With the exception of Russia, the great strength of America’s assumed allies in such a war would be in naval and air forces—forces that “may prevent wars from being lost, and by weakening enemy strength may greatly contribute to victory,” the Victory Plan acknowledged. “By themselves, however, naval and air forces seldom, if ever, win important wars,” the report continued. “It should be recognized as an almost invariable rule that only land armies can finally win wars.”
Those land armies would, with the exception of Russia, have to be predominantly American.
The President’s Victory Plan strategy, then, had already been clearly established in September 1941, months before the U.S. entered the war. In particular, Roosevelt’s strong doubts about the feasibility of successfully landing American forces across the English Channel anytime soon had, at his insistence, been clearly addressed in the document. After all, had not Hitler, even at the height of his military conquests in 1940, balked at attempting a crossing of the Channel to defeat the remnants of British forces after Dunkirk? It was, in the words of the Victory Plan, “out of the question to expect the United States and its Associates to undertake in the near future a sustained and successful land offensive against the center of the German power”—something that was beyond even Soviet Russia, with its millions of troops fighting in the field.
How then was Germany to be ultimately defeated? “It being obvious that the Associated Powers can not defeat Germany by defensive operations, effective strategic offensive methods other than an early land offensive in Europe must be employed,” the report had summarized.22 A two-part strategy would have to be adopted—defensive at first. The Associated Powers, or Allies, would have initially to concentrate on cauterizing the ambitions of the dictators. This should be done by “a continuation of the economic blockade,” and by “the prosecution of land offensives in distant regions where German troops can exert only a fraction of their total strength.” In the case of Japan, a “strong defense of Malaysia,” would be necessary, as well as an “economic offensive through blockade; a reduction of Japanese military power by raids; and Chinese offensive against the Japanese forces of occupation.”
Cauterization would not bring victory, however. In the second stage of American strategy, American armies would have to go on the offensive: aiming first at Rome and Berlin, then at Tokyo.
The route of such offensive action in Europe was here the issue—since the planning and especially the production targets for eventual offensive action would be contingent upon that decision. In setting out the “major strategic objectives” in the ultimate defeat of Germany, the report had emphasized—at the President’s specific direction—that an initial, indirect step in an American march on Rome and Berlin be rehearsed: namely via Northwest Africa—currently not occupied by German forces—which the President saw as the vital strategic first act in defeating Germany.
American occupation of French Northwest Africa—with or without Vichy help—would not only deny German access to the Atlantic Islands (a possible steppingstone to South America), the President was certain, but would provide the United States with “a potential base for a future land offensive,” as the Victory Plan concluded. “In French North and West Africa, French troops exist which are potential enemies of Germany, provided they are re-equipped and satisfactory political conditions are established by the United States. Because the British Commonwealth has but few troops available and because of the unfriendly relations between the British and Weygand [Vichy] regime, it seems clear that a large proportion of the troops of the Associated Powers employed in this region must be United States troops.”23
This, then, had been the President’s blueprint, prepared over the summer of 1941, for prosecuting a future global war, both in the short term and the long term—once hostilities came. The typed report, with numerous appendices, had been dated September 11, 1941, and had borne the President’s imprint and imprimatur on every page. Moreover, in the weeks after its preparation, the President’s predilection for landings of U.S. forces in Vichy-controlled French Northwest Africa had only grown stronger.
On October 3, 1941, for example, the U.S. secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, had confided to Lord Halifax that “what he wanted to see happen”—as Ambassador Halifax immediately reported to Prime Minister Churchill—“was for the Americans to send 150,000 men to Casablanca and join hands through an assenting Weygand with us [the British] in North Africa. The President, according to him, was much interested in this idea. I should suppose we are some way off that yet but the fact that they should be thinking about it at all is interesting.”24
Interesting it was! A giant pincer movement, using American naval, air, and ground forces that would, with British forces pressing from Libya, crush the German-Italian Panzer Army in Africa and provide a base and springboard on the very threshold of Europe—forcing Hitler to defend the continent from Norway to the Mediterranean! As Halifax had also learned, however, the President’s enthusiasm for such an indirect strategy was by no means shared by the aging Republican secretary of war—or even by General Marshall, who saw North African landings as too dangerous to undertake, and in any event a distraction from the most direct route to Berlin. They had thus favored U.S. troops being sent directly to Britain in the event of war, thence to be put into combat on a more straightforward path to the capital of Hitler’s Third Reich, beginning with cross-Channel landings, mounted from England’s southern coast against the coast of mainland France.
A week later, on October 10, 1941, over lunch at his desk at the White House, the President had confided his Northwest Africa plan in person to the British ambassador,25 informing Halifax he’d “told Stimson and Marshall to make a study of the proposal to send an American Expeditionary Force to West Africa. This had greatly excited Stimson and Marshall, who thought he was ‘going off the deep end’ and embarking on a dispersal of effort that they thought unwise,” Halifax had secretly reported to Churchill in London the next day, October 11, 1941. “He had explained to them, however, that he did not contemplate anything immediate, but none the less wanted the question studied,” Halifax had cabled the Prime Minister. The titular Vichy leader, Maréchal Pétain, “might die,” and his understudy, General Weygand, “might feel himself released from his personal pledge of loyalty” to Pétain and to Hitler, “and things might move. I don’t suppose that all this is to be taken very seriously at present, but it is a pointer,” the ambassador had added in his letter to Churchill.26 The long term, in other words, might well become the short term.
Given that America was not at war with Germany at the time, such a difference of opinion between the President and his War Department officials had remained academic—but potentially problematic, too, Halifax had wisely recognized. It would be unfortunate, he felt, if the President’s coalition pincer-strategy were to be defeated, not by the Germans, but by the U.S. War Department.
To check out for himself, Halifax had therefore wisely gone to the Munitions Building to sound out the secretary of war in person that very evening—October 10, 1941, as he informed Churchill. Stimson was dead against U.S. landings in North Africa. “Stimson told me that he was inclined to hold the President off schemes that would dissipate United States effort, the possibilities of which were severely limited”—for Stimson, like General Stilwell (who was initially chosen to lead the Casablanca attack), feared such an operation of war could never succeed—indeed, as the war secretary told the British ambassador in somewhat defeatist language, he was now far from confident the United States could do more than send American troops to help defend Britain against a possible Nazi invasion if, as Stimson suspected, the Russians were defeated in Operation Barbarossa, or sued for peace.
Churchill, in contrast to Colonel Stimson, had been delighted to hear of the President’s “great pet scheme” for North African landings—and had made it his personal task to help the President override Stimson’s objections to it.
Nine days after receiving Halifax�
�s cable, Churchill thus wired to tell the President that, if the United States chose to remain out of the war against Germany, and in the event of German pressure on the Vichy government to grant the Nazis “facilities in French North Africa,” he himself was “holding a force equivalent to one armoured and three field divisions ready with shipping,” that could “either enter Morocco by Casablanca upon French invitation or otherwise help to exploit in the Mediterranean a victory in Libya.”27
The President had smiled at such well-meant Churchillian bravado. How the British, whose performance in amphibious landings since Norway in April 1940 had been uniformly disastrous, imagined that a unilateral British invasion of French Northwest Africa would succeed against hostile Vichy forces without U.S. help did not say much for the Prime Minister’s realism. But the President had said nothing—admiring Churchill’s offensive spirit, and his support for Roosevelt’s strategy.
There the matter of potential American military operations in Europe had rested, up until December 4, 1941. For it was on that day, in the most egregious act of treachery, that Colonel McCormick had published many of the details of the President’s Victory Plan—the entire report to the President having been deliberately leaked by an individual in Stimson’s War Department. Printed by McCormick, it had inevitably found its way straight into Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, announced before the Reichstag on December 11, seven days later.
By then, however, events had swamped the scandal—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor making McCormick’s isolationism risibly naïve. Indeed, in the days after the terrible news from the Far East, there was many a patriot in Washington who, reflecting on the Chicago Tribune’s recent revelations, thanked the Almighty that, despite the disaster in Hawaii, the United States at least had a plan for fighting the war—and in Britain, an ally willing to fight with the U.S. to win it.
In days of preparation for Churchill’s arrival and “the strategic problems which are confronting us in the coming conferences,”28 the President had convened meeting after meeting at the White House. The first had been on December 18, 1941, at 3:00 P.M., a conference at which Stimson, Knox, General Marshall, Admiral Stark, Admiral King, Harry Hopkins, and Admiral Nimitz—the new commander the President had appointed to replace Admiral Kimmel in the Pacific—were present.
“The President then told this conference exactly the nature of the conference which is coming next Monday [December 23, 1941] and who will be there, and he said that he desired us to attend it as his advisers. A paper was produced containing [a] suggested agenda which had been drawn up by the British,” Stimson noted in his diary.29 The President, however, had wanted an American version—and had therefore told his advisers to draw up a counteragenda. America, not Great Britain, was to run the war, the President made clear—not only because the United States would be providing the bulk of the necessary forces to defeat Nazi Germany and Japan, but because the performance of the British so far had been, in all frankness, miserable.
The Japanese invasion of Malaya looked increasingly ominous—aiming toward Singapore, Britain’s primary naval base in the Far East. The Australians and New Zealanders were panicking—with very few British naval, air, or army forces to defend them. Stimson, for his part, was all for “safety first”—and therefore opposed any discussion of offensive action at this point. Defending the American West and East Coasts, helping to defend the British Isles, providing arms to help the British defend the Middle East and India, using American forces to defend Australia and New Zealand—these were the first priorities to be tabled, Stimson thus insisted. Beyond that, he forecast, there were “a number of things on which there will be sharp divergence” between the U.S. Army and the Navy—and between the United States and Great Britain.30
The President was disappointed in his war secretary. He felt it politic, however, not to risk dissension at such a critical moment. Unity of purpose was the foremost consideration, since the whole world was now looking to the United States to take the reins in a global war. The President’s plan was therefore to focus not on the things that might divide his advisers, the armed forces, and the U.S. and British, but on those that bound them together. He therefore laid down his first priority: namely, the moral basis for a coalition war, involving as many allies as possible in the fight against Germany and Japan. His Atlantic Charter should, he told Secretary Hull, now be enshrined in a new declaration of principles that all of America’s allies could sign up to.
Simultaneously, a good working relationship with America’s closest new coalition partner, Great Britain, should be fostered. Allied military strategy should be concerted, he explained—but with Washington, not London, as the central headquarters of the Allies. If, in the next days over Christmas, 1941, he got agreement on these two priorities, the President felt, he would be doing very well, no matter how bad the immediate news “from the front” might be. All would fall into place.
Winston Churchill, for his part, had a very different modus operandi from the President. Where Roosevelt sought to achieve agreement with his wishes by charm and goodwill, Churchill simply relied on his commanding personality and sense of privilege—fueled by an intake of alcohol that made him relatively impervious to criticism or rebuke. Immediately upon his arrival in the White House, the Prime Minister had made himself at home. “We had to remember to have imported brandy after dinner,” Eleanor complained—deeply aware of her own family’s history of alcoholism. “This was something Franklin did not have as a rule.”31 “Never had the staid butlers, ushers, maids and other Executive Mansion workers seen anything like Winston before,” recalled Roosevelt’s Secret Service detail chief—the Prime Minister consuming “brandy and scotch with a grace and enthusiasm that left us all openmouthed in awe.”32
Churchill’s commandeering of the First Lady’s office, the Monroe Room, for his portable maps and files did not endear the Prime Minister to Mrs. Roosevelt, either.
The President did not share his wife’s shock, nor her barely concealed disapproval. He liked eccentricity, which made people the more interesting, he found. Observing the diminutive politician setting up shop in his, the President’s, own residence, Roosevelt was amused—indeed, he wondered how he might turn the Prime Minister’s premature arrival in America into a public relations winner—thus helping him override the concerns of his secretary of war and senior generals in the War and Navy Departments. Hitler’s military success, after all, could not solely be ascribed to German tanks and air power. The Führer had spent years perfecting the art of propaganda, using the dark genius of his associate, Dr. Goebbels—and the sense of national unity they had created in the Third Reich was a fundamental component of German military morale.
Well then, the President recognized, the Associated Powers must do even better! In this respect, Churchill’s presence in the U.S. capital might prove a perfect foil in concealing American disarray—as well as internal dissension over future operations. The Prime Minister’s distinctive, pugnacious personality could be used to advantage—a perception the President put straight into action by asking, over lunch at his cluttered desk in the Oval Study, whether Winston would appear with him at his weekly press conference in the West Wing at 4:00 P.M. on December 23, 1941.
The Prime Minister said he would be delighted to do so. And thus, at one of the darkest moments of the war, before a barrage of cameras, microphones, and journalist’s notepads, the first image of a truly Grand Alliance was created, at the White House, in Washington, D.C.
Gazing at the extraordinary scrimmage of a hundred White House reporters jamming the small room—each one having been screened for security purposes—Roosevelt began with an apology. “I am sorry to have taken so long for all of you to get in, but apparently—I was telling the Prime Minister—the object was to prevent a wolf from coming in here in sheep’s clothing. (Laughter) But I was thereby mixing my metaphors, because I had suggested to him this morning that if he came to this conference he would have to be prepared to
meet the American press, who, compared with the British press—as was my experience in the old days—are ‘wolves’ compared with the British press ‘lambs.’ However, he is quite willing to take on a conference, because we have one characteristic in common. We like new experiences in life.”33
The President’s genuine affection for the Prime Minister was instantly clear to all. “Mr. Roosevelt liked Churchill a great deal,” wrote the AP reporter A. Merriman Smith, later; “disagreed with many of his ideas and suggestions, but nevertheless found his presence stimulating, often to the point of fatigue.”34
Before Churchill stood to speak, however, the President said he wanted “to make it clear that this is a preliminary British-American conference, but that thereby no other Nations are excluded from the general objective of defeating Hitlerism in the world. Just for example, I think the Prime Minister this morning has been consulting with the Dominions. That is especially important, of course, in view of the fact that Australia and New Zealand are very definitely in the danger zone; and we are working out a complete unity of action in regard to the Southwest Pacific. In addition to that, there are a good many Nations besides our own that are at war. . . . I think it is all right to say that Mr. Mackenzie King [prime minister of Canada] will be here later on. In regard to the other Nations, such as the Russians, the Chinese, the Dutch, and a number of other Nations which are—shall I say—overrun by Germany, but which still maintain governments which are operating in the common cause, they also will be on the inside in what we are doing.”
Churchill’s country, then, was but one combatant in a great coalition of nations the President was assembling to stand against Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese. “In addition to that, there are various other Nations, for example a number of [South] American Republics which are actually in the war, and another number of American Republics which although not acting under a declaration of war are giving us very definite and much-needed assistance. It might be called on their part ‘active non-belligerency.’
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