The Chairman

by Kai Bird

  “I have heard all these arguments,” replied Roosevelt. “De Gaulle is on the wane.”

  Overruled once again, Morgenthau and McCloy left the White House incredulous that Roosevelt could not see past his prejudices. McCloy told Morgenthau, “I am going to prophesy that in the not too distant future Churchill will make up with DeGaulle . . . and it is going to leave the President high and dry all by himself.”

  Later that spring, Churchill did mend his relations with the stubborn French general. But Roosevelt still refused to extend full recognition. So, as D-Day approached, de Gaulle acted as if he had no need of Eisenhower. Invited to London just a few days before the landings, and informed of the invasion plans, de Gaulle was less than supportive. He called the French occupation currency printed in Washington and awaiting distribution by the invading troops “faux billets”—“counterfeit currency.” Once the landings were under way and Eisenhower read a proclamation over the radio calling upon the French people to obey his orders, de Gaulle refused to endorse Eisenhower’s statement. McCloy was shocked, and told Morgenthau that de Gaulle’s behavior was “just outrageous.”96

  The strength of the French resistance inside France, however, quickly made de Gaulle’s stature irreversible. Large portions of the countryside were in open revolt. Concentrating on the railways that could have transported German reinforcements to Normandy, the resistance cut 314 rail lines and attacked an additional 211 lines. Donovan’s OSS had supplied the partisans with over a thousand bazookas and other armaments. The French resistance could easily claim credit for delaying the advance of German reinforcements by several days, a critical difference for the landings, which might easily have been repulsed had there been one more armored German division in the vicinity of the beaches.97

  In the midst of directing the massive invasion, Eisenhower had conflicting instructions from London and Washington regarding relations with the French Committee.98 One of his aides told McCloy on June 13, over a secure phone, that Ike didn’t care one way or another, as long as there was some kind of agreement worked out between the British and the Americans on one side and the French Committee on the other. McCloy assured Eisenhower’s aide, “The President has got it all right, I pounded it into him and what we can do about it. . . . I will convey this to the President and we will keep constantly after it in order to do all we can to help Eisenhower out.”99

  McCloy’s memos to the president made it clear that, in the view of U.S. military observers in Normandy, “de Gaulle seems to be generally accepted as the coming leader.”100 By D-Day plus eight, even Stimson was beginning to come around. On June 14, he admitted to McCloy, “I think the President’s position is theoretically and logically correct, but . . . it is not realistic.”101 At McCloy’s urging, that evening Stimson met with Roosevelt and urged him to extend provisional recognition to de Gaulle while simultaneously extracting pledges that he would not interfere in the free election of a postwar government. Roosevelt refused once again, saying it was a “moral issue” he could not ignore.102 The president assured Stimson that de Gaulle would fade away as non-Gaullist resistance groups were uncovered by the advancing Allied troops.

  In the end, Roosevelt’s suspicions of de Gaulle had to give way to military realities. As McCloy had foreseen, within weeks of the Normandy invasion large chunks of liberated French territory had to be governed. De Gaulle’s French Committee was the only obvious government. So, in early July, McCloy scripted the negotiations for a visit by de Gaulle to Washington. By the time the French general left a few days later, Roosevelt had reluctantly issued a statement recognizing his government.

  The usually astute president had misjudged the situation. He had wanted to impose a hard peace on France, specifically stripping her of her Indochina colonies and perhaps even the French possessions in West Africa. By waiting to deal with de Gaulle until after D-Day, he had allowed the Frenchman to capitalize on the popularity that was already his as the symbol of French resistance. Now the French would demand their share of the victor’s spoils, instead of being punished as collaborationists. McCloy was not unaware of these political consequences. But in his view, military necessity dictated dealing with de Gaulle in the summer of 1944, just as military necessity had required dealing with Admiral Darían in the autumn of 1942. As the War Department’s man, McCloy was always the pragmatist.

  De Gaulle was only one of many problems associated with D-Day that required McCloy’s attention in the spring of 1944. Just two months prior to D-Day, Stimson and Marshall sent him to London, where he was instructed to cable them a general assessment of Eisenhower’s plans for the cross-Channel attack. Upon his arrival, McCloy was given the secret code name of “Junior,” and Eisenhower arranged for his inspection of “all principal headquarters” throughout England.103 At SHAEF headquarters outside of London, he discussed with Ike every possible contingency related to the invasion. These were tense and weighty times for Ike, who was glad to have McCloy around to help deal with the ever-troublesome French and to reassure Winston Churchill regarding Overlord.

  With the invasion that he had put off for so long about to happen, the British prime minister was in a morose, even fatalistic mood. He told Eisenhower during this period, “I am in this with you to the end. If it fails, we go down together.”104 One afternoon, just as McCloy stepped out to keep an appointment with his British counterpart at the War Office, word came that the prime minister wanted to see him. Upon his arrival at 10 Downing Street, he was taken by Churchill to the Cabinet Room. This was the place, Churchill joked, “where all the mistakes are made.” The prime minister always thought of McCloy in relation to Stimson, that uncompromising advocate of a cross-Channel attack. When Stimson’s name came up in conversation, the prime minister humorously referred to him as that “thruster.” Though Churchill knew McCloy was late for his meeting at the War Department, he insisted that he join him in the dining room for a “delicious meal,” washed down with generous portions of white wine, port, and brandy.105 Finally, McCloy excused himself, and the prime minister volunteered to drive him to his appointment. Along the way, he said, he would give him a tour of London’s war scars. The two men walked out through the rear garden, past a bomb crater that had only recently narrowly missed the prime minister’s residence, and then climbed into a chauffeured car.

  McCloy was sure the driver had “carrot eyes” as he sped them through the blacked-out London streets. First they visited a park where Churchill’s daughter Mary served with an anti-aircraft battery. She was clearly annoyed when her father remarked loudly that her unit had yet to shoot down anything.

  Next stop was the bombed-out ruins of the House of Commons. Puffing on cigars, the two men walked amid the ruins. Churchill spoke about the building’s architecture and his desire to rebuild it after the war. They then went to the nearby House of Lords, where Churchill took a seat and reminisced: “When I look across the well of this house, I see the faces that should be here. . . . Sixteen thousand killed at Somme in one morning . . . It was a hecatomb. . . . I cannot afford to preside again over the loss of a British generation.”106

  By this time, it was almost midnight. As Churchill went on in this vein, McCloy understood finally that the prime minister’s meandering, nocturnal tour of blacked-out London had a purpose: to impress on Stimson’s favorite troubleshooter why he had so long opposed the great venture that was about to be launched across the English Channel.

  A few days later, McCloy flew into Washington, where he told Stimson in a thirty-minute briefing that “everything is going very well for the invasion plans.”107 The next evening, Stimson had the McCloys over for dinner, over which they discussed the trip at length. Despite Churchill’s midnight expressions of doubt, McCloy reported “a feeling that there is no disposition on the part of the British to hold back . . . Montgomery is confident and the P.M. is secure.” He recommended that more landing craft be sent to the theater, in addition to another two naval cruisers and their attendant destroyers. Regardin
g Operation Overlord itself, he thought the only “uncertain factors” were weather and security. “If the weather guess is wrong, many complications can ensue. If the time and place are tipped, it will be precarious.” But, to offset these uncertainties, McCloy reported there was little that Eisenhower’s “talent for coordination and straightening out could not deal with.”108

  CHAPTER 10

  McCloy and the Holocaust

  “We are alone. Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that all those horrible things happened?”

  JOHN J. MCCLOY TO WORLD JEWISH CONGRESS OFFICIAL DECEMBER 1944

  On the eve of D-Day, and in the midst of McCloy’s campaign to reorient the administration’s policy toward de Gaulle, a new and terrible problem was brought to his desk. Under pressure from Morgenthau, the president had finally, on January 22, 1944, agreed to establish a unique agency2 the War Refugee Board (WRB), “to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death. . . .”1 Roosevelt had specified that he wanted Stimson, Hull, and Morgenthau to supervise the WRB’s activities, and, inevitably, Stimson delegated this matter to his assistant secretary.

  McCloy was not unaware of the reports concerning Hitler’s war against the Jews and other minorities in Nazi-occupied Europe. No one reading the newspapers in the last two years could have been ignorant of the news filtering out of Europe. As early as December 1941, the New York Herald Tribune, a paper noted for its skeptical treatment of Nazi atrocity stories, had concluded that what was happening in Europe was nothing short of “systematic extermination.”2 Only a month later, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich’s Main Security Office, communicated Hitler’s “Final Solution of the European Jewish Question” to an assembly of Nazi officials at Wannsee on January 20, 1942.3 During the two years prior to the creation of the War Refugee Board, some three million Jews were systematically shot, gassed, or worked and starved to death. British and American newspapers during these years published numerous stories conveying the genocidal character of these mass killings. In June 1942, for instance, Polish authorities in exile in London released a report by the Warsaw Jewish socialist organization, the Bund, which calculated that seven hundred thousand Jews had been killed in Poland alone. The substance of this report was broadcast by the BBC in London and carried by The New York Times and other American newspapers. Citing firsthand accounts, the report revealed for the first time that as many as a thousand Jews per day were being killed in mobile gassing trucks.4

  In response to these reports, “Stop Hitler” rallies were held in a number of American cities to protest the “extermination of Jews . . . [by] forced labor, in concentration camps or as victims of experiment in poison gas factories.”5 Some commentators suggested that such incredible atrocity stories were reminiscent of the false reports of German baby-killings manufactured by British propaganda during World War I. But by the end of 1942, some of the country’s most prominent journalists were leaving no doubt as to the credibility of such reports. On December 13, 1942, Edward R. Murrow told his listeners on a CBS broadcast, “What is happening is this: millions of human beings, most of them Jews, are being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered. . . . The phrase ‘concentration camp’ is obsolete, as out of date as ‘economic sanctions’ or ‘nonrecognition.’ It is now possible to speak only of extermination camps.”6

  By this time, the Roosevelt administration had received confirmation of the press accounts from its own official sources. Only a few days before Murrow’s broadcast, Roosevelt told a delegation of visiting Jewish leaders, “Representatives of the United States government in Switzerland and other neutral countries have given us proof that confirms the horrors discussed by you.”7 There was confirmation, and yet there was disbelief. The State Department’s specialist on Jewish affairs, R. Borden Reams, in December 1942 was still telling people that reports of mass murders were “to the best of my knowledge . . . as yet unconfirmed.”8 There was still no fundamental comprehension of either the enormity of the evil or the possibility that something could be done to slow the killing. Such paralysis extended even into the Jewish American community. The New York Times editorialized about the “world’s helplessness to stop the horror while the war is going on. . . .”9 The consensus among the leadership of the established Jewish organizations was that the best way to aid European Jewry was to bring about an early defeat of Hitler.

  Hillel Kook, a former associate of Menachem Begin’s in the “revisionist” Zionist organization, Irgun, was one Jewish leader who believed otherwise. Kook, who went by the name of Peter Bergson outside of his native Palestine, had originally been sent to New York to serve as Irgun’s liaison in America. When early reports of the Holocaust surfaced in the American press, Bergson abandoned his Irgun activities and turned his energies toward various rescue schemes. In July 1943, he formed the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, which financed an advertising campaign demanding that the administration establish a special government rescue agency.

  Despite this publicity, Roosevelt probably would not have agreed to the formation of the War Refugee Board had it not been for Henry Morgenthau. Until December 1943, the Treasury secretary had been content to let the State Department handle the question of Jewish-refugee rescue. Morgenthau then learned that the State Department had blocked for more than six months a scheme to rescue seventy thousand Rumanian Jews in exchange for $170,000 in Rumanian currency. Worse, Morgenthau learned that the State Department had also hidden from him a cable from the U.S. Legation in Switzerland that confirmed the existence of Hitler’s plan to exterminate the Jewish people.10 In a meeting in late December, he confronted the official in charge of European affairs, Assistant Secretary Breckinridge Long, and bluntly asked him if he was an anti-Semite. Long denied it. Then, in early January 1944, Morgenthau’s staff wrote a devastating critique of the State Department entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews.” The report charged that the State Department was “guilty not only of gross procrastination and willful failure to act, but even of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler.”11

  Within days of receiving this report, Roosevelt agreed to establish the WRB. On February 1, 1944, Stimson took McCloy with him to the Board’s second session. Presiding over the meeting was John Pehle, the Board’s acting executive director. McCloy knew and liked Pehle, who had been a high-ranking lawyer on Morgenthau’s staff.12 Stimson dreaded the prospect of even attending the meeting, since he believed nothing of substance could be done to help the Jews short of winning the war. But Pehle was able to report that the WRB was accomplishing quite a bit. Licenses had been issued to the World Jewish Congress to allow that organization to transfer funds abroad in order to finance the evacuation of refugees from France and Rumania into Spain, Switzerland, and North Africa. Another operation might facilitate the evacuation of more than five thousand abandoned children from France at a cost of $600,000. Yet another program had been arranged with the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada to finance an underground operation whereby Jewish refugees in Poland could be encouraged to seek refuge in Hungary. In order to do this, Pehle had persuaded the State Department to approve the direct transfer of hard currency into enemy-occupied territory. Finally, Pehle reported that, in cooperation with the Rumanian government, some sixty-four hundred Jewish internees had been transferred from concentration camps to Bucharest.13 Stimson came away from the meeting quite pleased. It appeared that, contrary to his expectations, the new Board would be able to accomplish something concrete.14

  In fact, by this time it was very late, almost too late, to do anything to save what remained of European Jewry. Since the existence of Hitler’s plan for a Final Solution had been confirmed in late 1942, millions had died while the State Department blocked all efforts to ransom Jews or otherwise encourage them to seek refuge in the United States, Turkey, Switzerlan
d, Palestine, or other possible havens. With the exception of Hungary, where a Jewish community of nearly one million remained intact, most other Jews still alive in Europe were now in Polish and German concentration camps. To rescue them would require military action.

  But as McCloy learned soon after his first meeting with the WRB, military action had already been ruled out. Upon being apprised of the creation of the new agency, the British government inquired whether the presence of the secretary of war on the Board indicated that Washington intended to use parachute troops to free the Jews from any of the various concentration camps. In response, Pehle cleared a cable with the State and War departments informing the British that “it is not contemplated that combat units will be employed in rescue operations unless the rescues are the direct result of military operations.”15

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff already had a policy on rescue operations, which was to reject them out of hand. This stance had been established in November 1943, when the World Jewish Congress appealed to the War Department to ship some four thousand refugees stranded on the Adriatic island of Rab. These refugees had only recently been freed by Yugoslav partisans from Nazi concentration camps in Yugoslavia and transported to Rab. The island seemed about to be captured by the Nazis, so the Yugoslav Embassy in Washington appealed for military transport to shuttle the refugees to Allied-occupied Italy. A week before McCloy attended his first meeting of the War Refugee Board, he was informed that the theater commander in the area had investigated the matter and “determined that the military situation did not permit the rendition of direct assistance to these refugees, the majority of whom were Jews.” The commander assured Washington, however, that as in the past he would care for any refugees who managed to reach the safety of Italy “as a result of their own efforts.”16 McCloy did nothing to reverse this decision.