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

by Conrad Black

  The atmosphere at the conference was very cordial; Stalin arranged for a great ovation for Churchill when they attended the Bolshoi Ballet and Opera, and saw him off at the airport, an unprecedented courtesy. “He made several expressions of personal regard which I feel sure were sincere.” Doubtless they were, and Mr. Churchill deserved no less, but Stalin’s cordiality is hardly surprising: Churchill had legitimized the rape Stalin was about to commit, though refusal to do so would not have prevented it.

  11. THE 1944 ELECTION AND THE BATTLE OF THE ARDENNES

  Roosevelt campaigned as he had in the 1940 election, in the last three weeks, and spoke to very enthusiastic and large crowds in the great cities of the East, Northeast, and Midwest, including a dramatic appearance, under a spotlight in an otherwise darkened Soldier Field in Chicago, before 120,000 people (where Mrs. Sullivan, the mother of five sons who had perished in a cruiser, was introduced to great applause). His tour of New York City and vigorous stump appearances silenced the only issue the Republicans had: Roosevelt’s health. Dewey was a comparative upstart and Roosevelt ran as the conqueror of the Republican Depression, of Republican isolationism, and of the Germans and the Japanese. There were only 2.691 million military votes out of more than 12 million eligible, but Roosevelt won, for the fourth time, 25.6 million votes (54 percent) to 22 million for Dewey (46 percent), and 432 electoral votes from 36 states to 99 from 12 states for Dewey. It was a very respectable performance by Dewey against so invincible an opponent, but if the armed forces had been able vote in representative numbers, Roosevelt would undoubtedly have won by at least as great a margin as he had over Willkie in 1940. (Willkie and McNary had both died, so if Willkie had won in 1940, the president on election day would have been the Republican secretary of state, possibly Herbert Hoover.)

  On December 16, Hitler launched a major offensive in the west, out of the Ardennes Forest in poor winter weather that neutralized the Allies’ air advantage. The German attack involved about 500,000 men, nearly half of the 55 German divisions that had retreated to the Rhine before Eisenhower’s 96 divisions. The German plan was to overrun Allied supplies, especially tank fuel to resupply themselves, and proceed all the way to Antwerp, which had recently been cleared by the Canadians, in an attack that resembled the drive to Dunkirk in 1940. As in 1940, they were attacking out of the Ardennes against a relatively under-defended section of the Allied line, and one held by newly arrived American troops. Allied intelligence, especially from Patton’s Third Army, had warned that a German attack was possible, and Eisenhower had pulled Allied stores and supplies back from the front.

  The Germans achieved almost complete tactical surprise, and advanced about 50 miles in the first week, when the weather kept the Allied air forces out of the fight. Patton wheeled his Third Army north and the 101st Airborne Division fiercely defended the surrounded Belgian fortress city of Bastogne. American resistance stiffened steadily, and Patton crashed into the German southern flank on Christmas Day and relieved Bastogne the next day. Eisenhower committed all his reserves to Bradley’s Central Army Group, and gave command of the American Ninth Army, partly separated from Patton by the German advance, to Montgomery, who, after his usual methodical preparation, attacked the northern side of the German salient on January 2. The Allied line regained its original position on January 21. Germany had taken about 120,000 casualties to about 90,000 for the Allies, 77,000 of them Americans, including 21,000 prisoners. Germany lost about a third of its air force, 1,500 planes, after the weather lifted following Christmas. It had been the usual highly professional operation by the Germans, but the correlation of forces was now too lopsided and the quality of the Western armies too well-developed for any prospect of successfully resisting in the west. The senior Allied commanders, Eisenhower, Bradley, Montgomery, Patton, and McAuliffe (in Bastogne), all performed admirably.

  As 1944 ended, it was clear that Hitler would not be able to continue in the war for more than about six months. In both Europe and the Pacific, World War II had reached its final phase. The Allies were unstoppable; victory was at hand on every front. The Western Allies were on the Rhine and almost to the Alps and they had almost entirely occupied France and Italy. The Americans were approaching Japan from the east and southeast. The Russians were still not in Warsaw. Stalin would not be denied some spoils, but an immense strategic victory for Western democracy seemed imminent.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  From World War to Cold War, 1945–1951

  1. YALTA

  The Russians launched a general offensive on January 12, occupied Warsaw on January 17, and reached the Oder River, south of the border of Poland and Germany but only about 200 miles from Berlin, on January 23, 1945. Alexander and Clark had pushed the Germans into the extreme north of Italy. MacArthur’s forces entered Manila on February 5. This was where the Allied armies were when Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met at Yalta, in the Crimea, starting on February 4. Roosevelt was accompanied, apart from the service chiefs, by his new secretary of state, the former chairman of United States Steel Corporation, Edward Stettinius, who had been Hull’s under secretary when Hull retired in November 1944 (the longest-serving secretary of state in U.S. history); by James Byrnes, the head of the Offices of Economic Stabilization and War Mobilization; and by Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna. After introductory remarks from the leaders, and summaries of the Eastern and Western Fronts in Europe, Italy, the Pacific, and Burma, the conference dealt with great application with a succession of complicated points. It was agreed that France would receive an occupation zone of Germany carved out of the British zone and would join the European Advisory Commission and the Allied Control Commission in Germany; that Nazi war criminals would be punished, Germany disarmed, and the German general staff dissolved; and that reparations were to be determined by the Allies and paid by Germany. The United Nations Organization would be set up by the five founding powers (China and France as well as those present) at San Francisco, starting on April 25. (Roosevelt would have it set up and running before the war ended, and have equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats on the American founding delegation, to avoid the shambles that befell Wilson.)

  The Yalta Declarations on Liberated Europe and on Poland promised democratic government with free elections, with, in Poland, “universal suffrage and secret ballot.” In Yugoslavia, the Communists under Josip Broz Tito and the regent for the Karageorgevich monarchy would be encouraged to cooperate, as Churchill had proposed (with no practical likelihood of success).

  It was agreed that the foreign ministers of the Big Three would meet every three or four months for an indefinite period, and that unity between them was “a sacred obligation.” There was a slew of protocols and secret clauses, including relaxation of the Montreux Convention, assuring easier movement of Soviet vessels sailing to and from Soviet ports through the Bosporus, and the return of all prisoners and displaced civilians. As about one million Soviet citizens were serving with the German armed forces, Stalin wanted these people back to imprison or execute them. In practice, the Americans accepted their assurances that they were German, or whatever nationality they claimed, but the British, in the spirit of Colonel Nicholson in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, dutifully shipped back a large number of Soviet defectors to Stalin’s gruesome mercies.

  The Soviet Union undertook to enter the war against Japan within two or three months of the end of the European war, and the USSR would receive back all that Russia had ceded to Japan at the end of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905 in the Treaty of Portsmouth, brokered by Roosevelt’s cousin Theodore (southern Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, which had in fact been ceded in 1875, but not the Russian suzerainty of the Manchurian railways and the harbor of Port Arthur). Roosevelt was adamant that all Stalin could have was a lease, because China was another of the five designated permanent members of the United Nations, and he would not be a party to inflicting on China a return to colonialism. The entry of Russia into the war against Japan (which would requir
e abrogation by Stalin of the Russo-Japanese non-aggression pact of 1941, not a great conscientious problem for any of them), was a high priority to the U.S. Joint Chiefs. It was clear from their battles with Japan on the islands approaching Japan itself that no Japanese, even most civilians, would be taken alive, and it was feared that if atomic weapons, which were scheduled to be tested in about five months, did not work, Allied casualties in an attack on Japan itself could be as great as one million. The Soviet Union was to receive three votes at the United Nations, for Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus. The British Dominions were all entitled to votes, and it was agreed in secret side letters to Roosevelt by Stalin and Churchill (“My Dear Franklin”) that the United States, if there were any domestic political embarrassment, could also have three votes. (In what would become a controversial matter, the alleged former Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who was in the American delegation at Yalta, made only one recommendation, to oppose granting the USSR three votes in the UN.)

  The conference ended very cordially on February 11, and everyone, even the usually acidulous diarists Brooke and Cadogan, was quite satisfied with it. Roosevelt made it clear to intimates that he knew how easily its agreements could be violated, but he had what he needed most: the international organization with which he was going to defeat the isolationists and exercise through a façade of multilateralism America’s preponderant influence in the world; the solemn Declarations on Poland and on Liberated Europe, which if violated by Stalin, would justify strenuous U.S., U.K., French, and (if adequately bribed by the Americans) Chinese counter-measures; and the assurance that, if necessary, Russia would take a sizeable share of the casualties incurred in subduing Japan.

  Immense controversy has arisen about this conference, but the West got everything it wanted. As the Roosevelt biographer Ted Morgan has pointed out, “If Yalta was a sell-out, why did [Stalin] go to such lengths to violate the agreement?”128 Roosevelt was not well at Yalta, but his mental powers were unaffected, as all who worked with him, especially Bohlen and Stettinius, attest. His plan was to await the development of atomic weapons and then hold Stalin’s feet to the fire: the West would guarantee the permanent defanging of Germany (if not Morgenthau’s mad “pastoralization” plan), a large economic aid package for Russia, and entire respectability for Stalin and his regime as one of the world’s very greatest leaders of a co-equal superpower with the United States. And if that were not adequate incentive, Germany would be rearmed under Western tutelage, there would not be a cent of assistance, Stalin and his murderous regime could continue as the civilized world’s pariah, and, as Roosevelt had discussed with Stimson in August 1944, the United States would consider the potential for its status as holder of a nuclear monopoly, to accomplish “the necessity of bringing Russia ... into the fold of Christian civilization.”129 Roosevelt and Stalin parted on the cheerful agreement that they would “meet again soon, in Berlin.” They were not to meet again.

  2. THE FINAL OFFENSIVES

  Eisenhower’s armies launched their offensive to end the war in the west starting on February 8, with the British and Canadian invasion of Germany from Holland, followed by Patton’s attack across the Saar River on February 22. The American Central Army Group prorupted into the Ruhr Valley on February 23, and took Cologne and Dusseldorf on the Rhine, and the bridge across the Rhine at Remagen, all on March 7. A full Allied offensive across the Rhine, by boat and by air, was successfully carried out starting March 23, and Eisenhower’s grand double envelopment of the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany, was executed from March 24 to April 18, culminating in the surrender of 325,000 German soldiers.

  The only Central European country that had not been mentioned, at Tehran, at Yalta, in Churchill’s meeting with Stalin in October 1944, or otherwise, was Czechoslovakia. The Russians were soon in control of most of Slovakia, but Bohemia and Moravia, including Prague, which was undamaged by the war, were unclaimed, and it has never been explained, including in the memoirs of the principal figures in the drama, why the Western Allies did not occupy Prague.

  In the Pacific, Nimitz invaded Iwo Jima, a volcanic island about 700 miles from Japan, which, when captured, would make Japan much more accessible to air attack from American B-29s. There were 18,000 Japanese defenders, in a heavily fortified and camouflaged network of bunkers and artillery and heavy machine gun emplacements, connected by 18 kilometers of tunnels. The Americans arrived in an armada of 450 ships, attacked the entire periphery of the island for three days with the full continuous broadsides of 20 battleships at point-blank range, supplemented by heavy aerial bombing throughout that time, starting on February 19. A total of 70,000 marines were landed. Given the correlation of forces, the Japanese had no chance of repulsing the attack, but they held out until March 17. The Americans took about 4,500 dead and 15,300 wounded. The 18,000 Japanese defenders, who had, as at Saipan, to be incinerated or suffocated in their caves and bunkers with sustained assault from flame-throwers, all died, except for 216 taken prisoner, most of them while unconscious from wounds. It could be reasonably inferred that the defense of Japan itself would be a matter of suicidal tenacity to the last woman and ambulatory child, if atomic weapons did not obviate a conventional assault and occupation.

  This apprehension was reinforced with the battle for Okinawa, just 360 miles from Japan, which began on April 1. The United States had 23 battleships, counting the British Pacific Fleet, which had been beefed up, as the German navy was now almost extinct. The Allies had scores of fleet and escort carriers and again opened with a carpet bombardment of several days. The Japanese attacked the Allied fleet with 1,500 kamikaze (suicide) planes, and damaged several aircraft carriers and sank several destroyer escorts. An effort to attack with surface ships, led by the world’s largest battleship, the 73,000-ton Yamato, was foiled by American carrier forces, which attacked the Yamato with over 300 planes and sank it with 15 torpedo hits, all on the same side to prevent counter-flooding, and 21 heavy bomb hits. They sank almost all the escorting vessels too, and the Japanese lost 3,700 sailors, to only 12 American airmen, on April 7.

  Okinawa was defended by 120,000 Japanese, and the invaders landed 183,000 experienced and heavily armed shock troops. The battle continued to June 21, though it was generally a mopping-up operation for the last month. The Allies (95 percent Americans) suffered over 12,000 dead and 38,000 wounded. Japan achieved a 100 percent casualty rate, 113,000 dead and 7,000 wounded. No able-bodied Japanese were captured. There were more than 100,000 civilians killed, as the Japanese forces dispersed among the native (mainly Japanese) population. This bloody campaign confirmed that only atomic weapons, which would be tested in New Mexico a month after the end of the Okinawa campaign, could prevent a horrible bloodbath in the main islands of Japan.

  In Germany, the U.S. Ninth Army, part of Bradley’s Central Army Group, reached the Elbe on April 12. The Russians launched a drive on Berlin on April 13, and arrived in the eastern outskirts of the shattered German capital on April 24. The end of the Third Reich was at hand.

  3. THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT; PRESIDENT TRUMAN AND THE POTSDAM CONFERENCE

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his winter home at Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12. He was only 63. Vice President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as president several hours later. Winston Churchill spoke nothing but the truth when he said in his parliamentary eulogy on April 17: “In the days of peace, he had broadened the foundation of American life and union. In war he had raised the strength, might, and glory of the Great Republic to a height never attained by any nation in history. . . . All this was no more than worldly power and grandeur had it not been that the causes of human freedom and social justice, to which so much of his life had been given, added a luster [to him and his achievements] which will long be discernible among men.... In Franklin Roosevelt there has died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the New World to the Old.�
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  Roosevelt had infused an economically and psychologically depressed nation with his own vitality, had led it with consummate talent and astuteness, step by step, to overwhelming economic, military, moral, and popular cultural preeminence in the world, and to the brink of victory over every foreign and domestic enemy. He was exhausted in his fourth term, and was thinking of retiring just before he died, but President Roosevelt had made it America’s world to lead, a world largely safe for democracy, at last, as long as the United States was involved in it. He would have been proud that he headed the official list of America’s war dead on April 13, as commander-in-chief of the mighty and everywhere victorious armed forces of the United States.

  For some days, Churchill had been bombarding Roosevelt with messages urging him to send the U.S. Ninth Army on to Berlin, blissfully oblivious of the European Advisory Commission agreement on occupation zones in Germany, which his government had proposed. He continued this campaign with Truman, who had never been informed by Roosevelt about anything, and had to make decisions of historic and global importance in haste. Fortunately, the new president was a man of courage, sound judgment, and a decisive temperament. He referred Churchill’s importuning to Marshall, who consulted Eisenhower, although it was a strategic decision of national foreign and security policy, not a properly military matter. Eisenhower said that he would of course carry out any orders he received, but that he understood the United States was bound by the EAC zones, and did not personally see why he should sacrifice the lives of American, British, Canadian, and French soldiers to take territory that would then be handed back to the Russians.