American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  • • •

  Victory is paid for in blood and materiel. By October 1942, the Marines and the Navy had supplied most of the first, and the public supplied the second. Financed by defense bonds and taxes, war production for the year soared to $58.7 billion, elbowing its way into nearly a third of the nation’s industrial capacity.

  In May, FDR modified his list of production goals to make them less extemporaneous and bring some of them into line with recommendations of the Joint Chiefs. He reduced a few items (400,000 machine guns instead of an even half million), and added a few things to his “Must-Have” list, such as landing craft.15

  Virtually everything on Roosevelt’s shopping list had to be taken from consumer production, from cars to cans to clothing. For example, the War Production Board, the agency charged with finding enough cotton, steel, and everything else, issued “General Limitation Order L-85,” which regulated the size and look of civilian clothing. To comply with Order L-85, men’s apparel designers cut suits with narrow lapels and cuffless trousers, while women’s designers introduced “mini” skirts, low-neckline dresses, and two-piece bathing suits. Other consumer goods, from sugar to Clabber Girl to Christmas ornaments, were swept up in a wave of regulation and restriction that spread over the country like an immense, tangled Victory Garden.16

  The War Production Board’s problem was not a shortage of factories or tools, but a lack of raw materials. Rubber, for instance, was especially tight. As Hopkins had predicted in 1940, Japan’s occupation of Indochina and the Dutch East Indies sent American stocks of crude rubber tumbling to dangerous levels. The Army was forced to replace rubber tank treads with less-efficient steel ones, and it issued gas masks made of a new synthetic substance called neoprene. None of these substitutes were entirely satisfactory to the men whose lives depended upon them, and some items, like aircraft tires and intravenous bags, required the real McCoy.17

  The public would have to pitch in. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, FDR authorized a ban on the sale of new automobile tires. He directed the Office of Price Administration to draft a list of essential professionals whose work required them to buy tires for their cars. From his cramped government office at the corner of Second and D streets, assistant pricing chief John Kenneth Galbraith drew up a list that he limited to classes of professionals whose work was deemed essential to the national interest, such as doctors and public officials.

  Galbraith, not a religious man, excluded ministers from his list. The omission outraged rank-and-file faithful, especially in the rural South, where clergymen often rode big circuits and needed cars to comfort their sick or grieving parishioners. When FDR learned of Galbraith’s slight, he gave his pricing chiefs a fire-and-brimstone sermon of his own. “F.D.R. was outraged that anyone should be so casual about both fundamentalist religion and the fundamentals of American politics,” Galbraith later recalled. Ministers were quickly added to the “tired” list.18

  Other means to conserve rubber backfired. When production of women’s girdles was banned, a backlash from the fairer sex over “Price Regulation 220” forced the War Production Board to find ways to weave rayon and synthetic rubber threads into civilian garments. For a public already weary from meat, sugar, and gasoline rationing, rubber was becoming a sore spot.19

  After consulting with Wall Street investment guru Bernard Baruch and other informal advisers, FDR attacked the problem with a national rubber drive. He asked his fellow citizens to bring old tires, bicycle inner tubes, garden hoses, rubber overshoes, and anything else made of rubber to gas stations, which would pay a reimbursable penny a pound for used rubber.20

  He opened his appeal with a radio address that began, “I want to talk to you about rubber, about rubber and the war—about rubber and the American people.” He described the embryonic state of the synthetic rubber industry, Japan’s control of rubber trees, and the importance of rubber to victory. He explained how the shortage of rubber on the home front affected the fighting man on the battlefront. Until synthetic rubber became available in quantity, he asked Americans to donate their old tires, raincoats, and worn-out overshoes to the war effort.21

  The drive was a popular success. Thousands of ordinary citizens turned in dog chew toys, rubber-band balls, and galoshes in a roundup that garnered more than two hundred tons of rubber for the war effort.

  For the Army’s needs, the rubber drive was no more than a drop in a very large bucket. But the rubber drive, like FDR’s fireside chat with the maps, raised the public’s consciousness of the relationship between conservation and victory, and it helped ease some of the grumbling over draconian rationing laws. Roosevelt’s goal was not merely to glean secondhand rubber, or even to educate the public about a specific problem, but to broadly enlist the public’s help—to give all Americans a chance to feel they were hammering a nail into Tojo’s coffin.22

  •

  Not everyone would be hammering the same nails. Naval regulations obliged officers to drop their anchors at age sixty-four, and as Ernie King approached his sixty-fourth birthday, he saw plenty of unfinished business on his paper-strewn desk. The foundations of victory had been laid, but the Solomons still hung in the balance. TORCH had not yet been launched, and there would be plenty of rough water ahead: U-boats to sink, leathernecks to land, and islands to conquer before the sails could be trimmed and the guns stoppered.

  With the pounding he was taking in the press over Guadalcanal, the president just might feel it was time to make a change at the top, and King believed he should offer Roosevelt that chance. On October 23, one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, he sent the president a short letter calling attention to the date and its significance. He concluded, “I am, as always, at your service.”23

  Reading King’s letter, FDR shook his head. “He didn’t have to remind me of that,” he told McCrea. With his fountain pen, he scribbled his endorsement across the letter’s foot and sent it back to Main Navy:

  E.J.K.,

  So what, old top?

  I may send you a birthday present!

  F.D.R.

  True to his quip, on King’s birthday, Roosevelt sent Old Top an autographed photo.24

  • • •

  The president was in King’s corner for now, but how long he would stay there was a question other Washingtonians began asking. As the struggle for the Solomons dragged on and casualty reports made the papers, rumors flew around press circles that the Navy wasn’t giving the American people the full scoop on U.S. losses. Clouds began gathering in Congress over the Navy’s credibility gap, and MacArthur’s sycophants quietly accused the Navy of bungling the Solomons operation.25

  Apart from the naval committee chairmen, King had few allies in Congress. He spent little time courting most legislators, and when he defended the Navy’s budget requests, he made clear that if Congress didn’t support him there would be a political cost.

  “War inevitably results in waste,” he told one committee. “We cannot afford to pussyfoot when it comes to appropriating money to carry on.” Leaving nothing to congressional imagination, he added, “It is our belief that if the matter of appropriations is approached from a peacetime point of view, instead of from the war or realistic point of view, we shall be unable to prosecute the war effectively. In other words, Congress automatically shares the responsibility for the conduct of the war in respect to the funds appropriated.”26

  The growing tide of criticism worried King’s friends. Secretary Knox took public relations out of the admiral’s fumbling hands, and Undersecretary Forrestal began biweekly lunches with congressmen, where he introduced them to war heroes who had just returned from the front, to underscore the difficulty of the task the Navy was undertaking in the Solomons.27

  Lobbying efforts by Knox and Forrestal generally shored up the Navy’s rigging, but they did little to insulate its top sailor. It was up to two of King’s most unlikely friends, a lawyer and a r
eporter, to save the admiral from himself.

  Cornelius Bull, King’s personal attorney, was having drinks one afternoon at the National Press Club with his friend Glen Perry of the New York Sun’s Washington bureau when the subject of Admiral King came up. As their glasses sweated and they swapped Washington gossip, the two men hatched a plot to break the ice between Ernie King and the Fourth Estate.28

  The admiral, they acknowledged, was a man “reputed to hate newspaper men worse than anyone but Japs and Germans.” But they figured they could persuade him to meet informally with a few carefully selected reporters at Bull’s house in Alexandria. King could give journalists background information and reasons for military decisions that might seem inexplicable to those on the outside. No notes would be taken, and everything would be off the record. If word of the meetings leaked, they would end—as would, most likely, King’s career. But if the reporters didn’t muck it up, they would get two things every scribbler craves: access and information.29

  As Bull broached the subject to King, the wary admiral listened. While he disliked newspapermen, he realized he was drifting into dangerous shoals; to get back to safe, deep water, he had to win over some allies among the press. He agreed to give it a try.30

  Bull and Perry called six of their closest colleagues—Scripps-Howard columnist Raymond Clapper and editors from five major dailies. The group gathered at Bull’s home on the Sunday before Election Day, and waited patiently for the legendary admiral to arrive.

  King knocked on the door promptly at eight o’clock. Bull took his greatcoat and scrambled-eggs cap, and he seated himself in an easy chair. Sipping a glass of beer, a cigarette between his fingers, he appeared at ease among his natural enemies. “He spoke with great facility, without notes of any kind, and—I might add—without any expletives,” recalled journalist Phelps Adams of the New York Sun. “He told us what had happened, what was happening, and often, what was likely to happen next. He reported the bad news as fully as the good news, and in many cases, explained what went wrong on the one hand, and what strategy, weapon, or combination of both, had brought success on the other. Throughout, he was completely at ease and always patient, welcoming the questions that frequently interrupted his narrative, and answering them frankly and easily.”31

  The secret conclaves, which continued for the next two years, narrowed a credibility gap that had yawned during the uncertain months of 1942. The roaring sea kraken the newsmen had expected turned out to have an approachable, human side. Said Perry afterward, “A lot of firm friendships grew out of the correspondents’ discovery that King was not only a great officer but a great guy, and King’s discovery that the correspondents were smart, closed-mouthed when it counted, and also nice guys.”32

  •

  For King’s commander-in-chief, however, the political picture was a mixed bag. Polls suggested the public was behind him on rationing, compulsory work, and even drafting eighteen-year-olds. Solidarity behind the troops was as robust as ever; Frank Loesser’s hymn “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” became the war’s early hit song, and Spike Jones rode to fame on “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” a novelty song written for a Walt Disney short film titled Donald Duck in Nutzi-Land.

  But hardships at home and the absence of victory abroad—or even a second front—exacted a steady political toll. Transportation and food shortages caused the frequent stirs, and on October 26, the Office of Pricing Administration announced a one-cup-per-day coffee-rationing measure, an unpopular move designed to cut down on cargo ships hauling the sacred bean from Central and South America. On hit song charts, “Pass the Ammunition” would soon give way to Louis Jordan’s “Ration Blues,” and the demands of a war economy breathed new life into Republican prospects for the midterm elections.33

  Shuffling to voting booths through the specter of caffeine withdrawal, the public arrived at their precincts on November 3 in a predictably cranky mood. In an election with unusually low voter turnout, Republicans picked up forty-seven seats in the House, leaving Democrats with a four-vote majority. They harvested another nine in the Senate, cutting the Democratic lead to ten. In FDR’s home state, voters in the gubernatorial election chose a Republican, prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, to end a two-decade run of Democratic rule in Albany.

  Many Democrats who kept their seats took the election as a warning sign that the public was growing tired of the traditional Roosevelt slogans, at least on domestic issues. As U.S. News concluded, “An unofficial coalition was in the making between anti–New Deal Democrats and Republicans to pluck all budding social reforms from future war legislation.”34

  • • •

  Beneath the poplars of Shangri-La, the president’s wooded retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Hills, FDR could breathe only a shallow sigh of relief when the returns were counted.* The public hadn’t turned out his party, but that was about all the solace he could take. With conservative Democrats liable to defect on any number of issues, he was now, in effect, the head of a coalition government—a coalition in which Republicans would be almost as important as the New Deal cadre had been ten years earlier.

  To remain in power, FDR needed a victory, and his next opportunity would dramatically alter the lives of thousands of men who, at that moment, were being drawn toward a storm of fire.35

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE DEVIL’S BRIDGE

  ROOSEVELT WAS A MASTER OF DECEPTION, BUT SECLUDED AMONG THE RUSTIC furniture, martini shakers, and worn-down rugs of Shangri-La, he could not conceal the cocktail of tension stirring within him. He made little small talk, grinned less, and seemed distant, as if he were staring out from the back of a long, dark cavern. At one point, his secretary Grace Tully gave him a worried look. Noticing her concern, Roosevelt brushed her off, muttering something about an important message he was expecting.1

  It was Saturday evening, November 7. Morning had broken on Africa’s shores.

  As the clock patiently ticked off the minutes, Roosevelt waited for his phone to ring. Ring it did, shortly before nine p.m. Grace took the call and announced that the War Department was on the line.

  Roosevelt’s hand shook as he reached for the receiver. He sat in silence as the voice on the other end told him of events unfolding four thousand miles away.

  “Thank God. Thank God,” he said at last. “That sounds grand. Congratulations. . . . Thank God.”

  With the blissful face of the reprieved, he returned the handset to its cradle, then emerged from his dark cavern. “We have landed in North Africa,” he announced. “Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back.”2

  • • •

  Over the next three days, Signals men at the new Pentagon building decrypted cables from Eisenhower’s headquarters on Gibraltar. French and colonial troops had resisted the landings, but casualties on D-day had been light. At the harbor city of Oran, the defenders had fought back fiercely, but the surrounding beaches and a key airfield were secured by twilight. Algiers fell at noon on D-day, and Eisenhower’s deputy, Major General Mark Clark, began moving Ike’s advance headquarters to an Algiers hotel. And in an incredible stroke of luck, Admiral Darlan, Vichy’s number two leader, had been captured in Algiers while visiting his polio-stricken son.3

  On Africa’s treacherous Atlantic coast, General Patton landed at three points in French Morocco, and by mid-morning he was rolling toward the port city of Casablanca. Casablanca was defended by a strong garrison of regulars, Foreign Legionnaires, and the French battleship Jean Bart. Patton’s men converged on Casa from three sides, and based on early reports, Marshall expected the city to fall into Allied hands soon.

  Three days after the landing, all was quiet. Under a cease-fire deal brokered by General Clark and Robert Murphy, Admiral Darlan was appointed High Commissioner of French North Africa, and General Giraud was made commander- in-chief of all French forces there. Eisenhower flew to Algiers on November 13 to ratify the arrangement, and the truc
e became permanent. The Allies were ashore in Africa.*4

  • • •

  Eisenhower’s decision to place a pro-German Vichyite in charge of liberated French Africa set off a political firestorm. From London, American correspondent Edward R. Murrow bellowed, “What the hell is this all about? Are we fighting Nazis or sleeping with them?” Referring to Darlan, the liberal magazine Nation took the metaphor a step further: “Prostitutes are used. They are seldom loved. Even less frequently are they honored.” State Department mandarins—“starry-eyed circles,” Hull called them—were outraged, and Secretary Morgenthau ranted to Stimson at length about the shame of dealing with “a most ruthless person who had sold many thousands of people into slavery.”5

  FDR understood that the cease-fire order had saved U.S., British and French lives, so he held his nose and backed the “Darlan Deal” as a matter of military necessity. He cabled Eisenhower, “You may be sure of my complete support for this and any other action you are required to take in carrying out your duties. You are on the ground and we here intend to support you fully in your difficult problems.”

  With the heat turning up at home, however, he would not commit himself publicly on Eisenhower’s behalf unless he had to. And for the moment, he didn’t have to. He told Eisenhower not to make his letter public, and cautioned him, “We do not trust Darlan.”6

  • • •

  “Do not worry about this. Leave the worries to us, and go ahead with your campaign.”

  So Marshall wrote to Eisenhower on November 20. He and Stimson wanted their top general focusing on the battle for Tunisia without looking over his shoulder at daggers flying back home. To shield Ike from political flak, he held a secret meeting with a group of congressmen and read them a long cable from Eisenhower laying out the military necessity behind the Darlan Deal. He then held a press conference where he told reporters the deal had saved 16,000 American casualties, and that criticism of Eisenhower over his pact was “incredibly stupid.”7