Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Father and son were then “driven under heavy guard & in a car with soaped windows” not to Rick’s Café, the President wrote Daisy, but to “this delightful villa belonging to a Mme. Bessan whose army husband is a prisoner in France—She & her child were ejected as were the other cottage owners & sent to the hotel in town.”10

  He had, in short, arrived.

  Selection of the villa, indeed of the city, had only been made a few weeks earlier by Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, and Churchill’s military assistant, Brigadier Ian Jacob.

  Jacob had judged Casablanca a far better location than Fedala, further north and also on the ocean. The Villa Dar es Saada, in particular, had “the most magnificent drawing room leading out on to a large verandah,” plus a dining room at one end, and a “principal bedroom complete with private bathroom” at the other, on the same floor. There were two further rooms upstairs. Along with thirteen other villas it was situated in a “garden suburb” of Casablanca known as Anfa: an area a mile wide, built “on a knoll about a mile inland and 5 miles south-west of the center of town.” There was a large forty-room hotel nearby for the Combined Chiefs of Staff and their staffs, with a “view out over the Atlantic, or overland to Casablanca” that was “truly magnificent,” as Jacob noted in an account he wrote at the time. “The dazzling blue of the water, the white of the buildings in Casablanca, and the red soil dotted with green palms and bougainvillea and begonia,” he recorded, “made a beautiful picture in the sunlight”11—bounded, by the time the President arrived, with hastily erected barbed wire, antiaircraft guns, and an entire U.S. infantry battalion restricting all access to a single checkpoint.

  Although elaborate steps, Elliott Roosevelt later recalled, had been taken to keep news of the President’s impending arrival quiet, the heavily guarded compound could have fooled no one—least of all the “French fascists” left behind by the hastily departing French-German 1940 armistice team. Such individuals were armed, as Elliott caustically put it, “with German money in their pockets.”12 After several air raid alarms—though no German planes—Mike Reilly had certainly had enough, however. Having persuaded the U.S. Chiefs of Staff not to greet the President at the airport, or even at his villa, he now begged them to use their collective military influence, once they did see the President, to get him to change his plans and move south to safer quarters in Marrakesh.

  Warned of this, Roosevelt dismissed the very idea. As president he was U.S. commander in chief. He felt on top form—even without his chief of staff, who he’d counted on to keep his Joint Chiefs of Staff in line. Casablanca was the scene of recent battle, and one of the largest artificial ports in the world. Having spent four days and nights getting to the city in a succession of trains, floatplanes, tenders, transport aircraft, and limousines, he was “‘agin’ it,” and “said so, often enough and forcefully enough,” Elliott remembered, “to carry the day.”13

  In the meantime he wanted to see where he’d sleep.

  “When Father got his first look,” Elliott remembered, “he whistled.”14

  The bedroom’s décor reminded the President of a French brothel. “Now all we need is the madam of the house,” he laughed, throwing back his head. “Plenty of drapes, plenty of frills,” Elliott recalled. “And a bed that was—well, perhaps not all wool, but at least three yards wide. And his bathroom featured one of those sunken bathtubs, in black marble.”15

  The plumbing, too, worked fine. Wheeling his father around the house, Elliott found him more at home than he could have imagined possible. Guarded by a battalion of U.S. troops, in an area of Morocco under American rather than French or British military command, the Villa Dar es Saada—meaning “House of Happiness”—was the finest private residence in the suburb. It boasted almost twenty-eight-foot-high ceilings, steel-shuttered windows, and looked out over a beautifully terraced garden with vine-covered trellis. The two rooms upstairs could be used as bedrooms—one for Hopkins, and one for Elliott.

  Another of the President’s sons, Lieutenant Franklin Roosevelt Jr., would also be coming—unannounced. His destroyer, the USS Mayrant, had covered the Torch invasion and was still stationed offshore. Learning of this and having once served as a midshipman with the regional naval commander (the brilliant Rear Admiral John L. Hall), Captain McCrea immediately arranged for FDR Jr. to be brought the next day to Anfa, without being told the reason. “He sighted me and burst out ‘My God, Captain, is Pa here?” McCrea recalled humorously. “I told him his suspicion was correct and I took him across the street”—telling him to be “prepared for a surprised parent. The Pres. indeed was surprised, and father and son indulged in fond embrace”—followed by “an invitation to stay for lunch which, of course, Franklin did.”16

  All in all the Villa Dar es Saada was a house of happiness, thanks to Brigadier Jacob: the President’s pro tempore White House and his family residence, established in an American realm, guarded by American soldiers—not a British colony or quasi-colony, such as Khartoum or Cairo, the two cities Churchill had recommended.

  Once installed, the President asked Harry Hopkins to go fetch Churchill, whose villa, the Mirador, was only “fifty yards away,” as Hopkins recorded.17 It would be the first time they’d seen each other since Churchill’s fateful visit to Washington at the time of the British surrender of Tobruk, seven months before. The President could only marvel at how times had changed.

  Churchill, for his part, was equally excited—in fact had arrived two days early to prepare for the arrival of the “Boss.” In his speech at the Mansion House in London on November 10, 1942, announcing the success of Torch, Churchill had openly revealed that the “President of the United States, who is Commander in Chief of the armed forces of America, is the author of this mighty undertaking and in all of it I have been his active and ardent lieutenant.”18

  Reading the text of the speech, Hitler’s Reichsminister für Propaganda had been fascinated. Churchill, Goebbels had noted in his diary, was not only openly ascribing the Allied victories to the huge superiority now enjoyed by American arms, but “he also admits that the whole invasion plan came from Roosevelt’s brain, and that he is only a loyal servant to Roosevelt’s plans.”19

  Hitherto, Goebbels had assumed from British newspaper articles that Churchill was the brains behind Allied operations in the European theater—something he’d found “comforting,” as he’d noted cynically, “since all previous military operations he’s been behind have ended up as disasters.”20 Churchill’s public acknowledgment that the U.S. president was now in charge heralded something different—indeed, alarming.

  “The Americans are now out of the starter’s block. Their next target is Tripoli,” Goebbels had recorded; in fact, idle armchair strategists in America and England were assuming the Allies would soon clear Axis forces from North Africa entirely. “They already imagine themselves invading Italy and foresee themselves invading Germany via the Brenner Pass. All this, of course, a very simple and plausible calculation,” Goebbels had added sarcastically, “—if it weren’t for us being there!”21

  This was the crux of the matter—for the quality of armed German resistance was something the prognosticators of whom Goebbels spoke, whether in the United States or Britain, seemed incapable of appreciating. Tunisia was to be the key to thwarting Allied strategic ambitions, Goebbels had been told by the Führer—who saw the battle for Tunis becoming a new Verdun. “If we hang on to Tunis, then nothing is lost in North Africa,” he’d recorded. And already, as General Eisenhower and his invasion forces attempted to come to terms with the business of real combat with real Germans—as opposed to ill-armed Vichy defenders—Hitler was being proven right, on the field of battle rather than in the print of newspaper columnists.22

  Winston Churchill had been educated as a soldier at Sandhurst and boasted a lifetime’s military experience, from the North-West Frontier to the Sudan and South Africa. Like so many commentators in the press, he had visualized a swift Allied advance—b
y Montgomery’s Eighth Army marching from the east and by Eisenhower’s First Army from the west. “I never meant the Anglo-American Army to be stuck in North Africa,” the Prime Minister had chided his British chiefs of staff on November 15, 1942, only a week after the Torch invasion—irritated by the celerity with which Hitler had reinforced his meager forces in Tunisia by air, and the slowness of British and American ground troops spearheading Eisenhower’s thrust from Algeria. In one of his instantly memorable turns of phrase, the Prime Minister had berated them, saying the Torch invasion was “a springboard, and not a sofa.”23

  It became a classic Churchillian metaphor, oft repeated. In truth, though, it masked a huge difference between Allied and German soldiery. For the simple fact was, whether volunteers or conscripts, Allied soldiers were not like the Germans or the Japanese. As Roosevelt had confided in 1942 to Field Marshal John Dill, the British liaison to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Allied troops did not have, for the most part, the kind of ruthless, even fanatical obedience to orders and discipline that characterized German and Japanese forces. Only by adopting a careful, step-by-step approach to war, evading ventures that posed unnecessary risks; only by undertaking offensive operations within the capabilities of Allied troops; only by applying the advantages of U.S. mass production; and only by pursuing global military strategies that built upon Allied strengths—fusing air, naval, and ground forces—could the Allies actually defeat the Wehrmacht and the Japanese. Not by prime ministerial exhortation, however inspiring.

  Churchill’s bon mot reflected an aging yet still wonderfully indefatigable English leader. At heart he remained a dashing young cavalryman, as on the North-West Frontier in his early days of service, or in the Sudan fighting the self-proclaimed Mahdi at the turn of the century, in 1898. Half a century later, his “Action this day” tags—the red stickers he would attach to his brilliantly written memos demanding immediate response by his staff—were a tribute to his abiding energy as he approached seventy: spearing lethargy and electrifying traditional British bureaucratic pen-pushers, sclerotic after centuries of imperial paperwork. However, they masked a profound flaw in the Prime Minister’s makeup as his country’s quasi–commander in chief in 1943: the irreconcilable difference between his grand strategic ideas and his too-often ill-considered opportunism—a difference affecting tens of thousands of soldiers’ lives.

  After the war the former prime minister would go to great lengths to cast himself, in his six-volume epic The Second World War, not only as a lonely oracle but architect of war. Inasmuch as he saw better than any of his contemporaries the ebb and flow of military history, necessitating that Britain withstand the predations of Hitler’s Third Reich until it could be rescued, he was by 1943 being proven right. He had, after all, lost every battle against the Germans since 1940, yet with his U.S. partner in war was helping to force Hitler, thanks to Torch, onto the defensive. Once Tunis fell, the Allies would possess a springboard for eventual victory in Europe, he felt—provided the Russians continued to face the brunt of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the East. But beyond that his military strategy did not go, since he did not believe a cross-Channel attack could possibly succeed. In reality he had no idea how, in fact, the Third Reich could be defeated, beyond constant peripheral pressure and air attack.

  As the two Allied leaders met at 6:00 p.m. at the President’s villa on January 14, 1943, there was thus, behind the bonhomie and goodwill, a distinct divergence of opinion. The Prime Minister’s agenda was how to placate the United States, defer operations against Japan, and by “closing the ring” around the Third Reich—sheering off its allies, such as Italy, as they went, and hoping to get the peoples of occupied Europe to rise up against the Germans—engender Hitler’s fall, followed by that of Hirohito. Thence to return the world, as he saw it, to its former European imperialist setup, before the Führer, the Duce, and Tojo’s gang of admirals and generals had upset the balance of power.

  The President, for his part, had a quite different vision. Not only a vision of the future, but how to achieve that future: the endgame. Their clash of objectives in Casablanca, behind the scenes, thus promised to be historic.

  10

  Hot Water

  KNOWING VIA Field Marshal Dill, in Washington, that the U.S. chiefs of staff did not favor a delay in launching a Second Front that year, Churchill had told his British chiefs they would have to do again what they had done the previous spring: show willing, while stringing the Americans along, in order to pursue a more opportunistic course in the Mediterranean. The chiefs of staff were thus merely to pretend to be agreeable to closing down “the Mediterranean activities by the end of June with a view to ‘Round-up’”—an Allied 1943 cross-Channel invasion—“in August.” The final decision on a Second Front, however, would be made, he instructed them, “on the highest levels”—i.e., by himself and the President.1 For Mr. Roosevelt, he was sure, would agree with him it was impossible: the Germans, in northern France, were just too strong in the number of divisions they had there.

  With this in mind Churchill had made haste to set off for Casablanca on January 11, together with a huge retinue of staff officers and clerks. Bad weather threatened to vitiate his plan—but had not stopped it.

  Serving as Churchill’s military assistant, Brigadier Ian Jacob had been wary of the contingent the Prime Minister was taking, instead of the small staff the President had requested. “I was rather horrified at the size of the party which had been gotten together,” Jacob wrote in his contemporary account. “The whole added up to a pretty formidable total.”2 Some members of the party could, of course, be concealed and housed onboard the communications ship that was being sent out, HMS Bulolo, he recognized. “But knowing as I did from conversations with Beetle [Bedell] Smith that the Americans would bring a very modest team, I was rather afraid that the President or the Chiefs of Staff might take offense at the size of our party, & that the success of the conference might be endangered. I put this point to the P.M. on Sunday morning before I left Chequers [the prime ministerial retreat], & he said the party was to be cut down. However, when we went into the question on Monday with the Chiefs of Staff we found that there were few if any people who could be discarded, & it was decided that the best policy would be to take a full bag of clubs, leaving some of them concealed as it were in the locker—i.e. the ship.”3

  Despite bad weather delaying the takeoff of the main Boeing Clipper, Churchill had insisted the primary team fly still on January 13 using land-based aircraft. The staff were thus farmed out among four RAF American-built Liberator (B-24) planes, each of which could normally take only seven “passengers.” As a result the Prime Minister had found himself cramped in a bomb bay bunk, flying without heat, which had not left him in the best of moods. This had not improved when, after asking his manservant, Sawyers, to run him a bath on arrival at the Villa Mirador, he had found it neither hot nor deep enough. “You might have thought the end of the world had come,” Jacob described. “Everyone was sent for in turn, all were fools, and finally the P.M. said he wouldn’t stay a moment longer, & would move into the hotel [Anfa] or to Marrakesh”—where he’d spent a pleasant month in 1932.4

  In the event, food and drink—drink especially—had “had its mellowing influence,” as the Prime Minister lunched with General Marshall and the Fifth U.S. Army commander, Lieutenant General Mark Clark, and “the excitement died down. Plumbers were assembled from all directions, and somehow or other the water was kept hot in the future.”5

  Bath or no bath, Churchill did, however, take great pains to be amenable to Marshall and Clark—reporting to the British chiefs of staff on the evening of their first day’s work in Casablanca, on January 13, that “some kind” of cross-Channel “Sledgehammer” operation in Brittany would have to be undertaken that very year, if only to support U.S. efforts. “Only in this way should we be taking our fair share of the burden of the war,” he’d told them at their first meeting with him, at 4.30 p.m.6

  Brigadier Jacob also
noted, however, the Prime Minister’s openness to undertaking different operations. The son of a field marshal, Jacob was a first-class administrator, with a crystal-clear mind, fair judgment, loyalty to his superiors, and a talent for lucid exposition, which the Prime Minister particularly valued. A U.S. agenda had been lined up and sent from Washington, which “contained a list of every topic under the sun, but the most important thing,” the military assistant noted, “was to get settled in broad outline our combined strategy for 1943, and then to get down to brass tacks and decide how exactly to carry it out. One couldn’t decide in detail what to do unless one knew what one’s strategic aim was to be. At the same time one could hardly fix one’s strategic aims unless one examined in detail what operations we were capable of carrying out and what we were not.”7

  “Not” meant a cross-Channel invasion that year.

  Jacob did try to see the problem from a U.S. perspective, however, asking Sir John Dill’s view as the British representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington—and was not surprised when Dill warned that there was a “general fear of commitments in the Mediterranean, and secondly, a suspicion that we did not understand the Pacific problem and would not put our backs into the work there once Germany had been defeated. Thus although the Americans were honestly of the opinion that Germany was the primary enemy, they did not see how quite to deal with her, especially as they felt there were urgent and great tasks to be done in Burma and the Pacific.” These tasks involved logistical and operational struggles between General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz—the Army versus the Navy in terms of distribution of resources—and the right combination of those forces and campaign strategy. They had already led to much infighting, as well as uneven effort, such as at Guadalcanal, “where the U.S. Marines were thrown ashore, and then it was found that there was no follow-up, no maintenance organization, and no transport.”8