by Kai Bird
Throughout the war, McCloy was privy to the highest-level decisions on how to manage it. At the Trident Conference, held in Washington in May 1943, he was constantly by Stimson’s side, taking notes and whispering into the secretary’s ear. Through two solid weeks of negotiations, he watched as the Allied leaders renewed the debate on when to open a second front in Europe. Stimson was thoroughly annoyed with Churchill for “trying to divert us off into some more Mediterranean adventures.”41 He was greatly relieved when Roosevelt finally insisted upon and received British agreement to a date for a cross-Channel invasion of France. Operation Bolero—the buildup of an invasion force in Britain—would now result in a cross-Channel attack (Operation Roundup) by May 1944. As Stimson and Marshall had feared, the opening of a second front had been postponed by the invasion of North Africa. Roosevelt and Churchill were well aware that Stalin had never considered the occupation of North Africa a substitute for a second front. Now they agonized over how to tell him that a second front would not take place in 1943. As a substitute, they decided to promise Stalin that an invasion of Italy from North Africa—Operation Husky—would take Hitler’s major ally out of the war. Informed of these decisions, Stalin complained in an angry cable that this left “the Soviet Army, which is fighting not only for its country, but also for its Allies, to do the job alone, almost single-handed, against an enemy that is still very strong and formidable.”42
McCloy was aware of one other closely guarded decision reached at Trident. Churchill and Roosevelt formally agreed that their two countries would pool their scientific expertise in the production of “Tube Alloys,” the code name for the project to develop an atomic bomb. McCloy was one of a handful of War Department officials aware of the Manhattan Project. He, Harvey Bundy, Robert Lovett, and George L. Harrison (a president of New York Life Insurance Co. who moonlighted for Stimson as a special civilian consultant) were cautious about what they said to one another about the project. It was rarely mentioned in the office; instead, Stimson would sometimes lead a discussion on it in the privacy of his Woodley estate. None of Stimson’s aides were really competent to discuss the mechanics of the experimental weapon, but they were quite aware of its unique potential. The bomb was always in the back of McCloy’s mind. Sometime late in 1942 or in 1943, he had visited the closely guarded facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where an entirely new town was being built to accommodate some thirteen thousand workers.43 A great deal of money was obviously being spent by the Manhattan Engineering District; after being shown around the construction site, he thought it was all just too complex for him to grasp. Indeed, the project was so expensive and so secret that Stimson sometimes worried that Congress might censure him for spending so much money on such a speculative venture.44
Another problem thrown on McCloy’s desk in the spring of 1943 concerned the War Department’s treatment of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, who had fought with the Loyalists against Franco in the late 1930s. Some five hundred veterans of the antifascist fight in Spain were serving in the U.S. Army. Many of them were educated, officer-candidate material, but most were politically leftist or had once been members of the Communist Party. Consequently, as Brigade veterans were about to complete their officer training, an army security check frequently resulted in a recommendation for their dismissal from officer training school. Denied a commission, these “premature” antifascists were often still eager to volunteer for combat duty. But the army refused them even this opportunity, and instead placed them in labor battalions or low-security logistics units.
In April 1943, Harold Ickes wrote a stiff letter to Stimson, complaining that such discrimination was “shocking.”45 When similar complaints began to appear in press reports, McCloy requested an internal investigation. He quickly learned that two months earlier the War Department’s security board had issued a new policy “to remove the discrimination between Communists and others in the Army which prevented known Communists from having combat duty.” Henceforth, party members would be allowed to qualify for combat units; communists would be treated “just as any other soldier. . . .” There was, however, a catch: those individuals with current “communistic tendencies” could remain with their regular units “unless the circumstances of the case are unusually aggravated and the individual is in a sensitive organization.”46
McCloy was told that in practice this meant that many Brigade veterans were disqualified: “. . . if a soldier was formerly a Communist that fact will, of course, be considered in determining whether or not he should be commissioned. . . .” The individual might still receive a commission if he was no longer a party member, had never been an active party leader, and had a record indicating “complete freedom from Communist influence.”47 McCloy considered this a pretty fair compromise.
Throughout the remainder of the war, his office served as an informal court of appeals for many leftists and Lincoln Brigade veterans. Over lunch one day late that summer, he acknowledged to Ickes that Americans who had fought for Loyalist Spain were still being discriminated against in the army. But he said he was trying to do all he could to allow all those Brigade veterans who “are not Communists and who have not been too radical” to have their officer commissions. As Ickes wrote in his diary, “McCloy thinks that it is perfectly foolish to penalize a man simply on the ground that he is a radical.. . . McCloy says that they [Lincoln Brigade veterans] are not only good soldiers but much smarter than the average.”48
On the other hand, McCloy sanctioned punitive measures against individuals who openly advertised their Communist Party affiliations. If an officer candidate had once expressed radical opinions or had fought Franco in Spain, these facts alone would not be held against him. But evidence of current communist beliefs—such as attending Young Communist League dances or having current subscriptions to Communist Party publications—was another matter. During the rest of the war, dozens of officer candidates with such black marks on their security files were dismissed from officer training school and immediately sent overseas to a combat unit.49 A reform that had begun by allowing Lincoln Brigade veterans to volunteer for combat duty had now become part of a systematic policy: alleged communists were automatically ordered into the front lines of combat.
That summer, McCloy focused on another issue of discrimination, that against Negro soldiers. Before the war was over, some eight hundred thousand blacks would serve in the U.S. Armed Services. The army’s racial policies had remained unchanged since World War I; blacks served in segregated units and were not allowed the use of recreational facilities frequented by white soldiers. None of these segregated units could expect to see combat. Black morale was so low that by the summer of 1943 the army was, in the words of one army historian, reaping a “harvest of disorders.”50 Race riots broke out at army installations in California, Mississippi, Kentucky, Texas, and Georgia. The judge advocate general labeled these racial disorders acts of “mutiny.”51
Stimson and Marshall turned to McCloy to handle the crisis. When similar riots had occurred the previous summer, Stimson had appointed McCloy chairman of something called the Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policy. Created in August 1942, the McCloy Committee, as it was known, had been dormant for most of the year.52 McCloy had been content to study the problem of Negro morale, evaluate specific racial incidents, and receive recommendations on the training and assignment of black soldiers. He was aware of Stimson’s racial attitudes and recognized that the War Department was not prepared to launch any radical experiments in racial integration.
Stimson simply believed that Negroes were too backward to be relied upon to fight in a modern army. He scorned Eleanor Roosevelt and the “foolish leaders of the colored race” for seeking full “social equality.” This, Stimson believed, could never happen “because of the impossibility of race mixture by marriage.”53
One of these “foolish leaders” was Judge William H. Hastie, dean of Howard University’s law school, who in 1940 had been selected by Roosevelt to serve as Stim
son’s civilian aide on Negro affairs. To Stimson’s annoyance, Hastie had assumed an activist stance within the department, urging the department to experiment with some kind of plan that would lead to the progressive integration of the armed services. By late 1941, his proposals were still not particularly radical: he advocated only the assignment of a few qualified Negroes into regular army units. But even such a gradualist approach was rejected by Stimson and Marshall.54
Judge Hastie, however, repeatedly argued that segregation was “the most dramatic evidence of hypocrisy” in a war America was supposedly fighting in defense of democratic values. Didn’t such racial segregation give the lie to America’s ringing denunciations of Nazi Germany’s racial theories? After one such lecture from Hastie, McCloy told the judge, “Frankly, I do not think that the basic issues of this war are involved in the question of whether colored troops serve in segregated units or in mixed units and I doubt whether you can convince people of the United States that the basic issues of freedom are involved in such a question.” Moreover, McCloy observed, some Negroes “do not seem to be vitally concerned about winning the war.” If the war was lost, he said, the black community would suffer disproportionately. They ought to demonstrate their unswerving cooperation in the war effort now, in the hope that racial relations would improve after the war.55
Despite this reprimand, Judge Hastie made some progress against the army’s policies, and most of the time he found in McCloy an ally. In late 1942, he had brought to McCloy’s attention the fact that the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was still segregating Negro candidates in officer training school. This was at a time when most other such schools had been quietly and informally integrated, at least in the classroom. McCloy took measures to integrate the school.56 There were other such victories, most notably the establishment of an aviation unit at Tuskegee where qualified Negroes were trained to fly combat aircraft.
By January 1943, however, Judge Hastie was tired of such marginal progress and decided to submit his resignation. Segregation was still practiced in military-post theaters, blood-plasma banks, mess halls, and recreational facilities throughout the armed services. He complained that even those Negroes who were receiving combat training, such as the 99th Fighter Squadron, were not being used in combat. Such continued injustices, he said, brought into question “the sincerity and depth of our devotion to basic issues of the war.” Hastie concluded that he could best accelerate reforms as a “private citizen who can express himself freely and publicly.”57
The judge’s decision to go public had an almost immediate effect: stung by Hastie’s criticisms, the chief of the air staff wrote McCloy a week later promising that the all Negro 99th Fighter Squadron would see combat. For the next six months, Hastie and other Negro civilian leaders kept up the pressure on the War Department to change its policies. But not until the summer of 1943, when racial disorders erupted on many army facilities, did the McCloy Committee ask the army to take some concrete steps toward racial integration. Citing “riots of a racial character” at six army bases around the country, McCloy wrote Marshall that he thought it was time the army changed its policies. All these incidents, he said, had been incited by some specific allegation of discrimination. He urged that the army now adopt a policy of nondiscrimination regarding any base privileges, housing, or recreational facilities. Negro soldiers should be subjected to the same disciplinary standards as whites. “Discipline,” he told Matshall, “is not a matter of intelligence.”58
Marshall responded to McCloy’s July memo by urging base commanders to prevent individual acts of discrimination. Racial incidents could be avoided if base commanders censured “improper conduct of either white or negro soldiers, among themselves or toward each other.” Regarding base facilities, Marshall fell back on an assertion of equal treatment, and ordered that “adequate facilities and accommodations will be provided negro troops.” This could have amounted to empty words, but later that month, McCloy persuaded the adjutant general to issue orders that henceforth all base recreational facilities would be open to any soldier, irrespective of race.59 As official policy, its effect took some time to permeate day-to-day army practice, and for the remainder of the war McCloy was occasionally forced to rebuke individual commanders for not integrating their officers’ clubs. But there was no doubt that black leaders felt a measure of vindication in focusing their campaign for integration on the army.
The integration of army recreational facilities was a significant and highly visible step toward racial integration, not only within the military, but in American society at large. It was, however, a far cry from integrated combat units. And, with the exception of the 99th Fighter Squadron, McCloy did not persuade Marshall and Stimson of the wisdom of allowing black soldiers combat experience until the summer of 1944, when manpower shortages became acute. He then argued, “With so large a portion of our population colored, with the example of the effective use of colored troops (of a much lower order of intelligence) by other nations, and with the many imponderables that are connected with the situation, we must, I think, be more affirmative about the use of our Negro troops.”60
This time, General Marshall agreed to the experimental transfer of regimental combat teams from the 92nd and 93rd divisions to the Italian front. Advance elements of the 92nd Division arrived in Italy in July and performed well in combat. Their performance paved the way for further small shipments of black troops overseas. These troops quickly became a source of pride to the black community, and McCloy made sure their experiences were widely publicized in black newspapers at home.61
Late in the war, he could even sound a little boastful, arguing in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post that the army had “largely eliminated discrimination against the Negroes within its ranks, going further in this direction than the country itself.”62 Discrimination had certainly not been eliminated, but he could truthfully say he had done more to break down the barriers of segregation within the army than any other white government official.
By the summer of 1943, the war on all fronts was going well for the Allies. North Africa had been conquered, MacArthur’s forces were steadily clearing the Japanese from the South Pacific, the air war was taking a severe toll on Germany’s civilian population, and, most important, the third Nazi summer offensive in as many years against the Soviets had again been stymied. Soon Stalin’s forces took the offensive, pushing the Germans back at Orel. Simultaneously, a British-American invasion force landed in Sicily and encountered less resistance than had been expected.
McCloy was optimistic enough about the impending campaign in Italy that in mid-June he came into Stimson’s office and speculated that Italy might soon sue for peace.63 Stimson was not nearly so optimistic. In London that July, he distressed the British by once again “passionately advocating an early shock offensive across the Channel.”64 McCloy still disagreed. Over lunch one day not long afterward, he told Harold Ickes that “. . . Stimson had not changed his mind. He still thought that we should have landed somewhere on the coast of France [instead of North Africa in 1942]. McCloy said that if we had done this our casualties would have been terrific and perhaps when we had struck North Africa it would have been too late.”65
McCloy and Ickes now made a habit of lunching together as often as once a month. The iconoclastic New Dealer invariably found McCloy full of gossip and well informed about events. On one occasion, they discussed the air war against Germany. That summer, Allied Bomber Command had moved from precision bombing of specific war-production factories and military installations to experimenting with fire-bombing. The most successful of these attacks occurred over Hamburg on the evening of July 27, 1943. In one night, Allied bombers dropped enough bombs to engulf the entire city in flames; at least forty-five thousand Germans were killed, most of them women, children, and the elderly.66 If McCloy had any doubts about such fire-bombing, he did not express them to Ickes. On the contrary, he hoped that “once we get over the hump” the bombing raids would be a
ble to inflict terrible damage with fewer crew losses.67 Ickes did not disagree.
In mid-November 1943, Stimson decided to send McCloy as his representative to the Allied conference in Cairo. Fearful that Churchill would once again try to delay the invasion of France (the prime minister was at the moment asking Eisenhower to divert landing craft for an invasion of Rhodes), Stimson gave McCloy a “pep talk” on Overlord, as the cross-Channel invasion plan was now code-named. He told his aide that he was entrusting to him a task of immense responsibility, and he emphasized the “importance of giving a lead and courage to a lot of doubtful men.”68 His sermon ended, Stimson boarded a plane bound for his High-hold estate in New York, where he planned a few days’ rest.
A couple of days later, McCloy was in the air himself, traveling with Lew Douglas, Sir John Dill, and several staff officers. He wrote in his trip diary, “There is something of a very concrete nature to accomplish and it will mean taking part in an historical incident. How far away from 874 North 20th Street [his childhood home in Philadelphia] it all is; yet it all ties back to there. . . .”69
The plane took the tedious wartime route, through Brazil to West Africa. Flying across the Atlantic, he had a long talk with Dill, chief of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington. Like most British officials, Dill disparaged the need for a cross-Channel attack, telling McCloy, “By all standards Germany should give in by January. . . .” McCloy thought otherwise and diplomatically cautioned his friend, “We have to expect another tough blow from them before we win.”70
Upon landing in Cairo on the afternoon of November 20, 1943, McCloy was driven to the Giza district, on the outskirts of the city. Quarters were reserved for him and Douglas in Villa 22 on the famous Mena House estate, where the conference would take place.71 The site overlooked the three Great Pyramids. In a short note back to Stimson, McCloy observed, “We rest on the site of the Battle of the Pyramids and at least forty centuries look down upon us. I trust that our efforts will prove more lasting than were Napoleon’s in this area.”72