Roosevelt (58 page)

“Some of you Britishers know the old story—we had a General called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister’s, early days he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, or Japan. That means a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.” The other United Nations, he added, felt the same way.

Churchill was surprised. He and Roosevelt had discussed unconditional surrender briefly and he had exchanged views with his War Cabinet, especially on the question of whether Italy should be included. But he did not know that Roosevelt planned to announce it—and announcing it was the crucial step. In explaining his statement somewhat later, the President said that getting de Gaulle and Giraud together had been so difficult it reminded him of Grant and Lee—“and then suddenly the press conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant ‘Old Unconditional Surrender’ and the next thing I knew I had said it.” Actually the doctrine had not been born as spontaneously as Roosevelt implied, for a State Department advisory group had made known to him its consensus view that unconditional surrender should be imposed on Germany and Japan. It was the publicizing of the policy, with its critical implications for grand strategy and political warfare, that surprised Roosevelt’s British comrades—and indicated again his euphoric mood at Casablanca.

That euphoria was hardly dimmed in the last hours of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s African safari. Churchill insisted that the President drive with him to Marrakesh, which Churchill described as famous for its fortunetellers, snake charmers, and brothels—and for an incomparable view of the Atlas Mountains. So the two men drove 150 miles over the desert, talking shop and touching on lighter matters, while American troops stood at attention along the highway and fighters hovered overhead.

The sun was setting as they reached their villa at Marrakesh. Churchill climbed to the roof to see the evening light on the snowcapped peaks and purple foothills and urged Roosevelt to come up. Servants made a chair with their arms and carried the President up the winding stairs, his legs dangling like the limbs of a ventriloquist’s dummy. In the evening the President and the Prime Minister dined with a jolly company of a dozen or so. The two leaders made affectionate little speeches to each other; the President toasted the King; Churchill sang, and Roosevelt joined in the choruses.

“I love these Americans,” Churchill remarked to his physician before dinner. “They have behaved so generously.” Next morning, in slippers and a bright robe covered with dragons, the Prime Minister drove with the President to the airfield and saw his friend off on the long journey home.

The President was running a little fever by the time he reached Bathurst and the waiting
Memphis,
but the next day he insisted on taking a trip up the Gambia on a seagoing tug. Once again he was struck by the bad health and living conditions in the British colony; Africa would be a problem for years to come, he told reporters on returning. Next day the President flew to Liberia for lunch with President Edwin Barclay; then he reviewed American Negro troops and was gawked at by natives clustered outside their high grass huts. Then the long flight across the South Atlantic to Brazil, where he conferred at length with President Getulio Vargas on an American destroyer and reviewed troops from a jeep.

He was hollow-eyed and tired by now; the long hours in the air had been distressing, for flying “affects my head just as ocean cruising affects yours!” he wrote to his wife. He was glad to board his train for the trip back to Washington.

By now Stalin had received a message that Roosevelt and Churchill had painstakingly drawn up at the end of the Casablanca Conference. The message told in some detail the plans for the next few months, plans which, “together with your powerful
offensive, may well bring Germany to her knees in 1943.” Britain and America would keep the pressure on Japan, sustain China, push the Axis out of Africa, clear an effective passage through the Mediterranean, bombard Axis targets in southern Europe, “launch large-scale amphibious operations in the Mediterranean at the earliest possible moment,” and step up the bomber offensive from Britain against Germany. Several times the message referred to the paramount objective of re-entering the Continent, but there was no date. This would happen “as soon as practicable.”

In the Kremlin, Stalin listened to the translation of this note with a stony face. He turned to Molotov. Had they set a date? No, Molotov ejaculated—not yet, not yet. Stalin remained impassive. He waited out the day, and on January 30 sent thanks to Roosevelt and Churchill for “your friendly joint message” and added: Just when would the concrete second-front operations take place?

Almost two weeks later Churchill replied for Roosevelt and himself. They hoped to expel the quarter-million Axis troops from eastern Tunisia during. April, if not earlier. After that they intended to seize Sicily, in July at the latest; after that they would stage an operation in the eastern Mediterranean, probably against the Dodecanese. These operations would take 300,000 or 400,000 men and all the shipping and landing craft in the Mediterranean. The cross-channel attack would come in August or September. There was a slight hedging here. Shipping and assault landing craft would be “limiting factors.” And the timing “must of course be dependent upon the condition of German defensive possibilities across the Channel at that time.”

Stalin’s reply was frosty. It appeared, he said, that operations in Tunisia had been set back to April. But it was now, when the Soviet troops were keeping up their broad offensive, that Anglo-American action in Africa was imperative. And to hammer Hitler from both directions the cross-channel attack must take place much earlier. Stalin here made a hard thrust:

“According to reliable information at our disposal, since the end of December, when for some reason the Anglo-American operations in Tunisia were suspended, the Germans have moved 27 divisions, including five armored divisions, to the Soviet-German front from France, the Low Countries and Germany. In other words, instead of the Soviet Union being aided by diverting German forces from the Soviet-German front, what we get is relief for Hitler, who, because of the let-up in Anglo-American operations in Tunisia, was able to move additional troops against the Russians.”

Roosevelt cabled a conciliatory response. He shared Stalin’s
regret that the Allied effort in North Africa had not gone according to schedule. Heavy rain and poor transportation had been the trouble. He realized the adverse effect of the delay on the common effort and he understood “the importance of a military effort on the continent of Europe at the earliest date practicable in order to reduce Axis resistance to your heroic army.” But again there was a slight hedge. The cross-channel attack would go ahead as fast as transportation facilities could be provided.

It was not the best of times for the three leaders. Stalin’s troops were exhausted. In a mighty effort they recaptured Kharkov in mid-February, then lost it again as the Soviet counterattack petered out and the front stabilized. Churchill had been stricken with pneumonia after returning from his North African and Mid-Eastern journey. Roosevelt, too, had been ill. And at the time he wrote his February 22 letter, he was undergoing the doleful experience that other chiefs of state had known before him—he had received reports of his troops’ first real brush with German ground power.

Hitler had followed through on his decision to reinforce Axis strength in Africa. In December and January Nazi troops and supplies had flowed through Italy and Sicily to the ports and airfields of Bizerte and Tunis. Skimming over the water at 150 feet, Junkers and huge, six-engined Messerschmitts carried in hundreds of tons of war supplies every day. By the end of January 110,000 troops—almost three-quarters of them German—had arrived in Northwest Africa to bolster Rommel’s last-ditch stand. The Allies were now paying the price of having secured their rear by landing so far to the west of Tunisia. The Germans jabbed at the British, French, and American troops, and then dug in. By mid-February the British commanded the northern sector, the French the central, and the American II Corps the southern, on an almost straight north-south line, with Axis troops to the east; and the British were advancing along the Mediterranean shore from Tripoli.

It was here in this strange and melancholy land, with its jumble of flattened knolls, low escarpments, open desert, draws, gullies, and cactus, that American soldiers had their baptism of fire. Knowing that the Allies would steadily consolidate their positions, Rommel suddenly struck out at II Corps units on February 14. At last American troops experienced the famed German deployment of tanks, artillery, and dive bombers. They counterattacked bravely but suffered from poor intelligence and communications, faulty map reading, and amateurish deployment—in short, from inexperience. After probing and encircling American forces in a series of hard thrusts, the Germans broke through the Kasserine Pass on February 20. They took thousands of Americans prisoner and
destroyed or captured large quantities of weapons. Soon, however, Rommel’s forces began to run into bad weather and stiffened Allied defenses; they withdrew back through the Kasserine Pass, taking satisfaction in having knocked the Americans off balance and having disrupted Allied plans farther north. “Hate to disappoint you,” Alexander wired to Churchill on February 27, “but final victory in North Africa is not just around the corner.”

From the Kremlin, Stalin watched these events narrowly. When Churchill reported to him the “sharp local reverses” of February and hinted that clearing the Axis out of Africa was now hoped for by the end of April, Stalin could not conceal his anger. In mid-March he cabled to Roosevelt and Churchill:

“…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….Meanwhile Germany has succeeded in moving from the West 36 divisions, including six armored ones, to be used against Soviet troops.” Once again he listed the broken promises of the second 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 before the Anglo-Americans ever got into Europe? That United Nations unity in war and peace might be injured beyond repair? That he might go it alone, militarily and diplomatically? That he might even make a deal with Hitler? Roosevelt and Churchill pondered these questions. Then at the end of March the already glacial relations between Moscow and the West turned even colder when Churchill informed Stalin of another Anglo-American decision.

The trouble lay in the Atlantic. Allied losses by the end of 1942 had exceeded construction by well over a million tons. Heavy gales in the North Atlantic had frustrated the U-boats during the early weeks of 1943, but in March the wolf packs began again to score heavily against the convoys. The most perilous point was the northern reaches of Norway, where the Germans had poised the
Tirpitz,
the
Scharnhorst,
and other warships. Churchill did not dare put his Home Fleet at the mercy of enemy U-boats and shore-based bombers, and he feared that if one or two of his battleships were knocked out of action, the whole command of the Atlantic would be jeopardized.

For the Prime Minister there was only one solution: postpone all convoys to Russia. The President concurred on canceling the scheduled March convoy, but he urged that Stalin not be informed
until August or September that all convoys must be suspended. The news would be a heavy additional blow for the Kremlin, he argued, and nobody could be sure of the situation four or five months hence anyway. Churchill waited a week, but after Stalin sent a couple of congratulatory notes about impending Tunisian operations, he manfully decided to break the news. On March 30 he described to Stalin the situation in the North Atlantic and stated that “orders have, therefore, been issued that the sailing of the March convoy is to be postponed.” He and Roosevelt were greatly disappointed, he went on. “At the same time we feel it only right to let you know at once that it will not be possible to continue convoys by the northern route after early May, since from that time onwards every single escort vessel will be required to support our offensive operations in the Mediterranean, leaving only a minimum to safeguard our lifelines in the Atlantic.” If the attack on Sicily went well and the Atlantic situation permitted, “we should hope to resume convoys in early September.” Meantime he and Roosevelt would try to increase the flow of supplies by the southern and Pacific routes.

It was a jolting blow to the Kremlin, and an infuriating one. Postponement of the second front had been serious enough, but the Allies had always contended that at least they would get war supplies to the Russian front, where troops
were
engaging the Germans on a huge scale. Now, to have the crucial northern supply route cut off—and cut off to support a Mediterranean operation that the Kremlin considered at best a feeble substitute for a cross-channel attack, and at worst a means of evading it! Stalin’s answer was laconic.

“I regard this unexpected step as a catastrophic cut in the delivery of strategic raw materials and munitions to the Soviet Union by Great Britain and the U.S.A., because the Pacific route is limited in shipping and none too reliable, and the southern route has small clearance capacity, which means that those two routes cannot make up for the cessation of deliveries by the northern route. It goes without saying that this circumstance cannot but affect the position of the Soviet troops.”