The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  PART 3

  Strategy

  TEN Casablanca

  I AM GOING TO FIGHT back,” the President had exclaimed to David Lilienthal. “I’m really going to tell this next Congress.” But as the time for his address to Congress neared, he shifted toward a more conciliatory role, in part because public-opinion studies indicated that people would respond favorably to a co-operative attitude toward Congress. He knew that 1943 would be a transitional sort of year—not one of desperate defense like most of 1942, but not yet the year for all-out attack, and certainly not the year for victory. He had decided it was time to talk about postwar hopes and policies, but he could not forget that the November elections had left him with the biggest Republican-Southern Democratic opposition he had yet faced.

  Greeted by two minutes of applause as he made his slow way to the rostrum on January 7, 1943, he launched into a long speech that seemed to play on every note and mood.

  He was confident. “The period of our defensive attrition in the Pacific is drawing to a close. Now our aim is to force the Japanese to fight. Last year, we stopped them. This year, we intend to advance.” In Europe the main task during 1942 had been to lessen the pressure on Russia by compelling Germany to divert some of its strength west. North Africa had opened up what Churchill had called the “under-belly” of the Axis, the President said.

  He was belligerent. “I cannot prophesy. I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe. But we are going to strike—and strike hard. I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them”—and here the President bit off the names of possible targets in a rhythmic, mocking tone—“in Norway, or through the Low Countries, or in France, or through Sardinia or Sicily, or through the Balkans, or through Poland—or at several points simultaneously. But…we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly….Yes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and—they—are—going—to—get—it.”

  He was conciliatory. He praised workers, farmers, and even owners and managers for their war effort. He denied that Washington was a “madhouse”—except in the sense that it was the capital city of a nation that was fighting mad. He apologized for the number of complicated forms and questionnaires. “I know about that, I have had to fill some of them out myself.”

  He was a bit more apologetic. There had been criticism of the war-production effort and much of it had had a healthy effect, he said. Some production goals had had to be adjusted downward, and others upward; airplane and tank production had fallen short numerically of the 1942 goals. But the over-all record would give no aid and comfort to the enemy. “I think the arsenal of democracy is making good.”

  Above all, he wanted to talk about the peace. He reminded the Congress of his message on the Four Freedoms two years earlier. Soldiers would not be willing to come home to a bogus prosperity, to slums, or the dole, or selling apples on street corners. “I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America after the war. I am told it is a grave error on my part.

  “I dissent.

  “And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should become a subject of national debate, the country knows where I stand.”

  But it was of little account, he went on, to talk of attaining individual security if national security was in jeopardy. “Undoubtedly a few Americans, even now, think that this Nation can end this war comfortably and then climb back into an American hole and pull the hole in after them. But we have learned that we can never dig a hole so deep that it would be safe against predatory animals.” The President did not spell out postwar means and ends, but he made clear that he would not repeat the mistake of World War I of seeking a formula for permanent peace based on “magnificent idealism” alone.

  And he was eloquent.

  “I tell you it is within the realm of possibility that this Seventy-eighth Congress may have the historic privilege of helping greatly to save the world from future fear,” he said in closing.

  “Therefore, let us all have confidence, let us redouble our efforts.

  “A tremendous, costly, long-enduring task in peace as well as in war is still ahead of us.

  “But, as we face that continuing task, we may know that the state of this Nation is good—the heart of this Nation is sound—the spirit of this Nation is strong—the faith of this Nation is eternal.”

  The President submitted a “total war” budget that embodied his big plans. The figures were breath-taking. Current fiscal-year spending was running at seventy-seven billion; in the next fiscal year the federal government would spend one hundred billion dollars. More than ten million people had been added to employment rolls or the armed forces in two and a half years; another six million would be needed during calendar 1943. Sensing Congress’s mood the President said that nonwar expenditures had been reduced two billion from the 6.5 billion of fiscal 1939—but “we are fast approaching the subsistence level of government.” He called for more taxes, but “I cannot ask the Congress to impose the necessarily heavy financial burdens on the lower and middle incomes unless the taxes on higher and very large incomes are made fully effective.” The President asked again for a limitation of $25,000 a year on salaries.

  Indeed, beneath the conciliatory Roosevelt was the same old political warrior with his dislike of columnists, carping Congressmen, and conservative critics. He could not help noting that the applause that had repeatedly punctuated his earlier remarks on war policy petered out when he stressed domestic issues toward the end. Congress clearly would be a problem—at least until the next election.

  Around this time Roosevelt saw a poem by Howard Dietz, in PM, about Clare Boothe Luce, wife of publisher Henry Luce, a playwright, beauty, newly elected Republican Representative from Connecticut, and a recent critic of the administration for trying to fight a “soft war.”

  O Lovely Luce—O Comely Clare!

  Do you remember—way back there—

  Holding your lacquered nails aloft,

  “The war we fight,” you said, “is soft.”

  And while the vote hung in the balance

  You turned the trick with all your talents. You were the keystone brave and buoyant. By Lucifer, were you clarevoyant!

  Time marches on….

  And so did the verse, for another six stanzas, evoking the gallant deeds of Eisenhower and the rest in the no-longer-soft war. It was a bit crude, and Roosevelt loved it. He had long since fallen out with Henry Luce; only recently he had asked Welles to file a formal protest with Luce on any articles in Time, Life, and Fortune that “hurt the Good Neighbor policy with Latin America or tend to promote disunity among any of the United Nations….”

  “Can’t you find a freshman Congressman on our side,” he now wrote to McCormack, enclosing the verse, “who will wait his chance until the first time Clare talks and then quote this poem?” But no soldier in the House sprang to answer this summons by the Commander in Chief to perform such an ungallant act.

  Two days after his address to Congress the President left for Casablanca.

  THE GAMING BOARD OF STRATEGY

  “The Axis powers knew that they must win the war in 1942—or eventually lose everything,” the President had told Congress in his January 7 message. “I do not need to tell you that our enemies did not win the war in 1942.” It was a piece of Rooseveltian understatement, but much of the press in 1943 was not so restrained. The Axis was on the run. It was now only a matter of time. Hitler was licked.

  The drop in Nazi fortunes did seem dramatic and irreversible. In October 1942 Hitler had seemed a military colossus. To the east his forces held two vast chunks of Soviet territory, now labeled Reich Kommissariat Ostland and Reich Kommissariat Ukraine. Toward the far southeast his troops had raised the Swastika on Mount Elbrus, the highest alp in the Caucasus, seized the Markop oil fields, and readied their advance toward the Caspian Sea. To the north Norway was occupied, Sweden isolated, Finland militarily allied, and
the Nazis were still mauling the Russia-bound convoys in the northern seas. To the west Hitler ruled northern France and even the Channel Islands, and his U-boats and raiders were scoring spectacular successes in the Atlantic. To the south the Mediterranean had become virtually Mare Axeum, and the Balkans were held tight in the German-Italian grip, except for guerrillas, whom Berlin dismissed as bandits. Rommel’s forces had awaited orders to advance on Alexandria. Hitler at this point could well indulge the intoxicating thought of pushing through Iran or Egypt—or both—to India and a link-up with Japan.

  Then the fall. In four climactic weeks, from Montgomery’s counteroffensive during the last days of October and the successful North African landings to the pinching off of Stalingrad in late November as flanking Red Army troops joined forty miles to the west on the Don bend, Hitler’s strategy seemed to have collapsed. His own fanatical stubbornness seemed to compound his difficulties. “I won’t leave the Volga!” he screamed to his staff, but after a desperate effort to relieve the city, twenty-two German and two Rumanian divisions were left to freeze and die in Stalingrad. He demanded that Rommel hold his coastal strip along the Mediterranean, and his response to TORCH was to prepare to stand in North Africa rather than abandon it. In his hour of need his associates acted like fair-weather friends: Franco looked on blandly while the Americans invaded Africa; the French scuttled their fleet at Toulon; the Turks seemed responsive to Churchill’s lures and blandishments. Even the submarine offensive in the Atlantic was taking a turn for the worse by the end of 1942.

  Yet, just as the press had exaggerated Hitler’s strength in his heyday, they exaggerated his plight after his fall. He was able to consolidate his position on the Eastern Front after Stalingrad, and the insistence of the Americans on invading Africa so far to the west was giving him time to fortify Tunisia. His U-boats would soon be stepping up their Atlantic attack to the point where Roosevelt feared that cross-channel prospects and even the security of Britain were threatened. He had the priceless advantage of holding interior lines of control of the immense land mass he had won.

  Then, too, the invasion of Africa had left Hitler with a boon—the realization that the Allies could not invade northern France for some time, and hence the freedom to move troops to the Eastern Front, which to the Führer remained the crucial war. Invasion of Fortress Europe would be hard for his enemies—especially for the Anglo-Americans, who would have to win Africa and then move into the underbelly, which looked far less soft to Hitler than to Churchill. If the Führer’s strategy of blitz and annihilation and conquest was now bankrupt, a strategy of dividing and exhausting his enemies might still save the day.

  For such a strategy Hitler’s strongest weapon was the trait that drove his generals to despair—his merciless determination to deny requests to withdraw, to sack wavering commanders, to make his soldiers stand and die. Thus he could exact the heaviest cost from his enemies. His own resolution and ruthlessness never seemed to waver. During the day he listened, now stonily, now furiously, to the reports from the fronts; dispatched orders on minute tactical matters; berated his aides and his commanders for their stupidity, their cowardice, their refusal to fight to the end and then shoot themselves. In the evening he was more relaxed, sitting around the dinner table with exhausted and often bored officers. Hour after hour his monologues rambled on about Germany’s royal family, bureaucrats, industrialists, intellectuals, the Catholic church and all its components—popes, “parsons,” Isabella (“the greatest harlot in history”)—St. Petersburg, Hungarians, lawyers—all of whom he despised. And about peasant girls, soldiers, Mussolini, babies, and skilled workers, of whom he approved.

  Often he talked about his rivals—about Roosevelt, a “half-caste” who behaved like a “tortuous, pettifogging Jew”; about Churchill, the “raddled old whore of journalism,” the “unprincipled swine”; about Stalin, “half beast, half giant,” “an ascetic who took the whole of that gigantic country in his iron grasp.” He talked about the Russian people, whom he loathed; about the English, whom he half hated, half admired; about the Americans, for whom he had contempt mixed with a little fear. And always he returned to the Jews, the root of all evil.

  In Moscow the half beast, half giant was savoring, at the start of 1943, only part of the satisfaction that was his due after the Battle of Stalingrad. His troubles seemed to come now from his friends. His comradeship with Churchill had deteriorated sharply since their skittish intercourse in Moscow in August. A galling and ever-present issue was the desperate convoying of supplies around the North Cape of Norway through the Arctic Sea to Murmansk. In September PQ-18 had started out with a huge naval and air escort—a new auxiliary aircraft carrier, destroyers, and a score of torpedo bombers. Although the Soviets dispatched long-range bombers and fighters from their end, only about two-thirds of the merchantmen in this convoy got through. With TORCH coming up, the British had decided they must suspend northern convoying. Churchill so informed Stalin. The latter’s reply was crushing in its brevity: Churchill’s message had been received. “Thank you.”

  But the sovereign issue was always the second front. As the Wehrmacht columns lunged toward the Caucasus and coiled around the Volga, Stalin grimly pondered the pledges he thought he had received earlier in the year. His bitterness spilled out for public view in his speech of November 6, 1942, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. In his usual didactic way he asked and answered questions. “How are we to explain the fact that the Germans were…able to take the initiative in military operations this year and achieve substantial tactical successes on our front?” Because the Germans and their allies had been able to muster all their available reserves and shift them to their Eastern Front. But why were they able to do this? “Because the absence of a second front in Europe enabled them to carry out this operation without any risk.” He dwelt on the 240 Nazi and satellite divisions fighting on the Russian front. And how many divisions were the British engaging on the Libyan front? “Only four—yes, four—German and eleven Italian divisions.”

  He went on, ominously: “It is often asked: But will there be a second front in Europe after all? Yes, there will be; sooner or later, there will be. And there will be one not only because we need it, but above all because our Allies need it no less than we. Our Allies cannot fail to realize that since France has been put out of action, the absence of a second front against fascist Germany may end badly for all the freedom-loving countries, including the Allies themselves.”

  Still, when the Anglo-Americans landed in Africa, the Kremlin could not conceal its pleasure. Stalin wired to Churchill that he was highly pleased with his success in Libya and the successful launching of TORCH. The news was dispatched to the embattled Red Army, with evidently good effect. Later in the month Stalin even sent Churchill birthday greetings. But the sovereign issue remained. Within a week of sending his birthday card, Stalin cabled another message: What was Churchill’s answer to his earlier query about the opening of a second front in Western Europe in 1943?

  But even in the darkest days before Stalingrad the Kremlin probably was thinking of the implications of the delayed second front for the long run. Russia’s shouldering of the burden could pay off later. “To define the direction of the basic blow means to predetermine the nature of operations in the whole period of war, to determine nine-tenths of the fate of the whole war,” Stalin had written. “In this is the task of strategy.” The reluctance of the West to strike that basic blow could have crucial postwar effects, Kremlin strategists doubtless reasoned. Brooke had noted in Moscow that Stalin was a realist if there ever was one. “Plans, hypotheses, future possibilities, mean nothing to him, but he is ready to face facts, even when unpleasant.” And much as he wanted a second front, Stalin, it can be judged, knew that unpleasant facts also bore welcome opportunities.

  Winston Churchill had contemplated opportunities of a different sort in the turbulent fall months of 1942. His mind was alive with possibilities, alternatives, contingenci
es, choices. Would the Nazis break the back of the Red Bear this time? Or, on the contrary, might the Wehrmacht collapse from its own bleeding arteries and open up the Continent for a quick invasion from the West? In either event, might Stalin make a separate peace? Would Montgomery hold, and then beat back the Afrika Korps? Would TORCH bring a secure foothold, and how quickly could the Allies consolidate their position and move east to Tunisia? Would Hitler reinforce his bracketed legions in Africa?

  Churchill’s eye darted along the Mediterranean, with all its enticing problems and openings. Would Franco intervene? Could Malta hold out? Could Turkey be brought into the war? As the weeks passed, some of his questions were answered by events, but the same events opened up new alternatives. Was Sicily the logical access point to the underbelly? What about Sardinia, even Corsica?

  Nor did Churchill lose sight of ROUNDUP—a plan for a relatively early cross-channel attack—as he gazed at the churning events in the Mediterranean. To the chagrin of his military men he suddenly—indeed, while the African landings were proceeding—told his Chiefs of Staff that it would be “most regrettable to make no more use of the success of ‘Torch’ and Alamein in 1943 than the occupation of Sicily and Sardinia.” “If Africa was going to be used as an excuse to lock up great forces on the defensive,” he said, “better not to have gone there at all.” Would the Russians be content with “our lying down like this during the whole of 1943, while Hitler has a third crack at them”? He was still for ROUNDUP, though put off until August. But he did not want the Anglo-American armies stuck in North Africa. It was a springboard, not a sofa.

  Brooke was appalled at this turnabout. Had not the Americans warned that TORCH would probably preclude ROUNDUP in 1943? The PM “never faces realities,” Brooke complained to his diary; “at one moment we are reducing our forces, and the next we are invading the Continent with vast armies…. He is quite incorrigible and I am quite exhausted….” Yet the soldiers sensed that their chief’s strategic volatility would probably produce another shift in his goals. And they knew that on one matter neither he nor they would ever change their minds: British soldiers must never again go through the stalemate and the blood bath of World War I.