In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  Learning, as he did in so many respects, from Wilson’s mistakes, Roosevelt did not campaign for the Democrats in the congressional elections of 1942. As the nation’s wartime commander in chief, he had risen above party. He had become the President of all the people.

  Photographs of FDR with his wartime colleagues, Churchill and Stalin, show the President as preeminent. His posture looks welcoming; he seems always to be the host. Relaxed, at his ease, he is posed to act as chairman and to set the agenda. His air of authority is that of one born to command.

  He is the picture of what Aristotle famously described as “the magnificent man.” He is the person who does things on a great scale, but suits the size of his gesture to that of the occasion. He will not stoop to penny-pinching, “for there is something paltry about exact book-keeping”; but he will lavish his means only on undertakings worthy of him.

  So, too, the wartime United States that expressed itself through FDR: to itself and to others it seemed to be “the magnificent country.” It assumed the aspect of its great leader. The creation of that image of magnificence was a wonderful act of political imagination—more so, rather than less so, because it was somewhat at variance with the facts.

  THE UNITED STATES was far behind other major countries militarily. In Roosevelt’s war, as in Wilson’s, time was what stood in the way. In December 1941 the country was not ready. For years George Marshall had been preaching the importance of factoring lead time into military planning: that between the day a weapons system is conceived and the day it is ready to be deployed in the field, one must allow for a period of years. But he had been preaching to the deaf.

  Although, in accordance with plans formulated in advance, priority was given to the Atlantic, it was in the Pacific that America caught up first. The Japanese offensive pointing at Australia was blunted by American naval aircraft in the Coral Sea on May 6–7, 1942, the first sea battle in history in which the enemy fleets never caught sight of one another. Japan then was turned back early the following month in the battle of Midway Island, when the whole Japanese battle fleet was attacked by warplanes operating from a badly outnumbered U.S. naval task force. The navy fliers demolished the Japanese and sank all four of their aircraft carriers. It was a conclusive engagement; Japan was on the defensive for the rest of the war, could no longer win, and in that sense posed no further threat.

  The battle of the Atlantic was a war against U-boats. It was the critical endeavor in the American struggle with Germany. Until it was won, the United States could not mount and continue to support and supply an invasion of western Europe. But it was not until sometime in 1943—a long time into the war—that the U-boats were vanquished, and by then the Germans already had suffered their decisive defeat on land: in Russia, at the Battle of Stalingrad.

  While waiting, America’s leaders were determined to engage the German armies somewhere, both to take pressure off Soviet Russia and to demonstrate that they were trying to do so: they aimed to keep Stalin from negotiating a separate peace. In November 1942 American and British troops under Eisenhower’s command landed in, and subsequently liberated, French North Africa, linking up with British troops fresh from their victory over General Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein in Egypt. Eisenhower’s forces followed up their conquest of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia by invasions of Sicily and Italy in July and September 1943.

  With the Atlantic and the Mediterranean under their control, the United States and Britain at last were ready to join issue with Nazi Germany on what had been the central battlefields of the earlier world war. On June 6, 1944, the Allied forces landed in France. Hitler’s Germany was caught between Eisenhower’s forces attacking from the west and Soviet troops advancing from the east. After nearly a year of savage fighting on both fronts, Germany surrendered in May 1945.

  In the Pacific, America waged two campaigns. As commander in his own southern sphere, MacArthur led an army campaign that culminated in his return to the Philippines on October 20, 1944. Meanwhile, to his north, the navy and marines attacked and captured island after island.

  On August 6, 1945, American airmen dropped a secret new weapon, the atomic bomb, on Japan. Two days later the Soviet Union declared war, and the following day Americans dropped a second A-bomb. In mid-August Japan surrendered.

  In outline that was the story of the war, but it should be evident that no summary can encompass it adequately. Too much happened. It was too large. Tens of millions of civilians as well as soldiers were caught up in it personally over the course of years, each with his or her own individual story. In terms of scale, it was the biggest thing in history.

  THE STRATEGIES eventually pursued in their respective campaigns by such different personalities as MacArthur and Eisenhower had as a point in common that they were available only to generals whose countries could command overwhelming superiority. It was only in the later stages of the war—when, in terms of war production, the United States was starting to become the magnificent country it had been taken to be from the start—that such strategies became feasible.

  MacArthur got off to a shaky start in the war. It is commonly accepted that he was disastrously inadequate as a commander in 1941–42. But he recovered his grip the next year, and scored a decisive triumph in the Bismarck Sea in March 1943. Ahead of him lay Rabaul, capital and port of the island of New Britain, which 100,000 entrenched Japanese troops had converted into a seemingly impregnable fortress. It was the enemy strong point in the region, but MacArthur’s decision, in line with that of the chiefs of staff, was to leave it alone and go around it. Thereby he left 100,000 Japanese soldiers stranded, cut off as if they had been besieged. They were surrounded not by troops, but by the impassable ocean. Their ships and planes having been destroyed by the Americans, they were marooned. Ignored, they were obliged to sit out the war in helpless rage and frustration.

  Having done it once, MacArthur did it again, making it the trademark of his mature strategy. Repeatedly he would order his forces to sweep around the Japanese in vast encircling movements, saving time and the lives of his men, and consigning one enemy bastion after another to Rabaul-like irrelevance. It was a lordly strategy made possible only by a complete command of the seas and the skies that rendered the enemy earthbound and immobile.

  Eisenhower’s strategy was the reverse of dashing. He felt no need to match the brilliant generalship of his adversaries. His was the caution of a commander who knows that the crushing weight of the reinforcements eventually available to him makes victory certain unless he commits some terrible blunder. A superb coalition leader, as Fox Conner had trained him to be, he directed a chorus of prima donnas with soothing skill and focused on avoiding mistakes and limiting risks.

  It did not matter that the enemy often was equipped with weapons of superior design. The Germans produced better tanks and guns; the Japanese flew better fighter planes. The wartime Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, chaired by Senator Truman, discovered that workmanship in American factories was shoddy and quality control was lacking. Defense contractors were supplying the armed forces with equipment that they knew was flawed: Curtiss-Wright was delivering faulty engines for combat aircraft; Glenn Martin testified that his company was building airplanes with wings that were not wide enough—and that he saw no reason to change, for he already had the contract. No matter. However qualitatively inferior American military goods might be, the country could produce them in such quantity as to overwhelm.

  Then, too, there was the matter of organizing the economy for war. Conscious of Wilson’s failings in this regard, and prodded by Bernard Baruch even before the United States entered the war, Roosevelt knew in some part of his mind that he ought to appoint somebody to be in overall charge. But he could never bear to part with the power. Industrialists Edward Stettinius, Jr., Donald Nelson, and Charles E. Wilson, and banker Ferdinand Eberstadt were among those who tried bringing order out of the chaos. Most effective of all was James Byrnes, who resi
gned the Supreme Court seat with which FDR had rewarded him in order to try to run the civilian side of the war effort. From May 29, 1943, he served as “assistant President.” Somehow miracles of mobilization already had occurred—even without the coordination and central direction that many felt were required.

  MAGNIFICENCE SUGGESTS a polished style and culture, but these were not the traits that Europeans discerned in their liberators. The GIs were friendly, open, generous, and decent; but the peoples they freed, and who by and large had cut a poor figure in the war, salvaged some of their pride by looking down on the Americans for lack of manners, learning, and breeding.

  This European sense of superiority was not easily supportable—even though it continued to be maintained—once the troops had seen the death camps. True, the immensity of the horror made it not at first comprehensible—not, at least, as a whole; that took time. And it was only over time, too, that the true story came out, that the Germans were not alone in the genocide; that French, Polish, and other enthusiastic assistants joined in consigning millions to the flames.

  But to see the ovens into which humans were fed was enough to implicate the high culture of Europe; its value was drawn into question once it was suspected that such a culture had culminated in Dachau and Auschwitz. And by way of contrast, how could one look down on the typical GI who showered gifts on little children—without regard to whose little children they were?*

  Observing the works of Nazi Germany and her willing aiders and abettors in German-occupied Europe had the effect of reminding the United States of what it stood for. Americans told themselves, and others, that theirs was a country in which every person was as good as everybody else—a land tolerant of differences but conscious that beneath surface differences all were children of one God.

  Those who lived through the 1940s will remember the motion picture films then and afterward about the war and the names of the men in a typical army platoon—as the movies had it: Smith, O’Brien, Campbell, Kozlowski, Jones, Giannini, Suarez, Cohen. That was the way the country wanted to be seen: as a spacious, liberal-spirited New World that had risen above the hatreds that had destroyed the Old.

  AND, OF COURSE, that was not really true.

  It was evident even in those years, when FDR’s was America’s face to the world, that the picture of the United States as the magnificent country required significant qualification. Whatever the movies might say, the armed forces were racially segregated; there were wartime race riots in such cities as Detroit and Los Angeles; and the Ku Klux Klan still held a following. Anti-Semitism was deep and widespread, as was ethnic feuding.

  Even the material aspect of American magnificence was not entirely what it seemed. The picture of the United States as endlessly and effortlessly wealthy, though in line with life as a privileged few that included FDR had lived it, bore no relation to the common experience of Americans or to the prewar decade of soup kitchens and apparently incurable mass unemployment. It was difficult to reconcile even with the personal experiences of Roosevelt’s political contemporaries. Marshall, Eisenhower, and Vandenberg all had fathers who were wiped out financially in one or another of the depressions, panics, and crashes that were a recurring feature of the American landscape. Truman’s father was ruined in the market. So was Roosevelt’s grandfather Delano, who made a new fortune only by returning to China.

  Those who were Roosevelt’s age had witnessed the humiliating spectacle of their government losing control of finance and credit in the crashes of 1893 and 1907. In their childhood their country was the world’s major debtor nation, and the debts were repaid only with moneys unexpectedly flowing in from the European war. As they entered their middle years, their generation rode the roller coaster that led to the 1929 crash. Along with the Great War, it was the Great Depression of the 1930s that had shaped them: terrible poverty, no jobs, no future, and no way out—until the war, not the New Deal, bailed them out.

  Their experience of America therefore was not of a piece with the picture of the United States that FDR summoned up in the wartime years. That is why the creation of the image of magnificence was so great an achievement—and why the decision to try to live up to it was so morally admirable.

  IN RETROSPECT what fascinates is that the magnificent country was not what America was, but what she started to become. Though the peacetime United States had suffered from mass unemployment and though Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace were mocked for looking ahead to full employment for Americans in the postwar world, it turned out under FDR’s successors that a full-employment society could be achieved in America.

  Racial segregation in the armed forces came to an end—though not until after the Korean War showed it caused battles to be lost that might otherwise be won. The need for everyone to stick together in order to wage the Second World War did much to ease ethnic tensions. Middle western cities that were rife with anti-Semitism in 1939 witnessed the flourishing of interfaith Christian-Jewish civic associations in the post-1945 world. The hatred people felt for persons of other religions or ethnic backgrounds did not disappear, but a crucial change had occurred during the war: Americans, even those who felt the hatreds, now recognized that such feelings were wrong. They tried to rid themselves of prejudice, and knew they should feel ashamed if they could not.

  Socrates taught one of the central rules of classical Western ethics: if you want to appear beautiful or brave or wise, you ought to want all the more to actually be beautiful or brave or wise. Be what you wish to seem: the message of Socrates calls for an effort that the United States under FDR and his successors had the rare strength of character to be willing to undertake. America’s magnificence in the last Roosevelt years lay not so much in what she was but in what she was going to try to become.

  In this the country reflected its leader’s approach to life and politics. He looked up; he looked ahead—and as a Roosevelt he knew that Americans perform best when rising to meet a seemingly impossible challenge.

  * Yet a generation of postwar European intellectuals grew up in the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and elsewhere defining their literary and artistic superiority by a deliberate anti-Americanism.

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  AMERICA AGAINST THE ALLIES

  THE INNER HISTORY of an alliance is the story of its tensions, rivalries, and, sometimes, betrayals. Alongside these usual sources of discord, the United States brought to the broad coalition fighting the Second World War a unique one: the sense of separate purpose that had led Wilson in 1917 to term his country an associated power rather than an ally.

  Two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, William Bullitt sent a longhand note with unsolicited advice to Roosevelt: “Don’t let Churchill get you into any more specific engagements than those in the Atlantic Charter. Try to keep him from engaging himself vis-a-vis Russia. The Treaties—if made—will be as difficult for you to handle as the secret Treaties were for Wilson.”

  It was natural for an American to suppose that whatever bargain Churchill and Stalin might make would be secret, cynical, selfish, and—if ever revealed to the public—shocking.

  That was why FDR, in the Atlantic Conference of August 1941, had focused on obtaining from Churchill’s government details of all commitments made to allies, along with a pledge not to enter into secret treaties in future. The principles of the United States in this regard were that all commitments and war goals should be made public, and that all military decisions should be arrived at with a view to winning the war rather than to achieving some hidden agenda of political or territorial objectives in the postwar world.

  FRANCE WAS THE FIRST ALLY to find herself at odds with FDR—not least because he did not regard her as a genuine ally. As long as the regime presided over by Marshal Pétain in Vichy lasted, he recognized it as the legitimate government of France. As a student of Mahan, the President was sensitive to the geographical importance of French North and West Africa in regard to the south Atlantic highway to Latin America; he had instructed Robert
Murphy of the Vichy embassy, one of Bullitt’s protégés, to court the friendship of the French military authorities in Africa.*

  A logical next step was for Murphy, as political adviser to Eisenhower, to negotiate with the local Vichy authorities in Algeria and Morocco to offer no opposition to Ike’s invasion forces in 1942. The understandable objective Murphy pursued was to save the lives of American soldiers. In pursuit of the same goal, Eisenhower and Murphy arrived at an agreement with Vichy defense minister Admiral Jean-François Darlan in November 1942. In return for Darlan’s help in persuading his forces not to oppose the Allies, the admiral was appointed civil administrator of the territory, and Vichy colonial officials were allowed to remain in place.

  A storm of protest blew up in the United States and Britain. The Vichy government was in the nature of a fascist regime, yet the Anglo-American armies—as protesters pointed out—were propping it up rather than destroying it. Churchill and FDR considered disavowing the agreement. Eventually and reluctantly, however, the President was persuaded by Eisenhower to endorse the Darlan decision as a “temporary expedient justified solely by the stress of battle.” The assassination of Darlan December 24, 1942, by a French royalist† was a stroke of luck for Roosevelt that did away with the problems Ike and the admiral had caused.

  But the removal of Darlan did not bring FDR any closer to Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, a solitary figure who claimed to speak for Frenchmen who had refused to accept Pétain’s surrender to Germany. It was by no means clear in 1942 that de Gaulle represented anybody but himself. The President had a good debating point in his assertion that it was not for others to select a leader for France; after she had been liberated, elections would be held, and she then would choose a leader for herself. But it followed that France would have no spokesman in the councils of the Allies for the duration of the war, and indeed would not be a participant in the war.