Encouraged to the point of incaution, MacArthur wrote back, “I appreciate very much your scholarly letter. Your description of conditions in the United States is a sobering one indeed and is calculated to arouse the thoughtful consideration of every true patriot.” He concluded, “We must not inadvertently slip into the same condition internally as the one which we fight externally.”44
MacArthur had a long history of leaving behind compromising letters, and when Miller released his exchange to the press in April 1944, the backlash killed MacArthur’s non-candidacy. For twelve years, Americans had sent FDR to the White House, and while most voters had their complaints about the administration, MacArthur had made a serious mistake by taking sides against his commander on domestic political issues. As a furious Senator Vandenberg wrote in his diary, “Miller, in one inane moment, crucified the whole MacArthur movement and MacArthur with it.” 45
MacArthur’s contemporaries saw him as an able commander, but voters would not confuse a great general with a great president. Governor Dewey pulled ahead of the pack, Willkie formally withdrew from the race, and MacArthur’s candidacy began a death spiral from which it could never recover.
Stung fatally at home, on Sunday, May 30, MacArthur told the press, “I have on several occasions announced I was not a candidate for the position. . . . I do not covet it, nor would I accept it.” His gold-braided field cap would stay out of the ring.
With that face-saving measure, the bugler blew taps, three volleys were fired, and the “MacArthur for President” movement was planted in the earth. Republicans, looking elsewhere, would send an incumbent New York governor to replace the former New York governor.46
FORTY-THREE
HALCYON PLUS FIVE
AS THE FIRST OF JUNE CAME AND WENT, ROOSEVELT, MARSHALL, STIMSON and King watched the dice arc slowly through the air—tumbling, turning, spinning as they sailed toward the square marked “Normandy.” The roll on which thousands of lives had been wagered would fall, for good or evil, in a matter of days.
There was nothing left for them to do. The orders had been issued, the men assigned, and Eisenhower’s legions, not their warlords, would decide the fate of Europe. Eleanor Roosevelt recalled that her husband’s inner circle, those in the know, seemed “suspended in space, waiting for the invasion, dreading it and yet wishing it could begin successfully.”1
They had promised Stalin the invasion would go forward in May, but landing-craft shortages forced the Allies a postponement to HALCYON, the code name for June 1. But a favorable combination of moonlight and tides would not coincide until June 5, 6, or 7, so the invasion’s D-Day would await the weather’s leave.2
As May sauntered into June, the Atlantic weather turned sour and violent storms lashed the Normandy coast. After several stomach-churning days at Portsmouth watching thermal bubbles float between Iceland and Ireland, Eisenhower’s meteorologists thought they saw a break. On Sunday, June 4, Eisenhower cabled Marshall a terse message: “HALCYON plus 5 finally and definitely confirmed.”3
The invasion of Europe would begin on Tuesday, June 6.
• • •
Roosevelt had dreamed of sitting on English soil when the invasion was launched, but his health made the trip a fatal impossibility. His blood pressure was rising; in April it had run as high as 234 over 124, and in May his diastolic was holding at a dangerous 120.
Hobbled by his heart, he opted for a weekend at Pa Watson’s home in Charlottesville, Virginia, not far from Jefferson’s Monticello. He brought with him a small personal retinue, including his daughter Anna and her husband, John Boettiger, and the three of them worked on a draft speech that Roosevelt would read to the nation on D-Day.4
As in the hours leading up to TORCH, to his friends Roosevelt exuded a serenity that masked a gut-tightening tension. FDR sat quietly in Watson’s living room, going about his business with neither fuss nor flair. It was an imperfect facade. Grace Tully recalled, “The Boss was keeping up a pretense of normal activity, but every movement of his face and hands reflected the tightly contained state of his nerves.”5
Eleanor believed her husband was better equipped than most men to withstand the strain of waiting, in part because of the many hours he had spent struggling with his crippling illness. “He’d learned from polio that if there was nothing you could do about a situation, then you’d better try to put it out of your mind and go on with your work at hand,” she once explained.6
But waiting for a doctor’s diagnosis was a far cry from waiting to see how many men would die for an idea—and whether their deaths would be in vain. On HALCYON plus five, the single-minded stoicism Eleanor spoke of would be put to the test.
When Rome fell to the Allies on June 4, FDR returned to Washington and delivered a fireside chat extolling the heroism of the Fifth Army’s soldiers fighting in Italy. In words that would have appalled Fifth Army’s General Clark, he downplayed the significance of Rome and hinted at bigger things to come: “It would be unwise to inflate in our own minds the military importance of the capture of Rome. We shall have to push through a long period of greater effort and fiercer fighting before we get into Germany itself.”7
As he spoke those words, he knew thousands of young men were far from their homes, packed into large, slow landing ships, rolling over waves toward Normandy’s forbidding shore.
He finished his address, and having nothing else to do, Franklin Roosevelt went to bed.
• • •
He was in the dawn of consciousness when his mind perceived a soft, familiar voice in the distance. It was Eleanor, speaking gently to him, quietly prodding him to take a telephone call.
As light drifted through his blinking eyelids, Roosevelt’s mind registered what she was saying: General Marshall was on the line from the Pentagon. It was news the world had been waiting to hear.
He sat up in his bed and pulled an old, worn sweater over his head and shoulders. Then he picked up the receiver and listened.
Eisenhower’s first cable confirmed what Marshall knew it would say: “I have as yet no information concerning the actual landings nor of our progress through beach obstacles. Communiqué will not be issued until we have word that leading ground troops are actually ashore.” There was so little information in the message that Marshall’s wife had not even awoken her husband to read it.8
When the communiqués came, they reported heavy losses and bad weather. The First and Fourth Infantry Divisions had made it ashore, but the “hinge” beach, code-named OMAHA, was defended by a strong German infantry division that happened to be working on beach defenses at the time of the invasion.9
FDR met with Sam Rayburn that morning, then with Marshall, King, and Arnold. He was anxious for news, and between meetings, Dr. Howard Bruenn, his cardiologist, took the president’s blood pressure: a murderous 210 over 122.*10
No one, from the private at the shingle to the supreme commander in Portsmouth, knew if the invasion had succeeded, or what awaited them beyond the high ground overlooking the beaches.
• • •
“My fellow Americans,” the radio’s familiar voice began for the second night in a row, “last night, when I spoke to you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far. In this poignant hour I ask you to join me in prayer.”
Twelve years of selling hope had led to this moment, the last, supreme roll of the dice that would, in time, mean the end of Nazi tyranny. Roosevelt reached out to that hope, and to its brother, faith, and he rolled them into a prayer blending his secular and religious convictions:
Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a struggling humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their
arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. . . . Let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart courage unto our sons wherever they may be.11
It would take more than stout hearts. Allied troops were fighting for their lives, and by the end of the day 2,499 American sons would lose that fight. But as twilight swallowed the Norman sky, the public joined Roosevelt in celebrating, worrying, and praying for the men on French soil. “The president’s prayer last night was the nation’s prayer,” declared the New York Times. “We go forth to meet the supreme test of our arms and our souls, the test of the maturity of our faith in ourselves and in mankind.”12
•
Marshall would learn more about that supreme test when he, King, and Arnold flew to Europe to see their handiwork. On June 8, the trio boarded Skymasters for their usual landing site, the Air Transportation Command hub in Prestwick, Scotland. When a heavy Scottish fog set in around Prestwick, the ATC diverted their plane to a base in northwestern Wales. Wiring ahead to London, the warlords hitched a ride to the capital aboard an express train named the Irish Mail.13
When Irish Mail clacked into Euston Station, the British chiefs of staff were on hand to greet them. “Marshall was as charming as ever, and Admiral King as saturnine,” remarked “A.B.C.” Cunningham. The Americans coiled themselves into a line of cars and were driven to their temporary quarters, a Tudor-style mansion in Middlesex.14
Marshall, King, and Arnold were itching to see the French coast, but first they had business to attend to with the British chiefs. So strong was the lure of the battlefield on everyone, the Combined Chiefs did virtually nothing except race through the various fronts at the double-quick. The minutes of their June 10 meeting describe discussions as “brief,” “short,” or “very brief” thirteen times in the scant two-page record. The next day they did little more than debate, then shelve, the lingering question of ANVIL, now renamed Operation DRAGOON.15
Their formal business concluded, they scrambled to join Churchill on the night of June 11 aboard his private train bound for Portsmouth, where they would board ships bound for the Normandy coast. As the train rattled south from London, Churchill threw an excellent dinner at his dining car’s banquet table.
The evening warmed with the prospect of stepping onto the fulcrum on which the great war turned. After living for so long in the future, they were about to see the debate, planning, bitter argument, and nervous activity of the last two years come to life.16
King, more than the rest, had reason for the saturnine countenance that A.B.C. remarked on, for in addition to the Normandy landings he was thinking ahead to the invasion of Saipan, the Mariana island on the globe’s far side. Churchill, noticing his sour expression, tried to lighten the atmosphere. When King didn’t respond, a playful Churchill ribbed, “Don’t look so glum. I am not trying to take anything away from the United States Navy just now.”17
• • •
Eisenhower greeted the entourage at Portsmouth. The parties boarded two destroyers—USS Thompson for Ike and the American chiefs, HMS Kelvin for the British—and Marshall, King, Arnold, and Eisenhower took passage to Omaha Beach in the American sector. As Thompson cut her way through the Channel’s choppy waters, the three Joint Chiefs gazed in awe at the floating city filling land and water from Portsmouth to Bayeux.
It was one thing to envision an operation as immense as OVERLORD; it was another to see that plan take physical form. Stapled memoranda had become ships. Tables had become bombers. Footnotes and charts had become fighters and supply dumps. Blueprints with far-fetched names like MULBERRY and GOOSEBERRY had blossomed into artificial harbors warding off the Channel’s blows.
The chaos that welcomed them was both wretched and breathtaking. It was as if a titanic bin holding the jumbled product of the capitalist world had been upended onto Normandy’s shingle. Landing craft bellied up to beaches and spit out tanks, self-propelleds, ambulances, and bulldozers. Crates of medicines, grenades, bread ovens, spare tires, and howitzer tubes piled high. Beachmasters roared at longshoremen, while jeeps and scout cars scurried like Labrador retrievers from sand to grass, road to farm. Deuce-and-a-halfs, bunched like burros on the roads, carried their loads oblivious to the turmoil around them. The farms and factories of the New World had crashed into the Old with the fury of a democracy roused to anger.
The swarming anthill at Omaha Beach must have made sense to someone, but that someone was not among the chiefs. In his diary, an impressed Hap Arnold called it “a regular mad house but a very orderly one, in which some 15,000 troops a day go from ship to shore and some 1500 to 3000 tons of supplies a day are landed.” 18
Marshall, who had in 1939 been sworn in wearing a white single-breasted suit, now sported a short “Eisenhower” field jacket. In deference to combat regulations, he carried a modest, nearly invisible automatic pistol on his right hip. Like a child on Christmas Day, he could not suppress a broad smile as he rode in an amphibious truck over the newly conquered land. Admiral King—armed with a scowl and a lit cigarette—listened with interest as Eisenhower and his lieutenants described the fight for the beaches, the terrain ahead of them, and the supply situation for ten hard-pressed divisions ashore.19
Leading a small convoy of jeeps and scout cars away from sniper-infested villages to their front, General Bradley guided the chiefs to his headquarters, a small cluster of camouflaged tents near the hamlet of Saint Pierre-du-Mont. They washed up with water poured from a jerry can, ate C-rations and crackers, and savored what looked like the beginning of the conquest of Europe.20
• • •
Having seen what they came to see, after a few hours Marshall and King climbed onto an amphibious truck that rolled into the water and ferried them back to the Thompson. Before long, they were in Portsmouth sitting aboard Churchill’s train.
Churchill was not there. He had ordered His Majesty’s destroyer Kelvin to maneuver into firing position so he could have the pleasure of lobbing a shell at the enemy. “We arrived at the exact time,” King later wrote, “but had to wait in the special train for ‘W.C.’ for almost an hour since he insisted on shooting at least one large gun at the Nazis in France, which was just like him!”21
While Churchill tarried off the Norman shore, King, in better spirits for the return trip, ordered up a glass of sherry. Then another. And another. By the time the prime minister arrived, King was well lit. Churchill, for whom wine was a breakfast drink, ordered several bottles of champagne for toasts, and King was obliged to join in.
“I managed it,” King said charitably. But he could no longer handle grape or grain the way he did when he prowled the China coast with women and liquor on his mind. Two nights later, when a Churchillian session of cigars and brandy was cruising full sail as the clock struck one in the morning, a groggy King mumbled, “Don’t anyone ever go to bed around here?”
With an impish grin, Churchill replied, “This is early yet. We have lots to talk about.”22
•
France, for instance. Two days before D-Day, Charles de Gaulle refused Eisenhower’s request to broadcast a speech urging his countrymen to obey the instructions of the supreme allied commander. Then he denounced the use of “invasion francs” printed for Allied troops to use in bargaining for goods and services with the locals.
Long before the invasion, Roosevelt and Morgenthau had foreseen that a large influx of pounds and dollars would destroy the value of the franc; local merchants would naturally prefer safer currencies, and would heavily discount anything French. So the two Hyde Park neighbors designed paper notes as a stopgap measure in the absence of a viable French government with viable French currency. Angry at the Anglo-American infringement on French sovereignty, de Gaulle ordered his faction to treat the Allied francs as counterfeit. When the Allies began circulating the invasion francs over his objection, he howled to Churchill’s labor minister, “Allez,
faites la guerre avec votre fausse monnaie.”*23
In another fit of pique, de Gaulle halted the shipment of nearly two hundred bilingual French liaison officers, whose job was to assist invading troops working with French locals. This infuriated the American commanders even more than his resistance to the francs, because it directly hampered their efforts to liberate de Gaulle’s country and move east to fight the Nazis. “We had trained French officers for civil affairs, and he cancelled every damn thing,” Marshall fumed. “They had things fixed up well and then, by God, de Gaulle cancelled it all.”24
• • •
“The more I think of the whole French situation, the more I am convinced of the danger of de Gaulle,” Stimson told his diary on June 12. “He is in some ways a brilliant soldier but is a man of egocentric and unreliable nature and cannot be relied upon to be steadfast and to place the welfare of his country before that of himself.”25
But thinking it over at Woodley, he concluded the Allies needed to reach a workable arrangement. With no other viable leader on the French playing field, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was pressing an angry Cordell Hull to recognize de Gaulle as the provisional leader of France.
Roosevelt was emphatic: American policy was to let the French people choose their own leader in a fair and free election. De Gaulle would have no leg up on domestic French opponents through Allied recognition.
FDR’s policy was, however, blind to the reality of liberation. The people needed an interim government immediately. They were hungry, and winter would arrive before long. Cold, starving people don’t have the luxury of waiting for fair and free elections. As Eisenhower’s armies drove toward the Seine and beyond, FDR’s reluctance to face this inconvenient truth left his commanding general governing a nation whirling in ecstatic disarray. This, Stimson knew, would have terrible consequences come winter.26
American Warlords Page 45
