The Definitive FDR

by James Macgregor Burns

  Once again Roosevelt faced the problem of Poland, but now more urgently than ever. Polish-American editors and politicians in New York and Detroit and other cities were threatening to turn their constituents against Roosevelt in the fall if he failed anti-Communist Poles in their hour of need. Early in June the President held discussions in Washington with Prime Minister Stanislaus Mikolajczyk of the Polish government in London. At a state dinner for the Prime Minister he talked about the problem of borders; he had been looking over sixteen maps that morning, the President said, and they showed that in the last three centuries Poland had included most of Russia and a good part of Germany and Czechoslovakia. “Therefore,” he went on, “it is rather difficult to untangle the map of Poland.” So he and the Prime Minister had been talking about broader matters, “getting away from the mere questions of whether this town will be on this side of the line or that side of the line.”

  Roosevelt then sounded Stalin out on seeing Mikolajczyk in Moscow, but the Marshal was cool. A few weeks later Stalin informed Churchill and the President that since the Polish organization in London had turned out to be “ephemeral” and impotent, he was recognizing the new Polish Committee of National Liberation recently formed by Warsaw Poles. He was willing to see Mikolajczyk, but only if he approached him through the National Committee.

  Not only did the President fear Stalin’s design for Poland and the political reaction in the United States, but also he and Hull were apprehensive that Europe was already veering toward the sphere-of-interest and balance-of-power doctrines that Hull in particular felt had had such iniquitous consequences. The problem was emerging in Poland and, most dramatically, in that classic sphere of interest the Balkans. Halifax had questioned Hull at the end of May on the proposition that London and Moscow reach an agreement that Russia would have a controlling interest in Rumania and the British in Greece. The Secretary responded with a lecture on proper principles of international relations. At the same time Churchill put the matter to Roosevelt as a temporary arrangement.

  The President replied that he understood the immediate military necessity but feared that the natural tendency for such decisions to extend to other than military fields would be strengthened by Churchill’s action and would result in the division of the Balkans into persisting spheres of influence. Churchill answered that it would be best to follow the Soviet lead in Rumania, considering that neither he nor Roosevelt had any troops there anyway, and that Greece was Britain’s old ally. The President reluctantly agreed to a trial of three months, “making it clear that we are not establishing any post-war spheres of interest.”

  At this time the public relations between Roosevelt and Stalin were at their most cordial. In the spring Russian soldiers and civilians had been grumbling that a second front now would be too easy and too late, but Stalin in his May Day 1944 order gave full credit to Allied operations in Italy and the bombing of Europe. Only a combined blow could smash Hitlerism, he warned. After waiting prudently for a week following D day, the Marshal acknowledged the “brilliant success” of the Allies, adding that “the history of war does not know of an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution.”

  Privately, attitudes were somewhat different. On the eve of the Allied landing in Normandy, Stalin had received Milovan Djilas, from Tito’s headquarters. Urging the Yugoslavs not to frighten London with their Communism, he went on: “Perhaps you think that just because we are the allies of the English that we have forgotten who they are and who Churchill is….

  “Churchill is the kind who, if you don’t watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket. Yes, a kopeck out of your pocket! By God, a kopeck out of your pocket! And Roosevelt? Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins….”

  PACIFIC THUNDERBOLTS

  Strategy in Europe called for mass, focus, unity of purpose, singleness of command. Strategy in the Pacific was prone to dispersion, opportunism, shifting purposes, competing arms and commands. If as an administrator Roosevelt had long tended to parcel out authority among several subordinates and let them compete with one another, he was now surpassing himself in the Pacific and the Far East. In the great arc stretching ten thousand miles from northeast of Japan to the southwest, Nimitz commanded the northern and central Pacific, MacArthur the Southwest Pacific, and Stilwell and Chennault in the China-Burma-India theater, and each of these pursued his own tactics and relied on his own special combination of services and arms.

  The immediate issue lay between Nimitz and MacArthur. As Nimitz’s amphibious troops speared into the Gilberts and Kwajalein and Eniwetok, and as his task forces ranged farther and farther west with impunity, the Admiral became more confident of his power to promenade directly across the Pacific to the Marianas, Formosa, and the China coast. Not only would he bypass small island bastions such as Truk, but he saw no reason that troops should run the risk of bogging down in great land masses such as the Philippines. With his carriers achieving greater range, with a growing fleet of supply ships that could provision the Navy at sea, with B-29’s building that could fly immense distances, he proposed to leap along a small number of steppingstones on the shortest route to Japan.

  MacArthur had rolled the Japanese back over a thousand miles from their farthest penetration; he had routed them on small islands and big ones alike. Above all, he had a promise to redeem—the return to the Philippines. He looked on the Navy plans with a cold eye. A direct attack across the Pacific, he told the Joint Chiefs, would degenerate into a spate of separate sea-borne attacks against positions defended in great depth. Carrier-based aviation could not overcome enemy planes swarming out from big land bases. An attack from his theater, on the other hand, “departs from the base that is closest to the objectives and advances against the most lightly organized portion of the enemy’s defenses, effecting a decisive penetration. It is the only plan that permits an effective combination of land, sea, and air power.” Heavily defended areas could be bypassed and allowed to fall of their own weight.

  Doubtful that the Joint Chiefs would support him, MacArthur proposed that he come to Washington so that he could confront the Pentagon and appeal to the President. For months Roosevelt had held off making the strategic decision; he had not even mediated between the Army and the Navy. The argument and the tentative plans swung back and forth as events blocked certain lines of strategy and unfolded others. Pacific strategy was less the controller of events than the product of them.

  And of the enemy. The Japanese Navy had been following a cautious policy for almost two years, mainly because its carrier groups had been smashed at Midway and replacements eroded away in later encounters, especially in the Rabaul area. But Imperial Headquarters had not lost its will to fight. It was still hoping for the one big naval battle that would decide mastery of the central Pacific. The critical occasion would come when the Americans tried to penetrate the key defense perimeter running from the Mariana Islands through the Palaus and the Vogelkop to Timor. The most opportune situation would be to catch the American Navy when it was conducting an amphibious landing and was tied down to the committed troops.

  This decision of the Japanese precipitated one of the great naval battles of the war, for it was precisely the Marianas on which the eyes of King and Nimitz were fixed. The major islands—Guam, Tinian, and Saipan—at the foot of the 425-mile chain were big enough to serve as advance naval and air bases in penetrating the western Pacific. They were 1,600 miles from Tokyo, near enough for the huge B-29’s to make a round trip to the enemy homeland with several tons of bombs. And Guam, lost to the Japanese in the dark hours after Pearl Harbor, lay waiting to be liberated. Recognizing the attractiveness of the Marianas to the foe, Imperial Headquarters during early 1944 ordered about 45,000 troops into the islands. Even though American submarines picked off a dozen or more transports and freighters headed for Saipan, drowning about 3,600 troops and sinking the arms and equipment of another 4,000 or 5,000, the
Marianas—especially Saipan, with 30,000 troops—were heavily defended by June 1944.

  Early that month, while a great invasion force was storming Normandy beaches, another big amphibious force, of over five hundred warships and beaching craft and 125,000 troops, two-thirds of them Marines, was converging on Saipan from bases several thousand miles away. Early on the cool, bright morning of June 15, following heavy but ineffective bombardment by a dozen battleships and heavy cruisers standing six miles out to sea, am-tracs packed with Marines churned from the landing ships, clambered over the barrier reefs, and ground up the beaches into the scrubby trees beyond. Despite heavy enfilading fire and much confusion, the Marines were well inland by nightfall, but Japanese counterattacks on D day and the next day were so effective that rosy hopes of capturing Saipan in a few days were soon dashed.

  The main counterattack was now forming far out to sea. Admiral Toyoda, from his flagship in the Inland Sea, commanded the Combined Fleet to attack the enemy in the Marianas area and annihilate the invasion force. The Emperor himself warned his soldiers and sailors that “if Saipan is lost, air raids on Tokyo will take place, therefore you absolutely must hold Saipan.” Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa commanded nine carriers, five battleships, thirteen cruisers, twenty-eight destroyers, 430 carrier-based aircraft; Admiral Spruance could muster a fleet almost twice as big. On the morning of June 18, exploiting his planes’ greater range, Ozawa dispatched wave after wave of bombers and fighters from his carriers against Spruance’s battle formations, which were as tightly organized as a Wild West caravan defense, with carriers in the middle protected by a ring of interspersed battleships, cruisers, and destroyers.

  Then came the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” Ozawa’s planes ran into a curtain of fire from the big ships and their protecting Hellcats. Picket destroyers miles away could see Zeroes “falling like plums.” The American planes had heavier armor, more firepower, better-trained pilots. Only one of the American surface vessels was even damaged. Ozawa had depended heavily on shore-based aircraft from Guam, but the tables were turned when Spruance sent Helldivers and Avengers over the island and not only smashed planes on the field but also pockmarked it so deeply that Japanese carrier-based aircraft that survived the dogfights crashed on trying to land there. On this day and the next Ozawa lost three carriers, including his own flagship, to American planes and submarines. By the time he took refuge at Okinawa, about four hundred of his carriers’ planes had gone down.

  Freed from the threat of counterattack, the Marines, now joined by army troops, proceeded with the tedious, bloody advance across Saipan. The days of quick conquests were over; the Japanese were dug into jungles and ridges and were flushed out at a heavy price—a bitter foretaste of battles to come. After three weeks the Japanese, pressed into the northern reaches of the island, were still able to mount a desperate banzai attack that overnight killed or wounded almost 1,000 men in a single army regiment. But this was a last spasm; by July 9 Saipan was “secured.” Over 14,000 Marines had been killed or wounded.

  Within two weeks Marines and soldiers invaded Guam, which fell after more hard combat, and Marines captured Tinian. The Battle of the Marianas was over; already Seabees and army engineers were clearing great tracts of jungle and cane field for runways that soon would be lofting B-29’s toward Japan. Far to the southwest MacArthur had captured Biak and was assaulting Noemfoor, islands off the northern reaches of New Guinea that could serve as steppingstones to the Philippines.

  The capture of Saipan would be of the highest importance to future offensives against Japan, Roosevelt cabled to Churchill during the operation. If he regretted that he could not have been with the Prime Minister on his visit to Normandy, the President was consoled by the thought that in a few weeks he would get close to his own war in the Pacific. On July 20, while the national Democratic convention was concluding its proceedings in Chicago, the Commander in Chief, from a high bluff, was watching 10,000 amphibious troops conduct a landing exercise at the huge Navy and Marine Corps base at San Diego.

  The next evening Roosevelt and his party—Leahy, McIntire, Rosenman, and aides—boarded the heavy cruiser Baltimore, destination Honolulu. Guarded by air patrols and six destroyers, the grim, stripped-down cruiser traveled under wartime conditions, no lights showing. The President read and slept a good deal. The only casualty on the trip was Fala’s dignity as a result of the crew’s fattening him with tidbits and snipping locks from his hair to send home as souvenirs.

  Rows of ships with men standing smartly at attention in their whites greeted the Commander in Chief in Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and a brace of naval and military officers clambered up the gangplank to welcome the President; only MacArthur was missing. After an uneasy delay the President and his party were about to disembark when an automobile siren wailed, a huge open car rolled onto the dock, circled, and drew up at the gangplank—and out stepped MacArthur, in leather windbreaker, creased suntans, and jaunty gold-braided cap. Suddenly summoned from Australia for a military conference with the President—his first meeting with the Commander in Chief in seven years—he had arrived with only one aide and with no reports, plans, maps, or charts, but with a determination to appeal to the highest authority for his plan to redeem the Philippines. The Marianas campaign had not settled Pacific strategy but only sharpened the old dispute.

  In a cream stucco mansion overlooking Waikiki’s rolling surf Nimitz and MacArthur argued their differences in front of Roosevelt and Leahy. Those differences were sharp but not profound. Tracing distances on a huge chart with a long bamboo pointer, Nimitz once again proposed bypassing the Philippines and moving direct to the attack on Formosa, and MacArthur once again urged the liberation of the Philippines and the bypassing of Formosa. But Navy strategists saw dire problems in assaulting Formosa without securing the Philippine flank, and army planners recognized that it was not a matter of either taking the Philippines or bypassing them, but of which islands in the archipelago to take, in what sequence, on what dates, and with what forces.

  In such a situation Roosevelt was at his best, skillfully placating both the Admiral and the General, steering the discussion away from absolutes, narrowing the differences. MacArthur was at his most persuasive with Roosevelt when he took the stand that America had a moral responsibility to redeem its promises to liberate the Filipinos and to free imprisoned Americans. He claimed later that he also told the President—in a private session—that if their Filipino “wards” were left to languish in their agony, “I dare say that the American people would be so aroused that they would register most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall,” but that the President had already made his decision, stating: “We will not bypass the Philippines. Carry on your existing plans. And may God protect you.”

  Roosevelt asked MacArthur to stay on to take a ride with him around the island. With Leahy and Nimitz they drove in an open car through streets lined with saluting servicemen and cheering Hawaiians, while Rosenman and Secret Service men worried about a well-placed bomb. The Commander in Chief reviewed the Army’s famous 7th Infantry Division, saw wounded men unloaded from an ambulance plane that had just flown in to Hickam Field from the Marianas, watched a combat team make a simulated attack on a house, and kept remarking on the transformation of Oahu since his visit ten years before, when he witnessed an exercise in which, as he recalled, seven of the twelve World War I tanks broke down, and half the trucks.

  At a naval hospital Roosevelt asked to be wheeled through wards occupied by men who had lost arms and legs. He wanted to display himself and his useless legs to these boys who would have to face the same bitterness as he had for twenty-three years, Rosenman wrote later.

  After three strenuous days on Oahu the President and his original military party reboarded the Baltimore and headed almost due north to Adak. For five days the cruiser plowed north in steadily worsening weather. Cables from Washington and the fighting fronts followed, with reports of heavy fighting and steady progress in France an
d Italy. And with some grievous news, too—that President Manuel Quezon was dead, a few months short of the planned liberation of his country; that Missy LeHand had finally died after her long illness; that Joseph Kennedy’s oldest son, Joe Jr., had been killed in an air attack on German submarine pens.

  In Adak the President found intense activity at a nearly completed advance base. He talked to officers and men at the naval air station. “Gentlemen, I like your food. I like your climate.” Much laughter. “You don’t realize the thousands upon thousands of people who would give anything in this world to swap places with you.” Incredulity. It was standing operating procedure in the Aleutians to call the theater the worst iced-over hellhole a man could be stationed in. But here was the Commander in Chief dwelling at length on Alaska as a new frontier for settlement by ex-servicemen after the war. The Alaskan coast, he went on to say, reminded him of the waters off Maine and Newfoundland he had known as a boy. The weather was familiar, too—continuing wind and rain and fog along the Alaskan coast and all the way back to Bremerton.

  For the trip back, the President and his party, including Fala, changed to a destroyer, but their weather luck did not change. It was so foul that on the train crossing the country on the way back to Washington Roosevelt dictated a long complaint entitled “Mary Had a Little Lamb—1944 Version,” which blamed the Navy for the “low” that had encouraged Admiral McIntire, the President said, to use a new word with almost every sentence.

  ROOSEVELT AS COMMANDER IN CHIEF

  To observe the superb co-ordination of arms and of units in mock combat, to cause the face of a wounded soldier to light up with surprise and pleasure, to lie in his bunk in the skipper’s cabin and feel the engines of the great cruiser strain and pound underneath him, to find Pearl Harbor immensely expanded, with ships and docks back in service, to explore with Nimitz and MacArthur the imposing alternatives in the Pacific—never had Roosevelt assumed the role of Commander in Chief more intensely than in his days in the Pacific. He had not invited Marshall or King or Arnold to take part in the Honolulu conferences; this time the President wanted to deal with his theater commanders alone, except for Leahy. He would be tested in the fall as chief executive and chief politician; he also wanted—indeed, he preferred—to be tested as Commander in Chief.