Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Elliott made old-fashioneds (sugar, bitters, and whiskey) for the generals—and, joined by Franklin Jr., the five men sat down in the President’s dining room for a first-class Moroccan meal.

  Typically, Roosevelt wanted Marshall to feel he was respected, even if his advice had been wrong. He therefore deliberately raised again his wish to inspect troops not only in Morocco but closer to the frontline, near the Tunisian border.

  “Out of the question, sir,” Marshall stated unequivocally.23 Even with a fighter escort, the President’s slow C-54 could be attacked by Luftwaffe planes—“it would just draw attackers,” Eisenhower added frankly, “like flies to honey.”24

  The President reluctantly backed off the idea—allowing Marshall to feel he had won at least a tactical victory.

  Satisfied, Marshall and Eisenhower departed the villa after dinner and the President then spent quality time with his sons, talking about the family. “Father got to bed early that night: before midnight,” Elliott recalled.25

  The President had cause to feel the conference was off to a good start. The flight to North Africa had been historic. But so, too, had been the President’s first full day in Casablanca. By its end he’d ensured that the great Allied military conference would result in compromise and cooperation, not contention—thus injecting not only unity of Allied military purpose but a transfusion of realism into the veins of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were, in all truth, more green regarding modern warfare than Eisenhower.

  Instead of insisting upon mass American slaughter on the beaches of northern France that August, the U.S. chiefs could now set about mapping a detailed course of operations that year that would, above all, be within the capabilities of the Western Allies—whatever Stalin might plead, when eventually informed.

  Besides: if the Russian dictator had wanted to argue for a Second Front in Europe that year, he should have taken the trouble to show up.

  With that, having bidden his guests goodnight, the President retired and went to sleep, confident that, though the Allies had much to learn in combat, they would do so in the coming months, and that all would be well—with 1944 the year when the coup de grâce could be given and the Third Reich brought to an ignominious end.

  How difficult it would be to steer his coalition partners, however, remained to be seen. If the British were difficult, how much more so were the French. Moreover, how to keep the Russians happy with such a timetable, when they were facing two-thirds of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, would be tougher still.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  Unconditional Surrender

  13

  Stimson Is Aghast

  AT THE PENTAGON, Secretary Stimson was aghast on hearing the “bad news” from General McNarney.

  Joseph McNarney was the U.S. Army deputy chief of staff, standing in for General Marshall. His news related to “how the British were forcing us to do some more in the Mediterranean” after Tunis, rather than switching U.S. forces to a cross-Channel invasion, to be launched from England that year.1 In Washington, D.C., however, the secretary of war could do nothing.

  Two days later Stimson’s heart sank still further with the “somber news that I had been getting yesterday from the conference in Africa where it seems to be clear that the British are getting away with their own theories,” he recorded, “and that the President must be yielding to their views as against those of our own General Staff and the Chief of Staff. So it looks as if we were in for further entanglements in the Mediterranean, and this seems to me a pretty serious situation unless the Germans are very much less strong than I think we should assume.”2

  Stimson’s continuing lack of realism was deplorable, given the lack of U.S. experience in mounting an operation as vast and serious as a cross-Channel invasion would be, if undertaken that year. At the same time, the war secretary’s fear of “perfidious Albion” was well warranted. Could British assurances they would eventually participate in a Second Front honestly be believed? The answer was clearly no.

  For all their criticisms of Eisenhower’s tardiness in Tunisia, the British were not actually willing or able to say how the Third Reich could be defeated, rather than surrounded. As Admiral King reported to the President when the U.S. chiefs of staff came to the Villa Dar es Saada the following evening, January 16, for a two-hour session with Mr. Roosevelt, “the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been attempting to obtain the British Chiefs of Staff concept of how the war should be won”3—and had had little luck. It seemed the British had no idea.

  In his diary General Sir Alan Brooke, after his own experience in battle against German forces in 1940, remained implacably opposed to a cross-Channel attack unless the Wehrmacht was first weakened and brought to its knees elsewhere. He complained, in his diary, at the “slow tedious process” it was to get the U.S. team to accept his “proposed policy.” In a postwar annotation to the diary, he would even pen a diatribe against General Marshall. Among “Marshall’s very high qualities he did not possess those of a strategist,” Brooke (by then Lord Alanbrooke of Brookeborough) would claim. “It was almost impossible to make him grasp the true concepts of a strategic situation. He was unable to argue out a strategic situation and preferred to hedge and defer decisions until such time as he had to consult his assistants”—assistants who were “not of the required calibre.”4

  Brooke was being disingenuous—for Marshall, like Admiral King, was an excellent strategist; what he lacked was the ability to see how important it was to match U.S. strategy to reality. Neither general properly understood the need to create armies and army commanders who could defeat the Wehrmacht in battle—irrespective of wearing down German forces on other fronts.

  Hour after hour Marshall thus pressed Brooke and the British to explain how exactly a further campaign in the Mediterranean would, in itself, defeat the Third Reich—something neither Brooke nor his colleagues Admiral Pound (who was suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumor) and Air Marshal Portal could answer. Brooke’s assertions that the Germans would thereby be “worn down” to a point where they could not send reinforcements to northern France seemed particularly lame, given the likelihood that, if the Allies fought on in Italy, as Brooke envisioned, it would be the Allies who would be worn down rather than the Germans.

  Marshall and Brooke thus went at each other hammer and tongs. Almost five hours of discussion at the Anfa Hotel—however irritating to Brooke—did at least permit the American team to challenge and rehearse the different possible military alternatives for 1943 with relentless honesty within the framework of overall war strategy.

  The result was a consensus: there were no alternatives. If forced to fight on that year in the relative safety of the Mediterranean theater, the U.S. chiefs accepted, then it would be best to tackle Sicily, once North Africa was cleared—giving the Allies the amphibious-assault-landing experience necessary for a 1944 cross-Channel invasion.

  The President had been right, they reluctantly agreed as they went over the requirements for a successful Second Front with their British opposite numbers. General Brooke had pointed to forty German divisions available in or close to France—and a Luftwaffe that was still a potent weapon of war. By contrast, after the expected capture of Tunis in the spring of 1943, the Allies would have but twenty-one to twenty-four divisions ready to assault northern France even by the fall—and as Admiral Pound, the British navy chief, pointed out, “this was too late since the weather was liable to break in the third week of September and it was essential to have a port by then.” August 15, 1943, would be the cutoff date, weatherwise, were a cross-Channel invasion to be undertaken that year—moreover, according to the commander of the British amphibious forces, Vice Admiral Mountbatten, it would take all of three months to get the necessary landing craft from the Mediterranean to the United Kingdom. Any hope that the RAF or USAAF could interdict German air forces over Brest were scotched by Air Marshal Portal, the RAF chief, “since it was out of range.” Even if the Cherbourg-Normand
y area was chosen, “with limited air facilities in the [Cherbourg] Peninsula we should possibly find ourselves pinned down at the neck of the Peninsula by ground forces whose superiority we should be unable to offset by the use of air,” Portal pointed out. And once the Germans realized the Allies were not actually going to attack Italy and southern Europe from North Africa, they would “quickly bring up their air forces from the Mediterranean, realizing that we could not undertake amphibious operations on a considerable scale both across the Channel and in the Mediterranean.”

  The simple fact, then, was: “no Continental operations on any scale were in prospect before the spring of 1944,” General Arnold concluded.5

  If the Combined Chiefs were agreed on 1944 for a major cross-Channel assault, at what point should “further operations” in the Mediterranean be halted, though? How exploit Allied strength in the Mediterranean, once achieved, without risking stalemate requiring more and more reinforcements—thus vitiating the success of the cross-Channel campaign planned for 1944? As General Marshall memorably put it, the Mediterranean could become a dangerous “suction pump” on American manpower and arms. What Marshall therefore wanted from Brooke, Pound, and Portal, as a strategist, was an acknowledgment of that danger: an agreement that, if operations in the Mediterranean became stalled or an expensive dead end, the very combat experience the Allies were seeking would thereby be wasted, and a successful cross-Channel invasion in 1944 be rendered impossible.

  This danger General Brooke refused to validate, as only an owl-eyed, intelligent, but obstinate Ulsterman could—while paying lip service to the notion of an eventual cross-Channel attack in 1944.6

  Would Brooke keep his word, though, the U.S. team wondered? Would the British even undertake an offensive to reopen the Burma Road they had lost to the Japanese in 1942, which was vital in order to supply United Nations forces in China?

  Marshall had to hope they would. The British, after all, were America’s primary allies in the global war. At the Villa Dar es Saada Marshall therefore reported to the President on January 16 his understanding that, after the amphibious invasion of Sicily that summer, “the British were not interested in occupying Italy, inasmuch as this would add to our burdens without commensurate returns.”7

  These were famous last words—or hopes.

  The President was as concerned as Marshall over getting bogged down in Italy, and “expressed his agreement with this view.”8 Between them, however, they would have to make the British back off such a potential dead end—the President working on Churchill, Marshall on Brooke. Neither of them had any idea of the nightmares ahead, though, in this regard.

  In the meantime, crediting British good faith, the chiefs moved on to other strategic concerns. By Monday, January 18, in fact, Roosevelt had been able to get outline agreement on pretty much all he had wanted at Casablanca. The Combined Chiefs had agreed to his strategy for 1943: further operations in the Mediterranean, after the capture of Tunis, targeted on Sicily, with simultaneous preparations for a cross-Channel assault to be made earliest in late 1943, if there were signs of sudden German collapse; otherwise a full-scale assault early in 1944 on the Cherbourg Peninsula, targeted on Berlin. In Asia there was to be a 1943 British offensive in Burma to open the overland supply route to China. And in the Pacific, further advances that would take the Allies closer to the Japanese mainland—which would be ultimately bombed into submission, or subjected to land assault if required, after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

  In this respect the President had invited Churchill to lunch with him privately at the Villa Dar es Saada on the eighteenth, before the afternoon meeting he’d convened with the chiefs of staff—for he wanted something of major importance from Churchill: formal agreement to his “unconditional surrender” policy.

  Churchill raised no objection whatever—in fact the Prime Minister found himself positively inspired by the President’s proposals for prosecuting the war to the bitter end, gaily promising not only that the British would launch their offensive into Burma (Operation Anakim) under General Wavell that year but would “enter into a treaty,” if necessary, to assure him that Britain would fight alongside the United States to ensure the ultimate “defeat of Japan.” In reporting the day’s deliberations to his cabinet that night, Churchill informed his colleagues in London that the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Casablanca were “now I think unanimous in essentials about the conduct of the war in 1943,” and that in respect of the strategy decided upon at the meeting held in the President’s villa with the Combined Chiefs, “Admiral Q [FDR] and I were in complete agreement.” Moreover, Churchill cabled, he and the President were in agreement that, at the conclusion of the conference, there would be a public “declaration of firm intention of the United States and the British Empire to continue the war relentlessly until we have brought about the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Germany and Japan.”9

  Historians would later argue over the merits and demerits of such a war policy,10 but the fact that neither the U.S. chiefs of staff nor the British prime minister and his War Cabinet in London opposed the President’s “unconditional surrender” policy gives some idea of how much in control of such war strategies was the President. Time would tell how it would go down once announced to the world, but in the meantime Mr. Roosevelt had come too far to remain closeted in the Anfa camp. He had chosen as his nom de plume Admiral Q, in prior secret communications with Churchill—a humorous reference to his Spanish literary hero, Don Quixote. (Hopkins was “Mr. P.” for Sancho Panza.) Whether he was tilting at windmills in seeking unconditional surrender of the Axis nations would only become clear in the fullness of time—and war. In the meanwhile he wanted to get out and visit with his commanders and the troops in the field, like Lincoln.

  On the evening of January 19, the President went to dine with General Patton at his palatial headquarters in Casablanca—listening with fascination and amusement to the cavalryman as, in his distinctive high-pitched voice, he described his recent landings under French fire, and expounded upon the primacy of the tank in modern warfare.

  Two days later, at 9:20 a.m., the President left Casablanca by car with Patton “for an inspection of the United States Army forces stationed in the vicinity of Rabat, some 85 miles to the northeast,” as Captain McCrea recorded.11 U.S. troops lined the entire route as the fifteen cars in the cavalcade made their way north, covered by a U.S. Air Force umbrella.

  Recalled General Clark, the President “started asking questions, and I don’t think he stopped all day. He transferred to a jeep at Rabat, where Major-General E. N. Harmon, commanding the Second Armored Division, was introduced and joined us for that part of the trip. The President was driven within a few feet of the front rank of the troops, which were lined with their vehicles.” Then on to review the men of the Third Infantry Division. “A stiff wind made the flags and banners stand out smartly, and the outfits were polished and alert, so that the President had a fine time, seemed pleased with what he saw, and showed his pride for what they had accomplished.”12 And in the afternoon, the Ninth U.S. Infantry Division, commanded by Major-General Manton Eddy.

  “I went ‘up the line’ this a.m. beyond Rabat,” the President wrote Daisy that night, and “reviewed about 30,000 Am[erican]. Troops,” followed by a visit to Fort Mehdia—“a very stirring day for me & a complete surprise to the Troops.”13

  Given his paralysis, driving in an army jeep caused the President intense pain, but he bore it with equanimity: pleased as punch to review combat-readying soldiers on the battlefield—the brim of his soft Panama hat turned up as he held onto the jeep’s guardrail.

  One British staffer, witnessing the inspection, later recalled how “fortunate” he was “in being invited by an American colonel to watch President Roosevelt inspecting an American battalion. I was the only British officer present and I was told it was an historic occasion—the first time a President of the United States had ever inspected an American unit on foreign soil. Instead of the parade receiving
the visiting officer with a general salute, being inspected and then marching past, the President arrived first and took up his seat (in his jeep because of course he was paralyzed) at the saluting base. Then the photographers got busy, taking him from all angles, from above and below”—the brigadier disgusted by the photographers “who buzzed round the commanding officer and the leading ranks like flies round a horse’s ears. They put down wooden boxes to stand on and photographed the leading ranks from above; they lay on the ground and photographed them from the snake’s eye view, rolling out of the way to avoid being kicked. Even I, on the touch line, wanted to kick them. The proceedings were most undignified. Then the battalion formed up in line and the President, with two fierce and heavily armed detectives on his jeep and four others, one looking to each point of the compass, in a following jeep, drove down the line. Finally he decorated a soldier and then drove off.”14

  Brigadier Davy had been a highly decorated commander and then staff officer in Egypt, but like so many British colleagues he had simply no understanding of America: of its immigrant history, or the miracle by which ethnically and socially disparate citizens were being molded into a world power based on democratic principles and the President’s four freedoms. No picture was ever taken indicating the President’s paralysis, but press photographers were aware the whole nation would respond to images of the U.S. commander in chief out in Africa, inspecting his troops. Moreover, from the point of view of public opinion in America, where the majority of people favored dealing with Japan before Germany, such patriotic images were of inestimable importance.