1944
Page 9
On December 17, Roosevelt returned to the White House. He had been abroad for over a month. By Christmas Eve, he traveled north, to Hyde Park, and was preparing to deliver a fireside chat on Tehran. Surrounded by microphones and the glare of klieg lights, Roosevelt sought to prepare the American people for the final push against Germany; he spoke of a true “world war” and the “launching of a gigantic attack upon Germany,” adding, “We shall all have to look forward to large casualty lists—dead, wounded, and missing. War entails just that. There is no easy road to victory and the end is not yet in sight.”
Then came Christmas Day. For the Roosevelts it was spent listening to carolers and hearing the president read Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol. But in chilly upstate New York, the president was suffering through a bout of influenza, coughing and aching; his temperature would soon spike and he would feel “at loose ends.” Still, it was the first time in eleven years that he had spent Christmas with his family in Hyde Park, and he was determined to enjoy every minute of it.
Yet on that same day, as wreaths and red ribbons dotted the elegant hotels and homes of official Washington, and as the fire crackled at Hyde Park and eggnog and other drinks and little cakes were served, a young lawyer in the Treasury Department was working overtime on a memorandum for its chief, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. It had a long, but stunning title: “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.”
For all the talk of battle plans, empires, and postwar peace, the systematic murder of the Jews was one item that none of the Big Three had discussed in Tehran. The blistering report would be delivered to the secretary of the treasury at the start of the new year, and then in turn to the president himself.
2
“I Want to Sleep and Sleep Twelve Hours a Day”
AS EARLY AS 1940 a jubilant Führer had told Hermann Göring, “The war is finished.”
But as the Tehran summit ended and 1944 opened, the Nazis’ successes were increasingly limited. Still, even if the Allies could see a clear path to victory, the war was anything but finished and its outcome was far from evident. On January 3, the British Royal Air Force launched another large air raid on Berlin. This time, however, the damage to the city was minimal, while the RAF lost twenty-seven planes and 168 crewmembers. British planes were being lost at a rate of 10 percent each month. And in Italy, the only active front in the west, the Allies were bogged down at the Germans’ seemingly unbreakable Gustav Line. Yet more than ever, even as he acknowledged that “we have got a long, long road to go,” Franklin Roosevelt was now looking ahead.
Driven by a conviction that even today history has trouble fathoming, Roosevelt had helped to forge an alliance out of desperation abroad; had beaten back isolationism at home and kindled a democratic spirit when the days were darkest; and had emerged as the leader of free men everywhere. Hitler may have mocked him, but a sentimental Winston Churchill knew better, once calling Roosevelt “the greatest man I’ve ever known.” So did legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow, who reported that, to the men fighting or preparing to fight in this war, “The name ‘Roosevelt’ was a symbol, the code word for a lot of guys named ‘Joe’ who are somewhere out in the blue with the armor heading east.”
Yet there was to be nothing easy about this war, not in the beginning, nor in the middle, nor at the end. Actually, when Murrow spoke those words, the English-speaking Allied forces weren’t headed east yet; they were slugging their way north, mired in the invasion of Italy. The advance there was brutally slow. Here was a soldier’s hell: villages had to be taken house by house, while along the coastline the Germans holed up in impenetrable mountainous positions and targeted Allied soldiers one by one. Amid the billowing clouds of dense roiling smoke, the stabbing spurts of mortar fire, and the thunderous roar of bursting shells, one soldier quipped that this was “the winter of discontent.” It was. For the drenched and shivering GIs, the mud, the muck, the sleet, and the valleys were enemies every bit as implacable as the Nazis. Vile storms turned clay roads into sheets of water; and with the troops wedged between the German lines, all the Allied advances bogged down. Jeeps were paralyzed by the swamps, and tanks were rendered virtually useless. Supplies had to be shuttled by mules, which sometimes picked their way over corpses much as they had done on the western front in World War I. And everywhere they turned, Allied soldiers were assaulted by the biting cold and howling winds.
Indeed, the plight of the men, crouched precariously on knife-edge cliffs, was heartrending. Trench foot was widespread in the damp, cold foxholes, and so was frostbite. Pounded by heavy storms, the soldiers were often thigh-deep in rainwater. When there was a lull in the shooting and the men could look up, they saw scavenger dogs feasting on the entrails of dead GIs. At night, they could hear the cries of the wounded pinned down by withering machine-gun fire and stranded out of reach of their comrades, cries that as the hours passed became weaker and fewer and more desperate. German defenses seem to be everywhere and nowhere, despite the continuous whine of American planes strafing German outposts and supply lines. Predictably, morale plummeted and the Allied casualties rose. Isolated in their cragged ravines, or trapped in barbed wire, or hemmed in by enemy mines, or buffeted by the steady pop! pop! pop! of enemy gunfire, the men were pushed to the limits of human endurance. Many of them succumbed to shell shock, others to sheer exhaustion or outright insanity. Some spontaneously wet themselves from the unrelenting strain. As the weeks and months wore on, GIs ruefully dubbed this stretch of what had been the ancestral home of the Roman Empire “the Purple Heart Valley.”
But with the approach of spring, Roosevelt fervently believed the Allies would soon break the stalemate. Indeed, he hoped that the impending fall of Rome would signal the beginning of an operation far more profound: the long-awaited cross-Channel invasion, Overlord.
IT WAS TO BE the largest amphibious invasion in history, across the treacherous English Channel, and it was designed to be the decisive blow of the war. Far away from the Allied summitry, for the better part of a year the D-Day preparations had consumed military planners. Now, with Dwight Eisenhower at the helm, the operation would reach a new level of intensity. It had to. France was the only viable western route into Germany, and surprise was critical; Hitler knew the invasion was coming, but he didn’t know where. Still, the Germans could field fifty-five divisions—eleven of them armored—whereas on the first day Roosevelt could land only eight divisions of his own. Thus, the sheer magnitude of Overlord was astonishing, and every operational detail was critical: almost 180,000 GIs transported in more than five thousand ships and one thousand wide-bellied aircraft, leaving from eleven ports and converging on just five beachheads. These men were all now waiting breathlessly for the signal—“OK, let’s go!”
The key to the invasion was its location: Normandy, a formidable coastline with no ports, bracketed by two rivers and wide swaths of farmland. For months, thousands of Allied reconnaissance flights over coastal waters had sought to identify enemy bunkers and heavy artillery, while midget submarines patrolled the French beaches, attempting to examine German defenses. Meanwhile, to confound the Nazis, Roosevelt and the Allies spun an elaborate ruse. Employing the skills of America’s movie moguls, counterintelligence created a virtual dummy army under the leadership of renowned General George S. Patton; comprised of strikingly realistic armored divisions fabricated from rubber, painted prefabricated airplanes, and perfectly scaled landing craft—buttressed by the continuous hum of radio traffic and even camp stoves that smoked—this phantom force was meant to dupe the Germans into believing that the Allies were preparing for an all-out assault on the French coast at Pas de Calais, rather than at Normandy. Most of Hitler’s generals were convinced this was where the invasion would arrive.
And elsewhere in the United Kingdom, the true invasion force gathered.
It was a military caravan without parallel: tens of thousands of camouflaged tanks—landing ship tanks, swimmin
g tanks, and flail tanks—as well as trucks, jeeps, artillery pieces, gliders, typewriters, medicine, Mustang fighters, and locomotives (“hundreds”) were quietly positioned along miles of roadside in southern England, in expectation of the cataclysmic encounter to come. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of men, “tense as a coiled spring” and sealed off from the rest of the world, conducted poison gas drills, dug foxholes, were trained in demolition and wire cutting, and pored over detailed maps and photographs of enemy fortifications. By early June, their number would total nearly 3 million. They received copious distributions of invasion money, shiny wire cutters, gas masks, new toothbrushes, fresh cigarettes, seasickness pills, extra socks, and of course extra ammunition. To no one’s surprise, two of their most treasured possessions became French guidebooks and condoms. At the same time, fifteen hospital ships were prepared to accommodate eight thousand doctors, and loaded on board were 100,000 pints of plasma; 600,000 doses of penicillin; and 100,000 pounds of sulfa. Some 124,000 hospital beds were also readied. In quieter moments, the GIs closed their eyes, crossed themselves, and bowed their heads in prayer; they knew what was coming.
But it was rarely quiet. Each night, convoys many miles long rumbled for hours on end. And with row upon row of office buildings and warehouses, sprawling guest facilities, and a myriad of dockworkers stacking supplies and provisions—100,000 packets of gum, 12,500 pounds of biscuits, 6,200 pounds of sweets, endless spare tires, huge reels of cable, and tens of thousands of wheels and wooden cases—it would have been easy to mistake the military nerve center of this ever-expanding armada for a vast commercial metropolis. Indeed, the logistics of Overlord were mind-numbing. It was as if the Allies were ferrying the entire population of Boston, Baltimore, and Staten Island—every man, woman, and child, and every car and every van—in total darkness over 112 miles of choppy waters in a mere twelve hours.
The command post for this onslaught was an innocuous-looking trailer not far from the Portsmouth dockyard, distinguished only by the presence of a red telephone that sat on a simple wooden desk—this relayed scrambled calls to Roosevelt and the War Department in Washington—and a green telephone that was a direct line to Churchill at 10 Downing Street.
By late spring, all would be in readiness. The only thing left would be for the man in the trailer, General Eisenhower, to give the final order for the assault. For Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the Allies, there was no real contingency planning. As the general put it, “We cannot afford to fail.”
Overlord was all or nothing.
AT THE SAME TIME, across the Channel, a pacing Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler’s shrewdest and most daring generals, who had already sparred against the Allies in Egypt but had eventually come up short, was now firmly in command in France. Rommel felt that Germany’s best chance was to stop the Allied forces dead in their tracks—on the beaches. And he was determined to do just that. For half a year, some 500,000 Germans had meticulously built massive pillboxes and deadly obstacles to await the Allies. Whenever possible, awaiting Rommel’s orders were the elite of the Wehrmacht, the men who had raced into Czechoslovakia, who had brazenly stunned the Poles, who had overrun Norway and Belgium and outmaneuvered a dumbstruck France, and who, for good measure, had outflanked the Yugoslavs and the Greeks. Whatever private doubts Rommel may have harbored about the eventual success of an Allied invasion, he knew that he could make every yard costly. He also knew—or hoped—that even his second-class and third-class troops—a motley mix of children and old men as well as “volunteers” from Croatia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Crimea—could make up with Fanatismus (“fanaticism”) what they lacked in actual training. Moreover, he knew that every Allied reinforcement, every grenade, every dose of morphine, every tourniquet, and every tin of food would have to brave the English Channel before it could reach Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.”
Finally, Rommel knew just how complicated amphibious operations were; anything could go awry and often did. True, the American general Winfield Scott had successfully landed at Veracruz in 1847, but his enemy, Mexico, was ill-prepared. Even Napoleon had dismally failed to cross the English Channel, and so had Hitler himself. Not since William the Conqueror in 1066 had a military landing succeeded—and unlike the Allies, William had been going the other way. Recent history also offered little reassurance. Frustrated by the weather and the water, the British were ignominiously defeated at Gallipoli in World War I, a memory that a quarter of a century later still haunted Churchill. And when a large Allied commando force had attacked Dieppe along the French coast in August 1942, the Nazis had cut them to pieces.
So for weeks on end, Rommel’s men erected a formidable web of strongholds and defenses, connected by a vast system of tunnels. The pace was frenetic. They laid more than half a million advance barriers in the surf—“Belgian gates” and sharpened interlocking iron bars—designed to shred the hulls of the landing craft and thereby induce the Allies to wait for low tide, when the grazing fire of German machine guns would be at its most murderous and efficient. They ingeniously flooded hundreds of miles of Normandy fields to create a natural killing zone, forcing enemy aircraft to crash-land. And they set booby traps of all kinds, including hundreds of thousands of land mines, designed to detonate when a wire was tripped or cut. There were also antitank ditches and countless rolls of barbed wire, creating what Rommel hoped would be a marathon of horrific obstacles that the Allied troops would have to breach before they could even reach the coastal fortifications of Hitler’s famed Atlantic Wall. And of course everywhere there was concrete: concrete and steel reinforced walls, thirteen feet thick; concrete heavy gun nests for men keeping a vigilant watch; and concrete missile-launching sites. Meanwhile, in the distance deadly German panzer tanks waited to fire their guns and hurl the invaders back into the sea.
Was this the Nazis’ counterpart of the Maginot Line? Or was it an impregnable twentieth-century version of the Union’s defenses against Pickett’s foolish charge at Gettysburg? Only time would tell. “The war will be won or lost on the beaches,” Rommel solemnly told an aide. “The enemy is at his weakest just after landing [and] the first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive.”
It would be, he predicted, gazing into the distance, “the longest day.”
UNTIL THAT DAY ARRIVED, there was nothing to do but wait. So Roosevelt waited, in the Oval Office, or the map room, or when motoring through the capital’s streets. He knew the sights, sounds, and scars of a nation at war. These he could deal with. He knew winning the war could still “take an awfully long time.” This he could also deal with. And he could deal with the shiploads of coffins that he knew would soon return home. But as the Allies prepared to launch their most important effort of the war, there was one fact he could not control: since his trip to Tehran, his own time was running out.
As Overlord was gearing up, he was all but a dying man.
HE WOULD NEVER ADMIT this to the outside world, and just as likely, never even to himself. Why? As America prepared for an operation that would decide the fate of Europe, was this an act of reckless indifference? Or of self-deluding conceit? Or was Roosevelt, the resolute and clear-sighted wartime leader, simply unwilling to accept any personal weakness, or unwilling to accept any defeat? Despite his handicap, he had always been a commanding physical presence leading the Allied coalition. Suddenly, though, in the early months of 1944, when his energy was most needed, the president looked and acted dangerously ill.
He was just sixty-two, yet he had been in the public spotlight for the better part of three decades, ever since Woodrow Wilson had appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. Now, ten years after he had assumed the presidency, Roosevelt was, in ways large and small, the picture of exhaustion. His cheeks were sunken and his hand quivered violently when he reached for his cigarettes. His face was the color of milky chalk, except for the skin under his eyes, which was so dark and discolored that in photographs it appeared perpetually bruised. In the morning hours he was too fatigu
ed to work, while in the evening hours he felt too ill to sleep. When he sifted through position papers at his massive desk in the Oval Office, he far too frequently had a blank stare, his mouth drooped when he read the mail, and almost unthinkably, he fell asleep during dictation. As if this semi-stupor weren’t troubling enough, remarkably, he once all but blacked out when signing his name, leaving nothing more on the paper than smudged ink and an incoherent scrawl. On another occasion, his Secret Service agents were stunned to find that he had fallen out of his chair and was sprawled helplessly on the floor. And always there were the headaches—headaches that plagued him daily—and the hacking cough that refused to go away.
After dining at the White House, one of Roosevelt’s political allies confessed to being shocked at how “tired and worn” the president looked. Roosevelt’s director of war information, Robert Sherwood, was even more forthright, describing the president as having “an almost ravaged” countenance. Sherwood, “shocked by his appearance,” remarked on how much weight Roosevelt had lost and how “emaciated” his neck was. Winston Churchill confided to his own personal physician, Lord Moran, that the president looked like “a very tired man.”
Predictably, there were rumors. However much Roosevelt and the White House staff carefully managed his public persona, it became known that he had to cancel a number of engagements, including press conferences, and this led to talk of grave illness. The White House said that Roosevelt had “caught the flu,” which was true—it was a consequence of his globe-trotting and of his summitry with Churchill and Stalin at far-off Tehran the previous December. But the rest was fiction; the president was anything but fine. As his son Elliott would later write, “The influenza refused to let go. He felt perpetually tired.” He added, “One trouble followed another—chronic indigestion compelled him to forgo combining business with eating; on occasion, he was drenched with sweat; a phlegmy cough racked his lungs.”