Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  The Combined Staffs, in these conferences and studies during the past week or ten days, have proceeded on the principle of pooling all of the resources of the United Nations. And I think the second point is that they have reaffirmed the determination to maintain the initiative against the Axis powers in every part of the world.

  Over the past ten days, the President explained, the talks had examined how the Western Allies were to keep “the initiative during 1943,” moreover to keep sending “all possible material aid to the Russian offensive, with the double object of cutting down the manpower of Germany and her satellites, and continuing the very great attrition of German munitions and materials of all kinds which are being destroyed every day in such large quantities by the Russian armies. And, at the same time, the Staffs have agreed on giving all possible aid to the heroic struggle of China—remembering that China is in her sixth year of the war—with the objective, not only in China but in the whole of the Pacific area, of ending any Japanese attempt in the future to dominate the Far East.”

  It was at this point that the President, looking down at his notes, came to the crux of his outdoor statement—its historic import belied by the lush surroundings. “Another point,” he began:

  I think we have all had it in our hearts and our heads before, but I don’t think that it has ever been put down on paper by the Prime Minister and myself, and that is the determination that peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power.

  Some of you Britishers know the old story—we had a General called U.S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister’s, early days he was called “Unconditional Surrender” Grant.

  The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan. That means a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.

  In order to give extra emphasis to the announcement, the President now declared: “This meeting is called the ‘unconditional surrender meeting.’”

  Unconditional surrender. No negotiation or acceptance of a compromise peace or armistice. And an implacable aim that would be pursued West and East.

  While we have not had a meeting of all of the United Nations, I think that there is no question—in fact we both have great confidence that the same purposes and objectives are in the minds of all of the other United Nations—Russia, China, and all the others.

  And so the actual meeting—the main work of the Conference—has been ended. Except for a certain amount of resultant paper work, it has come to a successful conclusion. I call it a meeting of the minds in regard to all military operations, and, thereafter, that the war is going to proceed against the Axis powers according to schedule, with every indication that 1943 is going to be an even better year for the United Nations than 1942.7

  The fifty journalists in the garden of the Villa Dar es Saada were stunned. So, too, was Churchill.

  True, the Prime Minister had agreed to the unconditional-surrender policy and even recommended it be part of the President’s final pronunciamento, at the conclusion of the conference. Yet he seemed visibly surprised at the emphasis the President had placed upon it, as Captain McCrea vividly recalled. “I was standing nearby and when the President made that remark the P.M. snapped his head toward the Pres., giving the impression, to me at least, that the phrase came as a surprise to him.”8

  Pondering this in later years, McCrea could not quite explain the Prime Minister’s body language—“I shall never forget,” he wrote, “the quick turn of the head by the P.M. when the Unconditional Surrender of the Axis Forces was announced as to how the war would end.”9

  The fifty journalists, for their part, sat mesmerized. If they found themselves disappointed that the President was not willing to be more specific in terms of actual, forthcoming military operations, the Prime Minister followed up the President’s statement by asking them to understand why the enemy should not be told in advance what the Allies would undertake that year—and why the Allies could be grateful for what had already happened, now that the United States was in command. “Tremendous events have happened. This enterprise which the President has organized—and he knows I have been his active Lieutenant since the start—has altered the whole strategic aspect of the war . . . We are in full battle, and heavy action will impend.” He asked reporters therefore to convey to the world at home “the picture of unity, of thoroughness, and integrity of the political chiefs.” The Allies were going to win the war. “Even when there is some delay there is design and purposes,” he insisted, “and as the President has said, the unconquerable will to pursue this quality,” he sought to find a quotable phrase, “until we have procured the unconditional surrender of the criminal forces who plunged the world into storm and ruin.”10

  Unconditional surrender, then, it was—the news soon flashing across the world, once the two leaders were out of harm’s way.

  Reports and images of the “unconditional surrender meeting” and the President’s trip sent shockwaves across the Third Reich.

  The President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States: Inspecting his troops on the battlefield. Ten days of U.S.-British military discussions—and with the French, too. Every battlefront of the globe examined, and its needs factored into the Allies’ strategy for the prosecution of a global, offensive war—a war not only to win against the Axis powers, but to permit no compromise, no negotiated armistice, no agreement save unconditional surrender. And the President seated in the sun on a Moroccan lawn, speaking with such naturalness and confidence regarding the inevitable defeat of the Third Reich that those who’d experienced the German victories of the previous summer—the fall of Tobruk, the second massive German offensive toward the Volga and the Caucasus—could only rub their eyes in wonder. “F.D.R.’s ‘unconditional surrender’ pronouncement” had swept “practically all other news from today’s newspapers . . . It will, no doubt, prove to be,” predicted King George VI’s private secretary, “one of the most momentous of all such conferences since that of Lucca”—when in 56 B.C. Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus had renewed their triumvirate.11

  In the wake of Torch the tide had truly turned. In Berlin, Reichsminister Goebbels—who had been busy preparing the final touches for a forthcoming address of his own—was literally speechless.

  At first Goebbels could scarcely believe what he read and saw in newsreel film being distributed throughout the neutral countries. In his diary Goebbels expressed utter consternation—especially at the failure of the German intelligence services to learn the whereabouts of a ten-day, top-level enemy conference involving the political leaders of the Western world, together with the chiefs of staff of their air, ground, and naval forces. Even on January 26, 1943, two days after the conclusion of the actual press conference and departure of the principals, Goebbels had been idly noting—alongside secret reports that the terrible battle of attrition at Stalingrad was “reaching its end”12—that it seemed “pretty certain that Churchill is in Washington.”13

  The next day Goebbels noted that the rumors of a parley between Roosevelt and Churchill were gaining strength, “only we still don’t know where these gangster bosses are meeting.”14

  Goebbels, ever skeptical, had made nothing of the speculation. His own attention was locked on the approaching tenth anniversary of the Nazis’ assumption of power, when he would make his own grand announcement at a huge, mass rally of Nazi Party stalwarts in the Sportpalast—urging them with all the declamatory zeal he could summon to devote themselves to their fresh task: to make available to the Führer the men, materiel, and conviction necessary for Germany to embark on a third, this time successful, great offensive on the Eastern Front . . . totaler Krieg: total war.

  Goebbels was thus
floored by the seemingly authentic reports that finally reached Berlin on January 28, 1943. “The sensational event of the day, is the news that Churchill and Roosevelt have met in Casablanca,” the Reichsminister dictated in his diary. He made no effort to conceal his amazement. “So the discussions have not, as we assumed, been taking place in Washington but on the hot coals of Africa. Once again our intelligence services have completely failed—unable even to identify the place where the talks were taking place,” he fulminated. “They’ve been held now for almost a fortnight, and they’re being heralded by the enemy press as the gateway to victory.”15

  Ever anxious to see signs of Allied dissension, Goebbels had assumed Churchill and Roosevelt, if they were meeting in Washington, might well be sparring over which man should take the reins of the Allied offensive war effort.16 Reading the transcript of the Roosevelt-Churchill press conference in Casablanca, the Reichsminister became aware, however, that the earth had shifted. “It’s worth noting,” he reflected in his diary, “that Churchill officially designates himself now as Roosevelt’s adjutant; no such humiliation has probably been seen in British history.”17

  Humiliation or not, the threat was becoming daily more real. Not only were the anti-Axis armies targeting Nazi Germany, Goebbels was aware, but so were their political leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—leaders who, like Hitler, had taken command of their country’s armed forces, and were now coordinating those forces against the Third Reich—in complete contrast to the motley democratic forces of the late 1930s.

  Barely a year since Pearl Harbor and the Führer’s ill-considered declaration of war on the United States, the President’s appearance in Casablanca was a startling turnaround—his “unconditional surrender meeting” all the more disturbing to Goebbels, since it made clear there would be no peace feelers or possibility of a negotiated settlement with the leaders of the Third Reich. Along with the imminent extinction of von Paulus’s Sixth Army at Stalingrad, Goebbels knew, Hitler’s dreams of conquest and declaration of war on the United States now looked not only an unwise gamble, but raised the specter of the Thousand Year Reich—so gloriously proclaimed in the 1930s—being crushed in the nearest future, unless the Nazi Party, under their once victorious Führer, found some way to turn the tables.

  Since the Führer still refused to appear in public at such a fateful time—he had not been seen in Berlin since the previous September18—his propaganda minister recognized that he, Joseph Goebbels, would have to work the harder to rally the German nation at home.

  Accepting that the battle of Stalingrad would now end in utter defeat—the Führer confiding to Goebbels he’d had to sacrifice General Paulus’s army lest the whole extended German frontline in Russia be broken—the Reich minister had intended to use the approaching German catastrophe in Russia to new advantage: namely as a wake-up call to the German Volk, once the battle of Stalingrad ended. The fate of so many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers would illustrate, as nothing else could, the mortal threat of Bolshevism—and the need for supreme, self-sacrificing heroism on the part of the loyal German soldier if they were to survive the struggle against Soviet communism.

  The news from the Western (in fact, Southern) Front, however, eclipsed even Stalingrad. Coming after what the President had revealed in his State of the Union address on January 7, that the United States was on course to outmanufacture the collective output of the Axis powers several times over, the Casablanca declaration by the leaders of the world’s foremost capitalist democracies—democracies working with the Soviet Union—now deprived Goebbels of his “anti-Bolshevist” German master card.

  Every day there was more news in neutral countries about Casablanca. Film, photographs, newspaper stories—and discussion of what the conference would now presage for Nazi Germany. It completely turned the world’s attention to the Western, not Eastern, Front, Goebbels lamented—removing the primary fear of Bolshevism. Overnight, in short, the communist threat had been replaced, thanks to Casablanca, by a dramatically announced determination of the Western democratic powers to destroy all vestige of Nazism as a danger to, and scourge of, mankind—far worse, in effect, than the dangers of communism.

  The very words unconditional surrender—following the President’s use of total war in his State of the Union address to Congress—infuriated Goebbels as a master of propaganda. Curt and harsh, they gave no hint of dissension or disunity among the United Nations now lined up against the Third Reich—unsettling Goebbels’s ever-maneuvering assumptions, since it showed just “how confident the enemy now feels, or claims to feel, and how much we’ll have to do,” he noted, “to counter their machinations.”19

  For the second time that month, then, the President of the United States had beaten Goebbels to the punch. Instead of the Reich minister’s still-undelivered declaration of total war surprising the world and striking fear in the hearts of Germany’s enemies, his totaler Krieg speech, if Hitler authorized it, would now be viewed outside Nazi circles as a desperate effort, at best, of an unashamedly totalitarian regime to meet the prospect of defeat; at worst a sort of glorified willingness to countenance the complete destruction of the German nation rather than sparing it by surrender.

  To make matters worse for Dr. Goebbels, however, the Führer had declined to make him the sole director of the totaler Krieg initiative, lest the Reich minister (and gauleiter of Berlin) become too powerful in Germany. Instead, Hitler had agreed only to a triumvirate of mediocrities to steer the extended mobilization program, enjoying circumscribed powers—with Goebbels granted a “watching brief.” Isolated, ill, frustrated, depressed, and blaming others rather than himself for the Wehrmacht’s failure on the Eastern Front, the Führer even rejected Goebbels’s renewed appeals that Hitler return to the capital and rally the nation at such a time of crisis both on the Eastern and Southern Fronts.

  For Goebbels as Reichsminister für Propaganda, this made Roosevelt’s dramatic appearance in Morocco especially galling: the U.S. president seen by photographers, cameramen, and reporters so relaxed in the garden of a sunlit villa in Casablanca, while the Führer remained unseen by anybody: hiding out of sight at his freezing headquarters in East Prussia, moaning helplessly as he surveyed on his tabletop maps the sharp arrows of Russian advances, lancing into his besieged remaining forces at Stalingrad . . .

  It was in this context that Goebbels had been heard to say—by Albert Speer, the Reich armaments minister, no less—that Germany did not have a leadership crisis, but a “Leader crisis.”20

  Goebbels was not alone in thinking this—though few if any dared say so aloud. Goebbels was especially disturbed by reports from the Sicherheitsdienst concerning new anti-Nazi graffiti appearing on the walls of German cities. Some of these openly accused the Führer of mass murder—not of Jews, but of German soldiers, in forcing the Sixth Army to fight to the death at Stalingrad rather than allowing the men to retreat.21 There were even rumors circulating that Hitler was either dead or suffering mortal sickness in Prussia.

  However hard Dr. Goebbels tried, then, it seemed impossible to “counter” the sensational international effect of the Casablanca Conference. In his diary the minister thus cursed the way he and the Führer had been outmaneuvered.

  The very lack of military specifics in the President’s Casablanca press conference—or even in the final official conference communiqué issued after weeks of military discussions held by the most senior Allied generals and admirals—aroused still further concern in Goebbels’s suspicious, ever-calculating, yet in many ways brilliant mind. “They’re trying to conceal the real decisions they’ve made at the conference,” he dictated in his diary, “clearly to lull us into complacency. But there’s no possible doubt in my mind the Anglo-Saxons are planning to invade the mainland of Europe when it suits them. We’ll have to prepare for surprises,” he noted on January 28. “From week to week,” he added, “the war is moving into a bitter, ruthless stage.”22 And two days later, at the stated request of the ab
sent Führer, Goebbels delivered before an audience of invited Nazis in the Berlin Sportpalast—and on German radio—Hitler’s tenth-anniversary proclamation, celebrating the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933.

  Compared with the President’s Casablanca announcement, the proclamation was a dud.

  Without new victories to boast of, indeed with the Russians erasing the last pockets of resistance in Stalingrad, Hitler had been reduced in the proclamation to a vague catalog of Nazi “achievements” over the past decade, as well as an assertion that National Socialism would “inspire everybody to fulfill his duty.” If not, the Führer warned, woe betide the slacker. The Nazi Party “will destroy whoever attempts to shirk his duty,” he’d written—having agreed with Goebbels on the phone that the most savage measures, including execution, were to be taken against any who dared contest the increased mobilization measures that would now be enacted.23

  Thanks to the Führer and his accomplices, the war—Hitler’s war—would indeed move now “into a bitter, ruthless stage.”

  Three weeks thereafter Dr. Goebbels would, finally, be permitted by the Führer to deliver, in person, his long-awaited totaler Krieg speech at the Berlin Sportpalast.

  Goebbels was careful, in the days before, to pass word around that he’d be issuing more than a proclamation. One Goebbels biographer later described it as “the most important mass meeting” of Goebbels’s egregious life.24 Ignoring the President’s recent reference to Germany’s war of conquest and its subjugation of other peoples, Goebbels intended instead to portray Germany’s struggle as a noble European battle, waged by the Third Reich and its allies against “international Jewry,” and a fight to vanquish the forces of Jewish-sponsored chaos and aggression.