In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Unsmiling and unbending, the tall, ramrod-straight general, formal in manner and manners, was disciplined and organized, and was offended aesthetically by his commander in chief, who was none of those things. Ignoring the prompting of Hopkins, Marshall kept his relationship with the President on a professional basis. He did not visit Roosevelt at his Hyde Park or Warm Springs homes; and he refused to laugh at the President’s jokes. So he forfeited his chance of influencing FDR the way Hopkins and other favorites did. He left the President to his natural inclinations as a convert to airpower and a big-navy man. FDR had no intention of leading America into a land war, and therefore remained indifferent to the needs of the army.

  The War Department, in a state of permanent civil war between Secretary Woodring and Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson—two ambitious politicians, one of them isolationist and the other not, each of whom spent his time seeking to get the other fired—was of no help to Marshall in trying to find political support in the executive department for his plans to develop an effective army.

  So Marshall fell back on the help of Senator Byrnes of South Carolina, whom he had known years before in running the CCC program in that state. One of the triumphs that Byrnes made possible for Marshall was obtaining from Congress the power to weed out, or leapfrog, inefficient senior officers.

  Marshall was ruthlessly impartial, sparing no friends. Consulting the little black book that he had filled with the names of promising young officers, he brought them forward and put them to the test of varied commands and duties: Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Maxwell Taylor, Walter Bedell Smith, Matthew Ridgway, J. Lawton Collins, and others.

  Under his guidance original training programs were developed that would make possible the rapid creation of a mass army should the need arise. In doing so he was thinking ahead to contingencies that the country’s political chiefs were ignoring.

  Similarly the army, planning ahead, looked at the choices that might have to be faced if the United States came into conflict with Japan and Germany at the same time. Army planners reached the conclusion that Germany was the more dangerous, so that priority should be given to the European war.†

  America’s political leaders in 1939 had grown to manhood in the era of the Spanish-American War, and had lived ever since with the question that the war of 1898 had opened up: whether the United States, in its world policy, should put Europe or Asia first. A few would continue to debate that issue in years to come. But for the most part they were going to allow it to be decided on military grounds—just as President Wilson had left the chief question of his presidency, whether or not to send an American army to fight a land war in Europe, to the discretion of General Pershing.

  “Time—time more than anything else” was Marshall’s driving obsession, for the great formative experience of his life had been the world war in which the United States had been too late: too late in producing war matériel to be able to supply even its own army, and too late to create an army that could launch a broad offensive of its own.

  “We must be prepared the next time we are involved in war, to fight immediately, that is within a few weeks …,” the chief of staff wrote to one of his generals. The last time—a year and a half after the United States entered the war—the American commander, Pershing, still had not been ready to order the first American offensive. Marshall believed that Americans would not be given the luxury of waiting so long in the blitzkrieg age.

  A naturally taciturn person not given to revealing his private thoughts, he apparently did not reflect, at least out loud, on the curious chain of circumstances that had led him to take up in 1939 what he had left off doing in 1918.

  ON SEPTEMBER 3, the day Great Britain declared war on Germany, Winston Churchill was asked to Prime Minister Chamberlain’s rooms at the House of Commons. There Chamberlain invited his sixty-four-year-old critic, a pariah in the House of Commons for most of a decade, and one who had been given up long since for politically dead, to join the cabinet in the position he had held at the start of the Great War: First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill accepted and sent a message to the Admiralty that he would come by later that day.

  After an afternoon war cabinet meeting at Downing Street, Churchill, following the route so familiar to him in the great days of his career, crossed Horse Guards Parade to Admiralty House. He made directly for the First Lord’s room, which he had not entered since leaving it in disgrace—blamed, perhaps unfairly, for the disastrous Dardanelles expedition in 1915—a quarter of a century earlier. No sooner was he through the door than he rushed over to a cupboard in the paneling and, in the words of his private secretary, “he flung the door open with a dramatic gesture—there, behind the panelling was a large map showing the disposition of all German ships on the day he had left the Admiralty in 1915.”

  “Where is the octagonal table?” Churchill demanded; he told the naval assistant assigned to him that he wanted it back. The officer dashed off to consult urgently with housekeepers, and before long a remembered piece of furniture was restored to service.

  “He also told me,” the naval assistant later recalled, “that on the back of the sofa there should be a chart box. It was there with charts in it, which I showed him. He said, ‘I thought so. These are the same charts that I used in this room in 1915.’ ”

  A BIT MORE THAN A WEEK LATER, Churchill received a letter from the President of the United States. “It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War”—wrote the onetime assistant secretary of the navy, greatly exaggerating the importance of his own position in 1914 compared with Churchill’s—“that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty.” Roosevelt suggested that Churchill should “keep me in touch personally about anything you want me to know about.” Churchill obtained permission from Chamberlain and the cabinet to meet FDR’s request. Thus began the unprecedented private correspondence between the two public men that brought about, for a time, the first alliance into which the United States had ever entered.

  When Ambassador Kennedy asked Roosevelt why he was corresponding with Churchill, the President replied: “I have always disliked him since the time I went to England in 1918. He acted like a stinker at a dinner, lording it all over us.… I’m giving him attention now because there is a strong possibility that he will become the prime minister and I want to get my hand in now.”

  “Your letter,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt, “takes me back to 1914 and it is certainly a most unusual experience to occupy the same post fighting the same enemy 25 years later.” Emphasizing the link between them, the British leader employed the code name “Naval Person” in his cables to FDR.

  THE COURSE OF THE WAR, however, ran differently than it had in 1914, and in ways that at first were startling and then became merely puzzling.

  The German attack on Poland was the shock. It was the world’s first experience of blitzkrieg, and the Polish army was not equipped either mentally or materially to deal with it. The war pitted 2,000 German aircraft against 600 mostly out-of-date Polish planes that in any event were destroyed on the ground in the first days of the war. So Germany now controlled the skies over Poland, from which fighters and Stuka dive-bombers streaked down to strafe and bomb at will, cutting the lines of transportation and knocking out the communications of the defending forces.

  Poland was proud of its horse cavalry, but it belonged to another era and proved no match in mobility for the German mechanized divisions that raced through and behind the lines of the defenders to encircle them. Within days of the invasion the German forces succeeded in shattering the Polish army into isolated pieces. But before Germany could complete her lightning victory, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the other side and occupied the share of the country that Hitler had agreed (in the nonaggression pact the month before) should go to Russia.

  The French high command had hoped the Poles would hold out for months while France mobilized. Poland was nonetheless swallowed up, and disappeared f
rom the map of Europe in less than four weeks. Hitler wanted to turn immediately against France and her allies. He ordered his generals to fall upon the democracies of western Europe in order to render them incapable of resisting the “continued expansion of the German people.” He scheduled the attack to begin November 12, 1939.

  What puzzled the Western world in the autumn of 1939 was that no such German assault occurred. It is now known that the German army was not really ready for war in 1939 and that its generals were disturbed by Hitler’s unrealistically speeded-up timetable. The Polish campaign left in its wake shortages of ammunition and vehicles that could not be supplied, and a breakdown of machinery that could not be repaired, for months to come. Twenty-nine times Hitler set the date for his armies to attack in the west, only to be forced to postpone because the army was not yet ready to roll forward.

  Had they known that much of the German army was hors de combat, the Allied commanders might have realized that this was their opportunity to attack. Or perhaps they would not have, for it was a common view that the coming of the autumn rains had made military movement impractical. Then, too, as Bullitt reported to Roosevelt, “It is the opinion of the French General Staff that whichever army attacks first the lines of fortifications that now divide France and Germany will be defeated.”

  An eerie silence hung over Europe. The French called it a drôle de guerre—a funny kind of war; the British called it the “Great Bore War”; and old isolationist Senator Borah called it “the phony war.” A British war correspondent touring the French front lines wrote: “Across the river a young German was standing in the sun, naked to the waist, washing himself. It annoyed me that it should be possible for him to go on washing calmly there with two machine-guns on the opposite bank. I asked the French sentry why he did not fire.… ‘Ils ne sont pas méchants,’ he said—they’re not bad chaps—‘and if we fire, they will fire back.’ ”

  It was difficult for the United States government to know what to make of the situation, especially after Bullitt phoned the State Department November 28 with the news that the Soviet Union was about to invade Finland. Would this be done by prearrangement with Germany? Did the news mean that Russia and Germany were working together? Or did it mean, on the contrary, that the two predators were about to come into conflict? And did the quiet on the western front mean that Germany was going to call off her war against France and Britain? In Washington nobody knew.

  Perhaps a world settlement was at hand. In early December 1939 FDR told two of his intimates, Morgenthau and Berle, that he “proposed to make peace next spring on the basis of having everybody produce everything they could; take what was needed; and put the rest into a pool; and let the countries which needed the balance draw it as needed through the cartels.”

  His apparent assumption was that the war had come about because of economic scarcity, but if he really held that belief, he forgot it soon. A few days later the President was talking of the war as a crisis that was spiritual. It was in his mind to enter into diplomatic relations with the Vatican, a move that might well please Catholic voters in the 1940 elections. He did so in connection with a Christmas message to the pope (December 1939), in which he wrote in high-flown language of his faith in lofty moral values. He sent similar messages to the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and to the president of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America.

  Delighted by the prophetic posture he had struck in dealing with the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths, Roosevelt was restrained only with difficulty by the State Department from communicating in the same elevated tone with the patriarch of the Greek Orthodox faith in Istanbul (the former Constantinople) and with Muslim dignitaries throughout Asia.

  Despite the evident pleasure he took in portraying himself as a wise man who sees through the ephemera of wars and politics to the spiritual values that are timeless—and the no less evident political advantage to be gained by appearing so—Roosevelt was not a Wilsonian optimist: “I do not entertain the thought of some of the statesmen of 1918 that the world can make, or we can help the world to achieve lasting peace,” he wrote to William Allen White in January 1940. He saw little hope of achieving even the small improvement in the international situation for which he would settle. Influenced perhaps by reports from Bullitt and Kennedy that France and Britain might lose the war, the President wondered whether it would not be worse if they patched together a peace agreement immediately that would fall apart in a few years.

  Yet Europeans began to think it was just such a patched-up truce that FDR was seeking, for in March he allowed Sumner Welles to embark on a self-promoting, fact-finding trip to Europe to ask if there were a chance of making peace. The purpose of the Welles mission never was very clear, but it was not what the British government thought it was: an attempt to drive the Allies into coming to some arrangement with Hitler. Sir Robert Vansittart, chief diplomatic adviser to the British government, wrote in a memorandum that “the Prime Minister says … that President Roosevelt is ready to play a dirty trick on the world and risk the ultimate destruction of the Western Democracies in order to secure the re-election of a democratic candidate in the United States.”

  PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS affecting the approaching American presidential elections was the least noticed at the time: it was the deterioration in the health of Harry Hopkins, the President’s closest associate in the domestic management of the New Deal. Hopkins seemed to be the only person FDR could bear to think of succeeding him in the presidency; he had started to groom Hopkins as his candidate, and began in 1938 by appointing him to a cabinet position (as secretary of commerce) to give him political visibility. The President seemed to be sincere in pushing the Hopkins candidacy, though with FDR one never knew for sure.

  But Hopkins fell ill with everything from flu and nutritional disorders to cancer, and by September 1939—when Roosevelt received the news of Germany’s invasion of Poland and saw the war crisis of 1914 repeating itself—Hopkins was given only about four weeks to live.

  So as Roosevelt moved to try to lead America unharmed through the world crisis, he was left with only one candidate to back for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1940: himself. Of course, he did not admit that to anyone.

  * When the relevant portions of his diaries are opened to scholars, it will be interesting to read Ike’s comments about his boss.

  † The first draft of the army’s plan was completed in January 1939.

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  FDR’S NEW WORLD STRATEGY

  THE WORLD STRATEGY that Roosevelt had developed in 1939 and with which he entered 1940 rested on the assumption that given sufficient supplies, Britain and France eventually could win the war in Europe. It was a reasonable assumption and one that was held widely. If it held good, then FDR could pursue a foreign policy that allowed him to have it not merely both ways, but all ways, in a presidential election year.

  The American public was pro-Ally but still antiwar, and the President’s policy of equipping Britain and France to defeat Germany on their own was calculated to satisfy both of those not necessarily compatible feelings—while at the same time accomplishing long-standing domestic policy objectives in creating jobs and wealth. Indeed, as stock price movements on the New York Stock Exchange had anticipated, rearmament in the end would eliminate the problems in the American economy that the New Deal had never been able to solve.

  IN THE WINTER OF 1940 Kennedy and Bullitt found themselves on vacation in the United States at the same time. Privately Kennedy had grown to have a low opinion of Bullitt (“He is … rattlebrained.… His judgment is pathetic and I am afraid of his influence on F.D.R. because they think alike …”), but had continued to maintain an outward show of cordiality.

  Learning that Bullitt was giving an interview to Joseph Patterson, owner of the New York Daily News, and News writer Doris Fleeson, Kennedy came by. He was a friend of the two journalists, and interrupted their conversation with Bullitt to interjec
t views of his own. Kennedy violently denounced Roosevelt, and when the journalists left, Bullitt told him he was being disloyal and should not speak that way in front of the press. Bullitt later informed Ickes that “Joe said he would say what he god-damned pleased before whom he god-damned pleased”—to which Bullitt had replied that Kennedy was “abysmally ignorant on foreign affairs” and should keep his mouth shut. Bullitt told Ickes that he would never speak to Kennedy again.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1940, as Britain and France continued to quarrel about how to respond to the Soviet threat in Finland, the German war machine sprang to life. On April 9 Nazi forces invaded Norway and Denmark, overrunning both countries swiftly and providing a foretaste of wars of the future: the Oslo and Stavanger airfields were captured by the first paratroop attacks ever mounted.

  In Washington on the night of April 10, after the United States had received the news from Europe that Denmark had surrendered, General Marshall attended a dinner to which Senator Byrnes had invited him and a handful of Senate leaders. The suggestion had come from South Carolina financier Bernard Baruch, who was closely associated with Byrnes. Baruch had told Marshall that “the Army has never gotten its real story over” and had suggested that Byrnes arrange the meeting.

  Marshall was desperate. He could not obtain the money to build his army. Congress would not provide the sums needed, and the President, whose strategy did not envisage the need for an army, seemingly took no interest in the matter. All night and into the morning Marshall told the senators at the Byrnes dinner of the shortages the War Department could not fill. Marshall told them: “I feel culpable. My job as Chief of Staff is to convince you of our needs and I have utterly failed. I don’t know what to do.”

  A Colorado senator, Alva Adams, a leader of the Democratic party in the Senate, made a decision for himself and the others: “You get every God damn thing you want,” he said.