Roosevelt (68 page)

The President viewed the French record in Indochina as an utter contrast with the American record in the Philippines. To him, Indochina was Western colonialism of the worst sort. During 1943 his general anticolonial feeling came to a focus on this strategic area; nor could he forget that this area had served as a crucial issue between Tokyo and Washington in 1941, and as a staging area for Japanese aggression. Again and again Roosevelt made clear that he opposed the return of Indochina to French rule after the war, that he preferred some kind of trusteeship under the United Nations. It was rumored that Roosevelt had a family feeling about Indochina, too—that his hatred for the French there arose from the fact that his maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, had lost a good deal of money in 1867 in Saigon real estate. The truth was simpler. Roosevelt was convinced that Westerners in general and the French in particular had misgoverned their Asian and African colonies. The Indochinese had been so flagrantly downtrodden, Elliott Roosevelt remembered his father saying at Casablanca, that the natives felt that even Japanese rule would be better.

It was one thing for Roosevelt to press his views on the French, who, with the Germans occupying the homeland and the Japanese ruling Indochina, were hardly in a position to resist. It was something else to challenge John Bull himself in the person of Winston Churchill. In the fall of 1942, in response to a demand from Willkie that the United States should take a strong stand against imperialism everywhere, Roosevelt had told his press conference that the Atlantic Charter applied to all humanity. Four days later Churchill had declared, in a speech to the Lord Mayor’s dinner, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”

India was still the great issue. That ancient land still served in
1943 as the acid test of Roosevelt’s long-range strategy of freedom for “all humanity” in relation to his immediate need to run a coalition war with his Western allies in Europe. In the wake of the turmoil of 1942 Roosevelt sent his old friend, and Rome hand, William Phillips to India as his personal representative. Arriving in New Delhi in January 1943 with an open mind about the many factions and views in India, Phillips soon grew anxious about the situation and disenchanted with the rigidity of the British Viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, and his government. Week after week Phillips dispatched his gloomy reports to Washington, often writing to Roosevelt directly and at length. Gandhi, in detention, was about to conduct a perilous fast. Nehru and tens of thousands of other Congress party leaders were in jail. Indians had become contemptuous of British promises. The Viceroy, who seemed to be following London’s directions to the letter, was unyielding. Behind the emotional solidarity arising from anti-British feeling the Indians were sorely divided, race by race, region by region, class by class. The main cement was Gandhi, who, Phillips wrote to the President, was the “god whom people worship,” though a wholly impractical one. Fearing that the Mahatma would die, amid eruptions of terrible violence, Phillips tried to visit him and to indicate American concern with the Indian situation. The Viceroy, a veritable caricature of the Old Tory, objected.

Most alarming was Phillips’s report of the rapid decline of Indian faith in Roosevelt, the United States, the Atlantic Charter, the Western idea of freedom itself. He had found on arrival a strong popular feeling that the President of the United States alone could bring influence to bear on the British. By April Phillips was reporting that Indians were coming more and more to disbelieve in the American gospel of freedom for oppressed peoples. The United States was losing its chance to capture the sympathy and allegiance of the Indian people. Not only the conduct of the war but also “our future relations with colored races” were involved. Not only Indians but also other peoples of Asia were coming to regard this war as one simply between fascist and imperialist powers. Could not the President induce the British to make some kind of gesture?

The President could not, or at least would not. The actual issue was a small one—whether Washington would support Phillips in his request for the Viceroy’s permission to see Gandhi following his fast, or whether Phillips must ask on his own. The State Department refused such support, so Phillips asked for himself, and the Viceroy turned him down. At the end of April Phillips left for Washington “for consultation”; it was the end of his mission to India.

Two weeks later he talked with Roosevelt. He wanted to pour out his story of a hostile or indifferent India in the future, the lassitude and despair that were gripping the subcontinent, America’s right to a voice in Indian affairs in the light of its commitments of men and supplies. He found the President in one of his talkative moods; he felt that he had not got his message through. Roosevelt would not budge. He had tried to pressure Churchill on India the year before and failed. Whatever his private dismay, he would not, in Hull’s words, jeopardize the unity of command he and the Prime Minister had established in Europe.

Roosevelt carried this policy to tragic lengths later in 1943. A cyclone and three tidal waves had devastated western Bengal, ruining crops and causing plant disease. By mid-1943 hundreds of thousands of Bengalese were starving; the final toll ran to at least two million—three times the total number of Anglo-American military deaths in World War II. In August 1943 Calcutta officials cabled to Roosevelt desperately begging for cereals and milk powder. They received no reply. In September the President of the India League of America wired to the President asking for help for the famine and for the release of Gandhi, who had survived his fast; the appeal was referred to the State Department.

For a brief moment in mid-war the two Atlantic powers would be able to allocate continents, juggle with whole peoples, grant or renege on the Four Freedoms. But even during 1943 there were ominous indications of stupendous social and economic forces on the rise. Reports were trickling in from intelligence agencies, from newspaper correspondents, including the brilliant Theodore White of the
Time
bureau in Chungking, from famous writers, including Pearl Buck and Agnes Smedley, of the dedication and tenacity of the Chinese Communists, as contrasted with the increasing corruption and lethargy of the Kuomintang. In Indochina, Burma, Indonesia, and other colonial areas nationalist feeling was intensifying not only against the Japanese but also against Western colonialism. Throughout Asia Communist and nationalist forces were glimpsing a supreme opportunity to take over the leadership of the long-simmering rebellion against imperialism and colonialism. These forces, too, had their strategy of freedom.

The President’s political strategy was soon to face a hard test in Italy. At Casablanca, Roosevelt and Churchill had approved their soldiers’ plan to attack Sicily as soon as forces could be deployed after the conquest of North Africa. They hoped that the fall of this island just off the toe of Italy would begin to topple Mussolini’s
regime. The plan was almost as audacious as
TORCH;
and the commanders and planners could not even devote full time to fashioning it, since many of them were still engaged in Tunisia. Assault forces had to be gathered from distant areas, including the United States. For the first time a big air-borne operation was planned. Once again the landing-craft shortage complicated planning, but a windfall of LST’s and of “ducks,” load-carrying amphibious vehicles, made possible a concentrated assault on the southeastern corner of the Sicilian triangle.

On July 10, 1943 Patton’s Seventh Army and Montgomery’s Eighth Army landed under heavy air protection along the eastern and southeastern plains and beaches of Sicily. The weather was atrocious; paratroopers were blown far from their targets, landing all over southeastern Sicily or falling into the sea. Patton’s troops fanned out into the western part of the island toward Marsala and Palermo and then cut back to the east along the northern coast, while the British pushed north toward Mount Etna. The Wehrmacht resisted with its usual resourcefulness, but the invaders, enjoying heavy air superiority and with supporting gunfire from the sea, kept their enemy off balance. Naval gunners were even able to put German tanks under direct fire. Panzer units made a last stand along the saw-toothed ridge shouldering Mount Etna; then the remaining German and Italian forces began a skillful retreat to the mainland across the Strait of Messina. Sicily fell in thirty-eight days, at the cost of 20,000 Allied combat casualties. The Germans lost 12,000 dead and captured; the Italians had 147,000 casualties, mainly prisoners.

The climactic events in the Mediterranean during mid-1943 outshone developments in South Asia and the Pacific. After the seizure of Guadalcanal, MacArthur’s troops painfully worked their way up the long ladder of the Solomon Islands that pointed distantly but directly at Japan. In close battles in the gulfs and bays American naval losses were heavy as well as the enemy’s. By early fall combined army, naval, air, and Marine operations had secured the central Solomons—though some enemy outposts were simply bypassed—and were moving on Bougainville and the northern Solomons. Five hundred miles west of these steppingstones, American, Australian, and New Zealand troops slowly leapfrogged up the eastern coast of New Guinea toward the Japanese bastion of Rabaul. Capturing or outflanking enemy bases, finding the right mix of amphibious forces, moving inland into mountains and jungles without getting cut off or bogged down—these and other moves took all MacArthur’s resourcefulness. By fall his troops were halfway along New Guinea’s long northern coast and were threatening to outflank Rabaul.

In Burma fighting ebbed and flowed in small fitful skirmishes, and in the North Pacific, after seizing Attu in a bleak and bitter encounter, the Americans were embarrassed to mount an elaborate invasion of Kiska and find—nothing. The Pacific generally in 1943 was reflecting its lower priority, and it was in Europe that Axis solidarity cracked first.

At Shangri-La, on a bright Sunday afternoon, July 25, the President was working with Rosenman and Sherwood on a fireside chat when Early phoned from the White House to report that he had just heard a news flash on the radio saying Mussolini had resigned. The President seemed surprised but a bit skeptical. His aides eagerly tried to get confirmation—but the officials they talked to were trying to get confirmation from
them.
The President was relaxed. “Oh, we’ll find out about it later.” The three men then had a leisurely dinner and drove back to Washington. Sherwood marveled that during this whole five-hour period the White House lacked the means of knowing whether an Axis leader had fallen. Shortly, the news was confirmed; much later, the White House learned the details.

The loss of Africa—once the pride of his vaunted new Roman Empire—had brought the Duce near the end of his string. Then came the invasion of Sicily and a summons by Hitler north to a conference. They met in Feltre, in a villa that seemed to the tormented Duce like a crossword puzzle frozen into a house. While Mussolini sat passively in a big armchair Hitler upbraided the Italians for their cowardice and ineptitude in Sicily. But he promised reinforcements and braced Mussolini for a final stand; the voice of history, he said, still beckoned them.

Back in Rome, now under Allied bombing attacks, Mussolini seemed to become more paralyzed as his soldiers retreated and surrendered in Sicily. Disaffection was spreading around him. Members of the Grand Council, which had been moribund for years, demanded a meeting to consider the crisis. This was set for the afternoon of July 24, at the Palazzo Venezia. Expecting trouble, some members arrived at the meeting with concealed weapons and hand grenades, but there was nothing to fear. Mussolini was now a broken man. Long scornful of parliamentary talk and majority rule, he had to sit through six hours of oratory and denunciation, culminating in a vote of 19 to 8 against him. Next afternoon King Victor Emmanuel III received the Duce, dismissed him from office, saw him out the door onto the front steps, where the onetime dictator, unresisting, was whisked into an ambulance and driven off to confinement in a military-police barracks.

The first crack in the Axis had come, Roosevelt exulted. But the hour of triumph plunged him back into political dilemmas.
By chance the Office of War Information had just put out a broadcast quoting a commentator who referred to Victor Emmanuel as that “moronic little king.” Next morning Roosevelt saw the comment in the New York
Times
and the following day told reporters that “it ought never to have been done.” In his fireside chat he stood staunchly with unconditional surrender. “We will have no truck with Fascism in any way, in any shape,” he said. “We will permit no vestige of fascism to remain.” But it became evident that the King was staying on his throne and that he was asking Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the Duce’s former chief of the Comando Supremo, to become Prime Minister.

Victor Emmanuel, Mussolini’s accomplice, to go on as king? Badoglio, the ravisher of Ethiopia, to succeed the Duce? Once again American liberals burst into indignation. Was this a war against fascism, or just against aggression? Badoglio today—and Goering or Goebbels tomorrow? Was the reactionary State Department still running American war strategy? Would Roosevelt deal with a gang of monarchists, clerics, and reactionaries? For such questions Roosevelt was ready at a press conference. The issue was about as meaningful, he said, as the old argument as to which came first, the chicken or the egg.

“When a victorious army goes into a country, there are two essential conditions that they want to meet, in the first instance. The first is the end of armed opposition. The second is when that armed opposition comes to an end to avoid anarchy. In a country that gets into a state of anarchy, it is a pretty difficult thing to deal with, because it would take an awful lot of troops.

“I don’t care with whom we deal in Italy, so long as it isn’t a definite member of the Fascist Government, as long as they get them to lay down their arms, and so long as we don’t have anarchy. Now he may be a King, or a present Prime Minister, or a Mayor of a town or a village….