Donovan

by Richard Dunlop

  The point upon which Donovan, in his report to the President, laid greatest emphasis, was the enormous importance of psychological—or as the British called it, political—warfare in the current struggle. He dwelt at some length on German techniques, emphasized their success and insisted that the United States should make ready to fight with the same weapon.

  Roosevelt left that afternoon for a trip to Florida, and Donovan’s time with him was cut short. “This period of time was totally inadequate to convey the full meaning and significance of what he had learned on the mission,” asserted William R. Corson in The Armies of Ignorance.

  But then as now, the White House palace guard—in this case in the person of Hopkins—acted to hoard the precious commodity known as the “president’s time” for their own purposes. The impact of Donovan’s conclusions and recommendations was thus greatly lessened. As a result, Donovan’s shortened remarks were later damned with faint praise by others in the administration, and his ideas were put down on the spurious grounds of his being overly pro-British. It was a bum rap, and although Donovan was permitted to take to the airways in a coast-to-coast radio speech to describe in highly sanitized terms what he had seen and concluded, the administration ascribed no real urgency to his recommendations. To be sure, the decision to convoy protection assistance was soon forthcoming, but scant credence was given to Donovan’s recommendation that the United States go all out to give the British the means to attack and knock Italy out of the war.

  Donovan was discovering the frustration that most American agents at all levels experience. The Washington bureaucracy was—as it still is—a labyrinth through which its inhabitants picked their way with great care, and everything that came to their attention was considered and weighed in terms of how it affected the political situation at hand. Hopkins was only doing what comes naturally to any man who has survived in the American political jungle long enough to become an intimate of a president. Even with Europe on fire, politics in Washington went on as usual.

  Time magazine was far more glowing about Donovan’s trip. “Colonel Donovan had been on an assignment that any professional reporter would have given his left leg to get. He had been in England under bombardment, in North Africa with the British Empire Forces, in the Albanian Mountains with the Greeks. He had inspected ordnance, shipping, signal corps, maintenance depots. He had slept in sleeping bags on desert sands, on the jogging backs of mules. He had talked to kings, prime ministers, generals, admirals.”

  Time observed that no newspaper had gotten Donovan’s story. “A good soldier first, Colonel Donovan reported first to his Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Roosevelt.”

  23

  The Intelligence Proposal

  AFTER LEAVING the President, Donovan discussed his trip with Frank Knox and then telephoned Secretary of War Stimson. Stimson and Donovan met in Stimson’s office. “We talked for an hour or an hour and a half, and it was very interesting,” wrote Stimson in his diary. “He has played quite an important part diplomatically in the situation during his trip, and he and I stood over the map for a long time talking only in the way in which two old friends who are interested in military affairs can do it.” The situation in the Atlantic was particularly black, Donovan told Stimson, and the United States should begin soon to convoy British shipping.

  Later in the day Donovan briefed high-ranking navy officers, and on the next morning at Stimson’s invitation he talked to the military brass at the War Department. Donovan chronicled his trip in detail and again emphasized the importance of protecting British shipping so that Lend-Lease supplies would reach England.

  “I thought,” he said, “that if . . . [the British] ever hoped to defeat the German Army, they could not do it in France, where she could get her full strength but that they would have to pull her off base where she would have to fight in a more constricted way and therefore she could be trimmed down to their size; and I thought England would have to take the initiative in a new theater of operations which would be the Mediterranean.”

  In the days that followed, Donovan shuttled back and forth between New York and Washington. He discussed his findings with Secretary of State Hull and other key State Department officials, Chief of Staff General Marshall, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Stark. He dined with the Senate and House Military Affairs committees. Then he dropped out of sight to prepare a nationwide radio address, which had been decided upon at the White House breakfast. He spent Sunday evening, March 23, with poet Archibald MacLeish, at the time librarian of Congress. The next morning MacLeish wrote to Donovan:

  I have thought a great deal about our conversation of last night, and the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that my first reaction was the right one. This speech should be in form and manner what it actually is—a report to the people of the country by one of their fellow citizens, a soldier, who has just returned from a trip through the asbestos curtain and back and who is talking to them about the things he has seen and felt and heard. What you did last night was exactly that, and what I would like to hear you do would be the same thing again. In other words, I wish you would walk up and down your room and dictate a speech that would sound like your last night’s talk—about the best talk I have heard in my life.

  On Tuesday, March 25, Donovan, Stimson, and Knox, as well as General Marshall and Admiral Stark, held a conference with the heads of the British air, land, and sea services. The British were at first reluctant to admit their nation’s dire predicament. “We finally got the Englishmen talking frankly and fully about the situation,” noted Stimson in his diary. “They agreed, each one of them, that they could not, with their present naval forces, assume the entire escort duty that is required to protect the convoys of munitions to Great Britain. They also agreed and admitted that the food shortage in Great Britain was becoming alarming. We discussed some interesting points about methods of convoy; posts from which the patrolling airplanes should be sent out. I was interested to hear Admiral Stark say that in his opinion the most important part of our work was to get at once into the convoying.”

  The next day Donovan broadcast his report to the nation over all three networks. His speech was a call to arms.

  I have been given an opportunity to study at first hand these great battles going on in the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean, in Africa, in Greece, and in Albania. From my observations I have been able to form my conclusions on the basis of full information. These conclusions I will submit to my country for its use in furtherance of our national defense, an essential part of which is our policy of aid to Great Britain.

  We have no choice as to whether or not we will be attacked. That choice is Hitler’s and he has already made it, not for Europe alone, but for Africa, Asia, and the world. Our only choice is to decide whether or not we will resist it. And to choose in time; while resistance is still possible, while others are still alive to stand beside us.

  Let us keep this in mind. Germany is a formidable, a resourceful, and a ruthless foe. Do not underrate her. If we do, we deceive ourselves. Her victories have brought her new military and industrial strength. She got the jump at the start of the war and has kept it; but not yet has she made a full test. And until this test comes, it is better not to overrate her. But her greatest gains have been made through fear. Fear of the might of her war machine. So she has played upon that fear, and her recent victories are the product.

  But we must remember that there is a moral force in wars that in the long run is stronger than any machine. And I say to you, my fellow citizens, all that Mr. Churchill has told you on the resolution and determination and valor and confidence of his people is true.

  Donovan informed the public of his conviction that assistance given to England under the Lend-Lease bill “is going to mean nothing in winning the war unless the goods we produce and ship reach their destination. Are we going to deliver the goods? This question must be answered now. Are we prepared to take the chance? For there is a chance. There is a danger, and
whatever we do we must recognize that the danger of attack exists.”

  What Donovan told the American people was much the same thing he had told the leaders of every nation in the Balkans. The response from the isolationists was bitter. He was vilified not only by Goebbels and the German propaganda machine but by newspapers and magazines in the United States as well. Donovan struck back over the next few months in speeches throughout the country.

  While the public storm raged, Donovan made a significant report to Knox and Stimson:

  Although the commandos in Britain are somewhat similar to the independent company of the days of the Black Prince, the modern unit had its origin as a result of the Battle of France. In June, 1940, Britain did exactly the same thing that the Boers, Pathans, Afghans, and Arabs have done when they had suffered a hard blow from a powerful force. Britain withdrew her army within her own country and waited for the enemy to come in and fight. The Imperial General Staff recognized that under such conditions in South Africa, the northwestern frontier of India, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, such a movement would have been a signal for a guerrilla band to embark upon a war of attrition. With these lessons in mind, the Imperial General Staff made its first task after Dunkirk the creation of a special force of British guerrillas.

  At the end of March, Donovan urged President Roosevelt to consider the advisability of developing a commando force in the United States. He pointed out that the Germans were “big league professionals” in orthodox war and that America had only just begun to rearm and was still a “bush league club.” Donovan believed it would take at least two years to raise, equip, and train an army that could hope to beat Germany in a straight fight. America, Donovan told the President, must “play a bush league game, stealing the ball and killing the umpire.”

  At the same time, he urged Roosevelt to undertake psychological-political warfare, sabotage, and special intelligence operations to be combined with a guerrilla operation under a unified command. “Donovan saw all these instruments as part of an integrated whole,” wrote Allen Dulles, “and he presented a plan for an organization which would create and direct them.”

  Donovan had crystallized his thoughts about the type of organization he believed would serve the United States against Germany and its allies. Roosevelt was convinced that Donovan, who alone among his advisers had seen the war at first hand, was right, but he was held back from taking action by his political fear of the isolationists. Donovan’s plan leaked to Brig. Gen. Sherman Miles, assistant chief of staff for intelligence, who on April 8 wrote to General Marshall: “In great confidence ONI [the Office of Naval Intelligence] tells me that there is considerable reason to believe that there is a movement on foot, fostered by Col. Donovan, to establish a super agency controlling all intelligence. This would mean that such an agency, no doubt under Col. Donovan, would collect, collate, and possibly even evaluate all military intelligence which we now gather from foreign countries. From the point of view of the War Department, such a move would appear to be very disadvantageous, if not calamitous.”

  The inherent tendency of a bureaucrat to protect his own bailiwick and his customary way of doing things had come into play. Just back from his close-up look at the agony of the Old World, Donovan might be concerned with ways in which Hitler could be defeated, but army and navy intelligence officers were just as concerned about how Donovan’s radical new ideas would affect their established organizations and their own careers.

  On March 25, the day before Donovan’s nationwide speech, the Yugoslavs Cvetković and Cinkar-Marković signed the Axis Pact in Vienna. That night young King Peter was taken for a middle-of-the-night auto ride and agreed to claim his throne. Simović and a group of officers rallied around the young king and overthrew Prince Paul. The Yugoslav people responded with patriotic fervor to the king’s disavowal of the German alliance.

  Hitler was both astounded and angry. He was furious with German intelligence for not warning him of the impending Yugoslav coup d’etat, and he blamed the entire upset on William J. Donovan. On April 6, German soldiers invaded both Yugoslavia and Greece in what Goebbels’s propagandists called Colonel Donovan’s War. The campaign was short and brutal, since the Greeks, the Yugoslavs, and the British Expeditionary Force put ashore in Greece were poorly equipped and outnumbered. On April 27, the Germans raised the swastika over the Acropolis.

  In the United States the isolationist press picked up Goebbels’s charges that Donovan had instigated the Yugoslav uprising and therefore made it necessary for Germany to attack the Balkans. Donovan characterized the charges as “poppycock and tripe” during an interview by newspapermen in Chicago.

  “The statement that I had the ear of the President is also wrong,” he said. “I do not have the ear of the President.”

  When reporters remarked that German broadcasts had labeled him Washington’s number two agent provocateur, he blandly asked, “Who is number one, I wonder?”

  That same day in Chicago, Donovan spoke before a Chicago Council on Foreign Relations luncheon at the Palmer House. He told his audience that Germany had to win the war in 1941 or not win at all.

  This year is going to be a bad year. Germany is making every possible effort to end the war this year and for a very obvious reason. Her resources are under strain. Her lifeline is oil. And the comfortable limit of that supply cannot be based beyond next year.

  But it is not only because Germany is under economic strain now and will face economic disaster in the future that I tell you the war is not lost. There is an additional factor. Germany is a totally militarized state, and like all totally militarized states, her military power is at once her strength and her weakness.

  In a totally militarized state the army is the nation—materially and psychologically. So long as the German Army is everywhere victorious, Germany is great, powerful, and apparently irresistible. But it is equally true that the moment the German Army is not everywhere victorious, Germany is no longer great, is no longer powerful, but is on the contrary in the greatest danger. Her strength is her vulnerability, for the German nation has no other spirit, no other force than its army. And the army, though it may be everywhere successful for a time, will not be everywhere successful always.

  Defeats will come, perhaps this year, certainly next, and when they come, the disintegration of Germany will be as sudden and complete as her present power seems perfect and impervious.

  Donovan also urged that the United States convoy shipping to Britain.

  “Should we convoy now?” a Chicagoan asked.

  “I think we should have begun convoying yesterday,” he said.

  Donovan’s denials that he was responsible for Donovan’s War failed to convince many people. His assertions seem particularly hollow in view of Winston Churchill’s later remark that Donovan’s visit to Yugoslavia alone resulted in a disastrous upset for Hitler’s timetable of conquest. Churchill pointed out that short-lived as Yugoslavia’s resistance was, it was enough to postpone by at least five weeks Germany’s planned assault on the Soviet Union. This undoubtedly contributed to the final German catastrophe in Russia.

  Under the auspices of the Fight for Freedom Committee, Donovan went on a speaking tour through the Midwest and to San Francisco. The committee scheduled his appearances in cities where Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero turned isolationist leader, had just spoken. On May 22 Donovan went to Atlantic City to debate the University of Chicago’s Robert M. Hutchins over a national network. The subject of the debate was “Should America Enter the War Now?” Donovan’s firsthand knowledge of events across the Atlantic proved an overwhelming strength in his speeches and in the debate.

  Archibald MacLeish helped Donovan draw together ideas for the debate with Hutchins. “Yes, we should have been in the fight long ago,” stated Donovan’s notes.

  Men of the type of Hutchins are those who have weakened American resolve and have kept us from assuming our moral responsibilities by fanning to flame the smoldering embers of selfishness and
fear. They have built up a false hope in the hearts of many people that we can hide from a revolution. They have misled the country concerning our self-sufficiency in case of a Nazi victory and the possibility of retaining any of our present standards. They have willfully ignored the true meaning of democracy in proclaiming that we can lose what is really a spiritual conviction by fighting to defend it. They have fallen even lower in the moral scale by their presumptuous demand that we make America perfect before we dare help our neighbor.

  What does Hutchins think an attack consists of? We have been attacked in the sense that everything we believe in is being torn down before our eyes—we have German agents among us preaching just what Hutchins preaches; dividing America; telling us our democracy is worthless and so forth. We have full knowledge of the way they plan to bring about our capitulation by economic pressure, false promises, and the help of our Hutchins, Lindberghs, Hoovers, Wheelers, Nyes, et al.

  On June 8, Donovan boarded a plane and happened to sit down next to educator Eugene Grassman, who was too busy preparing a speech of his own to talk to him. When they left the plane in New York, they waited together for their bags. Donovan told Grassman about his findings in Europe and concluded, “The battle will be won here. This is the real seat of the struggle. If they can divide our people and keep us out, the English won’t have much chance. But if we are solid and stick and get in and produce as we can, we will win.”