Churchill further confided his dismay in a secret message to Anthony Eden: “We certainly do not want, if we can help it, to get [the enemy] fused together in a solid desperate block,” he said. Any crack in Axis unity was all to the good. “A gradual break-up in Germany must mean a weakening of their resistance and consequently the saving of hundreds of thousands of British and American lives.” General Eisenhower put “unconditional surrender” in blunt terms that any soldier could understand: “If you were given two choices—one to mount the scaffold and the other to charge twenty bayonets—you might as well charge twenty bayonets.”
Roosevelt’s later explanation for his solitary decision seemed almost flippant. “[S]uddenly the press conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant ‘Old Unconditional Surrender’ and the next thing I knew I had said it.” Franklin Roosevelt rarely made an uncalculated utterance in his life. The most plausible explanation for his raising unconditional surrender, since he never left a fuller explanation, lay with Joseph Stalin. Ever in the forepart of the President’s mind was the awareness that the Russians were suffering and inflicting the highest casualties. At their recent February 1943 victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army had dealt the Wehrmacht over 237,000 casualties, including twenty-four generals captured, but had lost over a million men killed, wounded, or missing, punishment dwarfing American and British losses. FDR had two fears: first, that Stalin might sign a separate peace with Hitler, and then it would be American and British boys taking the fearful casualties; second, that the ever-suspicious Stalin might fear that the Western Allies were considering a separate peace with Hitler and lose his incentive to fight on. A policy of uncompromising total surrender should put both fears to rest. One intimate was aware that FDR had known exactly what he meant to say at Casablanca. The night before, Roosevelt had confided to Harry Hopkins, “Of course, it’s just the thing for the Russians. They couldn’t want anything better. Unconditional surrender. Uncle Joe [Stalin] might have made it up himself.” But if FDR expected gratitude from Stalin, he had misread the Soviet dictator. Stalin believed that leaving the Germans no hope could serve only to weld them into a desperate unity. As for U.S. domestic consumption, the President still liked “unconditional surrender.” It had a crusading ring. The President was not risking American lives to achieve a brokered deal with the devil, but to destroy him.
*
George Earle had left Casablanca the day before FDR delivered his press conference shocker. Upon checking into Istanbul’s luxurious Park Hotel on January 23, he sent a telegram to an old flame in Budapest, Adrienne Molnar, described in Gestapo files as “a Jewish cabaret dancer.” Apparently feeling lonely with his wife, Huberta, and their four sons, far off in America, he wanted the beautiful Hungarian to join him in Istanbul. He signed the telegram with Adrienne’s pet name for him, Hefty.
Louis Matzhold, an Austrian journalist and his wife, Asta, also living in Budapest, were good friends of Adrienne’s. The former chorus girl went to Asta for sisterly advice on how to respond to Earle’s invitation, since the Matzholds had known the man in Washington. Journalism now served as a cover for Louis Matzhold’s true function, spying for the Abwehr, the Sicherheitsdinst, and Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s intelligence service. Matzhold was well aware of Earle’s personal connection to the American President, and Earle was now asking Adrienne Molnar to join him. Here was an espionage bonanza waiting to be mined. Ten days after Earle checked into the Park Hotel, Matzhold boarded a German courier plane bound for Istanbul and was in Earle’s suite that evening. He was acting, he explained, as Adrienne’s guardian, looking out for her interests in case she should take up Earle’s offer. Given the woman’s past, chaperoning hardly seemed necessary. Matzhold also claimed to be a covert anti-Nazi who had managed to penetrate the German intelligence services. He was privy, he said, to the Reich’s innermost secrets, which he was willing to reveal to Earle. Sensing their use to each other, the two men began to talk more freely. Earle ordered wine sent up to his suite. He boasted to Matzhold that he had been with Roosevelt at Casablanca and then, incredibly, revealed that, when the Germans were driven from North Africa, the Allies would make their first incursion into Europe by invading Sicily.
Earle let the Matzhold encounter percolate in his mind for a few days, then fired off a coded message for the President, sent through Harry Hopkins. Its content made clear that Earle was hardly the naïve, loose-tongued womanizer that he had played for Matzhold’s benefit. He described Matzhold as “unquestionably a Nazi agent [who] flew directly from Budapest to Istanbul to see me … on a plane used only by German officials.” Matzhold had told him, Earle reported, that “Russian communism was a hundred fold greater menace to the democracies than National Socialism … that Germany was sick of bloodshed and would like peace on fair terms …” and they would go down in history as the men who set in motion the talks to end this horrible carnage. His cable went on: “I told Matzhold that if I had anything to do with negotiating any peace except unconditional surrender, I would go down in German history but I would hate to see what American history would say about me.” Still, Matzhold was coming back to see him in a few days, and Earle asked for instructions in exploiting the contact: “What shall I say, if anything, when he returns?” Hopkins answered Earle regarding Matzhold’s offer to mediate: “There is no comment on his request here and believe you should also have no comment.” At the same time Hopkins sent a wire for the eyes only of the latest U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Laurence Steinhardt, asking his opinion of the President’s pleasure-loving pal. To Hopkins’s relief Steinhardt cabled back, “Earle is cooperating and relations are excellent.”
Each time Earle met Matzhold, he fed him new intelligence as to where the Allies intended to return to the Continent. In the course of these confidences, he divulged thirty-four places where the Allies were going to invade, including Spain and the Balkans, with Sicily lost in this fog of disinformation. When the Allied troops did invade the island, it was with surprise equal to that of their invasion of North Africa eight months before.
One day FDR received a large envelope from Earle stamped “Abwehr.” Handwritten across the front it read, “Property of Louis A. Matzhold, for the Mister President of the United States.” FDR emptied the contents with unconcealed delight. Out slid stamps recently issued by countries now under German occupation, editions largely unattainable outside Hitler’s Europe. Earle knew of the President’s love of stamps and thought that by forwarding Matzhold’s gift to the White House, the Austrian could be made to believe that he really had entrée to the President.
For his part, Matzhold felt jubilant that what had started as a long shot had produced a triumph. His reports to Joachim von Ribbentrop convinced the foreign minister that through the Matzhold-Earle connection Germany had a line into the Oval Office. Ribbentrop instructed Matzhold to use this link to persuade the President that assisting the Soviets was like providing rope to one’s hangman. America’s aid would only help the Communists rule the world—a world, as the foreign minister put it, where “there would be no place left for millionaires like Roosevelt and Earle.”
Adrienne Molnar did come to Istanbul, but by the time she arrived George Earle’s roving eye had fixed on a Belgian beauty. Still, the ex-lovers had use for each other. Adrienne, believed to be the mistress of President Roosevelt’s man in Istanbul, found herself showered with attention from practically every espionage service in the city, each thinking that, through a Hungarian chorus girl, it had a pipeline into the White House. Among the gifts pressed on her was a six-carat diamond ring. Whatever she heard she relayed to Earle, enabling him to establish the identities of scores of Axis agents operating in Turkey.
Chapter XVII
Leakage from the Top
GENERAL MARSHALL, bred in the cool, methodical school of warfare, well recognized the superiority of intercepted enemy transmissions over the more romantic
intrigues of spies. Yet, he had trouble persuading his commander in chief, who was still drawn to the adventures of secret agents like George Earle, and from the ever-burgeoning Donovan organization and John Franklin Carter’s ring. At one point, Marshall reproached the President, “I have learned that you seldom see the Army summaries of ‘Magic’ material.” But one decrypt coming into the President’s hands had to make clear the pricelessness of broken enemy codes. On April 14, 1943, Navy listening posts snatched from the air and Army cryptographers broke a Japanese message reading “C in C [Commander in Chief] combined fleet will visit RYZ and RXP in accordance with the following schedule… .” The officer would depart Rabaul on New Britain Island, the chief Japanese naval base in the South Pacific. He would fly in a medium bomber escorted by six fighters scheduled to arrive at the islands of Ballale and Buin in the northern Solomons. There he would make a tour of inspection and “will visit the sick and wounded… .” The commander in chief in question was the highest-ranking figure in the Japanese navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Harvard-educated and a principal architect of early Japanese Pacific victories, beginning with Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto’s trip was intended to encourage high morale by awarding medals and personally congratulating the men who had achieved these triumphs.
But from the moment the admiral began his journey, American fighter pilots, in effect, had him in their crosshairs. The messages broken by Magic revealing Yamamoto’s schedule, route, and mode of travel were relayed to the U.S. naval commander in the Pacific, Admiral Chester Nimitz. Nimitz’s operations officers immediately began to construct a trap to ambush the Japanese leader. In the early morning hours of April 18, eighteen Army Air Corps P-38 Lightning fighters equipped with special long-range fuel tanks took off from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, flying low to evade enemy radar. At the tip of southern Bougainville, five hundred miles later, Yamamoto’s plane appeared, like clockwork, and the Lightnings shot it out of the sky. The Americans had taken a gamble, weighing the possible revelation of their codebreaking success by the pinpoint reception given Yamamoto against robbing Japan of likely its greatest military thinker. So regarded was Yamamoto by Japan’s Axis partner, that after his death, the Germans struck a posthumous medal honoring him.
The American codebreakers’ luck held. While the Battle of Midway had been noisily trumpeted in American newspapers as a victory for cryptanalysis and while scuttlebutt swirled around U.S. Pacific bases that the same codebreaking had done in Yamamoto, the Japanese still failed to change their codes. Yamamoto was a figure of such stature that his assassination might have had political repercussions. It has been speculated that Nimitz sought FDR’s permission before ordering the lethal strike. No documents exist, however, establishing that Roosevelt’s approval was sought, though the decision did go up to Navy secretary Frank Knox. Whether FDR blessed the mission or learned of it after the fact, the demise of the mastermind of Pearl Harbor at last stimulated in the President, as General Marshall had hoped, a keener appreciation for Magic.
The intercepted Japanese communiqués provided an advantage extending beyond the strategic edge they offered in the Pacific. The messages encoded in Purple, the enemy’s diplomatic cipher, and broken at Arlington Hall, opened a window of astonishing breadth, revealing what was being said, done, and planned not only by Japan, but by its Nazi ally on the other side of the world. The principal and unwitting betrayer of the Reich’s topmost secrets was Hiroshi Oshima, an army general in his mid-fifties, from a prominent Japanese family, and since 1938 Japan’s ambassador to Berlin. Oshima, short, stocky, strong-jawed, strutting, something of an oriental Prussian, had become a familiar figure around the Reich’s Chancellery. The ambassador loved Germany, spoke its language fluently, and was enamored of Hitler. The American journalist-historian William L. Shirer wrote: “Oshima often impressed this observer as more Nazi than the Nazis.”
The ambassador was practically a member of Hitler’s inner circle. He became a social companion and confidant of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who supplied him daily with the foreign office’s intelligence summary. The Führer himself comfortably discussed with the Japanese his most closely guarded war plans and arranged guided tours for Oshima of the Russian front and the Atlantic Wall, the coastal defenses in France erected to block an invasion. After each such confidence, Oshima radioed what the Nazis shared with him to his superiors in Tokyo, his reports encoded in Purple. His relaying of Germany’s secrets to the home office was only marginally different from transmitting them directly to the White House, since Purple had long become captive to Magic, and the choicest intercepts were delivered to the Map Room for the President’s reading.
A sampling of intercepted traffic suggests the value of Magic. In the summer of 1943, British aircraft, equipped with radar, and ships using “Huff Duff”—high frequency direction finders—began targeting German U-boats to deadly effect. Oshima met with Admiral Karl Doenitz, architect of the U-boat wolf pack strategy that had previously proved devastatingly successful in sinking Allied shipping. Oshima later cabled Tokyo: “I took occasion to ask him with regard to this matter, to which the Admiral replied that because the enemy has begun to use a new direction finder and because they have attached auxiliary aircraft carriers to their convoys, the losses in German submarines have become very great, so that we have to stop the use of submarine wolfpacks.” FDR, leafing through Magic decrypts as Dr. McIntire massaged his shrunken legs in the dispensary next to the Map Room, knew that the Battle of the Atlantic was essentially over. He had it from Admiral Doenitz’s lips.
On July 25, Shinrokuro Hidaka, the Japanese ambassador in Rome, had a private audience with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who berated Hitler for the stalled, costly Russian campaign. Mussolini lamented to the ambassador, “Why does Germany have to take areas where no Germans live? My God! She has been able to do practically nothing since she took those areas… . I don’t see any reason why Germany can’t use sense and retire to the 1939 line.” During this discussion Mussolini divulged an intelligence gem. “Enemy bombers have played hell with our industries,” Il Duce told Hidaka. “Our synthetic petroleum plant at Livorno was bombed and it will take four months to get it back in shape. We have one single synthetic rubber factory at Bologna. It is working overtime and if they hit that, it will be a terrific blow.”
Decoded by Magic cryptanalysts, Mussolini’s observations both exposed a crack in Axis unity and provided more precise target intelligence than photo reconnaissance by air. Coincidentally, on the very day of Mussolini’s revelations to Hidaka, his own sun set. Before the day was out, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel announced that Mussolini’s long reign as Italy’s strongman was over.
That July, with Sicily almost conquered and with Mussolini fallen, Hitler revealed to Ambassador Oshima his fallback strategy. “Before long, as things now look, they are going to be on the Italian mainland. When they land I certainly am not going to be fool enough to fight them down at the tip of the boot. There are plenty of fine encampments north of Rome. There, in natural fortifications, I shall form three lines over the Apennines, along the River Po and the Alps.” FDR now had in hand the plan that Hitler essentially would follow; except that the fighting in Italy continued harsh and bloody all the way up the Italian boot to the Führer’s designated lines.
Oshima’s communiqués to Tokyo enabled FDR, sitting in his study, to know what only a handful of Germans knew of the Reich’s military output. On August 17, 1943, 315 American bombers struck aircraft plants in Schweinfurt and Regensburg, both inflicting and suffering heavy damage, with sixty U.S. planes shot down. That day, Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Göring’s chief Luftwaffe deputy, admitted to Oshima, “Well, it is quite true that these bombings are fierce… . Speaking man to man, the German air force has its back to the wall.” Milch then cautioned Oshima, “Please keep this number absolutely secret,” and revealed to him, “Our present output is a monthly number of about 2,700 first line planes, but in about 15 months, we plan
to double this figure… . So if we keep up with our plans, we will leave [the Allies] behind.”
Tokyo received intimations of what Japan could expect from American air raids through Oshima’s reports of the experience of Japanese diplomats living in Berlin. In one summary, the ambassador reported that the Berlin homes of seventy-nine of his staff members had been “burned and utterly destroyed.” Sounding gamely optimistic, Oshima closed noting that light and heat had been restored to his embassy, and that he expected telephone service to resume soon. A Magic decrypt provided a firsthand account of the effect of Allied raids on another key German city. After massive British and American strikes on Hamburg, the Japanese envoy there, Doctor Kuroda, reported to Tokyo, “Local municipal authorities told me that up to August 12th, 22,000 bodies had been recovered. In addition to this, there are no doubt from thirty thousand to forty thousand bodies in the shelters… . It is very difficult and dangerous to recover the bodies from underground shelters… . The authorities are using prisoners in this work. Public utilities, including gas, electricity and water, have been completely destroyed… . In a word, Germany’s proud second city received a fatal blow… . The restoration of the city will take fifty years.”
Joseph E. Persico Page 33