Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  One by one the President ticked Bullitt’s points: that unless Russia was pressured into declaring war on Japan, for example, following German capitulation, the United States would be tied down, having to fight its way unaided, island by island, until it could finally bomb and invade the Japanese heartland, which might take years—while in the meantime Russia’s amoeba would be left free to spread across Europe, infecting defenseless nations and hitching them to Stalin’s Sovietizing wagon.

  The answer to that, in Bullitt’s view, was to press Stalin, while U.S. Lend-Lease assistance was still critical to Soviet military victory against the Wehrmacht, into agreeing not only to enter the war against Japan in due course, but to sign up to a formal agreement committing the Allies to establish a postwar democratic Europe—not, as was the alternative, a group of communist puppet states subservient to the Soviet Union.

  This, as Bullitt articulately put it, could only be done by securing an early meeting with Stalin, since “our bargaining position will be hopeless after the defeat of Germany,” when Russian troops would in all likelihood be in occupation of all central Europe up to the Elbe—perhaps even up to the Rhine. Churchill, too, must be harnessed to a European, rather than imperial British, cause, alongside the United States—with everything done, from this moment forth, to prepare the governments in exile and future European leaders to establish strong democratic structures that Stalin’s fifth columnists could not successfully subvert.

  World disarmament was, in Bullitt’s realistic view, impossible—yet he doubted whether U.S. public opinion would willingly support yet another war in Europe to defend defenseless individual states. Ergo, rather than disarm those states, or press such states to disarm, they should be encouraged to arm themselves against Russian interference—forming a U.S.-and-British-supported coalition or alliance. They should be urged to become a European bloc of “Integrated Europe,” which Stalin would not dare challenge. “Soviet invasion finds barriers in armed strength,” Bullitt emphasized, “not in Soviet promises.”

  This prediction—an early 1943 version of what became, in 1948, the Western European Union and NATO—was very much the President’s thinking. Using Lend-Lease as a lever, it would involve a carrot-and-stick approach to get Stalin, as soon as possible, to dissolve the Comintern as the instigator of world communist revolution; to agree to eventual entry into the war against Japan, once Germany was defeated; and to agree, in a formal document, to sign up to a United Nations world authority guaranteeing the independence and self-government of sovereign states—with the United States and Britain, as two of the world’s Four Policemen, ready and willing to use air, naval, and, if necessary, ground forces to counter any attempt, by anyone, to invade such sovereign states.

  Would Joseph Stalin, dictator of a police state supposedly wedded to Marxist-Leninist communist ideology, willingly sign up to a democratic concept like this, however—a charter that would be a permanent indictment of the Russian police state?

  As Bullitt acknowledged, the Russians would have the “whip hand” at the end of the war. In all frankness, moreover, there seemed little evidence the Soviets, led and ruled by Stalin, were going to undergo a Pauline conversion and become guardians of democracy and freedom, together with the United States, Britain, and China, across the globe—at least not anytime soon. It was therefore imperative that the United States and Britain—since China, for all its millions of people, was in no position to police anyone, indeed would probably have to cede Manchuria to the Soviets—ensure that their own troops reached, as soon as possible, a demarcation line in Europe beyond which Stalin’s troops could not march without going to war with the United States, the Soviet Union’s great provider.

  Where, exactly, as Bullitt surveyed the world in January 1943, would this line be, however—and how could the Western allies hope to reach it before the Russians?

  This, indeed, was an interesting question.

  A colleague of Bullitt’s—Bullitt did not name him in his report—had recently posited the end-of-war Sovietization of Europe would include “at least Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the entire Balkan peninsula including probably European Turkey”—unless, Bullitt argued, the President beat Stalin to the punch. The United States should therefore “define as Europe the Europe of 1938,” he suggested—“minus Bessarabia, which should go to the Soviet Union”—and seek to save that version of Europe from the predatory clutches of the Russian bear. In this respect there was, Bullitt reemphasized, “only one sure guarantee that the Red Army will not cross into Europe—the prior arrival of American and British Armies in the eastern frontiers of Europe.”

  The eastern frontiers of Europe—when U.S. forces still did not have a single soldier on the European continent?

  Anticipating the President’s frown, Bullitt had admitted in his report: “To state this is to state what appears to be an absurdity, if the assumption is made that we can reach the eastern frontiers of Europe only by marching through France, Italy and Germany” before the Russians. However Bullitt had a better alternative. “It may . . . be possible to reach this frontier before the Red Army,” the former ambassador and now assistant to the U.S. Navy secretary wrote, “if we make our attack on the Axis not by way of France and Italy but by way of Salonika and Constantinople.”2

  Oh dear! the President sighed. Bullitt clearly had less idea of geography as it pertained to military matters than a schoolchild. Had he never heard of the disastrous “Salonika Front” in World War I, or Churchill’s fatal Allied assault in the Dardanelles in 1915—not to speak of the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913?

  The President had recently heard similar Balkan proposals being trotted out by Prime Minister Churchill and the French high commissioner, General Giraud, at Casablanca. Given the disaster in the Dardanelles in 1915, it had been utterly amazing to hear Winston recommending such a military strategy. Yet General Giraud was just as unrealistic, the President had found. Both were men of great courage—but in the search for alternatives to “war by attrition,” they were given to fantasies that were almost criminal in terms of the loss of human life to which their ill-considered ventures would lead—Churchill’s Gallipoli fiasco having cost the Western Allies no fewer than a quarter million casualties.

  Ignoring this, Churchill had at Casablanca favored pressing Turkey’s president to declare war on Hitler, and revival of the idea of a Dardanelles campaign. He’d asked Giraud whether he agreed—at which the five-star French general had countered with his own equally amazing notion of Allied military strategy.

  “Tout simple,” Giraud had opined. “First, liberate Africa. Which is being done. This should be finished by spring this year. Then, without wasting a minute, occupy the three big Mediterranean islands: Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. Establish a base there, primarily air forces, to assault the mainland of Europe. As soon as the forces are ready, invade the coast of Italy, between Livorno and Genoa. Seize the Po valley. Clean up the rest of the Italian peninsula, and prepare to strike into the heart of Europe on the axis: Udine [northwest of Venice, between the Alps and the Adriatic] and Vienna, backed by air power serviced from bases across the whole of Italy. In one blow Germany can thus be invaded through the Danube valley: we will isolate the Balkans on the right, and have France on the left, and we will beat the Russians to Vienna, which is not to be sniffed at,” he’d announced. “After that, following the fall of Germany, the business of Japan will be a piece of cake. QED.”3

  Clearly Giraud—who still pressed to be made Allied commander in chief in the Mediterranean instead of General Eisenhower, rather than have to deal with political matters he abhorred—saw himself as a modern Napoleon, though about a foot taller.

  At Casablanca, Churchill had not discouraged this idea—though the President had refused to countenance such craziness. It was therefore nothing short of galling, at lunch at the White House, to have to listen to former ambassador Bullitt, the director of public relations in t
he Navy Department, now recommending, as an American, such military bêtises.

  Bullitt claimed, to the President’s concern, he was not alone in Washington in advancing such a war strategy. His discussions at the Navy Department and elsewhere had convinced him, Bullitt maintained, that “there is a large body of military opinion in Washington that favors—on purely military grounds—striking at the Axis by way of Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Rumania rather than by way of France and Italy.”4

  Dump the whole idea of a cross-Channel attack?

  On paper the notion appeared bold and imaginative—if wars were conducted on paper. Like Giraud, Bullitt seemed convinced the Western Allies could make straight for central Europe, and secure its boundaries before the Russians got there, without problem—irrespective of the terrain. Or the Germans. “This is a question for you and Churchill, and your military advisors to decide,” Bullitt allowed5—convinced that Churchill, who was nothing if not imaginative, would be of like mind.

  The conclusion to Bullitt’s twenty-four-page report to the President had climaxed with a three-point politico-military recommendation. Roosevelt should persuade Churchill to subscribe to a “policy of an integrated, democratic Europe.” “Conversations between you and Stalin” should then be arranged. But behind the scenes, while negotiating on paper with Stalin, an “immediate study of an attack on the Axis by way of Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and Rumania” should be ordered by the President.6

  There was even a fourth recommendation: namely that Bullitt’s archrival at the State Department, Sumner Welles, be fired—thus empowering the deeply anti-Soviet secretary, Cordell Hull, to take Bill Bullitt as his deputy, as the Allies raced through the Balkans into central Europe.

  QED.

  Bullitt’s report—which would later be quoted as a kind of Lost Ark that could have changed the course of history, had it been followed—was, in its military naiveté, as senseless as it was callous in respect to the lives that would have been lost in pursuing such a course. Lunching with Bullitt, the President could only shake his head at a man so right about the Soviets and so wrong about military matters.

  Winston Churchill, for his part, did not feel the same way. While the President had returned straightaway from North Africa to Washington via Liberia, Bathurst, Natal, and Jamaica (where a recuperated Admiral Leahy was picked up), the Prime Minister had nevertheless flown, against the advice even of his own cabinet, to Turkey, in a vain attempt to get President Ismet Inonu to join the Western Allies—and thus open the way to an invasion of southern Europe via the Balkans and Constantinople: the dream that had consumed him in 1915 and had led to his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty when it failed.

  Roosevelt had been skeptical whether President Inonu would comply with Churchill’s request, any more than Portugal or Spain or Sweden could be expected to give up their neutrality in the war. He had, however, authorized Churchill to share with Inonu the President’s notions of unconditional surrender and a postwar United Nations authority—not only as a bulwark against future wars of aggression, but as a counter to future Russian expansionism.

  The President had cautioned Churchill, however, neither to promise too much military aid, if Inonu did decide to join the war, nor to suggest that the Allies were planning a new invasion of Salonika, as in 1915. The Germans, he warned, would be tougher even than Atatürk’s army at Gallipoli—and the mountains beyond Salonika would make an Allied campaign a dead end. His remit, in terms of the U.S.-British coalition, was merely to explore the possibility of airfields and military staging bases being established in Turkey, and if not, to encourage Turkey in its neutrality: dissuading it from any thought of alliance or cooperation with the Third Reich, and encouraging it as a bulwark against communism. This, to his great credit, Churchill had attempted to do as part emissary, part negotiator, flying to Adana and meeting with Inonu onboard their two trains. To the relief of Sir Alexander Cadogan and General Brooke, the Prime Minister had been surprisingly circumspect—relying on his gifts of ratiocination and literary composition. No sooner had he arrived, therefore, than he handed President Inonu a paper he’d written en route to Turkey called “Morning Thoughts: Note on Postwar Security”—a copy of which he was careful to cable to the President in Washington.

  Like Bullitt’s report, Churchill’s Turkish memorandum was to become an important historical document.

  In Churchillian prose (Cadogan noting in his diary, “He was awfully proud of it”), the Prime Minister’s paper summarized the outcome of the Casablanca Conference and the outlook for the world at the end of the war. As soon as the “unconditional surrender of Germany and Italy” was achieved, the “unconditional surrender” of Japan, too, would be procured—with subsequent “disarmament of the guilty nations” enforced by the victors. (“On the other hand no attempt will be made to destroy their peoples or to prevent them gaining a living and leading a decent life in spite of all the crimes they have committed,” Churchill added the rider.) Reparations would not be demanded by the Western countries “as was tried last time,” though Russia would have to be helped “in every possible way in her work of restoring the economic life of her people” after suffering “such a horrible devastation” as Hitler had inflicted. This, then, led to the President’s plans for a United Nations authority.

  The authority was to be “a world organization for the preservation of peace based upon the conceptions of freedom of justice and the revival of prosperity”—one that would not be “subject to the weakness of former League of Nations.” It would be held together under the military protection of the victors, who would “continue fully armed, especially in the air.” “None can predict with certainty that the victors will never quarrel amongst themselves, or that the United States may not once again retire from Europe, but after the experiences which all have gone through, and their sufferings and the certainty that a third struggle will destroy all that is left of culture, wealth and civilization of mankind and reduce us to the level almost of wild beasts, the most intense effort will be made by the leading Powers,” Churchill summarized, “to prolong their honorable association and by sacrifice and self-restraint to win for themselves a glorious name in human annals.” Great Britain would “do her utmost to organize a coalition of resistance to any act of aggression committed by any power;” moreover, “it is believed that the United States will cooperate with her and even possibly take the lead of the world, on account of her numbers and strength, in the good work of preventing such tendencies to aggression before they break into open war.”7

  Though it might not be as magically phrased as some of his prose masterpieces and speeches, Churchill’s memorandum reflected the extent to which he now understood and agreed with the President’s vision of the United Nations and postwar world security at this moment in the war. Given such a future, then, would not Turkey wish to guarantee its own security “by taking her place as a victorious belligerent and ally at the side of Great Britain, the United States and Russia,” Churchill had asked President Inonu?

  It was a beguiling prospect, but President Inonu, understandably, had declined. The Prime Minister’s paper certainly exuded confidence in the inevitable eventual victory of the Allies—but it seemed oblivious to Hitler’s likely actions in the meantime. The document made no mention of this, or of the military problems inherent in mounting an invasion of southern and central Europe through northern Italy and/or the Balkans. Or even of Stalin’s possible reaction to such a change in Allied military strategy—a change that, if it stalled in the Mediterranean without a Second Front, would give Stalin every reason to scorn the President’s plans for unconditional surrender and the establishment of a postwar United Nations authority as idle nonsense.

  Both Bullitt’s report and Churchill’s memorandum were, to be sure, written before the reality of war against the Wehrmacht finally set in. In this respect the American defeat at Kasserine, two weeks after Bullitt’s report, had quickly poured cold water on any idea in Washington or Londo
n that the Allies could race anywhere, let alone through the Balkans. At his private luncheon at the White House with the President, Bullitt had thus backed off his Balkan idea—for the moment. It was too early to be contemplating ambitious American campaigns in the Mediterranean when for a moment it looked as if U.S. forces would be driven out of Tunisia. Besides, the public would have to be encouraged to support a more interventionist role in American foreign policy if the President was to have any genuine credence in exploiting its current creditor-status with Stalin.

  In this respect, at least, the President’s vision of the postwar peace seemed to be gaining traction, unaffected by the reverse at Kasserine—in fact it began to become clear, as the weeks went by, that the President’s State of the Union address was bearing amazing, anti-isolationist fruit.

  Roosevelt had assumed his State of the Union address, with its description of “total war,” its call for the disarmament of America’s enemies, and his outline of postwar social programs and international security, would be strongly contested in Congress and outside. Far from it. His speech—and press coverage of the Casablanca “unconditional surrender meeting”—seemed to trigger, the President found, a sort of national American awakening to world responsibility that had never really existed before.