The Allies

by Winston Groom

  The marines, acting on information from a native constable who had been savagely beaten by the Japanese, set up an ambush by the Tenaru River and partially avenged the killing of the intelligence patrol. Forty-three marines lost their lives in the melee that followed, and more than eight hundred Japanese bodies were counted; scores of Japanese soldiers were killed crossing the river and were later eaten by crocodiles. The Japanese commander committed hara-kiri, and General Vandegrift, appalled at the slaughter, wrote in his report, “I have never heard or read of this kind of fighting. These people refuse to surrender.”16

  An air force arrived at Guadalcanal after the marines finished the runways that the Japanese had started. This relieved the overall military situation, as the planes limited the Japanese ability to reinforce their ground troops and send their navy down from Rabaul to shell the marines.

  Between defending against regular Japanese infantry attacks, their air attacks, naval shelling of the airfield, and troubling losses from malaria and other tropical diseases, the question arose of whether the marines could hold on. Roosevelt himself commented to a cabinet meeting that even if the marines were forced out of the Solomon Islands, the press could be told that “the delaying action had been of great value.”17

  The Japanese continued reinforcing their positions nightly on Guadalcanal by means of destroyer convoys from Rabaul known as the “Tokyo Express,” until, at the height of the battle, they had nearly thirty thousand men there.

  On the night of September 13, Washing Machine Charlie clattered over the airfield and dropped a pale green illumination flare; simultaneously twenty-four hundred Japanese soldiers screaming Banzai! attacked a six-hundred-man marine position on what would be named Bloody Ridge, and were repulsed with heavy losses. All night, the Japanese regrouped after these suicide charges and came again over ground littered with their dead. By morning, only eight hundred Japanese remained; they staggered off into the jungle. A New York Times correspondent, Hanson Baldwin, arrived to ask Vandegrift, “Are you going to hold this beachhead? Can you stay here?”

  Vandegrift didn’t hesitate. “Well, hell yes. Why not?”

  The air above the Solomons was consumed with daily dogfights and other run-ins between Marine F4F Wildcats and Japanese bombers, with their escorting Zeros. The Wildcat was heavier and not as maneuverable as the Japanese planes, but it was better armored and soon the Americans began to take a heavy toll of the enemy planes. In late October, a naval engagement known as the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands resulted in the sinking of the carrier Hornet. In a delicious irony, all of her planes had taken off and landed at the Marine airstrip at Guadalcanal full of fight.

  Roosevelt was highly apprehensive about the marines’ perilous circumstances, which he feared might end in disaster as it had in the Philippines. “My anxiety about the Southwest Pacific,” he told his aide Harry Hopkins privately, “is to make sure that every possible weapon gets into that area to hold Guadalcanal. And that having held it in this crisis, that munitions and planes and crews are on the way to take advantage of our success.”18

  Publicly, however, Roosevelt was less confident, and he seemed to prepare the American people for a disappointment, speaking in diminishing terms of the “importance of the Solomon Islands.” The public did not yet know of the terrible naval losses, and Roosevelt, according to his biographer Robert Sherwood, was “seeking to prepare the people” for the loss of Guadalcanal.

  The marines, however, were preparing themselves for what they knew would be the most powerful enemy assault yet. Fortunately, they too had been reinforced with an additional Marine regiment plus two Army regiments, bringing Vandegrift’s strength to twenty-two thousand. Fighting and dying continued on a daily basis, but the Americans still awaited the big attack they felt was coming.

  All the same, the American naval successes and Japan’s own inability to reinforce their ground troops without terrific loss of life were enough to convince Japanese naval authorities at Rabaul that continuing the offensive was futile. Still, somebody was going to have to tell the emperor—and nobody wanted to. So it was not until the end of December that the order was given to evacuate the Japanese army from the island. By that time they were starving, disease-ridden, and steadily being driven away from the airfield by the marines and the Army soldiers.

  The Battle of Guadalcanal was a humiliating defeat for the Japanese, whose army until then had gone undefeated throughout the Pacific. Their losses were estimated at between twenty thousand and thirty-six thousand total, including the naval dead and soldiers drowned on the transports. Worse, many Japanese troops died from disease or starvation due to their superiors’ inability to support them. If ever there was hubris in a battle, Guadalcanal stands as a shining example in military science. The Japanese consistently underestimated their enemy, put their troops in piecemeal, and continued to make the same mistakes in infantry tactics. Eventually, they would do the same in their sea battles.

  The Allies lost some seven thousand soldiers and thirty-six ships, including an aircraft carrier. But now they had a strong base from which to operate as they slogged their way up the Solomon chain, pushing the Japanese before them. Upon learning of these happy results, President Roosevelt remarked, “It would seem that the turning point in this war has at last been reached.”19

  * * *

  FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WAS HAVING a casual dinner party at Shangri-La, the presidential getaway in the Maryland mountains. But to some of his guests he seemed nervous and preoccupied. It was November 7, 1942, the eve of the American invasion of North Africa, and the president was waiting for an important call. The phone rang late, and some noticed that his hand shook as he picked up the receiver. He listened, and then said, “Thank God, thank God. That sounds grand.” He put the phone down and turned to his guests. “We’ve landed in North Africa. Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back.”20

  It was, as the British are fond of saying, a near run thing. American troops had come under shore fire from the Vichy French as the landing craft hit the beaches, but they withstood the storm with minimal casualties. The French navy came out to fight but the U.S. Navy sunk it.

  Meanwhile, the Allied high command had tried out General Giraud over the radio to silence the French batteries, but no one paid him any attention. De Gaulle was not on the scene, but Admiral Darlan proved to be the ace in the hole. Despite Darlan’s earlier dithering, Robert Murphy persuaded him to issue an order for a French cease-fire and proclaimed him the civil governor of French Morocco. That did the trick—though it put Roosevelt in a sticky spot with much of his liberal base, who did not fancy working with a collaborator and turncoat. Roosevelt tried out Churchill’s explanation that Darlan was merely a military expedient, but this did not sit well with the press and many in Congress.

  On Darlan’s orders, which stemmed from Nazi puppet strings pulled back in Vichy, all Jews in Morocco had been rounded up for eventual transportation to concentration camps. An order to set them free had come from the Americans, but Darlan protested that it might lead to a civil war with the Arabs. Roosevelt was on the verge of firing Darlan and clapping him in jail when fate saved him the trouble. On Christmas Eve, a twenty-year-old lunatic who wanted to restore the French monarchy assassinated Darlan in his office, thus putting the Allies firmly in control.

  Meanwhile, the British general Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, who had replaced Claude Auchinleck, had scored a great victory at El Alamein. This at last began to push Rommel’s Afrika Korps out of Egypt, through the vast Libyan desert and into Tunisia, where the Americans, it was hoped, would overwhelm them.

  It was a good strategic plan on paper but, as is often the case, difficult upon execution. First, this was the rainy season and the roads quickly turned into a muck that was impassible for large vehicles. Second, the weather became freezing cold; the men had not been issued winter gear, the idea apparently being that it did not get cold in Af
rica.

  The American advance labored mightily through Morocco and crossed into Algeria but, once in Tunisia, became utterly bogged down by the weather and very stiff resistance by the Germans, who were being reinforced there. Orders came down to attack, but were impossible to execute, due to weather conditions. One GI quipped (after Churchill) that “Never in the field of human conflict have so few been commanded by so many, from so far away.”

  At length, Eisenhower came down from Gibraltar for a personal inspection. Once he reached the fighting front, he called off the entire advance until the spring, when the roads dried out.

  In the meantime, Roosevelt and Churchill decided that now would be a good time to hold a grand Allied conference to discuss war aims, near to the battleground itself. They chose Casablanca as the meeting place and tried to persuade “Uncle Joe” Stalin to come. But the Soviet dictator demurred on grounds that he was needed in Moscow because of the fighting around Stalingrad. It was well known that Stalin didn’t like to fly, which was the only secure way he could have gotten to Morocco.*1021

  A date for Casablanca was set for mid-January 1943. To celebrate, on New Year’s Eve Roosevelt invited guests to the White House, no doubt with a taste of relish, to screen Hollywood’s latest hit movie Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

  In the meantime Stalin had sent Molotov as a special ambassador to the United States to agitate for continued Soviet Lend-Lease largesse. Like Churchill before him, Roosevelt welcomed Molotov to stay in the White House, where the staff was both startled and bewildered the next morning when they made Molotov’s bed. Beneath his pillow, they found a loaded pistol and a slab of salami.

  *1 It wasn’t true. “I would not have been damned fool enough to send such an idiotic message,” Devereux said after the war. Nobody knows who inserted that sentence.

  *2 More than one hundred U.S. civilians were forced by the Japanese to stay and work on Wake as slaves. By the end of 1943, their work done, they were marched to the beach and machine-gunned to death. After the war, the Japanese commander of Wake and eleven of his officers were sentenced to death by hanging by an Allied tribunal.

  *3 While the federally mandated Japanese internment camps were not places of torture or death, they were and are a tarnish on the history of America. Those who were sent to them lost everything after the war. For many, there was more to fear from their California neighbors and elected officials than from any overseas threat.

  *4 Roosevelt said this early on, apparently in reference to MacArthur’s suppression of the Bonus Marchers under the previous president. But there is no evidence that the president continued to feel that way during MacArthur’s term as Army chief of staff—or later, when he was fighting in the Philippines. Others speculate that Roosevelt considered MacArthur dangerous as a political rival.

  *5 Some versions have Churchill with a bottle of champagne in his hand. Churchill later denied that he was naked, saying he was wrapped in a bath towel.

  *6 King’s daughter said that her father was “very even-tempered. He had only one mood: furious.”

  *7 The pilots and crew were detained as prisoners in the Soviet Union until, two years later, they managed to escape into Iran.

  *8 Since the raid, the Doolittle fliers met annually for a reunion. A tradition developed that they would drink from silver cups engraved with their names. When a raider died, his cup was placed in a glass case. When it came down to the last two survivors, they would open a bottle of fine brandy, vintage 1896, the year of their leader’s birth, and that would end the tradition. The brandy bottle was opened in 2016.

  *9 The planes that had bombed the Yorktown, however, were in for a wrenching surprise when they returned to find the Hiryu capsized and sinking. All they could do was circle pathetically above their mother ship with nowhere else to go until their fuel ran out.

  *10 Some attributed this to his fear that a bomb might be placed on his plane by a disgruntled fellow citizen. Other sources claim he did not trust airborne travel of any kind.

  Journalist Walter Duranty in 1935. His coverage of the Soviet Union for the New York Times was so biased toward communism that the paper later declared it was “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.”

  Stalin with his henchman (and foreign minister) Vyacheslav Molotov in 1939. During the war Stalin confided to Winston Churchill, “That Molotov can drink!”

  Roosevelt cheerfully holds two of his grandchildren—Franklin D. Roosevelt III and John Boettiger—on Christmas Day 1939.

  Roosevelt with Ruthie Bie and dog Fala at the “Little White House” in Georgia. Roosevelt was so seldom photographed in his wheelchair that most Americans were unaware that he was completely crippled by polio.

  St. Paul’s Cathedral, dating to 1697 and designed by Christopher Wren, looms over the terrific damage to London by German bombing.

  The church was one of the few structures in that area to survive intact and in time to host the funeral of Winston Churchill.

  Churchill in his ubiquitous flying suit talks with American general Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of Operation Overlord—the Allied invasion of France.

  The “Big Three,” Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, at the Tehran Conference in 1943

  Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia aboard the cruiser Quincy in the Suez Canal in 1945. Roosevelt attempted to get the king’s permission to relocate ten thousand Jewish refugees to Palestine but was rebuffed by an answer the president described as “perfectly awful.”

  To celebrate V-E day on May 8, 1945, Churchill (center) stands on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to greet revelers with the royal family (from left) Princess Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, King George VI, and Princess Margaret.

  bottom left: At age seventy-five Churchill sits outside painting the Château de Lourmarin.

  bottom right: In April 1961 Churchill joins Aristotle Onassis (left) aboard his yacht, Christina. He points to the shore from his chair as they arrive in the Hudson River, New York.

  As Churchill’s funeral barge proceeds up the Thames River past the London shipyards, dozens of stevedoring cranes dip their giant appendages in a final reverential bow.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Winston Churchill’s elation at the news of Japan’s starting a war with the Americans was dampened considerably three days later when he was awakened in the early hours of the morning of December 10, 1941, and informed that two of the Royal Navy’s battleships had been sunk by Japanese airplanes in the Gulf of Siam: the HMS Prince of Wales, the fast, modern boat that had carried Churchill to the Atlantic Charter conference in Newfoundland four months earlier, and the HMS Repulse, a powerful battle cruiser. They had been sent to Singapore by Churchill himself as a symbolic deterrent to Japanese aggression in Indochina. At the time of their demise, they had been in the gulf looking for a Japanese landing force that had invaded the British-held Malaya on the same day as the Pearl Harbor attack.

  This “special” British fleet was supposed to have been joined by a flattop to provide it with air cover. But the carrier ran aground in Jamaica and was laid up for repairs—a fatal coincidence. A studied arrogance by the fleet admiral and the navy high command had led to the belief that British battleships were invulnerable to air attacks from countries such as Japan; as a result, the ships went to sea in harm’s way.

  When word came to Churchill shortly after 3 a.m., “I writhed and twisted in the bed as the full horror of the news sank in,” he wrote later. “In all the war I never received such a direct shock.”1

  One thousand two hundred and fifty sailors went down on the two ships, and an equal number were saved by destroyer escorts. But the loss of such valuable assets boded ill for the future of capital ships against airpower as practiced by the empire of Japan. As Churchill later
apologized, “The efficiency of the Japanese at air warfare was at the time greatly underestimated by ourselves and by the Americans.”2

  After word of the Repulse and Prince of Wales arrived, Churchill went into a depression for several days. He had sent these great battleships as a warning to the Japanese of Great Britain’s naval superiority; instead they became nothing more than targets. According to Churchill’s bodyguard, Inspector Walter Thompson of Scotland Yard, the prime minister moped, wept, and sat staring out to nowhere, sometimes mumbling, “I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand it.” He did this for a couple of days; the Christmas holidays, his favorite time of year, were looming up. Then he shook it off and went back to war.3

  The sinkings were but a harbinger of things to come for the British, French, Dutch, and other colonial powers in the Far East. Unpleasant surprises would now overtake the Allies as the Japanese swarmed across the Pacific like a biblical plague, devouring islands and nations from Indochina to Borneo.

  In British-held Hong Kong on December 7, 1941, a thirty-thousand-man Japanese attack was met by eleven thousand Scottish, Canadian, and Indian troops, as well as a seventeen-hundred-man militia of local British subjects known as the Gin Drinkers. Fierce fighting went on for two weeks, until the British force was split in two and nearly out of food, ammunition, and water. The only thing they were not low on was courage, with some of the most heroic work done by the Gin Drinkers. The Japanese had captured the electric power depot and the water works, so the island’s 2 million residents had neither.