The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  “‘Now I know that President Hoover had a camp on the Rapidau in the Catoctin mountains,’” the President had gone on to explain his idea. “‘I know nothing about it but that might be a good area to investigate, anyway. Ross, I want John and you and Steve Early [FDR’s press secretary] to find some place which will fit not alone my needs, but provide for the housing of the clerical staff which usually accompany me to Hyde Park. Remember now: nothing elaborate—something most modest, functional and within easy distance of the White House. This last requirement is important, so no doubt the choice of location will be limited to nearby Virginia and Maryland. Since the summer is approaching you should get after this as soon as possible.’”1

  McCrea, McIntire, and Early had diligently begun their search.

  “The Hoover camp was quickly eliminated,” McCrea later recollected. The thirty-first president’s camp had been built “alongside a nearby stream and had very little view of the surrounding countryside. President Hoover was interested in stream fishing and the camp, while ideal for that, did not fill the needs of President Roosevelt.”

  The general area, however, seemed ideal. “Nearby, atop the Catoctin Mountains at some 1800 feet elevation, was located a modest model recreation camp which had been built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration,” as part of the New Deal economic-stimulus program in the early days of the Depression. “The exact number of the buildings involved escapes me at the moment but it could not have been more than eight or ten. The buildings were small save for one somewhat larger building which had a mess hall and kitchen. The larger of the cottages could, we thought, with a few alterations be adapted for the President’s needs and the needs of his staff.”2

  The chief of the Bureau of Yards and Docks had then been brought in—a man who was no “stranger to action,” as McCrea neatly put it. “In a few short days this building was altered by the Seabees to provide for a combination dining and living room, the President’s bedroom, and three small bedrooms. All the small bedrooms had a common bath[room], which had no key! The living room area was, by usual standards, small, no larger in size than a modest living room. At one end was a stone fireplace which contributed greatly to the comfort of the place. The President’s bedroom was the largest of the four bedrooms, but it too could be said to be of modest size. One side of the President’s bedroom was equipped with a large hinged panel which, when tripped, would fall outward, and serve in an emergency as a ramp and escape route for the President’s wheelchair. A combination kitchen and pantry adjoined the dining room. A screened in porch—entrance to which was via the dining room, providing a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside—completed the structure.”

  The man responsible for the camp, the President had decided, should be his naval aide. “‘John,’ said he, ’since I shan’t be using the Potomac except on rare occasions you, in addition to your other duties, are hereby appointed the proprietor and landlord of the camp. And by the way, all camps should have a name. Let’s see. I think it quite appropriate that we call this camp Shangri-la’—referring of course to the mythical area. . . . ‘What do you say to this?’”3

  McCrea had said he would be honored—the camp accommodations of “USS Shangri-la” somewhat primitive, but the views stunning, and the air mercifully cool compared with Washington. On Sunday, July 5, 1942, the President drove with Harry Hopkins, McCrea, and a party of friends including Daisy Suckley to “what the papers are calling Shangri-La, ‘a cottage in the country’!” as Daisy noted. “No one is supposed to know, in order to give the President some privacy, and also for safety. But I am sure alien spies can find it out somehow without the slightest trouble.”4

  Walking with Hopkins to see the swimming pool, Daisy now found the President “cheerful & delighted & rested”—and reading Jane’s Fighting Ships, the famous encyclopedia of the world’s warships.5

  Back in Washington the next day, refreshed by his trip to Shangri-la, the President took the first step in bending the chiefs of staff to his will over Gymnast. With the War Department still parrying his wishes, the President needed a new stratagem.

  In all confidence, the President had admitted to Daisy, he was more “depressed by the situation” than he was letting on. “If Egypt is taken, it means Arabia, Afghanistan, etc., i.e. the Japs & Germans control everything from the Atlantic to the Pacific—that means all the oil wells, etc. of those regions—a bleak prospect for the United Nations.”

  “I asked where the blame lies for the present situation in Egypt,” the President’s confidante noted in her diary after speaking with him. The President thought about her question, then answered with surprising candor. “He said partly Churchill, mostly the bad generals.”6

  Was he, the President, any better than Churchill, though? Were American generals any better than their British counterparts?

  Roosevelt found it difficult to understand why Marshall remained so intransigent in pressing for a cross-Channel attack, while objecting to an American invasion of French Northwest Africa. Yes, Russia needed help—but so, too, did the British in Egypt. And urgently. The British Eighth Army seemed to be in its death throes in North Africa, as Rommel drove its remnant forces back almost a thousand miles to Alamein, the last defensive position before Cairo and Alexandria. Was this, then, the best moment to launch a supremely risky cross-Channel Second Front assault that had almost no chance of success, given the number of German divisions defending the French coast and interior? Would not an American landing in Northwest Africa—in Rommel’s rear—be the saving of the British in the Middle East, as well as a safe area in which U.S. forces could learn the art of modern war?

  Field Marshal Dill, the British representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, had been even more pessimistic than Churchill—prompting the President to say to him “that the trouble with the British is that they think they can beat the Germans if they have an equal number of men, tanks, etc.” As the President pointed out to Dill, this was a serious error. It was simply “not so—the Germans are better trained, better generaled.”7

  It was, the President reflected, a fact of life—“You can never discipline an Englishman or an American as you can a German,” he told Daisy what he’d shared with Dill.8

  Daisy was charmed by the observation, noting it in her diary. Yet its significance in the President’s growing realism went deeper than even she realized. For in that casual, consoling remark to Dill, the President of the United States had put his finger on the problem that his own U.S. generals were still not confronting.

  Americans might scoff at the British failure to fight the Germans effectively, despite two years’ experience of German tactics and interservice skills in action. Would Americans fare better in battle, though, straight off the mound? And was it fair to put them into battle in the supposedly right place but at the wrong time—when they would only get slaughtered? American troops, like most English soldiers, were for the most part citizen warriors, the President reflected—not professionals. They lacked the sort of self-sacrificing discipline that seemed second nature to German and Japanese troops.

  American and British individualism was, in effect, their undoing against such an enemy. Yet it was also, Roosevelt felt, their ultimate strength—if they could be encouraged to work together toward a realistic, common cause in which they believed, and were put into battle in operations that had a reasonable chance of success.

  This, then, was the insight that came to the President after Tobruk—and marked a profound shift in his thinking as his nation’s commander in chief. Millions of American troops were being called to serve their country. They would do fine, he was sure, if they could be given the chance to learn the arts of modern warfare against German or Japanese troops, on ground of their own choosing, not the enemy’s. The hostile beaches of mainland France, the President emphatically recognized, were not the place to do it, not yet—whatever General Marshall and his cohort of War Department staffers maintained.
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br />   Emboldened by his insight, the President formally asked Bill Leahy to resign on July 6, 1942, as ambassador to Vichy France. He was, the President requested, to leave the State Department, go back on the “active” list as a four-star admiral, and become the President’s first-ever “military assistant.”

  The President had, it seemed, hit upon a solution to his Second Front problem. As Roosevelt explained over lunch with the admiral, at his desk in the Oval Study, Leahy would have his own office at the White House, once reconstruction of the East Wing was completed. As to the responsibilities of his new job, Roosevelt was deliberately vague—but Leahy knew the President well enough to know what he was plotting.

  Besides, the admiral—whose wife had died unexpectedly after surgery at a hospital in France that spring—was lonely in Washington. He was thus happy to accept the position: bracing himself for what was, undoubtedly, in store.

  22

  A Staggering Crisis

  TWO DAYS AFTER APPOINTING Admiral Leahy to be his new military assistant came the cable Roosevelt had been expecting. Captain McCrea brought it from the Map Room to the President in his bedroom: a personal signal from the Prime Minister of Great Britain, in uncompromising language.

  “No responsible British General, Admiral or Air Marshal is prepared to recommend SLEDGEHAMMER”—code name for a cross-Channel invasion of France in the Brittany or Cotentin area that year—“as a practicable operation,”1 Mr. Churchill commenced his broadside, explaining that the British chiefs of staff would be sending their collective, formal decision to the U.S. Combined Chiefs of Staff that very evening.

  The cross-Channel idea was plainly madness in 1942—as it had always been.

  “In the event of a lodgement being effected and maintained it would have to be nourished and the bomber effort on Germany would have to be greatly curtailed,” Churchill explained the view of his British chiefs of staff. “All our energies would be involved in defending the Bridgehead. The possibility of mounting a large scale operation in 1943 would be marred if not ruined. All our resources would be absorbed piecemeal on the very narrow front which alone is open. It may therefore be said that premature action in 1942 while probably ending in disaster would decisively injure the prospect of well organized large scale action in 1943.”2 The Prime Minister therefore turned to the alternative.

  “I am sure myself that GYMNAST”—the American invasion of French Northwest Africa—“is by far the best chance for effective relief to the Russian front in 1942. This has all along been in harmony with your ideas,” Churchill acknowledged. “In fact it is your commanding idea.”3

  The relief the President felt was palpable. The Prime Minister might be an exhausting companion—a meddling commander in chief in dealing with his field officers, and a very, very poor selector of army commanders. His chiseled English prose, however, put most of the paperwork the President received to shame. The telegram was not only splendidly worded in its refusal to carry out a currently impossible military undertaking, it brought the evidence the President had been praying for: that Churchill had overridden his own generals in London in order to back the President’s “great secret baby.” Since his return to England, the Prime Minister had clearly gotten the British chiefs and the rest of his government to support Gymnast—abandoning their preference for large numbers of U.S. troops to be dispatched to Egypt and the Middle East to give more backbone to existing British imperial forces. “I have consulted cabinet and defence committee and we all agree,” Churchill’s telegram read. Gymnast it was. “Here is the safest and most fruitful stroke that can be delivered this autumn”4—with several summer months now to prepare and launch the invasion of French Northwest Africa, before the Germans could stop it.

  But if Churchill could override his generals, could he, the President, override his—American generals who were still clamoring for a cross-Channel attack that year, more and more loudly, while opposing Gymnast ever more venomously?

  There now arose, in Washington, a veritable uprising or quasi mutiny, as General Marshall declared open hostilities on the British.

  Marshall had never liked the President’s “great pet scheme,” and had done his best over the past year to wean the Commander in Chief from it—culminating in his and Admiral King’s uncompromisingly negative memorandum on June 19, 1942. Though the President had been unimpressed by their argument—especially their assertion as to the forces Hitler could deploy against a U.S. invasion of French Northwest Africa—the chiefs had held to their insistence on Bolero, the build-up to a cross-Channel attack, and to Sledgehammer, in particular, to be mounted if possible in 1942.

  British deceit in the spring—pretending to be in support of a 1942 cross-Channel assault but in truth opposing it from the start—had not helped. To Marshall—and to Secretary Stimson—the fight against Mr. Roosevelt’s Gymnast idea had thus been acerbic and exhausting, filling them with suspicion not only of Churchill but of their own revered President. Refusing to countenance the President’s Gymnast plan—which Marshall rightly feared would make a cross-Channel invasion impossible even in 1943, owing to the subsequent demands on U.S. reinforcement and supply, especially in shipping—Marshall had returned from his visit to London in April under the illusion that the British supported, albeit reluctantly, his 1942 cross-Channel plan. Churchill’s appearance in Washington had disabused him of that notion. Despite the President’s caustic remarks about his and Admiral King’s memorandum, however, Marshall had thought he had gotten both the President’s and Churchill’s consent to hold off any decision on such a 1942 cross-Channel invasion until September 1942. Now, only two weeks after Churchill’s departure from Washington, the Prime Minister’s new cable on the night of July 8, followed by a similar one from the British chiefs of staff to their U.S. colleagues on the Combined Chiefs of Staff, left no room for misunderstanding. The British were formally refusing to carry out a cross-Channel operation that year, despite the generosity of the President in sending so much military help to Egypt.

  Marshall, as well as his colleagues and staff, and the secretary of war, were incensed.

  For his own part, General Marshall felt doubly betrayed. That the British had lied in pretending they were prepared to mount a cross-Channel attack he was willing to swallow. But why were they now rolling over and supporting the President’s preferred course, Gymnast? The British chiefs of staff—especially General Brooke—had, after all, assured Marshall in June, only two weeks before, that they were just as opposed to Gymnast as he and Admiral King were, since they wanted all American help to go to Cairo, not to French Northwest Africa.

  In disgust Marshall now exploded. Typically, Winston Churchill, in Marshall’s view, wanted to use an American assault on French Northwest Africa as a distraction: a clever way of avoiding the challenge to Britain of a Second Front even in 1943—but risking only American lives, since Gymnast would be a U.S. undertaking. And, in his view, a very dangerous one.

  Ergo, the American response should be, Marshall decided, a switch of American military effort in the war. From “Europe First” to “Japan First.”

  Japan First?

  George Catlett Marshall was admired by all as the very soul of integrity and loyalty—an officer unimpressed by flimflam, always deeply serious, and a first-class administrator. Tall, trim, calm, and direct, he had served as General Pershing’s chief of staff in World War I, and was credited with excellent judgment, no matter what pressure he was under. He had never commanded in combat, but had a good eye for talented younger commanders and potential commanders. The President had come to rely on his administrative ability, working together with Secretary Stimson to transform a tiny professional army—seventeenth in world rankings in 1939, behind Romania—into the world’s most powerful potential army-air force in 1942: its numbers slated to reach 7,500,000 by the end of the year.

  Marshall was not joking, however. He was convinced that America’s expanding army should not be frittered away in diversions from the country’s
main effort in World War II—and the fact that a British prime minister was refusing to assist in mounting a Second Front in 1942 but was now backing the President’s deplorable plan reduced the otherwise wise, loyal, and imperturbable chief of staff of the U.S. Army to apparent apoplexy.

  At the weekly meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff held on July 10, 1942, General Marshall once again excoriated the President’s plan for landings in French Northwest Africa as “expensive and ineffectual.” The British veto on a cross-Channel attack that year was, he declared, a mark of British pusillanimity, even cowardice. “If the British position must be accepted,” he formally proposed to his colleagues, “the U.S. should turn to the Pacific for decisive action against Japan.”5