Along with the British chiefs of staff, the Prime Minister also interrogated Dill, who repeated his assessment of U.S. positions and problems. Delighted that he’d come early to the conference, Churchill was sure he could handle the President. The Prime Minister’s “view was clear,” Jacob recorded Churchill’s approach, expressed now in front of Dill and the British chiefs of staff. “He wanted to take plenty of time. Full discussion, no impatience—the dripping of water on a stone.” The big British contingent was to methodically wean the small American team away from its fixation on a major cross-Channel assault that year to more gradual, peripheral operations in the Mediterranean, with a smaller operation in Brittany, perhaps, to get a toehold at least on the continent. “In the meantime,” while the chiefs met their opposite numbers in the daily Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings at the Anfa Hotel, “he would be working on the President, and in ten days or a fortnight,” Churchill was confident, “everything would fall into place. He also made no secret of the fact that he was out to get agreement on a programme of operations for 1943 which the Military people might well think beyond our powers, but which he felt was the least that could be thought worthy of two great powers.”9
To the alarm of the British chiefs, then, the Prime Minister was all for action, on multiple fronts. To start with, he “wanted the cleansing of the North African shore to be followed by the capture of Sicily. He wanted the reconquest of Burma, and he wanted the invasion of Northern France, on a moderate scale perhaps. Operations in the Pacific should not be such as to prevent fulfilment of his programme. The Chiefs of Staff were dismissed on this note, and the rest of the evening,” before the President’s arrival the next day, “was given up to ice-breaking dinner parties.”10
11
A Wonderful Picture
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, for his part, was all for icebreaking. “I marveled at the way the Army just moved in and took charge and ran the whole operation,” even Captain McCrea later noted—speaking as a sailor.1
Brigadier Jacob, who had reconnoitered and recommended the venue, was equally delighted by the U.S. Army’s efforts, especially the catering: “certainly excellent, mostly U.S. Army rations, too. Of course it was supplemented with local produce,” including oranges, which—“large and juicy, with the best flavor of any oranges in the world”—formed “a part of every meal.” The “cooking too was good, and as again the whole thing was free, a genial warmth spread over our souls,” he recorded.2
McCrea agreed. “So well was this done that on the first evening of our arrival the President was able to entertain at dinner Prime Minister Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff (both the U.S. Joint Chiefs and British Chiefs of Staff), plus Col. Roosevelt and Averell Harriman—some twelve persons in all.”3
Churchill had hurried over with Hopkins at around 7:00 p.m. No formal notes were made of what was said between the President and Prime Minister, but the “three of us had a long talk over the military situation,” Hopkins wrote in his notes that night.4 The winter weather in the mountains had slowed the campaign in Tunisia, and Montgomery had yet to take Tripoli and advance toward Tunisia, but the plan of campaign was that the two Allied pincers would eventually trap the German and Italian forces in the Cape Bon Peninsula: forcing them either to attempt a Dunkirk-style evacuation or surrender. It was what would happen thereafter—locally, regionally, and internationally—that was the biggest problem to be resolved in the coming days.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff had been having cocktails at the Anfa Hotel when Hopkins arrived with the presidential summons. Dutifully, the bevy of generals and admirals—Generals Marshall and Arnold, Admiral King, General Alan Brooke, Admiral Dudley Pound, Air Marshal Charles Portal, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, as well as the Lend-Lease administrator, Averell Harriman—trooped over.
The dinner, in the President’s villa, went rather well. “People were tired, that first night,” Elliott recalled, “but it didn’t stop anybody from enjoying himself”—particularly as there was no attempt to limit the consumption of wine or liquor.5 General Hap Arnold recounted how he had just been down to the harbor to see the damage inflicted on the brand-new French battleship Jean Bart during the Torch invasion—the airman delighted to see that American thousand-pound bombs had smashed “holes in bow and stern large enough to take a small bungalow.”6 Others gave their own impressions of the city and its kasbah.
Admiral King “became nicely lit up towards the end of the evening,” Brooke scrawled in his diary that night. “As a result” the admiral became “more and more pompous, and with a thick voice and many gesticulations explained to the President the best way to organize the Political French organization for control of North Africa!”—something King would never have dared do when sober. “This led to arguments with PM who failed to appreciate fully the condition King was in. Most amusing to watch.”7
The dinner was certainly a far cry from life at Hitler’s headquarters in East Prussia, where the Führer had ceased to dine with his senior military staff. He’d stopped listening even to music at night, refused to go near the battle front or to make any public pronouncements—and was still demanding that no mention be made in the Nazi media of the increasingly catastrophic situation around Stalingrad.
“I busied myself filling glasses,” Elliott Roosevelt later recalled. “After dinner, Father and Churchill sat down on a big, comfortable couch that had been set back to the big windows. The steel shutters were closed. The rest of us pulled up chairs in a semicircle in front of the two on the couch.”8 “Many things discussed,” Arnold noted in his diary—including their leaders’ safety. “Everyone tried to keep President and Prime Minister from making plans to get too near front,” given that both men “seemed determined” to go, and “could see no real danger.”9
“We have come many miles and must stay long enough to solve very important problems,” Arnold finished his nightly jotting—aware how much responsibility the President carried, for good or ill. And he quoted the British prime minister, whose words had the sober ring of history, despite the immense quantity of alcohol the Prime Minister had imbibed. “Churchill: ‘This is the most important meeting so far. We must not relinquish initiative now that we have it. You men are the ones who have the facts and who will make plans for the future.’”10
An air raid siren then wailed, bringing the postprandial get-together almost to a close. “At about 1:30 a.m. an alarm was received,” General Brooke noted in green ink in his own leather-bound diary, “lights were put out, and we sat around the table with faces lit by 6 candles. The PM and President in that light and surroundings would have made,” he scribbled, “a wonderful picture.”11
Rembrandt might have painted it, but sadly, no photographs were taken that evening—though other, iconic photos would be, at the climax of the conference, ten days later. None could fail to be aware, however, just how symbolic was the meeting: the leaders of the two main Western democracies, gathering together with their chiefs of staff on the still-scarred battlefield of a foreign land, there to plan the further strategy and military operations against Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hirohito’s Japan. There would clearly be problems, especially political; but the new, dominating role of the United States was unmistakable—visible not only in the planes, tanks, artillery, and equipment factories were churning out at an ever-increasing rate across North America but their presence now in Northwest Africa, thousands of miles from American shores, barely eight weeks since the huge and successful amphibious U.S. invasion.
Not all was positive in the House of Happiness, however.
“Well after midnight, the P.M. took his leave,” Elliott later recalled. The President “was tired but still in a talkative mood”—and talk he did to his son. To Elliott the President confided his continuing distrust not only of the French, in regard to their tottering colonial empire, but of Churchill, too, in that respect. This might well complicate his dream of a United Nations authority committed to the principles of the
Atlantic Charter, after the war. “The English mean to maintain their hold on their colonies. They mean to help the French maintain their hold on their colonies. Winnie is a great man for the status quo,” the President said sadly to Elliott. “He even looks like the status quo, doesn’t he?”12
Elliott’s version of events was considered suspect by some, but Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s contemporary record of his stay at the White House the previous month, as well as the diary kept by Daisy Suckley, the President’s cousin, would lend credence to the overall veracity of Elliott’s account, published immediately after the war’s end. The President had disliked Admiral Darlan—but that did not mean he approved of de Gaulle, who harbored dictatorial ambitions. “Elliott,” the President said to his son, “de Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France”—and was committed to the revival of its colonial empire. “I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more. His whole Free French movement is honeycombed with police spies—he has agents spying on his own people. To him, freedom of speech means freedom from criticism . . . of him.”13
Which led the President to turn to “the problem of the colonies and the colonial markets, the problem of which he felt was at the core of all chances for future peace” across the globe. “‘The thing is,’ he remarked thoughtfully, replacing a smoked cigarette in his holder with a fresh one, ‘the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements—all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war. All you’re doing is negating the value of any kind of organizational structure for peace before it begins.” And with that he’d chortled: “The look that Churchill gets on his face when you mention India!”14
To Elliott the President then explained his notion of trusteeships: that “France should be restored as a world power, then to be entrusted with her former colonies as a trustee. As trustee, she was to report each year on the progress of her stewardship, how the literacy rate was improving, how the death rate declining, how disease being stamped out, how . . .”15
Phased decolonization, under the aegis of the United Nations, in other words.
“Wait a minute,” Elliott had countered, “Who’s she going to report all this to?”
And with that his father had set out—to Elliott’s amazement—his vision of the “United Nations” postwar “organization.” Also his notion of policemen: the “big Four—ourselves, Britain, China, the Soviet Union—we’ll be responsible for the peace of the world”—once the war was won. “It’s already high time for us to be thinking of the future, building for it,” Roosevelt remarked.16
“Three-thirty, Pop,” his son pointed out.
“Yes. Now I am tired,” the President acknowledged. “Get some sleep yourself, Elliott.”17
And with that the eve of the defining conference of World War II came to a close.
12
In the President’s Boudoir
ELLIOTT OVERSLEPT. When he staggered downstairs for breakfast on January 15, it was to find the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff already assembled in his father’s boudoir.
It was 10:00 a.m.—and the President was listening to what had transpired at the preliminary Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting the previous day, at the Anfa Hotel.
In insisting the conference take place in American-held Morocco, the President had chosen wisely—for it was vital the U.S. chiefs be exposed to the actual Torch battlefield in Northwest Africa. Instead of concocting strategy and operations thousands of miles away, in the safety and comfort of the Pentagon and the Mall, they would have a chance to meet the men and commanders on the ground who were fighting Germans now, not Vichy French troops. It was also crucial that the U.S. chiefs be separated for a time from their dangerously irresponsible planners, who had very little idea of modern hostilities in facing the Wehrmacht—or the fanatical Japanese. In the many documents accumulating in his Map Room at the White House—U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff minutes, Combined Chiefs of Staff minutes, Joint Strategic Survey minutes, Joint Intelligence Committee minutes, Joint Staff Planners Reports, recommendations and analyses of the differences between British and U.S. strategic views since November 1942—he had never seen a single mention of the need for American combat experience.
The plethora of paper evinced dutiful, unstinting research and statistical evidence gathered in Washington—but no common sense. That the Western Allies were holding half of the Luftwaffe’s entire operational strength on the Western and Mediterranean Fronts was calculated down to the nearest plane; the number of Wehrmacht divisions capable of offensive and defensive operations was tallied and enumerated; the amount of German naval vessels and U-boats estimated. Yet the need for American battle experience—and lessons—in matching up to professional German foes had seemed a closed book to such bureaucrats and staffers.
At the time of Casablanca—as well as after the war—there would thus be righteous indignation over the President’s decision to allow only a handful of staff officers to accompany the U.S. chiefs on the trip to North Africa. Led by the War Office’s chief planning officer, Brigadier General Albert Wedemeyer—who was one of the few permitted to travel with General Marshall to Casablanca—these men would complain they had been thrown to English wolves: a British prime minister taking with him a vast retinue of planners and operations officers and clerks committed to a vague British, rather than an Allied, military strategy for 1943.
Wedemeyer, in particular, would complain they’d been duped; that the President had made a terrible mistake; had through naiveté brought a military team simply too small to confront the host of staff officers accompanying the wily Churchill. Moreover, that the British had tricked the American contingent into abandoning their preferred Second Front invasion that summer, 1943. The British staff officers, Wedemeyer would complain, had been backed by yet more staffers aboard HMS Bulolo, anchored for their special use in Casablanca Harbor. Using this communications ship, the British planners were able to cable London and put their hands on any fact or figure they needed to support their alternative British plans, and thus defeat American counterproposals; whereas the U.S. contingent, despite being in a U.S. compound in a U.S. military area guarded by U.S. artillery and antiaircraft guns, was virtually captive in terms of British bureaucratic firepower.
“They swarmed upon us all like locusts,” Wedemeyer lamented in a letter from North Africa to General Thomas Handy, the assistant chief of staff in the War Department’s Operations Division (OPD) in Washington, and “had us on the defensive practically all the time”—backed by “a plentiful supply of planners and various other assistants, with prepared plans to insure that they not only accomplished their purpose but did so in stride and with fair promise of continuing in the role of directing strategy the whole course of the war.”1
General Wedemeyer was certainly not alone in perceiving a British conspiracy to subvert the swifter course of World War II. General Handy, who received Wedemeyer’s letter in Washington and passed it on to other generals at the Pentagon, was of like mind, bewailing afterward that “the British on the planning level just snowed them under.”2
Yet another U.S. planner later recalled how “we were overwhelmed by the large British staff.”
Brigadier General J. E. Hull, heading up the OPD at the Pentagon, was even more embarrassed than Wedemeyer and Handy by the U.S. unpreparedness for paper battle. “The British had come down there in droves,” he later recalled, “and every one of them had written a paper about something that was submitted by the British Chiefs of Staff to the American chiefs of Staff for agreement.”3
In sum, “We came, we listened,” Wedemeyer recoined Caesar’s famous epigram, “and we were conquered.”4
All this was true—bearing out Brigadier Jacob’s nervousness at the size of the British team Churchill insisted should be flown to Casablanca. Yet in terms of the Allied
strategy that President Roosevelt was now to lay down at Casablanca, it completely missed the point. For the reality was: Wedemeyer and his colleagues were still living in a fool’s paradise. And the moment of truth—not only the President’s truth, but truth on the ground—had arrived.
Inexperienced U.S. planning officers like Brigadier General Wedemeyer were the real problem—not the British.
The U.S. War Department’s final planning document, produced by the Joint Strategic Survey Committee and sent over to the White House Map Room for the President to review before he departed from Washington, had said it all: stating baldly that once Tunisia and Libya were secured, the Allies’ Mediterranean Front should be closed down. Mussolini’s Italy, in the planning committee’s view, could be forced to surrender by air bombing alone. All U.S. Army forces should be switched to Britain “for a land offensive against Germany in 1943”—without gaining any further amphibious experience, or campaign lessons in facing and fighting German forces.5
Thankfully the President had confided to Mackenzie King, in early December, his unwillingness to tackle a cross-Channel invasion before American commanders and troops were blooded and had the measure of their opponents—which could best be done in the Mediterranean, where this could be achieved, as he said, without risking a major setback. His interrogation of General Marshall at the White House before the chiefs left for Casablanca on January 7 had only convinced him more deeply that a premature invasion of northern France would be a disaster—and he had insisted no decision should therefore be made for several months. It was thus with decided relief that President Roosevelt found, at midmorning in his bedroom on his first full day in Casablanca, January 15, 1943, that the penny had finally dropped, at least among his chiefs of staff.
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