On the evening of May 31, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill, “Molotov’s visit is, I think, a real success because we have got on a personal footing of candor and as good friendship as can be acquired through an interpreter.” On June 12, Hopkins wrote to American ambassador John G. Winant in London, “Molotov’s visit went extremely well. He and the President got along famously and I am sure that we at least bridged one more gap between ourselves and Russia.” Goodwill, as the Roosevelt-Churchill relationship demonstrated, could lubricate alliances. But Hopkins and his chief seemed to assume that bonhomie could override profound differences in worldview and national interests.25
In World War I, it had been possible to transport a huge, semiprepared army to France and train it further there before finally taking it into combat. In 1942, the Allies would have to attack Hitler’s Festung Europa from Britain across the treacherous English Channel. The Soviet Union demanded such an operation before the end of the year. American military leaders thought they could comply. The British, more realistic, insisted that lack of landing craft and sufficient numbers of trained troops made an invasion impossible before 1943 at the earliest. On June 9, the most charismatic figure in the British high command, Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, met with Roosevelt and Hopkins to survey the war situation. In a wide-ranging discussion, he emphasized the difficulties of an attack across the channel. With the issue still unsettled, Roosevelt invited Churchill to return to the United States for another strategy meeting. The prime minister, accompanied by his military staff, journeyed to America ten days later for the second Washington conference.26
The two men talked privately at Hyde Park on June 19 and 20. Roosevelt personally met Churchill at the Poughkeepsie airport, drove him to Springwood, and, just as he had done with the king and queen, motored recklessly around the estate. “On several occasions the car poised and backed on the grass verges of the precipices over the Hudson,” Churchill recalled. “I was careful not to take his attention off the driving.” Churchill explained to Roosevelt and Hopkins in persuasive detail the impossibility of a quick attack on the continent, arguing instead for a landing in North Africa, where Britain was fighting a tough back-and-forth tank campaign with German general Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps. That evening, they boarded the presidential train for an overnight trip to Washington.27
In a series of intensive meetings over the next five days, the British made their case. The atmosphere shifted precariously between fraternity and hostility. The hot Washington weather did not help. Still, the dour, businesslike Sir Alan Brooke found himself more impressed than he had expected to be by Roosevelt and positively captivated when the president asked if he was related to a Sir Victor Brooke, who had visited Hyde Park some fifty years earlier (Sir Victor was the general’s father).28
On June 21, while meeting with Roosevelt in the Oval Office, Churchill and Brooke received the news that Britain’s eastern Libyan bastion at Tobruk had fallen to the Germans, leaving Egypt and the Suez Canal vulnerable. The president immediately asked, “What can we do to help?” Brooke, years later, recalled “vividly being impressed by the tact and heartfelt sympathy. . . . There was not one word too much or too little.” In short order three hundred US Sherman tanks were diverted to the African campaign. Such moments alternated with the dissents of General Marshall, Admiral King, and other American military leaders, who remained convinced that the Allies could hit the Germans directly in Europe and knock them back hard.29
When Churchill departed on the evening of June 25, Roosevelt had taken no firm decision. King, anxious to build on the American victory at Midway, advocated a Pacific-first strategy and may have thought he set one in motion by approving plans for the invasion of Guadalcanal. Marshall, Arnold, Eisenhower, and other senior army officers remained wedded to an assault on northern France, although they knew the Germans had twenty-five divisions already stationed in the country and possessed overwhelming advantages with interior lines of transportation and communications. The Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington continued to do business professionally, but the strategic division limited their effectiveness.
The issue, which Roosevelt let hang too long, had to be resolved. In mid-July, Marshall and Arnold forced the president’s hand by joining with King in recommending a shift in emphasis to the Pacific if an invasion of France was to be postponed. Roosevelt, who received their memorandum at Hyde Park, reacted sharply. He demanded a detailed plan, which of course did not exist. Supplied with an admission that it did not, he followed up with a brusque dismissal, telling his service chiefs that they had recommended “exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do” by advocating a diversion of troops to “a lot of islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next.” The proposal would relieve neither Russia nor the embattled Near East. “Therefore it is disapproved as of the present.” His signature underscored his authority: “Roosevelt C. in C.”30
Back in Washington on July 15, he saw Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, to whom he stated his displeasure with a Chiefs of Staff attitude that amounted to “taking up your dishes and going away.” General Marshall followed and later told Stimson that he and the president had had a “thumping argument.” Roosevelt’s only concession was to send Marshall and Admiral King, accompanied by Harry Hopkins, to London for talks with the British on an early offensive. He gave them a detailed memorandum of instructions that demonstrated the direction in which he was leaning and left them little room for moving away from it. It demanded feasible action for American troops in 1942, expressed doubts about the possibilities for a landing in France, and emphasized the importance of holding the Middle East.31
The British had regrouped behind a strong defensive line anchored at El Alamein, just sixty-two miles from Cairo. They seemed likely to beat off further attacks. During the talks that followed in London, the president sent cables prodding his representatives toward the North African plan. Brooke summed up the results in his diary: “A very trying week, but it is satisfactory to think that we have got just what we wanted out of the USA chiefs.”32
Roosevelt none too subtly had dictated grand strategy to his military Chiefs of Staff. Part of his motivation was no doubt political: a “sacrificial” invasion of France would be bad for him and his party. But it also might be catastrophic for the larger war effort.
He laid out his thinking in a conversation with Harry Hopkins on the evening of July 15. The United States would wage a holding action in the Pacific. Germany was the major threat, the European theater all-important. If an invasion of the continent was not possible, then North Africa and the Middle East were areas of critical urgency. Rommel could not be allowed to drive to Suez, establish German dominance in the Middle East, gain access to important oil supplies, jeopardize the Persian Gulf supply route to the USSR, and conceivably lay the basis for a meeting of triumphant German and Japanese forces in India. These considerations pointed toward a North African enterprise that was doable in short order and carried a high probability of victory.33
The president knew full well that, whatever their reservations, his military chiefs could only salute and obey. The normally volatile King, Marshall recalled years later, went along “without a quibble.” Marshall himself, fourteen years later, complained to his biographer, “We failed to see that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained.” Actually, Roosevelt correctly believed that he had a sounder grasp of the big picture than did King and Marshall. He also expressed hope to his confidants that newspapers would carry banner headlines proclaiming the invasion before the midterm elections.34
Although Roosevelt and Churchill focused mainly on the second front during their meeting, they also concluded another agreement that they must have understood to be potentially even more important: to pool their research programs on the military development of atomic energy. Albert Einstein had first alerted Roosevelt to the possibility by letter in 1939, but the administration
had taken only tentative steps before Pearl Harbor. The British had been more active but lacked the resources for so ambitious a program. Pearl Harbor and the certain knowledge that German physicists were at work on an atomic project unleashed nearly unlimited support for an American-led drive to build an atomic bomb.35
In August 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers established a lavishly funded branch called the Manhattan Engineering District, commanded by Brigadier General Leslie Groves. Within a year and a half, Groves presided over a scientific empire based in Los Alamos, New Mexico; Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Hanford, Washington. University of California physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, working as his civilian deputy, headed a team of scientists—Americans, British, and émigrés from Nazi-occupied Europe—intent on developing a weapon sure to win the war.
Josef Stalin learned of the atomic project through his remarkably productive espionage network in the United States and quickly initiated a Soviet effort. For the moment, however, he had far more urgent priorities.
By mid-August, the German drive through the Ukraine had reached the industrial city of Stalingrad on the west bank of the Volga River. The city was strategically significant; its name made it symbolically vital. The Soviet army poured seemingly endless reinforcements into the struggle. The Wehrmacht pushed forward in urban house-to-house fighting. The ensuing conflagration went on for the rest of the year, devouring men at appalling rates and becoming the decisive battle of not just the eastern front but the entire war.
Churchill assumed responsibility for personally telling Stalin that the second front would have to wait until 1943. Traveling to Moscow by way of Egypt and Iran, he met with the Soviet leader on August 1, accompanied by Roosevelt’s special envoy to Britain, Averell Harriman. The atmosphere was made all the more touchy by an Anglo-American decision to suspend northern-route Lend-Lease shipments to the USSR after German submarines and aircraft taking advantage of the Arctic summer’s round-the-clock daylight had almost totally destroyed convoy PQ-17.
Stalin did not take the second front postponement lightly. As was becoming a standard pattern of Soviet behavior, he became angry and demanding, accusing the British of cowardice, then relenting when the prime minister promised a massive strategic bombing offensive against German cities. Always wanting more supplies from the West, he was somewhat mollified when his visitors assured him of a southern route that would run through Iran.36
The relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin was less volatile but had its own rough edges and uncertainties. The correspondence was polite and businesslike, the relationship lubricated by large quantities of American aircraft, tanks, trucks, and high explosives. But specters hung over it. The biggest was the possibility that, in one fashion or another, the USSR might be forced either to surrender or to make a separate peace. Another was that Stalin might try to play Roosevelt and Churchill against each other.
Roosevelt had faith in the power of his personality. “I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department,” he told Churchill on March 18, 1942. “He thinks he likes me better.” This at a time when he and Stalin had conducted fewer than two dozen exchanges! He would persist in the belief that he could establish a relationship of trust and friendship with an ally every bit as bloody handed as Hitler and as inflexibly committed to the destruction of liberal capitalism.37
On November 8, 1942, a mostly American Allied force of more than 100,000 troops stormed the beaches of French North Africa. The 35,000 American soldiers who landed at Casablanca under the command of General George S. Patton were transported directly from the United States in the largest amphibious operation in American history. The rest came from bases in Britain. Resistance from the French quickly ceased when the Vichy leader in North Africa, Admiral Jean Darlan, agreed to capitulate in exchange for Allied recognition as the continuing supreme authority. The “Darlan Deal,” however justifiable militarily, received wide condemnation in both the United States and Britain as a compromise with fascism, but it gave the Americans most of their objectives with only light casualties. Darlan himself was assassinated shortly thereafter and replaced by a more palatable Frenchman.
On the other side of the continent, the British army, thoroughly reequipped and commanded by General Sir Bernard Montgomery, had begun its own offensive against the Afrika Corps on October 23. By November 8, the British were advancing on Tobruk. It was briefly possible to envision an enemy caught between rapidly advancing irresistible forces and ground to pieces in a relatively quick final battle. Instead, the Germans rushed reinforcements to both African fronts. American forces soon reached the Tunisian border, but from there their advance would become a five-month slugfest. Still, from early on it was a pretty sure thing that the Germans were only buying time in a lost cause.
On New Year’s Eve, 1942, Franklin, Eleanor, and a group of their closest friends watched a soon-to-be-released feature film from Warner Brothers titled Casablanca. The time had come for another Roosevelt-Churchill conference to make a firm decision on the next move in the war and enjoy a victory lap on conquered territory.38
For Churchill, the trip to their destination involved simply a ten-hour flight from Britain. For Roosevelt, given the menacing presence of German submarines in the Atlantic and the still evolving capabilities of transatlantic air transportation, it was an adventure. Supposedly bound for Hyde Park, he left Washington by train for Miami on the evening of January 9, 1943, accompanied by Hopkins, Leahy, numerous other aides, and security personnel. They arrived early on the morning of January 11 and at about 5:00 a.m. transferred to two Pan American Boeing 314 Flying Boats. This was the first time an American president would travel by air while in office. The largest and most advanced passenger planes of the day, the 314s each accommodated a maximum of forty passengers. Fitted with a dining room and separate sleeping area, the planes were luxurious and well heated, but the cabin was unpressurized, limiting the altitude achievable without passenger access to bottled oxygen. Top speed with a good tail wind was two hundred miles per hour.39
Twelve hours later, the president’s plane came down just north of Venezuela at the American naval base on Trinidad, acquired in the Destroyer Deal of 1940. The travelers had dinner, retired early, and arose at 4:00 a.m. on January 12. Leahy, ill with influenza, had to be left behind. By 5:30, the planes were back in the air again, bound for Belem, Brazil, at the delta of the Amazon River. After a two-and-a-half-hour refueling stop, they took off for an overnight nineteen-hour flight of more than 2,000 miles across the Atlantic to the British base at Bathurst, Gambia, and the US Navy cruiser Memphis, which would billet them over the next night. Roosevelt, on the basis of a quick auto ride to the docks, wrote that Bathurst was an “awful, pestiferous hole.” On the morning of January 14, the party boarded an Army C-54 transport for a 1,200-mile final hop to, as Roosevelt mockingly called it, “that well-known spot, ‘somewhere in North Africa.’”40
That afternoon, surely exhausted but exhilarated, he finally arrived at his destination. A trip that fifty years in the future would involve a half-day direct flight of 3,800 miles had consumed five days and traversed approximately 7,300 miles. Two of his sons—Elliott, an air force lieutenant colonel, and Franklin Jr., a navy lieutenant assigned to a destroyer—met him there.
The most immediate issue to be decided at Casablanca was the next step in the war. The US Joint Chiefs wanted to devote all resources to a buildup in England and to invade France before the end of the year. The British were determined to stay in the Mediterranean, attacking and occupying Sicily, then moving on to either Italy or Greece and the Balkans. They drew on research done for them by a shipload of military and diplomatic officials in direct contact with London. The sessions featured the haughty and imperious manner of General Brooke on the British side and the explosive temper of Admiral King on the American side. The much respected British liaison to the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, Field Marshal Sir
John Dill, employed his skill at soothing ruffled egos and finding formulas for agreement to smooth over most of the differences. Roosevelt agreed that control of the Mediterranean was a strategic imperative that required ousting the Germans from Sicily. Italy would be a logical and necessary next step. Beyond that, he was not prepared to support Churchill’s enthusiasms.41
Roosevelt and Churchill needed to reach agreement on a commander for an emerging Free French military force. Churchill favored Charles de Gaulle; Roosevelt wanted General Henri Giraud. Imposing men with no taint of collaboration with the Germans, both were also impossibly vain, inordinately touchy, obsessed with a sense of their own destinies, and barely able to speak to each other. In the end, there was little to do but cobble together a joint command structure. Giraud, who lacked de Gaulle’s political and rhetorical skills, would eventually fade from the scene.42
One of Roosevelt’s priorities was to appraise the American commander in chief of the North African operation, Eisenhower, now a lieutenant general. They met for the first time on January 15. Roosevelt struck Eisenhower as buoyant and optimistic, expecting a quick end to the military campaign, and prematurely focused on the future of France and its empire. When the president demanded a date for the end of hostilities, Eisenhower “blurted out” May 15—as it turned out just two days later than the final Axis surrender in Tunisia.43
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