The men whose judgment Roosevelt most prized agreed with his choice. “I believe that Marshall’s command of Overlord is imperative for its success,” Henry Stimson said. Harry Hopkins saw an even broader role for the general. “Marshall should have command of all the Allied forces, other than the Russians, attacking the Fortress of Germany,” he urged Roosevelt. What precisely the President told Marshall about the Overlord command is lost in FDR’s penchant for committing as little as possible to paper. The diffident Marshall never uttered a word himself suggesting that his appointment was in the bag. But Mrs. Marshall began to move the couple’s personal belongings from the Army Chief of Staff’s residence at Fort Myer and store them in their home in Leesburg, Virginia, in preparation for a likely move to England.
And then it began to unravel. General Pershing’s position that no one else possessed Marshall’s global grasp of strategy was seconded by Admirals Leahy and King and the Army Air Corps commander, Hap Arnold. They argued further that the Overlord command amounted to a demotion, since Eisenhower would now be issuing orders to Marshall, his former superior. Even the enemy entered the speculation. A Nazi broadcast out of Paris reported that Marshall had been dismissed and that “President Roosevelt has taken over his command.”
Though Marshall continued to keep his counsel, the command of Overlord would mark the logical capstone to his career. Still, the only certainty in the Roosevelt universe was indeed what went on inside FDR’s head, and a major shift had occurred between his departure for and return from Tehran. On December 3, on his way back to Washington, the President flew into Cairo, where he stayed at the luxurious Villa Mena, a hotel on the outskirts of town. On Sunday morning, FDR summoned Marshall to join him for a private lunch. The general later described this pivotal moment in his life as he and the President gazed out the window at the eternal pyramids of Giza. “I was determined that I should not embarrass the President one way or the other,” Marshall recalled. “I was utterly sincere in the desire to avoid what had happened in other wars—the consideration of the feelings of the individual rather than the good of the country. After a good deal of beating around the bush, he asked me just what I wanted to do. Evidently it was left up to me.” The command he longed for was Marshall’s for the asking. However, this reserved and selfless paragon was a longtime student of the President and well understood the man’s zigzag style in moving toward his ultimate goals. By leaving the decision in Marshall’s hands, Roosevelt had signaled the subtlest shift in his past thinking that the general was his choice. FDR, for his part, knew that Marshall would never promote his personal interests. Whatever he yearned for in his heart, Marshall did not ask for Overlord that morning. When he failed to ask, the President’s supple mind allowed him to convince himself that the old soldier had chosen to stay put. “The [President] evidently assumed that concluded the affair,” Marshall recalled of the end of the meeting, “and I would not command in Europe.” FDR threw the departing general a well-aimed consolation: “Well, I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.”
As word of the President’s change of heart spread throughout the staff, so did the shock. “I said frankly that I was staggered when I heard the change,” Henry Stimson noted, “for I thought that the other arrangement was thoroughly settled at Quebec.” FDR later shared with Stimson his version of the conversation with Marshall: “The President said he got the impression that Marshall was not only impartial between the two but perhaps really preferred to remain as Chief of Staff,” a rationalization of the first magnitude, Stimson recognized. The secretary of war tried to arouse a twinge of guilt in the President, telling him, “I knew in the bottom of his heart it was Marshall’s secret desire above all things to command this invasion force into Europe; that I had had very hard work to wring out of Marshall that this was so, but I had done so finally beyond the possibility of misunderstanding.”
The President had one more party to bring into his confidence. He invited Churchill, also in Cairo, to join him for a ride past the pyramids. “He then said, almost casually, that he could not spare General Marshall,” Churchill recalled of their conversation. “He therefore proposed to nominate Eisenhower to Overlord and asked me for my opinion. I said it was for him to decide but that we had also the warmest regard for General Eisenhower.” What everyone had known, what was common knowledge, what Churchill, Stimson, Hopkins, Stalin, and even Marshall himself knew, that the general was to command Overlord, had somehow been derailed in the curves of the Roosevelt mind. No confidant, however close, had been consulted by FDR. The secret had been uncontaminated by sharing until the President popped it.
Roosevelt’s next stop after Cairo was to return to Tunis, where he communicated ahead to have General Eisenhower standing by to meet him. His first words on his arrival were: “Ike, you’d better start packing.” Eisenhower assumed that Roosevelt was referring to his return to Washington to replace Marshall. Not until they were aboard the President’s plane, headed for an inspection tour of Malta and Sicily, did FDR enlighten the general. He cautioned Eisenhower that, once settled in his new job, he would be surrounded by strong, often prickly Britishers, the strongest and prickliest being Winston Churchill. These were people, Roosevelt warned, who believed that a frontal attack across the Channel into France was destined to fail. These were the doubters whom Ike had to convert.
The near-saintly Marshall was given the task of drafting a statement announcing Eisenhower’s appointment to the command he had so desperately wanted for himself. At the bottom of the note, Marshall penned, “Dear Eisenhower you might like to have this as a memento. It was written very hurriedly by me as the final meeting broke up yesterday, the President signing it immediately.” Something in Eisenhower’s manner, his bearing, his thinking, had resonated with FDR during that earlier visit back in November as Ike guided him through the Tunisian battlefield. Eisenhower later claimed that, at the time, he had had a sense that he was being studied, almost auditioned.
The President gave the most convincing explanation for his unexpected switch during a conversation with his Marine captain son, Jimmy. FDR answered when Jimmy asked why he had, in the end, picked Ike for Overlord: “Eisenhower is the best politician of the military men. He is a natural leader who can convince men to follow him and that was what we need in this position more than any other quality.” His own juggling of competing forces in governing the country had taught FDR a priceless lesson. Unless the Overlord leader also possessed a talent to reconcile rival politicians, generals, and admirals from opposite sides of the ocean, military genius alone would not suffice. Marshall could provide the latter. But Eisenhower could best supply the indispensable ingredient, the capacity to guide strong antagonists finally to say yes.
Soon after Eisenhower’s appointment, Churchill received encouragement from an unwitting source that he had not acted unwisely in agreeing to support Overlord. Roosevelt made sure that the Prime Minister saw a December 1943 Magic decrypt addressed to Tokyo from Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. Oshima had taken up Hitler’s invitation to tour the German defenses forming the West Wall in France. In his report, Oshima described fortifications and troop deployments in terms that finally led Churchill to conclude that, while formidable, Hitler’s Fortress Europa was not impregnable.
*
By 1943, Russia had dealt Germany its most telling loss thus far in the war, the defeat at Stalingrad. Further, Italy had broken with Germany, surrendered, and been invaded by the Allies. New air and sea anti-submarine tactics, aided by deciphered German codes, had broken the backs of Nazi wolf packs in the North Atlantic. What if, before Overlord could be launched, the Germans bowed to the inevitable and offered to surrender? FDR wanted to be prepared for this possibility, lest the Red Army find clear sailing all the way from the Oder River to the Atlantic Ocean. Thus he endorsed a hyper-secret, three-phased plan code-named Rankin, to which he won Churchill’s agreement. Should Germany appear to be collapsing in the west, Rankin
A would put an Allied force ashore well in advance of Overlord to take the Cotentin Peninsula and the port of Cherbourg. In the event of a complete Nazi pullout from occupied France and Norway, Rankin B would provide for seizing these territories. Rankin C was predicated on a total German surrender before Overlord. Roosevelt confided to his aides, as part of Rankin C, that if Germany did suddenly collapse, he was prepared to parachute American troops into the heart of Berlin to block the Red Army. “Every regulation, every restriction must go by the board if necessary,” the Rankin plan decreed. International niceties were not to stand in the way. The objective was “to transport the Army to Europe rather than obey Board of Trade regulations.”
However, despite major setbacks, German defenses stiffened rather than softened. In Italy the enemy held fast at the Cassino line, despite the Allied flanking operation at Anzio. The Germans were retreating in Russia, but not in a rout, rather with good order and discipline. The closer the May 1944 invasion date approached, the more irrelevant Rankin became, until, by the spring, it was shut down and its staff transferred to the main show.
*
Karl von Clausewitz, over a century before, had identified the element crucial to the success of Overlord. “… [T]here is an indirect way of gaining superiority of numbers,” he wrote. “It does this through surprise—attacking at an unexpected place. Surprise achieves superiority almost as strongly as direct concentration of forces.” During the Big Three meeting at Tehran, Churchill had made his famous remark, “Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The plotting of Overlord must not only proceed, its progress must also be concealed. Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “Stalin and his comrades greatly appreciated this remark … and upon this formal note, our formal conference ended gaily.” Before leaving Tehran, FDR and Churchill had settled on a passage in “The Military Conclusions” that read, “In particular it was agreed that a cover plan to mystify and mislead the enemy as regards these operations should be concerted between the Staffs concerned.”
Beneath the pavements of Westminster, under four feet of concrete reinforced by old London tramway rails, stood Churchill’s wartime command post. Here the British began putting Clausewitz into practice. In December 1943, less than a month after Tehran, two Allied operations were launched, Bodyguard and Fortitude, their planning almost as elaborate as that for Overlord itself. Bodyguard was designed to confuse the Germans as to where the Allies would land. Fortitude was to steer them to the wrong landing site, specifically, to persuade Hitler that a successful invasion across the English Channel had to occur at its narrowest point, the Pas de Calais. London Controlling Section, the deliberately gray-faced organization that oversaw Bodyguard and Fortitude, was led by Colonel John Henry Bevan, sandy-haired, mild-looking, a grandson of the founder of Barclay’s Bank, a winner of the Military Cross in the First World War, a stockbroker by trade, and an unlikely professional deceiver.
“I cannot prophesy. I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe,” FDR said during his 1943 State of the Union address. “I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them in Norway, through the low countries, or in France, or through Sardinia or Sicily or through the Balkans or through Poland—or at several points simultaneously—yes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and they are going to get it.” Roosevelt was as much anticipating the necessary deceptions of Bodyguard as he was stoking Allied morale.
Hitler’s erratic intuition, sometimes brilliant, sometimes mystifying, sometimes dead wrong, played into Allied hands, at least initially. A decrypt brought to FDR as far back as October 9, 1943, enabled the President to read Hitler’s thinking about the invasion site. The Führer invited General Oshima to the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair), his headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, located in a mosquito-infested marshland chosen, Hitler complained, because, “No doubt some government department found the land was cheapest there.” Whatever the discomforts of the dank bunkers at the Wolfsschanze, Ambassador Oshima still prized his private moments with Hitler and the confidences entrusted to him. Oshima’s latest intercepted cable reported that Hitler had told him, “I am inclined to believe that the Allies would land in the Balkans… .”
Still, a landing in France could never be omitted from Hitler’s calculations. By entering the minds of Allied strategists, the Germans could narrow the options considerably. The attack would likely have to get under way by moonlight to help the invading fleet stay in formation. Troops would probably be put ashore just as day was breaking in order to give them some visibility without subjecting them to enemy fire in broad daylight. The attack must occur during a season when the waters were not too rough. The troops would likely come ashore, not at high tide when the landing craft would be impaled on the upright steel girders spiking the West Wall beaches, nor at low tide, when the troops would have to traverse too much open beach under heavy fire. They would probably land midway between high and low tide. All these conditions, as the Germans could calculate as well as the Allies, coalesced on the French coast in a few days in late May or the fifth, sixth, and seventh of June.
*
Early in January 1944, German intelligence services obtained a copy of a British telegram to General Eisenhower classified “Most Secret.” “Our object is to get Turkey into the war as early as possible,” the message read, “and in any case to maintain a threat to the Germans from the eastern end of the Mediterranean until Overlord is launched.” This most zealously guarded code word, Overlord, had found its way into German hands by a convoluted route. Since the message concerned Turkey, a copy had been sent to the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. The ambassador had a valet, a swarthy, compact Albanian in his forties, heavily browed and black mustachioed, named Elyesa Bazna. His credentials included petty thief, locksmith, fireman, and chauffeur. Bazna had used his locksmith skills to copy a key to the ambassador’s bedroom safe. While the ambassador was in his office or entertaining guests, Bazna was photographing documents from the safe and selling them to the Germans, including the above telegram. He was to become a legend, known to every intelligence buff, moviegoer, and reader of espionage thrillers as Cicero.
The Allies learned of the alarming leak of the invasion code word through OSS Bern’s well-placed agent in Berlin, the inconspicuous Fritz Kolbe. While going over incoming traffic in the foreign office, Kolbe spotted the intercepted British message mentioning Overlord which Cicero had sold to the Germans. Kolbe, on his next phony courier run to Bern, strapped the message to his leg along with other Reich secrets and delivered them to Allen Dulles. The Bern OSS chief, upon learning that the Nazis had a source directly inside the British embassy in Turkey, immediately phoned his British counterpart, the MI6 man in Switzerland, and suggested a quiet rendezvous at an inn outside of town. There he explained that an unidentified person somehow had gained access to the most sensitive documents in the British embassy in Turkey and was passing them to the Germans. The Britisher alerted his government, and soon counterespionage agents were swarming over the Ankara embassy and interrogating the staff, except those employed in the ambassador’s residence. Cicero, feeling the approaching breath of exposure, smashed his camera, threw it into a river, never photographed another document, and resigned his post on April 20, 1944.
The crafty German ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, meanwhile, had cabled Berlin his guess as to what “Overlord” meant: “Apparently attack out of England.” Still, it was only a single word, submerged in the torrent of communications the Germans intercepted, just as strong signals of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had been lost in the effluvia of unrelated and irrelevant data. The word “Overlord,” by itself, did not betray the crucial where or when. These were the truths that Bodyguard and Fortitude had been created to befog.
British intelligence operatives would later claim that they had known about Cicero all along and had manipulated him as a conduit for supplying disinformation
to Berlin. It was a plausible defense from an espionage service caught with its pants down. Years after the war, however, in 1951, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, admitted in the House of Commons that “the ambassador’s valet succeeded in photographing a number of highly secret documents in the Embassy and selling the films to the Germans.” Bevin offered no defense that Cicero had been under British control. The man was never caught.
Chapter XX
The White House Is Penetrated
THE WORLD War II myth that Prime Minister Churchill, through Ultra, knew that Coventry was about to be bombed but failed to alert the city in order to protect the codebreaking secret has proved a durable tale. However, there has remained untold for well over a half century an actual tragedy that was indeed concealed in order to protect Ultra.
Since 1943 clouds of British bombers by night and American aircraft by day had been leveling Germany’s cities. President Roosevelt, through Magic and the now-sprawling OSS spy chain, received eyewitness accounts of the depth of this destruction. In one instance, Iran’s minister to Sweden had been permitted to stop in Berlin to visit his wife’s grave while en route from Stockholm to Tehran. Continuing his journey, the diplomat provided an OSS agent in Turkey with his firsthand account of daily life in the battered German capital. Bill Donovan had the report of the Iranian’s debriefing hand-delivered to the White House. From this account, FDR learned that, except for one, “all the major railroad stations in Berlin have been completely demolished … 50 percent of the buildings on Unter den Linden are intact and the other 50 percent destroyed… . not a wall is standing at the airport which is a shambles… . Informant claims he drove in a cab through central and west Berlin for a distance of six miles without observing a single house standing… . For the most part, the population of Berlin is living underground.” During a single raid in March, the report went on, forty thousand Polish and Russian conscript workers, barred from shelters, were killed. The Berliners’ best hope, the Iranian believed, was “that England and America may, in self interest, turn against Russia once they see that the Soviet is about to assume complete control.” Yet, for all this punishment, the President must have been surprised by the informant’s conclusion: “The essential business of Berlin proceeds to function doggedly.”
Joseph E. Persico Page 39