The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Hart’s answer was revealing. For one thing, the Japanese soldier was able and willing to fight with only minimal resources: “he goes out, into the field with his weapons and 5lbs of cooked rice, (he doesn’t worry about where the next meal after that is coming from—and no one worries for him), treks, and then fights bravely. He also fights skillfully, whereas we are to suppose that the troops which the Japs have been defeating were really poor troops.” For another, he was backed by applied air power of amazing efficiency. The Japanese, he noted, had “gained quite full control of the air, and have taken it by defeating some hundreds in all of British, American, and Dutch planes. Said defeat has been more or less in detail, with the Japs producing superiority of numbers at different points of contact but with all due allowances for everything—including the fact that the Allied Air has comprised no less than six different organizations—it must be regretfully admitted that the white airmen and their planes have not demonstrated superiority over the Japs. I repeat—most evidence indicates that it is mostly Jap Navy air which we have been contending against. The Jap observation, including photography, must have been very good. Many of us have seen that their bombing has been very high grade indeed; and their strafing has likewise been very good. As for fighters: the ‘Flying Fortresses’ and the ‘Catalina’ have done very well in carrying on in the presence of the Jap fighters. But the results gained by the British and American fighters—of which there must have been 200–300 in the area—have not demonstrated any superiority,” he recorded candidly, noting that “relatively few of the Jap pilots, or other airmen, are officers. Neither are they found to be of any particular education,” being pilots largely selected “from the enlisted ranks. So much for one specialty as regards skill”—and he duly noted exactly “the same in Japanese land and seagoing forces.”11

  Hart’s conclusion was thus uncompromisingly tart. The Allies had, as yet, “not defeated” or even turned the enemy back “at any point. At present,” he’d noted, “it does not promise that we can prevent the Japs from taking the rest of the N.E.I. [Netherlands East Indies] or relieve Corregidor in time. Current danger is that they will also take Rangoon and cut the communication to Free China. Yes we got into a war with an eastern Asiatic power that is First Class in a military sense. It has now in its control, (or nearly so), riches sufficient to make it enduringly first class in an economic way,” unless “interfered with and driven out from recent gains. That means a long war. Not a cheerful prospect but we must not forget that the enemy won’t look so good when he in his turn is surprised, loses the initiative, and gets set back on his heels.”12

  Hart’s prediction had proven all too accurate—in fact the Japanese “liberated” Rangoon the very day he met with the President.

  Listening to Tommy Hart, it was easy for Roosevelt to see why Wavell had asked for him to be relieved—Hart himself expecting he would be demoted from a four-star admiral to a two-star rear admiral for his alleged defeatism. Even Admiral Stark, the outgoing chief of naval operations, had told Hart on arrival in New York “that I was to go on up home and rest up,” which “fitted my desires perfectly as I’m decidedly travel-worn,” Hart had noted in his diary.

  It was Hart’s wife, Caroline, who had disagreed. “Not at all,” she had declared. “She says the world then will think that I’m sick and senile. That whatever I’ve brought back with me is hot right now and that I should get to Washington with it forthwith”—in fact, the next day. “She shows me that I can well give head to the subject—and I shall,” Hart had written.13 Scenting a story, the Washington Post published a headline: “Let Hart Speak!” and there arose some concern in the administration that Hart, a die-hard anti–New Dealer and Republican with strong opinions on America’s march to war, would prove an embarrassment to the President.

  The reverse proved, however, to be the case. Roosevelt’s insistence on hearing Hart’s side of the story at the White House, unadorned and in person, became a turning point in Roosevelt’s conception of the war. The President’s natural charm, his use of Hart’s first name, Tommy, and his penetrating questions about the Pacific and about MacArthur in particular, not only won over Hart—who became one of the President’s most loyal Republican supporters—but gave the President what he most needed at a critical juncture of the war: the truth.

  Following this interview, the President ordered that Admiral Hart keep his four stars; arranged that the admiral appear the next day at the President’s own press conference; and insisted Secretary Knox use the admiral to crisscross America, speaking to newspapers and professional organizations, in order to tell the American people the unvarnished verity.14 It was not enough, the President recognized, for the United States simply to ramp up its output as the arsenal of democracy. Just as Hart had predicted in his diary, Rangoon had fallen, as would the Netherlands East Indies—Hart’s successor, the bombastic Dutch naval commander Admiral Helfrich, wholly unable to compete with Japanese naval control of the air and Japan’s seagoing skills.

  Lack of cohesion between the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Army, as well as the inevitable problems of inter-Allied coalition warfare, suggested that Hart was not only right about a long war in the Pacific, but that America must address the issues that the admiral had raised; issues that went to the core of modern warfare itself. The U.S. high command would have to examine, study, and learn the lessons of modern war against an indoctrinated, cohesive, professional, and skilled opponent. Those advocating that the U.S. Air Force be split apart from the U.S. Army, as had been the case with the RAF and the British Army, must be stopped, at least during the war, the President was adamant—for it was vital that growing potential U.S. air power be used to support U.S. ground forces effectively. Naval ones, too. And with better planes.

  Admiral Harold Stark, the President had already decided the day before, would be sent to London to concert inter-Allied naval relations there, and would not be replaced as chief of naval operations, or CNO. Instead Admiral King would now take over Stark’s responsibilities, as well as remaining commander in chief of the U.S. Navy. After lunch with the navy secretary, Hart gave a talk to a “jam-packed” meeting of the General Board of the U.S. Navy in New York—including Admirals King and Stark, and “all Bureau Chiefs and an Asst. Sec. or two. I talked about fifteen minutes along narrative lines and then twice as long on what I called the lessons which I had learned. In that I pulled no punches, was plenty critical and, as I said in the body of it, I set forth some quite revolutionary ideas”—ideas that would back the “general changes which King and his entourage would like to make, and may in general have helped toward some realism in certain respects wherein we have long been much too theoretical.”

  With Stark removed from the helm, it would be up to King’s legendary “blowtorch” leadership, the President had decided, to kick the U.S. Navy into the mid-twentieth century. For the first time in American history, the head of the U.S. Navy would be answerable directly and only to his commander in chief, the President. He would be urged not only to ramp up naval aviation and order better interservice cooperation with U.S. Army and U.S. Army Air Forces, but to expand, develop, and employ the U.S. Marine Corps, a division of the U.S. Navy, in the same way as the Japanese were doing: as the spearhead of modern amphibious invasion forces.

  It was not for nothing that the President had spent six years as assistant secretary of the navy—however much Hitler, who had been a messenger in the trenches of the Western Front in World War I, derided him. With Admiral King at his side, the President was determined as U.S. commander in chief to refashion the U.S. Navy into a force the Japanese would learn to fear.

  13

  Churchill Threatens to Resign

  AS ANOTHER NINETY-SIX thousand Allied troops surrendered to the Japanese in the Netherlands East Indies, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long wrote in his diary that he was now becoming “apprehensive lest we be left mostly alone to carry on this fight.” If Russia made peace and the Briti
sh lost the Middle East, America would be left to face a conflict “in two oceans against a combined navy superior to ours.”1

  Assistant Secretary Long had reason to feel anxious. Not only did British forces still appear unable to fight effectively overseas—whether on land, ocean, or in the air—but their political leaders seemed incapable of embracing a postwar vision that would give British soldiers, as well as soldiers of the British Empire, a reason to do so.

  The consequences, for the United States, were thus serious. If Britain refused or failed to set out a postwar vision for the peoples of its former imperium, would Congress permit American sons to continue to give their lives for a crumbling colonial empire no longer capable of fighting, or willing to fight, for itself?

  Breckinridge Long had recently reported “a serious undercurrent of anti-British feeling” among the members of the Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill: senators expressing the concern that, unless given some form of self-government, Indians “would not have the desire to fight,” once the Japanese reached the Burmese-Indian border, “just in order to prolong England’s mastery over them.”2 Like the Burmese, Indians might well aid and abet a Japanese invasion, unless Prime Minister Churchill addressed the problem.

  Long, who was advising President Roosevelt and the acting secretary of state, Sumner Welles, had agreed with the senators’ view. “Concerning India,” he reported from Senate hearings on the Hill on February 25, 1942, “the argument was that we are participating on such a large scale and had done so much for England in Lend-Lease that we had now arrived at a position of importance to justify our participation in Empire councils and such as to authorize us to require England to make adjustments of a political nature within the framework of her Empire.”3

  The senators were, in other words, losing patience with the British. “We should demand that India be given a status of autonomy. The only way to get the people of India to fight,” they had concluded, “was to get them to fight for India.”4

  Bowing to appeals from the President, the Prime Minister had felt compelled to give in to pressure directly “from Roosevelt,” as Leopold Amery, the British secretary of state for India, explained in a confidential letter to the viceroy in Delhi—the Prime Minister finally seeing the “American red light” that, together with the urgent prodding of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party colleagues, had “opened the sluice gates” to Indian self-government. Churchill himself had cabled the viceroy that, thanks to “general American outlook,” it would “be impossible to stand on a purely negative outlook”5—hence the decision to send out Sir Stafford Cripps to assure Indian leaders of postwar independence, and negotiate meanwhile Indian self-government.

  Roosevelt had been delighted by Churchill’s climb-down—as had been senators in Congress and newspaper editorial writers across America, who mistakenly welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to send out Cripps as a significant new demonstration, however reluctant, of the sincerity of the Atlantic Charter: putting into practice the moral aims of the United Nations.

  None had quite reckoned, however, on the continuing obstinacy of Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, even at the nadir of British military misfortunes in the Far East.

  No sooner did Cripps arrive in India on March 23, 1942, than he met a duo of doubting Thomases: the British viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and General Sir Archibald Wavell, the British commander in chief in India. Moreover, Churchill and the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery—whose son was an open Nazi sympathizer who hated Roosevelt and would later be hanged for treason—now proceeded to do their best, from London, to wreck the negotiations, in the subsequent view of President Roosevelt’s personal emissaries. “Colonel Johnson and Colonel Herrington both reported, without using the word, that in their opinion the British Government had deliberately sabotaged the Cripps Mission and indicated that likewise in their opinion the Government in London had never desired that the mission be other than a failure.”6

  Roosevelt was at first disbelieving. Why, he wondered, were the British deliberately ignoring the Atlantic Charter? In his cable of March 10, the President had recommended “the setting up of what might be called a temporary government in India,” a “group that might be recognized as a temporary Dominion Government,” with executive and administrative responsibility for the civil government of India, “until a year after the end of the war,” when a formal constitution could be settled. “Perhaps the analogy of the United States from 1783 to 1789 might give a new slant in India itself, and it might cause the people there to forget hard feelings, to become more loyal to the British Empire, and to stress the danger of Japanese domination, together with the advantage of peaceful evolution as against chaotic revolution. Such a move is strictly in line with the world changes of the past half century,” the President had pointed out, “and the democratic processes of all who are fighting Nazism.” Moreover, he had specifically warned against allowing the British colonial authorities in India—the viceroy and his acolytes—to kibosh the mission. “I hope that whatever you do the move will be made from London,” he cabled Churchill—urging that the British viceroy of India, the pigheaded Marquess of Linlithgow, be discouraged from claiming that Indian self-government was being forced on him “by compulsion.”7

  Churchill, tragically, did the opposite—blaming American pressure. As his military assistant, Colonel Jacob, later reflected, Churchill was a thorough Victorian—his worldview “greatly coloured by his experiences in India, South Africa, and Egypt as a young man, and by his connection with the central direction of the First World War as a Minister. All these experiences tended to give him a great feeling for the British Empire as something, though diverse and growing, which could be directed from London, the great Imperial centre.” Unfortunately, Churchill had “never been further East than India.” Moreover, India itself was a country he had not seen since the end of the nineteenth century, four decades in the past. “By training and historical connection he was a European first, and then an American,” thanks to his mother, Jennie, Jacob attempted to explain. “He did not seem to understand the Far East, nor was his feeling for Australia and New Zealand deep or discerning”—his assumption being that, once the Japanese forced the United States into the war, America would win the war for the British Empire and that American “power would in the end be decisive.”8

  For Roosevelt, this casual British “assumption” was galling; indeed, the saga over Indian self-government was doubly vexing, coming on top of Churchill’s concurrent “duplicity” in dealing with Stalin: the Prime Minister agreeing to a draft treaty with the Russians that would, unless President Roosevelt stopped it, also vitiate the principles of the Atlantic Charter, by according Stalin the legal right to seize and rule the Baltic States and a large part of eastern Poland at the war’s end. So much for the self-determination and self-government the Prime Minister had signed up to on the USS Augusta. Even Sir Alec Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary at the British Foreign Office who had helped Sumner Welles draft the final wording of the Atlantic Charter in the summer of 1941, was appalled—railing in his diary at the perfidy of Churchill’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who was “quite prepared to throw to the winds all principles (Atlantic Charter). . . . We shall make a mistake if we press the Americans to depart from principles, and a howler if we do it without them.”9

  In the event, President Roosevelt was able to stamp on such British appeasement of the Russians—for the moment at least. But getting the Prime Minister to back off from sabotaging the very Cripps mission he had authorized to negotiate Indian self-government proved a more difficult battle—threatening to ruin the President’s entire strategy.

  To ensure that Churchill held to the Cripps mission plan, the President had decided to upgrade his munitions envoy to Delhi, Colonel Louis Johnson. Johnson was now told to fly to India as quasi American ambassador to the Indian government, in the rank of minister, bearing the title “Personal Representative of the President of the United States.”r />
  Johnson duly arrived in Delhi on April 3, 1942. To his chagrin he found that the Prime Minister had pretty much destroyed any possibility of the Cripps mission succeeding—for Churchill had not only refused to recall the viceroy to London, as Deputy Prime Minister Attlee had urged him to do, but had deliberately encouraged the Marquess of Linlithgow to thwart Cripps’s negotiations with the Indian leaders, once Cripps arrived in Delhi on March 23—and even as Japanese forces drew every day closer to the Indian border.

  So effective was the Prime Minister’s sabotage in this respect that, on April 3, 1942, Cripps had wired London, through the viceroy’s office, to give up. His “mission,” had failed, he cabled: the Indian Congress Party having decided it could not accept the pathetically emasculated version of self-government (“collaboration,” as Nehru called it) that was all Churchill, Amery, and Linlithgow would offer. Every mention Cripps made of a “National Government,” or “Indian Cabinet,” or “Indian Minister of Defense” to work with the British Commander in Chief in defending India had been immediately denied by the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow.10