American Experiment (321 page)

It was in these conferences that crucial war and postwar strategy was hammered out. It was also where a fundamental rigidity in Big Three relationships became more and more evident.

For Roosevelt, getting there was half the fun. When he left the White House on an early January 1943 evening with Hopkins and a small party, boarded the presidential train at a secret siding near the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and started a slow train trip to Miami, he was gay, relaxed, and full of anticipation. He was soon to see Churchill, a new continent, combat troops. He would travel by plane for the first lime since his flight to the Democratic convention eleven years before. He would be the first President to fly, the first to leave the United States during wartime, and the first since Lincoln to visit an active theater of war. After taxiing out of Miami harbor on a Pan American Clipper the President missed nothing as he flew over the Citadel in Haiti, scanned the jungles of Dutch Guiana, glimpsed the Amazon, then slept during the long overnight trip to British Gambia, where he drove through the old slaving port of Bathurst and was appalled by the ragged, glum-looking natives and reports of disease and high mortality rates. Thence he flew over the snowcapped Atlas Mountains and into Casablanca.

The President encountered few surprises at Casablanca. Churchill and his big staff, having laid their conference plans with exquisite care, were as resistant as ever to an early cross-Channel attack in force. Like an old roué viewing a beach beauty, Churchill could not resist casting a lascivious eye on the eastern Mediterranean, with all its delicious curves and tempting cleavages. In the plenitude of deep harbors and wide landing beaches he saw ways to strengthen his lifelines to and from the Dominions and colonies, keep Hitler off balance, and find entrances to Southern and Eastern Europe that might offset the potential expansion of Soviet power. And FDR’s military advisers, intent on winning the present war, were just as adamant as ever against drawing troops and weapons into the eastern Mediterranean suction pump, even while their own enormous pump in the Pacific sucked vast amounts of supplies away from Europe and General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s bombers consumed enormous resources in Britain for their ever-intensifying assaults on the Continent.

Roosevelt was still in the middle. Long eager to launch a major offensive, he wanted to thrust across the Channel but also at the underbelly if possible. The British approach had always had some appeal for him, since it kept major options open, allowed for quick and perhaps easy victories, kept American troops active and moving, might knock Italy out of the war, and provided Stalin with at least the semblance of a second front. By the close of the long and often heated Casablanca talks the Anglo-Americans were
broadly agreed on priorities for 1943: overcome the U-boat menace in the Atlantic; send all possible aid to Russia but not at prohibitive cost; center Mediterranean operations on the capture of Sicily; carry on the bomber offensive and the buildup for the cross-Channel invasion; counterattack Japan and support China.

What about the real second front—when and where and how big? The specter at Casablanca was Josef Stalin, who had been invited but declined because of his war burdens. He wanted one thing and one thing only out of Casablanca—absolute and foolproof assurance that the invasion of France would be launched in early 1943, as promised. And this was precisely the assurance he did not receive in the weeks following the conference. On the contrary, after the Wehrmacht poured tens of thousands of troops through Italy into Africa, broke through the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, and look many Americans prisoner, Churchill warned Stalin that these reverses would delay clearing the Axis out of Africa. Confirmed in his suspicion of the fecklessness or worse of the whole Mediterranean effort, Stalin responded in cold anger:

“At the height of fighting against the Hitler troops, in February and March, the Anglo-Saxon offensive in North Africa, far from having been stepped up, has been called off.” Meantime Germany had moved thirty-six divisions—six armored—to the eastern front. “I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught.”

“Grave danger.” What did Stalin mean? That the Soviet front might collapse? That Stalin might go it alone, militarily and diplomatically? That he might even make a deal with Hitler? The last seemed out of the question, but so had the Nazi-Soviet pact appeared before August 1939. Stalin nursed the gravest suspicions about his allies. For him the delay in the second front was not merely a question of strategy; hundreds of thousands of Russians would perish as a result. Were his “allies” hoping that Russians and Germans would exhaust themselves in mortal combat, leaving the Anglo-Americans supreme on the Continent? Was that why they had been so deceitful about the second front? The dictator’s suspicions were dark. Were they trying to help Russia just enough to keep the Soviets in the war, but not so much as to help them win it?

It was evident by mid-1943 that Roosevelt and Churchill must meet with Stalin before the delay in opening a second front brought the anti-Nazi coalition to collapse. But no conference could take place until the Allies could agree on the cross-Channel attack. In meeting after meeting the military leaders thrashed out their differences, postponing the second front until sometime in 1944. The successful invasion of Sicily in
midsummer and Mussolini’s resignation helped Roosevelt at the Quebec talks to gain British agreement to an invasion of northwestern France in May 1944, even while Churchill and indeed Roosevelt still cast lingering glances at the eastern Mediterranean. In September, Stalin agreed to a Big Three meeting, provided it was near Soviet borders, in Iran. Soon the President was happily preparing for another long trip, during which he would meet not only Stalin for the first time but Chiang Kai-shek.

This time the Commander-in-Chief and his Joint Chiefs crossed the Atlantic on a battleship, the
Iowa,
58,000 tons, almost a fifth of a mile long, 210,000 horsepower, 157 guns including nine sixteen-inchers. After a calm trip—aside from an errant torpedo from an escorting destroyer that almost hit the dreadnought—the
Iowa
put into Oran, on the old Barbary Coast. With Eisenhower, the President toured the recent battle area and flew along the Nile into Cairo. There he met Madame Chiang, who had charmed the President in a tête-à-tête in Washington, and the Generalissimo. The President beheld a small man in a neat khaki uniform, with a serene unwrinkled face below a clean-shaven pate. Roosevelt had to summon up all his tact in the meetings that followed, for MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s successes in the Pacific were rendering a China strategy obsolete. Chiang and the Madame left with rosy promises about China’s postwar role but only vague pledges of an amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal.

Then on to Teheran—and Stalin. Once again the President watched eagerly as his plane flew over storied Sinai and Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, the green valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and into Teheran. Soon he met Stalin, a short compact man dressed in a tightly buttoned, mustard-colored uniform with large gold epaulets. “Seems very confident, very sure of himself, moves slowly—altogether quite impressive, I’d say,” the President observed later.

At his first formal meeting with the President and Prime Minister, Stalin disdained oratory and came straight to the point—his point. The Nazis could be smashed only by a direct assault through France, not by an attack through Italy or the Balkans. Roosevelt restated his commitment to an early cross-Channel attack, but he also appeared to be flirting with the Balkans as well. Churchill too made the cross-Channel pledge, but he similarly dallied with Allied possibilities in Italy and points east. Once again it seemed that little had changed, with Stalin demanding an early second front, Churchill resisting it, and Roosevelt, as Churchill would later complain, drifting to and fro. But at least the three men could thrash things out face to face.

And so the hard, blunt talk went on for three days, Stalin doodling, smoking a pipe, scratching words on gridded pieces of paper; Churchill
glowering behind his glasses, gesticulating with his cigar, lofting into flights of oratory; Roosevelt fitting cigarette after cigarette into his long holder, listening, calculating, interposing, placating. At some point on the third day the balance swung slowly but inexorably against Churchill and an attack at the periphery. Cross-Channel, combined with a landing in southern France, was confirmed for May 1944. Churchill, celebrating the start of his seventieth year that day, gave in with good grace, partly because the Combined Chiefs of Staff had agreed on attack plans, partly because Stalin had privately warned him face to face about the impact in Moscow of further delay.

That evening, at Roosevelt’s birthday party for Churchill, the President properly saluted George VI, the Prime Minister toasted Roosevelt as the defender of democracy and Stalin as Stalin the Great, the Marshal saluted the Russian people and American production—especially of 10,000 planes a month. In a last word, at two in the morning, the President spoke of the coalition as a rainbow of “many varying colors,” blending into “one glorious whole.” At Teheran, “the varying ideals of our nations” could “come together in a harmonious whole.”

A brilliant ceremony had symbolized the hard-won agreement at Teheran. Between rows of towering British and Soviet soldiers Churchill presented Stalin with the Sword of Stalingrad, forged by British craftsmen and given by King George to the “steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad.” Stalin kissed the gleaming blade, then showed the weapon to Roosevelt, who drew the long blade from the scabbard and held it aloft. The soldiers and civilians of Stalingrad had stood off the Nazis, then counterattacked and encircled them. Now it was time for the Allies to marshal their forces for the attack across the Channel.

By June 1944 the coastal areas of southern England were one vast staging area. Rows of new Mustang fighters perched wing to wing on small airfields behind the coast. Along pleasant English lanes stood ungainly amphibious vehicles, stacks of bombs, tires, wheels, reels of cable. Landing ships built on Lake Michigan and floated down the Mississippi were packed beam to beam in the ports. Long ugly LSTs (landing ships with tanks) constructed in California, their front ends gaping wide, were ready to disgorge tanks, trucks, bulldozers. Far inland lay the reserve production of war, for use in France: hundreds of new locomotives, thousands of freight and tanker cars, tens of thousands of trucks. Nothing could stop this massed power—except bad weather. Eisenhower postponed the attack
once in the face of high winds and heavy clouds; two days later, with the forecast still dubious, he said calmly, “O.K., let’s go.”

Roosevelt and his commanders waited in suspense as the mightiest amphibious assault the world had ever known moved across the Channel, toward Normandy; paratroopers floated down in the dark over the pastures of the Cotentin Peninsula; warships poured shells and rockets into beach targets; bombers and fighters filled the dawn skies. Yet rarely has a great battle been decided so much in advance as the invasion of France--decided not so much by tactics as by strategy. The long delay in mounting the second front had made possible this stupendous buildup, had forced the Russians to engage the bulk of Nazi land forces, had enabled the Allies to mount a whole separate invasion of southern France. The invaders had almost total command of the sea and the air; the vaunted Luftwaffe had been reduced to fewer than 120 fighters in the defense area, and only two Allied destroyers and a number of smaller vessels were lost in the attack.

The invaders had outfoxed the defenders as well as outgunned them. The Allies’ remarkable decoder, Ultra, provided Eisenhower with virtually the enemy’s whole order of battle. The German radar that survived shelling was foiled by devices simulating a different landing. The Führer was so certain that the first landings were a feint that he delayed the dispatch of two Panzer divisions. General Rommel, commanding the defenders, was not even at the front; he had left the day before the invasion to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. But it was sheer Allied power that made the overwhelming difference: a million and a half Americans, another million British and Canadians, tens of thousands of Norwegians, Danes, Frenchmen, Belgians, Czechs, Poles, and others; 900 warships, including twenty-six battleships and heavy cruisers, 163 air bases directly supporting the offensive—and 124,000 hospital beds ready for the wounded.

Not that everything on D-Day went according to plan. Off Utah beach landing craft were swamped in the heavy seas, while other craft were swept by a strong current past their assigned beaches. Strong enemy defenses, surviving heavy bombardment, poured a withering fire on the invaders. For hours masses of men and equipment jammed the beaches. Radios and other equipment failed to function. But the Allies’ superior power allowed for this sort of thing; some spearheads would be blunted, but others would break through. By nightfall on D-Day, although none of the Allied landings had reached the designated target lines, almost continuous thickets of ships were disgorging war power along miles and miles of coast. That evening an enormously relieved President led his fellow Americans in prayer for “our sons, pride of our Nation,” and for the people at home who must wait out their long travail and the inevitable sorrow.

During the next few weeks, while the Allies deepened their bridgehead, bested the Germans in stiff fighting, and joined with troops moving up from almost unopposed landings in southern France, American commanders in the Pacific continued to give Eisenhower and his lieutenants some lessons in the tactics of combined sea, air, and land power. To be sure, the imperatives of war differed there. Strategy in Europe called for mass, focus, unity of purpose, singleness of command—under Eisenhower. Strategy in the Pacific was prone to dispersion, opportunism, competing arms and commands—under an admiral and two generals. In the great arc stretching ten thousand miles from the Aleutians south and west and then north into Southeast Asia, Nimitz continued to command the northern and central Pacific, MacArthur the southwestern Pacific, and Joseph W. Stilwell the China-Burma-India theater.