The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  At last a date had been fixed, a rough order of priorities set. Even so, the Americans were uneasy. Churchill did not seem wholly reconciled. And what about Stalin? From his view the only important result of the conference would be wholly negative—postponing a cross-channel invasion until May 1944. Stalin had been furious after the news from Casablanca that the attack had been postponed from spring 1943 to August or September. What would he say now?

  This was the question assailing Roosevelt and Churchill as the conference ended. Grimly they sat down together to prepare a letter to their comrade in arms. Hour after hour they wrote and rewrote, sending scrawled passages out to be typed, and then scribbling over the drafts until they were almost illegible. Two of the most gifted expositors in the world at this moment were reduced to stammering schoolboys making a confession. At two in the morning, to Roosevelt’s relief, Churchill offered to take the latest draft away with him and “tidy it up” and return it. Both Churchill and Marshall were leaving for Algiers to consult with Eisenhower; Roosevelt agreed that the Chief of Staff could fly with the Prime Minister and work on the statement.

  Next day, on the flying boat over the Atlantic, Marshall took the tattered drafts and in two hours wrote a message that aroused Churchill’s admiration for its clarity and comprehensiveness. He and Roosevelt approved it unchanged. The President held the message for a week before sending it, signed only by himself. Mostly it was a succinct statement of the whole range of Anglo-American global strategy. But almost hidden in the next-to-last paragraph was the fateful sentence: “Under the present plans, there should be a sufficiently large concentration of men and material in the British Isles in the spring of 1944 to permit a full-scale invasion of the continent at that time….”

  By now Davies had returned to Washington with a hopeful report on his meeting with Stalin. Things had started awkwardly, he told the President, who listened eagerly and demanded specifics about Stalin and his comments. Stalin had bluntly reiterated that he could accept neither the African invasion nor the air attack on Germany as equivalent to the second front. He was suspicious of the Americans as well as the British. When Davies urged that if he and Roosevelt met face to face they could together win the war and the peace, Stalin replied tersely, “I am not so sure.” It took Davies a long time, he told Roosevelt, to penetrate the suspicion and near-hostility. But he had come back bearing a favorable response to Roosevelt’s invitation. Stalin was willing to confer with the President in Fairbanks in July or August.

  Roosevelt was elated, but he was apprehensive, too. He had told Stalin about the postponement of cross-channel plans only after Davies had returned. What would Stalin say now? He had not long to wait. “Thank you for the information,” Stalin wrote on June 11, in reply to the Roosevelt-Churchill-Marshall message. He then listed item by item all the Anglo-American promises of a second front in 1943. Need he speak of the disheartening impression that this fresh postponement of the second front would produce both among the people and among the Army? The Soviet government could not align itself with this decision—which had been adopted without its participation. Stalin said nothing about the plan to meet in Fairbanks.

  Roosevelt now faced a crisis in Soviet-American relations not only over the second front, but also over Poland. Stalin had always been cold toward the Polish government-in-exile in London, headed by General Wladyslaw Sikorski, whom the Kremlin viewed as a bourgeois moderate surrounded by reactionaries and militarists. The Poles had repeatedly appealed to the President on the issue of the 1939 Polish-Soviet boundaries, established when the Russians and the Germans carved up Poland, and on Soviet treatment of Polish nationalists. The President, eager to promote unity within the United Nations camp but always sensitive to the big Polish voting groups at home, had tried to conciliate the London Poles while evading the central issue. On one point he was insistent: there must be no discussion of the Polish-Soviet boundary issue until a later time.

  Relations between the Kremlin and the Polish government deteriorated during early 1943 and collapsed in April, with a big assist from the Germans. Goebbels’s propagandists suddenly announced that in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, there had been found the bodies of thousands of Polish officers shot by the Bolsheviks three years earlier. “Revolting and slanderous fabrications,” the Russians charged; the Nazis themselves had committed the monstrous crime. At this point the London Poles, who had always suspected that the Russians were guilty, asked the Red Cross to make an investigation on the spot. Furious over this “collusion” with the Nazis, Moscow broke off relations with Sikorski’s government. Stalin so informed Roosevelt.

  The President asked Stalin to define his action as a “suspension of conversation” with the Poles rather than a complete severance of diplomatic relations. He doubted that Sikorski had collaborated in any way with the Hitler gangsters but granted that the London Poles had erred in appealing to the Red Cross. “Incidentally,” he reminded Stalin, “I have several million Poles in the United States….”

  Stalin was unmoved. By now he was seething at his allies. His grievances were many and painful. They had broken off the convoys. They had got bogged down in Africa and let the Red Army take the brunt of the winter fighting. They had never accepted the Polish-Soviet frontier of 1939. They had not broken with Finland. The Soviet government, he felt, had made concession after concession, gesture after gesture. Had he not responded to Anglo-American wishes in dissolving the Comintern, even though he had sworn on Lenin’s tomb never to abandon the cause—Lenin’s cause—of world revolution?

  And still no second front. To Stalin this was not a question of strategy alone. The blood of his people was at stake. Hundreds of thousands of Russians would perish because the Anglo-Americans would invade Europe in 1944 instead of 1943 or 1942. Millions of civilians would be left that much longer to suffer and die under the Hitlerites. Roosevelt worried about his Poles, but Stalin, too, had a kind of public opinion to consider. The bereaved Soviet families, the millions under Nazi rule, the maimed soldiers—what would they think about Stalin’s repeated assurances that the Anglo-Americans were coming? The Marshal—for Stalin had assumed that title during the commemoration of Stalingrad—must have reflected on the seeming obtuseness of the Anglo-Americans about the Soviet need for security on the western borders. For centuries Germans, Poles, Swedes, and others had pillaged their way eastward into Russia across the open plains. From the very start of the war—indeed, during the most desperate weeks in late 1941—Stalin had forthrightly insisted on a western border that would give his nation security. Roosevelt had not responded. In short, the Anglo-Americans would not provide real collective security through a United Nations second front, but neither would they support his efforts to gain security through unilateral action. Were the British hoping that Russians and Germans would exhaust themselves in mortal combat? Was that why they had been so deceitful about when the second front would come? Were they trying to help Russia just enough to keep it in the war, but not so much as to help that country win it? Did they hope that after the war they could pursue the old imperialistic policy of fencing Russia in? Could they even be plotting a separate peace? As long as they delayed the second front they could use it as a threat against Hitler, or as a way of bargaining with him—or his generals—for not attacking. All these dark suspicions must have smoldered in Stalin’s conspiratorial mind. He ordered Maisky home from London and Litvinov from Washington. And he cabled to Roosevelt that he could not meet with him.

  Twenty years after the end of World War II, historians would hotly debate the questions how and when the Cold War began. Did its origins lie in British and Russian colonial rivalry in the nineteenth century? In Pan-Slavism? In Marxist or liberal ideology? In the Russian Revolution or the Allied counterrevolution? In capitalist neoimperialism? In fascist aggression? In the Nazi-Soviet Pact? In the illusions or broken promises of Yalta? Or in postwar developments?

  Most of these forces or episodes doubtless had some part, but perhaps the mo
st determining single factor was the gap between promise and reality that widened steadily during 1942 and 1943. Imperialism, nationalism, revolution, ideology—these are longstanding forces in an unstable world, and can be calculated in advance by practical men. But the striking fact about the Allied postponement of the second front, and about Soviet policy toward Poland, was the contrast between this kind of Realpolitik and the promises, pronouncements, and ideals of the United Nations. For a brief shining moment during World War II democratic and Communist nations were united in a euphoria of hope and idealism about how people might live in brotherhood, with common goals, sacrifices, and triumphs. But behind the facade of unity statesmen were pursuing Realpolitik and national interest. The resulting cynicism was the breeding ground of postwar disillusion and disunity. The second-front delay far more than any other factor aroused Soviet anger and cynicism. If the Anglo-Americans were planning to land in France in the event that Germany was winning, or in the event that Russia was winning (Operation SLEDGE-HAMMER), was not this evidence that the West, whatever its protestations, was following a strategy of letting Russia and Germany bleed each other to death? By mid-1943 the grand coalition was foundering in a welter of broken promises and crushed expectations.

  THE KING’S FIRST MINISTER

  Nowhere in the world of 1943 did the gap between fact and expectation open so wide and ominously as in China. Nowhere were military reality and Roosevelt’s hopes in greater disjunction.

  Chiang’s problem was almost a caricature of Stalin’s. The Chinese, too, awaited a long-promised front—a second or third or fourth front. They, too, felt isolated from the Anglo-Americans, starved for supplies, robbed by Atlantic and Mediterranean needs, put off by promises and excuses, exploited for their vast manpower. Otherwise the Chinese scene was far more somber than the Soviet. Chiang’s three hundred divisions still held a sagging front against the Japanese. Prices were still soaring as printing presses turned out billions of fapi; the American loan seemed to have sunk without trace. The Communists, steadily consolidating their northern sectors, offered the peasants just what the Kuomintang could not: stern and demanding but honest village authority; campaigns against landlords, usurers, and other bourgeois devils; participation in local government, collectives, and militias; an ideology of equality, democracy, and freedom. By mid-1943 the Communists controlled 150,000 square miles and about fifty million people.

  Roosevelt clung to his high hopes for China’s wartime success and postwar greatness even as he stood by his priorities of Europe first, Russia second, and China third. He also knew that aiding China was popular at home. He felt, too, that “China really likes us” and he wanted to sustain the reservoir of good will. He expected China to be a great power after the war and he wanted its friendship. He was proud of his country’s record in China and of his own old-time family connections, though he himself had never been there or in any part of Asia. Hopkins said later: “The United States, through the espousal of the ‘Open Door Policy,’ has an absolutely clean record in China over the years. We must keep it so.”

  Early in 1943 the President struck a blow for Chinese friendship—a blow that did not cost a single gun or bomber. On February 1 he asked the Senate to ratify a treaty surrendering extraterritorial rights in China. For decades foreigners had resided or done business in China under their own laws and courts, backed by their own gunboats and garrisons, all exempt from Chinese law and taxation. Within eleven days the Senate ratified the treaty and ended an arrangement that was humiliating to the Chinese and embarrassing to wartime America. The British government took similar steps. By their action, declared Chiang, “our Allies have declared their Pacific war aim to sustain the rule of human decency and human right….” Later in the year Roosevelt asked Congress to repeal the Chinese exclusion laws, which had harshly discriminated against Chinese immigration. “Nations, like individuals, make mistakes,” the President told Congress. “We must be big enough to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and to correct them.” Again the legislators acted quickly and favorably.

  Roosevelt’s hopes for China were matched by fears. As the Nationalist armies fell back, rumors drifted out of Chungking of a possible separate peace with Japan. Americans in China worried about reports of a considerable trade going back and forth across the Chinese-Japanese lines. Stilwell suspected that Chiang would never pull out and was only bluffing. Roosevelt was not so sure.

  Certainly the military situation by early 1943 gave little cause for optimism. Stilwell deplored the rosy picture back home of China’s effort. Its army actually was in desperate condition, he reported to Marshall, “underfed, unpaid, untrained, neglected, and rotten with corruption.” Still, the hard-bitten General had ambitious military plans for the spring of 1943. He proposed an Allied effort to recapture key areas of Burma and reopen communications from Rangoon to Kunming. British and Chinese forces in India would attack over mountain land from the west, Allied naval forces from the Bay of Bengal to the south. Stilwell would then send thousands of tons of supplies up the Burma Road into Kunming; he would equip and modernize the Chinese armies; he would launch a new offensive to open a seaport in South China or Indochina, thereby gaining further war supply. Thus he would break the siege of China.

  Stilwell had planned boldly against the enemy; his troubles lay with his friends and associates. Roosevelt was all for the plan in principle, but he was still giving top strategic priority to Europe, and Churchill was cool to any plan that would drain naval and ground strength from the Mediterranean. Chiang would support the plan only if the Anglo-Americans backed it heavily and soon; otherwise he seemed more interested in it for bargaining purposes. Stilwell’s particular nemesis was his fellow general Claire Chennault, Chiang’s air adviser and commander of the air force that was still doing valiant work against the Japanese. Chennault had all the self-confidence of the American airman. He assured the President that with 105 fighters, thirty medium bombers, and twelve heavy bombers he could destroy the Japanese Air Force and accomplish the downfall of Japan. Stilwell regarded this plan with a groundman’s skepticism, but Chiang favored it as a way of avoiding a huge ground-power commitment he feared he could not deliver.

  As usual Roosevelt was caught among the contending forces. Stimson and Marshall strongly supported Stilwell; by the eve of 1943 Chiang was pressing for the Chennault plan and for at least the postponement of the Burma operation. In Congress a platoon of Senators continued to urge more help for China.

  At this point the slim, elegant figure of Madame Chiang Kai-shek entered the scene. She had flown to the United States in the fall, protesting to Hopkins on arrival that she had come only for medical treatment but making clear in the same breath that she opposed Europe First, disesteemed Stilwell, liked Chennault, and was suspicious of the Anglos if not of the Americans. By February 1943 she was recovered and in Washington, where she talked with Roosevelt for hours, discreetly lobbied with aides and officials, won a standing ovation from the Senate and shouts of approval from the House. Presented to 172 reporters by Roosevelt with the air of a benevolent uncle, she beguiled the press even as she subtly urged more help for China.

  She was an appealing figure in her long black dress, tiny, open-toed pumps, and minute splashes of jade and sequin. She knew how to mix gentle flattery with high strategy. She told Stimson that he had beautiful hands, putting the old man on his guard. Roosevelt was less resistant. He liked to tell friends—in a jocular way but with what Frances Perkins felt was more than a shade of pleasure—how he had asked Madame her impressions of Wendell Willkie in China.

  “Oh, he is very charming,” she answered.

  “Ah, yes, but what did you really think?”

  “Well, Mr. President, he is an adolescent, after all.”

  The President could not resist the opening.

  “Well, Madame Chiang, so you think Wendell Willkie is an adolescent—what do you think I am?”

  “Ah, Mr. President, you are sophisticated.”

 
; Madame’s visit was perfectly timed, for in late February Roosevelt was facing a crucial choice between the Stimson-Marshall-Stilwell plan for Burma and the Chiang-Chennault plan for air attack. The President, on the advice of Hopkins and Currie, chose the latter. Once again the personal factor weighed heavily in the scales. Roosevelt knew that Stilwell hated Chiang, though even the President could hardly know the extent of the General’s contempt for the Generalissimo, which went to the point of referring to him privately as “Peanut.” He felt that Stilwell was taking exactly the wrong approach to Chiang.

  “All of us must remember,” Roosevelt told Marshall, “that the Generalissimo came up the hard way to become the undisputed leader of four hundred million people—an enormously difficult job to attain any kind of unity from a diverse group of all kinds of leaders—military men, educators, scientists, public health people, engineers, all of them struggling for power and mastery, local or national, and to create in a very short time throughout China what it took us a couple of centuries to attain.

  “Besides that the Generalissimo finds it necessary to maintain his position of supremacy. You and I would do the same thing under the circumstances. He is the Chief Executive as well as the Commander-in-Chief, and one cannot speak sternly to a man like that or exact commitments from him the way we might do from the Sultan of Morocco.” Roosevelt must have sensed that he was overriding the weight of army opinion in stressing in this letter that priority must be given to Chennault’s efforts, for he concluded:

  “Just between ourselves, if I had not considered the European and African fields of action in their broadest geographic sense, you and I know we would not be in North Africa today—in fact, we would not have landed either in Africa or in Europe!”

  Marshall warned his chief that the Chennault tactic was risky. Just as soon as the air assault began to hurt the Japanese, they would attack the air bases and thus there would be a ground battle anyway. But the President wanted to give Chennault a clear chance. He was much impressed by the airman’s proposed strategy. He wanted to respond to Chiang and to Madame. Above all, his strategy of Europe First would not allow much war aid to China in any event, and an attack by air might bring victory cheaply.