The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Churchill was deeply disgusted, not least because reports of such camps and activities had only been rumored and he and his whole staff had mostly dismissed them as exaggerations. He knew that the Nazis were brutal, even barbarous. But he had refused to believe that Germans could be so utterly sadistic.

  * * *

  BY THE END OF APRIL 1945 the Russian army was on the outskirts of Berlin and so began a terrific shelling of the city with several thousand heavy artillery pieces, reducing to rubble what the Allied bombs had missed. Little was spared, including beautiful parks and tree-lined boulevards, historic buildings, churches—even the Berlin zoo. Officially, 125,000 Berliners died or committed suicide during this bombardment. The rest either fled or survived in basements. The German soldiers fired back with artillery of their own and fought fiercely from the upper floors of buildings. Eighty thousand Russian soldiers were among the dead.

  On April 20, during a lull in the shelling, Hitler emerged from his underground bunker into the chancellery garden to decorate a squad of boy soldiers, some as young as twelve, with iron crosses for fighting in defense of Berlin, before sending them back out to be killed by the Russians. It was the Führer’s fifty-sixth birthday, and all the notorious Nazis were there to celebrate in the dining room deep underground: Göring, Goebbels, Bormann, Ribbentrop, Himmler—as well as the military headmen Admiral Karl Dönitz, Generals Jodl and Keitel, and Albert Speer, the Reich’s architect.

  Hitler gave Speer special instructions that day. The German people had failed their Führer, and deserved nothing in return. Speer was to order immediate destruction of all infrastructure throughout Germany—power plants, dams, factories, and so forth—the same things the British and Americans had been trying to destroy for four years. Speer ignored the order, which might easily have meant his head. But he was at least more honorable than that.

  After dinner these worthies took their leave, some hoping to escape into other countries and others vainly hoping to supplant Hitler as the leader of Germany. What they didn’t know was that Eisenhower had decided as a matter of principle that the Allies would not accept surrender from any of the notorious Nazis, Hitler included.

  When the bombardment began, Hitler had convinced himself of the notion that the American and German armies would somehow link up and turn on the Soviets. After a solid week of shelling the deluded Führer gave up.

  After watching the simpleminded Eva Braun, whom Hitler had married less than two days before, swallow a cyanide capsule, Hitler stuck a pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The pair were later dragged up to the surface by aides and their bodies set afire with gasoline.

  Meantime, Churchill received word that Mussolini and his mistress had been killed and hanged by a mob on a scaffold in the town square of a small village in northern Italy. Churchill—likely thinking of his daughter Sarah’s Austrian stand-up comic husband—remarked, “Well, at least he had the pleasure of murdering his son-in-law.” Il Duce had in fact accomplished this a year earlier by executing his own daughter Edda’s husband, Count Galeazzo Ciano, for treason.

  In the meanwhile, Yugoslavian Communists sensed blood at Germany’s capitulation in Italy and agitated for their Italian Communist cohorts to rise up and seize power. But the Allied forces had split Italy in two and, to Churchill’s eternal relief, the effort failed.30

  Stalin’s enormous army was conquering new ground day by day and turning it into Communist territory. “My mind,” Churchill said later, “was oppressed with the new and even greater peril which was swiftly unfolding itself to my gaze.” To Clementine he wrote, “The misery of the whole world appalls me, and I fear increasingly that new struggles may arise out of those we are successfully ending.”

  Churchill’s gloomy frustration was palpable in remarks he made to the House of Commons in 1945, as Stalin annexed and absorbed European nations: “It is beyond the power of this country to prevent all sorts of things crashing at the present time. The responsibility lies with the United States, and my desire is to give them all the support within my power. If they feel they are not able to do anything, then we must let matters take their course.”31

  * * *

  ON MAY 3 four GERMAN OFFICERS appeared in General Montgomery’s headquarters under a flag of truce. “Who are they? What do they want?” Montgomery asked an interpreter. They were, the Germans said, officers of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. They knew they were surrounded now that the British had arrived, and they wanted to surrender the German army to Montgomery instead of to the Russians, whom they were presently fighting. In fact, they wondered if they might continue fighting the Russians without British interference. Montgomery refused, saying they should have thought about that before they started the war. The British general said that unless they surrendered unconditionally he would keep fighting them. He sent them to have lunch and think it over. They agreed to return next day with a reply. Late that night, Montgomery ordered his troops to stop firing. The Germans returned next day, May 4, and signed an unconditional surrender document that Montgomery handed them.

  Three days later, at Eisenhower’s headquarters, General Alfred Jodl surrendered the remainder of German troops unconditionally. The European war was over. Forty million people were dead.32

  The next day in London Churchill hosted a champagne lunch at Number 10 Downing Street for his closest staff and aides, whom he praised as the “architects of victory.” The following afternoon Churchill addressed the nation in a BBC broadcast. A million Londoners, each seemingly waving a small Union Jack, thronged the streets toward Buckingham Palace. The royal couple, with the king wearing his Royal Navy uniform, obliged the crowd and appeared on their balcony to continuous cheering and waving of flags. When Churchill also appeared, the roar of the crowd became frenzied and almost overwhelming.

  Church bells had been ringing since dawn all over England, and they continued ringing all day. At 3 p.m., when Churchill was scheduled to speak in the palace yard, a hush grew over a jam-packed crowd. Then the prime minister’s voice came through over loudspeakers. His short speech ended with a rousing call: “The evil-doers now lie prostrate before us. Advance Britannia!” There was a gasp from the crowd; then a band struck up “God Save the King” and the throng chimed loudly in. That night, hundreds of huge searchlights were turned on for the first time in years, illuminating buildings instead of a night sky filled with enemy bombers. Throughout the British Isles bonfires burned from dusk long into the gentle night. After five and a half long years Europe was at peace.

  *Hitler at one time held a job as a wall paperer.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  By late 1943 Roosevelt had decided to run for a wholly unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States. He was exhausted yet well aware of the pressures involved in being president. But as he considered the continuity of the job in the ongoing crisis, he concluded it would be dangerous to have a new man in his place when the major battles against the Germans and Japanese had yet to be fought. As he had in previous candidacies, Roosevelt shrewdly decided not to actively campaign but to merely shine a spotlight on his regular presidential activities. For vice president, he selected the Missouri senator Harry S. Truman.

  In his January State of the Union message, Roosevelt startled everyone when he proposed what he called a second, or economic, Bill of Rights, “under which a new basis for security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.” These rights included for everyone:

  The right to a decent home.

  The right to a satisfactory job that would earn enough for adequate food, clothing, and recreation.

  The right to adequate medical care.

  The right to adequate protection from the fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.

  The right to a good education.1

  This was as close
as Roosevelt got to pure socialism. He laid it on Congress to pass the laws providing for these benefits, and he warned of political consequences if it did not. But legislators, already conscious of antagonisms toward the president’s mushrooming social programs, let this pie-in-the-sky “Second Bill of Rights” die a slow but sure legislative death.

  On June 14, 1944, Roosevelt left for a promotional visit to the West Coast by way of Hyde Park and, incidentally, a stop at the magnificent New Jersey estate of Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, whose husband had died several months earlier at the age of eighty-two. There, while the Secret Service entertained Rutherfurd’s younger children outside by letting them fire the agents’ tommy guns into the lake, Roosevelt and Lucy enjoyed a long and private morning and afternoon together.2

  Later that summer, Roosevelt felt well enough to sail to Hawaii on the heavy cruiser Baltimore to settle a prickly argument between General MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz over the course the war would take as the Allies closed in on Japan. MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific command had cut loose from New Guinea and was now barreling northward, “bypassing” Japanese-held islands, toward the Philippines. Meanwhile, the Navy’s marines under Nimitz were fighting their way westward across the central Pacific in a series of terrific head-on battles that MacArthur considered wasteful.

  It was Nimitz’s contention that MacArthur should not try to reconquer Luzon and Manila, but instead focus on invading Formosa (now Taiwan). Here, Japan had installed enormous aerodromes from which it was bombing the islands where the Marines were fighting. MacArthur argued the opposite, on grounds that it would appear to the world inhumane to deliberately bypass the Philippines (an American protectorate) and let the Filipinos continue to suffer under Japanese rule. Also, he continued, it strategically made better sense to reclaim the Philippines (and, not incidentally, fulfill MacArthur’s famous pledge “I shall return”).

  On the first day of the conference in July, Roosevelt made MacArthur and Nimitz sit from morning to sundown in the rear of a large open car—the two of them with the president sitting in between—providing photo ops for newsreel cameras and the press while Roosevelt visited troops and made brief patriotic speeches. MacArthur claimed to be appalled. This was Roosevelt’s very effective notion of political campaigning, and MacArthur’s feigned outrage seems almost comical, given his reputation as a camera hog whenever the press was around.

  That evening, after dinner, they got down to business, with MacArthur and Nimitz each defending his position and the president acting as referee. In the end, MacArthur got his way in the debate, and the president got his in the upcoming election. He defeated New York governor Thomas E. Dewey, whom his cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth later famously characterized as looking like the “little man on the wedding cake.”

  * * *

  THE ELECTION OF 1944 was as close and contentious as any Roosevelt had endured. Considering his increasing ill health, the president managed to put up a front of high spirits and well-being that was truly remarkable. During October, the weather in the Northeast and Midwest turned miserably cold and rainy, but Roosevelt was up to the challenge. Stopping his train in Brooklyn, despite pleas from his doctor Admiral Ross McIntire to rest up and conserve his energy for a dinner speech that evening before the Foreign Policy Association, Roosevelt took to his open-topped Packard limousine in a freezing rain and made a four-hour waving tour of four of the five New York City boroughs, ending up in Manhattan with crowds along the sidewalks estimated by police as upwards of 3 million.

  This reception so invigorated the old campaigner that he repeated it in Philadelphia and elsewhere, bolstered by the news that MacArthur had at last landed in the Philippines. A few days later, he learned that the U.S. Navy had won a spectacular victory over the Japanese fleet in Leyte Gulf, in what was claimed to be the largest naval battle in history.

  Tom Dewey was a youthful and vigorous former prosecutor who had made a name for himself busting New York organized crime, an act that had carried him to the governor’s chair. He had learned somehow of the existence of Magic, the top secret U.S. code-breaking operation that had been able to intercept Japanese naval communications. Here was proof, Dewey concluded, that Roosevelt knew in advance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but had kept it a secret so the United States would be led into the war.

  Dewey was planning to use this bombshell information at an appropriate opportunity until George Marshall found out about it. He wrote him a letter, pleading against any unmasking of the code-reading capabilities of the armed services. As a patriot there wasn’t much Dewey could do but comply with the Army’s chief of staff. He was furious, though, because he considered Roosevelt a traitor and a liar in the Pearl Harbor affair. What he didn’t know was that at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl the American code breakers were reading only the Japanese diplomatic code, not the naval code that might have been useful to predict an attack on Hawaii.

  In Chicago, a crowd of a quarter million cheered Roosevelt for ten minutes before he told them, “Well, they [the Republicans] say in effect just this: ‘Those incompetent bunglers and blunderers in Washington have passed a lot of excellent laws about social security and labor, and farm relief, and soil conservation—and we promise that if we are elected we will not change any of them.’

  “And they go on to say: ‘Those same, quarrelsome tired old men—they have built the greatest military machine the world has ever known, which is fighting its way to victory.’ And they say: ‘If you elect us, we promise not to change any of that either.’3

  “Therefore, say these Republican orators, ‘it is time for a change.’ ”

  About all Dewey had in the way of political argument was to point out that under Roosevelt’s leadership the United States had been almost completely unprepared for the war. But that was four long years in the past, and the Allies were clearly winning now. His other argument centered on the president’s cozy relationship with the possibly Communist-influenced CIO labor union, but neither did this seem a big concern to the voters, for the United States and the Communist Soviet Union were now allies in the war.

  When the results were tallied, Roosevelt received more than 53 percent of the popular vote and 432 electoral votes to 99 for Dewey.

  * * *

  IT WAS AFTER THIS ELECTION that Roosevelt began to slip into a chronic spiral of ill health. Ever since polio had confined him to a wheelchair he had developed pulmonary disorders and other ailments consistent with living an inactive life, including a pack-a-day or more habit of unfiltered cigarettes. His daughter, Anna, who now lived in the White House, also was concerned over the palsied shaking of her father’s hands and alerted his personal physician Dr. McIntire.

  McIntire put Roosevelt in Bethesda Naval Hospital for a medical workup. Doctors diagnosed the president with dangerously high blood pressure, hypertensive heart disease, an enlarged heart with cardiac failure in the left ventricle, and troubling gastrointestinal problems. The president also had considerable bouts with breathlessness and a gray pallor in his face. He was sixty-two years old. McIntire gave orders that no one should reveal Roosevelt’s diagnosis, including to Roosevelt himself.

  In June, when the D-day landings took place on the coast of France, Roosevelt had wanted to be with Winston Churchill, among the first visitors to the fighting front. But his weakened condition foreclosed that possibility.

  Roosevelt was put on a low-fat diet by his doctors to lower his weight. It worked, and he lost twenty pounds. But this served to make him look unusually sallow as he continued to wear the same shirts and suits, which didn’t fit anymore. Rumors began to spread that he had cancer; Time magazine, then owned by Republican Henry Luce, declared that Roosevelt looked like “an old man.”

  Roosevelt paid these things little attention. He was more interested in promoting his design for a United Nations, which, led by the United States, Russia, Great Britain, and China, would “police” the world,
making it free of wars and undemocratic uprisings.

  Roosevelt was a Wilsonian idealist who always believed that the former president’s League of Nations scheme, if it had been backed by America’s might, could have prevented World War II. He never seemed to comprehend with Churchill’s prophetic clarity that a titanic conflict over the future of the world between totalitarian communism and democratic capitalism was going to dominate the second half of the twentieth century. When he returned from the conference in Tehran, Roosevelt remarked to one of his aides that after the war he expected more trouble from the British than from the Russians. Every time he asked Churchill when the British were going to return Hong Kong to the Chinese, the president complained, “All I get is a grunt.”4

  Roosevelt continued to see Lucy Mercer regularly after her husband died. Daughter Anna Roosevelt would arrange small dinner parties at the White House, and sometimes at Warm Springs she would be the go-between. Eleanor by now had divested herself of Lorena Hickok and was said by some, including the FBI, to have become romantically involved with a radical young writer and drafted serviceman named Joseph Lash, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for writing the first lady’s biography. According to Anna, a military officer one day brought her a packet of intercepted censored “love letters” to Eleanor from Lash, who was then posted (by personal order of Roosevelt) in the South Seas. The officer requested that she give them to her father. When she did, Roosevelt took them from her “without a word,” she said, and put them away.*1