Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Daisy was flabbergasted. “It made me feel terrible—I’ve never heard a word of complaint from him, but it seemed to slip out, unintentionally, & spoke volumes,” she had penned in her diary that night. The wife of the President’s military aide and appointments secretary, Mrs. Watson, had “said at lunch, on Friday, that ‘he is the loneliest man in the world.’ I know what she means. He has no real ‘home life’ in which to relax, & ‘recoup’ his strength & his peace of mind. If he wasn’t such a wonderful character, he would sink under it.”14

  Toward the end of February, 1943, he did, in fact, sink, laid low yet again, this time by what he afterward called “sleeping sickness or Gambia fever or some kindred bug in that hell-hole of yours,” as the President complained in a letter to the Prime Minister in London, that “left me feeling like a wet rag. I was no good after 2 p.m. and, after standing it for a week or so, I went to Hyde Park for five days.”15 Daisy looked after him there, recording in her diary on February 27 that it was “the P.’s. 4th day in bed, & he still feels somewhat miserable though his fever has gone. Last Tuesday, without any warning, he felt ill about noon. He lay on his study sofa & slept ’til 4.30, when he found he had a temp. of 102. The Dr. found it was toxic poisoning, but they can’t ascribe it to anything they know of . . . The P. doesn’t look well but is improving.” After having supper with him, eating from trays, she gave him the aspirin Dr. McIntire had prescribed—and almost wept when he said: “Do you know that I have never had anyone just sit around and take care of me like this before.” Apart from nurses when he was very unwell, “he is just given his medicine or takes it himself. Everyone else has been too busy to sit with him, doing nothing.”16

  If the President’s condition—his tiredness, his fevers, and his everlasting sinus infections—caused him now to draw back a little from the more commanding role he’d taken in directing the U.S. military, this was understandable—in fact, to many in the War Department it was a relief, as planning for the Husky invasion, slated for July that year, went ahead. Even the U.S. setback at Kasserine had not worried him unduly or diminished his confidence in young General Eisenhower; it was, after all, proof of his wisdom in insisting American forces learn the skills of modern combat in a “safe” region of the Mediterranean, where they could swiftly recover.

  When Eisenhower’s naval aide, Lieutenant Commander Butcher, was brought to the Oval Office to report to the Commander in Chief on March 26, 1943, one of the first questions the President asked him was to give an account of the Kasserine debacle—from Eisenhower’s perspective. “He wanted to know how things were going” in North Africa, Butcher recorded. Naturally, he knew them from “official reports,” but he wanted to have the story from the horse’s mouth. He was “inquisitive about Fredendall and other commanders at the front, the retreat of the Americans naturally being in his mind. I explained to him the reluctance Ike had in relieving Fredendall, and his hope that the change to Patton could be handled in such a way that Fredendall’s fine qualities, particularly for training, would not be lost to the army.”

  To Butcher’s surprise the President—who himself hated to have to fire people—seemed more interested in U.S. intelligence. He “wanted to know the circumstances that caused our G-2 [head of military intelligence] to predict that the main thrust of the Germans would come through the Ousseltia Pass rather than at Sidi Bou Zid. I explained to him [British Brigadier] Mockler-Ferryman’s reliance on one source of information, namely the interception of radio communications [Ultra] and that since this source theretofore had proven reliable, not only Mockler-Ferryman but [British General] Anderson, had relied on the ‘Mock’s’ advice in this instance. This reliance had caused General Anderson to hold his reserve in the North when it may have been used to extra advantage to help Americans farther South.”17 It was unfortunate, but a lesson learned in the use and misuse of—or overreliance upon—Ultra.

  Certainly the President’s faith in Eisenhower was rewarded in March when Rommel, in ill health, was withdrawn to Germany to recuperate. The day of the Desert Fox was over; that of the President’s protégé, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had come. He might not have the battlefield prowess of Rommel, Patton, or Montgomery, but he had something far more valuable to the Allies: the ability to get the soldiers, airmen, and sailors of an international coalition to fight together under his leadership. The result was often messy, sometimes contentious, and media-sensitive. As the President told Eisenhower’s naval aide, however, such was the price of democracy. The virtue of the Casablanca Conference had been that it enabled the President, as de facto commander in chief of the Western Allies, to make his historic decisions on a 1944 Second Front as well as on unconditional surrender, without the press (let alone the enemy) even knowing he was in Casablanca. “He said for the first time all participants were enabled to explore each others’ minds, get all the cards on the table, and reach decisions without distractions. These distractions, he said, are caused by newspaper men gaining small segments of the complete story and printing them under headlines that frequently mislead the public and failed to portray the complete story. ‘In most conference[s], particularly where newspaper men have access to the conferees,’ the President said, ‘almost every participant has a pet newspaper man. By button-holing such friends, newspaper men can get a part of the story and the whole issue becomes tried in the press on the basis of only a small part of all the facts. The result is distortion to the public and disruption to the conferences.’”

  No truer words were spoken by an American president—yet this had been the reality of American democracy since George Washington, and would never change. All one could do was, at certain times, employ a certain guile in order that the job got done. At this, the President, by his third term in office, was a past master—in war as well as in peace. “At Casablanca,” he told Eisenhower’s aide, “we had a secluded spot, well guarded and free from the press. Thus we were able to talk freely without feeling someone would start promoting his point of view in the press by means of contact with his favorite reporter.”18 So pleased was he with the “result of Casablanca” that he had arranged for the administration’s looming “food conference,” addressing the needs of allies and liberated countries, to take place in Virginia, “guarded by military police,” and with “no press permitted . . . I think the press will cry out against this arrangement,” but the “public good” was sometimes more important than “public discussion.” Moreover, once the decisions were announced, there was freedom enough to debate the matters. “I am planning to make another swing around the country,” he told Butcher, taking a group of White House correspondents who would only be allowed to file reports once the tour was over. “The press will yowl again I imagine, but the public seemed to appreciate that trip. In any event,” he made clear, “I am going to do it again,” yowls or no yowls.

  Subtly, the President had been passing on to Eisenhower his advice on how best to deal with “distortions” and “distractions” of a free press—something Butcher was able to convey to Eisenhower as soon as he returned. Along with the President’s parting words. “The principal message the President asked me to convey—and he spoke repeatedly of the General as ‘Ike’—was: “Tell Ike that not only I but the whole country is proud of the job he has done. We have every confidence in his success.”19

  As the President prepared for his second “swing around the country” aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, Eisenhower duly readied his two Allied armies in Tunisia—gathering his twenty divisions like bloodhounds for the final act of the President’s North African invasion: a battle the Germans themselves began to call “Tunisgrad.”20 More than a quarter million Axis troops were now hemmed in on the Cape Bon Peninsula, fighting for their lives. Two thousand German troops were being flown into the arena each day from southern Europe; Mussolini was begging the Führer to make peace with Stalin in order to save the Italian Empire; and three hundred thousand Allied troops were massing for the kill.

  PART SIX

 
* * *

  Get Yamamoto!

  21

  Inspection Tour Two

  BEGINNING ON APRIL 13, 1943, the President set off by train for his latest two-week, seventy-six-hundred-mile inspection tour of U.S. military training bases: from South Carolina to Alabama, Georgia to Arkansas, Oklahoma to Colorado, Missouri to Kentucky. Following his repeated bouts of ill health in February, these inspections would allow the Commander in Chief to see—and be seen by—tens of thousands of young aviators, Marines, tank crews, infantrymen, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps trainees, and Navy crewmen.

  Once again the President took Daisy Suckley with him—since Eleanor had her own agenda to fulfill—as well as his other cousin, Polly Delano, who was considered a “law unto herself,” but who amused the President: the two women giving him the sense of being looked after. (Eleanor did agree to join the train, in Texas, for a brief three-day detour to Monterrey, to meet the Mexican president, Ávila Camacho.)

  The President wanted to judge for himself whether young American servicemen, currently training at home, would fight abroad. Hundreds of young pilots taking off and landing, parades of ten to fifteen thousand men, tanks firing live shells in mock battle, soldiers in hand-to-hand fighting (“the sort of thing they have in the Pacific jungles, with the Japs—It’s all horrible when you stop to analyze it, but it’s a fight for survival,” Daisy noted, amazed1).

  The tour, the President was pleased to find, belied any German and Japanese assumptions that U.S. troops were too “soft” for the ruthlessness of modern warfare. Above all, however, it was the sheer magnitude of American mobilization for war—in manpower, munitions, organization—that awed the President’s party aboard the Ferdinand Magellan.

  “The impression I have is of vastness, and a miracle of quick construction,” Daisy noted in Denver, where they inspected the Remington Rand Ordnance Plant. Propelled by Japan’s sneak attack, America had become a new “melting pot,” with “50% men and women at Remington, cheerful, well-fed human beings, who, with all their lack of culture, are the backbone of the country, & probably the finest ‘mass’ of population in the world,” she noted proudly. “The women were dressed in pale blue 1-piece overalls (much like Mr. Churchill’s air raid zipper suit) and red bandannas tied tightly about their heads . . . People were collected all along the route full of spontaneous enthusiasm. Women & girls jumping, waving, laughing & cheering. The men grinning broadly & waving.”2

  At the President’s polio-rehabilitation center at Warm Springs in Georgia, Roosevelt stood tall, kept upright by his heavy steel leg braces, “holding on to his chair,” and “made a serious, soft voiced little speech” to the hundred patients assembled in Georgia Hall, then was “wheeled to the door of the dining room where he stayed to shake hands with each patient that filed through.”3 Using “the little car he has had for years down here”—a 1938 Ford Roadster with brakes and accelerator he could operate by hand, as well as a license plate reading “F.D.R.- 1—The President”—Roosevelt himself drove his guests around the area.4

  Daisy—visiting the Warm Springs center for the first time—was deeply moved. “It is certainly a monument to him, his imagination and his faith & his love for his fellow sufferers, and it is very lovely. Peaceful and beautiful. The houses homelike and attractive, mainly white, among trees.” For the first time in months the President swam—and insisted Daisy and Polly swim too. He had seemed desperately tired when they left Washington. Now he was “visibly expanding and blossoming.”

  One night—after a simple, homely dinner which he loved, in contrast to the “pallid” White House food that Eleanor’s cook, Mrs. Nesbitt, made and which Roosevelt “detested”5—Roosevelt took out “his stamps; the rest of us read. F. complained of a headache” and the women took his temperature—which was fortunately normal.6 He’d seemed actually happy, though.

  With the physical support of his new naval aide, Rear Admiral Wilson Brown—Captain McCrea having been assigned to command of the new U.S. cruiser, Iowa—the President was still able to stand and, by swinging his muscular torso, even walk. Visiting Fort Riley, in Kansas, he actually proceeded on foot to the exit of the amphitheater, where fifteen thousand troops had gathered for an Easter service. At the railway station, as the Ferdinand Magellan slowly pulled out, officers and men saluted the Commander in Chief. “It was a beautiful sight and the kind of thing that brings a lump in your throat, specially when the commander in chief is a man like F. & crippled besides—Our driver told us he had not the slightest idea that F. couldn’t walk, that his brother officers also had never thought of it,” Daisy noted. “F. is all the more an inspiration to them—.”7

  At dinner on the train on April 19, they were joined by Sumner Welles, and the Mexican ambassador, Francisco Castilia Nájero. “We stayed up until 10 listening to them talk about the future peace—Very interesting,” Daisy recorded in her diary. There was, she recognized, a steeliness in her champion that was never going to allow him to let up until he’d achieved his dream—with little trace of magnanimity toward those responsible for the global holocaust the Nazis and Japanese were so adamantly pursuing. The “perpetrators of the war, like Hitler, Himmler, etc. shall be court-martialed in their own country” and hanged or “liquidated,” as Daisy noted, quoting Hitler’s sickening word—“not sent to some distant island to turn into heroes and martyrs, with the danger of their trying to come back.”8

  The President might show deep and natural empathy for his fellow polio sufferers, she recognized, and great charm toward visitors of every stripe—but his forgiveness did not extend to the Nazi “Aryans” who were exterminating not only the handicapped but, it was becoming increasingly evident, millions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and political prisoners; sickening atrocities, moreover, that the Japanese were also reportedly committing, not only in the treatment of the populations of the countries Japanese troops had overrun, from China to the Philippines, but American POWs.

  In his diary, Secretary Stimson made note of what the Operations Division of the War Department had learned. Colonel Ritchie “gave me a dreadful picture of what is happening to our prisoners of war at the hands of the Japanese in the Philippines. I have been thoroughly churned up over it ever since. They are being killed off and are dying off under mistreatment. The situation is frightful. Yet it is very dangerous for us to make it public because of the reprisals which would be undoubtedly visited upon these,” he wrote—aware American prisoners would be tortured and executed for smuggling out news of their mistreatment. Nor could the United States threaten retaliation, “because we have only a few hundred prisoners” thanks to the Japanese code of Bushido, “while they have a good many thousands of our men . . . MacArthur is vowing vengeance and is keeping the score of injuries to our men which he has heard of which some day he hopes to live to avenge.”9

  News of the execution of captured crewmembers from Doolittle’s air raid on Tokyo the previous year had aroused similar outrage—Stimson wanting Secretary Hull to issue a warning there would be American “reprisals” for such “an act of barbarism” if it went on.10

  For such barbarians the President possessed, Daisy recognized, no sympathy. He would not permit MacArthur to carry out reprisals in the Pacific. But when, during his tour of U.S. training camps and manufacturing plants, a decrypt arrived via the communications car of the President’s train of a Japanese signal giving the forthcoming flying itinerary of the Japanese commander in chief—the man who had launched the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in peacetime, killing twenty-four hundred Americans in a single morning—the President, aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, had had no hesitation whatever.

  22

  Get Yamamoto!

  SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE leaving on his inspection tour the President had invited MacArthur’s air commander, General George Kenney, to give him a literal bird’s-eye view of the campaign in the Southwest Pacific, when Kenney accompanied MacArthur’s chief of staff to Washington to ask for more reinforcements.

&nb
sp; In Kenney—a World War I pilot almost as highly decorated (Silver Star and Distinguished Flying Cross) as MacArthur himself—MacArthur had recognized the right man to revolutionize the U.S. Army Air Forces in war: not only in combatting Japanese fliers and in bombing ground installations, but in decimating Japanese supply vessels. The result had proved transformative—and the President wanted to know how Kenney had done it.

  Whereas carrier-plane pilots of the U.S. Navy had become expert at low-level attacks on Japanese shipping, the U.S. Army Air Forces’ pilots had not, Kenney explained. He had therefore hurled himself into the challenge—developing new skip-bombing techniques and modified B-25 mast-height gunship tactics, which he’d ordered to be rehearsed against a partially sunken vessel off Port Moresby. Under his leadership the vessel-attack planes had adopted a new technique: to fly in at 150 feet—with P-38s and 40s providing higher air cover, and B-17s higher still.

  At the White House the President had thus been enthralled as Kenney described his new approach. “I talked for some time with President Roosevelt, who wanted to hear the whole story of the war in our theater in detail,” Kenney later recalled his first visit to the Oval Office, “as well as a blow-by-blow description of the Bismarck Sea Battle.”1

  Kenney’s description of the battle had been especially telling, for the flier had explained how the Ultra secret decrypts of Japanese communications that the President was seeing in his Map Room in Washington had enabled Kenney to put into effect his deadly new aerial war tactics in the field.