The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  “At 2:20, the President laid a corner stone at the NorthEastern [sic] corner of the new addition to the Executive Mansion which contains my office,” Leahy recorded in his diary, noting that the ceremony “involved no speeches and no formality other than the usual taking of photographs”1—for the press were to be given no chance to get too close to the President, or his staff, on the eve of such a momentous military undertaking, with tens of thousands of American lives at risk.

  “Of course we hear no word from the great convoys that are converging on the rendezvous,” Secretary Stimson noted that same day, “because they are all under radio silence. But the fact that they are coming is already foreshadowed by messages which are coming out of Germany.” Enemy reconnaissance planes had “evidently spotted them in the Gibraltar Channel. Today word came through that the Germans had asked Spain for permission to go through.”2

  Thanks to Montgomery’s great victory in Egypt, it seemed unlikely the Spanish, who had remained neutral for so long since 1939, would agree. “The news from Egypt is getting better and better. Rommel is in complete retreat, has lost a large number of tanks and a considerable number of prisoners and, as the day wore on today, the news indicated he was running faster and faster, and the British becoming more and more jubilant. For once matters have been timed admirably for our own action,” Stimson—the former refusenik—confessed, “for Hitler’s main forces are still tied up in Russia and now Rommel’s force seems to have been pretty effectively smashed in the eastern Mediterranean.”3

  So far, so good. General Marshall had warned the war secretary that the President “was very snappy today and was biting off heads,” but when Stimson sought an interview at the White House he found Roosevelt “in very good humor,” in fact was as “amiable as a basket of chips,” as he recorded afterwards with relief4—the President even agreeing with Stimson’s solution to the problem of competition between the nation’s need for soldiers and for specialists in the war industries: namely a presidential appointee to arbitrate between the Manpower Commission and the Selective Service authorities, both of which were working remarkably well.

  The tension in the War Department and at the White House was, however, growing by the hour.

  The next day, Friday, November 6, 1942, the President addressed the cabinet at 2:00 P.M. Stimson had a new bee in his bonnet, this time about a “military school at Charlottesville.” It was designed by the secretary of war “to train officers for proconsular duties after the war was over.” As the war was by no means over, and since the cabinet had been divided over the subject at its last meeting, the matter threatened to become a controversial red herring.5

  Once again Roosevelt had to beat back the temptation to silence his secretary of war—resorting instead to his usual tactic when he didn’t want a particular issue to be debated, or another to be raised. As he confided several weeks later to the Canadian premier, Mackenzie King, “I adopt the policy when asked a question that is embarrassing, of stalling to tell a story, and after a time, others forget and lose interest in the question they have asked.”6

  The tactic worked—for the most part. “I had all the typical difficulties of a discussion in a Roosevelt Cabinet,” Stimson lamented after the cabinet meeting, once back at the War Department. “The president was constantly interrupting me with discursive stories which popped into his mind while we were talking, and it was very hard to keep a steady thread through, but I kept my teeth in the subject and think I finally got it across.”7

  Roosevelt knew exactly what he was doing, however; the matter was deferred. No sooner was the cabinet meeting over, then, than the President—anxious to evade the press, who might pick up rumors of the impending landings—set off for Shangri-la. With him went Harry Hopkins, Hopkins’s new wife, Louise, Grace Tully, Daisy Suckley, and several more guests.

  “Quite cold—large fires in the fireplaces,” Daisy noted of their arrival. “There was a feeling of excitement. Telephone calls now & then, but the P. keeps conversation light—teases everyone.”8

  They went to bed early. There were “flashing lights” in the woods and some commotion, but eventually she fell asleep.9

  It was the eve of the largest amphibious invasion launched in American history—an armada of over a hundred ships approaching French Northwest Africa and about to land more than a hundred thousand men on the shores of Morocco and Algeria: Torch.

  How such a huge invasion, dispatched from two continents, could be kept so secret and timed to arrive synchronously was nothing short of miraculous.

  Daisy Suckley knew something was up, but what it was even she had no idea. “For weeks,” she noted in her diary afterwards, the President “has had something up his sleeve.” Only a handful of people knew of the operation, she recorded, “though everything, down to the very date, has been planned since July. He spoke of an egg that was about to be laid—probably over the weekend.” They might have to return to Washington on Saturday “if the hen laid an egg!” she recalled the President’s warning with amusement.10

  In the event, they remained at Shangri-la. There was little the Commander in Chief could now do. For good or ill, the invasion must go ahead—indeed, on November 1, while still in Hyde Park, Roosevelt had had to crush urgent recommendations from Robert Murphy, his presidential representative in Algiers, who pleaded for the invasion to be postponed for two weeks.

  Poor Murphy had run up against a dire difficulty. “Kingpin”—i.e., General Giraud, the “hero” who had escaped from a German prison camp—had been duly contacted in Vichy, on the grounds that he was, in contrast to General de Gaulle in England, the best prospective military leader who might persuade Vichy forces in Morocco and Algeria to lay down their arms, once U.S. troops landed. However, to preserve secrecy, the President’s emissaries had declined to tell Giraud in advance when exactly the invasion would take place. Once informed, the brave Frenchman had proven nothing less than a thorn in General Eisenhower’s side—insisting he needed more time if he was to be the savior of France.

  Murphy, hearing this at his office in Algiers on November 1, had suddenly lost faith in the whole Torch enterprise. “I am convinced that the invasion of North Africa without favorable French High Command will be a catastrophe,” he had wired to the President in Washington. “The delay of two weeks, unpleasant as it may be, involving technical considerations of which I am ignorant, is insignificant compared with the result involving serious opposition of the French Army to our landing.”11

  There can have been few more “ridiculous” cables sent by a career diplomat in the days before a major amphibious invasion involving more than a hundred and thirty thousand soldiers, sailors, and airmen in its first wave—as Murphy, to his credit, admitted in retrospect. “The intricate movement of vast fleets from the United States as well as England was already under way, and a delay of even one day would upset the meticulous plans which had been meshed into one master plan by hundreds of staff officers of all branches of the armed forces of both Allied powers,” the diplomat afterward reflected—complaining that no one had “briefed” him on the complexity of such an operation of modern war.12

  General Eisenhower, who had never commanded in combat, nor been responsible for such a vast operation of war involving army, navy, and air components operating simultaneously from two continents, had been rocked by his copy of Murphy’s cable, and waited for the President to decide what to do. “Of course it was a preposterous proposal,” Secretary Stimson noted in his diary, “but strangely enough” Giraud and his conspirators in Vichy France had “won over ’McGowan’ [Murphy’s code name] to support it.”13

  In Washington, Secretary Stimson called Giraud’s plea to postpone the invasion by two weeks “as impossible as a flight to the moon.”14 Roosevelt felt the same. Receiving Murphy’s personal recommendation, the President had been contemptuous. Oh, the French! he’d mused—hearing that General Giraud not only wanted to delay the invasion, but had announced he wished to be made commander in chief
of the entire Allied invasion forces, including the Americans, once it took place!

  Admiral Leahy, in Washington, spoke with Marshall and King. All were agreed: the Frenchman was mad, and must be dumped if he did not comply with the President’s wishes. “The decision of the President,” Leahy signaled in an uncompromising cable sent to Murphy from the White House on November 2, “is that the operation will be carried out as now planned and that you will do your utmost to secure the understanding and cooperation of the French officials with whom you are now in contact.”15

  “I personally don’t expect much enthusiasm on the part of the French African Army in opposing American troops,” Leahy noted in his diary that night, “although the coast defenses of the Navy may be expected to oppose the landings.”16 Even Secretary Stimson, who was feeling daily more confident in the enterprise, called the Murphy cable in his diary “one of the crises which inevitably occur in military operations, particularly in such long and complicated ones as the one we are now launching.”17

  The invasion was still on. The Germans remained unaware of what exactly was coming. The Vichy French were either blissfully ignorant, or squabbling over who would wield power in the aftermath. General Patton, commanding the Western Task Force, thirsted for glory. General Eisenhower cursed at the complexity of dealing with French colonial defenders he needed to befriend in order to fight the real enemy, the Nazis.

  And more than a hundred thousand trained assault troops fought seasickness and fear, as “D-day” and “H-hour”—the moment of touchdown—approached.

  November 7, 1942, in the Catoctin Mountains, in north-central Maryland, dawned chilly. “One can hear every sound from one room to another,” Daisy noted. Even the “doors themselves creak & snap & groan!”18

  She lit the fire in her bedroom from the paper and kindling outside her door. The camp’s staff brought her breakfast. She read the newspaper, then took Fala, the President’s dog, for a walk around the grounds. “When I got back to Shangri-La I found the P. sitting in the enclosed porch. He told me that one of the guards last night had challenged a dozen or so men with guns, in the dark. The dozen men refused to stop or answer, so he reported to headquarters. All available soldiers & S.[ecret] S.[ervice] were called out, beat the woods, etc. Much excitement!” Daisy recorded. It turned out that there were only two intruders: “two boys were looking for skunks, & being ’natives’ & independent, saw no reason for answering the challenge! All’s well!”19

  The President chuckled—wondering, however, whether this was a microcosm of what would be happening in Northwest Africa. Reports had been confirmed that ships sailing from Great Britain through the Straits of Gibraltar “have been spotted by Spanish and Italian observers,” as Secretary Stimson, at the War Department, noted.20

  Torch was now in the lap of the gods.

  The President remained serenely optimistic.

  This, the President reflected, was the great virtue of the Torch he was lighting: that whatever transpired on the battlefield—however mixed up the invasion forces, however chaotic the scenes in North Africa, however conflicted the Vichy French defenders of France’s African colonies—Torch simply could not fail.

  There were still no Germans in French Northwest Africa—and given the sheer size of the secret invasion forces poised to descend on Algeria and Morocco, there was nothing the Germans, or the Vichy French, could do to stop it. Within days of the first landings there would be almost a quarter million American troops, backed by British units, established on the Atlantic and Mediterranean shores, with airfields and seaports to receive reinforcements, drawn from the vast U.S. military arsenal the President had created that year. There was no way Hitler could evict them.

  How different a U.S. invasion of France, across the English Channel, would have fared that year—or, without combat experience, the next. The United States had never mounted such an amphibious operation in its history, and there was so much still to learn—even before U.S. troops actually met Germans on the field of battle. The British had been fighting Germans since the spring of 1940, when the “phony” war ended and Hitler launched his massive attack on the Western Front; it had taken them more than two long and unhappy years of combat to win a single battle. How long would it take the U.S. Army?

  It didn’t matter.

  This, again, was something which even the smartest brains in the War Department had been unable to accept, the President reflected: namely, the time it would take for a formerly isolationist, pacifist nation not only to gird itself up for foreign war, but to learn how to fight it there, on the battlefield.

  American observers had returned from the British front in Libya and North Africa that summer with many lessons and recommendations based on desert fighting: especially the need to deal with the Wehrmacht’s dreaded 88mm antiaircraft gun used in its lethal mobile antitank role; also the seamless cohesion between Rommel’s infantry, panzers, artillery, and his Luftwaffe air support. But until American commanders and their units were tested in battle, such observations were simply theory. Even after years of British combat in North Africa, it had taken a commander as ruthlessly professional as General Montgomery to kick out the duds in the British Eighth Army and recast the way the citizen army of a democracy should fight, if it ever hoped to defeat the indoctrinated, disciplined warriors of Hitler’s brutal Third Reich: a nation where killing had become the be all and end all of German vengeance for defeat in World War I; where butchering one’s own people, of the wrong creed or faith, was accepted by the masses—merciless slaughter, carried out without public protest, and without even a semblance of collective conscience. That stain, that genocidal distortion of humanity, had to be brought to an end, the President was utterly determined—and by putting his first major American army into battle in an area where it could win its spurs, and hearten the free world as well as occupied nations, seemed to him a noble, realistic, and achievable aim.

  It was this that caused the President to feel so confident in the days and hours leading up to the Torch invasion, as all around him attested. When Prime Minister Mackenzie King called him on November 6—his call put straight through to Shangri-la—the Canadian premier had been amazed and delighted to hear the President’s voice, immediately. “Said he was feeling very well,” and was speaking “from the top of a hill” seventy miles from Washington, and almost two thousand feet “high.” The President seemed untroubled by the congressional election results. In fact, “everything considered,” Roosevelt remarked, “to still have control of both Houses of Congress in a third term was not too bad.” Winston Churchill had called him the night before, “very pleased” with the victory at Alamein; and there would be “other things very soon,” the President cautiously assured King—who’d been informed of the Torch operational details both by Churchill and by his minister of defense, since many Canadian naval vessels would be taking part in the invasion armada.

  Prime Minister King had consistently argued against a cross-Channel Second Front invasion—and had been proven tragically right when so many of his compatriots were senselessly mown down at Dieppe on August 19. Torch, however, was different—and the Canadian premier was “looking forward” to it. “He said he had been so glad to hear my voice again,” King described the President. “He sounded very cheerful”—so much so, in fact, that he “said he wanted to tell me a joke about some of the Italians and the Germans who had been captured in Egypt. He said that they were in terrible shape, Italians were black with dirt, and the Germans in a positively filthy condition . . .”

  Mackenzie King didn’t get, or lost, the point. But where, in the spring and summer that year, his own mind had been disturbed by the collapse of British forces in the Far East, Indian Ocean, and Middle East, his Canadian heart was now filled with hope.

  As to the Pacific, “about all we can do there is to hold our own,” Roosevelt confided, “and we are doing that”—the situation at Guadalcanal “much better.”21 But the major blow, as the President had always insis
ted, was now to be in the West.

  The President’s telephone rang constantly—Hopkins ignoring his wife, Louise, as he sought to help field the incoming reports and facilitate the President’s responses. “Throughout the week-end, Harry was in & out of F.D.R.’s room from breakfast time on,” Daisy noted; “Louise stayed in her room all Sunday morning,” November 7.22

  In Washington the situation was more fraught. General Eisenhower had cabled to “inform us that a landing of the American expedition will be commenced at Oran and Algiers at 1:00 A.M. Greenwich civil time, which is 9:00 P.M. Washington time,” Admiral Leahy formally recorded in his diary in his new office in the White House East Wing. “Received radio information that one combat loaded ship in a convoy en route to Algeria was torpedoed before reaching the Straits of Gibraltar,” he added—telephoning the news to the President at Shangri-la. “This ship, which probably carried 3000 troops, is reported to be afloat and in tow but definitely out of the operation.”23

  In his diary, Secretary Stimson dismissed all office work but that relating to the impending assault, noting that “the underlying thing in our minds is the approaching offensive in Africa.” Telegrams were coming in “thick and fast”—zero hour being “early Sunday morning, November 8th in North Africa, “which means the middle of the evening tonight,” November 7, in Washington. He and his wife had kindly invited General Patton’s wife, Beatrice, to dinner, “and she came with great eagerness and we three spent the evening together.”24