The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Strategically Churchill focused on one area: Europe—Atlantic Europe, Western Europe, coastal Europe. “I must admit that my thoughts rest primarily in Europe—the revival of the glory of Europe, the parent continent of the modern nations and of civilization,” he had written to Eden two weeks before TORCH, during an exchange on postwar plans. “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe….”

  In the fall of 1942 Roosevelt was playing an even more improvised game of strategy than Churchill. The former naval person at least had his rough priorities and clear antipathies—notably his bent toward peripheralism and his categorical refusal to risk heavy losses in France. Aside from Atlantic First, Roosevelt had not even these rough guidelines. His reluctance to make a clear strategic commitment was one reason for the bog in which the American military planners were floundering even while the soldiers were planning and executing TORCH.

  From Roosevelt’s standpoint, however, decision and commitment were impossible while so many imponderables ruled the battle scene. One puzzle was Churchill himself. Over and again the Prime Minister had been warned by the American military, in early and mid-1942, that an invasion of North Africa in the fall of 1942 precluded any heavy cross-channel invasion in 1943. Churchill had seemed to accept this fact cheerfully. Thus it seemed strange that he should reverse himself in the fall and demand of his staff that ROUNDUP be kept alive. Actually his reversal was due to the changed military situation as he perceived it. The pessimism of the American staffs about a cross-channel attack had stemmed, he felt, from fear that Russia would be so crippled by 1943 that Hitler could shift scores of divisions to France and swarm over the Anglo-American invaders. But by fall 1942 it was evident that the Russians were holding their own and would compel the Wehrmacht to husband almost its total strength on the Eastern Front. Churchill had another factor in mind. He feared that a postponement of ROUNDUP would lead to an overdiversion of American troops and war supply to the Pacific. These considerations led him during the fall to call for a reassessment of the whole strategic situation; they did not make him a firm partner of the President in global decision making.

  But if Churchill’s evolving strategy was not wholly clear to the President, Stalin’s was almost opaque. Not that the Chairman’s main point was dim; his strident calls for a second front sounded like fire bells in the White House. Other business between Roosevelt and Stalin, however, seemed mired in ambiguity and suspicion. Anxious to bolster the Russians in every way possible except an immediate cross-channel attack, Roosevelt and Churchill had proposed to Stalin that they put a force of bombers and fighters under Soviet strategic command on the increasingly critical Caucasus front. The Kremlin seemed to welcome the idea. The offer was contingent on developments in the Middle East, and especially on the North Africa fronts. When it became necessary to suspend regular convoys to Murmansk, Roosevelt decided that the offer should be made without conditions. “The Russian front today is our greatest reliance,” he reaffirmed to Churchill.

  Difficulties arose over specific arrangements. The Russians, it developed, for various military and political reasons did not want whole units on Soviet territory; they wanted planes. In mid-December Roosevelt wrote to Stalin that he was not clear as to the state of affairs, but he was still willing to send air units with American pilots and crews, which would operate by units under army commanders but would be under general Soviet command. Stalin replied that the air units were no longer necessary—but would Roosevelt kindly expedite the dispatch of fighters, without crews, under the regular program?

  The President encountered similar difficulties, complicated by Soviet neutrality toward Japan, in trying to set up an Alaska-Siberia airplane ferry route. One conclusion seemed inescapable to the frustrated Americans: their Russian comrades were far more interested in bombers than in brotherhood.

  By December 1942 several of the imponderables facing Roosevelt had evaporated. The Northwest African foothold had been secured, with Rommel now pulling back toward Tunisia. Spain had stayed neutral. The final effort to drive Axis troops out of Africa was taking longer than expected, but a rough timetable could be set. The Red Army was not only holding but counterattacking. The Japanese were being contained in the Pacific; they were still at peace with Russia. But as some crucial questions and options closed for Roosevelt, others opened up. Did Soviet victories make a cross-channel attack more urgent, or less? Should the Anglo-Americans stand fast on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, where they could protect the east-west sea links, or should they move north? If the latter, where? Try to knock Italy out of the war, or strike farther east, against the Balkans or the Greek isles?

  For Roosevelt, tactical developments had outrun strategic decision making. A year after Pearl Harbor he had no definite battle plan. And in the absence of strategic commitments all sorts of other plans, pressures, demands, interests had wider play. The striking example was the Pacific. Despite all the decisions for Atlantic First, by the end of 1942 more than half the American divisions overseas were deployed in the war against Japan. The “limited” offensive moves against the Japanese had brought day-to-day commitments and sudden crises, as in the Solomons, that put heavy pressure on the Washington planners for piecemeal diversions of strength to the Pacific. The pressure was all the heavier in the absence of a set strategic plan that established iron priorities and grimly precluded dispersion.

  Clearly strategy making was overdue. “I believe that as soon as we have knocked the Germans out of Tunisia we should proceed with a military strategical conference between Great Britain, Russia and the United States,” Roosevelt wrote to Churchill late in November. He proposed that their military chiefs meet with a Soviet delegation in Moscow or Cairo. Churchill agreed on a conference but not of just the military people; Russian generals, he said, would simply refer every major question back to Stalin. And all the Soviet chiefs would do would be to demand a second front. Why shouldn’t the heads get together?

  After some hesitation Roosevelt agreed. He proposed a meeting in mid-January of the Big Three, accompanied by small military staffs, to take place south of Algiers or in or near Khartoum. “I don’t like mosquitoes.” He questioned Churchill’s idea of Marshall stopping off in London on the way. “I do not want to give Stalin the impression that we are settling everything between ourselves before we meet him. I think that you and I understand each other so well that prior conferences between us are unnecessary….” Roosevelt concluded: “I prefer a comfortable oasis to the raft at Tilsit.”

  The prospect of a Big Three meeting delighted Churchill. It was the only way of making a good plan for 1943, he wired; at present there was none on the scale or up to the level of events. He still hoped that American and British military staffs could meet in advance, so that there would be some definite plans. “Otherwise Stalin will greet us with the question, ‘Have you then no plan for the second front in Europe you promised me for 1943?’ ”

  Roosevelt believed that Stalin would agree to meet, but he was wrong. The dictator said that he could not leave his country during major military operations—and he said nothing about Roosevelt and Churchill coming to the Soviet Union. He was “deeply disappointed,” Roosevelt replied; what about March 1? Back came the cool answer: “front matters” would not permit this even in March. Could they not discuss questions by correspondence, Stalin inquired, until they were able to meet? “I think we shall not differ.” Stalin must have reflected on the opportunity he was losing to press the second front face to face with the other leaders. “I feel confident,” he went on, “that no time is being wasted, that the promise to open a second front in Europe, which you, Mr. President, and Mr. Churchill gave for 1942 or the spring of 1943 at the latest, will be kept and that a second front in Europe will really be opened jointly by Great Britain and the U.S.A. next spring.”

  Thus Stalin threw the gauntlet into the meeting without even attending it. Roosevelt suggested to Ch
urchill that the two of them confer anyway. England was out as a meeting place “for political reasons.” He wanted to get out of the political atmosphere of Washington for a couple of weeks. In Stalin’s absence they would need no foreign-affairs people with them, because their work would be essentially military. What about Casablanca as the spot? The military men could precede them by a few days and clear the ground. “Yes, certainly,” Churchill answered. “The sooner the better…”

  At the conference, Roosevelt knew, the British would have a plan and stick to it. Churchill and his chiefs did indeed busy themselves with staff papers that argued strongly for a vigorous follow-up to TORCH, in order to knock Italy out of the war and, they hoped, bring Turkey into it, and to give the Axis no respite. The cross-channel attack would be a basic but long-run project to be conducted by August or September 1943 if conditions permitted. The American planners were busy, too, and came up with their old emphasis on cross-channel first. As a secondary goal—and doubtless as a partial bluff against the British—offensive and defensive operations should be continued against the Japanese in the Pacific and in Burma. The Mediterranean was not even mentioned. In their response a week later the British stuck to their guns.

  On January 7, 1943, just before leaving for Casablanca, Roosevelt met with his chiefs for a final planning session. It soon developed that not only were the American and British chiefs still divided, but also the American Chiefs of Staff were not wholly agreed among themselves. King wanted to maintain constant pressure against the Japanese to prevent them from consolidating their conquests. Arnold, as always, stressed air power. Marshall suggested a limited cross-channel operation sometime after July 1943. Roosevelt, still hoping to avoid a definite decision, proposed a compromise that would prepare for operations both in the Mediterranean and across the channel while a commitment was postponed for a month or two. Marshall was unhappy with this notion.

  The meeting adjourned with no decision. On the eve of a showdown with the British the Commander in Chief was still evading a strategic commitment.

  TOWARD THE UNDERBELLY?

  Late Saturday evening, January 9, 1943, Roosevelt, Hopkins, McIntire, and a small party boarded the presidential train at the secret siding near the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The President was gay and relaxed. He was about to see a new continent, Churchill, combat troops. And he would travel by plane for the first time since his famous flight to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1932. He would be the first President to fly, the first to leave the United States in wartime, and the first since Lincoln to visit an active theater of war. To take a trip, to enter a war zone, to create precedents—no combination of events could make Roosevelt happier.

  On arriving in Miami early on Monday morning, after a long sleepy Sunday chugging through the Carolinas and Georgia, Roosevelt laughed with Hopkins over the realization that the “unbelievable trip” was actually taking place.

  Long before dark the Pan American Clipper taxied out of the harbor at Miami and, with Roosevelt and his party strapped in their seats, took off toward Trinidad. The President missed nothing. He asked the pilot to fly over the Citadel in Haiti; scanned the jungle of Dutch Guiana; glimpsed the Amazon where it widens out sharply; noted the merchant ships off the Brazilian port of Belém. Then came the long overnight hop to Bathurst, in British Gambia, where the flying boat landed in the big harbor at the mouth of the Gambia River. Here the cruiser Memphis was waiting to berth the President overnight. Hoisted to the deck, the Commander in Chief landed hard on his stern when one of the men carrying him slipped. Next morning the President was driven through the old slaving port of Bathurst to the airport. He noted ragged, glum-looking natives. “Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate,” he told his son Elliott later.

  A Douglas C-54 flew the presidential party from Bathurst over the snow-capped Atlas Moutains and into Casablanca. Mike Reilly and Elliott were waiting. The camouflage was thrown off the ramp, the President was whisked into an armored car, and soon he was driving through a small Eden of green parks and marvelous flowers to the Anfa Hotel, the site of the conference, a high white structure with a nautical shape, wide balconies, and a view of the dazzling blue Atlantic. The hotel and its environs had been converted into a military compound, surrounded by heavy wire, guarded by a zealous armored battalion under the nervous command of General George S. Patton, Jr., and protected further by antiaircraft batteries and radar-equipped British night fighters. The President was installed in a large bungalow. His bedroom, with its drapes and frills, was obviously that of a French lady. Roosevelt looked around and whistled. “Now all we need is the madame of the house.” Churchill’s bungalow was fifty yards away, and soon the Prime Minister was over for a drink before dinner. Roosevelt invited Churchill and his military chiefs—Brooke, Pound, Mountbatten, Sir Charles Portal—to dine with him and his own chiefs and aides.

  The party that night went on until early morning, when an air-raid alarm sounded, lights were doused, and the men sat around the table with their faces lighted by candles. Throughout the evening the talk ran fast and free—talk of war, of families and friends, of Stalin, of the French. It was a relaxed and merry company. But the good cheer was a bit artificial, for earlier in the day the Combined Chiefs at their first meeting had found themselves in flat disagreement over strategy.

  It was the same old dispute, but now more urgent than ever. At the first meeting Brooke had spoken for an hour, laying out the British proposals—proposals to clear the North African shore and then capture Sicily, meantime building up strength in England for a cross-channel attack when the time seemed propitious. Then Marshall took a categorical stand for a major cross-channel attack in 1943 and against diversions elsewhere. After lunch Brooke invited King to present the Pacific situation. The Chief of Naval Operations was only too eager to do so, because he felt that the British neglected the other side of the globe. He warned that the Japanese were consolidating their gains and that without greater help Chiang might pull out of the war. He proposed that 30 per cent of the war effort—twice the current proportion, he estimated—go to the Pacific and 70 per cent to the other fronts. The British remarked that this was hardly a scientific way of setting war strategy.

  During the conferences over the next few days Marshall doggedly stuck to his proposal of securing Africa and then immediately concentrating on the cross-channel attack. He argued against fighting the war on a day-to-day, opportunistic basis, against taking uncoordinated tactical steps that did not fit in with the “main plot.” Every diversion, he contended, acted like a suction pump against the main effort.

  The odds were heavily against Marshall. The British Chiefs were united and formidable. They had brought a command ship with ample staffs and communications and had docked her in the harbor as a back-up facility. They had met long and often to unify their position. They had Dill in to brief them on the American outlook. On the eve of the first Combined Chiefs conference they had met with the Prime Minister, who had set out the line he wanted them to follow with the Americans. Roosevelt’s corporal’s guard of military chiefs and aides, on the other hand, was divided. Whatever their general support for beating Germany before Japan, King could not help being drawn to the Pacific, with its great naval potential, and Arnold to the prospect of building up a huge bomber offensive in the United Kingdom while the cross-channel attack was delayed. All the planners worked amid a quiet, intense competition for scarce war supply. It seemed to one of the British present that the United States Army and Navy had divided the world, with the latter taking the Pacific, and that allocation of resources was a game of grab between the two sides.

  Only one man could turn the odds in Marshall’s favor—his Commander in Chief. Roosevelt seemed to hold a position midway between Marshall and Churchill, midway between wanting to thrust at the underbelly and thrust across the Channel. While he consistently viewed ROUNDUP as the main effort, his fancy was taken by immediate, opportunistic ventures, especially when Churchill was there to sug
gest them. In drilling his staff on dealing with the Americans, the Prime Minister had advised them to take plenty of time, to allow full discussions and not to be impatient—“like dripping of water on a stone”—and he would pursue the same tactics with the President. He did, but Roosevelt was hardly adamantine. The British approach had long appealed to him, because it kept major options open, allowed for quick and even cheap victories, might knock Italy out of the war, kept American troops active and moving, and provided the Russians with at least the semblance of a second front. By the fourth day of the conference Churchill could report to his War Cabinet that Roosevelt strongly favored the Mediterranean as the next step. The President did not indicate any less support of ROUNDUP. By taking his middle position he was able to go along with the British, placate Marshall, and assure Eisenhower that he firmly adhered to the basic concept of cross-channel and that he looked on the Mediterranean operation only as support for the main thrust.

  After ten days of sometimes heated discussions the Combined Chiefs presented their agreed-on plan in a full-dress meeting to Roosevelt and Churchill. The plan was an order of priorities. Ironically, at the top of the list was neither the underbelly nor cross-channel, but maintaining security of sea communications in the Atlantic; the ghost of Atlantic First still hovered over the strategists. Second priority was aiding Russia. Third was operations in the Mediterranean—specifically the capture of Sicily. Next came cross-channel, and then the Pacific. The British were elated. They felt they had won almost every point of contention. Brooke was disappointed that the plan made no mention of Italy, but he could console himself with the thought that events would dictate this as the next move, just as the pouring of troops into Africa had made Sicily the next logical step.