The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  But it was on the upper decks that the Queen Mary’s larger purpose on this voyage could be found. The secret passenger manifest listed the United Kingdom’s most senior war chiefs, including commanders of the British Army, navy, and air force, bound for Washington, D.C., and TRIDENT, the code name for a two-week Anglo-American conference on war strategy. Officers crowded the rails as the ship glided through the Verrazano Narrows, peering into the fog in a vain effort to glimpse the Manhattan skyline seven miles north; they settled instead for dim views of Coney Island to starboard and Staten Island’s Fort Wadsworth to port. Stewards and subalterns scurried about, sorting piles of luggage and tagging those bound for the White House with red slips bearing a large “W”—including two dozen bags belonging to a certain “Air Commodore Spencer.” Secret documents were collected and filed in locked boxes stacked in the former children’s playroom on the promenade deck, while classified wastepaper smoldered in an incinerator improvised from a bathtub in mezzanine suite number 105.

  To mislead potential spies lurking in Scottish ports, great pains had been taken to obscure the details of this voyage. The ship’s print shop in Gourock had engraved menus in Dutch to suggest that the mysterious traveler to New York was Wilhelmina, exiled queen of the Netherlands. Workmen also installed wheelchair ramps and handrails, and counterintelligence rumormongers in dockyard pubs let slip that the Queen Mary was being dispatched to pick up President Franklin D. Roosevelt for a secret visit to Britain. But all pretense ended shortly after nine A.M. The ship’s great screws turned a final turn, the iron anchor sank with a rattle and a mighty splash, and Air Commodore Spencer strolled on deck, “looking well and fat and pink,” and eager to get on with the war.

  Like the Queen Mary, Winston S. Churchill was simply too obtrusive to disguise, “the largest human being of our time,” as one contemporary concluded. There was the Havana cigar, of course, said to be long as a trombone and one of the eight he typically smoked in a day. The familiar moon face glowered beneath the furrowed pate he had taken to rubbing with a scented handkerchief. This morning, after leaving a £10 tip for the Queen’s service staff, he swapped the casual “siren suit” worn through much of the voyage for the uniform of the Royal Yacht Squadron. The effect had been likened to that of “a gangster clergyman who has gone on the stage.” The previous night Churchill had celebrated both his imminent arrival in America and the third anniversary of his premiership with the sort of feast that recalled not only the Queen’s prewar luxury but the sun-never-sets Empire itself: croûte au pot à l’ancienne, petite sole meunière, pommes Windsor, and baba au rhum, all washed down with a magnum of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge, 1926.

  “We are all worms,” Churchill once intoned, “but I do believe I am a glow-worm.” Who could dispute it? For three years he had fought the good fight, at first alone and then with the mighty alliance he had helped construct. He had long warned minions that he was to be awakened at night only if Britain were invaded; that alarum never sounded. His mission in this war, he asserted, was “to pester, nag and bite”—a crusade that Roosevelt, who would receive thirteen hundred telegrams from Churchill during the war, knew all too well. “Temperamental like a film star and peevish like a spoilt child,” the prime minister’s army chief wrote of him; his wife, Clementine, added, “I don’t argue with Winston. He shouts me down. So when I have anything important to say I write a note to him.”

  “In great things he is very great,” said the South African statesman and field marshal Jan Smuts, “in small things not great.” Certainly the small things engaged him, from decrying a shortage of playing cards for soldiers, to setting the grain ration for English poultry farmers, to reviewing all proposed code words for their martial resonance. (He sternly forbad WOEBETIDE, JAUNDICE, APÉRITIF, and BUNNYHUG.) Yet his greatness in great things obtained. It was perhaps best captured by an admirer’s seven-word encomium: “There is no defeat in his heart.”

  Sea voyages always reinvigorated Churchill, and none more than WW #21W. The prime minister’s traveling party privately dubbed him “Master,” and he had worked them hard each day, from cipher clerks to field marshals, preparing studies and the memoranda known as “prayers” for the TRIDENT meetings set to start on Wednesday. Typists worked in shifts on a specially designed silent Remington, taking down dispatches and minutes he mumbled through billowing cigar smoke. (His diction was further impeded by his lifelong struggle with the letter “s.”) He stamped especially urgent documents with the decree “action this day,” then retired for another hand of bezique—played with multiple decks from which all cards below seven were removed—and another tot of brandy, or champagne, or his favorite whiskey, Johnnie Walker Red. He had insisted on mounting a machine gun in his lifeboat. If the Queen were torpedoed, he declared, “I won’t be captured. The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy…. You must come with me in the boat and see the fun.” At times he seemed weighted with cares—“all hunched up and scowling at his plate”—and he rebuked those unblessed with his fluency by reading aloud from Fowler’s Modern English Usage on the “wickedness of splitting infinitives and the use of ‘very’ instead of ‘much.’” Yet more often he was in high spirits: discussing seamanship with the captain on the bridge, watching films like The Big Shot and All Through the Night in the lounge, or chuckling at stories swapped over supper in his cabin with his confederates. Particularly pleasing was a Radio Berlin report that placed him in the Middle East, supposedly attending a conference with Roosevelt. “Who in war,” he asked, “will not have his laugh amid the skulls?”

  Churchill had proposed inspiriting his American cousins by storming ashore in Manhattan’s Battery Park, then promenading up Broadway. “One can always do what one wants if it takes people by surprise,” he explained. “There is not time for plotters to develop their nefarious plans.” Alas, the U.S. Secret Service disagreed, and instead three anonymous launches wallowed across the gray harbor toward the Queen Mary from Tompkinsville, on Staten Island. Waiting on the docks was Harry Hopkins, the president’s closest counselor, with the Ferdinand Magellan, a seven-car presidential train pointed toward Washington.

  As Churchill stepped into the lead launch, the Queen’s entire company stood at the rails and cheered him off, their huzzahs trailing him to shore, where he disembarked and tossed a farewell wave before clambering onto the waiting train. They also knew, as they stood baying into the fog, that there was no defeat in his heart.

  Packed into the Magellan baggage car with the suitcases and document crates was a thick sheaf of maps that had covered the walls of a makeshift war room next to Churchill’s cabin on the Queen Mary. Replicating the campaign maps in the subterranean Cabinet War Rooms beneath Great George Street in London, the sheets depicted—with pushpins and lengths of colored yarn—the battle lines on a dozen combat fronts around the globe on this Tuesday, the 1,349th day of the Second World War. The struggle that had begun in September 1939 was more than half over; yet if both commanders and commanded intuited that they were nearer the end than the beginning, they also sensed that less than half the butcher’s bill had been paid in a bloodletting that ultimately would claim sixty million lives: one life every three seconds for six years. They also knew that if the Allied powers—led by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union—now possessed the strategic initiative, the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan still held the real estate, including six thousand miles of European coastline and the entire eastern littoral of Asia. This the maps made all too clear.

  The exception to Axis territorial hegemony was Africa, a campaign now in its final hours. Seven months earlier, in November 1942, Anglo-American troops had landed in Morocco and Algeria, sweeping aside weak forces of the collaborationist Vichy French government, then wheeling east for a forced march into Tunisia through the wintry Atlas Mountains. There they joined cause with the British Eighth Army, which, after a hard-won victory at El Alamein in Egypt, had pushed west across the crown of Africa. A success
ion of battles lost and won against two German-Italian armies raged across Tunisia, a country the size of the state of Georgia; particularly galling was the drubbing at Kasserine Pass in February 1943, which had cost six thousand U.S. casualties and, in terms of yardage lost, would remain the worst American defeat of the war. Yet superior airpower, naval forces, artillery, and the combined weight of the Allied armies had trapped and crushed the Axis forces, which would formally surrender on Thursday, May 13. The booty included a quarter million Axis prisoners, among them the scruffy vanguard now queued up in the Queen Mary’s hold for delousing.

  Victory in North Africa—exhilarating, unqualified victory—also gave the Allies control of the fine ports and airfields from Casablanca to Alexandria. It forestalled Axis threats to Middle Eastern oil fields, reopened the Suez Canal for the first time since 1941—saving two months’ sailing time for convoys going out to India from Britain, since they no longer had to circumnavigate Africa—and exposed the wide southern flank of occupied Europe to further Allied attack. The triumph in North Africa also coincided with victory in the North Atlantic. Ferocious depredations by German submarine wolfpacks had abruptly declined, thanks to improved electronic surveillance and because cryptologists had cracked German naval radio codes, allowing Allied warplanes and ships to pinpoint and destroy the marauders. Germany would lose forty-seven U-boats in May, triple the number sunk in March, and more than 3,500 Allied merchant ships would cross the Atlantic in the summer of 1943 without a sinking; a year earlier, the Allies had lost a ship every eight hours. The German submariner casualty rate during the war, 75 percent, would exceed that of every other service arm in every other nation.

  Elsewhere in this global war, the ebb and flow of battle was less decisive. In the Pacific, Japan had been driven from Guadalcanal and Papua; Japanese reinforcements had been badly whipped in the Bismarck Sea in February; and American forces on this very day, May 11, were landing on Attu in the Aleutians, a far-corner fight that would obliterate the Japanese garrison of 2,500 at a cost of more than a thousand U.S. lives. American fighter pilots on April 18, again thanks to a timely radio intercept, ambushed and killed Admiral Isokoru Yamamoto, architect of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet Japan held firm in Burma, and still occupied ports, coastal cities, and much farmland in China, as well as Pacific islands from the Kuriles to the central Solomons. Tokyo had embraced a defensive strategy of attrition and stalemate in hopes of breaking the Allies’ will and keeping the Soviet Union out of the Pacific war.

  On the Eastern Front, the war retained the immensely sanguinary character that had prevailed since Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Here, too, the tide had turned against the Axis, which less than a year earlier had invested the suburbs of Leningrad and Stalingrad and stood but a few hours’ drive from the Caspian Sea. The Germans had lost thirty divisions since January, most of them at Stalingrad or in Tunisia, a loss equivalent to one-eighth of Hitler’s total order of battle; tank numbers had dropped in the past three months from 5,500 to 3,600. A Soviet counteroffensive recaptured Kursk, Rostov, and the entire eastern shore of the Sea of Azov. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich, described the Führer’s despair in his diary on May 9: “He is absolutely sick of the generals…. All generals lie, he says. All generals are disloyal. All generals are opposed to National Socialism.”

  And yet: the Red Army remained more than three hundred miles from Germany’s eastern border, facing two-thirds of the Wehrmacht’s combat strength. Hitler still commanded three hundred German divisions, plus ninety more from satellite armies. The pummeling of German industry and cities with vast bomber fleets showed promise but had had skimpy results so far, in part because much of America’s airpower had been diverted from British bases to Africa. All of continental Europe, except for neutral Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden, remained under the Axis boot, from the Bay of Biscay to the river Donetz, and from the North Cape to Sicily. Some 1.3 million forced laborers toiled in German factories, while another quarter million slaved on Atlantic Wall fortifications along the vulnerable west coast in France and the Low Countries; countless others deemed worthless or dangerous were herded into concentration or extermination camps, including a quarter million French, of whom only 35,000 would survive.

  The next Anglo-American blow—after victory in North Africa—had been decided five months earlier, in Casablanca at the last big strategy conference. Operation HUSKY was summarized in twenty-one words by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the amalgamation of American and British commanders who directed the war for Roosevelt and Churchill: “An attack against Sicily will be launched in 1943 with the target date as the period of the favorable July moon.” The largest island in the Mediterranean lay only a hundred miles from Tunis, off the toe of the Italian boot, and its invasion would provide a postscript to the African campaign. American strategists had been leery of waging war in the Mediterranean since even before the November 1942 landings in northwest Africa; Roosevelt triggered that campaign by siding with Churchill and overruling his own generals, who argued that Allied power should instead be concentrated in Britain for a direct lunge across the English Channel toward Berlin. The American high command at Casablanca agreed to support HUSKY because the capture of Sicily would further safeguard Mediterranean shipping and perhaps divert Axis strength from the Soviet front; it would also provide air bases for bombing Italy and other targets in occupied Europe, and might cause weak-kneed Rome to abandon the war by abrogating its “Pact of Steel” with Berlin, formalized in May 1939.

  Beyond Sicily, however, there was no plan, no grand strategy, no consensus on what to do with the immense Allied army now concentrating in the Mediterranean. For this reason, the TRIDENT conference had been convened in Washington. Churchill had harbored ambitions of a campaign on mainland Italy for nearly a year; in early April he petitioned Roosevelt to go beyond Sicily, which he decried as “a modest and even petty objective for our armies…. Great possibilities are open in this theatre.” Knocking Italy from the war “would cause a chill of loneliness over the German people, and might be the beginning of their doom.” Sensing Yankee reluctance, he had warned Harry Hopkins on May 2 of “serious divergences beneath the surface” of Allied comity; privately, he told King George VI of his determination to battle the “Pacific First” advocates in Washington, where many demanded a stronger American effort against Tokyo.

  “We did not come here with closed minds or rigid plans,” Churchill had dictated during the passage from Gourock in preparing his opening argument for the TRIDENT talks. His musings, pecked on that silent Remington across 10 Downing Street stationery, included “Objective 1: Get Italy out of the war” and “Never forget there are 185 German divisions against the Russians…. We are not at present in contact with any.” And the heart of the matter: if Sicily fell “by the end of August, what should these [Anglo-American] troops do in the seven or eight months between this and a first possible BOLERO [the staging in Britain for a cross-Channel invasion of western Europe]? We cannot afford to have idle armies while the Russians are bearing such a disproportionate weight.”

  Beneath his brass lay a supplication. Forty-five months of war had stretched Britain as far as she would stretch. More than 12 percent of the British population now served in the armed forces; with national mobilization nearly complete, severe manpower shortages loomed if the war dragged on, particularly if it required storming the glacis of Festung Europa across the Channel. British battle deaths already exceeded 100,000, with thousands more missing, 20,000 merchant mariners lost, and another 45,000 dead in the United Kingdom from German air raids.

  Salvation lay here, in America. The green and feeble U.S. Army of just a few years earlier now exceeded 6 million, led by 1,000 generals, 7,000 colonels, and 343,000 lieutenants. The Army Air Forces since mid-1941 had grown 3,500 percent, the Army Corps of Engineers 4,000 percent. A Navy that counted eight aircraft carriers after Pearl Harbor would have fifty, large and small, by the end
of 1943. More cargo vessels would be built this year in the United States—a Liberty ship now took just fifty days, from keel laying to launch—than existed in the entire British merchant fleet. Just today, perhaps as a subtle reminder to Churchill before his arrival, Roosevelt had publicly announced that “production of airplanes by the United States”—86,000 in 1943—“now exceeds that of all other nations combined.” Of $48 billion in war supplies provided by the United States to its allies, two-thirds would go to Britain.

  The first eighteen months of war for the United States had been characterized by inexperience, insufficiency, and, all too often, ineptitude. A long seasoning, still unfinished, was required, a sorting out: of strong from weak, effective from ineffective, and, as always, lucky from unlucky. That sorting and seasoning continued in combat units and among those who commanded them. The New York Times’s veteran military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, after a long trip through the war zone, had concluded on this Tuesday morning’s front page that “the greatest American problem is leadership: the Army so far has failed to produce a fraction of the adequate officer leadership needed.” As for the average GI, Baldwin added, he “is not mentally tough or sufficiently determined. Part of his heart is in it, but only part.”