The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  And—the U.S. secretary of war, Colonel Henry Stimson, feared—eventual war with the United States.3

  Three weeks later a date for the Anglo-American summit “was finally decided”; it would take place, the President and Prime Minister concurred, in a mutually agreed upon location between August 8 and 10, 1941.4 The initial site chosen was the British island of Bermuda. Canada, though, considered by the President to be safer, met with final approval by both leaders.

  An official U.S. presidential visit to the capital city of Ottawa was mooted as cover for the meeting, with a secret side trip to the coast allowing Roosevelt to meet Churchill on his arrival. A problem was foreseen, however, in other British Dominion premiers asking to join the powwow. Such a gathering would have raised all sorts of political questions back in Washington, where a suspicious, isolationist Congress would have had to be informed—and involved.

  It had thus been decided that only the President and Mr. Churchill would meet, aboard their anchored battleships—preferably in a protected sixty-mile-wide gulf off the Newfoundland coast called Placentia Bay, named for a French naval station that had existed there before the British conquest. Though the waters were Canadian, the naval station at Argentia had been ceded to the United States for ninety-nine years as a quid pro quo in the previous year’s “destroyers for bases” deal to help Britain fight the Nazis. Following its acquisition it had been expanded to provide U.S. Army Air Force protection, and was already handling U.S. Navy minesweepers. Shore-based communications could also be provided, if required. From the President’s perspective, however, it would above all be an American venue—putting the Prime Minister at a disadvantage, in the same way that visitors to Louis XIV were made to climb a thousand steps at Versailles before meeting the French monarch.

  “Escape,” for the President, meant, of course, from something, namely the American press: mainstay of the nation’s vigilant democracy, but also a millstone in terms of executive privacy and confidentiality—and security. If word of the prospective meeting leaked, it would endanger not only the President’s life but the Prime Minister’s as well, drawing German U-boats in the North Atlantic to the area.

  More threatening to Roosevelt’s presidential authority in a time of continuing isolationism, though, would be the fierce debate aroused across America about the purpose of such a meeting. The majority of the American public (as expressed in opinion polls, which Roosevelt watched carefully)5 remained resolutely opposed to being drawn into the war raging in Europe. At the height of the previous year’s election campaign, the President had given his “most solemn assurance” that there was “no secret treaty, no secret obligation, no secret commitment, no secret understanding in any shape or form, direct or indirect, with any other Government, to involve this nation in any war or for any other purpose.”6 In the summer of 1941 there were still isolationists aplenty—encouraged by Hitler’s turn to the east—watching to see that the President kept his word. Only Congress could declare war—or alter the terms of the November 1939 Neutrality Act.7 For the President to end or breach American neutrality without congressional backing would risk his impeachment.

  It was for personal reasons as well that the President was anxious to keep away the press and other voyeurs. He wanted the meeting to be intimate: an opportunity to finally get to know in person the British prime minister, with whom he had begun secretly corresponding in 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland and Churchill was made First Lord of the Admiralty. Once Churchill had become prime minister in May 1940, the President had continued to bypass his own U.S. ambassador to London, the nefarious appeaser and isolationist Joseph P. Kennedy, and the communications between Roosevelt and Churchill had become more and more grave, as the President first agreed to provide American mothballed warships to the British, then brokered through Congress the vast Lend-Lease deal to provide munitions, aircraft, and weapons on credit. Instead of being grateful, however, the Prime Minister kept asking for more—indeed, to the President’s irritation, Churchill had recently told Roosevelt’s emissary in London, Harry Hopkins, that he would be bringing all his military chiefs with him to the Placentia Bay summit. The President therefore had no option but, on Hopkins’s advice, to take with him his own service chiefs: stern General George Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army; bluff but more junior Major General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces (the Army Air Corps and GHQ Air Force, which was still a division of the U.S. Army);8 and Admiral Harold R. “Betty” Stark, quiet, bespectacled chief of naval operations. As commander of the Atlantic Fleet, responsible for the small presidential contingent’s safe naval passage to Newfoundland, the irascible and somewhat anti-British Admiral Ernest “Ernie” King would be a party to the summit, too.

  On a very hot August 3, 1941, Roosevelt left Washington by train. That evening he embarked on the presidential yacht (which had a crew of fifty-four) at New London’s submarine base, in Connecticut—unaccompanied by the three Associated Press journalists who typically followed Roosevelt in a separate vessel on other such “fishing trips.”

  The USS Potomac motored north, anchoring that night off Martha’s Vineyard, across the water from Cape Cod. At dawn the next morning Roosevelt secretly sped away by launch from the two-deck, 376-ton motor yacht, leaving a group of U.S. Secret Service stand-ins to impersonate him and his private guests when it continued its stately way up the Cape Cod Canal. From the shore the white vessel would be (and was) seen and waved to by peacetime summer holidaymakers. In truth the U.S. commander in chief was by then aboard the flagship of Admiral King’s Atlantic Fleet, the USS Augusta: a ninety-two-hundred-ton, six-hundred-feet-long Northampton Class heavy cruiser, manned by more than a thousand sailors and armed with nine eight-inch guns, eight five-inch guns, and six torpedo tubes, lurking off Martha’s Vineyard.

  Admiral Stark and General Marshall were already onboard when the President arrived. A handful of other members of the presidential party, including General Arnold, had embarked on an accompanying heavy cruiser, the New Orleans–class USS Tuscaloosa. Escorted by four new American destroyers, the VIPs then sailed north toward a summit that, the officers finally became aware, promised to make history.

  Speeding at times at thirty-two knots, the American presidential party raced through patchy fog to reach the Newfoundland rendezvous ahead of time. Roosevelt had not even told his secretary of war, Colonel Stimson, about the conference, nor his secretary of the navy, Mr. Frank Knox—nor even his secretary of state, Mr. Cordell Hull, who was on medical leave. The President had not even told his secretary, Grace Tully! He had only informed General Marshall and Admiral Stark three days before departure—with orders that General Arnold, the air force commander, be invited to attend but not informed of the purpose or destination of the voyage before embarking on the USS Tuscaloosa. There was to be no fraternization, or planning, before the meeting: nothing that could later be denounced as preparatory to a secret agreement or alliance.

  By contrast, Prime Minister Winston Churchill had great plans for just such an affiliation.

  Buoyed by excitement and hope, Winston Spencer Churchill—son, after all, of an American mother—had ordered his chiefs of staff to draw up a “Future Strategy Paper,” setting out how Britain could win the war if the United States became an ally. He had also proudly sent secret signals to the prime ministers of all the Dominions of the British Empire to let them know of the impending conference—stating that, although none of them had been invited, he “hoped that from the meeting some momentous agreement might be reached.”9 Setting off “with a retinue which Cardinal Wolsey might have envied” (as his private secretary sarcastically noted in his diary),10 the Prime Minister had even written in excitement to Queen Elizabeth, consort of the monarch, to tell her of his great expectations.

  “I must say, I do not think our friend would have asked me to go so far, for what must be a meeting of world notice, unless he had in mind some further forward step,” Churchill confided, explaining why he w
as leaving his country at such a critical time.11 He had ordered grouse and rare turtle soup as among the provisions he would take, as well as a full military band. He would travel aboard his latest radar-equipped forty-three-thousand-ton battleship, HMS Prince of Wales. As he had presumptuously signaled to the President from Scapa Flow, Scotland, on August 4, 1941: “We are just off. It is twenty-seven years ago today that Huns began their last war. We must make a good job of it this time. Twice ought to be good enough.”12

  Churchill’s hope that the President was about to declare war on Nazi Germany, or was going to promise to solicit the backing of the U.S. Congress for such a declaration, or was perhaps willing to engineer a casus belli (as Churchill himself had been accused of doing in 1915, over munitions he had ordered to be taken aboard the ill-fated neutral American liner, the SS Lusitania), was understandable, but completely erroneous. Roosevelt had no intention whatsoever of entering hostilities in Europe to save the British Empire—especially its colonial empire. Instead, he wished merely to get the measure of the British arch-imperialist—and see if he might bend him to a different purpose.

  Poor Churchill, who rested up on the voyage and barely interacted with his own chiefs of staff, had no idea what was coming. Nor, ironically, did the U.S. chiefs of staff, who were not told the object of the meeting, or their roles, beyond that of advising the President.

  Roosevelt genuinely respected his chiefs of staff as spokesmen of the armed services they directed, but the truth was, he had as yet little or no faith in their military, let alone their political, judgment. Almost everything they and their war departments had forecast or recommended to him as commander in chief since May 1941 had turned out wrong.13 The “preparations” that the War Department had reported for a German drive through Spain and Northwest Africa to Dakar, prior to an anticipated assault on South America,14 had proven but a ruse. Instead, the Führer had invaded the Soviet Union, on June 22, with more than three million troops, thirty-six hundred tanks, and six hundred thousand vehicles, supported by twenty-five hundred aircraft.

  Far from conquering Russia in a matter of weeks, however, as forecast both by the secretary of war, the U.S. War Department,15 and the U.S. military attaché in Moscow,16 the vast 180-division German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe forces sent into battle looked by early August as if they were meeting stiff resistance in the Soviet Union.17 Moreover, far from abandoning their hold on the Middle East—as American military observers were still advising the British to do, but the President was not18—the British were holding General Erwin Rommel at bay in North Africa. British forces, in fact, had successfully driven into Iraq and Syria to deter Vichy French assistance to Hitler. As a result, neither Turkey nor Portugal, nor Spain, had moved a finger to help Hitler.19 Even Marshal Pétain’s egregious puppet government in Vichy had refused to alter the terms of its 1940 surrender to Hitler and permit French military cooperation with the Nazis. Hitler, the President was convinced, was not going to have things his own way.

  It was not only the predictions of the U.S. War Department that were wrong, the President felt. The advice given by the U.S. Navy Department had seemed to him, as a former assistant secretary of the navy, to be strategically unsound—as well as psychologically naïve. The chief of naval operations and his director of plans favored a one-ocean navy operating solely in the Atlantic, with U.S. forces in the Philippines and Pacific Islands left to defend themselves against potential Japanese attack.20 By contrast, the President had been determined to bluff both Hitler and the Japanese emperor, Hirohito, by keeping one U.S. fleet in the Pacific to deter Japan—still embroiled in a vicious land war on the Chinese mainland—from new conquests, while using the other U.S. fleet in the Atlantic to assert its naval authority over the waters of the Western Hemisphere. Hitler, the President was certain, had his hands full in Russia, and would not dare declare war on the United States as long as the U.S. was seen to be strong. In the meantime, moreover, the President would do his best to cajole Congress into expansion of the U.S. Armed Forces, to be ready for war once it came—as, inevitably, he was sure it must.

  Roosevelt’s firm belief about Russian resistance—backed by advice from old Russia hands like Joseph Davies, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow—had been mocked by senior officers in the War Department. However, Harry Hopkins’s latest signals from Moscow, where he had met personally with Marshal Stalin, had given Roosevelt renewed confidence in his own judgment. The President had therefore decided, in his own mind, America’s best course of action—but it was not yet something he was willing to share with his chiefs of staff or his cabinet. Nor with Winston Churchill, the political leader of a foreign, fading colonial power.

  To the surprise of his military advisers, then, the Commander in Chief had ordered all plans for U.S. military operations against the Azores, the defense of Brazil, as well as possible U.S. occupation of Vichy French territories in the Caribbean (which could be used as German naval bases) to be shelved. Instead, on July 9, 1941, he had formally instructed the secretary of war to draw up, in concert with the navy, a secret military plan or estimate: what exactly it would ultimately require of Congress and the U.S. military in terms of men, money, and machines to win the war against Hitler—and possibly the Japanese—if war came the following year, 1942, or, preferably, in 1943. That report was not due to be completed until September 1941. Thus, as the President set off for his sea summit with Churchill, his purpose was not to declare war on Germany, as the Prime Minister evidently hoped, but to see how war could be avoided for the moment.

  With the press fooled as to Roosevelt’s whereabouts, and his own staff, the cabinet, and even the U.S. chiefs of staff kept deliberately in the dark about the purpose of the powwow with Churchill, the most extraordinary drama now took place. Only the President—who seemed almost absurdly confident—appeared to have any idea what was going on, or of what was intended or likely to happen.

  “There is I fear little chance of my getting to Campobello,” the President had apologized in a letter to his elderly mother, who was summering at the Roosevelt camping estate off the coast of Newfoundland—but “I am feeling really well & the war is now encouraging to my peace of mind—in spite of the deceits & wiles of the Japs.”21

  To his distant cousin Daisy (an outwardly prim spinster with whom he had formed a quite intimate friendship over the past decade), Roosevelt was more jokey. “Strange thing happened this morning,” he wrote her en voyage on August 5—for he, his doctor, and his personal staff, even his beloved little Scottie, Fala, had “suddenly found ourselves transferred with all our baggage & mess crew from the little ‘Potomac’ to the Great Big Cruiser ‘Augusta’! And then, the island of Martha’s Vineyard disappeared in the distance, and as we head out into the Atlantic all we can see is our protecting escort, a heavy cruiser and four destroyers. Curiously enough the Potomac still flies my flag & tonight will be seen by thousands as she passes quietly through the Cape Cod Canal, guarded on shore by Secret Service and State Troopers while in fact the Pres. will be about 250 miles away. Even at my ripe old age I feel a thrill in making a get-away—especially from the American press. It is a smooth sea & a lovely day.”22

  The President was, in short, enjoying himself, hugely. Having bypassed Secretary Hull—who did not learn of the trip until Roosevelt was aboard the USS Augusta23—the President had secretly summoned Hull’s undersecretary, Sumner Welles: the handsome professional diplomat, six feet three inches tall, who had attended the same school and college as FDR and had been a page boy at Roosevelt’s wedding. Welles was, the President instructed, to travel separately, joining the U.S. team in Newfoundland. In the meantime Welles was ordered to start drafting a declaration of the President’s postwar peace aims.

  Postwar peace aims?

  It was this document, not a putative agreement to enter the war, that the President had determined would make history. Although Roosevelt had, at the last minute, decided to take extra people to the meeting, they would still amount to less
than half the number the British were bringing. Churchill had signaled that his party would include twenty-eight officers, military planners, and backup clerks, as well as (unbeknown to the President) two journalists and five photographers. By contrast, the President had limited himself to General Marshall, Admiral Stark, General Arnold, Admiral King, and only a handful of their staff; also his White House doctor, his appointments secretary, and his secret-intelligence officer24—advisers to the President who would, as Roosevelt made clear, be under strict orders to say nothing that would in any way commit the U.S. military, beyond its current Western Hemisphere patrol and military-supply duties under the congressionally authorized Lend-Lease.

  In short, any talk of operational military cooperation with the British, let alone an alliance, was streng verboten, the President told his military contingent when they finally assembled in his cabin onboard the USS Augusta, shortly after their arrival in Placentia Bay on August 7, 1941. They were merely to listen to the British.

  Marshall, Stark, and Arnold were stunned.

  As General Arnold noted in his diary on August 4 aboard the Tuscaloosa as it steamed north from New York, where he had boarded, he hadn’t even brought enough clothes for the trip. “Thank God there is a laundry aboard. Where are we going? And why? Certainly the crew and the ship’s officers do not know. Twice I was about to be informed and twice someone came up and I heard nothing.”25