Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3

by Blanche Wiesen Cook

  The Queen Mother was impressed with ER and wrote her brother, Lord Athlone, “I liked her very much. She is very intelligent and her grasp of what our women are doing here is splendid and she hopes to do much in the USA to wake up the women there to emulate our manifold activities. She is on the go from morning till night and I fear will kill her unfortunate secretary, Miss Thompson.”

  ER and Tommy left early the next morning for a tour of day care nurseries, run by the government for industrially employed mothers. ER hoped to emulate them since they solved “very much the same” problems faced by American women. The women’s husbands were off to war, they required employment, the government sought their services, and their children required care.

  Some great landed estates were being used for “country nurseries,” where preschool children lived full-time. Other estates were used by the new Women’s Land Army, where former typists or housewives now worked the land and herded cattle and sheep. These changes, in addition to all the water wagons and community shops established in bombed-out areas, enabled everybody to “get on with the war” in a “spirit of cheerfulness” that ER found “extraordinary.”

  Finally, on 8 November, good news arrived. Operation Torch, the Anglo-American landing in North Africa under General Eisenhower’s command, had begun, giving “the British people a tremendous lift,” ER wrote. Months of defeat, “disappointment and disaster” now gave way to feelings of vast relief that finally “we are fighting together.” ER was moved by expressions of gratitude for the Americans’ participation and hope for the invasion’s success.

  On 7 November FDR made a speech, broadcast in France and North Africa, in which he explained, “We come among you solely to defeat . . . your enemies. . . . We assure you that once the menace of Germany and Italy is removed . . . we shall quit your territory at once.” ER noted in her 10 November column that “we assured that nation [France] that we had no desire to take over any of her territory [in Africa], and that at the end of the war whatever we were obliged to invade, we would return.” The promise to restore French colonies, however, conflicted with the promise of the Atlantic Charter.

  The massive Allied armada had landed in three task forces. The western task force, under General George Patton, landed in Morocco at Casablanca; the center force disembarked at the Algerian port of Oran; and the eastern task force landed in Algiers. On all fronts, news of the early-morning landings was broadcast in London with enthusiasm.

  All these areas were under the rule of Vichy France. After the French debacle and the June 1940 armistice, FDR’s administration had given Vichy France full diplomatic recognition, hoping to encourage the collaborators to work against the Nazis, in what has been called his “Vichy gamble.” In preparation for the November 1942 Allied invasion, FDR’s State Department representative in North Africa, arch-conservative Robert Murphy, had chosen Henri Giraud to order the Vichy French forces to cooperate. But they ignored him and mounted a fierce resistance. It was what FDR’s Vichy gamble had hoped to forestall.

  As the fighting intensified, Admiral François Darlan was unexpectedly in Algiers to visit his son Alain, who was hospitalized, stricken with polio. Darlan was Pétain’s most senior deputy and commander in chief of Vichy France’s armed forces. Eisenhower asked him, in that high-level capacity, to negotiate a deal for a cease-fire to end the resistance, in exchange for French control of North Africa. At first Darlan refused. But on 11 November Nazi troops occupied the rest of France, ending Germany’s armistice with Vichy. Darlan thereupon ordered a cease-fire, and French resistance ended throughout Algeria and Morocco. Some 3,000 lives had already been lost on each side during this most complex landing in military history, and this agreement saved an estimated 55,000 lives.

  From 11 to 13 November, Eisenhower negotiated the so-called Darlan Deal. In essence, Vichy representatives retained sovereignty in North Africa, and French military forces remained under Vichy command. There was no effort to repeal or modify Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws or restrictions. Darlan became high commissioner of North Africa, in command of the French SS, which he had previously done much to create. Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, was entirely excluded from the deal.

  The Darlan Deal was a fascist victory that outraged Allied observers and frightened all governments in exile. British leaders of all parties were appalled. Journalist Edward R. Murrow angrily asked, “Are we fighting the Nazis or sleeping with them?” To play thus “with traitors” was no path to victory but moral loss. Wendell Willkie gloomily lamented that good people everywhere “felt betrayed and baffled.” ER made every effort to avoid discussion of the Darlan Deal, which exploded during the most exhausting phase of her journey across the Midlands, followed by a flight to Belfast and a tour of Londonderry; then a flight to Scotland and full days in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

  Instead, she chose to speak of Allied unity and the need to organize for peace while war raged. On 11 November, Armistice Day, 1918, she reflected on the “futility” of former peace plans, ignored and discarded. She now prayed that “we will accept reality and grasp the fact that we are part of a world which cannot be divided and treated in sections.”

  On her last day in Glasgow, ER embarked on an open steamer and boated down the Clyde. When they disembarked at Brown’s yard, they were met by “a big gathering of workers”—who joined the vaudeville singer Sir Harry Lauder to sing “To the End of the Road.” Tommy was told this was the first time work had been stopped since they were visited by the king and queen. As she departed, Sir Harry took ER’s hand and sang “Will ye no’ come back again?” ER was deeply moved, and said she hoped indeed to return.

  Bearing gifts of heather and shortbread for FDR, ER and her party entrained for London. Returning to John Winant’s apartment seemed like coming home, “and it was good to have a bath in a warm room.”

  During her final days in London, ER visited with relatives, allies, and old school chums. Her last London lunch was with thirty-five “very old Allenswood school friends.” In her diary, ER confided, “I suppose I look as changed as they do, but I hardly recognized any of them.” She took tea with the entire royal family and on 13 November “went to report on all I had seen to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth.” They spent “two solid hours” alone. At Winant’s she met with the Soviet ambassador and Madame Maisky, who urged her to visit Russia. A large farewell tea that afternoon was followed by an intimate dinner with her beloved aunt Maude and uncle David Gray, “a delightful evening talking of home people and happenings.”

  The trip concluded with a visit from Clementine Churchill, who arrived with a personal note from Winston: “You certainly have left golden footprints behind you.” The journalist Chalmers Roberts agreed, reporting to his chief at the Office of War Information that ER “has done more to bring a real understanding of the spirit of the United States to the people of Britain than any other single American who has ever visited these islands.”

  ER and Tommy departed at night on a military transport with six ferry pilots who had just delivered a bomber. Churchill and Winant did not want to take any chances with her safety, and FDR agreed: “I don’t care how you send her home. Just send her.”

  On 17 November at nine-thirty a.m., as her plane landed, ER was “surprised to see the Secret Service standing around several cars, which I knew meant the President was there to meet us.” That day she had lunch with FDR “in his office, which is something I only do on very particular occasions.” That evening “the President and I dined alone.” ER’s surprise at FDR’s interest was revealed by a note she penned on the last page of her diary: “I really think Franklin was glad to see me back and at dinner I gave a detailed account of such things as I could tell quickly to answer his questions. I think he even read this diary & to my surprise he had also read my columns!”

  ER felt acutely the ways the United States lagged behind Britain. There women and men worked together with shared dignity; troops of di
fferent races were not segregated; and everybody contributed all they could for community betterment. But in the United States, separate facilities, separate training, inferior equipment remained the rule. Routinely insulted, Black troops could not eat in post exchanges—they could only “buy refreshments” to take outside. Routine discrimination continued throughout the war in numerous and surprising ways: “In some Army camps, black soldiers were forced to sit behind German or Italian POWs for all entertainment,” including films and USO shows.

  ER made no public criticism, but she wondered what it meant to “fight for freedom” in a segregated military that discriminated in so many ways. She visited Norman Davis of the Red Cross, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and General Hap Arnold—who was relieved that she seemed “very temperate” with words of praise for the work of black troops and their officers. Everybody understood there was more work to be done, but ultimately only minimal changes were made.

  The Darlan Deal now required attention. Almost everybody she respected on her journey had expressed fury over U.S. support for Darlan, who was known as a violently anti-British warrior and as the person responsible for the anti-Jewish laws in all Vichy-controlled areas. Winant, who was personally close to de Gaulle, was stunned, although he urged momentary silence. He persuaded Harold Nicolson and other parliamentarians that the Darlan Deal was a temporary military measure. “I do not want us to abandon de Gaulle,” Nicolson wrote in his diary. “But we had best keep silence over this disgraceful and most profitable episode.” FDR’s refusal to support de Gaulle, whom he despised, cooled U.S. relations with Britain, and it was in that context that Churchill delivered his emphatic speech on 10 November: “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. . . . Here we are and here we stand, a veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world.”

  Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau confided to ER his upset over U.S. support for Darlan in North Africa. ER was his confidante for all personally upsetting issues, and he trusted her “more than anyone outside of his own family.” ER not only admired Morgenthau, she also trusted and depended on both him and his wife, Elinor, with whom she shared intimacies and personal concerns that she shared with no one else.

  Morgenthau had met de Gaulle in London and, like Winant, respected him. When he learned of de Gaulle’s exclusion and the details of the Darlan Deal, he protested to the War Department. Secretary Henry Stimson met with him and defended Robert Murphy’s vision. Morgenthau countered that Darlan “was a most ruthless person who sold many thousands of people into slavery, and . . . to use a man like that in these times” was to lose the war.

  The next day Morgenthau called on FDR to speak about North Africa, “something that affects my soul.” He insisted that the president make a public statement to assure Americans and the Allies that the United States did not support or condone fascism. FDR’s closest advisers, including Hopkins, Rosenman, and Archibald MacLeish, now representing the Office of War Information (OWI) agreed.

  On 17 November FDR issued a statement to the press, to the effect that General Eisenhower’s “political arrangements” in northern and western Africa were temporary. “We are opposed to Frenchmen who support Hitler and the Axis. . . . I have requested the liberation of all persons in North Africa who have been imprisoned because they opposed the efforts of the Nazis to dominate the world, and I have asked for the abrogation of all laws and decrees inspired by Nazi governments or Nazi ideologists.”

  Then on Christmas Eve 1942, a twenty-year-old French youth shot Darlan as he entered his office in Algiers. Immediately apprehended, Bonnier de la Chapelle was condemned by a secret military tribunal and executed by firing squad on 26 December. History will always speculate about the real identity of the assassin who had declared that he hated Vichy, the enemy of France. Rumors of Anglo-American involvement would persist. But even after Darlan’s assassination, Vichy remained in charge in North Africa, and its fascist repression continued. With their alliance in disarray, FDR and Churchill agreed to meet in Casablanca in January to negotiate workable compromises.

  • • •

  For the rest of December, ER turned her attention to the Nazi massacres of Jews. For months Nazi atrocities committed against Jews and Poles had been much in the news in Britain, with grim details of forced removals and massacres. Protest was vigorous: John Winant received more than two hundred petitions from British organizations demanding that the government take action to stop Nazi war crimes.

  The massacre at Lidice, six miles northwest of Prague, on 10 June 1942 was widely reported, in great detail. Most of the residents were killed; the town’s eighty-eight children and their remaining mothers were sent to concentration camps. The massacre was said to be in reprisal for the assassination of SS general Reinhard Heydrich, who had been shot in Prague by Czech patriots who allegedly hid in Lidice. The Nazis boasted that the village “was now forever erased from the map and the memory of the world.” In response to the ghastly reports, in June Britain endorsed a fact-finding UN Commission on Atrocities.

  ER devoted two columns to the destruction of Lidice, promising that “none of us will ever forget a little village named Lidice.” Indeed, the eradication of the village had captured the imagination of American artists only two days after the news reached the United States, as the Writers’ War Board, comprising thousands of U.S. writers, including ER, “resolved to do all in its power to make sure that Lidice . . . would never be forgotten.” Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote The Murder of Lidice, a dramatic verse narrative that was initially broadcast on 19 October over NBC “with a distinguished cast,” including ER’s friend Alexander Woollcott. “It was also short-waved to England and other countries” and published proudly as “one of the finest pieces of true propaganda to come out of the war.” ER, deeply moved by Millay’s work, gave her book to many for Christmas 1942.

  Other June 1942 news articles headlined Hitler’s extermination policies: “1,000,000 Jews Slain by Nazis.” A “vast slaughterhouse for Jews in Eastern Europe” condemned countless men, women, and children throughout German-occupied Europe. From September through November, details of the removal and slaughter of fifty thousand Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were reported. Cattle cars removed millions to “annihilation centers” in the East, including Chełmno, Treblinka, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Auschwitz. There “gas chambers are used” in camps established to complete the “Final Solution.”

  Throughout the autumn, Winant and others pressured FDR to join Britain in making a public statement against Nazi atrocities. On 5 December ER wrote, “This morning I saw that, in Poland, it was reported that more than two-thirds of the Jewish population had been massacred. There seems to be little use in voicing a protest, but somehow one cannot keep still when such horrors are going on.” Protests and prayers were needed, but ER also demanded action—and intensified her work with Quaker relief and rescue agencies.

  In a subsequent column, ER wrote about the resistance by the women of Poland against the Nazis. The prime minister of Poland, while visiting the United States, gave her “a message transmitted from a secret radio station in Poland” to London in September. In the message, Polish women told how they were “enduring awful times. . . . The shadows of thousands tormented to death in concentration camps in Oswiecim [Auschwitz], Ravensbruck, Oranienburg and other places hover around us. . . . We Polish women have, therefore, all joined the ranks of subterranean struggling Poland, and together with our husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons we will fight to the end. . . . We are prepared either to win or perish.” Even to send that message, ER explained, was an act of tremendous courage—since if discovered it meant death, “and ten efforts were made before it was finally transmitted.”

  Throughout the autumn Varian Fry, who had done so much to rescue almost two thousand of Hitler’s intended victims, had sent ER the details he received—and they again worked together, specifically to assi
st children who had escaped to Spain and Portugal. She was horrified and galvanized by Fry’s powerful “The Massacre of the Jews,” published in December in the New Republic. It presented the bitter facts of the slaughter, the ongoing failure to confront them, and specific suggestions for immediate action:

  Letters, reports, cables . . . add up to the most appalling picture of mass murder in all human history. Nor is it only the Jews who are threatened. . . . The entire Polish people may be wiped out. . . . The decimation of the Greek people is a matter of record. . . . The Nazis are systematically destroying the potential leaders of democratic movements in all the countries they have overrun. We must face the terrible truth. . . .

  President Roosevelt could and should speak out against these monstrous events. . . . A similar warning from Churchill might help. . . . Tribunals should be set up now to begin to amass the facts.

  Fry had been told of an OWI directive that banned “mention of the massacres,” which he considered “sadly mistaken.” He called for broadcasts in every language “day and night.” There was nothing to achieve by “appeasing” the slaughterers.

  Proof the Nazis feared “news of their crimes” was that the massacres did not occur in the West; the victims were transported to the East to be destroyed. “Finally, and it is a little thing, but . . . a big thing, we can offer asylum now, without delay or red tape, to those few fortunate enough to escape.” Fry rejected State Department notions of a “security risk”—which had ended his own efforts—with a very simple suggestion: “we can intern the refugees on arrival, and examine them at leisure.” If there was doubt, “we can keep them interned for the duration of the war.” But it would be preferable to the current visa situation, which had condemned so many “stalwart democrats” to death.