It was not the best of times for the three leaders. Stalin’s troops were exhausted. In a mighty effort they recaptured Kharkov in mid-February, then lost it again as the Soviet counterattack petered out and the front stabilized. Churchill had been stricken with pneumonia after returning from his North African and Mid-Eastern journey. Roosevelt, too, had been ill. And at the time he wrote his February 22 letter, he was undergoing the doleful experience that other chiefs of state had known before him—he had received reports of his troops’ first real brush with German ground power.
Hitler had followed through on his decision to reinforce Axis strength in Africa. In December and January Nazi troops and supplies had flowed through Italy and Sicily to the ports and airfields of Bizerte and Tunis. Skimming over the water at 150 feet, Junkers and huge, six-engined Messerschmitts carried in hundreds of tons of war supplies every day. By the end of January 110,000 troops—almost three-quarters of them German—had arrived in Northwest Africa to bolster Rommel’s last-ditch stand. The Allies were now paying the price of having secured their rear by landing so far to the west of Tunisia. The Germans jabbed at the British, French, and American troops, and then dug in. By mid-February the British commanded the northern sector, the French the central, and the American II Corps the southern, on an almost straight north-south line, with Axis troops to the east; and the British were advancing along the Mediterranean shore from Tripoli.
It was here in this strange and melancholy land, with its jumble of flattened knolls, low escarpments, open desert, draws, gullies, and cactus, that American soldiers had their baptism of fire. Knowing that the Allies would steadily consolidate their positions, Rommel suddenly struck out at II Corps units on February 14. At last American troops experienced the famed German deployment of tanks, artillery, and dive bombers. They counterattacked bravely but suffered from poor intelligence and communications, faulty map reading, and amateurish deployment—in short, from inexperience. After probing and encircling American forces in a series of hard thrusts, the Germans broke through the Kasserine Pass on February 20. They took thousands of Americans prisoner and destroyed or captured large quantities of weapons. Soon, however, Rommel’s forces began to run into bad weather and stiffened Allied defenses; they withdrew back through the Kasserine Pass, taking satisfaction in having knocked the Americans off balance and having disrupted Allied plans farther north. “Hate to disappoint you,” Alexander wired to Churchill on February 27, “but final victory in North Africa is not just around the corner.”
From the Kremlin, Stalin watched these events narrowly. When Churchill reported to him the “sharp local reverses” of February and hinted that clearing the Axis out of Africa was now hoped for by the end of April, Stalin could not conceal his anger. In mid-March he cabled to Roosevelt and Churchill:
“…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….Meanwhile Germany has succeeded in moving from the West 36 divisions, including six armored ones, to be used against Soviet troops.” Once again he listed the broken promises of the second 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 before the Anglo-Americans ever got into Europe? That United Nations unity in war and peace might be injured beyond repair? That he might go it alone, militarily and diplomatically? That he might even make a deal with Hitler? Roosevelt and Churchill pondered these questions. Then at the end of March the already glacial relations between Moscow and the West turned even colder when Churchill informed Stalin of another Anglo-American decision.
The trouble lay in the Atlantic. Allied losses by the end of 1942 had exceeded construction by well over a million tons. Heavy gales in the North Atlantic had frustrated the U-boats during the early weeks of 1943, but in March the wolf packs began again to score heavily against the convoys. The most perilous point was the northern reaches of Norway, where the Germans had poised the Tirpitz, the Scharnhorst, and other warships. Churchill did not dare put his Home Fleet at the mercy of enemy U-boats and shore-based bombers, and he feared that if one or two of his battleships were knocked out of action, the whole command of the Atlantic would be jeopardized.
For the Prime Minister there was only one solution: postpone all convoys to Russia. The President concurred on canceling the scheduled March convoy, but he urged that Stalin not be informed until August or September that all convoys must be suspended. The news would be a heavy additional blow for the Kremlin, he argued, and nobody could be sure of the situation four or five months hence anyway. Churchill waited a week, but after Stalin sent a couple of congratulatory notes about impending Tunisian operations, he manfully decided to break the news. On March 30 he described to Stalin the situation in the North Atlantic and stated that “orders have, therefore, been issued that the sailing of the March convoy is to be postponed.” He and Roosevelt were greatly disappointed, he went on. “At the same time we feel it only right to let you know at once that it will not be possible to continue convoys by the northern route after early May, since from that time onwards every single escort vessel will be required to support our offensive operations in the Mediterranean, leaving only a minimum to safeguard our lifelines in the Atlantic.” If the attack on Sicily went well and the Atlantic situation permitted, “we should hope to resume convoys in early September.” Meantime he and Roosevelt would try to increase the flow of supplies by the southern and Pacific routes.
It was a jolting blow to the Kremlin, and an infuriating one. Postponement of the second front had been serious enough, but the Allies had always contended that at least they would get war supplies to the Russian front, where troops were engaging the Germans on a huge scale. Now, to have the crucial northern supply route cut off—and cut off to support a Mediterranean operation that the Kremlin considered at best a feeble substitute for a cross-channel attack, and at worst a means of evading it! Stalin’s answer was laconic.
“I regard this unexpected step as a catastrophic cut in the delivery of strategic raw materials and munitions to the Soviet Union by Great Britain and the U.S.A., because the Pacific route is limited in shipping and none too reliable, and the southern route has small clearance capacity, which means that those two routes cannot make up for the cessation of deliveries by the northern route. It goes without saying that this circumstance cannot but affect the position of the Soviet troops.”
Even in his bitterness, though, Stalin could not help taking pleasure in North African developments. He had always deprecated plans and contingencies and stressed the need of simply killing and trapping masses of Hitlerites and fascists. And this is what Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s men were doing by early spring of 1943.
Everything still came hard in Africa. Hitler was determined, now that he had allowed Rommel to withdraw across North Africa, that the Afrika Korps and its reinforcements would make a long and vigorous stand by launching forceful spoiling attacks on Allied positions. He ordered that the rate of supply across the Mediterranean be doubled and even tripled. Early in March Rommel threw four furious attacks against the Eighth Army and lost over two-score tanks to Montgomery’s massed antitank artillery. Soon after, the “Desert Fox,” ill and dispirited, gave up his command and left for his homeland, never to return to Africa. Later in the month the Eighth Army attacked Axis forces dug in on the Mareth Line, originally a French defense system built to ward off the Italians. Montgomery’s frontal attack failed, but New Zealand and other units made a wide flanking movement that routed the foe and forced him to move up toward his Tunisia bastion.
American troops made contact with an Eighth Army patrol in a joyous union early in April. The two armies that had started 2,000 miles apart, Churchill noted, were at last joined together. In an effort to rejuvenat
e II Corps, which was still licking its wounds from the February setbacks, Eisenhower had put Patton in command. In April, with Patton driving and goading his commanders, II Corps’ armored and infantry units tried to push eastward to the sea and thus cut off Axis troops moving up the coast under pressure from Montgomery to the south. Despite Patton’s colorful leadership, the attack faltered, and most of the Germans managed to make good their retreat northward. Some in the British command now wanted to send II Corps divisions into rear areas for more training, or at least to parcel them among the more experienced corps, but Marshall and Eisenhower would have none of it. They insisted that the corps be preserved as a unit and given a chance to be in on the final victory, learning the art of battle while it fought. Alexander concurred, but had the whole corps leapfrog north to a new sector adjoining the Mediterranean.
By the end of April Allied troops had compressed German and Italian forces into a shrinking area of northern Tunisia. Escape had been cut off; it was now, as Churchill said, “scrunch and punch.” British and American fighters were pouncing on convoys of Axis air transports, bringing down fifty planes one day, fifteen another, thirty another. Hitler’s commanders were scouring the Italian coast for small craft and fishing boats, to little avail. Early in May Allied armored troops punched through the German defenses, entered Tunis, and then lunged north to link up with American forces that were overrunning Bizerte. After valiant fighting, the enemy units began to disintegrate. The victors were amazed to see long lines of Germans driving in their own trucks and carts in search of prisoner-of-war cages. Almost a quarter-million prisoners were taken, about half of them German. The victory of Tunisia, Churchill felt, could hold its own with Stalingrad.
Early in April Hitler and Mussolini had met at Berchtesgaden. They were still hopeful. A month later, back in his Eastern Front headquarters, Hitler knew that the African situation was hopeless. He stood by his decision. “Naturally,” he said to some officers, “I have tried to reckon whether the undertaking in Tunis, which eventually led to the loss of both men and equipment, was justified. I have come to the following conclusion; by the occupation of Tunisia we have succeeded in postponing the invasion of Europe by six months. More important still, Italy is as a result still a member of the Axis.” If he had not stood in Tunisia, he went on, the Allies would have landed in Italy unopposed and pushed up to the Brenner Pass, with German resistance weakened again because of the Russian break-through at Stalingrad. “That would inevitably have led rapidly to the loss of the war.”
Stalin could make the same calculation. The capture of Tunisia had taken much longer than his allies had expected, and he could not but consider the implications for the second front. But facts—especially Hitlerites killed—were the main thing, and now the Anglo-Americans were slaying Germans. At the height of the battle he told Churchill he hoped he would capture as much booty as possible, as well as finish off the enemy and take prisoners. At the end he wired to Roosevelt: “I congratulate you and the gallant U.S. and British troops on the brilliant victory which has resulted in the liberation of Bizerte and Tunis from Hitler tyranny. I wish you further success.”
ELEVEN The Administration of Crisis
WELL, IT IS NOW 60 hours since the Old Smiler returned to the White House from his great adventure,” William Allen White wrote in his Gazette on Roosevelt’s return from Casablanca. “Biting nails—good, hard, bitter Republican nails—we are compelled to admit that Franklin Roosevelt is the most unaccountable and on the whole the most enemy-baffling President that this United States has ever seen…a certain vast impudent courage….Well, damn your smiling old picture, here it is….We, who hate your gaudy guts, salute you.”
Not all the Roosevelt watchers back home were as gallant as the old Kansas Republican. After the first flush of excitement over the President’s trip abroad, Washington seemed to revert to its usual condition of guerrilla warfare. Power was so fragmented on Capitol Hill that Congress was able neither to support the President’s domestic program wholeheartedly nor to muster support for real alternatives. But Congress could always investigate. The Dies Committee girded itself for further onslaughts against federal bureaucrats. Congressman Howard W. Smith, of Virginia, long a conservative Democratic foe of the President, fished for administrative failures.
Politics seemed to have fallen to a new wartime low of spite and pettiness. The kind of publicity that the President particularly detested was aroused by his provocative nomination early in January of Edward J. Flynn as Minister to Australia. Flynn had been exonerated of the much-publicized charge of having city workers pave a courtyard of his country home with city-owned paving blocks, but the chairman of the third-term campaign was still fair game. Willkie called the nomination crassly cynical. Flynn ran into such heavy weather on Capitol Hill that, by mutual agreement, the President withdrew his nomination. It did not help matters that during the furore over Edward Flynn the movie actor Errol Flynn was undergoing a lurid trial for statutory rape of two teen-agers, or that the other Flynn also was found not guilty.
Some of Roosevelt’s friends were as critical of the defense effort as his enemies. “One year after Pearl Harbor,” reported a Senate Education and Labor Subcommittee headed by New Deal Senator Claude Pepper, “the Nation looks in vain for a unified program of all-out war production. Each new crisis in production evokes a piecemeal attempt at solution.” In the House, the Tolan Committee called for an end to “the drift” in war production. Washington infighting seemed brisker than ever. Czars jousted with czars, army officials with Navy, civilians with soldiers. The manpower program was in a muddle. Senator Vandenberg complained in his diary of a “complete and total lack of authentic liaison between the White House and Congress in respect to war responsibilities.”
The President sailed through all these reefs and shoals with his usual outward imperturbability and private annoyance. Editor White watched Roosevelt at a press conference on February 12. “He seemed to be gay, sure of himself, a bit festive at times, informative, indeed illuminating,” noted the long-time observer of famous men. He noticed that Roosevelt had grown notably heavier since coming to the White House. But “his growth has not been in paunch. It has been above his navel. His shoulders have widened. His neck and jowls have filled out. His head has taken a new form….” Roosevelt was a vital person, White kept thinking. But that night, sitting after dinner in the new Statler Hotel while Roosevelt gave a Lincoln’s Day speech, he felt that in the few hours Roosevelt had grown tired. His voice seemed to lose its fire. In the final sentences his voice dropped, and White could hardly hear him.
White ruminated on Roosevelt’s enemies. There were two Republican schools of thought about the President. One “speaks of him trippingly on the tongue as that ‘God damn Roosevelt,’ short, snappy, and staccato, but without grinding the vocal gears. The other crowd snarls it savagely, adagio, making two words out of God—like Gawud—and two out of damn—like da-yum—growled with heart-pumping scorn and generally with a table-pounding drumbeat. I belong to the lighter, staccato left wing….”
After a year or so of “all-out” war mobilization, though, some in Washington were wondering if the President as Chief Executive was not his own worst enemy.
EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
In a farsighted move a year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had established the Office for Emergency Management in the Executive Office of the President. The OEM had become a peculiarly Rooseveltian instrument—flexible, informal, adaptable—for spawning, nourishing, and embracing a host of defense units that Roosevelt could not fit easily into the existing departmental structure and that captured far more public attention than the mother office ever did. The OEM, indeed, later was pushed aside, but the concept and spirit of emergency management hung over all the fifty or sixty war agencies that would come to life. The origin of the two words is not clear; probably they were Roosevelt’s. Certainly they summed up the curious combination of orderly management and crisis government that cha
racterized his war administration.
That administration never settled down; it never freed itself of the prod and aura of crisis. The rapidly changing battle needs, the stupendous appetite for war production, the ever-shifting impact of science and technology, the zest and combativeness of the chieftains Roosevelt recruited for his war agencies, and the President’s own administrative habits kept his regime in almost constant turmoil. Students of public administration would long argue whether the creativity, flexibility, competitiveness, even rugged individualism nurtured by those habits outweighed the wasted effort, faulty coordination, disorder, delays, muddle. The striking fact was that the White House itself, despite its boasts and claims, was never really satisfied with its organization for war, as evidenced by its continual making and breaking of war chiefs and their agencies until the European war was almost over.
On the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor—two and one half years after the United States began its first serious mobilization, in the wake of the fall of France—the administration still faced crises of production. The nation had not achieved the balanced, assured output necessary for its great offensives in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Production of military airplanes more than doubled from 1941 to 1942 but was still short of the President’s call for 60,000 planes; the output of combat planes fell even more below his goals. The navy yards turned out an aircraft carrier and a dozen battleships and cruisers, but the loss of four carriers and five heavy cruisers in 1942 still left fleet strength little greater at the end of 1942 than before Pearl Harbor. Landing-craft output skyrocketed but lagged behind both goals and needs. The production of merchant ships totaled over eight million tons—seven times the 1941 output—but still a million tons short of the President’s announced goal—a serious lag considering that the Allies had lost an average of a million tons a month. Somervell admitted to Raymond Clapper on the last day of 1942 that shipment of four hundred tanks to North Africa had cleared out the surplus. Artillery and machine-gun turnout was also short.
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