American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  He then asked Stalin and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, the Soviet defense minister, how best the western allies could help the Soviet Union. Voroshilov knew better than to move a muscle, and Stalin commenced with a thorough overview of the Soviet battlefront. Approximately 260 Axis divisions were facing the Red Army, he said. He needed a genuine second front, not a diversion. Italy was good, and the Balkans were good, but neither was the decisive theater. The only way to destroy Hitler was to invade through northwestern France. The Germans would fight like devils there, but a landing in France was the only way to win the war.46

  All eyes turned to Churchill. Speaking through the twin handicaps of raspy voice and Russian interpreter, he told the conferees he fully supported an operation in France. In Italy, he offered no plans to move north of Pisa and Rimini, just above the Italian knee, and he said he had always considered Mediterranean operations of secondary importance, compared to OVERLORD.47

  Yet, he continued, there was much to be gained in the Aegean. Partisans in Yugoslavia could strike a blow at the German war machine. The entry of Turkey into the war would open the sea to a prodigious flow of Allied supplies to the Soviet Union. Soldiers standing idle in the Middle East, and a very small part of the Allied fleet, could provide great assistance to the Red Army.48

  As Churchill expounded on the Mediterranean, Stalin sat in silence, watching mechanically, looking down every now and then to doodle on a small pad of paper, which he would fold, then fold again, and when he could fold it no further, he would stuff it into his pocket and reach for another piece of paper.*49

  When Churchill finished, Stalin said the Anglo-American situation was clear to him. It was useless to scatter British and American forces. The presentation seemed to indicate plans to send some soldiers to Turkey, some to northern France, and some to the Adriatic. Everywhere, which meant nowhere. The Allies, he said, should consider everything besides OVERLORD to be diversionary and focus on France. If other operations were considered, let them go forward in the Western Mediterranean, toward Corsica and the southern French coast as a supplement to OVERLORD.50

  As his words carried around the room, first in Russian, then in English, the Americans smiled inwardly. Uncle Joe had come down hard for OVERLORD, and Churchill, a shorn Samson, had little choice but to back down. “I thank the Lord Stalin was there,” a grateful Henry Stimson wrote when he read the dispatch from Tehran. “In my opinion, he saved the day. He brushed away the diversionary attempts of the PM with a vigor which rejoiced my soul.” 51

  Two and a half years into the war, Stalin’s blunt decision meant the battle for the west would begin, finally and irrevocably, with OVERLORD.

  • • •

  Marshall’s face reddened when he learned the first plenary session had started while he and General Arnold were sightseeing in Tehran. Roosevelt had said nothing of a meeting that afternoon, but after he moved into the Soviet compound, the Big Three decided to hold the general session at four o’clock that day. While Marshall and Hap were gawking at Persian architecture and Tehran’s squalor, their colleagues were making history.52

  King gave the two generals a rundown of the meeting. Stalin had cut through the rhetoric and put a stop to Churchill’s diversions. As King remarked later, “The British had to be pitchforked into the coming invasion, and it was our pal Joey that applied the pitchfork.”53

  The next few days were filled with more conferences, more discussions, and more estimates. It was also filled with dinners, luncheons, and the inevitable lengthy toasts. But Stalin’s cold pronouncements on that first day in Tehran set the tone for the military advisers. Nothing would be permitted to drain men or machines from OVERLORD or delay its commencement beyond May 1944.54

  • • •

  Between courses of vodka, beef, and sturgeon, Roosevelt considered how to build a personal relationship with a tyrant. FDR had built his career by forging bonds with antagonists, but at home he had months, even years, to win over men like Sam Rayburn, Joe Kennedy, or Wendell Willkie. In Tehran for only a few days, and handicapped by translators, there seemed no way he could crack the armor of a Georgian whose soft-spoken words masked a supernatural relentlessness.

  “I had come here to accommodate Stalin,” he told Frances Perkins afterward. “I felt pretty discouraged because I thought I was making no personal headway. I couldn’t stay in Teheran forever. I had to cut through this icy surface so that later I could talk by telephone or letter in a personal way.”55

  Roosevelt believed Stalin feared the two western powers “ganging up” on him, and at Cairo he had taken pains to limit both U.S.-British military talks and his personal meetings with the prime minister. Spooling out that line a bit, on the second day of the conference he experimented by ribbing Churchill in front of Stalin. Before the meeting began, he joked to Stalin, “Winston is cranky this morning. He got up on the wrong side of bed.” The remark survived translation into Russian, and though Stalin seemed puzzled by the display of disunity between the world’s capitalist leaders, his face betrayed a slight smile.56

  Using Churchill as bait, FDR set the hook over the next two days. “I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits,” he told Perkins afterward. “Finally Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him ‘Uncle Joe.’ . . . That day he laughed and came over and shook my hand.”57

  Whether Stalin’s laughter was contrived, or genuine delight at finding a rift between the two westerners, no one but Stalin knew. It made little difference, for strategic objectives were the coin of the realm; the dictator and the Democrat stood united on grand strategy. In Italy, Eisenhower could advance as far north as Pisa, but go no farther. The Allies would invade southern France, and OVERLORD would go forward in May 1944. In return for a second front, Stalin promised that the Soviet Union would join the war against Japan once Germany was defeated.58

  The agreement left Churchill as the odd man out. The one big British-dominated theater, the Mediterranean, was being straitjacketed, and further efforts to open another front in the Balkans proved futile. As Churchill later told a diplomat, “There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one . . . who knew the right way home.”59

  • • •

  One question Stalin refused to drop was command of OVERLORD. The western Allies were disunited, and as Stalin saw it, putting one man in charge—a man figuratively standing between victory and the firing squad (figuratively in the West, that is)—was a practical necessity. His brusque comments to Roosevelt and Churchill on the summit’s second day told them both that Soviet faith in the West was still lacking.

  “Who will command OVERLORD?” he asked abruptly.

  Roosevelt, caught off guard, replied that no decision had been made.

  “Then nothing will come out of these operations,” said Stalin. Until a commander is appointed, he said, “the OVERLORD operation cannot be considered as really in progress.”

  Roosevelt had no satisfactory answer for Stalin, and he knew it. Leahy recalled Roosevelt leaning to him and whispering, “That old Bolshevik is trying to force me to give him the name of our supreme commander. I just can’t tell him, because I have not made up my mind.”

  Playing for time, Roosevelt said decisions made at the conference would affect his choice of commander. Stalin shrugged, unconvinced. The Soviets did not desire a voice in the selection of a commander, he said. They just wanted the commander appointed as soon as possible, and they wanted to know who it would be. Until that happened, he repeated, nothing would happen.60

  Over lunch with Stalin and Churchill the next day, Roosevelt promised to name a commander soon. He would release the
name in a few days, shortly after his return to Cairo.61

  •

  As the Big Three shifted their discussion to political matters, the Combined Chiefs flew back to Cairo to figure out how to implement the sweeping military decisions. Brooke, backed by Air Chief Marshal Portal and Fleet Admiral Andrew B. “A.B.C.” Cunningham, Pound’s successor, insisted that an invasion of the French Riviera required two divisions, not one. This meant finding more of those precious landing ships—or “lift,” to use the British term—and the only place to find more lift was the Burma theater.62

  The mundane question of lift would dominate Allied war councils for the next ten months, for it was a deeply rooted problem whose seeds were planted shortly after Pearl Harbor. In the war’s first months, a large landing craft construction program had been planned around ROUNDUP in 1942. When ROUNDUP was canceled in favor of TORCH, the Navy and the War Production Board put their resources into destroyers, cargo ships, and convoy escorts. As a result, the Allies found themselves some two dozen landing craft short of the requirements of BUCCANEER, OVERLORD, an assault toward Rome, and an invasion of southern France.63

  For all his expertise in logistics, Marshall had been slow to grasp the importance of landing craft. When he went to Europe with Pershing’s army in 1917, “lift” simply meant renting enough ocean liners to carry two million doughboys to Calais. “Prior to the present war I never heard of any landing craft except a rubber boat,” he had joked at Tehran. “Now I think about little else.”64

  Portal suggested they face the math and cancel BUCCANEER. But canceling BUCCANEER was anathema to the Americans, since FDR had promised Chiang that the Andamans invasion would go forward. King strongly believed canceling BUCCANEER would make the Chinese “feel that they had been ‘sold out,’” and until Roosevelt returned from Tehran, he would not budge on Burma.65

  Roosevelt returned on December 2 and met with the Combined Chiefs and Churchill two days later. Churchill pressed for a two-division ANVIL in southern France, and argued that the Allies could find the necessary lift in Burma. King tried to salvage BUCCANEER by suggesting a slight delay in OVERLORD; if OVERLORD could be moved from May 1 to the end of May, the Allies would have an extra four weeks to make up the landing craft deficit from new production. BUCCANEER need not be canceled.

  King’s logic strained under the weight of OVERLORD’s requirements. As originally written, OVERLORD contemplated only a three-and-a-half-division assault. That scale now seemed too puny to ensure the success of a second front. If OVERLORD needed more muscle, BUCCANEER was the only place to find the extra lift.66

  Roosevelt’s first impulse was to keep his promise: he could not, in good conscience, tell Chiang the Allies were going back on BUCCANEER. But after listening to his chiefs and running through the math, he concluded that operations in Burma left too few ships to mount OVERLORD with the margin of safety it needed.

  BUCCANEER was an American commitment, so it would fall to Roosevelt to break the news to Chiang. Perhaps, he mused, he could instead offer Chiang a renewed bombing campaign when the B-29 “Superfortress” was deployed in the spring of 1944.67

  King was profoundly disappointed to lose BUCCANEER, for he believed passionately that China could pin down a large part of Japan’s main army, keeping it out of his Pacific theater. As he saw it, the nation was also breaking faith with an important ally; FDR, King felt, had been too worn down from weeks of travel and banquets and meetings to make the right decision every time.

  General Stilwell, who had waited in Cairo for final instructions on BUCCANEER, was floored when FDR told him the Andamans project was dead. “I’ve been stubborn as a mule for four days, but we can’t get anywhere,” Roosevelt told Stilwell, stretching the truth again. “The British just won’t do the operation, and I can’t get them to agree to it.”68

  Stilwell wasn’t buying it. The president had made an improvident promise, and now he was going back on his word. Topping it off, Stilwell would have to break the bad news to Chiang. “God-awful is no word for it,” a blue Stilwell told his diary after emerging from his meeting with FDR. “The man is a flighty fool. Christ, but he’s terrible.” 69

  •

  While men in uniform wrangled over landing craft and divisions, Roosevelt faced a question he could no longer defer: whether to spare Marshall for OVERLORD.

  His intuition told him Marshall was the best man for handling MacArthur, Chiang, Republicans, the British chiefs, the press, and Congress. Eisenhower, for his part, was doing an admirable job of keeping the war machine together in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, Stimson insisted that only Marshall had the stature to pull off OVERLORD in the face of British resistance.70

  Then there was Marshall’s place in history. Roosevelt had told both Eisenhower and Pershing that Marshall had earned his place in the Pantheon of American generals. While Marshall professed to have no such ambitions, his denial flew in the face of human nature. FDR didn’t believe him.

  Perhaps, thought Roosevelt, there was another way to decide the question. He called for Harry Hopkins.

  Hopkins had been George Marshall’s protector and patron since 1938. Marshall had become one of Harry’s personal heroes, and Harry used his influence as Roosevelt’s closest adviser to prevent Marshall’s opponents from gaining access to the president.71

  Hopkins pulled Marshall aside before dinner on December 4. The boss, he said, was “in some concern of mind” over Marshall’s appointment as supreme commander. Without letting on which way Roosevelt was leaning, he asked Marshall to express his preference.

  Command of OVERLORD would be the greatest opportunity any American soldier had ever been given. To Marshall, it would be the culmination of his life’s work, his chance to make history on a grand stage. The Great War, St. Mihiel, Meuse-Argonne—those battles were small potatoes compared to what the Pershing of World War II would do in France, the Low Countries, and Germany. That general would be known as the liberator of Europe.

  To be that general, all Marshall had to do was ask.

  But that was what bothered Marshall. He hated asking. He took a perverse pride in refusing to let anyone pull strings on his behalf, and he had never hinted at his personal ambition. Characteristically, he told Hopkins he would go along, wholeheartedly and cheerfully, with whatever the president decided. The issues were too great to turn on personal preferences. “He need have no fears of my personal reaction,” Marshall assured him.72

  Roosevelt was puzzled when Hopkins shuffled in and told him what Marshall had said. After nearly five years of working with George Marshall, Roosevelt still didn’t know what to make of him. Now that the job of a lifetime—perhaps ten thousand lifetimes—was his for the taking, Marshall didn’t seem to want it. Or if he did, he wanted Roosevelt to reach across the table and stuff it into his pocket.73

  But Roosevelt also knew Marshall was a man who could handle anything the war could throw at him. He had equipped an army, convinced Congress to extend the draft, guided strategy, and handled MacArthur, the press, the Navy, and his field commanders masterfully.

  Around lunchtime on December 5, after a meeting with Churchill and the Combined Chiefs ended, Roosevelt took Marshall aside. When Marshall sat down next to him, Roosevelt, in his usual indirect way, made a weak attempt at small talk before broaching the subject burning in his mind: What were Marshall’s feelings about commanding OVERLORD?74

  “I was determined,” Marshall said, “that I should not embarrass the president one way or another—that he must be able to deal in this matter with a perfectly free hand in whatever he felt was the [nation’s] best interests.”

  Marshall drew a breath and told Roosevelt the same thing he had told Hopkins. “I just repeated again in as convincing language as I could that I wanted him to feel free to act in whatever way he felt was to the best interest of the country and to his satisfaction and not in any way to consider my feelings,” he s
aid later. “I would cheerfully go whatever way he wanted me to go.”75

  Much relieved, Roosevelt gave Marshall his answer. “I didn’t feel I could sleep at night with you out of the country,” he said. General Dwight Eisenhower would command OVERLORD, and Marshall would remain U.S. Army chief of staff.76

  If Marshall was deflated by Roosevelt’s decision, he never let on. After the last meeting, he pulled out a piece of paper and drafted a message to Stalin for the president’s signature. It read: “The appointment of General Eisenhower to command of OVERLORD operation has been decided upon.” Roosevelt interlineated the word “immediate” at the beginning, signed the note, and handed it back to Marshall, who sent it to Signals for transmission to Moscow.

  The next day Marshall had Colonel McCarthy retrieve his handwritten message from the coding clerks, and he forwarded it to Ike with a personal note:

  Dear Eisenhower:

  I thought you might like to have this as a memento. It was written very hurriedly by me as the final meeting broke up yesterday, the President signing it immediately.

  G.C.M.77

  THIRTY-NINE

  RENO AND GRANITE

  THE SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN TWO POINTS IS USUALLY A STRAIGHT LINE. On Admiral King’s charts, the straightest line from Pearl Harbor to downtown Tokyo ran through the Central Pacific. Nimitz’s Central Pacific.1

  By the fall of 1943, Nimitz’s marines were closing in on Makin and Tarawa, the last holdouts of the Gilbert Islands. Their capture would pave the way to the Marshall and Caroline islands, which included the formidable naval base on Truk. After the Carolines, the Navy’s next ports of call would be the Palaus, to the south, and the Mariana Islands—Saipan, Tinian, and Guam—which Nimitz hoped to reach by November 1944.