Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  The President of the United States certainly knew more than the British ambassador about the postwar social blueprint for Britain. “The President said the Beveridge report has made a real impression in this country,” King recorded.34 “The thought of [medical and employment] insurance from the cradle to the grave. ‘That seems to be a line that will appeal,’” Roosevelt had said to King at dinner. “You and I should take that up strongly. It will help us politically as well as being on the right lines in the way of reform”—a remark King correctly interpreted as meaning “the President has in mind a fourth term and that he feels it will come as a result of winning the war, and the social programme to be launched.”35

  As president of the United States, Mr. Roosevelt “did not think the country will stand for socialism,” King recorded the President’s caution, but he did make clear that improving the condition of America’s working people was as much a part of his vision of the postwar world as would be international security achieved through unconditional surrender of the Axis warrior nations, and disarmament closely monitored by the United Nations. “I felt in listening to the President that he was naturally anxious to be responsible for planning the new order,” King reflected36—a new order that would snatch the wind from the sails of those idly or idealistically espousing communism, since it would guarantee the well-being and security of the majority of ordinary people, without communist barbarity or oppression.

  As a deeply devout Christian who read the New Testament first thing in the morning and last thing at night, Mackenzie King had thus listened to the President’s tour d’horizon with growing “relief,” he admitted—the opportunity to discuss with the President of the United States “social questions and reform, instead of these problems of war and destruction. I felt tremendously pleased. It may be that when the war is over, new force and energy will come forward toward the furtherance of these larger social aims. It was midnight when I got to bed . . . From the moment I turned out the light until waking I slept very soundly.”37

  The world, after this war, was clearly going to be very different from the one bequeathed by the victors of World War I.

  4

  What Next?

  WHAT HAD MOST moved Mackenzie King on his stay at the White House early in December, 1942, were the little details that went hand in hand with his discussions with the President.

  After lunch in the small dining room upstairs in the White House mansion one day, King noticed “on the President’s desk” among the bric-a-brac, “a little bronze of his mother,” which touched him deeply.1 Fresh from her trip to England, the President’s wife, the First Lady, had been present—the President proud, King had happily noted, of what Eleanor had accomplished there as a spokesperson, so to speak, of American idealism.

  The President’s health, though, was another matter. On the afternoon of December 4, 1942, for example, King had been somewhat alarmed by Roosevelt’s physical condition. “Had tea alone with the President at 5:20 in his circular chart room [the Oval Study]. The President poured tea himself.”2 The two leaders had spoken of manpower and mobilization—problems common to both countries. However, “I noticed that his hand was very, very shaky,” King had dictated—the tea in danger of spilling. The President looked “rather tired,” but as they talked he’d “brightened up.”

  Here again Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s testimony, in the detailed diary he was keeping, would offer the most intimate clues to the President’s mind in late 1942. No other war leader was exploring a postwar vision such as the President was doing; Churchill could only dream of the past; Hitler, only of the German Volk and of ruthless conquest. And who knew what Stalin dreamed of? Would the President be well enough, however, to get his allies to cooperate and carry out his grand vision of the postwar world? Would Congress and the American public embrace it, or go back to isolationism? And what of the war itself?

  Turning to confront the President on the sofa, King had therefore asked him, face to face: “What are the immediate plans, supposing you get complete possession of North Africa, what next?”3

  From the point of view of military strategy in order to achieve political ends, it was a most interesting question.

  The President seemed glad that King had raised it. “That of course is the next problem,” Roosevelt replied. “I wanted to speak of it.”4 To his great disappointment, despite the success of the President’s Torch operation, which they’d opposed almost to the point of mutiny, his U.S. generals and admirals were still out of sync with their commander in chief. In fact his generals and admirals were now out of sync with each other, and the British.

  “For some time past,” Roosevelt confided to the Canadian prime minister—whose country was supplying a vast amount of war material to the Allied effort, as well as significant numbers of troops, and the crucial materials for development of an atomic bomb in the United States—“we have had the Chiefs of Staff both here and in England working on the strategic side of things.” There were “at least 10 different places” where the Allies could advance, from northern Norway to the Balkans. “No decision was reached as yet,” though, Mackenzie King recorded the President’s lament, since “it was very hard,” the President said, “to get the different Chiefs of Staff to agree on a plan.”5

  Harry Hopkins had been little help in this respect. Hopkins was by nature and ability a “fixer”—a highly intelligent man, brilliant at absorbing reports, and able to see beyond hurdles. Never having fired a gun or seen war at close quarters, however, Hopkins had erratic military judgment, to say the least. He had urged the President to declare war early in 1941, before the nation was ready to fight a one-ocean war, let alone two.6 Then—having become convinced the Russians were not going to be defeated by the Germans in 1941—he had urged throughout 1942 a cross-Channel invasion of France rather than the President’s “great pet scheme” of Torch, believing the North African operation might actually fail. Even if successful, it would be a diversion of decisive American effort, he felt.

  Hopkins, as a civilian, could at least be forgiven for his ignorance of military realities—especially the lack of American experience in fighting an enemy as battle-hardened, ideologically driven, and professional as German troops marching to Hitler’s triumphant tune. However, Hopkins’s military innocence had been mirrored by most senior, professional desk generals and admirals in the U.S. War and Navy Departments in Washington. Despite the success of Torch, the U.S. chiefs were once again urging, early in December, that a cross-Channel Allied invasion be mounted in the spring of 1943, or latest by the summer of ’43—without American soldiers or their field commanders having seen more than a few days of battle, and that only against conflicted Vichy French forces.

  Mackenzie King was as skeptical of the chances of a cross-Channel attack succeeding in 1943 as the President—indeed, more so given the “fiasco” of the Canadian raid on Dieppe three months earlier. Still mourning the loss of so many thousands of Canadian soldiers killed or wounded and captured on the beaches of the little French seaport on August 19, 1942—almost all of them brave volunteers, sacrificed to no real purpose other than to demonstrate the futility of a premature cross-Channel assault—the Canadian prime minister had been alarmed by Hopkins’s views the day he arrived at the White House. The President’s counselor had shared with him “the need of a decision being fairly quickly made as to what the campaign for next year [1943] was to be. He said the military heads could not yet make up their mind but he thought that decision would have to be made at once if supplies were to be gotten in to the right place. It would seem to him it would probably have to be from England on Europe”—i.e., for a cross-Channel assault in 1943—“and that great quantity of supplies would have to be gotten across immediately.”7

  The notion that Allied forces could defeat the Wehrmacht simply by supplies had seemed to the Canadian premier unbelievably optimistic. To King’s profound relief the President, however, declared he didn’t agree with Hopkins—or with his U.S. Wa
r Department staff. He reminded King how it was only through his own and Churchill’s combined efforts that the Allied war against Hitler had been saved from disaster that year, 1942, by insisting on Operation Gymnast (which was then renamed Torch). “It is a good thing Winston and I kept it out [on the table] as we did,” the President had remarked of the invasion of Northwest Africa—for “during early 1941, army and navy were all for direct attack across the Channel in the spring of 1942.” The plans for a Second Front invasion “kept taking longer and longer, after spring of 1942. Then it was to be on in the summer.” Again, this had proved impossible, at least in sufficient force to assure success. “Could not get ships, etc. Then the next plan was that they would try in the spring of 1943.” At that prospect, the President had, in the summer of 1942, finally drawn the line as U.S. commander in chief, convinced that U.S. forces would have to gain actual combat experience fighting the Wehrmacht if a difficult cross-Channel invasion were to have any chance of success. “The President then said that he and Winston [had decided they] would get together in June” of 1942, to work out a new strategy. Tobruk’s fall, and the failure of the British to halt Rommel’s advance in Libya, had put the kibosh on any hopes of British-American success across the English Channel, where twenty-five German divisions were awaiting their arrival. “The President then said he had told Churchill: ‘I go back to my first love, which is to attack via North Africa.’” Such a strategic blow would secure the Atlantic port of Dakar and, in terms of lines of communication and resupply, enable the Allies to use “the short route from Britain to Africa, and short route from U.S. to Africa.” Torch would coincide with the British, reinforced with U.S. tanks and air groups, getting “control of North Egypt and with good luck” lead to “control of the Mediterranean.”8

  “I felt the soft place was Southern Europe,” Roosevelt had reminded King—who’d been staying with him at the White House the previous spring, when the strategic debate had burned fiercely. Side by side with that southern European/North African strategy, the President had meanwhile wanted “a strong hitting force pointed at Germany from the North” as a permanent threat9—forcing Hitler to keep his twenty-five or thirty German divisions stationed along the North Sea and Atlantic coasts of Europe, well away from Russia.

  It was in the Mediterranean, however, that U.S. forces could best actually fight and gain crucial command and battle experience, the President had explained to King—at the very extremity of German lines of communication and resupply. The campaign in Northwest Africa was already drawing huge Axis military forces to the Southern Front, across the Mediterranean, forcing Germany and Italy to meet the Allies in combat there—the Germans using vital, battle-hardened and battle-worthy troops, planes, and military resources that could not, as a result, be sent to reinforce their war on the Eastern Front.

  The Mediterranean thus offered the U.S. Army, Air Forces, and Navy a priceless opportunity: namely to rehearse and perfect the command and combat skills they would need in fighting ruthless, highly disciplined, strongly motivated German forces in Europe, before being expected to undertake anything as daunting as a contested cross-Channel invasion—an operation of war that had not been successfully attempted, after all, in almost a thousand years, since the time of William the Conqueror.

  Battle experience, then, was the crux of the matter: the reason why the President so profoundly disagreed with Hopkins; with Secretary of War Henry Stimson; with General George Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff; and with all the voices in Washington baying again for an immediate cross-Channel Second Front. As U.S. commander in chief he, President Roosevelt, had a responsibility to ensure the nation did not embark on a course of military action that would fail—especially when there was no need to do so, as he confided to Mackenzie King in another talk on December 6, 1942, as King prepared to return to Canada. He had, “this afternoon, sent word to the Chiefs of Staff in Washington and also to the joint staffs in England to ask exactly what they had thus far decided about the next moves, and what were the points they were still debating. He said when you think it took from January till June before we settled on Africa and definite plans for the campaign, you see it is time we get the next step settled or next move determined.” As president and commander in chief, however, he had his own view—which he now shared with King.

  “In many ways,” the President confided, “he wished for nothing more than let the fighting continue in Africa indefinitely. We are able to get supplies across, so much easier to Africa than to any other place. We can wear down the Germans there by a process of attrition”—just as U.S. forces were doing in the Pacific, in the Solomon Islands, while learning the art of modern combat. “He said: I feel the same about the Japs. As long as we can go on the wearing down in the one place, we are coming nearer to certain victory in the end.”10

  Mackenzie King, as prime minister of Canada, had breathed a sigh of relief. When asked by the President if his Canadian generals were also pressing for an immediate Second Front, King responded that, unlike the generals in Washington, the Canadian generals “felt it was better to keep a strong hitting force pointed at Germany from the North,” but not to launch such an actual invasion before there was a reasonable chance it would succeed. The President “said he felt that very strongly” too, King recorded.

  “It would be a great mistake,” Roosevelt had remarked, “to do anything which would take away the German armies that are now concentrated in occupied France and in the North—anything which would make them less fearful of an enemy invasion,” in terms of threat. Beyond that potent menace, however, the President had explained to King, he had no actual wish to launch a D-day landing any time soon across the English Channel, with forces and commanders still inexperienced in combat. “He thought that what the Canadians had done at Dieppe”—where almost a thousand men were slaughtered in a matter of a few hours, and two-thirds of their forces were killed, wounded, or captured by the Germans, without even getting off the beaches—“was a very necessary part of the campaign,” for it had “made clear how terribly dangerous the whole business of invasion across the Channel was.”11

  These had been the President’s own words. They explained why the President was so determined to stop his top military staff from insisting upon a suicidal assault in the wrong place, at the wrong time. The Second Front should be kept as a threat—but no actual cross-Channel invasion be launched until 1944, when U.S. mass production could ensure superiority in arms; more important still, it would be a time by which Allied forces in Africa and the Mediterranean would have learned the lessons of modern combat: how to defeat the Germans in battle. Only then would it be fair to ask huge numbers of American sons—perhaps two million—to land across the defended beaches of northern France and fight their way to Berlin.

  Mackenzie King thus set off to return to Ottawa that evening, December 6, 1942, deeply relieved: knowing the President would do nothing rash before the military forces of the Western Allies—Canada, the United States, and Britain—had proven themselves in combat and were ready: preferably in 1944, unless by some miracle the Germans collapsed. In the meantime, the President hoped, he confided to King, that Stalin would cease parrying his appeals for a summit, and would help start an international dialogue on the postwar world—with history at stake.

  5

  Stalin’s Nyet

  FINALLY, ON DECEMBER 6, 1942, shortly after Mackenzie King left Washington, the President heard back from Stalin. Although the Russian dictator “welcomed the idea of a meeting of the leaders of the Governments of the three countries to determine a common line of military strategy,” he himself would “not be able to leave the Soviet Union. I must say that we are having now such a strenuous time that I cannot go away even for a day.” Around Stalingrad, he explained, “we are keeping encircled a group of German troops and hope to finish them off.”1

  The question of postwar agreements was not even mentioned.

  Given the amount of aid—more than 10 percent of Russia�
�s war needs—that the United States was supplying the Russians, the President cabled back that he was “deeply disappointed that you feel you cannot get away for a conference with me in January.” Stalin was known never to have gone near the Russian front.

  The President urged Stalin to reconsider. The date proposed was still five weeks in the future. “There are many matters of vital importance to be discussed between us. These relate not only to vital strategic decisions but also to things we should talk over in a tentative way in regard to emergency policies we should be ready with if and when conditions in Germany permit. These would include also other matters relating to future policies about North Africa and the Far East which cannot be discussed by our military people alone.” If Stalin could not see a way to leave Moscow in January, what about “meeting in North Africa about March first”?2

  To this plea, however, there was no response from Moscow for a week. When the reply came, it was only to say Stalin regretted “it is impossible for me to leave the Soviet Union either in the near future or even at the beginning of March. Front business absolutely prevents it, demanding my constant presence near our troops.”3