1944

by Jay Winik

  Overlord and its tactics dominated the remainder of the afternoon, until the three leaders retired. They were to reconvene shortly afterward for dinner.

  ROOSEVELT HOSTED THE DELEGATION next. In the past few hours, the president’s Filipino cooks had built cooking ranges and had begun preparing a quintessential American dinner of grilled steak and baked potatoes. For their part, the Secret Service agents were relieved that it was American food being prepared in an American kitchen; at the Roosevelt-Churchill summit in Casablanca, all food and drinks were tested first by medical officers and then bundled together and placed under heavy guard to prevent poisoning or any other tampering.

  As the three leaders gathered, the president began by mixing cocktails for what he affectionately called the “children’s hour.” His drinks—free-form, ever-changing combinations of alcohol and various accompaniments—were very much an acquired taste. This evening Roosevelt put a large quantity of vermouth, “both sweet and dry,” into a pitcher of ice, then added a “smaller amount” of gin, stirring the concoction “rapidly.” Stalin dutifully drank it—actually, he preferred wine to vodka—but said nothing until Roosevelt eagerly inquired how he liked it. “Well, all right, but it is cold on the stomach,” the Marshal replied.

  At dinner, the cocktails were replaced by wine and bourbon, which flowed freely for a long series of toasts.

  But if on the surface the leaders were festive, there remained an icy undertow in their discussions. As the meal progressed, postwar Europe again became the focus. Coldly writing off Russia’s ancient enemies, Stalin took control: he returned to a theme from his private talk with Roosevelt, this time publicly denouncing the French to the entire delegation gathered around the table. He declared the entire French ruling class to be “rotten to the core,” adding that its members deserved “no consideration from the Allies” and should not be left “in possession of their empire.” Churchill, firmly believing that France would have to be reconstructed as a strong nation, spoke up on behalf of the French. Roosevelt attempted to play peacemaker, but to no avail. Stalin then took up the more crucial issue of Germany, arguing for its “dismemberment and the harshest possible treatment” as the only means to prevent an eventual return of German militarism.

  To emphasize his point, Stalin, himself the ruthless force behind countless purges—the slightest criticism of his regime was an offense against the state, and he himself once muttered, “Who’s going to remember all those riffraff in ten to twenty years? No one!”—spoke about interrogated German prisoners of war. When these prisoners were asked why they had butchered innocent women and children, their reply was that they were doing only what they had been ordered to do. Then Stalin recounted an experience of his own inside Germany.

  In 1907, he had been in Leipzig to attend a workers’ meeting. But two hundred German delegates failed to appear, because the railroad clerk who had to punch their train tickets did not arrive at work and the German delegates would not board the train without properly punched tickets. The German mentality, Stalin declared, was too blindly obedient to authority. (In the interest of maintaining harmony, neither Roosevelt nor Churchill was daring enough to comment on the paradox of such a statement by an absolute despot who wielded power from the barrel of a gun.) Clearly Stalin was probing his allies, attempting to see exactly how far they could be prodded into punishing and remaking a postwar Germany. He even said he disagreed with Roosevelt’s view that the Führer was mentally unbalanced, instead calling Hitler an intelligent man hindered by a primitive approach to politics.

  This time, Roosevelt tried to steer the conversation back to less controversial topics, like the matter of access to the Baltic Sea. But suddenly, at about 10:30 p.m., just as he prepared to speak, no words came out of his mouth. There was a long pause.

  To the horror of the participants, the president turned green, and “great drops of sweat” began to “bead off his face.” Then he put “a shaky hand to his forehead.”

  A stunned silence descended on the gathering as everyone gazed at the American president, who was clearly in serious distress.

  Saying little, Harry Hopkins leaped from his seat and had Roosevelt wheeled away from the table and back to his room. Roosevelt’s physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, was dining outside. He raced to the president’s room.

  As it happened, only McIntire knew that a similar incident had happened once before, on an evening in February 1940, also during dinner. Was this a repetition of that ghastly dinner—except that this time, the presidential collapse was happening with the world’s most powerful leaders present? At this pivotal time, the nation could not afford to have Roosevelt seriously ill.

  In Roosevelt’s room, McIntire hurriedly began his examination. Roosevelt explained that after the meal ended, he had felt faint. McIntire’s diagnosis was surprisingly perfunctory: indigestion and excess stomach gas. He gave Roosevelt something to relieve the symptoms. If the president’s discomfort was anything more than indigestion—and it almost surely was—McIntire apparently never pursued it. And by the next afternoon, Roosevelt was again meeting with Stalin to lay out his vision of a postwar world, before the two then joined Churchill for another round of conferences.

  But even if the Americans could move on, untroubled, the night was surely a worrisome omen, as well as a grim reminder to Churchill and to Stalin that for Roosevelt, good health was fleeting.

  WHILE ROOSEVELT SEEMED “FULLY recovered” from the attack of indigestion, and was, according to the Americans, “as alert as ever,” the summit had once more snagged on the increasingly thorny issue of the cross-Channel invasion. Fearing that a direct assault could “wipe out civilization” and leave the Continent desolate, Churchill was still dragging his heels. For his part, Roosevelt, unable yet to commit vast forces for the planned assault on Europe, still wanted to focus on the postwar world and his concept of an international organization to resolve disputes. Stalin, however, mindful of his troops bleeding and dying on the unforgiving eastern front, kept returning to Overlord. Whether doodling on a pad with a red pencil (he liked to draw wolves’ heads) or sitting impassively cradling a cigarette, he was relentless. He wanted an explicit date in May—as Roosevelt had promised—and he wanted a commander. To this end, a somber Stalin pointedly asked Roosevelt for the commander’s name. The president acknowledged that he had not made a final choice, although everyone knew that the leading candidate, General George Marshall, was attending the conference.

  Stalin saw this simply as stalling and fumed, “Then nothing will come out of these operations.”

  After some talk of Turkey and Bulgaria, the discussion again returned to Overlord. Now Stalin said accusingly to Churchill, “Do the British really believe in Overlord, or are you only saying so to reassure the Russians?” Churchill, chewing on a cigar, scowled and noted that “it will be our stern duty to hurl across the Channel against the Germans every sinew of our strength.” As on the previous day, the session ended with Churchill’s words.

  Later, in private, the frustrated prime minister retorted, “Bloody!”

  NOW IT WAS STALIN’S turn to be the host at dinner.

  Through the long succession of toasts and amid tables groaning with a classic Russian meal—cold hors d’oeuvres to start, then hot borscht, fish, an assortment of meats, salads, compotes, and fruits, all accompanied by vodka and fine wines—the Soviet leader began goading Churchill. He alternately “teased” or “needled” the British prime minister, and even went as far as suggesting that Churchill still harbored warm feelings toward Germany and privately desired a “soft” peace. Despite the fact that it was Churchill who had mustered the facts against Hitler earlier and more cogently than anyone else, Stalin continued with his verbal barbs, almost always sanctioned and even aided by Roosevelt. The “acrid” exchanges accelerated, until Stalin riposted that the German general staff “must be liquidated.” The whole force of Hitler’s armies, he continued, “depended upon about fifty thousand officers and technicians.
” If these were “rounded up and shot at the end of the war,” German military strength would be undone. Stalin made his remark with a “sardonic smile” and a “wave of the hand.” But either Churchill’s translator missed the Soviet leader’s ostensible sarcasm or the prime minister himself decided that he had had enough. Furious, he icily replied, “The British Parliament and public will never tolerate mass executions. Even if in war passion they allowed them to begin, they would turn violently against those responsible after the first butchery had taken place.”

  Churchill added, “I would rather be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself than sully my own and my country’s honor by such infamy.” At this point, a previously silent Roosevelt sought to mediate by offering some humor of his own. He suggested a compromise: on the number fifty thousand, he could not support Marshal Stalin. Instead, only “49,000 should be shot.”

  Unremarked by any side was the glaring fact that when it came to human liquidations in this ghastly war, including an entire race of innocent civilians being inexorably butchered in the dark forests of Poland, fifty thousand seemed to be a very small number indeed.

  ON THE THIRD DAY, all sides found a way to come together. Stalin made a less than subtle suggestion that failure to open a second front in Europe in 1944 could all but ensure that a war-weary Soviet Union would seek a separate peace with Hitler. However improbable it was at this stage of the conflict, his threat had the desired effect. This time, Churchill bowed to reality. By lunchtime, he and Roosevelt pronounced Overlord a go, with a possible side operation against the south of France. The Soviets, for their part, would organize an offensive to take place in May against German forces in the east.

  That night, November 30, Churchill, although still ailing—by now he had a miserable bronchial cough and an intermittent fever—nonetheless was the host of the official dinner. It was his sixty-ninth birthday, and the trappings of the British Empire were on display. Crystal and silver glistened in the candlelight, Roosevelt and Churchill wore black tie, and the toasts were poignant. Usually, the person proposing a toast would circle the table to touch his glass to the toastee’s. At one point, however, Roosevelt toasted the health of Churchill’s daughter, Sarah. But it was Stalin who rose and walked around the table to clink glasses with her and bow. Sarah Churchill hesitated a moment, then left her seat to walk to Roosevelt’s place, where she touched her glass to his, and he said with great charm, “I would have come to you, my dear, but I cannot.”

  As the evening wore on, for the first time Stalin rose to thank America publicly for the extensive shipments that were keeping the Red Army alive (“I want to tell you what the president has done to win the war”). He even acknowledged, memorably, that without Lend-Lease, “we would lose this war.”

  Then it was Churchill’s turn. With Stalin sitting to his left and Roosevelt to his right, he recalled: “Together, we controlled practically all the naval and three-quarters of all the air forces in the world, and could direct armies of nearly twenty millions of men, engaged in the most terrible of wars that had yet occurred in human history.” He paused, then added, “I could not help rejoicing at the long way we had come on the road to victory since the summer of 1940 when we had been alone.”

  It was Roosevelt, however, who would have the last word. At 2 a.m., he triumphantly raised his glass and said, “We have differing customs and philosophies and ways of life. But we have proved here at Tehran that the varying ideals of our nations can come together in a harmonious whole, moving unitedly for the common good of ourselves and of the world.”

  But whatever harmony was achieved at Tehran, it nonetheless remained elusive in a larger sense; for there was still much more war—and unfathomable moral tragedy—to come.

  WHEN ROOSEVELT RETIRED TO his room on his last night in the Soviet compound, he fretted, worrying that he had not yet achieved his primary purpose: reaching a lasting, personal accord with Stalin. Despite his best efforts, he found the Soviet dictator “correct,” “stiff,” “solemn,” with “nothing human to get hold of.” In his own words, he felt discouraged. Then it occurred to him that for two evenings, he had watched Stalin needle and tease Churchill with obvious enjoyment. True, he had joined in, but with some restraint. For the most part, when Stalin had been blunt and Churchill had debated vociferously, he himself had patiently listened and mediated, joked and prodded. On the final day of the conference, seeking political gain, he chose an opposite course. He would mock the prime minister outright.

  On his way to the conference room on that last morning, the president caught up with Churchill and said, “Winston, I hope you won’t be sore at me for what I am going to do.” The prime minister was somewhat taken aback; just days earlier he had enjoyed an intimate Thanksgiving dinner with Roosevelt in Cairo, where they had carved turkeys (two of them), drunk champagne while holiday music blared in the background, and eaten pumpkin pie. Amid the carnage of war, it was an evening of unforgettable friendship. Nevertheless, Churchill, a veteran of tough-nosed English politics, needed little help in imagining what was about to come next; as Roosevelt remembered it, the prime minister simply shifted his cigar and “grunted.”

  As soon as he entered the conference room, Roosevelt wheeled his way over to Stalin and the surrounding Soviet delegation. He appeared cagey, even intimate, as if drawing Stalin into his confidence; but Stalin was unmoved. Then, lifting his hand toward his mouth, as if covering a whisper, Roosevelt chuckled, “Winston is cranky this morning; he got up on the wrong side of the bed.” As the Soviet interpreter repeated the words, “a vague smile passed over Stalin’s eyes.” Roosevelt immediately decided that he was on the right track. Once the group was seated at the table, he began to tease Churchill about his “Britishness,” about “John Bull,” about “his cigars, about his habits.” The president watched Churchill turn bright red and scowl, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally, Roosevelt recalled, “Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light.” At last, the ice has been broken.

  Having made his inroad, an ecstatic Roosevelt even took the liberty of calling Stalin “Uncle Joe” to his face, and the Soviet leader was not offended. What Churchill felt went unrecorded. However, it was the American ambassador Averell Harriman, an admirer of both Roosevelt and the Russians, who offered perhaps the most telling observation on the president’s choices: “He always enjoyed other people’s discomfort,” Harriman would write.

  THE SUMMIT WAS A success. Roosevelt left Tehran for Cairo, as did Churchill. Overlord had been agreed to; they had discussed the need for an international body to keep the peace; they had hashed out the fate of the Baltic states and the status of a postwar Germany; they had talked of reparations from Finland and of persuading the Turks to enter the war; and they had huddled over State Department maps of central Europe, hotly debating the contentious matter of the borders of Poland as well as its government-in-exile.

  But there was still unfinished business, including one of Roosevelt’s most important decisions of the war. On December 5, he rendered the much-awaited verdict that would set Operation Overlord and D-Day fully in motion: he formally selected the commander for the joint Allied invasion. His army chief of staff, General George Marshall, whom the president considered the most accomplished figure of the joint chiefs and who had accompanied Roosevelt to Tehran, was now anxiously waiting. Marshall knew that almost every sign suggested he would be the commander, and he wanted the job. Indeed, at one point during the Tehran conference, Stalin had personally congratulated Marshall on his upcoming command. Yet the more Roosevelt had thought about it, the more he worried about losing Marshall’s discreet, wise counsel. He wanted him in Washington, not in the field, and decided this was a gamble not worth taking. So late on a Sunday morning, Roosevelt called Marshall into his room. After some small talk, the president finally asked the general what he wanted to do about Overlord. The taciturn Marshall, ever the good soldier, replied that it w
as the president’s decision to make. “Then it will be Eisenhower,” Roosevelt said. To ensure the finality of his decision, the president then instructed Marshall to start writing as he dictated a personal message to Stalin. The general put pen to paper and took down Roosevelt’s words announcing the appointment of his military subordinate: “The immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of Overlord operation has been decided upon.” Once Marshall wrote this, Roosevelt added an exclamation point and coolly affixed his signature. There would be no turning back. Marshall later gave Eisenhower the original signed note as a memento, adding by way of explanation, “It was written very hurriedly by me.”

  This was the start of a year of fateful decisions. But first, the president, tired but feeling confident, had to return the thousands of miles home.

  ON HIS WAY BACK, Roosevelt had wanted to go to Naples to see the troops, but combat was still raging there, and the president was eventually dissuaded, electing to go to the islands of Malta and Sicily instead. At Malta, he would present a plaque to the inhabitants for resisting the Nazis; in Sicily, he would inspect the troops, decorate war heroes, and speak to his flamboyant but troubled general, George Patton, who had recently slapped a shell-shocked soldier in the face. Then Roosevelt went on to Morocco and the sea voyage back across the Atlantic.