Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Far from intimidating the President, however, let alone hammering a wedge between the President and British prime minister, Stalin’s outburst now served to bring the leaders of the Western alliance closer to each other than Stalin could ever have imagined.

  Behind the scenes at Quebec and Ottawa a deep and consequential political shift began to take place—a “sort of changed attitude,” as Roosevelt put it to Mackenzie King on the way back to Quebec.7 The President and his Joint Chiefs of Staff might hold Churchill’s fantasies of defeating the Wehrmacht via the Mediterranean—whether through Italy, Yugoslavia or Greece, Turkey or the Balkans—to be just that: fantasy. But in terms of Soviet intentions, the President was very much on the same page as the Prime Minister. Stalin might make outward concessions to the Western Allies, such as closing down the Comintern, and even easing Soviet restrictions on religion—which the Soviet leader now also did. But the dictator himself remained a godless Russian psychopath—“Ivan the Terrible,” directing two hundred divisions on the field of battle.

  It was at this point that the President—who still nursed serious qualms not only about Churchill’s military judgment but his backward, Victorian views on colonial empire and postwar social reconstruction—paused to reconsider his approach to the Grand Alliance. He still hoped he could come to a military understanding with Stalin, since neither he nor Stalin could defeat Hitler without the other. Moreover he still hoped he could come to a political understanding with the Russians, where the two powers—who clearly would be the dominant world powers at the war’s end—could agree to disagree in terms of their own ideologies. But he needed, he recognized, a Plan B if Stalin did not cooperate in the postwar world the President envisioned—or even failed to cooperate in the end-of-war scenario that would come either in 1944 or 1945.

  Winston Churchill might be the most infuriating partner in terms of his military obsessions, his impetuous whims, and his failure to follow a consistent strategy. He was, nevertheless, a political partner of huge and possibly historic importance in the world that was fast approaching: a democratic partner more important, in terms of dealing with Russia, than Harriman, or Hopkins, or former ambassador Davies—all of whom had been to Moscow and had firsthand knowledge of Stalin—perhaps realized.

  What, though, was Stalin’s real plan—if indeed he had one? Stalin was refusing to meet the President, either one-on-one or with the Prime Minister. Clearly the dictator wanted to conceal and safeguard Russian intentions behind a wall of paranoid secrecy, using a front of apparatchiks and spokesmen who never dared speak with authority, but referred everything to Stalin, on pain of dismissal or death.

  For his part, Churchill didn’t necessarily believe that Stalin would conclude a separate peace with Germany, despite the 1939–1941 Ribbentrop Pact, since “the hatreds between the two races”—the millions killed—“have now become a sanitary cordon in themselves,” as Churchill told the President, and cabled his deputy prime minister in London that night. To Mackenzie King Churchill said the same: that the Russians and the Germans had “come to hate each other with an animal hate.” So conscious were the Germans of their crimes against humanity in Russia and the likely repercussions, in fact, that they would probably “prefer to open their Western front to British and American armies and have them conquer Germany rather than Stalin,” Churchill thought (and hoped), if “Stalin went on winning.”8 But the tone of Stalin’s message boded ill for agreement between the Allies themselves in prosecuting the war. Which raised the question: what was Stalin’s version of the endgame?

  Without a single American or British boot on the mainland of Europe, the Western Allies were in a weak position, still, to inhibit Stalin. Would he use the new power of his many hundreds of Russian divisions—four hundred in total, it was calculated, stationed across the entire Soviet Union—to dictate the territorial and political outcome of the war in Europe?

  To both Harriman and Mr. Roosevelt, the Prime Minister said he “foresaw ‘bloody consequences in the future’”—“using ‘bloody’ in the literal sense,” as Harriman noted. “‘Stalin is an unnatural man. There will be grave troubles,’” Churchill declared—and openly rebuked Eden, who, like Harriman, considered the cable from Stalin “not so bad.” “There is no need for you to attempt to smooth it over,” he snapped, “in the Foreign Office manner.”9

  The President felt the same as Churchill—the Soviets a strange yet brave people, in the service of another psychopath.

  Some historians would later resent and question Churchill’s anti-Soviet stance,10 but there can be little doubt in retrospect that, though Churchill would be proven completely wrong about Hitler, the Wehrmacht, and the progress of the war in Italy, he was extraordinarily prescient about Stalin and the Russians—and that the President was of like mind. Where Roosevelt and Churchill differed, however, was in how to deal with the Russian threat to freedom and democracy, as the Western Allies understood those ideals.

  With no American or British forces yet on the mainland of Europe, the Western Allies were hamstrung. By the same token, however, without an Allied Second Front the Russians could not defeat the forces of the Third Reich. Ergo, if the Third Reich was to be defeated and the Nazi nightmare brought to an end, there would have to be a military agreement between the three countries, irrespective of political considerations. It would be up to the President and the Prime Minister, if possible, to turn that military agreement into a political accord, setting out a road map for postwar Europe and the world that both sides could live with. It might not prove possible to reach, but it would be worth trying to. The example of the disastrous Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, which had been tasked with solving end-of-war issues that had not been discussed or agreed in advance, was too awful to contemplate.

  Encouraging Russia, then—a country or empire that had not been a party to the 1919 peace talks, but which had been the elephant in the room there—to take a responsible role in the postwar world was now the biggest challenge for Roosevelt and Churchill.

  Both men had been present at Versailles, and both knew the task of an enduring postwar security settlement would be no easier. Also that Russia would be, together with the United States, the key player. In spite of the terrible losses the Soviets had suffered since Hitler’s invasion in 1941, the USSR still comprised more than 170 million people: the largest nation, or union of so-called republics, in Europe. It was more than twice the size of Nazi Germany in population—and many times its size in territory. Its wartime economy might be a disaster, its industry dependent largely on slave labor, its military dependent on American Lend-Lease aid, and its society ruled by fear, incarceration, deportation, and execution; nevertheless, it now boasted the largest number of troops in the world—in excess of thirteen million men in 1943. After utter disarray and retreat in the summer of 1941, Soviet forces had finally turned the tables on the mighty Wehrmacht: by numbers, willingness to take casualties, determination to fight for the homeland, fear of what further atrocities the dreaded Nazis would commit if they were not repelled; and younger, better, nonpolitical professional military leadership on the field of battle. Patriotic pride, moreover, had swelled and grown as the Soviet armies successfully defended Mother Russia—the Communist Party taking a secondary, background role. Stalin’s Great Terror and his Purges of the 1930s had been set aside—for the moment at least. As supreme commander in chief of the Soviet Armed Forces, Joseph Stalin was not only the effective, single ruler and dictator of the USSR, but he was in a position to begin moving Russia toward a less repressive future, if he so chose: something his ambassador to Washington, Maxim Litvinov, had begged him to do, before Stalin had recalled him from America.

  Would Stalin dare—or want—to take that course, though?

  It seemed unlikely, as Churchill intuited—especially after reading the latest, more detailed investigation of the Katyn massacre.11 Behind Soviet propaganda, directed and controlled from Moscow, Marshal Stalin remained an arguably certifiable psychopat
h: a mass murderer living with his own terror, namely that of being assassinated. And of flying. His refusal to meet with the President, as well as his recent decision to withdraw his highly experienced Soviet ambassadors from Washington and London and replace them with apparatchiks, offered little hope of an open, democratic future for the Russian-dominated world—at least one based on the four freedoms to which the President referred in his Ottawa speech.

  Stalin’s latest cables to Quebec were thus dispiriting, at a moment of Allied joy and hope, on the eve of Italian surrender. The telegrams convinced both Churchill and the President that the defeat of the Third Reich and Japan—which would still entail a vast military effort—would be but the first act in a new struggle for control of those occupied nations: nations such as Poland, currently ruled by the Germans, whose people innocently hoped for independence, self-determination, free elections, and freedom from fear.

  This was, in actuality, the saddest of prospects, even as the unconditional surrender of Italy loomed.

  Churchill, too, saw the moment as a watershed. He had earlier favored Sumner Welles’s notion of grand regional or hemispheric councils, representing “spheres of influence” across the postwar world; now, suddenly, it became clear to him—as to the President—that there would, essentially, be but two such spheres: Anglo-American versus Russian. A rivalry, moreover, that would not necessarily be confined to central Europe, if Stalin’s talk of southern Europe—of Sicily and Italy—was anything to go by.

  In many ways it was a tragedy: a road not taken. Had Stalin been a different leader, a statesman willing to rise to the challenge of advancing and protecting a postwar world based upon the four freedoms, the challenge of the future could, in the aftermath of Hitler and Hirohito’s demise, have been that of a secure, spirited, economic, social, and cultural opportunity for the progress of all nations. Instead, a very different prospect arose: a darker world of communist dictatorships and puppet states, modeled on the Soviets, answering to Moscow.

  Unless Stalin were assassinated, or the Allies could somehow prevail upon the Russians to abandon the notion of tyrannous rule by fear, the postwar future thus suddenly looked bleak to Churchill and the President—despite the grandeur of a United Nations coalition that had successfully turned the tide against two empires, German and Japanese, still committing crimes against humanity on a scale of mass murder not seen for centuries, if ever.

  All therefore now seemed to depend on a Russian dictator: a Soviet supreme commander in chief who was, as Averell Harriman later remarked, “the most inscrutable, enigmatic and contradictory person I have ever known.”12 It was a sobering prospect.

  The Canadian prime minister accompanied the President to the station at 7:00 p.m. on August 25. “As the last word,” King recorded in his diary, “I reached over to the President and said quietly God bless and help you.”13

  Roosevelt’s talks with the Canadian prime minister had left Mackenzie King at once awed and anxious. In his library at Laurier House, the Canadian premier had shown the President and Grace Tully, the President’s secretary, not only his private library but a “photograph of Hitler.” The President had “instantly reacted to it with a shudder at the appearance of the man.” King had also “pointed out the handbill of the time of Lincoln’s assassination”—a reminder how seldom violence was separable from politics, their chosen profession.

  “I was unfortunately pretty tired and unable to take in or contribute to the conversation as much as I would have liked, but I felt throughout how real was the affection the President had for myself and felt drawn more closely to him than ever,” King recorded that night. “I confess, too, one came to feel he had a much more profound grasp of the situation than I had, at times, believed him to have. By that, I mean not a knowledge of the facts but the understanding of history and places and the like which are so essential to the understanding of great movements. The kind of thing that Churchill possesses in so great a degree.”14

  In his pedantic, cautious way the Canadian had come to see, increasingly, just how blessed was the free world in having such titans of humanity as their two great leaders—and how vital it was to create a durable system of international security and development while they were still in office. Moreover one that would survive them—since, “unhappily, we could not rely on having the President and himself at the head of affairs for all time,” as King remarked to Churchill. “That any post-war order would have to take account of the persons who might take their places, and that each nation would want its say.”15

  Winston Churchill, Mackenzie King reflected, was “not so democratic at heart as the President. He still remains a monarchist and a Conservative,” whereas “Roosevelt is clearly for the people and they know it.” To be sure, “Churchill is for his country and its institutions”—including its “great Empire,” King allowed. Thinking especially of India, though, King deplored continuing colonialist complacency at high levels in England, where “less believe in the abilities of people to govern themselves” than was the case in the United States and Canada.16

  The future shape and peace of the world, however, was at stake: leading inexorably to the question of whether the President would stand for an unprecedented fourth term. “We talked,” King had already noted, “of the next elections,” which would take place the following year, in November. Health was a factor, the President had acknowledged. “He quite clearly has it in mind to run again but says he will not travel about; will not do any speaking over the radio and not make many speeches. He dislikes Willkie”—his Republican opponent in the 1940 presidential election—“but says he has been encouraging Willkie’s renomination in order to get more or less a split in the Opposition [Republican] party which he believes will come if Willkie is nominated. He said that Willkie was all right on foreign policy which was important, but it would be dangerous if a Republican isolationist were to get the nomination.”17

  American participation, even leadership, in the new world order was quite clearly the President’s goal—thus redeeming the failure of President Woodrow Wilson to get Senate ratification of U.S. membership in the League of Nations in 1920. As Churchill pointed out, it was not the League of Nations that had failed; rather, it was the nations who had failed the League of Nations—something the President was determined would not be the case this time.

  Thus arose, at Quebec in the summer of 1943, the greatest irony of the war: that the United States and its Western Allies were, in effect, faced with two potentially competing struggles. The first, to pursue the fight against the odious, genocidal Axis powers to obtain their unconditional surrender; the second, to achieve a global postwar democratic system that would not be prejudiced or sundered by the emerging power of a Russian-directed Soviet Union—a communist quasi-empire ruled by a psychopath scarcely less dangerous to humanity than Adolf Hitler.

  PART TWELVE

  * * *

  The Endgame

  47

  Close to Disaster

  THE PRESIDENT HAD laid down the strategy and timetable of the war to defeat the Third Reich and then Japan, on behalf of the Western Allies; Churchill, for all that he feared a bloodbath in northern France, had had to comply. Yet to achieve the political results of the war that he wanted—a new world order—the President had need of Stalin. And in dealing with Stalin, he also had need of Winston Churchill, as a demonstration of unity between the U.S. and British governments. Roosevelt therefore asked the Prime Minister to come stay with him in Washington after Quebec. They would be together when the Italians, as seemed likely, surrendered. Above all, though, they would be together in showing Stalin there was no rift in the Western Allies: that the U.S.-British coalition was inviolable, and would remain so.

  Early on August 26, 1943, the Ferdinand Magellan pulled into the little halt at Highland, north of New York, and the President was driven up to his family home. “The P. came from Ottawa, looking well,” Daisy Suckley noted in her diary, “but tired. He said he would try to get rested
before Churchill comes to Wash.[ington] next Wednesday. The Quebec Conference was a success but Russia is a worry—the P. said a message had come from Stalin which was ‘rude—stupidly rude.’ Churchill wanted to send back an answer—even ruder!”1

  Stalin was not the only problem. There was the question of how Hitler would react, once the Italians surrendered and U.S. and British armies landed on the mainland of Europe, as they planned to do in the coming days. Though in a sense it was only a diversion in order to keep the Germans from beating the Russians and away from the eventual beaches of Normandy, the Allied assault on Italy would reveal whether Churchill was right, or the President: whether the Germans would collapse, or whether Italy would turn out to be a hornet’s nest.

  All too soon they would find out.

  In the domestic comfort of his Hyde Park home, Roosevelt meantime took things easy—with Admiral Leahy at his side. “Today ends a three day restful visit with the President at Hyde Park, where there were no demands on any of us at any time,” Leahy noted in his diary on August 29, 1943, “and where we were completely relaxed after our strenuous Staff Conference in Canada.”2 “The P. was very cheerful & seemed relaxed,” Daisy recorded. Taking the sun at his cottage he “sent for some eggs & bread & butter—He toasted the bread on the electric toaster, sitting by the fire on the sofa,” and to unwind “talked about a good many phases of the present situation.”3

  The first landings in mainland Italy would begin on September 3, 1943: a crossing of the Strait of Messina by troops of Montgomery’s British Eighth Army, which would hopefully draw Axis forces into close combat—and away from the primary invasion site: Salerno, where the major Allied assault would take place a week later. The Salerno landings would be a massive three-division invasion in the Gulf of Salerno, 270 miles north of Montgomery’s army; it would plant major Allied forces close to Naples under U.S. general Mark Clark, and hopefully cut off German forces facing the British. Not content with this sweeping plan, Marshall had urged Eisenhower to use his Eighty-Second Airborne Division—not to ensure the success of the Salerno landings but to mount a yet more ambitious landing, 200 miles further north still. On Rome, from the air.