The Ferdinand Magellan duly pulled out from the Bureau of Engraving’s special siding in Washington at 9:45 p.m.
The President was far from alone. In addition to Admiral Leahy he was taking his doctor, Vice Admiral McIntire; his naval aide, Rear Admiral Brown; his military aide, Major General Pa Watson; his two secretaries, Grace Tully and Dorothy Brady; twenty Secret Service men; his secret communications personnel; and Filipino crewmembers from the USS Potomac and Shangri-la.
The President had still heard nothing from Stalin, and thus knew as much or as little as the New York Times correspondent in Moscow concerning the dictator’s intentions or thoughts. “The Stalin meeting is ‘on,’” his cousin Daisy had noted in her diary on July 28 after speaking to the President on the phone8—which was to say the meeting wasn’t off, and might still take place at Fairbanks, Alaska, to which he could fly from Ontario, using the nearest air base to his fishing expedition.
Daisy hated the idea. “It is much too dangerous,” she recorded her anxiety about such “trips by air.” “But he feels he has to, so he has to—His feelings are mixed about them, he told me—He doesn’t want to go, but he has to put every possible effort into going because he thinks it will help in planning the future of the world—so—all we can do is wish him Godspeed and pray that all will go well.”9
The fishing part of the plan, at least, went well—the bulk of it spent in McGregor and Georgian Bays, Ontario. “The days were interesting in providing fresh air and sunburn for all of us, and for me the nights were reasonably busy with messages to and from our British Allies in regard to the Italian campaign, the proposal to make Rome an open city which military authorities do not look with favor upon, and the general war situation,” Leahy recorded.10
Harry Hopkins joined the party on August 4, in case they were to fly from there to meet Stalin, and though Leahy felt the vacation was a “success in giving all of us a change and exposure to the air and the sun,” he did acknowledge “that on a vacation for relaxation we should have gone to bed earlier than midnight which was the usual hour.”11
“For a week we lived in the train which remained a few yards from a landing from which we embarked each day on our daily fishing expeditions—each member of the party contributing a dollar a day for prizes,” Leahy added. “The fish caught were small-mouth bass, wall-eyed pike, and what was either a pickerel or pike that the guides called snakes. In the final settlement of our pool at the weekend only the President and I were the winners.”12
Air, sun, and pool winners, however, were not enough to solve the growing strategic crisis: one the President knew would be waiting for him once he got back to the White House.
37
The President’s Judgment
TO A CONSIDERABLE extent, the brewing Allied crisis was inevitable in a coalition, the President accepted, for each ally had its own concerns and war aims.
The President certainly did not take amiss Churchill’s excitement over Mediterranean operations, or even the Prime Minister’s loyalty to a decaying British empire. Churchill was, he felt, merely misguided—the product of high Victorian imperialism. As the President had discussed with former ambassador Davies, in a conversation that Davies had then related to Stalin, “British imperialism had contributed much to civilization, as well as to their people but, under modern conditions, there were now some aspects of it which did not conform to the American viewpoint. These variances in points of view were not such, however, as would or should be permitted to jeopardize a common effort for victory, and for the preservation of post-war peace. The Statute of Westminster [the Adoption Act of 1942, legally recognizing the independence of the Dominions] had given proof that modern England was conscious of the need for change, and with great courage and nobility had given independence of action in foreign affairs to the colonies and dominions.”1
Stalin, looking up from his doodling pad, had queried the reason for excluding Churchill from the proposed meeting with the President, demanding to know “Why?”
“I replied,” Davies recounted, “that Roosevelt and Churchill respected and admired each other, and although they did not always see eye to eye, they were always loyal. They were ‘big’ men, and on matters of difference, each could be relied upon. In fact, each would insist on finding common ground to win the war.”2
This was, however, to tiptoe around the matter of the Second Front—and the more the Italians caved in, the more brazen had become Churchill’s call for exploitation in the Mediterranean—leaving the notion of Overlord as an Allied cross-Channel invasion to wither, the Prime Minister hoped, on the vine.
For the President this was not a surprise. He had gotten to know Churchill, on the Prime Minister’s repeated visits to the White House, probably better than any American during the course of the war. The Prime Minister’s moods, swinging from gravity to elation, were part and parcel of his colorful character as a leader. Churchill’s approach to modern war was, the President accepted, wonderfully exuberant if often flawed. Certainly, with respect to what would now happen in Europe, the Prime Minister seemed to be giving way to a dangerous assumption: namely that Hitler might be toppled in the same way that Mussolini had been brought down.
Unhappily, despite a lifetime spent as a military officer and warrior-politician, Churchill seemed not to understand the nature of the problem confronting the Allies. This was not so much the Führer as the Germans themselves. The Prime Minister’s abiding belief was that, once shorn of its allies, the men of the Third Reich would be unable to defend the vast territories they had so rapidly overrun when the Allies had been weak and disjointed. The Allies had now only to “close the ring,” as the Prime Minister saw it, and sooner or later Germany would collapse, as it had in 1918—without the Western Allies having to take the great gamble of a cross-Channel assault and campaign in northern France. Churchill thus failed, in the President’s view, to fully credit what had happened in Germany under Hitler—and how German forces, like the Japanese, would fight to the bitter end to defend the territory they had seized, even without the Führer’s orders; that they would make the Allies pay for every meter of advance in blood, whether in the Balkans, Greece, Italy, or France.
Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender had therefore been no aberration, or momentary thoughtlessness, as certain writers—even Churchill himself in a forgetful moment3—would later aver. Rather, it went back to the President’s childhood sojourns in Germany, and spoke to the President’s deep-seated cognizance of the collective German mentality. Roosevelt’s unwavering judgment was that, whatever happened with the Italians, the Germans—like the Japanese—would go on fighting until beaten in battle; moreover, that their nations must be completely disarmed after the war’s end and the world kept safe from any prospect of their military renascence. “The President believed also,” Davies had told Stalin on May 20, “that, despite differences in ideology and methods of government” between capitalism and communism, “it was entirely possible that our countries could live together in peace, in a decent world, with mutual respect, reciprocal consideration and joint safety, against a possible militant Japan, Germany or any other would-be disturbers of the Peace . . . Together, they could maintain and enforce law and order to preserve a just Peace, or there would be renewed disastrous wars.”
Stalin had affirmed his complete agreement. “You can tell your President that so far as Germany is concerned, I will support him to any length he thinks necessary, no matter how soever, to destroy Germany’s war potential for the future. Our people and our country have suffered immeasurably because of it. It is vital to us that Germany’s war potential be destroyed. As to Japan, he said, the President already knew what their position was and needed no assurance.”4
Goebbels’s April announcement of totaler Krieg, in Roosevelt’s view, had merely confirmed his judgment of Germany as the world’s most dangerous nation, given the size and ruthlessness of its Wehrmacht and the abiding belief that Macht ist Recht: might is right. A
ny notion that the Germans would be easily pried from their conquests across Europe was therefore wishful thinking. The struggle to defeat the Germans and the Japanese would be hard and bloody, as he’d stated in his White House broadcast on July 18—for there was no alternative to battle. And bloodshed.
What was important was for the Allies therefore to make no mistakes. To proceed methodically, building up command and combat experience, and trained, well-armed forces in order to defeat the Wehrmacht completely and relentlessly in combat, as Grant and his generals had done in the Civil War. Fantasies of victory merely by peripheral operations were seductive in terms of saving lives, but in the end they were idle. Only by relentless concentration of force, in focused application of America’s growing output as the arsenal of modern democracy, would the Allies be enabled to win within a reasonable time frame.
The President’s judgment of Wehrmacht intentions and abilities, moreover, was reinforced by reports he was receiving from his intelligence services. Access to the extraordinary riches of Ultra posed the danger that one sought in the decrypts for what one wanted to see. Churchill, who read Ultra decrypts every day and often “raw” ones—i.e., uninterpreted by his military staff—had fastened tightly on those indicating that Hitler only intended his troops to stand in northern Italy, at the foot of the Alps. By contrast, the President was less beholden to that one source, and remained skeptical. On July 10, as the troops of the Western Allies had stormed ashore in Sicily, the latest OSS intelligence bulletin from Brigadier General Bill Donovan, who directed U.S. espionage services abroad, had been couriered to the White House Map Room. Rear Admiral Brown, the President’s naval assistant, had himself brought it to the President—a report predicting the Italians would soon betray their Axis partner and sue for surrender. With stark realism, however, Donovan’s report had also warned that the Germans “are quite prepared to treat the Italians as they would an enemy.”5 They would thus squash their former partners like cockroaches—and fight the harder once free of coalition allies they largely despised.
The President had agreed with Donovan—who had won the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Medal fighting the Germans in France in World War I. The Allies, the President was sure, must not be complacent, or be swayed by armchair strategists. Italy’s collapse would certainly be a political triumph for the Allies, and was certainly worth pursuing. It could also be dangerous, however, if it encouraged Churchill and like-minded peripheralists to jump to conclusions about Italian assistance, or German unwillingness to fight in southern Italy.
As the days of high summer unfolded, Donovan’s prediction did indeed become reality. The Germans, it would become clear to even the most starry-eyed, were very, very different from their southern neighbors—neighbors the Germans had always held in suspicion but now began to treat with merciless, murderous contempt.
The profound cultural difference between the two Axis enemies would, in fact, climax in the summer and fall of 1943—exposing the fault lines of what Churchill called the Grand Alliance, and threatening to sunder what had, in July, appeared to be the approach of Hitler’s end.
PART TEN
* * *
Conundrum
38
Stalin Lies
AS THE Ferdinand Magellan made its way back from Ontario to Washington, the President finally heard from Stalin. Once decoded, the cable—dated August 8, 1943—was handed to him. It was a long message agreeing to a meeting. Not, however, the meeting Roosevelt was hoping for.
In surprisingly friendly English, the Russian marshal—who had gotten himself promoted as the first civilian to hold that rank by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on March 6, 1943, in recognition of his role as supreme commander in chief of the armed forces of the Soviet Union—began by apologizing. His focus as a Russian marshal had had to be on his “primary duty—the direction of action at the front. I have frequently to go to the different parts of the front and to submit all the rest to the interests of the front,” he kept repeating—blatantly lying, since he had only once ever gone near the front, and that only for a few hours. “I hope that under such circumstances you will fully understand that at the present time I cannot go on a long journey and shall not be able, unfortunately, during this summer and autumn to keep my promise given to you through Mr. Davi[e]s. I regret it very much, but, as you know, circumstances are sometimes more powerful than people who are compelled to submit to them.” He was, however, willing to agree meantime to a later “meeting of the responsible representatives” of the United States and the Soviet Union at Archangel, on the north coast of Russia, or Astrakhan, on the south, Caspian, coast—i.e., on Russian territory, and terms.
If the President was unable to go to such a summit, so distant from Washington, Stalin continued, Mr. Roosevelt could send a “responsible and fully trusted person”; moreover, he was quite happy for Churchill to attend the get-together—thus making it a “meeting of the representatives of the three countries.” In the meantime they should raise, in advance, the “questions which are to be discussed,” and the “drafts of proposals which are to be accepted at the meeting.” He added his belated congratulations to “you and the Anglo-American troops on the occasion of the outstanding successes in Sicily which are resulted [sic] in collapse of Mussolini and his gang.”1
The dictator’s excuses for not meeting the President might be specious, but what was clear, now that the battle of Kursk was over and Mussolini toppled, was that Stalin saw no need to travel to America or to Alaska, cap in hand. He could afford to play hard to get—or please.
The President was understandably disappointed, given the phenomenal amount of Lend-Lease equipment, food, chemicals, and metals being shipped to the USSR. Even Marshal Zhukov, Russia’s greatest general, would admit after the war that “the Americans shipped over to us materièl without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war.” As Zhukov explained, “We did not have enough munitions [and] how would we have been able to turn out all those tanks without the rolled steel sent to us by the Americans?”2—let alone the four hundred thousand trucks dispatched.3
“Drafts of proposals,” meantime, made the President frown. Not only might it be more difficult to get agreement on the President’s United Nations authority plan if preconference proposals had to go through the endless (and appropriately colored) red tape of Russian communist bureaucracy, but Churchill’s presence might let the cat out of the bag—namely, that Churchill and his generals were once again tilting away from a cross-Channel Second Front in favor of exploitation in the Mediterranean. And dangerous overoptimism in London.
One American chaplain in London, Colonel Maurice Reynolds, had openly forecast that the war might be over in five months—that he would not be “surprised if we all went home for Christmas. The rats are beginning to leave the sinking ship—one [Mussolini] has left already,” he’d been quoted in Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army newspaper.
This was an almost tragic assumption, given the tough fighting that lay ahead with the Germans. Not only was Allied strategy in danger of being compromised by naive opportunism, but if the Western Allies pulled out of their commitment to a Second Front, the President recognized, there would be tough problems with America’s Russian partner—with grave consequences for the peoples of central and even western Europe.
The disagreement between the U.S. generals at the Pentagon, and the growing continental divide between the Allies, was thus the unhappy scenario that faced the President when he finally entered the White House on the morning of August 9 for a whirlwind round of meetings. He’d agreed to meet Churchill and the British chiefs of staff in Quebec around August 15. This gave him only a few days to get his ducks back in a row.
He saw Secretary Hull for lunch, General Marshall at 2:00 p.m., Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, at 2:30, and dined with Hopkins that evening. He called his cousin Daisy to tell her what a great fishing trip he’d had—“a real success�
��the place much like the Maine Coast—rocky, wooded, 100s of islands, cool on the whole, very nice—He says he’ll take me there, perhaps, next year!”4 But he also confided to her his latest plan: that he was determined to do his best to head off another Trident-like battle royal in the Canadian capital. He would therefore see Churchill in private at Hyde Park before the Quebec meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff even began—and twist Churchill’s arm there until the Prime Minister backed off.
39
War on Two Western Fronts
IN HIS FIRESIDE CHAT radio broadcast, the President had denied there was any disunity between the Allies. “You have heard some people say that the British and the Americans can never get along well together—you have heard some people say that the Army and the Navy and the Air Forces can never get along well together—that real cooperation between them is impossible.” He’d denied the assertions, as U.S. president and commander in chief. “Tunisia and Sicily have given the lie, once and for all, to these narrow-minded prejudices. Ahead of us are much bigger fights. We and our Allies will go into them as we went into Sicily—together. And we shall carry on together,” he’d claimed—lauding the achievements of the Soviet Union as America’s ally, too.
Behind the façade of unity, however, the conduct of the coalition war was in grave peril. Moreover, with Stalin calling for a meeting of foreign ministers in the fall, before the Allied leaders or their representatives got together, it would become impossible to conceal British pressure to defer or abandon the Second Front in favor of further operations on the Southern, or Mediterranean, Front.
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