American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  Reflecting on his experience with elections in Central and South America, Stimson concluded that without a provisional government under de Gaulle, America would end up arbitrating disputes among a kaleidoscope of bickering factions. Playing umpire, even temporarily, was a no-win proposition that would blacken relations between France and the United States for decades to come—no matter whom America backed or who won. The best Roosevelt could insist upon was de Gaulle’s promise of free elections once the war was over.

  With venom spewing from Hull, Marshall, and Roosevelt, it was up to Henry Stimson to broker a compromise. On June 14 he called Hull and told him that Roosevelt’s position, while theoretically correct, was unrealistic. For the sake of the war effort, the United States and Britain must support an interim leader, even if that leader was the tall, obstreperous general.

  Hearing this, Hull lapsed into a stream of Tennessee profanity—“almost incoherence,” Stimson wrote. So Stimson gave up on Hull and called Roosevelt. He asked for an accommodation with de Gaulle.

  FDR wouldn’t budge. Relying on information from Bill Donovan’s OSS sources, he said de Gaulle’s popularity with the French people had been grossly exaggerated. While the French respected him as a symbol of resistance, that symbolism would not translate into political power. French parties were springing up all over France, and the Gaullists would crumble as new parties congealed into a governing coalition. “As the liberation goes on, de Gaulle will be a very little figure,” FDR said confidently.27

  Stimson wasn’t so sure. “This is contrary to everything that I hear,” he wrote in his diary. “I think de Gaulle is daily gaining strength as the invasion goes on and that is to be expected. He has become the symbol of deliverance to the French people.”28

  Moving to the other side of the aisle, Stimson called on the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, and explained Eisenhower’s dilemma. Eden’s support for de Gaulle encouraged the Frenchman’s antics, and those antics were hampering the war effort and making it hard to move Roosevelt and Hull. Was there something Halifax could do to bring Eden around?

  Halifax agreed to look for a middle ground. He told Eden that the president was not dead set against de Gaulle’s rise to power, so long as he was not installed by the Allied governments. If the French wanted to elect him as their leader, Roosevelt would abide by their decision.29

  Returning home to Woodley after speaking with Halifax, Stimson found the secretary of state playing croquet on his mansion’s neatly clipped grounds—a favorite pastime of Hull’s. Stimson took up a mallet, joined Hull, and pressed his case for reconciliation. In this instance, he knocked no balls through the wicket. When the game ended, Hull left Stimson’s croquet field, obstinate as ever.

  A few days later Stimson again lobbied Hull, whose penchant for curse words and disgust with de Gaulle had not abated. Stimson told Hull he was being shortsighted. The Americans, he said, had the choice of “telling [de Gaulle] he is a blank, blank, blank, or trying to get some working arrangement.”30

  After more shuttle diplomacy, Roosevelt agreed to give de Gaulle a warm if unofficial reception in Washington. Because Roosevelt considered de Gaulle a short-term expedient—and because Hull had an endless supply of “blank, blank, blanks” to shoot at him—FDR told Stimson, rather than Hull, to make the arrangements. To avoid inflating le général’s troublesome ego, Stimson arranged for Marshall to keep the self-saturated general busy in military meetings, “so his visit would be filled up instead of having a parade through the country.”31

  •

  As Stimson cauterized the oozing French sore, another wound broke its stitches in the Mediterranean. King and Marshall were adamant that the DRAGOON landings in southern France proceed on schedule. Churchill, however, was dead set against the operation. He favored using those ships and troops to push General Harold Alexander’s armies in Italy north to Trieste, on the Adriatic coast, then north again through Slovenia’s Ljubljana Gap, into Austria.

  A drive into Austria—under a British commander—was a strategic vision that Churchill would not let go of, despite his staff’s belief that any thrust into the Italian Alps was a fool’s errand. A weary Brooke told his diary, “We had a long and painful evening of it listening to Winston’s strategic ravings! . . . In the main he was for supporting Alexander’s advance on Vienna. I pointed out that even on Alex’s optimistic reckoning the advance beyond the Pisa-Rimini line would not start till after September. Namely we should embark on a campaign through the Alps in the winter!”32

  Marshall agreed: “The ‘soft underbelly’ had chrome-steel sideboards.” The Adriatic region would become a huge, parasitical drain as the defeated countries contributed nothing except demands for food, fuel, and money to support their populations.

  Caught between Churchill and the Joint Chiefs, a frustrated General Eisenhower received a broadside of protests, declamations, and pleas from 10 Downing Street. But after talking over the difficulties with Field Marshal Henry “Jumbo” Wilson, Churchill’s Mediterranean theater commander, Eisenhower recommended launching DRAGOON and scuttling stabs north of the Pisa-Rimini line.33

  Churchill had once succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to overrule his warlords, and on June 28 he tried again. “Our first wish is to help General Eisenhower in the most speedy and effective manner,” he wrote FDR. “But we do not think this necessarily involves the complete ruin of all our great affairs in the Mediterranean, and we take it hard that this should be demanded of us. I think the tone of the United States Chiefs of Staff is arbitrary and, certainly, I see no prospect of agreement on the present lines.”34

  Churchill’s persuasive spell ebbed when communications were separated from the man. His plea to kill DRAGOON, encoded, wired to the Map Room and decrypted, then typed and retyped for FDR’s perusal, lost much of the eloquence and force it had coming from Churchill’s own lips.

  In any event, Roosevelt was in no mood to break with his chiefs. “On balance I find I must completely concur in the stand of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff,” he told Churchill. “General Wilson’s proposal for continued use of practically all the Mediterranean resources to advance into northern Italy and from there to the northeast is not acceptable to me, and I really believe we should consolidate our operations and not scatter them. . . . ANVIL, mounted at the earliest possible date, is the only operation which will give OVERLORD the material and immediate support from Wilson’s force.”35

  As a follow-up, Marshall, King, and Arnold drafted a second message from Roosevelt to Churchill stressing the superiority of the Rhône Valley approach to either the Italian mountains or the Ljubljana Gap. Roosevelt approved the message, but before sending it, he added a paragraph reflecting a more personal motive: “Finally, for purely political consideration over here I would never survive even a slight set-back in Normandy if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”36

  The unwritten part of Roosevelt’s message was just as clear: America was running the show now. After meeting with the prime minister, Brooke wrote, “He looked like he wanted to fight the President. However in the end we got him to agree to our outlook, which is: ‘All right, if you insist on being damned fools, sooner than falling out with you, which would be fatal, we shall be damned fools with you, and we shall see that we perform the role of damned fools damned well!’” 37

  The next day a sullen Churchill wrote Roosevelt, “We are deeply grieved by your telegram. . . . The splitting up of the campaign in the Mediterranean into two operations, neither of which can do anything decisive, is, in my humble opinion, the first major strategic and political error for which we two have to be responsible.” Looking for a hook that Roosevelt might respond to, he added that pouring French troops into the Rhône Valley “would no doubt make sure of de Gaulle having his talons pretty deeply dug into France.”38

  Roosevelt didn’t take the bait. He suggested that the British and Americans make their ca
ses to Stalin and ask what the dictator preferred. A shocked Churchill replied, “On a long-term political view, [Stalin] might prefer that the British and Americans should do their share in France in the very hard fighting that is to come, and that east, middle and southern Europe should fall naturally into his control.”

  Churchill’s rhetorical grenadiers—logic, pathos, geopolitics, even the threat of de Gaulle—failed to breach Roosevelt’s defenses. With loud complaints to his cabinet and generals, Churchill gave ground to the senior partner. On July 1 he wrote Roosevelt, “It is with the greatest sorrow that I write to you in this sense. I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement. I send you every personal good wish. However we may differ on the conduct of the war, my personal gratitude to you for your kindness to me and all you have done for the cause of freedom will never be diminished.”39

  But behind closed doors he ranted to Pug Ismay, “I hope you realize that an intense impression must be made upon the Americans that we have been ill-treated and are furious. Do not let any smoothings or smirchings cover up this fact. After a while we shall get together again; but if we take everything lying down there will be no end to what will be put upon us. The Arnold-King-Marshall combination is one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen.”*40

  • • •

  Histrionics were second nature to Winston Churchill. But when Jumbo Wilson told him the assault troops had embarked for the Riviera, Churchill gamely came around and took his station aboard the destroyer Kimberley to watch the landings.

  After it was over, he sent Eisenhower a gracious note to compliment him on the operation. A relieved Ike replied, “I am delighted to note in your last telegram to me that you have personally and legally adopted the DRAGOON. I am sure that he will grow fat and prosperous under your watchfulness.”41

  FORTY-FOUR

  HATFIELDS AND MCCOYS

  IF JUNE 6, 1944, WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR HITLER, THEN JUNE 15 was the beginning of the end for Tojo. On that day fifty of Arnold’s new B-29 bombers winged their way from central China to southern Japan and hit the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata, on the island of Kyushu. And on that day, Nimitz’s marines landed on the Mariana island of Saipan.

  As the command ship USS Rocky Mount beamed encrypted reports to Pearl Harbor, a dim picture of the fighting began to take form. Eight thousand marines under Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith crashed ashore in twenty minutes, but their tracked landing vehicles and tanks bogged down in the rough, swampy ground of Saipan’s shoreline. Blistering enemy shellfire and a Japanese night attack inflicted heavy casualties on the first day, and by D-plus-1, the Army’s 27th Infantry Division, one of the assault units, was having tough going along the island’s rocky central spine.1

  Despite heavy casualties, the leathernecks made a good showing. The island would not be fully pacified until early July, and those twenty-five days of fighting would cost the Marines another eleven thousand men. But the casualties were well spent. Once Saipan, Tinian, and Guam were in U.S. hands, Japanese supplies to Truk would be cut, and the Emperor’s bastion there would surrender or starve. The drive on Japan would begin in earnest.2

  • • •

  More than a thousand miles to the north, one geocultural fact had arrested Hap Arnold’s attention: Japan was unusually vulnerable to air attack. Its houses were made of wood, its population was concentrated, and oil and steel, the lifeblood of modern war, were funneled through identifiable ports and refineries. To Arnold, Japan’s main island, Honshu, and its southern neighbor, Kyushu, were ripe for saturation bombing.3

  The problem was distance. Kyushu and Honshu lay beyond the thousand-mile radius of America’s longest-range bomber, the B-24 Liberator. Until America produced a “very long range” bomber—an expensive, mistake-ridden process that took an agonizing four years to complete—strategic bombing of Japan remained a distant dream, and the Emperor’s home remained inviolate.

  The solution was the B-29 “Superfortress,” a four-engine behemoth with a 1,500-mile radius and a ten-ton bomb load. The B-29 gave Arnold’s pilots the ability to hit the Home Islands from either central China or the Marianas. Anticipating delivery of the weapon in the spring, at Cairo the Combined Chiefs had approved Operation MATTERHORN, a strategic bombing campaign against the Japanese homeland, to run from 1944 until the war’s end.*

  The Superforts that lifted off from China on June 15 caused little damage when they emptied their bomb bays and headed home. But it was only the beginning. With fuel, bombs, crews, and planes trickling into central China, and with new air bases under construction on Saipan and Tinian, the silver geese would return, and in greater numbers. The wind the Emperor sowed at Pearl Harbor was about to reap a typhoon, courtesy of the Twentieth Air Force.4

  • • •

  While the Marianas were the big prize, a second plum fell from the tree on June 19, when a five-carrier fleet under Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa attacked Admiral Spruance’s Task Force 58 in the Philippine Sea, just west of the Marianas. American Hellcats, their pilots dead tired from defending the skies over Saipan, took to the air and intercepted Ozawa’s torpedo and dive-bombers. Their adrenaline up, American fighter pilots slaughtered their poorly trained enemy. Some three hundred Japanese planes went into the ocean for a cost of twenty-nine Hellcats, while below the water’s surface, two American submarines sank the carriers Taiho and Shōkaku.5

  The next day, Admiral Marc Mitscher sent his own flattop bombers on a revenge raid. Flying to the edge of their fuel range into headwinds and fading daylight, the Americans found and pounced on Ozawa’s fleet. They sank the carrier Hiyo and damaged two carriers, a battleship, and a cruiser. The full extent of the enemy’s loss would not be clear for some time, but it appeared the Japanese had lost between three and four hundred planes and three irreplaceable flattops. The Battle of the Philippine Sea had finally broken the Emperor’s most feared weapon.6

  •

  On the twenty-ninth of June, Admiral King learned of some three-star stupidity that threatened to sour his victory at Saipan. Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith, nicknamed “Howlin’ Mad” Smith by fellow marines, had been giving the Army’s 27th Division hell for its slow pace up Saipan’s center.

  The Marine way, grim as death, called for storming the enemy rapidly and violently wherever he could be found. After the main defense lines were ruptured came the cleanup: devil dogs would fire into tunnels and caves, or cauterize openings with flamethrowers, while the engineers moved up with detonation charges. Blow the mouth of the cave, and shoot or bayonet anyone left outside—dead or alive, since Japanese corpses had a habit of waking up and shooting passing troops in the back. That was how the Marines fight.7

  The 27th Infantry Division’s commander, Major General Ralph Smith, was trained in the Army method: Call down air and artillery support, move methodically, watch for gaps, and protect flanks. Replacing a few truckloads of howitzer shells cost a lot less than replacing a company of flesh-and-blood men. That was how Army soldiers fight, live, and fight some more.

  To the bloodied Marines, the Army method might have worked fine in French dairy fields, but it sure as hell didn’t work in the ravines of Saipan. As the Second and Fourth Marine Divisions advanced steadily across the island on the flanks, a U-shape formed in their line as the 27th Division, in the center, slowed to a crawl by heavy resistance.8

  The two General Smiths had a history going back to the Tarawa campaign, where Holland Smith, then a two-star observer, excoriated the Army’s Ralph Smith for taking so long to capture the nearby island of Makin. The Marine general raised hell over Army errors, like firing indiscriminately into jungle cover, while overlooking those same rookie mistakes by his younger leathernecks. Howlin’ Mad’s prejudice against the Army in general, and Ralph Smith in particular, deepened as he and the 27th were drawn toward Saipan’s rocky center.9

  On
the tenth day of fighting, Marine Smith asked Admiral Spruance to relieve Army Smith, and the 27th’s commander was promptly put on a boat for Hawaii. When news of Smith’s relief reached Oahu, it unhinged Lieutenant General Robert Richardson Jr., an Army officer with a temper to match Howlin’ Mad’s. Richardson recommended to Nimitz that Ralph Smith receive a naval medal, to assuage the Army’s hurt feelings, and Nimitz forwarded the recommendation to Washington with his approval.

  King predictably turned down Richardson’s medal request, so Richardson appointed a board of inquiry to investigate the matter. To head that board, he selected Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., whose own brawls with the Navy had already percolated to the desks of King and Marshall. To no one’s surprise, Buckner’s board found General Holland Smith at fault for mismanaging his Army units. Holland Smith howled about Richardson’s investigation to Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, and Turner, his blood up, asked Nimitz to shut down Richardson.10

  When the “Smith versus Smith” skirmish escalated into a “Richardson versus the Navy” battle, Nimitz and King tried to stop the fireworks. Nimitz deleted disparaging references to the 27th Division from Admiral Spruance’s official report, and he and King created a new “Fleet Marine Force,” with Holland Smith as its commander, ensuring that Howlin’ Mad would never again lead Army troops.11

  Word leaked out, as it always did. Hearst newspapers picked up the family feud and castigated the Marines for their casualty-filled methods. The Luce magazines, Time and Life, weighed in on the side of the leathernecks.12

  Though he had approved the loan of the 27th Division to the Navy as part of a deal to support MacArthur, Marshall had never liked the idea of an Army division working under the Marines in general, and General Smith in particular. The year before, he had foreseen problems and hoped to nip them in the bud with a stern letter to General Richardson. “Under the circumstances,” he wrote, “I want General [Ralph] Smith to be made aware of the critical importance of his training preparations for the operation and of the cooperative spirit of himself and his staff. There must be no weakness, no hesitations or reluctances in the action of units once they have landed. There must be no misunderstandings, jealousies, or critical attitudes.”13