This operation would be called Giant II—perhaps the most misguided military undertaking of the war thus far. Churchill thought it a masterstroke, which would enable the Allies to seize Rome, the Italian capital, by coup de main. Were Rome to fall to the Allies, and the Italians turn against their former partners, who knew what might then transpire? The Third Reich might collapse like a house of cards.
The President remained doubtful; taking Rome would be nice in terms of morale and publicity, but it led nowhere, strategically, given the terrain in northern Italy. And Hitler, he was sure, would not fold his hand that easily. He thus left the campaign to Marshall and the chiefs of staff, confident that General Eisenhower would not be pressed into doing anything too foolish.
As it turned out, however, Eisenhower was so pressed—and the Allies, in the days that followed, came very close to disaster in Italy.
48
A Darwinian Struggle
HITLER, FOR HIS part, was contemptuous of Roosevelt’s call for Allied unity in Quebec, as was Goebbels. The President’s speech in Ottawa was dismissed as rhetoric. “It consisted of dull, stupid scolding and lacked any political substance,” Goebbels sniffed in his diary. “It’s not worth bothering about. One can see from the speech, and the terrific reception it was given by Canadian members of Parliament, though, just how half-witted the public is over there. Roosevelt threatens military operations, but refrains from being specific, because he probably can’t be. He ends by quoting Jesus, which is all-of-a-piece with his bizarre and misbegotten character.”1
For both the Reich minister and the Führer, the world was now entering the vortex of a great Darwinian struggle of survival—a struggle in which only the strongest would emerge. Italy was exhibiting weakness, would most likely crumble, and would have to be sacrificed on an altar of blood; Germany, by contrast, would only grow stronger, more savage—and more ruthless once unencumbered by allies.
Those among the Allies who hoped Germany’s generals or Wehrmacht soldiers would lose heart in their leader were to be disappointed. Hitler and Goebbels’s Weltanschauung, including their Nibelungentreue, was to be largely replicated among German civilians across the Third Reich—and among German troops across the occupied countries. Goebbels noted, for example, how contented were German soldiers, returning on leave from the frontline to their relatives in the German homeland—yet how angry, stunned, and surprised they were at the effects of RAF and U.S. Air Force bombing on the civilian population.
The question, then, arose for Goebbels as the propaganda genius of the Third Reich: could the war be prolonged for another six months or a year by stubborn German defense of the nations the Wehrmacht had conquered in western, southern, and eastern Europe—keeping the enemy as far as possible from Germany until the Führer’s Vergeltungswaffen, or V-bombs, were ready to be launched?
On his last visit to the Wolf’s Lair, Goebbels had found the Führer disinclined to think Kharkov as being in danger—at least, if it was in danger, there should be no mention of it in public. “Wir kämpfen an allen Fronten, im Süden wie im Osten, möglichst weit vom heimatlichen Boden entfernt, um den Krieg vom Reichsgebiet fernzuhalten”—“We are fighting on all fronts—in the South as well as the East, as far from home ground as possible—in order to keep the war as far as we can from the Reich,” Hitler had declared—while doing everything in his power as führer to counter Allied air power, from expediting German antiaircraft guns to greater priority for jet-engined Messerschmitt fighters, better radar, and new interception tactics.2
As this was ordered, the question of a political solution had meantime become more and more tempting. How could Goebbels and the German Foreign Ministry exploit the widely suspected split between the Western Allies and the Soviets? Could they persuade either Churchill or Stalin to negotiate an armistice with the Third Reich, and thus avoid war on two fronts?
“I ask the Führer whether he thinks we might be able to make an accommodation with Stalin, over time,” Goebbels noted on his next visit to the Wolf’s Lair. “For the moment, however, the Führer thinks not,” he recorded, disappointed. Moreover, the Führer was unwilling to surrender, if negotiations could be started, the Ukraine: the breadbasket of Europe and crucial for Germany’s food needs. “In general,” Goebbels noted, “he thinks it more likely we would have more success in doing something with the British rather than the Soviets.” As the British came to realize that fighting the Wehrmacht on European soil was very different from war in faraway North Africa, they would surely “come to their senses”—especially once German V-bombs began to rain down on London.
“It’s true Churchill is an absolute anti-Bolshevist,” Goebbels agreed with Hitler—a Churchillian stance that might be manipulated to get him to abandon his antifascist rhetoric and agenda in favor of anticommunism. Given Churchill’s Mansion House speech, in November 1942, warning that he would never allow the dissolution of the British Empire, the Prime Minister might well be open to new peace feelers, Hitler intimated, if convinced Britain could not win the war militarily. Churchill was “naturally pursuing British imperial objectives in this war, as in the last. Now that he has Sicily in his pocket he’s in a good position,” Goebbels recorded their conversation. “The Italians will never get Sicily back, for with Calabria and Sicily in British hands Churchill will control the whole Mediterranean as an English ocean, for all time . . . So the Führer thinks the English rather than the Russians will be more willing to come to an arrangement in the end.”3
Knowing Churchill, Goebbels was skeptical, however. “I don’t see any sign of this happening,” he admitted in the privacy of his diary, whatever Hitler might think—though he did not dare say so to the Führer. Besides, the matter of an armistice either with the British or the Russians was academic, since the split between the Allies had not reached the point where they could be prised apart—yet. Nevertheless, the “controversy between the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans is really serious,” Goebbels noted with satisfaction. “Our information from Quebec is quite clear about that.” However, “the Führer doesn’t think the crisis in the enemy camp is ripe enough to exploit at the moment. So we have to wait, and make sure we get both our fronts back under control. That is a sine qua non: that we have to stand firm where we are. A faltering military power can’t be looking for an arrangement.”4
September 1943, then, would reveal whether the Allied coalition was going to hold together, or could be brought to stalemate on the battlefield and either the Western Allies or Russia be persuaded to sue for an armistice with Germany.
49
A Talk with Archbishop Spellman
“I LEFT QUEBEC by train, and arrived at the White House on September 1,” Churchill recorded in his memoirs. “I deliberately prolonged my stay in the United States in order to be in close contact with our American friends at this critical moment in Italian affairs.”1
News had come from General Eisenhower that the post-Mussolini government of Italy, under Marshal Badoglio, had secretly agreed to surrender, once American and British troops were established on the mainland of Italy—and two days later, on September 3, Montgomery’s troops crossed the Strait of Messina to Reggio, where they encountered negligible opposition. Italian forces simply abandoned their posts, in anticipation of imminent surrender, while Wehrmacht forces laid mines, detonated bridges, and staged a fighting withdrawal from Calabria.
Staying in Washington with the President, the Prime Minister seemed dangerously overconfident about impending victory in Italy. “Churchill does not think,” Mackenzie King had already noted in his diary on August 31, as the British prime minister set off from Quebec, that “the further fighting in Italy will occasion anything like the loss of life that the fighting in Sicily has occasioned.”2
The President certainly wished Winston to be by his side when the Italian surrender took place. But in truth, there was a more important, underlying reason for Churchill to stay at the White House—a purpose both men had agreed was vital not only
to the winning of the war, but the postwar. For whatever happened on the ground in Italy, it was understood by the two leaders, the unity of the Western Allies must be further symbolized, beyond the conference in Canada, and an incontrovertible message of common purpose be sent not just to Hitler and the world, but to Stalin in Moscow.
The Western Allies, this message went, would hold together in pursuing the defeat of Germany—and beyond.
Though he could barely contain his excitement over Montgomery’s crossing at Messina and Clark’s impending invasion at Salerno, Churchill made every effort to be patient and good company to the President. Mrs. Roosevelt was still on her tour of the Pacific, requiring Daisy Suckley to stand in for her as White House hostess, and at Hyde Park. In her diary she noted the “intensely interesting” conversations at table—the President “full of charm, always tactful, even when he has to be ‘painfully’ truthful & perhaps harsh. He is harsh, but with a smile which tells you you are wrong, but there is no ill-feeling toward you because of the wrong—It’s more that you are mistaken—in all probability because you don’t know the facts. I’ve never known a person who so consistently tries not to hurt people.”3
Churchill, by contrast, “snaps out disapproval. They say he fights with everyone”—not just Hitler; “jumps all over them. One person alone he doesn’t jump on,” Daisy added, however, “& that is the P.! The P. laughs about it: he says that if the P.M. ever did jump on him, he would just laugh at him! As I have said before, the P.M. loves F.D.R.” Moreover, Daisy had had this confirmed, from the highest authority, for “Mrs C[hurchill]. told me that, too, out of a clear sky.”
“The P.M. recognizes in the P. a man with a greater soul & a broader outlook than his own—It is very evident to a person who has had such wonderful opportunities to see them as I have. I consider W.S.C. a ‘great man,’ also, but he has not yet achieved the spiritual freedom of F.D.R. . . . They get along beautifully, and understand each other. The P. is all for the Democratic ideal because he loves it & believes in it. The P.M. is working for it because he thinks it is inevitable . . .”4
Daisy was naturally biased, but she was also perspicacious—and one of the only people, other than the President’s White House doctor, who was watching Roosevelt’s health. Churchill’s daughter Mary, traveling now with her mother, Clementine, found “the pres magnetic & full of charm” as she wrote in her own diary; “his sweetness to me is something I shall always remember—But he is a raconteur,” she noted, and in all honesty, aged only twenty, she found his stories “tedious” at times, though “at other times it is interesting & fun”—a “cute, cunning old-bird—if ever there was one. But I still know who gets my vote,” she added loyally—her father probably the most eloquent raconteur alive. “Every evening FDR makes extremely violent cocktails in his study. Fala attends—& it is all very agreeable & warm. At dinner Mummie is on his right, & several nights no other guests being there I’ve been on his left. I am devoted to him & admire him tremendously—He seems to have fearless courage & an art of selecting the warmest moment of the iron.”5
Still so young, Mary thought both her father and the President indestructible. She did, however, find herself intrigued, as was Daisy Suckley, by the “contrast” between their two characters. “To me,” she noted in her diary, Roosevelt “seems at once idealistic—cynical—warm hearted & generous—worldly-wise—naïve—courageous—tough—thoughtful—charming—tedious—vain—sophisticated—civilised—all these and more for ‘by their works ye shall know them’—And what a stout hearted champion he has been for the unfortunate & the battling—and what a monument he will always have in the minds of men. And yet while I admire him intensely and could not but be devoted to him after his great personal kindness to me—yet, I must confess [he] makes me laugh & he rather bores me.”6
The truth was, the President had had other things on his mind, despite doing his best to keep the Churchills and their daughter entertained. He’d dined on September 2 with Winston and Averell Harriman—who was to be his new ambassador to the Soviet Union—to discuss Russia. Also present at the meal was Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York, who was returning after a long inspection tour of American units overseas, as the vicar military responsible for all Catholic priests in the United States.
The next morning—the day Montgomery’s troops crossed onto the mainland of Italy—Spellman came to see the President privately at the White House for another hour. The Archbishop was concerned about the Allied bombing of Rome—where he’d spent the greater part of his adult life. Spellman had shown as little concern about the alleged extermination of European Jews as his mentor who had promoted him to the top American see in 1939: the pope, Pius XII. Now that Rome itself was threatened with heavy bombing, however, Spellman was deeply worried. Moreover, he was becoming concerned over Russian designs on European countries yet to be liberated—especially Catholic Poland.
As Spellman had found on his tour overseas, American officials in Iran (where the majority of U.S. Lend-Lease supplies were now being delivered) were disgusted at the way the Russians behaved. It was as if every Russian lived in terror of being accused of cooperation with their allies, or worse: sharing secrets with a quasi-enemy. Spellman’s “information is that two of the four freedoms as we understand them,—freedom of expression and freedom of religion,—do not exist in Russia.”7
The President was all too aware of this. What to do, though? Spellman had hitherto raised no protest over the President’s conduct of the war, and at the White House he now found the President extraordinarily frank about the chances of American forces being able to stop two hundred Russian divisions from doing whatever Stalin pleased, at a time when the United States did not yet have a single boot on mainland Europe. The President certainly hoped to “get from Stalin a pledge not to extend Russian territory beyond a certain line,” but there was little the United States could do when Stalin “had the power to get them anyway”—“them” being Finland (which had been a Russian duchy from 1809 through 1917), the Baltic States (a part of the Russian Empire from the eighteenth century until 1917), the eastern half of Poland (partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in the wake of the Russo-Polish war of 1792, and much of it a czardom until 1918), and Bessarabia (a czarist governorate from 1812 until 1917). Such countries might want to retain their recent independence, but the President was sanguine. “There is no point to oppose these desires of Stalin, because he has the power to get them anyhow. So better give them gracefully.”8
“Give” them?
In later years—especially once the United States became a nuclear superpower, with global military reach—Roosevelt’s acceptance of the inevitable would be seen as shocking, even immoral, especially for a president who was so idealistic.9 Right-wing American critics of Roosevelt such as Senators Robert A. Taft and Arthur H. Vandenberg, fired by American exceptionalism, would deplore such a “giveaway,” but the criticism reflected their historical ignorance and lack of realism.10 No one at that time had any idea how the United States could have approached the matter differently, given U.S. military weakness, with no soldiers yet in mainland Europe—and little idea how effective those soldiers would be, once they reengaged with Wehrmacht forces on European soil.
At a moment when the Third Reich still extended from the shores of France to the Ukraine, and when Hitler, Goebbels, and Ribbentrop seriously hoped to split the Allied alliance and compel the British to negotiate an armistice in the manner of Munich in 1938, or get Stalin to renew the Ribbentrop Pact, the President saw his main priority in avoiding a premature collapse of the Grand Alliance before the Western Allies even landed in force on the European mainland. As he made clear to Spellman, one had to be realistic. Over time, he was sure, the Russians would become more civilized—especially when having to interact and compete with Western economies. Unless they somehow remained a closed society, under lock and key, they would eventually be forced to adapt to Western cultural influences.
Such a l
ong-term view left open the question of the imminent fate of western European nations, however—nations the United States could, realistically, hope to save, as long as the President could get Churchill and the British to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the cross-Channel assault the following spring. Once these nations were liberated, however, would the American public support tough American peacekeeping, in countering Russian influence, after the war? Taking soundings nationwide, Judge Rosenman had warned the President that, politically, he would have to be more careful in his speechmaking with regard to postwar security, if he or any Democratic nominee wished to prevail in the 1944 election. “People are almost twice as much interested in domestic affairs as international affairs,” Rosenman passed on to the President the conclusion of a recent opinion poll. Two-thirds of those polled did not wish even to provide “aid to foreign countries after the war,” let alone have to keep the peace in Europe.11
Such findings did not stop the President from pursuing his vision of a United Nations authority, with the Four Policemen acting on the UN’s behalf. It did, however, cause him to wonder how far he could single-handedly change or guide American public opinion to back such a vision. What would be the fallout, the President and the Archbishop wondered, if the United States did not take the leading role? Would Britain—virtually bankrupt and, pace Churchill, far more concerned with avoiding the dissolution of its colonial empire than maintaining European peace—be able to marshal sufficient will and force of arms to do the job: namely holding the Soviets at bay, if and when they began to “Bolshevize” the continent after the fall of Hitler?
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