American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  WELCOME

  The Captain, officers, and men of the Iowa are happy to have you on board.

  Your room number is—Captain’s Cabin

  You will mess in—Flag Mess

  Your Abandon Ship Station is—Lee Motor Whaleboat

  Your Action Station is—Conning Tower (Flag Level)

  and on the list went. In typical Navy fashion, some items seemed overdone:

  The General Alarm and Gas Attack Alarm will be tested daily at 1200. They are not sounded for drill. When sounded at any time other than 1200, enemy action is expected.14

  Enemy action was apparently expected the next day when, during an antiaircraft exercise, the General Alarm broke out. The siren was followed by the frantic call, “Torpedo defense! Torpedo defense! This is not a drill!”

  The massive battleship listed as her rudder turned hard and Iowa’s screws revved to flank speed. The thump of hundreds of feet boomed as sailors scrambled to their battle stations like a herd of stampeding buffalo. Iowa executed a surprisingly nimble change of direction, and every antiaircraft gun on her starboard side lowered its muzzle and began shooting into the churning water.15

  Two of those thumping feet belonged to Admiral King, who thundered up to the flag bridge as a concussive thump and geyser abaft announced a torpedo’s death. King’s face was turning that deep shade of crimson again, and he was working up to a three-day blow as he howled for an explanation from the bewildered Captain McCrea. In seconds, Iowa’s signal flags burst out, demanding answers from all ships in the convoy.16

  The reluctant truth emerged in a flashing signal from a destroyer off the starboard bow. The destroyer was USS William D. Porter. While tracking Iowa as if she were an enemy during the drill, the destroyer had accidentally let loose a torpedo in Iowa’s direction. Fortunately, Iowa’s lookouts had spotted the torpedo’s wake and Captain McCrea had time to swing clear of the deadly fish. The torpedo did not run “hot and straight,” one passenger remembered, “which was indeed a lucky break, as it would have been most embarrassing for the U.S. Navy to have torpedoed their Commander in Chief.”17

  Leahy didn’t have to tell his commander a second time that they had been sunk by a torpedo, but King was purple with rage. Had there been planks to walk in the modern Navy, he would have sent the destroyer’s captain to Davy Jones’s locker without a second thought. But Roosevelt, who had followed the ruckus with interest but no evident alarm, shrugged it off. He had survived an assassination attempt in 1935, and an anarchist’s bomb years earlier, and showed no sign of fear during the torpedo warning. He told King not to lop off any heads.

  “It seemed to me,” King recalled, “that it was F.D.R.’s idea to cover up the error, especially since there were some few reporters on board who apparently were told to forget the incident because it wouldn’t look well that all hands were in danger by our own people.”18

  William D. Porter was sent off for the obligatory investigation under the humiliating track of Iowa’s guns. At her next few ports of call, her mortified crew would be welcomed with the flashing signal “Don’t shoot! We’re Republicans!”*19

  • • •

  After seven days at sea, Iowa’s passengers disembarked at Mers-el-Kébir, the Algerian port captured during the TORCH landings. FDR, unable to descend to the ship’s whaleboat by gangway or Jacob’s ladder, was sent over the side in a bosun’s chair, evidently unconcerned as his chair hovered above the chopping waves. As ship’s surgeon Robert Coffee recalled, “It was a very dramatic sight to see this single, lonely figure lowered precariously into this ‘rowboat.’”20

  Once safely ashore, Roosevelt and his entourage were met by General Eisenhower, two Roosevelt sons—Lieutenant Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and Colonel Elliott Roosevelt—and a retinue of British and U.S. officials. The core group boarded a trio of C-54 Skymasters—Roosevelt’s plane was nicknamed the Sacred Cow—and the American warlords flew along the African coastline to Carthage. They would spend the night in Tunisia before pushing on to Cairo for the SEXTANT conference.21

  In Carthage that evening, as Eisenhower prepared to leave his home for dinner with the president, he spent a few moments with King and Marshall in his villa’s living room. As the men nursed cocktails in the ornately tiled salon, King casually opened the subject of the OVERLORD command.

  “The time has come,” King said, “for the President and Churchill to decide who the OVERLORD commander should be.”

  Marshall sat, silent as the Sphinx, as King explained to Eisenhower that the other chiefs wanted Marshall to remain in Washington, but Roosevelt had decided to give command of OVERLORD to Marshall. Walking Ike to the door, he remarked, “I hate to lose General Marshall as chief of staff, but my loss is consoled by the knowledge that I will have you to work with in his job.”22

  As Eisenhower recalled, “General Marshall remained completely silent; he seemed embarrassed.” Harry Butcher, Eisenhower’s naval aide, told his diary, “General Marshall had not mentioned or indicated anything about Ike’s probable assignment, and Ike was embarrassed, not only by the warmth of the Admiral’s statement, but by the spontaneity of his comment in General Marshall’s silent presence.” 23

  Caught off-guard in an awkward moment, Eisenhower mumbled something about the president having to make his own decisions. Marshall, annoyed with talk of his own prospects, growled, “I don’t see why any of us are worrying about this. President Roosevelt will have to decide on his own, and all of us will obey.” The conversation abruptly ended.24

  • • •

  Outside Tunis the next day, Eisenhower’s drab-colored Cadillac gunned its big engine as it rumbled over the dusty battlefields of Medjez-el-Bab and Tebourba. Travel security required the president to travel by night, so during his extra day in Tunisia, he asked for a tour of some nearby battlefields.

  He and Eisenhower rode in the car’s spacious main seat; Ike’s attractive driver, Kay Summersby, and his dog, a scrappy Scottie named Telek, accompanied the two commanders. As they rumbled over unpaved roads, the Cadillac and its protective convoy of motorcycles, half-tracks, and armored trucks passed burned-out tank carcasses—American and German—flagged minefields, Arab farms, Red Cross tents, and the ruins of an old Roman aqueduct.25

  At lunchtime, they pulled over for a roadside picnic, where Roosevelt’s thoughts turned to command of OVERLORD. Acutely conscious that Americans would soon outnumber Commonwealth troops, he had asked Marshall for an estimate of the two armies by January 1944. Marshall told him Britain and her dominions would have 4.92 million men, while the United States would have 10.53 million in uniform, of whom 3.78 million would be serving overseas. Because the numbers were tilting steadily toward the Americans, at Quebec Churchill had agreed that the man who led OVERLORD should be an American. That American, Roosevelt knew, would go down as one of history’s greatest generals.26

  As he and Eisenhower rode back to Carthage, Roosevelt brought up the subject of the invasion. He mused, “Ike, you and I know who was chief of staff during the last years of the Civil War. But practically no one else knows, although the names of the field generals—Grant, of course, and Lee, and Jackson, Sherman, Sheridan and the others—every schoolboy knows them. I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was. That is one of the reasons I want George to have the big command—he is entitled to establish his place in history as a great general.”27

  The balding Kansan sat beside Roosevelt, nodding, listening. Saying nothing, except that he would do his duty wherever his president sent him.

  • • •

  Sacred Cow and her consorts touched down at Cairo West airfield the next morning, November 22, and Marshall, King, Arnold, and their staffs spent the next five days at Giza’s Mena House Hotel, in the shadow of the Great Pyramid.

  The hotel, whose manager had been told of the conference only three days earlier, had been
crash-converted from a luxury resort to a heavily guarded military camp. From its hill overlooking the Pyramids, Mena House was ringed with barbed wire, antiaircraft guns, and battalions of MPs demanding identification cards from hotel staff wherever they went. Hotel guests were moved out, with the abject apologies of the manager. Bedroom furniture was pushed aside for desks, radios, and file cabinets, and Mena House joined a long list of Egyptian headquarters from which the campaigns of Pharaoh’s chariots, Caesar’s legions, Selim’s Turks and Napoleon’s Frenchmen had been directed.28

  As the war chiefs debated operations for 1944, FDR’s overriding concern was keeping Chiang in the Allied camp. He felt the Kuomintang regime could make a material contribution to the war against Japan, but even if it if could not, China would play a major role in the postwar world. Roosevelt wanted to ensure that after the war China would remain firmly in the western fold, and for that reason he had invited Chiang and his entourage to come to Cairo.

  The price of Chiang’s enthusiasm for battle would be steep. The generalissimo demanded that the Allies launch an amphibious assault on the Burmese coast and drastically increase the level of supplies over the Hump. If they would take those first great steps, he promised to launch a drive into Burma. If the two efforts were successful, the Allies could reopen the Burma Road, and that would enable Chiang to ask for more supplies from the United States.

  Roosevelt assured Generalissimo and Madame Chiang that the Allies would mount an invasion somewhere along the Bay of Bengal. Until the land route to Kunming was reopened, he pledged to increase supplies coming over the Hump to ten thousand tons of equipment per month, promising supplies at a level his air chiefs found dangerously optimistic.29

  Marshall did not share Roosevelt’s confidence in Chiang. From the detailed reports of General Stilwell, he held the firm conviction that whatever Chiang’s personal intentions, he was being “sold down the river” by his advisers.

  But it was the president’s decision, not his, and Marshall would have to toe the line when he met with the skeptical British. In the Combined Chiefs meetings on Asian operations, he and King made a pitch for Operation BUCCANEER, the capture of the Andaman Islands near Rangoon’s coast. In Allied hands, the Andamans would give the Allies a naval base to cut Japan’s supply line to Burma, which would be the first step toward reopening the Burma Road.30

  General Brooke, Britain’s Doubting Thomas on all things Burmese, believed Chiang was a broken reed whose only proven skill was talking the Americans into giving him weapons. Madame Chiang, he concluded, was the “leading spirit” of the Chinese nationalists, but he did not trust her. As an afternoon meeting devoted to Burma wore on, Brooke moved to postpone discussion of BUCCANEER, and he later suggested that landing craft slated for Burma might instead be sent to the Aegean. If BUCCANEER went forward, he said, then OVERLORD must be postponed.31

  The Aegean had always been a lightning rod for the Americans. By late 1943, the mere suggestion of another foray into the Eastern Mediterranean sent the U.S. chiefs into a rage. They had given in on the Mediterranean a thousand times more than they had intended, and after months of compromise and ultimatum, they had finally stuffed Churchill’s Balkans cat back into the gunnysack. Now Churchill’s lieutenants were trying to weasel their way back to the Aegean—out of China and, most likely, out of France.32

  “Things got so hot,” wrote Army staffer Charles Donnelly, “Admiral King and General Brooke traded insults.” The RAF’s Air Marshal Sholto Douglas called it “the father and mother of a row,” while a bemused Stilwell scribbled in his diary, “Brooke got nasty & King got good & sore. Brooke is an arrogant bastard.”*33

  Arrogant, perhaps, but Brooke’s demands came from a higher source. Aware that Britannia was being eclipsed as the senior partner, Winston Churchill had become so obsessed over the Dodecanese Islands that Brooke wasn’t sure he could rein in the prime minister. He fretted to his diary, “[Churchill] is inclined to say to the Americans, all right if you won’t play with us in the Mediterranean we won’t play with you in the English Channel. And if they say all right well then we shall direct our main effort in the Pacific, to reply you are welcome to do so if you wish!”34

  Churchill’s Dodecanese dream was a sepsis poisoning Allied blood. The evening after the row over BUCCANEER, Churchill invited Marshall to dine with him. Surrounded by a few personal retainers and Pug Ismay, he discoursed at length on Balkan partisans, the Dodecanese Islands, and Aegean air operations. After dinner, he carried the conversation into the courtyard and was still holding forth on the Aegean well after midnight.

  Churchill was at his persuasive best in these late-night discussions, while Marshall, an early riser, was tired, ornery, and short. In the wee hours of the morning, Churchill pontificated as if he were giving a speech to the House of Commons. The war, he thundered, could not wait until May 1944 for a new offensive. “His Majesty’s Government can’t have its troops standing idle. Muskets must flame!”

  Marshall gave Churchill a look that, for what it lacked in eloquence, made it up in brute force. “God forbid if I should try to dictate,” he growled to Churchill, “but not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned beach.”

  Aides stared at Marshall as if he had slandered Churchill’s wife, Clemmie, and a disheveled Pug Ismay had to stay up late that morning calming down the irate PM. Marshall didn’t care. Churchill had made a mess of the Mediterranean in 1915, and nobody, including Churchill’s own generals, wanted to see that happen again.

  “The others were horrified,” Marshall chuckled afterward, “but they didn’t want the operation and were willing for me to say it.”35

  •

  The flight from Cairo to Tehran took the American delegation over the ancient cities of the Holy Land, the Dead Sea, the Transjordan, Babylonia, and Persia. After many a barren stretch, their wheels touched down five hours later at a Red Air Force base outside Tehran.

  Emerging from their Skymasters, the travelers were surrounded by ranks of American, British, and Soviet sentinels armed with rifles and stern looks. At Stalin’s request, Roosevelt agreed to stay at the Soviet embassy compound, where he could rest safely from the prying eyes and pistols of the assassins Molotov assured him were skulking about Tehran.36

  The Soviet embassy was reasonably comfortable and—as some in his party suspected—infested with listening devices. But, as Molotov had promised, it was secure. At least it seemed to be, judging from the valets with holsters bulging under their uniforms, and the sprinkling of GRU agents whose clumsy efforts to hide behind lawn trees proved more comical than insulting.37

  • • •

  “I am glad to see you. I have tried for a long time to bring this about.”

  Josef Stalin came to the opening meeting early to pay his respects to the man he had heard so much about. From his wheelchair, Roosevelt extended his strong hand to Stalin. Smiling broadly, the dictator shook it and patiently waited for his translator to finish Roosevelt’s greeting before replying in kind.38

  The short, clubfooted man who ruled the empire of the tsars blended the political fire of St. Petersburg with the pitiless fatalism of the Caucasus. Georgian, not Russian—his family name was Dzhugashvili—Stalin’s human empathy and compassion traced their roots to Ivan the Terrible. As Marshall later remarked, “He was a rough SOB who made his way by murder and everything else.” Brooke’s first impression was not far from Marshall’s: “He has got an unpleasantly cold, crafty dead face, and whenever I look at him I can imagine him sending people off to their doom without turning a hair.” 39

  Yet Stalin had not climbed the Kremlin’s bloodstained ladder merely by pounding fists and murdering rivals. Quiet and laconic, he wielded the blunt comment as his usual weapon, though the occasional humorous quip would waft through his lips like smoke from his briar pipe. Leahy appreciated Stalin’s direct methods and plain speaking, while Brooke, a military snob if there ever
was one, considered Stalin an abler strategist than either Roosevelt or Churchill. Stalin, concluded Brooke, was a politician with “a military brain of the very highest calibre.” 40

  In their first conversation in Roosevelt’s sitting room, Stalin and Roosevelt touched on many subjects they would delve into later in detail. But Roosevelt knew the smiling man in the mustard suit was looking for one thing above all others: a true second front. When it would open, how large it would be, where it would take place. Those were the questions the Georgian sphinx would ask. And soon.41

  • • •

  Formal discussions of the “Big Three” began in the embassy boardroom a few minutes after Stalin left Roosevelt’s sitting room. The conference had been scheduled with some ambiguity as to its starting time, but FDR and Stalin, not wanting to waste hours in Tehran, spontaneously agreed to move the first plenary meeting to that afternoon and rang up Churchill.42

  By mutual agreement, FDR presided over the meetings. He delivered a lengthy and eloquent opening speech in which he thanked the other members for the privilege of chairing the conference—a meeting on which so much of the world’s future would turn.

  Picking up Roosevelt’s theme, a hoarse Winston Churchill, suffering from laryngitis, stressed the momentous nature of the decisions before them. “In our hands we have perhaps the responsibility for shortening this war,” he croaked. “In our hands we have, too, the future of mankind. I pray that we may be worthy of this God-given opportunity.”43

  Stalin sat silently through the perorations, chain-smoking Latakia cigarettes, betraying no thoughts. When Roosevelt and Churchill concluded their flowery remarks, Stalin roused himself just long enough to say, “I think the great opportunity which we have and the power which our people have invested in us can be used to take full advantage within the frame of our potential collaboration. Now let us get down to business.”44

  Roosevelt sketched out American concerns in China, Burma, and the Pacific before turning to what he called the most important theater of the war: Europe. A contested landing in France, he cautioned, would be no easy task. The English Channel is a disagreeable body of water, and operations would be impossible before May 1944.45