American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  “The reason for the trip,” King wrote in his postwar notes, “was for me to look over the new carrier (Lady Lex), but foremost to get Gen. Marshall educated, a little, about carriers since he had never been on board one and didn’t even know how they were managed.” Marshall, he wrote, “had a little idea about naval aviation, which it was my idea to get across to the Army people (and the Army Air Corps people), so they might understand at least a little about ‘sea power’ itself.”*9

  Marshall listened politely as King’s men regaled him with the power of their new carrier. But it was wasted effort, for carrier procedure meant nothing to the strategic debate among the Joint Chiefs. With an independent committee advising them to go through the Central Pacific, Marshall could hardly dissent from King’s plan. He was, however, able to keep the First Marine Division under MacArthur’s wing for the Rabaul operation. To pay back the Navy for the loan of the marine division, Marshall found an infantry outfit undergoing amphibious training in Hawaii, the 27th Division, which he gave to King.10

  With that shaky bargain, King and Marshall had set the stage for the next hard fighting in the Pacific. MacArthur’s borrowed marines would pry open the road to the Admiralty and the Bismarck islands near New Guinea, keeping the campaign for Rabaul and the Philippines alive. At the same time Nimitz, supported by Army aircraft and ground troops, would have his shot at the Gilberts and Marshalls, the next steps on the bloody path to the Marianas.11

  •

  On the morning of July 10, landings on a scale that MacArthur and Nimitz could scarcely fathom commenced halfway across the globe. The greatest armada in history gathered off the southeastern corner of Sicily for the long-anticipated Operation HUSKY.

  That morning, eight divisions from two armies fought their way ashore and locked up a thin slice of the Sicilian coast. General Montgomery’s Eighth British Army smothered a stretch of the island’s rocky east side, and General Patton’s Seventh U.S. Army covered the south. Ahead of Patton’s troops, the 82nd Airborne Division made a daring night drop and seized the high ground beyond the beaches.

  On D-day and the next, men of Patton’s army slugged their way inland. On Patton’s right, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley’s II Corps, veterans of the Tunisian campaign, drove back a vicious panzer counterattack by the Hermann Göring Division. On Bradley’s left, Major General Lucian Truscott’s Third Infantry Division captured coastal ports and fought its way toward the island’s capital. Montgomery’s army ground to a halt against stiff German resistance on the road to Messina, the island’s key port. After a violent three days, the Allies were fixtures on Mussolini’s island, and they were not leaving.

  Yet the question weighing on the minds of the American warlords was “Where are those troops going next?”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “A VITAL DIFFERENCE OF FAITH”

  WHILE PATTON’S FOOT SOLDIERS TRAMPED DOWN CENTRAL SICILY’S DUSTY roads, Henry Stimson sat for dinner at London’s No. 10 Downing Street.

  As a cabinet member, Stimson rarely accompanied Roosevelt to meetings with America’s allies, so his inspection trip of U.S. troops in Iceland, the U.K., and North Africa afforded him his first opportunity to come to London. There he planned to sound out the prime minister on a matter of utmost concern to him.1

  From the beginning, Stimson had been a disciple of OVERLORD, the operation’s Peter, James, and John. Marshall even claimed the old man literally included the invasion in his nightly prayers. Over china plates and glasses of sherry, Stimson stressed to Churchill the political operation’s importance in America. Roosevelt would face another election in 1944, and if the Allies could not pull off an invasion of the Continent by then, Republicans—Stimson’s own party—would tap into anger at Japan as a campaign issue. The American voter, Stimson explained, was intellectually persuaded that Germany was the greater foe, but “the enemy whom the American people really hated, if they hated anyone, was Japan, which had dealt them a foul blow.”2

  Churchill kept his distance when Stimson pressed him about the political importance of OVERLORD. He blithely replied that Allied victories anywhere would suffice, but did not explain how the capture of some unknown Mediterranean island or patch of desert would give Roosevelt a selling point with voters in 1944.

  Churchill’s nonchalance toward France worried Stimson. It worried him still further when the prime minister spoke of operations on Italy’s mainland and future landings in the Balkans. With a troubled mind he told his diary, “The PM renewed his pledge of loyalty to Bolero with conditions it seemed to me less destructful than before, unless his military advisors could present him with some better opportunity.”*3

  It was this last bit, “unless his military advisors could present him with some better opportunity,” that worried him most of all.

  Five days later, while Stimson was riding with Churchill to Dover on an inspection tour, the hair on his neck stood up when Churchill began reading aloud a Combined Chiefs memorandum supporting a landing at Naples, halfway up the Italian shin. Because the chiefs had previously considered a more cautious effort against Italy’s toe, Churchill inferred that Marshall and the Americans now supported a far more aggressive effort in the Mediterranean. Something more opportunistic that would take them farther up the Italian boot—and perhaps open new fronts leading to the Alps, Austria, and the Balkans. Energized by the possibilities, he waxed eloquent to a rattled Stimson about the prospects of stirring up the Balkans against the Hun.4

  Stimson was certain that the prime minister had the wrong impression about Marshall’s intentions. When they arrived back in London, he rang up Marshall on a new transatlantic phone line set up in an American bunker. Through the squelch of the phone scrambler, Marshall told Stimson what Stimson already knew—the Joint Chiefs had suggested landings in Naples only to hasten the fall of Rome and clear the way for OVERLORD. The operation, called AVALANCHE, was Marshall’s way of avoiding a slow, debilitating crawl through the toe of Italy, up the foot, ankle, and lower shin, so everyone could get back to OVERLORD.5

  Stimson told Churchill he was mistaken about Marshall; he had it straight from the horse’s mouth that the general’s eye was fixed on France, not the Balkans. A deflated Churchill glumly remarked that fifty thousand Allied troops would have a terrible time fighting their way into France. “On direct questioning,” Stimson wrote, “he admitted that if he was C-in-C, he would not figure the Roundhammer operation; but being as it was, he having made his pledge, he would go through with it loyally.” 6

  Stimson spoke bluntly to Churchill. The Americans, he said, were looking for the quickest end to the war. He accused the prime minister of “hitting us in the eye” by stonewalling OVERLORD with his unending Italian schemes.

  Churchill backed off. He said he did not propose going north of Rome—unless northern Italy were relatively free for the taking, that is. He had no desire to send troops into the Balkans. “If we start anything,” Churchill said, referring to OVERLORD, “we will go through it with the utmost effort.”7

  It was hardly the ringing endorsement Stimson was looking for.

  A year before, when FDR ordered the invasion of North Africa, a bitter Stimson had railed in his diary against Great Britain, “a fatigued and defeatist government which had lost its initiative, blocking the help of a young and vigorous nation whose strength had not yet been tapped.” He returned to Washington convinced that the British wanted out of OVERLORD. As in London, and Casablanca, they would find a way to strangle OVERLORD if the Americans were not vigilant and inflexible. The only way to safeguard the operation, he felt, was to appoint an American commander. Someone of stature. Someone who would not be blinded by British arguments. Someone like George Marshall.8

  •

  As he ate lunch in the Oval Office with Stimson on August 10, Roosevelt carefully studied Stimson’s report of his visit to London. The report laid out Stimson’s case for an American commander of
the OVERLORD operation. “We cannot now rationally hope to be able to cross the Channel and come to grips with our German enemy under a British commander,” he wrote. “His Prime Minister and his Chief of the Imperial Staff are frankly at variance with such a proposal. The shadows of Passchendaele and Dunkerque still hang too heavily over the imagination of these leaders of his government. Though they have rendered lip service to the operation, their hearts are not in it.” He concluded, “The difference between us is a vital difference of faith.”9

  The Allies were approaching their supreme test: Did they believe they could beat Germany in a head-to-head battle on the Continent? Stimson knew the British did not. He believed, and so did Marshall.

  • • •

  For OVERLORD, the Americans would need to field their most capable leader. Stimson, the Athos of FDR’s Musketeers, saw only one choice for the job. His report to FDR concluded:

  You are far more fortunate than was Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Wilson. Mr. Lincoln had to fumble through a process of trial and error with dreadful losses until he was able to discover the right choice. . . . General Marshall already has a towering eminence of reputation as a tried soldier and as a broad-minded and skillful administrator. I believe that he is the man who most surely can now by his character and skill furnish the military leadership which is necessary to bring our two nations together in confident joint action in this great operation.10

  When he finished reading the report, Roosevelt looked up at Stimson and said he emphatically agreed. Fired up about OVERLORD, Roosevelt called in the Joint Chiefs and had Stimson describe the apathy he witnessed from Churchill in London. “The president went whole hog on the subject of Roundhammer,” Stimson wrote, using the operation’s old TRIDENT name. “He was more clear and definite than I have ever seen him since we have been in this war.” 11

  Roosevelt told his chiefs he wanted a large American force in Britain before the invasion—a force larger than the British force. “Frankly, his reason for desiring American preponderance in force was to have the basis for insisting on an American commander,” the minutes recorded.12

  Marshall seemed to be the only one in the room with no opinion on the identity of the invasion’s commander. Taking a spartan pride in his stoicism on personal matters, Marshall refused to express any preference on the subject of his own appointment to lead OVERLORD.13

  But everyone crowding the president’s office that day knew who OVERLORD’s commander would be.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  PLAINS OF ABRAHAM

  IN MID-AUGUST THE JOINT CHIEFS FLEW TO QUEBEC FOR QUADRANT, THE fifth major conference with Churchill and the Imperial General Staff. On the banks of the stately St. Lawrence River, they would fight another round over the fates of Italy, the Balkans, the Far East, and OVERLORD.1

  Flying under dark skies, the American chiefs were comfortably billeted at the Château Frontenac, a palatial hotel whose spires, towers, and European charm were ornamented by red-coated Canadian Mounties who patrolled the grounds and stiffly saluted anyone in uniform. Inside the hotel, black-jacketed servants provided every accommodation to the generals, admirals, and staffers who would decide where great masses of men would die.2

  Canada’s governor-general lodged the stars of the show, Roosevelt and Churchill, in the Citadel, an imposing fortress dating back to an age when French and British kings fought over an empire in the west. Perched atop the Plains of Abraham, an ancient battleground for the New World, the two men would chart the fate of the Old.3

  • • •

  Roosevelt and Churchill enjoyed two different kinds of football. The football of FDR’s America—an obsession for men like Eisenhower and MacArthur—was based on set-piece plays worked out between coach and quarterback. At the snap, linemen would hurl themselves forward, opening a hole, and the plunging back would charge through the hole for a touchdown if everything went as planned. If it did not, the team would line up and try a different play. A fixed plan and vigorous execution were the keys to the football played on green American fields.

  The football of Churchill’s Britain was more fluid and less choreographed than the gridiron battles of Knute Rockne or the Chicago Bears. An English attacker might send the ball to the wings, slow the tempo of the drive, or pass back to midfielders as he looked for an opening to exploit. The path to the net could play out in many different directions, and an unplanned opportunity to score would vanish if not seized quickly.

  Churchill’s strategic heart lay closer to the English style of play than the American variant. To Winston, OVERLORD, the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the air war were simultaneous plays on a monstrous, moving pitch, any of which might put the Allies in Berlin. He later explained the different modes of thinking:

  The American mind runs naturally to broad, sweeping, logical conclusions on the largest scale. It is on these that they build their practical thought and action. They feel that once the foundation has been planned on true and comprehensive lines all other stages will follow naturally and almost inevitably. The British mind does not work quite in this way. We do not think that logic and clear-cut principles are necessarily the sole keys to what ought to be done in swiftly changing and indefinable situations. In war particularly we assign a larger importance to opportunism and improvisation, seeking rather to live and conquer in accordance with the unfolding event than to aspire to dominate it often by fundamental decisions.4

  At Quebec, the planners and the opportunists clashed in a fog of suspicion and disdain. Sitting across a long table in the Frontenac’s Salon Rose, Marshall vehemently objected to further adventures in the Mediterranean. Brooke then sallied forth with a proposal to move through Italy as far north as the airfields around Milan. In response, Marshall and King unsheathed the old Pacific threat and laid it on the table like a rusty yet still-lethal sword.

  “The conference at Quebec was the scene of two ‘show-downs,’” King told an admiral a few days later. “When I say ‘show-downs,’ I mean just that!”

  King dropped all pretense of courtesy. Using “very undiplomatic language,” in Leahy’s words, he fought like a shark for drives in the Pacific and a very limited Mediterranean effort, pushing the British to the end of their patience.5

  “Come on, Ernie, you know you are talking bullshit!” said one exasperated British admiral.* But for King the Pacific drive was anything but bullshit. OVERLORD and a push to the Marianas were the two most important thrusts of the war for 1944. As King saw it, the Americans were making the largest human contribution to the war in the west; the British could no longer pretend they were entitled to direct it from Whitehall.6

  An exasperated Brooke told his diary, “This is the sixth of these meetings with the American chiefs that I have run, and I do not feel that I can possibly stand any more!” But Brooke knew that the time had come to concede the primacy of OVERLORD. It would be the decisive hammer-blow against Hitler, and like Marshall, Brooke had dreamed of commanding the cross-Channel invasion. He genuinely believed the Mediterranean could pin German troops and give OVERLORD a better chance of success, but he knew the time for open-ended adventures in Italy was drawing to a close.7

  Feeling that matters could be better resolved on a personal level, without a large, high-level audience watching their every utterance, Brooke had the conference room emptied of planners, aides, and secretaries. When they had left, he told Marshall, King, Leahy, and Arnold the problem was lack of trust. The Americans doubted British intentions to put their full energies into OVERLORD, while the British were not confident the Americans would seize other opportunities once a contractlike memorandum had been signed.8

  Brooke’s candor melted the ice. After two closed-door sessions, the Combined Chiefs emerged with yet another compromise: OVERLORD’s target date was confirmed as May 1, 1944, and its commander would be selected by President Roosevelt. OVERLORD would take priority over the Mediterranean, but the Allies would continue to exert “
unremitting pressure” on the Germans in Italy, to borrow King’s favorite Pacific phrase. The only new amphibious landing in the Mediterranean would be along the southern French coast, near Toulon or Marseilles, as an adjunct to the landings in northern France.9

  • • •

  As the last closed-door session let out, Lord Mountbatten approached a worn-out General Brooke. Blocking the door, Mountbatten begged a few minutes of the Chiefs’ time to show them Project HABAKKUK, a plan worked up by his scientists to create floating airfields from immense blocks of pykrete, a frozen mixture of wood pulp and water.

  An exhausted Brooke relented, probably against his better judgment. With the earnestness of a Fuller Brush salesman, Lord Mountbatten told the puzzled chiefs the new substance was many times stronger than ice, and would bear the weight of aircraft. If towed as a giant sheet and anchored off the French coast, the pykrete blocks would give the Allies new airfields from which to cover the invasion.10

  To demonstrate the hardness of pykrete, Mountbatten had two large blocks—one of ice, one of pykrete—wheeled into the Salon Rose by his scientists. An assistant drew a pistol from his pocket with a flourish and announced that he would demonstrate the substance’s resistance to gunfire. Nervous chiefs stepped back as the man leveled his arm and aligned the sights. With the first shot, the ice block shattered. At the second, the pykrete deflected the bullet, flinging it back toward its audience. The lead slug buried itself in a wall behind the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

  “The damn fool!” an incredulous King said later. “One of those ‘nuts’ brought into the room a revolver and made a shot at the ‘mush’ which shot at least passed to nearby one of my own shins.” Outside the room, a staffer joked, “My God! Now they’re shooting at each other!!”11