Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Marshall, placed on the spot, had “replied that there would of course be losses but that there were no narrow straits on our lines of communication” like Gibraltar—both in terms of reinforcement or evacuation—“and we could operate with fighter protection from the United Kingdom.”7

  The President could only rub his eyes. No mention of the two hundred miles that Allied fighters would have to fly before they, like the assault ships, even reached the heavily defended invasion points, nor the proximity of twenty-five all-German infantry and armored divisions already stationed in western France, waiting and in constant training to repel an assault on its Atlantic coast, as they had done at Dieppe. No mention of the ease with which Germans could reinforce their Wehrmacht troops there, using short lines of communication from the Reich—and further armored forces they could quickly commit to battle. No mention, either, of the Luftwaffe’s ability to use French airfields to attack the invading forces. Above all, no mention of the Canadian catastrophe at Dieppe the previous August, only four months ago. Merely a heartless disdain for the U.S. casualties that would be suffered, in comparison with landing craft—and a deeply, deeply questionable assumption that the invasion would, as Marshall had assured Stimson that morning, be at such “terrible cost to Germany as to cripple her resistance for the following year.”

  Marshall’s presentation of the strategy he recommended the United States should best adopt, as chief of staff of the U.S. Army, was thus lamentable—as even Marshall himself seemed aware, once forced to defend his position.

  The President, however, was a model of tact—unwilling to humble Marshall before his fellow chiefs. How, exactly, he then questioned Marshall, was such a landing at Brest to be actually mounted by U.S. forces—and how did Marshall expect the Germans to respond?

  Marshall twisted in the wind. “The President had questioned the practicability of a landing on the Brest Peninsula,” General Deane noted in the minutes of the meeting; “General Marshall replied that he thought the landing could be effected but the difficulties would come later in fighting off attacks from German armored units”—though “U.S. airplanes, flown from the United States, could give the troops help.”8

  Again, the President was amazed. U.S. air power such as U.S. Army Air Forces were giving U.S. and British ground forces in Tunisia, in the battles of Medjez-el-Bab and Longstop Hill—where American casualties were reported as heavy, and the Allies were just beginning to learn how tough it was to defeat the Germans in battle? Tellingly, the President therefore “asked why,” if Marshall thought a cross-Channel invasion was the best course, “the British opposed the Brest Peninsula operation?”9

  Embarrassed, Marshall had to concede “he thought they feared that the German strength would make such an operation impracticable.”10

  To Admiral Leahy’s equally direct question as to when Marshall thought such a U.S. invasion of the Brest Peninsula could be “undertaken,” Marshall had responded: “some time in August.”11

  August 1943.

  It was clear to both President Roosevelt and Admiral Leahy that General Marshall had not done his homework. Above all, the Army chief of staff had no practical idea how a U.S. cross-Channel assault could possibly succeed that very year—in six months’ time.

  American armed forces currently had only eight weeks’ battlefield experience—and most of this fighting ill-armed Vichy French forces, not German troops. How, then, were they to miraculously produce by August of that year the commanders and warriors capable of mounting a successful contested Allied landing in German-occupied Brittany, so close to the German Reich, and then hold out against—let alone defeat—Hitler’s concentration of dozens of German infantry and panzer divisions stationed in northern France? And was Marshall really contemplating—as he’d said to Stimson that morning—the possible, even likely, defeat of U.S. armies on the field of battle, and a Dunkirk-like evacuation from Brest? How would the public at home in America—who in any case favored winning the war against Japan over the difficulties of war in Europe—react to that?

  The President had not been impressed. Choosing, by contrast, to back further operations in the Mediterranean, where the Allies had “800,000 or 900,000 men” and were currently in the ascendant, would furnish U.S. forces with a good opportunity to gain tough, amphibious battle experience against retreating German troops, far from the Reich, and in a relatively safe theater of war. U.S. operations in the South Pacific were, after all, providing such experience at the very extremity of Japanese lines of communication and resupply, on the other side of the world. With half a million troops that “might be built up in the United Kingdom for an attack on either Brest or Cherbourg,” in Normandy, there was certainly every reason to consider a plan for their commitment to battle, if the Germans showed signs of collapse—but the President saw no reason to rush such a decision. He therefore asked whether “it wouldn’t be possible for us to build a large force in England and leave the actual decision” as to its use “in abeyance for a month or two.”

  General Marshall took the point—saying he “would have a study prepared as to the limiting dates before which a decision must be made.”12

  General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the Army Air Forces commanding officer, did not dare say a word—and Admiral King, embarrassed, very few.

  There would, then, be no immediate decision on a U.S. Second Front in France that year—leaving the chiefs ample opportunity to discuss, with the British at Casablanca, the question of whether to assault Sardinia or Sicily if they crossed the Mediterranean after securing Tunis.

  This left only the overall politico-military strategy of the war to be addressed. Which, without further ado, the President now rehearsed. “The President said he was going to speak to Mr. Churchill about the advisability of informing Mr. Stalin that the United Nations were to continue on until they reach Berlin,” the minutes of the meeting recorded, “and that their only terms would be unconditional surrender.”13

  In the months and years that followed, wild claims would be made that, at Casablanca, the President had thoughtlessly and unilaterally announced a misguided war policy that “naturally increased the enemy’s will to resist and forced even Hitler’s worst enemies to continue fighting to save their country,” as the chief planner on Marshall’s team at Casablanca put it.14 Moreover, that it was a policy his own staff vainly disagreed with,15 and that neither Churchill, his staff, nor his government had had any idea of it, prior to the President’s announcement.16

  Like so much popular history, this allegation lacked substance. Not only had the President discussed the matter with Prime Minister Mackenzie King a month prior to the White House meeting with the U.S. Chiefs of Staff, but the President’s determination to pursue unconditional surrender of the Axis powers had been widely discussed by Sumner Welles’s committees when conceptualizing the United Nations authority and end-of-war requirements—which were in turn shared with senior British government officers. In speaking of it to his generals on January 7, 1943, the President made clear his wish that the chiefs factor this objective into their discussions on military strategy with the British at Casablanca. Thanks to Torch, the war against Germany and Japan was no longer one of defense against Axis attack, but of Allied offense—offense that would not stop until Berlin was reached, and then Tokyo.

  No negotiations. No ifs and buts. No concessions, or anything that could later be revoked. Nothing but complete and unconditional surrender of the Germans and Japanese, and their “disarmament after the war,” as the President put it to his Joint Chiefs of Staff, sharing with them as well his notion of a four-nation postwar policing force on behalf of the United Nations, which they, as the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, would have to lead.17

  As for the cross-Channel invasion, he would, the President said, follow the Combined Chiefs’ advice on the timing “as they thought best.” For himself, he was anxious to hammer out with America’s allies not only the matter of German and Japanese postwar disarmament but other “polit
ical questions” that he would discuss with Mr. Churchill at Casablanca—and hopefully then at another “meeting between Mr. Churchill, the Generalissimo [Chiang Kai-shek], Mr. Stalin and himself some time next summer,” perhaps at the port of Nome, in Alaska, which was also the final stop for planes flying Lend-Lease supplies to the Soviet Union.

  The Joint Chiefs did not demur. With that—save for a brief discussion of planes for Russia, and French sovereignty versus U.S. military government in North Africa—the meeting ended. The Commander in Chief had spoken, and the chiefs had been given their orders. They would depart that very evening for North Africa, where the President was to join them on January 14, if all went well.

  PART THREE

  * * *

  Casablanca

  9

  The House of Happiness

  EARLY ON THE morning of January 14, 1943, the President and his party boarded a four-engine Douglas C-54 Skymaster of U.S. Air Transport Command about twenty miles outside Bathurst. “Normally, the air route from Bathurst to Casablanca would be entirely over land,” Captain McCrea later recalled. “On this occasion,” however, “a swing to seaward was made in order to afford the President an aerial view of Dakar and St. Louis, Senegal, French West Africa.”1

  The route would allow the President to see the coastline he’d studied for over a year, when thinking about a possible U.S. invasion of Northwest Africa—especially Dakar. First occupied by tribal Africans, then Portuguese, Dutch, British, and finally French slave traders, Dakar was a fabled port. Following the French surrender at Compiègne in 1940, it had posed the danger that, if occupied by the Germans, it could become an impregnable African base for German naval and U-boat operations in the southern Atlantic. Thanks to Torch, however, it was now under American control—the port and fortress having been ceded by its governor-general to General Eisenhower and his French commissioner, Admiral Darlan, on December 7, 1942.

  Passing over Dakar, “the French Battleship Richelieu was clearly observed alongside a seawall as were several other ships at anchor in the harbor,” McCrea noted. There was a special reason, also, that Roosevelt wished to see the battleship, for it symbolized both the challenge and the success of Torch. With its eight fifteen-inch guns, eighty-five-hundred-mile cruising range, and fifteen-hundred-man crew, the Richelieu had been the first modern battleship built by the French since the 1922 Naval Treaty. Completed in 1940, too late to defend France against the Nazis, it had nevertheless helped defeat France’s former allies and anti-Nazis—Major General Charles de Gaulle’s ill-fated attempt to seize the seaport on behalf of the Free French having been ignominiously repelled that year. For two years the Richelieu had then stood sentinel against the Allies, on behalf of the Vichy government and in accordance with the terms of Maréchal Philippe Pétain’s capitulation to the Third Reich.

  An hour later, two hundred miles further north, at the mouth of the Senegal River, the C-54 flew over “the very old French port” of Saint-Louis as well—giving the Allies two American-controlled ports which, thanks to their strategic importance on the Atlantic seaboard, were to be of inestimable significance to the Allies for the remainder of the war. “Then inland over the desert,” the President described his route in a letter he penned that night to Daisy.

  On the early-morning drive to the Bathurst airfield, Roosevelt had been upset by the extreme poverty of the people—which said very little for the British and their colonial rule over Gambia, despite having suppressed the slave trade in 1833. Now, over the West African desert, there were no people at all. “Never saw it before—worse than our Western Desert—Not flat at all & not as light as I had thought,” he described to Daisy, “—more a brown yellow, with lots of rocks and wind erosion.”2

  The Skymaster, with its wingspan of 117 feet and space for forty-nine troops, was not nearly as luxurious as the Pan American Clipper. For five hours they flew at six thousand feet, until at last they caught sight, inland, of “a great chain of mountains—snowy top,” Roosevelt recorded—explaining that the “Atlas run from the Coast in Southern Morocco East and North, then East again till they lose themselves in Tunis”: the goal of General Eisenhower’s current campaign.

  “In approaching the Atlas mountains the cruising altitude was gradually increased from 8,000 feet to 12,000 feet,” Captain McCrea remembered the flight—adding his own vivid recollection of how he’d persuaded the President to take oxygen for the first time. “The President was seated amidships, on the starboard side of the plane,” he recalled—ever the naval officer. “I was seated directly across the aisle from him, & Ron McIntire was seated immediately in front of me. Harry Hopkins was seated well forward in the plane. Both Ron and I were quickly aware that the pilot was increasing altitude gradually. Ron suggested that I enquire from our pilot as to how much altitude he was going to level off at. This I did.” Told that the pilot expected to cruise at about twelve thousand feet, “I squared away in my seat,” and the President’s doctor, “turning outboard, addressed me in a low tone of voice over his shoulder. ‘John,’ said he, ‘how about putting on your oxygen mask? I want the President to put his on but if I suggest it to him he will no doubt make a fuss. If he sees you put on your mask he no doubt will follow.’ In a few seconds I reached for my mask and proceeded to adjust it. Sure enough when the Pres. saw me putting on my mask he started to fumble with his. I promptly moved across the aisle, straightened out his mask harness and adjusted it for him.” The doctor then put his own mask on, as did Hopkins—“And thus we were all set when shortly thereafter we reached 12,000 feet—an altitude which [was] maintained while crossing the Atlas Mountains.”3

  “We flew over a pass at 10,000 ft. & I tried a few whiffs of oxygen,” the President wrote that night to Daisy. In truth he was more interested in the terrain than the air. “North of the Mts. we suddenly descended over the first oasis of Marrakesh—a great city going back to the Berbers even before the Arabs came—We may go there if Casablanca is bombed.”4

  They were approaching the battlefield.

  In Washington the President had done his homework on the Berbers—Lieutenant George Elsey, in the Map Room, managing to get Lieutenant Commander S. E. Morison, a distinguished naval scholar from Harvard, a fifteen-minute interview with the President, “who asked questions I was unable to answer,” as Morison subsequently wrote Elsey. Morison had therefore researched a “brief memorandum” on the subject of the Berbers for the President.5 In this, the historian had pointed out that the Berbers, according to Egyptian inscriptions, dated as far back as 1700 B.C., and were “an entirely distinct race from the Phoenecian [sic] Carthaginians, who are comparative newcomers in Africa.” The Berbers, by contrast, were “the aborigines of North Africa, with a distinct language and writing,” and possibly the original inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula. “They are a ‘white’ or ‘Nordic’ race, brown or hazel eyed, and no darker than the North American Indians in complexion.”6

  Morison’s report had only whetted the President’s curiosity aboard the C-54 Skymaster as they approached Casablanca—which, despite air raid sirens going off at various times, was not in fact targeted by long-range German bombers from Tunisia. For all their vaunted efficiency, it seemed the Germans had no idea the President was planning to meet Churchill there, let alone intending to stay almost two weeks—Goebbels recording, afterward, his near-disbelief that the Sicherheitsdienst of the great Third Reich had actually intercepted enemy phone calls, yet had taken the name Casablanca to be Casa Blanca, or White House, Washington, D.C.7

  Those “in the know” at the real White House, however, had remained on tenterhooks lest the President, whose leadership of the Allies seemed so crucial to winning the war, fall victim to accident or assassination.

  In particular, Mike Reilly, head of the White House Secret Service detail, had furiously objected to the idea of such a well-known venue—fears that had only increased when he arrived in Casablanca in advance of the President. Concerned the city was full of agents, assassins,
and former Vichy officials of dubious reliability, Reilly had instantly tried to have the summit moved to Marrakesh, several hours’ drive further south. Told that only the President could order this, he’d nevertheless persuaded the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who’d arrived on January 12, not to go meet the U.S. Commander in Chief in person on his arrival at Medouina airport on the afternoon of January 14, lest they attract unwarranted attention.

  Landing at the airfield, the President was not in the least put out. Filming of a new Hollywood movie called Casablanca had, by complete coincidence, recently been completed in Los Angeles, and had been flown to Washington and shown to the President at the White House on Christmas Eve. The film—starring Humphrey Bogart, Paul Henreid, and Ingrid Bergman—had charmed him, and the climax at the faux-Medouina airport (“Round up the usual suspects!”) had made him much more interested in the fabled city, its kasbah, its émigrés and spies, than in presidential protocol. “At last at 4 p.m. Casablanca & the ocean came in sight—I was landed at a field 22 miles from the town,” he recorded in his letter to Daisy. “Who do you suppose was at the airport?” he wrote rhetorically. Not the U.S. chiefs but Lieutenant Colonel Elliott Roosevelt, his second son, standing beside Mike Reilly! And “looking very fit & mighty proud of his D.F.C. [Distinguished Flying Cross]”8—awarded for dangerous low-level reconnaissance missions, flown both before and during the Torch invasion.

  As Roosevelt proudly told his son when they got into the camouflaged car, this trip marked the first time he’d flown in a decade. And with that the President shared with Elliott his amazement at the progress in air travel in only a few decades. There had been some flights in his early career that had been positively hair-raising, he recounted, when he was assistant secretary from 1913 to 1920. “In naval airplanes. Inspection trips. The kind of flying,” he chuckled, thinking of the open biplane cockpits, “you’ll never know.” By contrast, this, his first transatlantic trip, had given him a dramatic idea of “what so many of our flyers are doing, the sort of thing aviation’s going through these days, and developments of flying. Gives me,” he’d told Elliott—who knew this far better than his father—“a perspective.”9