The other instance concerned Roosevelt’s wish—“pet idea,” Leahy called it—for a series of strategic military bases all over the world under the control of the United Nations. If that sounded vaguely Wilsonian, Leahy’s opposition to it took on the aura of Senator Lodge and his conservative Republicans. Leahy “could never agree” with Roosevelt on that subject the many times they discussed it and “always felt that any bases considered essential for the security of our own country should be under the sovereignty of the United States.” Roosevelt’s support for the plan was based chiefly on his principle that the United States was not seeking to acquire any territory as a result of the war. Leahy thought that rather naive and repeatedly told Roosevelt he was wrong.25
George M. Elsey was a naval reserve officer who worked in the White House Map Room from 1941 to 1946 and as such was pretty much at Leahy’s elbow on a daily basis. “Admiral Leahy was a pretty crusty and salty old fellow,” Elsey recalled. “I don’t think [he] ever really trusted anybody [emphasis in original] other than the United States, and had it been possible, he would have liked to have fought all wars without allies because he knew that you invariably had difficulties and difference of opinion with [them].”26
At Yalta, there were allies, and the long days and late night festivities were enough to tax even the healthiest of individuals. One Soviet dinner started at 9:00 p.m. and lasted until 1:00 a.m., complete with thirty-eight standing toasts. Leahy wryly noted, “The mosquitoes under the tables worked very successfully on my ankles [and] all the people who had any sense watered their liquor and managed to stay alert.” Considering the important work to be accomplished, he considered such celebrations “an unwarranted waste of time.”27
Leahy left Yalta with great feelings of foreboding. Soviet domination of Poland, France’s admission to the big three, and the plan to demilitarize Germany totally—thus making the Soviet Union the dominant power in Europe—were all issues that weighed heavily on him and came to dominate postwar Europe. But those who blame the subsequent collapse of the wartime alliance with the Soviets on Roosevelt’s declining health at Yalta do so without considering FDR’s long-held desire for multilateralism and belief that he could genuinely elicit compromise from Stalin. Had Roosevelt at Yalta been the man he had been at Casablanca two-plus years before, the result may not have been any different. Conservative Leahy himself would have no doubt taken a harder line, but he served his more liberal master.28
Averell Harriman, who at the time of Yalta was the American ambassador to the Soviet Union, characterized Leahy as able to move easily into “almost anything that came into the White House, whether it be production matters or policy matters of almost any kind.” But as several White House aides pointed out, “He was no empire builder. He simply wanted to get on with the war.”29
Among those aides, assistant naval aide Lieutenant William M. Rigdon may have offered the clearest portrait. “Leahy was always close to the President,” Rigdon recalled. “He was not only the President’s chief planning officer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the highest ranking American officer on military duty… but he was also the President’s confidant and adviser on matters other than military. FDR trusted him completely.” Noting that Leahy had had a reputation in navy circles before the war of being “extremely difficult to work for,” Rigdon figured that Leahy had surely mellowed and “was one of the most thoughtful and appreciative men I have known.”30
Perhaps most interesting about Leahy’s accumulation of power is that it occurred with very little scrutiny from the press—certainly without any self-promotion. After his cover appearances on Time and Life in 1942, Leahy largely dropped out of sight of the mainstream press. In an era when Time was a meaty magazine of a hundred-plus pages, Leahy was mentioned only once in 1943 and not at all in the first six months of 1944. When his face appeared on the cover again in May 1945, it was largely to promote a war bond drive led by the five-star admirals and generals, of whom, Time readily acknowledged, “Leahy is the least known.”31
A final point must be made about Leahy as presidential adviser. Given his long history of military service and de facto ranking as the country’s senior soldier/sailor, it might be assumed that he supported the military position and emphasis to the exclusion of the political. In fact, particularly in this last year of FDR’s life, Leahy seems to have done just the opposite.
As Roosevelt gathered more power into the White House and made military decisions that had increasingly political overtones, the State Department frequently took a backseat in U.S. policy, and “many decisions were made without foreign policy consideration having come into play.” But this was not because of Leahy.
“Instead of being an anti–State Department man, as some people assumed that an old sailor automatically would be,” Map Room aide George Elsey recalled, “Admiral Leahy was the one man around the White House who kept constantly saying, ‘But the State Department ought to be consulted.’ As the war went further and further along and as decisions began to be more and more political and less and less military, it was Leahy who insisted that there be a relationship with the State Department.” Consequently, Leahy named Charles E. “Chip” Bohlen as his personal liaison and met with him daily to keep the State Department in the loop with the latest FDR-Churchill-Stalin messages and negotiations. “Admiral Leahy,” Elsey maintained, “was perhaps the one strong man in the White House during the war who was trying [all emphasis in original] to keep political and foreign policy matters in some sort of perspective with President Roosevelt.”32
Bill Leahy transferred this same degree of fidelity to Harry Truman. Returning to the United States after the strain of Yalta, Roosevelt’s workday became even more compressed and less productive. All FDR wanted to do, it seemed to many observers, was sleep and sleep and sleep. The performer in Roosevelt rallied to give his last press conference on March 20—the 997th of his presidency—but most who saw him found him listless, unengaged, and simply worn-out.33
On March 29, 1945, Leahy made a laconic, single-sentence entry in his diary: “The President departed for a vacation at Warm Springs, Georgia.”34 Save for a two-week trip to Warm Springs the previous December when Leahy remained in Washington, this would be the longest period they had been apart since Leahy became FDR’s chief of staff. Simply put, Leahy had been at FDR’s side everywhere, even through the monthlong stay at Hobcaw in the spring of 1944.
There is no clear reason why Leahy did not accompany Roosevelt to Warm Springs this last time, but the facts fuel much speculation. It is possible that Leahy did not go because he had so little substantive interaction with FDR anymore. Knowing full well the answers and directives he should give in the name of his boss, Leahy may well have figured that he could do his job far more readily from his office in the East Wing of the White House than from the backcountry of Georgia. Inconceivably, however, after Dr. Bruenn pronounced Roosevelt dead on April 12, Leahy learned the news from the radio while at home—not from a call from the White House. Leahy, as well as Marshall and King, met the president’s train when it returned his body to Washington on Friday morning, April 14, and all three accompanied it to Hyde Park for burial the next day.
By then, Truman had already had his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs and a private conversation with Leahy. Truman asked the admiral to remain in his position, but Leahy was quick to note that he had spoken his own mind to Roosevelt and that if he remained chief of staff for Truman, “it will be impossible for me to change.” Fine, Truman replied. “That is exactly what I want you to do.” Leahy initially thought that this new engagement might last for a few months; instead, it lasted four years.35
Thus, Leahy and his staff prepared dozens of background papers for Truman as the new president oversaw the unconditional surrender of Germany on May 7 and prepared for the Potsdam Conference with Churchill and Stalin that July. All of these briefing papers were prepared under Leahy’s direction or at his request, and he became the chief translator or inter
preter of Roosevelt’s policies for Truman. Significantly, by this time the major issues were increasingly political rather than military.36
Truman came to trust and value Leahy because the admiral was a thread of continuity running to Churchill, Stalin, and the Joint Chiefs. Leahy was also quite capable of being Truman’s “enforcer,” as in the case of James F. Byrnes. After Truman appointed Byrnes secretary of state in July 1945, Byrnes proceeded to conduct American foreign policy as if he had been Roosevelt’s running mate instead of Truman.
The breaking point came when Byrnes returned from a trip to the Soviet Union in 1946 and called a press conference to report to the public without first reporting to Truman. The president’s appointments secretary, Matthew J. Connelly, told Byrnes to cancel the press conference and hasten down to the presidential yacht, Williamsburg, for a heart-to-heart with Truman. But it was Leahy who “took [Byrnes] apart to a fare-the-well” and “never let him off the hook.”37 Byrnes resigned as secretary of state soon afterward.
Admiral Leahy’s principal biographer would title his work Witness to Power, but particularly during the final year of FDR’s life, Leahy wielded power as much as witnessed it. “Unseen Wielder of Power” might have been a more descriptive title. That Leahy did so in the name of his commander in chief, with no personal agenda of his own, is a testament to his long association with Roosevelt and his policies as well as his personal character.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Toward Tokyo Bay
Having experienced some difficulties over the years with his own American allies in the Pacific—chief among them Douglas MacArthur—it came as no surprise that Ernest J. King was never enthusiastic about a role in the region for Great Britain’s Royal Navy. But as the war in Europe showed signs of an Allied victory, this is exactly what Churchill sought to achieve. He had put the Americans on the spot at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944 by grandly offering Roosevelt the British fleet for Pacific operations and then bluntly asking, right then and there, if his offer was accepted. There was little at the time that Roosevelt could say but yes, of course. One wry British observer noted that the official minutes should then have read, “At this point Admiral King was carried out.”1
It wasn’t quite that bad, but almost. King didn’t want to take on the additional logistical burden of supplying British ships with stores and ammunition, or the operational headache of integrating them into Nimitz’s command. The Pacific had been a decidedly American theater of operations since early 1942, and now, if it was not fully awash with American ships, there were certainly enough on station to complete the mission. In private, Roosevelt opined the obvious for Churchill’s grand gesture: “All they want is Singapore back.”2
But Roosevelt had accepted Churchill’s grand gesture—no matter how politically motivated—and it was once again up to Leahy to see that the presidential directive was followed militarily. When King professed at a subsequent meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that “the practicability of employing these forces would be a matter for discussion from time to time,” Leahy interrupted to assert that “where they should be employed” was open to debate, but the question of “if” had been firmly answered by the president. If King had any further objections, he could take the matter up with FDR.3
It was December 1944 before the British Pacific Fleet, consisting of four carriers, two battleships, and fifteen destroyers—all told about the size of one of the task groups of Halsey’s Third Fleet—arrived in Australia looking for a fight, presumably with the Japanese. Nimitz was hardly more keen on the British than King. “I do not need Paul Revere,” Nimitz wrote King, “to tell me that the British are coming.” Nimitz thought the Royal Navy’s dispatches read like operations orders for an occupation. “Perhaps,” he continued, “it is intended to be an occupation force.”
But by the time Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, the commander of the British fleet, arrived at Pearl Harbor just before Christmas 1944 to confer with the Americans, Nimitz was his usual gracious self. He and Fraser had met a decade before when Nimitz was commanding the Augusta on the Far East Station. Nimitz invited Fraser to be his houseguest and then set about sorting out the details of the British involvement.
A large part of the problem was that two centuries of “Rule, Britannia” aside, the British had no occasion or capacity during World War II to mount the type of sustained, oceangoing operations that the American navy routinely practiced. Fraser satisfied some of King’s logistical concerns by assuring Nimitz that his fleet was equipped with its own oilers and supply ships, but the Royal Navy was simply not as proficient at underway refueling and provisioning as the Americans. When Fraser boasted to Nimitz that the British were able to remain at sea eight days out of the month, Nimitz shook his head in disbelief. That wouldn’t do. “We compromised on twenty,” Nimitz noted, and then turned Fraser over to Admiral Spruance with orders to work the British into the coming campaign against Okinawa.4
The other ally spoiling to get into the fight against Japan in the waning days was the Soviet Union. Stalin privately agreed with Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta to do so ninety days after Germany surrendered. This was a highly guarded secret, but Leahy was among those who had misgivings about taking on another Pacific ally. While at the time Leahy never publicly voiced opposition to the Soviets entering the Pacific war—it would have been politically unrealistic to do so—his tendency was to hope privately that the war might end before they got involved. Marshall and King remained focused on purely military matters, but Leahy’s growing concern about the Soviet Union and the state of the postwar alliance was just another example of his increasingly political role.5
As the war churned toward its inevitable conclusion, ingrained frictions also continued in the American high command. Despite his self-proclaimed triumphant return to the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur looked at a map of the Western Pacific and finally saw what King and Nimitz had been seeing for months. The direct route to Japan lay through Nimitz’s provinces in the Central Pacific. Unless MacArthur quickly became engaged in that direction, his command would be left mopping up operations in the Philippines. The War Department, George Marshall, and, in the closing days of his life, Franklin Roosevelt, refused to let that happen. The army needed its heroes, too.
On April 3, 1945, the Joint Chiefs agreed to a plan for the final attack against Japan. MacArthur would command all army ground and air forces, while Nimitz would continue to command all naval forces. But it wasn’t that simple and certainly not so quickly implemented. MacArthur’s chief aides roared into Nimitz’s forward headquarters on Guam and, with typical gusto reminiscent of the post-Tarawa conferences, began giving orders as if MacArthur was in charge of everything except ships at sea.
Once again, Nimitz politely but firmly stood his ground and salvaged the unity of command among the branches that he had worked so hard to nurture. MacArthur would eventually command the ground forces for the invasion, but in the interim Nimitz continued to command the flow of men, ships, and materiel, as well as the bases en route to Japan.6
The decision to invade the main islands of Japan was also not without controversy and debate. Two main alternatives presented themselves: a blockade coupled with a continuing bombing campaign that would eventually starve Japan into surrender, or a direct invasion that quite likely would make the casualties of Tarawa and Okinawa pale in comparison. Early in May 1945, the planners for the Joint Chiefs recommended the latter, arguing that the Japanese were unlikely to surrender without a direct invasion.
Leahy, and initially King, were highly skeptical of an invasion. Leahy had been lobbying against it for some time with Roosevelt and did not hesitate to do the same with Truman. Even if a blockade took longer, in Leahy’s estimation it would cost fewer lives. Marshall, however, was inclined to keep up the momentum, fearing that any pause for a blockade would only give the Japanese time to organize homeland defenses, thus making the ultimate invasion that much more costly.
Leahy ad
mitted that King “had never been as positively opposed to invasion as I had,” and Marshall soon won King over to landings on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu. Until then, King had not entirely given up his long-held interest in China as the best place from which to attack Japan proper. Marshall now instead convinced him that Kyushu was the most logical next step toward Tokyo Bay. Nimitz, who had also favored encirclement and continued bombing over a direct invasion, momentarily agreed with the rationale to seize Kyushu as a necessary staging area.
On the afternoon of June 18, the Joint Chiefs met with Truman and the secretaries of war and the navy at the White House to make a final decision. Marshall argued that regardless of the eventual strategy toward the other main islands, Kyushu was essential to tightening any blockade and increasing any bombing campaign. King supported Marshall’s views, Leahy acquiesced, and the decision was made for a direct assault on Japan. Ten days later, the Joint Chiefs set November 1, 1945, for the invasion of Kyushu, code-named Operation Olympic, and reaffirmed their earlier directive that MacArthur and Nimitz would be jointly responsible for the operation.7
The Marshall-King relationship, which had had its stormy moments, had matured and certainly become respectful—one might even say friendly. Far more than the requisite Christmas and birthday greetings praising the other’s cooperation, Marshall and King seemed to look out for each other, even if only under the banner of harmony and a better image for their combined services.
When Marshall and King were asked to take part in pregame ceremonies for the Washington Senators’ 1945 baseball season opener and march to the flagpole, Marshall worried about negative publicity from overseas if they formally participated in ball field ceremonies. “There is considerable difference,” Marshall cautioned King, “between raising the flag at Griffith Park and raising it at Ehrenbreitstein or on Iwo Jima. I see no objection to possibly going to the game and sitting in a box but I don’t like this idea at the present time of being sucked into the publicity formalities of the procedure. What is your reaction? Have you committed yourself?”
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