The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  “Terror bombing,” as the Germans called it, did not sit well with such walking. Even Lord Halifax, a deeply religious man, had blanched when recently told by a British pilot what he had done—“a red-headed young Scottish sergeant-pilot from Motherwell who had been on nearly every trip to Germany including Rostock, but had missed Cologne as he was getting ready to come over here. About Rostock he said the fires were tremendous; ’I’m afraid we not only killed them but cremated them.’”8

  The Prime Minister’s much debatable paean to his new “ally,” however, now led him to his ultimate revelation—a confidential admission in the White House that was far, far more welcome to the Dominion representatives.

  As Mackenzie King recorded that night, “Churchill reserved to the last part of his talk the reference to the European front; here he spoke very positively”—or negatively.9 A Second Front, he confided in absolute candor, was simply not on the cards for that year.

  “He said, using the expression ’By God,’ nothing would ever induce him to have an attack made upon Europe without sufficient strength and being positively certain that they could win. He said that to go there without a sufficient force would be to incur another Dunkirk, and what would be worse than that, they would have of course to supply the French with arms and cause them to rise when any invasion was made, and that to have to leave them to the Huns [in a subsequent evacuation] would be to have the whole of the French massacred, and none of them left.”10

  Churchill’s only answer, beyond RAF terror raids on German cities, was therefore more minor raids on the French coast to force the Germans at least to keep their defense forces stationed there, rather than in Russia; but “he did not think they could afford to contemplate the invasion of the continent before the spring of 1943, despite the number of troops that the Americans might be able to send across . . . Perhaps in the spring, shipping facilities will be better and the attack could take place then.”11

  Stopping there, Churchill asked for questions or comments, “and turned to me.”12

  Mackenzie King’s testimony would be important to historians, because the Canadian premier’s relationship to the President was a sort of marker in the war’s changing dynamic. Canada was producing huge amounts of war materiel, food, and shipping; it was also providing a considerable number of volunteer troops to the global struggle against the Axis powers. Canada, in fact, was now as important to the war effort as Great Britain—and King, as Canadian prime minister, was as opposed to a cross-Channel Second Front as was Winston Churchill—a fact the President had been aware of ever since King had stayed with him at the White House, earlier that year, when King had experienced a strange vision relating to Mr. Roosevelt.

  “Had a very distinct vision during the night,” the Premier had noted in his diary in April. “It seemed as though some being was seeking rest; alongside were forces in the nature of flames, not of a fire but of passion or an animal instinct like fighting, etc. were continually banging at the side of this individual and in a way seeking to compel a yielding to its influence.” The person “who came to mind” with respect to this dream “was the President and the influence of those” of his senior military staff “who were forcing him into a line of warfare without sufficiently surveying the whole field. The more I think of the vision,” King recorded, “the more I feel it was to let me see that there was a spiritual significance behind the attitude which I took yesterday at the Pacific Council and again with the President last night in discussing the plan of campaign in Europe for this year.”13

  At that time—April 16, 1942—it had become clear to the Canadian prime minister that the President had no idea how few divisions there were, in reality, in Britain, with Roosevelt imagining there were a hundred. Nor had the U.S. president quite recognized, in King’s view, the magnitude of military effort required to mount a successful cross-Channel assault. King had therefore warned the President at the April Pacific War Council that a failed assault would make Britain itself vulnerable to attack. There had been “no dissent” from the council members—the Australian representative supporting King, and speaking “very emphatically about the necessity of avoiding the possibility of a second Dunquerque, and how disastrous anything of the kind would be. He said he wished to support very strongly what I had said.” The New Zealand representative had spoken “in an equal strain, saying that while everyone believed in a second front, and the need for offensive action, up to the present there had been no one who could say how it could be done.”14

  That was two months ago; now, in the wake of the disaster being suffered by the British Eighth Army in Libya and Egypt, a cross-Channel invasion seemed even less mountable that year—especially, Mackenzie King reflected, when the lives of volunteer Canadian troops, training in Britain, were at risk.

  It was, in this respect, a tragic moment: Prime Minister King as straightforward as Churchill in responding to the British prime minister’s appeal for questions or comments. Addressing the Dominion assembly on June 25, 1942, King warned “that the subject he had dealt with was one about which we [Canadians] were most concerned. That we felt very strongly he was right in what he had said about the necessity of overwhelming forces, and not taking unnecessary risks.”15

  It was abundantly clear, then, that in late June 1942 it was not simply the British who were balking at the implications of a cross-Channel Second Front, but America’s crucial ally, the Canadians—whose premier felt no shame or inhibition in sharing with the President his concerns. None of the Dominions, in fact, were willing to risk another military debacle, whatever the U.S. chiefs might favor—especially after the surrender of Tobruk and the flight of the British Empire forces of the British Eighth Army toward Suez and Cairo.

  20

  Avoiding Utter Catastrophe

  IRONICALLY, CHURCHILL AND HITLER agreed on one thing: a cross-Channel attack in 1942 would fail. Hitler and Goebbels naturally prayed that it would be attempted.

  After reading secret intelligence reports from Moscow, Goebbels recorded on July 4 that the Kremlin was calling for a Second Front, “but Churchill and Roosevelt are in no position to comply.” The situation was giving rise, to Goebbels’s delight, to idle talk of the Soviets taking the “most extreme measures unless the English and Americans actually mount a Second Front. But how can Churchill and Roosevelt launch a Second Front in reality,” he asked himself, “when they don’t have the necessary shipping and are having such difficulties on existing fronts and suffering such fatal defeats?”1

  Two weeks later Goebbels was noting the British “have no intention of rushing into any invasion adventure. Even they will have learned that we’ve now stationed, in the West, the quality of first-class German troops, well-trained and hardened by battle on the Eastern Front, who would welcome such a confrontation with pure joy.”2

  Scanning the British and American press, as well as reports from German agents, Goebbels noted the continuing pressure on Roosevelt and Churchill to launch just such an invasion. “The man in the street screams for a Second Front, and it remains an open question whether Churchill and Roosevelt might, in certain circumstances, together with the deteriorating military situation for the Russians, have to give in to such pressure. It’s one of the disadvantages of democracy that it can’t conduct politics or war according to logic and intelligence, but has to respond to the up-and-down swings of public opinion. In such circumstances,” he mused, “a concession to public pressure for a Second Front could lead Churchill and Roosevelt to utter catastrophe.”3

  Ironically, it was not only the proverbial man in the street who was driving the President toward “catastrophe,” but his most senior military officers in Washington.

  General Marshall was becoming the most evangelical of Second Fronters—determined to avoid unnecessary dispersion of effort. Even the President’s offer to send the Second U.S. Armored Division to reinforce and revitalize the British Eighth Army in Egypt had been revised on Marshall’s instructions, since it would take, it
was calculated by his staff at the War Department, three to four months to get such a fully armed division to Suez—by which time the war in Egypt would have been decided. Only the tanks themselves, and a cadre of technicians, were thus sent, by fast convoy. On limiting the forces to that, the general would not bend—in fact he actually walked out of the President’s study rather than contemplate dispatching yet more American forces to the Middle East beyond the Second Armored Division’s tanks—forces that would then not be available for the planned build-up in Britain prior to a Second Front attack.

  The President was surprised, and disappointed. But then, as quasi Allied commander in chief, he saw the situation differently from his U.S. Army chief of staff and war secretary. The collapse of the British at Tobruk was disheartening, but might yet offer the Allies a great strategic opportunity for a counterstroke. Rommel had lured the tanks and vehicles of the British Eighth Army into the range of his deadly 88mm antitank guns, winning a historic victory in the desert at Gazala and causing the British to flee eastward across the deserts of Libya for their very lives. But driving his Panzerarmee Afrika onward toward Cairo, Rommel was leaving himself open to a possible strategic counterstrike—a huge American army landing in his rear, in French Northwest Africa, after which the new Feldmarschall could, if all went well, be crushed inexorably between the two Allied pincers.

  Why Marshall, King, Stimson, and others held so firmly to their idea of a cross-Channel Second Front in 1942, and seemed so naïve about the reception they would be given by Hitler’s waiting forces, never ceased to amaze the President. For almost an entire year, ever since July 1941—long before Pearl Harbor—the President had favored as an alternative a U.S. landing in French Northwest Africa, in the event of war, to forestall the Germans—yet every time he had pressed for serious operational study of the scheme he had met with opposition from the War Department.

  At the very least, Operation Gymnast promised to allow the United States to control the whole Atlantic seaboard of French West Africa, including the vital port of Dakar—thus ensuring German forces would be denied the closest jumping-off point to a potential attack or invasion of South America. Better than that, though, it would give the Allies the chance to jam and crush German and Italian forces in North Africa between the west and eastern ends of the Mediterranean.4

  Hitler would not be able to ignore such a threat to his Italian Axis partners and to his southern flank. He would have to join battle—but on the periphery of Europe, at the very farthest point from his own bases and supplies—while all the time having to hold significant German forces in France to meet a possible cross-Channel invasion from Britain. This would aid the hard-pressed Russians substantially, without risking a devastating reverse in a cross-Channel landing that year. Against nominal Vichy French resistance in North Africa, moreover, U.S. forces would get to rehearse the business of amphibious warfare. Then, in the relative “safety” of an American-occupied Northwest Africa, they would be able to put into practice in real time the command and combat techniques they would later need for an ultimate “Bolero” cross-Channel invasion, using preponderant force.

  By contrast, the challenge of Bolero—facing at least twenty-five German divisions charged by Hitler with defending against Allied landings on mainland France—would be a far harder proposition. Allied formations would have to land on hostile shores that were within easy air, road, and rail reinforcement from Germany. And face a far, far tougher prospective enemy there than Vichy French troops in Morocco or Algeria.

  In short, Churchill and the British chiefs of staff were right in being disinclined to carry out Bolero. Breaching Hitler’s so-called Atlantic Wall and smashing down the gateway to Hitler’s Third Reich was, in mid-1942, an almost impossible task—as Hitler and Goebbels knew better than anyone. Whereas U.S. landings in French Northwest Africa would give the Allies the initiative they needed in steadily pursuing a “Germany First” strategy. Shorn of its North African territories, and with Sicily and southern Italy within striking distance, Mussolini’s Italy would very likely capitulate—leaving Hitler’s Germany alone, battered from all sides.

  In the President’s eyes the United Nations were looking a gift horse in the mouth—for the Germans had still not occupied French Northwest Africa, even two years after their conquest of Western Europe! Morocco and Algeria were there for the taking—with Hitler still obsessively focused on defending the Atlantic Wall.

  Yet how to get Stimson and the U.S. chiefs of staff to fall in line with such reasoning, without turning them against him as commander in chief?

  Quietly the President began to cast around for a way to bring his reluctant sheep back into the fold, and support—instead of sabotage—Gymnast. It was at this point that he called on Bill Leahy.

  The tall, balding, stern-looking Admiral William Leahy was well known to the President—Leahy having preceded Admirals Stark and King as chief of naval operations. Before his mandatory retirement as CNO, Admiral Leahy had even served on the newly minted Joint Chiefs of Staff board that the President had set up in 1939.

  The President had come to admire Leahy’s calmness of judgment—respect that had prompted him to make the admiral the U.S. ambassador to the French government in Vichy, after the 1940 French capitulation, and to press Leahy to gain and keep the trust of Vichy’s military leaders.

  Leahy had done well. Almost two years later the United States and Vichy French governments were still at peace with each other; indeed, even in the face of Premier Laval’s active cooperation with the Nazis, Roosevelt had insisted that U.S. diplomatic relations with the Vichy government not be broken off, disregarding the pleas of the Free French leader, General Charles de Gaulle—who had almost zero influence or authority in Northwest Africa.

  As Leahy had reported to the President, the commander in chief of all French Vichy forces, Admiral François Darlan, had told him confidentially that if the Americans landed “with sufficient force in North Africa to be successful against the Nazis, he would not oppose us.”5 It was this prospect, not specious public calls for a Second Front, that had remained the abiding lure of Gymnast for the President. As an extra incentive to French goodwill, Roosevelt had even insisted American food aid must continue to be sent to Vichy France and North Africa.

  These had proved wise decisions, despite the political outcry that arose in the United States over appeasement of appeasers. Yet for all that Gymnast could achieve for the Allies in 1942, it had received only derisory responses from General Marshall and Admiral King—trained and experienced officers who claimed to see no point in such an invasion, and all too many military reasons why it was too daunting, and would founder.

  The President disagreed. In fact he found their reasoning for the most part fallacious, and in some respects nonsensical, especially the claims in their memorandum of vast numbers of forces the Germans could bring to bear to smash a U.S. assault on Northwest Africa. Far from being in a numerically superior position to defeat such landings, the Germans were in no position to interfere with a U.S. invasion. In fact Admiral Leahy had assured Roosevelt, on June 5, 1942, when he returned to Washington from France for “consultations” with the President and Secretary Hull, that there were not 180 Germans in the whole of French Morocco.

  Fewer than 180 Germans in Morocco?

  It was in the context of Ambassador Leahy’s revelation that, two weeks later, when the British surrendered at Tobruk and Churchill could only clutch at RAF bombing straws, the President’s mind was largely made up. Bolero in 1942 was a pipe dream. The British disaster at Tobruk was simply the final straw. The British could no longer be depended upon to fight for their empire in the Far East, perhaps even the Middle East. How, then, could they be seriously expected to fight for the immediate liberation of mainland France, their ancient enemy in Europe, let alone for Europe?

  Chances of Allied success in a cross-Channel invasion in 1942 were nil; a Second Front there would be suicidal. Instead, the President was now adamant, if the Weste
rn Allies were truly committed to a “Germany First” strategy, then the United States must land forces in French Northwest Africa before the Germans did—if he could overcome the skepticism of his own War and Navy Departments. It was they, after all, who would have to assemble and launch such an American invasion force.

  As Churchill departed to face the music in the House of Commons (including a vote of no confidence in his government),6 the stage was set in Washington for a monumental confrontation between the Commander in Chief and his own military staff, which had not taken place since Lincoln and the Civil War.

  PART NINE

  JAPAN FIRST

  21

  Citizen Warriors

  BY JULY, WASHINGTON, D.C., WAS sweltering in all respects.

  If only he could get away, the President sighed to his staff. Fortunately, he did not have long to wait. A “getaway” had been selected several months before, as a presidential retreat—and it was almost ready.

  “Early in the spring of 1942, possibly late March or early April while having his sinuses packed one evening in [Dr.] Ross McIntire’s office, President Roosevelt remarked about as follows,” Roosevelt’s naval aide, Captain McCrea, later related—attempting in his somewhat stilted English to recall the President’s request.

  “‘Both of you’—referring to Ross McIntire and me—‘know how very much I like to go to Hyde Park for weekend breaks. With the war on, I am conscious of the fact that I cannot go to Hyde Park as often as I have in the past’”—for the overnight journey from Washington to the Hudson Valley and then back was too time-consuming. Nevertheless, the President had said, “‘I would like very much to dodge, as far as possible, the heat and humidity of the Washington summer: additional air conditioning is not for me, as you well know. As I have often told you, Ross, I never had sinus trouble until I became shipmates with air conditioning. The two may not be related but nevertheless I associate this condition’”—at which he tapped his sinus area with a forefinger—“‘with air conditioning. Now, cannot we locate an area within easy access of Washington where it would be possible to set up a modest rustic camp, to which I could go from time to time on weekends or even overnight and thus escape for a few hours at least the oppressiveness of the Washington summer? I suggest this as an alternative to the Potomac’”—referring to the USS Potomac, the presidential yacht—“‘since the Secret Service people are adamant against my using it, except on selected occasions.’