The President refuses to listen to such defeatism. He threatens to withhold the Manhattan Project’s atomic bomb discoveries from Britain. The two men join the Canadian PM and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Quebec. There the D-day plans for spring 1944 will be cast in stone.
The First Crack in the Axis
* * *
In Ottawa, the President announces “the first crack in the Axis.” The Allies suffer their own cracks, however. Churchill misunderstands German determination to fight, even in other people’s countries, and Stalin—facing two-thirds of the Wehrmacht—loses faith in Allied willingness to defeat the Axis.
The Reckoning
* * *
At Hyde Park (driving his own car), FDR tries to keep the Allies focused on the defeat of Nazi Germany, rather than become too embroiled in the Mediterranean. For all of Winston’s faults, though, FDR needs the Prime Minister to help save western Europe from postwar Soviet domination once the Nazis are beaten.
At Salerno, south of Naples, on September 9, 1943, FDR’s worst fears are realized. Churchill’s vision of a “soft underbelly” is not soft. Fortunately, as Commander in Chief the President has stood firm, and U.S. preparations for D-day in 1944 will, he hopes, erase Churchill’s near-fatal misjudgment.
41
A Cardinal Moment
MRS. CHURCHILL HAD felt unwell, following the turbulent sea voyage from Scotland, so Churchill, summoned to stay a few days with the President at Hyde Park, arrived by train from Canada at the small railway halt near the President’s home around midday on August 12, 1943, without her. He had, though, his twenty-year-old daughter, Mary, in tow, a bubbly, charming subaltern in the Women’s Auxiliary Territorial (equivalent to National Guard) Service.
Contrary to General Brooke’s sour mien in Quebec, where he was preparing to meet the U.S. chiefs, the Prime Minister was full of joy at the latest news of secret negotiations for Italian surrender with Marshal Badoglio’s representative. Ever the historian in attempting to set current events within the larger picture of the past, he felt the coalition nations had reached “one of the cardinal moments” of the war, as he’d put it in a cable to the President when calling for a tripartite meeting with Stalin, rather than waiting for the President to meet with Stalin one-on-one. In his telegram he’d claimed “our Mediterranean strategy” had already gained all that Stalin had “hoped for from a cross-Channel second front” that year—dooming the German offensive at Kursk—and that a Big Three meeting “would be one of the milestones of history.”1
The President, for his part, worried that, far from being a milestone of history, it would be a millstone, if the Russians learned Churchill and his 230-man entourage were all for pulling out of Overlord yet again. Worse, in fact, if the Russians—who were still facing some two hundred Wehr- macht divisions on the Eastern Front—lost all faith in the Western Allies. Stalin’s unwillingness to meet before the fall had at least given the President time to reassert his role as leader of the Western nations. Roosevelt therefore arrived at Springwood ahead of Churchill on August 12, shortly after breakfast.
Rather than incurring an immediate contretemps, the President had decided to show no outward concern, but to treat Churchill and his daughter with his usual affable hospitality and respect. He’d therefore instructed that Winston’s lovely painting of Marrakesh, which the Prime Minister had brought over in person in May, at the time of the Trident Conference, should be hung in the main room of the new Library at Hyde Park before the Prime Minister’s arrival, as well as Raymond Perry Neilson’s vibrant new canvas of the both of them at the Atlantic Charter meeting, on the deck of the Prince of Wales, flanked by their chiefs of staff.
Greeting Churchill and his daughter—who was in uniform—the President drove them in person to Hyde Park. Given the oppressive summer heat, he also arranged, once they were settled in, for swimming at Val-Kill, Eleanor’s cottage: the President driving Churchill there in his special Ford, the swim to be followed by fish chowder from an old Delano family recipe, and hot dogs cooked by the First Lady herself.
The Prime Minister certainly showed no disappointment at the simple outdoors fare, indeed he entered into the spirit of the country weekend as to the manor born—even eating the hot dogs he was served. “Mr. C. ate 1 & 1/2,” Daisy Suckley recorded with amusement in her diary, “and had a special little ice-pail for his scotch.”
Daisy thought Churchill “a strange little man,” though. “Fat & round, his clothes bunched up on him. Practically no hair on his head”—a fact that compelled him to seek shelter from the sun’s harsh glare under “a 10-gallon hat.”2 When he undressed, Daisy was even more amused. “In a pair of [swimming] shorts, he looked exactly like a kewpie,” she described.
Returning to her own family mansion at Wilderstein that evening, Daisy noted that “Churchill adores the P”—“loves him, as a man, looks up to him, defers to him, leans on him. He is older than the P. but the P. is a bigger person, and Churchill recognizes it. I saw in Churchill, too, an amount of real greatness I did not suspect before. Speaking of South Africa, Ch.[urchill] said General Smuts is one of the really great men of the world—a prophet—a ‘seer’—his very words—He wants to get him to London, for his ‘mind on post war Europe’ . . .”3
The President, too, was an admirer of Jan Christiaan Smuts.
Smuts’s support for Roosevelt’s vision of the United Nations had certainly been encouraging. But in terms of military strategy, Smuts’s overoptimism was as worrying as Churchill’s, the President felt—seemingly unaware, despite or perhaps because of his great reputation as a guerilla fighter in the Boer War, just how difficult it would be to fight the Wehr-macht head-on, and thus, like Churchill, now contesting the feasibility of Overlord.
To add to the British Commonwealth preference for peripheral rather than head-to-head combat, also, there was Anthony Eden, the British Balkanist—who would be attending the Quebec Conference and clashing horns with Secretary Hull. This would make the President’s task doubly difficult. The President gave no hint of anxiety, however, even to Daisy.
“The P. was relaxed and seemingly cheerful in the midst of the deepest problems,” she described. As the President explained to Churchill, the imminent surrender of Italy was a most welcome development—but it would not win the war against Germany. Nor could it be counted upon, in all likelihood, to keep Russia as an ally in the war against the Axis. Germany would arguably be more powerful alone than burdened by an ally like Italy. This could have serious ramifications—not only in the event that Stalin sought a separate peace with Hitler or an alternative German government, but in terms of Russian cooperation in the war against Japan, slated to follow the defeat of Germany.
There was also the question of whether Russia would agree to be a participant in a United Nations security system thereafter, if the Western Allies failed to carry out Overlord—and instead put their energies into a doomed campaign in the Dardanelles, to spite the Russians. As Secretary Stimson had put it in the memorandum he’d brought with him to lunch with the President two days before, the “Prime Minister and his Chief of the Imperial Staff,” General Brooke, were still “frankly at variance with” Overlord. “The shadow of Passchendaele and Dunkerque still weigh too heavily over the imagination of these leaders of his government. Though they have rendered lip service to the operation, their hearts are not in it.” Nor were their heads—though it was difficult to understand British reasoning that “Germany can be beaten by a series of attritions in northern Italy, in the eastern Mediterranean, in Greece, in the Balkans, Rumania and other satellite countries, and that the only heavy fighting which needs to be done will be done by Russia. To me, in the light of the post-war problems which we shall face, that attitude towards Russia seems terribly dangerous,” Stimson had written. “None of these methods of pinprick warfare can be counted on by us to fool Stalin,” he’d warned. And he’d pointed to the year 1864, “when the firm unfaltering tactics of the Virginia campaign were endorsed b
y the people of the United States in spite of the hideous losses in the Wilderness, Spottsylvania [sic], and Cold Harbor.”4 Overlord was the only way “Germany can be really defeated and the war brought to an end.”5
Stimson was certainly right to question the Prime Minister’s loyalty to the Trident agreement. The day after his first talk with Churchill in London, on July 13, the Prime Minister had minuted his chiefs of staff with an immortal phrase that would come to personify his irrepressible but often unrealistic spirit. In the minute he had scorned the notion of landing merely on the toe of Italy, across the narrow Sicilian strait at Messina; “why should we,” he’d asked his generals, “crawl up the leg like a harvest bug, from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee”—an amphibious assault north of Naples, “thus cutting off and leaving behind all Axis forces in Western Sicily and all ditto in the toe, ball, heel and ankle. It would seem that two or three good divisions could take Naples and produce decisive results if not on the political attitude of Italy then upon the capital. Tell the planners to throw their hat over the fence,” the Prime Minister had declared in July, adding it was “of the utmost urgency.”6
Two or three whole divisions, to be transported by sea, put ashore by landing craft, and reinforced more than two hundred miles behind the current German-Italian frontline?
The feasibility of this was something that had not concerned the Prime Minister. He’d seemed on the Mediterranean warpath, delighted with Smuts’s supportive cable, and responding to it with excitement. “I believe the President is with me: Eisenhower in his heart is naturally for it. I will in no circumstances allow the powerful British and British-controlled forces in the Mediterranean to stand idle.” He would bring a Polish division from Persia, he would use Canadians and Indians—all rushed in to exploit the imminent “collapse” of Italian forces. “Not only must we take Rome and march as far north as possible in Italy but our right hand must give succour to the Balkan Patriots.” If the Americans declined to cooperate “we have ample forces to act by ourselves.”7
Churchill’s claim, in retrospect, was as ridiculous as the President’s remark to his chiefs that U.S. troops could mount Overlord on their own, if the British reneged on the operation. The two statements were, however, an alarming indication as to how much the two Allies were now separating, not converging, in their war strategy. It was therefore up to the President to stitch them back together—if he could.
In the circumstances, the President felt he had no option but to play his biggest card: the atom bomb.
42
Churchill Is Stunned
BEFORE LEAVING WASHINGTON, the President had rehearsed over lunch with Stimson the latest position over U.S. atomic bomb research—which he’d placed under the war secretary’s direction the previous year.
When swift development of research had been in danger of stalling for lack of sufficient funding, early in January, 1943, Roosevelt had found the necessary money. Critical Canadian supplies of the necessary raw materials, moreover, had been contracted with the cooperation of the President’s friend, Prime Minister Mackenzie King—leaving the British, essentially, with only a cadre of theoretical physicists and no possibility of producing such a weapon by themselves. For months Churchill had been pressing for a bilateral agreement to pool research and its dividends—the U.S. authorities refusing to cooperate, however, on grounds of American national security. Only the President had the authority to decide.1
If Churchill would not adhere to the American Overlord strategy, as per the Trident agreement reached in May, the President thus quietly indicated to the Prime Minister that the United States would have to withhold an agreement to share development of the atomic weapon. If, by contrast, the British were willing to stand by the agreed Anglo-American Overlord strategy, then the President would go ahead and sign an agreement to share its atomic research program with the British—and not the Russians. This would, in itself, assure the Western Allies of a reserve weapon that could, if indeed it worked, stop the Soviets from spilling into western, perhaps even central, Europe.
The Prime Minister was shocked by the President’s proposed deal. For Churchill personally, it would be a climbdown even more embarrassing than at the climax of the Trident Conference. Before leaving for Hyde Park on August 10, Churchill had gaily assured Prime Minister Mackenzie King in Quebec that the “president is a fine fellow. Very strong in his views, but he comes around.”2 This had not only been smug but clearly presumptuous, it seemed.
The President’s firmness certainly surprised Winston. How would he explain backing off his opposition to Overlord, in Quebec, after bringing 230 staffers to argue his case? An agreement on the atomic bomb project must, of necessity, remain as secret as the research itself; he would thus not be able to reveal, let alone explain, the quid pro quo arrangement, save to a handful of his British team back in Quebec. It would also be politically problematic at home in England. A groundswell of resentment was already forming there against the United States, given that America was so clearly becoming the dominant partner in the Western Alliance. It might well affect the Prime Minister’s support in Parliament, and room for maneuver in the War Cabinet.
In his heart of hearts, Churchill therefore continued to hope events on the ground in Europe would make Overlord unnecessary: that if the Allies’ fall and winter operations against the Germans prospered in Italy and the Mediterranean, they would find Overlord unnecessary. Or if German defense forces in northern France swelled to an even greater extent, threatening disaster for Overlord, then he could always request the right to cancel the Overlord landings . . .
In any event, after swallowing the bitter pill, Winston Churchill recognized he would have to agree to the President’s terms—for the moment. He thus gave his assent.
Overlord would go ahead as the number one Allied operation—the decisive Allied operation—with priority over all other commitments.
Churchill was disappointed, but took his defeat graciously.
There was one further potion, however, Churchill must take before the two men left Hyde Park, the President made clear.
Churchill waited to hear it.
The supreme commander of Overlord must be an American, since the largest contingent in the cross-Channel invasion would ultimately be from the United States. This decision, too, the Prime Minister would have to convey to General Brooke.
Churchill was shocked—the President’s insistence an understandable blow to his patriotic British pride.
In the circumstances, though, there was nothing he could say, other than: Yes, Mr. President.
The historic deal, then, was struck.
Churchill was not happy with the outcome—indeed, he woke in the night “unable to sleep and hardly able to breathe.” He got up and “went outside to sit on a bluff overlooking the river,” where he “watched the dawn,” he later recalled.3
The worst, at least, was over, however—leaving the Western Allies with a clear, unified timetable and strategy for defeating Hitler’s Third Reich. Considering that, at the Oval Office on August 10, Admiral King had suggested switching U.S. priority to the Pacific, Churchill had been skating on very thin ice—with the gravest consequences for world history.
Fortunately the President had gotten the Prime Minister to concur. And with their new accord, the brief Hyde Park summit came to a happy end—the Western Allies on the same page.
Churchill tried to persuade the President they should both now go straight to Quebec to meet with the Combined Chiefs—and thus spare Winston the humiliation of reporting his change of stance alone. The President said no, however.
Mrs. Roosevelt was about to tour American forces, hospitals, and installations in the Pacific theater for six weeks, and the President wanted to see her off. He wished, in particular, to give her a personal letter for General MacArthur in order to facilitate her tour once she arrived in Australia. Though they conducted more or less separate lives, Roosevelt was more proud of Eleanor as First Lady, a
nd guardian of his social conscience, perhaps, than ever. He also wanted to have lunch with Secretary Hull in Washington and concert their approach to Italian government after unconditional surrender, before they both went to Quebec.
Taking Churchill to the station, meantime, the President bade him and his daughter farewell. The following evening, August 15, Roosevelt himself boarded the Ferdinand Magellan together with Harry Hopkins, who did not look at all well—“white, blue around the eyes, with red spots on his cheek bones,” Daisy Suckley commented4—and set off, southwards. Traveling through the summer night the little presidential party made its way back to the White House. It had been quite a weekend.
PART ELEVEN
* * *
Quebec 1943
43
The German Will to Fight
IN THE GENERAL narrative of the Second World War, the famous Quebec Conference of August 1943 would be seen as the moment when the Allies—the Western Allies—laid down their D-day strategy and timetable—an Overlord operation scheduled to take place on May 1, 1944.
In reality, however, the decision had already been taken in May 1943, at the Trident Conference—and in writing. Overruling Churchill—and General Hull’s brief planning revolt at the Pentagon—the President had thereafter stuck to his guns. There was therefore no reason for Churchill to have brought his 230-man team to the Canadian capital, from a military point of view—or for them to stay. General Eisenhower was handling the secret Italian surrender negotiations with Marshal Badoglio’s representative, and the decision to appoint an American, not a British, supreme commander for Overlord had been agreed by Churchill at Hyde Park, in deference to the President’s wishes. Had Churchill simply told his British team of the new deal—trading partnership in the atomic bomb’s development for British commitment to a clear American D-day strategy—and had they returned to their ship, the Queen Mary, the Quebec Conference need not have taken place.
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