The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Worse would surely follow, the President added. Once Queen Wilhelmina—a notoriously demanding lady—arrived in the United States, he would, as President, have to invite her over to Hyde Park, for the summer home he’d found for her was not far from his own home. He was “afraid the lady might be shocked by his informality around Hyde Park in the summer,” he confided to King. Fortunately, “the Legation had told him she did not wish anything in the nature of ceremonies,” he added with relief: “no salute or guard of honour or anything of the kind. . . .”4

  Again, the two men chuckled at the irony: Mackenzie King hauled out of a crucial debate on military conscription—a knife-edge issue in Canada, given the country’s French-speaking population with mixed cultural loyalties to Canada, Vichy France, and General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French movement—to speak with the President. Reflecting on the mix of wartime crisis and the accommodation expectations of the royals, King noted that the situation was approaching “opera bouffe.”5

  It seemed unlikely, however, that the President of the United States would be calling the Canadian premier only about a matter so trivial. Aware still of the security issue of an open telephone line, King went on to congratulate his interlocutor on news of the American victory at Midway.

  “Was it not splendid?” he recorded Roosevelt’s response. “It made a complete difference in regard to the whole situation in the Far East and throughout the Pacific as well.” The President didn’t have “all the information yet,” but was able to tell King cautiously that the situation was “very good.”6

  Only then, finally, did the President get to the point.

  Prime Minister King should be ready for a phone call summoning him to Washington “on pretty short notice some day soon.”7

  The President was expecting a yet more important VIP than “a certain lady.”

  Two days later the anticipated cable came from London.

  “In view of the impossibility of dealing by correspondence with all the many difficult points outstanding,” Winston Churchill signaled the President, “I feel it is my duty to come to see you.”8

  The President knew what this meant. Since he had personally promised Mr. Molotov, the Russian foreign minister, that the Allies would launch an Allied landing in France that year in order to draw German divisions away from the Eastern Front—German divisions that would otherwise be thrown into Hitler’s renewed offensive in Russia—and since the British would have to furnish the majority of troops for such landings in France, the President was pretty sure what the Prime Minister was coming to say.

  Whatever he had promised in the spring, when India looked vulnerable to Japanese invasion and he desperately needed American help, he was going to go back on his word. The British wouldn’t do it.

  Churchill’s second visit to Washington would certainly put the cat among the pigeons—and given the feelings of the U.S. War Department on the subject, would require even more finessing than dealing with the Dutch battle-ax, Queen Wilhelmina.

  In preparation for the inevitable uproar that the Prime Minister’s arrival would cause, the President called a meeting of his old war cabinet at the White House at 2:00 P.M. on June 17, 1942, before heading to Hyde Park for a last weekend of peace and quiet.

  It was in the war cabinet meeting that the President “sprung on us a proposition which worried me very much,” as Secretary Stimson recorded in his diary that night—full of foreboding.

  The President’s “proposition” was the one Stimson had feared for over a year, since Roosevelt first ordered the Victory Program to be prepared: namely, Roosevelt’s personal preference for American landings in French Northwest Africa, where there were currently no German forces.

  Stimson had always hated the Northwest Africa plan—preferring the idea of a single Anglo-American thrust across the English Channel. So too did General Marshall—who had hoped that his recent appointment of young Major General Dwight Eisenhower to head up U.S. military forces in Britain would bring a sense of urgency to Allied plans for landings on the coast of mainland France: plans that, on a prior trip as an “observer,” Eisenhower had thought lamentably unfocused.9 “I’m going to command the whole shebang,” Eisenhower had proudly told his wife, Mamie, as he got ready for his departure to London, slated for June 24, 1942, to stiffen British resolve.10

  Thanks to Churchill, the “shebang” suddenly seemed in grave jeopardy. “It looked as if he [the President] was going to jump the traces over all that we have been doing in regard to BOLERO [code name for the build-up of U.S. forces in Britain leading to an invasion of France] and to imperil really our strategy of the whole situation,” Stimson recorded in his diary. “He wants to take up the case of GYMNAST [the U.S. invasion of French Northwest Africa] again, thinking that he can [thereby] bring additional pressure to save Russia. The only hope I have about it at all is that I think he may be doing it in his foxy way to forestall trouble that is now on the ocean coming towards us in the shape of a new British visitor.”11

  The “British visitor” was not on the ocean, however, but in the air—and already almost over Washington.

  Forewarned was, at least, forearmed, Stimson comforted himself. General Marshall, at the meeting with the President, thus had “a paper already prepared against” Gymnast, “for he had a premonition of what was coming,” Stimson noted with satisfaction. “I spoke very vigorously against it [Gymnast]. [Admiral] King wobbled around in a way that made me rather sick with him. He is firm and brave outside of the White House,” Stimson derided the “blowtorch” sailor, “but as soon as he gets in the presence of the President he crumples up. . . . Altogether it was a disappointing afternoon.”12

  The President insisted—insisted—he wanted a renewed study of what it would require to mount landings in French Northwest Africa.

  There was little the secretary of war or the chiefs of staff could therefore do, other than to comply. “The President asked us to get to work on this proposition,” Stimson noted in anguish, “and see whether it could be done.”13

  In their collective view, it couldn’t.

  At the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, meantime, there had been “every sort of minor turmoil” over Churchill’s imminent arrival—and how to explain to the American press the reason for the Prime Minister’s Second Coming.

  For his part, Winston Churchill could not wait to see the President, not the press—and having landed in a Boeing seaplane on the Potomac River on June 18, 1942, after flying direct from Scotland in twenty-six and a half hours, he declared he was ready to fly straight up to meet with Roosevelt at Hyde Park.

  The President, to his chagrin, was not ready to see him.

  “Winston arrived at 8 P.M.,” Lord Halifax noted that night in his diary, “and I brought him to dine and sleep at the Embassy. He was rather put out at the President being away, and inclined to be annoyed that he hadn’t been diverted to New York, from where he could have flown on more easily” to Hyde Park. “He got into a better temper when he had had some champagne, and we sat and talked, he doing as usual most of it, until 1.30 A.M.”14 Even General Sir Alan Brooke, and Major General Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff, “took advantage of the darkness on the porch to snatch bits of sleep,” Halifax described, “while Winston talked.”15

  Halifax—who had good reason to resent that Churchill, not he, Edmund Halifax, had become prime minister in May 1940—was now strangely passive, recognizing he himself would never have had the stamina or the determination to lead Britain in war. “He certainly is an extraordinary man,” the ambassador described Churchill in his diary; “immensely great qualities, with some of the defects that sometimes attach to them. I couldn’t live that life for long!”16

  The Prime Minister seemed full of beans. The Battle of Midway had removed his fears of a Japanese invasion of India, as well as any possible Japanese threat to the Middle East from the Orient—so much so that Churchill appeared utterly indifferent to the mounting negative reaction to his refusal to g
rant self-government to the British colony. In a moment of vexation a few days before, he had even cabled to instruct the viceroy of India to arrest Mahatma Gandhi if he “tries to start a really hostile movement against us in this crisis”17—claiming that “both British and United States opinion would support such a step. If he starves himself to death we cannot help that.”18

  Even Halifax found that difficult to swallow. But what of German moves in the opposite direction—the threat of German armies blitzing their way through southern Russia and the Caucasus, and Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika, aiming toward Egypt and the Suez Canal?

  The “news from Libya doesn’t look good,” Halifax confided in his diary, with the British Eighth Army being forced to retreat toward the Egyptian frontier. This had left the big garrison at the port of Tobruk to be surrounded and to have to hold out, as it had the previous year, on Churchill’s express, if meddling, orders. Surely, Halifax mused, “Rommel must be getting a bit strung out himself.” He’d quizzed the Prime Minister on the subject. “Winston on the whole, though disappointed with Libya, was in good heart about the general situation.”19

  With British complacency born of American naval victory, the real Allied opera began.

  Meeting briefly with Mr. Churchill at the British Embassy before the Prime Minister’s departure by air to Hyde Park on the morning of June 19, 1942, General Marshall, for his part, became deeply worried. Not only did Rommel’s panzer forces seem dangerously effective in North Africa, but the situation in Russia looked potentially worse than the previous year—with vast numbers of German tank and motorized troops assembling for a breakthrough.

  In April that year, Churchill had sworn in person to him that the British government was one hundred percent behind American plans for a joint U.S.-British cross-Channel operation that summer or fall, if at all possible, to help the Russians, and begin at least the march on Berlin. Now, at the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue two months later, the Prime Minister sounded quite different—thanks to Midway.

  The U.S. Navy had routed the Japanese—and thereby saved the British position in India. With India externally secure, Churchill’s primary concern now seemed to be the defense of the Middle East as the lifeline of the British Empire—not the question of how best to mount an offensive in Europe that would help keep the Russians in the war, and bring down Hitler’s odious Nazi regime.

  Stimson, when he met with General Marshall later that morning, was as furious as Marshall over the Prime Minister’s broken promises. Marshall explained he’d “seen Churchill this morning up at the Embassy,” as Stimson confided to his diary, and had described Churchill as being “full of discouragement” about a Second Front, while sounding off with “new proposals for diversions. Therefore the importance of a firm and united stand on our part is very important,” Stimson concluded.20

  Frantic lest the Prime Minister, by flying up to Hyde Park to stay with the President, now ruin the plans which the War Department had been making for a cross-Channel invasion of France, Stimson and Marshall discussed their options. They were adamant they wanted no “diversions”—especially ones that would simply bolster the British position or empire in the Middle East. Sitting down, Stimson thereafter drew up a new strategy paper, or Memorandum to the President. General Marshall thought it brilliant. “Mr. Secretary,” Marshall declared, “I want to tell you that I have read your proposed letter to the President [aloud] to these officers”—indicating Generals Arnold, McNarney, Eisenhower, Clark, Hull, and one or two others, who were present at the War Department meeting—“and they unanimously think it is a masterpiece and should go to the President at once.”21

  Stimson thereupon sent his Memorandum to the President by personal messenger, together with a letter saying it also represented the views of Marshall “and other generals” in the War Department. As if this were not enough, Marshall and King drew one up, too, which they also dispatched by courier. Marshall even telephoned the President at Hyde Park personally, asking Mr. Roosevelt to please, please read it, once it arrived—begging him to make no decisions with Mr. Churchill until there had been time for the President to meet with his military advisers in Washington, on Mr. Roosevelt’s return to Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Thus began Act 2.

  Secretary Stimson’s letter to the President certainly pulled no punches.

  Not only was Bolero, the plan to build up massive American forces in the British Isles, a definitive way of dissuading Hitler from any thoughts of invading Britain, Stimson lectured the Commander in Chief in writing, it promised to be a potent launch pad for the U.S.-British invasion of France—an invasion that would “shake” Hitler’s renewed invasion of Russia that year and eventually lead, in 1943, to “the ultimate defeat of his armies and the victorious determination of the war” for the United Nations.

  “Geographically and historically,” Stimson noted in his diary that night, “Bolero was the easiest road to the center of our chief enemy’s heart. The base,” in the British Isles, “was sure. The water barrier of the Channel under the support of Britain-based air power is far easier than the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. The subsequent over-land route into Germany is easier than any alternate. Over the Low Countries has run the historic path of armies between Germany and France.”22

  The recent “victory in mid-Pacific” at Midway had now ruled out any possibility of Japanese raids affecting U.S. aircraft manufacturing on the West Coast, Stimson was glad to record. “Our rear in the west is now at least temporarily safe. The psychological pressure of our preparation for Bolero is already becoming manifest. There are unmistakable signs of uneasiness in Germany as well as increasing unrest in the subject population of France, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland and Norway,” he asserted—with rather less evidence. “This restlessness,” he claimed, “patently is encouraged by the growing American threat to Germany. Under these circumstances an immense burden of proof rests upon any proposition which may impose the slightest risk of weakening Bolero,” he added—fearing that the Prime Minister was going to suggest alternative schemes: schemes that would do nothing to expedite victory beyond frittering away America’s huge but overstretched arsenal of men and materiel.

  “When one is engaged in a tug of war,” the secretary of war warned the President in his letter, “it is highly risky to spit on one’s hands even for the purpose of getting a better grip.” No “new plan should be whispered to a friend or enemy unless it was so sure of immediate success and so manifestly helpful to Bolero,” he noted, “that it could not possibly be taken as evidence of doubt or vacillation in the prosecution of Bolero.”

  The problem, in Stimson’s view, was Winston Churchill—and his predilection for fatuous diversions. The Prime Minister had even told Marshall at the British Embassy that he favored an Allied landing in Norway, instead of France, that year—a proposition Stimson could only shake his head over. Yet it was not Churchill’s Scandinavian fantasy (Churchill having been responsible as First Lord of the Admiralty for utter disaster when ordering an Anglo-French invasion of Norway in the spring of 1940) that made the U.S. war secretary anxious. Rather, it was the President’s own bright idea that really worried him: the “President’s great secret baby,” as Stimson would sneeringly call it: “Gymnast.”23

  Against the President’s preference for a U.S. invasion of French Northwest Africa the secretary inveighed, in his letter to the President, with a kind of elderly man’s fervor. Gymnast, Stimson claimed, would tie up “a large proportion of allied commercial shipping,” thus making the American “reinforcement of Britain” in the Bolero build-up to an eventual cross-Channel landing “impossible.”24

  The Allies were coming, as Stimson saw it, to a real “crisis” in the direction of the global war25—with Prime Minister Winston Churchill more interested in saving British interests in Egypt and the Middle East, just as he had done in India, than in attacking Nazi Germany.

  Stimson’s talks with Marshall “over the crisis which has arisen owi
ng to Churchill’s visit” had in fact continued all morning on June 20, 1942, even after dispatching his “masterpiece” letter to the President.26

  To add insult to injury, Stimson learned, a frank letter to Marshall had been received from Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, in London. This indicated that the British chiefs of staff (in whose meetings Mountbatten, as chief of British Combined Operations, participated as an “observer”) were not only unanimously opposed to a cross-Channel Second Front in 1942, but hoped to persuade the President of the United States, via Mr. Churchill, to abandon a further Bolero build-up of U.S. troops and eventual assault landing in France. Instead, they hoped the President could be persuaded to send American reinforcements to help the British in holding Egypt.27

  Stimson was furious—seeing in all this a British conspiracy to turn the war against Hitler into a war to preserve, or even expand, the British Empire. All-out “American support of the Mideast”28—Britain’s shortest lifeline to its empire—would thus be the British chiefs’ game plan in accompanying the Prime Minister, according to Mountbatten’s somewhat duplicitous warning—Mountbatten claiming, as chief of Combined Operations, that he personally was all in favor of an Allied assault on the French coast, in which he might be given a starring role.

  All thus rested now upon the Commander in Chief of the United States, in Hyde Park—and how Mr. Roosevelt would respond to Churchill’s artful arguments against a Second Front landing across the English Channel that year.

  Stimson feared the worst. “I can’t help feeling a little bit uneasy about the influence of the Prime Minister on him at this time,” the war secretary noted in his diary that evening. “The trouble is Churchill and Roosevelt are too much alike in their strong points and in their weak points. They are both brilliant. They are both penetrating in their thoughts,” the secretary dictated, “but they lack the steadiness of balance that has got to go along with warfare.”29