The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Seeing Stimson’s crestfallen face, however, Marshall took pity on the secretary—who meant well, and had been devoted to the best interests of the U.S. Army since his appointment in July 1940. Marshall therefore assured the secretary “that I could rest confident that he and the Staff would not permit Gymnast to become actually effective if it seemed clearly headed to a disaster.”13

  General Marshall was not alone in stepping away from Stimson’s revolt. To Stimson’s added chagrin, Secretary Knox, the following day, also withdrew any presumed support for an official protest, mutiny, or further machinations against the President. The doughty Colonel Knox, who had served with courage in Cuba in 1898 with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and again as an artillery major in World War I in Europe, was “less worried about Torch than I was,” Stimson noted—admitting that, as secretary of the navy, Frank Knox was, by contrast, “more worried about Sledgehammer than I was.”14

  With this evaporation of support, Stimson decided he had best shelve his “Letter to the President.”

  The possible mutiny was over, for the moment at least. In high dudgeon the secretary went away for another two weeks’ vacation.

  Given what was awaiting the five thousand brave but inexperienced Canadians who had been assigned to Operation Jubilee, the mini-version of Sledgehammer that Churchill had felt compelled to authorize nine days later in order to silence men like Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, and the senior officers of the War Department, Colonel Knox had had every reason, however, to be worried.

  PART ELEVEN

  Reaction in Moscow

  27

  Stalin’s Prayer

  PERHAPS THE GREATEST IRONY of the 1942 Second Front/Torch imbroglio was Stalin’s reaction.

  Secretary Stimson, the U.S. chiefs of staff, and the senior generals in the War Department had all claimed that Torch would not aid the Russians. Winston Churchill, flying to Moscow to tell the Russian leader the news that no Second Front would be mounted in France that year, but that instead, U.S. landings would be substituted in Northwest Africa, was understandably apprehensive. Bravely he ventured, on August 12, 1942, to the heart of the Soviet Union—a country whose Communist forces he had himself tried to destroy in 1920, after World War I. With Russian backs to the wall in the Caucasus—Hitler’s legions having crossed the Don and now aiming to take Stalingrad—it felt as if he was “carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole,” in the Prime Minister’s immortal later phrase.1 “We were going into the lion’s den,” one general recalled, “and we weren’t going to feed him.”2 Fortunately, however, Churchill was traveling to the Kremlin with the personal representative of the president of the United States, Averell Harriman.

  Reading the cables Harriman sent him from Russia, the President considered Churchill’s mission to have been nothing short of heroic. As soon as Harriman returned to the United States, the President said he wanted to see him and hear his firsthand account, in person.

  Two weeks later, on August 30, 1942, Averell Harriman duly drove to lunch with the President, together with the President’s two speechwriters, Robert Sherwood and Sam Rosenman. The President was at his new summerhouse retreat: the USS Shangri-la, as Roosevelt called it.

  The rustic mountain camp consisted of “a number of rudely constructed, small pine cabins, each of two or three rooms,” which did not impress Judge Rosenman—especially the President’s hut. “It was furnished with the most rudimentary kind of secondhand furniture, most of which had come from a navy storehouse where unwanted and well-used furniture had been accumulated over the years,”3 he sniffed.

  The President didn’t mind; the cabin was as Spartan as the rooms of his beloved presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, but possessed something forbidden on the steamer (a converted coast guard cutter): rugs. “The rugs,” Rosenman recorded, however, “had come from the same place and were in a bad state of repair.”

  The view, Judge Rosenman allowed, was magnificent. “The President occupied a bedroom looking out through the woods over a beautiful valley. To it was attached one of the two bathrooms. The other three bedrooms were double bedrooms but none of them had space for more than two simple metal beds, a dresser, and a chair. These three bedrooms were all served by one bathroom. The door to the bathroom never quite closed quite securely, and the President laughingly used to warn each of his guests of that fact; but the door was never repaired.”4

  Most of all Rosenman was amazed at the President’s buoyant mood, when the war seemed to be going so badly. The Germans, Rosenman had been informed, had by now advanced more than five hundred miles on the Eastern Front, capturing half a million Russian troops. They had already reached the peaks of the Urals: poised, it seemed, to race to the Caspian Sea, seize the crucial Caucasus oil wells, and threaten northern Iran. In North Africa Erwin Rommel, promoted to field marshal by the Führer following his capture of Tobruk, was bringing up hundreds of new and improved long-barreled Mark IV panzers as well as lethal 88mm antitank guns for his final assault on Alexandria, Cairo, the Suez Canal—and then on, if successful, to Palestine.

  In the Pacific, Americans were fighting fiercely for a toehold on Guadalcanal, where on August 8–9 they had suffered a naval defeat so great it had had to be kept from the public: no fewer than four Allied cruisers—three American and one Australian—being sunk in the Savo Sea by the Japanese, who suffered no losses at all. . .

  Questioned at Shangri-la by the President, Harriman assured him the Germans had still a huge task on their hands—contradicting reports of the War Department’s head of intelligence, who was currently predicting the imminent fall of Stalingrad to the Germans.5 The Russians would hold, Harriman assured the President—whatever Secretary Stimson and the men in the War Department might say to the contrary. “Averell gave a lucid analysis of the situation,” Sherwood recalled Harriman’s verbal report, “and then firmly predicted that Stalingrad would not fall, and that the battle could conceivably end in a major military disaster for the Germans.” As far as the Ural Mountains were concerned, “He thought the Russians could prevent the breakthrough which would have cut them off from the Caucasian oil fields and given the Germans a clear road into Iran and the Middle East”—for Stalin had assured Harriman and Churchill he could hold both Baku on the Caspian Sea, and Batum on the Black Sea, for the next few months, when the approaching winter snow would “greatly improve their position.”6 Better still, Mr. Stalin had even confided to Harriman that he was planning a huge counteroffensive that would stun the Germans.

  This was greatly encouraging to the President, who listened to his personal emissary’s blow-by-blow account of the three-day series of summit meetings in the Kremlin with intense fascination—and sly amusement. Churchill had first off “announced the decision to give up Sledgehammer without mincing words.” Stalin, in response, had been rude to the point of deliberate insult, Harriman related—“Stalin gave him hell,” and “without mincing words” derided “the timidity of the democracies in comparison to Russia’s sacrifices.”7 A tyrant by nature and struggle, Stalin could not resist denigrating the pathetic British military performance in the war so far—sneering at the Royal Navy’s failure to protect its convoys to Murmansk, scorning the failure of the British Army to beat the Wehrmacht in open battle. War was war, he had grimly pronounced; to win a battle, one must be willing to accept huge casualties.

  It was then that Churchill, according to Harriman, had delivered his tersest riposte.

  “War is war,” the Prime Minister acknowledged, “but not folly.”8

  The President, at Shangri-la, was utterly delighted by the phrase—and by Winston’s refusal to be bowed by the Russian’s ill-mannered rebuke. Or to be tempted to pack his bags, once Harriman put his mind at rest by passing him a note, in which he pointed out that this was merely par for the psychopath’s bullying course. The next day, Harriman had promised the Prime Minister, the Russian monster would be all sweetness and roses.

  The President “appeared to enjo
y hearing about Churchill’s discomfiture in those long reproach-filled sessions,” Harriman later told his ghostwriter, Elie Abel9—for there, but for the grace of God, the President might well have been: attempting to explain in person to the Soviet dictator why neither the United States nor Great Britain were willing to make good on their promise of a Second Front in France that fall.

  About the President’s substitute invasion plan—Torch—however, the Russian leader had been, to even Churchill’s astonishment, almost ecstatic.

  Churchill, according to Harriman, had gone on to explain, after delivering the bad news, that there was good news, too. The Americans were, indeed, coming—within weeks!

  At this the dictator had changed his tune entirely. By way of metaphor, the Prime Minister had described the President’s substitute strategy as akin to dealing with a crocodile: instead of hitting the critter on its hard snout, it was best to cut into its “soft underbelly.” Moreover, this would be far more than a mere slash: for the invasion that would be mounted by American and British forces would number a quarter of a million men: more troops than Hitler had sent into the Caucasus—dispatched separately from the British Isles and the United States with massive air and naval cover.

  Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, General Arnold, Admiral King, General McNarney, General Handy, General Wedemeyer—all had sought to persuade the U.S. commander in chief that Torch was a mistake and would not help the Russians in any way in their hour of need. Instead, according to Harriman, the Russian dictator had instantly grasped how the U.S.-led invasion could change the whole dynamic of the war against Hitler.

  As Prime Minister Mackenzie King subsequently heard the story, via the Canadian defense minister who’d met with Winston Churchill in London, “Stalin had approved strongly” of Torch. “He had thought for 10 minutes after Churchill had proposed it, and then was greatly pleased. This of course is to be the second front that will be opened this year.”10

  The description of Stalin’s response given to Mackenzie King, though given to the President weeks later, was certainly in line with the detailed minutes of the summit meeting, taken down at the time by a stenographer and used by Churchill in his own cables from Moscow to the President in Washington. According to the typed minutes of the meeting, which Harriman then showed the President at Shangri-la, “Mr. Stalin appeared suddenly to grasp the strategic advantages of ’Torch.’ He saw four outstanding advantages” of the operation:

  It would take the enemy in the rear.

  It would make the Germans and the French fight each other.

  It would put Italy out of action.

  It would keep the Spaniards neutral.11

  Reflecting on this extraordinarily positive response, the President had shaken his head at the irony. Stalin had required but ten minutes to recognize the way Torch would turn the tide of World War II, whereas it had taken the War Department more than a year! Moreover, the most senior U.S. generals were reputedly still trying to sabotage the operation, by ordering preparations for Bolero to continue in England without interruption, even at the risk of compromising the success of the Torch operation.

  However, Stalin’s next remark had been, if anything, even more astonishing.

  Turning to the President’s personal representative, Stalin had said to Churchill and Harriman—as Harriman now told Roosevelt—“May God help this enterprise to succeed.”12

  PART TWELVE

  AN INDUSTRIAL MIRACLE

  28

  A Trip Across America

  RETURNING FROM SHANGRI-LA on August 30, 1942, the President summoned General Marshall to dinner at the White House. He wanted to see whether, with Hopkins and Harriman present, he could use Stalin’s positive reaction to the news of Torch to reinvigorate the general, and get him to now put his whole authority at the War Department behind preparations for the U.S. landings. To the President’s dismay, however, General Marshall presented him, instead, with a draft cable to Churchill, reducing Eisenhower’s plans for a three-pronged invasion of French Northwest Africa to two: one outside the Mediterranean, one within. At Casablanca and Oran only.

  “This matter has been most carefully considered by me and by my naval and military advisers,” Marshall’s draft cable ran, for the President to sign. “I feel strongly that my conception of the operation as outlined herein must be accepted and that such a solution promises the greatest chance of success in this particular theatre.”1

  The President could only laugh—suspecting that Secretary Stimson and Admiral King were behind the maneuver: the War Department still hoping that by limiting the landings to the Atlantic seaboard of Morocco and the westernmost part of Algeria, the United States could continue to pursue plans for a cross-Channel landing in the spring of 1943—or even a switch to the Pacific, if the battle for Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands became more and more menacing.

  Shaking his head, the President told Marshall the cable was unacceptable. Landings only in Morocco and at Oran would not persuade the Vichy French that America was serious—indeed, facing such meager landings, Vichy French forces in the rest of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia would be encouraged to resist invasion by America as an outside power. Worse still, recognizing the weakness of such a force, Hitler would undoubtedly seize the chance to ship troops across the Mediterranean and order them to occupy the Vichy territories—threatening to create the very scenario Secretary Stimson had always feared: a sort of Custer’s Last Stand by American troops, or second Gallipoli. Instead of a mighty American operation on the threshold of Europe that would give heart to all those praying for Hitler’s defeat, Torch would be a flickering candle.

  The President was deeply disappointed in Marshall. Somehow, Roosevelt insisted, enough naval forces must be found for all three landing areas to be simultaneously assaulted, however hard this might be. Redrafting Marshall’s proposed cable, he turned it on its head.

  Torch must succeed, by its very preponderance of men and munitions, convoyed and landed in overwhelming strength. “To this end I think we should re-examine our resources and strip everything down to the bone to make a third landing possible,” Roosevelt reworded the cable to Churchill and the British Admiralty.2 All three initial landings must be made by purely American forces, he also laid down in the telegram he eventually sent to Churchill that night, lest the Vichy French be inspired to defend their colonial territories the more determinately, given their hatred of the British. “I would go so far as to say,” he wrote, “I am reasonably sure a simultaneous landing by British and Americans would result in full resistance by all French in Africa whereas an initial landing without British ground forces offers a real chance that there would be no French resistance or only token resistance.”3

  Poor Eisenhower, the designated supreme commander for Torch, now found himself torn between instructions from the Commander in Chief of the United States and his U.S. Army chief of staff to whom he owed his meteoric promotion since 1939. “I feel like the lady in the circus that has to ride three horses with no very good idea of exactly where any one of the three is going,” he laughingly told General Patton, who’d been chosen to command the Western Task Force’s assault landings in the Casablanca area, setting out directly from the United States.4

  Receiving the President’s cable, Churchill was understandably disappointed that no British troops would be landing in the first wave of Torch. He bravely accepted Roosevelt’s logic, however—and urgency.

  Time was running out, if the invasion was to be mounted that fall—the leaves at Shangri-la already beginning to turn. Over the following days the three-pronged Torch operation, despite Marshall and Stimson’s objections, was finally set in stone. The Western Task Force’s Casablanca operation was trimmed, the Eastern Task Force’s Algiers landings increased. “We are getting very close together,” the President cabled Churchill from Washington on September 4, 1942—adding: “I am directing all preparations to proceed”—meaning that General Marshall and the War Department would now be told
to obey, or resign. “We should settle this whole thing with finality at once.”5

  Trying to put together the largest Allied amphibious operation of the war from a headquarters in London, over three thousand miles from the troops that would be embarked in America, Lieutenant General Eisenhower was understandably nervous. For his own part he remained unconvinced that Torch was a better option than Sledgehammer, or Bolero staged in 1943, and gave it only a fifty-fifty chance of success.6 He was, however, relieved that a final decision had been made—indeed, he was already proving a remarkably patient and intelligent coalition commander. The “Transatlantic essay contest,” as he put it, was at least over.7

  The next day, Churchill cabled his agreement. “It is imperative now to drive straight ahead and save every hour. In this way alone shall we realize your strategic design,” he telegraphed the President in cipher, “and the only hope of doing anything that really counts this year.”8

  The President’s simple comment was one word: “Hurrah!”9