The Allies

by Winston Groom

  The fighting went on all through the spring, with Patton constantly pushing forward. Scripps-Howard correspondent Ernie Pyle described the incongruity of the battlefields with the Arabs “herding their camels, just as usual, some of them plowing their fields. Children walked alongside their sack-ladened burros, as tanks and guns clanked past them. The sky was filled with planes and smoke-bursts from screaming shells.”8

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  ONE OF THE SUBJECTS DISCUSSED at the Casablanca Conference was the need to step up the bombing of German industrial and military facilities. By then, what would become the U.S. Eighth Air Force was organized and operating out of bases in England.

  Both the British and the Germans had tried out daylight bombing on each other but soon dropped the idea because of heavy casualties. The brash Americans, however, left it to the British to restrict themselves to night bombing and took on the job of daylight sorties. The British said it couldn’t be done without a fighter escort—and no fighter at that point could then carry the fuel to accompany a long-range bombing mission.

  But the Americans had a weapon they felt could do the job. The four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress—so toughly constructed and so well armed, bristling with up to fourteen .50-cal. machine guns—presented a formidable challenge to any foe that ventured near it.

  The famous Memphis Belle flew its first mission November 7, 1942. Over the next seven months, while performing her required twenty-five combat missions, the Belle shot down at least eight enemy fighters, remarkably without a single loss of her own crew.

  While the B-17 of the Eighth Air Force was a tough customer, it was certainly not invulnerable to the enemy. More than five thousand B-17s were shot down by German flak or fighter planes, and twenty-six thousand men of the Eighth were killed during the course of the war. The chilling irony and shocking conclusion of Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” tells the story in one of the best-known poems to come out of the war.

  From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

  And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

  Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,

  I woke to black flak and nightmare fighters.

  When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

  The last commander of the Eighth Air Force was none other than Jimmy Doolittle, leader of the famed raid on Japan. Before it was over, the Eighth had reduced to rubble not only most of Germany’s industrial might but its cities as well. Aside from the flak and the fighters, the bombers fought a sterile, impersonal kind of war, flying in at thirty thousand feet and higher. But it wasn’t impersonal for everyone. As Jarrell put it,

  In bombers named for girls, we burned

  The cities we had learned about in school.

  If Roosevelt thought about any of this, it would mostly have been in the abstract. There was so much to do and so little time to do it, so more and more he left military matters to the military via General Marshall. He still worried about the American marines fighting on Guadalcanal, and the terrific price in lives and ships paid by the U.S. Navy. But about all he could do was inquire whether they were being properly supplied. Roosevelt was annoyed by statements MacArthur had given to newspaper reporters that this was not happening, but still he knew it was the truth. While every effort was being made to keep things flowing to the Southwest Pacific—airplanes, food, guns, ammunition—Roosevelt was also aware that the secret “Germany First” agreement was taking its toll on the entire Pacific theater.

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  BY THE LATE SPRING OF 1943 Patton’s and Montgomery’s armies began to wear down the Germans in Tunisia. Rommel had made a beeline in that direction, thinking that Hitler would evacuate his army to Sicily—just a few hundred miles distant—so that it could fight another day. But now Hitler was thoroughly disgusted; after all, he had sent Rommel’s force to North Africa only to prop up his idiot ally Mussolini, who was now getting beaten by the British. He would not allow himself to admit defeat and again told Rommel to fight it out to the last man.

  It nearly worked out that way. Rommel in fact had gone back to Germany for continuing medical issues. In May the Allies captured some 275,000 Axis troops, more than half of them German. It was the greatest Axis defeat thus far, and North Africa was for the most part free of Axis occupation.

  The next step, at least for Churchill, was Sicily. General Marshall and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no great objection to invading Sicily, but they did not want to commit to any further operations in the eastern Mediterranean. As Marshall had warned, “Distractions only lead to more distractions,” and Sicily—like the North African invasion itself—was distraction enough.

  Churchill, however, didn’t agree, and he boarded the Queen Mary with a staff of one hundred to argue his case at the so-called Trident conference in Washington. For his part, Roosevelt was adamant that there would be a cross-Channel landing in France in 1944. Churchill agreed to this, and he further agreed to provide seven divisions—about 120,000 men—from the Mediterranean theater. But Churchill continued his ramblings about hitting Europe’s “soft underbelly” to get at Austria and southern Germany.

  There were also lengthy discussions about how to help defeat the Japanese in China. When the Japanese invaded Burma in 1941 they had cut the Burma Road, Chiang Kai-shek’s supply lifeline of Allied goods and munitions, through India. It was important to keep Japanese armies occupied in China, so that they could not be sent as reinforcements to counter American efforts to oust them from the myriad Pacific islands on the way to the Home Islands of Japan.

  A year earlier, the Allies had organized the India-China Ferry, consisting of mostly American transport planes that would “fly the hump” between India and China with supplies to supplant the Burma Road. This involved extremely difficult flying conditions because the route led over the Himalaya, the highest mountains in the world. General Stilwell, the U.S. commander in China, wanted a joint operation to reopen the Burma Road. But Roosevelt and Churchill turned it down, believing that this would be too difficult and dangerous in the Burma jungles. Instead, they opted to beef up “flying the hump” operations.

  There were approximately 350,000 enemy soldiers protecting Sicily, including two mobile German Panzer divisions. This meant in practice that a far larger Allied force would be needed than for the North Africa invasion.

  On the evening of July 9, 1943, at a state dinner in the White House, President Roosevelt announced to his guests that the Allied invasion of Sicily had begun. Montgomery’s army of one hundred thousand was landing on the eastern beaches of Sicily’s southern “horn,” and Patton’s army of sixty thousand was invading along a thirty-mile stretch of western beaches. This would be the largest-scale Allied amphibious landing to date, as well as a practical education for the run-up to Overlord the following spring.

  All things considered, the Sicily invasion, dubbed Husky, went off with surprisingly few hitches. As the two Allied armies moved inland, other American and British divisions began arriving until the forces reached more than four hundred thousand. Axis strategy under an Italian commander was to slowly give way to the Allies at first, only to meet them with overwhelming force as they drove into the country’s mountainous interior. However, led by overpowering tank units, the Americans and British were able to move more quickly than the enemy believed possible. As the Allies passed through towns and villages, the people greeted them as liberators, with girls giving kisses and women handing out fruit and flowers. The Germans, it seemed, had not been seen as good stewards in Italy, probably owing to their high-handed treatment of civilians.9

  Patton’s army raced northward and took the large city of Palermo along Sicily’s coast, then struck out for Messina, which was to have been in Montgomery’s area of operations. The Germans, sensing the inevitable, detached themselves from Italian control and scrambled for Messina themselves, which
was the closest port to the Italian mainland. They began embarking on escape craft.10

  To Montgomery’s mortification, Patton had arrived in Messina first. But the last Germans had departed with most of their equipment, which would prove to be a problem when the Allies invaded Italy shortly afterward. About a hundred thousand Italian soldiers had also escaped, but another hundred and fifty thousand were taken prisoner.

  The Sicily operation had taken just over a month and, among other things, had caused Hitler to quickly move two German divisions from Russia and postpone his attack on Kursk, which, to a lesser extent, appeased Stalin’s demands for a second front.

  On July 25, 1943, a coup removed Mussolini from power. The Italian government fell into the hands of Marshal Pietro Badoglio who, seeing the handwriting on the wall, secretly indicated a willingness to switch sides. This put Roosevelt’s “unconditional surrender” to the test. As badly as he and Churchill wanted Italy, with all her arms and soldiers, on the Allied side, Roosevelt knew that an unconditional surrender edict might likely keep the prideful Italians in the fight.

  This notion must have been on his mind since May, after the Allied victory in Tunisia and the great surrender of Italian troops. In any case, Roosevelt had sought to mitigate his unconditional surrender position by assuring the Italian people in a Voice of America broadcast that once the Fascists and Nazis were removed they were free to choose their own form of government, and that Italy could take her place “as a respected member of the European family of nations.”11

  For nearly two months, the Allies remained in a kind of limbo over what exactly was going on in Italy. The Germans, suspicious of Badoglio’s intentions, began rushing tank and infantry divisions into northern Italy. Meantime, peace talks with the Allies were secretly being held and on September 8 it was announced that Italy had formally and “unconditionally” surrendered. American troops began crossing from Sicily to Naples and moving up the Italian mainland toward Rome. The furious Germans had by then fortified the mountainous terrain north of the Italian capital. The terrible and deadly battle that commenced to eject them lasted until the end of the war.

  By then the American marines had defeated the Japanese on Guadalcanal and were fighting their way up the Solomon Island chain toward the big Japanese base at Rabaul, while other marines escorted by the U.S. Navy were taking Japanese-held islands ever westward across the central Pacific. The fighting in New Guinea was drawing to a close and MacArthur now pointed his men northward toward the Philippines to fulfill his “I shall return” promise.

  As they entered the fourth quarter of 1943, it was becoming apparent to the Allies that they would likely win the war—although in war nothing is certain and who knew what secret weapons or tactics the enemy might employ. Nevertheless, both Roosevelt and Churchill were becoming increasingly concerned about maintaining a lasting peace after the conflict officially ended. A major question among many in the State Department was how the Soviet Union would fit into this peace. The Americans and British continued supplying Stalin with arms and equipment, but both governments had begun to mistrust his intentions for postwar Europe.

  Roosevelt was far more sanguine about Uncle Joe, and he wanted that kind of optimism to pervade not only his White House counselors but the nation at large. Stalin was deliberately presented by the Roosevelt administration as a benevolent dictator, a fatherlike figure, beloved by his people. When, for example, Chip Bohlen, State’s new number two man on the Russia desk, attended a White House dinner, he was buttonholed by Roosevelt’s top troubleshooter Harry Hopkins, who demanded to know if he was a member of “that anti-Soviet clique.” Hopkins then lectured Bohlen on Russia’s contributions to the war effort.12

  To encourage this way of thinking, U.S.-made propaganda films were produced. They showcased the Soviet Union as a peaceful, idyllic place populated by happy citizens who worked joyfully together, engaged in folk dances in their time off, and fought Germans with the ferocity of lions. These films were shown repeatedly at neighborhood theaters throughout America. Nothing was mentioned about what happened to Russian soldiers who did not fight lionlike, or who surrendered when surrounded. As it happened, of the hundreds of thousands of captured Soviet troops repatriated to Russia after the war, practically all were immediately sent by Stalin to spend their lives in shame and hard labor in the Siberian gulags.

  Gradually, however, the propaganda campaign worked, and many Americans began to reverse their previous notions of the Soviet Union as a violent dictatorship that aimed to spread communism throughout the world. Instead they began to see Stalin as a worthy ally in the fight against Nazism who would become a faithful peacekeeper once the war ended.

  Roosevelt continued to believe that he could deal with Stalin better than Churchill could—even better than he and Churchill together—and wanted to arrange a one-on-one conference with the dictator in Alaska. To do so, Roosevelt sent his trusted counselor Joseph Davies to see Stalin personally in May 1943. Davies, who had been ambassador to the Soviet Union from late 1936 to 1938, was highly sympathetic to the Soviet regime and in 1941 had published a well-received book titled Mission to Moscow about his experiences. (It was later made into a Hollywood feature movie starring Walter Huston as Davies and Ann Harding as his wife, the former Marjorie Merriweather Post.) Both the book and the movie painted a rosy picture of Stalin’s Soviet Union, whitewashing the purges, the show trials, and the executions, and concluding that Americans had “nothing to fear from communism.”

  Roosevelt knew his man. Davies not only got the president’s letter delivered, but secured an agreement from the Soviet dictator to meet the U.S. president in Fairbanks.13 A photo of the meeting shows a grinning Stalin clasping hands with an equally sunny Joseph Davies.

  Every time they tried to set a firm date for Roosevelt’s proposed conference, however, Stalin balked—usually as a sulk against some perceived offense by either Roosevelt or Churchill. He was skeptical, for example, when Eisenhower announced the surrender of Italy, reasoning it was somehow a “separate peace” that the Allies had made with the enemy, after agreeing to avoid such arrangements. There was some truth to this observation, because the Americans didn’t consult Stalin beforehand. But that diplomatic overlook seemed more of an afterthought as everyone but the Germans wanted Italy out of the war.

  Then an incident came to light that gave even Roosevelt serious pause about the intentions and methods of Stalin’s Soviet regime.

  German troops entering the Katyn Forest in the western Soviet Union had discovered mass graves containing the bodies of tens of thousands of Polish military officers who had been executed Soviet style with a bullet to the back of the neck. These men, who were rounded up in 1939–1940, after the German-Russian invasion of Poland that had started the war, had been ostensibly bound for Russian concentration camps to prevent them from organizing any resistance to Soviet rule. But the NKVD (with Stalin’s blessing) decided they were too much trouble to keep in Russia and had had them murdered instead.

  The Soviets, of course, blamed the massacre on the Germans, who vehemently denied it. The Polish government-in-exile—citing the fact that the men were last seen in Soviet custody—demanded an investigation by the Red Cross. This gave Stalin the excuse to cut off diplomatic relations with Polish authorities (headquartered in London) and organize his own Polish government-in-exile in Moscow, known as the Union of Polish Patriots, which he obviously intended to install in the country after the war in order to absorb Poland into his empire.14

  All of this had a terrible smell to it and caused Roosevelt to rethink his relationship with Uncle Joe. He still wanted to meet with him, and he remained of a mind to continue for the war’s sake to portray him and his country in the brightest terms. But there was now an element of unsettling mistrust. The warnings that Roosevelt had brushed off, the dark reports coming from junior officers in the State Department, some of them directly from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, n
ow had a different and alarming ring.15

  On a more favorable note, Eleanor Roosevelt had just conducted a two-month, twenty-five-thousand-mile tour of American fighting units in the South Pacific. This included Guadalcanal and other of the Solomon Islands, during which she is said to have told an audience of marines: “The marines that I have seen around the world have the cleanest bodies, the filthiest minds, the highest morale, and the lowest morals of any group of animals I have ever seen. Thank God for the United States Marines!”

  Her report to the president was filled with useful observations, insights, and recommendations regarding treatment and care of troops in the rear areas and the occasional deficiencies of the military and the Red Cross. “I think perhaps I shouldn’t have gone,” she lamented to her husband later, “because of all the trouble I caused by simply being there.”

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  IN NOVEMBER 1943 ROOSEVELT set out for the Big Three conference in Tehran. Stalin had insisted on the location because, he said, there were telephone and telegraphic communications available there with Moscow. He could also ride down in his special train, which consisted of comfortable, if spartan, accommodations. Roosevelt and Churchill had also decided to use the occasion to meet with Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo, which Stalin declined to do because the Soviet Union was not at war with Japan—and also because it would have required him to fly over the Mediterranean.

  There was a minor but telling to-do over Roosevelt’s choice for a State Department officer to accompany him to the conference. The president wanted a young assistant secretary named Sumner Welles, not the elderly secretary of state Cordell Hull, to be his right-hand man in Tehran. But suddenly Welles was identified by the FBI with affidavits and other evidence as having “solicited homosexual services” from the porters on a train returning from the funeral of House Speaker William Bankhead in Alabama.