At Marshall’s suggestion, Roosevelt added a word of support for Eisenhower to his “State of the Union” message to Congress. “The speed with which we have recovered from this savage attack is largely possible because we have one supreme commander in complete control of all the Allied armies in France,” he told Congress. “General Eisenhower has faced this period of trial with admirable calm and resolution and with steadily increasing success. He has my complete confidence.”9
•
Other commanders held Roosevelt’s confidence, and FDR intended to recognize them with more than just words. In early 1944, he decided to add another rung to the military ladder by giving Leahy, Marshall, and King a promotion.
The idea had lain dormant for some time. In 1942 Admiral King had suggested that the Joint Chiefs make a recommendation to the president standardizing the criteria for four-star ranks for men like Halsey and Eisenhower. To this King added, “We should also recognize the fact that there is a need to prepare for ranks higher than that of Admiral or General. As to such ranks, I suggest Arch-Admiral and Arch-General, rather than Admiral of the Fleet and Field Marshal.”10
Nothing moved until January 1944, when the idea gained new life. This time, Roosevelt said he preferred “Chief Admiral” and “Chief General,” while King suggested the perplexing titles “Captain Admiral” and “Colonel General.” A nonplussed Secretary Knox had written King at the time, “Personally I don’t care very much how the title is fixed so long as recognition is given to the pre-eminence of the command you [and Marshall] both exercise.” But everyone who did care, other than King, thought the name “Captain Admiral” too confusing.11
According to the Washington grapevine, FDR’s real motive behind the new stars was to promote his personal physician, Rear Admiral Ross McIntire—who, in addition to his jovial personality and deep-sea fishing prowess, had an exceptional gift for reassuring the press that his patient was in the best of health. To promote his cronies, FDR would have to bump up seven other admirals, which would require every senior admiral to move up by at least one more star. So Nimitz, Halsey, and Ingersoll would each become a five-star “Admiral of the Fleet,” while Leahy and King would hold the six-star ranks of “Admiral of the Navy.”12
The Army’s supporters would naturally demand similar promotions, and it would be unthinkable for Congress to overlook Time’s Man of the Year. But Marshall frowned at the idea, since a promotion was the kind of favor some sharp-elbowed congressman would one day call in.
“I didn’t want any promotion at all,” Marshall explained later. “I didn’t think I needed that rank and I didn’t want to be beholden to Congress for any rank or anything of that kind. I wanted to be able to go there with my skirts clean and with no personal ambitions.” Added to this was the odd ring of “Marshal Marshall,” which had the same linguistic absurdity as, say, promoting a man named “Major” to the rank of major.*13
In early February Roosevelt told Stimson he intended to promote three rear admirals, including Dr. McIntire, to vice admiral. He would also approve fifth stars for King and Marshall, to keep parity with the British chiefs—Field Marshal Alan Brooke and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew B. Cunningham.14
The impetus to pin more stars on the shoulders of America’s war chiefs came to a screeching halt in April 1944, about the time the New York Herald Tribune ran an article under the headline “Marshall Asks That New Rank Bill Be Shelved.” The article quoted a War Department source as saying General Marshall opposed the bill. It also claimed certain “friends of Admiral King were quick to point out that, like General Marshall, he too, was not in the least interested in ‘gathering a new title.’”15
But King was interested in doing just that, for both organizational reasons and self-aggrandizement. When he read the story, he blew up and called in his director of public relations. He told the man to get over to the War Department and find the bastard who had talked to the press.
Marshall denied that anyone on his staff had contributed to the article, but he took the fall for killing the bill. Stimson told his diary, “Poor Marshall said he was getting blamed by columnists as responsible for the holdup of Navy promotions and he told me that the President was hellbent on getting the five star promotions in large numbers for the Navy.”16
• • •
At the end of 1944, the idea was resurrected when Roosevelt again urged Congress to create a five-star rank. The Navy side was reasonably simple—the new rank would be called “Admiral of the Fleet”—but the Army side was a bit more complicated. “Field Marshal” was out, and Stimson and General McNarney looked for a name slightly less grandiose than Pershing’s five-star rank, “General of the Armies.” After kicking around various titles, they proposed “General of the Army,” keeping Pershing’s title unique while according Marshall preeminence among Pershing’s successors.17
A bill to authorize eight five-star officers—four from the Army, four from the Navy—made its way through Congress in early December and was ready for the president’s signature by mid-month. General Thomas Handy, Marshall’s deputy chief, met with his opposite number at Main Navy, and together they worked out the line of seniority. The new ranks would keep the same pecking order they currently had, more or less. Admiral Leahy took first place, then came Marshall, then King, then MacArthur, Nimitz, Eisenhower, and Arnold.*18
Marshall, who had been away on an inspection trip during the latest fuss over promotions, had just arrived back in his Pentagon office when he and Hap were abruptly summoned to meet Stimson in his office. The two men entered to the welcoming smiles of nearly two dozen top generals holding champagne flutes. Warm congratulations were offered by the secretary of war, and the group toasted the Army’s two newly minted Generals of the Army.19
Then, as always, everyone went back to work.
FIFTY
THE TSARINA’S BEDROOM
“NO MORE LET US FALTER! FROM MALTA TO YALTA!”
In his whimsical prose Churchill wired Roosevelt in January 1945, as the western leaders prepared for their next meeting with Stalin. With decisions on the final drive into Germany, European borders, a world peace organization, and war with Japan coming at them fast, Roosevelt and Churchill agreed it was time for another meeting of the “Big Three.”
Stalin said he would go no farther west than the Black Sea resort of Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula. His role as Soviet military commander, he said, ruled out lengthy travel. He also said his health problems made any journey outside Russia’s vast borders inadvisable; his doctors urged him not to travel too far.1
Roosevelt’s own health had been an issue—a very public issue during the election—and he didn’t relish the idea of traveling six thousand miles to the Black Sea. Most of the ports there had been destroyed by the Germans, and the health and sanitary conditions, he had heard, were abysmal. Churchill felt the same way; he groused to Harry Hopkins, “If we had spent ten years on research we would not have found a worse place in the world than Yalta.”2
But Stalin was in no mood to bargain. His armies were almost to the Oder River, the last geographic barrier to Berlin. What Stalin wanted most, a security corridor on his western border, he had practically attained by force of arms. What he wanted after that—Allied recognition of his conquests—was of far less importance.
So the summit was set for Yalta in late January, shortly after Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration. At Churchill’s request, Americans and British would hold preliminary talks on Malta, Britain’s island fortress in the eastern Mediterranean. Churchill chose the code name ARGONAUT for the meetings.3
•
On the second of February, the cruiser USS Quincy picked her way through the entrance of Malta’s Grand Harbor to the cheers of what seemed like the island’s entire population. Gliding serenely past a collage of ships and the limestone rubble of bombed-out buildings, the presidential flagship pulled into her berth as a beaming Winston Ch
urchill stood at the siderail of a his own cruiser to bid the Americans welcome.4
Churchill later wrote, “I watched the scene from the deck of the Orion. As the American cruiser steamed slowly past us towards her berth alongside the quay wall I could see the figure of the President seated on the bridge, and we waved to each other. With the escort of Spitfires overhead, the salutes and the bands of the ships’ companies in the harbor playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ it was a splendid scene.”5
• • •
The Malta meetings of the Combined Chiefs had started three days earlier in the conference room of Montgomery House, a large, stately office building in a Valletta suburb named for the diminutive British general who had finalized his plans for the invasion of Sicily there. Marshall, King, and Major General Laurence Kuter, representing the ailing Hap Arnold, arrived on January 29 and took up the dwindling plate of military issues relating to the war against Germany and Japan.*6
By January 1945, most of the great decisions had been made. Execution of those decisions lay in the hands of Eisenhower, Jumbo Wilson, Lord Mountbatten, Admiral Nimitz, and General MacArthur. There was really only one unanswered question at the moment, and on that point Allied harmony broke down: Eisenhower’s plan for the conquest of Germany.7
Eisenhower sent Lieutenant General “Beetle” Smith to Malta to explain his strategy. His plan was simple. Montgomery’s Twenty-first Army Group in the north, Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group in the center, and General Jacob Devers’s Sixth Army Group in the south would close up against the Rhine together, destroying the enemy along the Siegfried Line and spreading Germany’s thin forces to the breaking point. Once up to the Rhine, all three groups would make the final push into Germany. Under Eisenhower’s “broad front” plan, no army group would expose itself by dashing ahead of the others, a limitation the brash Montgomery found infuriating.8
Montgomery had argued, often and loudly, that his army group should be given the lion’s share of ammunition, fuel, and air support. With enough resources, he assured the high command, he would drive into Berlin and plant the Union Jack on the Brandenburg Gate.
But Allied supply limitations and the enormous amount of fuel, food, and ammunition it took to move an army meant that to give Montgomery what he wanted, Eisenhower would have to shut down every other army group. To Eisenhower and his staff, pushing the Allied line on all fronts would prevent Hitler from concentrating his reserves against any single attack. In addition, the Allies could support only thirty-six divisions in Montgomery’s area. With some eighty-five divisions available, he could afford to push Bradley through the center and Devers to the south.9
Even before first meeting at the Montgomery House, the Americans were in a foul humor. Brooke and Montgomery had been lobbying to displace Eisenhower as ground commander by inserting a new layer of command between him and his field generals. Marshall and King took this as a slap in the American face. Brooke’s incessant pecking about American strategy had become tiresome and repetitive, and it did not help that after their long air journey to Malta, Marshall and King had endured a terrible night’s rest in the Royal Artillery Barracks, an ancient billet so insufferably cold and damp that everyone slept fully clothed and wrapped in their topcoats.10
Shortly before the Combined Chiefs met to discuss Eisenhower’s plans, Beetle Smith briefed Marshall, King, and Kuter on Ike’s strategic reasoning and his problems with Montgomery. King, fully worked up, growled that the chiefs should sack Monty, and he insisted he would make that an item on their agenda. Marshall, barely less angry, tried to keep relations civil. “Please leave this to me. I will handle it,” he said.11
At the meeting, Brooke, as expected, argued vehemently against Eisenhower’s “broad front” strategy. The north, where Montgomery’s group lay, was the decisive region, he said. It abutted the industrialized Ruhr and opened the most direct path to Berlin. In his rapid, grating manner, “Colonel Shrapnel” clicked off everything he found wrong with Eisenhower’s approach. As he did, the Americans fumed.12
Marshall’s patience finally snapped when Brooke claimed that the British chiefs were concerned that Eisenhower was being unfairly influenced by his American associates Bradley and Patton. Marshall cleared the room and bellowed, “Well, Brooke, [the British chiefs] are not so nearly as much worried as the American Chiefs of Staff are about the immediate pressures and influence of Mr. Churchill on General Eisenhower. The president practically never sees Eisenhower, never writes to him—that is at my advice because he is an Allied commander—and we are deeply concerned by the pressures of the prime minister and of the fact of proximity of the British Chiefs of Staff, so I think your worries are on the wrong foot!”13
With that prologue, Marshall launched a full-throated attack on Montgomery, a supreme egotist whose attitude toward Eisenhower bordered on contempt of a superior officer. Montgomery had been pushing for months to supplant Eisenhower as Allied ground commander, and in his high-handed way, he had insisted on having all available gasoline, ammunition, and air to support his personal crusade to aggrandize himself.*14
Amidst heated words flying in both directions, Beetle did his best to clarify Eisenhower’s plans. Ike did not intend to slight Montgomery, and he would allow Monty to charge over the Ruhr once everyone was, more or less, up against the Rhine. If something unexpected happened—a collapse in the Ruhr pocket, for instance—they would take advantage of the opportunities and unleash forces wherever they could be put to good use. Relieved to hear that Monty would not be held back while the Americans tore through central Germany, and stung by the venomous American response, Brooke, Portal and A.B.C. withdrew their objections to Eisenhower’s plan and his retention as ground commander.15
Though the Combined Chiefs managed to settle the strategy questions, the meeting’s sour taste lingered like a bad cigar. Two weeks later, Marshall was still fuming, and after the war Brooke described for his diary the bleak British viewpoint:
I did not approve of Ike’s appreciation and plans, yet through force of circumstances I had to accept them. . . . In addition there was the fact that Marshall clearly understood nothing of strategy and could not even argue out the relative merits of various alternatives. Being unable to judge for himself he trusted and backed Ike, and felt it his duty to guard him from interference.16
•
After Roosevelt’s flagship docked and protocol visits were completed, the Amer-ican chiefs marched up Quincy’s gangplank to update the president, who sat placidly in a wicker chair near a slumbering antiaircraft gun.17
Roosevelt, King thought, looked terrible. His dark suit hung from his limbs and his tweed driving cap, almost comically wide now, balanced itself precariously over a thin face and body. Sea voyages usually buoyed him, but the sixty-three-year-old New Yorker looked like an aging groundskeeper on his last tour of the master’s estate.18
Exchanging pleasantries, the group retired to Roosevelt’s cabin to talk in private. FDR, almost somnolent, roused himself during the half-hour talk when Marshall brought up the fight over Eisenhower’s strategy for central Germany. Perking up, Roosevelt called for a map of the region. Studying the map, he told his chiefs he had bicycled in that area as a boy. Momentarily energized by a story he repeated every time the discussion turned to Germany, he said he approved of Eisenhower’s strategy, settling Allied strategy once and for all.19
The Anglo-American war chiefs had resolved other issues with the same give-and-take that had characterized the alliance since 1941. Churchill gave up his designs on northern Italy, and Roosevelt, seeing China for the dead end that it was, scaled back his support for Chiang.* Roosevelt agreed to allow General Sir Harold Alexander to join Eisenhower’s headquarters team as deputy supreme commander, so long as Ike remained ground force commander. Since the move might be interpreted as disapproval of Eisenhower’s handling of the Battle of the Bulge, Roosevelt insisted that they delay the announcement for several week
s, giving the Ardennes time to fade from the front pages.20
• • •
Next morning, the Allied high command piled into a fleet of C-54 transports for the 1,400-mile journey from Malta to the Black Sea coast. Accompanied by Harry Hopkins, his watchful daughter, Anna Boettiger, Admiral Leahy, and his cardiologist, Dr. Bruenn, FDR settled into a more luxurious version of the Sacred Cow, a dedicated presidential airliner boasting an office, a full-size bed, and elevators that allowed him to disembark without using tall, cumbersome wheelchair ramps.21
Sacred Cow carried Roosevelt over the Adriatic, across Greece and Macedonia, and over the Black Sea to Saki, a Soviet airfield near Sevastopol. It was Russian territory now, but as some spots had only recently been evacuated by the Germans, the pilots took no chances. They flew under cover of darkness, in radio silence, and the Navy stationed sea rescue vessels along the Adriatic and Black Sea portions of the flight, to pluck any unfortunates from the water.22
The air flotilla touched down in Saki and the entourage was welcomed by Commissar Molotov, Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko, and a platoon of Red Army and Navy brass. An honor guard stood at attention, bayonets fixed, and behind them a Red Army band played passable renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “God Save the King,” and the minor-key Soviet anthem “Internationale.”23
After inspecting the honor guard in an American jeep, Roosevelt transferred to a convertible Packard and was driven along the “Route Romanov” to Livadia Palace. The bumpy three-hour road trip took the Americans across the heart of the Crimean Peninsula. “The Russian drivers used only two speeds,” King recalled. “Stop, and drive as fast as they could.”
Winding along unnerving cliff roads, they passed surreal scenes of snowcapped mountains, burned-out German vehicles, and thousands of Red Army guards, men and women, stationed along the route. Rolling through the palace gates some sixteen hours after leaving Malta, the exhausted visitors bathed, ate a perfunctory meal, and fell into bed.24
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