Roosevelt was certainly bombarded by arguments that weekend.
Responding to the President’s latest June 17 request for an immediate, up-to-date study of U.S. landings in Morocco and Algeria, General Marshall’s own couriered letter was emphatic. It informed the President that Marshall, Admiral King, and their army, air, and naval staffs had duly reexamined the “Gymnast project as a possible plan for the employment of U.S. forces against the Axis powers in the summer and fall of 1942, following our conversation with you Wednesday.” Their conclusion was devastatingly negative. “The advantages and disadvantages of implementing the Gymnast plan as compared to other operations, particularly 1942 emergency Bolero operations, lead to the conclusion that the occupation of Northwest Africa this summer should not be attempted,” they bluntly reported.30
To explain their opposition to the President’s plan, the U.S. Army chief and U.S. Navy commander in chief enclosed, with their letter, a three-page official army and navy analysis for the President. Gymnast would not work, they claimed, because the Luftwaffe would be able, they asserted, to move aircraft into “Spanish and North African bases, from which they could operate against Casablanca”—air operations that would threaten the U.S. aircraft carriers vital to provide the necessary air support for the invasion. If Gymnast was seriously being advanced as a major undertaking by the President, they argued, necessitating an inevitable diversion of U.S. forces from other projects, why on earth not invade Brittany or the Brest Peninsula—Operation “Sledgehammer”—instead? These would at least bring U.S. forces closer to an eventual Allied path to Berlin.
Gymnast’s naval requirements, moreover, promised “disaster in the North Atlantic,” the chiefs claimed, owing to the “thinning out” necessary to provide naval support to a Northwest African campaign as it unfolded. Moreover, Vichy French cooperation was essential, yet unlikely—the American vice consul at Casablanca having reported that the Nazis “have already made plans to meet a U.S. invasion of Northwest Africa.” The Germans, according to the vice consul, had available three armored divisions, boasting three hundred tanks, on top of the “700 tanks there” and “200-300 Stukas” and “58 Messerschmitts.” There were even, the chiefs claimed, “250 to 300 fast launches collected on the coast of Spain” that Hitler might use . . .31
Polite as always, the President duly met Churchill’s U.S. Navy plane when it landed at New Hackensack airfield on the evening of June 19, 1942. He was annoyed, however, at Churchill’s presumption—the Prime Minister emerging from the aircraft with no fewer than five other people, including Major General Ismay, his military assistant or chief of staff. Faced with the unexpected retinue the normally stoic President said testily to his private secretary, “Haven’t room for them”—and gave instructions some would have to be housed nearby.32
The President was yet more irritated when Churchill began to use the President’s exclusive, personal telephone line to the White House as if it were his own. Churchill had, the President’s secretary Bill Hassett recorded, “seated himself in the President’s study and had entered upon an extended conversation with the British Embassy in Washington,” until it was terminated by the President’s chief switchboard operator, Louise Hachmeister.33
Churchill, though, was Churchill.
“You cannot judge the P.M. by ordinary standards,” General Ismay had written to General Claude Auchinleck, commanding British forces in the Middle East, earlier that year. “He is not in the least like anyone that you or I have ever met. He is a mass of contradictions. He is either on the crest of the wave, or in the trough, either highly laudatory or bitterly condemnatory; either in an angelic temper, or a hell of a rage. When he isn’t fast asleep he’s a volcano. There are no half-measures in his make-up. He is a child of nature with moods as variable as an April day.”34
The President could be forgiven for comparing the situation to that of August 1941, when meeting Churchill aboard their battleships off the coast of Newfoundland. Then, too, the President had known Churchill was approaching with a purpose—to get the United States to declare war on Germany—and had his own counterstrategy: to make the British sign up first to a statement of principles, before any idea of a wartime alliance could be discussed. But then, at least, the President had had his own chiefs of staff by his side. Now he was on his own, without even Harry Hopkins.35 His chiefs were in Washington, imploring him by courier and phone not to make any premature “deal.”
In the circumstances, the President resorted to his usual strategy in such matters: charm. Taking Churchill in his specially converted convertible, equipped with only hand controls, he drove the Prime Minister “all over the estate, showing me its splendid views,” as Churchill later related—but with some close calls. “In this drive I had some thoughtful moments. Mr. Roosevelt’s infirmity prevented him from using his feet on the break, clutch or accelerator. An ingenious arrangement”—designed by the President—“enabled him to do everything with his arms, which were amazingly strong and muscular. He invited me to feel his biceps, saying that a famous prize-fighter had envied them. This was reassuring; but I confess that when on several occasions the car poised and backed on the grass verges of the precipices over the Hudson I hoped the mechanical devices and brakes would show no defects.”36
The President’s performance was clearly intended to keep the Prime Minister quiet, rather than allow him to “talk business” without their advisers present—indeed, the picture of the two men was all too symbolic, careering around Hyde Park in the President’s open-topped, dark-blue 1936 Ford Phaeton with Churchill attempting to tell the President that the Allies should invade either Norway, in the far north of Europe, or French Northwest Africa, to the south of Europe, or indeed anywhere but mainland France.
More ominously, Winston Churchill was bearing with him his own memorandum for the President, which he’d dictated to his secretary at the British Embassy that very morning—a document he had in his pocket and was intent on handing in person to Roosevelt, if he could, without any of Roosevelt’s military advisers being present. And Churchill was no mean writer, the President knew.
The President promised to read it—side by side with General Marshall and Admiral King’s three-page memorandum that night.
Once he’d read the two competing memoranda carefully, the President recognized there would be a tough session on his return to Washington.
“The President wanted to see secretaries of War and Navy, Admiral King, and General Marshall tomorrow afternoon,” Hassett noted in his diary. “Said later he might not see them till evening and would notify them after reaching the White House. Does, however, want to see General Marshall at 11 o’clock tomorrow morning—all appointments off the record,” Hassett added.37
Had Stimson written a better memorandum, he too might have been invited to attend the “crisis” meeting at the White House the next day. But the war secretary’s prose was far from masterful, it was dour.
Stimson’s argument for an immediate and exclusive Bolero build-up and cross-Channel invasion of France seemed not only doctrinaire, but his justifications for building up forces in Britain rather than sending them into battle in French Northwest Africa were jejune: among others he now asserted that Britain faced a possible, even imminently “probable,” invasion by German paratroopers, “producing a confusion in Britain which would be immediately followed by an invasion by sea.”38
The President shook his head over that.
Churchill’s memorandum, by contrast, addressed squarely and without fear the real question the President had in mind: if a Second Front could not be mounted in 1942, where could the Allies actually strike? “Arrangements are being made for a landing of six or eight Divisions on the coast of Northern France early in September,” Churchill began his critique. However, he declared, “the British Government would not favour an operation that was certain to lead to disaster,” since this would “not help the Russians whatever in their plight, would compromise and expose to Nazi vengeanc
e the French population involved and would gravely delay the main operation in 1943. We hold strongly to the view,” he summed up, “that there should be no substantial landing in France this year unless we are going to stay.”39
The fact was, neither Churchill nor his advisers could see any hope of such a successful “substantial” operation in France in 1942—whatever the U.S. chiefs of staff might argue. “No responsible British military authority has so far been able to make a plan for September 1942 which had any chance of success unless the Germans become utterly demoralized, of which there is no likelihood,” Churchill stated categorically. “Have the American Staffs a plan? If so, what is it? What forces would be employed? At what points would they strike? What landing-craft and shipping are available? Who is the officer prepared to command the enterprise? What British forces and assistance are required?”40
Churchill was famous for his Macaulayan eloquence, rich in metaphor and tart phrasing; this time, however, he simply ended with what he knew would resonate with the President. If an immediate Second Front landing was impossible in September 1942, “what else are we going to do?” he asked. “Can we afford to stand idle in the Atlantic theatre during the whole of 1942? Ought we not to be preparing within the general structure of BOLERO some other operation by which we may gain positions of advantage and also directly or indirectly to take some weight off Russia? It is in this setting and on this background that the Operation GYMNAST should be studied”41—unaware that General Marshall and Admiral King had just studied it yet again, on the President’s orders, and had concluded it “should not be undertaken”!
Shortly before 11:00 P.M. on Saturday, June 20, 1942, the President’s party left Hyde Park and drove to the local railway station. Churchill got out first, in his black topcoat, and walked up the ramp toward the train. In his diary Bill Hassett recorded the sight of the venerable little Englishman standing at the top, “at just a sufficient height to accentuate his high-water pants—typically English—Magna Charta, Tom Jones, Doctor Johnson, hawthorn, the Sussex Downs, and roast beef all rolled into one. Nothing that’s American in this brilliant son of an American mother. The President went at once into his [railway] car and Winnie followed.”42
The train then moved off, traveling slowly in order not to shake the President, who slept well.
“We all went to the White House together,” Hassett recorded, once they had arrived at Arlington Cantonment, just before 9:00 A.M. on June 21, 1942, for what was to prove an historic, calamitous day.43
18
The Fall of Tobruk
LORD HALIFAX, a Roman Catholic, had gone to church at St. Thomas—“where everybody was provided with fans” to combat the heat—having been assured that “the party had got back all right” from Hyde Park.1 He was relieved to know Churchill wouldn’t be returning to the embassy—the Prime Minister having been invited by the President to stay at the White House for the remainder of his visit.
Once Churchill was reestablished in his old bedroom on the second floor, he and Major General “Pug” Ismay joined the President and General Marshall in the Oval Study to debate the pros and cons of Bolero and Gymnast. They had barely begun, however, when the whole issue of a Second Front in 1942 was exploded by a bombshell. It came in the form of a piece of pink paper: the copy of an urgent telegram, brought up from the Map Room and handed to the President.
The President read it, then handed it to Churchill.
It came from the war cabinet in London.
“Tobruk has surrendered,” the message ran—“with twenty-five thousand men taken prisoners.”2
Twenty-five thousand British troops? Without fighting?
“The year before,” recalled the President’s speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, “Tobruk had withstood siege for thirty-three weeks. Now it had crumpled within a day before the first assault. This was a body blow for Churchill. It was another Singapore. It might well be far worse even than that catastrophe in its total effect—for with Tobruk gone, there was little left with which to stop Rommel from pushing on to Alexandria, Cairo—and beyond.”3
In his diary, Breckenridge Long, the assistant secretary of state, noted that the British “lost 1009 tanks”—largely to Rommel’s secret weapon, his dreaded “88” (millimeter) antiaircraft gun, used as a long-range antitank weapon—“and just smashed the British. They have had six months to prepare—and are now licked. It is serious now. They have no real fortifications between Rommel and Cairo or Suez—and a broken army. It may easily mean the loss of Egypt—unless we can stop it.”4
As Churchill himself later wrote, it was “a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.”5
Lord Halifax heard the same news. Meeting Churchill’s doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, the ambassador “discussed probable reactions in England” to the catastrophe, “and how it is likely to affect the Prime Minister’s plans here.” The Prime Minister had “never meant to stay long this time,” Halifax reflected, “and he certainly will not make the mistake he made in January of overlooking feeling at home”—critical outcries that might well lead now to a vote of censure in the House of Commons.6 He would surely have to fly home, instanter.
Back in England there was, indeed, consternation and calls for Churchill to stand down as prime minister. At the Foreign Office, Sir Alec Cadogan had just acknowledged in his diary that “Libya is a complete disaster”7 when he learned “that Tobruk had fallen.” It seemed impossible to believe. The heavily fortified port, with ample munitions, water, and troops, had “held out for 8 months last time, and for about as many hours this. I wonder what is most wrong with our army. Without any knowledge, I should say our Generals. Most depressing.”8
Averell Harriman, who had returned to the United States with Churchill for talks about munitions and Lend-Lease consignments, called it “a staggering blow” to the Prime Minister, which Churchill at first refused to believe. “But when it was confirmed, by telephone from London, he made no attempt to hide his pain from Roosevelt.”9
General Ismay recalled the same. Churchill had “scarcely entered” the President’s study when the news was delivered. “This was a hideous and totally unexpected shock, and for the first time in my life I saw the Prime Minister wince.”10 Before Ismay could get official confirmation, on Churchill’s disbelieving orders, he met Churchill’s secretary, John Martin, in the corridor bearing a new telegram. This one was from the British naval commander in chief in the Mediterranean, Admiral Harwood. It confirmed not only that Tobruk had surrendered but went on to explain to the Prime Minister that, in the circumstances, Harwood was sending the Royal Navy’s Eastern Mediterranean Fleet south of the Suez Canal, toward the Indian Ocean.
General Alan Brooke, the next day, recorded the timing differently—noting news of the disaster had come through only in the afternoon of June 21, after he’d lunched with the President. “Harry Hopkins and Marshall also turned up,” and it was only in the midst of a “long conference” that “the tragic news of Tobruk came in!” he scribbled. “Churchill and I were standing beside the President’s desk talking to him when Marshall walked in with a pink piece of paper containing a message of the fall of Tobruk!”11
Whatever the actual timing, the British team seemed distraught, even lost. As Brooke subsequently admitted, in his annotations to his diary, “Neither Winston nor I had contemplated such an eventuality and it was a staggering blow”12—with neither man having any idea what to do.
Certainly, when Sir Charles Wilson was finally summoned and went over to the White House to see the Prime Minister, later in the afternoon of June 21, 1942, around 3:00 P.M., he found Churchill “pacing his room. He turned on me,” Moran recorded in his diary notes. “Tobruk has fallen.”13
“He said this as if I were responsible. With that, he began again striding up and down the room, glowering at the carpet.” “What matters is that it should happen when I am here,” Churchill confessed—stung by the humiliation in front of his American hosts.14
C
hurchill went to the window. “I am ashamed. I cannot understand why Tobruk gave in. More than 30,000 of our men put their hands up. If they won’t fight—”15
Churchill paused, midsentence—bitterly aware of the effect abroad of such an abject British surrender, following the disastrous showing of British imperial forces in Malaya, Burma, and the Indian Ocean. Not only might people in the occupied nations lose heart, but the surrender could even drive neutral countries like Turkey, Portugal, or Spain to parley with Hitler . . .
Directing all Third Reich propaganda, Joseph Goebbels reveled in the news from North Africa.16 The Spanish press agency EFE, he noted, was describing “an atmosphere of catastrophe in Washington.”17
Even Goebbels had not expected Rommel to be so successful, given the general’s skimpy reports to Berlin since the beginning of Operation Theseus, his plan to drive the British out of Libya and Egypt, on May 26, 1942. Not only had the great port of Tobruk now been captured by Rommel, but it contained enough food, oil, and weapons to keep the Panzerarmee Afrika going for three months. Churchill must have knowingly flown the coop in order to be out of London, Goebbels conjectured cynically—the Prime Minister knowing he’d be blamed for misleading the public into thinking the British were winning the desert war. The British press were now in an uproar, making mincemeat of Churchill’s lamentable military leadership and personal “responsibility for the catastrophe.”18
The Mantle of Command Page 38
