Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Inevitably, as the weeks went by, an AP reporter dutifully tracking a story that was common knowledge on Guadalcanal, blew it in Australia in May 1943—despite being warned it should not be used. Admiral King was incensed—just as he had been the year before, when a similar report had been published ascribing the great victory at Midway to naval code-breaking. Nimitz ordered a full-scale investigation and disciplinary action, with orders that every pilot on Guadalcanal, as well as staff officers and flight mechanics, be questioned. Four citations for Medal of Honor awards were withdrawn, and Halsey, blaming the pilots, declared they should be court-martialed, stripped of their rank, and jailed.5

  By a miracle, the Japanese, however, proved unable or unwilling to investigate too closely their suspicions. The sheer shock and shame of the admiral’s death—the six Zero pilots wishing to commit ritual suicide for their utter failure to protect him—caused a wave of gloom to spread from Bougainville to the Emperor’s palace in Japan. Yamamoto’s ashes were taken back to Japan aboard his battleship, the Musashi, and after lying in state in Tokyo, were interred in a state funeral.6

  In later years there would be claims that Admiral Yamamoto’s death had been a dangerous gamble and counterproductive, given that his earlier objections to war with the United States would have made him, if brought back into the Japanese government, more willing than his successor (who was killed in 1944) or other Japanese admirals to negotiate an armistice.7

  President Roosevelt certainly had no truck with such hypotheticals. He had laid down a policy of unconditional surrender on the basis that neither the Germans nor the Japanese could ever again be trusted to keep the peace unless forced into complete surrender—and the way Japanese troops were fighting, from the Aleutians to the Solomon islands they had conquered, and the atrocities they were committing, bore out his contention. In Yamamoto’s cabin aboard the Musashi the admiral had left a poem he’d recently written, lamenting his “dead comrades” in the war—but declaring “with an iron will I will drive deep / Into the camp of the enemy / And will show the true blood of a Japanese man.”8

  Japan’s retreat into medievalism, like Germany’s, was something America could only end by force of arms—not negotiation. In depriving the Japanese of their greatest admiral in the war, Roosevelt had struck an incalculable blow to the Japanese military machine and national morale at a critical moment in the war.

  Certainly, as the President continued his national inspection tour, he was seen to be in great form. The training establishments he’d visited had given him a potent sense of American willingness to fight—and to win. At a press conference he convened onboard the Ferdinand Magellan on April 19, he spoke of the “great improvement I have seen since last September in the training of troops of all kinds,” and referred to the “cutting down of the age of the higher officers than in the last war.” There was, too, higher “morale” to be seen among the troops as they learned the deadlier skills of modern combat—“there is a great eagerness on their part to get into the ‘show’ and get it over with.”9 Moreover, the strategy he’d settled at Casablanca seemed to be working out. In North Africa, putting Kasserine behind them, American troops were moving in for the kill in Tunisia, close to the time frame Eisenhower had given him at the Villa Dar es Saada. And in the Atlantic—following the President’s order to Admiral King to resolve the interservice argument regarding air coverage of the mid-Atlantic and the alarming success of U-boat wolfpacks or face dismissal10—King had buckled.

  Finally setting aside his childlike struggle with the U.S. Army Air Forces over which service should be responsible for antisubmarine air patrolling, King—in fear of losing his job—had convened a conference of all parties in Washington at the beginning of March. Chastened, he’d belatedly established a special headquarters in the Navy Department, the so-called U.S. Tenth Fleet, to direct the anti-U-boat campaign: a campaign that would use new ASDIC 271M centimetric radar capable of detecting a submerged submarine four miles away; high-frequency radio direction finding (HFRDF) to pinpoint where U-boats were signaling from; “baby flattops” the President had earlier ordered to be constructed from merchant ship hulls as convoy escort carriers; incoming new Bogue-class aircraft carriers; and most important of all: American Liberator long-distance bomber planes.

  Based on the Boeing B-24 USAAF bomber, but equipped with torpedo-like depth charges, radar, and Leigh lights to illuminate U-boats surfacing for night attacks on shipping, the Liberators would now almost instantly turn the tide of war in the Atlantic—completely disproving King’s assumption that convoying was the only answer. Within weeks the new combination had worked—the results beginning to show already in April 1943. Sinkings of German U-boats increased—dramatically.

  The President was relieved—and Admiral King relieved not to be relieved of his command. By May the demise of the wolfpack menace would become a rout, forcing the commander of the German navy, Admiral Dönitz, to admit defeat that month and recall his entire submarine fleet to safety in Europe, pending the construction of more modern submarines with “snorkels” that could hopefully evade air detection.

  And with regard to the death of Admiral Yamamoto? The President was careful to say nothing to anyone until May 21, 1943, when giving his 898th press conference.

  “Mr. President,” one reporter asked innocently, “would you care to comment on the death of the Japanese admiral (Isoroku Yamamoto), who forecast he would write the peace in the White House?”

  “He’s dead?” the President asked, as if stunned.

  “Q[uestioner]: The Japanese radio announced it. Yamamoto. Killed in action while directing operations in an airplane.”

  “The President: Gosh! (loud laughter)”

  “Q: Can we quote that, sir?”

  “The President: Yes. (more laughter).”11

  To his own staff the President was less deceptive. In truth he could never forgive Yamamoto for his role in attacking Pearl Harbor, causing the deaths of so many thousands of Americans there and in the aftermath, after the many years of hospitality and education Yamamoto had enjoyed in the United States. Two days after the press conference, the President thus had his secretary, Grace Tully, type a letter, headed The White House, dated May 23, 1943, and which he signed.

  “Dear Bill,” the President scrawled across the top of the letter in his own hand as a memo to Admiral Leahy, “Please see that the Old Girl gets the following:

  ‘Dear Widow Yamamoto,

  Time is a great leveler and somehow I never expected to see the old boy at the White House anyway. Sorry I can’t attend the funeral because I approve it. Hoping he is where we know he ain’t.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt’

  “And ask her to visit you at the Wilson House this summer,” Roosevelt added in a postscript to Leahy.

  It wasn’t kind, or gracious; indeed the President never sent the letter.12 But it reflected something of what, in his heart of hearts, he really felt about Japanese perfidy. And his profound satisfaction that he’d been able to see Admiral Yamamoto get his just deserts.

  Ending his long inspection tour at Washington’s Union Station on April 29, the President certainly had good reason to be in high spirits.

  April had been a bountiful month for the Allies. Admiral Mineichi Koga would be a very poor replacement for Yamamoto—indeed, I-Go was called off, and on Guadalcanal the 339th Squadron’s seventy-six pilots did not encounter a single Japanese plane in combat for the rest of April and the whole of May.13 Staging out of the Ellice Islands—which Marines had captured the previous October—Admiral Nimitz’s long-range bombers had been able on April 20 to hit Tarawa, the atoll that was impeding future invasion of the Marshall Islands—some twenty-four hundred miles from Hawaii.14 General MacArthur had begun to revise his strategy in order to do more with less—persuaded by Washington, in fact, to drop his costly notion of step-by-step advance and merely bypass Japanese “fortresses” in the Pacific, such as Rabaul, if possibl
e. Such strongpoints would thus be allowed to wither on the vine as MacArthur’s air forces, ground forces, and naval vessels pursued a leapfrogging, or island-hopping, campaign instead.

  All in all, then, the Allies stood fair to succeed in a two-ocean war—if they made no more mistakes, and capitalized on their growing productive and fighting strengths. By the end of the current year, the President had been told by Secretary Stimson, the U.S. Army would have some 8.2 million well-trained men and women in uniform—including more than 2.5 million U.S. Air Forces personnel. With a target of a million U.S. combat troops to be ferried in the coming months to bases in Britain, the President felt the Allies had every prospect of mounting a successful 1944 Second Front, and be on course to win the war that year, or early in 1945—after which the unconditional surrender of the Japanese could be obtained, he was confident, within months.

  Such heady confidence, though, rested on a fundamental assumption: that Winston Churchill and the British would stand by the agreements made at Casablanca.

  That, however, as Admiral Leahy and General Marshall informed the President at the White House on April 30, was probably misguided. Instead, the Prime Minister, they’d learned, was intent upon coming to Washington with a huge new posse of military advisers and clerks—determined to convince the President his whole strategy was wrong.

  PART SEVEN

  * * *

  Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts

  24

  Saga of the Nibelungs

  WITH EVERY NEW day, the news from North Africa had been getting better, the President had felt—under American leadership and arms.

  By the end of April, American forces in North Africa outnumbered British, French, and other national contingents 60 percent to 40. From a frontline west of Bizerte that ran first south, then east to Enfidaville on the Tunisian coast, more than three hundred thousand Allied troops were preparing to launch Operation Strike: the final Allied offensive in North Africa to drive the Axis forces into the sea. Italian troops were beginning to desert in increasing numbers, but German troops were paradoxically selling their lives ever more dearly in battles to hold onto djebels and hilltops many thousands of miles from their homes—infused with a blind, arrogant loyalty to their comrades, scorn for their opponents, and a suicidal unwillingness to question either what they were doing in North Africa or why they maintained such slavish faith in their führer.

  Certainly the Führer was indifferent to their fate. At his meeting with Mussolini near Salzburg on April 8, he’d dismissed out of hand the notion of a negotiated armistice with Stalin, or revival of the Ribbentrop Pact. As at Stalingrad, he was banking upon his understanding of the unique German psyche: that the members of his chosen Volk would stay loyal to each other, whatever happened; and that, in the manner of the Nibelungen myths, they would only gain greater nourishment for their national pride from stories of heroic valor and self-sacrifice, even death in distant fields. Nibelungentreue—whether on the Volga or in the mountains of Tunisia. Not dishonorable retreat or evacuation.

  The tenacity and blind courage shown by soldiers of the Wehrmacht to their comrades in battle in North Africa certainly suggested Hitler was right. German casualties had escalated as the end approached, yet in contrast to Italian troops, far from dispiriting the German survivors, the likely outcome appeared to make no discernible dent on their morale in the field. Nor would the Führer countenance plans for Axis flight. Just as he had ordered von Paulus to die rather than surrender his last remaining forces at Stalingrad, so now Allied code breakers read with amazement the decrypted signals in which, from his East Prussian headquarters at the Wolfschanze, or Wolf’s Lair, the Führer not only ordered more infantry reinforcements to be flown into the last Axis redoubt—which was now down to only sixty-seven panzers—but declined to permit the word evacuation to be spoken.

  The Saga of the Nibelungs was thus being enacted—in real life. Allied planners had assumed in early April that Hitler could, if he chose, save as many as thirty-seven thousand men of the Wehrmacht per day by evacuation—the better to defend the shores of mainland Europe. There came, however, no such order. Instead, on April 13, the Führer had dispatched his historic cable to General von Arnim, in command of the quarter million Axis troops in Tunisia. Except for a few “useless mouths” to be airlifted or shipped out of Tunisia, the Axis forces were ordered to fight to the death1—killing as many of the Allies as possible before they were themselves felled.

  It was a bloody, tragic prospect. Yet thanks to his insistence on Torch as the means by which American forces could first learn how to defeat the vaunted Wehrmacht in battle before embarking on a Second Front, it was also a tribute to the President’s patience and determination not to undertake military operations beyond the capabilities of his forces. General Patton—“our greatest fighting general,” he called him2—had restored morale in II Corps after Kasserine, and was now slated to command all American troops in Husky, the invasion of Sicily, in July—which would allow the Allies to rehearse a major assault landing, this time against Axis defenders, not Vichy French. Meantime, U.S. air forces were beginning to take a huge toll of Axis shipping as well as of the Luftwaffe. Above all, despite the mischief being sewn by the American and English press—delighting in the rivalry between U.S. and British exploits in the field—General Eisenhower was doing a magnificent job in holding together the Allied military coalition in North Africa.

  This, more than anything, was what reinforced the President’s faith in the outcome of his grand strategy. Hitler and Hirohito might well wish to see their populations obliterated rather than save them, but as long as the Allies held together and continued to build upon their combined strength, they would prevail, he was certain. The timetable General Eisenhower had given him at Casablanca for clearing North Africa of Axis forces, as the final Allied offensive kicked off on May 6, 1943, looked remarkably prescient—indeed, in a brilliant armored coup, British tanks from Montgomery’s Eighth Army, stalled beneath the high ground at Enfidaville, performed a magnificent end run, or left hook, which took them into the city of Tunis itself within twenty-four hours, on May 7—where they took the unconditional surrender of all Axis troops there. Infantry and tanks of General Bradley’s U.S. II Corps force simultaneously smashed their way down from the mountains in the northwest—including famously bloody combat around Hill 232—into the port city of Bizerte.

  General von Arnim’s days, perhaps hours, seemed numbered—U.S. and RAF planes swooping on any German or Italian vessel attempting to leave North African shores, while Luftwaffe attempts to fly in final supplies were shot down.

  By contrast, the Queen Mary—the vessel bearing the British prime minister—was making a mercifully safe passage across the Atlantic—indeed was approaching the East Coast of the United States surrounded by U.S. destroyers and escort vessels, the sky above thick with U.S. planes watching for U-boats as it made its way toward the Statue of Liberty without mishap. Ensconced in the grand staterooms he’d ordered to be reconstructed for his voyage (the transatlantic liner having earlier been converted into an Allied troopship), Mr. Churchill was toasting every new report from London and Algiers: drunk not so much from champagne as sheer excitement over the imminent Allied victory in Tunisia—one that would soon exceed the German Sixth Army surrender at Stalingrad.

  After his long years of military failure, the Prime Minister felt wonderfully, arrogantly alive, his staff later recalled: seemingly certain he could, by the force of his ebullient personality and the scores of staff officers and advisers he was bringing with him, reverse the agreements he’d made on behalf of his country at Casablanca.

  25

  A Scene from The Arabian Nights

  AT THE WHITE HOUSE, the President, having discussed with Admiral Leahy and General Marshall what the British might be plotting, still found it hard to believe.

  The President had hitherto been under the impression that his partnership with his “active and ardent lieutenant” was a firm and happy
one. Had the two leaders not motored together, after the Casablanca Conference, to Marrakesh—the fabled Berber city at the foot of the Atlas Mountains? Had they not spent the night there, in the house occupied by the American vice consul, Kenneth Pendar? Had they not settled together into “one of the showplaces of the world,” as Pendar afterward described it, a “stylized, modernized version of a south Moroccan kasbah”?1 Had not Churchill asked to be shown up the famous tower, and had he not counted the sixty steps before asking whether Pendar thought it possible “for the President to be brought up here? I am so fond of this superb view that it has been my dream to see it with him”?2 And had it not so been arranged—the six-foot-three-inch paralyzed president of the United States borne up the sixty-foot tower by his attendants “with his arms around their shoulders, while another went ahead to open doors, and the rest of the entire party followed”? With Churchill humming “Oh, there ain’t no war, there ain’t no war,” had not the President “amidst much laughing on his part and sympathizing with his carriers” been brought up to the open terrace of the tower, and had not a wicker chair been “fetched for him and the Prime Minister,” allowing the two leaders to sit and survey the vast Atlas range? “Never have I seen the sun set on those snow-capped peaks with such magnificence,” Pendar—who ordered highballs to be fetched and served—certainly recalled. “There had evidently been snow storms recently in the mountains, for they were white almost to their base, and looked more wild and rugged than ever, their sheer walls rising some 12,000 feet before us.”3