Above all, Roosevelt wanted complete control of the information that came to him. When Winston Churchill visited the United States just after Pearl Harbor, he had installed in the White House a war communications center, replete with detailed maps. Impressed, Roosevelt copied it right down to the name “Map Room.” Confidential messages came into the Map Room from army lines and went out through navy lines. The system ensured that only the president would have a complete file.8
By virtue of America’s wealth, industrial might, and potential military power, Roosevelt was functionally, if not officially, at the head of an improbable coalition in which his two leading partners were Churchill and Stalin. Each had his distinct ideological perspective and concrete objectives. Each understood the necessity of unity. Of the three, Roosevelt was probably alone in believing that this alliance of convenience could stand in a vaguely perceived postwar world.
The president, exhibiting the instincts of his kinsman Theodore, was a man of consummate realism when it came to issues of power. He was also about equally committed to an overriding and unrealistic ideology, essentially derived from the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson. It was embodied in the Atlantic Charter, which, depending on one’s perspective, was either a shining statement of principle or a confession of hopeless naiveté. He probably never expected 100 percent implementation of the charter, which he no doubt saw as an important motivational tool for the American war effort. All indications are that he really believed in its principles and envisioned himself, in contrast to his two allies (the Old Tory and the Old Bolshevik), as voicing the aspirations of the common people of the world.
On December 7, 1941, Roosevelt’s relationship with Stalin was still in a very early phase, with only thirteen messages having passed between them. His interaction with Churchill totaled about two hundred communications and the personal meeting at Argentia. Just five days after Pearl Harbor, Churchill, accompanied by an entourage of civilian and military advisers, was aboard the new battleship Duke of York on his way to Washington.
Churchill’s visit to America, which he code-named ARCADIA, had multiple purposes. The most fundamental, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke put it, was “to ensure that American help to this country does not dry up.” It was also to provide a strong British input into the military strategy of the war. In Brooke’s recollection, someone remarked that circumspection had been necessary up to that point in dealing with the United States. Churchill replied, “Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her, now that she is in the harem we talk to her quite differently!” Now, the prime minister thought, was the time for a well-prepared Britain to seize control of the direction of the war. Now, he also certainly believed, was the time to personalize the alliance as never before with a display of his outsized ego and rhetorical powers.9
During the eight-day voyage to the United States, Churchill began work on four strategy papers, which he would present to Roosevelt. The first, a survey of “the Atlantic Front,” focused heavily on a need to clear the enemy from North Africa and secure control of the Mediterranean, the “lifeline” to Suez and Britain’s South Asian empire. The second and fourth papers, on “the Pacific Front,” conceded the huge temporary advantage of the Japanese and the need to fight a delaying action marked by inevitable losses of territory while the American and British navies built a powerful capability based on aircraft carriers. The third paper, titled “The Campaign of 1943,” projected that year as the target date for a major invasion of the European continent, which, assuming large-scale uprisings against the Germans by captive peoples, might bring the war to a quick end. In their large outlines, these documents forecast the course of the war.10
The American high command reaffirmed the ABC-1 priority of Germany first but, from the beginning, questioned the British inclination to “peck around the periphery.” Senior US officers favored a rapid buildup of American forces in Britain, followed by a direct Anglo-American strike into the heartland of Europe. They actually floated to the skeptical British the possibility of establishing a “lodgment” on the continent that somehow could withstand Wehrmacht counterattacks. The issue was left unresolved.11
The talks produced an achievement of great importance: establishment of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, a unified US-British command structure based in Washington. Derived from the American experience of World War I in which the independence of the Allied commands had impeded coordination, the development brought senior American and British officers into a common structure, albeit with US predominance. ARCADIA produced a signature press release. Labeled “Declaration by the United Nations,” it had twenty-six signatories, including countries actively at war with Germany or Japan, numerous governments-in-exile, and several Caribbean republics. Released on New Year’s Day, 1942, it reaffirmed the principles of the Atlantic Charter, stated a common determination, and produced a name for the alliance: the United Nations.12
Churchill spent three weeks in America, leaving a deep impression on both Roosevelt and the larger public. As a guest at the White House, he was both demanding and entertaining. His capacity for alcohol was overwhelming: a tumbler of sherry with breakfast, Scotch and soda at lunch, champagne at dinner, brandy afterward, then more Scotch and soda. As Chief Butler Alonzo Fields remembered it, he once asked for a favor: “I hope you will come to my defense if some day someone should claim that I am a teetotaler.” Yet he also worked hard on conference matters and kept in daily touch with London. In private, he generally wore the zippered paramilitary overalls he called a “siren suit.”13
In public, Churchill charmed a wide audience. He took over a presidential press conference from Roosevelt. Addressing a joint session of Congress, he remarked, “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.” Before the Canadian parliament, he ridiculed the comment of the defeated French general Maxime Weygand in 1940 that Britain would have its neck wrung like a helpless chicken: “Some chicken! . . . Some neck!”14
The dynamics of the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship could be grand to watch. The two men at one level sincerely admired each other. All the same, their comradeship was complex and often difficult. Aside from not liking to be upstaged, Roosevelt remained at his core an ideological liberal prone to see Churchill’s beloved British Empire as an exploitative enterprise that victimized subjugated peoples around the globe. He had long fixated on Imperial Preference trade policies that he believed excluded American enterprises and products.
On January 13, 1942, the night before the prime minister departed for Britain, Roosevelt could not resist the temptation to haze him at a small White House dinner party. One of the guests, noted author Louis Adamic, recalled the president’s words a few years later:
You know my friend over there doesn’t understand how most of our people feel about Britain and her role in the life of other peoples. . . . [W]e’re opposed to imperialism—we can’t stomach it. . . .
I remember very clearly that when I was seven or thereabouts, in 1889 or ’90 and my mother took me to England, and we saw Queen Victoria drive in her carriage down a London street, why, I hated the old woman.
Adamic thought to himself, probably accurately, “He must have said all this to Churchill before. He’s using me to rub it in.” Churchill, knowing that he had no choice, took it all, jaw clinched, silent and impassive.15
The next day, as Churchill departed, Roosevelt’s final words to him were “Trust me to the bitter end.” At the end of the month, responding to birthday greetings from the prime minister, he said, “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.” There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of those statements, but we must remember the president made them after he had established his dominance. That done, he could be a generous and supportive ally. He wrote to Churchill on March 18, “There is no use giving a single further thought to Singapore or the Dutch I
ndies. . . . Australia must be held and . . . we are willing to undertake that. India must be held, and you must do that; but frankly I do not worry so much about that problem. . . . You must hold Egypt, the Canal, Syria, Iran and the route to the Caucasus. . . . I know you will keep up your optimism and your grand driving force.”16
In late January 1942, the first significant detachments of US troops arrived in Britain, the small beginnings of a two-and-a-half-year buildup that would transform an insular country into a large and effective invasion base. In late June, General Marshall dispatched his valued aide Major General Dwight D. Eisenhower to London as their commander.
At home, most Americans riveted their attention on the Philippines. MacArthur, in conformity with long-established war plans, fought a delaying action and retreated to the American island fortress of Corregidor, off the tip of the Bataan Peninsula. Relief by sea was impossible. Roosevelt decided that MacArthur, despite his inexplicable unreadiness in the wake of Pearl Harbor, was too famous, and perhaps too politically connected, to sacrifice. In early March, the president ordered him to turn over Corregidor to Major General Jonathan Wainwright and retreat to Australia, where he would assume command of Allied forces in the southwestern Pacific. Wainwright would preside over a determined resistance until finally forced to surrender on May 6. By then some 80,000 already captured American and Filipino soldiers had endured a brutal and homicidal “death march.” Word of that atrocity assured that the Pacific War for both sides would become one of extermination.
Having witnessed how World War I had ground Woodrow Wilson down, Roosevelt knew he needed to pace himself. He advised Churchill to follow his example: “Once a month I go to Hyde Park for four days, crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me. I am called on the telephone only if something of really great importance occurs. I wish you would try it.” It was good advice, but the president would learn there was no effective escape from the grueling responsibility of command.17
His strongest instinct was to strike back at the enemy as quickly as possible, for morale more than for effect. At his request, the army air force and navy developed a plan to steam a small task force into the Pacific, launch light B-25 bombers about six hundred miles from Tokyo, bomb the city, and then fly to bases in China. Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, an already famed aviator widely believed to be, in the words of his copilot, “the best pilot in the Air Force,” commanded the operation. Doolittle recruited from the cream of the service’s talent. Roosevelt surely recognized the risk he was taking with high-value personnel and deemed it worth the gamble.18
On April 18, 1942, Doolittle’s squadron, sighted by a Japanese picket ship fifty miles farther from Tokyo than originally planned, took off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, dropped its payload on Japan, and made for China. Amazingly, Doolittle and most of the participants survived. They became instant American heroes and lifted the nation’s spirits. Where, newsmen asked, had the mission flown from? Roosevelt answered with a big smile and a reference to the mythical realm of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon: “Shangri-la”!19
The raid itself was of little material consequence—a few bombs dropped on the Japanese capital hardly amounted to a pinprick—but it delivered a severe blow to Japanese pride and ignited a renewed determination to devote Japan’s naval power to the conquest of the western Pacific, from Australia in the South to Midway Island in the East.
Japan faced a US Navy that displayed remarkable resilience. Some three weeks after the Doolittle raid, an American force engaged a Japanese invasion fleet bound for Port Moresby, New Guinea, a position from which Japan could menace Australia. In the ensuing Battle of the Coral Sea, the United States lost one precious aircraft carrier, Lexington, and suffered substantial damage to another, Yorktown, but still managed to turn back the enemy. Off Midway just a month later, a limping Yorktown, along with the carriers Enterprise and Hornet, defended the island base against a numerically superior Japanese incursion. American naval aviators managed to hit and sink four Japanese carriers. Japan’s navy would never recover from the blow. The United States lost only Yorktown.
At the beginning of August, the navy landed a division of marines on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon chain, initiating a months-long battle that raged on land and sea. In the naval fighting, both sides suffered important losses, but in early 1943 the Allies would secure Guadalcanal. The United States would have only one operational aircraft carrier left in the Pacific, but Australia would be safe and Midway effectively removed from Japanese reach. American shipyards would replace the carrier losses at a rate the Japanese could not approach. There was every reason to believe that their onslaught had been stopped.
Ten days after the landing on Guadalcanal, a company of marine raiders staged a surprise attack on Makin Island in the Gilberts chain. Their leader, Lieutenant Colonel Evans Carlson, a political radical who enjoyed the friendship of the president, took with him as commander of the landing party Major James Roosevelt. Four months short of his thirty-fifth birthday, Jimmy had a medical record that should have disqualified him from combat. In the fighting that followed he was an exemplary leader; at one point, he had a field telephone shot out of his hand. He later received the Navy Cross and an Army Silver Star. One of his men described him to a friend of Eleanor as “a prince.” The action inflicted heavy casualties on a small Japanese garrison but was of even less material consequence than the Doolittle raid. All the same, Hollywood used it as the basis for a popular movie, Gung Ho! It would be Jimmy’s one taste of combat. He was brought stateside and assigned to training duties.20
Victory in the Pacific was still a distant prospect, but by the fall of 1942, the United States had taken the offensive. When and where would the European second front appear? And would it be possible to maintain the developing alliance with the Soviet Union?
Russia was a distant and demanding ally, scorning generous Lend-Lease assistance as inadequate, harassing US diplomats, and constantly reminding America that the Red Army was battling the Nazis on the eastern front alone. Nonetheless, supporting the USSR’s fight against Germany was clearly of prime importance. Instinctively looking to build on the personal relationship Harry Hopkins had established, Roosevelt would consistently strive for a man-to-man bond of confidence and trust with his Soviet counterpart, Josef Stalin. His penchant for dealing with the Russian dictator through special envoys and direct messages frustrated his ambassadors and may have led Stalin to congratulate himself as a shrewd manipulator.21
Almost certainly entertaining some illusions about the essential “progressivism” of the Soviet Union, Roosevelt and Hopkins were also concerned about the possibility of a separate peace on the eastern front. The USSR and Germany had signed an agreement in 1939; they might conceivably conclude a truce of convenience that would leave Hitler free to transfer the bulk of his forces to the west. The impetus for American deal making with Stalin and the inevitable concessions that would accompany the process began early.
Meeting with Soviet ambassador Maxim Litvinov on March 12, 1942, the president delivered assurance that he would not oppose the USSR’s territorial ambitions in eastern Europe, that he had in fact thought it folly to take away from Russia the Baltic states and the eastern half of Poland after World War I. He also remarked that it would be politically unwise to make his commitment public, possibly leaving Litvinov and Stalin wondering whether he was playing them. A year later Roosevelt would tell British foreign secretary Anthony Eden that, as Harry Hopkins summarized it, “he did not like the idea of turning the Baltic States over to Russia and that she would lose a great deal of public opinion in this country.” The two statements were not necessarily irreconcilable. The comment to Eden likely reflected political concerns more than personal principle.22
On May 29, Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov arrived in Washington from London, where he had concluded a treaty with Britain. He stayed at the White House as an honored guest. A servant, unpack
ing his luggage, found among his belongings black bread, cured Russian sausage, and a loaded revolver. When the Secret Service reported the latter item to Roosevelt, he laughed it off, but he might also have reflected on the paranoia that the items signified.
The talks with Molotov over the next few days were awkward. Palpably uncomfortable with the tedious process of translation between Russian and English, Roosevelt found the doctrinaire Molotov more trying than the cosmopolitan Litvinov. (As Robert Sherwood reflected later, Roosevelt had never before met a doctrinaire Bolshevik.) But he was determined to handle the major issues himself, much as he had done with Churchill. Secretary of State Hull functioned more as an interested bystander than an active participant.23
Molotov pushed hard for two objectives: copious Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR and quick establishment of a second front on the European continent in strength sufficient to draw forty German divisions away from the Soviet Union. The first demand was difficult but possible. Throughout the war the United States seldom questioned Soviet Lend-Lease requests and made shipments on terms considerably more generous than those offered the British. In response to the second demand, Roosevelt asked General Marshall to confirm that plans were under development for a second front, then, as the American translator paraphrased it, “authorized Mr. Molotov to inform Mr. Stalin that we expect the formation of a second front this year.” In fact, however, American war planners were already beginning to envision the exercise, if attempted at all, as a hopeless “sacrifice play” undertaken to keep the USSR in the war.24
Man of Destiny: FDR and the Making of the American Century Page 47