The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  “My first impression,” he notified them in a warning telegram July 14, “is that it is exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do following Pearl Harbor.”

  As if this was not enough, he added another paragraph.

  “Secondly, it does not in fact provide use of American troops in fighting,” as he pointed out tartly, “except in a lot of islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next.

  “Third: it does not help Russia or the Near East. Therefore it is disapproved of at present.”

  He signed himself “Roosevelt C-in-C.”14

  In the entire war President Roosevelt would never express his contempt so forcefully. In addition to this rejoinder the President then added a further message, saying he wanted to see General Marshall at the White House first thing upon his arrival in Washington the next morning; he would then see all three Joint Chiefs in the afternoon. He had meanwhile “definitely” decided, he alerted them in the cable, to send General Marshall with Admiral King along with Harry Hopkins to London “immediately.” There they could thrash out the matter of the next steps to be taken in Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East—but they were not to make mention of any empty Pacific threats; they should arrange to fly “if possible on Thursday, 16 July.”15

  The President’s devastating response to the Marshall-King memorandum was perhaps the tersest rejection Marshall had ever experienced—or would experience—in his life. He read it aloud to his fellow chiefs of staff at a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 14. Colonel Albert Wedemeyer of the War Department—the officer reputed (though without proof) to have leaked the Victory Program before Pearl Harbor to the McCormick press—kept notes.

  However humiliating, the chiefs would have to take the President’s telegram seriously, Wedemeyer recorded, since “unquestionably the President would require military operations in Africa.”16

  The question was, therefore: where in Africa?

  Once again the “relative merits of operations in Africa and in the Middle East” were discussed—none of the chiefs happy about the President’s pressure on them. Despite the tart language of the President’s telegram, none showed embarrassment or willingness to rethink their stance over switching to a “Japan First” strategy.

  “All agreed to the many arguments previously advanced among the military men in the Army and Navy that operations in the Pacific would be the alternative if Sledgehammer or Bolero were not accepted wholeheartedly by the British. However, there was an acceptance that apparently our political system would require major operations this year in Africa.”17

  “Our political system” meant the United States Constitution, which stipulated that the President of the United States be commander in chief of the nation’s armed forces.

  The refusal of the U.S. chiefs of staff to consider the folly of a premature cross-Channel invasion was breathtaking in its lack of professional military realism—yet their response, when challenged, had only been to blame the democratic “political system.” This did not reflect well on them.

  For his part, Secretary Stimson preferred to blame “the other” politician, Winston Churchill. The President had asked to see Marshall, Arnold, and King on his return to Washington, before they left for England, but Stimson decided he should perhaps see the President first, and attempt a plea bargain: explaining perhaps that the chiefs were not really pressing for a turn to the Pacific, just trying to put further pressure on the British to be serious about a Second Front that year.

  Landing at Bolling Field at 9:15 A.M. on July 15, 1942, Stimson thus went “directly to the White House where the President had just returned from his absence at Hyde Park. I had no appointment but he very kindly saw me and I had a long talk with him about the crisis which is happening in regard to Bolero.”18

  For Stimson, his July 15 interview with the Commander in Chief in the Oval Office was painful. The secretary brought with him a book he had recently been rereading, first at Fort Devens, then at his one-hundred-acre estate on Long Island: Field Marshal William Robertson’s Soldiers and Statesmen, with its vivid account of Churchill’s Dardanelles fiasco in World War I.

  The decision “to go half-baked to the Dardanelles is being repeated now as to the proposed expeditions to North Africa and the Middle East which Churchill twenty-five years afterwards is trying to entangle us into,” Stimson had noted in his diary two days before. “The trouble is neither he nor the President has a methodical and careful mind. They do not implement their proposal with any careful study of the supporting facts upon which the success of such expeditions must ultimately rest.”19

  Handing over the Robertson book, Stimson “begged” the President “to read the chapter on the Dardanelles in which I had carefully marked important passages,” the secretary noted that night. “The President asserted that he himself was absolutely sound on Bolero which must go ahead unremittingly, but he did not like the manner of the memorandum in regard to the Pacific, saying it was a little like ’taking up your dishes and going away.’”20

  Stimson, as a lawyer, was cut to the quick by the accusation of childish pique. “I told him I appreciated the truth in that but it was absolutely essential to use it as a threat of our sincerity in regard to Bolero if we expected to get through the hides of the British and he agreed to that. He said he was going to send Marshall and King abroad to thrash the matter out in London. I don’t know how much effect I had on him although he was very clear in his support of Bolero. I think he has lingering thoughts of doing something in the Middle East in spite of my thumping assertions of the geographical impossibilities of doing anything effective.”21

  Clearly, Stimson was embarrassed by his own threat of a switch to the Pacific—indeed, he later noted that “the Pacific argument from me was mainly a bluff.”22

  A bluff that had been called.

  Shaming the secretary of war and the Joint Chiefs of Staff into dropping their recommendation of a diversion to the Pacific was one thing. Getting Marshall and Stimson to back Gymnast, Roosevelt’s “great secret baby,” was another.

  It became even harder once General Marshall, following Stimson’s visit, arrived in the Oval Office.

  Harsh words were exchanged.

  Stimson noted the outcome later that night. “I had a talk with Marshall over our respective conferences in the White House, he having seen the President immediately after my early morning interview. He evidently had a thumping argument with the President and thought he had knocked out the President’s lingering affection for Gymnast,” the American invasion of Northwest Africa, “and then Middle East. Between us the President must have had a rough day on those subjects. I had told him that when you are trying to hold a wild horse the way to do it was to get him by the head and not by the heels, and that was the trouble with the British method of trying to hold Hitler in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The better way would be to get a grip on his head.”23

  Marshall had, he said, “pointed out to the President that by going into the Middle East we lost Sledgehammer and Bolero ’43 and got nowhere, being everywhere on the defensive, for the Middle Eastern operation at best was a defensive operation even if successful. At the same time by so doing, we put ourselves in great peril on the Pacific. Such a situation therefore cost us a year’s delay in which Germany would recuperate herself while we simply imperiled ourselves.”

  For his part, Marshall was clearly not surrendering his notion of a switch to the Pacific lightly—whether out of pride or genuine strategic belief was unclear. The President had insisted on a campaign to hold Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, as the ultimate stop line in confronting the Japanese. Well, then, switching to the Pacific, Marshall maintained, would permit the United States to build upon that, take the offensive, and win a victory there that “would have a tremendous beneficial effect on the general fortunes of the war. It would clear our Pacific area,” halt Japanese thrust in the Indian Ocean, and “thereby make it
impossible for Germany and Japan to clasp hands.”24

  The sheer silliness of this argument had, however, left the President speechless.

  As Stimson noted, the President had had a rough day—he and the War Department clearly still at loggerheads.

  Marshall’s “thumping argument” with the Commander in Chief did his cause no good. Nor did it improve Marshall’s chances of being chosen to command the Bolero landings, once they took place—indeed, Marshall’s obstinacy and his outburst in the White House would ultimately wreck his chances of military fame.

  Even in retrospect Marshall could not admit his error—blaming the “politicians” for a decision he deplored. “Churchill was rabid for Africa. Roosevelt was for Africa,” Marshall recalled. “Both men were aware of the political necessities. It is something we [in the military] fail to take into consideration,” he later said. “We failed to see that the leader in a democracy must keep the people entertained. That may sound like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought. . . . People demand action.”25

  This remark was unworthy of Marshall, who in other respects was an entirely honorable man. The “people” of America and the free world certainly demanded action, as newspapers in the United States and Britain trumpeted in 1942—but in terms of political pressure, the action they wanted, by an overwhelming majority, was Marshall’s Second Front.

  Far from responding to political, and popular, pressure, the President was, however, doing the opposite: patiently preferring, as U.S. commander in chief, a military operation that had a reasonable chance of success. Moreover, one that might change the course of World War II if it succeeded.

  PART TEN

  THE MUTINY

  24

  Stimson’s Bet

  NEITHER THEN NOR LATER did Marshall concede that the President, in his role as U.S. commander in chief, was demonstrating a greater military realism in devising Allied strategy in 1942 than his U.S. Army chief of staff.

  In the meantime, however, the President wished to make sure there would be no misunderstanding—or ill will. Gymnast would not succeed unless the War Department got behind the plan wholeheartedly. He therefore wanted Marshall and King to see for themselves, in person, how impossible an imminent Bolero operation was—not because the British were cowards, but because Hitler’s forces were waiting, and the Allies could not, that year, assemble preponderant force to ensure its success. Drawing up in his own handwriting General Marshall’s and Admiral King’s instructions for their mission to London on July 16, Roosevelt gave the document to Harry Hopkins, who was to fly with them—and make certain they stayed to the script.

  Paragraph nine was direct and to the point. “I am opposed to an American all-out effort in the Pacific against Japan with the view to her defeat as quickly as possible,” the President made clear. Yet some form of Second Front was desirable that year, since Hitler—whose troops were smashing their way deep into the Caucasus, as well as toward the gates of Cairo, at Alamein—would otherwise be given time to achieve total control of Europe. “It is of the utmost importance that we appreciate that the defeat of Japan does not defeat Germany and that American concentration against Japan this year or in 1943 increases the chance of complete [Nazi] domination of Europe and Africa.” On the other hand, “Defeat of Germany means the defeat of Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life.”1

  There was to be no switch to the Pacific.

  Successive military historians would extol General Marshall as the great architect and “organizer” of American military operations in World War II: a “titan”2 whose strategic grasp and patient handling of his commander in chief would, like Marshall’s opposite number in London, General Alan Brooke, entitle him to the highest pantheon in military history.

  Such accolades were understandable with regard to a man of noble character—especially in countering the excessive admiration, even adulation, garnered by World War II field generals such as Eisenhower, Patton, Montgomery, and MacArthur. Certainly with regard to Marshall’s administrative achievement there would be every reason to laud his record in World War II. But as to his strategic and tactical ability, such tributes were way off the mark.

  As commander in chief, the challenge for Roosevelt was thus how to marshal Marshall: how to direct, encourage, and support his work at the War Department, while stopping him from losing the war for America. While Marshall and King journeyed to London on their presidential mission, therefore, the Commander in Chief decided now to put his coup de main into action—in their absence.

  Ambassador Leahy, emerging from dental hospital, was summoned to see the President on July 18, 1942. The admiral would not only be his military assistant, the Commander in Chief announced, but his new chief of staff, or deputy. As the sole senior military officer supporting the American invasion of French Northwest Africa, Leahy was critical to the President’s success in avoiding American defeat on the beaches of mainland France that year, and instead adopting the President’s preferred course: U.S. landings in Vichy-held Northwest Africa, before the Germans could occupy the area. Leahy was therefore instructed by the President to become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Not only a member, in fact. He was, the President laid down, to be the chairman of the Combined Chiefs of Staff—speaking for the Commander in Chief.

  Before submitting his formal resignation as U.S. ambassador to Vichy France, Leahy was asked first, however, to do everything in his power at the State Department, where Leahy still had an office, to ensure the United States did not side with General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, lest this lead to a hostile Vichy response to an American landing in Morocco and Algeria, as it had done when de Gaulle’s Free French forces had attempted to assault Dakar, in 1940. This, in a meeting with the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, Leahy promptly did. (“Conferred with Secretary of State Hull regarding the advisability of maintaining diplomatic relations with the French Government in Vichy,” Leahy noted in his diary).3

  Four days later, on July 22, Leahy then transferred his papers from the State Department to the Combined Chiefs of Staff Building, at 1901 Constitution Avenue, and “took up my duties as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,” as Leahy proudly wrote in his daily diary, “which duties included presiding over the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Chiefs of Staff.”4

  By the time Marshall and King returned from England, the coup would be complete: the Commander in Chief’s own man in control of the Combined Chiefs.

  In the meantime, the Marshall-King mission fared badly at the hands of the British. The officers were forbidden by the President to use bluff or blackmail by threatening an American switch to a “Pacific First” strategy. Without the threat, they found, as the President knew would happen, that the British were wholly opposed to a cross-Channel invasion that year for the soundest of military reasons: namely, that it would fail.

  In Washington, Secretary Stimson, on July 23, was stunned. Initial cables from Marshall had seemed as if the American chiefs were making headway, he had thought.5 “A very bad jolt came this morning at nine thirty in the shape of a telegram from Marshall,” he recorded in his diary, however—a cable “saying the British War Cabinet had definitely refused to go on with Sledgehammer and that perforce negotiations were going on along other lines.”6

  Stimson knew exactly what “other lines” signified.

  “I went at once over to the White House,” Stimson recorded, “and got into the President’s room before he was up”—only to find he was too late. The President “had received his telegrams to the same effect last night and had replied to them.”7

  There was little that the war secretary could say or do. “Apparently Marshall tried hard to carry his point,” dropping all pretense of switching U.S. priority to the Pacific, while “offering to give up an attempt on the Pas de Calais,” which the British said would be suicidal, “and to take instead another place” on the Fren
ch coast, such as Brittany, using it as a quasi-permanent cross-Channel bridgehead through the winter—Sledgehammer. “But the British were obdurate and Marshall had informed the President that we would be unable to go with any Sledgehammer attack without their cordial cooperation.”

  This was exactly as President Roosevelt had anticipated. “The President had telegraphed expressing his regrets but saying American troops must get into action somewhere in 1942. He then suggested in order of their priority a number of places to the south, each of which seemed to me to be a dangerous diversion,” Stimson lamented, “impossible of execution within the time we have.”8

  Stimson was now hopelessly outfoxed. He had been living, he began to realize, under a delusion in thinking Marshall was making headway with the British over a cross-Channel assault—an initial landing to be made in the fall of 1942, then reinforced in 1943, followed by a drive on Berlin.

  Stimson had even met up with Frank Knox, to see if he could obtain his support and extend the strategic struggle to members of the cabinet. With the navy secretary by his side he had then approached the U.S. secretary of state, the most senior member of the administration, and had given Mr. Hull a grand tour d’horizon militaire, telling him the United States had enough forces to launch a cross-Channel attack and continue fighting in the Pacific, but not enough to chase their own President’s red herrings. A “diversion of strength to an African expeditionary force would be fatal to both,” he told the secretary of state, who seemed to have little or no idea what Stimson was talking about. Nor did Secretary Knox—who looked bemused by Stimson’s “rather long-winded explanation,” of current army and navy plans—Bolero, Sledgehammer, Roundup, et al.—which the navy secretary “has thus far been unable to assimilate,” Stimson noted with irritation.