Commander in Chief
Page 24
Had not Pendar explained the history of the great twelfth-century Koutoubia Mosque tower that they could see some distance away, dominating the city? As the sun finally disappeared, had not electric lights come on at the top of every mosque, calling the faithful to prayer? “From where we were, we could see the going and coming of the innumerable Arabs on camel- and mule-back, as they made their way in and out of the city gate. Both Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill were spellbound by the view,” Pendar recalled.4 It had been a far, far cry from Washington, D.C.—followed later by more cocktails in the salon.
Had not the President—after slicing off the top of a huge profiterole representing the Koutoubia tower, in the manner of Alexander the Great—then raised a toast to the English king? Had not Churchill responded by raising a toast to the head of state before them: the President? For his part Pendar, sitting between such exalted modern rulers, had found himself “surprised,” he later recorded. Traveling in England, he’d seen Mr. Churchill often in the prewar days, and had felt “sure that no one could eclipse his personality.” Now, however, he was “struck by the fact that, though Mr. Churchill spoke much more amusingly than the President”—mesmerizing listeners with his antiquated yet masterly use of language, and his descriptive, imaginative storytelling ability—it was Mr. Roosevelt who “dominated any room they were in.” Reflecting on this, Pendar attributed it not to Roosevelt’s larger physique when compared to the diminutive prime minister, nor to his rank “merely because he was President of the United States;” no, Pendar had afterward mused, it had resided much more in the radiance of the President’s “being”: his lionine head and Caesar-like presence. Also an intense curiosity about others—others as real people, not simply an audience to entertain or impress. In this respect, despite the Prime Minister’s extraordinary mind, the President exhibited, Pendar thought, “a more spiritual quality than Mr. Churchill, and, I could not help but feel, a more profound understanding of human beings,” rather than just the course of history.5 Most surprising to Pendar, perhaps, had been the President’s seeming indifference to his own disability—as if employing his abundant interest in people not only to engage those he met in conversation, but to deflect attention from his own paralyzed lower limbs. Nor did he seem to mind being contradicted or corrected, as Churchill did—Pendar recalling how he’d talked “at length about the Morocco and the Arab problem” with the President at dinner—who was not only well informed, but listened. “To my amazement and delight, I found that the President had an extraordinary and profound grasp of Arab problems, of the conflict of Koranic law with our type of modern life and its influence on Mohammedans, and of the Arab character with its combination of materialism and highly developed intuition.” In the presence of a diplomat steeped in the history and culture of Morocco, the President had seemed fascinated to hear Pendar’s views—Pendar subsequently recalling how, “some six months later, when I was in London talking with Averell Harriman,” who had attended the dinner, Harriman “began to laugh and said: ‘I will never forget your conversation with the President. I enjoyed hearing you explain to him, in no uncertain terms, that the New Deal simply wouldn’t work in Morocco.’”6
Had not the two potentates then “set to work,” after dinner, writing cables to Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek to tell them, cautiously, of the Casablanca meeting—cables that Churchill’s ubiquitous secretaries typed, then retyped to incorporate further corrections and revisions? The President, at one point, had been “wheeled into his room so he could work alone at his dressing table which he used as his desk”—anxious not to dismay Stalin by revealing the Western Allies would not launch a Second Front before 1944, by which time their forces would have sufficient combat and command experience to make such landings in northern France decisive for the outcome of the war . . .
Why, then, three months later, was Winston Spencer Churchill on his way to Washington with an army of staff officers and advisers to argue against a cross-Channel invasion even in 1944? What alternative plan did Mr. Churchill have for continuing the war?
26
The God Neptune
THE PRESIDENT WAS as much in the dark about Churchill’s plans as were his Joint Chiefs of Staff. In fact the more so, since he had fondly imagined that he and the Prime Minister were very much in unison with regard to the Allied prosecution and timetable of the war.
Instead, according to the President’s best information, Churchill’s ever-fertile mind was changing from day to day. According to sources known to the British representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee in Washington, Field Marshal Dill, the Prime Minister was said to be settling more and more on ditching the notion of a cross-Channel attack, and instead exploiting the Allies’ impending victory in North Africa in the Mediterranean.
Churchill’s preference, it was reported, was to pursue, instead, an opportunistic strategy of multipronged Allied attacks following the invasion of Sicily: not only on the Italian mainland but in the Aegean and the Balkans in late 1943 and 1944, especially if—President Inonu’s unwillingness nothwithstanding—Turkey could be persuaded to enter the war on the Allied side. By this scattershot, indirect method Churchill apparently hoped the Allies would not only draw away from the Eastern Front crucial German forces that Hitler might otherwise employ to hold back the Russian armies, but would provide the Western Allies with the launch pad for a drive into central Europe via the “soft underbelly” of southern Europe: an Allied advance such as the one General Giraud had outlined to him at Casablanca. Or through the Balkans—an avenue of advance that harked back to Churchill’s abiding Dardanelles obsession. Either way, such a peripheral strategy would serve to avoid a Second Front bloodbath across the English Channel, which the Prime Minister had always feared.
More disturbingly—again, according to Field Marshal Dill—the British chiefs of staff were now deferring to their prime minister’s ideas. The result would be to delay, if not rule out, the agreed Second Front assault across the English Channel to 1945—two years away—at the earliest.
How the Russians would respond to such delay was predictable. So too would be the response of the American press and public, if they learned of it.
It was small wonder, then, that the U.S. chiefs of staff had grown each day more worried as the Queen Mary, which had left port on May 5, drew closer—even as Allied forces moved in for the kill in Tunisia.
“Some of our officers have a fear that Great Britain is desirous of confining allied military effort in Europe to the Mediterranean Area in order that England may exercise control thereof regardless of what the terms of peace may be,” Admiral Leahy had noted in his diary on May 2—his contacts in the State Department fueling his fear that the British were “principally concerned with a post war control of the Mediterranean.”1 Moreover, in view of rumors the Russians were already exploring peace feelers with German representatives, Leahy was doubly concerned lest the Soviets would fight only to liberate Soviet republics, not to defeat the Third Reich. In this potential scenario, Hitler would remain master of western and central Europe, making nonsense of the President’s “Germany First” strategy since Pearl Harbor.
For his part, Secretary of War Henry Stimson worried about Churchill’s eloquence—and what he saw as the President’s unwillingness to put Churchill in his place.
Stimson had not attended the Casablanca Conference, but what he had gleaned of it had been alarming—an account obtained in large part from officers such as Major General Wedemeyer. The British team had run rings around their American “opponents,” he’d been told, not only because the U.S. team had been too small, but because the President himself was too accommodating to the British.
By May 7, with U.S. troops entering Bizerte and British troops entering Tunis, Stimson was cock-a-hoop at the “great victory” at hand—one that would “hearten the Russians and discourage the Germans.” The Western Allies should therefore be thinking big, not small, in his view: of direct assault, not peripheral piddling.
Would the President be swayed by Churchill’s anti–Second Front rhetoric, once the Prime Minister arrived at the White House for the new conference—code named, ominously, Trident? Was Churchill a new version of the great god Neptune, rising out of the sea to defeat American strategy for winning the war?
As the British arrival-day neared, General Marshall, for his part, “expressed his reservation as to how firmly the President would hold to his acquiescence” to the U.S. chiefs’ position. “I fear it will be the same story over again,” Stimson despondently recorded in his diary. Repudiation redux: “The man from London will arrive with a program of further expansion in the Mediterranean and will have his way with our Chief, and the careful and deliberate plans of our Staff will be overridden. I feel very troubled by it,” Stimson lamented3—the British contingent expected to arrive in Washington the next evening, May 11, 1943.
27
A Battle Royal
WHEN HEARING THE sheer size and composition of the approaching British contingent—160 officers, with their assistants and chief clerks—the Canadian prime minister thought it a crazy gamble. “I was astonished when I saw the list of names,” Mackenzie King noted in his diary, the day of their scheduled arrival in New York. “It is a tremendous risk to have so complete a representation of the military heads, chiefs and their experts and advisers cross the ocean at one and the same time.”1
Why, though, had they come at all? Had not the overall strategy and timetable for the war in 1943 and 1944 been agreed at Casablanca?
The President had summoned all his chiefs of staff once again to the White House on May 9. There, in the Oval Office at 2:30 p.m., he’d rehearsed with Leahy, Marshall, King, and Arnold “the attitude that should be taken by the U.S. Chiefs of Staff at the conference with the British war officials who will arrive in Washington Tuesday,” as the President’s chief of staff noted dryly in his diary.2
All had been agreed. “The principal contention of the American government will be a cross Channel invasion of Europe at the earliest practicable date and full preparation for such an invasion by the Spring of 1944,” Leahy had recorded that night—adding sniffily: “It is expected that the British Chiefs of Staff will not agree to a cross channel invasion until Germany has collapsed under pressure from Russia and from allied air attack.”3
No cross-Channel Second Front before the Germans collapsed?
The likely British proposal seemed to Leahy a pretty awful way to run a war—one that would either leave Hitler in control of mainland Europe, or if not, give the Russians a head start in the overrunning of western Europe. Though thanks to his fever he had not attended the Casablanca Conference, Leahy had read all the minutes and final agreements, as well as hearing firsthand from the President, Marshall, Arnold, and King the accords the British had made. What on earth were the British up to now, he wondered?
Early on the evening of Tuesday, May 11, the U.S. chiefs of staff congregated for the third time in a week at the White House. The arrival of the Queen Mary in New York Harbor had been reported, and the Prime Minister’s huge retinue had apparently entrained for the capital. Then at “six forty-five p.m. the American Chiefs of Staff accompanied the President,” Leahy recorded in his diary, “to meet a special train bringing to Washington the British Prime Minister and his War Staff.”4
“Reached Washington at 6:30 pm where we were met by Roosevelt, Marshall, Dill, etc,” a tired General Alan Brooke recorded in his own diary that night.
Ambassador Halifax was there to greet them, too. Churchill and his secretaries were immediately whisked off by the President to the White House; Brooke was invited to stay with Field Marshal Dill, his former boss.
It was a “hot and sticky night,” Brooke noted before he went to bed at Dill’s rented house in Virginia.5
He was nervous—embarrassed at the friendliness being shown by his American hosts, given that he was carrying a veritable bombshell. He’d been required first to go to the recently opened Statler, where the rest of the British party would be accommodated, to attend “a cocktail party given in our honour” by his hosts, the American chiefs. “From there,” he recorded in his diary, “we did not escape till 8.15 pm.” “I must now prepare my opening remarks for tomorrow’s Combined Chiefs of Staff conference and muster up all our arguments,” he added to his entry. “We have a very heavy week’s work in front of us!”6
At the White House, the Prime Minister and his closest personal staff were meantime shown to the rooms where they would stay. The First Lady, however, was nowhere to be found. Irritated that the President had seen fit to receive Churchill for an unspecified length of time in the White House, and knowing her husband was having to steel himself for the confrontation he was rather dreading, she had simply decamped—going in the opposite direction, to their house in New York.
For his part, Churchill had begun to show signs of anxiety over his mission—in fact he’d suggested he might stay at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Roosevelt had refused to hear of it—figuring it might be better to suborn the recalcitrant prime minister under lock and key, so to speak, in the White House mansion, where he’d have a better chance of countering whatever it was that Winston was harboring or plotting in his brilliant but sometimes dangerously inventive mind.
Instead of cocktails, then, the President wined and dined Churchill on Pennsylvania Avenue, with just his daughter, Anna Boettiger, and Harry and Louise Hopkins, present. Though the Prime Minister’s office assistant, Leslie Rowan, and Churchill’s aide-de-camp, Commander Tommy Thompson, were asked to eat with them, no invitation was extended to Churchill’s military advisers. The dinner ended shortly after 9:00, after which the President invited Churchill to his Oval Study on the second floor. There the two men talked until after midnight.
Secretary Stimson, at his own house across the Potomac, remained on tenterhooks. As he noted anxiously in his diary the following day: “Churchill arrived last night with a huge military party, evidently equipped for war on us.”7
“I fear it will be the same story over again,” the secretary lamented—furious that Churchill had come with such a huge contingent. He was all the more concerned since General Arnold had suffered “a severe heart attack” immediately after the May 9 Joint Chiefs meeting at the White House. The U.S. chiefs would thus be fielding a man short at the top, and might, Stimson feared, now be overwhelmed by their British colleagues in the talks—talks he had not been asked to attend.
Though the air in Washington remained warm and sticky on the morning of May 12, the atmosphere in the White House seemed somewhat frosty—a far cry from the happy spirit that had invested the Casablanca Conference. The President only went to his office at 11:10 a.m., where he had a succession of appointments—the American Legion, the mayor of Chicago, American labor leaders (regarding the national coal strike—the largest single strike ever called in the United States, involving more than half a million miners demanding more pay). And then lunch in his Oval Study with Hopkins, Churchill, and Lord Beaverbrook—former British minister of munitions, who had come without portfolio, as he was no longer in the British cabinet or government.
If there was open debate at the White House lunch, none recorded it. Indeed, no one recorded the luncheon—reflecting, perhaps, the awkwardness. Given that Beaverbrook was an outspoken advocate of a Second Front to be mounted as soon as possible—at the very latest, he pleaded, in the spring of 1944—and since Harry Hopkins remained an unrepentant advocate of priority being given to such a direct, cross-Channel strategy, even by ine
xperienced troops, the Prime Minister was on his own at table. At all events, Churchill’s narrative of the trip, written seven years later, jumped straight from joyful arrival in Washington, the night before, to a fictitious account of the discussion that took place that afternoon with the Combined Chiefs of Staff—pretending in his memoirs that he, too, was in favor of a spring 1944 Second Front.
This was, in truth, mendacious—for minutes of the meeting, held in the Oval Office immediately after lunch, were kept by General Deane, secretary of the Combined Chiefs of Staff: minutes that documented, in writing, the rift between the President’s and the Prime Minister’s views on global strategy.
Anxious to maintain at least a semblance of Allied unity, the President opened the meeting at 2:30 p.m. with a look back across the past year—reminding the generals how far the United Nations had come since their last get-together in Washington. It was, he said, “less than a year ago when they had all met in the White House, and had set on foot the moves leading up to TORCH. It was very appropriate that they should meet again just as that operation was coming to a satisfactory conclusion”—for Allied troops had already “seized Bizerte and British troops had fought their way into Tunis,” General Deane noted the President’s words. Given complete Allied air and naval control of the southern Mediterranean now exercised by the Allies under General Eisenhower, no Dunkirk-like evacuation of German or Italian forces was possible. It had taken time, but Torch had led, methodically, to a great Allied victory.