by FDR
Quantity was the all-important goal of the war effort. American industry thrived on high-volume output performed on an assembly-line basis. No other industrialized nation had mastered the art of mass production so efficiently. In a sense the United States made a virtue of necessity. With a workforce composed disproportionately of unskilled labor, assembly-line techniques fit American industry like a glove. And they matched the needs of war perfectly. The Germans and Japanese, by contrast, with their highly trained labor pools (at least in the early stages of the war), chose qualitative superiority over mass production and depended on precision-made, flawlessly performing, high-standard weapons for their margin of victory.11 But as the war dragged on they simply could not produce enough of them. “We never did develop a top tank during the war,” said General Lucius D. Clay. “We did all right because we made so many of them. That offset some of their weaknesses. But we never had a tank that equaled the German tank.”12*
Roosevelt, who had handled the Navy’s contracting responsibilities in World War I, was well served by the procurement team Stimson assembled at the War Department. Undersecretary Robert Patterson, General Brehon Somervell, who commanded the supply services, and Clay presided over the greatest military buildup the world has ever known within a time frame few considered possible. Between Pearl Harbor and VJ Day the armed services let contracts that ultimately exceeded $200 billion ($2 trillion currently) with scarcely a breath of scandal. “We were not against industry making a profit,” said Clay, “but we were damned sure they were not going to make an excess profit.” For the first and only time in American history the military employed a process of mandatory contract renegotiation. Whenever a supplier reaped an excessive profit or the Army no longer needed what it had contracted for, the War Department renegotiated the contract and recaptured the government’s money. “I think it was the greatest job we did during the whole war,” said Clay years later. “You haven’t heard any criticism of excess profits from World War II, and no one else has.”13*
The conflict in North Africa continued longer than Roosevelt anticipated. The Germans and Italians resisted stiffly in Tunisia, and fighting did not end until May 13. The Allies took upward of 250,000 prisoners—a victory roughly equivalent to the Russian success at Stalingrad, with the added benefit of clearing Africa of Axis forces.
At the time of surrender Churchill was en route to Washington on the Cunard liner Queen Mary for another conference with FDR. The giant 80,000-ton vessel and her sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, had been converted to troop transports each capable of carrying 15,000 men, the major part of a division. Their speed, almost thirty knots, provided a margin of safety, and no submarine ever managed to intercept them on their many wartime crossings. With Churchill, in addition to a large staff, were five thousand German prisoners of war destined for American internment camps.
Dubbed TRIDENT by Churchill, the Washington conference of May 1943 wrestled with the problem of what to do after the battle for Sicily. Churchill and the British chiefs sought to press on in the Mediterranean, drive Italy out of the war, and hit Germany from Europe’s “soft underbelly.” Roosevelt and the American chiefs of staff wanted to go at Hitler directly with a quick cross-Channel attack and minimize efforts in the Mediterranean—which they continued to see as diversionary. After two weeks of sometimes acrimonious staff debate, Roosevelt and Churchill reached a compromise. The British agreed to set the invasion of France (code name OVERLORD) for May 1, 1944. The initial assault would be mounted by nine U.S., British, and Canadian divisions, with twenty additional divisions ready to move in once the beachhead was secure. The United States, for its part, agreed to move against Italy provided it be done with forces already committed to the Mediterranean. The buildup in Britain for the cross-Channel attack was to be accelerated, and after Sicily had been conquered seven divisions (four American and three British) were to be withdrawn from the Mediterranean to fight in France.
Halfway through the TRIDENT conference, FDR invited Churchill for a quiet weekend at the president’s wooded retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains. As the presidential party motored through Frederick, Churchill (who had visited the Gettysburg battlefield years before) inquired about the house that had belonged to Barbara Frietschie, the elderly woman whose courage in mounting an American flag in her attic window as the Confederate army marched by inspired John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1864 poem “Barbara Frietchie.” The prime minister’s inquiry prompted Roosevelt to quote Whittier’s famous lines:
“Shoot if you must this old grey head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
Churchill waited a moment, and when it became clear that no one in the presidential party was going to finish the quotation he began reciting the poem from memory:
Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,
The clustered spires of Frederick stand,
Green walled by the hills of Maryland.
Churchill sailed on, word for word, through the entire poem—which he had not read for at least thirty years—and then proceeded to entertain his listeners with a review of Confederate and Union tactics at Gettysburg.14*
Roosevelt told Churchill he was looking forward to a few hours with his stamp collection. “I watched him with much interest and in silence for perhaps half an hour as he stuck them in, each in its proper place, and so forgot the cares of State,” Churchill wrote later. “My friendship for the President was vastly stimulated. We could not have been on easier terms.”15
Sunday morning FDR took Churchill fishing in a nearby stream. The president “was placed with great care by the side of a pool and sought to entice the nimble and wily fish,” Churchill remembered. “I tried for some time myself in other spots. No fish were caught, but he seemed to enjoy it very much, and was in great spirits for the rest of the day.”16
Eleanor evidently had her fill of Churchill and left the men to themselves. “Mrs. Roosevelt was away practically all of the time,” Winston wrote his wife, Clementine. “[The President] does not tell her the secrets because she is always making speeches and writing articles and he is afraid she might forget what was secret and what was not. No one could have been more friendly than she was during the two or three nights she turned up.”17
It was during the TRIDENT conference that Roosevelt recognized he could not conduct the war and manage the home front at the same time. As soon as the conference ended and Churchill returned to England, FDR announced the establishment of the Office of War Mobilization with Supreme Court justice James F. Byrnes as director. Byrnes was a consummate Washington insider. A former congressman and senator from South Carolina—and one of the few southerners who consistently supported the New Deal—he stepped down from the Court at Roosevelt’s behest to head the mobilization effort. With an office in the east wing of the White House adjacent to Admiral Leahy’s, Byrnes became the final arbiter of home-front decision making. “Your decision is my decision,” FDR told Byrnes, “and there is no appeal. For all practical purposes you will be assistant President.”18
On July 10, 1943, Allied forces invaded Sicily in the largest amphibious operation of the war.* Because of the shaky performance of the U.S. II Corps in North Africa, the principal task was assigned to General Montgomery’s veteran Eighth Army, which was to attack northward along Sicily’s east coast and seal the island exit across the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland. Patton’s Seventh Army would cover Montgomery’s left flank. But when Montgomery bogged down sixty miles short of Messina, Patton seized the initiative, sliced through western Sicily, and captured the city of Palermo on July 22. The Seventh Army then wheeled east along Sicily’s north coast and after heavy fighting arrived at Messina August 17, shortly before Montgomery. The Seventh Army’s relentless offensive resolved whatever doubts military planners had about the combat-worthiness of American troops. But it arrived too late in Messina to prevent the Germans and Italians from evacuating some one hundred
thousand troops, together with most of their vehicles and equipment.
Three days after Patton took Palermo, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy triggered a coup in Rome, dismissed Mussolini as prime minister, and ordered him into custody. To replace Il Duce the King appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the ranking member of the Italian armed forces, a Darlan-like figure fully prepared to fight or parley, whichever course seemed more advantageous. While assuring Hitler that Italy remained loyal to the Axis, Badoglio opened secret negotiations with the Allies in Lisbon.
Roosevelt paid lip service to unconditional surrender. “Our terms to Italy are still the same,” he told the nation in a fireside chat on July 28, 1943. “We will have no truck with Fascism in any way, in any shape or manner.”19 Privately he told Churchill, “we should come as close to unconditional surrender as we can, followed by good treatment of the Italian populace.”20
Like Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio, Roosevelt was ready to cut a deal. He not only wished to end the fighting but recognized the need to accommodate the nation’s large Italian-American community. Asked at his press conference on July 30 whether the United States would negotiate with Italy’s new government, the president ignored his previous insistence on unconditional surrender. “I don’t care who we deal with in Italy so long as it isn’t a definite member of the Fascist government, so long as they get them to lay down their arms, and so long as we don’t have anarchy. Now his name may be a King, or a present prime minister, or a Mayor of a town or a village.”
Q: Mr. President, you wouldn’t consider General Badoglio as a Fascist, then?
FDR: I am not discussing personalities.21
Churchill was equally eager to negotiate. Separating Italy from Germany had been a goal of British diplomacy for at least a decade, and Winston had no qualms. “I will deal with any Italian authority which can deliver the goods,” he cabled Roosevelt. “I am not in the least afraid of seeming to recognize the House of Savoy [Victor Emmanuel] or Badoglio, providing they are the ones who can make the Italians do what we need for our war purposes. Those purposes would certainly be hindered by chaos, bolshevism, or civil war.”22 In effect, Roosevelt and Churchill were ready to conclude a separate peace with Italy, the doctrine of unconditional surrender notwithstanding.
Badoglio prolonged negotiations until an Allied ultimatum at the end of August forced his hand. Italy surrendered on September 3, 1943, switched sides, and declared war against Germany. Hitler responded by rushing sixteen battle-tested divisions down the boot of Italy. Rome was occupied, the Italian Army disarmed, and Mussolini restored to office.* When American and British forces landed near Salerno in early September, they were met by well-positioned German forces determined to contest every kilometer of Italian soil. So much for Europe’s “soft underbelly.”
Roosevelt and Churchill met for their fourth wartime conference (QUADRANT) at Quebec City on August 17, 1943. Once again Churchill traveled on the Queen Mary, this time bringing Clementine and their daughter Mary. The British party arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a week early, and Churchill took advantage of the interval to spend time privately with FDR at Hyde Park. “You know,” he told Eleanor, “one works better when one has a chance to enjoy a little leisure now and then. The old proverb all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy holds good for all of us.”23 Churchill wore a ten-gallon Stetson to protect his head from the sun, sipped Scotch chilled in a wine cooler, and downed the obligatory hot dogs at a picnic hosted by ER at Val-Kill. Cousin Daisy Suckley, a guest for the weekend, believed Churchill “adored the president, loves him, looks up to him, defers to him, leans on him.” In Churchill’s presence FDR was “relaxed and cheerful in the midst of the deepest problems.”24
During the weekend Churchill proposed that the command of OVERLORD, the cross-Channel invasion, be entrusted to an American. Churchill and FDR had previously agreed that whichever country furnished the preponderance of forces should command the operation, and it was becoming increasingly clear that the United States would do so. Both Churchill and Roosevelt assumed General Marshall would be tapped for the assignment.25
The Quebec conference focused on the projected Normandy landing, particularly the logistics of crossing the Channel—landing craft, temporary harbors, fuel pipelines, and the mountains of equipment that would have to be off-loaded. Roosevelt and Churchill were absorbed in the details. “I’m nearly dead,” the president confided to Frances Perkins. “I have to talk to the P.M. all night, and he gets bright ideas in the middle of the night and comes pattering down to my bedroom. They are probably good ideas, but I have to have my sleep.”26
Roosevelt raised the question of Germany’s surrender. Had the military staffs prepared for Hitler’s sudden collapse? According to General Marshall, the president “recognized the importance of capturing Berlin as both a political and psychological factor. He felt that it was a question of prestige and ability to carry out the reorganization of Europe on an equal status with the Soviet Union.” General Alan Brooke, the British chief of staff, assured FDR that plans were in place for a prompt Allied entry into German-occupied territory should the opportunity arise.27
Churchill and the president also discussed the atomic bomb. Following receipt of a letter from Albert Einstein in October 1939, Roosevelt had authorized preliminary research on a nuclear bomb.* Einstein and FDR shared a long history. When the scientist arrived in the United States in 1933, the president invited him and his wife to spend a night at the White House. They dined with the Roosevelts and conversed at length in German, which Einstein later recalled FDR spoke very well.28 It is likely that no other physicist could have captured the president’s attention, and when Einstein warned of the potential destructive capacity of nuclear fission, Roosevelt listened. When he said evidence suggested the Germans were already at work on a nuclear weapon, the president took action. At FDR’s direction an Advisory Committee on Uranium was established to explore a weapons program. The uranium committee was annexed by the National Defense Research Council and then in May 1941 melded into the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush. But its initial work was unpromising. The expense of isotope separation plus the uncertainty of whether a controlled chain reaction was even possible appeared to rule out a bomb-making program.
Meanwhile, British scientists, working independently, concluded that a deliverable bomb could be constructed using as little as twenty-five pounds of fissionable material and that if sufficient resources were devoted to the project the first weapon could be ready by the end of 1943.29 Churchill gave the go-ahead at the end of August 1941, and on September 3 the British chiefs of staff concurred. “Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives,” wrote Churchill, “I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.”30
After reviewing the British findings, Vannevar Bush recommended to Roosevelt that the United States expedite its research for an atomic bomb. That was October 9, 1941. The project, Bush warned, would require a vast industrial plant “costing many times as much as a major oil refinery”—an estimate woefully short of what the project would ultimately entail.31 The president pigeonholed Bush’s recommendation. Then came Pearl Harbor. On January 19, 1942, he returned the memo to Bush with a terse reply handwritten on White House stationery:
V.B.
OK—returned—I think you had best keep this in your own safe.
—FDR32
Roosevelt’s “OK” galvanized American efforts. Secretary of War Stimson went to Capitol Hill for the money—“I don’t want to know why,” said Sam Rayburn, who arranged with Appropriations Committee chairman Clarence Cannon to conceal the funds in the War Department budget.33 Robert Oppenheimer of the University of California assembled physicists to work on bomb design; General Leslie R. Groves of the Corps of Engineers, fresh from building the Pentagon, assumed direction of the “Manhattan Project,” named for a mythical Manhattan engineering district; and in December 1942 Enrico Fermi, an Italian Nobel laureate who had fle
d to the United States with his Jewish wife after Italy enacted Nazi-like racial laws, attained a sustained chain reaction in his Chicago laboratory, establishing the reality of what until then had been merely a theoretical prospect. Curiously, while the United States and Britain were moving ahead, Germany dropped out of the race. In the autumn of 1942 Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s armaments minister, after conferring with scientists Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, decided the construction of an atomic bomb was too uncertain and too expensive. “It would have meant giving up all other projects.” The decision to cancel the effort came easily for Speer. Hitler was uninterested in an atomic weapon and disparaged nuclear science as “Jewish physics.”34* Japan also discontinued its efforts in 1943, scientists telling the government that neither the United States nor Germany could possibly develop a weapon that would be usable in the current war.35
From the beginning Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to cooperate. In October 1941, shortly after their meeting off Newfoundland, FDR wrote Churchill suggesting that American and British nuclear efforts be coordinated “or even jointly conducted.”36 Churchill followed up during his visit to Hyde Park in June 1942. At the prime minister’s suggestion it was agreed that the programs be combined and that future research and development be conducted in the United States. Churchill believed continued German air attacks made it unwise to locate the massive facilities needed to construct a bomb in Great Britain.37 This momentous decision to share the development of an atomic weapon was made on the spot by Roosevelt and Churchill. Neither had his scientific advisers with him at Hyde Park—although Hopkins was sitting in a corner when the deal was struck—and there was no written record of the agreement. The president and Churchill felt sufficiently self-confident to plunge ahead on their own.38
