Commander in Chief Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Prologue

  A Secret Journey

  A Crazy Idea

  Aboard the Magic Carpet

  Total War

  The United Nations

  What Next?

  Stalin’s Nyet

  Addressing Congress

  A Fool’s Paradise

  Facing the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  Casablanca

  The House of Happiness

  Hot Water

  A Wonderful Picture

  In the President’s Boudoir

  Unconditional Surrender

  Stimson Is Aghast

  De Gaulle

  An Acerbic Interview

  The Unconditional Surrender Meeting

  Kasserine

  Kasserine

  Arch-Admirals and Arch-Generals

  Photos I

  Between Two Forces of Evil

  Health Issues

  Get Yamamoto!

  Inspection Tour Two

  Get Yamamoto!

  “He’s Dead?”

  Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts

  Saga of the Nibelungs

  A Scene from The Arabian Nights

  The God Neptune

  A Battle Royal

  No Major Operations Until 1945 or 1946

  The Riot Act

  The Davies Mission

  A Dozen Dieppes in a Day

  The Future of the World at Stake

  The President Loses Patience

  The First Crack in the Axis

  Sicily—and Kursk

  The Führer Flies to Italy

  Countercrisis

  A Fishing Expedition in Ontario

  The President’s Judgment

  Conundrum

  Stalin Lies

  War on Two Western Fronts

  The Führer Is Very Optimistic

  Photos II

  A Cardinal Moment

  Churchill Is Stunned

  Quebec 1943

  The German Will to Fight

  Near-Homicidal Negotiations

  A Longing in the Air

  The President Is Upset—with the Russians

  The Endgame

  Close to Disaster

  A Darwinian Struggle

  A Talk with Archbishop Spellman

  The Empires of the Future

  A Tragicomedy of Errors

  Meeting Reality

  A Message to Congress

  Achieving Wonders

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Credits

  Notes

  Index

  Read More from Nigel Hamilton

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Nigel Hamilton

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hamilton, Nigel.

  Title: Commander in chief : FDR’s battle with Churchill, 1943 / Nigel Hamilton.

  Description: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt : Boston, 2016. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037253

  ISBN 9780544279117 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780544277441 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—United States. | Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945 | Churchill, Winston, 1874–1965. | World War, 1939–1945—Diplomatic history. | Command of troops—Case studies. | World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns. | Great Britain—Foreign relations—United States. | United States—Foreign relations—Great Britain.

  Classification: LCC D753 .H249 2016 | DDC 940.53/2273—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037253

  v1.0516

  Maps by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photograph © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

  The author is grateful for permission to quote from the following: Diary of Lord Halifax, 1941–1942, reprinted by permission of the Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York. Letters and diaries of Margaret Lynch Suckley, reprinted by permission of the Wilderstein Preservation, Rhinebeck, N.Y.

  For Lady Ray

  Prologue

  IN THE MANTLE OF COMMAND: FDR AT WAR, 1941–1942, I described how President Franklin Roosevelt first donned the cloak of commander in chief of the Armed Forces of the United States in war—a world war stretching from disaster at Pearl Harbor to his “great pet scheme,” Operation Torch: the triumphant Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, which stunned Hitler and signified one of the most extraordinary turnabouts in military history.

  Commander in Chief: FDR at War, 1943 addresses the next chapter of President Roosevelt’s war service: a year in which, moving to the offensive, the President had not only to direct the efforts of his generals but keep Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his “active and ardent lieutenant,” in line. Roosevelt’s struggle to keep his U.S. subordinates on track toward victory, without incurring the terrible casualties that would have greeted their military plans and timetable, proved mercifully successful that fateful year, but his assumption that Churchill would abide by the strategic agreements they had made proved illusory. Thus, although Roosevelt’s patient, step-by-step direction of the war led to historic victories of the Western Allies in Tunisia in the spring of 1943, and again in Sicily in August of that year—results that assured the President a cross-Channel assault would be decisive when launched, in the spring of 1944—the British prime minister did not agree. The President’s resultant “battle royal” with Churchill—who was in essence commander in chief of all British Empire forces—became one of the most contentious strategic debates in the history of warfare.

  This dramatic, repeated struggle forms the centerpiece or core of this volume, for it is not too bold to say that upon its outcome rested the outcome of World War II, and thus the future of humanity. The struggle took most of the year—das verlorene Jahr, as German military historians would call it. Had Churchill prevailed in his preferred strategy, the war might well have been lost for the Allies, at least in terms of the defeat of Hitler. Even though the President won out over the impetuous, ever-evasive British prime minister, the fallout from Churchill’s obstinacy and military mistakes would be profound. Not only was American trust in British sincerity severely damaged, but the need to keep the Prime Minister sweet, and loyal to the agreements he had only reluctantly made for Operation Overlord, led to dangerously naive plans for the Allied invasion of mainland Italy in September 1943—plans involving an airborne landing on Rome, and a gravely compromised amphibious landing in the Gulf of Salerno, south of Naples: Avalanche.

  The reality was, Winston Churchill had remained a Victorian not only in his colonial-imperialist mindset, as President Roosevelt often remarked, but in his understanding of modern war—and the Wehrmacht. He grievously underestimated the Wehrmacht’s determination to hold fast to the last man at the very extremity of the European mainland, giving rise to fantasies of easy Allied victory, and a possible gateway to central Europe that would make Overlord unnecessary.

  Fortunately, the President’s absolute determination in 1943 to prepare his armies for modern combat and to then stand by the Overlord assault as the decisive battle of the Western world rendered Churchill’s opposition powerless. The Prime Minister’s strategic blindness would prove tragically expensive in human life, but mer
cifully it did not lose the war for the Allies. The President may justly be said to have saved civilization—but it was a near-run thing.

  To a large extent the facts of this dark saga are well known to military historians. However, because President Roosevelt began to assemble1 but did not live to write his own account of the war’s military direction, and since others did go on to recount their own parts—sometimes with great literary skill—the President’s true role and performance as U.S. commander in chief has often gone unappreciated by general readers. Churchill, who was nothing if not magnanimous in victory, certainly attempted in his memoirs to pay tribute to Roosevelt’s leadership, but in his concern to regain the prime ministership he had lost in 1945 he could not always bring himself to tell the truth. Nor was he ashamed of this. As he had boasted after the Casablanca Conference, he fully intended to tell the story of the war from his point of view—and where necessary to suborn history to his own agenda: “to wait until the war is over and then to write his impressions so that, if necessary, he could correct or bury his mistakes.”2 During the war itself he had openly and publicly expressed his loyalty to President Roosevelt as the mastermind directing Allied strategy—a surprise even to Joseph Goebbels—but in private he nevertheless let it be known that he himself was the real directing genius. As King George VI’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, noted in his diary on November 10, 1942, though in his Mansion House speech extolling the successful U.S. invasion of Morocco and Algeria the Prime Minister “gave the credit for its original conception to Roosevelt,” Sir Alan believed “it belongs more truly to himself.”3 By the time General Eisenhower took the surrender of all Axis forces in North Africa six months later, this notion of the Prime Minister as sole military architect of Allied strategy and performance had grown to ridiculous levels. Not only was Churchill given credit for having “built up the 8th Army into the wonderful fighting machine that it has become”—despite Churchill’s original refusal to appoint General Montgomery to command the army, and his opposition to the new military tactics Montgomery was employing—but Lascelles was convinced, like King George, that “Winston is so essentially the father of the North African baby that he deserves any recognition, royal or otherwise, that can be given to him . . . He has himself publicly given the credit for ‘Torch’ to Roosevelt, but I have little doubt that W. was really its only begetter.”4

  Aided by his “syndicate” of researchers, civil servants, and historian-aides, Churchill was able to have his day in literary court, in his six-volume opus, The Second World War, which helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953—a work that, as Professor David Reynolds has shown,5 was often economical with the truth. For the memory of President Roosevelt—whose funeral Churchill had not even attended—it was, however, near-devastating, since its magisterial narrative placed Churchill at the center of the war’s direction and President Roosevelt very much at the periphery.

  In many ways, then, this book and its predecessor are a counternarrative, or corrective: my attempt to tell the story of Roosevelt’s exercise of high command from his—not Churchill’s—perspective.

  In my first volume I selected fourteen episodes, centering on President Roosevelt’s “great pet scheme”: his Torch invasion of Northwest Africa, and the near mutiny of his generals to stop this and plump instead for a suicidal invasion of northern France in 1942. In this new volume I have selected twelve representative episodes of 1943, beginning with the Casablanca Conference in January and ending with the invasion of Salerno in September. While this has entailed omitting many important events and aspects of Roosevelt’s presidency as U.S. commander in chief—some of which, like the development of the atom bomb, progress in the Pacific, and questions of saving the Jews in Europe, will be addressed in a final volume—they continue to give us a clearer picture of how President Roosevelt operated when wearing, so to speak, his military mantle in World War II. By following him closely in his study, in the Oval Office and the Map Room at the White House, at his “camp” at Shangri-la and his family home at Hyde Park; on his historic trip abroad to Africa (the first president ever to fly in office, and the first to inspect troops on the battlefield overseas); and on his long inspection tour of military installations and training camps in the United States (during which he authorized the secret air ambush of Admiral Yamamoto), we are able to see him at last as we have previously been able to see so many of his subordinate military officers and officials of World War II—that is to say, from his perspective.

  It will be noted that, as hostilities approach their climax in the fall of 1943, the political ramifications take on a more urgent role. Churchill may have been completely wrong in his understanding of the Wehrmacht, and a menace to Allied unity in his Mediterranean mania—one that drove even his own chiefs of staff to the brink of resignation. But Churchill’s understanding of the deepening rift and rivalry with the Soviets bespoke his greatness as a leader. Many thousands of miles removed from the continent of Europe, President Roosevelt needed the Prime Minister by his side not as military adviser—given that Churchill’s judgment and obstinacy were more millstone than help, as Churchill’s doctor himself recognized—but as the President’s political partner in leading the Western democracies.

  As the final pages of this volume demonstrate, Winston Churchill was thus invited to spend long weeks with the President in Washington and at Hyde Park, in a deeply symbolic act of unity—as much in confronting Stalin as Hitler.

  The degree to which President Roosevelt began to rely on Churchill’s loyal political support and his political acumen in the summer and fall of 1943—before the Tehran and Yalta Conferences—are thus a testament to the importance of their relationship in world history. Churchill had rattled the unity of the Allies that year to the very brink of collapse by pressing for a military strategy that would arguably have lost the war for the Allies had not President Roosevelt overruled him. In political terms, however, it was to be his steadfast, statesmanlike partnership with the President of the United States that would ensure the democracies, under their combined leadership, had at least a chance of ending World War II with western Europe under safe guardianship in relation to Soviet “Bolshevization.”

  To better understand FDR’s direction of the military is thus to me important not only in terms of a greater appreciation of President Roosevelt’s actions, but in understanding the foundations of the world we live in today. From boasting only the world’s seventeenth-most-powerful military in 1939, the United States gradually took upon itself the successful leadership of the democratic world under Roosevelt’s command—and became the most powerful nation on earth, bar none. How exactly President Roosevelt directed this transformation and the operations of his armed forces across the globe—with what aims, with what challenges, with what lessons—is to me of abiding interest in the world we’ve inherited. For good or ill, America’s military power under a freely elected president remains in large part the basis of the continuing role of the United States in attempting to provide leadership and world security, however imperfect.

  This, then, is the record of FDR as U.S. commander in chief in the crucial year 1943—a year in which the United States went on the offensive both in the West and in the East—as seen from the President’s point of view. Upon his leadership depended the outcome of the world war: success or failure.

  PART ONE

  * * *

  A Secret Journey

  1

  A Crazy Idea

  IT WAS LATE in the evening of Saturday, January 9, 1943, when a locomotive pulling the Ferdinand Magellan and four further carriages1 departed from a special siding beneath the Bureau of Engraving in Washington, D.C.—the federal government’s massive printing house for paper money, and thus a sort of Fort Knox of the capital.

  Aboard was the President of the United States, his secretary, his White House chief of staff, his naval aide, his White House counselor, and his doctor, all traveling to Hyde Park for the weekend, as usual. Or s
o it seemed.

  The Secret Service had insisted the President use for the first time the massive new railway carriage reconstructed for him—the first such railcar to be made for the nation’s chief executive since Lincoln’s presidency. Boasting fifteen-millimeter armored steel plate on the sides, roof, and underside, the carriage had three-inch-thick bulletproof glass in all its windows. Best of all, it had a special elevator to raise the President, in his wheelchair, onto the platform of the car—which weighed 142 tons, the heaviest passenger carriage ever used on U.S. rail track.

  The car was “arranged with a sitting room, a dining room for ten or twelve persons, a small but well arranged kitchen, and five state rooms,” Admiral William Leahy, the President’s military chief of staff, recorded in his diary. “Dr. McIntire, Harry Hopkins, Miss Tully, and I occupied the state rooms, and Captain McCrea joined us in the dining room. Other cars accommodated the Secret Service men, the apothecary, the communications personnel, and the President’s valet,” Chief Petty Officer Arthur Prettyman.2

  Their luggage had been taken to the baggage car separately, an hour earlier. But was the President really going to Hyde Park? If so, why the thousand pounds of bottled water? Why clothes for two weeks away? Why the four Filipino members of the crew of the USS Potomac, the presidential yacht, replacing the normal Pullman staff? Why Eleanor, the First Lady, and Louise Macy, the new wife of Harry Hopkins, bidding them goodbye at the underground siding?

  Something was up—something unique. Even historic.

  Among the few who did know of the President’s real destination, most had counseled against it. Even the President’s naval aide, Captain John McCrea, opposed the idea when the President tricked McCrea into supplying information on the geography, history, and significant towns of the region of North Africa. Following the successful Torch landings in Algeria and Morocco on November 8, 1942, the President had explained to McCrea—whose knowledge of the sea exceeded his knowledge of land—U.S. troops would be fighting in battle, and he’d found himself, as U.S. commander in chief, sadly ignorant of the terrain. “See if you can help me correct that deficiency,” he’d instructed McCrea, “by means of travel folders, etcetera, put out by travel agencies.”