The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Stimson had been “amazed again at how little he [Secretary Knox] knows about the plans of his own people. This time I hope I got it across,” he added, “and, when I parted with Knox on the street after we had left Hull’s office, he expressed his warm appreciation of the entire situation and said he would back us up. We shall need him for we never can tell what is going to happen in the White House, although I hope that the President will this time stick to his confession of faith as to Bolero.”9

  With the arrival of Marshall and King’s cable reporting the British war cabinet’s latest rejection of a cross-Channel invasion that year, however, the bottom fell out of Stimson’s strategic world. Given his open attempts to turn members of the cabinet against the President, he was deeply embarrassed—in fact, after several hours trying to calm down, on his return to the War Department, Stimson dictated a formal letter to the President, deploring the “fatigued and defeatist mental outlook of the British government,” and had it couriered to the White House.10

  The letter was as ill conceived as it was jejune. In a last-ditch effort to save Marshall’s preferred strategy, he now urged the President to authorize Marshall and King to insist the Allies put all their eggs in one basket: discard the idea of a cross-Channel attack in 1942, but concentrate all efforts on preparing at least for a 1943 invasion of France—with no question of any “diversions” to Africa. American forces—“young vigorous, forward-looking Americans”—would, he claimed, have “a revolutionary effect” on the British. He even cabled General Marshall to tell him what he had written the President.

  Stimson’s appeal fared as badly as the chiefs’ argument in London, however—as Stimson recognized when there was a knock on his door the next morning, July 24, 1942.

  In came four-star Admiral Bill Leahy, the new military chief of staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, who had arrived to talk to him—on the instructions of the President.

  Stimson, a first-class prosecutor, did not propose to go down without a fight. He attempted to give Leahy, before the admiral could tell the secretary to get in line with the President’s wishes, a brief history of the cross-Channel project since the previous December, hoping to turn Leahy against the Commander in Chief.

  As Stimson claimed to Leahy, Marshall had gotten apparent British acceptance of the scheme on his last trip to London, in April, but then “Churchill had come over and tried to break it in June; and how we had rounded him up and again gotten his acceptance; and how he had jumped the boundary for the third time.”11

  Stimson’s ranch metaphors had little effect on the new chief of staff, however—a full admiral, a former U.S. ambassador to Vichy France, and a supporter of Roosevelt’s plan to invade Vichy French Northwest Africa, not German-occupied France. “I also gave him a copy of my last letter to the President about continuing the influx of men and munitions into Britain and he read it. But he dropped remarks which confirmed my fears that the President was only giving lip service to Bolero,” Stimson confessed in his diary that night, “and that he really was thinking of Gymnast.”

  Stimson was at last correct—Leahy noting in his own diary that he returned from Stimson’s office to the White House for an interview with the President “in which we discussed the practicability of ’Gymnast’ in 1942.”12

  Matters were now moving fast. As Stimson dined quietly with his wife at his Woodley Mansion home, there came the “long awaited message from London giving the arrangement arrived at by the conference”: Gymnast.

  To me “it was most disappointing, not to say appalling,” Stimson confided, “for Marshall and Hopkins had apparently been compelled, in order to get an agreement, to agree to a most serious diversion of American troops.”13 Not only were United States forces to embark on landings in French Northwest Africa, but the plan was to be enlarged! Instead of being just the President’s plan for U.S. landings in Morocco and Algeria, the British—the very people who would not land troops across the English Channel—would contribute twenty thousand troops to back up the American landing at Algiers.

  Stimson’s heart sank. With a sickening sense of doom, he went over the cable with Marshall’s deputy, General McNarney, who was with him, and “analyzed it, he agreeing with my analysis, and then after he had gone I got the President on the telephone and gave him my views.”

  It was fruitless to object. The President was at least compassionate in victory. “He said that he was strongly opposed to the giving up of Bolero but I could see,” Stimson noted, “that nevertheless he was anxious to go on with Gymnast. And I felt in my soul that the going on with Gymnast would necessarily destroy Bolero even in 1943 and throw us on the defensive.”14

  The President, by contrast, was clearly delighted. Far from fearing it would put the United States on the “defensive,” he thought his plan would put America on the offensive—a shot that would be heard round the world in the next few weeks.

  “The President asked me to come to the White House bringing Arnold and McNarney to meet him and Admiral Leahy at 11:30 tomorrow Saturday,” Stimson recorded.15

  The President, it appeared, had truly taken over as commander in chief.

  Henry Louis Stimson was nothing if not obstinate—a trait that had made him a fortune as a trial lawyer, but something of a millstone as secretary of war. He still thought he could, at the last hour, deflect the President from his preferred course, and therefore now “hurried down to the Department” early on July 25, where he “dictated an analysis of my views,” as he called it16—driving with Generals McNarney and Arnold to the White House and handing his latest memorandum to the President, who received him with his new chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, standing behind him.

  The President did not even look at it. He had, he announced, “decided that the going on with Sledgehammer this autumn was definitely out of the question,” Stimson recorded.17 The President had already telegraphed to Marshall, King, and Hopkins “that he accepted the terms of the agreement they had negotiated with Churchill except that he wished a landing made in Gymnast not later than October 30”—i.e., before the November congressional elections.18 Hopkins was instructed to tell the British prime minister it was now “full speed ahead” on Gymnast—which was renamed “Torch” that day.19

  It appeared to be a done deal—yet still Stimson objected to the idea, as did the senior air and army officers who had accompanied him to the President’s office. “McNarney, Arnold, and I pointed out to him the dangers of the situation produced by this operation as contrasted with an operation in the Pacific.”20

  The Pacific? This was, given the weakness of King and Marshall’s amateurish paper on the merits of a “Pacific First” strategy, a mistake. In any event it was of no avail. “I cross-examined him as to his realization that his decision on Gymnast would certainly curtail and hold up Bolero,” Stimson added—and with complete frankness the President “admitted that it would,” thus delaying, therefore, an eventual cross-Channel operation until 1944.21

  Stimson was mortified. Pointing to his memorandum, he said he wanted it to be placed on record that he, the secretary of war of the United States, completely opposed the U.S. landings in Northwest Africa—indeed, in perhaps the single most dramatic gesture of the war’s direction since Pearl Harbor, Stimson took up the President’s offer to wager on the outcome of the landings: Stimson betting, in effect, against the success of his fellow Americans.

  “I told him,” Stimson recorded in his diary, “I wanted this paper read at the time when the bets were decided”—i.e., when the landings were made, that fall. “The decision,” Stimson recorded, “marks what I feel to be a very serious parting of the ways.” The secretary of war was distraught. “We have turned our back on the path of what I consider sound and correct strategy,” he lamented, “and are taking a course which I feel will lead to a dangerous diversion and a possible disaster.”22

  Stimson’s bleak “prophecy,” as he referred to it afterward, was dire: that Russia would li
kely be conquered by the Germans that very year. As a result, if the United States went ahead with the invasion of Northwest Africa, a “large portion” of American troops would be left “isolated in Great Britain, Africa and Australia”—leaving “a Germany victorious over Russia” and “free to turn its forces on us.”23

  In the light of history, Stimson’s prediction said little for his acumen. The war secretary’s own preferred strategy for America was, if anything, even more fanciful. If the British would not mount a Sledgehammer version of a Second Front that year, he now felt the United States should switch all its forces to the West Coast of America, leaving only enough U.S. forces “consolidated” in Britain to be able to launch an “overwhelming attack on Germany if and when that time finally arrives”—while in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Far East the United States should seek “check-mating Japan’s attack against Iran and India; falling on Japan’s back in Siberia; and opening access to China through Burma.”24

  Japan’s attack against Iran and India? Like the President, Admiral Leahy could only rub his eyes in disbelief when he read the war secretary’s memorandum.

  The Japanese, the admiral knew, had withdrawn their navy to home waters after their devastating defeat at Midway in June 1942; they would not be able to replace their sunken aircraft carriers for years. A successful invasion of India from the Burmese border or in the Indian Ocean was now unlikely, given the amount of air power the United States had diverted to protect the British. Moreover, how Stimson hoped to get Stalin to permit U.S. forces to move into Siberia and thereby risk Russian forces having to divert their efforts into a war with Japan, at a time when Soviet forces were only holding the German armies by the skin of their teeth, or how they might miraculously reopen the road to China through Japanese-held Burma, was beyond Leahy’s comprehension. As Leahy noted laconically in his own diary that evening, the two-hour meeting that was held “with regard to a second front in 1942” had been lamentable. Secretary Stimson and his War Department team had been utterly and wholly negative. The President demanded, as Leahy noted, not pique but action: “an effort in the ’Gymnast’ plan this Fall.” But “the Army was not favorably disposed.”25

  Adamantly opposed would have been a better description. Marshall and Stimson seemed to have infected the entire senior staff of the War Department. General Eisenhower, who had arrived ahead of Marshall in London to take command of U.S. troops in Britain in preparation for a cross-Channel Bolero attack, even went as far as to call the July 22 cancellation of Sledgehammer “the blackest day in history.”26

  Stymied in their efforts at the White House, Secretary Stimson and Generals McNarney and Arnold returned to the War Department on July 25 to lick their wounds.

  The next day, July 26, found the war secretary “very depressed.” To his shame, he would never admit to the President that he, Roosevelt, had been right. Nor would he apologize, or make good on his bet. In his memoirs, written after the President’s death, he glided over the saga,27 unwilling to be reminded of his great protest in July 1942, in which he had thought of himself as a sort of Revolutionary orator, adopting the language and nobility of the Declaration of Independence. “They have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity,” the famous text had described the British under King George III. “We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”

  Stimson had certainly felt the same way.

  Even when reading over his diary, in private, after the war’s end, Stimson remained surprisingly churlish. “As I look back on this paper,” he wrote of his infamous bet and memorandum, “it seems clear that the one thing which saved us from the disaster” that he’d forecast “was:

  the unexpected victory of Russia at Stalingrad

  enormous luck in landing in Africa

  success over submarines.”28

  Given that the Russian success at Stalingrad took place months after Operation Torch, as did Allied success against the U-boat menace, this was ungracious.

  At Woodley Mansion, meantime, Stimson confided to his diary his sense of foreboding at “the evil of the President’s decision. It may not ripen into immediate disaster. What I foresee is difficult and hazardous and very likely successful attempts made to attempt a landing in northwestern Africa”—to be followed, however, by an American failure, since “even when obtained, it will be a lodgement more or less like that of the British at Gallipoli in 1915—troops suffering constant attacks from the German air force and possibly German and Spanish land troops.”

  Stimson’s mix of bravado, pessimism, and abject fear had reduced him to a wreck. He now worried for the safety of General Marshall, who was returning by air to Washington in poor flying weather. “On the whole this is written on a blue Monday morning,” he confessed on July 27, 1942—and his mood only got bluer the following afternoon, when Marshall’s Stratoliner arrived from London and the secretary of war was given the “full story of what happened”—“a somber tale and I see very little light in it,” the war secretary noted.29

  Knowing that Stimson had spoken not only for General Arnold but for General Marshall, General McNarney, and most senior staff officers at the War Department, the President was acutely aware, in the White House, that he needed to change not only their minds but their hearts: to rally them to his Northwest Africa cause if the landings were to succeed.

  25

  A Definite Decision

  THE PRESIDENT WAS INCREASINGLY disappointed in his aging war secretary—and furious when leaks began to filter into the American press that the Commander in Chief was ignoring the advice of his senior military advisers.1

  Fortunately, one of the President’s qualities as a leader was to focus on the positive aspects of an individual’s character. Stimson’s behavior seemed uncharacteristic of the secretary, who despite his party affiliation had hitherto been a loyal colleague in cabinet, and an effective administrator of the War Department alongside General Marshall. He had handled the awkward business of internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and the noninternment of German Americans and Italian Americans on the East Coast, with tact and skill, even if the Japanese “relocation” was, in many ways, a tragedy. As reports of Japanese atrocities multiplied and anti-Japanese feeling grew, any hope of being able to release the internees early was dashed. It was, Stimson had found, simply easier to leave them in camps well away from the West Coast, where they would be out of public sight and out of mind.2 Stimson had also taken quiet responsibility for development of the top-secret “diabolical weapon”3 that the President had ordered to be developed before the Germans could do so, and was handling that efficiently, too. Above all, though, Stimson was a Republican, and thus represented crucial bipartisanship in the Roosevelt administration in its conduct of the war—especially with midterm elections approaching in November that could affect the passage of all future legislation.

  If Stimson’s leaks were in part designed to stop Roosevelt from firing him, they worked. They did not, however, change the President’s mind—Roosevelt simply bottling up his irritation rather than seeking a further fight with his war secretary. Having initially ignored Stimson’s memorandum when the secretary brought it to the White House in person, he now refused to respond to Stimson in writing. He did, however, set down his written response for posterity. Ever the antiquarian and history buff, Roosevelt wanted historians, at least, to have the truth. “Memorandum to go with Memorandum from the Secretary of War dated July 25, 1942,” the President therefore dictated a response to his secretary, which he ordered should be filed with the rest of his secret papers at his presidential library in Hyde Park.4

  “This memorandum from the Secretary of War is not worth replying to in detail,” the President wrote bluntly, “because it is contradictory in terms and fails to meet the objective as of the Summer of 1942.” The threat of further expansion of Japanese conquest in the Pacific was now almost n
il—“They seem to be making little progress westward or southward,” the President noted, thanks to the Battle of Midway. His decision to contest Japanese occupation of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands would, he was certain, seal off the Japanese rampage in the South Pacific. To mount an American amphibious offensive in the Pacific would, however, take “one to two years—and the total lack of effect on Germany of such a major offensive” would be unconscionable, in his view. It would not “win the war,” particularly if “Germany puts Russia completely out of action, occupies the Near East and the Persian Gulf and starts down the west coast of Africa.”

  Europe or its doorstep, by contrast, was different. “On the other hand,” as he pointed out, “helping Russia and Britain to contain Germany this Autumn and undertake an offensive in 1943 has a good chance of forcing Germany out of the war, in which case Japan could not conduct war in the Pacific alone for more than a few months.”

  In that, at least, the President and Colonel Stimson were as one. “The Secretary of War fails to realize,” however, the Commander in Chief went on, “the situation which prompted me to send Hopkins, Marshall and King [to London] to urge ’Sledgehammer’ or, failing that, some definite offensive, using American ground troops in 1942.” The result had been a foregone—and in his view—correct conclusion. “They find ’Sledgehammer’ is impracticable and, therefore, make the other proposal,” the President’s plan for U.S. landings in French Northwest Africa—a plan “with which the British,” having initially objected to it, now “agree.”