Roosevelt (70 page)

Old friends were passing. Rudolph Forster, who had taken a job at the White House the day after McKinley’s first inauguration, died in the summer of 1943, and Marvin McIntyre, who had worked for Roosevelt over a twenty-five-year stretch, at the end of the year. As usual the President expressed his public sorrow and withheld his private grief. Missy LeHand was seriously ill. Eleanor Roosevelt was off to the four corners of the globe, including Australia, New Zealand, and the South Sea islands. The President had at least two heavy illnesses during the year. He told Churchill that he had picked up “Gambia fever” in “that hell-hole of yours called Bathurst,” and after he was laid up again in October he complained gaily—again to Churchill—“It is a nuisenza to have the influenza.”

“We will have no truck with Fascism in any way, in any shape or manner,” the President had proclaimed in his July 28 fireside chat. In fact, things were not so simple. The Badoglio government could
still negotiate with Hitler for protection. “The war will continue,” Rome announced. The Führer, his divisions poised to take the country over, reacted with his usual fury. “Jodl,” he exclaimed, “work out the usual order.” Panzer troops were to drive into Rome with their assault guns and “oust the government, the king, and the whole crew.” And he would rescue his friend Mussolini. “I’ll go right into the Vatican,” Hitler declaimed. “Do you think the Vatican embarrasses me? We’ll take that over right away.” He would get hold of the whole diplomatic corps in there—“that rabble…that bunch of swine.” For the moment, though, he was content to mobilize his division and poise them on the Alpine passes.

Like Darlan nine months before, Badoglio had some strong cards: the Italian fleet, some loyal divisions, a structure of government. He also had—no small matter to Churchill—74,000 British prisoners of war, whom he could send into Nazi hands in Germany. It was the same old dilemma: the President wanted to establish a clear moral principle in dramatizing Axis defeat, extirpating fascism, clearing the slate, but immediate military necessity outweighed all. So he allowed Churchill to play down unconditional surrender, while he negotiated with Badoglio. His liberal critics were still protesting. Some “contentious people,” he warned Churchill, were ready to make a row if the Allies recognized Badoglio or the House of Savoy. They were the same people who had “made such a fuss” over Darlan. Roosevelt still feared anarchy in Italy and the number of Allied troops that would be needed to restore order.

It was precisely Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s concern about social unrest that worried more thoughtful liberals. “Allied public opinion would make no worse mistake,” Count Carlo Sforza wrote in the New York
Times,
“than showing itself afraid of the so-called danger of revolution. This fear was the best ally of Hitler and Mussolini during the many years of Chamberlain’s blindness….” Alvarez Del Vayo, veteran Spanish antifascist and editor of the
Nation
’s political-war section, complained about the lack of a clear, democratic, antifascist policy. But Roosevelt was concentrating at the moment on military, not political, policy, on the invasion of Italy and the mounting campaign against Germany.

On August 5 Churchill embarked on the
Queen Mary
for a conference in Quebec. That same day he reported to Roosevelt the first peace feelers from Rome. He also passed on alarming intelligence about Italy. As every vestige of Italian rule was swept away, Italy was turning red overnight. Communist demonstrators had been put down by armed force in the northern cities; the middle class had been obliterated, Churchill reported; nothing stood
between the patriots rallying around the King and “rampant Bolshevism.” The Germans were ready to take over. In these circumstances the King and Badoglio would have to put up a show of fighting the Allies, but this would be only a pretense. “If we cannot attack Germany immediately through the Balkans, thus causing German withdrawal from Italy, the sooner we land in Italy the better.”

While Roosevelt and Churchill were exchanging messages about Italy the Prime Minister and his party—the largest yet, including Mrs. Churchill, their daughter Mary, and a staff of over two hundred—were sailing west. As usual intensive staff planning took place en route. After arriving in Halifax August 9 and checking arrangements in Quebec, where ramps had been specially built for the President on the upper floor of the Citadel, Churchill and his daughter traveled to Hyde Park. Detouring to show Mary Niagara Falls, he told local reporters that he had seen the waterfall thirty years before and the principle of the thing still seemed the same. At Hyde Park, Churchill found the President his usual hospitable self, the weather stifling, and Hopkins ailing and fearing that he had lost favor with his chief. But in two days it seemed like old times again. Soon the party moved north to Quebec for the parley.

Once again Roosevelt’s military staffs had tried to prepare as carefully for a conference as had Churchill’s. The crucial factor, they knew, was the backing their Commander in Chief would give them. Marshall had confronted Roosevelt on the cross-channel issue with all his moral and military authority. Remembering the apparent decision for
ROUNDUP
the year before, followed by the diversion to North Africa, the Chief of Staff set himself categorically against further peripheralism. Stimson, just back from London, where he had argued about cross-channel plans with Churchill face to face, took an even firmer line with his chief. “We cannot rationally hope to be able to come to grips with our German enemy under a British commander,” he told Roosevelt. The shadows of Passchendaele and Dunkerque hung too heavily over the British. They were giving it only lip service, the Secretary said. They still felt that Germany could be beaten by attrition, but that kind of pinprick warfare would never fool Stalin.

Stimson appealed to Roosevelt’s sense of history. “We are facing a difficult year at home with timid and hostile hearts ready to seize and exploit any wavering on the part of our war leadership. A firm resolute leadership, on the other hand, will go far to silence such voices. The American people showed this in the terrible year of 1864, when the firm unfaltering tactics of the Virginia campaign were endorsed by the people of the United States in spite of the hideous losses of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, and Cold Harbor.”

If Roosevelt’s spine had to be stiffened for the cross-channel decision, Stimson’s and Marshall’s pressure did the trick. Faced by a firm and united American stand at Quebec, the British were now ready to make the cross-channel pledge, but they still fought for a bigger effort in Italy, in part, they said, as a way to strengthen preparations for the invasion of France. Even so, Churchill argued against any attack in France unless the Allies had clear ground and air superiority. For days the Combined Chiefs debated strenuously about the right mix of forces for the cross-channel build-up and for Italy, with Roosevelt and Churchill each backing his own chiefs. In the end it was agreed that the main Anglo-American effort would be across the Channel, with a target date of May 1, 1944. The Mediterranean effort would be pressed, too, with the aim of knocking Italy out of the war and seizing the Rome area for air bases. And an invasion of southern France—a project Churchill had long resisted and would never fully accept—was planned in connection with the thrust into the north.

The agony of Italy kept obtruding into the quiet rooms overlooking the parapets of the once-embattled fortress. Badoglio was still transfixed between the growing Nazi power north of Rome and the looming Allied invasion of the Italian toe from Sicily. There was a long hiatus while the opposing forces stayed in balance and Badoglio put out frantic peace feelers in Spain and Portugal. The Allies were insisting on unconditional surrender while hinting at easier arrangements later. It was like a dialogue of sleepwalkers, each the victim of his own hallucinations, two historians concluded later: “In the nightmare of the German occupation, Italy gasped, ‘Help, I am not free.’ After a long pause, the Allies replied, ‘Say Uncle.’ ”

Essentially Roosevelt had wanted Eisenhower to obtain a simple unconditional surrender formally while indicating favorable treatment later, depending on the extent of Italian assistance to the Allies. The British had preferred that the immediate military settlement be related to long-term political arrangements. At Quebec the President went along with the British approach. But military events were already taking control of diplomacy and negotiation. Before dawn on September 3 the British Eighth Army began to stream across the Strait of Messina and onto the Italian mainland. On the same day Italian representatives, after further tortuous negotiations, signed military terms of surrender in an olive grove near Syracuse. It was certain that announcement of this action would bring quick German retaliation, so General Maxwell Taylor slipped into Rome to arrange with the Italian General Staff for a sudden seizure by air-borne troops of the airfields around Rome. He was too late; the Nazis had arrived first with the most. Taylor’s
air descent was canceled, but the armistice was announced. Italy had surrendered.

Now events accelerated. The Germans began to encircle Rome; the royal family and Badoglio and his officials escaped to Brindisi; Italian fleet units, heavily bombed by the Nazis, made their way to the sanctuary of Malta. Mussolini, who had been moved to a mountain resort in central Italy, was plucked out of confinement by ninety German parachutists, who carried him off to a triumphant reunion with Hitler. Meantime the Allies had launched their climactic blow against Italy.

On September 9 American and British forces landed on a great crescent of beaches at Salerno, about thirty miles south of Naples. Against fierce but scattered opposition the infantry moved across the narrow plain toward the jagged mountains beyond. On the eve of invasion the troops had heard of Italy’s surrender, but the Germans had expertly taken over the defense of the area, so the opposition was stiffer than had been expected. Field Marshal Albert Kesselring was relieved that the Allies had not landed closer to Rome; as it was, the invasion was so far south that he was able to clamp a firm grip on the capital area. But Salerno was also far enough south to enable General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army to enjoy heavy air cover and to link up with Montgomery’s Eighth Army working its way from Taranto and the instep of the Italian boot.

Four days after the landing at Salerno the Germans mustered enough combat power to launch major thrusts against Allied positions and to try to cut in between the landing forces. They almost succeeded. American artillerymen and antitank units, supported by naval gunfire, bore the brunt of the attack, and despite one precipitous retreat the defenders held on to their beachhead. A week after D day patrols from the Fifth Army and the Eighth Army joined hands.

Roosevelt and Churchill had been together at Hyde Park when the battle began. The Prime Minister was ill at ease because he was reminding himself of battles lost over the centuries when generals had failed to press ahead vigorously. He dispatched reminders to the men in the field, while Roosevelt left matters in the hands of Eisenhower and his subordinates. After the fortunes of battle turned, Churchill congratulated Eisenhower: “As the Duke of Wellington said at the Battle of Waterloo, ‘It was a damned close-run thing.’ ” Stalin telegraphed to Roosevelt and Churchill that the landing in the Naples area would considerably facilitate the Red Army’s operations on the Soviet-German front. In Italy, Allied soldiers regrouped and began pursuing the enemy north through the narrow defiles between Salerno and Naples. The Germans conducted a slow, hurtful retreat, but on October 1 Allied forces seized Naples.
The successful invasion of Italy opened new military and political opportunities for the President; it also brought military and political dilemmas. Relations with Iberians, French, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Turks, and the peoples along the southern rim of the inland sea were affected by the advances of Allied soldiers up the boot of Italy. Much of Roosevelt’s political effort in the months ahead was aimed at enlisting the active support, or at least the passive co-operation, of the Mediterranean nations—nations steeped in age-old enmities and suspicions toward one another and toward the great powers.

On the Mediterranean also lay Palestine, a haven and a dilemma. Of all the opportunities now before Roosevelt the most hopeful and the most tragic was the fate of Europe’s Jews. Tens of thousands of them survived perilously in Nazi-occupied Europe, and their escape lines lay mainly across the Mediterranean. During 1942 reports had trickled into the White House of a Nazi decision so appalling that administration officials could not believe them and asked representatives abroad to check and verify. The reports were of Hitler’s order for the “final solution” of the racial problem through the wholesale rounding up and systematic murder of all the Jews under Nazi control. The reports were true.

The President had, of course, been concerned about the plight of the Jews ever since Hitler took power in 1933. During the war he had repeatedly attacked the Nazis for their crimes and warned that the guilty, high and low, would be punished. Late in 1942 he announced the plan of the United Nations to establish a commission to investigate war crimes. It was clear, however, that the deterrent effect of these warnings would be small. Tens of thousands of Jews were being murdered every month. Rising popular concern in both Britain and America was demanding quick action. In December 1942 Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, head of the American Jewish Congress, wrote to the President.

“Dear Boss, I do not wish to add an atom to the awful burden which you are bearing with magic and, as I believe, heaven-inspired strength at this time. But you do know that the most overwhelming disaster of Jewish history has befallen Jews in the form of the Hitler mass-massacres.” At least two million civilian Jews had already been slain, Wise said. He asked the President to meet with Jewish leaders. At that meeting, just a year after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was handed a twenty-page document on the Nazi “Blue Print for Extermination,” and he assured the group that the United States would try to save those who might yet be saved and to end the crimes. “The mills of the gods grind slowly,” he said. “But they grind exceedingly small.”