Far more substantively, Roosevelt then denied rumors that Leahy’s return to Washington was somehow connected to the usual speculation about British and American plans for a second front against Germany—the first being the Soviet Union’s lone stand in the east. The president then answered a question about rubber shortages at home, but other reporters would not let go of the Leahy appointment. Roosevelt was asked if it would mean that the president would “take a more active part in the strategic conduct of the war.” FDR laughed and said that would “be almost impossible.”
Almost casually, Roosevelt said that he spent an “awful lot of time” scrutinizing war strategy, and having a chief of staff to summarize reports, gather information for him, and maintain direct contact with various agencies—not just the military—would save him valuable time. Then, using a term that the assembled reporters knew well but that was not necessarily a compliment, the president said that Leahy would help do his “leg-work.”24
“The President was cagey, as he always was in dealing with the newsmen,” Leahy noted afterward, “and did not tell them very much.”25 If anything, this lack of information fueled rumors as to the scope of Leahy’s assignment. The New York Herald Tribune tried to have the last word the next day: “All of Washington was speculating as to just how much power had thus been conferred on the sixty-seven-year-old diplomat and Navy officer and whether, in fact, it meant that he was to be America’s war lord of the second front.”26 Time got closer to the truth. If “Generalissimo Leahy was a legman, the editor was still Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”27
As usual, Roosevelt also had a political motive behind this military move. Public outcry for a reorganization of the nation’s military had not abated, and while Roosevelt denied that Leahy was to be “a supreme commander of all the American forces,” there was definitely some truth to a British report that Leahy’s appointment managed “to take some of the wind out of the sails” of the movement to name MacArthur supreme commander of armed forces.28
MacArthur had his hands full in the South Pacific, and favorable reactions to Leahy’s appointment seemed to accomplish FDR’s secondary purpose. Emphasizing Leahy’s sterling reputation in Washington circles, George Fielding Eliot, military affairs correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, confessed that while “it is true that his duties are but vaguely defined at present… the personality of the man is a sufficient guaranty that he will find a means of discharging his duties… to the immense benefit of the country he has served so well.”29 Further singing Leahy’s praises, Walter Lippmann of the Washington Post pronounced him clearly the most qualified candidate, “so much so that many have begrudged the time he spent in Vichy when he was so obviously needed in Washington.”30
Whatever Leahy’s evolving role, Roosevelt desperately needed a steadying hand between his geopolitical considerations and the military’s implementation of overall strategy. Despite his professed enthusiasm for King’s Pacific offensive earlier in the spring, Roosevelt wanted to commit American troops to Europe in 1942 in part because of continued lobbying from Churchill but also because he clearly saw the need to support the Soviet Union.
Western perspectives, particularly when subsequently colored by Cold War tensions, frequently understate the Soviet Union’s critical role in defeating Nazi Germany. Roosevelt, however, recognized it immediately. On June 26, 1941, just four days after Hitler invaded his gargantuan neighbor, FDR wrote Leahy, still in France. “Now comes this Russian diversion,” Roosevelt characterized the move. “If it is more than just that it will mean the liberation of Europe.”31
A year later, 4.5 million German troops that might engage the Allies elsewhere were far from defeated but increasingly mired in Russia’s expanse. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted them to stay there and the Soviet Union to remain an active Allied combatant. King’s March 5, 1942, memo on Pacific strategy also recognized that America’s “chief contribution” to Russia would “continue to be munitions in general,” although that would not keep him from occasionally bristling when aircraft and ships were diverted to the effort.32
Thus, in late June 1942, Marshall dispatched Dwight Eisenhower, who in just sixteen months had jumped from colonel to lieutenant general as Marshall’s right-hand man, to London to confer with their British counterparts and implement Roosevelt’s goal of American troops in combat in Europe before the end of the year. Roosevelt strongly preferred Operation Sledgehammer, a small-scale, cross-Channel invasion of Europe. It was meant to establish a British-American bridgehead for future operations on the continent, but more important, it would distract Germany from a victory on the Eastern Front that might take the Soviet Union out of the war.
Eisenhower, however, found nothing but chaos in London. The buildup of American forces there (code-named Bolero) was only beginning, and the British evidenced a lack of both planning and desire to prepare a cross-Channel invasion of any sort. The British instead trotted out Operation Gymnast, a previously discussed invasion of Morocco on the north coast of Africa. Neither Marshall nor Eisenhower supported such a circuitous route into Europe, and they looked around for yet another alternative. King was all too happy to provide one by pushing for additional forces in the Pacific.
Leahy was not quite a member of the Joint Chiefs, but Marshall and King had been working well together in implementing King’s proposed Pacific strategy. Now they momentarily became the ultimate teammates by jointly advising Roosevelt that if the British prevailed and the United States undertook any operation except the buildup of troops in Great Britain in anticipation of Sledgehammer or some other direct European attack, “we are definitely of the opinion that we should turn to the Pacific and strike decisively against Japan; in other words, assume a defensive attitude against Germany, except for air operations; and use all available means in the Pacific.” Marshall may well have been bluffing the British, or even Roosevelt, but King was dead serious.33
Not so fast, said FDR. If at least one of his military chiefs was bluffing, the president decided to call it. From the quiet of Hyde Park on Sunday morning, July 12, Roosevelt ordered an immediate, same-day estimate of the men and materiel necessary to implement this all-out Pacific alternative and the impact the same would have on operations in the Atlantic. Marshall scurried to Washington from his country home in Leesburg, Virginia, to join King in gathering what, given the time constraints, was only a cursory overview.
Just two days after reading it, having known full well in advance that his opinion would not be changed, Roosevelt hand-wrote a draft in response. “My first impression,” FDR scrawled, “is that it is exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do following Pearl Harbor. It does not in fact provide use of American troops in fighting except in a lot of islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next… It does not help Russia or the Near East. Therefore it is disapproved.”34
Two days later, Roosevelt ordered Marshall and King to depart for London immediately, along with presidential confidant Harry Hopkins. They were to seek Eisenhower’s advice as the man on the scene and then get the British to commit to a definite plan. “Sledgehammer is of such grave importance,” Roosevelt wrote the trio in his instructions, “that every reason calls for accomplishment of it.” But if the British position remained immovable and an invasion of the European mainland was “finally and definitely out of the picture,” the president directed his chieftains to determine another place for U.S. troops to fight in 1942. Among Roosevelt’s suggestions was the Middle East, which Marshall and King found even more appalling than Gymnast as a potential quagmire and lacking in strategic merit.35
“It will be a queer party,” chief of the British Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke predicted beforehand, “as Harry Hopkins is for operating in Africa, Marshall wants to operate in Europe, and King is determined to stick to the Pacific!” Brooke would side with Hopkins, who appears to have taken his cue from Churchill. That did not, however, keep Hopkins from assuring Roosevelt, “Marshall
and King pushed very hard for Sledgehammer, I wanted you to know.”36
But in the end, the British could not be moved, and Gymnast, a thrust into North Africa, prevailed. Eisenhower characterized the abandonment of Sledgehammer as “the blackest day in history.” He was no less pleased that North Africa would be the alternative, fearing that it could only lead to a “further dispersal of the Allied forces.” But within a month, Eisenhower had his orders to become supreme commander of the combined Allied landings in North Africa, now renamed Torch.37
But Marshall and King were not quite finished lobbying FDR. When they returned to Washington, they stressed to Roosevelt that embarking on Torch necessarily canceled Sledgehammer, as well as Operation Roundup, a planned full-scale invasion of Europe in the spring of 1943. The president remained adamant about Torch but characteristically failed to accept that it was a trade-off for the others. On July 30, the American Joint Chiefs met with their British counterparts in the first session of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that Leahy chaired. Marshall and King still thought there was room to negotiate on Torch, in part because the outcome of the summer battles raging on the Eastern Front was still in doubt and there had been no formal abandonment of Sledgehammer or postponement of Roundup.
But now there was another player in the room. Far more than simply mediating disputes between the American services, Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief, soon made it abundantly clear that he was indeed the president’s man on the spot. Leahy told the Combined Chiefs that Roosevelt and Churchill considered the agreement on Torch in the late fall of 1942—less than four months away—to be final. When Marshall and King protested that no irrevocable decision had been made despite the discussions in London, Leahy assumed his role and assured them he would discuss the matter with the president.
That same evening, Leahy delivered Roosevelt’s answer to Marshall and King. “Very definitely,” the JCS minutes recorded Leahy reporting, Roosevelt, “as Commander-in-Chief, had made the decision that Torch would be undertaken at the earliest possible date.” The president considered it “our principal objective,” and assembling the means to carry it out would “take precedence over other operations,” including delaying the American buildup in Great Britain (Bolero) and hampering King’s operations in the Pacific.38
Meanwhile, King and the U.S. Navy had certainly not forgotten about the North Atlantic. King knew firsthand, both from his World War I days and more recently from the tensions of 1941, that German U-boats sinking Allied merchantmen were as much or more of a threat to the war effort than a clash of giant battleships. The number of Allied ships lost to U-boats reached an all-time high in July 1942, and during the first six months of the year American merchant losses alone to enemy action exceeded the total losses during World War I. The Germans indeed remembered how close they had come to winning the war at sea, and they were determined to do so this time. Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic “the dominating factor” of the war. “Never for one moment could we forget,” he wrote in retrospect, “that everything happening elsewhere, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome.”39
King readily agreed with Churchill about the desperateness of the situation, particularly along the Atlantic Coast of the United States. Flaming ships sinking within sight of East Coast cities were not only a major blow to the flow of war supplies, but such events also had the dismal secondary effect of torpedoing American morale. King and the navy in general came under criticism for not organizing convoys for all shipping.
Even Roosevelt lectured King by memo, saying, “Frankly, I think it has taken unconscionable time to get things going.” King politely agreed but pointed out that while their mutual goal was “to get every ship under escort,” that result would require upwards of one thousand seagoing escort vessels, essentially destroyer escorts, or corvettes. It was simply going to take time for American industry to produce those ships, and in the meantime—still doing the best with what he had—King concentrated convoys in the most dangerous areas, including the dreaded Murmansk and Archangel runs to support Russia. These Arctic convoys were principally Great Britain’s responsibility, but British ship commitments and heavy losses there worked to pull U.S. resources from the North Atlantic and stretch King’s forces that much thinner.40
And they were made thinner still when King begrudgingly agreed to spare enough ships to protect the troop convoys that were soon assembled in Virginia and sent across the Atlantic for the much-debated invasion of North Africa. Torch was, in fact, a series of landings from French Morocco, on the Atlantic coast, eastward into the Mediterranean to Oran and Algiers in French-controlled Algeria. “This African adventure,” as Leahy termed it privately, “had long been under consideration by President Roosevelt” and went off surprisingly well.41
French admiral Darlan, who despite his earlier outburst at Leahy was no friend of the pro-German Laval, had managed to keep the French fleet out of Axis hands. As the Torch invasion force bore down on the North African coast, Darlan was in Algiers visiting a son who was very sick with polio. After the Allied landings met with initial Vichy French opposition, Darlan ordered opposition to cease. This caused considerable confusion throughout Vichy. For several days, conflicting orders to fight or surrender were given before Germany quickly occupied the remainder of France. The end result was that the French fleet was scuttled at Toulon before it could fall into German hands, and the Allies—with Free French forces a part of the effort—established a front in North Africa from which to relieve pressure on British forces in Egypt by attacking the rear of Erwin Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps.
As Roosevelt told Eisenhower, who led the assault, “Our occupation of North Africa has caused a wave of reassurance throughout the Nation not only because of the skill and dash with which the first phase of an extremely difficult operation has been executed, but even more because of the evident perfection of the cooperation between the British and American forces.”42
Upon sailing for Africa, Eisenhower had already expressed to Admiral King his own “very real and deep appreciation for the magnificent support that has been given to me by you personally and by all elements of the United States Navy with which I have come in contact.” Considering King’s other commitments, especially the battles then raging in the South Pacific, Eisenhower was “particularly appreciative of your action in standing by original commitments.”43
It was hardly that harmonious, but Torch provided the United States with a valuable testing ground for men and machinery, and it lent a particularly American feel to the conflict. Leahy would later say that Roosevelt “never made a single military decision with any thought of his own personal political fortunes,” but that public recollection seems entirely in keeping with Leahy’s “loyal soldier” persona and not with Roosevelt’s always-calculating political agenda.44
Torch was originally scheduled for October 30, 1942, a few days before the midterm elections. With far more candor, Marshall recalled briefing FDR on preparations for Torch and the president holding up his hands in an attitude of prayer and remarking, “Please make it before Election Day.” When the landings were later postponed until November 8, a week after the election, Roosevelt did not complain, however, and “never said a word.”45
With typical understatement, Leahy showed in hindsight that he perfectly understood his role with FDR: “It has been said that Roosevelt ordered ‘Operation Torch’ in the face of opposition from his senior advisers. I never opposed the North African invasion. I told the President of the possibilities of trouble, but it looked to me like a feasible undertaking.”46 Certainly, Torch was the first test of the wartime partnership of Roosevelt and Leahy and only the beginning of their work together on deciding the course, one that would include dealing with avowed enemies as well as difficult allies.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Fighting the Japanese—and MacArthur
General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most
valuable military leader in American history—at least that’s what Douglas MacArthur thought. When asked by a proper British gentlewoman if he had ever met the famous general, Dwight D. Eisenhower—himself about to march into history—supposedly replied, “Not only have I met him, ma’am; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines.”1
MacArthur owed his escape from the Philippines to navy PT boats, but that did not stop the general from questioning the veracity of the navy in coming to his aid or from placing the blame for the eventual fall of the islands at the navy’s door. “The Navy, being unable to maintain our supply lines,” MacArthur wrote in his memoirs, “deprived us of the maintenance, the munitions, the bombs and fuel and other necessities to operate our air arm.”
Conveniently overlooking the fact that his planes were caught sitting on the ground nine hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, MacArthur went on to assert, “The stroke at Pearl Harbor not only damaged our Pacific Fleet, but destroyed any possibility of future Philippine air power.” Still, MacArthur jabbed, “a serious naval effort might well have saved the Philippines, and stopped the Japanese drive to the south and east.”2
At his new headquarters in Melbourne, Australia, MacArthur granted Time correspondent Theodore H. White an interview and “managed to denounce all at once, and with equal gusto and abandon,” Franklin Roosevelt, George Marshall, Harry Luce (Time’s publisher), and the U.S. Navy. “White,” MacArthur lectured, “the best navy in the world is the Japanese navy. A first-class navy. Then comes the British Navy. The U.S. Navy is a fourth-class navy, not even as good as the Italian navy.”3
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