The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Churchill continued to dig in his heels, however, and by March 2, 1942, five days later, the undersecretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, was recording in his diary that his boss, Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, “feels—as I do—that for the last fortnight there has been no direction of the war. War Cabinet doesn’t function—there hasn’t been a meeting of Defence Committee. There’s no hand on the wheel. (Probably due to P.M.’s health). . . . News from everywhere—except Russia—bad. There’s something wrong with us, I fear.”3

  Two days after that, Cadogan noted: “Poor old P.M. in a sour mood and a bad way. I don’t think he’s well and I fear he’s played out.”4

  It was small wonder the Prime Minister was cast down. Not only were British and British Empire troops not fighting as stoutly as he hoped, but Churchill was being asked by Stalin to accept, as the Soviet Union’s price for shouldering the burden of fighting the Nazis, a new treaty by which the Soviets would keep a slice of Poland as well as all the Baltic States after the war. And now, from across the Atlantic, he was being cajoled by the President of the United States: the head of state of a foreign country telling the British Prime Minister that he ought to grant self-government to India, leading to Dominion status or even complete independence after the war—the President quoting not only the current model of the U.S. relationship with the Philippines, but that of the American Revolution in 1776!

  Seen in retrospect, Russia and the United States were thus laying down their own markers for a postwar world, at the expense of the dying British Empire—even as the world war itself reached its most critical point for the survival of the United Nations. Military intelligence revealed to Stalin that the German high command was preparing a vast new mechanized assault into the southern regions of Russia, giving access to the oil fields Hitler needed to fuel, literally, his Nazi rampage. Meanwhile, German-Italian forces in Libya, under the command of General Erwin Rommel, were pushing back the British Eighth Army through Libya—with the possibility that, if successful, Rommel could sweep the British out of the Middle East entirely, and threaten the region’s oil resources from the south.

  In the Far East the situation was even more menacing. Rangoon, the capital of British Burma, was in its death throes—the British beginning to set fire to the oil depots, and getting ready to abandon the city to the Japanese.

  In these circumstances, under pressure from President Roosevelt, Churchill finally gave in. He who pays the piper, the Prime Minister reluctantly acknowledged, plays the tune.

  On March 4, 1942, the Prime Minister finally signaled to the President that he and his cabinet were “earnestly considering whether a declaration of Dominion status after the war, carrying with it, if desired, the right to secede, should be made at this critical juncture.”5 Moreover, to try and effect this turnabout, Churchill was seeking enough support from the Conservative members of his cabinet to appoint Sir Stafford Cripps, the leader of the House of Commons, as the British government’s express emissary to Delhi, bypassing the viceroy of India, Lord Linlithgow.

  Cripps would be empowered to seek an immediate, if provisional, accommodation with Indian leaders, including Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, in order to win majority Indian support for what promised to be a last-ditch defense of the subcontinent against Japanese invasion from the north, once Burma was completely overrun.

  There was also the possibility of an amphibious invasion by Japanese troops landing from their assault vessels in the Indian Ocean—an ocean that the Royal Navy was currently ordering its ships to abandon, in fear of approaching Japanese fleet carriers and their deadly attack-fighters and bombers. It was time—high time—to act.

  Churchill’s problem, however, lay in the very quality that had enabled him to stand up to Hitler in 1940, when France collapsed—his pride. And more than pride: namely, his complete unwillingness to embrace a vision of Britain as a postcolonial leader of a commonwealth of English-speaking nations.

  “Trouble in Cabinet,” Sir Alec Cadogan noted in his diary on March 5, 1942, lamenting the Prime Minister’s attempts to sabotage the very policy he’d assured the President he was advancing. “Winston having agreed in War Cabinet to [President Roosevelt’s] Indian plan, puts it to other Ministers with a strong bias against, and finds them unanimously of that way of thinking! Talk—only talk—of [Conservative] resignations from War Cabinet—who met again at 6. Poor old Winston, feeling deeply the present situation and the attacks on him, is losing his grip, I fear. The outlook is pretty bloody.”6

  Sir Stafford Cripps, the leader of the House of Commons, was one of those threatening to leave the coalition government in London. In Delhi, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, threatened, however, to resign his post over any usurpation of his imperial role. With Churchill’s mishandling of the war as minister of defense—invoking renewed calls for him to relinquish the post, or at least take a deputy such as Anthony Eden in that position—the question now arose as to whether Winston could survive as coalition prime minister.

  Since Churchill’s doctor claimed the Prime Minister’s very health was being adversely affected by the Anglo-American dispute over India, Ambassador Winant decided to return to Washington to brief the President in person. Averell Harriman, meanwhile, penned a long letter to Mr. Roosevelt on March 6, telling of his own worries about the Prime Minister—“both his political status and his own spirits.” Churchill had, it was true, reshuffled his war cabinet, making Clement Attlee his formal deputy prime minister. Though “the British are keeping a stiff upper lip,” he reported, “the surrender of their troops at Singapore” had been a terrible shock. As things stood, “they can’t see an end to their defeats”—and in all frankness, nor could the Prime Minister, in his view.7

  Harriman, at least, felt Churchill would survive, if only because there was no other figure on the English political scene who could supplant him. Sir Stafford Cripps vainly imagined he could lead the country—but without popular appeal or support. “Eden you know all about”—a lightweight. “[Sir John] Anderson [Lord President of Council] is an uninspired, competent technician. Bevin has never really risen above labor union politics. And then we have Max!”—Lord Beaverbrook, who had resigned as minister of production in a huff, hoping he could wait in the wings and then be called to lead Britain by acclamation, once Churchill collapsed, from his seat in the House of Lords. “There is no one else on the horizon,” Harriman pointed out candidly.8

  The prospect, for the United States, was discouraging.

  In the circumstances, Roosevelt decided, he would have to make do: pressing the Prime Minister, yet not to the point of causing him to fall—and in the abiding hope that, in terms of the current British panic in Burma, it was not too late.

  The President’s patient pressure seemed to pay off. Swallowing his pride, the Prime Minister at last did as the President bade him. Recognizing that his own history of fierce objection to Indian independence meant that he himself would never be accepted by Indian leaders as a credible broker if he traveled there in person to negotiate, Churchill now formally asked Sir Stafford Cripps, the former British ambassador to the Soviet Union, on March 10, 1942, to set off for India as the cabinet’s chosen representative as soon as possible. “We have resigned ourselves to fighting our utmost to defend India in order, if successful,” Churchill wrote mournfully to Mackenzie King, his fellow prime minister, “to be turned out.”9 Yet that was what American troops were doing in the Philippines, proudly.

  How genuinely, though, did the Prime Minister intend the British to bow out after the war, Indian leaders asked themselves. And how much fighting would the British really do to defend India in the meantime, judging by their performance in Malaya and Burma—where dreadful cases of cowardice, military incompetence, and racial as well as imperial misconduct were reported? Was it really worth Indian Congress Party leaders throwing in their lot with “perfidious Albion,” in such circumstances?

  For President Roosevelt, there now unfolded the
most difficult test of his career as commander in chief, not only of the United States Armed Forces, but of the United Nations in the struggle against the Axis powers.

  12

  Lessons from the Pacific

  THE PRESIDENT DOESN’T KNOW me and besides, I’m no New Dealer,” Captain John McCrea had protested his appointment to be Mr. Roosevelt’s new naval aide. The secretary of the navy, Frank Knox, had laughed, telling McCrea that “FDR needs some of our kind”—Republicans—“to give him support!”1

  The President’s ability to draw people into his orbit was legendary—and effective. “Most cordial—offered me a cigarette and remarked: ‘Up in Dutchess County I have a friend by the name of John McCrea Livingstone. By any chance are you related to him?’”

  McCrea was “astounded that the Pres. of the U.S. has time to look up my name in register. Flattered a bit too,” the captain confessed. “Invites me to his birthday party. I am completely charmed by him.”2

  The Commander in Chief appeared relaxed and confident, despite the worrying reports McCrea brought him each morning at breakfast—his coffee served in a “very large” cup that “must hold as much as four ordinary cups.” He seemed to know “more naval officers by their nicknames,” from his earlier days as assistant secretary of the navy and later as president, than McCrea knew as a serving officer.3

  McCrea was also stunned by how astute the President was, behind his mask of easy affability. “Had luncheon with President at his desk,” he recorded—“cream spinach soup, veal on toast, mushrooms, potatoes, asparagus tips, double ice cream and fresh raspberries. Told me some remarkable things about MacArthur—I feel flattered at the confidence!”4

  Roosevelt’s huge, handsome head seemed to McCrea to be like an intelligence-gathering machine—putting people at ease, then encouraging them to be frank with him. One example was the way he asked to see the recently fired Admiral Tommy Hart, MacArthur’s former naval counterpart in the Philippines, on his return from Batavia, following his brief but tragic stint as Allied naval commander in chief in the Southwest Pacific, serving under the supreme commander, General Sir Archibald Wavell.

  At Wavell’s request, Hart had been relieved of his command on the grounds he was “a defeatist”—a view with which Hart had not demurred. “They don’t like to hear anything which is not optimistic,” Hart had noted in his diary. “I think their idea is that frank statements which openly express something which is unpalatable smacks too much of defeatism—and in that they may well be much nearer right than I.”5 His “blunt fashion” realism6 had, however, proved all too accurate—his successor, the senior Dutch officer, Admiral Conrad Helfrich, subsequently lost virtually the entire Allied fleet in the South Pacific.7

  On March 10, 1942, the “defeatist” was “convoyed” at the President’s request into the Oval Office by Captain McCrea, accompanied by Navy Secretary Knox and Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Navy. As Hart wrote in his diary that night, “F.D.R. greeted me as ‘Tommy,’ turned on all his charm, etc. He asked some searching questions, particularly as regards MacArthur’s affairs and therein indicated that he was not sold on Douglas’ ‘masterful defense’ to the extent the public is.”8

  “In the public eye,” Hart jocularly noted, “MacA[rthur] now stands as the best soldier, say, since Napoleon!!” but at the White House, Roosevelt was having none of it—in fact, the President “simply astounded me by saying that Gen. Marshall had assured him”—thanks to MacArthur’s overoptimistic signals from Manila to the War Department—“that the Army was ready in the Philippines on 1 Dec [1941]!! That otherwise he, F.D.R. could have held the Japs off, say, another three months” by spinning out negotiations. Hart was incredulous. “That is difficult to swallow,” he noted, “but the President is the man who said it.”9

  In part the President was trying to console the admiral. Yet what most interested the Commander in Chief now, as he talked to Hart, were the lessons to be learned about the war in the Far East.

  It was in this respect that the difference between Roosevelt and Churchill—indeed between Roosevelt and Hitler—was revealing, as the President listened to the admiral’s analysis of the war in the East thus far.

  Hart’s report from the Pacific was sobering. The admiral had spent the several weeks it had taken him to return by sea and air to the United States pondering and analyzing recent military events.

  “The man-in-the-street must have been tremendously surprised when the Japs attacked—probably could not possibly imagine that such a small and poor country would have the temerity to attack BIG US,” he’d reflected in his diary, “to say nothing of taking on all of our Allies in the same breath. Moreover I wonder if our Rulers, in general, had anything like a true estimate of the danger of a war with Japan.” For his part Hart had assumed that war with Japan “was entirely evident to responsible people in Washington. I wonder if it was? Well, what must not have been evident was that if said war did come, in the Pacific, we Allies would find ourselves in a war with a First Rate Power; 1st class in a military way, at least. I guess some of us realized that; we didn’t guess that, even with the enormous advantage which an all-out surprise attack gives, we should find Mr. Jap anywhere near as high grade as he has been thus far. We Americans in general may have realized the imminence of this war,” he’d summed up, “but thought that if it came it would be with a second or even third rate enemy.”10

  Listening to Hart’s blunt American appraisal, given before Secretary Knox and Admiral King as well, the President could have taken offence—but he didn’t. It was clear Hart was a professional and a realist. The war in the East was currently being lost because Allied military leaders—and their commanders in the field—had been unable to match the professionalism of a “First Rate” enemy. And here, Hart’s analysis proved spellbinding to its witness.

  “And now: lacking almost everything in the way of natural resources, hampered by so very many other disadvantages, after four years of an exhausting war in China, how is it that the Japs have set us so back on our heels in this theater of the war?” Hart had asked himself—“all in less than three months? The advantage of surprise of course but the fact remains that the Japs have done everything very well indeed and have repeatedly accomplished what we of the white race said it was impossible for them to do. How have they done it? Certain wise men have long been saying that the worth, strength and power of a country lies in the quality of its people. Well, in a military sense, the Japs are a strong people. Whatever the basis for it, the Jap’s patriotism is first class. No race excels them in willingness to get killed or mutilated in war. Moreover, during all the grind of training for war, they have not had to be hired by high pay, good feeding, ‘aids to morale,’ etc. They have gone on, in peace and war, with a minimum of everything that we have to have to make life endurable. And they come to the ‘push of pike’ full of fight, hardy, tough, enduring, almost fanatical in courage and, thus far at least, equipped with the material they need for the task, with sufficient skill in its use and—seemingly—under adequate leadership. Now it has happened!”

  “This war, in the western Pacific: it is an offensive war,” the admiral reflected, “being the long talked about Southern Advance, or the solution of their national difficulties, which the Jap Navy has advocated for some years. It is the variety of war known as amphibious war—named thus I think by [the] British. My recent experience with the British Army didn’t indicate that their generals ever use the term very much or that they understand that kind of war, as much as one would expect. I know that in our own Army there has been no understanding of it, and I have known a general or two who had never heard the term used. One, even though it was immediately confronting him,” Hart added with sarcasm—a reference to General MacArthur in the first days of the Japanese invasion of Luzon.

  “It is a risky variety—Amphibious War—but the advantage of surprise goes with it. And this war began as a surprise.”

  Hart correctly assumed that the
“Jap Navy is in Supreme Command of this war,” since it was “what nationalism would dictate—and the Southern Advance idea is theirs.” But this was no old-fashioned independent Japanese navy, he noted—it was the very acme of combined services operating in the field, not simply at a distant headquarters. And the Japanese combination of those services began with air.

  “We know that the control of the air, over the war theater, has been gained and exercised by the Jap Navy air. And that control is what has defeated all the defensive power which the Allies could get into the fight. The Japs know the value of the Ships-Plus-Planes combination, handled under one controlling command and without any of all those restrictive limitations which ham-strung the British Navy and so badly hampered ours. Moreover the Japs were prepared for an Amphibious War to the Enth [degree] because they had available a large population habituated to sea-going on all kinds of vessels. And a considerable part of those people knew the waters of the ABDA [American, British, Dutch, Australian] area, including all the harbors and surroundings, because of earning their living therein, as fishermen, small traders, etc.” They had studied not only war, then, but the terrain and waters in which they would fight it. “Their expeditions could always be supplied with adequate pilots and guides, and their air service could always tell the Jap leaders what their enemies were doing.”

  Aspect by aspect, from advanced weaponry (“The Japs are copyists . . . they codify and simplify”) to war supplies, Hart had pondered the extraordinary way the Japanese had developed their war machine—and how they had applied it to the business of amphibious invasion. “It is to be noted that the Japs have landed expedition after expedition from ships directly on to open beaches and that these landings have included all the equipment, munitions and supplies needed to win campaigns in Luzon and Malaya at will,” as well as “to seize many other points well scattered over the ABDA area.” Once ashore, Japanese Army troops could count on naval supply and air support—but showed their own resourcefulness, too. “In the Malaya campaign the expedition fought southward over 400 miles of rough country, during the rainy season. From what I have seen of our own forces, I would estimate that expeditions having similar tasks would require loading in improved harbors—and need a vast amount of ‘Transport’ to maintain supply lines as they advanced. So why the difference?” he asked pointedly.