The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  On September 3, 1942, meanwhile, the President had agreed to give, in the White House, a talk to representatives of the International Student Assembly—a speech that was sent out across the world and gave perhaps a better idea of his growing sense of America’s destiny in the modern world than any he had previously broadcast.

  The talk was, the President explained to listeners, “being heard by several million American soldiers, sailors, and marines, not only within the continental limits of the United States, but in far distant points—in Central and South America, in the islands of the Atlantic, in Britain and Ireland, on the coasts of Africa, in Egypt, in Iraq and Iran, in Russia, in India, in China, in Australia, in New Zealand, in many parts of the Pacific, and on all the seas of the world. There—in those distant places—are our fighting men. And to them,” Roosevelt declared in a voice not only of authority but of absolute conviction and confidence, “I should like to deliver a special message, from their Commander in Chief, and from the very hearts of their countrymen.”

  The speech touched on familiar themes. “Victory is essential,” Roosevelt stated, “but victory is not enough for you—or for us. We must be sure that when you have won victory, you will not have to tell your children that you fought in vain—that you were betrayed. We must be sure that in your homes there will not be want—that in your schools only the living truth will be taught—that in your churches there may be preached without fear a faith in which men may deeply believe.

  “The better world for which you fight—and for which some of you give your lives—will not come merely because we shall have won the war. It will not come merely because we wish very hard that it would come. It will be made possible only by bold vision, intelligent planning, and hard work. It cannot be brought about overnight; but only by years of effort and perseverance and unfaltering faith.

  “You young soldiers and sailors, farmers and factory workers, artists and scholars, who are fighting our way to victory now, all of you will have to take part in shaping that world. You will earn it by what you do now; but you will not attain it if you leave the job for others to do alone. When you lay aside your gun at the end of the war, you cannot at the same time lay aside your duty to the future.

  “What I have said to our American soldiers and sailors applies to all the young men and women of the United Nations who are facing our common enemies. There is a complete unanimity of spirit among all the youth of all kinds and kindreds who fight to preserve or gain their freedom.”

  “This,” the President declared, “is a development of historic importance. It means the old term, ’Western civilization,’ no longer applies. World events and the common needs of all humanity are joining the culture of Asia with the culture of Europe and the culture of the Americas to form, for the first time, a real world civilization. In the concept of the four freedoms, in the basic principles of the Atlantic Charter, we have set for ourselves high goals, unlimited objectives. These concepts, and these principles, are designed to form a world in which men, women, and children can live in freedom and in equity and, above all, without fear of the horrors of war.

  “For no soldiers or sailors, in any of our forces today, would so willingly endure the rigors of battle if they thought that in another twenty years their own sons would be fighting still another war on distant deserts or seas or in faraway jungles or in the skies.

  “We have profited by our past mistakes. This time we shall know how to make full use of victory. This time the achievements of our fighting forces will not be thrown away by political cynicism and timidity and incompetence.”

  It would not be straight sailing. “We are deeply aware that we cannot achieve our goals easily. We cannot attain the fullness of all of our ideals overnight. We know that this is to be a long and hard and bitter fight—and that there will still be an enormous job for us to do long after the last German, Japanese, and Italian bombing planes have been shot to earth.

  “But we do believe that, with divine guidance, we can make in this dark world of today, and in the new postwar world of tomorrow—a steady progress toward the highest goals that men have ever imagined.

  “We of the United Nations have the technical means, the physical resources, and, most of all, the adventurous courage and the vision and the will that are needed to build and sustain the kind of world order which alone can justify the tremendous sacrifices now being made by our youth.

  “But we must keep at it—we must never relax, never falter, never fear—and we must keep at it together.

  “We must maintain the offensive against evil in all its forms. We must work, and we must fight to insure that our children shall have and shall enjoy in peace their inalienable rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

  “Only on those bold terms can this total war result in total victory.”10

  Roosevelt was seeking not only to raise national morale in the weeks before the Torch invasion, but to prepare Americans for a far greater challenge: asking young Americans, especially, to step up to the plate in embracing America’s moral role in a postwar world.

  Along with more proselytizing, though, the President was anxious to make sure American industrial output and its expansion of the military were matching his high expectations. In his State of the Union address in January 1942, he had announced production targets that were ridiculed by Hitler and Goebbels. Not only were the majority of them being reached, however, but many of them were being exceeded, the President was informed, by dint of mass production on a scale never seen before in human history. To check on this, and to spread something of the gospel of inspiration that his personal presence would engender, Roosevelt now set off on what was for him an epic, 8,754-mile train journey across America—and was amazed.

  Mrs. Roosevelt accompanied the President only as far as Milwaukee, but FDR’s daughter Anna, his secretary, Grace Tully, and his stenographer, Dorothy Brady, as well as his first cousin, Laura Delano, continued on with him. Daisy Suckley was also a member of the party, together with the President’s former law partner, Harry Hooker, as her escort, in order that there be no gossip. Steve Early, the White House press secretary, went along to ensure no word of the trip be reported in the press before the President’s return;11 also Ross McIntire, the President’s doctor, and Captain McCrea manned the communications car.

  “I can’t quite believe it even,” Daisy scribbled in her diary, ensconced in Stateroom B on Car No. 3, as it left Silver Spring, Maryland, “yet, here I am—on board—to tour the country with the P. of the U.S.!” Donald Nelson, head of the War Production Board, had briefed the President on “munition plants, the new airplanes, etc.” that would be viewed on the President’s tour.12 It was only at the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Detroit, however, that the true magnitude of what was being achieved industrially hit home.

  At the tank plant in Detroit, “a boy with a yard-long Polish name plowed through water & mud” in his new M-4 Sherman, “straight up to the President’s car, stopped and pushed his head through the hole with a smile. People standing around looked rather alarmed as the tank plowed forward, but the P. had a good laugh.”13

  “Good drive!” the President shouted.14 “It was a monster performing his tricks & lacked only the final bowing of the front legs, like the elephant in the circus!” Daisy noted on September 18. “30 tanks a day—”15

  A day? Two hundred a week? Sure enough, by year’s end tank production had increased from under four thousand in 1941 to twenty-five thousand in 1942—hoisted “like ducks on a spit” by thirty-ton jigs as they were assembled.16

  It was the same story at Ford’s new plant at Willow Run on September 18, 1942. Where in March that year there had been but trees there now stood a new aircraft factory a mile and a half long, containing the world’s first mass-production assembly line for airplanes, which that month produced its first B-24 Liberator bomber for the President to see. Over succeeding months it would churn out planes at a phenomenal rate that
would eventually top one B-24 every sixty-three minutes—the plant’s contribution to some forty-nine thousand U.S. planes produced that year.17

  At North Chicago some sixty-eight thousand naval officers and men were training; at Milwaukee a huge turbine manufacturing plant was visited. At Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho there had been nothing in March 1942. A naval training station opened only five days before the President’s arrival. It would train almost three hundred thousand sailors over the following thirty months, becoming the second-largest training center in the world.

  In Seattle the President drove beneath the wing and fuselage of a B-17F Flying Fortress at the new Boeing Plant 2—the factory buildings camouflaged with burlap and fake trees to resemble a quiet American suburb. Produced both by men and women (“Rosie the Riveters”), production of the four-engine bomber rose from 60 that fall to almost 100 per week, or 362 per month, as the war progressed.

  Factory workers “evidently knew nothing of the P.’s coming & looked up vaguely from their work as we drove between the machines,” Daisy recorded. “It seemed incredibly crowded, though in perfect order. When we came out, the word had spread & workers were running to get a view of the P., clapping & smiling. We see many women in these plants, & they tell us more & more are being taken in. Here they are even welding, with masks on.”18

  From there they traveled to the aluminum smelting works at Vancouver, Washington—“Long sheds filled with electrolytic cell furnaces burning 24 hours a day and 7 days a week—No stop is possible.”19 Later that morning they inspected the Kaiser shipbuilding yard on the Willamette River, in Oregon. The country’s biggest housing project had been undertaken to provide labor, and it was there that the President witnessed a true miracle of mass production: the launching of a ten-thousand-ton freighter, the USS Joseph N. Teal, built in only ten days.

  “The work men were all lined up,” Daisy noted as the President’s car drove up a special ramp to face the bow of the ship. Roosevelt’s daughter Anna was given a “bouquet” of Defense Stamps, tied with a “red white & blue ribbon. The ceremony began with a prayer by a priest.” Then, as the last of the eight rivets holding the vessel were knocked out, the champagne bottle swung against the bow “showering Anna to the skin, & down the ways went the Ship—it is a most moving scene, specially now, when you realize that that ship may be sunk by a submarine on her very first trip.”20

  How was it possible to build and launch a vessel of that size in mere days—an almost biblical achievement? As the President was driven “around the shops where they are making the various parts & assembling them as far as possible,” the genesis of Roosevelt’s confidence in American industry became clear to Daisy. “Large portions of the ships were loaded on huge trucks with rubber tires ready to be taken to the ’ways,’” Daisy noted. “This is Mr. Kaiser’s ’secret’ for getting a ship built in 14 days!! The P. likes both Mr K. & his son Edgar who was there with him, said Mr. K is a ’dynamo.’”21

  Henry Kaiser was. Notable too was the morale of the workforce, and the managerial and engineering masterminding that went into a process in which, like the assembling of a model from a kit, the constituent parts of a vessel were first manufactured, then merged at the appropriate moment with the nascent vessel, from the keel up.

  This miracle of mass production was awe-inspiring for the President to witness with his own eyes, barely two years after he himself had secretly begun assembling the team that would cause it to happen: a marvel that had begun on May 28, 1940, when Roosevelt had put in a phone call to the CEO of General Motors, a Danish immigrant by the name of William Knudsen. “Knudsen? I want to see you in Washington. I want you to work on some production matters. When can you come down?”22

  Knudsen had taken leave from General Motors and become a “dollar-a-year man” in Washington—first as leader of the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense, then as director general of the Office of Production Management. When Donald Nelson was made chairman of the War Production Board in January 1942, Knudson became a lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and director of production in the Office of the Under Secretary of War: Knudson and Nelson the equivalent of Hitler’s production tsars, Fritz Todt and Albert Speer.

  Prefabrication, then, was the key to American military mass production, as the President explained to Daisy Suckley and his other guests—whole sections of a ship, such as deckhouses, built elsewhere, then transported and welded into place on the slipway—the shipyard becoming a literal as well as metaphorical assembly line. To achieve such output, Kaiser’s Oregon complex would employ thirty thousand people—30 percent of whom were women.

  America’s transformation from potential into actual industrial superpower dwarfed in swiftness, scale, and quality anything comparable in the world. It was small wonder the President felt proud; by the end of the year the United States would be producing more war material than all three Axis powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, put together.23

  From the Boeing plant the President traveled the next day to Mare Island Naval Shipyard, where fifty thousand workers tested, built, and repaired submarines. From there to Oakland Naval Station, where dozens more submarines and subchaser vessels were under construction and repair. At Long Beach, Los Angeles, he visited the huge Douglas Aircraft plant, which would manufacture upwards of thirty-one thousand aircraft during the war; at Camp Pendleton he inspected more naval training units and visited the San Diego naval hospital—caring for wounded men from the fighting in the Pacific, as well as some still recuperating from Pearl Harbor. Then to the Consolidated Vultee plant at Fort Worth, Texas, where not hundreds but thousands of B-24 Liberators were being mass-produced. And on to Louisiana—where the President visited the Higgins boatbuilding yard.

  Employing twenty thousand people, Andrew Higgins had overcome initial U.S. Navy hostility and revolutionized landing-craft production. His accumulated knowledge of shallow-draft vessels required for the marshes and bayous of Louisiana had given him a fierce faith in his own product—enabling him, once contracted, to begin building landing craft for the U.S. Navy on a bewitching scale: more than twenty thousand craft being produced in the months after Pearl Harbor. “He is the same type as Mr. Kaiser, a genius at getting things done,” Daisy Suckley wrote in her diary, “constantly inventing new gadgets. His trouble is that he is too blunt & fights with everyone, so that the maritime commission hates him and won’t play ball with him—But, he turns out the goods!”24

  And so the journey had continued: everywhere the same story, that of a nation not only at war, but operating at almost manic speed to provide itself with the means to win it. At Camp Jackson, in South Carolina, thousands of soldiers “marched before the P. and disappeared over the hill, raising a mist of dust, their guns and helmets showing against the sky,” Daisy described. “It is our last evening on board. But the P. said the trip had worked so well with us four that he will take us on another! No complexes—no quarrels—etc.!”25

  29

  The President’s Loyal Lieutenant

  IF ANYONE QUESTIONED, LATER, just how it was that Roosevelt remained so deeply confident of victory in the fall of 1942, after such a summer of reverses for the United Nations, they need only have looked to the President’s trip across America that September.

  “So I think he has had a real mental rest, & is now ready to go back & ’talk turkey’ to a good many people—He can talk from what he has seen with his own eyes,” Daisy Suckley noted1—for the President knew now, beyond all doubt, that the United States was ready to win the war, whatever it took. He did not want Torch to be “delayed by a single day,” as he wrote in a cable to Churchill from his train—and certainly not by diverting troops to a landing in Norway, as Churchill was suggesting once again, to mollify Stalin over the cancellation of further convoys to Murmansk, in view of the heavy casualties. Nor did he see a need to tell Stalin in advance that the latest convoy, PQ 19, would not sail. “I can see nothing to be gained by notifying Stalin sooner than is necessary
and, indeed, much to be lost,” he cabled. Torch, he was more and more certain, would change the whole dynamic of the war: would give the United States and United Nations the global initiative. “We are going to put everything in that enterprise and I have great hopes for it. . . . I am having a great trip. The training of our forces is far advanced and their morale excellent. Production is good but must be better. Roosevelt.”2

  Dimly, even Winston Churchill began to face up to what was obvious to the rest of the world: that the United States would not only win the war for the Western Allies, but was set to become the dominant world power thereafter.

  No sooner had the President returned from his inspection trip than Churchill cabled Roosevelt to question the incredible numbers that the American Production and Resources Board had given the British for U.S. military production—output amounting to some seventy-six thousand tanks by 1943, enough to equip two hundred U.S. divisions.

  “This appears to me to be a provision on a scale out of all proportion to anything that might be brought to bear on the enemy in 1943,” Churchill telegraphed in alarm. It was clear to him that if Great Britain was intending merely to cauterize Hitler’s Europe by more ad hoc raids—operations like Mountbatten’s “Operation Plough” mini-landings in snowbound Norway, or Rumania, or Northern Italy3—the President was not. Nazi Germany, Roosevelt was certain, would not be felled by pinpricks but by a sequence of ever-greater amphibious landings that would unroll the true military potential of the United States.

  Churchill, having predicated his whole strategy for British survival in World War II upon his alliance with the United States, could hardly complain—and to his credit, beyond his mild protest over American über-production and Roosevelt’s insistence on Torch being, in its initial phases, a completely U.S. operation of war, he didn’t. When General Brooke, the British Army CIGS, protested against Averell Harriman’s recommendation that U.S. teams take over the Persian port and railroad system, which would result in British forces in Iran becoming wholly dependent on America, Churchill had rounded on Brooke with the words: “In whose hands could we be better dependent?”4