American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Even participation and sharing were not enough—what was the war for? During World War I, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, with its wide powers of propaganda and censorship, had aroused such intense opposition that Roosevelt shied away from any similar agency. He created first the Office of Facts and Figures, under poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and later the Office of War Information, which absorbed OFF and was directed by Elmer Davis, a journalist much respected for his terse and factual radio reporting. Charged with both putting out information and facilitating understanding of the war, Davis soon encountered the traditional opposition of the military to full dissemination of war news.

  More surprising was OWI’s internal division over how to explain the meaning of the war. The “writers” followed MacLeish’s belief that Americans should begin at once to try to grasp what they were fighting for and hence that OWI should dramatize issues in a way that would “excite and encourage discussion.” The “advertisers” contended that OWI should “state the truth in terms that will be understood by all levels of intelligence.” The advertisers gained such ascendancy within OWI that many writers resigned in the spring of 1943, one of them leaving behind a mock poster displaying a Coke bottle wrapped in an American flag with the legend: “Step right up and get your four delicious freedoms.”

  Such government-sponsored shows as This Is War! explained the fighting to “all levels of intelligence” by trivializing it. Broadcast into 20 million homes, This Is War! began with “Music: ominous”—“What we say tonight has to do with blood and with love and with anger, and also with a big job in the making. Laughter can wait. Soft music can have the evening off.… There’s a war on.” OWI encouraged radio stations to broadcast one-minute plugs of the war. At least there was some down-to-earth humor. On Jack Benny’s “Victory Parade” his partner, Mary Livingston, told of her uncle who had shed twenty-three pounds by eating nothing but soup. “Nothing but soup?” exclaimed Benny, the straight man. “S-a-a-y, he must a had a lot of will-power!” Then Livingston’s punch line: “No, my Aunt gave his teeth to the Rubber-drive.”

  Hollywood was quick to get into uniform. Producers met the demands of the OWI advertisers and the public by playing up martial themes, casting servicemen as romantic leads, and replacing gangsters as public enemies with Nips and Huns. The Japanese, usually played by Chinese-Americans or Korean-Americans—except for Peter Lorre, a German who could also do Nazis—were portrayed as treacherous, sly, cruel, and prone to saying things like “The Rising Sun never sets, so her spies never sleep.” The GIs were average Joes, modest, stoic, loyal to the sweet girl they’d left behind. They explained the war in simple terms: “It doesn’t matter where a man dies, so long as he dies for freedom.” At its peak Hollywood was packing war themes into a third of its films, from God Is My Co-Pilot to We’ve Never Been Licked to Four Jills in a Jeep. But filmmakers lost interest in war themes about the same time audiences did. In July 1943, Variety headlined: “STUDIOS SHELVE WAR STORIES AS THEY SHOW 40% BOX OFFICE DECLINE.”

  Tin Pan Alley chimed in with “We’ll Knock the Japs Right Into the Laps of the Nazis,” “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap,” “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific,” “Over Here,” “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’.” None of these measured up to World War I’s “Over There.” The most popular tune of the war— dolefully sung by men on sunny atolls and by their wives and sweethearts back home—was Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” crooned by Bing Crosby.

  Even more pervasive than the sentimentalizing and trivializing of the war was its commercialization. “Fertilizer can win the war.” Prune juice was good for “America behind the guns.” A maker of bedroom furniture advertised that “America’s greatest fortress is the American home.” Mineral water helped “keep America fit in war time.” A manufacturer of air conditioning claimed that a Japanese ship was torpedoed because part of a periscope had been produced in an air-conditioned factory. The makers of Coca-Cola, seeking to keep their sugar allotment, persuaded the government to make Coke an essential war product. A bomber pilot coming across an ad headed “Who’s Afraid of the Big Focke-Wulf?” scrawled across it “I am” and mailed it to the manufacturer.

  But few soldiers objected to the commercialization, especially when the ads spoke of home. If the GIs had an ideology, that was it. They wanted to win the war so they could go home. Meanwhile they made ersatz homes of their bivouacs. “The American soldier is a born housewife,” Ernie Pyle wrote from the front. “They wish to hell they were someplace else,” Bill Mauldin wrote. “They wish to hell the mud was dry and they wish to hell their coffee was hot. They want to go home. But they stay in their wet holes and fight, and then climb out and crawl through minefields and fight some more.” They fought to go home.

  “What would you say you were fighting for?” John Hersey asked a group of Marines on Guadalcanal. “Today, here in this valley, what are you fighting for?” The men fell silent, they looked distracted. Finally one of them spoke: “Jesus, what I’d give for a piece of blueberry pie.” Soldiers talked less about returning to democracy, historian John Blum observed, than about creature comforts and affluence after the war. They talked about hot baths, flush toilets, a nice little roadster, a mother’s cooking, a blonde on each arm, a bottle of Scotch, a cabin on five acres, running their own filling station, fresh eggs.

  Some would never come home. A new war photograph repelled soldiers and civilians alike. It showed a gray sea lapping at three men, armed, helmeted, booted, swelling into their fatigues, face down, sinking into the sand, dead. Was it an epigraph to the Japanese martial song about “across the sea, corpses in the water” when an American soldier-poet wrote of

  … the slow, incessant waves

  curving and falling,

  the white foam lifting the white sand drifting

  over your face, your outflung hand … you have come a long way, a world away, to sleep …

  The Rainbow Coalition Embattled

  For Roosevelt and Churchill 1943 was a year of conferring and planning, as they presided over an almost nonstop series of traveling strategy meetings. The President met with Churchill at Casablanca in January 1943, as well as with the feuding French generals Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle; with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in Washington in March; with Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington in May. Late in August he met with the Prime Minister and their military and diplomatic staffs in Quebec, and these meetings continued in Washington the next month. Then these sessions broadened into a series of global climaxes: Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, and military staffs in Cairo in late November; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in Teheran at the end of November; Roosevelt and Churchill in Cairo in early December.

  It was in these conferences that crucial war and postwar strategy was hammered out. It was also where a fundamental rigidity in Big Three relationships became more and more evident.

  For Roosevelt, getting there was half the fun. When he left the White House on an early January 1943 evening with Hopkins and a small party, boarded the presidential train at a secret siding near the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and started a slow train trip to Miami, he was gay, relaxed, and full of anticipation. He was soon to see Churchill, a new continent, combat troops. He would travel by plane for the first lime since his flight to the Democratic convention eleven years before. He would be the first President to fly, the first to leave the United States during wartime, and the first since Lincoln to visit an active theater of war. After taxiing out of Miami harbor on a Pan American Clipper the President missed nothing as he flew over the Citadel in Haiti, scanned the jungles of Dutch Guiana, glimpsed the Amazon, then slept during the long overnight trip to British Gambia, where he drove through the old slaving port of Bathurst and was appalled by the ragged, glum-looking natives and reports of disease and high mortality rates. Thence he flew over the snowcapped Atlas Mountains and into Casablanca.

  The President encountered few s
urprises at Casablanca. Churchill and his big staff, having laid their conference plans with exquisite care, were as resistant as ever to an early cross-Channel attack in force. Like an old roué viewing a beach beauty, Churchill could not resist casting a lascivious eye on the eastern Mediterranean, with all its delicious curves and tempting cleavages. In the plenitude of deep harbors and wide landing beaches he saw ways to strengthen his lifelines to and from the Dominions and colonies, keep Hitler off balance, and find entrances to Southern and Eastern Europe that might offset the potential expansion of Soviet power. And FDR’s military advisers, intent on winning the present war, were just as adamant as ever against drawing troops and weapons into the eastern Mediterranean suction pump, even while their own enormous pump in the Pacific sucked vast amounts of supplies away from Europe and General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s bombers consumed enormous resources in Britain for their ever-intensifying assaults on the Continent.

  Roosevelt was still in the middle. Long eager to launch a major offensive, he wanted to thrust across the Channel but also at the underbelly if possible. The British approach had always had some appeal for him, since it kept major options open, allowed for quick and perhaps easy victories, kept American troops active and moving, might knock Italy out of the war, and provided Stalin with at least the semblance of a second front. By the close of the long and often heated Casablanca talks the Anglo-Americans were broadly agreed on priorities for 1943: overcome the U-boat menace in the Atlantic; send all possible aid to Russia but not at prohibitive cost; center Mediterranean operations on the capture of Sicily; carry on the bomber offensive and the buildup for the cross-Channel invasion; counterattack Japan and support China.

  What about the real second front—when and where and how big? The specter at Casablanca was Josef Stalin, who had been invited but declined because of his war burdens. He wanted one thing and one thing only out of Casablanca—absolute and foolproof assurance that the invasion of France would be launched in early 1943, as promised. And this was precisely the assurance he did not receive in the weeks following the conference. On the contrary, after the Wehrmacht poured tens of thousands of troops through Italy into Africa, broke through the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, and look many Americans prisoner, Churchill warned Stalin that these reverses would delay clearing the Axis out of Africa. Confirmed in his suspicion of the fecklessness or worse of the whole Mediterranean effort, Stalin responded in cold anger:

  “At the height of fighting against the Hitler troops, in February and March, the Anglo-Saxon offensive in North Africa, far from having been stepped up, has been called off.” Meantime Germany had moved thirty-six divisions—six armored—to the eastern front. “I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught.”

  “Grave danger.” What did Stalin mean? That the Soviet front might collapse? That Stalin might go it alone, militarily and diplomatically? That he might even make a deal with Hitler? The last seemed out of the question, but so had the Nazi-Soviet pact appeared before August 1939. Stalin nursed the gravest suspicions about his allies. For him the delay in the second front was not merely a question of strategy; hundreds of thousands of Russians would perish as a result. Were his “allies” hoping that Russians and Germans would exhaust themselves in mortal combat, leaving the Anglo-Americans supreme on the Continent? Was that why they had been so deceitful about the second front? The dictator’s suspicions were dark. Were they trying to help Russia just enough to keep the Soviets in the war, but not so much as to help them win it?

  It was evident by mid-1943 that Roosevelt and Churchill must meet with Stalin before the delay in opening a second front brought the anti-Nazi coalition to collapse. But no conference could take place until the Allies could agree on the cross-Channel attack. In meeting after meeting the military leaders thrashed out their differences, postponing the second front until sometime in 1944. The successful invasion of Sicily in midsummer and Mussolini’s resignation helped Roosevelt at the Quebec talks to gain British agreement to an invasion of northwestern France in May 1944, even while Churchill and indeed Roosevelt still cast lingering glances at the eastern Mediterranean. In September, Stalin agreed to a Big Three meeting, provided it was near Soviet borders, in Iran. Soon the President was happily preparing for another long trip, during which he would meet not only Stalin for the first time but Chiang Kai-shek.

  This time the Commander-in-Chief and his Joint Chiefs crossed the Atlantic on a battleship, the Iowa, 58,000 tons, almost a fifth of a mile long, 210,000 horsepower, 157 guns including nine sixteen-inchers. After a calm trip—aside from an errant torpedo from an escorting destroyer that almost hit the dreadnought—the Iowa put into Oran, on the old Barbary Coast. With Eisenhower, the President toured the recent battle area and flew along the Nile into Cairo. There he met Madame Chiang, who had charmed the President in a tête-à-tête in Washington, and the Generalissimo. The President beheld a small man in a neat khaki uniform, with a serene unwrinkled face below a clean-shaven pate. Roosevelt had to summon up all his tact in the meetings that followed, for MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s successes in the Pacific were rendering a China strategy obsolete. Chiang and the Madame left with rosy promises about China’s postwar role but only vague pledges of an amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal.

  Then on to Teheran—and Stalin. Once again the President watched eagerly as his plane flew over storied Sinai and Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, the green valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and into Teheran. Soon he met Stalin, a short compact man dressed in a tightly buttoned, mustard-colored uniform with large gold epaulets. “Seems very confident, very sure of himself, moves slowly—altogether quite impressive, I’d say,” the President observed later.

  At his first formal meeting with the President and Prime Minister, Stalin disdained oratory and came straight to the point—his point. The Nazis could be smashed only by a direct assault through France, not by an attack through Italy or the Balkans. Roosevelt restated his commitment to an early cross-Channel attack, but he also appeared to be flirting with the Balkans as well. Churchill too made the cross-Channel pledge, but he similarly dallied with Allied possibilities in Italy and points east. Once again it seemed that little had changed, with Stalin demanding an early second front, Churchill resisting it, and Roosevelt, as Churchill would later complain, drifting to and fro. But at least the three men could thrash things out face to face.

  And so the hard, blunt talk went on for three days, Stalin doodling, smoking a pipe, scratching words on gridded pieces of paper; Churchill glowering behind his glasses, gesticulating with his cigar, lofting into flights of oratory; Roosevelt fitting cigarette after cigarette into his long holder, listening, calculating, interposing, placating. At some point on the third day the balance swung slowly but inexorably against Churchill and an attack at the periphery. Cross-Channel, combined with a landing in southern France, was confirmed for May 1944. Churchill, celebrating the start of his seventieth year that day, gave in with good grace, partly because the Combined Chiefs of Staff had agreed on attack plans, partly because Stalin had privately warned him face to face about the impact in Moscow of further delay.

  That evening, at Roosevelt’s birthday party for Churchill, the President properly saluted George VI, the Prime Minister toasted Roosevelt as the defender of democracy and Stalin as Stalin the Great, the Marshal saluted the Russian people and American production—especially of 10,000 planes a month. In a last word, at two in the morning, the President spoke of the coalition as a rainbow of “many varying colors,” blending into “one glorious whole.” At Teheran, “the varying ideals of our nations” could “come together in a harmonious whole.”

  A brilliant ceremony had symbolized the hard-won agreement at Teheran. Between rows of towering British and Soviet soldiers Churchill presented Stalin with the Sword of Stalingrad, forged by British craftsmen and given by King George to the “steel-hearted citiz
ens of Stalingrad.” Stalin kissed the gleaming blade, then showed the weapon to Roosevelt, who drew the long blade from the scabbard and held it aloft. The soldiers and civilians of Stalingrad had stood off the Nazis, then counterattacked and encircled them. Now it was time for the Allies to marshal their forces for the attack across the Channel.

  By June 1944 the coastal areas of southern England were one vast staging area. Rows of new Mustang fighters perched wing to wing on small airfields behind the coast. Along pleasant English lanes stood ungainly amphibious vehicles, stacks of bombs, tires, wheels, reels of cable. Landing ships built on Lake Michigan and floated down the Mississippi were packed beam to beam in the ports. Long ugly LSTs (landing ships with tanks) constructed in California, their front ends gaping wide, were ready to disgorge tanks, trucks, bulldozers. Far inland lay the reserve production of war, for use in France: hundreds of new locomotives, thousands of freight and tanker cars, tens of thousands of trucks. Nothing could stop this massed power—except bad weather. Eisenhower postponed the attack once in the face of high winds and heavy clouds; two days later, with the forecast still dubious, he said calmly, “O.K., let’s go.”

  Roosevelt and his commanders waited in suspense as the mightiest amphibious assault the world had ever known moved across the Channel, toward Normandy; paratroopers floated down in the dark over the pastures of the Cotentin Peninsula; warships poured shells and rockets into beach targets; bombers and fighters filled the dawn skies. Yet rarely has a great battle been decided so much in advance as the invasion of France--decided not so much by tactics as by strategy. The long delay in mounting the second front had made possible this stupendous buildup, had forced the Russians to engage the bulk of Nazi land forces, had enabled the Allies to mount a whole separate invasion of southern France. The invaders had almost total command of the sea and the air; the vaunted Luftwaffe had been reduced to fewer than 120 fighters in the defense area, and only two Allied destroyers and a number of smaller vessels were lost in the attack.