Once again Roosevelt’s military staffs had tried to prepare as carefully for a conference as had Churchill’s. The crucial factor, they knew, was the backing their Commander in Chief would give them. Marshall had confronted Roosevelt on the cross-channel issue with all his moral and military authority. Remembering the apparent decision for ROUNDUP the year before, followed by the diversion to North Africa, the Chief of Staff set himself categorically against further peripheralism. Stimson, just back from London, where he had argued about cross-channel plans with Churchill face to face, took an even firmer line with his chief. “We cannot rationally hope to be able to come to grips with our German enemy under a British commander,” he told Roosevelt. The shadows of Passchendaele and Dunkerque hung too heavily over the British. They were giving it only lip service, the Secretary said. They still felt that Germany could be beaten by attrition, but that kind of pinprick warfare would never fool Stalin.
Stimson appealed to Roosevelt’s sense of history. “We are facing a difficult year at home with timid and hostile hearts ready to seize and exploit any wavering on the part of our war leadership. A firm resolute leadership, on the other hand, will go far to silence such voices. The American people showed this in the terrible year of 1864, when the firm unfaltering tactics of the Virginia campaign were endorsed by the people of the United States in spite of the hideous losses of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor.”
If Roosevelt’s spine had to be stiffened for the cross-channel decision, Stimson’s and Marshall’s pressure did the trick. Faced by a firm and united American stand at Quebec, the British were now ready to make the cross-channel pledge, but they still fought for a bigger effort in Italy, in part, they said, as a way to strengthen preparations for the invasion of France. Even so, Churchill argued against any attack in France unless the Allies had clear ground and air superiority. For days the Combined Chiefs debated strenuously about the right mix of forces for the cross-channel build-up and for Italy, with Roosevelt and Churchill each backing his own chiefs. In the end it was agreed that the main Anglo-American effort would be across the Channel, with a target date of May 1, 1944. The Mediterranean effort would be pressed, too, with the aim of knocking Italy out of the war and seizing the Rome area for air bases. And an invasion of southern France—a project Churchill had long resisted and would never fully accept—was planned in connection with the thrust into the north.
The agony of Italy kept obtruding into the quiet rooms overlooking the parapets of the once-embattled fortress. Badoglio was still transfixed between the growing Nazi power north of Rome and the looming Allied invasion of the Italian toe from Sicily. There was a long hiatus while the opposing forces stayed in balance and Badoglio put out frantic peace feelers in Spain and Portugal. The Allies were insisting on unconditional surrender while hinting at easier arrangements later. It was like a dialogue of sleepwalkers, each the victim of his own hallucinations, two historians concluded later: “In the nightmare of the German occupation, Italy gasped, ‘Help, I am not free.’ After a long pause, the Allies replied, ‘Say Uncle.’ ”
Essentially Roosevelt had wanted Eisenhower to obtain a simple unconditional surrender formally while indicating favorable treatment later, depending on the extent of Italian assistance to the Allies. The British had preferred that the immediate military settlement be related to long-term political arrangements. At Quebec the President went along with the British approach. But military events were already taking control of diplomacy and negotiation. Before dawn on September 3 the British Eighth Army began to stream across the Strait of Messina and onto the Italian mainland. On the same day Italian representatives, after further tortuous negotiations, signed military terms of surrender in an olive grove near Syracuse. It was certain that announcement of this action would bring quick German retaliation, so General Maxwell Taylor slipped into Rome to arrange with the Italian General Staff for a sudden seizure by air-borne troops of the airfields around Rome. He was too late; the Nazis had arrived first with the most. Taylor’s air descent was canceled, but the armistice was announced. Italy had surrendered.
Now events accelerated. The Germans began to encircle Rome; the royal family and Badoglio and his officials escaped to Brindisi; Italian fleet units, heavily bombed by the Nazis, made their way to the sanctuary of Malta. Mussolini, who had been moved to a mountain resort in central Italy, was plucked out of confinement by ninety German parachutists, who carried him off to a triumphant reunion with Hitler. Meantime the Allies had launched their climactic blow against Italy.
On September 9 American and British forces landed on a great crescent of beaches at Salerno, about thirty miles south of Naples. Against fierce but scattered opposition the infantry moved across the narrow plain toward the jagged mountains beyond. On the eve of invasion the troops had heard of Italy’s surrender, but the Germans had expertly taken over the defense of the area, so the opposition was stiffer than had been expected. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was relieved that the Allies had not landed closer to Rome; as it was, the invasion was so far south that he was able to clamp a firm grip on the capital area. But Salerno was also far enough south to enable General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army to enjoy heavy air cover and to link up with Montgomery’s Eighth Army working its way from Taranto and the instep of the Italian boot.
Four days after the landing at Salerno the Germans mustered enough combat power to launch major thrusts against Allied positions and to try to cut in between the landing forces. They almost succeeded. American artillerymen and antitank units, supported by naval gunfire, bore the brunt of the attack, and despite one precipitous retreat the defenders held on to their beachhead. A week after D day patrols from the Fifth Army and the Eighth Army joined hands.
Roosevelt and Churchill had been together at Hyde Park when the battle began. The Prime Minister was ill at ease because he was reminding himself of battles lost over the centuries when generals had failed to press ahead vigorously. He dispatched reminders to the men in the field, while Roosevelt left matters in the hands of Eisenhower and his subordinates. After the fortunes of battle turned, Churchill congratulated Eisenhower: “As the Duke of Wellington said at the Battle of Waterloo, ‘It was a damned close-run thing.’ ” Stalin telegraphed to Roosevelt and Churchill that the landing in the Naples area would considerably facilitate the Red Army’s operations on the Soviet-German front. In Italy, Allied soldiers regrouped and began pursuing the enemy north through the narrow defiles between Salerno and Naples. The Germans conducted a slow, hurtful retreat, but on October 1 Allied forces seized Naples. The successful invasion of Italy opened new military and political opportunities for the President; it also brought military and political dilemmas. Relations with Iberians, French, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Turks, and the peoples along the southern rim of the inland sea were affected by the advances of Allied soldiers up the boot of Italy. Much of Roosevelt’s political effort in the months ahead was aimed at enlisting the active support, or at least the passive co-operation, of the Mediterranean nations—nations steeped in age-old enmities and suspicions toward one another and toward the great powers.
On the Mediterranean also lay Palestine, a haven and a dilemma. Of all the opportunities now before Roosevelt the most hopeful and the most tragic was the fate of Europe’s Jews. Tens of thousands of them survived perilously in Nazi-occupied Europe, and their escape lines lay mainly across the Mediterranean. During 1942 reports had trickled into the White House of a Nazi decision so appalling that administration officials could not believe them and asked representatives abroad to check and verify. The reports were of Hitler’s order for the “final solution” of the racial problem through the wholesale rounding up and systematic murder of all the Jews under Nazi control. The reports were true.
The President had, of course, been concerned about the plight of the Jews ever since Hitler took power in 1933. During the war he had repeatedly attacked the Nazis for their crimes and warned that the guilty, high and low, would be punished. Late in
1942 he announced the plan of the United Nations to establish a commission to investigate war crimes. It was clear, however, that the deterrent effect of these warnings would be small. Tens of thousands of Jews were being murdered every month. Rising popular concern in both Britain and America was demanding quick action. In December 1942 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, wrote to the President.
“Dear Boss, I do not wish to add an atom to the awful burden which you are bearing with magic and, as I believe, heaven-inspired strength at this time. But you do know that the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history has befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass-massacres.” At least two million civilian Jews had already been slain, Wise said. He asked the President to meet with Jewish leaders. At that meeting, just a year after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was handed a twenty-page document on the Nazi “Blue Print for Extermination,” and he assured the group that the United States would try to save those who might yet be saved and to end the crimes. “The mills of the gods grind slowly,” he said. “But they grind exceedingly small.”
The wheels not only of justice but also of the Roosevelt administration ground small and slow throughout 1943, to the disbelief and despair of Jewish and other leaders. Some pleaded that the Allies negotiate directly with the Axis powers for the release of Jews, others that the Allies at least relax the blockade to allow the shipment of food and medicines to people in concentration camps and that they persuade the neutral nations to open their frontiers to escaping Jews. The administration was urged to suspend immigration quotas to quicken the flow of refugees. During early 1943 there seemed to be much action on Washington’s part, or at least motion; indeed, London and Washington competed for public recognition of their concern for the Jews. But actually the administration moved with wooden legs. At a conference on refugees held in Bermuda in April, American and British delegations agreed on a few expedients and palliatives, but the conference was debarred from pledging funds, committing ships for the transportation of refugees, or promising changes in immigration laws. Reviewing the work of the conference in early May, the President agreed to share with Britain the cost of financing the movement of specific numbers of persons and he approved the setting up in North Africa of temporary depots. But he was emphatically against trying to change immigration laws, he questioned sending large numbers of Jews to North Africa, and he opposed any sweeping promises of relief.
This wariness of the President, rather than his moral indignation, set the pattern of administration policy over the next crucial months. It took the State Department weeks to deal with issues, even to answer letters. And every week lost meant thousands of Jews and others crossed off on Hitler’s ghastly calendar of death. In August 1943 the New York Times published an “extermination list” detailing, country by country, the 1,700,000 persons who had died from organized murder, the 746,000 who died from starvation or disease. The nation and the administration were shocked, but not into creative action. Roosevelt was helpful in meeting specific situations and spurring emergency rescue efforts, but he seemed unable to face the main problem—the millions of Jewish men, women, and children trapped in the Nazi heartland and headed for the gas chambers.
One reason was the sheer intractability of the problem. Helping to rescue even a few thousand Jews on the rim of the Mediterranean took endless negotiation among local Jewish leaders, the State and Treasury Departments and other United States agencies, neutral nations, relief organizations, and others involved, over money, transportation, relief, housing, Moslem hostility. Getting Congress to modify the immigation laws would probably have been as difficult as Roosevelt anticipated. The fact that so many of the imperiled people abroad and the exhorting leaders at home were Jews made Roosevelt nervous about the reactions of Congress and of some elements among the people. Nor could he, with his heavy military and diplomatic involvement in Moslem Africa, ignore the reverberations there.
But the main reason was Roosevelt’s war strategy. The only way to persuade Hitler to relinquish his grip on his victims was by bribing him or by negotiating with him, and Roosevelt flatly opposed this as violating the policy of unconditional surrender. The best way to assist the Jews and other helpless peoples, he believed, was by winning the war as quickly and decisively as possible. Alienating neutrals like Spain, diverting vital shipping from the main task of war supply, arousing false expectations and undue fears, above all, antagonizing Moslems in countries where fighting continued—all that was inconsistent with Roosevelt’s single-minded pursuit of military victory.
The same stern priority controlled Roosevelt’s approach to “Zion.” The President had long taken a cautious but benevolent view of the dream of Palestine as a Jewish homeland, though he felt that the little country was not physically suitable for resettling great numbers of Jews and he flirted with the notion of the Cameroons and later of Paraguay and still later of Portuguese West Africa—Angola—as other havens. By the end of 1942 he was again thinking about the possibilities of Palestine.
“What I think I will do,” he told Morgenthau, “is this. First, I would call Palestine a religious country. Then I would leave Jerusalem the way it is and have it run by the Orthodox Greek Catholic Church, the Protestants, and the Jews—have a joint committee run it.…I actually would put a barbed wire around Palestine.…I would provide land for the Arabs in some other part of the Middle East…. Each time we move out an Arab we would bring in another Jewish family….But I don’t want to bring in more than they can economically support…. Naturally, if there are 90 per cent Jews, the Jews would dominate the government….”
All such thoughts, however, Roosevelt subordinated to war needs, and one great war need of 1943 semed to be peace and stability in the Mid-East. Any time the President touched the issue—even by merely receiving Zionists—he triggered explosive reactions in Egypt or Syria or Saudi Arabia. During 1943 he took steps to get Jewish and Arab leaders to talk with one another, but the War Department was worried about Mid-East repercussions, and at Quebec the President and Churchill decided to postpone any further encouragement of talks between the parties. By fall of 1943 the President was leaning toward a new idea—a trusteeship for Palestine to make it into a real holy land for all three religions, with a Jew, a Christian, and a Moslem as the three trustees. Always confident of his power to persuade on a face-to-face basis, he thought that the ancient, searing enmities of the Middle East could be overcome by negotiation and balm. Meanwhile the Nazi extermination mills ground away.
CAIRO: THE GENERALISSIMO
Reporters had rarely seen the President as wroth as he seemed to be at his press conference of August 21, 1943. He had been asked if he would comment on reports that Stalin had suggested a tripartite conference. No—but he had something else to say, and on the record. A columnist had committed an act of bad faith toward his country; he had damaged the unity of the United Nations and hence the war effort. “I don’t hesitate to say that the whole statement from beginning to end was a lie, but there is nothing new in it, because the man is a chronic liar in his columns.”
The reporters knew whom and what he meant: Drew Pearson had just written in “Washington Merry-Go-Round” that Cordell Hull “long has been anti-Russian” and had asserted on his radio program that Hull and his chief assistants, “Adolf Berle, Jimmy Dunn, Breckinridge Long, would really like to see Russia bled white—and the Russians know it….” Hull had shown the statements to the President, had labeled them “monstrous and diabolical falsehoods,” and had summoned the Soviet Chargé d’Affaires, Andrei A. Gromyko, to his office to repudiate them.
Observers wondered why the administration had felt stung so hard by a seeming pinprick. Pearson was not the first to accuse the administration of trying to let the Russians take the blood bath. The reaction was due mainly to Pearson’s timing. By late August 1943, just after Quebec, the President had to confront the fact that his plan for a grand concert of antifascist powers was faltering. Although war supply to Russia had risen
sharply during 1943, it was attended by numberless grievances and misunderstandings on the Soviet side, and American officials in charge of the long supply lines grumbled that the Soviets were showing little public or private recognition of American efforts. Soviet newspapers kept up a chorus of criticism of their allies’ diplomatic and military progress. And neither Churchill nor Roosevelt had yet even met with Chiang Kai-shek.
April 19,1943, Martin, PM, reprinted by courtesy of Field Enterprises, Inc.
In the wake of Quebec, Stalin was clearly piqued by one more Roosevelt-Churchill conference deciding matters in his absence. The situation could not be tolerated any longer, he wrote to the President and the Prime Minister late in August. “To date it has been like this: the U.S.A. and Britain reach agreement between themselves while the U.S.S.R. is informed of the agreement between the two Powers as a third party looking passively on.” Stalin was referring to negotiations with Italy, but in general he felt shut out of Anglo-American discussions. His complaint was rather baffling, since he had refused to meet with Roosevelt and Churchill earlier. Perhaps at the moment he preferred having a grievance to having a meeting—he could complain that the Russians were taking the brunt of the fighting but were treated as only a half-ally.
Most ominous of all in the fall of 1943 were scattered indications that the Soviets might be seriously considering a go-it-alone strategy. The recall of Maisky and of Litvinov had been sinister reminders of the diplomatic prelude to the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Throughout 1943 there had been reports of peace feelers by Berlin and Moscow to each other—though on what terms and of how much seriousness were obscure. The Kremlin constantly worried that the Anglo-Americans might make a deal with a non-Hitler German government and leave Russia and Germany to a death struggle. Some Russians now seemed less concerned about the postponement of the cross-channel invasion. Alexander Korneichuk, a Foreign Vice-Commissar, said to Alexander Werth in Moscow: “Things are going so well on our front that it might even be better not to have the Second Front till next spring. If there were a Second Front right now, the Germans might allow Germany to be occupied by the Anglo-Americans. It would make us look pretty silly.…”
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