Dimly—despite the lurid stories that General Wedemeyer and others had spread about how the British had “put one over” the American team at Casablanca, resulting in the outrageous delay of a Second Front—even the senior officers of the War Department began to come to their senses: accepting the President was right. A Second Front would never work until U.S. forces were battle-hardened and had had a chance to rehearse large-scale amphibious landings in Sicily.
Kasserine, moreover, put a temporary damper on the U.S. War and Navy Departments’ ridiculous obsession with rank rather than experience.
No sooner had the Torch landings taken place than Admiral King had begun pressing his colleagues to back his bid to be promoted above four-star rank. “It seems to me that the time has come to take up the matter of more ‘full’ Admirals and more ‘full’ generals,” he had written in a special memorandum to Admiral Leahy and General Marshall (though not to Lieutenant General Arnold) soon after the Torch invasion. Theater commanders in chief now needed to have four-star rank, to keep up with the British; this then meant that the Joint Chiefs, though not Arnold, should have even higher rank, he felt. “I therefore suggest that we consider the matter and make appropriate recommendations to the President,” he’d urged.
Not satisfied with the idea of merely a fifth star for the chiefs, King wanted wholly new ranking nomenclature in the U.S. Armed Forces—indeed, he had his own pet proposal. “We need also to recognize that there is need to prepare for ranks higher than that of Admiral and General. As to such ranks, I suggest Arch-Admiral and Arch-General,” he gave his considered view, “rather than Admiral of the Fleet and Field Marshal.”13
Arch-Admiral King? Arch-General Marshall?
No one was impressed. King had continued to push, however. In the days leading up to Kasserine, Secretary Stimson had learned from Secretary Knox that Marshall was now slated to become a field marshal. He was appalled.
True, before Kasserine, on February 12, General Eisenhower had been promoted to temporary four-star rank in order to give him further authority as Allied commander in chief in Algiers. But for General Marshall to become an American “field marshal” when he had never actually held a field command as a general?
Stimson had asked Marshall what he thought of the idea. “Marshall was dead against any such promotion,” Stimson noted with relief in his diary. “He said it would destroy all his influence both with the Congress and with the people, and he said that it really all came from the lower Admirals of the Navy Department forcing this upon King and Knox and upon the President.” Stimson thus immediately wrote to the President, on February 16, in the midst of the battle in Tunisia, to try and scotch the idea—which the President did. Fiddling with more stars and “field marshal” titles—which would require Stimson and Knox putting the proposal in person before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees—seemed to Roosevelt a very poor way of defeating Field Marshal Rommel.
For his part, Dwight Eisenhower had not wanted a fourth star, even. He’d immediately cabled to thank the President for his temporary promotion to full general, in the field—but seven days later he wrote privately to his son John, at college. “It is possible that a necessity might arise for my relief and consequent demotion,”14 he warned—glad to be able to say that his colonel’s silver oak leaf in the regular army couldn’t be taken away, whatever happened.
Eisenhower’s untrumpeted humility did him proud. True, Ike had placed too much trust in Marshall’s protégé, Fredendall. Only the cordite of Blitzkrieg combat could have exposed the dire weaknesses in American command and battlefield skills in the end, however. Along with many thousands of platoon, company, battalion, brigade, division, and corps commanding officers, Eisenhower himself would have to learn the “hard” way. As he wrote to his son, “You are quite mistaken in thinking that the work you are now doing is useless in the training of yourself for war.” He was there, at college, to train his “mind to think. That is essential. No situation whether general or special, is ever the same in war as it was foreseen or anticipated. You must be able to think as the problem comes up.”15 And he instanced having to use Admiral Darlan to obtain swift surrender of Vichy forces in Morocco and Algeria to save American lives.
It was this very quality that President Roosevelt liked in Eisenhower. The President was certain Ike would mature in theater command. Far from demoting Eisenhower, the President was proud of the way he had handled himself and his relations with the British—authorizing General Alexander, his new field deputy, to take over day-to-day handling of the battlefront on February 19; his treatment of the press (Eisenhower accepting “full responsibility” for the debacle, off the record, with reporters); his quiet removal of General Fredendall; and his patient refusal to advance the launch date for Husky, the invasion of Sicily, by a month, as Winston Churchill pressed him to do, lest it prejudice the conditions for Husky’s success.
No: in the President’s view young General Eisenhower, at age fifty-two, was doing just fine—and U.S. troops, too. The President had seen them, in person, at Rabat, and was confident they’d learn the crucial lessons soon enough. Rommel was withdrawing from Kasserine, and would shortly be given his own drubbing by Montgomery at Medenine, on the Gulf of Gabès—probably the most perfect defensive one-day battle of the twentieth century.
It would all turn out for the best. It was Stalin who worried the President—for the ramification of the President’s patient war strategy was this: that the United States would, by its step-by-step approach, win the global war, yet in delaying a Second Front, might well risk Russian domination of Europe in the war’s aftermath.
Military prosecution of the war, in other words, was becoming every day more freighted with political consequences.
Total War
* * *
On January 7, 1943, President Roosevelt announces “total war” to Congress, then secretly embarks for North Africa aboard a Boeing clipper. He will be the first U.S. president to fly while in office, and the first to visit the battlefield abroad in time of war.
En Route to Casablanca
* * *
Via Trinidad and Brazil, the President flies across the Atlantic to Gambia, where he tours the harbor in an American tender and spends the night on the USS Memphis.
Then, using a special ramp for his wheelchair, Roosevelt (with Captain Bryan) flies in a C-54 transport up the coast of northwest Africa to Casablanca, Morocco.
Casablanca
* * *
German intelligence mistakes “Casablanca” for “Casa Blanca,” the White House, concluding that FDR and Churchill planned to meet in Washington.
Meanwhile, in secret, FDR establishes his headquarters in a Moroccan villa (with his sons Elliott and Franklin Jr. and Harry Hopkins). His task: to set the Allies—and the U.S. chiefs of staff—on an implacable course for offensive victory in World War II.
Directing World Strategy
* * *
At his villa headquarters, FDR assembles the Combined Chiefs of Staff. He must stop his own generals from committing U.S. forces to mass suicide before they have combat experience. He must also get the British to agree to a 1944 cross-Channel strategy. And get the fractious French to fight the Nazis, not each other.
Visiting Troops on the Battlefield
* * *
Generals Eisenhower, Clark, and Patton agree with FDR: U.S. forces need more combat experience before launching a cross-Channel invasion. The presence of the President on the North African battlefield is meanwhile inspiring.
Unconditional Surrender
* * *
Churchill has mixed feelings, but his British government applauds the policy Roosevelt announces to the press and to the world on behalf of the Allies: no negotiation with tyranny, and “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers.
End of Empires
* * *
What should the Allies fight for? FDR and Churchill do not share the same vision, the President tells his son. They are at logger
heads over colonization: FDR is unwilling to sacrifice American lives just to restore British and French empires.
At Casablanca, FDR invites the Sultan of Morocco to dine, and admires the sunset with Churchill in Marrakesh. Before flying home, he insists on visiting Liberia, which became independent in 1847.
Totaler Krieg
* * *
At the Sportpalast in Berlin, Goebbels announces totaler Krieg (total war), not only as a battle of ideology, but of will.
Back in the States, the President tours the nation’s military training camps where soldiers prepare for combat overseas. In secret, he orders P-38s from Guadalcanal to “get Yamamoto,” the man directing Japan’s war in the Pacific.
19
Between Two Forces of Evil
THE ENIGMA THAT was Russia—its communist purges in the late 1930s; its appeasement of Hitler in its infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the summer of 1939; its subsequent occupation of eastern Poland, in the wake of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg attack on western Poland; its similarly egregious invasion of Finland and the Winter War that had resulted in Russian annexation of 10 percent of Finnish territory, in Karelia; its fearsome NKVD police-state methods to maintain absolute communist control of the entire Soviet Union; its displacement and enforced migration of vast populations to Siberia; its veritable paranoia in terms of capitalistic, foreign influence or sway over its citizens—had not given most Americans much reason to support the Soviets, save as opponents of the even more egregious Germans.
The sheer refusal of Russian soldiers and citizens—often ill armed and ill trained—to cede their country to the German troops who had overrun all of Europe had aroused belated popular admiration in America, and growing confidence that Hitler—despite his control of Europe from Norway to Greece, and the whole of central Europe to the Crimea and Ukraine—could, in truth, be beaten. What would happen then, though? Would the Soviets, obedient on pain of death to absolute communist rule from the Kremlin, permit those countries of Europe liberated by the Soviets to become genuine, capitalist, functioning democracies? Or would they be “Sovietized” by Russia?
The President had been thinking of such matters with increasing concern in the fall of 1942, as he’d confided to the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King. The prospect, however, had become all the stronger once it became clear that Hitler had overplayed his hand at Stalingrad, and his Sixth Army was going to get a hammering on the Volga—indeed, that he might lose not only his Sixth Army at Stalingrad but his armies in the Caucasus, by the Black Sea, too. From being on the desperate defensive, the Russians would then begin to pose a mortal threat to the Third Reich—with or without a Second Front.
Certainly this was an eventuality that, in the privacy of his diary, Joseph Goebbels pondered. Far from causing him to question the Nazi ideology that he and Hitler had pursued over the past two decades, it only caused him to dedicate himself the more determinedly to the Ausrottung of the people he blamed for Europe’s travails: the Jews, as he’d declared in his totaler Krieg speech. He now gave orders for the last Jews left in Berlin to be rounded up and sent to be liquidated in SS concentration camps—noting how much more psychologically free this made him feel. He also recorded his determination to stamp out any protest in Germany to his total-war policy in the most ruthless manner—in other words, via execution—as well as ruthless reprisals to be taken against any acts of disrespect or attempted assassination of Nazi officials in the occupied countries of Europe.
Between these two forces of pure evil, it was difficult to say which was the worst. The President had therefore, on November 19, 1942, asked his former ambassador to the Soviet Union, William C. Bullitt, to furnish him with a private report on how he saw the future of Europe, following the successful Torch landings. In particular, Roosevelt wanted to have the former ambassador’s reading of Russian intentions.
Bill Bullitt had taken his time. He’d recently been used by the President as an ambassador at large, conducting a presidential mission to West Africa, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Iran in the spring of 1942. Independently wealthy thanks to his second marriage, he had then become director of public relations to the secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox. It had taken him two months to comply with the President’s new request—too late, unfortunately, for the Casablanca Conference—but when it was ready, it was dynamite.
“Dear Mr. President,” Bullitt’s covering letter ran, written on January 29, 1943, the day before the President’s return to Washington. “The appended will take thirty minutes of your time. It is as serious a document as any I have ever sent you.” He warned that “its conclusion is that you should talk with Stalin as soon as possible”—and wished Roosevelt good luck in the attempt.1
The President did read it—and swiftly invited Bullitt to lunch at the White House to discuss its implications for Allied political and military strategy.
Bullitt’s report pulled no punches. Having served as America’s very first envoy to Moscow, he had, after all, an almost unrivaled perspective both on Stalin and the Russians. In addition, for an American he had a keen perspective on Europe, having been U.S. ambassador to France for four years, right up to the German conquest of France in 1940.
Bullitt’s portrait of Stalin and his Soviet aims was uncompromising. His memorandum began by trashing former Republican president Herbert Hoover’s notion that Stalin had changed his philosophy, wanted no annexations, and was only interested in Russian security. The dictator was reported, in the view of such innocents as Hoover, “to be determined to have the Soviet Union evolve in the direction of liberty and democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. We ought to pray that this is so,” Bullitt allowed; “for if it is so, the road to a world of liberty, democracy and peace will be relatively easy.” If this was not so, however, “the road will be up-hill all the way.” The free world would be tilting in one direction, the oppressive Soviet Union or empire in another.
In these circumstances, Bullitt felt, America must do everything to halt the Russian tilt before it was too late. It was, he wrote, “in our national interest to attempt to draw Stalin into cooperation with the United States and Great Britain, for the establishment of an Atlantic Charter peace,” such as the President’s teams in Washington were mapping out. “We ought to try to accomplish this feat, however improbable success may seem,” for America would then be on the side of right, not merely might. But in dealing with Stalin, Bullitt was adamant, it was imperative to strip away any illusion.
“The reality is that the Soviet Union, up to the present time, has been a totalitarian dictatorship in which there has been no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, and a travesty of freedom of religion; in which there has been universal fear of the OGPU [secret police] and Freedom from Want has been subordinated always to the policy of guns instead of butter.” Stalin might well be persuaded to close down the nefarious Comintern, fomenting world communist revolution—but only because, in the end, Stalin actually had no real interest in world revolution by communists; his interest was only in communist-controlled nations serving as “5th column for the Soviet State” or empire. World communist revolution was but “a secondary objective.”
As Bullitt pointed out from his intimate, personal knowledge of the dictator, Joseph Stalin had no illusions—or even belief in communism as a motivating faith. He “lets no ideological motives influence his actions,” Bullitt warned. Whether the global future lay with the ideal of communism or the president’s four freedoms, Stalin was indifferent. His only goal was to maintain and extend the power of the Soviet Union: greater Russia, in effect, as a police state ruled by fear. “He is highly intelligent. He weighs with suspicious realism all factors involved in advancing the interests or boundaries of the Soviet Union. He moves where opposition is weak. He stops where opposition is strong. He puts out pseudopodia”—amoeba-like tentacles—“rather than leaping like a tiger. If the pseudopodia meet no obstacle, the Soviet Union flows on.”
The moral
, then, was that the United States must do everything in its power to show genuine desire for cooperation, as well as to “prove to Stalin that, while we have intense admiration for the Russian people and will collaborate fully with a pacific Soviet State, we will resist a predatory Soviet State just as fiercely as we are now resisting a predatory Nazi State.” If not, “we shall have fought a great war not for liberty but for Soviet dictatorship.”
This was a sobering eventuality.
“How can we make sure that this will not happen,” Bullitt asked rhetorically, “and achieve our own aim in a world of freedom and democracy?”
It would be a case of America Inc. versus Russia Red.
President Roosevelt nodded his head in agreement—for whatever was published in liberal-minded newspapers and journals in the United States, he himself had no illusions about Stalin, or the nature of the Soviet terror state, maintained entirely by patriotism and fear. Moreover, he was pleased to see Bullitt supporting his presidential policy of unconditional surrender of the Nazis and Japanese—whereas there were many, including Third Secretary George Kennan in Moscow, who favored making a deal with the German generals, or non-Nazis, to help fight the Soviet regime. To the President this would be tantamount to condoning German militarism, wars of conquest, and use of terror against its own citizens—whether Jews or gypsies, political prisoners or priests—just as it would be were Japan’s example of inhumanity—its savage, genocidal war in China and its atrocity-ridden rampage across the Southwest Pacific—to be condoned. Unconditional surrender and disarmament of the Axis powers was a sine qua non of a permanent postwar peace in the world, beginning on a new page, the President felt strongly—and Bullitt, in his report, did not contest this.
Commander in Chief Page 18
