The Allies

by Winston Groom

  In time, Svetlana married again—this time, to the son of Andrey Zhdanov, a powerful figure in the communist hierarchy. But that didn’t last either. There were long periods when father and daughter never saw each other; then, Stalin would contact her and a reunion of sorts would ensue. It was not until after Stalin’s death that Svetlana finally realized the extent of his crimes. She defected to the West in 1967.

  * * *

  AT LAST, IN JUNE 1943, Hitler took the bait and attacked the Soviet positions at Kursk. He had no choice. Retreat from Russia was unthinkable and would inevitably lead to an attack while withdrawing, or degenerate into a World War I–style static battlefield, inviting an Allied air campaign that would reduce Germany to brick dust and rubble.

  On July 5, 1943, nearly eight hundred thousand German soldiers attacked the ninety-by-one-hundred-thirty-mile Kursk salient with tanks, artillery, planes, and infantry. For two days they slowly pressed the Soviet army backward along both sides—but then Red Army resistance stiffened. A week and a half later it appeared the Germans had run out of momentum. That’s when the Soviets counterattacked.

  The scale of the battle was stupendous, dwarfing anything seen in World War I. Because the Germans had attacked both sides of the salient, they had created a fighting front well over three hundred miles in length. In this roaring, flaming cauldron, roughly fifteen thousand tanks were fighting each other, forty thousand artillery pieces were shelling one another, eight thousand planes were bombing and strafing, and nearly 3 million men were at one another’s throats. The fighting lasted for nearly two months.

  Zhukov had numerical superiority everywhere. In addition to having nearly 2.5 million men, he had more tanks, guns, and warplanes than Marshal Manstein—and he wasted them commensurately. Stalin, still smarting from being “overruled” by Zhukov and the army generals, took no part in directing the battle, instead sulking in the high command headquarters and phoning Zhukov for information.

  By the end of the month it was clear that the Germans were stalled, exhausted, and being bled white. The German strategic reserve, which might have made a difference in the battle’s outcome, had been diverted to North Africa to support Rommel, who was being pressed hard by the British and American armies.

  By August 23, Manstein had given up and he withdrew. In addition to thousands of wrecked tanks, planes, and artillery pieces, the Germans had lost a quarter of a million men and the Red Army lost some four hundred thousand. It was one of the bloodiest battles in history, and one of the most historic. Kursk is generally viewed as the turning point in the Second World War in Europe, for the Germans never again launched a successful offensive.

  Once the Russian battle was declared won, Stalin called for a tremendous military parade in Moscow complete with tanks, motorized artillery, and endless divisions of infantry marching for so long that Stalin and his guests in the reviewing stand took time out to sit down for a luncheon before returning to the spectacle continuously unfolding before them.

  * * *

  AFTER WINNING THE BATTLE OF KURSK, Stalin now had the tiger by the tail. Germany had been beaten badly at Kursk, but if the Germans withdrew, the Russians would be on their backs as soon as possible.

  Hitler reasoned that if he could keep Poland and the Balkan countries as battlegrounds, he could regroup and hope the Allies would slip up. Perhaps they would be defeated in a cross-Channel invasion, or stuck in Italy or elsewhere, and a deal might be made: an armistice or truce that would ensure the leavening out of issues and territory. At this point, it must have been clear to Hitler that he’d made a grievous mistake at Kursk. But in the fog of war commanders often do not always appreciate the errors they’ve made, and hope that Providence or the errors of the enemy will help them prevail. At this point, that was about all the German generals could hope for.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In January 1943, while furious tank battles rumbled across Tunisia, Roosevelt and Churchill convened in Casablanca as planned. The conference was Churchill’s idea; he thought the Allies ought to define and restate their war aims at this point in the conflict. Roosevelt agreed. He also felt that Allied interests would be advanced by having such highly publicized meetings between leaders, which would show a common resolve. Stalin absented himself, admitting that he didn’t like to fly.

  The trip wasn’t very difficult for Churchill, who arrived from London in an RAF bomber after refueling at Gibraltar. But Roosevelt’s journey was more arduous. He was spirited out of the White House by the Secret Service guard, who took him across the Mall to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, where the money was made; his special train waited on tracks that ran inside the redbrick building in the shadow of the Washington Monument.

  For security reasons, the regular dining car waiters had been replaced with Filipino mess stewards from the presidential Shangri-La retreat in Maryland. The train then took off for Miami with General Marshall, Admiral King, and their staffs, as well as Harry Hopkins, aboard.

  At the Miami Naval Station, Roosevelt boarded a big Boeing flying boat that refueled at Trinidad and Belém, on Brazil’s south coast, before an exhausting flight across the South Atlantic. Roosevelt didn’t like to fly, but for reasons different than Stalin’s. Polio had destroyed his leg muscles, so that in turbulent weather he couldn’t brace himself and it was very uncomfortable. (He wrote Eleanor that the plane trip was “bumpy.”) Finally, after eighteen hours, they landed at Gambia, the old slave port in French West Africa. Roosevelt was appalled at the living and working conditions of the natives, who received less than twenty-five cents a day and a half bowl of rice. It reinvigorated his opposition of empires—French, British, Japanese, whatever—and made him more determined that the postwar world would not be an imperial one. An army transport plane then carried the party north across the Atlas Mountains to Casablanca.1

  Eisenhower had been anxious ever since he’d received word that the president and prime minister were coming to Casablanca—as if he didn’t already have enough on his plate. He assigned George Patton to make the arrangements for their comfort and safekeeping, and though Ike had his doubts he also knew that pomp and circumstance were Patton’s specialty. Patton, however, was more concerned with safety and secrecy than with pomp, and when the dignitaries arrived they were smuggled into Army Cadillacs with mud-smeared windows to conceal their identities.2

  Outside Casablanca, Patton found a comfortable, secure resort compound located in the suburb of Anfa. To Roosevelt’s delight the Third Division Artillery Band was playing “Hail to the Chief” when they arrived, as well as “Missouri Waltz,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” and, for Churchill, “The Naughty Marietta Waltz.”

  Patton felt it had gone off quite nicely (except for Roosevelt’s entourage of Secret Service agents who had tagged along behind the mud-plastered limousines in an open jeep, brandishing pistols). In Patton’s view his fifty-thousand-man Western Army Corps provided more than adequate security. He dismissed the Secret Service men as “a bunch of cheap detectives always smelling of drink.”3

  For Roosevelt it was a happy occasion; his sons Elliott and FDR Jr. were both there in their Army and Navy uniforms, respectively. (His son James was off in the Pacific with the Marines.) Churchill’s son Randolph was also there, serving with the British commandos at the front. And Sergeant Robert Hopkins, Harry’s son, whom Eisenhower had dug up out of his foxhole in Tunisia, completed the party.

  When the conference convened next day, the first order of business was what to do next, if the Allies were successful in whipping the Germans and Italians in North Africa. (There seemed to be no plans for what would happen if the reverse occurred.) Roosevelt and Marshall still favored an attack across the English Channel by the summer, a strategy Churchill vehemently continued to oppose. By clearing the Axis out of the Mediterranean, he argued, Italy could be taken and knocked out of the war. That would r
elieve much pressure on Stalin, Churchill said, and give the Allies air bases from which to bomb Germany from the south, as well as a possible entrée from northern Italy into Austria and then Germany.

  It was the same old argument going round like a carnival ride—not only the premiers but their staffs had it out. The British gave a presentation pointing out their disastrous raid on the French port of Dieppe the previous summer. It had been planned partially as a response to Stalin’s insistent calls for a second front, and partially to test the enemy defenses.

  At Dieppe the Germans were waiting for them. Artillery and machine guns lashed out at the invaders even before they could get out of their barges. British tanks foundered on German obstacles along the beachhead. Of six thousand soldiers who landed there—most of them Canadians—a thousand were killed and two thousand were made prisoners. The rest managed to escape to the barges that ferried them back to England. It proved that a landing in France was going to be an extremely tough proposition. The hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who were to be a part of it were just beginning to arrive in England, Churchill pointed out, and had not yet been trained.

  The British argument at long last proved persuasive, and it was finally agreed that Sicily would become the next invasion point, once the Allies had cleared North Africa. This was easier said than done, as the Americans fighting the Germans in Tunisia and the British fighting Rommel in the Libyan desert were finding out.

  One of the matters partially settled at the conference had both diplomatic and political reverberations for Roosevelt. He had been enduring considerable vitriol from his enemies in the Democratic Party over the administration’s continued dealings with the discredited Vichy regime in France. It remained Roosevelt’s view that all avenues of approach should be kept alive, but this left him open to criticism on both military and moral grounds. Roosevelt and Churchill had invited to the conference both the vain General Giraud and the even more vain General Charles de Gaulle, who hated Vichy and proclaimed himself the only true leader of the French army. The goal was to get these two bitter antagonists to cooperate in order to ease the political strain on Roosevelt.

  De Gaulle, for his part, refused to leave London when he heard Giraud also would be at Casablanca; Churchill prodded him by threatening to cut off his funding. At the conference, de Gaulle and Giraud avoided each other entirely, but Churchill shooed them out onto the lawn and made them shake hands while a photographer snapped their picture. The photograph was flashed around the world as proof that Roosevelt had patched up French dissension, when in fact he had produced only a reluctant photo op.

  Members of these Frenchmen’s staffs somehow cracked the ice. It was suggested that one should become the civilian authority of all French North African territories, while the other would be the military authority. Giraud said he would be the civilian leader and de Gaulle could be the military man, but then de Gaulle, probably out of spite or pique, suggested he wanted it the other way around. Upon hearing this, Roosevelt remarked of de Gaulle sarcastically, “Yesterday he wanted to be Joan of Arc,” to which Churchill riposted, “Well, fine. We just need to find some bishops to burn him at the stake.” And there the matter rested.4

  Churchill, who had loved North Africa ever since he had fought the Mahdi in the Sahara, took Roosevelt on an exotic sightseeing tour of Morocco, with the pistol-packing Secret Service men dogging them from behind. They drove through Casablanca’s bazaar, with its markets of fake antiquities, snake charmers, and veiled dancing girls, and into the countryside, where they passed Arabs riding camels and women hauling water. Finally, they arrived at a six-story observation tower near Marrakech.

  As Churchill led the way, the Secret Service agents lugged Roosevelt’s wheelchair up the stairs. In the quiet of the tower, the two world leaders were treated to a spectacular vista of the distant Atlas Mountains painted purple by the setting sun, a sight that made the war seem far away.5

  To end the conference, Roosevelt and Churchill seated themselves in small white chairs on the lawn of the compound amid the African palms and fruit trees. Together, they gave the gaggle of reporters a brief recitation of what had been decided—omitting, of course, the next invasion target. Then, Roosevelt made one of the most startling and controversial statements of the war.

  He and Churchill, the president suddenly declared, had determined that the only way the war could end was by the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Among the many people who were shocked by this stark declaration was Churchill, who claimed this was the first he’d heard of it. British diplomacy, in its illustrious history, had always tried to leave a little wiggle room where military matters were concerned. Later, Roosevelt told newsmen that the idea just “popped into my mind,” but this turned out to be not exactly true. Harry Hopkins revealed that he had found it in Roosevelt’s notes the night before.

  The announcement caused a considerable uproar that lasted for some time afterward. After the war, “there were many experts,” explained Hopkins’s biographer Robert Sherwood, “who believed that the utterance of these words would put the iron of desperate resistance into the Germans, Japanese, and Italians,…needlessly [prolonging] the war and [increasing] its cost; there are some who still believe that it did so…There were others who violently opposed the principle itself, and…still [attribute] the world’s postwar troubles to the enforcement of unconditional surrender.”

  After the war Churchill was asked about the matter and said: “I would not have used those exact words but I stood by the president. Negotiation with Hitler was impossible. He was a maniac.”6

  * * *

  AFTER EISENHOWER CALLED OFF the Tunisian advance during the previous winter, the Americans had used the time to get their tanks and trucks unstuck, improve roads, build airfields, land reinforcements, and regroup and reorganize for the coming dry season offensive.

  Unfortunately, that is what the Germans used the time for as well. The original Allied plan had been to seize Tunisia and its valuable port in Tunis before the Germans could reinforce it. But now Hitler had rushed in an army of more than fifty-six thousand troops and heavy weapons. Moreover, after its defeat at the Battle of El Alamein, Rommel’s army, rather than implementing a slow, methodical withdrawal, made it a race back to Tunisia; if they arrived in time, the Germans would give the Americans double trouble. By midwinter the vanguard of Rommel’s eighty-thousand-man army had indeed reached Tunisia.

  Tunisia is about the size and shape of the state of Florida. Its northern half is covered with mountains and valleys, with little infrastructure except for the coastal cities. When news of the American landings became known, the Germans thoughtfully covered all the mountain passes, roads, and bridges with powerful artillery and machine guns, backed by tanks and antitank guns and bristling with land mines. This spelled trouble for the green American soldiers who were anything but battle hardened.

  Worse, much of their armor was out of date and no match for the German Panzer and Tiger (88mm cannon) tanks. Many U.S. armored units were equipped with the old General Lee (37mm cannon) and General Stuart tanks because most of the newer General Sherman and General Grant tanks had been sent to the British for their fight against Rommel. These obsolete vehicles ran on gasoline instead of diesel oil and came to be known as “flaming coffins.” One old soldier, seeing a column of General Lees with their high profiles clanking down the road, described the tank as looking “like a damned moving cathedral.”

  The first major American action in North Africa was not impressive. It was a battle for the Medjerda River valley, and it seesawed back and forth for more than a month. The Americans would attack and then withdraw in the face of German counterattacks. American tank shells simply bounced off the thick-armored German tanks, and hideous scenes were offered up of U.S. crews roasted alive in their inferior vehicles or blown to atoms by German guns. British troops were there too, fighting alongside the Americans, and included
among their numbers certain ethnic groups fighting alongside the Allies. A mercenary tribe known as the Goums, from the deserts of Algeria and Morocco, were infamous for coming into Allied camps carrying the severed heads of German soldiers; for these, they were paid a bounty. Likewise, a terror tactic practiced by the British Gurkhas, learned in their native Nepal, was to creep up on a sleeping patrol of Germans and slit every throat but one, leaving him, when he awoke, to spread the news.7

  In February, the Americans tried to break out to the coast but received an awful setback at the Kasserine Pass. Rommel had finally arrived, but he was still stinging from his army’s loss to Montgomery and the British and determined to secure a victory over the green American army. The Germans overwhelmed the U.S. forces in both firepower and tactics, causing them to retreat back across miles of ground they had already taken. It remains one of the greatest defeats in U.S. military history with ten thousand casualties and hundreds of tanks lost. The American forces, it seemed, were simply not performing. Amid reports of undaunted courage, there was evidence also of shirking, incompetence, and even cowardice.

  In Eisenhower’s view the army was poorly led—and, indeed, if anything good came out of the Kasserine tragedy it was Ike’s appointment of George Patton to take charge of the entire operation in Tunisia. The American Army, from its generals to its lowliest private, now thoroughly understood this was no lark adventure they were embarked on but deadly serious business. From then on, the soldiers responded accordingly. They’d become battle hardened the hard way.