In the Time of the Americans

by David Fromkin

  That was the crux of FDR’s position: he did not recognize France as an ally. In reality, she was not one. In 1942 there was no meaningful French resistance movement. Under German rule Paris wined, dined, and glittered as before. The Vichy regime did Hitler’s bidding with enthusiasm. But Roosevelt seemed to be doing more than facing facts; he was taking advantage of them to demote France from the ranks of the great powers. His plan for Britain and the United States to police the postwar world, and disarm everybody else, relegated France to the position of Belgium, Holland, or Greece. In mid-1942 Roosevelt went further and classified France with Germany, Italy, and Japan, calling the French “associates of the aggressors.”

  The Vichy regime could be expected to accept an inferior status in the postwar world. In its dealings with the Germans, it already had agreed to a subordinate role for France in world affairs. Meanwhile, the Pétain government seemed much more open to American than to British influence; and—such was FDR’s gamble—it would keep the Germans from using its territory in Europe and Africa in making war on the United States. So both during and after the war, Vichy would do all that Roosevelt now asked of France.

  Moreover, in maintaining that Pétain, not de Gaulle, was the leader who commanded the loyalty of France (in 1942), FDR almost certainly was right. He was being realistic. But he was not being generous.‡

  FDR may have been affected by France’s behavior in his own political lifetime. In Paris at the end of the First World War, she had blocked Wilson’s plan for a liberal peace. In 1919 she had overruled the United States, and in the end had forced a treaty on Germany so onerous that it was predictable Germany would go to war someday to get it changed. Then, in the 1930s, she had lacked the nerve to defend the treaty—the treaty she had insisted on imposing—when Germany rebelled against it. She could have faced down Germany at the Rhineland in 1936, but did not. In 1939–40, when the war came that her Versailles treaty helped cause, she lacked the courage to fight on; despite what even might have been superiority in numbers of troops and war machines, she had surrendered.

  Roosevelt despised people who give up. It could well have been his view of the ignoble role France had played between 1919 and 1940 that shaped his attitude toward de Gaulle, even though the general’s own conduct had been heroic at all times.§ It was only reluctantly, and under the influence of Eisenhower and the British, that the President moved toward some sort of official recognition of de Gaulle’s standing. Even so, he foresaw political chaos once France was liberated. And he looked forward to disbanding the French colonial empire, taking over its naval bases in Africa and Indochina for America’s use in policing the disarmed postwar world.

  WHEN HE HEARD THE NEWS of the attack on Pearl Harbor, de Gaulle remarked that the war was over. From that it followed that the battle to shape the postwar world had begun. De Gaulle took that as a starting point in alliance politics: he left to Marshall, Eisenhower, and others the task of winning the war, and devoted his attentions to elbowing Britain and America aside to make room for France in the front ranks of the Allies. That he added to the difficulties of fighting the war did not concern him. One can easily come away from a reading of his war memoirs with a sense that his—and France’s—enemies were the United States and England rather than Germany and Italy.

  This ran exactly counter to the American sense of how a government should wage war—without regard to politics, and with priority given to winning—and explains why Britain’s protégé, de Gaulle’s Free France, was so unpopular not merely with Roosevelt, but also with such other members of his administration as Secretary of State Hull. For much the same reasons, another ally unpopular with Americans—at any rate, those in the field—was Chiang Kaishek’s government of China.

  China was a protégé of the Americans, pictured by them as a great power even though she was far from being that yet. But the high hopes and idealism lavished on the sleeping giant tended not to survive any prolonged encounter with Chiang’s regime. One American after another came away disgusted by the financial corruption of Chinese officialdom and by the web of political intrigue.

  It became evident to Americans on the spot that Chiang was less concerned with fighting the war than with preserving his own power and the wealth of his family and associates. To him the chief enemy was the communist enclave in the northwest. The communists, however, whatever their true intentions may have been, in public took the patriotic line that the war against Japan came first.

  That posed a dilemma for the United States, unwilling because of anticommunism to back the only force in China that could and would fight effectively against the Japanese, yet loath to continue pouring resources into the bottomless pit of Chinese Nationalist corruption. In terms of the American political outlook, there was no answer to the question of what to do about China.

  GREAT BRITAIN IN 1941 became the first real ally the United States had ever had. FDR had made a start in his initial meeting with Churchill at sea off the Newfoundland coast in August 1941. But it was an uncertain beginning, for Marshall and others in the President’s inner circle remained suspicious of British intentions. When the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor and the prime minister offered to come over to America immediately to discuss joint strategy—now that America was in the war—Washington’s first instinct was to ask him to wait. Unsent drafts of the President’s reply suggest that his military advisers were distrustful of their new ally. They suspected that Churchill would propose a grand strategy aimed at using American troops to achieve British imperial gains in the postwar world. Wisely, FDR overcame these fears and settled on asking the prime minister to hold off his visit only for a week.

  Churchill and his aides arrived in Washington December 22 for a conference that the prime minister code-named ARCADIA and that was to last three weeks. Insofar as relations between the two English-speaking democracies were concerned, it proved to be the most important conference of the war. Moved, despite themselves, by George Marshall’s powerful persuasiveness, participants agreed on the principle of entrusting a single officer with overall command of each theater of operations—which meant not only that an Englishman could direct American armies, but that an air force officer could give orders to naval fleets.

  Another visible manifestation of the real partnership of the two countries was the establishment in Washington of a combined Joint Chiefs of Staff—the heads of the American army, navy, and army air force, together with representatives of their opposite numbers in London—to hammer out agreement on the conduct of the war as a whole. From the point of view of waging war, it was about as close as an alliance could come to unity.

  The U.S.-British partnership was at the center of the ARCADIA scheme. Orbiting around it were the countries associated with it in the war, which FDR had the happy notion of calling the “United Nations.”‖ These included the Soviet Union, which had survived the initial German assault. Though not regarded at the time as a major power, Russia as of December 1941 had come to be thought of as a country that Hitler might not be able to occupy.

  Close friendships developed quickly between the Americans and their British colleagues. Churchill, who stayed at the White House, pushed Roosevelt’s wheelchair to the elevator each night as a gesture of respect. He wrote to his wife: “The Americans are magnificent in their breadth of view.”

  In 1942 British researchers into the military uses of atomic energy turned over their information to the United States; the following year FDR reciprocated by promising Churchill full sharing of data. Yet the good faith tended to be one-sided. Churchill discovered that British intelligence, having broken the U.S. cipher, had been spying on the Americans—and promptly informed Roosevelt; but FDR said nothing to the prime minister about similar American activities.

  Neither Marshall nor Eisenhower had battlefield experience. The British commanders could not very well point that out, but they had seen their country nearly go down the drain in the First World War by mounting the direct attacks on entrenched enemy posit
ions that the Americans now urged. Marshall wanted to launch an amphibious assault on German-held France immediately. Problems encountered later in the opening trial of arms against German troops in French North Africa confirmed the judgment that U.S. forces were far from ready: that such an assault might have been suicidal. British military leaders were proposing peripheral strategies in 1941–42, not necessarily or at least not entirely from imperialistic motives, but instead because their experience had taught them, wrongly or rightly, that it was the only way to win without suffering a bloodbath. The experience of D day showed that Churchill and FDR were right to postpone that event until 1944, and Marshall was wrong.a But American military leaders would not credit the sincerity of the motives of their English colleagues.

  Suspicions of British imperialism persisted. It was in part FDR’s idea, inspired by Mahan, to invade French North Africa, but Marshall, who was opposed, ascribed it to Churchill; he believed it was intended only to further British postwar interests, and reacted by proposing to shift priority from the European theater to the Pacific—in which he was overruled by the President. But Roosevelt, too, disapproved of European empires, and repeatedly criticized the prime minister on that score, urging him, among other things, to free India.

  IN JANUARY 1943 Roosevelt and Churchill met in a suburb of Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, to discuss next steps in the war. Coming after the Newfoundland and Washington conferences of 1941, it was their third wartime meeting. The prime minister was an old hand at flying into war zones; but for the President, the airplane trip thousands of miles across the Atlantic was a novel and exhilarating experience.

  Stalin, who had been invited, claimed that he was unable to join them. His presence, however, was felt. The leaders of the democracies were keenly aware that the communist dictator demanded the launching of an invasion of western Europe as a proof of their loyalty to their alliance with the Soviet Union.

  Nazi Germany still was undefeated. German troops still held the line outside Stalingrad and battled British and American troops in Tunisia; German submarines still waged the Battle of the Atlantic and impeded the American effort to ship a mass army across the ocean to England in order to invade France. But the President and the prime minister clearly felt that their countries were on the road to victory.

  Among their military decisions were agreements to give top priority to the battle of the Atlantic; to complete the North African campaign and then go on to invade Sicily; to increase strategic bombing of Germany and build up forces in Britain to invade France; and to launch various operations in Burma, China, and the Pacific.

  The most controversial issue then and now was when to open up a “second front” by invading western Europe in force. Its implications were political as well as military. It had a direct bearing on the shape of the postwar world. It was debated at the Casablanca conference and continued to be argued passionately throughout 1943.

  Marshall and America’s other military leaders worried about the Pacific campaign against Japan because, despite aid from British Commonwealth and other forces, it was a war waged largely by the United States. America’s strategy was to hold Japan at bay while defeating Germany first. But this gave the Japanese time to build up their defenses. The more time they were given, the greater American casualties eventually were likely to be. It followed that Marshall and his colleagues wanted not merely to defeat Germany, but to do so in the quickest possible way. They were prepared to take risks if necessary in order to save time. They wanted to try for a knockout blow immediately by sending their armies to liberate France and invade Germany.

  General Albert C. Wedemeyer, one of Marshall’s chief operations planners along with Eisenhower, spoke for the influential group of American army leaders who believed that British opposition to an immediate assault on the coast of France was inspired by political rather than military calculations. According to Wedemeyer, the British were paying mere lip service to the concept of a cross-Channel operation while they really were devoted to a war of attrition in which Germany and the Soviet Union would bleed each other white. Only when Germany disintegrated would they wish to invade Europe. This would allow them to dominate the Continent in the postwar world, playing off an enfeebled Germany against an enfeebled Soviet Union. Their preferred wartime strategy of focusing on the Mediterranean theater of operations would allow them also to hold on to the maritime road to the Middle East and their empire in Asia and the Pacific.

  The Soviet wartime strategy of focusing all resources on defeating Germany in Europe was in accord with the thinking of America’s generals. Marshall and his colleagues were not necessarily blind to the possibility that the strategy they favored might expose Europe to a Soviet threat in the postwar world. But Marshall believed that his advice as a military man should be strictly military and that he should leave political considerations to the civilian commander in chief. Like Roosevelt, Marshall also seems to have believed that any postwar Soviet threat to Europe was Britain’s problem, not America’s. Until 1943, at least, it was commonly believed that Britain was strong enough to deal with the problem by herself.

  But FDR’s views diverged from those of his military advisers. Despite their reluctance, he had ordered them to invade French North Africa, not merely because to his Mahan-influenced mind it was of strategic importance, but because he wanted to see American troops engaged in battle against Germans as soon as possible, committing the United States to his priority of defeating Germany first. Victory in North Africa would create a momentum of its own, leading on to the invasion of Sicily (as decided at Casablanca) and then of Italy. All of these—the assaults on North Africa, Sicily, and Italy—were urged by Churchill and agreed to by Roosevelt. FDR seemed to be siding with the British against his own generals.

  Fears were in evidence on Capitol Hill that at Casablanca the President was subordinating his country’s interests to those of British imperialism. Questions were asked by the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Only reassurances by Marshall, who was trusted universally, sufficed to quiet these concerns.

  At the close of the Casablanca conference on January 24, Roosevelt announced that the war goal pursued by the United States and Great Britain was the “unconditional surrender” of their enemies. FDR may have intended thereby to help overcome the doubts raised by the Darlan deal as to whether he sincerely intended to destroy fascism; and in a statement of clarification he explained that he intended to eradicate not the civilian populations, but the vicious political philosophies, of the enemy powers. He also may have intended the unconditional surrender formula to reassure the Soviet Union that the democracies would not negotiate a separate peace at Russia’s expense. Then, too, FDR may have hoped to avoid the mistakes Wilson had made in 1918 in offering peace terms that misled the German people.

  AT THE CLOSE of the Casablanca conference, Churchill took Roosevelt on a pleasure jaunt. It was a measure of how well things had gone in the previous year that they felt they could afford to relax. They headed for the Moroccan oasis of Marrakesh, a hundred miles from the ocean, and a refuge from both the Atlantic and the Sahara.

  Marrakesh is a pink city, watered by streams and rivers, lined with orange trees and palms, and filled with gardens and cool hidden courtyards. Early one evening, Churchill had servants make a chair of their arms to carry FDR up to a villa rooftop to see the sun set over the distant snowcapped Atlas mountain range. Churchill had painted the scene years earlier, and did so again on his trip with Roosevelt; it was the only painting he did during the war. He told FDR that the sunset at Marrakesh was the most beautiful scene in the world.

  After viewing the sunset, the two leaders went down to dinner. Over the meal they spoke to and of each other with great affection. Enchanted, Roosevelt spoke of his political dreams. He said he wanted to see a global immunization program that would eradicate disease; compulsory education for everyone; and a birth control system.

  It was a foretaste of what America would
bring to the world of the twentieth century: the President of the United States addressed the concerns not of his own country alone, but of the planet.

  ROOSEVELT CRUSADED, as had Wilson, for free trade in the postwar world. At times he saw Britain through the eyes of his grandfather Delano, as a commercial rival; he then urged the abolition of the tariff wall built around the commonwealth system.

  The President was under domestic political pressure to treat England as a business competitor. That became clear in the autumn of 1943, when a bipartisan group of five traveling senators called the United States a “global sucker” for not making wartime aid contingent on the granting of commercial concessions. The five included powerful Senator Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat, and young Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, a leader of the internationalist wing of the Republican party and the grandson of the man who had defeated Wilson and the League of Nations in 1919–20.

  England’s imperialism remained unpopular with the American public. In a June 1942 poll, 56 percent of Americans called the British “oppressors” who had taken unfair advantage of the peoples they ruled. Those who did so might not have believed recent calculations that the empire provided Britain in the late 1930s with only about 1 percent of her income.

  Roosevelt was voicing his country’s sentiments when he told the press: “There never has been, there isn’t now and there never will be, any race on earth fit to serve as masters of their fellow men.… We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to its own nationhood.”

  Although Churchill stoutly argued that “British imperialism has spread and is spreading democracy more widely than any other system of government since the beginning of time,” his views fell on deaf ears. A report from the United States to the British Foreign Office warned that “official opinion is tending towards the conclusion that as part of the post-war settlement the existing Colonial Empires ought to be liquidated.…”