The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Was an underground bunker necessarily the best idea, though? Morgenthau had queried. Hitler’s Berlin bunker (Vorbunker) had been constructed beneath the garden of the Reichskanzlei in 1936, and another at Wolf’s Lair, his forward headquarters in the Masurian forest near Rastenburg in East Prussia in the winter of 1940–41. But new information from Britain indicated to Morgenthau—an inveterate believer in research—that bunkers below ground were even more susceptible to bomb damage than above-ground fortified premises, owing to the transmission of subterranean shock waves.

  “The suggestion,” General Fleming told the Treasury secretary as he unrolled a map of Pennsylvania Avenue, was therefore “to build about a five story building on that site, a complete blackout building. No windows at all. It can be made—it would have about two hundred seventy-five thousand square feet of floor space. We can make it so that there is living quarters and everything else there. It can go ahead and just stand a long siege, that building. It has a very heavy reinforced roof”4—in fact, at twelve feet thick it would be only eight feet less thick than the latest windowless Admiralty building in London, a veritable fortress near Churchill’s War Rooms.

  In actuality Churchill had declined to use the Admiralty Citadel, referring to it later as “a vast monstrosity which weighs upon the Horse Guards Parade.”5 Such a windowless, above-ground fortress had definite advantages over a below-ground complex, General Fleming assured the Treasury secretary, however. Within the building, the “farther down the safer it is, so the ground floor and basement are completely safe,” he claimed, and extolled its virtues: an above-ground reinforced-concrete building, like a medieval castle, capable of housing “fifteen to twenty thousand people.” The building would be “about a hundred and forty-four feet deep,” and would accommodate “Treasury, State, and the Executive Offices,” as well as the senior military personnel. “I think he [the President] probably wants some of the higher staff officers of the Army and Navy in there,” General Fleming had explained to Morgenthau. The President would have his own access via a secret tunnel from the White House that would branch off the current zig-zag tunnel being dug to the basement shelter in the Treasury’s gold vaults—avoiding trees.

  “That will please the President. He and I both like trees,” Morgenthau had commented. Claiming that “the President asked me to get together and have ready a building which would house the White House staff, State, and Treasury,” Morgenthau had then telephoned General “Pa” Watson, the President’s appointments secretary, on December 15, 1941, to say they had an architect’s plan for the bunker, had already purchased virtually the complete site, and were “ready to go ahead. I’d like to show it to the President, with General Fleming, and it would take about five minutes.” He even had the money—although, as Morgenthau wisely cautioned, “I don’t want to go ahead and order a seven million dollar building without the President seeing it.”

  The monster complex was not the only fortification Morgenthau wanted in order to protect “the Boss,” as the President was called. As in Alice’s Wonderland, Morgenthau and his team of security advisers also planned a thirty-feet-deep interim bunker in the grounds of the White House itself, with eight-feet-thick walls and ceiling, inside of which was a second, interior box-like room with walls two feet thick, which “gives you a pretty good protection”—though not against a “four thousand pound bomb.” It was to be dug in front of the White House, “for the President and for our communications center,” and would protect against . . .

  Here the Treasury secretary was unclear. General Fleming had explained that the U.S. Air Corps had told him to expect only “token raids,” for the moment—planes that would “come in and terrify the population, show what they can do. They would have to come in from a carrier some place. That therefore limits the size of the bomb that can be carried to about two thousand pounds.”

  German or Japanese air raids were not the only danger envisaged, it appeared; there might also be enemy ground forces parachuted in and deployed against the President and even Congress, General Fleming had added.

  The mention of Congress complicated the matter still further. While the bunker plans for the President were being prepared, there were now other, equally zealous proposals also put forward to protect the capital—and Capitol. There were to be machine-gun nests protected by sandbags everywhere, including on the roof of the White House; bulletproof glass in the President’s office and study windows. Moreover, the White House itself would no longer be white. It would be repainted, Fleming had explained, in camouflage colors, with a fifteen-feet-high “sand-bag barricade” that would go “completely around the White House building and Executive Offices” or West Wing.6

  Even Fleming expressed skepticism as to whether the President, who loved history and had been for some years planning a museum in the new East Wing in order to house the many artifacts and documents he and his predecessors had been given, would tolerate such draconian changes—especially given his love of trees and landscaping. “It is believed the President would not permit it,” Fleming had warned Morgenthau about the great earthwork/barricade proposal—or indeed the other plans.

  Such wariness as to the President’s response was well founded. General Watson called Morgenthau back on the afternoon of December 15, 1941, to say that not only would the President not see the Treasury secretary, but he was not pleased. “He said you were crazy as hell. He’s not going to build that building.”7

  “He asked me to!” Morgenthau had vainly protested.

  General Watson, however, repudiated this claim, quoting the exact words the President had used and which he wanted Watson to convey to Secretary Morgenthau. “‘Why,’ he said, ‘tell him he’s crazy, what is he talking about?’”8

  Putting the kibosh on Morgenthau’s bunker idea had turned out to be but the tip of the President’s derision. To Morgenthau’s chagrin, Roosevelt had been equally disparaging about Morgenthau’s idea to cancel the traditional lighting of the Christmas tree, in front of the White House, on Christmas Eve. General Albert Cox had warned how dangerous such a public illumination would be—a veritable invitation to the enemy—saying, “you might just as well put up an airplane beacon right in front of the White House.” The President had remained adamant, however. Morgenthau was thus forced to drop this and any idea of a fortified government control center or bunker. “We’ll have to let it rest there until the President changes his mind,” Morgenthau had acknowledged wearily on December 22.

  The President hadn’t changed his mind, however—even after the Prime Minister’s long stay over Christmas. The notion of a “token raid,” launched from “a carrier some place,” seemed too remote a possibility to take seriously—though the idea itself lodged in the Commander in Chief’s capacious mind as something the U.S. might well carry out against the enemy.

  Maps were a different matter. The President loved maps, just as he loved stamps—a hobby that had become the more passionate the less he himself could travel, owing to his disability. It was no surprise, then, when the President ordered that something similar to Churchill’s portable map-and-filing system be installed in the White House.

  “I can’t think how I’m going to get on when you take your Map Room away,” the President had said to Churchill before his departure. “I shall feel quite lost.”

  “But Franklin, you must have a Map Room of your own. That shall be my parting present,” Churchill had responded. “And you shall have my lieutenant to help make it and to run it for you. Lieutenant Cox, how would you like to work for the President?”9

  Sublieutenant Cox had been thrilled. When first introduced to Mr. Roosevelt, he’d “found my hand taken in a warm, strong grasp and saw two piercing eyes looking into mine with a kindly twinkle, and the wide mouth was curved up in an understanding grin.”10 It had been clear to Cox from the start how deeply Churchill admired the President—Cox writing to his mother in England how the Prime Minister had said to him, “What a wonderful man that is. It is a mercy f
or mankind he is where he is at this moment.”11

  The Prime Minister, Cox recalled, was like a “miniature whirlwind,” his mind forever racing, calculating, preparing. The President seemed the opposite—as if no burden, however great, would ever dent his smile. “He is an amazingly great man,” Cox described his feelings to his mother, “though not as fiery as the P.M. . . . He is a great admirer of Churchill’s, but the P.M.’s energy seems to have worn him out a bit during the past few days, and I can well understand it!”12 “Your man has worn me out so I am taking the day in bed,” the President had stated in a message to Cox, when Churchill briefly flew to Canada. “I guess he’s worn you out too, so I suggest you take the day off,” he ordered—an order “I obeyed,” noted the sublieutenant, gratefully.13

  Cox’s “temporary” commission was to train a U.S. officer in the mechanics of setting up and running a map room for the Commander in Chief. “Roosevelt wanted something comparable to the Map Room,” explained Commander George Elsey seventy years later, and “asked his naval aide [Captain Beardall] to establish some form of communications center at the White House.” However, the idea was never, Elsey was at pains to point out, intended to be a version of Churchill’s London War Rooms—which soon led to yet another round of Alice-in-Washington misunderstanding when Captain Beardall “looked around and found this young Reserve officer,” Lieutenant Robert Montgomery, a famous former Hollywood actor.14

  “Montgomery had been on duty in London, as an aide to the U.S. naval attaché, and had become acquainted with Churchill’s War Room,” Elsey (who had been a naval ensign working for Lieutenant William C. Mott, who was transferred to the White House as an aide to Captain Beardall) explained. It was from Captain Mott that Elsey had obtained a firsthand account of how the President had put his überzealous military aides in their place.

  Roosevelt had “responded positively right away, because Montgomery had quite a reputation as a movie actor.” The movie actor, however, completely misunderstood the President’s instructions. Whether Montgomery was “got at” by Secretary Morgenthau or other conniving figures such as General Fleming remains unclear, but the suggestions he began to make for a fortified bunker seemed eerily similar to Morgenthau’s. “Robert Montgomery had the same sort of grandiose plans,” Elsey explained with a laugh more than a half century later. “He had been on duty in London, he was familiar with the catacombs there, and he prepared the same sort of thing to be built on Constitution Avenue, across from where the War and Navy Departments were.”

  The President, when he heard Montgomery’s latest scheme, was as appalled as he had been by Morgenthau’s plans the month before. “All Roosevelt wanted,” Elsey pointed out, “was simply one secure spot in the White House itself which he and only his immediate associates would have access to—not something for the whole military to use!” In particular the President had no wish to set up a “control room.” Montgomery’s proposition was “beyond anything FDR wanted,” Elsey made clear, given the accretion of myths and misconceptions that had built up in subsequent years. “This was in no sense to be a command center, as Churchill’s War Room was,” the President’s former aide emphasized, for that was simply not how the President operated—nor wished, instinctively, to operate in directing the war.

  “And that was it!” Elsey remarked with finality. The idea of a presidential control room on the lines of Churchill’s London bunker, or Hitler’s bunkers in Berlin and Rastenburg, was irremediably nixed—indeed, its progenitor was soon fired. “[Robert] Montgomery was brought down to earth” and removed from the White House, Elsey recalled. Instead of a grand above- or below-ground bunker, the President merely wanted a small, secure room to house his secret signals to and from Allied leaders and his own military advisers. And with that in mind it was temporarily installed “right across a narrow corridor from the Oval Office in the West Wing,” in the Fish Room.

  “It was called the Fish Room because that was where Herbert Hoover had mounted his fish trophies,” Elsey recounted, amused by the irony. “Roosevelt had replaced Hoover’s fish with his own fish, and it became the Fish Room.” Instead of fish stretching across its walls, however, there were soon global and campaign maps, just as Churchill had recently mounted in the Monroe Room. Even this setup proved unsatisfactory to the President, however—in fact within a few days Roosevelt decided it was no good. “It was too public, there was too much access to it—the room had been used by the President and senior White House staff members for all kinds of meetings, and there just wasn’t adequate security,” Elsey explained of the Map Room’s demise in the West Wing. “Too many newspaper people and others pushing around! So it was moved.”

  The new location that the President chose was in the presidential mansion itself—installed, by even greater irony, in “the Museum,” a small ladies’ cloakroom, next to the Diplomatic Reception Room, where guests had traditionally hung their coats and freshened up. This room was on the ground floor of the White House, below the formal entrance vestibule of the mansion. Barely twenty-four feet by nineteen, the new Map Room would be closer to the President’s elevator, so he could visit the secret communications sanctum in private, from his bedroom or study, without needing to go to the West Wing at all.

  In due course, the cloakroom was easily converted. The door to the beautiful Diplomatic Reception Room was blocked off, the elegant wood-paneled walls were faced with soft wallboard, and maps of the world and of the various battlefronts were mounted at eye level. “The ground situation was marked with grease-coated pens on plastic sheets over the maps,” recalled Elsey, who began working under Lieutenant Mott at the new Map Room in April 1942, after Montgomery’s departure. In the middle of the room, filing cabinets were installed for the signals that came in and went out, brought by army and navy couriers in locked leather pouches, with the latest information and intelligence. Most important, Mott explained to Elsey, were the President’s secret, direct communications with Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek, as well as top-secret messages and reports from the secretaries of war and navy and chiefs of staff for the President. But what struck Elsey later was not only Roosevelt’s deliberate decision not to replicate Churchill’s bunker or War Rooms, but the President’s reasons for doing so.

  “During the early days the President visited the growing room with keen interest,” Cox explained, “remarking on the progress of construction and suggesting modifications about the fittings and the placing of the furniture. When the room was at last working, Mr. Roosevelt’s visits tended to occur towards the end of his working day, usually just before 7 o’clock, but as the collection, evaluation and display of information increased in efficiency, he came to pay a regular routine visit at 10.45 A.M., immediately before his conference with his Chiefs of Staff.”15

  As time went on, however, the President’s visits to the Map Room grew less frequent—the President possessing, as Cox recalled, an almost photographic memory for geography. By the time Elsey joined the staff in April, “the President rarely came into the Map Room,” Elsey later recalled. Instead, Roosevelt asked that important communications from his global counterparts—Churchill, Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek—as well as other secret signals be brought to him, wherever he was. Even more intriguingly to the young ensign, the President insisted that outgoing presidential messages continue to be enciphered and sent by the Navy Department, while incoming messages be deciphered and sent over by the Army Department. In this way neither department had more than half the story. It was “characteristic of Roosevelt,” reflected Elsey with a chuckle—“all too characteristic of Roosevelt! Wanting to be the only person who knew everything.”

  The simple truth remained, however, that although manned eventually by a six-officer staff and guarded twenty-four hours a day, the President’s new Map Room was only ever intended to be his own secret store of information or reference.16 It was never meant to be a control center like Churchill’s War Rooms—for by the time Ensign Elsey was posted to the Map Room in Apri
l 1942, Roosevelt clearly had developed his own distinctive vision of how he would direct the war as commander in chief.

  First off, the President seemed to have no intention of rubbing shoulders continually with his military chiefs, as Churchill did; indeed, the army, air, and navy chiefs would not even have access to his new Map Room, unless the President or one of his immediate staff personally accompanied them into it. The Commander in Chief’s “control center” would remain, by contrast, the same as it had always been, upstairs: his bedroom, or his beloved, cluttered, but welcoming Oval Study, next to his bedroom; or his larger, equally cluttered oval-shaped room, the Oval Office in the recently rebuilt West Wing, connected to the White House via a colonnade.

  From those rooms, the Commander in Chief would exercise his unique approach to military command—hoping it would prove more effective than had Churchill’s, thus far.

  The Plan of Escape

  Worn down by cares at the White House, following Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, FDR claims he is leaving Washington on August 3, 1941, for a private fishing trip aboard the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac.

  Placentia Bay

  Instead of fishing, the President secretly transfers to the USS Augusta, flagship of the Atlantic Fleet. He then speeds to Argentia, the new U.S. military base in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. There, on August 9, 1941, the former assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy invites the former First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to board—and to dine with him and his “advisers.”

  The Atlantic Charter

  Using the U.S. destroyer McDougal as a floating bridge, the President boards Churchill’s battleship, HMS Prince of Wales, where he walks the length of the vessel, supported by his son Major Elliott Roosevelt for a binational Sunday worship.