Even the President’s postwar vision was in danger of unraveling—from within. Two New York Times journalists, John Crider and Arthur Krock, had now openly reported, while the President was fishing in Canada, on the growing rift between the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, and Undersecretary Welles—reports that had been carried in other newspapers, too.1
The President had therefore summoned both Welles and Hull to the Oval Office on August 10, the day after his return—a meeting at which Hull declared he could not work with Welles, and that one of them must resign.
As if this was not enough, the President had read carefully his war secretary’s “Brief Report on Certain Features of Overseas Trip,” which Henry Stimson had sent over to the White House, following his return from London and North Africa—a report so alarming in terms of Allied strategy that the President had asked Stimson to lunch with him on August 10, immediately after his meeting with Hull and Welles. The lunch would precede the meeting he had convened with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at 2:30 in the Oval Office, to discuss “the attitude to be taken by the U.S. Chiefs of Staff at the coming conference [in Quebec] with our opposite members from London,” as Admiral Leahy put it in his diary.2
An unfortunate breakdown in Allied war strategy was approaching—at the very moment when, in the Southwest Pacific, American destroyers had sunk all four Japanese destroyers of the “Tokyo Express” seeking to reinforce their troops on Kolombangara in the Solomons; a moment when, in the North Pacific, U.S. and Canadian troops were preparing to land on Kiska Island in the Aleutians; a moment when, in Sicily, the retreating German troops were beginning to evacuate their forces across the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland; and when, in Russia, the Wehrmacht was being forced to retreat on a three-hundred-mile front, giving up Orel and Belgorod—cities occupied by German troops since October 1941.
Of one thing the President was absolutely certain at this strategic crossroads for the Allies, however: that whatever anyone said or posited, the war might very well not be over by Christmas—even by Christmas 1944. He must therefore redouble his efforts to keep the Allied coalition together, marching to the same tune.
And place. Berlin. Then Tokyo.
Reading over the materials the Joint Chiefs of Staff had sent him, prior to their meeting at the White House, the President appreciated their clear strategic reasoning, especially their August 9 memorandum, with its various enclosures.
The President was not, however, amused by the wording of one enclosure: a paper prepared by the Operations Division of the War Office, dated August 8, which stuck in his craw. In it the authors, headed by General Handy, painted the Torch invasion and year of victories since 1942 as wasteful and unnecessary—in fact as having set back the defeat of Germany by a year. A cross-Channel invasion in 1943 “was the one chance to end the war in Europe this year. If this had happened,” General Handy claimed, “all that has been gained would be insignificant by comparison.”3
Clearly the authors had never reflected on Dieppe. Or Kasserine. Or Sicily, for that matter, where the fighting had become remorseless. They had certainly never faced a German soldier in battle. It was, arguably, one of the most egregious underestimations of the enemy ever produced by a senior general of the U.S. military—neither combat nor battle experience ever appearing in the document. All arguments had merely been laid out in terms of numbers of men furnishable to the front.4
The President had shaken his head over that. Would these armchair planners never learn?
Fortunately, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had themselves prepared two far more mature papers, on August 7 and 9, attempting to “develop a strategic concept for the defeat of the Axis in Europe.”5 These papers concluded that, thanks to the Allied invasion of Sicily, the German offensive at Kursk had had to be curtailed; that the Wehrmacht would no longer be able to go on the attack or seek victory on the Eastern Front; and that therefore German strategy would now likely be one of fierce fighting to attain “a satisfactory negotiated peace.”6 As they warned, however, the Axis “still retains strong defensive power. A defensive strategy on the part of the Axis might develop into a protracted struggle and result in a stalemate on the Continent.” Therefore, “the rapidly improving position of the United Nations in relation to the Axis in Europe demands an abrogation of opportunistic strategy and requires the adoption and adherence to sound strategic plans which envisage decisive military operations conducted at times and places of our choosing—not the enemy’s.”
This, at least, was sensible. “We must not jeopardize our sound over-all strategy,” the memorandum argued, “simply to exploit local successes in a generally accepted secondary theater, the Mediterranean, where logistical and terrain difficulties preclude decisive and final operations designed to reach the heart of Germany.”7
This new memorandum, Roosevelt felt, was far better argued than Handy’s counterdocument. What it did not do was explain how the Western Allies could simply put major offensive operations against Germany on hold for nine months while they prepared Overlord. Not only would a nine-month hiatus be difficult to excuse to people at home, but it would be harder still to excuse to the Russians, currently facing three-quarters of the German Wehrmacht in combat on the Eastern Front. As the President chided Marshall, who had brought the memorandum to the White House for him to read on August 9, at 2:00 p.m., “the planners were always conservative and saw all the difficulties”; he was sure “more could usually be done than they were willing to admit,” as Marshall noted on his return to the Pentagon. By 11:00 a.m. the next day Marshall therefore wanted new planning documents that would meet the President’s concerns. As Marshall reported Mr. Roosevelt’s wishes:
That between Overlord and Priceless [further major operations in the Mediterranean] he was insistent on Overlord but felt that we could do more than was now proposed for Priceless. His idea was that the seven battle-experienced divisions should be provided for Overlord but that an equal number of divisions from the U.S. should be routed to Priceless.
He stated that he did not wish to have anything to do with an operation in the Balkans, nor to agree to a British expedition which would cost us ships, landing craft, withdrawals, etc. But he did feel that we should secure a position in Italy to the north of Rome and that we should take over Sardinia and Corsica and thus set up a serious threat to southern France.8
Marshall was stunned—able only to protest that “we had strained programmed resources well to the limit in the agreements now standing.” Moreover, though Overlord would have priority of resources, a multifront strategy by the Western Allies, if adopted too heavily in the Mediterranean, would impose grave constraints on Overlord and its chances of success.
The President seemed unimpressed by Marshall’s response—as the general was aware. Clearly the President saw Marshall as maintaining a kind of ideological focus on Overlord, which seemed not only bureaucratic but wooden and out of touch with political reality. The American people, furnishing the weapons and the soon-to-be eleven million soldiers for the war—as well as paying the taxes to fund it—could not be expected to condone nine months of a virtual cease-fire at this juncture, during which anything might happen—both positive and negative.
Rather, the President sounded determined the Allies should keep the initiative, now that they had the Germans on the run. General Brooke, the British CIGS, was right to see Italy as a major theater of war, where major German forces could be forced to fight, rather than switch divisions back to the Eastern Front. Once in Italy, moreover, the Allies could maintain the offensive initiative: possessing the airfields from which to bomb southern Germany, and bases for the troops from which to mount an invasion of southern France if it were deemed opportune, thus helping Overlord—indeed offering an alternative lodgment if Overlord did not succeed. The President, Marshall penned in the note he made at the Pentagon, therefore wanted to see him “at noon tomorrow” with the logistical implications of a two-front campaign on the European mainland. “Incidentally, h
e said he did not like my use of the word ‘critical’ because he wanted assistance in carrying out his conception rather than difficulties placed in the way of it—all of this in a humorous vein,” Marshall reported to his staff.9
The President had spoken. He was U.S. commander in chief, and it was for Marshall, as U.S. Army chief of staff, to ensure the President’s conception be carried out, not keep harping on “critical” insufficiencies, or jeopardy. Period.
Once the Joint Chiefs of Staff were seated in the Oval Office at 2:15 on the afternoon of August 10—and with the secretary of war, Mr. Stimson, having been invited to witness the meeting, following his lunch with the President—Mr. Roosevelt held forth: explaining the political context behind the next decisions that must be made at Quebec, where they would be conferring with their British opposite numbers.
The “British Foreign Office does not want the Balkans to come under the Russian influence,” he told them. Therefore, “Britain wants to get to the Balkans first”—understandably. However, he himself rather doubted the Russians wanted or were in a position to “take over the Balkan states” such as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Greece. They would, he predicted, prefer rather to “establish kinship,” or associative relationship, “with the other Slavic people” in southern Europe.10 “In any event,” he went on, he “thought it unwise to plan military strategy on a gamble as to political results,” rather than what was possible or desirable militarily.11 A major U.S. campaign in the Balkans would have no guarantee of succeeding, indeed might well fail. It would certainly distract from the cross-Channel invasion scheduled for May 1944—a gamble the United States couldn’t take.
General Marshall agreed wholeheartedly. If the shift of the seven battle-hardened Allied divisions designated for Overlord from the Mediterranean did not take place, it would, he pointed out, “simply invite having these extra divisions used for invasion in the Balkans. This would meet the Prime Minister’s and Mr. Eden’s desires, but would make the Mediterranean operation so extensive as to have a disastrous effect on the main effort from England”12—a warning that prompted Admiral King to suggest “to the President that if the British insist upon abandoning Overlord or postponing the operation indefinitely, we should abandon the project as in carrying it on we would simply waste our substance.”13
Admiral King’s disgust with the British prompted the President to reassert the crucial necessity of mounting Overlord as the number one priority. Indeed, to the amazement of his own advisers, the President then “said we can, if necessary, carry out the project ourselves. He was certain that the British would be glad to make the necessary bases in England available to us.”14
The United States mounting the cross-Channel invasion without British participation?
In the long months since Pearl Harbor, there had been threats to switch military priority to the Pacific, but never such a gesture of scorn for British timidity and avoidance of decisive battle—certainly never before by the President.
In part the bleak picture of British cowardice was the result of Secretary Stimson’s journey to London and Algiers. On his return he had painted a disturbing portrait of Churchill’s intentions, but the President didn’t think, in the end, it would come to a breach in the alliance. The British, he was certain, could not afford to let down, before the whole world, the major ally that had saved them from German and Japanese victory. Moreover, the United States was not averse, the President explained, to establishing air bases in southern Italy and opening a fighting front in Italy; it was just a matter of saying no to an advance further north than the capital, lest the Allies be drawn into Hitler’s web.
“He was for going no further into Italy than Rome,” Stimson noted with satisfaction that night, “and that for the purpose of establishing bases. He was for setting up as rapidly as possible a larger force in Great Britain for the purpose of Roundhammer [Overlord] so that as soon as possible and before the actual time of landing we should have more soldiers in Britain dedicated to that purpose than the British. He said he wanted to have an American commander and he thought that would make it easier if we had more men in the expedition at the beginning. I could see that the military and naval conferees were astonished and delighted at his definiteness.”15
They were. “The President stated that, frankly, his reason for desiring American preponderance in force,” General Deane wrote in his minutes of the meeting, following discussion of the American divisions that could be shipped to England before D-day (fifteen in number), was “to have the basis for insisting on an American commander. He wished that preponderance of force to be sufficient to make it impossible for the British to disagree with the suggestion.”16
The new strategy was thus clear. War on two western fronts—but the Italian front limited to a line just north of Rome. And an American supreme commander for Overlord, lest the British try to renege on their commitment to a cross-Channel invasion.
“The President then summed up the discussion by stating that our available means seem to fit in pretty well with our plans. He outlined these as insistence upon the continuation of the present Overlord buildup and carrying out that operation as our main effort,” Deane recorded. Moreover, the President wanted to have enough Americans in Britain “in order to justify an American commander” for Overlord, he restated. Together with this, he was in favor of leaving Eisenhower with sufficient forces in the Mediterranean to establish U.S. air power in southern Italy (where weather conditions permitted takeoff and landing almost every day, compared to often prohibitive flying conditions over England). Such forces on the southern European front would give the Allies strategic flexibility if for any reason the Overlord operation was repelled, but the President was emphatically “opposed to operations in the Balkans.”17 Yes, it would be good to have an army able to stop the Russians from overrunning countries in south-central Europe as they advanced—but the Western Allies still did not have a single boot on the mainland of Europe, and the Balkans were in any case a nightmare in terms of terrain. Knowing the Germans, the Wehrmacht would contest every yard. It was, therefore, “unwise to plan military strategy based on a gamble as to political results.”18
“I came away with a very much lighter heart on the subject of our military policy than I have had in a long time,” Stimson dictated at home in his diary, delighted with his commander in chief’s stance. “He was more clear and definite than I have ever seen him since we have been in this war.”19
What pleased Stimson even more was that the President now wanted an American in charge of Overlord—something Stimson, in a letter he’d brought with him to the White House for the President, had also recommended. He’d shown his draft letter to Marshall before leaving the Pentagon that morning, pleading for Marshall to be the man, and Marshall had not demurred (though anxious that Stimson not tell the President he had seen the recommendation, lest he be seen to be pursuing personal ambition).
The loss of Marshall from Washington—were he to be Overlord’s supreme commander—would be dire, but it was necessary, Stimson felt, to show the British that America meant business: Overlord the only way that “Germany can be really defeated and the war brought to an end.”20
Whether the President would select Marshall as supreme commander, however, was quite another matter. As would be the British chiefs’ reaction to the President’s strategy, once they all reached Quebec.
And with that the President prepared to meet his counterpart, the Right Honorable Winston Churchill and his wife at Hyde Park on August 12, 1943.
The planning for the endgame in World War II in Europe was now coming to a climax.
40
The Führer Is Very Optimistic
THE PRESIDENT’S INSISTENCE that Churchill meet him at Hyde Park before the Quebec Conference was not motivated by politeness or hospitality. For good or ill, the President was aware the meeting with the British prime minister might well determine the course of World War II—and its aftermath.
Strategic flex
ibility or inflexibility—that was the question in Churchill’s eyes. Opportunism or strategic determination—this was the question in Roosevelt’s.
The question of who was right and who was wrong would vex political and military historians for the next seventy years. Time was certainly of the essence—the President having received reports of ever-increasing German atrocities in the occupied countries of Europe. The latest of these had come on August 10, the day he met with the Joint Chiefs at the White House. From London, the U.S. ambassador to the Polish government in exile, Tony Biddle, had reported German mass murder—genocidal pogroms—on a scale never seen before in human history.
The President, in his broadcast on July 31, had already warned neutral countries not to give asylum to war criminals, but Biddle felt this would not be enough. As he put it, “apart from the punishment of war criminals for the crimes they have committed, it has become more imperative than ever to restrain the Germans from committing further the mass murder of the Polish population in Poland. This becomes all the more urgent since it may be anticipated that the policy of exterminating the population of entire provinces, as is practiced in Poland, may also be applied by the Germans in the present final stages of the war to the people in other German-occupied territories, like the Czechs, Yugoslavs, French and those in the occupied parts of the U.S.S.R.,” his report warned—noting the Germans had already “exterminated” the majority of the Jewish population, and were deporting to concentration camps hundreds of thousands of Poles, while men between the ages of fourteen and fifty were being taken to Germany as slave labor. “Women, children and old people are sent to camps to be killed in gas chambers which previously served to exterminate the Jewish population of Poland,” he reported. As if this were not enough, it “may be presumed that the Germans are reckoning in the possibility of a defeat, and have consequently decided to exterminate the largest possible proportion of the Polish population” in a kind of apocalyptic conflagration—quoting Fritz Sauckel, the Reich minister of slave labor, saying as recently as June 19, 1943, in Kraków: “If the Germans lose the war, we shall see that nothing remains either here or elsewhere in Europe.”1 The Germans would, in other words, not only resort to a scorched-earth policy, but torch peoples as well.
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