The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Ideologies are shaped and hardened in the crucibles of fear and stress. Unlike the British and Russians, Americans as a whole had never had the experience or prospect of fighting for their lives and lands against a foreign invader. Most Americans, even in the darkest days after Pearl Harbor, had never feared a major invasion and certainly not defeat. They had differed only over the question of how long it would take to win, with most expecting victory over Germany within a year or two. But the cause of American optimism and lack of ideology lay much deeper—perhaps in what D. W. Brogan in mid-1944 described as the permanent optimism of “a people that has licked a more formidable enemy than Germany or Japan, primitive North America.”

  A country has the kind of army its total ethos, institutions, habits, and resources make possible, Brogan wrote. The American Army was the army of a nation whose motto was “Root, hog, or die,” of a country that, just as it slowly piled up great economic power as a special kind of corner, piled up military power for a final decisive blow; of a mechanized country of colossal resources and enterprises. “Other countries, less fortunate in position and resources, more burdened with feudal and gentlemanly traditions, richer in national reverence and discipline, can and must wage war in a very different spirit.” But Americans were interested not in form but in manpower, resources, logistics; not in moral victories, but in victory.

  “Manpower, resources, logistics…” The admirals and generals passed through the gates to the White House grounds in their limousines and command cars and strode into Leahy’s quarters or into the map room or into the oval office. The military police, walking their hundred-foot beats in their white leggings, belts, and gloves, marched to and from the military installation nearest to the White House, a barracks behind the State Department built in the shadow of the Peace Monument put up after World War I. WAVES, quartered on the Mall, hung up their underthings to dry a stone’s throw from the Washington Monument. Encampments stretched alongside the Navy Yard, the Pentagon, the airport. The military dead slept at Arlington.

  Unending caravans passed through the city, following occult unit designations posted along the streets. Along the highways and railways north and south of the capital sprawled vast embarkation areas, airfields, dumps, hospitals, depots, encampments, war plants, ports, proving grounds. At the ports of embarkation armies of men and mountains of equipment, clothing, weapons, ammunition were gathered, divided, allocated, paired, and dispatched on aged merchantmen, on Liberty and Victory ships, on converted liners like the Queen Mary that could carry a whole division. Overseas, men and munitions were sluiced into more camps and dumps, redistributed, assigned, loaded, shipped to the fronts: artillerymen, engineers, medical corpsmen, storekeepers, cooks, torpedomen, tail gunners, clerks, aircraft spotters, chaplains.

  Near the front the manpower and supply routes branched off into corps and division headquarters and dumps, forked off to regiments, twisted along stream beds and jeep roads and mule paths to companies and platoons and squads. At the end of the long road bulging with war supply from the overflowing war plants of America was a thin, irregular line of soldiers with stubby faces, in shapeless fatigues, hardly distinguishable from the earth in which they lived and to which they clung. This was the seemingly fragile shield that held and advanced with tensile force. That force lay not in these few expendables, but in the colossal technology that lay behind the front.

  American soldiers were workmen. They did not advance as in a pageant or charge the enemy in splendid array. Occasionally men fought with bayonets and pistols in Hollywood fashion, but for the most part soldiers wormed ahead on their bellies, came up against strong points, manhandled their light weapons into place, poured in fire and explosives; moved on; or if the strong point held, they called up reinforcements, asked for bigger tools, waited, summoned artillery, heavy mortars, planes, directed the holocaust of fire, waited….This was the “cutting edge” of war, glorified by combat reporters, but the Army really moved on the ocean supply routes and the endless lines of trucks clogging the highways.

  Behind the front there rose a whole new culture, symbolized more by the quartermaster than the combat soldier. The GI had his own myths and credo, his own humor, his own blasphemy and invective invariably and irrelevantly garnished by one fuckin’ expletive, his own press—Yank and Stars and Stripes and countless unit publications—his own food, clothing, laundries, postal system, schools, recreation, paperbacks, shops, doctors, libraries. Like the soldier himself, all these were Government Issue.

  There was no deep gulf between soldiers and civilians, in part because they shared the same ideology or lack of it. The area of consensus among Americans both in and out of the armed forces, investigators found, lay simply in the belief that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor meant war. Now they had to win the war to get back to home and blueberry pie. Like the civilians, the soldiers remembered little about the Four Freedoms, had no doubt that their side would win, felt little sense of personal commitment even while, in the soldiers’ case, sacrificing years of their lives and sometimes life itself. There was considerable distrust of Russia and some distrust of Britain. The soldiers lacked a consistent rationale by which to justify the war; they lacked a context; the war had no connection with anything that had gone before, except Axis aggression, or would come after it. It had to be fought, to be gotten over quickly so that men could go home.

  The Commander in Chief was neither loved nor hated by most soldiers, but simply taken for granted as the top man in charge. He was the only President the younger men had known since the dawn of their political consciousness. A little of the old cynicism remained. Occasionally a vexed soldier would burst out to no one in particular: “Ah hate wah. Eleanor hates wah. Sistie hates wah….” But this was exasperation, not isolationism. By and large there was not much interest in the upcoming national elections. The average GI did not feel that his Commander in Chief would be tested at the polls in November. Ernie Pyle reported from Italy that, sure, the average combat soldier wanted to vote, but if there was going to be any red tape he would say nuts to it.

  Washington was aware of the problem. The Army searched for Tolstoy’s quantity X, “the spirit of the army, the greater or less desire to fight and to face dangers….” Colonel Frank Capra directed a series of films called “Why We Fight,” based mainly on Allied and captured enemy newsreels. The films were eloquent, professional, relatively factual; they were required to be shown to all personnel; they provided men with a better knowledge of the prelude to war; they were found to have influenced specific opinions. But they had virtually no effect on general opinions, on commitment and conviction, on ideology. The GI had not ideology, but faith—faith in the Tightness of his cause, the iniquity of the enemy, the certainty of victory. He was persuaded mainly by the fact of war, just as the people had been after Pearl Harbor—and just as Roosevelt helped them to be. The GI was a realist, a workman, a practical achiever, just as, in large measure, his Commander in Chief was.

  Thus the GI lived and worked and fought and sometimes died in the culture of war. Cutting across it, both at home and abroad, was a curious subculture—scattered enclaves of black soldiers. The Army in 1944 was still segregated; the Navy was lily-white, except for messmen and a few others. Some Negro army outfits had white officers, some had black. Despite their resentment of segregation, Negroes had developed some pride in black combat air and ground units, only to become more indignant than ever in early 1944 when black combat-infantry troops—some of them from famous old Negro outfits—were used for labor service and black pilots were accused of poor combat performance. The Negro press protested; Representative Fish appealed to Stimson; William Hastie, who had resigned as civilian aide on Negro affairs because of despair over the continuing misuse of black troops, wrote to Stimson that the Secretary had been misled by his own subordinates as to the conversion of Negro combat units into service units.

  The White House rarely intervened in the services’ handling of Negro matters, but Elean
or Roosevelt passed along complaints, and the known concern of both the President and the First Lady was a brooding presence in Pentagon decisions. Annoyed by both the racists and the Negro “extremists,” Stimson believed that “we are suffering from the persistent legacy of the original crime of slavery”; he wanted equal opportunity for both races but not social intermixture. “We have got to use the colored race to help us in this fight and we have got to officer it with white men,” he wrote in his diary. “…better to do that than to have them massacred under incompetent officers.” For Stimson the issue was how best to win the war; but he would not face the question of the potential effectiveness of integrated units. Nor would Roosevelt.

  “This war is an ideological war fought in defense of democracy,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma, which appeared in 1944. “In fighting fascism and nazism, America had to stand before the whole world in favor of racial toleration and cooperation and of racial equality.”

  Roosevelt’s position was a mixture of concern, realism, and resignation. When the Negro publishers in their February meeting with him chided him on the treatment of black soldiers, the President answered:

  “It is perfectly true, there is definite discrimination in the actual treatment of the colored engineer troops, and others. And you are up against it, as you know perfectly well. I have talked about it—I had the Secretary of War and the Assistant—everybody in on it. The trouble lies fundamentally in the attitude of certain white people—officers down the line who haven’t got much more education, many of them, than the colored troops and the Seabees and the engineers, for example. And well, you know the kind of person it is. We all do. We don’t have to do more than think of a great many people that we know. And it has become not a question of orders—they are repeated fairly often, I think, in all the camps of colored troops—it’s a question of the personality of the individual.

  “And we are up against it, absolutely up against it….”

  SIXTEEN The Fateful Lightning

  BY JUNE 4 ALL seemed ready for OVERLORD. Landing ships built on Lake Michigan and floated down the Illinois River and the Mississippi were packed beam to beam in the ports of southern England. Long ugly LST’s constructed in California, their front ends gaping wide like hungry alligators, devoured tanks, trucks, bulldozers. Along pleasant English lanes, under blooming English elms, stood strange amphibious vessels, track to track; barrel-shaped metal containers of ammunition; stacks of bombs; enormous reels of cable; tires, wheels, wooden cases stacked twenty feet high. Rows of Mustang fighters, newly shorn of their protective grease, stood wing to wing on small fields behind the coast. Hundreds of new locomotives and thousands of freight and tanker cars lined the green valleys, waiting to be used in France.

  In the dusk mile-long convoys moved down the English roads and disgorged men onto the quays. Soldiers in assault jackets bent under their loads: rifle, life preserver, gas mask, five grenades, a half-pound block of TNT with primacord fuse; and K rations and C rations stuffed into their packs and jackets. The men slowly filed onto the transports and took their positions near their assault craft. The first to land would be the section leader and five riflemen with M-1’s; then a wire-cutting team of four men, also with rifles; followed by four search-nose cutters, two Browning automatic rifle teams of two men each, carrying nine hundred pounds per gun; two bazooka teams of two men each; four sixty-millimeter mortarmen with fifteen to twenty rounds; a flame-thrower crew of two men; five demolition men with pole and pack charges of TNT; a medic and the assistant section leader.

  The great attack, which had hung in the balance so many times as Roosevelt and Churchill forsook it for Africa, as American admirals drained sea power and landing craft into the Pacific, as Italy insistently sucked in troops, was now itemized and “finalized” and blueprinted on thousands of battle orders, landing schedules, and beach plans. For fifty miles along the Bay of the Seine stretching westward to the Cotentin Peninsula sections of beaches were marked off and code-named—Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah. A million and a half Americans, another million British and Canadians, tens of thousands of Norwegians, Danish, French, Belgian, Czech, Polish, and other troops, waited on their landing craft in sealed-off sectors across the south of England, and in supporting areas behind. Nine hundred warships, ranging from PT boats to twenty-six battleships and heavy cruisers, 229 LST’s and 3,372 landing craft, and 163 air bases would mount and support the onslaught; 124,000 hospital beds were ready.

  The top command post of this massed and balanced power lay in a hazel coppice a few miles north of Portsmouth dockyard, in a nondescript trailer remarkable only for a red telephone for scrambled calls to Washington and a green one for a direct line to 10 Downing Street. This was Eisenhower’s headquarters. A mile away was Southwick House, an old country mansion where formal conferences took place; nearby was the caravan of General Montgomery, ground commander of the assault phase. General Omar Bradley’s assault headquarters was established near Bristol.

  On the far shores waited the Germans. They had long expected an attack across the Channel in the spring of 1944—just when and where they were not sure. Most of the Wehrmacht tactitians anticipated an onslaught between the Seine and the Scheldt; in a flash of intuition Hitler at one point predicted the Cotentin Peninsula as a likely target, but his intuition later flicked up other possibilities. The Führer and his generals had long argued over defense strategy. Demanding “fanatical energy,” Hitler had ordered the Atlantic Wall—almost a coastal Maginot Line—to be armed and concreted in order to prevent the invader from gaining a beachhead. He directed his western Commander in Chief, Gerd von Runstedt, to throw the enemy back into the sea by a quick and massive counterattack. Runstedt preferred to rely on the proved tactics of rapid maneuver behind the front, with mobile infantry and powerful armored units deployed to overwhelm the enemy beachheads. Sensing Runstedt’s doubts, Hitler had assigned Rommel to the Western Front, with special responsibilities for coastal defense. The old commander of the Afrika Korps would have liked a mobile defense in depth as well, but knowing the air power of the Allies and the poor quality of his troops, many of whom were either young and undertrained or battle weary from service in Russia, he concentrated on beach defenses. By June the Channel beaches were peppered with half a million steel piles, wooden stakes armed with mines, interlocked iron bars, and “Belgian gates,” huge slanting gates braced by girders, all connected with barbed wire.

  The enemy assault must be liquidated within a few hours, Hitler demanded. This would prevent the re-election of Roosevelt, who, “with luck, would finish up somewhere in jail.” Churchill, too, would be finished, and the Allies would never dare launch another invasion of France.

  Only the weather was not ready. When Eisenhower met with his commanders early Sunday morning, June 4, forecasters warned of high winds and heavy cloud. Montgomery was ready to go ahead, but when the others demurred, Eisenhower ordered the operation postponed, even though some ships had to be called back. The prospects improved by evening. For a day or two the weather would be tolerable, though by no means ideal; then it would close in again. The airmen were dubious; Montgomery again said, “Go!” For long minutes Eisenhower agonized. Postponement would bring grave risks, too. How long, he wondered, could he leave the operation hanging on the end of a limb. “I’m quite positive we must give the order.…I don’t like it but there it is….” Then, “O.K. We’ll go.”

  These words loosed the most formidable amphibious assault the world had ever known. After rendezvousing in a great circle south of the Isle of Wight, warships and transports, landing ships and smaller craft moved in orderly never-ending streams toward the south. Flanking the Utah-bound column was the graceful Augusta, with General Bradley in the skipper’s cabin occupied by Roosevelt at Argentia. Barrage balloons lofted above the ships on cables guarded the LCI’s against enemy air attack. Paratroopers, their faces blackened, sat shoulder to shoulder hugging their parachutes in the transport planes above the Channel.
The roar of bombers going out, Edward R. Murrow broadcast from London, was so powerful and triumphant he imagined he heard the strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  Soon after midnight the paratroopers were floating down in the dark over the low, flat pastures of the Cotentin Peninsula; assault waves were milling around in the launching area and moving toward Utah, Omaha, and the “British” beaches to the east. Warships poured shells and rockets onto beach targets. Boats roared toward the shore; tanks churned through heavy seas, some of them foundering; men waded for hundreds of yards toward the beaches. Some drowned; some were shot down and died in little paroxysms of red foam; some cowered behind obstacles at the water line; some were annihilated as they tried to sprint up the beach. But most made it and dug in under the heavy protection of low bluffs or sea walls, and many of these pressed on.

  Roosevelt had spent the weekend with a small entourage at Pa Watson’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia. Watching him, Miss Tully felt that every movement of his face and hands betrayed his tenseness. During the weekend he had perused his Book of Common Prayer for a D-day invocation. He returned to the White House Monday morning and that evening went on the air not to pray for the invaders but to salute the fall of Rome, the symbol of Christianity, of authority, and now of Allied victory. He dwelt at length on the degrading effects of fascism as compared to the greatness of the Italian people in both Italy and the United States. But his mind was on the military significance. “One up and two to go!”

  And now D day was crowding hard on the event. Even while marking the fall of Rome, Roosevelt had known that ships and troops were streaming across the Channel. He stayed in touch with the Pentagon during the night. At four in the morning the White House operator began waking up staff members with the news. First reports were fragmentary and bewildering, but by the time of his regular press conference in the morning the President was relaxed and even gay. As the correspondents—almost two hundred strong—crowded in, he was joshing with his aides, and Fala was wriggling on his back on the couch.