Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  This latter acknowledgment was, for Roosevelt, especially gratifying. Not only was the President relieved that his long, patient striving to convene a Big Three summit seemed about to pay off, but for the first time since Torch, Stalin had conceded that the President’s strategy of landing in Sicily and then the mainland of Italy was having a major military impact on the war on Stalin’s own Eastern Front. First at Kursk—where the Germans had called off the battle early—and now in the helter-skelter Russian advance in the Ukraine, where the Wehrmacht was being defeated in battle largely because Hitler simply had insufficient reserves to put into the line. The initiatives taken by the Western Allies had effectively spoiled any chance of the Wehrmacht defeating the Soviets that year.

  “Everything turns on Italy at the moment,” Goebbels had himself acknowledged on September 11, while staying with Hitler. Granted, “the enemy hasn’t the faintest idea of the real situation in Northern and Central Italy. They are still imagining we’ll pull back our divisions over the Brenner to the homeland, and they’ll be able to unleash a huge aerial attack on Berlin from airfields in southern Italy.” Clearly the Allies hadn’t reckoned on the German genius for combat. The ruthless German occupation of Rome and other Italian cities was being greeted with applause in the Third Reich, evoking shades of 1940 and the German occupation of Paris: the German Volk expressing “rage against the Italians,” who had nefariously betrayed them24—a people who would now be treated with the same remorseless cruelty that the Wehrmacht had shown their former Ribbentrop Pact partners when launching Barbarossa in 1941.

  At the Wolf’s Lair, the Reichsminister for Propaganda had even gotten Hitler to deliver the speech he’d desperately wanted the Führer to give, in order to bolster morale in Germany. It had been recorded at the OKW headquarters and relayed by radio in Berlin to the nation on September 10: a speech given in measured tones without the usual Hitler histrionics. Instead, it had soberly denounced those Italians who had failed their Duce and who were now giving an example of cowardice and treachery that would go down in the annals of dishonor. Germany had consistently been compelled to bail out its ailing partner, in the Balkans and in North Africa—“the name of Field Marshal Rommel will forever be attached to this German effort”—but the Reich had now been “betrayed” by reactionary elements in Italy. “Italy’s defection will have little military impact,” the Führer claimed, “since the battle in that country has primarily been carried and conducted by German forces. We’ll now be freed of all restrictions and constraints.”25

  Hitler’s calm, measured tone would be balm to those in Germany wondering at the massive Allied air raids, the arrest of Mussolini, and then the unconditional surrender of the Italian government—his speech worth “seven divisions,” as Goebbels put it. Hitler even made open mention of his secret weapons program. With Germany’s enemies a thousand kilometers from the Reich, only their bombers could seek to “terrorize” the German population—and in that connection “there are,” the Führer announced, “technical and organizational measures now being developed not simply to completely stop the terror bombing attacks, but to repay them with other, more effective measures”—his Vergeltungswaffen, or V-1 and V-2 weapons.26

  The Führer’s speech worked “like a refreshing thunderstorm,” Goebbels noted—“one of the best,” he reflected, “he has delivered in the whole war.”27

  Still and all, Goebbels acknowledged, the Allied invasion of the European continent was now a game changer. Though the Führer was confident the Wehrmacht could hold back the Allied armies south of Rome if they were fortunate, the divisions required for such a campaign would make it impossible to restrain the gathering Soviet tide on the Eastern Front: thus starving the German line of the reserves they desperately needed, especially on the line of the Dnieper, where little had been done to prepare solid defensive positions.

  As Goebbels dictated in his diary, not only was the Allied invasion of Italy a lance in the German flank, but the situation in the East was “absolutely critical,”28 with German troops pulling further and further back. “We see here what the unexampled betrayal of the Italians has caused us. If we’d had at hand the divisions we’ve had to send to Italy since the fall of Mussolini available to go into action on the Eastern Front, the current crisis would never have arisen. The superiority the Russians have over us is not that big—you can see that in the way we’ve slowed their advance.”29

  It was, for the Reich, a tragedy, he wrote. “We have about eight divisions in northern Italy and in southern Italy another eight, so about sixteen divisions, fitted out with first-class personnel and equipment. The Führer is convinced that with these sixteen divisions we’ll be able to deal with the crisis in Italy,” with a further fifty thousand troops in Sardinia and four thousand in Corsica who could be switched to Italy—battle terrain that would be “tabula rasa,” with no concern about civilian casualties or destruction.30 Yet the absence of those very divisions from the Eastern Front was now galling. “If we only had fifteen or twenty intact first-class divisions to put into battle, we’d be able to throw back the Soviets without any doubt whatsoever. But we’re having to send those fifteen, twenty divisions south to the Italian theater,” Goebbels wailed.31

  For German leaders accustomed to seize whatever they wished from weakly defended European neighbors, the arrest of Mussolini, the defection of Italy as an ally, and the arrival of the Western Allies on the mainland of Europe now threatened, in other words, to stretch and bring down the whole Axis edifice—with the Allies possessing the upper hand.

  If only the Western Allies would have launched a Second Front that year, Goebbels mused. A cross-Channel invasion by the Anglo-Americans would have given the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe a real chance to defeat the Allies using the forces the Germans had in France, while retaining sufficient first-class divisions to deal with Stalin’s forces on the Eastern Front. “But that would be too good to be true,” Goebbels lamented.32 Instead, the Western Allies had brought the war to the mainland of Italy: not only obtaining the unconditional surrender of its government at very little cost to themselves, but opening the floodgates, in the east, to Stalin’s armies, against whom the Wehrmacht would now have insufficient reserves. And with the Führer too anxious about a fall invasion of France or even the Netherlands by the Allies to dare withdraw German divisions from the Atlantic Wall.

  It would be up to valiant German troops both on the Eastern Front and the Southern Front, then, to show the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans the true mettle of the Wehrmacht. In Italy, Goebbels noted with a kind of sneering satisfaction, Allied troops would now face a ruthless German military machine unencumbered by Italians—and with more German divisions streaming down from the north, they would demonstrate their prowess in killing, without question or remorse. Italians who did not lay down their arms, or who sought to impede the German military occupation of Italy in any way, would simply be shot or slaughtered—as would civilians who aided partisans. Ruthlessness had gotten the Third Reich to its hitherto unimaginable string of imperial conquests—and would now be applied as mercilessly as in Russia. Totaler Krieg.

  “The main purpose of my visit to the High Command Headquarters is fulfilled,” Goebbels thus noted with satisfaction, on September 12. “I think Göring was right when he said to me that we have thereby won a battle. The Führer’s speech will be worth whole divisions on the Eastern Front and in Italy. I spend a little time chatting with the Führer. He himself seems pleased he’s gotten the speech out of the way. He wishes me all the best in my work and for my health . . . He promises to give another speech in the Sportpalast [in Berlin], to start the Winter Assistance Program. I’ll make sure he’ll get to taste once more just what it’s like to be in touch with the Volk. Our farewell is very warm. I wish the Führer all the best.”33

  At 8:00 p.m. the Reich minister heard the latest news on the radio of “our operations in Italy, which are going very well,” at Salerno, on top of the Führer’s recorded speech—which
the Russians had failed to jam. “A little more work, a little more talk. Then I fall into bed, dead tired. There’ll be a mountain of work waiting for me in Berlin.”34

  53

  A Message to Congress

  GOEBBELS WAS, HOWEVER, misinformed about the Italian campaign. Though the Allied assault landings at Salerno came close to the very “brink of obliteration,” as the American campaign historian Rick Atkinson recorded six decades later, the line held.1

  It was touch-and-go, however. According to Rommel’s son, Manfred, Hitler—buoyed by early reports of Wehrmacht victory at Salerno—“discussed with my father the possibility of launching a counter-offensive to retake southern Italy and possibly Sicily.”2 Ordered in panic by General Alexander to cease dawdling and save Clark, however, General Montgomery—who feared just such a Rommel riposte, as the Desert Fox had attempted at Medenine—finally renewed his advance. As Clark himself related, years later, “we had a hard time . . . Monty was sending me messages: ‘Hang on, we’re coming!’ And I’d send back: ‘Hurry up—I’m not proud, come and get me.’ So it was really something.”3

  In truth it was Clark himself who saved Fifth Army, since his U.S. VI Corps commander, Major General Ernest Dawley—another protégé of General Marshall’s—proved a broken reed. Clark himself went ashore to take personal command, in a magnificent display of courage and leadership in battle. He persuaded General Ridgway to drop airborne troops on the beaches, and with U.S. and Royal Navy vessels firing almost as many shells as at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, later,4 Clark’s men fought off the German counterassault.

  Eisenhower had meantime warned the chiefs of staff of the possible need to evacuate the landings—a message passed on to the President and to Churchill—but the crisis eventually passed. Necessity—the need to fight harder or die at Salerno—had proven the ultimate mother of virtue.

  Hitler was furious, as was Goebbels, but the President was relieved. “You know from the news of the past few days,” the President began his Message to Congress on September 17, 1943, as the Allied situation at Salerno seemed to stabilize, “that every military operation entails a legitimate military risk and that occasionally we have checks to our military plans—checks which necessarily involve severe losses of men and materials.

  “The Allied forces are now engaged in a very hard battle south of Naples,” he admitted. “Casualties are heavy. The desperation with which the Germans are fighting reveals that they are well aware of the consequences to them of our occupation of Italy. The Congress and the American people can rest assured that the landing on Italy is not the only landing we have in mind. That landing was planned at Casablanca,” he claimed—bending the truth somewhat, since post-Husky operations had not actually been discussed in more than principle. Still and all, such planning had certainly taken place during the early summer. At Quebec, he explained, “the leaders and the military staffs of Great Britain and the United States made specific and precise plans to bring to bear further blows of equal or greater importance against Germany and Japan—with definite times and places for other landings on the continent of Europe and elsewhere.”

  Congress should be aware, then, that even though reverses lay ahead, the story of the Allied prosecution of the war was proceeding according to a genuine timetable and a larger, overall strategy—a strategy that was American, not British, but one calculated to succeed on behalf of the United Nations.

  The President also pointed to the difference between Allied liberation and Nazi occupation—the “food, clothing, cattle, medicines, and household goods” systematically stolen by the Germans in “satellite and occupied Nations,” whereas the Allies had a “carefully planned organization, trained and equipped to give physical care to the local population—food, clothing, medicine.” He lauded the advance of the Allied armies from Sicily to the mainland of Italy on September 3—stating: “History will always remember this day as the beginning of the answer to the prayer of the millions of liberty-loving human beings not only in these conquered lands but all over the world.” However, “there is one thing I want to make perfectly clear. When Hitler and the Nazis go out, the Prussian military clique must go with them.”

  Unconditional surrender—without negotiation. “The war-breeding gangs of militarists must be rooted out of Germany—and Japan—if we are to have any real assurance of future peace,” he asserted. Surrender negotiations with the Italian government, of necessity, had had to be conducted in secret, in order that the Nazis not be able to seize Marshal Badoglio or his associates in Rome, but he wanted Americans and Congress to know “that the policy which we follow is an expression of the basic democratic tradition and ideals of this Republic. We shall not be able to claim that we have gained total victory in this war if any vestige of Fascism in any of its malignant forms is permitted to survive anywhere in the world.”

  Bearing a banner of American democracy, the United States was, in other words, on the move—producing planes, tanks, and matériel on a scale that beggared description: fifty-two thousand airplanes, twenty-three thousand tanks, forty thousand artillery guns in the first six months of 1943 alone, he reported. American shipyards were launching “almost five ships a day.”

  The war had become “essentially a great war of production. The best way to avoid heavy casualty lists is to provide our troops with the best equipment possible—and plenty of it,” the President asserted. Although the nation had come a long way since his State of the Union address just before the Casablanca Conference, he now cautioned that “we are still a long, long way from ultimate victory in any major theater of the war.” It would entail “a hard and costly fight up through Italy—and a major job of organizing our positions before we can take advantage of them.

  “Likewise,” in the British Isles “we must be sure we have assembled the strength to strike not just in one direction but in many directions—by land and sea and in the air—with overwhelming forces and equipment.” Moreover, to “break through” the Japanese defensive ring stretching from the “mandated islands to the Solomons and through the Netherlands East Indies to Malaysia and China” would be a challenge. “In all of history, there has never been a task so tremendous as that which we now face,” he stated candidly. And warned: “Nothing we can do will be more costly in lives than to adopt the attitude that the war has been won—or nearly won. That would mean a letdown in the great tempo of production which we have reached, and would mean that our men who are now fighting all over the world will not have that overwhelming superiority of power which has dealt so much death and destruction to the enemy and at the same time has saved so many lives.”5

  “Overwhelming superiority of power”—directed at the right time and at the right place—to produce the necessary outcome: the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan. Their total disarmament. And a “national cooperation with other Nations” in order that “world aggression be ended and that fair international relationships be established on a permanent basis”6: these were the military and political objectives the President was pursuing on behalf of the United States—on a global scale.

  Aware there were those who resented him in his role as U.S. commander in chief as much as they had resented him as president in tackling the Great Depression and New Deal, Roosevelt dismissed the narrow-minded critics who, “when a doughnut is placed in front of them, claim they can only see the hole in it”—people who lacked “war-winning ideals.” “Obviously,” he added, “we could not have produced and shipped as much as we have, we could not now be in the position we now occupy in the Mediterranean, in Italy, or in the Southwest Pacific or on the Atlantic convoy routes or in the air over Germany and France, if conditions in Washington and throughout the Nation were as confused and chaotic as some people try to paint them”—paintings “eagerly sought by Axis propagandists in their evil work.” For himself he remained proud of the “amazing” job that “the American people and their Government” were doing “in carrying out a vast program which tw
o years ago was said to be impossible of fulfillment.”7

  Nothing, the President claimed, could now halt the Allies, whatever the Germans and Japanese threw at them.

  54

  Achieving Wonders

  IN BERLIN, THE master of Axis propaganda read the text of the President’s latest Message to Congress carefully.

  “The American struggle isn’t just against Nazism,” Dr. Goebbels noted, “it’s also against militarism. We know these words. The British and the Americans have always used them to try to carve the Reich into little pieces,” he sneered. “More significant was what he says about American output. The numbers are way behind their needs; nevertheless,” he confessed, “as far as airplane production goes, the U.S. has achieved wonders.”

  In proof of what he saw as his own analytic intelligence, however, the Mephistopheles of public relations and propaganda thought he could discern Roosevelt’s deeper motive behind his Message to Congress—and the free world. “It’s quite clear,” Goebbels noted, “that the whole enemy press is being brought to bear to distract attention from Soviet successes on the Eastern Front—and make sure their own public isn’t made uneasy.”1