The chiefs unanimously agreed they didn’t need to see any more. When Mountbatten proposed a similar presentation to the president and PM, the chiefs suggested it would be best to leave out the pistol part.
After seeing the proposal, the normally inquisitive FDR told King, “We better leave HABAKKUK to the British.” King heartily agreed, and he had the project quietly scuttled beneath a wave of staff papers and feasibility studies.12
• • •
Another scientific oddity, swallowed with more conviction than HABAKKUK, was TUBE ALLOYS, or “S-1,” as the Americans called it. The year before, at Hyde Park, Churchill had agreed to pool British atomic fission research with the Americans, and he believed FDR had agreed to reciprocate by sharing the fruits of American labors. Since then, however, British military and scientific leaders complained, with good reason, that American scientists were keeping them in the dark.13
Roosevelt and Churchill saw the weapon as a possible war-winning breakthrough, and U.S. reluctance to share information became a discordant note in the partners’ duet. “There is no question of breach of agreement,” fumed Churchill in one of several irate letters to Harry Hopkins on the subject. American reticence, he said, “entirely destroys the original conception of ‘A coordinated or even jointly conducted effort between the two countries.’”14
Churchill raised the issue privately with Roosevelt, who agreed that his team needed to be more forthcoming. He signed an aide-mémoire promising the British full access to American research, and the two men further agreed that neither side would use the bomb without the other’s consent. Churchill left reassured, and before long British scientists began arriving at the heart of America’s most secret program. Information began flowing in two directions, not one.*15
• • •
As the Quebec conference wrapped up on August 25, the only political meddling in military plans was Roosevelt’s insistence on a SLEDGEHAMMER-like invasion if the Russians overran the Wehrmacht and were racing toward Berlin. Marshall deduced that Roosevelt wanted to maintain a U.S. military presence during the reconstitution of Europe.16
Otherwise, QUADRANT ended exactly as the Combined Chiefs recommended. Top priority would go to an invasion of France around the first of May, 1944; tides, moon, and cloud cover would dictate the exact date. Mediterranean operations would go forward, so long as they didn’t restrict men, ships, or planes needed for OVERLORD. An invasion of the French Mediterranean coast, code-named ANVIL, would be launched at the same time as OVERLORD to draw Germans in southern France away from the OVERLORD landing site.
In the Pacific, King’s “unremitting pressure” would be aimed at Japan’s defeat within one year of Germany’s surrender. In the Central Pacific, the Navy would take the Gilberts, Marshalls, Carolines, Palaus, and Marianas islands during 1944, while to the south MacArthur would bypass Rabaul and push through New Guinea toward the Philippines. Strategic bombing would be provided by a fleet of heavy long-range bombers still under development, and the Navy’s job would be to take one or more islands that would put those monsters within range of Japan.17
Burma had consumed more time than anything else on the agenda, but even that problem was, more or less, peaceably resolved. A new headquarters, called South-East Asia Command, or SEAC, would be formed under Lord Mountbatten.* The Allies would open the Burma Road by attacking the Burmese coast, provided there were enough resources to meet all commitments in France, Italy, and the Pacific. The British insisted, as usual, that “priorities cannot be rigid,” and Mountbatten’s Burma Road work would be considered “a longer-term development.” In other words, China could be ignored for a little while longer.18
The plan satisfied no one entirely, but it was achievable, and that was the important thing. It was also the best deal each side could get, given the limitations of the moment and the lingering distrust. When they packed their bags and left Quebec, the Allied war leaders knew the next big job was to prepare for the invasion of Europe.
And that job started by selecting the man who would lead the invasion.
THIRTY-FIVE
THE INDISPENSABLE MAN
SEPTEMBER 1, 1943, MARKED THE FOURTH ANNIVERSARY OF MARSHALL’S APpointment as Army Chief of Staff—a post lasting, by tradition, four years. But FDR, who had already run past his traditional term limit, didn’t care about either tradition or the calendar. George Marshall was a steady hand in war councils, congressional hearings, and press conferences. He was a gifted speaker, he had good political sense, and he harbored no ambitions, at least not the unhealthy kind Greek playwrights warned against. Army dogma decreed that there was no such thing as an indispensable man, but to Roosevelt, General George Catlett Marshall came pretty damned close. He would keep Marshall on his infield team.
Though FDR agreed with Stimson that Marshall should command the OVERLORD invasion, he believed the general’s guiding hand would be needed in Washington at least a little longer, and an unexpected political spat over the Army’s logistics branch underscored the need to keep Marshall near the throne.
While Marshall was negotiating at Quebec, General Brehon Somervell, commander of the Army Service Forces, unveiled a proposal to reorganize the Army’s sprawling supply network. Somervell’s plan would bring the disparate elements of the Army’s rambling, unruly hydra under the control of one general, and that general, naturally, would be Somervell.1
Somervell had made a long list of enemies. The ambitious, sharp-tongued bureaucrat had been head of New York City’s Works Progress Administration under Harry Hopkins before the war, and many Washingtonians, including Harold Ickes, saw in Somervell’s plan an empire grab by a Hopkins protégé. Conservatives in both parties grew rabid at the thought of a New Dealer eventually succeeding General Marshall as chief of staff, either formally—by sending Marshall to Europe—or, as seemed more likely, through a murky reorganization scheme that gutted Marshall’s authority.2
Ickes, who loathed Hopkins, warned Roosevelt that MacArthur and Somervell were the two greatest threats to democracy among men in uniform. “He agreed as to MacArthur but said that he had not thought of Somervell,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “I told him that [Somervell] would bear watching, pointing out that he was ambitious, ruthless, and vindictive.” 3
But in preparing his bureaucratic coup, General Somervell made two fatal mistakes: He took an around-the-world inspection tour of Army posts after announcing the plan, and he failed to win the advance backing of Stimson and Undersecretary Robert Patterson, Stimson’s logistics chief. He would be a long way from Washington when opposition to the Somervell plan found its voice.4
•
Marshall’s services, thought King, were invaluable as Army chief of staff, and it was a dumb idea to send him off to Europe as a field commander.
King had butted heads with Marshall since early 1942, but he respected the general and felt they could see the war to victory if they stuck together. They were hardly friends—most of their meetings were conducted with the warmth and cheer of a real estate closing—but since that long-ago day in Ernie King’s office, the two men had learned to “get along.” It bothered King when Knox privately told him the president wanted to send Marshall to Europe, for the move would require someone else—possibly Somervell, maybe Eisenhower, perhaps even MacArthur—to step into Marshall’s large brogans.
“This was no time to ‘swap horses in mid-stream,’” King told Knox, and he made it his personal mission to see that George Marshall remained in Washington. He went to Roosevelt and urged him to keep Marshall in Washington. Knox, Leahy, and Arnold did, too. But Roosevelt, as usual, nodded along, refusing to commit himself.5
King had no illusions about his influence over FDR. He knew the president wouldn’t listen to him about Marshall, and he probably wouldn’t listen to Knox, Leahy, or Arnold, either.
But Roosevelt did read the papers, and he listened to their editors. So when King returned fr
om Quebec, he told his newspaper friends the British “were raising Heaven and Earth to get Marshall removed from the Combined Chiefs to command the invasion.” Stressing Marshall’s value to the Allied team, he asked his confidants to publish editorials extolling Marshall’s virtues as Army chief of staff and stressing the need to keep him home.6
Before long, Marshall’s virtues as chief of staff were a matter of public debate, and it was clear his ticket to Europe had not been punched. At least not yet.
• • •
In a year when politicians were sharpening their knives for 1944, Marshall’s upcoming transfer to London set off a firestorm of conspiracy theories. The Army and Navy Journal speculated that Marshall may have “come into conflict with powerful interests which would like to eliminate him from the Washington picture and place in his stead an officer more amenable to their will.” Frank Waldrop of the conservative Washington Times-Herald wrote, “General Marshall right today is out as Chief of Staff, because he won’t further subordinate his ‘technical’ views on global strategy to Messrs. Roosevelt and Churchill.” Representative Jessie Sumner of Illinois had another theory: Marshall, Leahy, and MacArthur were targeted by the British for standing up for “American rights.” Arthur Krock of the New York Times warned, “If the Army’s Chief of Staff is replaced, those who have urged it will more easily be able to displace Admiral King.”
The story of Marshall’s “Dutch promotion” became such an article of faith that Senator Harry Truman warned Marshall of a palace coup in the making. Somervell, he told Marshall, was out to get his job.7
White House fumbling made things worse. Denying stories of a demotion in the works, press secretary Steve Early privately told a reporter that Marshall would become a sort of global supreme commander.
Early’s off-the-cuff remark was a preposterous notion—the sort of rot, Stimson feared, that would upset the delicate game FDR and Churchill were playing with their voters. “I can well understand that Churchill has got a terrific difficulty in getting his constituents to consent to putting in another general, an American general, in a key position over in the European theater,” he told his diary. “This has been made a heap worse by all this gossip that has gone on in America about Marshall getting not only a total European position but a global position over the world.” Early denied making any such announcement, but as Stimson noted, “the White House has not got a great reputation for truth in these matters of publicity.” The storm lashed without letup.8
Stimson had seen the thunderheads forming, and he spoke with Roosevelt about naming Marshall’s successor as chief of staff. “We both agreed Eisenhower was probably the best selection in his place,” said Stimson. “He mentioned MacArthur, but I told him strongly that I thought MacArthur was not up to Eisenhower and he agreed. MacArthur is so lacking in the fine disinterestedness that Marshall has shown that I could not possibly feel the same confidence in him.” 9
Stimson was not the only one worried about changes in the American command. Three ranking Republicans on the Senate Military Affairs Committee drove out to Woodley to tell Stimson they needed Marshall’s prestige in Congress to win over fellow Republicans on controversial issues. Stimson assured the senators that while Marshall deeply desired command of the invasion, the president had not yet ordered him to England. If the president did send Marshall to Europe, he suggested, Marshall’s influence might still be felt in Washington if he were promoted to the five-star rank of General of the Armies—a title previously held only by General Pershing.10
That suggestion resonated with the senators, and the next day Stimson asked Roosevelt to urge Congress to pass a bill promoting Marshall. He suggested that both Congress and Marshall would accept the new rank as long as it had the blessing of Pershing, Marshall’s revered mentor. Stimson then asked FDR to push for Marshall’s command of both the European and the Mediterranean theaters, and the two men discussed having General Brooke lead the cross-Channel attack and General Alexander, Eisenhower’s ground commander, run the Mediterranean war.11
It was a trying time personally for George Marshall, who hated to see his name tossed about like a political football for politicians and newspaper editors. But he understood Washington’s mercurial ways and took the teacup tempest in stride. When German-controlled Radio Paris announced that Roosevelt had fired Marshall and personally assumed the position of Army chief of staff, Marshall sent a report of the announcement to Hopkins with a note:
Dear Harry,
Are you responsible for pulling this fast one on me?
GCM
Hopkins passed the note to Roosevelt, who returned it to Marshall with his penciled endorsement,
Dear George—
Only true in part—I am now Chief of Staff but you are the President.
FDR12
As the autumn days grew short, Marshall contemplated the commanders he would lead in Europe. For field command, he saw Omar Bradley, Jacob Devers, Mark Clark, or Dwight Eisenhower leading the American army group, and he told his aide Frank McCarthy to be ready to fly to England to secure quarters and offices. His wife, Katherine, began quietly moving their furniture from Fort Myer to their home in Leesburg. She planned to live there until her husband’s return from Europe.13
In late October Churchill cabled Roosevelt to urge him to make an official announcement. But now that the moment was upon him, Roosevelt was strangely indecisive. He wrote Churchill, “The newspapers here, beginning with the Hearst, McCormick crowd, had a field day over General Marshall’s duties. . . . It seems to me that if we are forced into making public statements about our military commands we will find ourselves with the newspapers running the war. I therefore hope nothing will be said about the business until it is accomplished.”14
But the business would not be accomplished until Roosevelt made a decision. In the midst of the newspaper field day, Admiral Leahy told his diary that the president “was stalling for time. I definitely had the impression that he was being influenced more by the adverse public reaction than by anything that took place within the military groups.” 15
Though not prone to revealing his inner thoughts, Roosevelt expressed himself most directly on the subject in a letter to General Pershing: “I think it is only a fair thing to give George a chance in the field. . . . The best way I can express it is to tell you that I want George to be the Pershing of the second World War—and he cannot be that if we keep him here.” 16
Eleanor once said that her husband “doesn’t think. He decides.” But this time he had a lot more thinking to do before he made a decision about George Marshall.
THIRTY-SIX
“DIRTY BASEBALL”
THE LINE THAT DIVIDES POLITICS AND STRATEGY IS NEVER AS SHARP AS POLIticians and strategists pretend, and those lines all but disappeared in the summer of 1943. As rhythmic waves of Allied bombers blasted factories and railyards in Rome, Pope Pius XII and U.S. Catholic groups called on both sides to declare Rome an open city, neither attacking it nor using it for military purposes. Rome, they emoted, was a cultural treasure and the seat of one of the world’s great religions. It would be a crime to turn the home of the Forum, the Sistine Chapel, and Michelangelo’s Pietà into a field of rubble.
But Rome was also home to Italian military offices and communications hubs. Its railyards funneled thousands of Axis soldiers to points south, and these soldiers had sent plenty of young Americans to places painted on Vatican chapel ceilings. So portions of Rome would fall under British and American bombs.1
Roosevelt, eyeing Catholic voters, could not ignore calls to spare the Eternal City, and he took the matter up at his regular press conference on July 23. He assured everyone he hoped the Axis would declare the city off-limits to both armies, but until they did, Allied bombers must strike military targets wherever they were found. “I don’t believe in destruction merely for retaliation,” he emphasized. “It’s the wrong basis to put it on. But destruct
ion for saving the lives of our men in a great war sometimes is an inevitable necessity.”2
On July 25, three days after Patton’s tanks clattered into Palermo, Sicily’s capital, Mussolini’s tottering government fell. King Vittorio Emanuele III placed the dictator under arrest and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio as his replacement. Badoglio, desperate to end the war without drawing Hitler’s armies into Rome, secretly contacted Eisenhower’s diplomatic agents to arrange an armistice.
When news of Il Duce’s fall reached the Allied capitals, an elated FDR wrote Churchill, “It is my thought that we should come as close as possible to unconditional surrender followed by good treatment of the Italian populace.” Sticking to his Casablanca announcement, however, the next day Roosevelt announced that the unconditional surrender terms would stand.3
Badoglio’s emissaries secretly agreed to an armistice on September 3, but when rumors of Italo-Allied negotiations reached German ears, Hitler’s Mediterranean commander, Field Marshal Albrecht Kesselring, funneled troops down the Italian boot and prepared to turn the ancient battlefield into a modern one.4
On September 8 Eisenhower announced the armistice and Badoglio belatedly ordered his forces to cease resistance to United Nations forces. The next morning the Fifth U.S. Army under Lieutenant General Mark Clark splashed ashore at Salerno, south of Rome on the Neapolitan coast. Churchill’s dream of an invasion of Italy was the war’s new reality.
By the time the Higgins boats dropped their ramps, however, Kesselring had captured Rome and sent five divisions lurching toward Salerno Bay. His panzers crashed into Clark’s VI Corps at the Sele River, and with a bloody counterattack, they threatened to drive the Americans into the sea.5
•
As Clark’s men clawed their way onto Salerno’s beaches, Roosevelt and Churchill puzzled over Italy’s new status. Should Italy be treated as an ally? A vanquished enemy? A neutral?
American Warlords Page 36