FIFTEEN
“O.K. F.D.R.”
“I HAVE A TOAST TO OFFER,” THE PRESIDENT SAID, AFTER WHITE HOUSE butlers had cleared the guests’ dinnerware. Raising his glass over the long dinner table, he announced, “It has been in my head and on my heart for a long time—now it is on the tip of my tongue: ‘To the Common Cause.’”
Roosevelt’s guests, Secretary and Mrs. Hull, Lord Beaverbrook, Ambassador Halifax, and, most serenely, Prime Minister Winston Spencer Churchill, raised their goblets in reply and sipped.1
The prime minister and his entourage had crossed the Atlantic aboard the battleship Duke of York and arrived in Washington on December 22 for a series of top secret meetings code-named ARCADIA. As the city awaited winter’s first snowfall, Churchill and Roosevelt began charting the war’s course.
Pondering an immense global jigsaw puzzle in the family quarters that night, the two men sorted through the war’s theaters like cards in a tarot reader’s deck: British Isles defense, the Azores, the Burma Road, Russia, Brazil, bombers, the Pacific, U-boats, Spain, west Africa, northern France, Singapore. Each problem carried its own unique quirks, and like hungry puppies yelping for a tired mother, each theater cried out for an unsustainable share of food, money, weapons and fighting men.2
To Roosevelt fell the added duty of hosting his frenetic houseguest. The stocky prime minister wedged into the Rose Suite easily enough, but his servants and equipage kept the White House staff busy moving beds and dressers around the second floor. Custodians removed most of the furniture from the Monroe Room, which, temporarily, became the headquarters of the British Empire. Churchill had oversized maps of every theater mounted on the room’s walls, and officious-looking gatekeepers moved symbols, pushpins, and lines around the maps as they received fresh dispatches from London. In his map room, Churchill could see at a glance the strategic picture in Asia, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and Europe.
Roosevelt, an avid stamp collector with a passion for geography, was mesmerized by Churchill’s portable map room. He and the prime minister spent hours there discussing sea-lanes to Sumatra, Suez trade routes, the Brazil-Africa gap, and maritime choke points from Iceland to Murmansk.3
For FDR, it was an education in world war. To Eleanor, a pacifist at heart, it seemed like an overgrown, violent board game. “They looked like two little boys playing soldier,” she remarked dolefully after stopping by one evening. “They seemed to be having a wonderful time, too wonderful in fact.”4
Churchill kept Roosevelt awake into the wee hours of the morning discussing strategy, politics, and Britain’s experience fighting the Germans. “The outstanding feature [of the conference],” Churchill later wrote, “was of course my contacts with the President. We saw each other for several hours every day, and lunched always together, with Harry Hopkins as a third. We talked of nothing but business, and reached a great measure of agreement on many points, both large and small.”5
The conversations were accompanied by endless trays of cigars, liquor, and food. “[Churchill] ate, and thoroughly enjoyed, more food than any two men or three diplomats,” remembered Roosevelt’s Irish bodyguard Mike Reilly. “He consumed brandy and scotch with a grace and enthusiasm that left us all openmouthed in awe.” Roosevelt’s secretary Bill Hassett, lacking Reilly’s appreciation for Churchill’s talents, told his diary, “Churchill is a trying guest—drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney, irregular routine, works nights, sleeps days, turns the clock upside down.” 6
Churchill’s upside-down hours exhausted Roosevelt and infuriated Eleanor, who would shuffle into the smoke-filled study several times a night with progressively less subtle hints about bed and the next day’s work. The men ignored her. Around midnight, she would leave in a huff and they would talk until two or three in the morning.7
As First Lady, Eleanor was polite and proper to the Conservative Party leader. But as a die-hard progressive, her every fiber opposed nearly everything the British Empire stood for. Riding in the back of the president’s touring car with Franklin and Eleanor one day, Churchill began thumping a pet theme of his: After the war, the two countries must form an Anglo-American alliance to meet the world’s problems. To these ramblings Roosevelt merely nodded, repeating offhandedly, “Yes, yes, yes,” as the car rumbled on.
Eleanor sat as Churchill prattled on about the Anglo-American postwar order. She held her tongue until she could hold it no more.
“You know, Winston,” she interjected, “when Franklin says ‘yes, yes, yes,’ it doesn’t mean he agrees with you. It means he’s listening.”
Churchill withdrew into sullen silence.8
• • •
But oftener Roosevelt did agree with Churchill, and Stimson and Marshall soon learned what could happen when the two political leaders sequestered themselves out of earshot of military advisers. On the afternoon of December 23, Churchill sent word that he was anxious to speak with Stimson on the subject of the Philippines. The next morning, Stimson and Eisenhower unrolled their maps before Churchill and showed the prime minister the vital points along MacArthur’s battlefront. The PM, clad in pajamas and slippers, listened intently and dismissed the two men with his thanks.9
Later that day, a British secretary telephoned Marshall to request an addition to the day’s military agenda. Britain proposed to divert a division of U.S. reinforcements slated for the Philippines to Singapore. Checking around, Marshall learned the idea had already been agreed to between Roosevelt and Churchill.
Marshall was aghast. He went straight to Stimson, and behind closed doors the two men blew their stacks. Churchill had a lot of nerve asking the president to interfere with a U.S. reinforcement operation. MacArthur was in desperate need of help, and Churchill was poaching what little help they could give him.
Brimming with indignation, Stimson rang up Harry Hopkins and told him what happened. He asked Harry to tell the president that if he persisted in overriding his war chiefs, “The president would have to take my resignation!”
Hopkins, used to his boss’s erratic style, interrupted a meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill and came straight to the point. Taken aback, both men denied they had made any such deal. They said they had no intention of diverting troops from MacArthur’s Philippines to Britain’s Singapore. When Harry called Stimson back to tell him both men denied the rumor, Stimson read from a British memo reflecting just such a discussion. Hopkins admitted the paper belied Roosevelt’s story, but it didn’t matter, because the transfer was off.10
Later that day, Roosevelt made a cutting remark in Stimson’s presence about inaccurate statements flying around about deals between himself and Churchill. Stimson held his tongue, but he would not trust Churchill so long as Singapore was imperiled. He told his diary that night, “This incident shows the danger of talking too freely on international matters of such keen importance without the President carefully having his military and naval advisors present. This paper, which was a record made by one of Churchill’s assistants, would have raised any amount of trouble for the President if it had gotten into the hands of an unfriendly press. I think he had felt that he had pretty nearly burned his fingers.” 11
It would not be the last time those fingers were nearly burned.
•
While questions of empire and politics belonged to Roosevelt and Churchill, the problem of crafting a military strategy to fit political goals fell to Marshall, Stark, King, and Arnold. Working alongside the Americans—and sometimes at cross-purposes—were the men who wielded the Empire’s trident: Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the good-natured First Sea Lord who, like Lewis Carroll’s dormouse, tended to doze off in meetings; Field Marshal Sir John Dill, whom Marshall liked best among the Brits; and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, an Oxford-educated airman whom Marshall and King agreed possessed the best mind of the lot.*12
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for the ARCADIA participants was American
disorganization. Caught up in the calamities of Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, U-boats, and Germany’s declaration of war—to say nothing of domestic problems with the draft, Lend-Lease, and weapons production—U.S. commanders had little time to ponder grand strategy. They were caught flat-footed by British questions about global logistics and were thrown into disarray over strategic nuances they hadn’t time to study. “We were more or less babes in the woods on this planning and joint business with the British,” remarked Brigadier General Thomas Handy, Eisenhower’s planning deputy. “They’d been doing it for years. They were experts at it and we were just starting.”13
Preparation for the conference was so haphazard that the first meeting in the Federal Reserve Building was held up when the embarrassed hosts realized the conference room Marshall’s staff had reserved was too small to hold everyone. Marshall, mortified, scowled when he saw the tiny room and table, but before anyone could comment, the group’s quick-thinking guide told them, “This room is for the overcoats and coats. The conference will be in the Board Room at the front.” The chiefs obediently laid down their caps and coats on the table and were escorted to the magnificent boardroom, which was hastily opened for the gathering.14
The British sat together on the table’s south side, quiet and tightly organized. They had rehearsed their arguments aboard the Duke of York, and they knew each service’s strengths and problems intimately. The Americans couldn’t find a crack of daylight in the British shield wall when they sat down and began to talk strategy.15
Churchill intended to fight the Nazis the way Spaniards fought bulls. It was suicidal to attack a fresh, raging toro head-on, so Spanish matadors had developed a peripheral approach to wear the monster down before going in for the kill. Picadors stab and banderilleros jab, weakening the beast’s neck muscles and tiring him out. Only when the bull is depleted, through blood loss and exhaustion, does the matador expose himself for the tercio de muerte and drive the sword home.
Through twelve days of formal meetings, the British chiefs trumpeted a similar strategy. They took as their guide a memorandum dictated by Churchill assigning primary importance to guarding America’s war industries, protecting Atlantic convoys, and defending the British Isles. Churchill also advocated “closing the ring” around Germany through subversive activities, air bombardment, sea blockade, and propaganda.16
Early in the conference, the British chiefs presented a plan, code-named GYMNAST, that envisioned a landing in French Northwest Africa. To this they added a permutation called SUPER-GYMNAST, which included an American landing at Casablanca, on Africa’s Atlantic coast.17
It was this “closing the ring” bit that Marshall didn’t like. A military strategy premised on German political collapse seemed dangerously optimistic. Britain had not succumbed to hammering by the Luftwaffe, and Stalin’s communists, battered to the gates of Moscow, were still fighting savagely. Why did Churchill think Germany would collapse when Hitler had the entire Continent under his thumb? To Marshall, a frontal assault through northern France was the only path to victory.
For similar reasons, Marshall saw North Africa as a sideshow. An invasion there would do little to relieve the hard-pressed Russians, and it would draw off troops, bombers, and ships needed for an invasion of northern France. Counting noses on the American side, Marshall found he had strong backers in Stimson, Stark, and Arnold. So he took his case for northern France to the one man whose vote counted most.18
FDR agreed with Marshall on the importance of coming to grips with Germany directly, but he expressed the concept a shade differently. According to Marshall’s notes of their meeting, Roosevelt “considered it very important to morale, to give the people of this country a feeling that they are in the war, to give the Germans the reverse effect, to have American troops somewhere in active fighting across the Atlantic.” That somewhere, Marshall felt, should be northwestern France, though FDR would not be more specific than “somewhere across the Atlantic.”19
The divergence between the president and his army commander was a subtle one. But to an eye as keen as Churchill’s, it was a crack of daylight between the generals and their commander-in-chief. He would return to that subject again, when the time was right.
•
On Christmas Day, General and Mrs. Marshall hosted Admiral and Mattie King and the British chiefs for a Christmas dinner. When the Marshalls learned the morning before that Christmas was also Sir John Dill’s birthday, Katherine Marshall sent the general’s orderly, Sergeant James Powder, to scour Washington pastry shops for an appropriate cake. The cake and candles secured, Powder managed to find a five-and-dime store open that morning, where he bought some cheap American and British flags to decorate the cake.
The dinner was a delightful gathering. On closer inspection, the guests noticed tiny markings on the flags that gave them a good chuckle: “Made in Japan.” Fruit and eggs were plentiful—compared to England, at least—and Sir John remarked, to Marshall’s astonishment, that it was the first birthday cake he had been given since he was a small boy.
The only mishap, unnoticed by Marshall’s companions, was the absence of a Western Union singing telegram ordered by Dill’s wife, Nancy. The singer was turned away from the Marshall home by Secret Service men, whose job evidently included foiling assassins dressed as Western Union singers.
But the dinner was otherwise a success, and the Allied war chiefs returned to work thankful for the short respite from a world plunged into blood.20
•
Though questions of grand strategy flared up during the conference, the first job of the Arcadians, taken up after Sir John’s birthday celebration, was to bring order to an organizational mess. The cousins discussed actual fighting in only a few places—the North Atlantic, the Middle East, the Southwest Pacific, and the Philippines—and large questions turned on the command structure at the top.
“I am convinced,” Marshall told the chiefs on Christmas Day, “that there must be one man in command of the entire theater—air, ground, and ships. We cannot manage by cooperation. Human frailties are such that there would be emphatic unwillingness to place portions of troops under another service. If we make a plan for unified command now, it will solve nine-tenths of our troubles.”21
The other chiefs weren’t so sure. Air Marshal Portal countered that in London, forces were allocated at the direction of the “highest authority”—meaning Churchill—while Sir Dudley Pound expressed skepticism about Marshall’s “supreme commander” concept. The British ran things by committee and consultation, and it was as unthinkable for a Royal Navy admiral to place his ships under a landlubber as it was for a field marshal to let an admiral lead an infantry assault.22
Perhaps, thought Marshall, if the British saw something on paper, they’d have fewer doubts. He went back to his office and told Eisenhower to draft a letter of instruction for a supreme commander for the American, British, Dutch, and Australian spheres in Asia and the Pacific. Military staffers, always on the lookout for new acronyms, promptly dubbed the new theater “ABDA.”23
Admiral King was lukewarm on Marshall’s proposal. He favored a unified command under a naval officer for coastal and island areas, but as a general principle he did not want a theater commander standing between himself and his fleet admirals—especially if that commander wore an army uniform. He told one colleague, “I have found it necessary to find time to point out to some ‘amateur strategists’ in high places that unity of command is not a panacea for all military difficulties!”24
To win over the U.S. admirals, Marshall made a round of lobbying calls on Main Navy. In Admiral Stark’s office he met with Stark, King, Knox, and a bevy of lesser admirals who knew King’s views and were obediently suspicious of the Army. But King was changing his vote. Initially ambivalent, he had seen Roosevelt leaning toward the “supreme commander” concept, at least for the Far East, and he was reluctant to buck the president.
; At length King said he agreed that the Australasian region required a single commander for all forces. “When King said this,” one staffer recalled, “all the other Navy people smiled and concurred.” Stark, whose power had been eclipsed by King’s, gave Marshall his blessing, and the Americans at last had a united front.25
But getting past the U.S. Navy was only the first phase. The Royal Navy, Stimson wrote, “kicked like bay steers” when they read the proposal. During a plenary meeting where Churchill argued against Marshall’s supreme commander structure, Lord Beaverbrook, Churchill’s Lend-Lease emissary, slipped Harry Hopkins a scribbled note that read, “You should work on Churchill. He is open-minded and needs discussion.”26
Seeing an opening, Hopkins arranged a morning meeting to allow Marshall to plead his case to the prime minister.
• • •
Marshall walked through the door of the Rose Suite to find the head of the British Empire in his usual morning state, sitting in bed in his dressing gown, his pink face jovial and alert despite a bout of chest pain the night before.* Churchill greeted the general with his usual enthusiasm, and waving his cigar like a maestro’s baton, he invited Marshall to make his sales pitch.27
As the recumbent warlord listened, Marshall paced up and down along Churchill’s bedside, launching into the basic reasons a supreme commander was vital to future success. With air, ground, and sea forces each pushing its own viewpoint, someone would have to keep all three services marching in the same direction, at the same cadence.
Churchill listened carefully, then interrupted him sharply. What could an Army officer possibly know about commanding ships in battle? he asked.
“What the devil does a naval officer know about handling a tank?” Marshall retorted. Marshall’s point—driven home fast and forcefully as he paced—was not to ask admirals to command tank battalions, but to find a man with good all-around judgment to balance the needs of competing forces without favoritism.
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