American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  The spoiled boy came around the next day, when Churchill announced his agreement to go along with the group. The exhausted warlords breathed a collective sigh of relief, and went back to draft the necessary orders for their theater commanders.

  • • •

  The Yankees had, for once, obtained a better bargain than their cousins. The great prize was British commitment to a cross-Channel assault in May 1944, but the Americans also won British assent to sending Nimitz as far as the Caroline Islands. While agreements on Burma and China did not give Roosevelt everything he wanted, as he told Leahy, it was “the best I could get at this time.”32

  When Churchill left for England, Roosevelt knew he had leaped over the TRIDENT and landed on both feet. He took the Ferdinand Magellan home to Hyde Park and slept in his own bed for thirty hours over the next three days.33

  No one who knew him begrudged Roosevelt his rest. The man had been balancing Allied relations, arbitrating Army-Navy disputes, battling old foes at home, and fighting Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito abroad. He had survived another visit from Churchill, and he had wrestled with a nasty moral dilemma that began when a hungry wolf went scrounging for food in a faraway forest.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE FIRST CASUALTY

  TRUTH IS NOT, AS THE ADAGE CLAIMS, THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR. IN THE war for Asia, the first casualties were the unfortunate Chinese of Manchuria. In Europe, they were the Poles of the German frontier.

  But truth was not long in catching up, for like everyone else, in wartime honesty had to make its fair share of sacrifices.

  To dictatorships, truth and lies are tools of power, just like secret police, rigged elections, and state-run media. Democracies, built upon the dissemination of truth, have to be more circumspect. Yet even democracies depend on the suppression of information—and the occasional lie—as the price of survival.

  Duplicity was second nature to FDR. His mind was not a windowless house, but a house with mirrors, prisms and false doors, easy to enter but hard to navigate. Visitors on opposite sides of an issue left the White House convinced that Roosevelt was in their corner, and FDR’s compulsion to tell visitors what they wanted to hear sometimes required him to affirm untruths. He rarely placed himself in the position of telling a bald-faced lie he’d have to ask forgiveness for later, but he would go to extraordinary lengths to stretch facts and conceal the truth when the truth became uncomfortable.

  Roosevelt’s relationship to public candor was ambiguous. As president, he had to maintain a basic level of trust with the newsmen who made up the Fourth Estate. For their part, most journalists put country ahead of scoop, and accepted that in war there are secrets that must be kept, truths that must not be told. While the American high command sometimes manufactured a falsehood, such as King’s explanation of the Midway ambush, more often it simply withheld small but critical facts.

  One of the more difficult feats for an idealistic democracy is collaborating with a dictatorship on an abject lie, and in the winter of 1943, a wolf roaming through western Russia dumped just such a problem on to FDR’s lap.

  The wolf, scavenging near Smolensk, sniffed out a pile of human bones buried near the bivouac of the German 537th Signal Regiment. The animal tracks, bones, and stories from local peasants led German troops to a massive burial trench in the nearby Katyn Forest. As they excavated, the cairn rendered up some three thousand rotting corpses clad in uniforms of Polish officers.

  Radio Berlin, in its broadcast of April 13, announced the find. It claimed that the hands of the victims had been tied and each had been shot in the back of the head. The graves at Katyn and other sites, said the Nazis, were evidence of a massacre of some ten thousand captured Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD after Stalin occupied eastern Poland in 1939. Goebbels and his propagandists offered the bodies as Exhibit A to their indictment that the communists were every bit as murderous as the Allies claimed the Germans to be.1

  The response from both Poles and Russians was immediate and bitter. London-based Poles, led by General Wladyslaw Sikorski, publicly called for a Red Cross investigation. Stalin claimed the murders were the handiwork of Germans in the summer of 1941, and accused Berlin of waging a propaganda war with the help “of certain pro-fascist Polish elements picked up in occupied Poland.” Pravda branded the Polish exiles in London “Nazi collaborators,” and the USSR broke off diplomatic relations with the London Poles. Stalin’s apparatchiks began building a government-in-waiting among communist partisans of the Polish underground.2

  American reaction to German accusations was mixed. Most newspaper editorials focused on the larger war aims rather than the specific crime. Newsweek ran the story under the headline “Poles vs. Reds: Allied Unity Put to the Test Over Officer Dead.” Time remarked: “The U.S. State Department and No. 10 Downing Street were in complete accord: nothing must be allowed to create a final schism between Russia and the Anglo-American coalition.”

  On the other hand, the Polish-American and anti-Roosevelt communities were outraged. McCormick’s Tribune published an article headlined, “American and Polish Leaders Brand Russia a Nation of Liars and Old Conspirators.” Two senior Democrats, Congressman John Lesinski and Senator Burton Wheeler, saw the bad old Russia of the 1920s coming back, and called on Roosevelt to respond to Soviet persecution of Poles. Russia’s popular image in the United States as a champion of the anti-Nazi cause lost some of the luster of 1941.3

  Caught off guard, FDR did his best to prevent the atrocity from widening into a full-fledged rift between himself and Stalin. Without passing judgment on the Red Army’s guilt or innocence, he drafted a cable to Stalin accusing Sikorski of making a “stupid mistake in bringing this issue to the international Red Cross.” But he cautioned that with a great number of Polish Americans serving in uniform, it would not help him politically if Stalin broke relations with Sikorski.

  Washington and London pressured the exiled Poles to drop their demand for an investigation, and tried to downplay the story at home. As evidence of German innocence quietly worked its way through the Army’s intelligence branch, Roosevelt had Elmer Davis, head of the Office of War Information, urge reporters not to give credence to “phony propaganda stories,” including a “very fishy statement” about an unproven Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners.4

  Churchill set Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary, to work on the breach. Eden discreetly asked Owen O’Malley, his representative to the Polish exiles, to find out what really happened, and a month later O’Malley reported that Soviet denials were not credible. The victims wore winter coats, while the Germans had occupied Katyn in the summer. The ropes binding their hands were of typical Russian manufacture. The victims belonged to units that retreated east from the German invasion, toward the Red Army, and their letters home and pocket diaries all ceased in April 1940, when the Red Army occupied the area. Small, concealing pine trees planted atop the graves were old enough to have been introduced to the area in 1940.5

  In light of the evidence, O’Malley was troubled by His Majesty’s Government’s inclination to deny Soviet guilt. “We have in fact perforce used England’s good name like the murderers used the little conifers to cover up the massacre,” he told Eden. Yet he concluded that in light of the overwhelming need to defeat Germany, “few will think that any other course would have been wise or right.”6

  Churchill told Sikorski, “If they are dead, nothing you can do can bring them back.” In August he forwarded O’Malley’s report to Roosevelt, though if FDR read it, he kept his mouth closed. There was a war to be won, and spring 1943 was not the time for moralizing to one’s ally. The year would bring enough problems of its own.*7

  •

  As a cabinet member, Henry Stimson was focused on the home front. He supported Marshall’s military strategy, but like FDR, most of his thoughts centered on domestic matters like production, funding, conscription, transportation, and weapons development. A car’
s engine will shut down if an air bubble gets into the gas line; if America’s farms, factories, or railroads faltered, it wouldn’t be long before its great military engine would grind to a halt.

  One of those air bubbles formed in April, when half a million coal miners led by CIO head John L. Lewis threatened a strike to force management to boost wages by two dollars a day. Wildcat strikes by another 100,000 miners shut down some 3,000 mines and produced a daily loss of two million tons of coal, the stuff that fired every steel, automotive, and textile plant in the nation.8

  Stimson struck back. Livid over labor agitation, he asked Roosevelt to use his emergency powers to reopen the mines, and he urged the president to order the War Manpower Commission to draft any miner who refused to work.9

  In a national emergency, President Roosevelt could simply order the Army to take over the mines. He and Stimson hoped the strikers would back down first, however. “We hate to have the Army do it,” Stimson told his diary when a strike threatened in 1941. “It will be misrepresented all over the world and be treated by the Nazis as a revolution.”

  But German propagandists were already playing up the strike as evidence of a collapse of national will, and coal production was so critical that Stimson told Roosevelt he saw no other option. FDR agreed, and on April 30 he ordered the Army to seize and reopen the mines. Lewis declared a temporary truce, and the miners went back to work.10

  Labor was one of Roosevelt’s basic constituencies, and to Stimson’s dismay, he refused to take punitive action against the unions. When Congress passed a bill imposing drastic penalties on anyone urging a strike in government-owned plants, Roosevelt vetoed it. He told Congress that during 1942, “99 and 95/100 of the work went forward without strikes, [and] only 5 one-hundredths of 1 percent of the work was delayed by strikes. That record has never been equaled in this country. It is as good or better than the record of any of our Allies in wartime.”11

  An unimpressed Senate overrode Roosevelt’s veto in fifteen minutes. Two hours later, the House followed suit. The antistrike bill became law, and Stimson told his diary, “The President met with a bad rebuff and an unnecessary rebuff. His administration really is beginning to shake a little and throughout the country there is evident feeling that he has made a mistake in regard to labor.” 12

  • • •

  In the hot summer of 1943, the nation’s collective nerves frayed as America struggled to swallow domestic sacrifices and population upheaval. Food prices had risen nearly 25 percent since 1941, and race riots scarred Detroit and Mobile. In Southern California, sailors, marines, and white mobs waged a two-week running battle with Latino youths wearing “zoot suits,” long, baggy, flamboyant outfits openly defying federal cloth-rationing laws.

  Everyone seemed to be complaining about someone else’s lack of shared sacrifice, and everyone seemed unhappy. Sketching out the tattered landscape that was the Home Front of 1943, the New York Times lamented, “Our President has said, and often, that we would show the world that a democracy could be made to work at war as well as any totalitarian state. . . . Therefore, much depends on how we run our democracy at war. And we are not running it any too well.”13

  With the war stuck in a doldrums and the public likely to take its frustrations out on Roosevelt in 1944, members of the Democratic National Committee quietly proposed offering up Stimson as a sacrificial lamb. The old Republican was becoming a political liability, they suggested. Dumping him would rid the administration of excess baggage without signaling a Republican purge, since Frank Knox, another Republican, would remain in the cabinet.

  Roosevelt considered the idea. Morgenthau, Ickes, and Hopkins would have jumped at the chance to head the War Department, and bleak times make a dramatic shake-up an attractive option. But FDR stood by his man. He told the party elders he believed Stimson was “a man of courage, fairness, and great capacity.” He had a high reputation throughout the country, said Roosevelt, and he was an asset to the nation at war.14

  However duplicitous, however disorganized Roosevelt might be, he was loyal to those who were loyal to him. Henry Stimson, the establishment Republican, had set aside party loyalty for the good of the country, and he would remain part of Roosevelt’s war team.

  THIRTY-TWO

  LANDINGS, LUZON, AND LADY LEX

  IN THEIR PENTAGON SUITES, MARSHALL AND STIMSON BUTTED HEADS OVER the unconditional surrender of Italy.

  In his “unconditional surrender” announcement at Casablanca, FDR had mentioned Italy in the same breath with Germany and Japan, but Stimson felt Italy might warrant an exception to the rule. He had traveled there as secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, and had met with Mussolini and other government officials. In their hearts, he said, the Italian people were not genuine Axis material. If they ejected Il Duce and his thugs, he said, it would make sense to treat them with a light hand. Instead of humiliating the Italians, the Allies should come as liberators, bearing the torch of freedom that Garibaldi had carried during the previous century.1

  Marshall, who was studying an amphibious leap onto Italy’s bony knee, told Stimson he was surprised to hear him side with mushy sentimentalists who wanted to go easy on the cradle of fascism. It was no easy job keeping the public mad enough to make the sacrifices needed to defeat the Axis, and he thought it a terrible idea to water down the cask of hate by invoking romantic images of Garibaldi and good Italians.2

  Stimson’s mustache twitched and he grew hot under his starched collar. He wasn’t trying to go easy on the Italians, he said. “Divide and conquer” was a better strategy. By telling the Italians they were in for the same treatment Germany and Japan had coming, the Italian soldier—or at least his officers and leaders—would fight that much harder.3

  As the invasion of Sicily drew near, they were about to find out which man was right.

  •

  Japan’s surrender, unconditional or otherwise, remained a landfall far below the horizon. The TRIDENT agreement had authorized Admiral King to drive through the Carolines, and shortly after the conference ended he flew to San Francisco for another conference with Nimitz. There the two men mapped out an aggressive campaign for the Marshall and Gilbert islands, stepping-stones to the Carolines and Marianas.

  They also decided on the all-important command assignments. The main fleet would go to Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, the hero of Midway, whom King would bump to vice admiral. The amphibious commander would be Rear Admiral Kelly Turner, a veteran of Guadalcanal. The landing force commander, necessarily a marine, would be Major General Holland M. Smith—one of the best amphibious experts alive, but, like King, a difficult person to get along with. Nimitz, as theater head, would select the islands to assault, and King would ensure that Nimitz had every landing craft, warship, and marine that the country could spare. It was a good working team, and it was King’s job to see that no dumb bastard in Washington blew them off their course.4

  In early June, King told Marshall he wanted to put Nimitz in charge of the Pacific war’s scheduling and allocation of resources. He also proposed that the Joint Chiefs approve an invasion of the Marshall and Gilbert islands by November 1. He wanted the Joint Chiefs to order MacArthur to give them a timetable for his upcoming operations against the Western Solomons and New Britain, home of Fortress Rabaul, so they could coordinate blows. Finally, he proposed transferring the veteran First and Second Marine Divisions from MacArthur to Nimitz.5

  Marshall usually deferred to King on details of Pacific strategy. The general had one idea for Europe—to invade northern France—but he was out of his depth when evaluating the strategic merits of operations in the Dutch East Indies, the Marianas or the western Carolines. Those details were best left to MacArthur, Nimitz, Arnold, and King.

  Command was another matter, however, and he pushed back when King proposed placing Nimitz in charge of “scheduling.” Control of scheduling meant control of the Pacific war, for Nimitz would be able to po
stpone MacArthur’s campaign until the Marines had driven far enough to make MacArthur and the Army irrelevant.6

  Marshall kept MacArthur informed of his deliberations with King, and told him of King’s request for the two Marine divisions. MacArthur shot back an indignant message, blasting the Joint Chiefs for even thinking of taking away his only trained amphibious fighters. The loss of the First and Second Marine Divisions would doom operations against Rabaul, he declared. He also warned of dire political repercussions that would follow the emasculation of his Pacific strategy.7

  But King was not finished with MacArthur’s Pacific strategy. One week after MacArthur’s reply, the Joint Strategic Survey Committee, the senior Army-Navy strategy think tank, released a memorandum cautioning that MacArthur’s planned drive to the Philippines was not necessarily a sacred cow. In fact, the committee concluded, the Allies would be better served by taking Nimitz’s Central Pacific route to Japan, through the Marianas, than by crashing through the southern door at Rabaul and Luzon.

  The study was a godsend to King, who had never liked MacArthur’s Rabaul operation. He crowed that the JSSC had done a “great service” to the nation by presenting its paper. King’s Central Pacific strategy had been vindicated.8

  • • •

  As he planned his advance through the Pacific, King decided that Marshall needed some basic education in the Navy’s way of war. It had taken him three months to school Marshall on the importance of the Marianas, and now, he decided, the general needed a graduate course in carrier procedures. In early July, he invited Marshall to accompany him to inspect USS Lexington, a brand-new Essex-class fleet carrier and the namesake of his late, lamented flagship.