The Mantle of Command

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The Mantle of Command Page 49

by Nigel Hamilton


  At the White House, meanwhile, the President, reading Ultra decrypts of German signals and hearing from his OSS chief, “Wild Bill” Donovan, could hardly believe the reports from Germany and North Africa. Could the Führer really have no idea of the magnitude of what was going to hit him?

  That a thousand things could go wrong with the Torch invasion, Roosevelt was well aware, from the notorious autumnal surf off Casablanca to Axis identification of the approaching fleets from America and the British Isles. The Vichy French, too, might react as they were doing on the island of Madagascar still—defending their colonies with everything they had. Would the fact that the “invaders” were American not make a big difference, though? To make absolutely sure, the President prepared special printed leaflets addressed to the people of French North Africa, to be distributed and dropped from the air once the landings took place. He also made a specially recorded audio message to be broadcast on radio—in the President’s best French.13

  How the French would respond thus remained for Roosevelt the biggest question. General Weygand, the pro-American commander in chief of French forces in Africa, had been fired by Marshal Pétain, under pressure of the Nazis, and his successor, General Darlan, was fiercely anti-British and not necessarily pro-American—though he had assured Admiral Leahy that an American landing in overwhelming force would be enough to get the French to agree to a cease-fire, after perhaps token resistance “pour l’histoire.” There was also the possibility being explored by Robert Murphy, the former chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy to Vichy France and currently the President’s special emissary in Vichy-administered North Africa, that General Henri Giraud, a brave and popular warrior who had escaped to France from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, where he’d been held since 1940, could be used to rally French forces in North Africa to the American cause. For this to happen, however, he would have to be sprung from Vichy France by submarine, and attached to General Eisenhower’s headquarters.

  At the end of the day, however, the President had as little confidence that the Vichy French wished to be “liberated” as Hitler did. Or Churchill. Life in French Northwest Africa—save for French Jews—had been remarkably easy, and made all the easier by Roosevelt’s decision to continue sending food. Resistance to an American invasion might therefore be weak—but the President doubted whether the French would resist a German invasion, either, if Hitler chose to contest the Allied campaign. It wouldn’t matter, however. In fact the President was counting on German opposition, which would ensure that American troops learn on the field of battle the same military skills that the Russians had had to learn on the Eastern Front—but on ground of America’s choosing, at the very limit of German communications, and with the strategic goal of gaining a secure steppingstone, on the threshold of Europe, that could be relentlessly reinforced from the United States, and lead to the elimination of Italy as an Axis belligerent—as Stalin had so swiftly understood. Roosevelt thus remained quietly optimistic, even as his secretary of war slipped into an ever deepening funk.

  The Dieppe fiasco, paradoxically, frightened Stimson more as an example of what might befall Torch than it did in relation to his support for a premature cross-Channel invasion. No matter how much the President pointed out the difference—especially the fact that there were still only a handful of Germans in Morocco and Algeria—Stimson continued to argue and conspire to cancel the project. Dimly, though, he became aware that he was testing the President’s legendary patience. When he insisted on lowering the age for the draft, or Selective Service, claiming it was immediately necessary for manpower reasons, before the congressional elections in November, the President was furious—but agreed to ask Congress for the bill—knowing it would dent his Democratic majority in the House and in the Senate. It did not endear Stimson to the Boss, however—the President refusing to invite Stimson to the White House.

  “I have not been seeing as much of the President lately as I used to,” Stimson acknowledged in his diary, but ascribed it erroneously to the President’s increasing trust in General Marshall’s judgment and advice. “That is a good result,” he wrote, pretending to welcome the change, “but I shall have to look out to be sure that it does not cut me out of situations where I have duties and responsibilities as constitutional adviser of the President and will be criticized if I do not present my views to him. I have been much worried lately over the African situation and our variances of views there, but I have presented my own views very clearly to him both verbally and in writing.”14 Reflecting on where it had gotten him, the aging war secretary at last faced up to his failure, however. “I have decided thus far,” he noted, “that it would be unwise to do it again.”15

  Stimson, ever the lawyer, wanted a paper trail of protest if the Torch invasion proved a disaster, but steered away from dismissal for being defeatist. On September 17, 1942, only seven weeks before the projected invasion, he finally abandoned his incessant carping—having been told by Marshall to cut it out: by trying to stop the switch of U.S. bomber forces from Bolero to Torch he was only sabotaging General Eisenhower’s chances of success.16 “We are embarked on a risky undertaking but it is not at all hopeless,” he acknowledged, “and, the Commander in Chief having made the decision, we must make it a success.”17

  Stimson’s reluctant acquiescence in the Torch operation was a relief to the President, but it did not make the path toward victory certain by any means. The speed with which the army and navy operations staffs had to work was phenomenal—and interservice rivalry and disagreement became rife.

  For his part General Patton, commanding the Western Task Force that would be setting out on its epic venture from the Chesapeake Bay, became more and more determined to smash Vichy French opposition if it came—but less and less inclined to work with his naval counterpart, Admiral H. Kent Hewitt.

  Refusing to micromanage, Roosevelt declined to meddle in operational matters, once his strategy had been laid down and accepted: a confidence in his chosen theater and field commanders that was beginning to mark his leadership style as U.S. commander in chief. On occasion, however, he had no option but to intervene—as he did on hearing of the Patton-Hewitt feud. Learning from Admiral King that Hewitt and Patton had almost come to blows (Patton reported to have unleashed a “torrent of his most Rabelaisian abuse” that had made Hewitt’s staff flee in “virtual panic, convinced they could never work with a general so crude and rude as Patton”),18 the President flatly turned down Admiral King’s recommendation that Patton be fired from the invasion lineup. Instead, both officers were summoned to the White House at 2:00 P.M. on October 21, 1942.

  “Come in, Skipper, and Old Cavalryman,” the President welcomed his two field commanders, “and give me the good news.”19

  Patton entered the Oval Office wearing his ivory-handled pistols, and holding under his arm his helmet with his two oversize major general’s stars. Roosevelt had taken a personal interest in the swashbuckling tank commander as far back as 1933, when Patton commanded the cavalry at Fort Meyer, and seemed genuinely delighted by his swagger and pugnacious attitude—which contrasted greatly with so many of the War Department personnel he saw. “He was one of the earliest Cavalry officers to shift to tanks,” the President later wrote of Patton. “He came to see me two weeks before the American expedition started for Casablanca and I asked him whether he had his old Cavalry saddle to mount on the turret of a tank and if he went into action, with his saber drawn,” he recalled with a chuckle. “Patton is a joy.”20

  For his part, now that Torch was definitely “on,” the cavalry general was determined to make the American landings a success. But if Admiral Hewitt had hoped the President would intercede over complications with the British over destroyers, and if Patton hoped he would intercede by giving an order to Hewitt that the landings must take place whatever the weather conditions, they were disappointed. The Commander in Chief refused to get involved. “Of course you must,” he responded to Patton, declining to be drawn over t
he matter of touchdown conditions; meanwhile to Hewitt he advised temporizing with the British Admiralty, whose suggestion of switching around British destroyers with American warships threatened to compromise clear American fire control in support of their troops. “I never say no [to the British],” the President confided mischievously to Admiral Hewitt, “but we can stall until it is too late.”21

  “A great politician is not of necessity a great military leader,” Patton left the White House thinking22—unaware that the very operation he was tasked with was “the President’s great secret baby.” Unaware, moreover, that to get the landings mounted at all the Commander in Chief had had to fight a far, far more prolonged and arduous battle than the brave tanker was having with his naval counterpart.

  From the President’s point of view, though, the White House meeting on October 21, two weeks before Torch, was exhilarating. In his characteristic manner Roosevelt had with charm and goodwill gotten his two commanders to stop squabbling and recognize they were on the same side, in a momentous enterprise that would alter the course of the war.

  Patton’s parting words, spoken in his high falsetto voice as he left the President’s office, said it all:

  “Sir, all I want to tell you is this. I will leave the beaches either a conqueror or a corpse.”23

  32

  Alamein

  THE PRESIDENT, TRAVELING to spend the last days of October at Hyde Park, had to pretend to reporters that nothing was afoot. This was so even as the White House Map Room became the focal point for a veritable fusillade of secret communications—and even as, in the midst of a world war, Americans went to the polls on November 3, 1942, to elect a new Congress.

  The results were dismal—the Democrats retaining control over both chambers, the Senate and the House, though with sorely diminished majorities.1

  How different might have been the outcome, the President reflected, if the Torch invasion had been mounted, as he had hoped, on October 30. But war was war, and the lives of the assault troops were too important to be risked without the extra week’s training and issue of armaments that General Marshall had deemed necessary, when he asked for—and got—a week’s extension of D-day.

  Besides, the omens for Torch looked good. On his way to Moscow in August, Churchill had felt compelled to fire General Auchinleck, and appoint a new British Eighth Army commander. The man he’d chosen, Lieutenant General Richard Gott, was yet another of Churchill’s poor selections, and would, in the view of almost all Eighth Army veterans, have lost the battle for Egypt. But Gott had been shot down by a flight of Messerschmitts while flying back to Cairo for a bath, and had been burned to death.2 His replacement, General Bernard Montgomery, had dealt with Rommel’s August 31 panzer offensive without turning a hair, and had then set about remaking the Eighth Army into a professional modern force of all arms, working together, in preparation for what he described, in a “Personal Message to be read out to the troops on the morning of D-day” as “one of the decisive battles of history.”3 On the night of October 23, 1942, over a thousand artillery guns of the British Eighth Army opened fire at El Alamein, and an all-out assault had begun in the Egyptian desert—Montgomery hoping to smash the German-Italian African Panzer Army at the very moment when Rommel was away in Berlin, officially receiving his baton as a field marshal in person from the Führer, as well as a standing ovation from his fellow Nazis at the Sportpalast.

  Rushing back to Egypt on October 25, Rommel had found his vaunted Panzerarmee Afrika facing disaster—the British not only having attacked in the middle of the night, but having breached the minefields he had ordered to be sewn with half a million land mines. They had killed the acting German Army commander, General Stumme, and broken through with a massive combined force of infantry, tanks, and artillery onto higher ground in the north of the Alamein line, forcing Rommel to counterattack them. The battle had then become a desperate struggle of attrition, causing the Prime Minister to become frantically nervous, and the President—worried lest a British failure prejudice the responses of Vichy officials and military commanders to an American invasion of Morocco and Algeria on November 8—to wish the British could have postponed their offensive for a week, as he had wanted, to synchronize with Marshall’s delay of Torch.

  Lieutenant General Montgomery—who had ordered the entire Eighth Army to undertake training in night fighting—had refused, however, to order his men into minefield combat (crossing the largest sewn minefield in military history to that date) without at least the light of the full October moon.

  By November 2, 1942, when the Alamein battle was still not won, after eleven days, there was growing apprehension. Yet as the disappointing results of the American congressional election came in on the night of November 3, so too did Ultra intercepts of Rommel’s desperate appeals to Hitler to be allowed to retreat, taking with him what was left of his once-victorious Afrika Korps.

  The tide, then, was turning in the Middle East.

  Churchill’s mood—which had dipped during the last days of October, when victory was still not won4—changed from depression to elation.

  Hitler’s negative response—“siegen oder sterben” (win or die)—marked a turning point in World War II. Not even the famed Field Marshal Rommel, though, could halt the exodus of his mobile units as they fled the battlefield, leaving behind even their own Afrika Korps commander, General von Thoma, and tens of thousands of abandoned, battle-weary German and Italian troops, to surrender to Montgomery.

  It was victory, at last, for the British, after three long years of defeat—and the President was as excited as Churchill—for the great pincers he had planned for over a year could soon be applied, if all went well.

  Hitler, having so recently entertained and extolled Rommel in Berlin, was mortified. The Führer had moved his headquarters back to East Prussia—chagrined that, having come so close to victory in Russia and in Egypt that summer, victory seemed now to be slipping away from him by the hour.

  His troops had not succeeded in swiftly capturing Stalingrad. Nor had they quite breached the vast mountain chain of the Urals, despite reaching the peak of Mount Erebus. Now, with Rommel’s Panzer Army in Egypt in full retreat, the possibility of a double German envelopment of the oil fields of the Caucasus from north and south became a chimera—indeed, so worried was Hitler by the military situation that Goebbels was told the Führer might not be able to travel to Munich for his annual get-together with Nazi Party stalwarts on November 9, 1942.5

  Goebbels, for his own part, remained sure that Rommel, the star performer of the German Wehrmacht, would spring something out of the bag to confound the British, as he had so often done before.6 A German internal Security Service reported on November 4, 1942, that “the people are breathlessly following the battle for North Africa. Their trust in Rommel is so high, they cannot imagine a crisis there. The situation at Stalingrad is murky, but it’s hoped the city will be in our hands before the onset of winter.”7

  It was not to be. At his Wolf’s Lair headquarters in Rastenburg, “huge problems” were awaiting Hitler. “He still isn’t eating either lunch or dinner with his staff,” Goebbels noted in his diary on November 4. “Actually this is quite good for his health,” Goebbels added, “since that way he saves four or five hours a day, hours he would otherwise need for conversation.” Nevertheless, “the way things are going in North Africa are getting to one’s nerves—even the Führer’s. I’m getting reports he’s more and more anxious about the outcome. The whole afternoon is consumed by concern. It’s absolutely dreadful we have to wait so long for news. But it’s the same for the Führer. Rommel doesn’t send much. In these critical hours he’ll have other things to do than constantly send us dispatches. We’ll have to wait patiently for tomorrow, when things will be clearer.”8

  The next day’s news was “somewhat bleak,” however, Goebbels noted—plotting how, as Reichsminister for propaganda, he could turn defeat into a story of “calculated withdrawal” to better positions in Egypt.9
American losses in the naval and land battle for Guadalcanal, as well as the Democratic Party’s losses in the congressional elections, would keep American focus on the Far East, surely.10 Yet even Goebbels had to wonder when he received reports, on the night of November 6, 1942, that Allied warships and troop transports were passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, and entering the Mediterranean Sea—ships whose destination was “still unknown.”11

  Was it a British relief convoy for Malta? Or an attempt to land British forces behind Rommel’s front, in Libya? “We’re going to do everything in our power to smash it” using air and naval forces, Goebbels recorded. “There are reconnaissance reports of three aircraft carriers and a battleship among them. If we can lure them into a naval battle, we could reverse the defeat we’ve suffered. . . . Everything else that’s going on in the world is being overshadowed by North Africa.”12 He lamented Hitler’s increasing reluctance to broadcast or be filmed for weekly newsreels, but hoped the Führer’s forthcoming trip to Munich, if he went ahead with it, would give an opportunity for rabble-rousing rhetoric.

  Instead he got Torch.

  33

  First Light

  RETURNING FROM HYDE PARK on November 5, 1942, the President stayed briefly in Washington. There he finally revealed to the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, the still-secret details of Operation Torch—tasking him to do his best to keep the Spanish government from interfering from Spanish Morocco, or offering free access across Spain to the Mediterranean to the Germans, once the landings commenced. Then the President formally opened the new White House wing, where Admiral Leahy was now installed as his military chief of staff.

 

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