American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  Roosevelt understood failing health. He suffered from bronchitis, sinusitis, high blood pressure, and fatigue far more than he would admit. He worked in sustained bursts of energy, but his mainspring would run down so low he needed long periods to rest at Hyde Park, Warm Springs, and other places of seclusion.

  Sympathy aside, Roosevelt wasn’t sure that a man with a bad heart ought to be running the war’s air fleet. “If he continues as commanding general,” Roosevelt asked Arnold’s cardiologist, “is it likely to endanger his life?” The doctor said it could—though at Arnold’s request, he reminded the president that when combat crews go on missions they too put their lives in danger; there was no reason their commanding general should shrink from the same risk.

  FDR, who had used that same argument against friends who advised him not to run for a third term, agreed with Arnold. Before the war, Arnold had been in Roosevelt’s doghouse, but he was playing ball now, and Roosevelt liked the man’s fighting spirit. He would keep Hap in the pilot’s seat. For now, at least.8

  • • •

  The Queen Mary steamed into New York’s crowded harbor on May 11, her hold crammed with 5,000 German prisoners bagged in Tunisia. Her upper-deck staterooms, crammed with papers, baggage, and wartime luxuries, catered to Winston Churchill and one hundred military advisers, political staffers, valets, secretaries, and personal assistants. Harry Hopkins greeted the prime minister at the Staten Island pier and whisked him to the White House for one of Mrs. Nesbitt’s bland dinners.9

  Formal meetings of the Allied high command began the next afternoon at the White House with a broad overview of global strategy by the two political leaders. Churchill argued that Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was still impregnable. Better, he argued, to invade the Italian mainland. A successful landing near Rome might knock Italy out of the war, which would eliminate the Italian Navy as a naval threat. The surrender of Italy would, in turn, encourage Turkey to declare for the Allies, and it would loosen the Nazi grip on the Balkans. “The collapse of Italy would cause a chill of loneliness over the German people, and might be the beginning of their doom,” the minutes record Churchill prognosticating. “Even if not immediately fatal to Germany, the effects of Italy coming out of the war would be very great, first of all on Turkey, who had always measured herself with Italy in the Mediterranean.”10

  FDR’s focus, understandably, embraced both Europe and Asia. He said he expected a commitment to invade the Continent during 1944. On the Asian mainland, he said the Chinese were not “crying wolf” when they demanded material support. They were on the brink of collapse, and Roosevelt wanted western China preserved as a fortress from which attacks against Japan could be launched. It was imperative that the United States and Britain sustain the Kuomintang Army.11

  With those remarks, the battle lines were drawn.

  • • •

  While Churchill and FDR continued their talks over tobacco and drinks in the Rose Suite, the Combined Chiefs met in the Board of Governors room at the Federal Reserve Building to put meat on the strategic bones. Chaired by Admiral Leahy, the morning session saw Marshall and Brooke plunge into the first and most intractable problem: where to go after Sicily.

  Surrounded by a silent audience of staffers, the two generals sparred like gladiators over the next big invasion. Brooke wanted a leap from Sicily to the Italian mainland; Italy’s surrender, he claimed, would force Hitler to pull at least twenty German divisions off the Russian front to secure the Balkans—and several more to block the exits around the Italian Alps. If they did not invade Italy, then three Allied armies would sit idle until the spring of 1944. “It is unthinkable that we should be inactive during these critical months when Russia is engaging about 185 German divisions,” the British chiefs declared.12

  Marshall replied that ROUNDUP could go forward only if all detours were, for once, ignored. The Allies would “deeply regret not being ready to make the final blow against Germany, if the opportunity presented itself, by reason of having dissipated ground forces in the Mediterranean area.” Raising the specter of the Pacific again, he declared that a burgeoning Mediterranean strategy would “mean a prolongation of the war in Europe, and thus a delay in the ultimate defeat of Japan, which the people of the U.S. would not tolerate.”13

  Brooke felt that Marshall was missing the point, though in an unusual display of tact, he didn’t say so outright. He did say that an Italian landing to draw off German troops was a prerequisite to ROUNDUP. Without that diversion, even if the Allies could land fifteen or twenty divisions of green troops on the French coast, they would be quickly bottled up by battle-hardened Germans moving unhindered from the Russian Front. Brooke warned the Americans, “No operations would be possible until 1945 or 1946, since it must be remembered that in previous wars there had always been some 80 French divisions available on our side.”14

  Thunderstruck by Brooke’s suggestion that Europe might not be invaded until 1945 or 1946, Marshall dug in his heels and refused to budge. Churchill wouldn’t let his chiefs make a tactical retreat from Italy, even had they been so inclined, so progress quickly ground to a halt.

  • • •

  In their meetings at Casablanca and Washington, the Combined Chiefs struggled to reach compromises that cut into their deeply held beliefs. But smaller annoyances added to the basic problems of strategy and national war aims.

  The English language was one of them. Things necessary for operations, to the Americans, were “requirements,” while in British vernacular they were “demands.” The word “demands” had an imperious ring to the American ear, and when the British presented “demands,” it sounded like an edict from King George III to his colonists. Similarly, the British might suggest that the group “table” a difficult matter—meaning lay it on the table for discussion—while to the Americans, to “table” something meant to set it aside for the future.15

  It took time to overcome these small but irritating differences, particularly when they were shot from General Brooke, whose rapid-fire delivery, French-Ulster accent, and easy excitability grated on American nerves. Alan Brooke, for all his strategic acumen, lacked tact. The British chiefs, recognizing Brooke’s limitations, sometimes tried to channel the discussion through the smoother Air Marshal Portal, but that was not always an option.

  Then there was the “cloud of witnesses,” as Dill called the staffers, aides, and assistants who watched the Combined Chiefs like spectators at Rome’s Circus Maximus. For every British staff officer who thought the Americans were strategic rubes, there was an American staffer who believed the British were devious agents of imperialism. In front of staffers with whom they worked every day, it proved difficult for both groups of chiefs to back off positions they had worked up with their staffers before the meetings.16

  Through three days of negotiations, a deadlock set in over the interconnected problems of the Mediterranean, France, and the Pacific. Tempers became short, veiled threats grew less veiled, and the meetings lurched forward without consensus. Distrust penetrated the Anglo-American relationship the way a vine’s tendrils reach into a wall and separate brick from mortar over time. Something had to be done.

  To rebuild their working relationships, Marshall arranged for the Combined Chiefs to take a break. On Saturday, May 15, he brought the British chiefs and their aides to Colonial Williamsburg for a weekend of sightseeing, fine dining and relaxation. Chaperoned by General McNarney and Marshall’s aide, Colonel Frank McCarthy, the party lodged at the Williamsburg Inn, a magnificent period hotel built by millionaire John D. Rockefeller Jr.

  As they stepped back in time along wooden shops and cobblestone streets, the masters of war withdrew from the horrors of industrial-scale death. Strolling along Duke of Gloucester Street in the evening, walking past the Capitol, Raleigh Tavern, and the old brick magazine, the men shared a blissful moment when they could mingle as friends and ponder an era when their forefathers had carved out
an empire together. Isolated from the cares of office, Marshall talked of duck hunting with Wavell and the frail Admiral Pound, while Brooke spoke of his passion for birdwatching and Portal discoursed on falconry.17

  To ensure the camaraderie flowed into the evening, Marshall’s aide brought a case of bourbon, a case of scotch, two bottles of gin, two of brandy, and a bottle of vermouth. The men ate like kings, a few swam in the inn’s pool—Air Chief Marshal Portal lost his borrowed swimming trunks after one audacious dive—and General Marshall plucked out “Poor Butterfly” on an antique harpsichord as the warlords sipped their drinks.

  Next morning they attended services at a local church. Admiral Pound, the senior British guest, read the Scripture from the sixth chapter of Matthew: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought of the things of itself.”

  As they drove back to Langley on Sunday afternoon, Marshall hoped cooler minds would prevail when they returned to work.18

  To Marshall’s disappointment, the British chiefs had hardly sat down at that long, remorseless table before they locked shields and argued their plans for Italy as if the weekend had never existed. Brooke watching red-breasted robins, Portal swimming bare-assed in the pool, Pound reading, “Take no thought for the morrow.” Back in Washington, those men were taking thoughts of far too many morrows for Marshall’s liking. Morrows of 1946, or even later. Marshall was personally prepared to violate the biblical injunction into, say, the morrows of 1944, but no longer.

  Discussions again grew strained as the chiefs replowed old ground: Mediterranean against France, Europe against the Pacific, Burma against everywhere. But on Wednesday, May 19, the logjam began to shake loose as the two sides began working from points of common agreement. Both agreed that ROUNDUP was ultimately necessary to defeat Germany, and the only questions were when ROUNDUP should take place, whether operations against Italy should be put on ice until then, and how an invasion of Italy would affect the timing of ROUNDUP.

  Brooke said he felt ROUNDUP could go forward in the spring of 1944, if operations designed to knock Italy out of the war were carried out in 1943. Italy, he claimed, could be purchased on the cheap—as few as three or four divisions—and its surrender would reap huge rewards by tying down dozens of Hitler’s divisions around the Italian, French, and Austrian Alps. Those troops would not be waiting for the Allies on the beaches of France, making the landings infinitely easier.

  Warming to a settlement, Marshall asked for time to study the British idea. The next day he and Brooke worked out a compromise they called ROUNDHAMMER: something less than a full-blown ROUNDUP, but more than SLEDGEHAMMER. ROUNDHAMMER could go forward by May 1, 1944, but its reduced size would still allow a knockout blow against Italy in the fall of ’43.19

  The next region they bulled through was China, a vast strategic swamp in which there was no discernible Allied policy. Like an old ecclesiastical court, the chiefs sat behind their table for an afternoon and listened to opposing sides argue strategy. As in February, the debonair Claire Chennault pressed for the lion’s share of supplies in China, while “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, still looking tired and irritable, advocated a ground campaign to reopen the Burma Road.

  The British chiefs saw little to be gained in either Burma or China. The terrain was terrible, the Japanese had better supply lines, and a ground operation to open the Burma Road would have little immediate effect, as the decrepit, winding road could not be improved to carry large-scale supplies until 1945 or even later. They agreed with Chennault that air supplies could get over the Hump in sufficient quantities to keep China in the war. ANAKIM, Brooke and his colleagues argued, should not be attempted that year.20

  Siding with Stilwell, Marshall argued that the air route was too weak to sustain the Chinese field army. Without ground operations, China might fall, and without China, the Pacific war might drag on for years.21

  On the afternoon of May 20, the chiefs met without their staffers and hammered out another compromise. The Hump capacity would be expanded to ten thousand tons of supplies per month. Ten thousand tons, the Americans calculated, would be enough to feed the air war over China and leave a few crumbs for Stilwell’s ground troops. Beyond that, the Allied chiefs agreed to work with the Chinese on some sort of “vigorous and aggressive” operations. Because the sense of urgency of the Pacific and Europe was not mirrored in the China-Burma-India theater, everyone sitting around the table knew nothing would be done there on the ground.22

  Admiral King’s Pacific bell clanged loudly in Brooke’s ears. In their discussions, King had asked the Allies to maintain and extend “unremitting pressure” on Japan while the Germans were still fighting in Europe.

  King’s calls for offensive action were anathema to the British, who saw King as a wolf baying at the Germany First flock. But even those shoals were crossed when King stopped pressing for abstract, open-ended authority in the Pacific—in words whose flexibility frightened the British—and told Brooke, Pound and Portal what he had in mind.23

  King said his service had been studying the problem of Japan for more than three decades. His own ideas on the Pacific, he said, were neither original nor novel. They represented orthodoxy laid down at the Naval War College by the Navy’s best planners.24

  As the Navy saw it, there were three routes to Japan. One was the Central Pacific route, through the Mariana Islands. The others were through the southwest, MacArthur’s area, or the far north, near Alaska. The tall, churlish admiral became animated, specific, and eloquent as he described a limited drive across the Marshall, Gilbert, and Caroline island chains during 1943. He assured the chiefs he meant only to threaten Japanese supply lines to Truk and Rabaul during 1943, setting the stage for larger steps in 1944. With air and naval bases on a few key islands of the Central Pacific, he said, the Allies could move against the Philippines, and perhaps even take the big Chinese island of Formosa.25

  Stripped of its troublesome abstractions, King’s explanation satisfied the British. They agreed to keep “unremitting pressure” on Japan by pushing as far as the Caroline Islands, so long as the Combined Chiefs were able to give “consideration” to each specific operation before it was launched. King agreed, because to him, “consideration” was a damned long swim from “authorization.”26

  With an agreement on the Pacific, the last of the great blocks fell into place. The path to victory by 1946 had been set, and all the chiefs had to do was get the approval of their national leaders.

  Selling war strategy to two energetic meddlers like Churchill and FDR required military men to hold their breath. Like two octopi groping at a school of fish, the long tentacles of president and premier darted into every economic, political, military, and social crevice within reach. The Combined Chiefs feared that their bargain, reached after so many hours of wrangling, would be entangled and shredded by the leaders to whom they reported.27

  Roosevelt was the easy one. Content to accept most unanimous decisions of his military experts, his interference in grand strategy was usually limited to political matters, like putting American troops into the field in Africa in 1942. For this round, he wouldn’t be the problem.

  Churchill’s penchant for meddling ran deeper. Like Bulgakov’s cat, his notions leaped from nowhere, wreaked destruction around the room, then, self-satisfied, sauntered off on two legs to await the next opportunity to pounce. As an exasperated Sir John Dill remarked, “It is a thousand pities that Winston should be so confident that his knowledge of the military art is profound when it is so lacking in strategical and logistical understanding and judgment.”28

  When the Combined Chiefs presented their agreement to the two leaders on May 24, they described a cross-Channel invasion in May 1944, rechristened “OVERLORD.” The Allies would commit twenty-nine divisions to OVERLORD, nine of which would form the initial assault. As collateral for the British promise, seven divisions would be transferred from the Mediterranean t
heater to the United Kingdom in November 1943. The Allies would expand the air corridor over the Hump, and American forces would launch campaigns to take the Marshall and Caroline islands, the western Solomons, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the rest of New Guinea.29

  In return for British concessions, the Americans agreed to a blow designed to knock Italy out of the war. General Eisenhower would be tasked with coming up with a recommendation for what that blow might be—the Riviera, Corsica, Sardinia, Italy proper, or someplace else. Putting Eisenhower in the driver’s seat, the Americans hoped, would squelch any wild Churchillian ideas about running off to obscure Aegean islands or the Balkans.30

  After they presented the report, Churchill expressed dismay that the Allies might take seriously a recommendation from Eisenhower to assault something west of Italy—say, Sardinia—rather than strike the Italian boot near Rome. Jutting out his pudgy chin, he declared that a Sardinian operation would be unacceptable to His Majesty’s Government. Operations should be commenced toward the Balkans, where perhaps thirty-four German divisions might be worn down in the mountains and ravines of Yugoslavia.

  Marshall and King did not need to attack, cajole, hector, or circumvent Churchill; the British chiefs would do that for them. To the British chiefs, an ill-conceived Balkans adventure would wreck the Anglo-American relationship built over two painstaking years. Brooke was personally mortified by Churchill’s recalcitrance, for he knew the Americans would think he had double-crossed them by allowing Churchill a second bite at an apple he had personally selected.

  There was plenty of suppressed anger on the American side over Churchill’s objections. In his diary, Admiral Leahy complained that Churchill was advocating a “permanent British policy of controlling the Mediterranean Sea regardless of what may be the result of the war.” Even the normally indulgent FDR told Stimson that Churchill was acting “like a spoiled boy” over the Balkans.31