Roosevelt (59 page)

Even in his bitterness, though, Stalin could not help taking pleasure in North African developments. He had always deprecated plans and contingencies and stressed the need of simply killing and trapping masses of Hitlerites and fascists. And this is what Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s men were doing by early spring of 1943.

Everything still came hard in Africa. Hitler was determined, now that he had allowed Rommel to withdraw across North Africa, that the Afrika Korps and its reinforcements would make a long
and vigorous stand by launching forceful spoiling attacks on Allied positions. He ordered that the rate of supply across the Mediterranean be doubled and even tripled. Early in March Rommel threw four furious attacks against the Eighth Army and lost over two-score tanks to Montgomery’s massed antitank artillery. Soon after, the “Desert Fox,” ill and dispirited, gave up his command and left for his homeland, never to return to Africa. Later in the month the Eighth Army attacked Axis forces dug in on the Mareth Line, originally a French defense system built to ward off the Italians. Montgomery’s frontal attack failed, but New Zealand and other units made a wide flanking movement that routed the foe and forced him to move up toward his Tunisia bastion.

American troops made contact with an Eighth Army patrol in a joyous union early in April. The two armies that had started 2,000 miles apart, Churchill noted, were at last joined together. In an effort to rejuvenate II Corps, which was still licking its wounds from the February setbacks, Eisenhower had put Patton in command. In April, with Patton driving and goading his commanders, II Corps’ armored and infantry units tried to push eastward to the sea and thus cut off Axis troops moving up the coast under pressure from Montgomery to the south. Despite Patton’s colorful leadership, the attack faltered, and most of the Germans managed to make good their retreat northward. Some in the British command now wanted to send II Corps divisions into rear areas for more training, or at least to parcel them among the more experienced corps, but Marshall and Eisenhower would have none of it. They insisted that the corps be preserved as a unit and given a chance to be in on the final victory, learning the art of battle while it fought. Alexander concurred, but had the whole corps leapfrog north to a new sector adjoining the Mediterranean.

By the end of April Allied troops had compressed German and Italian forces into a shrinking area of northern Tunisia. Escape had been cut off; it was now, as Churchill said, “scrunch and punch.” British and American fighters were pouncing on convoys of Axis air transports, bringing down fifty planes one day, fifteen another, thirty another. Hitler’s commanders were scouring the Italian coast for small craft and fishing boats, to little avail. Early in May Allied armored troops punched through the German defenses, entered Tunis, and then lunged north to link up with American forces that were overrunning Bizerte. After valiant fighting, the enemy units began to disintegrate. The victors were amazed to see long lines of Germans driving in their own trucks and carts in search of prisoner-of-war cages. Almost a quarter-million prisoners were taken, about half of them German. The victory of Tunisia, Churchill felt, could hold its own with Stalingrad.

Early in April Hitler and Mussolini had met at Berchtesgaden. They were still hopeful. A month later, back in his Eastern Front headquarters, Hitler knew that the African situation was hopeless. He stood by his decision. “Naturally,” he said to some officers, “I have tried to reckon whether the undertaking in Tunis, which eventually led to the loss of both men and equipment, was justified. I have come to the following conclusion; by the occupation of Tunisia we have succeeded in postponing the invasion of Europe by six months. More important still, Italy is as a result still a member of the Axis.” If he had not stood in Tunisia, he went on, the Allies would have landed in Italy unopposed and pushed up to the Brenner Pass, with German resistance weakened again because of the Russian break-through at Stalingrad. “That would inevitably have led rapidly to the loss of the war.”

Stalin could make the same calculation. The capture of Tunisia had taken much longer than his allies had expected, and he could not but consider the implications for the second front. But facts—especially Hitlerites killed—were the main thing, and now the Anglo-Americans were slaying Germans. At the height of the battle he told Churchill he hoped he would capture as much booty as possible, as well as finish off the enemy and take prisoners. At the end he wired to Roosevelt: “I congratulate you and the gallant U.S. and British troops on the brilliant victory which has resulted in the liberation of Bizerte and Tunis from Hitler tyranny. I wish you further success.”

W
ELL, IT IS NOW
60 hours since the Old Smiler returned to the White House from his great adventure,” William Allen White wrote in his
Gazette
on Roosevelt’s return from Casablanca. “Biting nails—good, hard, bitter Republican nails—we are compelled to admit that Franklin Roosevelt is the most unaccountable and on the whole the most enemy-baffling President that this United States has ever seen…a certain vast impudent courage….Well, damn your smiling old picture, here it is….We, who hate your gaudy guts, salute you.”

Not all the Roosevelt watchers back home were as gallant as the old Kansas Republican. After the first flush of excitement over the President’s trip abroad, Washington seemed to revert to its usual condition of guerrilla warfare. Power was so fragmented on Capitol Hill that Congress was able neither to support the President’s domestic program wholeheartedly nor to muster support for real alternatives. But Congress could always investigate. The Dies Committee girded itself for further onslaughts against federal bureaucrats. Congressman Howard W. Smith, of Virginia, long a conservative Democratic foe of the President, fished for administrative failures.

Politics seemed to have fallen to a new wartime low of spite and pettiness. The kind of publicity that the President particularly detested was aroused by his provocative nomination early in January of Edward J. Flynn as Minister to Australia. Flynn had been exonerated of the much-publicized charge of having city workers pave a courtyard of his country home with city-owned paving blocks, but the chairman of the third-term campaign was still fair game. Willkie called the nomination crassly cynical. Flynn ran into such heavy weather on Capitol Hill that, by mutual agreement, the President withdrew his nomination. It did not help matters that during the furore over Edward Flynn the movie actor Errol Flynn was undergoing a lurid trial for statutory rape of two teen-agers, or that the other Flynn also was found not guilty.

Some of Roosevelt’s friends were as critical of the defense effort as
his enemies. “One year after Pearl Harbor,” reported a Senate Education and Labor Subcommittee headed by New Deal Senator Claude Pepper, “the Nation looks in vain for a unified program of all-out war production. Each new crisis in production evokes a piecemeal attempt at solution.” In the House, the Tolan Committee called for an end to “the drift” in war production. Washington infighting seemed brisker than ever. Czars jousted with czars, army officials with Navy, civilians with soldiers. The manpower program was in a muddle. Senator Vandenberg complained in his diary of a “complete and total lack of authentic liaison between the White House and Congress in respect to war responsibilities.”

The President sailed through all these reefs and shoals with his usual outward imperturbability and private annoyance. Editor White watched Roosevelt at a press conference on February 12. “He seemed to be gay, sure of himself, a bit festive at times, informative, indeed illuminating,” noted the long-time observer of famous men. He noticed that Roosevelt had grown notably heavier since coming to the White House. But “his growth has not been in paunch. It has been above his navel. His shoulders have widened. His neck and jowls have filled out. His head has taken a new form….” Roosevelt was a vital person, White kept thinking. But that night, sitting after dinner in the new Statler Hotel while Roosevelt gave a Lincoln’s Day speech, he felt that in the few hours Roosevelt had grown tired. His voice seemed to lose its fire. In the final sentences his voice dropped, and White could hardly hear him.

White ruminated on Roosevelt’s enemies. There were two Republican schools of thought about the President. One “speaks of him trippingly on the tongue as that ‘God damn Roosevelt,’ short, snappy, and staccato, but without grinding the vocal gears. The other crowd snarls it savagely, adagio, making two words out of God—like Gawud—and two out of damn—like da-yum—growled with heart-pumping scorn and generally with a table-pounding drumbeat. I belong to the lighter, staccato left wing….”

After a year or so of “all-out” war mobilization, though, some in Washington were wondering if the President as Chief Executive was not his own worst enemy.

In a farsighted move a year and a half before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had established the Office for Emergency Management in the Executive Office of the President. The OEM had become a peculiarly Rooseveltian instrument—flexible, informal, adaptable—for spawning, nourishing, and embracing a host of defense units that
Roosevelt could not fit easily into the existing departmental structure and that captured far more public attention than the mother office ever did. The OEM, indeed, later was pushed aside, but the concept and spirit of
emergency management
hung over all the fifty or sixty war agencies that would come to life. The origin of the two words is not clear; probably they were Roosevelt’s. Certainly they summed up the curious combination of orderly management and crisis government that characterized his war administration.

That administration never settled down; it never freed itself of the prod and aura of crisis. The rapidly changing battle needs, the stupendous appetite for war production, the ever-shifting impact of science and technology, the zest and combativeness of the chieftains Roosevelt recruited for his war agencies, and the President’s own administrative habits kept his regime in almost constant turmoil. Students of public administration would long argue whether the creativity, flexibility, competitiveness, even rugged individualism nurtured by those habits outweighed the wasted effort, faulty coordination, disorder, delays, muddle. The striking fact was that the White House itself, despite its boasts and claims, was never really satisfied with its organization for war, as evidenced by its continual making and breaking of war chiefs and their agencies until the European war was almost over.

On the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor—two and one half years after the United States began its first serious mobilization, in the wake of the fall of France—the administration still faced crises of production. The nation had not achieved the balanced, assured output necessary for its great offensives in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Production of military airplanes more than doubled from 1941 to 1942 but was still short of the President’s call for 60,000 planes; the output of combat planes fell even more below his goals. The navy yards turned out an aircraft carrier and a dozen battleships and cruisers, but the loss of four carriers and five heavy cruisers in 1942 still left fleet strength little greater at the end of 1942 than before Pearl Harbor. Landing-craft output skyrocketed but lagged behind both goals and needs. The production of merchant ships totaled over eight million tons—seven times the 1941 output—but still a million tons short of the President’s announced goal—a serious lag considering that the Allies had lost an average of a million tons a month. Somervell admitted to Raymond Clapper on the last day of 1942 that shipment of four hundred tanks to North Africa had cleared out the surplus. Artillery and machine-gun turnout was also short.

The President had been a little defensive about war production in his State of the Union address to Congress in January 1943.
He granted that plane and tank production fell short numerically—“stress the word numerically”—but noted that models were changing, becoming heavier and more complex. The arsenal of democracy, he said, was making good, and he hit out at criticism based on guesswork and malicious falsification. But he remained dissatisfied with war production during early 1943. “The war goes on and on—” he wrote to Beaverbrook in March, “and while I think we are gaining, it is difficult for you and me to curb our impatience, especially when our military and naval friends keep saying that this cannot be done and that cannot be done and this time schedule seems so everlastingly slow to us.” A few weeks later Baruch reported that shipbuilding was going well, escort vessels improving, high-octane gasoline coming along better, but aircraft production still lagged. “We are making planes but not as many as we should.”

Manpower was a growing problem all through 1943. Manpower! For ten years the Roosevelt administration had struggled to find jobs for workers; now it had to find workers for jobs. Over-all statistics looked good but they concealed serious problems. Unemployment, which was still running at about nine million in mid-1940, fell off to less than a million by mid-1943. In the same span of time womanpower rose from almost fourteen to almost nineteen million. In February, after months of complaints by Congress and the press, Roosevelt called for a minimum wartime work week of forty-eight hours in defense plants and federal agencies; by mid-1943 average weekly hours in manufacturing were about forty-five, though shipbuilders and some others were working sixty hours or more. Turnover and absenteeism, however, continued at alarming rates. The Boeing plant in Seattle, which had 39,000 employees in June 1943, had employed 250,000 people during the previous three years. Labor supply was also uneven across the country. On the West Coast and in the Northeast it reached emergency proportions.

Roosevelt seemed curiously passive about the manpower crisis, which had been predicted months ahead. The War Manpower Commission under Paul McNutt had been unable to cope with the situation in advance, in part because the WPB and the armed services had far more control of the situation than did the commission, in part because the manpower crisis was slower in showing up than rival crises, in part because McNutt neither was a strong chief nor ran a strong agency. The President toyed with a plan to make Ickes Secretary of Labor, with control of manpower, but gave up the idea when people—including Ickes’s young wife—warned that the two jobs would be too much for the sixty-nine-year-old Interior chief. Roosevelt seemed far more upset by charges that too
many federal civilian employees were receiving deferments than by the broader problem.