The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Admiral King agreed—knowing the switch would please Admiral Nimitz in his preparations to contest the Japanese operations at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, which the President had authorized.

  General MacArthur, too, would be ecstatic. MacArthur had foretold only doom in Europe, whereas in the Pacific there was a chance for the United States to assert its burgeoning air, sea, and military power to good purpose.6 Switching America’s main effort to the war in the Pacific, Marshall thus asserted to his fellow chiefs, “would tend to concentrate rather than scatter U.S. forces.” Moreover, such a move would “be highly popular on the West Coast,” where there was still great concern about Japanese raids. The general even claimed that “the Pacific War Council, the Chinese, and the personnel of the Pacific Fleet would all be in hearty accord”; and from a strategic point of view in conducting the global war, switching to the Pacific was “second only to BOLERO”—in its potential. Going flat out in the Pacific, in other words, “would be the operation which would have the greatest effect towards relieving the pressure on Russia.” 7

  Admiral King heartily agreed. He had never liked Gymnast. The transfer of aircraft carriers from the Pacific to support the invasion of French Northwest Africa would, he claimed, wreck U.S. naval domination of the central and southern Pacific—indeed, he even stated, “in his opinion, the British had never been in wholehearted accord with operations on the continent as proposed by the U.S. He said that, in the European theater, we must fight the Germans effectively to win, and that any departure from full BOLERO plans would result in failure to accomplish this purpose.”8 General Arnold, still only a lieutenant general and subordinate to General Marshall, kept silent.

  The chiefs thus concurred, and in the first outright confrontation with their own commander in chief in World War II, they agreed that afternoon to send a new chiefs of staff “Memorandum for the President” drawn up by General Marshall, and signed by both King and Marshall.

  Not content with this formal new July 10 memorandum by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marshall felt compelled to send an even more personal third memorandum, on his own individual account, explaining the Joint Chiefs’ second memorandum: again decrying the President’s Northwest Africa alternative as “indecisive” and leading to an “ineffective” Second Front in the spring of 1943, if such an invasion were actually mounted. The United States, he maintained, would “nowhere be pressing decisively against the enemy.” Therefore, “it is our opinion that we should turn to the Pacific, and use all existing and available dispositions and installations, strike decisively against Japan.”9

  Marshall’s advice to the Commander in Chief, then, was simple: that the President should give the British an ultimatum. Full, exclusive cooperation over a cross-Channel Second Front that fall, or latest by the spring of 1943. Otherwise the United States would switch its forces to the Pacific, and leave only token forces in Britain for defense, together with a few U.S. air missions. “Admiral King and I have signed a joint memorandum to you regarding the foregoing,” Marshall ended, ominously, enclosing the somewhat sensational document and giving it to a dispatch rider.10

  The President had already left for Hyde Park the night before. He’d reluctantly undertaken to spend the weekend entertaining Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands—the head of state of a main ally in the war against Hitler and Japan. “The President rather dreads the coming of Queen Wilhelmina because of the stories of her stiff and stern ways that have preceded her,” the President’s personal secretary noted in his diary—one story being “that she is a teetotaler and once left the room when drinks were brought in.”11

  The Queen’s visit proved not nearly as bad as feared—but the arrival of General Marshall and Admiral King’s new memorandum was. Delivered by courier on the evening of July 10, it ruined any semblance of peace or relaxation for the President. The new memorandum, he was told, was once again supported by the secretary of war.

  It was—Secretary Stimson having become deeply involved. “In the afternoon,” the secretary noted in his diary on July 10, “Marshall told me of a new and rather staggering crisis that is coming up in our war strategy. A telegram has come from Great Britain indicating that the British war cabinet are weakening and going back on Bolero and are seeking to revive Gymnast—in other words, they are seeking now to reverse the decision that was so laboriously accomplished when Mr. Churchill was here a short time ago. This would simply be another way of diverting our strength into a channel in which we cannot effectively use it, namely the Middle East. I found Marshall very stirred up and emphatic over it. He is naturally tired of these constant decisions which do not stay made. This is the third time this question will have been brought up by the persistent British and he proposed a solution which I cordially endorsed. As the British won’t go through with what they have agreed to, we will turn our backs on them and take up the war with Japan. That was the substance of a memorandum which he wrote and sent to the President this afternoon. It was fully concurred in by the Navy and secretly concurred in by Sir John Dill and the British staff here. I hope it will be successful in preventing a new series of painful negotiations. But there is no use in trying to go ahead with Bolero unless the British are willing to back up their agreements. I rather think this will serve as an effective block.”12

  Stimson, in other words, saw the ultimatum as a bargaining ploy—which, in effect, it was. The secretary and General Marshall had had enough of the President’s niceness to the British—indeed, they were so confident their “showdown” would stun the President and compel him as commander in chief to back them that Marshall took the next day off “for rest and recreation at Leesburg,” while Stimson went riding with a friend at Woodley, his estate outside Washington.

  Receiving Marshall and King’s memorandum at Hyde Park, the President shook his huge head. Not only was the document a renewed repudiation of his “great secret baby,” but the document was filled with unsupported assertions and dictatorial absolutes unworthy of the chiefs of staff of the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy.

  The memorandum, once again, ridiculed the President’s Gymnast plan as “both indecisive and a heavy drain on our resources.” It claimed, moreover, “that if we undertake it, we would nowhere be acting decisively against the enemy and would definitely jeopardize our naval position in the Pacific.” The two chiefs acknowledged that the United States could not mount a Second Front on its own, however. For a Second Front to succeed, it needed “full and whole-hearted British support,” since the British “must of necessity furnish a large part of the forces.” Giving up all possibility of an immediate cross-Channel attack in 1942 “not only voids our commitments to Russia,” but neither one of the proposed alternatives or “diversions” for that year—Churchill’s idea of an invasion of northern Norway or the President’s Gymnast plan—would achieve anything, in their unhumble view. Instead, those diversions “will definitely operate to delay and weaken readiness for Roundup [the actual liberation of France] in 1943.” The chiefs’ recommendation of a switch to operations in the Pacific would, they claimed, not only “be definite and decisive against one of our principal enemies, but would bring concrete aid to the Russians in case Japan attacks them.”13

  It was perhaps the worst-argued strategic document ever produced by America’s highest military officers—as studded with ill-defined “definitely,” “decisive,” and “definitive” claims as MacArthur’s most outspoken missives from the Pacific. The President was disappointed in them.

  On Sunday, July 12, 1942, having pondered the best tactics to employ, Roosevelt telephoned the secretary of the General Staff, Brigadier General Walter Bedell Smith.14 To Smith’s consternation it was not, however, to ask for a meeting, but for something far more ominous.

  23

  A Rough Day

  INSTEAD OF RESPONDING with anger or invective to his chiefs’ defiance, as Churchill would have done, Roosevelt simply turned the tables on General Marshall and Admiral King. They had recommended switching A
merican priorities to the Pacific. Well, then, what exactly was their plan for a “decisive and definitive” campaign in that hemisphere?

  As Stimson found when he reached the War Department, a “telephone request had come in from the President for a memorandum in detail outlining the steps that would be necessary to make the alternative change over to the Pacific which General Marshall suggested in his memorandum on Friday that he and King would recommend if the British insisted on sabotaging Bolero,” the secretary noted in his diary.

  Roosevelt was calling their bluff. “This was important and required very immediate and prompt action, for the President wished to have such a memorandum flown up to him this afternoon.”1

  That afternoon? Marshall was not even in Washington that day. Moreover, as became instantly clear to Stimson as a first-class attorney, neither Marshall nor King had actually considered how a “decisive and definitive campaign” switch to the Pacific could be mounted.

  As Stimson confided to his diary in embarrassment that night, it was clearly “impossible to have a careful study” of a new Pacific campaign manufactured in a few hours, without prior preparation; in fact it was unwise, even stupid, of Marshall and King to have proposed such a “decisive” switch without first bothering to rehearse its ramifications—and then disappearing for the weekend!

  Panic ensued. General Marshall’s senior planner, General Handy, was summoned urgently, and “he and his fellows in the General Staff plunged into work on it and I went down to the Department at three o’clock to be ready for consultation on the subject,” Stimson noted—the trial lawyer in him reeling at the situation in which Marshall and King’s empty threat had placed him and the whole War Office team. “Marshall was called back from his rest at Leesburg and came into the office at the same moment that I came in. By that time General Handy had a rough memorandum ready and Marshall went over to the Navy Department to consult over it with King.”2

  Had the moment in World War II been less serious—Hitler having moved his advance headquarters from East Prussia on July 6 to the Ukraine, near Vinnitsa, to be closer to his armored forces as they raced beyond Voronezh to the Caucasus—the scramble in Washington might have been comical. At the War Department on Constitution Avenue, Secretary Stimson read over Marshall’s proposed reply, together with his assistant secretary of war, John McCloy. McCloy had been a captain in World War I like Stimson, but could hardly be expected to come up with a detailed “definitive” military strategy for the Pacific on his own, let alone in five minutes.

  McCloy was quiet—sensing his bosses had been exposed. “He has always been somewhat of a ‘Middle-East-ner’ but I think my arguments before Marshall came in had pretty well knocked that out of him,” Stimson claimed3—erroneously.

  “Marshall came back and told us that he and King had revised it [the Handy memorandum] rather drastically and tried to put a little more punch into it. As soon as it was written out he brought me the revised draft, a copy of which I attach,” Stimson wrote in his diary4—the document signed by Marshall, King, and Arnold.

  “I told him and Marshall that I approved of the [new] memorandum as the only thing to do in such a crisis. I hope that the threat to the British will work and that Bolero will be revived. If it is not revived, if they persist in their fatuous defeatist position as to it, the Pacific operation while not so good as Bolero will be a great deal better and have a much stronger chance of ultimate effective victory than a tepidly operated Bolero in which the British do not put their whole heart.”5

  Still, George Marshall remained uneasy.

  Marshall hated to be challenged in such a way—a general “as cold as a fish,” in the words of the secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.6 As chief of staff of the U.S. Army, Marshall was the first to point out holes in subordinates’ logic and to question unsubstantiated claims. He also hated to be contradicted over his decisions. When Major General George S. Patton protested in June over Marshall’s decision to send only one U.S. division to Egypt to help fortify the British line at Alamein, rather than the two that Patton had said would be essential for such a mercy mission to be effective, Marshall had responded like a viper. Patton, he ordered, was to be put on the first plane from Washington to California “that morning”7 for insubordination. “You see, McNarney, that’s the way to handle Patton,” Marshall had boasted8—even claiming later he had “scared him half to death.”9

  Now it was Marshall who was sweating for his career—yet unwilling to admit he might be wrong. He was for the most part an imperturbable officer, but he could be obstinate where his pride was concerned. His dander was up—unwilling to accept he had made a stupid mistake in proposing a course of action he had not thought through: a mistake he would have lashed a subordinate for making, but which he only made worse as, challenged by the President, he now faced the secretary of war—and argued for the seriousness of his overnight Pacific ultimatum.

  “Marshall was eloquent and forceful in his advocacy of the plan,” Stimson dictated that night. “He is a little more optimistic as to the speed with which he thinks Japan can be knocked out in the Pacific than I am. But he has thought it out more carefully than I and has more facts at his disposal. He told me that Sir John Dill, who is very loyal to Bolero and has been very helpful to us, has sent a telegram to Churchill warning him that, if the British government persisted in their defeatism as to Bolero, we would turn our backs and go to the Pacific. Such a telegram ought to have great force with the British government.”10

  This was to dig themselves only deeper—the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, via General Dill, going behind the President’s back to the British government.

  As Marshall, King, and Arnold admitted in the new memorandum they now sent by air to the President, “There is no completed detailed plan for major offensive operations in the Pacific. Such plans are in process of being developed,” they claimed—untruthfully. “Our current strategy contemplates the strategic defensive in the Pacific and offensive in the Atlantic,” they acknowledged; therefore to switch to offensive in the Pacific and withdraw from Europe, or merely remain on the defensive in the British Isles and Iceland, would, they confessed, be a mammoth planning task. “A change therein would require a great deal of detailed planning which will take considerable time.”11

  The lameness of this excuse was embarrassing even to Stimson. If the heads of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force had no idea how such a switch could be done, why had the chiefs of staff gone out on a limb to propose such a supposedly “decisive” campaign in the Pacific?

  Aware the issue was dynamite, Stimson held a war council with all senior army and air officers at the War Department on July 13, 1942, and “cautioned all present that this matter must not be spoken of to anyone whatever.”12 If word should get out to the press that the chiefs of staff were in revolt against their own commander in chief, the entire direction of the war could be compromised. Moreover, if word of Marshall’s recommendation of a switch to the Pacific reached MacArthur, there would be no end of pressure from that source to make good on the threat.

  The fact was, Colonel Stimson knew, to switch all U.S. military attention to the Pacific was something that had never been seriously studied. (“This shows how little we had really thought of the Pacific,” Stimson admitted when annotating the account in his diary, after the war.)13

  Hastily contrived, Marshall’s arguments for such a major change in strategy defied common sense, Stimson recognized. Their argument that such a diversion would dissuade the Japanese from declaring war on the Soviet Union was utterly without merit, since there was no evidence whatever that the Japanese were currently intending to attack the Soviet Union—Japan far too heavily invested in China and across half of Asia and the Pacific. American operations to clear the Japanese from their conquests in the Malay Barrier would take years, even if such a Marshall-proposed switch to the Pacific took place—without having any appreciable effect on Hitler’s war, or helping the Russians. Moreover, in terms of a reinfo
rced Pacific counteroffensive, American soldiers would be fighting and dying to restore the Netherlands East Indies to a colonialist European power; Malaya and Burma to another colonialist power; and the Philippines to its mandated independence as a sovereign country. What was the urgency for this? And where was the “decisiveness,” that such a campaign would offer?

  While Marshall oversaw the dispatch to the President of his explanation of what he and Admiral King proposed to do in the Pacific, Stimson went to dinner at the Chevy Chase Club, somewhat perturbed.

  It was now the President’s move.

  At Hyde Park, the President continued with his duties of hospitality toward Queen Wilhelmina—showing her his new presidential library and his estate, holding a picnic, then inviting her to dinner at the Big House, without ever intimating to her that one of the great crises of the war was now taking place: a crisis that would affect her country, the Netherlands, more directly than any other, since a cross-Channel Second Front promised to liberate Holland, while a switch to the war in the Pacific promised to oust the Japanese from the Netherlands East Indies—neither of which he was intending to do that year!

  Receiving the new memorandum from Marshall and King, the President chose at first to ignore it—not even summoning his new military assistant, Admiral Leahy, who was in hospital at the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, outside Washington, having emergency treatment for an abscessed tooth. Messrs. Stimson, Marshall, and King could wait, the President decided, until he returned to the White House to discuss the matter in detail. In the meantime, however, he let them know he was utterly unimpressed by their paper on Pacific strategy.