Roosevelt (51 page)

The reports to Roosevelt could hardly convey the horror of Stalingrad—the German forces battering through the ruins to points within a few hundred yards of the Volga; the blazing combat between troops in adjoining buildings, floors, and even rooms as the Russians grappled with the foe within a hand grenade’s throw in order to escape Nazi air attack; the tanks firing point-blank at lower floors until houses collapsed, then stalling on the very rubble
they had made; a flame thrower flushing out lower stories with fire until the operator himself was hit by an incendiary bullet and turned into a torch; frenzied hand-to-hand struggles in factories, cellars, the grain elevator; the Russian wounded and dying crawling down to the edge of the Volga and groping for a way across; the steady crunch of Russian mortar fire from across the river, omen of victory.

But the President was not long in doubt about the meaning of Stalingrad for the whole war. As the Germans bogged down for days that turned into weeks, it was becoming clear that once again Hitler would be stopped short of his goals on the brink of winter, and that the Anglo-Americans could continue to enjoy their most precious commodity—time.

The full dimensions of Stalingrad would take weeks to become clear even to the Russians, however, and meantime tension and suspicion rose in the Kremlin as the Nazis pressed harder on the whole southern flank and a Russian diversionary effort in front of Moscow failed dismally. In October—the month that Stalin would later concede was the most critical of the whole war—Anglo-Soviet relations fell to a new low. The Soviet press hinted that some British leaders were not entirely free of the taint of Munich. Soviet officials fawned over Willkie, especially after he called for a second front and added that some Allied military leaders might need some “public prodding.” He told correspondent Alexander Werth in Moscow that it was taking a terrible risk to postpone the second front until 1943. The Russians did not know that the President had failed to tell Willkie of the plans for North Africa. Willkie left a Moscow aroused to fresh hope by the possibility of a massive second front soon.

The second front that most occupied Roosevelt during these fall days was not in Russia, but in the Solomons, about 1,200 miles northeast of Australia. Here the battle centered on Guadalcanal, a small island the Japanese had occupied as one of a series of stepping-stones down which they were moving toward New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa in order to reach their supreme goal in the Pacific: cutting the lifelines between the United States and Australia.

Almost everything had been marginal about the Guadalcanal operation from the start. It was not part of a broad strategic counter-offensive, since the main effort was still planned for the Atlantic. Both MacArthur’s planners and the Navy commanders had wanted to delay the invasion until a more powerful and cumulative assault could be mounted up the chain of islands, but the Joint Chiefs insisted on a quick counterassault to halt the enemy’s southerly advance. Equipment was inadequate, maps faulty, planning amateurish, loading methods primitive. For a time it seemed that the
men invading Guadalcanal and neighboring islands might be cut off for good. On August 9, when the Japanese sank four cruisers—including one Australian—and killed over 1,000 sailors, it was one of the worst defeats the American Navy ever suffered. Then the three American carriers pulled out of the area, leaving the amphibious forces “bare-arse,” in their commander’s phrase. But after quickly seizing a rough airstrip and renaming it Henderson Field, Marines dug in along the north central coast, probed for the enemy, and awaited reinforcements.

The Guadalcanal area had seemed even less likely than Stalingrad to turn into a strategic prize, but, like the Soviet city, it sucked in huge forces intent on bigger goals. Like the soldiers of Stalingrad, too, the Marines after ten weeks still held a narrow strip of land, were backed up against the water, and were facing enemy attempts to drive right through their strip. Otherwise Guadalcanal was a different kind of hell from Stalingrad. Endless tropical rains turned roads, campsites, and the airstrip into a gluey muck. Dysentery, fungus infections, and malaria struck men down by the hundreds; malaria alone sent almost 2,000 to the hospital during October. Night after night Japanese warships, planes, and artillery—including an infuriatingly persistent gun nicknamed “Pistol Pete”—pounded the airfield perimeter and forced sailors and Marines into their rain-filled foxholes. There were shortages of almost everything except a stubborn determination to hang on.

By mid-October Roosevelt was fearful that his troops might be driven out of Guadalcanal. “If we are defeated in the Solomons,” MacArthur warned, “…the entire Southwest Pacific will be in gravest danger”; he asked that the nation’s “entire resources” be diverted to the area. The Navy was locked in fierce battles to hold a line of support. In a series of bloody, old-fashioned sea fights in the “slot” running down from Bougainville to Guadalcanal, and in the eastern Solomons, both sides had suffered cruel losses. The carrier
Wasp
was torpedoed; more cruisers went down; the Japanese lost heavily in transports.

On October 24 the President requested the Joint Chiefs to send every possible weapon to Guadalcanal, even if other areas had to be stripped. At this point Henderson Field had fewer than thirty operational aircraft. Plans were quickly laid for heavy reinforcement, and the Navy kept up the pressure even after the
Enterprise,
the only American carrier in the Southwest Pacific, was knocked out of action. By the end of the naval encounters each side had lost warships totaling about 130,000 tons—the Americans, two carriers and eight cruisers; the Japanese, two battleships and four cruisers—but the Marines and soldiers had hung on to Henderson Field and the coastal strip and were fanning out, ultimately to drive the remaining Japanese off Guadalcanal.

The Japanese spearhead had been blunted. “We have hit the Japanese very hard in the Solomon Islands,” Roosevelt cabled to Stalin. “We have probably broken the backbone of the power of their Fleet. They have still too many aircraft carriers to suit me, but soon we may well sink some more of them….” But by this time world attention had shifted to the Atlantic.

Rarely has an American President commanded a major military enterprise as bizarre, doubt-ridden, and unpredictable as the invasion of Northwest Africa in early November 1942. The attack—now labeled
TORCH—
was mounted not against his nation’s mortal enemy, Germany, but against its oldest ally, France. Its success would turn more on political than military factors. It was opposed by the very generals and admirals who would have to carry it out. It had not even been included in a list of alternatives the Commander in Chief had written out less than four months before the operation.

The targets were French Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, forming a huge shoulder of sand and rock mountains that stretched a thousand miles from Casablanca, on the Atlantic, to the Tunisian coast that looked out across the narrow waist of the Mediterranean toward Sicily and the boot of Italy. From the ruins of June 1940 the French had salvaged and desperately clung to two possessions outside France—their Mediterranean fleet and their colonial possessions in Africa. Vichy Frenchmen still ruled imperturbably in Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, Bizerte, Tunis; east of Tunisia the Italians and Germans controlled Tripoli and Cyrenaica, in Libya; and their armies in the summer of 1942 were pressing the British at El Alamein, hardly fifty miles west of Alexandria.

The cast in the forthcoming drama was as remarkable as the plot and the setting. In Vichy: Marshal Henri Pétain, a traditionalist with authoritarian leanings, contemptuous of parliamentary politics of the Third Republic variety, vain, aloof, well disposed toward the United States as long as his regime was not threatened; Pierre Laval, the Premier, who had traversed the parliamentary spectrum from Communism to a fanatical anti-Bolshevism, Foreign Minister under the old regime, now blatantly anti-British, suave to the point of oiliness, “hated, vomited by France,” according to one American journalist; Admiral Jean-François Darlan, commander in chief of all land, sea, and air forces under Pétain but more a political animal, smooth, opportunistic, touchy, loyal to the fleet admirals under him, as they were to him, angry at Britain for its humiliating destruction of French warships bottled up in Mediterranean ports. In London: Winston Churchill, relieved that the
cross-channel assault had been indefinitely postponed, intent on working with the Americans to make
TORCH
a brilliant success, but ever keeping a peripheral eye on tempting targets like northern Norway; Dwight Eisenhower, lodged in “Eisenhowerplatz,” Grosvenor Square, entrusted by Washington and London with command of the whole enterprise, coping with a thousand problems of supply, organization, personnel, and tactics as he strove to convert the early preparations for “cross-channel” to a plan for Africa; Charles de Gaulle, head of the Free French organization in London, proud, stiff, lofty and vulnerable at the same time, convinced that he embodied the spirit of all anti-Nazi Frenchmen and indeed the honor of France itself. In Northwest Africa: Robert Murphy, in Algiers, the President’s political representative, Foreign Service veteran and old Paris hand, who had been organizing in Africa a group of consuls and agents to identify existing Nazi influence and the anti-Vichy potential; Auguste Noguès, Resident General of Morocco, warily friendly to Murphy but dead set on defending his domain against both Germans and Americans; and in the other cities a host of Vichy men who were anti-Nazi but also anti-British and conservative, authoritarian, or even royalist in their views. These men were the main actors, but so labyrinthine were the lines of leadership influence that the actions of a bey or sultan, or a tribe in Morocco or a French warship in Oran, could jeopardize the whole operation. And as in all such undertakings, the stage was full of agents and double agents, adventurers and mercenaries, opportunists and innocents.
TORCH
was a project bound to activate and test Roosevelt’s skill at deception and surprise and to gratify his flair for the complex and the indirect. Yet he showed a remarkable consistency for over two years in keeping the African option open. He was pressed by liberals to break with the Vichy regime, which seemed so clearly a Nazi tool. He was urged by military advisers to make a surprise attack on the French fleet in order to remove that knight from the chessboard. Even Ambassador Leahy was so disgusted with Darlan for granting military aid to the Germans that he asked to be recalled. The President stuck to his line. He cultivated good relations with Vichy because he wanted at least to keep the French fleet and French Africa out of Nazi hands, and at most he hoped for help from North African French if and when Americans entered Africa.

The President was not averse to letting Hull take most of the brickbats from liberal moralists, but he kept a close eye on policy toward Vichy. He had asked Murphy to send him direct reports from Africa—“Don’t bother going through State Department channels”—and Murphy invariably found him knowledgeable about the
intricacies of North African politics, economics, and personalities. Month after month—during the long negotiations with Japan, the Atlantic skirmishes with Hitler, Pearl Harbor, the Pacific defeats, the mobilization struggles at home—Roosevelt played his careful hand with Vichy, pressuring here, appeasing there. He recognized that Pétain, fettered and bullied by Hitler, was half impotent, but also that the old Marshal had some bargaining power against all comers, with his fleet and his 100,000 or so troops in Africa. Even Laval’s return to power in April 1942—as Vice Chief of State, Foreign Minister, and Interior Minister—brought only Leahy’s delayed recall from Vichy, but no basic change in policy.

Roosevelt’s dalliance with Vichy meant strain with anti-Vichy Frenchmen, especially the Gaullists, but he was willing to pay this price. It was essential, he told Churchill, that de Gaulle be kept out of the picture and given “no information whatsoever, regardless of how irritated and irritating he may become.” He suspected that de Gaulle’s headquarters could not keep military secrets. De Gaulle, however, was in good company. “Don’t tell anybody in the State Department about this,” Roosevelt said to Murphy in discussing invasion plans. “That place is a sieve!” And he was determined above all that
TORCH
would be an essentially American operation, with the British having a secondary role. His reason was partly that the French would be hostile to the onetime ally who had attacked their fleet and bombed and blockaded their nation. But even more he was intent on making a stunning victory out of
TORCH
.

It was the first big attack. It would take place just before the congressional elections. It was the President’s project, ordered against the advice of his military advisers. It was so politically oriented that a failure would be charged to the politician in chief. It had to succeed.

Success in North Africa was precisely what Roosevelt’s soldiers feared would elude them. Marshall warned that the operation would be slow to mount, would turn on hazardous political conditions, would further disperse naval escort—even aside from his main fear of its effect of endlessly delaying a cross-channel second front. King was opposed to North African operations in 1942 partly because of its escort and transportation aspects, partly because it might drain naval strength from the Pacific. Stimson was flatly opposed. At best, he feared, it would be another Gallipoli; the British had lost their nerve. But the President, determined that American troops fight in Europe or Africa in 1942, stuck to his and Churchill’s decision for
TORCH.
Stimson and Marshall and their operations people remained skeptical of the enterprise well into
August, but Marshall dutifully and energetically went about the job of making it succeed.

The military risk alone was formidable. To land on the Atlantic hump of Africa meant taking the gamble of bad weather, especially of the towering rollers that thundered on Casablanca beaches from the Atlantic winds. To land on the more protected beaches of Algeria meant running the heavy risk of a German lunge through Spain to cut the invaders off in Spanish Morocco. To land anywhere in North Africa meant moving thousands of troops across the North Atlantic in waters infested by U-boats, now near their peak strength,
TORCH
would demand such a mobilization of sea and ground forces as to be a strategic risk, too. Marshall had to reduce eight or nine divisions to such low levels in personnel that at least six months would be needed to restore them to efficiency, and he had “scalped the troops” at home for equipment. The October convoy to Murmansk was suspended partly to help
TORCH.
British troops in Egypt had to be reinforced by unescorted liners. Even the far-off Pacific felt the drain of naval power.