Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  The British still thought the Americans blasé about the implications of conducting war with Germany, though by now they acknowledged the overwhelming strength of the Americans in armor and in the air, as well as a numerical manpower advantage on the ground. Roosevelt thought that once the Western Allies were established in France and rolling east, the Germans would fight to the last cartridge in the east but surrender relatively easily in the west, to benefit from the comparative civility of the Western Allies, who observed the Geneva Convention, as Germany did with them, in contrast to the unspeakable reciprocal savagery on the Eastern Front, where nearly five million prisoners of war were murdered, the majority by the Germans. The American encounters with the Japanese were somewhat similar to the Eastern Front, as the Japanese did not observe the niceties with prisoners, and preferred to die than to be captured. As at Guadalcanal, at Tarawa on November 20 to 23, 1943, Nimitz’s 35,000 marines took about 10 percent casualties, while the Japanese suffered almost 100 percent casualties, with nearly 4,000 dead and only 17 men taken prisoner. This pattern would become steadily more pronounced and the numbers of defenders larger as the Americans closed in on the home islands of Japan.

  7. THE CAIRO AND TEHRAN CONFERENCES

  This year of conferences reached its climax at the Cairo and Tehran conferences, between November 22 and December 1, 1943. Both Western leaders approached the conferences on large warships, Roosevelt on the new and very powerful battleship Iowa, and Churchill on the sleek and venerable battle cruiser Renown. Churchill was fluish and Brooke recorded that he was in foul humor, threatening dire consequences if the Americans did not support his Mediterranean ambitions. (At one point, Churchill, in night attire, shouted out the window of the governor’s residence in Malta to startled passersby to be quiet and to stop disturbing his rest.)115 Roosevelt opposed any efforts by the recently established European Advisory Commission to demarcate occupation zones in Germany because of his theory, which he explained to his staff in a shipboard meeting en route, that, once across the Rhine, the Allies might be able to conduct “a railroad invasion of Germany with little or no fighting,”116 as the Germans gave way while fighting fanatically in the east. He tore out a map from a copy of National Geographic magazine in the admiral’s wardroom and marked out with a pen the zones of occupation that would be acceptable if there had to be any. He had the Western and Russian zones meeting at Berlin.

  Roosevelt disembarked at Oran and flew to Cairo via Tunis, where he conferred with Eisenhower, and Churchill docked at Alexandria. The Cairo Conference began November 22 with an absurd meeting with the Chinese, led by Chiang and his scheming, feline wife. The Burmese theater commander, Mountbatten, gave a confident presentation (without use of side arms, unlike at Quebec), and when Brooke invited the Chinese to comment, there was what he called “a ghastly silence.” The Chinese had had advance copies of Mountbatten’s presentation, but had no idea how to respond to it. Brooke suggested they withdraw and consider if they had any questions and comments. It was a complete shambles, but Roosevelt, though he recognized Chiang’s limitations, wanted to make the conference a success for him, to strengthen his hand opposite the Japanese and the Communists. A communiqué was eventually issued promising increased assistance to Chiang.

  The Americans wanted to give Chiang the plum of taking the Andaman Islands, but the British dismissed this as nonsense, and Churchill championed his latest hobby horse, the taking of the Mediterranean island of Rhodes, which, he claimed, would help bring Turkey into the war. At one point, Churchill grasped Marshall by the lapels and exclaimed, “Muskets must flame.” Marshall replied, at a distance of six inches, that “Not one American is going to die on that Goddamned beach,” Rhodes. There were pleasant dinners on American Thanksgiving Day and Churchill was impressed that the United States provided a turkey dinner for all 12 million of its servicemen, wherever they were in the world. Roosevelt sang the Marine Corps anthem, accompanied by a military band. Brooke, a churchgoer, dutifully attended an American Thanksgiving service at the Cairo Anglican cathedral, which he described as “a sad fiasco” (unlike the service he had attended at Williamsburg, where he found the liturgy and homily acceptable and the women well turned-out). But these outings did improve and stabilize the ambiance.117 After fierce arguments, neither Rhodes nor the Andaman operation was pursued.

  The British and Americans left the Chinese behind and flew to Tehran to meet Stalin. After one night at his legation outside the city, and a Soviet claim that they had uncovered a plot to kill all three leaders, Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s rather than Churchill’s invitation to stay in his embassy, as his own security detail had recommended he move into the city center. Ostensibly he chose the Soviet embassy because it was roomier, but in fact because Roosevelt was relying on Stalin to resolve the Overlord/Italy debate once and for all. He feared that Stalin might, after his Stalingrad and Kursk victories, support Churchill’s plans for activities in the Balkans, in order to have a clearer path through Germany and into France. He arrived at the Soviet embassy on November 28, and Stalin immediately requested to visit him in his rooms. Roosevelt correctly assumed that his suite was bugged, that all conversation would be recorded, and that the personnel assigned to serve him (who were obviously carrying firearms) were secret police. In fact, Stalin had entrusted the task of recording conversations to the son of his much-feared police minister, Lavrenti Beria. Even Stalin described the bugging to young Sergio Beria as “delicate and morally reprehensible.”118 Roosevelt spoke with his suspected auditor’s sensibilities in mind. The Grand Alliance was off to an uneasy start. Sergio Beria later wrote that Stalin assumed that Roosevelt thought he was being overheard. Stalin questioned Beria very closely about Roosevelt’s tone of voice and exact words. Beria claimed that he recorded Churchill beseeching Roosevelt not to commit to a date for Overlord, and Roosevelt telling Leahy that he was not going to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the British Empire.” Roosevelt liked and admired Churchill but thought him a romantic, and not a man in close touch politically with his countrymen, trying to maintain an empire that could not long survive. With Stalin, an extremely cunning and ruthless cynic, it was, from the start and to say the least, scarcely a relationship of mutual trust.

  At this first meeting, Roosevelt and Stalin were accompanied only by their interpreters, the redoubtable Pavlov and the deputy chief of the Russian desk and future eminent American diplomat Charles E. Bohlen. The contrast between the leonine patrician Roosevelt in an elegant blue suit in his wheelchair, and the five-foot, five-inch Stalin, with bushy hair, sallow, pockmarked complexion, a partially deformed left arm, unruly mustache, and stained and broken teeth, could hardly have been greater. After a discursive review of de Gaulle, whom Stalin sagely described as “an authentic representative of the soul of France,” though “unrealistic” (Stalin had never met him at this point), and India, about which Stalin did not take the bait and said that the castes and cultures of the subcontinent made it very complicated (Roosevelt had for a time bombarded Churchill with gratuitous comments about the need for Indian independence, a meddlesome distraction he should not have inflicted on the British leader in the middle of the war), there came the most important moment of the conference. Roosevelt casually presented the northern France (Overlord) option and the Balkan option favored by Churchill, and Stalin emphatically confirmed his preference for Overlord. Though buoyed by the turn of fortunes on the Eastern Front, as Roosevelt had hoped, Stalin still felt he needed a main Allied effort in the west to be sure of victory in Europe, from which he would gain more than from a negotiated separate peace, toward which, as Stalin was about to confirm, there had been overtures from the Germans. Of course, any peace between Germany and Russia could always be torn up without notice again, as had been the last one.

  After a few minutes, they adjourned their meeting for the first plenary session. As the only chief of state present, Roosevelt was the chairman of all meetings (Stalin’s innocuous rubber-stamp president Mikhai
l Kalinin and King George VI were the analogues). All three leaders made opening statements referring to their great opportunity and duty, and Roosevelt gave a summary of the military situation in all theaters from the American standpoint, concluding with “the most important theater, Europe.” He spoke of Overlord as a strong American commitment, and said that it was delayed to May 1 only because the English Channel is “such a disagreeable body of water.” He blamed prior delays on difficulties with collecting enough landing craft. He said that for reasons of manpower, the British and Americans had to choose to some extent between committing forces to Overlord or to the Mediterranean and would be governed by what Stalin and his chief of staff, Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, said would be of greater use to the Soviet Union. (Voroshilov was an old Bolshevik loyalist of Stalin’s completely out of his depth trying to match strategic military insights with Brooke and Marshall.)

  WWII Atlantic. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History

  Stalin supported the American view, as he had told Roosevelt he would. He said that the Russian general Alexander Suvorov in 1799 had established that it was impossible to invade Germany from Italy. He said the Italian campaign was of secondary importance to Russia and there could be no decisive outcome there, that he doubted Turkey would enter the war, and that the Balkans were of more interest but a long way from the heart of Germany, and rugged country. “We Russians believe that the best result would be a blow at the enemy in northern France. Germany’s weakest spot is France. The Germans will fight like devils to prevent such an attack.”119

  Churchill’s ambivalence could not now continue. He expressed his support for Overlord, but said Britain could contribute only 16 divisions, not an impressive figure to the Russians or even the Americans, and an inexplicable conference gambit. Churchill expected Rome to fall in two months (it would take over six months) and saw a domino theory involving Turkey and the Balkan countries, and asked Stalin’s detailed views. Stalin questioned him closely but courteously and after some minutes back and forth said that after the capture of Rome, the Italian effort should be continued in southern France and the invasion there should join forces with the Overlord armies and proceed into Germany. “Overlord should be the basic operation for 1944.” (He here volunteered that he had had peace overtures from Germany and preliminary discussions in Stockholm.)

  Brooke claimed in his diary that Stalin only supported Overlord because he assumed the Germans would throw the Western Allies into the sea, as they had done a number of times to the British, and that this would be the best of all worlds for him: Germany heavily distracted in the west, but the British and Americansdefeated, enabling Stalin to continue indefinitely into Europe.120 It was assumed that Stalin was also angling for Communist Party takeovers in France and Italy. (Roosevelt peremptorily rejected Stalin’s request for a place on the Italian Control Commission, though he did allow the Italian Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, into the provisional government as a minister without portfolio, with philosopher Benedetto Croce.) Brooke wrote in his diary for November 28 that “The conference is over when it has only just begun. Stalin has got the President in his pocket.” This was the beginning of the myth, largely propagated by the British, though not by Churchill himself, that Stalin had duped Roosevelt. Brooke may have been correct that Stalin expected Overlord to fail, but it was Roosevelt who had triumphed, in causing Stalin to advocate precisely the course that assured the West the bulk of the geopolitical assets of Europe, and denied them to Russia. Churchill’s Adriatic option would have facilitated Stalin’s designs. Stalin and Churchill had inadvertently championed courses of action that were detrimental to the interests of both. Roosevelt had performed a remarkable diplomatic feat.

  Correctly judging Overlord’s likely success and recruiting his country’s postwar rival to secure the reluctant adherence of his great but, on this issue, mistaken ally was an astoundingly successful maneuver. The next day, Roosevelt again met privately with Stalin and outlined the international organization he had in mind. Stalin wasn’t much interested, but he was clearly prepared to go along with such a fig leaf for the Great Powers (among whom he did not number China or France), but was very concerned about the permanent demilitarization of Germany. That appeared to be the subject of Stalin’s only fear and desire, apart from seizing as much of Europe as he could. Stalin’s next line of attack in the plenary sessions was to impugn the credibility of Overlord if no commander had been designated. Churchill and Roosevelt promised that the commander would be named within two weeks. Stalin questioned Churchill’s commitment to Overlord and Churchill growled back that he was committed to it as long as certain conditions were met. The British leader had boxed himself into a corner by playing games with the Americans until Roosevelt had to dragoon Stalin into settling the issue.

  On the evening of November 29, there was a disagreeable incident over Stalin’s suggestion that 50,000 German officers be shot out of hand. Churchill strenuously objected and stormed out of the dinner, but Stalin, in conciliatory mode, fetched him amiably back. The two leaders embraced. In private conversation, Roosevelt, in complete friendliness, advised Churchill to remember that he was now (for the first time) a party leader and would have to fight an election as soon as the war was over, which they believed would be within two years. He told Churchill that if he didn’t produce a social and political vision for his war-weary people, he could lose. Churchill would have done well to listen to Roosevelt, the all-time heavyweight champion of democratic politics.

  On November 30, Winston Churchill’s 69th birthday, it was agreed by the British and American chiefs that Overlord would take place by June 1, provided the Russians launched a major offensive in the east to coincide with it and prevent Hitler from transferring units from east to west. Churchill had a private meeting with Stalin and tried to recoup lost ground by pledging to Overlord 500,000 of Britain’s best troops, 4,000 aircraft, and the Royal Navy’s entire Home Fleet, the most powerful naval force in the Atlantic. The United States, the Battle of the Atlantic having been won, would be sending 150,000 soldiers a month to Britain. Churchill’s birthday dinner at the British embassy that evening was a very jolly affair that continued through endless flattering toasts, including Stalin’s deep admiration for American aircraft production of 10,000 a month. It ended at 2 a.m.

  It is alleged by Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s labor secretary, that Roosevelt claimed to have disparaged Churchill the next day to ingratiate himself with Stalin, having apologized in advance to Churchill for doing so. No one else who was present—and almost all the British and Americans who wrote memoirs of the conference—recalled any such episode, so it probably didn’t happen. But what possessed Roosevelt to tell Miss Perkins such a story (she was a generally reliable source) is disconcerting.

  The generals and admirals departed to sightsee in Jerusalem, leaving the leaders to discuss political matters. Roosevelt largely absented himself from a discussion of Poland, though he said that he approved moving Poland’s eastern and western borders 250 miles to the west and giving East Prussia (Konigsberg) to the Russians. He was unwise to tell Stalin he wanted no reference to these arrangements until after the next U.S. election, 11 months away, because of Polish American voters. But it didn’t matter, as Stalin did not believe a word of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s comments on what they could do in their domestic political environments. He assumed that such formidable leaders could do what they wanted and regarded these democratic niceties as nonsense, like the schoolboy claiming the cat ate his homework.

  A communiqué was agreed that pledged to enlist the world to the elimination of “tyranny, slavery, oppression, and intolerance,” and claimed that the three leaders departed Tehran “friends in fact, in spirit, and in purpose,” a serious liberty, which conformed to Churchill’s assertion, in the most famous line of the conference and in another context, that “The truth deserves a bodyguard of lies.” Stalin later told the Yugoslavian communist politician Milovan Djilas that “Ch
urchill would pick my pocket for a kopek; Roosevelt only dips in his hand for larger coins.”121

  Roosevelt and Churchill went to Cairo and met with Turkish president Ismet Inonu. He was extremely resistant to the idea of entering the war. Churchill and Eden accompanied him to the airport and Inonu embraced and kissed Churchill. Eden remarked that that was all they got from him. Roosevelt departed for Tunis. He had asked Marshall what he would prefer, between continuing where he was or commanding Overlord. Marshall, with his usual selflessness, declined to express a preference, because he did not think his wishes should be thought relevant. Roosevelt said he would be uneasy without Marshall at his side, and in Tunis appointed Eisenhower the Overlord commander, Churchill having agreed that it was Roosevelt’s decision and that either Marshall or Eisenhower would be entirely acceptable to the British.

  If Stalin had sided with Churchill on a Balkan campaign, he would have ended up with most of Germany and would have had a crack at a communist France. Tehran was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of Western diplomacy; Roosevelt’s was on a par with Franklin’s in Paris in 1778 (Chapter 3). Having a man of Stalin’s cunning and cynicism advocate something detrimental to his territorial ambitions in Central and Western Europe because he underestimated Western military capabilities was a colossal achievement. Roosevelt flew to Palermo to review troops and encourage General George S. Patton (whom he considered “a joy”), as Patton had had to apologize to his army for slapping a demoralized but otherwise uninjured soldier in a field hospital. He flew on to Dakar, where the Iowa awaited him, and returned from there to the United States, arriving back at the White House on December 17. The war would now be a countdown to the invasion of Western Europe, followed, if that were successful, by a race to Berlin.