When the pioneering airman—the first to fly over the U.S. Capitol, and two-time winner of the Mackay Trophy—was brought by launch to the USS Augusta, off Martha’s Vineyard, Admiral King, commander of the Atlantic Fleet and the man in charge of the secret expedition, had thrown a fit. “King quite mad because we came aboard his ship and he knew nothing about it. He gave us a look, got mad and went out to cool off prior to our getting in his office,” Arnold noted.26 They did not like each other.
Once King had finally cooled down, however, “Marshall and Stark came in. Marshall told us of our ‘Brenner Pass’ conference ahead”—a mocking reference to Hitler’s earlier meeting with Mussolini to concert Axis strategy, and then his recent meeting at the beginning of June 1941, prior to Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia—an offensive that the Führer had somehow failed to mention in advance to his main ally, lest the Italians leak the date and details! The Anglo-American version, General Arnold now learned from Marshall and Stark, would take place off Newfoundland and begin, General Marshall explained, on Saturday, August 9—with Arnold ordered to remain on the Tuscaloosa, away from Marshall and Stark—lest they form a military triumvirate, as in ancient Rome, and spoil the President’s plan.
It seemed a strange way to prepare for modern war, let alone fight one. But then, unknown to the somewhat “unsophisticated” air force general,27 or even to Stark and Marshall, that was precisely the President’s point.
Churchill’s plan, concocted with his chiefs of staff before setting out from Scotland, was very different.
Acting as both British prime minister and minister of defense (a position he had created for himself, thus making himself military as well as political supremo), Churchill had decided in advance that he should first present to the American team his own strategic overview of the current war—and his plans for winning it. This would be followed by carefully drawn-up military proposals in the “Future Strategy Paper,” a formal document his chiefs of staff would present to the American team as to how to achieve military victory—with American help.
Such an agenda for the summit had by no means been agreed to by the President, however. In fact, the scheme had not even been communicated to him—leaving the British “war party” somewhat anxious as they rehearsed in advance the ceremony of piping the President aboard the HMS Prince of Wales (a ceremony, given the President’s disability, requiring a reversal of normal naval procedure: British officers would have to file past and salute the President, rather than vice versa).
“The programme is quite unknown at present,” the Prime Minister’s military assistant noted in his diary on August 8, 1941. “All that is certain is that the Prime Minister will call on the President and the President will call on the Prime Minister, but whether they will be accompanied by their Chiefs of Staff or whether the Chiefs of Staff will go separately will not be known till we reach harbour and there is an opportunity to consult the wishes of the Americans. . . . The Chiefs of Staff met once during the day, at noon. There is little more they can do now until the meetings start.”28
Onboard the USS Augusta, things were not much clearer.
On August 6, steaming through fog and with its radar malfunctioning, the huge cruiser had put out its antimine paravanes, which “made a lot of noise,” the President noted in his diary-style letter to his cousin that afternoon, revealing they were “off Halifax and in the submarine area—Tho’ there have been no reports of them in these waters recently.” Visibility was good, but Roosevelt had gotten word that morning of a “leak” in London regarding the meeting—though “it seems to be pure guesswork,” he told Daisy, unworried. “I went up to the deck above—alone in the bow & the spray came over as it has before.”29
The President seemed entirely in his element, “smiling and cheerful,” as Admiral Stark described him30—the former assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy in a previous world war now the nation’s commander in chief; commander in chief, moreover, not only of the country’s navy, but its army and burgeoning air force too.
Emerging on deck at 11:00 A.M. the next day, August 7, the President was glad he’d overruled Churchill’s suggestion that they meet at an alternative British location. Under U.S. management, Argentia was bustling with American activity. “[F]ound several destroyers & patrol planes at this new base of ours,” Roosevelt boasted to Daisy, “—one of the eight [bases] I got last August in exchange for the 50 destroyers. It is a really beautiful harbor, high mountains, deep water & fjord-like arms of the sea. Soon after we anchored, in came one of our old battleships accompanied by two destroyers—& on one of the latter F[ranklin] Jr. is asst. navigator—so I have ordered him to act as my Junior Naval Aide while I am here,” he confided proudly, referring to his son. The “old battleship” was the World War I–era thirty-thousand-ton dreadnought USS Arkansas: three times the size of the Augusta, mounting a dozen twelve-inch guns and carrying three floatplanes.
“It was a complete surprise to him & to me to meet thus,” the President told Daisy. In fact, loath to show favoritism, the President, who hoped to spend the afternoon fishing and to see how the naval station was progressing, soon summoned his chief of the Army Air Forces, General Arnold, and ordered that his other son, Elliott, an Army Air Corps navigator currently stationed at Gander, “80 miles from here,” should “join me as Junior Military Aide. Again, pure luck, but very nice.”31
The President was fortunate in his fishing sally, too—catching “toad fish, dog fish and halibut,” General Arnold noted in his diary.32 Arnold had earlier upset the President by his reluctance to recommend selling, let alone giving, warplanes to Britain, concerned that it would slow deliveries to his own U.S. Air Corps; in fact, “I felt I was about to lose my job,” Arnold later recalled as, “looking directly at me,” the President had said “there were places to which officers who did not ‘play ball’ might be sent—such as Guam.”33 In the end it was only on General Marshall’s recommendation that the President had relented, and finally, a few weeks before, had forwarded Arnold’s name to Congress for promotion from mere colonel to the rank of permanent major general. Relieved to be back in presidential favor, Arnold dutifully congratulated the President on his angling success.
Arnold possessed one advantage over his colleagues, however: he was the only one to have met—indeed stayed—with Prime Minister Churchill in England, that spring. His personal report to the Commander in Chief at the White House—advocating more airplane production and assistance to the British in countering the continuing German bombing of London and other British cities—had saved his career, which was slated to end that fall, after the usual two-year stint. But though he had genuinely admired the courage of Londoners enduring the Blitz—pounded by upwards of five hundred German bombers each night—the experience of being bombed had only increased Arnold’s determination to build up America’s own heavy-bomber air force, not dissipate its strength by giving most of U.S. airplane production to the Brits. To his boss, General Marshall, Arnold had therefore said that morning: “We must be prepared to put a [U.S.] force into the war if and when we enter. The people will want action and not excuses. We will be holding the sack. Time then will be just as important to us as it is to the British now.”34
This was a new, more assertive Hap Arnold, aviator and spokesman for air power. As commander in chief, however, the President was determined not to allow the military to decide American policy, which he was intent on holding strictly in his own hands. The airman was thus summoned a second time that afternoon, to the Augusta, at 4:30 P.M. “Sort of heavy seas, almost fell into sea when little boat went down,” Arnold recorded, “and gangway to big ship went up.” Having spoken to General Marshall, Arnold then filed into Roosevelt’s cabin, along with Admiral King, Admiral Stark, General Marshall, General James Burns, Colonel Harvey Bundy, and General Edwin “Pa” Watson, the President’s elderly appointments secretary and longtime military aide.
Welcoming the officers for the first time on the trip as a group,
the Commander in Chief then made clear that the meeting with Mr. Churchill and his staff was to be informal and informational—i.e., neither strategic nor political. The United States was not, repeat not, at war with Germany, and had no congressional mandate to go to war. Nevertheless, it was the policy of the U.S. government to aid both Britain and Russia in their struggle to deal with the Axis menace in Europe, as it was to aid China in its struggle with the expansionist Empire of Japan. Making sure that military aid was manufactured and successfully delivered to Great Britain, Russia, and China was the point at issue—without incurring war. Indeed, it was the President’s purpose to dissuade the Axis powers and Japan from risking war with the United States as the U.S. ramped up military production, by deterrence: i.e., showing strength rather than weakness. There was to be no collective summit of the U.S. chiefs of staff with the British chiefs of staff; rather, they would simply meet one-on-one with their counterparts, to find out what the British needed in the way of weaponry and help.
The officers got the message. No politics. And absolutely no mention of U.S. military strategy, let alone U.S. entry into the war.
“Discussed: convoys,” Arnold noted in his diary, and “defense of convoys: US responsibility for getting [Lend-Lease] cargoes safely delivered . . . [L]ine of [U.S.] responsibility extends east of the Azores and east of Iceland; duties and responsibilities of Navy; what British may want from [U.S.] Navy, ships from Maritime Commission; tanks from Army, airplanes; troops in Iceland, Marines, relief by soldiers; airplanes to Russia; aid to Philippines, B-17s, P-40s, tanks, AA guns.” The only nod to future strategy related to the question of Japan, whose government’s most secret war plans had been revealed by “Magic,” the U.S. Army’s Signals Intelligence decryption of the supposedly unbreakable Japanese “Purple” diplomatic code. The United States would, the President stated, “turn deaf ear if Japan goes into Thailand but not if it goes into Dutch East Indies.”35
In later years, General Marshall would look back at the lack of preparation for the Placentia Bay conference with disbelief. Claiming he “had no knowledge” of the impending discussions with the British “until we were well up the coast on the cruiser Augusta,” Marshall had had no time to assemble papers or even files in advance. At the President’s firm insistence, he’d found, the rendezvous was to be “largely a get-together for the first time, an opportunity to meet the British chiefs of staff, and to come to some understanding with them as to how they worked and what their principal problems were.”36
Having given his pep talk, the President meanwhile sent his lieutenants back to their quarters—with no instructions even to meet again the next day.
General Arnold was not the only one to be amazed. With nothing to do on August 8, since Churchill’s battleship was delayed by heavy weather in mid-Atlantic, Admiral Stark and Admiral King commandeered a Catalina navy patrol plane and flew up to the Avalon Peninsula, while General Marshall suggested to Arnold that they inspect the growing U.S.-Canadian air base at Gander Lake, the final staging post for U.S. aircraft being delivered by air to the United Kingdom.37 As they circled Placentia Bay in their twin-engine Grumman Goose seaplane on their return, they saw that even more U.S. vessels and floatplanes had arrived in the harbor. “We now have corvettes, destroyers, destroyer leaders, cruisers, one battleship, two tankers, one aircraft tender, about 18 [four-engined] PBYs and PBYMs,” Arnold noted. Moreover, as they disembarked and transferred back to their warships “we saw a large 4-engine flying boat arrive. Where from? The U.S.? What for? Carrying two distinguished passengers? Who?” he recorded the questions running through his and Marshall’s minds.38
One passenger, they learned, was the undersecretary of state, Sumner Welles. Was the President preparing a diplomatic surprise, then, despite his assurances the previous day? Was he contemplating a more formal alliance with the Prime Minister, who was due to arrive first thing the next morning—even American entry into the war?
It was a measure of General Arnold’s naïveté—and the success of the President’s insistence on keeping his military team lodged on different vessels, with no orders but to listen to the British war needs once Churchill’s party arrived—that the primary U.S. air force general had absolutely no idea what was going on. “I can’t make up mind as yet whether most of us are window dressing for the main actors,” he would write several days later.39 For the moment, however, finding “everyone taking a nap” onboard the Tuscaloosa, he was completely in the dark.40
Sumner Welles, for his part, experienced no such puzzlement. A consummate professional of the “striped pants brigade,” the assistant secretary of state was both counselor and confidant to the President—who trusted him more than the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, who, a former congressman and senator, was very much a distinguished political appointee.
To Welles the President had stated, before leaving Washington, that he wanted “some kind of public statement of objectives.”41 It should be, he explained, a draft declaration that would “hold out hope to the enslaved peoples of the world,”42 based upon his famous “four freedoms” address (of speech and worship; from want and fear).43 That would be all the President wanted of a concrete, or formal, nature from the conference. Such a peace communiqué would quieten the isolationists at home, and give the Prime Minister something positive to take back to Britain. It would also serve to mask, the President intended, America’s complete military unpreparedness for war.
The fact was, for all the outward show of U.S. naval and air strength to impress the British visitors on their arrival at Placentia Bay, the United States had no army to speak of—at least no army capable of mounting anything other than a minor operation overseas; no air force with the capacity to deter a determined enemy, let alone support its own ground troops; and no navy able to operate effectively in one ocean, let alone in two.44 As the official historians of the U.S. Army later put it, “the United States Army’s offensive combat strength was still close to zero.”45
Worse still, according to General Marshall, the U.S. Army was now in a “desperate plight” unless the Selective Service Bill, or draft, was extended for a further six months. Its belated preparations for possible war were in imminent danger of being put back “a year and a half or two years,” if its current eight hundred thousand draftees were sent home, once the draft lapsed. Letting these trainees go home would result in “the complete destruction of the fabric of the army that we had built up,” Marshall told the President—who had meanwhile heard from the Speaker that there were insufficient Democratic votes in the House of Representatives to pass the extension bill; in fact, at the very moment when the President was secretly steaming to Placentia Bay on August 6, the majority leader had reported to the White House that he simply had not enough votes to pass the new bill.46
Yet to Welles and to Averell Harriman—the U.S. Lend-Lease administrator who had accompanied the undersecretary of state in the flying boat from the capital—the President looked and sounded refreshed, indeed positively ebullient, during their three-hour talk.47 “Father looked well, and was obviously enjoying his break in routine,” Roosevelt’s son Elliott also found when, along with his brother Franklin Jr., he was ushered into the presence of the nation’s commander in chief.48
Captain Elliott Roosevelt had recently been scouting potential bases for air ferry and delivery routes across the Northern Hemisphere. Like General Arnold, he’d stayed with Churchill at Chequers, the British premier’s official country residence, on a visit to England. In Elliott’s account, published five years later, the President now rehearsed over lunch with his sons the next day’s meeting with the Prime Minister: a meeting that he saw primarily as morale-boosting. “You were there,” the President said to Elliott. “You saw the people. You’ve even told me how they look—gray and thin and strained. A meeting like this one will do a world of good for British morale,” his father asserted—adding that the British would be concerned over “Lend-Lease schedules” now that Russia, too, would be rec
eiving American military aid. “They’ll be worried about how much of our production we’re going to divert to the Russians,” the President predicted—the British still convinced Hitler was going to win on the Eastern Front. “I know already how much faith the P.M. has in Russia’s ability to stay in the war,” Roosevelt remarked—snapping his fingers to indicate zilch.49
“I take it you have more faith than that?” his son queried.
Roosevelt did—his confidence buoyed after receiving Hopkins’s recent cables from Moscow. Although the war on the Eastern Front would help England, it wouldn’t save Britain in the long run, the President told his son.
“‘The P.M. is coming here tomorrow because—although I doubt that he’ll show it—he knows that without America, England can’t stay in the war. . . . Of course,’ my father went on, ‘Churchill’s greatest concern is how soon we will be in the war. He knows very well that so long as American effort is confined to production, it will do no more than keep England in. He knows that to mount an offensive, he needs American troops. . . . Watch and see if the P.M. doesn’t start off by demanding that we immediately declare war against the Nazis.’”50
Elliott, who had been the first of Roosevelt’s sons to join the U.S. Armed Forces, would become increasingly ambivalent in the ensuing years about Britain’s national interests, and may have been dramatizing the conversation he recalled with his father. However, the gist of it was probably correct, judging by contemporary accounts—especially the President’s next assertion: namely that the “British Empire is at stake here.”51
The Mantle of Command Page 3
