As Churchill strode up the gangway to the upper deck the Augusta’s band struck up “God Save the Queen.” The two leaders beamed and shook hands warmly. As they chatted, Ed Starling, chief of the White House Secret Service detail, was sitting in a deck chair on the Potomac’s fantail, headed back to the mainland. A battered fedora was perched on Starling’s head, the trademark FDR cigarette holder clamped between his teeth, and a cloak like the President’s draped over his shoulders. Starling’s impersonation was the first time that a double had been used to conceal FDR’s whereabouts. Roosevelt had taken great delight in the deception. The year before, he had boasted to his confidant Daisy Suckley of how he had fooled the press while making a secret tour of Atlantic defense zones. He had told his press officer to release in advance his itinerary before he boarded the Tuscaloosa out of Pensacola, Florida. From the ship he wrote Suckley, “We have all been laughing at the complete ignorance and gullibility of the press! They fell for the visit to the Andaman Islands (Indian Ocean), Celebes (North Pacific) and South Hebrides (Antarctic) and believe it or not, the Cherubic Isles from Edward Lear’s Book of Nonsense!”
FDR mentioned to Churchill that they had met before at Gray’s Inn during Roosevelt’s 1918 visit to England. The Prime Minister said that he had no recollection of the occasion, which took the proud President aback. Reading the disappointment in FDR’s face, Churchill quickly refreshed his memory and claimed, yes, he vividly remembered Roosevelt’s “magnificent presence in all his youth and strength.”
The Churchill whom FDR was meeting, essentially for the first time, was a man straddling two centuries in age and manner. He was now sixty-six. He had stood in the crowd celebrating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. He became a national hero at age twenty-five after his well-publicized escape from the Boers in South Africa during their failed struggle against the British. He entered Parliament at age twenty-seven. He subsequently held an impressive array of posts—undersecretary for colonies, privy councillor, home secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, minister of munitions, and chancellor of the Exchequer. The Admiralty post had nearly been his undoing when, after the bloody disaster in the Dardanelles in 1915, he had been relieved. He thereafter went into the trenches in France with the Grenadier Guards. He took to soldiering much as he had as a young man and seemed heedless of death. He was a man of fleeting moods, shifting from bursts of euphoria to bouts of depression that he called his “black dog.” While still in the trenches and contemplating his political future, he wrote his wife, Clementine: “I am so devoured by egoism.” Yet, he confessed to his physician, Lord Moran, a latent self-destructive impulse. “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through,” he told Moran. “I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second’s action would end everything, a few drops of desperation.”
FDR could let his hair down with Daisy Suckley, whom he once told, with unintended callousness, that he could tell her anything because she didn’t know anything. She was fifty years old at the time of FDR’s meeting with Churchill, a maiden lady only distantly related but always introduced by Roosevelt as his “Cousin Daisy.” She was genteel, prudish, and judgmental. Fortunately, a basic decency and kindness counterbalanced her inclination to brand people too quickly as “common” or “coarse,” terms she applied especially to Jews. It was to Daisy that FDR wrote his first impression after lunching alone with Churchill aboard the Augusta. “He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English Mayor LaGuardia. Don’t say I said so!” he told her. “I like him and lunching alone broke ice both ways.”
Churchill, like FDR, had a taste for the clandestine. The historian Ronald Lewin writes: “… [A]ll that was romantic in [Churchill] … thrilled to the excitement of intercepted signals, delphic reports from agents, broken code… . the same impulse drew him to mavericks and buccaneers, unorthodox figures who defied convention… . they appealed to his craving for the flamboyant, the adventuresome, the unusual, the unconventional; cloaked in secrecy, their attraction was doubly potent.” The description could just as easily have mantled FDR.
Almost daily, British aircraft dropped Ultra decrypts for the Prime Minister onto the deck of the Prince of Wales. The box they came in was weighted so that if the plane crashed and sank the box would sink too. Churchill did not share all these secrets with FDR. By now, American and British codebreakers had supposedly reached an agreement for a “free exchange of intelligence.” But with Britain’s cryptanalysts so far ahead, Churchill felt that too free an exchange might become a one-way street. He had recently roared at one of his aides, “Are we going to throw all our secrets into the American lap? If so, I am against it. It would be very much better to go slow, as we have far more to give than they.”
When the President and Prime Minister finally sat down to work at the Augusta’s wardroom table, first on the agenda was Japan. The month before, forty thousand Japanese troops had seized Indochina with its vast rubber resources. FDR had retaliated by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and cutting off the sale of high-octane airplane fuel to Japan. Still, as the President had told his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, at the time, his goal was not war in the Pacific: “I simply have not got enough Navy to go around—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.” He said to Churchill that a fight with Japan would be “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.” The PM agreed. Their first objective must be to defeat Hitler.
All that the public was later told of the secret meeting at sea was that it had produced a ringing declaration, the Atlantic Charter, released to the press on August 14. Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that their nations sought no other country’s territory, nor any changes in other territories without the freely expressed wishes of their inhabitants. They supported the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government, and they pledged to promote free trade, disarmament, and a permanent system of security for the world. These goals were to follow “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” the continuing priority. Churchill was only too delighted to wed Britain publicly to the United States in these lofty sentiments. But it was his private agenda that had dominated his sessions with FDR on the Augusta. Britain’s sea losses had so far totaled a nearly fatal fifteen hundred ships sunk by mid-1941. FDR promised the PM that American warships would not only protect British convoys, but that they would patrol as far as three hundred miles into the Atlantic to seek out and attack German submarines.
Upon his return to London, Churchill told Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord, “Our objective is to get the Americans into the war… . We can settle best how to fight it afterwards.” He assured his cabinet that Roosevelt “was obviously determined to come in.” He further reported, “The President had said that he would wage war but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack the American forces.” As far as Churchill was concerned, FDR had all but declared war against Germany, at least on the high seas.
Three weeks after the Atlantic conference, the USS Greer, a destroyer of World War I vintage, camouflaged in shades of gray, was sailing from Boston to Iceland to deliver mail to the forty-four hundred American Marines FDR had sent there nearly eight weeks before. Off Iceland, a British patrol plane signaled the Greer that a U-boat lay ten miles ahead. The destroyer began tracking the German sub, reporting its position back to the plane. The plane dropped four depth charges without scoring a hit and left to refuel. The Greer continued to pursue the submarine. The U-boat’s captain, believing the depth charge attack had been made by the destroyer, then fired torpedoes at the Greer, unsuccessfully. The Greer then fired several depth charges with equal lack of success before breaking off the engagement. Since the U-boat had remained submerged throughout the fight, its skipper never knew who had attacked him first, aircraft or ship, British or American.
Roosevelt chose a firesid
e chat on September 11 to exploit the incident. He had intended to make the radio talk sooner, but his beloved mother, Sara, had died four days before. Her influence on his life was incalculable. She was a physically imposing woman, almost five feet ten, a great beauty in her day, and with a character to match her stature. Even after FDR became president, she still controlled his money. She always sat at the head of the family table, a grande dame, imperious and accustomed to reign. When her sister was stranded in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1939, she simply could not understand why Franklin did not send a battleship to fetch his aunt. The loss of his mother struck FDR hard, and he remained in seclusion at his home in Hyde Park for several days before returning to Washington for the radio address.
Wearing a light gray seersucker suit and a black mourning band, the President was wheeled into the East Room to a clutch of microphones next to a poster proclaiming, KEEP ’EM FLYING. An estimated sixty million Americans were listening as he began. “The United States destroyer Greer, proceeding in full daylight toward Iceland, … was flying the American flag,” Roosevelt intoned somberly. “Her identity as an American ship was unmistakable. She was then and there attacked by a submarine… . I tell you the blunt fact that the German submarine fired first upon this American destroyer without warning, and with deliberate design to sink her.” Technically, yes, the submarine had fired first at the Greer, but only after having been depth-charged by the British plane. “It is clear,” the President continued, “Hitler has begun his campaign to control the seas by ruthless force. From now on,” he warned, “if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters the protection of which is necessary for the American defense, they do so at their own peril.” He meant that American warships would shoot on sight. FDR would later say that he was perfectly willing to tell untruths to win a war. At this point, he was willing to bend the truth about the attack on the Greer to prepare the country to accept war. He justified his stance with a simple homily, “… [W]hen you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him… .” He had proof, FDR said, that Hitler was not only a threat at sea, but a danger to the American landmass. Bill Stephenson’s British Security Coordination had provided him with a letter from the Bolivian military attaché in Berlin reporting a plot to create a Nazi government in that South American country. Stephenson’s information enabled FDR to state in his broadcast that this attempt “to subvert the government of Bolivia” proved Hitler’s designs on Latin America.
Churchill, upon hearing the President speak, instantly understood the Nazi dilemma. “Hitler will have to choose between losing the Battle of the Atlantic,” he said, “or coming into frequent collision with United States ships.” The Germans also now recognized that, at least on the Atlantic, they faced two enemies. The German navy chief, Admiral Erich Raeder, advised Hitler, “There is no longer any difference between British and American ships.”
Six weeks later, on October 27, a rainy evening in Washington, Secret Service agents carried the President from his limousine into the shelter of the Mayflower Hotel. The first time that his secretary, Grace Tully, had seen the President of the United States hoisted like a sack of flour out of the car and into a wheelchair, she had turned away and cried. But since the President never showed the slightest embarrassment at this handling, she and the rest of the staff became accustomed to it. FDR was already late for one of the premier events of the Washington social season, the annual Navy Day dinner. The performer in him knew that his late arrival would only heighten his audience’s anticipation. Waiting in the flag-draped ballroom under a canopy of blazing chandeliers were the capital’s powers—cabinet members, congressional leaders, Supreme Court justices, the nation’s military chiefs, and their spouses, everybody who was anybody.
On the dais, the President, smiling and exuberant, looked splendid in black tie, especially after being seen so often in the gray suits he favored. As the Marine Corps band finished “Hail to the Chief,” a new star in the federal constellation, William J. Donovan, rose to introduce the President. Roosevelt maintained a magisterial silence until the audience became hushed, and then began his remarks. A little over a month after the Greer incident, on October 16, a brand-new $5 million destroyer, the USS Kearney, had been torpedoed while patrolling off Iceland with the loss of eleven American lives. The President seized on the incident this evening to denounce Germany. “We have wished to avoid shooting,” he said. “But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot. In the long run, however, all that will matter is who fired the last shot.” He then traced a threat that ran from land to sea. “Hitler has often protested that his plans for conquest do not extend across the Atlantic Ocean.” He paused for effect before unleashing his shocker. “I have in my possession a secret map, made in Germany by Hitler’s government—by planners of the New World Order… . It is a map of South America and a part of Central America as Hitler proposes to reorganize it… . The geographical experts of Berlin have ruthlessly obliterated all the existing boundaries; they have divided South America into five vassal states… . And they have also so arranged it that the territory of these new puppet states includes the Republic of Panama, and our great lifeline—the Panama Canal. This map, my friends, makes clear the Nazi design not only against South America but against the United States as well.”
Fear of a Nazi end run through South America and into the United States had long preoccupied the President. He had directed Adolf Berle to instruct all American embassies in Latin America to spy on German companies, German immigrant clubs, and just plain suspicious Germans south of the border. Berle had quickly been inundated with the effluvia of amateur informants. From Cuba came a list of schoolteachers, students, and an unemployed sixty-two-year-old mulatto, all described as “persons believed to hold pro-German sympathies.” A thick dossier compiled in Mexico would surely have astonished the popular café society pianist José Iturbi. Iturbi was, according to this file, “a principal agent for Germany in Latin America.”
The British had long been feeding FDR’s fears. An MI6 report forwarded to the President nearly a year and a half before warned him that German troops were headed for Dakar, Senegal, just 1,900 miles across the South Atlantic from Natal, Brazil. These troops, the British claimed, were the vanguard of a far larger force that would cross this narrow neck of the ocean and set up bases in Brazil within striking distance of the Panama Canal. The British report had six thousand German troops already there prepared to join pro-Nazi Brazilians to overthrow the pro-American regime of President Getulio Vargas. FDR ordered the Navy to come up with a plan to thwart the takeover. The Navy devised “Pot of Gold,” an operation to transport over a hundred thousand American troops to Brazil. However, the plan had a flaw. The American military, at that point, had neither the ships nor the men to carry it out.
The American press was instantly suspicious of the map FDR described in his Navy Day speech. At a press conference the next day, a reporter asked Roosevelt if he might see the map. Oh, he could not do that, the President explained in horror. It “has on it certain manuscript notations, which if they were reproduced would in all probability disclose where the map came from.” And disclosure, he went on, would “dry up the source of future information.” Another reporter pressed ahead: “What would you say to the charge of the suspicion that the map … had been foisted on you in some way? That it was also a forgery or a fake of some sort?” FDR smiled complacently. He had acquired the map from “a source which is undoubtedly reliable,” he said. “There is no question about that!”
FDR’s isolationist nemesis, Senator Burton K. Wheeler, learned that the unidentified source of the map was Little Bill Stephenson, who gave it to Big Bill Donovan, who passed it on to the President. Wheeler’s suspicions had immediately been aroused. “Where did it originate?” he asked on the Senate floor. “It originated in the office of Colonel Donovan… . Perhaps I should say it originated in New York, in the minds of gentlemen closel
y associated with the British government… .” The map’s provenance was indeed cloudy. The British had an explanation as to how they had acquired it, another tale of derring-do. Their secret agents had snatched it from a German courier, Gottfried Sandstede, who thereafter “met with an accident” arranged by the Gestapo for his carelessness. Sandstede, however, was not murdered by the Gestapo in 1941; he died on the Russian front in 1944. The map of South America that FDR had refused to share with the press did not outline a Nazi partition. Rather, it was entitled, in German, “Air Traffic Grid of the United States of South America’s Main Lines,” and showed straight line routes connecting major cities and contained longhand notes, also in German, referring to the production, storage, and shipment of airplane fuel to these sites.
Not only was the map spurious, but the Nazi plot to take over Bolivia that FDR had warned of in his earlier fireside chat was an outright British fabrication. The letter from the Bolivian attaché alleging the plot had been forged by the BSC and swallowed whole at the White House. Even before FDR had used this information in his speeches, Adolf Berle had warned Secretary of State Cordell Hull that British intelligence agents were “manufacturing documents detailing Nazi conspiracies in South America.” He cautioned, “I think we have to be a little on our guard against false scares.”
The intriguing question is why all this suspect intelligence—reports of Nazi troops in South America, a forged letter predicting a Nazi takeover in Bolivia, a suspicious map, a manipulated version of the Greer incident—found its way into the speeches of the President of the United States. The answer clearly lies in FDR’s underlying objective. He wanted U-boats attacked. He wanted America in the fight. And if someone handed him documents that strengthened his case, he was not about to scrutinize them to death. The truth was that since June 1941 the British had learned from Ultra decrypts that German U-boat commanders had received frequent instructions to avoid clashes with American vessels. Further, Hitler had not the slightest intention of invading the Western Hemisphere. But these facts stood in the way of what FDR wanted—to stand by Britain in the defeat of Nazism. His proselytizing appeared to be working. On November 8, after a close House tally and a thirteen-vote margin in the Senate, Congress amended the Neutrality Act to allow the President to arm U.S. merchant ships. That same month a Gallup poll revealed that if the Nazis attacked South America, two thirds of Americans were willing to go to war.
Joseph E. Persico Page 18