Axis Surrender in North Africa. Roundup of German and Italian soldiers in Tunisia, June 11, 1943: Associated Press; soldiers in a prison camp: The Print Collector / Getty Images
Reading Churchill the Riot Act. FDR fetching Churchill from train, Washington, May 11, 1943: Bettmann / Corbis; fishing with Churchill at Shangri-la: FDR Library; U.S. Chiefs of Staff (Generals Arnold and Marshall, Captain Royal [deputy secretary], Admirals Leahy and King) at a Combined Chiefs Conference, facing British counterparts, 1943: Three Lions / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Sicily—and Kursk. Allied landing in Sicily, July 10, 1943: IWM © Sgt. Frederick Wackett / Getty Images; retreat from Kursk: Bundesarchiv, Federal Archives of Germany
The Fall of Mussolini. Mussolini greets Hitler upon arrival in Italy, July 19, 1943: ullstein bild / Getty Images; on their way to Feltre, Italy: ullstein bild / Getty Images; before the meeting at Feltre: ullstein bild / Getty Images
Churchill Returns—Yet Again. Churchill with daughter Mary, Aug. 16, 1943: Toronto Star Archives / Getty Images; FDR with Churchill, Canadian Prime Minister McKenzie King, and Combined Chiefs in Quebec, Aug. 18, 1943: FDR Library
The First Crack in the Axis. FDR addresses crowd outside Canadian parliament, Ottawa, Aug. 25, 1943: FDR Library; Stalin with Foreign Minister Molotov (seen later, Feb. 1, 1945): Keystone / Getty Images
The Reckoning. FDR drives Churchill at Hyde Park, Sept. 12, 1943: Associated Press; Allied invasion of Italy, Salerno, Sept. 9, 1943: SeM / UIG / Getty Images
Notes
PROLOGUE
1. Lieutenant Commander George Elsey, interview with author, September 12, 2011.
2. See this volume, chapter 32, 257.
3. Entry of Tuesday, November 10, 1943, in Alan Lascelles, King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: The Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, ed. Duff Hart-Davis (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 75.
4. Ibid., entry of Thursday, May 13, 1943, 129.
5. David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005).
1. A CRAZY IDEA
1. “Exclusive of the President’s own car, the train comprised one compartment car, one Pullman sleeper, one combination club-baggage car, and the special Army radio car”: “Log of the Trip of the President to the Casablanca Conference, 9–31 January, 1943,” Papers of George M. Elsey, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY.
2. Entry of January 9, 1943, Leahy Diary, William D. Leahy Papers, Library of Congress.
3. “Because of his infirmity he [the President] could walk only briefly on two canes. It was much easier for him to use one cane and the right arm of an escort” for balance and support while swinging the fourteen-pound steel irons encasing his legs, from his thighs to his shoes, McCrea explained: John McCrea, “Handwritten Memoirs/Recollections,” McCrea Papers, FDR Library.
4. Ibid.
2. ABOARD THE MAGIC CARPET
1. “Marriage of Hopkins to Louise Macy,” miscellaneous files for “Roosevelt & Hopkins,” Robert E. Sherwood Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
2. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), 669.
3. Entry of January 8, 1943, in Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 194.
4. Ibid.
5. Entry of January 9, 1943, in Ward, Closest Companion, 194.
6. Ibid., entry of January 10, 1943, 196.
7. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 669.
8. Ibid.
9. McCrea, “Handwritten Memoirs/Recollections.”
10. Letter of January 11, 1943, in Ward, Closest Companion, 196.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., letter of January 12, 1943, 197.
14. Ibid., letter of January 13, 1943.
15. Related to John McCrea by the President: McCrea, “Handwritten Memoirs/Recollections.”
16. Letter of January 13, 1943, in Ward, Closest Companion, 197.
17. Ibid.
18. Letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, January 13, 1943, in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928–1945 (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1950), vol. 2, 1393.
3. THE UNITED NATIONS
1. Nigel Hamilton, The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 138 et seq.
2. Ibid.
3. Christopher D. O’Sullivan, Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937–1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 65 and 72.
4. Sumner Welles, Seven Decisions That Shaped History (New York: Harper, 1951), 182–83.
5. Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 221. Christopher O’Sullivan argued that such foot-dragging was deliberate. “The imperial powers faced growing demands for independence” among colonial and mandated countries—exposing “a paradox at the heart of empires: progress in the political and economic sphere would encourage self-rule, whereas a lack of progress justified continued European rule”: FDR and the End of Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 4.
6. O’Sullivan, Sumner Welles, 67.
7. Ibid., 74, quoting Gladwyn Jebb.
8. It was not only the British Empire that was having to face the prospect of dismantlement; Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands gave a broadcast on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1942, promising that the Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia would be given home rule—see Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 218.
9. David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), 334.
10. Letter of November 24, 1942, in Elliott Roosevelt, ed., F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928–1945 (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pearce, 1950), vol. 2, 1371–72.
11. Ibid.
12. Entry of December 4, 1942, Diaries of William Lyon Mackenzie King, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON (hereinafter Mackenzie King Diary). The Democrats lost the election in the House of Representatives by over a million ballots in the popular vote. To Roosevelt’s relief they nevertheless retained a majority of 222 seats to 209. In the Senate, Democrats lost 8 seats and 1 independent—as well as the popular vote, in ballot numbers cast. Again, however, they held on to their majority, 58 seats to 37.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Susan Butler, ed., My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 98.
16. Ibid., 99.
17. Ibid., 99–100.
18. Ibid., 101.
19. Entry of December 5, 1942, Mackenzie King Diary.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Roosevelt’s speechwriter and later editor of his presidential papers, Sam Rosenman, later pointed out that “it was not at Appomattox but at Fort Donelson that Grant demanded unconditional surrender; it was not of Robert E. Lee but of S. B. Buckner—in 1862”: Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (New York: Harper, 1952), 372.
26. Entry of December 5, 1942, Mackenzie King Diary.
27. In June 1941, prior to the war, Roosevelt had set up an Office of Scientific Research and Development to direct science for military purposes. The OSRD was soon tasked with atomic research. The notion that an atomic weapon would have to be launched by ship, given the necessary volume, quickly gave way to the idea of a small, bomb-size weapon that could be flown and dropped on a target. A so-called S-1 Committee was therefore set up to report directly to the President at the White House, chaired by the president of Harvard University, James Conant. Robert Oppenheimer was made director of fast-neutron research, and by the summer of 1942 the need for sub
stantially more fissionable material was reported to FDR. To accelerate development, General Brehon Somervell, the U.S. Army’s senior officer for logistics, appointed Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Groves to take charge of the Manhattan Project—which was moved to Los Alamos, in New Mexico. The 60 tons of Canadian uranium ore, already ordered in March 1942, was judged insufficient. After consultation with the U.S. government, Mackenzie King’s Canadian government nationalized the Eldorado Mining and Refining company in June 1942, and another 350 tons of uranium was immediately ordered by the U.S. government—followed by another 500 tons later that year, and 1,200 tons of stored Congolese ore to be refined by the Canadians.
28. Entry of December 5, 1942, Mackenzie King Diary.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Churchill referred to the plan as “airy visions of Utopia and El Dorado” (Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7, Road to Victory: 1941–1945 [London: Heinemann, 1986], 292), while Harold Laski, professor of political science at the London School of Economics, wrote to President Roosevelt, hoping he would “teach our Prime Minister that it is the hope of the future and not the achievement of the past from which he must draw his inspiration” (Thorne, Allies of a Kind, 144).
33. Entry of Saturday, January 9, 1943, “Secret Diary” of Lord Halifax, Papers of Lord Halifax, Hickleton Papers, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York, Yorkshire, England.
34. Entry of December 5, 1942, Mackenzie King Diary.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
4. WHAT NEXT?
1. Ibid., entry of December 6, 1942.
2. Ibid., entry of December 4, 1942.
3. Ibid., entry of December 5, 1942.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. David Kaiser, No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
7. Entry of December 5, 1942, Mackenzie King Diary.
8. Ibid., entry of December 4, 1942.
9. Ibid., entry of December 6, 1942.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
5. STALIN’S NYET
1. Cable of December 6, 1942, in Butler, My Dear Mr. Stalin, 102.
2. Ibid., cable of December 8, 1942, 103.
3. Ibid., cable of December 14, 1942, 103.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 103–4.
6. ADDRESSING CONGRESS
1. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt, 366–68.
2. Entry of November 29, 1942, in William D. Hassett, Off the Record with F.D.R., 1942–1945 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1958), 145.
3. “The Spirit of This Nation Is Strong”—Address to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 7, 1943, in Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, comp. Samuel I. Rosenman, 1943 vol., The Tide Turns (New York: Russell and Russell, 1969), 21–34.
7. A FOOL’S PARADISE
1. Entry of January 7, 1943, Halifax Diary.
2. Entry of November 20, 1942, Stimson Diary, Henry L. Stimson Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT.
3. Ibid, entry of December 11, 1942.
4. Ibid., entry of December 12, 1942.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Henry Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service In Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947).
8. Entry of December 14, 1942, Stimson Diary.
9. Ibid.
10. Nigel Hamilton, The Full Monty, vol. 1, Montgomery of Alamein, 1887–1942 (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 467–68.
11. Because of its five fortress-like side walls, President Roosevelt referred to the Pentagon as the “Pentateuchal Building,” after the first five books of the Bible: Steve Vogel, The Pentagon: A History (New York: Random House, 2007), 297. The U.S. Navy was offered space to ensure a combined-services headquarters; “He was very much pleased,” Stimson had noted the President’s satisfaction with the offer in his diary, “and told us to go ahead”: Ibid., 281. The Navy bureaus declined to integrate their activities, however—as they did racial integration in the seagoing Navy, other than small numbers of black sailors as messmen or glorified bellhops. Even onshore, the Navy insisted their installations be strictly segregated, with no black officers—causing the National Urban League’s journal Opportunity to declare Japan was not wrong in claiming “the so-called Four Freedoms in the great ‘Atlantic Charter’ were for white men only”: Morris J. MacGregor, Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940–1965 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1985). The Pentagon saga would epitomize the President’s difficulties as commander in chief in a democracy—the U.S. Navy refusing, in fact, to move in with the Army and U.S. Air Force until 1948, under protest, while the Marine Corps held out another four decades, until 1996.
12. Entry of January 7, 1943, Stimson Diary.
13. Entry of December 28, 1942, Leahy Diary, William D. Leahy Papers, Library of Congress.
8. FACING THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
1. “Joint Chiefs of Staff Minutes of a Meeting at the White House,” Washington, January 7, 1943, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943 (hereinafter FRUS I) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), 511.
2. Ibid., 509.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 509–10.
6. Ibid., 510.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. E.g., Albert Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports! (New York: Henry Holt, 1958), 95, and John McLaughlin, General Albert C. Wedemeyer: America’s Unsung Strategist in World War II (Philadelphia: Casemate, 2012), 31, referring to “the utter failure of ‘Unconditional Surrender.’” For the view that it was a sop to the Soviets, see Frank Costigliola, Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 179–81. The classic condemnatory statement on unconditional surrender was, however, by Hanson Baldwin: “Unconditional surrender was an open invitation to unconditional resistance: it discouraged opposition to Hitler, probably lengthened the war, cost us lives, and helped to lead to the present abortive peace”: Hanson Baldwin, Great Mistakes of the War (New York: Harper, 1950), 13.
15. Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports!, 186–87.
16. In the House of Commons on July 21, 1949, Labor Minister Ernest Bevin claimed the British War Cabinet had not been consulted over “unconditional surrender,” prompting Churchill to claim he “had never heard the phrase until the President suddenly uttered it at the Casablanca press conference”: David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), 323.
17. Ibid., 506.
9. THE HOUSE OF HAPPINESS
1. John McCrea, “Handwritten Memoirs/Recollections,” McCrea Papers, FDR Library.
2. Letter of January 14, 1943, in Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 198.
3. McCrea, “Handwritten Memoirs/Recollections.”
4. Letter of January 14, 1943, in Ward, Closest Companion, 198.
5. Letter of December 17, 1942, Elsey Papers, FDR Library.
6. S. E. Morison, “Memorandum For the President,” December 18, 1942, Elsey Papers, FDR Library.
7. David Stafford, Roosevelt and Churchill: Men of Secrets (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1999), 197–98.
8. Letter of January 14, 1943, in Ward, Closest Companion, 198.
9. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1946), 65.
10. Letter of January 14, 1943, in Ward, Closest Companion, 198.
11. Ian Jacob, unpublished Casablanca account, Churchill College Ar
chives, Cambridge, UK.
12. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It, 62.
13. Ibid., 67.
14. Ibid., 66.
15. Ibid., 66.
16. McCrea, “Handwritten Memoirs/Recollections,” McCrea Papers, FDR Library.
17. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), 673.
18. “A Gleam of Victory: A Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon at the Mansion House, November 10, 1942,” in The War Speeches of the Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill, ed. Charles Eade (London: Cassell, 1952), vol. 2, 342–45.
19. Entry of 10.11.1942, Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels [The diaries of Joseph Goebbels], ed. Elke Froehlich (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1995), Teil II, Band 6, 273 (hereinafter Die Tagebücher 6). Quotes from this source have been translated by the author.
20. Ibid., entry of 10.11.1942, 265.
21. Ibid., entry of 11.11.1942, 273.
22. Ibid., entry of 15.11.1942, 294.
23. Quoted in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell & Company, 1951), 583.
10. HOT WATER
1. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 7, Road to Victory: 1941–1945 (London: Heinemann, 1986), 269.
2. Ian Jacob, unpublished Casablanca account, Churchill College Archives, Cambridge, UK.
3. Ibid. The ship, which had been the headquarters ship for the landing at Algiers, had “a complete set of wireless instruments.” It could be “placed in Casablanca harbor, & our cipher staff could live aboard and all our telegram traffic with London could thus be handled without the necessity for any elaborate machinery ashore. All that was necessary was a constant carrier service between ship & hotel, and a Defense Registry organization in the latter”—“exactly as” if they were operating out of the War Rooms in London. The Bulolo sailed for Casablanca on January 5, arriving on January 10, 1943. Jacob, unpublished Casablanca account.
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