And everyone would take orders from the Joint Chiefs.
So they hoped.
•
“The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril,” Winston Churchill later wrote.
Churchill had good reason to be frightened during the spring and summer of 1942, for the Battle of the Atlantic was going badly for the Allies. During the first three months of 1942, Hitler’s roaming U-boats—only a dozen or so at any given time—sent 237 ships to the ocean floor. Their happiest hunting grounds shifted from the eastern Atlantic, near Britain and Iceland, to the U.S. coastline. From Maine to Miami, city lights threw out an incandescent invitation to U-boat captains, who were grateful to find clear silhouettes of unescorted oil tankers and merchantmen passing by.* The gray wolves slaughtered the lambs faster than the Allies could replace them, and the president and public demanded that something be done.19
What that something might be remained unclear, for there were simply not enough escort destroyers to go around. When convoys were organized in one area, wolf packs simply moved to other waters, such as the Gulf of Mexico, where hunting was safe and prey abundant. The first German submarine was not sunk until March 1942. By May, six months into the war, the Allies had lost more than 360 merchant ships; the U.S. Navy, Royal Navy, Army Air Forces, and Coast Guard managed to sink a combined total of eight subs in the western Atlantic and Caribbean. Unfortunately for King, Hitler’s shipyards were turning out eight new subs about every ten days.20
In his office, his chart room, and his cabin at night, King’s thoughts turned to the challenges of protecting ships carrying the provisions Britain and Russia needed to survive. The first problem, he well knew, was a simple shortage of escorts. Fixated on big capital ships, the prewar Navy had paid scant attention to small craft and subchasers. When war broke out it had no corvettes, few planes, and few destroyers—and those few ships and planes were stretched across the Iceland-to-Murmansk run, the Atlantic, three U.S. coasts, and the Pacific from Alaska to Australia. The only solution was to wait for more of those small but precious fighters to slide off the docks, and a system of escorted convoys would not be fully operational until mid-May.21
A second problem was a shortage of bombers. Heavy and medium bombers, with their long range, big payloads, and radar units, made excellent sub hunters. But bombers were owned by the Army, and Army pilots were not trained to patrol water and protect shipping. Army bombardiers might hit a large, stationary factory or bridge, but they couldn’t hit a crash-diving submarine with a depth charge.
King intended to rectify that. He wrote to General Arnold and asked for 1,300 bombers, B-24 and B-25 type, to conduct coastal patrols in the United States and Australia. Arnold refused, telling King he didn’t have the planes to spare. Besides, he said, the B-24 was a long-range, strategic bomber, and the Air Force was the proper branch to carry out long-range missions. Congress placed coastal air patrols in the hands of the Army, not the Navy, and that was where they belonged. If King wanted an antisub air group, the Air Force would supply the bombers, but they would remain under Air Force command.22
Stimson heartily agreed. The Army had spent years developing bases, training programs, and logistical infrastructure to support its bomber fleet. One could not simply hand bombers over to sailors and assume they could do the job competently, any more than airmen could pilot a warship. The most Stimson would approve was a temporary proposal to give “unity of command” authority to admirals of the Eastern Sea Frontier over the First Bomber Command. But direct command of the bombers would remain with the Army.23
The more Ernie King saw of Henry Stimson, the less he liked him. King conceded that Stimson was an able statesman, but when he got an idea into his head, he simply couldn’t let it go.
“Stimson was more than firm,” King groused years later. “He was stubborn. Marshall had a hell of a time with him, just as Lee had with Jefferson Davis. In fact, Lee managed Davis, but Marshall had great trouble with Stimson.” King added, “I’ve been thinking many times about Secretary Stimson, and why he did not like the Navy. Probably he went to sea once and got in a storm. That’s the way Hoover was. He went in a battleship to South America, got seasick, and never liked the Navy.”24
Neither had King forgiven Stimson for protecting Marshall over Pearl Harbor, while Betty Stark took the fall. He felt Marshall was just as culpable as Stark, yet Stark was being mothballed while Marshall was running the land war.
“The Army did not really tell the exact truth about what happened there,” King muttered in his later years. The unshakable feeling that Marshall had escaped punishment, partly through Stimson’s intervention, galled King to no end.25
Turning his broadsides back to Arnold, King sent the air chief another lecture in what, for him, was a king’s ransom of words:
All of us—no matter what uniform we wear—must go to work to win the war. I stand on the ground that whenever the use of land planes will enable Naval air units more effectively to perform their tasks, they should have land planes. Whenever the Army air forces can make use of torpedoes, dive-bombers, etc.—as developed and used by the Navy—they should be free to make use of them. . . . I think that it is high time the trend toward a separate air force should be given up—and that we face the realities of the situation with which we are confronted.”26
• • •
The stalemate continued through the summer with no resolution. Trying to prod King into accepting an Army-run coastal air command, Marshall replied with a testy letter of his own:
The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort. . . . Of the 74 ships allocated to the Army by the War Shipping Administration, 17 of them have already been sunk. Twenty-two percent of the Bauxite fleet has already been destroyed. Twenty percent of the Puerto Rican fleet has been lost. Tanker sinkings have been 3.5 percent per month of tonnage in use.
We are aware of the very limited number of escort craft available, but has every conceivable improvised means been brought to bear on this situation? I am fearful that another month or two of this will so cripple our means of transport that we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy in critical theaters to exercise a determining influence on the war.27
King countered with an elaborate defense of the Navy’s efforts to stop the U-boat menace. In the end he admitted, however, “Our east coast system is far from invulnerable and we may expect the Germans to return to this area whenever they feel inclined to accept a not-too-heavy risk.”28
As ships went down in the Atlantic, ownership of the bombers remained stuck in a tug-of-war between the Navy’s top admiral and the secretary of war. In the Pacific, Admiral King was quietly planning his first spectacular blow of the war.
NINETEEN
SHARKS AND LIONS
THE SEAS PITCHED AND TOSSED AS USS HORNET TURNED INTO FORTY-KNOT headwinds. The carrier’s long, flat deck rolled, and officers doubted that the plump bombers lining the runway would even make it into the air. Nothing that size had ever been launched from a carrier, and sailors pictured themselves fishing half-drowned bomber crews from billowing waves.
The flight deck officers, their yellow jackets adding a festive look to the runway, took the measure of the ship’s pitch and raised their arms to signal “go.” Glancing out the bomber’s side window, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, the group’s leader, pushed his throttle levers, and the two big engines roared. He released the brake, and plane, crew, and bombs lurched forward.
As it rolled to the deck’s edge, Doolittle’s B-25 waddled so sluggishly it seemed impossible that it could get airborne by the time the deck ended and the ocean began. Doolittle heaved back on the stick, and the twin-tailed plane yanked up, nearly stalled, then went nose down toward the water.
Then, inexplicably, the ten-ton monster clawed its way into the air. Like an
ungainly bumblebee, it slowly gained altitude, and within an hour Doolittle was circling overhead with fifteen other bombers. The bumblebees, airborne now, flew west. Destination: Japan.1
• • •
The Doolittle raid was the child of Admiral King’s bloodlust and the creative impulses of Captains Francis “Frog” Low and Donald Duncan, two of King’s planners. The raid required the approval of Marshall and Hap, of course—the bombers belonged to the Army—and President Roosevelt had to authorize the mission. Knox and King cautioned Roosevelt not to ask too many questions, however, and he dutifully backed off. It would not be until the mission was well under way that more than seven people knew the complete details of what was going on.2
The bombers reached Japan’s shores on the afternoon of April 18 and emptied their bays on Tokyo and five other cities. Oil refineries, an aircraft plant, and a Japanese ship went up in flames. Smoke billowed into the sky, and the bombers jogged through antiaircraft fire for the safety of China and Vladivostok.*
Back home, news of the “Doolittle Raid” electrified the public. After taking it on the chin for four months, America had landed a blow of its own. Headlines screamed, “AMERICAN PLANES BOMB TOKYO,” and editorial cartoonists set their pens to drawing beefy American arms shoving oversized bombs down the throat of an apelike, bespectacled Tojo. Even Henry Stimson, a skeptic of the plan, admitted that the raid produced “a very good psychological effect in the country both here and abroad.” 3
The Doolittle Raid was the kind of dramatic statement Roosevelt loved to make, at least when there was nothing else for him to do. When asked by reporters where the bombers had been launched from, he gave them an inscrutable grin. Referring to the mythical realm in Hilton’s Lost Horizon, he replied, “They came from our new secret base at Shangri-La!”4
•
But Shangri-La, wherever it might be, was too far from Berlin to launch a Doolittle raid against Hitler. Before the ARCADIA meetings with the British, Marshall and Stimson had been so busy fighting fires in the Pacific, sending aid to America’s allies, and mobilizing for war that they had little time to focus on where to fight Hitler. When the conference ended, Marshall ordered his planners to take a hard look at America’s options. As they looked, British talk of Africa and the Middle East began to sour in their stomachs.
Marshall and Eisenhower believed the fastest way to win the war was to assemble overwhelming forces in the British Isles in 1942, then launch an invasion of northwestern France the next year. To men seeking the “decisive battle,” that holy grail of military strategists, the logic was inescapable. “We’ve got to go to Europe and fight,” Brigadier General Eisenhower told his diary. “We’ve got to quit wasting resources all over the world—and still worse—wasting time.” 5
To carry the war to Germany, Eisenhower planned three operations, code-named BOLERO, SLEDGEHAMMER, and ROUNDUP. BOLERO, like Ravel’s symphonic score, was a steady buildup of land, air, and naval forces in the United Kingdom. SLEDGEHAMMER was an emergency invasion of the French coast in 1942, to draw German forces away from Stalin if it appeared the Red Army was going down for the count. ROUNDUP, to be launched in the spring of 1943, was the main invasion of France. After careful study, Marshall approved Eisenhower’s proposals, and he presented them to Roosevelt at a White House luncheon on March 25, with Stimson, Knox, King, Hopkins, and Arnold listening supportively.6
As Roosevelt listened, he instinctively began tossing out possible operations in and around the Mediterranean. Marshall and Stimson pulled hard on the wheel to steer him back to France. “He looked like a man going off on the wildest dispersion debauch,” wrote Stimson that night. “But, after he had toyed a while with the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin, which last he seemed to be charmed with, Marshall and I edged the discussion over to the Atlantic and held him there.” 7
Stimson could see only one strategy. From his time as an artilleryman in France, and from his wide reading over the decades, Henry Stimson believed with the zeal of a religious convert that concentration of force (BOLERO), and violent execution (ROUNDUP), were the “proper and orthodox” means of fighting the Germans. Paper cuts in the Mediterranean would do nothing except siphon off men and ships needed for the smashing blow in France.8
Blunt force was the nature of Henry Stimson’s personality. He lived life on a big scale. He reveled in vigorous exercise, traveled the world, and hunted big game. In arguments before court, he preferred the rhetorical sledgehammer to the rapier. When presenting a point to Roosevelt, he eschewed understatement and unleashed Verdun-like barrages of evidence and argument from lengthy, bombastic memoranda.9
To set ROUNDUP in motion, there were two rapids Stimson and Marshall would have to cross. The first was America’s ally. The British had their fingers in a hundred colonial pies, and their eyes were drawn to India, the East Indies, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and the connecting sea-lanes. Those regions protected His Britannic Majesty’s interests, but they would not win the war. Stimson feared that Churchill and his generals, if not kept on a short leash, might fritter away Allied strength on interesting but indecisive theaters.10
The second problem was Roosevelt. FDR supported a decisive invasion of Northwest Europe, and in early 1941 he had told Marshall and Stark that “we must be ready to act with what we [have] available.” But that was before Pearl Harbor. With casualties mounting in the Pacific and vital equipment scarce, Roosevelt dreaded a premature invasion that invited disaster. Like Churchill, he began looking for alternatives to a battle royale in 1942.11
• • •
On Stimson’s advice, FDR ordered Hopkins and Marshall to fly to England, their mission being to win over the British to a European invasion. The two men, accompanied by a few of Marshall’s staffers, arrived in London on April 8 and got down to business with the British high command.12
The general who would be negotiating strategy with Marshall was General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Four years younger than Marshall, Brooke had commanded an artillery unit in the First World War and a corps during the Second. He stood slightly shorter than Marshall, and Brooke’s narrow face was dominated by large owl-like eyes, a heavy, patrician nose, and a frown of the sort that might be found on some rare and exotic bird, such as a gray hornbill or a self-confident bald ibis. Nicknamed “Colonel Shrapnel” behind his back by intimidated staffers, Brooke was abrupt and somewhat rude by nature. His personality had been hardened by a long military lineage, the death of his wife in a car accident, and the recent horrors of Dunkirk. When pressed in conference, he would fire back with the rapid cadence of a Vickers gun and overwhelm his opponent with facts and figures, not all of which were necessarily germane to the dispute.13
Colonel Shrapnel held little regard for the Johnny-come-lately Yanks who knew nothing of the German fighting man, and his first impression of Marshall was of a pleasant man lacking military sense. As Brooke later remarked in his diary, Marshall “is, I should think, a good general at raising armies and providing the necessary links between the military and political worlds. But his strategical ability does not impress me at all!!! In fact, in many respects he is a very dangerous man whilst being a very charming one!” 14
When Marshall outlined American plans to Britain’s Defence Committee on April 9, he ran into fierce opposition to SLEDGEHAMMER, a risky operation for which the British would foot most of the bill. Having buried their dead in the Balkans, the Middle East, France, Belgium, and the Orient, British ministers were in no mood to pay the ferryman again.
The British view, as Marshall might have expected, was both global and flexible. To the Britons, Northwest Europe was a heavily defended corner of a much larger battlefield. In peripheral theaters like the Near East, a region anchored by Tobruk, in Libya, and Alexandria, in Egypt, the Allies could drain manpower from Hitler—much as the Spanish and Portuguese, aided by British gold, had drained the blood of Napoleon’s
Grande Armée 130 years before.
Complicating perceptions on both sides was the British experience in the First World War. Harking back to the slaughter of 1915, Lord Moran told Marshall the Americans were fighting the ghosts of the Somme. It became an article of faith in American circles that the last war was dictating Britain’s strategy for the present one.15
But the British were not just plowing Flanders fields anew. In their darkest hours of 1940, when Hitler had threatened England with invasion, they had considered every facet of a Channel crossing from the receiving end. As they planned air, sea, and land defenses against Hitler’s landing barges, His Majesty’s subalterns developed a keen appreciation of the naval and air obstacles to a cross-Channel assault. Those obstacles, which had protected their island nation, worked in both directions.
Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Britain’s combined operations chief, told Marshall the Allies lacked enough landing craft to deliver sufficient troops. Air Chief Marshal Portal cautioned that the RAF could not provide adequate air cover. SLEDGEHAMMER was, in the British view, an impossibility for 1942.16
They appeared much more sympathetic toward ROUNDUP, which would not take place until the spring of 1943. With Churchill taking the lead, the British war chiefs said they were in agreement with the Americans about ROUNDUP as the centerpiece for the next year, and they asked the Americans to proceed energetically with the BOLERO buildup in England. At a meeting with the War Cabinet on April 14, Churchill spoke glowingly of a cross-Channel effort and said nothing about North Africa. The nations, he said, would “march ahead in a noble brotherhood of arms.” Churchill’s burly military adviser, General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, recalled, “We were all rather carried away by the idea of millions of Americans falling into England and charging into the Channel and I thought that Winston was carried away emotionally with this great brotherhood in arms.”17
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