To Quezon, Roosevelt vowed, “As long as the flag of the United States flies on Filipino soil as a pledge of our duty to your people, it will be defended by our own men to the death.”14
• • •
A few, he hoped, would not die under that flag. In a follow-up message Roosevelt offered to evacuate MacArthur’s wife and son, along with the Commonwealth’s top officials. MacArthur cabled Marshall, “I am deeply appreciative of the inclusion of my own family in this list, but they and I have decided that they will share the fate of the garrison.” He declared he would fight on the Bataan Peninsula until driven off, then wage a final stand on the island of Corregidor.15
No one who knew Douglas MacArthur doubted his personal bravery. If he said he would die on Corregidor, he intended to die there. After checking with several of MacArthur’s associates, Marshall concluded that only a peremptory order from the president would compel MacArthur to relinquish his command and save himself.16
The specter of an abandoned MacArthur led into captivity, or his broken body—and those of his wife and son—placed on display like hunting trophies, haunted Marshall, Stimson, and Roosevelt. The general was a national hero, a striking media personality, and a decorated battlefield commander.
He was also a rallying figure for Republicans like Wendell Willkie, who called for MacArthur’s return to command all American forces in the Pacific. Willkie’s cry was taken up by a public starving for a hero. In an article titled “Bring Home MacArthur!” Time gushed: “With the air of a man who has been groping for a word and hears it unexpectedly from a passerby, the U.S. echoed Willkie in the press, in Congress, on the street.”17
Roosevelt knew MacArthur was an egomaniac and a political problem. But with the Japanese pounding on the gates of Bataan, he had to decide whether to make a martyr of the conservative icon or remove him to Australia for future use.
On Sunday evening, February 22, Roosevelt called King, Hopkins, and Marshall into his office, where the four men debated the fate of the general for half an hour. After thrashing the question out from a number of angles, Roosevelt made his decision: MacArthur would leave the Philippines and establish a new headquarters in Australia. Marshall would wire orders to Corregidor in the name of the president, and assure MacArthur that Roosevelt would urge Britain and Australia to accept him as commander of all Allied forces in the Southwestern Pacific Area.18
•
On a moonless night two weeks later, a tiny squadron of torpedo boats revved their engines and slipped past a Japanese naval squadron blockading Manila Bay. Aboard they carried a seasick MacArthur, his wife, Jean, his young son, Arthur, and a handful of staffers who would form the core of his new command. When the boats reached the southern island of Mindanao, MacArthur’s party transferred to waiting B-17 bombers for a rough flight south to Australia.19
Upon his arrival at Terowie, South Australia, the general’s train was set upon by a pack of reporters and townspeople, who jostled for a glimpse of the famous general.
Flashing a Hollywood smile to the crowd, he declared, “I came through and I shall return.”20
SEVENTEEN
“INTER ARMA SILENT LEGES”
AS COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, ROOSEVELT HAD TO SEND AMERICAN TROOPS wherever they were needed to win the war. As president, he had to keep the citizens at home feeding the voracious war machine. That meant production.
In his annual message to Congress in January, he declared, “We must raise our sights all along the production line,” and for 1942 he raised these sights impossibly high: 60,000 planes, 45,000 new tanks, six million tons of merchant ships, and 20,000 antiaircraft guns. “These figures,” he told Congress, “will give the Japanese and the Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished at Pearl Harbor.”1
Having started his draft speech with production targets supplied by his advisers, Roosevelt blithely penciled through the numbers and boosted them as he thought proper, asking no input from either military or industrial experts. His numbers were not based on what had been possible in the past; they were based on what America needed to defeat three enemy empires that had swallowed nearly one-third of the world’s strategic resources and population.
The experts were appalled by Roosevelt’s naïveté. Incredulous War Department officers lamely joked that their president had “gone into the numbers racket.” When Harry Hopkins asked Roosevelt whether he should announce targets so unrealistically high, the president dismissed Harry’s concern with another cigarette-holder gesture: “Oh—the production people can do it, if they really try.”2
To ensure that they would really try, in January he shook up his Office of Production Management, the agency responsible for materials rationing and coordination of production. He moved GM’s William Knudsen out and replaced him with Sears, Roebuck’s Donald Nelson. Nelson’s revamped agency, called the War Production Board, would make final decisions on raw materials allocation and set production priorities—subject, as everything else was, to Roosevelt’s orders.3
Nelson and his fellow board members would be sorely strained in the coming months as America’s factories were pushed to industrial feats never before imagined. And it would not only be the giants—the Fords and the Grummans and the U.S. Steels—pitching in. Jukebox maker Rock-Ola was given a contract to make M-1 carbines. Typewriter assembler Smith-Corona milled out bolt-action rifles. A barge company owned by Andrew Higgins of Louisiana began making plywood landing craft with steel ramp bows. Any shop that could turn out textiles was a supply of uniforms, tents, socks, and coats, and any electronics company was a source of generators, headsets, and radio tubes.
The demand for food, weapons, medicine, housing, and raw materials did more than shake the war industry. It transformed the genetic makeup of America. Sons of farmers moved to the big cities to work in factories and shipyards. Sharecroppers became carpenters and white-owned industries hired record numbers of Rosie the Riveters and black and Hispanic workers. A mass migration pushed American families from the rural midland to the industrialized coasts and Great Lakes regions, changing forever the nation’s political and social maps.4
The war’s emerging bottleneck was the shortage of shipping. The Army was training draftees at an unprecedented rate, and by the end of the year Marshall would have 1.8 million men in khaki. But it took 144,000 tons of shipping space to move a single infantry division, nearly twice that to move an armored division. America would need to produce an extra eighteen cargo ships every month, dedicated solely to the military, to send a force of 750,000 overseas by the end of 1942. “The war effort of the United States,” Marshall predicted, “will be measured by what can be transported overseas.”5
•
During Churchill’s visit, Roosevelt had kept a quietly covetous eye on the British map room, and after the PM and his entourage left, Roosevelt asked his naval aide, Captain John McCrea, to create a similar room where he could review his most secret dispatches and see at a glance where the battle lines stood.6
With the help of a young naval lieutenant, an actor named Robert Montgomery, McCrea delivered. He set up a small, efficient map room on the White House ground floor across the hall from the doctor’s office. A sign outside the door read “NO ADMITTANCE,” and meant it. Few officers besides Map Room staff were regularly admitted, and the only civilians allowed inside without special permission were Harry Hopkins and FDR’s secretary Grace Tully.7
Within this sanctum, an aide recalled, “The walls were covered with fiberboard, on which we pinned large-scale charts of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Updated two or three times a day, the charts displayed the constantly changing location of enemy and Allied forces. Different shape pins were used for different types of ships, a round headed pin for destroyers, a square head for heavy cruisers. For the army we had a plastic cover with a grease pencil to change the battle lines as new dispatches came in.”8
With a touch of the dramatic, an aide
bought special pins for the locations of the Big Three leaders: FDR’s pin was shaped like a cigarette in a holder, Stalin’s like a briar pipe, Churchill’s like a cigar. The floor was left uncarpeted so Roosevelt’s wheelchair could roll freely, and maps were arranged so FDR could see them easily from a sitting position.9
In keeping with Roosevelt’s obsession with secrecy, the Map Room also served as his clandestine communications center. Messages of the highest importance—cables from Churchill or Stalin, or the most important MAGIC intercepts—were routed there. To keep what he said hidden, even from his own military, FDR sent most outgoing wires through Navy channels and received incoming messages through the Army, ensuring that the White House maintained the only complete set of his correspondence with key leaders.*10
• • •
Roosevelt had spent his life looking at maps of far-off places—places he could see in his mind’s eye, even if, at his age, it was unlikely he would ever visit them. To a man unable to walk, the stylized features depicted on stamps and maps—peninsulas, islands, straits, and bays—sparked his imagination. They were old friends he greeted with the delight he lavished on longtime Hyde Park neighbors. He understood, as few others did, that these obscure geographic features drove strategy, and strategy dictated how America would parcel out its blood, men and machines.
But the average American knew nothing of the railways of Burma or the atolls of the Pacific. For decades the nation had looked inward, from Jersey’s Boardwalk to the Rockies, from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Mighty Mississip. To give the public an idea of why American sons would be sent to fight for places like Java, Persia, or Midway Island, he needed to acquaint the public with the scope of this vast new war.
He would do something no president had done before. He scheduled a fireside chat and ordered his press people to ask listeners to have a map of the world open when he spoke to them. “I’m going to speak about strange places many of them have never heard of,” he told his speechwriters. “I want to explain to the people something about geography—what our problem is and what the overall strategy of the war has to be. I want to tell them in simple terms of A-B-C so that they will understand what is going on and how each battle fits into the picture. . . . If they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure that they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.”11
Intrigued by the president’s request, the public responded enthusiastically. Citizens descended in droves on booksellers, libraries, and general stores to buy or borrow world maps. People who had never heard of Malaya or Leningrad or the Azores bought atlases for their families. With maps pinned to walls and spread over laps, sixty-one million adults tuned in on the night of February 23 to hear the sonorous voice of their president.12
“My fellow Americans,” that voice began. “This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air lane in the world.”
FDR walked his audience across the globe, starting with China and moving to the South Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic. He explained, in basic terms, how industries at home and maritime lanes at sea sustained the Allied war effort.
“Until our flow of supplies gives us clear superiority we must keep on striking our enemies wherever and whenever we can meet them, even if, for a while, we have to yield ground,” he said. “The object of the Nazis and the Japanese is to separate the United States, Britain, China, and Russia, and to isolate them one from another, so that each will be surrounded and cut off from sources of supplies and reinforcements. It is the old familiar Axis policy of ‘divide and conquer.’”
In Roosevelt’s populist vision of total war, the woman in the factory or the child collecting scrap aluminum was as much a warrior as the marine at Midway or the soldier on Bataan. At every level, he said, the nation must match and exceed the effort of the enemy. “From Berlin, Rome and Tokyo we have been described as a nation of weaklings—‘playboys’—who would hire British soldiers, or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us,” he said. “Let them repeat that now! Let them tell that to General MacArthur and his men. . . . Let them tell that to the boys in the Flying Fortresses. Let them tell that to the Marines!”13
•
As everyone knew, there was one group of American men who would not be flying bombers or fighting with the Marines. After Pearl Harbor, newspaper reports told of an unidentified Negro mess attendant at Pearl Harbor on the battleship West Virginia who, under strafing fire from Japanese Zeros, seized an idle machine gun and fired back until the weapon ran out of ammunition.
The unnamed messman was obviously a war hero at a time when heroes were badly needed, but the Bureau of Navigation, the Navy’s personnel department, had an ironclad policy against employing colored sailors outside the messmen’s corps—cooks or stewards. Keeping with naval tradition, the man would not be publicly recognized for wandering into the field of combat, the exclusive province of white officers and sailors.14
As the largest of the military services, the Army was the most visible focus of the nation’s growing pains, and Stimson felt the War Department was getting more than its share of criticism over exclusion of black citizens from the military. In mid-January he complained to his diary, “The Navy has successfully evaded taking any Negroes into the naval forces or marines. Consequently this raises the pressure on us because it makes us obliged to take more than the proportional ratio between white and colored people in the general population.” 15
Stimson was, however, resigned to placating civil rights leaders, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the band of “do-gooders” that sometimes seemed to run the White House. But he was determined to make Knox’s Navy play by the same rules. “I am insisting that we shall create colored divisions and use them,” he wrote in his diary.
I am also insisting that we shall give special attention to the training of colored officers. I am very skeptical about the possible efficiency of such officers but, as it has been determined that we shall have them, I propose that we shall educate them to the highest possible standards and make the best we can of them. . . . I am planning to take up with the President the misbehavior of his own pet arm—the Navy—which has been acting like a spoiled child in the matter.16
Pressured by Stimson and others, FDR wrote to Knox, “I think that with all the Navy activities the Bureau of Navigation might invent something that colored enlistees could do in addition to the rating of messman.” Two weeks later, Knox sent Roosevelt a report by the General Board underscoring the need to segregate colored and white sailors, except where colored sailors served as personal attendants to white officers. “Men on board ship live in particularly close association,” the board solemnly declared. “How many white men would choose that their closest associates in sleeping quarters, in mess, be of another race?”
Incorporating colored sailors would depress morale and erode discipline, the board concluded. If that was discrimination, “it is but part and parcel of similar discrimination throughout the United States, not only against the negro, but in the Pacific States and in Hawaii against citizens of Asiatic descent.” Efforts to overcome this discrimination in the Navy, said the board, were “political” problems instigated by both Republicans and Democrats “to gain the support of the negro vote.”
The board therefore recommended limiting colored enlistees to the messmen’s branch. If the president refused, they recommended throwing open the doors to all jobs the Navy offered to men of any race—something they were confident no sane president would do.17
The old refrain of morale, discipline, and the good of the service had always worked before. Except around the edges, Roosevelt had never kicked when the admirals dropped their kedges and refused to budge.
But this time it was different. The nation was at war, and the board hadn�
�t shifted its sails to match the changing winds. The president was prying open factory doors to people of all races, and the Army was training black aviators and platoon leaders. Black families were moving from the rural South to the industrial North, and they would become a political force in the years ahead.
The board also made a serious mistake in calling Roosevelt’s preferences “political.” To Roosevelt, the admirals were using that word in a loaded, partisan sense, and he bristled at the implied accusation of playing politics with the nation’s defense.18
FDR was tired of hearing the Navy buck the tide of progress. As he once told banker Marriner Eccles, “To change anything in the Na-a-vy is like punching a feather bed. You punch it with your right and you punch it with your left until you are finally exhausted, and then you find the damn bed just as it was before you started punching.”19
This time, the feather bed would give. Roosevelt shot back a reply to Knox declaring the board’s report unacceptable. He castigated the admirals for calling his position “political” and lectured the secretary, “Officers of the U.S. Navy are not officers only but are American citizens. . . . It is incumbent on all officers to recognize the fact that about 1/10th of the population of the United States is composed of members of the Negro race who are American citizens.” He ordered the admirals to go back to their offices and prepare a better report.20
A month after Roosevelt’s letter to Knox, the Navy Department’s press office released the name of Doris Miller, the “unidentified Negro messman” whose valor at Pearl Harbor had earned him the Navy Cross. The story of this John Henry and his .50-caliber hammer energized civil rights leaders and pushed Roosevelt to shove the Navy a little more into line.21
American Warlords Page 18
