The Mantle of Command Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Maps

  Prologue

  PLACENTIA BAY

  Before the Storm

  PEARL HARBOR

  The U.S. Is Attacked!

  Hitler’s Gamble

  CHURCHILL IN THE WHITE HOUSE

  The Victory Plan

  Supreme Command

  The President’s Map Room

  Photos

  TROUBLE WITH MACARTHUR

  The Fighting General

  END OF AN EMPIRE

  Singapore

  The Mockery of the World

  The Battleground for Civilization

  INDIA

  No Hand on the Wheel

  Lessons from the Pacific

  Churchill Threatens to Resign

  The Worst Case of Jitters

  Midway

  Doolittle’s Raid

  The Battle of Midway

  Photos

  TOBRUK

  Churchill’s Second Coming

  The Fall of Tobruk

  No Second Dunquerque

  Avoiding Utter Catastrophe

  JAPAN FIRST

  Citizen Warriors

  A Staggering Crisis

  A Rough Day

  THE MUTINY

  Stimson’s Bet

  A Definite Decision

  A Failed Mutiny

  Reaction in Moscow

  Stalin’s Prayer

  AN INDUSTRIAL MIRACLE

  A Trip Across America

  The President’s Loyal Lieutenant

  THE TRAGEDY OF DIEPPE

  A Canadian Bloodbath

  The Torch Is Lit

  Something in West Africa

  Alamein

  First Light

  The Greatest Sensation

  Armistice Day

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  This one is for my grandchildren, spread across the world:

  Sophie, Oskari, Toby, and Matthew

  Copyright © 2014 by Nigel Hamilton

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Hamilton, Nigel.

  The mantle of command : FDR at war, 1941–1942 / Nigel Hamilton.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-547-77524-1 (hardcover)

  1. World War, 1939–1945—United States. 2. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945 3. World War, 1939–1945—United States—Biography. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Diplomatic history. 5. Command of troops—United States—Case studies. 6. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns. 7. Great Britain—Foreign relations—United States. 8. United States—Foreign relations—Great Britain. I. Title.

  D753.H25 2014

  940.54'1273—dc23 2013045586

  eISBN 978-0-547-77525-8

  v1.0514

  The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following: War Diaries, 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates. Diary of Lord Halifax, 1941–1942, reprinted by permission of the Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York. Diary of Thomas C. Hart, reprinted by permission of the Operational Archives Branch, Naval Historical Center, Washington, D.C. Letters and diaries of Margaret Lynch Suckley, reprinted by permission of the Wilderstein Preservation, Rhinebeck, N.Y.

  Prologue

  WE CAN VIEW World War II from many angles, military to moral. Many fine books have been written about the struggle—perhaps the most famous being Winston Churchill’s The Second World War, in six volumes, which helped the former British prime minister to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  The Mantle of Command: FDR at War is my attempt to retell the story of the military direction of the Second World War from a different perspective: that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his role as U.S. commander in chief.

  Following Pearl Harbor there were many calls for Roosevelt to hand over direction of America’s world war to a military man: a professional like General Douglas MacArthur, the former U.S. Army chief of staff, who was serving in the Philippines. FDR rejected such calls—arguing that, as U.S. president, he was the U.S. commander in chief, and the Constitution made him so. As Alexander Hamilton had written in Federalist No. 74, the President of the United States was to have “the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral” of the nation. This Roosevelt was, whether people liked it or not. “What is clearer than that the framers meant the President to be the chief executive in peace,” he said to his doctor, Ross McIntire, “and in war the commander in chief?”1

  Nevertheless, the military challenges facing Roosevelt as commander in chief were greater than any that had confronted his predecessors: America assailed by a coalition of three twentieth-century military empires—Hitler’s Third Reich, Mussolini’s Italian Empire, and Hirohito’s Empire of Japan—seeking, in a Tripartite Pact, to remake the modern world in their own image. To this end they had revolutionized warfare: Nazi Blitzkrieg in Europe, and dazzling, ruthless amphibious invasions in the Far East by the Japanese.

  How Roosevelt responded to those challenges as his nation’s military commander is thus the burden of my new account. It is a story that, astonishingly, has never really been chronicled. Roosevelt himself did not live to tell it, as he had hoped he would, in retirement;2 Churchill, surviving the war, did, in incomparable prose—but very much from his own point of view.

  Succeeding generations of writers and historians have certainly addressed Roosevelt’s career, but primarily as statesman and politician rather than as commander in chief. As far as the military direction of the war was concerned, such writers tended to ignore or downplay the President’s role, focusing instead on Allied global strategy or on Roosevelt’s subordinates and field commanders: General Marshall, Admiral King, General Arnold, Admiral Nimitz, General MacArthur, General Eisenhower, General Patton, General Bradley, and other World War II warriors.3 As a result, the popular image of President Roosevelt has become one of a great and august moral leader of his nation: an inspiring figure on a world stage, but one who largely delegated the “business of war” to others—including Winston Churchill.

  General George C. Marshall, for example, once remarked to the chief of staff of the British Army, General Alan Brooke, that Brooke was lucky to see the Prime Minister almost every day in London; in Washington, by contrast, Marshall—who was chief of staff of the U.S. Army—often did not see the President “for a month or six weeks.”4

  Marshall was exaggerating; moreover, he was expressing a very different frustration from the one the majority of writers have taken him to mean. Marshall was, in reality, complaining that President Roosevelt was making all the major military decisions at the White House, rather than allowing Marshall to make them at the War Department—and worse still, not allowing his U.S. Army chief of staff to contest them, or give advice, unless by appointment with the President.

  This was a deliberate stratagem, as I hope The Mantle of Command will demonstrate. Deference to the military by political leaders in World War I had permitted the senseless battles of attrition on the Western Front. For this reason the President was unwilling to delegate something as important as world war to �
��professionals.” Keeping General Marshall and Admiral Ernest King as separate though equal supplicants, the President intentionally sought to assert his ultimate authority as commander in chief: a power he kept strictly within the parameters of the U.S. Constitution, but which brooked no real opposition to his wishes or decisions—until the fateful day in 1942 when his military officials attempted a quasi mutiny, which is the centerpiece of this book.

  The story of how America’s commander in chief conducted World War II in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, then, is almost the polar opposite of what we have been led, for the most part, to believe.5 It is also more freighted, since the stakes for America and the free world in 1942 were perhaps the most serious in global history.

  Tracing afresh how Roosevelt dealt with the military challenges he faced as commander in chief following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor allows us to see him in perhaps his greatest hour—setting and maintaining the moral agenda of the United Nations (as he christened the Allied powers), while slowly but surely turning defeat into relentless victory. His handling of General MacArthur and the manner in which he kept the Filipino forces fighting as allies of an embattled America, rather than giving in to the Japanese, was but one of his extraordinary achievements of the succeeding months as, swatting the persistent machinations and rumblings of near treason in the U.S. War Department, Roosevelt finally overruled his subordinates and, ordering into battle the largest American amphibious invasion force in the nation’s history, his legions set out from shores three thousand miles apart to turn the tide of war against Hitler—astonishing the world, as they did so, and giving rise to the slogan that would hearten millions across Europe: “The Americans are coming!”

  Side by side with this perspective, The Mantle of Command seeks to tell another story that has been largely downplayed or obscured in the decades since World War II: namely the collapse of the British Empire in the weeks and months after Pearl Harbor.

  As prime minister of Great Britain, Winston S. Churchill had become an emblem of his island country’s noble resistance to Nazi tyranny in 1940 and 1941—so much so that writers and historians, following in the literary footsteps of Churchill’s own multivolume account, have tended to overlook his often suspect leadership thereafter. In particular, Churchill’s imperialist obsession over India, and the crisis this led to in his military relations with President Roosevelt in the spring of 1942, have been largely ignored in terms of their significance.

  A third perspective that I feel has been neglected or underappreciated in relation to Franklin Delano Roosevelt was his modus operandi in the White House—and the consequences this has had for the writing of history. Paralyzed from the waist down after contracting polio in 1921, the President led a very different life from that of the British war leader. Winston Churchill was from childhood a romantic historian and journalist who loved to travel and put everything he thought or witnessed on paper—indeed, he made his living, his entire life, primarily by his writing. He also loved speechifying, holding forth with inimitable turns of phrase and perception to gatherings small and large. As his own doctor observed, he was not a good listener—and many of his worst mistakes as his nation’s war leader stemmed from this.

  Franklin Roosevelt, by contrast, was a very good listener. Though he could, as his mother’s only child, be perfectly content on his own, reading or pasting items into his beloved stamp albums, Roosevelt also loved getting to know people, and enjoyed true conversation. He had earlier edited his university’s newspaper; as a politician in a democracy made vibrant by an unfettered press and deeply partisan Congress, however, he came to distrust paper save as annotated records to be kept locked in his “‘Safe’ and Confidential Files” in his eventual presidential library at Hyde Park on the Hudson. These were the documents he thought he would eventually employ to reconstruct, once the war was over, the greatest drama of his life: his struggle to impose a moral, postimperial vision on his coalition wartime partners, and how he had been compelled by circumstances to supplant the United Kingdom as guardian of the world’s democracies.

  The President did not live to write that work. Reassembling from surviving documents his role as commander in chief seventy years later is thus considerably harder than it has been for writers seeking to portray and chronicle Churchill as wartime British prime minister. Piecing together the evidence not only from archival records but authentic wartime diaries, as well as the testimony of President Roosevelt’s last surviving Map Room officer, I hope nevertheless that I’ve been able to restore for the reader something of the drama, the issues, and the confrontations Roosevelt faced, as well as the historic decisions he had to make as commander in chief in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.

  From the vantage point of Roosevelt’s Oval Study, Oval Office, and his ground-floor Map Room at the White House, as well as his mansion at Hyde Park and Shangri-la (his presidential retreat, or camp, in the Maryland hills), the true story of FDR’s conduct of the war bears little semblance to the picture Winston Churchill was at pains to chart in later years. Nor was it always perceived by outsiders, who found themselves charmed by Franklin Roosevelt’s easy manner, and were not witnesses to the Commander in Chief’s iron glove. General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, for example, had “retained the family’s Republicanism and joined naturally in the exhilarating exercise of Roosevelt-hating” for his New Deal policies, in the words of his biographer; the general’s contempt for the President got no better once war began. As Stilwell sniffed in his diary, Roosevelt was a “rank amateur in all military matters,”6 and “completely hypnotized by the British,” who had “his ear, while we have the hind tit.”7 Churchill’s right-hand military man, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, reflected in later years that, in contrast to his own master, the “President had no military knowledge and was aware of this fact and consequently relied on Marshall and listened to Marshall’s advice.”8

  How little Sir Alan Brooke, as a British officer, knew! Churchill did, however—especially once his beloved British Empire began to collapse. It was not for nothing that the Prime Minister, waving goodbye to the President’s plane some weeks after the successful American landings in Northwest Africa which turned the tide of World War II, remarked to the U.S. vice consul in Marrakesh: “If anything happened to that man, I couldn’t stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the furthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.”9

  The Mantle of Command, then, focuses for the first time on Roosevelt’s military odyssey in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor—the personal, strategic, staffing, and command decisions he was called upon to make, in the context of the challenges he faced. In the interests of brevity I have focused on fourteen episodes, beginning with the President’s historic meeting with Prime Minister Churchill on August 9, 1941, aboard their battleships in Placentia Bay, off the coast of Newfoundland, and ending with the first major landing of American troops on the threshold of Europe, in North Africa in late 1942. This time frame reveals Roosevelt’s evolution from noncombatant supporter of Churchill, to become the master of the Allied effort, a commander in chief who took control of the war not only from his ally but from his own generals.

  How accurately President Roosevelt read the demented mind of the Nazi führer; how, after ensuring U.S. naval victory in the Pacific, he turned his attention back toward Europe; how he overruled his generals and insisted upon American landings in French Northwest Africa in 1942, rather than a suicidal “Second Front” assault on the coast of mainland France—these marked a remarkable reversal of fortune for the Allies, and testify to Roosevelt’s extraordinary military leadership: the saga reaching its climax as he sent into battle the massive American air, army, and naval forces that, on November 8, 1942, stunned Hitler and changed the course of World War II.

  The tough challenges that came thereafter are the subject of another book. In the meantime, though, I hope these fourteen episodes will allow us to better understand the global test that Franklin Roosevelt faced as his country�
�s military leader in the months following America’s terrible defeat in Hawaii—and perhaps better appreciate the wisdom of Churchill’s valedictory remark, seven decades ago.

  PART ONE

  PLACENTIA BAY

  1

  Before the Storm

  THE “PLAN OF ESCAPE,” as Roosevelt called it, was simple. It was also deceitful—the sort of adventure that the President, confined to the White House by the burden of his responsibilities as well as his wheelchair, loved. He would pretend to go on a fishing trip on his 165-foot presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, similar to the vacation he had taken earlier in the spring. In reality he would secretly transfer from the “floating White House” to an American battleship or cruiser lying off the New England coast, then race up to Canadian waters to meet with the embattled British prime minister, Mr. Winston Churchill: the man who for more than a year had been leading his country in a lonely struggle against the Third Reich, following the fall of France and most of Europe.

  FDR had suggested such a meeting several times since January 1941, when his emissary, Harry Hopkins, first put the idea to Churchill on a visit to London. The purpose was, according to Roosevelt’s own account (which he dictated for the historical record and a magazine article—one that, sadly, he never completed), “to talk over the problem of the defeat of Germany.”1

  The proposed date “mentioned at that time,” the President stated in his narrative, was to be “March or April” of that spring. However, the tortuous passage of the vast Lend-Lease bill through Congress and other important legislation made it impossible for him to leave Washington before the early summer, “and by that time the war in Greece—and later the war in Crete—prevented Churchill,” Roosevelt explained. “The trip was mentioned again in May and June,” the President narrated—but talk of such a meeting was overshadowed by a more momentous event than Hitler’s predations in the Mediterranean. For on June 22, 1941, the German invasion of Russia began—Hitler launching several million mobilized German troops in a do-or-die effort to smash the Soviet Union before turning back to the problematic invasion of England.2