The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Stimson was feeling a great deal better, having heard that, although the “Germans this morning invaded unoccupied France and are rushing through it towards the south coast in an attempt to get to Marseilles and the French fleet at Toulon,”21 there was no chance that they could now halt or throw back the American forces in Algeria and Morocco. At last Admiral Darlan, Stimson noted, “has ordered all resistance in North Africa to cease.”22

  Torch was over; the pincer campaign to defeat or evict Axis forces from the southern Mediterranean could now proceed.

  In the circumstances, the President’s address was deeply moving.

  “Here in Arlington we are in the presence of the honored dead,” Roosevelt, standing with the aid of his fourteen-pound steel leg braces, reminded his audience. “We are accountable to them—and accountable to the generations yet unborn for whom they gave their lives.

  “Today, as on all Armistice Days since 1918, our thoughts go back to the first World War; and we remember with gratitude the bravery of the men who fought and helped to win that fight against German militarism. But this year our thoughts are also very much of the living present, and of the future which we begin to see opening before us—a picture illumined by a new light of hope.

  “Today, Americans and their British brothers-in-arms are again fighting on French soil. They are again fighting against a German militarism which transcends a hundred-fold the brutality and the barbarism of 1918.

  “The Nazis of today and their appropriate associates, the Japanese, have attempted to drive history into reverse, to use all the mechanics of modern civilization to drive humanity back to conditions of prehistoric savagery.

  “They sought to conquer the world, and for a time they seemed to be successful in realizing their boundless ambition. They overran great territories. They enslaved—they killed.

  “But, today, we know and they know that they have conquered nothing.

  “Today, they face inevitable, final defeat.

  “Yes, the forces of liberation are advancing.”

  The President looked around. “Britain, Russia, China, and the United States grow rapidly to full strength,” he stated. “The opponents of decency and justice have passed their peak.

  “And—as the result of recent events—very recent—the United States’ and the United Nations’ forces are being joined by large numbers of the fighting men of our traditional ally, France,” he declared—hopefully! “On this day, of all days, it is heartening for us to know that soldiers of France go forward with the United Nations.”

  Which brought the President to the mission of the United States.

  “The American Unknown Soldier who lies here did not give his life on the fields of France merely to defend his American home for the moment that was passing. He gave it that his family, his neighbors, and all his fellow Americans might live in peace in the days to come. His hope was not fulfilled,” he declared candidly.

  Roosevelt was coming to the crux of his vision of the United States as a global guardian of liberty, in a world where it was too easy for the forces of violence, intolerance, and savagery to get their way unless effectively challenged. “American soldiers are giving their lives today in all the continents and on all the seas in order that the dream of the Unknown Soldier may at last come true. All the heroism, all the unconquerable devotion that free men and women are showing in this war shall make certain the survival and the advancement of civilization.”23

  As the spectators and participants in the little ceremony made their way back from Arlington National Cemetery to their cars in the chilling cold, they recognized that, in a sense, America’s new journey had just begun. It would not be an easy road, but it was a noble challenge Roosevelt was setting. Moreover, they could take comfort in the fact that the President, who had saved the nation at a time of the worst economic depression it had ever suffered, was now, on a global stage, proving to be perhaps the greatest commander in chief in American history.

  Returning to his office at the White House, Admiral Leahy was certainly proud of his commander in chief—the man who liked to call himself “a pig-headed Dutchman.”24 The President had, he noted in his diary, “made a very impressive five minute address to a large gathering of people,” with spectators “seated in an amphitheater and standing about in the clear cold morning. Except the President and myself, all of the official party wore heavy overcoats.”25

  Torch had set the tone and determination of the United States in prosecuting the war against the Axis powers. In overruling his generals, the President had, Admiral Leahy reflected, undoubtedly saved his nation from the military catastrophe that would have awaited them on the shores of mainland France. Instead they could now learn in comparative safety the dark arts of modern war—with every chance of ultimate victory. Vast American forces were, after all, now safely established on the threshold of Europe—and of greatness on behalf of their nation, if they could translate that triumph, step by step, into the defeat of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and finally of Emperor Hirohito’s Japan.

  More difficulties would arise with the French, and with a rejuvenated Winston Churchill, now that his British Empire stood to be restored, thanks to American might. And there would be the problem of Stalin, the Russians—and the Chinese.

  It would all work out, the President assured Leahy. It had been quite a journey over the past eleven months, since December 7, 1941.

  Most moving of all to the widower admiral, though, had been the President’s prayer, at the end of his address. “Our thoughts,” Roosevelt had proclaimed in his unmistakable, lilting tenor voice, “turn in gratitude to those who have saved our Nation in days gone by. God, the father of all living, watches over these hallowed graves and blesses the souls of those who rest here. May He keep us strong in the courage that will win the war, and may He impart to us the wisdom and the vision that we shall need for true victory in the peace which is to come.”26

  Acknowledgments

  The study of leadership—moral, literary, political, and military—has been my abiding interest for almost forty-five years as a biographer and historian.

  My particular fascination with FDR goes back to American Caesars, a Suetonian-style biography of the last twelve U.S. presidents, which I published in 2010. Researching the opening chapter on President Roosevelt, I found it hard to believe that no military biographer or military historian had tackled his military leadership in World War II as commander in chief in a full-scale work. Once I completed American Caesars I was able to examine the literature and original documentation more closely. I became even more intrigued—especially at the difference in command styles adopted by Churchill and Roosevelt in directing World War II.

  I knew perhaps more than many people of my generation about Winston Churchill as a military leader, and as a striking personality, for I had stayed with him and Lady Churchill at their home at Chartwell, in Kent, while a student at Cambridge University. Moreover, I had spent many, many hours discussing Churchill’s leadership with my quasi godfather, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who revered the former prime minister—but lamented his intrusions into the battlefield, and his failure to understand the principles of effective modern command. Later on, over the period of a decade, I spent yet more time interviewing men and women who had known or served under the Prime Minister in World War II for Monty, my official life of Montgomery, published in three volumes in the 1980s—in each of which Winston Churchill played a major part.

  On the American side, I was also lucky to have interviewed many of the senior surviving World War II commanders and staff officers, from General Mark Clark to Generals “Lightning Joe” Collins, Max Taylor, and Jim Gavin; from General Al Gruenther to General Freddie de Guingand. In the course of my work I had also gotten to know many senior American World War II military writers and historians, from Forrest Pogue to Russell Weigley, Steve Ambrose, and Carlo D’Este.

  And on the German side I was fortunate, too. Thanks to a semester a
t Munich University and my first marriage to a German (who died tragically in 1973), I had good command of the German language, and sources not available or translated for use by many British or American writers.

  In short, I felt confident enough in 2010 to tackle such a project afresh.

  The result, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, presents a very different portrait than the conventional characterization of President Roosevelt as commander in chief in World War II. In this respect I was blessed by being able to interview the last living member of FDR’s White House team in World War II, Commander George Elsey, who worked in the Map Room, as well as several members of FDR’s family, including his granddaughter Ellie and his step-grandson Tom Halsted. Working my way through the many diaries, memoranda, and correspondence kept by the members of the President’s staff and military officials, held in various archives in the United States and United Kingdom, I tried my best to reconstruct the story wie es eigentlich gewesen ist—how it really was.

  For reasons of length I had decided from the beginning to focus on selected landmark moments or episodes in FDR’s performance as commander in chief in World War II that best illustrate his responses both to defeat and to victory in war, for good or ill. Unfortunately, even this attempt at condensation proved a failure. The eleven-month period between Pearl Harbor and the first landings of American troops on the threshold of Europe—Operation Torch—seemed to me too important not to reconstruct and get right, given the many alternative, often misleading, accounts that have been given over the years: in particular, that of Winston Churchill in his monumental opus, The Second World War.

  Interviewing so many World War II commanders and their staffs, I had learned how much of history, in the end, is dependent on the perspective or point of view of the participant. The main perspective of The Mantle of Command, let us be clear, is unabashedly that of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the White House he used as his command post in 1941 and 1942. The story, moreover, is a quite fatal one, in terms of world history. Had FDR, in the first year of America’s involvement in World War II, not learned to wear the mantle of command so firmly, and to overrule his generals, it is quite possible Hitler would have achieved his aim when declaring war on the United States on December 11, 1941: winning the war in Europe. It is a sobering reflection.

  Naturally, in retelling and recasting this extraordinary story I have subjected certain reputations to revision, from those of Winston Churchill and General George Marshall to General Douglas MacArthur and the war secretary, Colonel Henry Stimson. I hope I am not unsympathetic to their memories, serving to the best of their abilities in a world crisis such as we hopefully will never have occasion to repeat or replicate; nevertheless, it seemed important to me to recount the saga from FDR’s perspective with absolute if compassionate honesty, since the President did not live to do so. Every other major military participant managed to impart his own account, either autobiographically or via a chosen plaidoyer; only President Roosevelt’s POV as commander in chief has remained dark since his death in 1945.

  In researching and writing this account—which will be followed by a concluding work—I was helped by a small but wonderful army of professional colleagues, friends, and family. I’d like first to thank my educator wife, Dr. Raynel Shepard, for her everlasting patience in the book’s genesis, research, writing, and preparation. Next: Ike Williams, my literary agent in Boston, who saw immediately the potential importance of the undertaking—and found me a well-tempered, experienced commissioning publisher and editor in Bruce Nichols of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Bruce not only cut and clarified my often prolix prose, but recognized the need for two separate books to do justice to FDR’s wartime story.

  To Ike and his associates Katherine Flynn and Hope Denekamp, therefore, and to Bruce Nichols and Melissa Dobson, my copyeditor, my deep gratitude. In terms of colleagues, I have been fortunate to have been a Senior Fellow in the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, for many years, and wish to thank Steve Crosby, his successor, Ira Jackson, the staff, and my colleagues there for their constant support—as also the University Provost, Winston Langley, and the ever-helpful staff of the University Library.

  The staff and facilities of the Widener Library and Microfilm Department in the Lamont Library, Harvard University, have also been outstanding, as has been the staff of the Boston University Microfilm Department, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library at Hyde Park.

  I’m deeply grateful, too, to those colleagues and friends who were willing to read and offer criticism of sections of the growing manuscript, as it evolved, beginning with my oldest Cambridge University friend, Robin Whitby; Professor Mark Schneider; Lieutenant Colonel Carlo D’Este; Professor David Kaiser; James Scott; and Professor Mark Stoler. I’d also like to record my thanks to members of my Boston club, The Tavern, who listened to my early readings from the manuscript and offered advice and encouragement—especially Stephen Clark, Frinde Maher, Alston Purvis, Ed Tarlov, David Scudder, David Amory, and Clive Foss.

  Two conferences at which I gave papers based upon chapters of the manuscript were extremely helpful to my work. They were a Raymond E. Mason Jr. Distinguished Lecture on FDR’s “Great Spat” with Winston Churchill over India in 1942, delivered at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans as part of the second annual Winston S. Churchill Symposium in July 2012; and a paper on Torch, given at the invitation of Professor David Reynolds to the Guerre des Sables Conference of international World War II scholars at the École Française de Rome in November 2012. The 2012 International Conference on World War II, held at the National World War II Museum in December 2012, was also fruitful, and I thank the director, Dr. Nick Mueller (and conference organizer Jeremy Collins), for inviting me to speak along with fellow panelists Rick Atkinson, Gerhard Weinberg, Allan Millett, Christopher Browning, Conrad Crane, and Mark Stoler.

  In the U.K. I would like to thank Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, for his help on my visit there, and especially Professor David Reynolds for his hospitality and intellectual support in reexamining the fateful year, 1942, and the story of the collapse of the British Empire, together with its ramifications for FDR.

  In London I would like to thank the wonderful staff of the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Documents: the former Curator, the late Rod Suddaby, and current Curator, Anthony Richards, for pointing me to useful Churchill and FDR material; also Phil Reid, Director of the IWM’s Cabinet War Rooms below Whitehall, for a wonderful personal tour. Also the Liddell Hart Military History Centre at King’s College—and my research assistant in London, Jean Simpson, for her help in obtaining documents.

  Back in the U.S., I want to record my thanks to the staff of the Manuscript Division Reading Room at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., especially Jeff Flannery, the Head of Reference and Reader Services Section in the Manuscript Reading Room. Also the staff of the Operational Archives of the U.S. Naval History and Command, Washington Navy Yard, D.C., especially John Greco for his help. In Oakland, California, I’d like to thank the volunteers and staff of the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, for their tour—and cruise in San Francisco Bay—in August 2012. And in Boston, my research assistant, Eric Prileson, a graduate of Northeastern University.

  As President of BIO—Biographers International Organization—from 2010 to 2012 I was privileged to work with a wonderful committee of fellow biographers, and to participate in excellent annual conferences in Boston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York. Thanks to them, the craft of biography has seemed vastly less isolating than in my earlier years, and I want to thank especially Elizabeth Harris and my fellow members of the Boston Biographers Group (BBG), who meet once a month to share progress on their individual projects. Listening to and comparing the practical challenges of biography of fellow practitioners, working on an extraordinary array of different life stories across different centuries, has been
, over the past five years, a veritable lifeline to me, and I cannot too highly recommend joining such an organization to anyone contemplating or already working on a biography.

  I’d like finally to acknowledge the memories of two women who died recently: Margery Heffron, who cofounded the Boston Biographers Group, but managed to complete her masterpiece, The Other Mrs. Adams, before she passed; and my mother, Olive Hamilton, who first invested me with my love of biography, and wrote many herself before passing in January 2012, at age ninety-six—twenty-two years after my father, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Denis Hamilton, DSO, who landed as a twenty-five-year-old battalion commander on D-day, four months after my birth—and inspired my fascination with leadership.

  Photo Credits

  The Plan of Escape. FDR in Oval Office, summer 1941: Corbis / © Arthur Rothstein; USS Potomac off New England coast, Aug. 1941: Corbis / Bettmann

  Placentia Bay. USS Augusta before the onset of war: U.S. Navy Official / National Archives; FDR welcomes Winston Churchill (WSC) aboard Augusta, Aug. 9, 1941: FDR Library; FDR, WSC, and their staffs on board Augusta, Aug. 9, 1941: FDR Library

  The Atlantic Charter. FDR walks from USS McDougal onto HMS Prince of Wales, Aug. 10, 1941: FDR Library; WSC greets FDR aboard Prince of Wales, Aug. 10, 1941: FDR Library; Divine service aboard Prince of Wales, Aug. 10, 1941: FDR Library

  Pearl Harbor. Hopkins and FDR in Oval Study, 1941: FDR Library; Japanese bomber’s photo of Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941: National Archives; Burning U.S. battleships, Dec. 7, 1941: FDR Library

  A Date Which Will Live in Infamy. White House, night of Dec. 7, 1941: Getty / © Thomas D. McAvoy; FDR before Congress, Dec. 8, 1941: Corbis / Bettmann; Hitler before Reichstag, Dec. 11, 1941: Getty / Keystone-France