Captain Kirk shrank from putting on paper. If the invasion succeeded, said Churchill, “a pro-German government would certainly be called into being to make peace. It might present to a shattered or a starving nation an almost irresistible case for entire submission to the Nazi will.” Churchill cabled Roosevelt on June 15:

  THE FATE OF THE BRITISH FLEET WOULD BE DECISIVE ON THE FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES BECAUSE IF IT WERE JOINED TO THE FLEETS OF JAPAN, FRANCE AND ITALY AND THE GREAT RESOURCES OF GERMAN INDUSTRY, OVERWHELMING SEA POWER WILL BE IN HITLER’S HANDS. . . . IF WE GO DOWN, YOU MAY HAVE A UNITED STATES OF EUROPE UNDER THE NAZI COMMAND FAR MORE NUMEROUS, FAR STRONGER, FAR BETTER ARMED THAN THE NEW WORLD.

  Stephenson was working now with a team he had pulled together of American legal and commercial brains. With Big Bill Donovan’s firsthand reports from London, they helped in the President’s search for the formula that would release the destroyers. It involved trading bases for American arms, for there was nothing else with which Britain could pay. By August 1940 she was close to bankruptcy.

  When Donovan flew back to Washington with his assessment of British reliability, the country’s resources of gold and dollars were almost exhausted. One-third of the British Army’s budget, for instance, had been shot on purchase of a single type of special American shell. Yet there was a logical, equitable argument. Donovan believed the bases could be traded for destroyers if presented as a bargain struck in defense of the United States. He believed the deal should be pushed through swiftly. In the previous two weeks, 135,000 tons of ships had been lost and twenty percent of the total British fighter aircraft strength had been destroyed in combat. The old four-funnel destroyers, ill-equipped though they might be for modern fleet actions, would help cu
t down these unacceptable shipping losses and would escort cargoes of new aircraft now being dispatched through Canada.

  Stephenson cabled to Churchill on August 8:

  DONOVAN GREATLY IMPRESSED BY VISIT AND RECEPTION. HAS STRONGLY URGED OUR CASE RE DESTROYERS. . . . IS DOING MUCH TO COMBAT DEFEATIST ATTITUDE WASHINGTON BY STATING POSITIVELY AND CONVINCINGLY THAT WE SHALL WIN.

  But the very next day, Göring began to mass German bombers for what he regarded as the real Battle of Britain—the systematic destruction of fighter bases in England. The attacks that followed were to reduce British reserves of pilots and aircraft to dangerously low numbers while simultaneously knocking out Fighter Command airfields and the radar stations that the Germans now vaguely realized must be playing some role in the dogfights filling the clear blue skies of this benevolent summer.

  Roosevelt’s faith in Stephenson’s assertion that “we shall win” was badly shaken. The President followed each stage of the savage fighting in British skies, knowing that the RAF was not able to make best use of its two most secret weapons: radar and ULTRA. Five coastal radar stations had been bombed on the first day of the new German attacks. ULTRA’S recovery of enemy orders was not yet swift and complete enough for British fighter pilots to be sure how to handle the new threat.

  On Thursday, August 15, more Luftwaffe bombers and fighters were launched against England than at any previous time. Luftflotte 5 struck from Norway at the north of England. Luftflotten 2 and 3 hurled formations once again across the Channel. The Germans were convinced that the RAF had lost so many fighters that it could not handle attacks in both north and south. Actual losses in aircraft on both sides were difficult to assess in the heat of battle, but Churchill’s War Cabinet had just completed a study of “pilot wastage” that projected the loss of young fighter pilots at the rate of 746 a month, a disastrously high figure.