Eleanor and Franklin (149 page)

With the conquest of North Africa completed, Churchill arrived in the United States to plan the next blows against Fortress Europe. “Mr. Churchill arrived at seven last night and Franklin says it is going to be the toughest of all the conferences.” Command decisions were at the forefront, but India and the priority to be given to the Chinese theater were also high on the agenda, with Generals Stilwell and Chennault present to argue the case for more aggressive operations in the China-Burma theater. When Anthony Eden had been in Washington in March to discuss postwar plans, Roosevelt and Hull had tried to soften British resistance to acceptance of China as one of the Big Four. But Eden was dubious about China's stability, and he “did not much like the idea of the Chinese running up and down the Pacific.” Mme. Chiang was still in the country, in New York City, when Churchill arrived, and Roosevelt thought she should meet Churchill. He asked Eleanor to invite her back to Washington. But, as Eleanor wrote a friend, Mme. Chiang balked:

A curious little drama has been going on. The Chinese gentleman sent his lady advice she didn't like so when I phoned to ask if she'd come down & lunch with these two gentlemen now here she said “No” the one she had not met could come to her! He wouldn't go & I could see Franklin thought they might fight if left alone so the brother was sent for & wires buzzed & now I believe she is coming but it may be Friday or Monday!
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The meeting did not take place, and Mme. Chiang in June returned to Chungking. “I still like Mme. very much & Franklin said today that she had a brilliant mind,” Eleanor wrote. From Chungking Mme. Chiang sent Eleanor some Before the Rain and Orange Blossom tea “which you like so much, and also two pieces of silk for the President for shirts. . . . Please do not forget that you are coming to visit me as
soon as the cool weather sets in.” Eleanor was leaving the middle of August, she replied, but for a short visit to the Southwest Pacific: “I talked to the President about getting out to you and he said just what he always says about so many other things—that I must not interfere with war plans. However, he said he would try to arrange it as soon as it seems practical.”
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In the end she was not allowed to go to China, and she was also advised to stay away from Detroit, the scene of the racial riots. It was dangerous to permit a woman who refused to suppress the promptings of her conscience and imagination to visit the areas where the most searching test of the Christian ethic was taking shape.

54.
GI'S FRIEND, II: THE FIRST LADY AND THE ADMIRAL

E
LEANOR PREPARED FOR HER JOURNEY TO THE
S
OUTHWEST
Pacific with considerable trepidation because there were many “Eleanor stories” circulating among GIs in the South Pacific. A sergeant in New Guinea, she was informed, had written that they had heard that “dear Mrs. Roosevelt thinks it would be nice to keep us malaria-ridden forgotten men overseas until six months after the war.” Of course she had never made such a remark, and she suspected it was enemy propaganda playing on the homesickness of the boys in the Pacific; but if such stories were believed, GIs might not be pleased to see her.

This trip will be attacked as a political gesture, & I am so uncertain whether or not I am doing the right thing that I will start with a heavy heart. Well, enough of my doubts. I'll go because other people think I should, & if I see you that will be a joy, & if I don't I'll try to do a good job on seeing the women's work & where I do see our soldiers I'll try to make them feel that Franklin really wants to know about them.
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The four-engined Army Liberator in which she flew to the South Pacific carried a ton of mail and some military personnel as well as its distinguished passenger. It was not heated, so she slept “in that much scorned red flannel lining to my Red Cross coat as it grew fairly cold.” Norman Davis had been delighted with her offer to visit the South Pacific in the uniform of the Red Cross as its “Special Delegate,” and the uniform solved a wardrobe problem that was compounded by the necessity of taking a typewriter and yet staying within the 44-pound baggage limitation. She had decided not to take Tommy—“we will go together to China!”—and had learned to type again in order to be able to do her daily column.
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In Honolulu she showered at General William O. Ryan's house, did her exercises “to get the kinks out,” breakfasted in a green bower alive
with brilliantly plumaged birds, and then was off to Christmas Island, a coral atoll that they reached at dusk. She was worried about snakes, associating their presence with tropical climates, and was relieved to learn from the commanding officer that there were none on the atolls. But when she stopped by her quarters before going to the movie that was a standard item on the daily schedules of these isolated Pacific outposts, she was horrified to find the floor crawling with large bugs. “I might have screamed if I had not been the only woman on the Island and I knew a feminine scream would attract a good deal of attention.” She stamped hard instead, and the bugs quickly vanished through the cracks in the floor.

Soon after reveille the next day she was ready to go, with—at her request—two enlisted men as her escorts. She toured the hospital, visited military installations, took the names of the boys who wanted to have her write their home folks that she had seen them, and drove forty miles in a jeep to visit the island rest camp. Afterward she wrote her husband that older men did not stand up to the debilitating heat as well as the younger ones, and that if possible no one should be stationed in such a climate for more than two years. “I think the men here have been glad to have me come,” she wrote Tommy. That was a relief to her, for she had feared that the officers and men might find her visit a bore and an imposition. She reminded them more “of some boy's mother back home, than the wife of the President of the United States—and we all loved it,” the correspondent for the
Pacific Times
wrote.
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In the Cook Island group, her next stop, after she had made her rounds she wrote, that “there seems to be no trouble anywhere out here between Southern white and colored. They lie in beds in the same wards, go to the same movies and sit side by side and work side by side.” But at Aitutaki, as she wrote Tommy, a different picture was given to her by the officer in command:

The Colonel, regular army, Mass. Republican, and snobby was not pleased to see me. I'm sure he would sleep with a Maori woman but he told me he does not believe in mixed marriages, and he would like some Army nurses because some of his younger officers want to marry some of the native girls. He has both white and colored troops and is much worried since he has some white Southerners and he is afraid some day a white boy will find his native girl that he went out with last night is off with a colored boy the next night and then there would be a shooting and a feud would start between
white and colored troops. He thinks we should have all colored or all white on an island, but he owns that the colored have done very good work so he just prays hell won't break loose.
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The colonel regarded her as a “do-gooder,” and she was determined to show him there was nothin effete about this particular reformer. He drove her in his jeep to the island's radar station: “I have never seen a steeper road but since I was sure he took me to see if I would be afraid, I summoned all my experience with Hall and tried to behave as tho' I usually drove over such roads!” In the Fijis she enjoyed a real mattress for the first time since leaving the United States; an Army cot, she wrote, “would not be my permanent choice for a bed.” More should be done for the men's recreation. Phonographs and needles—and women—were needed. “Two commanding generals have now spoken to me about the fact that seeing no white women had the effect of making officers and men forget that certain kinds of intercourse with the natives was not desirable, and when it is safe to let women on duty come to these areas I think it will be a very good thing.” The absence of wine and beer was bad: “last night four men died from drinking distilled shellac.” She visited two hospitals in the Fijis, one with 903 patients, the other with 843. “Malaria [is] more of an enemy than combat though there were some serious wounds.” The boys were “plenty hardboiled,” she wrote as the plane winged on to New Caledonia and Admiral William F. Halsey's headquarters in Noumea, “but as far as I can tell my being here is giving them a kick.”

She was anxious about her meeting with Admiral Halsey. Most of the men in the hospitals in the Fijis were casualties from the great battles that had taken place in the Solomons. Her heart was set on going to Guadalcanal, which for her was the symbol of the war in the South Pacific and of all the hardships and suffering to which American boys were being subjected. How could she look wounded men in the eye in the future and say she had been in the South Pacific but had not been to Guadalcanal? She felt as strongly about going there as Franklin had about going to the front in the First World War when he had insisted on visiting a battery of 155s under fire, and even firing one of its guns. But he had been unwilling to give her a firm “yes” and left the decision up to Halsey.

The conqueror of the Japanese fleet in the South Pacific also classed Eleanor Roosevelt as a “do-gooder” and “dreaded” her arrival. What were her plans, he asked almost as soon as she had stepped from the
plane. “What do you think I should do?” she countered, hoping to get her way by subordinating herself to his wishes. But the admiral was wise to that feminine tactic.
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“Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said, “I've been married for thirty-odd years, and if those years have taught me one lesson, it is never to try to make up a woman's mind for her.” He suggested that she spend two days in Noumea, proceed to New Zealand and Australia, and then return to Noumea for two days on her way home. She agreed, and the admiral began to relax when she produced a letter from the president that said he had told his wife that he was “leaving the decision wholly up to the Area Commanders” as to where she should go. “She is especially anxious to see Guadalcanal and at this moment it looks like a pretty safe place to visit,” the president concluded.

“Guadalcanal is no place for you, Ma'am!” Halsey brusquely responded.

“I'm perfectly willing to take my chances,” she said. “I'll be entirely responsible for anything that happens to me.”

“I'm not worried about the responsibility, and I'm not worried about the chances you'd take. I know you'd take them gladly. What worries me is the battle going on in New Georgia at this very minute. I need every fighter plane that I can put my hands on. If you fly to Guadalcanal, I'll have to provide a fighter escort for you, and I haven't got one to spare.”

Eleanor looked so crestfallen that Halsey found himself adding, “However, I'll postpone my final decision until your return. The situation may have clarified by then.” He thought this cheered her up, but she wrote to the president:

Ad. Halsey seems very nervous about me, the others I can see think I could safely go to Guadalcanal, he says on my return I may go to Espiritu Santo & he will then decide, conditions may be more favorable. I realize final responsibility is his but I feel more strongly than ever that I should go & I doubt if I ever go to another hospital at home if I don't for I know more clearly than ever what it means to the men. . . . I won't get near any dangerous spots in Australia either. In some ways I wish I had not gone on this trip. I think the trouble I give far outweighs the momentary interest it may give the boys to see me. I do think when I tell them I bring a message from you to them, they like it but anyone else could have done it as well & caused less commotion!
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But she had a job to do, and early the next morning she started her round in New Caledonia. By the time she departed for New Zealand Admiral Halsey had become her most ardent partisan in the theater:

Here is what she did in twelve hours: she inspected two Navy hospitals, took a boat to an officer's rest home and had lunch there, returned and inspected an Army hospital, reviewed the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion (her son Jimmy had been its executive officer), made a speech at a service club, attended a reception, and was guest of honor at a dinner given by General Harmon.

And, the admiral might have added, pecked away at her typewriter in the dead of night, doing a column. Halsey's report continued:

When I say that she inspected those hospitals, I don't mean that she shook hands with the chief medical officer, glanced into a sun parlor, and left. I mean that she went into every ward, stopped at every bed, and spoke to every patient: What was his name? How did he feel? Was there anything he needed? Could she take a message home for him? I marveled at her hardihood, both physical and mental, she walked for miles, and she saw patients who were grievously and gruesomely wounded. But I marveled most at their expressions as she leaned over them. It was a sight I will never forget.
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