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

by Conrad Black

  The long-awaited and tortuously prepared visit of Charles de Gaulle to the United States finally began on July 6, 1944. Even de Gaulle was impressed by the overwhelming confidence and power of America, and by Roosevelt’s “glittering personality,” but added, “As was only human, Roosevelt’s will to power cloaked itself in idealism.” It was almost incomprehensible to de Gaulle that Roosevelt really was an idealist, given how cynical and ruthless he was in his methods, and also how overwhelming was now his and his country’s power. This was a complicated relationship, as de Gaulle sought a restoration of the unquestioned status as a coequal Great Power with Britain and America that Clemenceau had enjoyed with Lloyd George and Wilson. Churchill was prepared for this, but never to the point of considering France a rival to America for Britain’s affections. Roosevelt liked and knew France, which accentuated his disappointment in the French collapse in 1940, and the shameful performance of many Frenchmen, including most that Roosevelt knew personally.

  De Gaulle understood the debacle of 1940 better than anyone, having loudly warned of the dangers of the military and political policies that led to it. But he wanted an instant resurrection of France based on its historic standing and not the contemporary correlation of forces. Time was to some degree on his side, as France was in the process of being liberated, chiefly by the exertions of the Americans. He oscillated between aggravating the British when, as he put it, “Mr. Churchill felt some of the spirit of Pitt in his own soul,” and trying to entice Churchill back into an Entente Cordiale that would be entirely independent of the Americans. It was, for a time, an impossible position, as France had infinitely less stature in the world than Britain and Roosevelt didn’t owe him anything. And it was the beginning of what de Gaulle later aggregated into a comprehensive foreign policy: that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t really care about Europe but France did and would take care of Europe, as it could make bilateral arrangements with both Germany and Russia, in the interests of Europe and at the expense of the British and the Americans, while professing absolute solidarity with Britain and America in times of crisis.

  It was also the relaunch, after five years of frantically importuning the United States for assistance, of the post-Versailles practice of blaming the United States for everything. Thus, de Gaulle implied in his memoirs, it was American isolationism that caused the fall of France, and nearly 30 years later it would supposedly be American policy in Vietnam that caused the general strike that paralyzed France in 1968. Roosevelt supposedly conceded too much to Stalin, another part of the confidence trick that France and not the Anglo-Saxons was the guarantor of Western Europe. De Gaulle claimed that these conversations convinced him, as if he had been unaware of it before, that “in foreign affairs, logic and sentiment do not weigh heavily in comparison with the realities of power; that what matters is what one takes and what one can hold on to; that to regain her place, France must count only on herself.” Roosevelt replied: “We shall do what we can, but it is true that to serve France, no one can replace the French people.”

  It was a successful visit, as Roosevelt tendered de Gaulle a state luncheon and proposed two generous toasts, and thereafter declared that he and de Gaulle had mended fences. In his public remarks, he denounced “troublemakers” who had stirred up problems between his guest and himself. Roosevelt realized that he had underestimated de Gaulle and confirmed full recognition of him as the leader of France, pending democratic confirmation of that fact, and warmed to the idea of assisting France, as Churchill had long proposed, in reassuming an important role as a more reliable ally, whatever its failings, than the Germans, Russians, or Italians. Roosevelt had moved just in time, because six weeks after de Gaulle left the United States (for “the beloved and courageous” Canada, as de Gaulle described it, with some irony, given his subsequent mischief in that country), he was welcomed with immense fervor by millions of Parisians in a manner that made it clear that he spoke unquestionably for France. The private and public references of Roosevelt and de Gaulle to each other, and the correspondence between them, would hereafter be quite cordial. The consequences of the ups and downs of the Roosevelt-Churchill problems with de Gaulle would echo in the relations of the three countries for the rest of the twentieth century. Had those men stayed in office for a few more consecutive years, they would doubtless have worked it out, but in less than two years, all were gone, Roosevelt permanently.

  The Germans vacated Paris and it was occupied by the Allies on August 24, and Charles de Gaulle made his historic walk down the Champs-Elysées the following day at the head of all the notables of France, however they had spent the last four years (“Two steps behind, please, gentlemen,” he said as he started down the great boulevard). In his remarks, to millions of jubilant Parisians, he amplified the double myth that France had never left the war and had contributed very largely to its own liberation. This was a fraud, though a useful one in rallying all the non-communist forces in the country, especially the numerous Pétainists, to ensure that there was no possibility of a coup by the communist underground armies, which may have been almost as numerous as the Gaullist Resistance.

  10. CLOSING IN ON GERMANY AND JAPAN

  By this time, there had been a number of other developments on other fronts. On June 22, Roosevelt’s benefit bill for veterans, known to history as the G.I. Bill of Rights, one of the most successful measures of his entire presidency, was passed. It gave every serviceman a free year of post-secondary education for every year in the armed forces, and provided virtually interest-free loans for ex-servicemen to set up a small business or to buy a farm. For years after the war, a very large proportion of American university students were veterans, and the unemployed youth that Roosevelt had cycled through his workfare programs and then conscripted, and who had been led to victory by outstanding theater commanders in a just and necessary war, now became a highly motivated and patriotic middle class. This was the sort of program that Roosevelt had recommended to Churchill at Tehran as good in itself but likely necessary to assure reelection.

  Roosevelt journeyed to Hawaii later in July to meet with his Pacific theater commanders, Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur, to concert the end-game strategy against Japan. MacArthur, who had famously promised to return to the Philippines, wished to do that, while Nimitz made himself, with no great enthusiasm, the proponent of the ambition of his irascible colleague Admiral Ernest J. King to bypass the Philippines and invade Formosa. (Roosevelt said he had promoted King, an argumentative Anglophobe, to be fleet commander because he understood King “cut his toenails with a torpedo-net cutter and shaved with a blowtorch.”126 He was a very crusty character and now held the scepter of the seas; when Nimitz’s mighty Pacific Fleet set sail in the last months of the war with over 20 battleships, 30 fleet carriers, and 70 escort carriers, it carried 400,000 sailors and over 4,000 aircraft.) It was a cordial meeting, as Nimitz and MacArthur got on well and Roosevelt was a respected patron of both, despite his suspicions of MacArthur’s political maneuvering. When he returned to Washington, Roosevelt decided in favor of MacArthur’s plan, as the United States owed something to the Philippines, and Formosa was a long way through open seas, with a still significant Japanese navy prowling about, and the bombing of Japan could be accomplished from other islands in the western Pacific that Nimitz’s forces were already approaching.

  While he was on his way to embarkation for Hawaii from San Diego, the Democrats, at Chicago, renominated Roosevelt by acclamation for a fourth term. As Henry Wallace, an obscurantist leftist mystic, was clearly a hazardous occupant of the vice presidency, he was dumped, with a minimum of ceremony but with elaborate Rooseveltian cynicism and dissembling, for Missouri’s Senator Harry S. Truman. Roosevelt made his choice known when his train stopped briefly in Chicago on his way west, though he did not leave the train. The Republicans had met three weeks before in the same city and had nominated New York’s 42-year-old governor, Thomas E. Dewey, for president and Ohio senator John W. Bricker for vice president.<
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  Both parties supported some notion of postwar international organization. It was impossible to attack the Roosevelt administration, as the president had led the country out of the Depression that most Americans blamed on the Republicans, had been vindicated in his assistance to the democracies from 1939 to 1941, was considered to be blameless in the U.S. involvement in the war, and had managed all aspects of the war with conspicuous success. And the invasion of the Philippines was planned for before the election. The only issue the Republicans could find was Roosevelt’s health, which had visibly deteriorated, though he was only 62. His doctor, Ross McIntyre, whom he had promoted from navy lieutenant and White House duty medical officer, because of his successful treatment of Roosevelt’s sinus condition, to vice admiral and surgeon general of the United States Navy, assured the country that FDR was good for another term. Roosevelt resented the attacks on his health, and to spike the rumors had a two-hour motor trip through the four main boroughs of New York City in an open car on a raw and rainy day, October 21, 1944. More than three million New Yorkers stood for an extended period in the rain, up to 30 deep, just to catch a glimpse of the president as he passed at 20 miles an hour in his open car.

  The interesting and controversial aspect of the election was that the southern senators and congressmen, virtually all Democrats, who had supported every aspect of Roosevelt’s national security and war policy, were concerned to prevent the more than 500,000 southern African American servicemen from voting, and so joined with the congressional Republicans to restrict voting in the armed forces, which contained over 10 million eligible voters, to only about 25 percent of them, by spurious requirements. It was assumed that the great majority would vote for the commander-in-chief. Roosevelt did not wish to split his party, and he was going to carry the southern states anyway, without the young black servicemen. But he accused the Republicans of denying the right to vote to the armed forces and generally served notice that the mistreatment of African Americans had to stop. There had been several nasty racial riots during the war, and the issue, whose moral unacceptability Roosevelt well recognized, was festering. The G.I. Bill of Rights, like the prewar workfare and agricultural price support programs, though segregated, applied equally to all eligible candidates regardless of pigmentation, and constituted a tremendous breakthrough for African Americans.

  Roosevelt and Churchill met again at Quebec from September 11 to 16. Churchill, called upon by Roosevelt to kick off the conference, generously allowed that Anvil (Dragoon, the landings in southern France) had been a great success, and that the Italian campaign had not, as he had feared, been “ruined,” and was proceeding quite well. There were no strategic disagreements between the two sides at this conference, and there was an unspoken recognition throughout that it was not really a meeting of equals, but Roosevelt and Marshall managed it with exquisite tact, and even Brooke, in his generally rather acidulous diary, was quite upbeat. The conference met as the Warsaw Uprising was being crushed by the Germans while the Red Army stood, inert, on the other side of the Vistula, declining to render assistance. The Poles had only staged the uprising when the Russians were across the river, to facilitate the liberation of Warsaw. Stalin would not even allow the Western Allied air forces to drop assistance to the Poles in Warsaw and land in Russia. It was a grim foretaste of Stalin’s notions of the political future of Eastern Europe. Most of Warsaw was reduced to rubble, and 200,000 Varsovians, one-fifth of the population of the city, died in the heroic uprising.

  Roosevelt allowed his Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, to propose a plan for the “pastoralization” of Germany, its reduction to a deindustrialized state. The British were at first quite skeptical but became more interested when what was in contemplation was shown to be the elimination of a great deal of competition for British industries. Roosevelt had told his cabinet committee on Germany that Germans should be deprived of indoor plumbing and prevented from wearing uniforms, in a considerable feat of deadpan advocacy. He didn’t take the issue seriously, other than its potential as a bargaining chip with Stalin, who had made it clear at Tehran how much he feared a revival of German militarism. Although the European Advisory Commission agreement on German occupation zones was confirmed at this meeting, it was clear that most of Germany and most Germans would be in Western hands at the war’s end, and that the Western Allies had the power to deliver or withhold a full demilitarization of Germany. The conference continued for a few days at Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, before Churchill and his party returned home from New York on the great liner Queen Mary.

  The Western Front as it moved into eastern France was organized into the Northern, Central, and Southern Army Groups, commanded by, respectively, Montgomery, General Omar N. Bradley, and American general Jacob Devers. Montgomery had the Sixth British and First Canadian Armies (18 divisions); Bradley had the U.S. Ninth, Third, and First Armies (46 divisions), and Devers had the U.S. Thirteenth and French First Armies (24 divisions). There were also five airborne divisions and a number of other divisions available to Eisenhower’s headquarters and involved in mopping up pockets of Germans in the French interior and assuring logistics. Eisenhower’s armies continued to grow as they approached and entered Germany, and Patton’s Third Army, in particular, badly mauled the Germans in the center of the front. Unfortunately, Montgomery’s agitation for a larger role and Churchill’s concern to take down the German V-2 launchers that were raining a good deal of devastation on England led to a diversion of supplies from Patton’s fast-advancing forces to the north, as Montgomery attempted an outflanking maneuver into Holland, led by 34,000 airborne troops. The Western Allies entered Germany at Eupen on September 12. The Americans took Nijmegan, but the British were defeated at Arnem (the “bridge too far”), and the operation was not a success. The Germans opened the dikes and flooded much of Holland, threatening the entire civil population with starvation, and the Canadians cleared the Scheldt estuary and opened the vital port of Antwerp in October. The Americans took Aachen, the first substantial German city to be occupied, on October 2, and Patton had occupied Metz and Strasbourg, French Rhine fortress cities, on September 22 and 23.

  In the east, the Russians occupied Talinn, Estonia, on September 22, and Königsberg and Belgrade, Yugoslavia, a month later (with, in Belgrade, collaboration from communist and anti-communist Yugoslav partisans). In the Pacific, the American return to the Philippines was initiated by the naval victory of the Philippine Sea on June 19 and 20, in which three Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk and many other vessels damaged. On October 20, MacArthur’s forces invaded the central Philippines at Leyte, smoking out the Japanese Combined Fleet in a desperate gamble that led to the greatest naval battle of the war in several separate actions in and near Leyte Gulf, October 23–25. The Americans destroyed the Japanese navy as a coherent fighting force, sinking three battleships, four aircraft carriers, and nine cruisers and nine destroyers, with light losses themselves. It was a welcome present for Roosevelt, one week before the election. The battle for the Philippines continued to February 23 and caused severe damage to Manila, but was never in doubt.

  Winston Churchill was in Moscow visiting Stalin from October 9 to 18. Roosevelt asked that Harriman be included, and advised Churchill and Stalin that he considered this meeting preliminary to the scheduled meeting between the three leaders in the Crimea in February, and said he would not be bound by any agreements from these meetings in Moscow. Stalin, who assumed that Churchill would be bringing whatever he and Roosevelt had concerted at Quebec, replied that Roosevelt’s position “does not seem to correspond with reality.”127 As his armies were already in Central Europe, he presumably meant the reality of what the Red Army was about to impose on “liberated” territory, and of the geographic misfortune of those countries that found themselves between Germany and Russia. (Churchill did not reply at all to Roosevelt, a rarity in their voluminous correspondence.)

  Churchill and Eden met with Stalin on the night of their arrival, and C
hurchill opened with “Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans. Don’t let us get at cross-purposes in small ways.” He suggested that the Soviet Union have 90 percent of the influence in Romania and 75 percent in Bulgaria, that it be 50–50 in Yugoslavia and Hungary, and that Britain have 90 percent of the Great Power influence in Greece. While this was being translated for Stalin, Churchill wrote it out on a piece of paper and handed it to his host. Stalin “took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back to us. It was all settled in no more time than it takes to set down.” Churchill said: “Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?” He suggested burning what he later called the “naughty” piece of paper, but Stalin told him to keep it. In his memoirs, Churchill claimed that these were only temporary arrangements, but that is completely implausible. Churchill well knew the nature of his host, and if it had been temporary, the demarcation would not have been “fateful to millions,” nor even “naughty.”

  In fact he hadn’t struck a bad bargain, as Stalin was going to take what Churchill conceded anyway. But Molotov bullied Eden into raising the Soviet position in Hungary to 75 percent, and even then, Stalin raised his status in Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary to 100 percent and stoked up a civil war under the noses of the British and the Americans in Greece. Churchill didn’t tell Roosevelt exactly what had happened but told him there was a need to resolve Balkan issues to avoid civil war there (though civil war resulted in Yugoslavia as well as in Greece).

  In the light of subsequent revisionist history, including most ingenious revisions by Churchill himself in his voluminous memoirs, it is worth noting that if Churchill hadn’t dragged Britain’s heels on Overlord and distracted the Americans with all the bunk about the “soft underbelly” and “Ljubljana Gap,” and hadn’t thrown in with Russia at the European Advisory Commission’s demarcation of occupation zones in Germany, the Western Powers would have ended up with almost all of Germany, at least the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.