Roosevelt’s anger flashed as he read the reply signed by Marshall, Arnold, and King. It was July 1942, seven months into the war, and if the American chiefs sincerely wanted to go to the Pacific, they would have given him better answers on short notice.
No, he decided, their proposal was just a ploy to squelch GYMNAST. With evident disgust, he set the memorandum aside, picked up his fountain pen, and scratched out a curt note to his military chiefs:
I have carefully read your estimate of Sunday. My first impression is that it is exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do following Pearl Harbor. Secondly it does not in fact provide use of American Troops in fighting 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 as of the present.
—Roosevelt C in C
To drive home his point, he called his aide, Captain McCrea, and handed him a five-page telephone message to read to Marshall and King. The message concluded, “I am unwilling to continue with Bolero on the full basis unless we are going to do Sledgehammer in 1942. If we cannot, then we must attack at another point. Gymnast might not be decisive but it would hurt Germany, save the Middle East and make Italy vulnerable to our air power. The war will be lost this year in Europe and Africa not in the Pacific. I think we are doing well in the Pacific.”38
• • •
Back at the White House, “Roosevelt C in C” told Stimson he was committed to BOLERO, but he objected to the Pacific business. It was, he said, “a little like taking up your dishes and going away.” Stimson admitted the Pacific option was mostly bluff, but said it was a necessary bluff, to force the British to remain true to BOLERO and ROUNDUP.39
As Stimson left Roosevelt’s office, Marshall came in and, in Stimson’s words, had a “thumping argument” with his commander-in-chief. The general argued vehemently that an African expedition would deplete the force needed for northern France in 1943 while dangerously shortchanging the Pacific. A Pacific strategy, by contrast, would prevent Japan and Germany from joining hands in the Middle East. “Between us the President must have had a rough day on those subjects,” Stimson remarked.40
Unfortunately for Marshall and Stimson, the code names became confused when leaders used BOLERO, SLEDGEHAMMER, and ROUNDUP interchangeably. They were muddled further when the warlords spoke of semi-official variants like SUPER-GYMNAST, Maximum ROUNDUP, and ROUNDHAMMER. Stimson claimed the British were backing off BOLERO when it was really SLEDGEHAMMER they objected to. Marshall thought Brooke and Churchill opposed ROUNDUP, because in his mind GYMNAST made ROUNDUP impossible—though it was only SLEDGEHAMMER that the British opposed. The meaning of the operations thus became lost at times in a fog of code words used imprecisely by the politicians. Or, in the case of Churchill and FDR, disingenuously.41
To cut through this fog, Roosevelt ordered Harry Hopkins to take Marshall and King to London. Together, they were to thrash out an agreement with the British. FDR was firm only about a clash with Germany in 1942, and he told Hopkins over dinner, “I do not believe we can wait until 1943 to strike at Germany. If we cannot strike at SLEDGEHAMMER, then we must take the second best—and that is not in the Pacific.”42
Marshall and King drafted instructions for themselves and submitted them to Roosevelt for his signature. Roosevelt, still miffed over their Pacific bluff, scratched “Not Approved” across the top with his pen, then rewrote their orders. “If SLEDGEHAMMER is finally and definitely out of the picture, I want you to consider the world situation as it exists at that time and determine upon another place for U.S. troops to fight in 1942,” he stressed. Four times in his three-page instruction letter he demanded a major operation in the year 1942, and as with his previous letter, he signed the letter, “Commander-in-Chief.”43
•
Marshall and King arrived in London on July 19, and for three days they fired every shell in their limbers to convince their hosts to conserve men and ships for ROUNDUP. Marshall even tried to convert SLEDGEHAMMER from a sacrifice play into a full-fledged invasion for the fall—a foothold that would be pushed in full the following spring.44
The British found Marshall’s arguments absurd. The Empire had spent two years just trying to survive the war. Now they were trying not to lose it. They had lost too many long bets at Singapore, Crete, Tobruk, and Norway, and had no appetite to push their luck again. It was not yet time, in British eyes, to win the war, especially on a shoot-the-moon wager.
“The burned child dreads fire,” King put it.45
A four-sided standoff emerged. Marshall and King insisted on an invasion of northwestern France in 1942. The British chiefs agreed with the Americans on the where, but violently disagreed over the when. Churchill agreed with the Americans on when, but disagreed with the military men over where; he wanted North Africa, or perhaps even Norway, either of which could be invaded in 1942. Roosevelt had his own when, but he didn’t care where the Allies landed, so long as U.S. soldiers were shooting at German soldiers before year’s end.
Cables buzzed back and forth between Hopkins and Roosevelt as the stalemate hardened. The two old friends concocted a private code for the negotiators, taken from the names of FDR’s acquaintances at Hyde Park: Marshall was “Plog,” the name of a Roosevelt family superintendent; King was “Barrett,” a local farm manager; Churchill was “Moses Smith,” a man who rented a farm on Roosevelt lands; and Brooke was “Mr. Bee,” the caretaker of FDR’s hillside cottage.46
Moses and Mr. Bee refused to budge, and after a rearguard battle, General Plog and Admiral Barrett were cornered by a reality as bleak as it was inescapable: An invasion of France was simply impossible before late September or October. The landing would be too little, too late, to be of any real use to Stalin, and if they attempted it, their men might be trapped on the French coast and driven into the sea.
“Moses Smith” ended the debate on July 22 by laying the question before the British War Cabinet, which unanimously voted down a cross-Channel invasion that year. FDR gave Marshall and King a peremptory order: the Americans were to agree to an operation somewhere to be commenced no later than October 30—not coincidentally, five days before the congressional midterm elections.
They had fought like Horatius at the bridge, but it was no use. Out of ammunition, surrounded, and staring defeat in the face, Marshall and King surrendered.47
• • •
A downcast George Marshall returned to his hotel suite at Claridge’s, sat down at his desk, and took up a pencil. What, he asked himself, would be the least dangerous diversion? The Middle East? Norway? West Africa?
Scratching out several options, he settled on French North Africa, the British preference. A limited foray there would meet Roosevelt’s requirements. ROUNDUP would be dead for 1943, because GYMNAST would eat up the needed shipping, but he felt the buildup in England might continue on a smaller scale, in case some unexpected opportunity sprang up on the Continent.48
As Marshall assembled his thoughts, Admiral King walked in. Marshall outlined his view of the lesser evil, and King, to Marshall’s surprise, supported him without qualification. “It is remarkable now,” Marshall told an interviewer, “but King accepted without a quibble. Usually he argued over all our plans.”49
The next day Marshall presented his proposal to the British chiefs and asked for their endorsement. The Combined Chiefs of Staff approved Marshall’s official summary in a bureaucratic-sounding memorandum designated “CCS/94.”
But before they could forward CCS/94 to the two leaders, a cable arrived from Washington. Roosevelt “evidently had a sharp attack of strategy the previous evening,” one British staffer told his diary. He proposed “combining GYMNAST with Dakar and God only knows where else” for a fall invasion. Hopkins fired off a cable to Washington asking Roosevelt to hold off until the Combined Chiefs finished their plan.5
0
The War Cabinet also threw a last-minute wrench into the delicate deal by disputing a line in Marshall’s proposed summary, which noted that GYMNAST in 1942 would make ROUNDUP impossible for 1943. “They didn’t want it used against them politically if they prevented ROUNDUP in 1943, thus delaying the freeing of Europe,” Marshall later explained. “I blew hell out of that and said unless the cabinet agreed I wouldn’t go along.”51
A compromise, softening Marshall’s sullen indictment of GYMNAST, was eventually worked out. GYMNAST was rechristened TORCH, a merciful end to a code name that had caused such bitter feelings among allies.52
• • •
Before the Americans left London on July 25, the British threw them a bone. In return for scrapping SLEDGEHAMMER, they consented to an American commander in the North African theater. Marshall returned to Claridge’s and had an aide summon General Eisenhower.53
The chief of staff had a bath drawn. He had undressed and immersed himself for a few minutes when he heard a knock on the lavatory door. It was Eisenhower. Not one for formalities—Marshall enjoyed dropping big news on subordinates in an offhanded way—Marshall brought Ike up to speed through the bathroom door, and told him an American would command the invasion of North Africa. That American, if Marshall and King had their way, would be General Eisenhower. The two men chatted for a moment, and Eisenhower left Marshall’s bathroom doorway a happy man.54
In eight months following Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower had earned Marshall’s confidence. The Kansan understood logistics and transportation, and he grasped the political realities that Marshall and Stimson faced daily in Washington. And unlike MacArthur, Eisenhower was not the type to scream for more, more, more.
As a measure of his trust, Marshall encouraged Eisenhower to take the Army’s top-level talent with him to Africa. Before long, Generals George Patton, Lloyd Fredendall, Lucian Truscott, and Terry Allen, along with Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, the Army’s ablest staff officer, would select trails that thousands of fighting men would follow. Whatever his personal feelings, TORCH was to be the Allied centerpiece for the year, and Marshall was determined to give it every opportunity to succeed.55
•
A dejected Stimson said nothing publicly about his disagreement with Roosevelt, but it did not take long for hints of dissent to begin creeping into the newspapers. An angry FDR felt pressure to deny the implication that he was ignoring the advice of his military experts, and at a cabinet meeting on August 7, he told his ministers he had never overridden the advice of his military men, unless the Army and Navy disagreed and required a tie-breaker.56
Knox and Stimson, who knew better, held their tongues. But Stimson left the cabinet meeting with the feeling that Franklin Roosevelt, for all his positive qualities, was either self-delusional or a casual liar. Against the unequivocal advice of Admiral King, Generals Marshall and Arnold, and Secretaries Stimson and Knox, the president had vetoed the Pacific proposal and let the British kill SLEDGEHAMMER-ROUNDUP. Roosevelt, Stimson concluded, had a “happy faculty of fooling himself and this was one of the most extreme cases of it that I have ever seen.” 57
On the following Monday he drafted a letter to the president. In correct yet vaguely defiant tones, he reminded Roosevelt that he had overruled the advice of his military chiefs concerning North Africa. TORCH, he reiterated, would delay the liberation of France until at least 1944.58
Stimson took his draft to Marshall, who urged him not to send it. The letter would only stir up a hornet’s nest, to no good result. Besides, he said, as the president’s military adviser, he felt that he himself should be the one to lodge a protest, if a protest were needed. If Marshall let Stimson go to bat for him on a military argument, he said, it would appear as if he were “not being manly enough to do it himself.”59
Stimson believed the president had been guilty of self-deception. He was, in Stimson’s mind, an amateur making a rash decision about military matters where lives would be spared, ruined, and forever altered. Marshall said that Roosevelt knew exactly what he was doing. The upcoming midterm elections made him hungry for a military victory over Germany, and Roosevelt wanted tangible progress to show the public before November 3, 1942.60
But intentional or not, Roosevelt would do a lot more meddling. King and Marshall were about to see a new face in the president’s inner circle.
TWENTY-THREE
CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD
LIKE MANY THINGS IN ROOSEVELT’S WAR, CHANGE AT THE TOP BEGAN WITH the Navy. After Pearl Harbor, he appointed Ernie King as Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet, the Navy’s top fighting admiral, while Betty Stark remained Chief of Naval Operations—the man running long-term planning, shore logistics, budgets, and everything else that didn’t go “boom.”1
King found the arrangement unworkable. He believed the fuzzy, fluid line between strategic planning and battle planning required a single man to direct weapons and manpower to the fleet captains who used them. He told Secretary Knox he would step down as COMINCH in favor of Stark, if that was what Roosevelt wanted, but either Stark or King had to go. Knox took King to see Roosevelt, and in his low, slow cadence, King explained that the dual monarchy was breaking down.2
It was another decision that could only be made by the commander-in-chief, and like many of Roosevelt’s decisions, it came down to his feeling for personalities. Stark was a good, intellectual administrator, but King was a fighter, and in war the Navy needed fighters. Besides, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, with its investigations and calls for scapegoats, Roosevelt wasn’t about to place Betty Stark in charge of the war at sea. Roosevelt gave Betty a Distinguished Service Medal and packed him off to Europe, out of easy reach of Congress, and out of King’s few remaining hairs. Admiral Ernest J. King, he announced, would assume the duties of both COMINCH and CNO.3
King told his staff to draft an executive order for Roosevelt’s signature defining his new duties, and Roosevelt signed King’s order into law as Executive Order 9096 on March 12. With a smiling Frank Knox looking on, Admiral King gingerly placed his fingertips on the corner of a Bible and took the oath of office of chief of naval operations. When he released the Bible, he became the most powerful admiral on earth.4
• • •
Ernie King had little beyond mild amusement—with a liberal sprinkling of contempt—for the civilians who ran the Navy Department. Some he could safely ignore. Assistant Secretary Ralph Bard, for instance, the department’s head of civilian personnel, invited King to lunch time and again, while King excused himself, always pleading “press of business.” Bard finally gave up. “I didn’t have time to educate those people,” King muttered.5
But even the Navy’s undisputed heavyweight champ couldn’t ignore everyone. Secretary Knox was one of those “too-important-to-ignore” functionaries—which, to King, was most unfortunate. The secretary was, in his eyes, a civilian interloper of the worst kind, a landlubber-politician who had no idea how to run a navy at sea or ashore. To King, Knox and his undersecretary, a Dutchess County politico named James Forrestal, were incompetents to be tolerated but not encouraged. In 1942, a mutual friend passed on to King one of Secretary Knox’s complaints that King wouldn’t tell him about the Navy’s war plans. King snorted, “Why should I? The first thing he does is to tell the reporters everything he knows.”6
Each morning, King would arrive at Knox’s chart room on Main Navy’s second deck for an 8:30 a.m. conference of the bureau chiefs, the Marine Corps commandant, and the COMINCH department heads. Before one meeting, when the only men present were Knox, King, and Captain McCrae, the president’s naval aide, King and Knox began quietly arguing over a matter at Knox’s desk. As their voices grew terse and snappish, McCrae, standing on the far side of the room, heard Knox bellow, “Admiral King, that matter has been settled! I don’t want it raised again. I trust you understand that the final word has been said!”
McCrae glanced up to see Knox glaring a
t King. King, his face flushed, glared back at Knox, furious but unable to tell Knox what he really thought of him. Soon other conferees arrived, and the argument was overtaken by the meeting.
The next morning, King summoned McCrae to his office overlooking Constitution Avenue. Standing stiffly, his back to the large picture windows, King asked, “You were at the secretary’s conference yesterday, were you not?”
“Yes, sir,” said McCrae.
“You heard what the secretary said to me?”
“I did, sir.”
“I want to inform you that I am going to make an issue of his remarks,” said King. “I have never been so spoken to since I can remember. I just want to make sure that you heard what he said to me and how he said it.”
King obviously planned to take the matter up with the president, and with unaccustomed temerity, McCrae told the admiral that Knox had been within his rights. More importantly, McCrae said, the president had enough problems with strategy, Allied relations, domestic politics, the economy, and war production. He didn’t need to be dragged into a personal spat between his navy secretary and senior admiral.
The lava in King’s core began to bubble up from the mantle. As it rose through the crust, King’s face turned the shade of crimson that his staffers had learned to dread. But he said nothing and spun away from McCrae and faced his window for a long, measured minute.
Then he turned back slowly, eyeing McCrae like he was measuring him for a coffin.
“Good day,” he said, biting off his words.7
Thinking further, he let the matter drop.
• • •
As he balanced the twin duties of CNO and COMINCH, Admiral King learned how difficult Roosevelt could make life. While their relationship was cordial and constructive, FDR’s experience as a small-craft yachtsman and former Navy assistant secretary gave him license, he felt, to meddle in details of naval assignments, promotion, warship construction, and strategy. King’s jobs.
American Warlords Page 24
