American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  The Pihl farm was not King’s only port of call. Another naval wife, Abby Dunlap—a longtime friend married to one of King’s Atlantic Fleet officers—lived on a farm in Cockeysville, Maryland, and King was among her frequent visitors. Abby and her sister, Betsy Matter, offered King a place to unwind, where he could sip a glass of Southern Comfort, engage in light banter, and think of nothing strenuous. Betsy was the subject of at least some of King’s affections, and his letters to her were mildly flirtatious.42

  “There would be times,” said Betsy, “when he would come in and sit in the tiny drawing room and we would leave him alone. He would stay in there for perhaps fifteen minutes to a half hour and never say a word to anyone. He would just sit there on the Victorian sofa with his feet stretched out and his head back.” She remembered, “Just before King would arrive we would kill chickens and fix corn and we would all sit out on the terrace and eat. Everyone would put their feet up, completely relaxed, and eat.”43

  Though marital fidelity was not among King’s strong points, the admiral sought out the company of women for something beyond mere carnal diversion. In his line of work, there were not many men he could trust completely. He could let his few hairs down more easily around women, and with a wife and six daughters, he was accustomed to a house filled with feminine banter.

  King’s women friends saw it as their contribution to the war effort. “When King was with Abby he could be amused and relaxed,” Betsy said later. “He could return to work refreshed and ready for anything.”44

  •

  That anything might present itself at any time. In the spring of 1943, a bright spot flickered when Navy cryptologists stumbled upon the travel itinerary of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan’s naval genius behind the offensive of 1941.

  Before the war, Yamamoto had spent a great deal of time in the United States. He loved American sports, read American magazines, and respected America’s production capacity. He harbored no illusions about its latent power, and as Japan looked ahead to war with the United States, he had warned his government, “To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House.”

  By April of 1943, the prospect of making it to Washington looked dimmer than ever, and to boost the morale of his soldiers and sailors, Japan’s most famous admiral decided to make a personal inspection to the front lines near New Guinea.45

  Learning from Nimitz’s codebreakers that Yamamoto would be flying from Rabaul to the Solomon Islands, Roosevelt and Knox arranged for a welcoming party of P-38 Lightnings to greet him over Bougainville. On April 18, the interceptors zeroed in on the bomber carrying the admiral and sent Yamamoto into the next life with a burst of machine-gun fire. His body was recovered by Japanese soldiers near his plane’s wreckage.46

  The killing, on the first anniversary of the Doolittle raid, was a shot in the arm for the American public, which still burned to avenge the dead of Pearl Harbor. When the Japanese government released the news of Yamamoto’s death, Roosevelt, in a jocular mood, sent Leahy a letter for personal delivery to “Mrs. Admiral Yamamoto, Tokyo, Japan.” Borrowing a line from Mark Twain, the letter read:

  Dear Widow Yamamoto:

  Time is a great leveler and I never expected the old boy at the White House anyway. Sorry I can’t attend the funeral because I approve of it.

  Hoping he is where we know he ain’t.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  He scribbled a postscript to Leahy: Ask her to visit you at the Wilson House this summer.47

  TWENTY-NINE

  BLIND SPOTS

  IN HIS OLD CHAIR, AT HIS OLD DESK IN THE NEW PENTAGON BUILDING, HENRY Stimson shook his aged head in disbelief. Marshall had come to him with a lengthy memorandum from Giraud’s staff listing the items the French general wanted for his army. Giraud brusquely informed Marshall that the president himself had approved the requests, and demanded to know when his equipment would arrive.1

  Caught off guard, Marshall went to Stimson. What was this all about? he asked.

  Stimson frowned. The president hadn’t told him of any specific aid list for the French.

  But neither was he surprised. Stimson knew how infuriating it could be to work for a man of Roosevelt’s improvisations. During the Casablanca conference, he had complained to Justice Frankfurter about FDR’s disorganized method of running the world’s largest government. It was far worse, he said, than anything under Hoover, Taft, or even Warren G. Harding.

  Nearly everyone drawn into Roosevelt’s circle became a willing accomplice to the death of orderly procedure, and Frankfurter could offer his mentor neither reassurance nor remedy. He told the secretary that “he had better make up his mind that orderly procedure is not and never has been characteristic of this Administration—it has other virtues, but not that.” The jurist advised Stimson to “reconcile himself to looseness of administration and the inevitable frictions and conflicts resulting therefrom which naturally go against the grain of an orderly, systemic brain like his.”2

  When FDR returned from Casablanca, Stimson marched over to the White House and dressed FDR down for failing to ask his military advisers if what he had agreed to give General Giraud was even possible. Roosevelt shrugged off Stimson’s point, but Stimson, a bulldog in argument, refused to let go. Tightening his jaws around the bone, Stimson sputtered that Hull had complained that the military aid agreements with Giraud might have been signed over a drink, for all the thought that went into it.

  Throwing his head back, Roosevelt laughed and said other agreements he had signed might well have been reached in the same way.3

  • • •

  But Roosevelt wasn’t laughing in June, when the tenuous peace between Giraud and de Gaulle fell apart. In a blitzkrieg power play, de Gaulle seized control of the Comité Français de la Libération Nationale, a body claiming leadership over freed French territories. By the end of the month, de Gaulle’s men had effectively shut out the hapless Giraud.

  Roosevelt, who still bore a grudge against the snooty bride of Casablanca, was incensed. He wrote Churchill, “I am fed up with de Gaulle. I am absolutely convinced that he has been and is now injuring our war effort and that he is a very dangerous threat to us. . . . I agree with you that he likes neither the British nor the Americans and that he would double-cross both of us at the first opportunity.”4

  Much as Roosevelt would have liked to jettison de Gaulle, the uncomfortable truth was that the Gaullists were more fanatical—and more willing to trade French unity for power—than any other faction. They had outshouted their rivals and had the relentless staying power that other resistance groups lacked.

  There was little Roosevelt could do, though that didn’t stop him from trying. When he suggested that Marshall send troops into Dakar to keep the country free of Gaullist influence, Marshall recommended against it. The move, he said, would legitimize Axis propaganda claims that the Allies were trying to dominate France’s political affairs. Until an alternative French leader emerged, FDR would have to live with Charles de Gaulle.5

  •

  FDR refused to bet on de Gaulle’s horse, but in Asia he found another filly that seemed like a sure thing: Chiang Kai-shek.

  As American strategists saw it, the great mass of Chinese troops would keep the Japanese Army pinned down on the Asian mainland if they were given enough tools to do the job. But Japan had cut the Burma Road in early 1942, and without that carotid artery, supplies could only be airlifted over Himalayan peaks that might as well have been guarded by Shiva and Bhairab. The “Hump” route over the Himalayas was too dangerous and too prone to weather close-outs to allow Chennault’s supply planes to move more than the barest trickle of fuel, weapons, and equipment. If Chiang’s government collapsed from lack of sustenance, King feared the war against Japan might be prolonged by ten to fifteen years. As with Stalin the y
ear before, FDR felt the Allies could not afford to let Chiang drop out of the war.6

  Churchill had never understood Roosevelt’s attachment to Generalissimo Chiang. The British Foreign Service, which had dealt with the Chinese for one and a half centuries, had no faith in Chiang’s ability to weld together a nation convulsed by civil war since 1927. Chiang’s struggle against the communists would claim the lives of twenty-five million of his countrymen before it was over, and Chiang and his lieutenants seemed more interested in re-arming for a renewed civil war—or lining their own pockets—than defeating the Japanese.*7

  But the picture from 10 Downing Street looked very different from the picture at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Roosevelt, who had not traveled beyond the Western Hemisphere in a quarter century, was a political genius with a tremendous grasp of America’s economic and social issues. Foreign policy was often his blind spot. He had a habit of cutting out experts like Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles, and he formed snap judgments from reports by a handful of ambassadors, cronies, spymasters, and White House visitors.

  Having spent so much time canvassing all strata of American society—New York financiers, Georgia sharecroppers, California factory workers—Roosevelt assumed he also understood the mind-set of other world leaders and their people. People are the same everywhere, the egalitarian in him proclaimed. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that some people, at least the ones making the decisions, were not animated by common human motives.

  In late February, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek came to Washington to present his case for more military assistance, and this time he brought one of the Kuomintang regime’s most important assets: his wife. Mei-ling Soong, an articulate, Wellesley-educated power broker, was an Oriental blend of Eleanor Roosevelt and Marlene Dietrich, a rare woman whose sharp mind and vague sexual charm mesmerized westerners in equal measure.

  In her formfitting black dresses, a lit cigarette nestled between her glossy red lips, Madame Chiang electrified the Washington press corps and politicians on both sides of the aisle. After her speeches to the Senate and House urging support for Chiang’s people, Washington gossips buzzed over the tigress of the Orient. “I never saw anything like it,” gushed one congressman after her speech to the House. “Madame Chiang had me on the verge of bursting into tears.”8

  Pushing as many buttons as her thin fingers could reach, the first lady of China met privately with FDR, Wendell Willkie, and even the aging Henry Stimson, who found her a “most attractive and beguiling little lady.” A bemused Eleanor Roosevelt wrote to her daughter, Anna Boettiger: “In a queer way I think the men (including FDR) are afraid of her. She is keen & drives her point & wants to nail them down and they squirm.”9

  • • •

  While the Chiangs pitched for aid from Washington, the Joint Chiefs struggled over how to split that aid between their two American field commanders—Major General Claire Chennault, the tough, lantern-jawed commander of the Fourteenth Air Force, and Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, who wore the hats of commander of U.S. ground forces in China, chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang, and commander of U.S. and Chinese ground forces in India.

  The two American officers, both thin and bronzed from months in the Asian countryside, were natural rivals for the trickle of supplies flowing over the Hump. Like hungry lion cubs, they scratched and clawed over every scrap of food, fuel and equipment the Joint Chiefs would give them.10

  Meeting with the Joint Chiefs on May 4, Chennault argued that all supplies should be earmarked for his air forces, which could increase the tempo of the bombing campaign against Japan. Stilwell proposed that the Allies divide supplies evenly between Chennault’s airmen and the Chinese infantry, who would spearhead an offensive to open the Burma Road.11

  The China problem split the Joint Chiefs along unfamiliar lines. Stilwell, one of Marshall’s men at Fort Benning, enjoyed the wholehearted support of the chief of staff and secretary of war. Arnold just as strongly backed Chennault, and the Navy tended to support the air solution. Roosevelt would have to make this call.12

  Stilwell had served in China for years in military and quasi-diplomatic roles. He traveled the countryside, mingled with its people, and spoke the language. But Roosevelt thought his brash approach was the wrong tack with the sensitive Chiang. FDR’s grandfather Warren Delano II had once been a merchant in China, and his late mother, Sarah Delano, had lived in Hong Kong. Believing he knew more about the situation in China than his Mandarin-speaking general did, he wrote to Marshall, “My first thought is that Stilwell has exactly the wrong approach in dealing with Generalissimo Chiang who, after all, cannot be expected, as a Chinese, to use the same methods that we do.”13

  FDR’s second thought was that the dashing Chennault should receive the lion’s share of supplies. But after listening to Stilwell, Chennault, the Combined Chiefs, and Chiang’s foreign minister, Dr. T. V. Soong, Roosevelt split the băobăo: Chinese troops under Stilwell would receive enough supplies to defend Kunming, and Chennault would have most of the rest for his air offensive.14

  It wasn’t a lot, but it was all America could spare for the moment. Roosevelt was getting ready to make an all-out push for the invasion of northern Europe, and he was finding himself thinly spread.

  THIRTY

  STICKPINS

  TWO WEEKS AFTER HIS RETURN FROM CASABLANCA, FDR HELD HIS 879TH press conference since becoming president. Sitting back in his worn office chair as a crowd of notepad-wielding journalists pressed against the desk’s edge, he explained his method of managing his war chiefs:

  You can’t leave things to the military, otherwise nothing gets done. Now that’s a dreadful thing to say, but the fact is that if you get almost all admirals and generals from different nations, or even one nation, talking over future plans, they spend a month or two in talking about why each plan or suggestion won’t work—get just a series of “No’s.”

  On the other hand, if you get certain laymen to stick pins into them all the time—prod them, if you like—and say you have got to have an answer to this, that, and the other thing within so many days, you get an answer.1

  To get those answers, FDR would stick a few more pins. In the spring of 1943 Army intelligence analysts concluded that Hitler’s big summer blow against Russia would put renewed pressure on the Allies to open the long-promised second front. Where that front should be opened—and what character it should take—were questions that would stare the Allies in the face when the upcoming Sicilian campaign came to an end. It was time for another meeting of the western warlords.2

  As Churchill prepared to embark on the ocean liner Queen Mary for his third transatlantic crossing to meet Roosevelt, Roosevelt called Marshall to the White House to talk about the next invasion. Churchill’s roving eye, they both feared, would be directed toward the Italian mainland, the Balkans, or some ancient Greek island that might make a fine USO stop but had no strategic value.3

  • • •

  At Casablanca the Americans had been outmanned, out-thought and outmaneuvered. But for the next round, they would be fighting on far better terrain. At the Washington conference, which Churchill code-named TRIDENT, the American leaders would have the full resources of the War and Navy Departments close to hand. Their limber chests would be filled with shipping timetables, production forecasts, and training schedules. Staffers, defending the flanks, would be ready to attack obscure questions of logistics and air allocation.

  And most of all, they would have the unwavering support of their president.

  To deafen Roosevelt to Churchill’s Mediterranean siren song, the Joint Chiefs prepared a flurry of studies outlining the American game plan. Marshall and King acknowledged that post-Sicily operations in the Italian theater might garner some benefits, and they agreed to discuss them with the British as a possible compromise. But they insisted that any new operations there must reduce the Allied forces in the Mediterranean, not add to them. Furthe
rmore, they wanted any new operations there to be launched in the western half of the great sea, such as on Corsica, Sardinia, or the French Riviera. “The United States will not become involved in operations east of Sicily except possibly for special air operations,” they declared. “If the British insist on doing so, they do it alone.”4

  Roosevelt agreed. It had been a year since he had sent Marshall and Hopkins to London to win British approval for ROUNDUP, and in that year the coalition had followed a decidedly un-American path. That path had done little to alter the titanic struggle between Russia and Germany, it hadn’t opened the Mediterranean to Allied shipping, and it helped neither MacArthur nor Nimitz. It was time to lunge onto the Continent.5

  The day after discussing these points with Roosevelt, the Joint Chiefs suffered an unexpected blow. A heart attack sent General Arnold into Walter Reed Hospital for the second time in ten weeks. The strain of interservice conflicts, the impossible demands on his overstretched forces, and the physical stress of spending thousands of hours in unheated bombers had overloaded his ticker.

  Hap’s absence would deprive the Joint Chiefs of a booming voice on air matters at a critical point in the war. “It is a bad blow to the strength of our smoothly working military machinery,” Stimson wrote. “He is not as cautious and diplomatic as Marshall, who is a good counterpoise to him, but on the other hand he does not hesitate to espouse the unpopular side of a discussion and make it clear even in the face of his chief.” 6

  Marshall, worried about his friend’s health, grew alarmed when he heard that Arnold intended to leave Walter Reed early to deliver a commencement address at West Point in June. “Please don’t do it,” he pleaded. “Your Army future is at stake and I don’t think you should hazard it with a matter of such trivial importance.” He ended his letter with a rare personal closing: “Please be careful. Affectionately, G.C.M.” 7