The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  “Well, I think this is a very happy conference today,” Roosevelt began. “Looking at the rows of you coming in, you have the same expression as the anonymous and silent people this side of the desk who came in just before you—all smiles!” He had little definite to report—only that the invasion was up to schedule, “and as the Prime Minister said, ‘That’s a mouthful.’ ”

  How was the President feeling? “Fine—I’m a little sleepy!”

  In the evening he led the nation in prayer. He prayed first for “our sons, pride of our Nation….Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again….” And he prayed also for the people at home, for stout hearts to wait out the long travail and to bear sorrows that might come. “Give us Faith in thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; faith in our united crusade….”

  CRUSADE IN FRANCE

  Enough things went wrong on D day to lend suspense to the occasion and drama to the retelling. The paratroopers were badly scattered; scores of gliders were shot down or lost their way; on Omaha Beach the invaders ran into unexpected enemy strength and were slaughtered in the water and on the beach; heavy seas slowed operations along all the beaches. But in fact the invasion was not in jeopardy. The long wait until the Germans had been weakened in the east, the stupendous build-up, the elaborate planning by Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were now paying off. Strategy was now dominating tactics. By the end of D day, with almost continuous thickets of ships disgorging war power along miles and miles of coast, the immediate issue was all but resolved.

  The Germans were not only overwhelmed; they also were deceived, outwitted, and caught flat-footed. Their radar had been so mercilessly shelled that only a handful of radar pieces were operating on the eve of D day, and most of them were foiled by devices that simulated a different landing. The weather that had worried Eisenhower seemed too rough to the enemy to permit amphibious operations. Rommel was not even near the front; he had left on June 5 to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. The Führer was so certain that the first landings were a feint that he delayed the dispatch of two Panzer divisions. But even if he had known the date of D day, he could not long have held off the Allies. He had inadequate sea power and air power to challenge the invaders on the Channel or over it. And in the face of massive Allied attacks on railroads, bridges, highways, and marshaling yards, he lacked enough maneuverability to deploy even the forces he had.

  The hurricane of fire could be slowed but not stopped. British troops assaulted Caen, which Montgomery now used as the pivot of a great wheeling movement by the Americans to the west. From eastern beaches Canadians moved inland to cut the highway from Caen to the west. The Germans held out tenaciously in the city, which became the center of a furious struggle for weeks. From Utah and Omaha beaches American forces pushed their way slowly south and west in the crucial effort to cut off the Cotentin Peninsula and seize the port of Cherbourg. Progress was agonizingly slow, for this was bocage country, where the thick hedges and ditches that enfolded the fields gave ideal protection to the Germans. But the troops inched ahead. Supporting them from the ocean was a continuous relay of ships, which unloaded half a million men in the first ten days. Then storms disrupted the supply lines, but on the Fourth of July Marshall passed on to his chief a report from Eisenhower that the millionth man had just been landed that morning. Slowly the Americans converged on Cherbourg, whose commander had received the usual Hitler order to stand and die, and, after a combined ground-sea attack, broke into the city. The port was found so blasted and mined that it could not be used for weeks. This delay made all the more urgent the two complete artificial harbors—the Mulberries—that were towed across the Channel in huge sections. One Mulberry was torn to pieces in the terrible gales, but the other was properly installed out from the beach and provided a roadstead to receive ocean-going vessels.

  All this Roosevelt watched with admiration; he could have no direct part in it. Neither could Churchill, but at least he could visit the beaches. He reported to Roosevelt on his “jolly day”: “…After doing much laborious duty we went and had a plug at the Hun from our destroyer, but although the range was 6000 yards he did not honour us with a reply….You used the word ‘stupendous’ in one of your early telegrams to me. I must admit that what I saw could only be described by that word….The marvellous efficiency of the transportation exceeds anything that has ever been known in war….We are working up to a battle which may well be a million a side….How I wish you were here!” The President could only reply that he wished he were, too, and that when he did get over he could land alongside the Quai of Cherbourg.

  Roosevelt faced the responsibilities of war if not the experience of it. Hard on the heels of OVERLORD—probably the most impressive combined operation ever conducted by allies—came one of the sharpest disagreements ever between Washington and London. The issue was ANVIL, the invasion of southern France. The Italian suction pump had already delayed ANVIL and robbed it of its original purpose of taking pressure off Eisenhower’s forces in the weeks after D day. Eisenhower still wanted ANVIL, in order to bring heavy strength from the Mediterranean up through the Rhone Valley to support his ultimate campaign for the Ruhr. The British flatly opposed shifting divisions from Italy to southern France at a time when Alexander had finally seized Rome and was driving north. Churchill cabled to Roosevelt late in June: “Let us resolve not to wreck one great campaign for the sake of another. Both can be won.”

  Roosevelt’s long reply bluntly answered the British and underscored his strategy for the West.

  “…I agree with you that our over-all strategic concept should be to engage the enemy on the largest scale with the greatest violence and continuity, but I am convinced it must be based on a main effort, together with closely coordinated supporting efforts directed at the heart of Germany.

  “The exploitation of ‘Overlord,’ our victorious advances in Italy, an early assault on Southern France, combined with the Soviet drives to the west—all as envisaged at Teheran—will most certainly serve to realize our object—the unconditional surrender of Germany….

  “I agree that the political considerations you mention are important factors, but military operations based thereon must be definitely secondary to the primary operations of striking at the heart of Germany….

  “Until we have exhausted the forces in the United States, or it is proved we cannot get them to Eisenhower when he wants them, I am opposed to the wasteful procedure of transferring forces from the Mediterranean to ‘Overlord.’ If we use shipping and port capacity to shift forces from one combat area (the Mediterranean) to another (‘Overlord’) it will certainly detract from the build-up of ‘Overlord’ direct from the United States, and the net result is just what we don’t want—fewer forces in combat areas.

  “My interest and hopes center on defeating the Germans in front of Eisenhower and driving on into Germany, rather than on limiting this action for the purpose of staging a full major effort in Italy. I am convinced we will have sufficient forces in Italy, with ‘Anvil’ forces withdrawn, to chase Kesselring north of Pisa-Rimini and maintain heavy pressure against his army at the very least to the extent necessary to contain his present force. I cannot conceive of the Germans paying the price of ten additional divisions, estimated by General Wilson, in order to keep us out of Northern Italy….

  “At Teheran we agreed upon a definite plan of attack. That plan has gone well so far. Nothing has occurred to require any change. Now that we are fully involved in our major blow history will never forgive us if we lost precious time and lives in indecision and debate. My dear friend, I beg you to let us go ahead with our plan.

  “Finally, for purely political considerations over here, I should never survive even a slight setback to ‘Overlord’ if
it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”

  The military disagreement between the two leaders reflected basic differences over grand political strategy. While denying any strategic interest in the Balkans, Churchill was clearly interested at the least in securing military positions on the Istrian Peninsula that could make possible a major advance against Vienna through the Ljubljana Gap. At the moment, he was less intent on a definite Balkan commitment than in broadening his strategic options, in part as a counter to Soviet power rumbling in from the east. More and more, Churchill had become concerned with postwar political implications. Roosevelt wanted to win the quickest possible military victory; he was worried also about Stalin’s reaction to the abandonment of ANVIL and about the political risk he ran at home if people came to feel that the troops and landing craft he had withheld from the Pacific had been used in Europe in a Balkan adventure.

  Even after this insistence on the original plan, Churchill appealed again to Roosevelt, and separately to Hopkins, who was now convalescing in his Georgetown home. The Americans remained adamant, partly because they had information from Eisenhower that in the final pinch the British would give in. Grumbling that His Majesty’s government would go ahead with the project only under solemn protest, Churchill finally agreed to ANVIL. He visited the Mediterranean at the time of the invasion and could not refrain from boarding a British destroyer to watch the assault troops boating in toward their landing in the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. Having “done the civil” to ANVIL, however, he did not change his mind about its strategic value, even after General Alexander M. Patch’s American and French divisions streamed ashore on August 15 over weak opposition and advanced so rapidly north, with the help of the French Resistance, that OVERLORD and ANVIL linked arms within a month of the southern landings. Years later the Prime Minister was still lamenting that the forces in Italy had been denied their chance to disable the Germans and very possibly reach Vienna before the Russians, “with all that might have followed therefrom.” Roosevelt and his planners felt that they were thoroughly vindicated by the military success of ANVIL—a success all the sweeter after the doubts of their British comrades.

  Just as the descent of his armies onto Africa in the fall of 1942 had confronted Roosevelt with the conflicts of the Mediterranean world, now his forced entry into France made the political problems of Europe more immediate and insistent. Most visible on the horizon was the towering problem of Charles de Gaulle.

  Roosevelt’s relations with de Gaulle and his Committee of National Liberation had hardly changed since the awkward encounter in Casablanca a year and a half before. Time and again the President insisted that he would not make commitments to the Gaullists that might jeopardize the freedom of the French people to decide their own political fate after their liberation. De Gaulle, certain that he embodied the independent will of the French people, was determined to establish such clear legitimacy before liberation that neither his foes in France nor his reluctant allies outside could gainsay him the role he wished to play. Sheer personal dislike still sharpened the relations between him and Roosevelt. Each viewed the other as a prima donna seeking personal power and the spotlight.

  De Gaulle’s icy rigidity was a force in itself; it produced a kind of glacial flow that ground down his adversaries even as they resisted. On the last day of 1943 Roosevelt complained to Churchill that “De Gaulle and his Committee have most decidedly moved forward by ‘the process of infiltration’—in other words, here a little, there a little.” Slowly the General rendered Roosevelt’s man Giraud impotent, first by excluding him from any real political power, then by edging him out of the committee, and finally by sacking him as Commander in Chief—all without creating a major clash with the President. Roosevelt had ways of showing his disapproval. When he turned over a destroyer escort to the French at the Washington Navy Yard, with many a fine reference to the Bonhomme Richard, French-American friendship, and all the rest, he pointedly gave it to the French Navy, with not a reference to de Gaulle, the National Committee, or even the French government. In the face of threats from Algiers to repudiate the Allies’ planned invasion currency for France, Roosevelt personally went over the scrip’s design. He objected to the words “République Française” on the proposed notes and wanted to print in the middle, in color, the French flag supported by the American and British flags on each side. Angrily de Gaulle accepted what he called “de la fausse monnaie.”

  Nothing, indeed, at this point so easily provoked Roosevelt as the issue of de Gaulle. When Eisenhower deferentially suggested that from his information from agents and escaped prisoners of war there seemed to be only two groups, Vichyites and Gaullists, Roosevelt told Marshall that Eisenhower “evidently believes the fool newspaper stories that I am anti-deGaulle, even the kind of story that says that I hate him, etc., etc. All this, of course, is utter nonsense. I am perfectly willing to have deGaulle made President, or Emperor, or King or anything else so long as the action comes in an untrammeled and unforced way from the French people themselves.” He cited an example, “which I happen to know about” of an old-time mayor in a little French town in occupied France who was doing a splendid job, but the committee already planned to replace him with an unsuccessful politician who was probably a porch-climbing robber.

  How did Eisenhower know that there were only two groups? Roosevelt went on. He had overlooked the biggest group of all—the people who didn’t know what it was all about.

  “It is awfully easy to be for deGaulle and to cheer the thought of recognizing that Committee as the provisional government of France, but I have a moral duty that transcends ‘an easy way.’ It is to see to it that the people of France have nothing foisted on them by outside powers. It must be a French choice—and that means, as far as possible, forty million people. Self-determination is not a word of expediency. It carries with it a very deep principle in human affairs.” Roosevelt also felt that de Gaulle was on the wane politically.

  So on the eve of the supreme adventure of liberating France the Allied relationship with the Free French ranged between acrimony and absurdity. Churchill, who had tried to mediate between Roosevelt and de Gaulle, had invited the Frenchman to be present in England for D day. The General arrived but was so prickly about his real and fancied grievances that a private conference between the two ended in a flat statement by Churchill that if there was a split between de Gaulle’s committee and Washington he would almost certainly side with the Americans, and a final remark by de Gaulle that he quite understood that.

  Still, with thousands of Anglo-Americans about to pour into France in a grand crusade, it was clear that relations must be patched up. Eisenhower kept insisting that something must be done to cope with the scores of civilian problems that would rise. Through the good offices of the British, de Gaulle and Roosevelt were persuaded to agree to a visit by the General to Washington. To be sure, Roosevelt did not want to take the initiative in inviting him, nor the General the humiliation of asking to be invited, but Downing Street called on all its diplomatic finesse to arrange a meeting with neither an invitation nor an acceptance.

  Externally de Gaulle’s trip to Washington was a great success. Guns boomed out a salute; the President, his family, and his Cabinet greeted him at the White House; Roosevelt addressed him in French. There followed a round of festivities and ceremonials, capped by a state dinner where Roosevelt not only toasted de Gaulle as “our friend” but lambasted the journalists in Algiers and Washington who made trouble between leaders. The climax of the meeting was Roosevelt’s decision to recognize the French Committee of National Liberation as the de facto authority in the civil administration of France.

  Privately the exchanges were less meaningful. De Gaulle felt that Roosevelt was condescending, even if graciously so, in his long monologues about a future peace based on trust and good will. And Roosevelt, who in his toast to de Gaulle had once again asserted that there were no problems that could not be settled by sitting around
the table, must have sensed that the General was impervious to genteel bribes or blarney.

  Yet the immediate issue was resolved, and just in time. After cutting and battering through the bocage country during July, the American First Army captured Saint-Lô. The new Third Army, under General Patton, then turned one corps into Brittany to mop up and another to move east in a huge wheeling operation linked with the First Army, under General Courtney H. Hodges. Repulsing do-or-die counterattacks ordered by Hitler, the Americans raced east and then turned north to link up with English and Canadian forces, trapping thousands of Germans. The road to Paris was now open. As the Nazis fled and the Resistance began taking over, de Gaulle’s troops made their ceremonial entrance into the tumultuous city, and soon the General himself marched down the boulevards before ecstatic throngs.

  “The joy that entered the hearts of all civilized men and women,” Roosevelt announced in Washington, “can only be measured by the gloom which settled there one June day four years ago when German troops occupied the French capital….”

  There was joyful news from the east as well. Shortly after D day, Stalin had cabled to Roosevelt that soon the Red Army would renew its offensive, and he hoped that this would be of substantial help to Allied operations in France and Italy. On June 23, the day after the third anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, over a million Red Army troops surged forward across a 450-mile front in Byelorussia. Within a week the Russians had broken through the enemy front in half a dozen places, trapped a huge number of Germans, and captured Minsk; during July the Red Army plunged on, with slowing momentum, destroying a score of German divisions, moving into Poland, and seizing Lublin and Brest-Litovsk.