To win over a few influential liberals, Stimson and his wife, Mabel, hosted a tea at Woodley for Morgenthau, speechwriter Archibald MacLeish, and Justice Felix Frankfurter. Over china cups, Stimson explained the rationale for the Darlan arrangement. His explanation, given and received in good faith, blunted their wrath. On the Republican side, when Stimson learned that Wendell Willkie would be making a speech lambasting the Darlan Deal, he rang up Willkie and warned his former client in blunt, Long Islander terms that his speech “would run the risk of jeopardizing the success of the United States Army in North Africa.” Willkie hung up in a huff, but he modified his speech.8
Willkie, Morgenthau, and a few other opinion leaders had been defused, but visceral reaction—from journalists and activists who had no understanding of the complexities of Eisenhower’s war—stung Roosevelt. Furious with the sanctimony of liberals who formed his political base, FDR fumed with indignation from within the White House, but could say nothing publicly.9
As political winds howled, FDR shut the cellar doors and waited for the storm to pass. But after enduring a week of editorial assaults, FDR felt he had to make an announcement of some kind. He issued a clarifying statement that, while not renouncing the Darlan Deal, put Darlan and Eisenhower on notice that the decisions made in Algiers were not set in stone. “I have accepted General Eisenhower’s political arrangements for the time being,” the statement read. “We are opposed to Frenchmen who support Hitler and the Axis.” The arrangement, he emphasized, “is only a temporary expedient justified solely by the stress of battle.”10
After releasing his statement, FDR met with reporters in the Oval Office, who pressed him further. Why were the Allies working with Darlan, an anti-Semitic French fascist? In his typically whimsical manner, Roosevelt quoted them “a nice old proverb of the Balkans that has, I understand, the full sanction of the Orthodox Church: ‘My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.’”*11
For Roosevelt, that bridge stretched out further than anyone’s eyes could see. And Roosevelt had a hunch they would be walking with the Devil many more times before they were safely on the other side.
•
As 1942 drew to a close, Franklin Roosevelt could look over a year of shock and convulsion with a certain justifiable pride. He had pushed the conversion of a third of America’s industry to military production. Landing craft from Louisiana, bombers from Seattle, and small-arms cartridges from Minnesota were flowing into Army and Navy warehouses. The automotive industry had produced nearly 25,000 tanks during 1942—dwarfing the world’s previous leader, Germany, which had turned out panzers at an annual rate of 4,000. Antiaircraft gun production jumped from 696 in 1941 to a predicted 24,000 for 1943. The twenty-one billion rounds of small-arms ammunition scheduled for the next year was ten times that produced in 1941. Combat ship production had increased sixfold by the end of 1942, while merchantman tonnage leaped sixteenfold.12
The war was also changing American society. With the support of Congress—not without dissent from both parties—FDR had built an administrative apparatus that regulated American life from paychecks to pleasure drives. Women were going into the workforce for the first time in large numbers, the population began migrating toward the industrialized coasts, and Negro citizens had a vague promise of rough equality in war industries. The Army and Air Forces ballooned from 1.7 million men to 5.4 million, and by the end of 1943 that number would reach seven million. The Navy would grow to 2.4 million sailors by the middle of the coming year, of whom half would be sent overseas.13
There were mistakes, obstacles, and shortages, of course. Although Congress extended the draft to eighteen-year-olds, there were still not enough men to feed the industrial, agricultural, and military machines. Donald Nelson’s War Production Board couldn’t decide whether to give first priority to synthetic rubber, high-octane fuel, destroyer escorts, or merchant vessels—all of which the president had thrown onto the “Number One Priority” list. And beating plowshares into swords incurred a political cost. New Deal stalwarts complained that the progressive agenda was being sacrificed to the war effort; Eisenhower’s Darlan Deal enraged liberals, and conservatives rallied against a three-term monarchy cloaked as wartime necessity.14
Most of all, the picture beyond America’s shores remained dark. In the Atlantic, U-boats were sending ships to the bottom in terrifying numbers. In Russia, Germans were fighting from house to house in Stalingrad, and in the Pacific, marines, soldiers, and sailors were still dying in the Solomon Islands. In Africa, Eisenhower’s November offensive bogged down in the mud of Tunisia’s rainy season, and Marshall and Stimson warned FDR that America would be mired strategically if it didn’t get out of the Mediterranean, and soon.15
To fix this last problem, Roosevelt decided it was time to see Churchill again. But as 1942 drifted into the history books on a subdued New Year’s Eve, he gave himself a little time to relax. He worked late into the afternoon, but spent part of the evening watching a new Warner Bros. hit starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It was called Casablanca.16
Roosevelt must have smiled to himself as he watched Bogey’s intrigues against the fascists, for few people knew the home of Rick’s Café Américain was about to become history’s next turning point.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“HOLLYWOOD AND THE BIBLE”
ERNIE KING ENJOYED WOMEN, LIQUOR, AND A GOOD BOXING MATCH. HE knew the technical details of sea power and global logistics like few other men, but the old sailor in him thought of grand strategy in earthy terms that a forecastle tar would appreciate.
During a secret meeting at Nellie Bull’s house in early November, King explained to his circle of journalists that the Pacific war would go through four phases, which he likened to a reeling prizefighter’s comeback. In the first, defensive phase, the boxer regained his footing and covered himself against his opponent’s blows. In the second, “defensive-offensive” phase, the fighter covered himself while looking for an opening to land a blow of his own. In the third, “offensive-defensive” phase, he used one glove to block while he jabbed and struck with the other. And in the last, offensive phase, he threw haymakers with both fists.1
By the end of 1942, King felt the war with Japan was entering its third, “offensive-defensive” phase. Coral Sea was a jab. Midway was a clean uppercut. Guadalcanal, though messy, was a body blow. If Japan were denied enough time to consolidate her defenses, the tide could be turned with as little as 30 percent of the combined Allied strength. Admiral Nimitz could light across the Central Pacific, and a blockaded Japan would be starved into submission.2
The war against Germany had not yet revealed its path, at least to King. Churchill’s strategy, to encircle Germany from the Mediterranean, seemed to him a fool’s errand, because the German reich was economically self-sufficient. With a strong Italian fleet at Taranto and excellent defensive ground on the Italian peninsula, the Mediterranean, King said derisively, was the “soft underbelly of the turtle.”3
King figured Northern France, Marshall’s obsession, would eventually become the war’s focus. The wolf had to be killed in its den, and the entrance to that den was the French coast. But until enough landing craft, soldiers, and airplanes had been collected in England, the time for a cross-Channel invasion was not ripe.4
If there were one way the Allies would not defeat Germany, it was through airpower alone. As he observed over a beer, “The Germans are pretty much the same stock as the British and ourselves and are tough people. The blitz did not crack the British morale and there is no more reason to suppose that Germany can be blasted into surrender by planes than the British.”5
That left Stalin’s Russia, which was swallowing entire German armies around Leningrad to the north and Stalingrad to the south. As King saw it, the Red Army had the manpower, the land route to Germany, and if Lend-Lease continued, the materiel needed to break the
Wehrmacht. “In the last analysis,” King told his listeners, “Russia will do nine-tenths of the job of defeating Germany.”6
The last tenth would be up to the American warlords.
•
Looking through the plane’s round windows, the passengers could see a kaleidoscope of ancient homes and modern office buildings, of consulates and kasbahs, French architecture and fountain squares. The clash of modern European and old Moorish confirmed General Patton’s lyrical description of Casablanca as a combination of “Hollywood and the Bible.”7
Flying over a patchwork quilt of sand, orange groves, and turreted mosques, the big four-engine Skymaster descended to treetop level as it neared Casablanca. The plane touched down on the runway and gently rolled to a stop, and a company of men in dark suits surrounded the Skymaster. A door, tiny against the plane’s fuselage, opened. Through the door and onto a long wooden ramp debouched a wheelchair-bound man traveling under the code name “Don Quixote.” Behind Quixote shuffled his squire, a lanky, sickly former commerce secretary named “Sancho Panza.”8
The Secret Service men drove Quixote and Panza through heavily guarded streets to Anfa, an upscale suburb of Casablanca. There the three-story Anfa Hotel—nicknamed “Hotel Patton”—awaited its distinguished guests. The agents installed Quixote in Villa No. 2, one of the hotel’s large, modern lodgments, and before long the man in the wheelchair was welcomed to Casablanca by a plump, cigar-smoking gentleman registered on British travel manifests as “Air Commodore Frankland.”9
• • •
Roosevelt and Churchill had been planning this rendezvous since early December. They had invited Stalin—“Uncle Joe,” as they privately called him—but Uncle Joe refused to leave Russia while a battle raged around Stalingrad. Because decisions on post-African operations could be deferred no longer, in late December Churchill had proposed a two-power conference to take place in Morocco. He dubbed the conference “SYMBOL.”*10
Roosevelt brought along his military advisers, but not his military secretaries. It was “the prima donna element,” he explained to Bill Hassett. “If I sent Stimson to London, Knox would have thought he should go.”
But with a bit more candor, he hinted at his real reason for excluding the cabinet: “Churchill and I were the only ones who could get together and settle things.”11
As they arrived in Casablanca, FDR’s advisers were not unanimous about what to do after Rommel had been run out of Africa. At the only pre-conference meeting between FDR and the Joint Chiefs, held at the White House on January 7, Marshall admitted his own planners were not of one mind. While the U.S. chiefs preferred a cross-Channel operation, they conceded many logistical obstacles.
Yet a British-led detour through, say, Sardinia, would draw fierce Luftwaffe and naval attacks from Axis-held France, Italy, and the Balkans. Given enough time, those attacks would inflict heavy casualties and cost the Allies irreplaceable landing craft and transport ships. “To state it cruelly,” Marshall told Roosevelt, “we could replace troops whereas a heavy loss in shipping, which could result from the [Sardinia] operation, might completely destroy any opportunity for successful operations against the enemy in the near future.”12
For the moment, King’s eyes turned to the sea-lanes between Britain and Asia. The shortest route from England to India ran through the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. He agreed with Marshall that Sardinia was a bad idea, but told Roosevelt that Sicily, whose airfields covered southern Italy and the central Med, would make a worthwhile target.
In the Oval Office that cold January afternoon, Roosevelt had given no guidance to his lieutenants. He wanted to know what the half million Allied troops in Tunisia would do when the shooting stopped, and warned his warlords that in the upcoming conference in Morocco the British would have a firm plan and would stick to it.13
When the meeting broke up, the men advising Roosevelt had no firm plan. In fact, they were no closer to a decision than they had been when they sat down.
FDR’s near-magical ability to give each visitor the impression that he agreed with him once again worked on Marshall. As Stimson told his diary, “Marshall said that thus far they have the backing of the President. In a word, it is that just as soon as the Germans are turned out of Tunisia and the north coast of Africa is safely in the hands of the Allies we shall accumulate our forces in the north and prepare for an attack this year on the north coast of France.” 14
•
George Marshall arrived in Casablanca at the end of a miserable trip that took him through Miami, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Gambia, and Marrakesh. The first leg occasioned a snub between King and himself over landing priorities. When they left Miami, Marshall flew with General Arnold and Sir John Dill, while King flew in a second plane. King habitually badgered his pilots to go full throttle, and his plane arrived over Puerto Rico ahead of Marshall’s. Marshall’s pilot, technically flying the senior officer, ordered King’s pilot to remain aloft until Marshall disembarked, and after some argument, King’s pilot circled the airfield until Marshall’s plane touched down.15
When they landed, a riled King told Marshall his performance “cost you about a hundred gallons of gas.” Never one to let go a grudge, he recalled years later, “I didn’t like spending one hour in the air just so that [Marshall] would be the first to land.”*16
For the voyage, Marshall’s industrious aide, Lieutenant Colonel Frank McCarthy, had supplemented the plane’s standard survival equipment—life rafts, flare guns, drinking water, and fishing tools—with a complete set of desert gear: tents, hats, dried food, and trinkets to trade with the natives. Hearing that Marshall might also be sent to Russia after the conference ended, he added snowshoes, parkas, mittens, fur-lined boots, fire-starting tools, and heating blankets. Then, warned by the Quartermaster’s office of a malaria threat in Bathurst, Gambia, McCarthy added mosquito boots, mosquito gloves, and floppy veiled hats that resembled beekeeper bonnets.
As the plane touched down on Bathurst’s runway, the lieutenant colonel solemnly addressed Marshall’s entourage about the dangers of malaria and instructed everyone that before leaving the plane they must be protected against local mosquitoes. Marshall obediently donned the oversized boots, floppy hat, and big gloves, leaving no skin surface uncovered. With an indulgent smile that preserved some of his dignity, he climbed down the plane’s ladder to the runway, where a delegation of British notables and an honor guard awaited the general’s review.
In Bermuda shorts and short-sleeved shirts.
Marshall, looking like Buck Rogers in an interplanetary fashion show, glared at McCarthy. The bemused hosts stared at the Americans.
Flushed with embarrassment, Marshall yanked off the hat and gloves and thrust them into McCarthy’s shaking hands. “You take these,” he said coldly, and abruptly steered the conversation with the British governor to any subject other than mosquitoes.17
• • •
The Anfa conference began on January 14 with preliminary meetings among the war chiefs in the hotel’s main conference room. Marshall, King, Arnold, and a few planning staffers sat on one side of a long, narrow table, while General Brooke, Admiral Pound, and Air Marshal Portal took up chairs on the opposite side.*
In a pattern that would hold for the rest of the war, the service chiefs had circulated papers outlining their positions before the conference began. If the two sides agreed on a concept—say, an invasion of Corsica or a bombing campaign in Romania—their planning staff would draft a memorandum setting forth the game plan. If they disagreed, they worked out their differences in face-to-face meetings by arguing, cajoling, reasoning, and outwaiting them until a consensus was reached. Once they were in agreement, they presented their final plan to Roosevelt and Churchill in the form of a final memorandum.18
For the conference’s first hour General Brooke described the basic options as the British saw them: The Allie
s could build up for an invasion of France in late 1943, doing nothing in the meantime, or they could capitalize on the momentum they had gained by rolling up the Mediterranean. In his staccato cadence, Brooke declared that the Mediterranean course made the most sense. It would knock Italy out of the war, possibly draw Turkey into the Allied camp, and still allow for a small, opportunistic landing in France if German resistance there collapsed.19
As Roosevelt had warned, the British service chiefs had worked out their strategy before setting foot in Casablanca. On the voyage from London, British spokesmen rehearsed arguments they and the Americans would make when the conference began. Like Cecil B. DeMille on a big-budget film set, Winston Churchill set the role each chief would play, and coached his marshals on their delivery. He stressed tact and diplomacy. The British chiefs, he said, must not cut off discussion prematurely, they must let the Americans have their full say, and they must listen carefully. In particular, he said, Admiral King must be allowed to “shoot his line about the Pacific and really get it off his chest,” while Marshall must be allowed to thunder about France.20
When they arrived, the Americans were taken aback by the size of the British delegation. Roosevelt wanted a lean party to accompany him, while Churchill brought a small battalion of planners, aides, technical specialists, and code clerks aboard HMS Bulolo, a specially fitted headquarters ship that linked Churchill to London almost as easily as if he were sitting in 10 Downing Street. Brigadier General Al Wedemeyer, Marshall’s planning assistant, told a War Department friend afterward: “They swarmed down upon us like locusts with a plentiful supply of planners and various other assistants with prepared plans to insure that they not only accomplished their purpose but did so in stride. . . . [I]f I were a Britisher I would feel very proud. However, as an American I wish that we might be more glib and better organized to cope with these super negotiators.” 21
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