Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  Churchill’s interpreter was unable to translate the torrent of words (and Churchill fired him that evening), but Stalin’s interpreter, Vladimir Pavlov, persevered and finally Stalin stood up, raised his arm, and said that he didn’t really believe Churchill but deferred to his unconquerable spirit. The visit closed with an amicable drinking bout until 3:30 in the morning, and Churchill took off at dawn for the long return via Tehran. Stalin said he had prepared a nasty surprise for the German drive to the south, but Brooke believed the Germans would overwhelm the Russians, as Marshall believed the Germans would win the battle for Egypt and take the Suez Canal. The civilian leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt, thought differently, on both fronts, and were correct.

  3. THE TURNING OF THE TIDE

  All of the chief theaters came to a head in November 1942. On November 4, Montgomery launched a preparatory artillery offensive and then a general attack at El Alamein that forced Rommel back out of Egypt by November 12. On November 8, MacArthur’s former chief aide, and Marshall’s former chief of war planning, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commanded the Torch landings, at Casablanca, Morocco, and Oran and Algiers, Algeria. The Anglo-American forces were largely embarked directly from the United States, and made a relatively uncontested descent on French North Africa, as the Vichy forces put up token resistance before concluding that the tides of war indicated that too strenuous a resistance would be inappropriate. The slippery, political French admiral, Jean François Darlan, was in North Africa visiting his son, who had been stricken with polio. In order to shut Vichy down, as Pétain, despite Roosevelt’s efforts to placate him by invoking what Churchill called “the rather tired pieties of World War I,” ordered resistance, Roosevelt had Darlan appointed as nominal governor in North Africa (and had his son treated at his Warm Springs Polio Foundation in Georgia). A French military-political farce ensued: de Gaulle was the only French leader apart from Pétain who had any support, but the Americans were trying to support General Henri Giraud, a limited but patriotic escapee from Nazi imprisonment, while handing titular authority to Darlan, a former Vichy premier. Churchill’s chief of the defense staff, Brooke, accurately summarized the three: “Giraud has integrity but is not intelligent; Darlan is intelligent but has no integrity; and de Gaulle has high intelligence and high integrity, but an impossible and dictatorial personality.”

  The Germans invaded Vichy France, and the French fleet at Toulon scuttled itself rather than join the Allies or be captured by the Germans, or even sail to a neutral port. It was, as de Gaulle wrote, “the most sterile suicide imaginable.” The British and American forces entered Tunisia on November 15 to try to cut off Rommel’s retreat. They were too late for that and the battle of Africa was reduced to a fierce and prolonged rearguard action by the Germans in Tunisia. The political confusion was rationalized somewhat by the assassination, by a French monarchist, of Darlan on Christmas Eve, 1942. (The monarchists were an eccentric faction in French affairs 112 years after the final overthrow of the Bourbons.) Roosevelt had some friends to the White House on New Year’s Eve, and privately screened the about-to-be-released film Casablanca, starring two of his most fervent Hollywood supporters, Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines. He was about to depart for a conference with Churchill, de Gaulle, and Giraud at Casablanca, and expressed the humorous concern that he might encounter as cynical and confused a group of Frenchmen as the epic film depicted.

  The naval battle of Guadalcanal, November 12–15, was a decisive American victory, which ensured that the Japanese would not be able to contest the island much longer, and had been definitively prevented from invading Australia. Henceforth, MacArthur would advance northwestward toward the Philippines, and Nimitz, the Central Pacific commander, would advance due west through the Marshall Islands and to Saipan, Guam, and toward the home islands of Japan. Roosevelt’s immense naval construction programs and the Midway and Solomon Islands naval victories would now confer constantly lengthening naval superiority on the United States in the Pacific.

  What became the greatest land battle in the history of the world, surpassing even Verdun, raged all through the late summer and autumn at Stalingrad. At the height of the battle in November, there were about 2,000,000 men engaged, perhaps 60 percent Russians, and including 200,000 Romanians and 100,000 Italians supporting the Germans. There were about 25,000 artillery pieces and 2,000 airplanes, evenly divided, and 1,500 tanks, 900 of them Russian. Ultimately, there were 1.1 million Russian and 840,000 Axis casualties, including approximately a million dead. It came to savage hand-to-hand fighting in the rubble of the city, and in the piercing cold of the Russian winter. The Russians attacked the German flanks, largely protected by the Romanians, on November 19, in overwhelming force. The Romanians put up a fairly spirited fight, but the Russians closed behind the German Sixth Army and surrounded it. Hitler would not hear of a break-out retreat.

  The United States had gone to accelerated development of an atomic bomb in August 1942, having agreed on a full sharing of information with Britain (which did not, in fact occur, as Roosevelt determined that since the United States was spending most of the money, it would retain the science). The Manhattan Project created a separation plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, relying on the hydroelectric power of the TVA (Chapter 10), a bomb development laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and a plutonium production facility at Hanford, Washington. As progress was made, the possibilities of a military use of such a bomb loomed steadily larger in the minds of Roosevelt, Stimson, and Marshall.

  In the 1942 congressional elections, the Democrats lost 46 congressmen and nine senators but retained their majorities in both houses, and legislation was much less disputatious in wartime. Roosevelt’s acquiescence in Marshall’s Torch timetable probably cost him 20 congressmen.

  As 1942 ended, the Germans were trapped at Stalingrad and in inexorable retreat in North Africa, and the Japanese were being forced off Guadalcanal and pushed westward across the Pacific. The mighty American war engine was producing all categories of military equipment, munitions, and necessities in astonishing quantities, and the three main Allies (counting the British Commonwealth and Empire as one) had nearly 40 million men under arms.

  The almost unspoken British-American strategy of leaving most of the heavy lifting against the Germans to the Russians, while contributing importantly in other theaters and as suppliers, is illustrated by the comparative scale of these decisive battles. Where Stalingrad engaged millions and produced nearly two million casualties, and a million dead, most of them Russians, El Alamein involved 310,000 troops, almost two-thirds of them British, and caused 45,000 casualties, two-thirds of them German and Italian. And Guadalcanal engaged fewer than 100,000 men, over 60 percent of them American, though the ferocity of the fighting is indicated by the fact that the Japanese suffered 31,000 dead and only 1,000 captured, and the United States 7,100 dead and only four captured. Defeating the Axis in Africa and at the gates of Australia were extremely important events, but they involved barely 2 percent of the Allied casualties that the Russians sustained at Stalingrad alone, and accounted for just 1 percent of the number of Axis casualties the Russians inflicted at Stalingrad. From this point on, the Germans and the Japanese and, while they lasted in the Axis, the Italians, were in almost unbroken retreat.

  4. DIVERGENT WAR AIMS

  With the momentum residing now with the Allies, 1943 would be a year of almost constant conferences, as the noose tightened around the necks of the Germans and the Japanese, and the Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—maneuvered toward the postwar world each sought. It would shortly be confirmed that the British were reluctant to shift the focus of operations from the Mediterranean to northern France, as the Americans insisted was the only way to defeat Germany. Beyond the question of military strategy to achieve victory, the three leaders all sought different outcomes. Churchill, who had been active in European politics and diplomacy for nearly 40 years, from when he became an under secretary for colonies in Sir Henry Campbell-Ba
nnerman’s government in 1905, wished to restore a balance of power in Europe, whose scales could, as throughout the last 400 years, be tipped by Britain. This would require the reconstruction of France, and de Gaulle, uncommonly difficult though he was (and violent though his disagreements with Churchill often were), was essential. And it would require a politically cleansed and reconstituted Germany and Italy, and a durable arrangement with the United States, preferably with the retention of some U.S. forces in Western Europe, a closer relationship than had been envisioned at the end of the previous war and that had been rejected in the byzantine complexities of the American congressional ratification process.

  Stalin saw the door open to Western Europe, and oscillated between morbidly suspecting that Churchill and Roosevelt were just trying to promote attrition between him and Hitler, to leave a mountain of German and Russian war dead in Eastern Europe and the protagonists exhausted, and, if the Anglo-American Allies would, as they promised, seriously attack Germany in the West, seeing the opportunity for an unprecedented Russian thrust into Central and even Western Europe. Roosevelt did believe that Russia would be relatively exhausted after the war, and that the British Empire and other colonial empires would disintegrate, especially because of the defection of relatively sophisticated units like India, and he was determined to keep the United States permanently involved in Europe and the Far East in order to prevent overseas aggressors from gaining control of those theaters and threatening the national security of the United States.

  Roosevelt saw that if the United States were not engaged in the world, the strength of the democracies would be critically divided, and there would be the danger, as there had been in both World Wars, that without American assistance the other democracies could be overrun and the United States would, as Roosevelt had said in his “Great Arsenal of Democracy” address on December 29, 1940 (Chapter 10), be “living at the point of a gun.” He also expected the United States to emerge from the war as overwhelmingly the most powerful country in the world. To disguise its preeminence and cloak it in collective action, as well as to convince his previously isolationist countrymen that the world was not as dangerous a place as it had been, and to fulfill the Wilsonian requirement of a measure of idealism in a coldly realistic design, he sought a more effectual successor to the League of Nations: an international forum where the victorious powers would have the status of world policemen, armed with the right and the strength to intervene against aggressor states before they gained any traction.

  In this spirit, he sought trusteeships for colonial territories, which would emancipate them to independence when they were ready, and foresaw that China, despite its present primitive and war-torn condition, would become one of the world’s Great Powers, and should be recognized in advance in that role (although it was in the midst of a civil war between the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, which was pursued by both parties with more determination than the war against the Japanese invader).

  Also complicated was the status of France. Churchill considered the revival of France essential to keeping Russia out of Western Europe, and de Gaulle the only French leader who could achieve that. Roosevelt was something of a Francophile, and spoke the language tolerably well, but he had been so shocked by the parliamentary bedlam and irresolution of the latter Third Republic, and by the astonishing collapse of the French state and army in 1940, that he was disinclined to believe that any French revival was in the cards, or that the obdurate de Gaulle, who had emerged from complete obscurity, as he put it himself, to “assume France,”109 had any credentials to lead such a renascence. De Gaulle desperately wanted to be treated as the representative of the French national interest traditionally was—as the leader of a great and durable nation—and he sought to entice Churchill to a more European and less Americocentric perspective, but he could not compete with Roosevelt for Churchill’s attention. And he sought to be treated by Roosevelt as America treated Britain, but he was more keenly aware than anyone that France’s recent history and current circumstances did not justify such treatment, so his only method of achieving attention and adding a cubit to France’s status was to impress his allies with his powers of obstructionism and intractability. All agreed that in this activity, de Gaulle possessed preternatural genius (which he would continue to display for many years).

  For the first four months of 1943, the German Afrika Korps was bottled up in Tunisia, reinforced by Hitler with constant airlifts of troops, as he believed he was deferring an invasion of Italy. Eisenhower and the Allied high command were happy enough to have him pouring first-class German troops into a theater where he couldn’t win (and where if he had done the same a year earlier he would have taken the Suez Canal and the oil of the Middle East). The Allies might have been able to shut down the airlift, but didn’t seriously try to do this. For Hitler to sacrifice forces in a lost cause in Africa while prohibiting a break-out effort by his surrounded army at Stalingrad was insane. He should have pulled out of both places and used the African forces to reinforce the Russian front.

  The Soviets drove the Germans westward through the winter and the early spring in Russia, while the Americans, under MacArthur in the Southwest and Nimitz in the Central Pacific, pushed the Japanese steadily west. The joint chiefs had devised and both Pacific theater commanders very skillfully executed an island-hopping strategy, by which many Japanese garrisons were bypassed and stranded, as the United States’ naval advantage grew steadily longer. A Japanese garrison of nearly 250,000 was stranded in Rabaul as MacArthur swept past it toward the Philippines. (Roosevelt, in the most important direct leader’s intervention in naval construction of the war, ordered a class of 10 heavy cruisers to be altered in the shipyards and completed as the Independence class of aircraft carriers. They entered service in 1943 and accelerated the attainment of U.S. naval superiority.)

  Eisenhower, as the Allied commander in North Africa, quickly achieved prodigies of seamless integration of a binational command structure, proving himself an outstanding soldier-diplomat, and made some sense out of the steaming political bouillabaisse of French North African politics. He and other senior Allied officials gave Darlan a mighty funeral in the Algiers cathedral and saluted Darlan’s coffin as it preceded the cardinal-primate of Africa down the cathedral steps, but he recognized at once that de Gaulle was the only serious French political leader, and opened a good relationship with him that would take both men through 25 years, to the highest distinctions and offices within the gift of their countrymen.

  5. THE CASABLANCA AND TRIDENT CONFERENCES

  The first of the major conferences of 1943 was the meeting at Casablanca from January 14 to 24. General George S. Patton had commanded the landings there and was responsible for the security of the Anglo-American military and civilian leadership, meeting within range of German air strikes from Tunisia. There was a stark difference between American ambitions to invade northern France as soon as possible across the English Channel and British desires to probe what Churchill had been describing since his visit to Stalin in August 1942 as “the soft underbelly of Europe” in Italy and the Balkans (although a glance at a topographical map showed that it was nothing of the kind, especially if the mountain ranges were being defended by experienced German troops as they soon would be). The debate was sharpish at times, especially between Marshall, a taciturn but very intelligent and direct and efficient man, preeminently an organizer, and Brooke, a fast-talking and somewhat peremptory Ulsterman who indulged himself in the usual British conception that the Americans were novices at serious war, and had wildly naïve notions of their ability quickly to transform millions of farm boys and office and factory workers into capable fighting forces.

  Eisenhower’s achievement, from now to the end of the war, in getting senior British and American officers to work together quite smoothly, was a remarkable one. He was almost the only senior American officer who had any affection for the British, as Patton and the c
ommander of the United States Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King, detested the British, and even Marshall regarded most British generals as weak and afraid to fight. And none of the senior British apart from some of their liaison officers and perhaps Alexander, some of the RAF commanders, and Admiral Andrew Cunningham, Britain’s greatest sea leader and Mediterranean commander, could abide the American senior officers. Montgomery and Brooke professed to regard Marshall and Eisenhower as completely incompetent, apart from clerical tasks. Fortunately, the officers on each side were somewhat in awe of the government leader on the other side, and Churchill and Roosevelt let their service chiefs fight it out between themselves, holding over them the Damoclean sword that if they were unable to reach agreement, the whole matter would be settled by the political leaders, a prospect that was so frightening it galvanized the generals and admirals of both countries into cooperative action.