Since Leyte was in the Southwest Pacific Area, MacArthur’s domain, the American chiefs asked MacArthur for his views. They left the decision to him, but hinted it was “highly to be desired and would advance the progress of the war in your theater by many months” if MacArthur accepted the gift.11
MacArthur’s reply arrived as the Combined Chiefs were dining at a banquet thrown by their Canadian hosts. Arnold, Marshall, and King politely excused themselves to read MacArthur’s response. MacArthur, through his chief of staff, proposed to move forward the attack on Leyte by two months, from December 20 to October 20. Within ninety minutes, MacArthur’s headquarters was decoding formal orders from the Joint Chiefs directing him to abandon Mindanao and Yap and proceed directly against Leyte. They also ordered Nimitz to go ahead with his attack on Peleliu and the Palaus.12
The next day King informed the British chiefs of the change in strategy. The minutes simply record that the British “took note with interest of Admiral King’s remarks.” Having no say in the matter, the British said nothing.13
• • •
The “Luzon versus Formosa” debate had been tilted in MacArthur’s direction by some timely help from a downed Navy pilot. By moving up the attack on Leyte, Nimitz, King, and Marshall had shifted the critical element of time in favor of MacArthur. Luzon, Leyte’s northern neighbor, would be within easy reach, while Formosa remained a shimmering vision on a distant horizon.
At the end of September, King’s Formosa plan finally collapsed. After the U.S. chiefs left Quebec, King flew to San Francisco to bring Nimitz up to speed on the high command’s thinking. There Nimitz, Spruance, and Rear Admiral Forrest Sherman, Nimitz’s planning deputy, told King that Formosa was a strategic dead end. Without Luzon, air support for an attack on Formosa would be thin; with Luzon, Formosa would be irrelevant. The better solution, they argued, was to bypass Formosa and assault Okinawa and Iwo Jima.14
King frowned. “Why Iwo Jima?”
An airstrip, Nimitz replied. He and Sherman explained that Army air bases on Tinian could reach Japan with long-range bombers, but those bombers would have no escort fighters, which had a shorter fuel range. Taking Iwo would allow AAF fighters to protect the Superforts as they made their way to the Home Islands and back.15
King didn’t like the idea of quitting on Formosa, for like Stimson and Churchill, he rarely gave up the ship without a fight. But Nimitz was adamant, and he knew Nimitz was probably right.
With a sullen expression King turned to Spruance and muttered, “Why are you so quiet?”
Spruance calmly replied, “Nimitz and Sherman are doing very well. I have nothing to add.”16
King grudgingly struck his colors. On October 3 the Joint Chiefs ordered MacArthur to take Luzon beginning December 20. Nimitz would capture Iwo Jima.17
•
A curious feature of Rooseveltian government was that individuals meant everything and titles meant nothing. The treasury secretary had overseen the sale of arms to London, the secretary of war negotiated a destroyers-for-bases deal with the British Empire, the secretary of the interior regulated Japan’s oil supply, and a sickly man with no title at all negotiated with Stalin and Churchill. When one department or agency didn’t move fast enough, FDR found one with a better whip-cracker, which often left two competitors working on the same job. It made no sense when drawn on an organization chart, but to White House veterans, it was just how the Boss ran the shop.
As one of Roosevelt’s oldest friends, Henry Morgenthau carried a roving license to insert himself into matters outside the Treasury Department’s jurisdiction. His loyalty to FDR, not his financial expertise, was the reason he remained in Washington, and early in the war Roosevelt had quipped to him, “You and I will run this war together.”
Britain’s lifeline, the Lend-Lease program, had begun as a cash-and-carry arrangement. That gave the Treasury Department tremendous influence over British aid as Britain began picking up the pieces of its empire. When Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to refer postwar Lend-Lease issues to a committee chaired by Morgenthau, the apple farmer turned treasury secretary found himself with a booming voice in the postwar world.18
Henry Morgenthau had never been a very religious man, but as the highest-ranking Jew in Roosevelt’s administration, he had been a natural focus of efforts to rescue Europe’s victims of Hitler’s abattoir. Morgenthau and his staff had been privy to information about the horrific slaughter in Eastern Europe—information, he believed, the State Department routinely ignored—and Morgenthau met with refugee groups, traveled to Western Europe, and gathered information on conditions behind enemy lines. Like others in the administration, he was shocked at what he heard. Unlike others, he was willing to upset a lot of applecarts to punish the Nazi architects and their followers.19
FDR quietly encouraged him. He liked to tell of bicycling through Germany as a boy during the days of the Kaiser’s reign, and seeing firsthand militant Prussian attitudes that filtered down to the nation’s roots. In mid-August he told Morgenthau, “We’ve got to be tough with Germany, and I mean the German people, not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue as they have in the past.”*20
In a cabinet meeting in late August, a tired and petulant Roosevelt asserted that the German people could live on soup kitchens if their heavy industry were dismantled. Warming up to the subject, he then pulled out a draft handbook on military government in Germany, written by Eisenhower’s civil affairs men. He read with scorn passages describing the need to restore water, heat, and other basic services to the civilian population. Morgenthau, who had quietly passed the draft on to Roosevelt, beamed with approval as FDR blasted Stimson over Eisenhower’s handbook and argued vehemently for a punitive peace with Germany.21
But for all his talk of soup kitchens and castrated Germans, Roosevelt was not about to give Morgenthau a free hand to reshape Germany. He wanted drive but not recklessness, and in a private sidebar conference, he quietly asked Henry Stimson to have a talk with Morgenthau.22
Stimson loathed Prussian arrogance, which he had seen up close during the First World War. He believed small, industrialized portions of Germany, such as Alsace and Silesia, ought to be lopped off and given to France, Poland, and Russia. German schoolchildren should be re-educated—a process he thought would take thirty years—and he favored prompt trials and severe punishment for Nazi leaders.
But he took a long view of Germany. Its population had numbered about forty million until 1870. With industrialization, it swelled to seventy million, and it was obvious that without industry and trade Germany would be unable to feed those thirty million extra mouths. Food shortages would set in motion the next stage of Adolf Hitler’s campaign for lebensraum, and in the meantime, Central Europe would suffer economically from the loss of German markets and manufacturing.23
• • •
Henry Morgenthau spent the Labor Day weekend at his home in Hyde Park, near the Roosevelt place, where he had a full, uninterrupted day to talk with FDR about Germany. Buoyed by Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for a harsh peace, Morgenthau returned to Washington the following Monday and invited Stimson and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy over for dinner, at which he outlined his vision of a new Germany.24
He proposed to strip modern Germany down to its agrarian roots. The Ruhr and Saar regions, the industrial heart of Germany, would be dismantled, every mine flooded, every factory wrecked. Heavy industry would be banned, and the land would be converted to fields and pastures. The German people would be held to a subsistence level, kept in a perpetual noose of dependency on imports to sustain life.
If Morgenthau’s vision meant mass dislocation, if it meant dispersing inhabitants to some faraway place like Africa, so be it. Never again would Krupp cannon or Porsche tanks spring from these troves of coal and iron.
“Flood and dynamite,” he told his Treasury Department lieutenants.25
Stimson and Morgenthau had exchanged frank views on Germany a few days earlier, but Stimson was still shocked when he heard Morgenthau outline the full extent of his plan. As the scion of a Wall Street investment banker, Stimson saw economic opportunity as a sanctified path to lift Germany above its violent habits. Instead of grinding Germany into a bitter, resentful poverty, Stimson thought the Allies should give Germans an economic incentive to stay out of future wars. Even if the German people were due for a good kicking—and they were—the Ruhr was too important to the rest of Europe to destroy. After going home that night, he told his diary, “Morgenthau is, not unnaturally, very bitter and as he is not thoroughly trained in history or even economics it becomes very apparent that he would plunge out for a treatment of Germany which I feel sure would be unwise.”26
The next morning Hull, Hopkins, Morgenthau, and Stimson convened in Hull’s office to work out the American position on postwar Germany. Over Stimson’s heated objections, Hull, Morgenthau, and Hopkins pushed for the permanent destruction of the German economy. “This Naziism is down in the German people a thousand miles deep, and you have just got to uproot it,” Hull declared. Hopkins and Morgenthau looked on approvingly. “You can’t do it by just shooting a few people.”27
The meeting sputtered into a hung jury, and Stimson shuffled back to his office in a blue mood. He groused to Marshall how ironic it was that he, the man in charge of the department that did the killing, was the only cabinet member with an ounce of mercy for the other side.28
To halt what he saw as the administration’s runaway train, Stimson wrote a memorandum to Roosevelt warning of a second Treaty of Versailles in the making. He concluded, “By such economic mistakes I cannot but feel that you would also be poisoning the springs out of which we hope that the future peace of the world can be maintained.” Stimson knew the memo probably would do no good, but as he told his diary, “I feel I had to leave a record for history that the government of this Administration had not run amuck at this vital period in history.”29
The next day, September 6, the group met in the Oval Office to brief the president. Repeating his position, FDR opined that the German people could get along well enough with soup kitchens and an agrarian, subsistence-level economy. But when Stimson outlined his objections to the pastoralization of the Ruhr—“the destruction of a great gift of nature,” he called it—Roosevelt waffled. Perhaps Britain would need German steel to help rebuild itself, he mused. In any event, he said he was in no hurry to dismantle German industry.30
Stimson felt he had at last made some headway with the president. Morgenthau, on the defensive, asked for two more hours of the president’s time later in the week. He and Stimson made an appointment to come back to the White House on Saturday, to reach some definite answer.
For the rest of the week, Morgenthau set his Treasury staff to work dismantling Stimson’s objections, and Stimson and McCloy did the same for Morgenthau. To cover his bases, Stimson consulted Dr. Isaiah Bowman, an economic adviser and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and he buttonholed his old friend Justice Felix Frankfurter, “a Jew like Morgenthau” whose study of German saboteur trials gave him an expertise on “the common law of war crimes.”31
Armed with studies and expert opinions, Stimson went back to the Oval Office on Saturday, where he found his chief in a wretched physical state. Roosevelt was suffering from a sinus cold. He was tired, he was thin, and the circles around his eyes were dark. He seemed in no shape to do much other than sleep, and deciding the future of a world power was probably not one of his doctor’s recommendations for that day.32
Yet he listened quietly as Morgenthau spoke from a compendium of Treasury staff studies. The best way to help Britain, the secretary claimed, was to seal off the Ruhr and Saar so England could dominate Europe’s coal and steel markets. The best way to help the world was to strip the Ruhr, Rhineland, and Kiel Canal areas of all industry. A list of “arch-criminals” should also be drawn up, and those on the list would be lined up before firing squads posthaste.
Stimson argued vehemently against the destruction of the Ruhr and summary execution of Nazis, but he knew he was in the minority. Through rheumy eyes, Roosevelt fell back on his old tenets about soup kitchens. His comments leaned toward Morgenthau’s position, though he was, as usual, unclear exactly where he was going.33
Shortly after Roosevelt left for Quebec, he sent for Morgenthau to join him there—ostensibly to work out Lend-Lease questions with Churchill and Anthony Eden. Stimson, not invited to the conference, fretted to Justice Frankfurter about what FDR would do without a counterweight to Morgenthau. “[Frankfurter] said I need not worry over it; it would not go anywhere and that the President himself would catch the errors and would see that the spirit was all wrong,” Stimson told his diary. “I wish I was as sure as he was.”34
•
Churchill arrived at Quebec passionately opposed to Morgenthau’s plan for Germany, for many of the same reasons that moved Stimson. “He turned loose on me the full flood of his rhetoric, sarcasm and violence,” wrote Morgenthau, when the subject of Germany’s future came up. Britain, Churchill declared, must not be “chained to a corpse.” The PM called the plan “unnatural, un-Christian and unnecessary,” and said the British people would not stand for it.*35
But two days later, he changed his tune. Morgenthau had been England’s benefactor in the dark days of 1940. Morgenthau held America’s Lend-Lease purse strings, and Morgenthau knew that one of Churchill’s goals was to keep America from snapping those strings tight when Germany surrendered. After Morgenthau had a long talk with Lord Cherwell, one of Churchill’s personal advisers, the PM claimed he had reconsidered what a crippled Germany would do for British exports. Churchill would play ball, and he and Roosevelt initialed a memorandum agreeing to the pastoralization of Germany. Morgenthau had won.36
Helpless to influence events in Quebec, Stimson was livid when he heard that Roosevelt and Churchill had accepted the destruction of the German economic engine. To Stimson, government should never become so personalized as to make revenge an object of national policy. “I have yet to meet a man who is not horrified with the ‘Carthaginian’ attitude of the Treasury,” he vented to his diary. “It is Semitism gone wild for vengeance and, if it is ultimately carried out (and I cannot believe that it will be), it will sure as fate lay the seeds for another war in the next generation.”37
• • •
But those seeds would not fall onto Germany’s bomb-furrowed soil. Days after the Quebec conference, the tides began flowing the other way. Word of the Morgenthau Plan was leaked by underlings in the War and Treasury Departments—for opposing reasons—igniting an election-year brushfire. “Mr. Morgenthau would destroy the economic utility of a continent to gain revenge on a few hooligans,” a disgusted New York Times reader wrote. “Such a Carthaginian peace would leave a legacy of hate to poison international relations for generations to come,” wrote another.38
Rumors of a rift within Roosevelt’s team hit the newspapers. Editorial comments centered on the cabinet split, and on FDR summoning Morgenthau to discuss foreign policy at Quebec, but not Stimson or Hull. Sounding more like Oz the Great and Terrible than the self-assured president at Casablanca, Roosevelt heatedly denied the existence of a schism within his cabinet. Few believed him. Even the New York Times observed that the affair “underline[s] once more the President’s vacillations and vagaries in the administrative field.”39
• • •
Overseas, German media seized on the Morgenthau Plan for its propaganda value. The Berliner Morgenpost called Morgenthau’s proposal a “satanic plan of annihilation,” while the 12 Uhr Blatt declared, “the aim of these conditions, inspired by Jews, is the annihilation of the German people in the quickest way.”
The press uproar signaled a stiffening of German resolve. M
arshall complained to Morgenthau, “We have got loudspeakers on the German lines telling them to surrender and this doesn’t help one bit.” Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado echoed Marshall’s complaint: “Prior to the announcement of the Morgenthau Plan, the Germans were surrendering in droves,” he told the press. “Now they’re fighting like demons.”40
Roosevelt’s Republican opponent felt the same way. Governor Thomas Dewey claimed the Morgenthau Plan left the Germans with no choice but to fight to the bitter end. As he bellowed to a friendly crowd at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, “Almost overnight the morale of the German people seemed wholly changed. Now they are fighting with the frenzy of despair. We are paying with blood for our failure to have ready an intelligent program for dealing with invaded Germany.” The Morgenthau Plan, Dewey claimed, was as valuable to Hitler as “ten fresh divisions.”41
•
“I think you have to take whatever rap is coming during the next month,” Treasury’s senior adviser on Germany, Harry Dexter White, told Morgenthau. “The president will do whatever he thinks is of interest to him politically. After the election, it will be a different story.”42
Politically, it was of interest to Roosevelt to distance himself from the Morgenthau Plan. In a radio address, he drew a distinction between the Nazi leaders and German citizens. “The German people are not going to be enslaved, because the United Nations do not traffic in human slavery. But it will be necessary for them to earn their way back into the fellowship of peace-loving and law-abiding nations. And, in their climb up that steep road, we shall certainly see to it that they are not encumbered by having to carry guns. We hope they will be relieved of that burden forever.”43
American Warlords Page 49
