The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Roosevelt attempted to keep Welles through mighty opposition, but at last he was confronted by Hull with an “It’s me or him” ultimatum. Welles was then forced to tender his resignation, on grounds that he was vulnerable to enemy blackmail.

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  ON NOVEMBER 11—Armistice Day—1943, Roosevelt was spirited out of the White House at 9:30 p.m. and driven to the presidential yacht Potomac at the Quantico, Virginia, U.S. Marine Corps base south of Washington. Before sunup the boat anchored off the mouth of the Potomac River. In the dark to the east could be seen the great shadowy hulk of the USS Iowa, one of the new, larger class of battleships, now commanded by the president’s friend and former aide Captain John McCrea, who had at last got his sea command. Adding to the president’s party of ten were Marshall, King, and Hap Arnold, commander of the Air Corps, who had come aboard the night before. They joined 107 staffers, planners, clerks, typists, translators, security people, and others involved in the mission. More than one person remarked that if a bomb had sunk the ship the entire top echelon of war directors would be wiped out.

  The president had special bath facilities prepared for his condition, private phone lines, a private dining room, and a private elevator to take him between decks. Three destroyers would screen for enemy submarines. By the morning of November 13 the Iowa had cleared the Chesapeake Bay and stood out to sea under cloudy skies at a speed of 25 knots.

  Next day, a Sunday, the weather turned sunny and warmer; the president was wheeled out to the deck by his valet Arthur Prettyman to observe antiaircraft exercises. He and a contingent of his party were duly impressed by the powerful curtains of fire laid down by the ship’s antiaircraft weapons. They had been given cotton to put in their ears and seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely when, suddenly, an alarm began to clang and the shooting stopped. Someone shouted over the loudspeakers, “Torpedo defense! This is not a drill!” The ship put on full speed and was heeled in an evasive maneuver when the hull momentarily quivered from an underwater explosion. An officer shouted, “It’s the real thing!”

  Harry Hopkins shouted to the president to go inside, but instead Roosevelt told Prettyman, “Arthur, take me over to the starboard side. I want to watch the torpedo!” It was pure Roosevelt. Whether it was in France when he wanted to see some action as assistant secretary of the Navy or in the open convertible in Miami when the shots rang out, the president, like Churchill, was a picture of controlled, excited calm in moments of danger.16

  It turned out that the torpedo had been fired by a careless accident from one of the screening destroyers during the antiaircraft drill. The tube had detonated astern of the Iowa from the roiling prop wake of the ship. Admiral King was of course outraged and had summoned the skipper of the offending destroyer over to the Iowa to personally relieve him of command; Roosevelt intervened and no action was taken. Hopkins, however, probably made an understatement when he observed that “the Navy will never hear the end of it.”17

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  THE REMAINDER OF THE VOYAGE was uneventful and on November 20 the Iowa arrived in Mers el-Kabir, the great harbor of Oran in Algeria. General Eisenhower was there to greet the president when he landed on the quay, as were two of the president’s sons, Navy Lieutenant Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and Colonel Elliott Roosevelt. That day, they flew to Eisenhower’s theater headquarters in Tunis, where the president stayed in a villa once used by Germans. Ike took FDR, Marshall, and King on a tour of what used to be Carthage, two thousand years previous, which they had studied in their military academy textbooks. The intimacy of the occasion was palpable owing to the fact that either Eisenhower or Marshall was going to get the nod from Roosevelt as the commander of Overlord, the Allied invasion of France. Before dinner, Admiral King embarrassed everybody by weighing in on the subject of who should head the upcoming invasion. He suggested that the president preferred Marshall, but that the Joint Chiefs thought Marshall was more needed in Washington and that Ike should have the job.

  Roosevelt was to fly on to Cairo next morning, but Eisenhower intervened on grounds that in the daylight the German fighters might make the presidential plane their target. That gave Eisenhower a day with Roosevelt by himself. The general used the opportunity to take the president on a tour of old Roman-Carthaginian battlefields, during which he gave him a lengthy and compelling discourse on how the Allies had whipped the German-Italian army in the area. During a roadside picnic, Roosevelt got to banter with Ike’s red-haired Irish driver, Kay Summersby, whose romance with the commanding general was becoming an open secret. If word of this indiscretion got back to the president he never mentioned it—and likely, given his own situation with Lucy Rutherfurd, he put it out of mind.

  The presidential party arrived in Egypt after a night flight and, with the pyramids as a backdrop, began the Cairo Conference featuring not only Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, but his wife, Madame Chiang, who arrived in a slinky black satin dress slit up the sides that caused at least one British officer to offer up “a suppressed neigh.”*18

  Churchill was furious that Roosevelt had put the Chiangs at center stage, when he wished the conference to concern itself with plans for next year’s fighting in Europe. But Roosevelt had already stated his hopes that, after the war, the 400 million—strong Chinese nation would become, along with the United States, Great Britain, and Russia, the “peacekeepers of the world” under the aegis of the new United Nations. In fact, Roosevelt was so convinced that the Chinese would acquit themselves on the world stage that he reportedly offered them the job of occupying Japan after that country was defeated. Chiang politely turned him down, saying he didn’t think China was the right country to occupy Japan—remembering, no doubt, the horrific atrocities committed on his countrymen by the Japanese, as well as the war with Mao Tse-tung’s Communists that he knew would commence as soon as the Japanese threat was quelled.

  Roosevelt also told Chiang that he would launch an amphibious attack on the Japanese in Burma to reopen the Burma Road for supplies, a promise that caused Churchill to become almost apoplectic. The prime minister wanted the United States to concentrate resources on the Germans in the Mediterranean, not on the Japanese in the jungles of Asia.

  On Thanksgiving Day Roosevelt entertained the entire conference with a turkey dinner. The birds were provided by Undersecretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr., from his Virginia farm, and from Joe McCarter, a black farmer from Burnt Corn, Alabama, who had personally sent the president a turkey because he thought he was a good man.

  Roosevelt, who was helped in by his son Elliott, sat down in a dinner jacket while Churchill appeared in coveralls. A U.S. Army band played tunes during dinner, including “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” and “Old Man River,” requested by Churchill; Roosevelt gave the nod to “The White Cliffs of Dover” for the British contingent. At the playing of the “Marines’ Hymn” to celebrate the recent capture of Tarawa Island in the Pacific, Churchill rose to his feet flashing the V sign. After that, the party seemed to degenerate slightly when Churchill insisted that Roosevelt’s military adviser Major General “Pa” Watson dance with him while the orchestra played a waltz. Roosevelt’s laughter at this bizarre scene was “enough to wake the pharaohs,” according to one of his aides.19

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  LESS THAN A WEEK LATER Roosevelt and party found themselves in Tehran, staying in (of all places) the Soviet Embassy. Stalin had insisted that Roosevelt stay at the Soviet Embassy for the course of the meeting, owing to a reported assassination plot ginned up by the Russian foreign minister Molotov, who spoke vaguely of German “saboteurs and parachutists.” While American diplomats and security personnel concluded the thing was a hoax to maneuver Roosevelt and others into a place where they could be secretly surveilled, the president welcomed the opportunity to “make a positive gesture toward the suspicious Stalin,” according to the historian Thomas Parrish. “What better way to start than by accepting Russian hospitality?�
�� he wrote.

  In any event, Roosevelt was reading cables in his suite at the Soviet Embassy on a Sunday afternoon when a short, stocky, pockmarked man entered without knocking. He was wearing a Soviet army tunic with a gold star signifying the rank of a marshal of the Soviet Union. It was Stalin, at last come to meet the president of the United States.

  The big question that had loomed all through the preconference days for the Americans was what the Soviets’ policies would be after Germany was defeated. It was obvious that if they continued their successes on the battlefield, the Russian army would break through eastern Europe, the Balkans, all the way into Germany itself. Would the Communists remain there to claim spoils or return to their own boundaries? The answer came more quickly than anyone thought possible. Stalin surprised Roosevelt before their meeting even formally began by volunteering that he “had no desire to own Europe,” and that his countrymen had “plenty to do at home, without undertaking great new territorial responsibilities.” This was what Roosevelt had wanted to hear, and it certainly got things off to a good start, although there were those among the president’s diplomats and military brass who remained suspicious of the Soviets’ intentions.20

  For Roosevelt, there were more pleasant surprises in store. In early 1943 the War Department had produced a top secret strategic assessment, concluding that “the most important factor the United States has to consider in relation to Russia is the prosecution of the war in the Pacific.” At the rate things were going, the paper said, “if the United States alone had to fight a ground war on the Japanese mainland, the costs and casualties would be immeasurably increased,” and the action might even fail. It was thus imperative because of their strategic location and powerful military that the Russians join in the defeat of Japan.

  When Stalin agreed to join the fight against Japan as soon as Germany was defeated, it was music to the U.S. military contingent’s ears. Again, however, some of the more cynical diplomats wondered what reward the Communists would want for their services against Japan. Would it be concessions elsewhere? Japanese territory? Japan itself?

  Throughout the conference, Roosevelt’s firm commitment to Operation Overlord put him at odds with his friend Churchill. But Roosevelt was pleased with himself to be ganging up on the British prime minister in order to curry favor with Stalin. Almost invariably in a trio, at some point two will turn against the third, and Churchill had been asking for it, Roosevelt thought. “Winston just lost his head when everybody refused to take the subject seriously,” Roosevelt told his son later. “He was going to take offense at what anybody said, specially if what was said pleased Uncle Joe.”

  Yet Roosevelt didn’t forget the importance of his relationship with Churchill. The next morning the president had himself wheeled through the embassy’s post exchange and “from among the Persian knives, daggers, rugs, he selected a Persian ‘bowl of some antiquity’ ” as a gift he would present to Churchill that evening. Roosevelt knew how to play it. And he played it to the hilt.21

  On the final day of the conference Roosevelt participated in meetings “that could have been done by the foreign ministers.” Then, without consulting or even inviting Churchill, he got down to business with Stalin, divvying up the countries of Europe after the war.

  Roosevelt conceded the fate of Poland to Stalin’s Communist state, as well as that of the Baltic countries Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. He blithely explained to Stalin that if the war was still going on in 1944, he intended to run once more for the presidency, and that he would “need the votes of the six hundred million Americans of Polish descent” (there were in fact only 3 million of these). Therefore, he begged Stalin not to formally occupy the country until after the American elections.

  As for the Baltic states, Roosevelt observed that they had once been a part of the old Russian Empire, and that he had no objection to the Soviets reabsorbing them after the war, provided there would be “some expression of the will of the people…perhaps not immediately after their re-occupation by the Soviet forces, but some day.”22

  He also seemed willing to concede Finland, with whom the Soviets had been at war. But Stalin didn’t want it. He asked for only one of its ports on the Gulf of Bothnia, and that was okay by Roosevelt.

  Despite the apparent treachery of condemning these European nations to the tender mercies of Soviet communism, there was a method of sorts to Roosevelt’s seeming madness. First, he told people both within and without the U.S. Department of State that these were countries the Soviets could take at will anyway. They were all states in the far north bordering the Soviet Union, whose provenance was vaguely Russian anyway. The idea was, Roosevelt noted, that if he conceded their occupation to Stalin, the Soviets would not cast an envious eye on the larger, more European states such as Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans—even Germany itself. As for Poland, Roosevelt explained that he had no confidence in its government-in-exile anyway, which, he said, consisted of “landed aristocrats” who intended to rule over a feudalistic system to the detriment of the masses.

  Much of the talk centered on the critical second front issue. Stalin had long called for an invasion of France from the West in order to draw some of Hitler’s power away from the Russian front. At Tehran, he was finally going to get what he wanted. Against Churchill’s counsel, Roosevelt concluded that western Europe would remain the chief military focus, and that the longed-for cross-Channel invasion—now dubbed Overlord—would definitely take place in the spring of 1944. When this was translated to Stalin, he stunned conference participants by reiterating that “after the defeat of Germany, the Soviet Union would join the Allies in war against Japan.”23

  Churchill fumed at Roosevelt’s concession, yet even the prickly British statesman was able at times to play the diplomat. At an elaborate dinner Churchill presented Stalin with the so-called Stalingrad Sword, a gift from the English king. Churchill told the Soviet dictator that he could “take his place among the major figures of Russian history,” and deserved to be known as “Stalin the Great.”24 The Soviet premier replied that it “was easy to be a hero when you were dealing with people like the Russians,” which was a fairly easy thing to say considering he had given orders that anyone who wasn’t heroic would be shot.

  When the discussion turned to what should be done with Germany after the war, Stalin suggested that the country should be dismantled and broken up into parts, so as to never again become an aggressive force. “You will not change Germany in a short period of time,” Stalin declared, citing that country’s aggression in 1870, 1914, and yet again in 1939. “There will be another war with them.” Two years later, he told a delegations of Czechs, “I hate the Germans. We can’t get rid of them. We Slavs must be prepared for the Germans to rise again against us.”25

  Roosevelt seemed outwardly sympathetic to Stalin’s position but said his military planners and diplomats favored turning the country into zones administered for a specified period of time by Britain, France, the United States, and, of course, the Soviet Union, to ensure that a peaceful Germany reappeared.

  Churchill, once again, was uneasy. In fact, he secretly wanted a strong Germany after the war as a bulwark against Soviet communism, which he believed to be the greater threat once the Nazis had been defeated. During the discussions he kept muddying the waters, insisting that the Allies should consider his Balkans strategy, as well as Overlord. But according to Elliott Roosevelt, who was present, “It was quite obvious to everyone in the room what [Churchill] really meant. He was above all else anxious to knife up into Central Europe, in order to keep the Red Army out of Austria and Romania, even Hungary. Stalin knew it, I knew it, everybody knew it.”26

  Dinner that evening was less convivial, owing to Churchill’s brush with a brandy bottle and an apparent black-dog mood. The Big Three, along with their aides, translators, and diplomats, were dining in the embassy’s Great Hall at the behest of Stalin. After a multicourse dinner th
e toasts began, led by Stalin, who was drinking vodka. Churchill had been drinking brandy all afternoon and was conscious of being needled good-naturedly during dinner by Stalin, who seemed to enjoy the activity. (After all, for years Churchill had quite publicly denounced Soviet communism as the archenemy of the West.) The Soviet premier was also apparently peeved over Churchill’s Balkans scheme, which he saw for what it was. As Charles “Chip” Bohlen wrote afterward, Stalin “lost no opportunity to get in a dig at Mr. Churchill. Almost every remark he addressed to the prime minister contained some sharp edge.”27

  At length Stalin rose for what Elliott Roosevelt deemed his “umpteenth toast,” which was a proposal for “the swiftest justice for all Germany’s war criminals.” At least fifty thousand [German officers] must be immediately shot upon capture, Stalin continued, in what the younger Roosevelt thought was a “jocular fashion.”28 At this Churchill could contain himself no longer and growled, “The British people would never stand for such mass murder.” It was “wholly contrary to our British sense of justice. I feel most strongly that no one, Nazi or no, shall be summarily dealt with, before a firing squad, without proper legal trial.”29

  Stalin then asked for FDR’s opinion. The president, evidently sensing Stalin’s mood, replied, “As usual, it seems to be my function to mediate this dispute. Perhaps we could say that instead of executing fifty thousand war criminals, shall we say forty-nine thousand five hundred?”