Roosevelt (32 page)

From the
Japan Times & Advertiser,
December 20, 1941, courtesy of the
Japan Times

The most crushing news of all arrived in Washington on the tenth. Japanese bombers from Saigon, catching the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
at sea without air cover, had bombed and
torpedoed the great ships to the bottom. In London, Churchill twisted and writhed in bed as the import of the news sank in on him: the Japanese Navy was supreme from the Indian Ocean to the eastern Pacific.

For Roosevelt and his military chiefs the long-dreaded predicament was now fact: cut to the bone to help its allies, the nation’s Army and Navy suddenly had to guard dozens of vital sectors. Rumors spread that Japanese warships were headed back to Hawaii, to Panama, even to California. Frantic calls for protection came in from coastal cities. The Army and Navy dared not be caught napping a second time. For a while all was improvisation and inadequacy. Antiaircraft regiments had to be sent to the West Coast without most of their guns. Aviation schools were stripped to fill out combat groups. A convoy of five ships, halfway to the Philippines with infantry, artillery, munitions, and seventy dive bombers and pursuit planes, was ordered back to Hawaii. But Stimson and Marshall, anxious to buck up MacArthur in his travail, appealed to the President, who asked the Navy chiefs to reconsider their decision. The convoy was rerouted to Brisbane.

During these days Roosevelt was never seen to lose his air of grave imperturbability, punctuated by moments of relief and laughter. He not only kept cool; he watched himself keep cool. He took the time to write to Early a curious memo noting the many comments that “the President seems to be taking the situation of extreme emergency in his stride, that he is looking well and that he does not seem to have any nerves.” People tended to forget, the memo went on, that the President had been through this kind of thing in World War I, that he had personally visited practically all defense activities throughout the United States and many abroad, that he had gone to Europe in the spring of 1918 on a destroyer and “probably saw a greater part of the war area than any other American.” Roosevelt had long been defensive about his failure to don uniform in World War I; now he was in psychological uniform as Commander in Chief.

In this, the biggest crisis of his life, Roosevelt’s first instinct was to unify the nation, his next to unify the anti-Axis world. Churchill had asked if he could come over to Washington at once, for military conferences, and Roosevelt gladly agreed. While Churchill sailed westward on his new battleship the
Duke of York,
Roosevelt took steps to solidify the spirit of unity that had swept the country after Pearl Harbor.

Party harmony was no problem; the President accepted pledges from the Democratic and Republican National Chairmen of cooperation during the war and suggested that the two party organizations could help civil defense. Nor did the Great Debate have to be
adjourned; former isolationists were tumbling over themselves with promises of support. The most worrisome continuing division was between management and labor. The National Defense Mediation Board had been devastated by the resignation of the CIO representatives. Clearly new machinery was necessary for industrial peace. Shortly after Pearl Harbor the President asked union chiefs and the Business Advisory Council of the Commerce Department to designate representatives for a conference to draft a basic wartime labor policy. The first and essential objective of the conference, the President made clear, would be to reach a unanimous agreement to prevent strikes during the war period.

The President invited the conferees to the White House for a preliminary talk. In they came: industrialists who had hated Roosevelt; Lewis, who had broken with him in the 1940 election; Green, friendly but wary. The President greeted each delegate and then spoke to the group for almost half an hour—about the need to do “perfectly unheard of things” in war, about the need for a complete agreement quickly, for a time limit on conference speeches, for a self-imposed discipline. He had just been thinking of an old Chinese proverb, he said: “Lord, reform Thy world, beginning with me.”

There was not much difference between labor and management, the President went on. “It’s like the old Kipling saying about ‘Judy O’Grady an’ the Colonel’s Lady.’ They are both the same under the skin. That is true in this country, especially this country, and we want to keep it so.” His manner, Frances Perkins noted, was both sober and buoyant, confident and serious, and even touched with humility. The shock of Pearl Harbor, she felt, the hazards ahead, had acted like a spiritual purge and left him simply stronger, more single-minded. The conferees went on to their labors moved by the President, if still unsure of finding common ground.

Christmas was nearing, but a strange Christmas for the nation and for the Roosevelts. Thousands of men were taking their last leaves before shipping out; other thousands had their Christmas furloughs canceled; whole outfits were pulled out of posts and bases overnight. The Roosevelts were not immune to the new anxieties of war. In New York a few days before Christmas Joseph Lash talked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the phone. He found her worried and despondent in her Sixty-fifth Street home; she mentioned having had a hard day and then burst into tears. Lash wondered if she was upset by some trouble in her work at the Office of Civilian Defense; but not so. She and the President, she told him, had said good-by to their son James, who was headed for Hawaii, and to Elliott. They had to go, of course, but it was hard; if only by the law of averages, not all her boys would return. She wept again, then
steadied herself. No one saw the President weep. Probably he could not; on his desk awaiting his signature was a bill that could send seven million men, from twenty to forty-four years old, off to the battle fronts.

Only one sock—Fala’s—would hang from the White House mantle, it was reported. But on December 22 Winston Churchill arrived in Washington, and life at the White House was instantly transformed.

Roosevelt was waiting, propped against his car, at the Washington airport as Churchill flew in from Hampton Roads, where he and his party had disembarked. With the usual plump cigar clamped in his teeth, the Prime Minister marched over to the President and “clasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” Churchill wrote later. After a semiformal dinner for seventeen the Prime Minister was installed in the big bedroom across from Hopkins’s, with his cherished traveling map room nearby.

Suddenly the second floor of the White House was an imperial command post, with British officials hurrying in and out with their old red leather dispatch cases. The White House servants were soon agape at Churchill’s drinking, eating, and sleeping habits. The President and the Prime Minister were together for several hours every day, with Hopkins often present. They worked together in the closest familiarity: sometimes after cocktails Churchill would wheel Roosevelt in his chair from the drawing room to the elevator, as a token of respect, but also with his image of Raleigh spreading his cloak before Elizabeth. Eleanor soon discovered with concern that her guest took a long nap in the afternoon while her husband worked—but that the President hated to miss any of Churchill’s and Hopkins’s talk in the evening, and stayed up much later than usual.

The two leaders and their staffs at once plunged into the business of war. Roosevelt’s first priority, however, was not military strategy, but a declaration of the “associated nations” to symbolize the unity and aspirations of the anti-Axis coalition. The President and the Prime Minister, using a State Department draft and working much as they had at Argentia, each wrote a separate statement and then blended them together. Since many governments had to be consulted, further drafting went on while the two leaders turned to immediate military problems.

Christmas Eve they stood side by side on the south portico for the traditional ceremony of lighting the tree. A great throng waited in the cold blackness below. Addressing his listeners as “fellow workers for freedom,” Roosevelt said: “Our strongest weapon in this war is that conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of man which Christmas Day signifies….” He presented Churchill, who matched
him in eloquence: “I have the honor to add a pendant to the necklace of that Christmas good will and kindness with which our illustrious friend, the President, has encircled the homes and families of the United States.” Christmas Day was observed without a single son or grandchild in the house. Roosevelt and Churchill attended an interdenominational service, dined with a company of sixty, listened to Christmas carols by visiting carolers—and then worked on the war until long after midnight.

One paramount question had occupied Churchill and his colleagues as they plotted strategy in the ordered calm of the
Duke of York.
Would an aroused American people, venting its wrath over Pearl Harbor, force the President to turn the main weight of the nation against Japan, leaving Britain to cope alone with the Axis in Western Europe, Africa, and the Middle East? Had the carefully fashioned Atlantic First strategy collapsed when the first bombs were dropped in the Pacific? This cardinal question embraced numerous secondary ones. If Roosevelt stuck to Atlantic First—and it was Churchill’s supreme aim to induce him to do so—what would be the plan of attack against Hitler? How could Japan be contained or at least slowed in the Pacific while the Allies concentrated on Germany? How would the Allied command be organized in the vast Pacific and Atlantic theaters? And how would new plans affect demand, supply, and transportation of munitions?

Atlantic First was not left long in doubt. Roosevelt and his military chiefs quickly made clear that—even under the frightful pressure of Pacific defeats—the Americans still saw Germany as the main enemy and victory in Europe as crucial to the whole global effort. Indeed, little time was spent during these tumultuous days on any fundamental reconsideration of the long-planned priority. The old Plan Dog was almost taken for granted. Reassured, Churchill, in the first evening’s discussion, plunged into the next question-strategy for Europe.

The Prime Minister had rarely been in better form. He had carefully worked out his plans for Europe and cleared them with his military men on the way across the ocean. Now, flanked by Beaverbrook and Halifax, he presented his case to Roosevelt, Hull, Hopkins, and Welles. If the Germans were held in Russia, he said, they would try something else—probably an attack through Spain and Portugal into North Africa. It was vital to forestall such a move. He than presented his plan—
GYMNAST.
He proposed that American forces invade Northwest Africa in the Casablanca area, and later hook up with British troops renewing their drive along the North African coast from the east into Tunisia.

The eager Prime Minister wanted to launch the attack
quickly—in three weeks, he hoped. He had 55,000 troops ready to load onto ships at short notice. The actual plan of operation would depend largely on whether the French authorities in Northwest Africa cooperated or not. It seemed to Churchill—and so he reported confidently to his War Cabinet—that Roosevelt favored the plan “with or without invitation” from the French.

Perhaps Roosevelt was merely being the polite host this first evening; perhaps, as the absent Stimson and Marshall feared, he tended to be vulnerable to Churchill’s eloquence and zeal when his military staff was not with him. In any event, Roosevelt’s enthusiasm for a North African invasion had cooled markedly by next day, when the two leaders presided over a meeting of their staffs. The President now spoke on the basis of a War Department memorandum that stressed the safety of the British Isles as the central “fortress” and of Atlantic communications, but played down the value of American action anywhere in the Mediterranean. Stimson and Marshall had won the President’s endorsement of this approach at a war conference the day before the British arrived; but the Secretary was as surprised as he was delighted when his chief now used the memorandum to brief Churchill and his party.

While Churchill’s hopes for
GYMNAST
sank, the President posed other major possibilities. He was willing to take over the defense of Northern Ireland, thus freeing British troops for use elsewhere. He granted the importance of the islands in the eastern Atlantic, but inclined toward the Cape Verde Islands, rather than the Azores. He acclaimed the British successes in Libya but doubted the value of placing American troops there. He then moved across the globe to the Pacific. It was vital, he said, that Singapore be held; the United States would do its utmost to save the Philippines, or at least to help the defense of the Dutch East Indies.

By the time Churchill took over, the initiative had been gained by the President. The Prime Minister still clung to
GYMNAST,
emphasizing that British advances into Tunisia might arouse French support, or precipitate a showdown between Berlin and Vichy—and in either case Africa would be a fine opportunity. But Marshall remained cool to
GYMNAST
if it required a large American force.