American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  The Presidential Special chugged its way through short stops in Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, and Boston on its way to Hyde Park, where FDR would cast his vote. He was at his buoyant best along the way, and when Reilly’s men helped him off the Magellan, his grin betrayed no doubts about the result.

  “I can’t talk about my opponent the way I would like to, sometimes, because I try to think that I am a Christian,” he told a platform crowd in Bridgeport, Connecticut. “I try to think that some day I will go to Heaven, and I don’t believe there is anything to be gained in saying dreadful things about other people in any campaign. After next Tuesday, there are going to be a lot of sorry people in the United States.”23

  FDR believed he would not be one of them. But he was tired and had barely campaigned. He spoke at only five major events, three of them before large crowds. At each stop, his performance was exquisite—a taste of the old master—but his offstage indifference rattled his inner circle. “He doesn’t seem to give a damn,” fretted Pa Watson.

  That attitude began showing in the polls. As summer gave way to fall, public opinion surveys found Dewey’s stock rising steadily. By October it was even possible that Dewey might pull off an upset. In the campaign season’s final Gallup poll, FDR led in states claiming 209 electoral votes, while Dewey held the lead in states with 255 votes. States holding another seventy were too close to call.24

  • • •

  The skies over Hyde Park were clear and cold on Tuesday, November 7. It was a fair mix of Republican and Democrat weather, but voter turnout was heavy in urban industrial centers, which favored Roosevelt. After voting at his home precinct—again, listing his occupation as “tree farmer”—FDR rode back to Springwood. There, in the comfort of his home, he, Eleanor, Hopkins, Pa, Leahy, and the rest gathered in the study at nine p.m. to hear returns on the radio.25

  The news was little more than speculative banter until around eleven, when AP and UPI ticker machines in the smoking room began to chatter. As three times before, Dutchess County voters pulled their levers for a Republican. So did a majority of voters in a dozen states. But New York and thirty-five others went for Roosevelt, giving him a margin of 3,594,993 votes over Dewey, and a lopsided electoral count of 432 votes to Dewey’s ninety-nine. FDR had won his fourth presidential election.26

  Dewey would not concede the race until after three o’clock in the morning. Waiting up for Dewey’s concession, FDR dictated a telegram to the governor thanking him, then went to bed at four.

  “I still think he is a son-of-a-bitch,” he grumbled.27

  FORTY-EIGHT

  VOLTAIRE’S BATTALIONS

  ROOSEVELT HAD THRASHED DEWEY, BUT THE “SON-OF-A-BITCH” HAD BEEN right about one thing: Below the surface, the war hadn’t been going too well lately.

  The bright hopes of August had ground to a screeching halt in early September, when Eisenhower’s forces outran their supply lines and halted short of the Rhine River. German rockets—first the simple jet-engined V-1 “buzz bombs,” then the infinitely more lethal V-2 ballistic missiles—began crashing down on London. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery captured the vital port of Antwerp, a critical step in the Allied war plans, but he could not get the port working because the Germans doggedly held the estuary that linked Antwerp to the sea. Then First Airborne Army suffered a bloody repulse when it tried to capture a series of bridges across Holland. Operation MARKET-GARDEN, Montgomery’s gambit to get across the Lower Rhine, cost the Allies fifteen thousand men and achieved nothing.

  Montgomery’s neighbor to the south, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, fared no better in the Rhineland’s rough terrain. His First Army under General Courtney Hodges lost five thousand men capturing the German city of Aachen, then another thirty thousand wriggling through the primordial Hürtgen Forest, a defender’s dream where everything but numbers favored the Germans. Patton’s Third Army, which had made headlines racing across France, now slammed ineffectually against the fortified city of Metz. At the southern end of the front, the Seventh U.S. and First French Armies made it to the banks of the Rhine, but would go no farther until Bradley’s First and Third Armies pierced the Siegfried Line.1

  • • •

  A shortage of supplies, luck, and favorable weather swirled in the cauldron of Allied misfortune that fall. But the biggest problem—a problem Marshall wrestled with for nearly two years—was a shortage of war’s most basic expendable commodity: soldiers.

  Voltaire once quipped, “God is on the side of the big battalions,” and George Marshall intended to keep American battalions big. During the first nine months of 1944, the Army moved two million men to England and France; Britons joked that their island would sink under the weight of all those Yanks if it weren’t for the barrage balloons holding it up. On the other side of the globe, more than one million soldiers were arrayed throughout the Pacific, while another 150,000 worked the supply lines between India and China.2

  Getting all those big battalions where they could fight Hitler or Hirohito was only the first problem. The second was keeping them big when the enemy began shooting back.

  The volunteer wave that swept the nation after Pearl Harbor had broken long ago, and since 1943 the Navy, Air Forces, Marines, and Army had been competing for the same limited pool of draftees.* Even within the Army, there was intense manpower competition: Europe absorbed fighting men badly needed in the Pacific and Mediterranean, the Air Forces needed flight and maintenance crews, and the Army Ground Forces required over a million men to train, equip, transport, and process draftees who would be sent abroad.

  Congress bowed to Stimson’s calls to lower the draft age from twenty to eighteen, at considerable political risk to themselves. But even with eighteen-year-olds in uniform, the Army had only 6.7 million men by 1943, about 1.5 million fewer than the number FDR had approved in late 1942.3

  As clouds darkened the Rhineland’s rain-soaked battlefields, Allied casualties jumped. Besides the expected hazards—getting shot, blown to bits, or captured—cases of trench foot, self-inflicted wounds, combat fatigue, and the GI trots yanked a small army out of the line. AWOL cases jumped, and Eisenhower declined a clemency request by a deserter from Detroit named Eddie Slovik, who was tied to a post and shot. The Army needed an example, and Eddie was the example.4

  Marshall understood the fine line America’s war leaders had to walk. They could not simply draft another million men and hand out M-1 rifles. The Arsenal of Democracy required millions of miners, factory workers, oilmen, and steel refiners to produce the tools of war, and it needed millions more truckers, railyard workers, stevedores, and merchant mariners to move those tools overseas. Rosie the Riveter made a fine propaganda image, but throwing open factory doors to women still did not deepen the labor pool enough to solve the problem looming before Stimson and Marshall.

  Assuming that Russia would be knocked out of the war no later than 1943, Marshall originally thought the United States would need to raise two hundred divisions. When it became obvious that the Red Army was in for the long haul, he revised his estimates down to ninety divisions. To him, it was better to have fewer divisions and an assembly line of trained replacements as the blades of war took their toll. Airpower, mobility, and firepower, he assumed, would make up for any imbalance on the ground.5

  ROUNDUP’s deferral in 1942 relieved immediate pressure to train teams of riflemen and tankers. Infantry units no longer needed for an invasion of France in 1943 were broken up to create specialist units like parachute, antiaircraft, and signal battalions. By the time OVERLORD was written back into the calendar, those fighting men had been scattered like millet seeds in the wind. New men had to be found to take their place.6

  In late 1943, as OVERLORD and ANVIL grew into hungry, fussy babies, Marshall pillaged divisions in training and sent the gleanings to Europe. He scoured the Western Hemisphere for troops he could pull from Iceland, Panama, and California, and sent Japanese Amer
icans to fight Germans in Italy.*

  Marshall leaned on his personnel wizards to ship healthy conscripts overseas and refuse “limited service” ratings to draftees who were not really incapacitated. But those wizards made plenty of mistakes, and would make plenty more before the war’s end. Marshall had bellowed to an aide about a story claiming that a major-league catcher had been put on limited duty by Army doctors because he had a couple of broken fingers. “It is ridiculous to place on limited service a man who can catch with his broken fingers a fast ball,” Marshall fumed. “I have seen dozens of men with half a dozen serious complaints, in addition to their years, passed by Army doctors—and now to find great athletes, football and baseball, exempted, is not to be tolerated.”7

  But cannibalizing regiments and drafting athletes wouldn’t be enough. While Congress had authorized an Army of 7.7 million by the end of 1944, authorization was not the same thing as having 7.7 million fighting men. One Army survey showed an estimated 200,000 men living within the replacement pipeline; one general called them “an invisible horde of people going here and there but seemingly never arriving.” Another 400,000 were casualties recovering in hospitals, while 150,000 were classified simply as “overhead,” for lack of any better description.8

  Of the men who actually made it overseas, only a relative handful would be doing the bloody work. Most would ride the Army’s serpentine logistical tail—“one a-shootin’, ten a-lootin’,” the GI grumble went—and in early 1944 Marshall told Roosevelt that infantry, accounting for 11 percent of the Army and Air Forces, was taking 60 percent of all casualties in Italy. All told, European infantry and armored divisions were thought to be short about 100,000 men, though no one really knew for certain.9

  To find replacements for rifle companies, Marshall began dismantling every non-essential program he could lay his hands on. He began by tackling the Army Specialized Training Program, a pet project of Stimson’s that was educating 75,000 men for specialist jobs like engineering, dentistry, and foreign languages. He slashed furloughs, cut infantry training by two weeks, retrained 30,000 men from the Air and Service Forces, and told Eisenhower to cut his quartermaster count in Europe. He then stripped more infantry divisions training in the United States until he had moved another 78,000 replacements to Europe.10

  Despite Marshall’s cuts and cannibalization, the Army still lacked enough killers to drive the dagger home. Marshall and Stimson knew there would come a bitter season when the German will to resist would break, or the lines on both sides would stagnate and harden.

  Back in May, Stimson had asked Marshall whether a stalemate would grip the western front in the autumn. At the time, Marshall could not say for certain, but by November 1944 the answer was plain to everyone. Heavy rains, swollen rivers, Rhineland mud, and desperate German resistance had left the Hun in possession of the forbidding land along the Rhine.11

  •

  In times of peace, the death of an empire is brought on by old age, or by chronic diseases like complacency or debt or corruption. It comes so slowly its people do not even know their world is dying until the disease is irreversible. In times of war, the end comes like a wild boar from the woods, yellowed teeth bared, mud-spattered tusks lowered to gore. Those empires are overrun quickly and violently, and nearly every inhabitant, highborn or low, knows damn well what is happening to them—and what awaits them.

  In the Third Reich, the few who did not know death was upon them lived like blind moles in their underground bunkers and Alpine redoubts. These men, to whom a far-off, indistinct gallows beckoned, saw no defeat, because defeat’s implications were unthinkable. Defeat meant the end of their existence, the end of their ideology, the end of the world they had built.

  Those men, the leaders of the master race, heard no Allied bombers and saw no despair in the faces of their famished, glassy-eyed followers. They put their faith in destiny, Hitler’s uncanny luck, and the battered but unbroken Wehrmacht as it reared back for its most desperate gamble.

  FORTY-NINE

  COUNTING STARS

  AS GENERAL BRADLEY MET WITH EISENHOWER NEAR PARIS ON DECEMBER 16 to discuss the deteriorating manpower situation, word arrived of a German attack through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium and Luxembourg. Through softly falling snows and under cover of low, thick clouds, the Second SS Panzer Division led a quarter-million-man panzer army straight into the belly of Bradley’s thin line. “A complete surprise to our people,” Jack McCloy told his diary when word reached the War Department. “I could sense that General Marshall was very much upset over the developments.”1

  Upset he was, but Marshall didn’t want anyone in Washington bothering Eisenhower when he had his hands full. He forbade his staff from sending any message to SHAEF inquiring about operations in the Ardennes without his express approval, and as the German bulge deepened, Marshall refused to interfere, trusting that Eisenhower knew best what to do.2

  Mulling over the attack in Stimson’s office, Marshall and Stimson compared the battle raging in Belgium to von Hindenburg’s last great offensive in the spring of 1918. When the Kaiserschlacht was broken, an exhausted Germany had no choice but to sue for peace. Perhaps, Stimson thought, history was ready to repeat itself. “We know a good deal more today about the situation behind the German lines than we did twenty-six years ago,” he wrote. “So if this is stopped, particularly if stopped quickly and sharply and with big losses to the Germans, then we may have them crumbling sooner than expected.”3

  But thoughts of a second Armistice Day were premature. Like a Boris Karloff monster, the Wehrmacht that had been destroyed at Stalingrad and Tunisia, at St. Lô, Belorussia and the Falaise Gap, kept shuffling back like an animated corpse, arms outstretched and claws spread, unaware of its own death. On December 19, Eisenhower sent word that he was throwing in his only reserves, the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, and he placed the First and Ninth U.S. Armies, which had become separated from Bradley’s headquarters, under command of Field Marshal Montgomery.4

  Roosevelt spent the morning of the twentieth in the Map Room reviewing dispatches with Leahy and pinpointing obscure crossroad towns like St. Vith, Spa, and Bastogne. But throughout the Battle of the Bulge, as the papers began calling it, he maintained his usual routine, taking trips to Warm Springs and Hyde Park to celebrate Christmas, keeping one tired eye on the battle’s progress.

  “Roosevelt didn’t send a word to Eisenhower nor ask a question,” Marshall recalled. “In great stress Roosevelt was a strong man.” Stimson agreed. “The anxiety on [Roosevelt’s] part must have been heavy,” he wrote in his diary at year’s end. “He has been extremely considerate and has not asked any questions or sought to interfere in any way with either Marshall or myself while the crisis of the German counterattack has been going on.”5

  Their faith in Eisenhower paid off, for in the Ardennes Hitler rolled snake eyes. Ike’s men held on by their fingernails, but they blunted, then turned back the great armored onslaught. The north shoulder of the bulge held at Malmédy. Fierce resistance at Bastogne and St. Vith slowed Hitler’s advance long enough for Patton’s army to stab into the bulge from below. The day after Christmas, Patton’s Fourth Armored Division shot its way into Bastogne, and Montgomery’s British and American troops blunted the nose at the Meuse River, sixty miles from where the Germans started. By year’s end it was clear to everyone that Hitler’s gamble in the west had failed.

  •

  While Eisenhower juggled manpower, supply, and strategy problems, Field Marshal Montgomery lobbied for a shake-up in the Allied command structure.

  Montgomery had begun complaining almost from the moment Eisenhower assumed personal command of Allied ground forces on September 1, and his cry was echoed in London by Field Marshal Brooke. Comparing the breathtakingly swift advance of August—when Monty had been ground force commander—to the slow grind of autumn, Monty told anyone who would listen that he, not Eisenhower, was the better man to r
un the ground war. Eisenhower, he said, should remain supreme commander, a “chairman of the board” coordinating land, air, sea, supply, and civil matters, but Montgomery should resume his place as the overlord of battle.6

  Considering the matter to be Eisenhower’s business, Marshall held his tongue. But it was not easy to hold one’s tongue with a persistent, tactless man like Montgomery. “I came pretty near to blowing off out of turn,” Marshall said later. It was “very hard for me to restrain myself because I didn’t think there was any logic in what he said but overwhelming egotism.”

  Yet Marshall did sound off to Ike. He cabled Eisenhower, “My feeling is this: Under no circumstances make any concessions of any kind whatsoever. You not only have our complete confidence but there would be a terrific resentment in this country following such an action. . . . You are doing a grand job and go on and give them hell.”7

  Montgomery’s complaints to Brooke made their way to Churchill, who passed them along to the president. Roosevelt, like Marshall, refused to second-guess Eisenhower. “For the time being,” Roosevelt counseled Churchill, “it seems to me the prosecution and outcome of the battles lie with our Field Commanders in whom I have every confidence.”8

  On the last day of the year, Stimson told Roosevelt of a clamor in London newspapers for Montgomery to replace Eisenhower as ground commander. He showed Roosevelt Marshall’s “give them hell” telegram to Ike, and Roosevelt agreed they could not allow Eisenhower to be displaced by Montgomery or anyone else.