THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF had no direct part in either the dismal setbacks or the glittering victories of his Navy in the Pacific. He offered suggestions, approved the major decisions, and received a stream of reports during large engagements, but unlike Hitler, who constantly advised and pressed his generals on tactical matters, Roosevelt was content to leave such questions to Admiral King and his Navy headquarters down on Constitution Avenue, and to Admiral Nimitz in his command post at Pearl Harbor. The President occasionally got the same inflated reports of air victories over the Japanese that the public did; he happily informed Churchill that carrier planes in a surprise raid in New Guinea had sunk two heavy cruisers and probably a light cruiser, when actually only one light cruiser and a small transport had gone down. Tempted though he was to involve himself in the fascinating day-to-day moves of his services—especially the Navy—he knew that he must reserve himself for the overriding political and strategic problems. These were coming to a head in the early months of 1942.
For the third spring in a row Hitler was mobilizing for a vast offensive on his Eastern Front. During March the Russian counterattacks had ground down in the snow and mud. The invaders had suffered well over a million casualties—over 100,000 from frostbite alone—and new divisions had to be drawn from Germany and its junior partners. Hitler’s aim was no longer the crushing of the Soviet colossus in great encircling movements, but attrition and defeat through close pincer actions.
“Our aim is to wipe out the entire defense potential remaining to the Soviets,” he ordered in mid-April, “and to cut them off, as far as possible, from their most important sources of war industry.” The Wehrmacht would hold in the center and seize Leningrad in the north, but put its main weight in the south to capture Sevastopol, immobilize Stalingrad, and break through into the Caucasus. Five armies, of one hundred divisions, and 1,500 aircraft were poised for the attack in the south. Hitler did not ignore the heady prospect below the Mediterranean of pushing the British east, opening up the Middle East for assault, and even driving on to a meeting with Japan in India. But, ever the proponent of concentrated strength and attack, he barred any strategic diversion from the eastern war.
The Kremlin still had little choice of strategy. “We want to rid our Soviet land of the German fascist scum,” Stalin proclaimed on May Day 1942. “To achieve this aim we must smash the German fascist army and annihilate the German invaders to the last man if they do not surrender. There is no other way….” The Kremlin, emboldened by its winter victories, was not relying on a passive defense; spoiling actions were planned against the expected Nazi assault. But to contain and hurl back the Nazi legions Stalin needed far more aid than he was receiving from the West. Above all, he wanted a direct attack across the English Channel that would create a major second front in France and ease the pressure.
The Kremlin was not reticent on the matter. Pravda complained about the inactivity in the west; to the Russians, who could lose whole divisions in a day, the Mediterranean and Pacific battles seemed little more than skirmishes. Litvinov, still the Kremlin’s most persuasive commentator to the West, complained to American and British friends that only simultaneous offensives in the east and the west could vanquish Hitler. We hear much about the common efforts of the United Nations, he argued, but what were common efforts without common fighting?
The most powerful supporters of this point of view outside Russia were three politically conservative, anti-Communist, and militarily orthodox Americans: Henry Stimson, George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower. As the new head of the Army’s revamped War Plans Division, Eisenhower had consistently urged the massing of American strength in Britain as the nearest, safest, most usable, best-located area to mount a concentrated attack against the German rear. “We’ve got to go to Europe and fight—and we’ve got to quit wasting resources all over the world—and still worse—wasting time,” he argued. “If we’re to keep Russia in, save the Middle East, India, and Burma, we’ve got to begin slugging by air at West Europe, to be followed by a land attack as soon as possible.” Stimson and Marshall strongly concurred, despite some differences of opinion in the War Department. The plans for a North African invasion that had been tentatively worked up at the ARCADIA Conference were shelved for the time—a decision made easier by German successes in Libya. Late in March Stimson wrote to the President:
“John Sherman said in 1877, ‘The only way to resume species payments is to resume.’ Similarly, the only way to get the initiative in this war is to take it.
“My advice is: As soon as your Chiefs of Staff have completed the plans for the northern offensive to your satisfaction, you should send them by a most trusted messenger and advocate to Churchill and his War Council as the American plan which you propose and intend to go ahead with if accepted by Britain….And then having done that, you should lean with all your strength on the ruthless rearrangement of shipping allotments and the preparation of landing gear for the ultimate invasion. That latter work is now going on at a rather dilettante pace. It should be pushed with the fever of war action, aimed at a definite rate of completion not later than September….”
By the end of March, Stimson, Marshall, and Company had a double-pronged war plan for a second front. Between eighteen and twenty-one divisions, including armored, motorized, and one airborne, would be prepared for a massive assault across the Channel by April 1943. A contingency plan was also drawn for a more limited operation, employing a third as many men, for the fall of 1942. The purpose of the second plan betrayed the Army’s concern that the Soviets might be either too weak or too strong. It would be employed only if the Russians faced imminent collapse without a second front—“In this case the attack should be considered as a sacrifice to the common good.” Or it would be used if the German defenses in Western Europe became critically weakened.
On April 1, 1942, Stimson and Marshall took their plans to the White House. They were worried about the President’s reaction. In past meetings he had shown, they felt, a tendency to respond too readily to the widely scattered needs of his allies and his area commanders. Stimson feared he might go in for another “dispersion debauch”; Marshall had tabbed the President’s habit of “tossing out new operations” as his “cigarette-holder gesture.” But this time they found their chief ready to be convinced. Whatever the difficulties, he recognized the importance of bolstering the Russians and keeping them in the war. Not only did he endorse a cross-channel attack, but he decided to send Hopkins and Marshall to London to consult Churchill. The President’s decision “will mark this day as a memorable one in the war,” Stimson noted in his diary for this April Fool’s Day.
“What Harry and George Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and mind in it,” Roosevelt wrote to Churchill three days later. “Your people and mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, and these people are wise enough to see that the Russians are today killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together. Even if full success is not attained, the big objective will be….”
In London the Americans found Churchill surprisingly responsive to their plans. They sent optimistic reports to Roosevelt about the prospects for agreement. Actually Churchill was skeptical of an early large-scale invasion and downright hostile to an emergency landing in the fall of of 1942. All his old fears remained—of another desperate landing with a strong possibility of defeat and evacuation, as in Gallipoli, of a premature British commitment before the Americans could invest heavy ground and air power, of another blood bath in France like World War I. As always, he was playing with thoughts of peripheral operations; an invasion of northern Norway was the favorite at the moment. His military chiefs, notably Brooke, put their professional judgment behind his fears and doubts. Uncharacteristically, though, Churchill did not present his real views bluntly. He accepted the cross-channel attack in principle but lobbed up reservations and qualifications. At this juncture he wanted neither to discourage his ally Stalin, who, after all, could make some kind of deal with Hitler, nor to thwart his friend Roosevelt, who might give in to popular clamor to concentrate in the Pacific and abandon Atlantic First.
The London meetings took place during the Japanese naval victories in the Bay of Bengal. Again and again Churchill conjured up the dread picture of a Japanese conquest of India and a meeting with the Germans in the Middle East. In fact this picture was something of a bogy. The Japanese did not plan a strategic offensive against India. At this point they were heading in just the opposite direction—toward a naval attack in the central Pacific and the fateful showdown at Midway. Hitler was too involved in Russia to make a strategic commitment in the Middle East. The Germans and Japanese were not even conducting joint strategy.
But Churchill saw a mortal peril. To desert four hundred million of His Majesty’s Indian subjects would be shameful; to let the Germans and Japanese join hands in India or the Middle East would be a “measureless disaster.” Roosevelt doubted that the enemy would join hands—but he could not doubt the intensity of Churchill’s feeling of imperial obligation to this huge, vulnerable area.
Heartened by Churchill’s apparent support of a cross-channel second front, the President turned to the ticklish job of involving the Kremlin in both the problems and the possibilities of the plan. It was unfortunate, he wrote to Stalin, that the distances were too great for them to meet; he hoped that next summer they could spend a few days together near their common border off Alaska, but in the meantime he hoped Stalin could promptly send Molotov and a general to discuss “a very important military proposal involving the utilization of our armed forces in a manner to relieve your critical Western Front.”
A week later Stalin responded that he would send Molotov “for an exchange of views on the organization of a second front in Europe in the near future.” He, too, hoped for a personal meeting. Roosevelt was pleased at the prospect of the Foreign Commissar’s visit. As always, he felt that problems and misunderstandings could best be overcome by face-to-face talk. “I know you will not mind my being brutally frank,” he had written to Churchill a few weeks before, “when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better and I hope he will continue to do so….”
Molotov arrived at the White House on the afternoon of May 29, 1942. He arrived in a state of uncertainty and apprehension, as symbolized by the pistol—along with a roll of sausage and a chunk of black bread—that he carried in his luggage. He had left a Kremlin still resentful over the lag in American military aid, the diversion of supplies to other battlefields, and the delay in planning for a second front. He had stopped in London on the way and signed with Eden a twenty-year peace treaty, but had found Churchill studiously vague about plans for an invasion of the Continent. At this point the Soviet spoiling attacks in the Crimea and south of Kharkov were going badly.
Soon the Foreign Commissar was installed, pistol and all, in a room on the family floor and then meeting with the President, Hull, Hopkins, Litvinov, and two interpreters. At first the discussion stumbled. For all his confidence in man-to-man talk, the President found Molotov stiff and reticent, and the translation delays were cramping. Seeking to establish common ground, Roosevelt ventured that the Soviets might work out some understanding with the Germans over prisoners of war. Molotov sharply dismissed any idea of treating with the treacherous Nazis, whereupon the President remarked that he had similar problems with Japanese treatment of American prisoners, who were fed on the Japanese army rations—“starvation for any white man.” After desultory talk about other matters—but not the second front—Hopkins suggested that the Foreign Commissar might like to rest.
Things warmed up after cocktails and dinner that evening. The President talked at length about disarming after the war, policing Germany and Japan, guaranteeing peace for at least twenty-five years, or for as long as his and Stalin’s and Churchill’s generation could expect to live. Molotov seemed responsive, even amiable. Next day Roosevelt brought Marshall and King into the discussions and asked Molotov to brief them on the strategic situation. The Russian drew a gloomy picture. Hitler might throw so many men and machines into the next general offensive that the Red Army might not be able to hold. The Nazis would be immensely strengthened, since they would then command food and raw materials in the Ukraine and oil in the Caucasus. This was the ominous prospect. But if the Americans and British were to create a new front and draw off forty German divisions in 1942, Russia could either beat Germany in 1942 or definitely insure its ultimate defeat. It must be 1942, not 1943, because in another year Hitler would be the undisputed master of the Continent and the job would be immeasurably more difficult.
He wanted a straight answer. What was the President’s position on a second front?
Roosevelt was ready for the question, but he let Marshall answer it. Were developments clear enough, he asked the Chief of Staff, that we could tell Mr. Stalin that we were preparing a second front? Yes, said the General. Roosevelt then authorized Molotov to tell his government that it could expect the formation of a second front “this year.” Disturbed by this apparent commitment, Marshall talked about the problems: the shipping shortage, getting enough men across the Channel, seizing air superiority. King stressed the frightful losses on the Murmansk route; only the day before, a destroyer and five ships out of a convoy of thirty-five had been lost. The Admiral hoped that the Soviet Air Force might bomb German air and submarine bases in northern Norway. Molotov favored a proposal by the President that twenty-four heavy bombers fly from Khartoum, bomb Rumanian oil fields, and land in Russia, but he was cool to a presidential tender that American fighter planes be delivered by air from Alaska to Siberia. The meeting recessed for an official lunch, at which Molotov reminisced about Hitler and Ribbentrop—“the two most disagreeable people he had ever had to deal with”—and the President toasted the masterful leadership of Joseph Stalin, whom he looked forward to meeting.
Thus Roosevelt made the fateful pledge. Later there would be controversy as to just what he had promised—what kind of second front, where, and when—but all the discussions with Molotov clearly implied a cross-channel attack by all the ground and air power Britain and the United States could muster, in August or September of 1942. Roosevelt’s reasons seem equally clear in restrospect. He was affected by Molotov’s dark picture of the Eastern Front, even though the Foreign Commissar stressed that Russia would never surrender. The news from that front seemed blacker day by day. It had long been agreed that a quick assault must be launched in the west if Russia seemed to be losing. Now the time seemed to have come.
The President, moreover, had an embarrassment on his hands. He had recently promised the Russians 4.1 million tons of shipments, most of it general supplies but 1.8 million tons of it in planes, tanks, and guns. It was soon evident that the shipping shortage, production delays, and the stepped-up plans for supplies to Britain made such support impossible. Roosevelt decided to leave intact the military aid, which the Russians would need during the summer, and slash the general supplies by more than two-thirds. At his last meeting with Molotov he proposed this reduction on the ground that it would make available a large number of ships that could carry to Britain the munitions needed for the second front. Molotov reminded him that nonmilitary supplies like railroads had a direct bearing on maintaining the front.
A sharp exchange followed. Every ship shifted to England, Roosevelt repeated, brought the second front closer to realization; the Soviets could not eat their cake and have it, too. Molotov bristled at this. The second front would be stronger if the first front still stood. What would happen, he asked cuttingly, if the Soviets got less supply and then no second front eventuated? Evidently sensing a soft brokerage element in the President’s proposal, Molotov became insistent. What answer should he take back about a second front? The President was placatory. He told his guest that the British and American military were already discussing practical invasion problems of landing craft and the like, although he knew at this time that Churchill was still worried about the difficulties of a 1942 invasion and was still eying Norway and French Africa.
A private promise was one thing, a public commitment something else. Molotov wanted the latter. He proposed a sentence to be included in a communiqué released in Washington and Moscow: “In the course of the conversations full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942.” Marshall felt that the statement was too strong and urged that there be no reference to 1942, but Roosevelt wanted it kept in. Molotov left Washington happy, the declaration in his pocket; the President wrote to Winant that his Russian visitor had “actually got chummy” toward the end.
Churchill watched these happenings with deepening anxiety. When Molotov returned to London with the communiqué, Churchill agreed to its publication in order to deceive the enemy, but he did not want to deceive his friends. He told Molotov both orally and in writing that although preparations were going forward, he could not promise a second front in 1942. When Molotov said that he had agreed to a reduction in supplies, the Prime Minister was unmoved; he could not see how Roosevelt’s proposal to cut Russia’s tonnage deliveries would help solve the problem of landing a small army on a heavily fortified coast. He was fully resolved on a big invasion in 1943, and if it was possible to do in 1942 what was planned for 1943, so much the better. With this vague reassurance Molotov flew back to Moscow and to a jubilant meeting of the Supreme Soviet, where in Stalin’s presence he quoted the communiqué.
Churchill had sent to Washington Lord Louis Mountbatten, the youthful, adventurous Chief of Combined Operations, to present to Roosevelt some of the dire problems of staging a cross-channel attack in 1942; when Mountbatten reported to him that Roosevelt was talking about a “sacrificial landing” if Russia should be nearing collapse, the Prime Minister decided that he should fly to Washington to keep the President from “getting a little off the rails.” His military staff continued to argue strongly against a 1942 assault, but he knew that Stimson and Marshall were pressing for it hard. Roosevelt, as usual, welcomed the visit and invited Churchill to see him first at Hyde Park. As the Prime Minister, Brooke, and Ismay left London on June 17, reports were coming in from Africa that the British were in full retreat and Rommel’s forces were closing in around Tobruk.
Two days later the President was waiting in his car when Churchill came to a bumpy landing on a small airstrip near Hyde Park. He showed the Prime Minister his convertible and then drove him around the estate and out on the lawn overlooking the river. Churchill had some anxious moments as his host, using manual controls, turned and backed the car over the grassy bluffs and darted into thick woods to slip away from the Secret Service; the President tried to reassure him by inviting him to feel his biceps, which he said a famous prize fighter had envied. All the time they talked, with Churchill trying not to take Roosevelt’s mind off his driving. After lunch the talk continued in Roosevelt’s hot little study off the portico. Plans for a landing were going ahead, Churchill told the President, but not one of his commanders had been able to make a plan for September 1942 that had any chance of success. Had the American staff a plan? What would be required? Who would command? In the evening the two men boarded the presidential train for Washington.
Next day Churchill had hardly entered the President’s study when a secretary came in with a telegram. Roosevelt read the pink slip and without a word handed it to Churchill, TOBRUK HAS SURRENDERED WITH TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND MEN TAKEN PRISONERS. Churchill visibly winced. Defeat he could take; this he felt was disgrace. There was a moment of silence. Then Roosevelt said:
“What can we do to help?”
“Give us as many Sherman tanks as you can spare, and ship them to the Middle East as quickly as possible.”
The President sent for Marshall. The Chief of Staff had hardly been able to scrape together enough modern tanks to supply his armored units, after heartbreaking delays. But he rose to the occasion, too. “It is a terrible thing to take the weapons out of a soldier’s hands,” he said—but if Churchill needed them he could have them.
The fall of Tobruk clinched the British opposition to a European second front in 1942. The plan died hard. Churchill and his generals continued to pay lip service to a cross-channel attack in theory while finding numberless reasons to oppose or delay it in practice. Roosevelt continued to favor it in general while still allocating ships and supplies to other battle sectors across the vast fronts of Africa and Asia. Stimson kept pounding away at the President, as did Marshall, until Roosevelt sent him, along with Hopkins and King, to London for a showdown with the British. Roosevelt’s instructions were ambivalent: to fight hard for an attack in France that year, but if that was “finally and definitely out of the picture,” to determine upon another place for United States troops to fight in 1942. The three Americans found the British dead set against a second front in Europe. Other ways to commit American troops in 1942 were canvassed; attention turned more and more to Northwest Africa.
The President could hold out no longer, especially since he was somewhat ambivalent himself toward the cross-channel attack for 1942. Giving in to the British, he pressed for a decision on Africa, since time was getting short even for that lesser operation. When Hopkins cabled that the British were delaying a decision on that question, too, Roosevelt urged that planning proceed at once for African landings not later than October 20. He was relieved that a decision was finally in the works; tell Churchill, he said to Hopkins, that the orders now were “full speed ahead.”
Who would tell the Bear in Moscow? After all the hopeful talk and half-promises, how would Stalin be informed that there would be no cross-channel attack in 1942? Churchill, who was headed for Cairo to deal directly with Middle Eastern command changes after Rommel’s thrust east, glumly volunteered to go on to Moscow to impart the bad news. The President suggested he tell Stalin that a course of action had definitely been set for 1942 without informing him of its precise nature. “It is essential for us to bear in mind our Ally’s personality,” Roosevelt said, “and the very difficult and dangerous situation that he confronts. I think we should attempt to put ourselves in his place, for no one whose country has been invaded can be expected to approach the war from a world point of view.”
Churchill left Cairo for Moscow on August 10 feeling as though he was carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole. It was a terrible time for the Russians. German forces had taken Sevastopol and the whole Crimea, easily captured Rostov, crossed the Don, and were moving slowly toward Stalingrad. In the south they were racing toward the eastern shore of the Black Sea, penetrating the Caucasian foothills, and heading for the prized oil fields to the southeast. Once again Stalin faced desperate shortages, and he could not forget all the delays in shipments and all the diversions of supplies Churchill and Roosevelt had tolerated or effected—diversions to the Pacific, to the Middle East, even to Britain. After a convoy to Murmansk had been decimated, Churchill decided to suspend further such perilous expeditions during the long summer days; he told Stalin he could not defend the convoys with big warships because any major losses would jeopardize the “whole command of the Atlantic.” Stalin had answered furiously late in July that wars could not be fought without losses, the Soviet Union was suffering far greater losses—and “I state most emphatically that the Soviet Government cannot tolerate the Second Front in Europe being postponed till 1943.”
Harriman flew with Churchill to Moscow and cabled the proceedings to an anxious Roosevelt. On the first evening, Harriman reported, Stalin answered Churchill’s arguments with a bluntness that approached insult. You cannot win wars, he said, if you are afraid of the Germans. He showed little interest in a 1943 second front. Churchill adroitly brought the discussion around to the increased heavy bombing of German cities—an agreeable topic to Stalin—and then to the plans for North Africa. Instantly Stalin showed an intense interest in these plans and before long was giving a masterly defense of them.
At the next evening’s session, however, the atmosphere turned polar again. Stalin opened the meeting by handing Churchill and Harriman an aide-mémoire asserting that a 1942 second front had been “pre-decided” during Molotov’s trip, that the Soviets had based their summer and fall plans on the assumption of such a front, that this failure not only inflicted a “moral blow on the whole of the Soviet foreign opinion” but would impair the Anglo-American military position as well. When Stalin said that if the British infantry would only fight the Germans as the Russians and indeed the RAF had done, it would not be so afraid of them, Churchill said: “I pardon that remark only on account of the bravery of the Russian troops.” When Harriman asked about plans for ferrying American aircraft across Siberia the dictator turned on him: “Wars are not won with plans.”
Another strange shift of mood occurred the next evening, Harriman reported to the President. Stalin was in good spirits at the state dinner and seemed completely oblivious of the previous evening’s unpleasantness. On the final evening Stalin invited Churchill to his apartment, and, after introducing his daughter, Svetlana, to his guest, talked with Churchill for six hours. “On the whole,” Churchill cabled to Roosevelt, “I am definitely encouraged by my visit to Moscow.” Roosevelt cabled Stalin that “we must bring our forces and our power against Hitler at the earliest possible moment.”
Roosevelt, like the others, wondered why the Russians had blown so hot and cold during the short series of meetings. Both Harriman and Eden had encountered equally mystifying shifts in earlier conferences. There was speculation that Stalin on his own was friendly but had to take a harsher line in the presence of Politburo members or in reporting to them. Probably the truth was simpler. Frightful reports from the front, especially the Stalingrad sector, were arriving at the Kremlin during Churchill’s visit.
Still, Stalin was profoundly ambivalent. Even as he denounced the lack of American and British help he must have reflected—for he never lost sight of the long-run, postwar implications of immediate decisions—on the strategic aspect of the Soviets’ taking the brunt of the ground fighting in 1942. If the Anglo-Americans were tardy in returning to Europe, where would the various armies stand after the crushing of Germany?
All the immediate decisions made in the crucible of crises and conflict, all the improvisations and expediencies, would have their long-run effects. Doubtless Hopkins was reflecting much of the President’s feeling when he wrote to Winant after Molotov’s departure from Washington in June: “We simply cannot organize the world between the British and ourselves without bringing the Russians in as equal partners. For that matter, if things go well with Chiang Kai-shek, I would surely include the Chinese too. The days of the policy of the ‘white man’s burden’ are over. Vast masses of people simply are not going to tolerate it and for the life of me I can’t see why they should….” But the Soviets could hardly feel they were equal partners if they took an unequal share of the losses among the United Nations without an extra share of postwar compensation. Nor could the Chinese. Nor could the Indians.
While Churchill was dampening Soviet second-front hopes in Moscow, his political policy in Asia was facing its harshest test. The failure of the Cripps mission precipitated a crisis in the Indian Congress. Gandhi and the other militants were urging civil disobedience. Nehru was in a dilemma. He abhorred any brand of fascism, supported the cause of the United Nations, and admired the Russian and Chinese defense against invaders. He believed, indeed, that a United Nations victory was necessary for Indian freedom. But he distrusted the British and wanted to stay abreast of his master, Gandhi, and the other nationalists as India marched toward independence. At a meeting of Congress leaders late in April Nehru supported a Gandhi-inspired resolution calling for a scorched-earth resistance to the Japanese while neither helping nor hindering Britain’s war effort. “Quit India,” Gandhi demanded of the British Raj; soon thousands were rallying to the call.
Early in the summer, as emotions were rising, Gandhi appealed to Roosevelt. “Dear Friend,” he began.
“I twice missed coming to your great country. I have the privilege [of] having numerous friends there both known and unknown to me.…I have profited greatly by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson. I say this to tell you how much I am connected with your country.” He went on to speak in the same vein of Great Britain; his plea that the British should unreservedly withdraw their rule, he said, was prompted by the friendliest intention.
“My personal position is clear. I hate all war. If, therefore, I could persuade my countrymen, they would make a most effective and decisive contribution in favour of an honourable peace. But I know that all of us have not a living faith in non-violence.” So he proposed that if the Allies thought it necessary, they might keep their troops, at their own expense, in India, not for maintaining internal order but for preventing Japanese aggression and defending China. Then India must become free, even as America and Britain were. Only the full acceptance of his proposal could put the Allied cause on an unassailable basis.
“I venture to think that the Allied declaration, that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow, so long as India and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain, and America has the Negro problem in her own home. But in order to avoid all complications, in my proposal I have confined myself only to India. If India becomes free, the rest must follow, if it does not happen simultaneously….”
It was a compelling appeal to the Roosevelt of the Four Freedoms, a bold linking of the aspirations of Indians, Chinese, Africans, and even American Negroes—but it produced no reply from Washington. In Chungking, now almost cut off from India by Japanese troops, Chiang somberly watched the growing crisis in the subcontinent. He had long felt a natural kinship with Indian nationalists. As the British position collapsed in Malaya and India he had talked with Gandhi in Calcutta and later had told Churchill and Roosevelt that he was shocked by the military and political situation in India and that, while he had tried to view the colonial problem objectively, he was certain that the political problem must be solved before Indian morale collapsed. In yielding to Churchill, Roosevelt had in effect repudiated Chiang’s view. In their extremity the Chinese and Indian nationalists were drawing closer together. Late in June Gandhi wrote to Chiang.
“I can never forget the five hours close contact I had with you and your noble wife in Calcutta. I had always felt drawn towards you in your fight for freedom….” He described his early friendships with Chinese in Johannesburg. Because of his warm feeling toward China he was anxious to make clear that his appeal to British power to withdraw from India was not meant in any way to weaken India’s defense against the Japanese. “I would not be guilty of purchasing the freedom of my country at the cost of your country’s freedom.” Japanese domination of either country must be prevented. “I feel India cannot do so while she is in bondage. India has been a helpless witness of the withdrawal from Malaya, Singapore and Burma.” The failure of the Cripps mission had left a deep wound that was still running.
Gandhi described to Chiang his overtures to the British. “…the Government of Free India would agree that the Allied powers might under treaty with us keep their armed forces in India and use the country as a base for operations against threatened Japanese attack.” His heart went out to China in its heroic struggle and endless sacrifice. “I look forward to the day when Free India and Free China will cooperate together in friendship and brotherhood for their own good and for the good of Asia and the world.”
Late the next month, with the situation degenerating as he had predicted, Chiang wrote a long letter to the President. “With both sides remaining adamant in their views, the Indian situation has reached an extremely tense and critical stage.…If India should start a movement against Britain or against the United Nations, this will cause deterioration in the Indian situation from which the Axis powers will surely reap benefit. Such an eventuality will seriously affect the whole course of the war and at the same time the world might entertain doubts as to the sincerity of the lofty war aims of the United Nations.” The letter was rather repetitive, but Chiang put the matter squarely to the President. “Your country is the leader of this war of right against might and Your Excellency’s views have always received serious attention in Britain.” The Indians had long been expecting the United States to take a stand for justice and equality. The Indians were by nature a passive people, but likely to go to extremes. Repression would bring a violent reaction. The enlightened policy for Britain would be to grant complete freedom “and thus to prevent Axis troops from setting foot on Indian soil.”
Chiang emphasized that this message was “strictly confidential…only for your Excellency’s personal reference.” But the day after receiving it Roosevelt, by telephone, instructed Welles to send the complete text of Chiang’s cable to Churchill, with a covering message. Welles drafted the message, arguing that it would do no good. All State Department information, he told the President, confirmed Chiang’s views that a desperately serious situation was at hand in India, of vital concern to American military interests in the Far East, and that Washington and Chungking should try to mediate between London and New Delhi. But the cable went to Churchill with a request for the Prime Minister’s thoughts and suggestions. The reply came not from Churchill, but from Attlee for the War Cabinet. It was a stiff defense of the British position, plus a notification that stern measures would be taken in the event of mass civil disobedience.
Roosevelt sent a bland message to Chiang, stressing the need for military defense against Japan and declining to put pressure on the British. From New Delhi, Currie warned Roosevelt that Gandhi was accusing the United States of making common cause with Britain, and that this tendency “endangers your moral leadership in Asia and therefore America’s ability to exert its influence for acceptable and just settlements in postwar Asia.”
June 1, 1942, Rollin Kirby, reprinted by permission of the New York Post
After Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian leaders were arrested in early August, Chiang sent a final appeal to the President as “the inspired author of the Atlantic Charter.” Roosevelt answered that neither he nor Chiang had the moral right to force their feelings on either the British or the Congress party, and that “irrespective of the merits of the case, any action which slows up the war effort in India results not in theoretical assistance, but in actual assistance to the armed forces of Japan.”
Chiang had more than enough problems in his own country. China was nearing the end of its fifth year of war. The economy was steadily deteriorating. Artillery and aircraft were in desperately short supply. For months Washington had been promising military aid; much of it had been diverted to other, nearer fronts; some had been held in India; only a trickle had got through over the long, tortuous, and embattled supply lines. Chennault was still fighting gamely with his volunteer air group, and an army general, Joseph Stilwell, had been appointed commander of United States Army forces in China, Burma, and India, as well as Chief of Staff to Chiang, but neither officer had much to operate with. Roosevelt personally was the soul of graciousness to the Chinese, but also somewhat remote and evasive.
China simply had a low priority in Washington compared with other fronts. But Chiang at least had comrades in adversity. By a twist of fate Roosevelt, within the span of a few weeks, was the target of direct and moving appeals from the leaders of a billion people—Stalin and Molotov for a second front, Gandhi and Nehru for aid in their campaign for independence, Chiang for expanded military support to China and for moral support of Indian nationalists. Roosevelt had found it necessary to deny all these appeals.
There was a brief moment when the American military, galled by British rebuffs over the second front and other issues, flirted with the notion of repudiating Atlantic First and giving the Pacific top priority. MacArthur and King, both Pacific-oriented, favored heavy commitments to their respective theaters. The idea might have contained a bit of bluff; still, Marshall formally proposed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that if the British prevailed on cross-channel postponement, “the U.S. should turn to the Pacific for decisive action against Japan.” This would be a popular step with the American public, he added, and the Chinese and Russians would be in accord.
Roosevelt would have none of it. To draw back from the Atlantic, he told Stimson, would be a little like taking up your dishes and going away. He stood fast for the basic plan of defeating Germany first, on the continuing assumption that trying to defeat Japan first would increase the chance of complete German domination of Europe and Africa. Defeat of Germany first, on the other hand, meant the defeat of Japan, probably without “firing a shot or losing a life.”
So it was still Atlantic First—but of all the Commander in Chief’s battle efforts in the early months of the war, the most ineffective and humiliating occurred in the Atlantic itself. By spring 1942 the German submarine offensive against coastal shipping was scoring stunning triumphs. Within a day of declaring war Hitler had summoned Admiral Raeder to plan the offensive. Gone were the days when the Führer had to order his Navy to avoid provoking the Americans in the Atlantic. Now he could take the offensive. Raeder’s and Karl Doenitz’s U-boats were scattered from the Arctic to the South Atlantic, including a sizable fleet in the Mediterranean, but six large submarines were dispatched to the western Atlantic, with more to follow.
The German commanders found a U-boat paradise. Hundreds of Allied ships were beating along the great lanes that ran from off the coast of Nova Scotia down to Nantucket Shoals, to New York City, to the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, to Florida, and thence to the rich oil ports of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. Few of the ships were armed; they did not sail in convoys; often they were silhouetted, a perfect target for German torpedoes, against the glowing shore lights of tourist cities like Miami and Atlantic City, whose neon signs were not doused until mid-April. The U-boats would strike without warning, sometimes blowing a tanker or cargo ship in two with one torpedo, usually rescuing survivors or letting them get away in lifeboats, sometimes offering provisions to survivors—“send the bill to Roosevelt”—but occasionally machine-gunning them. The young U-boat commanders sometimes had so many targets they would coolly let a ship in ballast pass by and wait for a laden freighter. In March the over-all toll was 788,000 tons of dry cargo shipping, 375,000 tons in tankers, mostly along the coast and in the Gulf. The loss in tankers was so severe they had to be withdrawn from the Atlantic coastal trade.
The Nazis were exultant. Raeder calculated that total Allied shipbuilding in 1942 would be seven million tons and that the Navy need sink only 600,000 tons a month to keep ahead; it was doing far better than that. Hitler, once so parsimonious with his Navy, played with the enticing hope that the offensive could slow down all Allied operations across the Atlantic or even stop them completely.
For a man who had dealt with a somewhat similar though far less critical problem during World War I, Roosevelt commanded a Navy that was surprisingly unprepared to cope with the fury and scope of the U-boat offensive. In part the problem was the usual one of scant equipment. Three months after Pearl Harbor the Navy had only eighty-six planes, sixty-seven Coast Guard cutters, and a motley collection of converted yachts and trawlers to cover the whole East Coast. The President had complained that it was hard to interest the Bureau of Ships in small vessels, but he merely ruffled the independent-minded admirals instead of commanding them. For a time the Navy tried aggressive patrolling, but as the sinkings mounted and ships had to run in and hole up in sheltered bays at night, King turned to ingenious combinations of convoys.
Not only was the Navy ill prepared and equipped when the U-boats first struck the coast in force; it also had virtually no plans to enlist, and co-operate with, the Army Air Force. The admirals became so desperate, however, that they turned to the Army as a temporary expedient. The Army Air Force was eager to help. It had been unable to close with the enemy in the Pacific, and its grandiose plans for the strategic bombing of Germany were still mere plans. Now it could fight Germans. By early spring a few score army bombers of any type that could be scratched up—one observer was reminded of Joffre’s taxicab army—were running patrols out over the sea. The whole operation was gallant but amateurish. The pilots had not been trained for their work; indeed, under an old Army-Navy treaty, the Army controlled land-based and the Navy sea-based aviation. Army pilots had had little training in the fine art of hunting the U-boat; some of them first went out with demolition rather than depth bombs, ship identification was poor, and there was always the problem of co-ordinating with the Navy under harrowing conditions of shortages, faulty intelligence, and the constantly growing and moving packs of submarines.
The President was annoyed by the Navy’s slow mobilization against the Nazi attack, Sherwood said later, but he took little direct hand, aside from suggesting to King on one occasion that a PBY be fit with a searchlight for night-hunting of submarines. In mid-April Hopkins cabled from London that losses were now running at more than half a million tons a month and that the need for ships over the next few months would be desperate. It was clear to the White House that the antisubmarine campaign would not succeed in time. The best way to overcome shipping losses was to outbuild them.
If there were any miracles in World War II, the shipbuilding spurt of 1942 would qualify. The President had set astronomical goals in January; he boosted these again the next month, and then again a few months later. Admiral Land and his Maritime Commission were aghast at these figures, which seemed to have been plucked out of nowhere. The commission had to compete for supplies against the Navy and Army, and the shipyards were plagued by machine-tool shortages, strikes, and poor planning of their own. Land demanded steel and more steel; he also urged the President to freeze labor-management relations in the industry so that the workers would not be distracted by union issues. During the first nine months of 1942, shipbuilding fell behind schedule and seemed unable either to meet Roosevelt’s final goal or to offset Allied losses. But it was evident even during the output troughs that the curve of production would rise so high that by the end of 1942 the Commander in Chief’s initial objective of eight million tons would be met. It was.
The near-miracle would become an American legend. It was achieved as much by flouting the rules as by observing them. Henry J. Kaiser, in particular, grabbed all the tools and materials he could lay his hands on, hired untrained workers recklessly on the theory that he could teach them, and was denounced for pirating labor and priority supplies. But he depended on American experience in standardization, prefabrication, and mass production, plus the happy protection of cost-plus. He had instinctively grasped Roosevelt’s rule, Eliot Janeway noted, that energy was more efficient than efficiency. By spring of 1942 Kaiser’s and other shipyards that had begun to build only the year before were breaking records by completing ships in sixty to seventy days rather than the anticipated 105. Deliveries rose from twenty-six in March to sixty-seven in June. Most of the credit for the feat went to the builders and doers. But the dreamer in the White House who had set the “impossible” goals in 1942 was also the signer of the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 and the launcher of a long-range shipbuilding program; he had stepped up the shipbuilding effort after the fall of France; he had put men like Land and Vickery in charge; and—perhaps hardest of all despite his love for small graceful ships he had approved the design of a simple cargo vessel called the “Liberty ship” but known to Roosevelt and other sailors as the “Ugly Duckling.”
Five months after Pearl Harbor war production had been lagging so badly that Roosevelt warned Nelson and others that his great goals for 1942 were not being met. War supply improved markedly during the spring, however, and by midsummer the toughest problem facing the administration was not so much production as planning the allocation of war supply to different services at home and to beseeching Allies abroad, in the face of ever-shifting strategic needs, as the fortunes of war rose and fell in distant battle theaters. This planning, of incredible magnitude and complexity, was putting heavy pressure on Roosevelt’s war agencies and on his and Churchill’s allied boards by late spring of 1942.
Part of the trouble lay in the sudden transition from cold to all-out war. Before Pearl Harbor the President had been cautious in his public projection of spending and in his requests to Congress, and Congress had been irresolute and at times niggardly. On December 7 everything instantly changed: Roosevelt set seemingly fantastic production goals, and Congress simply opened the floodgates, appropriating almost a hundred billion dollars in the first six months and adding another sixty billion in the next four.
Such was the case with fighting manpower, too. The Congress that had almost voted out the draft endorsed sudden huge expansions after Pearl Harbor. In January 1942 the President authorized an increase in army strength to 3.6 million by the end of the year. Four months later he boosted this goal to well over five million, but he would not approve Marshall’s proposal to go to almost nine million by the end of 1943. To Marshall’s chagrin, the President preferred to plan six months to a year ahead—and he made no secret of that preference. Roosevelt was sensitive to charges that more equipment was being bought than could be used or could be sent overseas—for example, a newspaper report that enough uniforms were on hand or on order for fifty million men.
Struggling to hold the colossal sums in some kind of balance was Donald Nelson and his WPB. In early spring he had to inform the President that the forty billion dollars’ worth of production considered feasible for 1942 right after Pearl Harbor had become inflated to sixty-two billion, and the sixty billion for 1943 had swollen to 110 billion—and that the increases were physically not possible. Nelson was in an unhappy position of being the “production czar” without a czar’s powers. The President had placed on him, he insisted to the War Department and other rivals, the duty of exercising direction over the entire war procurement and production program. But in fact he had to compete with General Brehon Somervell’s huge new Services of Supply, with the Navy, with the international raw materials and allocations boards, and with a cluster of shipping and other czars. And Nelson himself was too much the conciliator and the negotiator to give driving leadership to the whole mobilization and allocation effort. The result was a procurement free-for-all. Merchant ships took steel from the Navy, the Navy took aluminum from aircraft, rubber took valves from escort vessels and from petroleum, the pipelines took steel from ships, new tools, and the railroads. “All semblance of balance in the production program disappeared,” a Budget Bureau study revealed, “because of the different rates of contracting and of production that resulted from the scramble to place orders.”
Roosevelt was still being urged to set up an integrated super-agency under a real superczar, as Baruch had proposed long before the war, and he was still resisting. In the spring of 1942 strategic plans were still open; whether or not Russia could survive the gathering German offensive was still a burning question. The President still did not want to plan ahead more than six months or a year; he wanted, as always, to protect other options in case of a collapse in Russia or North Africa or the Pacific. He could not forget that the very strength of a production and allocation superczar might tie his hands in granting aid to other nations, especially Russia.
Always there were the frantic demands of Allied nations for supplies, and no one in authority in Washington was more sensitive to those demands than Roosevelt. The pressure from abroad itself was institutionalized; uneasily coexisting with United States agencies by this time were a host of international organizations for allocation. At the ARCADIA Conference Roosevelt and Churchill had set up the Combined Munitions Assignments Board (MAB) in Washington and London, operating under the Combined Chiefs of Staff; other combined boards were established for raw materials, production, shipping, and food during the first half of 1942. Despite some misgivings in Washington that the British would have an undue influence over the MAB pool of arms while making much the smaller contribution, the board worked reasonably well as a means of Anglo-American consultation and adjustment. But it was by no means a global agency. Its members were required only to “confer” with Russia, China, and other United Nations; when Chungking put out feelers for membership it was denied on the ground that only nations with disposable surpluses should be admitted.
Lend-Lease, now one of the veteran programs after a year of expansion and hard experience, had become a potent instrument of American foreign policy. It could set broad policy for programs in support of the civilian economy of beneficiary nations, but after Pearl Harbor it gave up to the War Department most of its control of military Lend-Lease. Military and civilian goods that could easily be segregated in theory could not be in practice—for example, when it came to shipping military equipment and nonmilitary supplies in one cargo vessel. For months after Pearl Harbor, military Lend-Lease was snarled by interagency conflict, administrative confusion, and innumerable crises.
The obvious questions were always there: who of the many claimants should get what, how much, and when? Those who lost out in the strenuous competition were sorely tempted to appeal to the White House—to Hopkins and even to Roosevelt. The elaborate and constantly expanding machinery set up to free the President from lesser problems could also jam and eject crises back into the White House, often at the most unpropitious moments. The Commander in Chief was not averse to shouldering this burden; he often seemed to welcome it. “Come to Poppa,” he would tell the aggrieved. But there was always the possibility that the machinery would subvert or erode presidential purpose, especially when the machinery itself served narrower needs. Aid to Russia was a case in point.
Morgenthau came in to see the President in mid-March with some disturbing figures. Washington had agreed to deliver to the Soviets by April 1, 1942, 42,000 tons of steel wire, of which only 7,500 tons would have been shipped under existing schedules. The Secretary went down the gloomy list: 3,000 tools promised, 820 shipped; stainless steel—120 tons versus twenty-two; cold-rolled steel strips—48,000 tons versus 19,000; steel alloy tubes—1,200 tons versus none at all….
“I do not want to be in the same position as the English,” Roosevelt said as he contemplated these figures. “The English promised the Russians two divisions. They failed. They promised them help in the Caucasus. They failed. Every promise the English have made to the Russians, they have fallen down on….The only reason we stand so well with the Russians is that up to date we have kept our promises….
“I would go out and take the stuff off the shelves of the stores, and pay them any price necessary, and put it in a truck and rush it to the boat….Nothing would be worse than to have the Russians collapse.… I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else than have the Russians collapse.”
The President told Morgenthau to see to it personally that the “stuff” moved to Russia. He initialed a chit for his Secretary: “This is critical because (a) we must keep our word (b) because Russian resistance counts most today.” Morgenthau told his staff that the President wanted him to get all concerned together, that the boss felt “they had made a perfect monkey of him” on Russian aid and he would not stand for it.
For weeks the President prodded his agencies, which had many excuses for delays and inaction, including failures at the Soviet end. By midsummer—a year after the original decision to aid Russia—deliveries were beginning to catch up with pledges. Through it all Roosevelt remained basically optimistic, even while the Russians were once again reeling back from German blows.
“The amusing thing about the President,” Morgenthau noted in his diary in September after listening to the President discuss the holocaust in Russia, “is that he can state these facts coolly and calmly whether we win or lose the war, and to me it is most encouraging that he really seems to face these issues, and that he is not kidding himself one minute about the war. That, to me, seems to be the correct attitude for a commander-in-chief to take.”
The Commander in Chief during these ominous summer weeks was worried by a prospect even more appalling than the overrunning of Russia—the possibility that the Nazis might have unlocked the secrets of the atomic bomb and might be building it.
It was now three years since Albert Einstein had written to the President to tell him that recent work by Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard led him to expect that the element uranium might be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future, that it might be possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium to generate quantities of new radiumlike elements, and that it was “conceivable—though less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed”—bombs so powerful, Einstein added, that they could blow up a whole port and its environs. Einstein’s letter was the culmination of passionate efforts by refugee scientists and others to press on the government their understanding of atomic energy, following Niels Bohr’s announcement that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin had achieved the fission of uranium atoms and the release of stupendous amounts of energy.
An atomic bomb in the hands of Hitler—this was unthinkable. How could the American government be alerted? After Fermi failed to interest the Navy Department early in 1939, it was decided that the President must be approached, and that this could best be done under the auspices of the celebrated Einstein. But it was not a time when even this name could unlock doors quickly. August and September 1939 were months of crisis and war in Europe. The letter was entrusted to Alexander Sachs, a financier and occasional adviser to the President, but it was not until mid-October 1939 that Sachs could get in to see the President.
“Alex, what are you up to?” Roosevelt had demanded genially when Sachs came in. Sachs had an extraordinary answer, not only in Einstein’s letter, but also in more recent atomic developments. Roosevelt’s interest flagged during the long explanation; he tried to end the whole business by remarking that though it was very interesting, government involvement at the moment seemed premature. Sachs wangled an invitation to breakfast, however, and spent part of the evening calculating how he could get through to the President. When in the morning Roosevelt asked him, “What bright idea have you got now?” Sachs told him about Napoleon’s rejection of Fulton when the inventor of the steamship tried to interest him in the idea.
“This is an example of how England was saved by the shortsightedness of an adversary,” Sachs went on. The President was quiet a few moments, thinking.
“Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up.” He called in Watson. “Pa, this requires action.”
Action came in fits and starts, and always under the dread apprehension that the Germans might be ahead. Bohr compared the atomic scientists to the “Alchemysts of former days, groping in the dark in their vain efforts to make gold.” An advisory committee on uranium was created, with representatives of the Ordnance Departments of both the Army and the Navy, and with Lyman J. Briggs, Director of the National Bureau of Standards, as chairman. The President did not want the initial research and evaluation to be monopolized by one of the services. The committee met with Szilard and Fermi and others but made little progress in the first year. Both the theoretical and operational problems seemed immensely complicated.
Roosevelt did not press the matter. Late 1939 and early 1940 were taken up with the twilight war in Europe. On May 10, 1940 he addressed the Eighth Pan American Scientific Congress in Washington and stated that the “great achievements of science and even of art can be used in one way or another to destroy as well as to create.…If death is desired, science can do that. If a full, rich and useful life is sought, science can do that also….You and I, in the long run if it be necessary, will act together to protect and defend by every means at our command our science, our culture, our American freedom and our civilization….” In the audience was a young scientist named Edward Teller. He had not planned to attend, because he disliked politics and considered political speeches a waste of time. But the Netherlands had been invaded that day and the shaken physicist went. Sitting there he concluded that Roosevelt was saying that the duty of scientists was to see that the best weapons would be available for use if necessary, and Teller, who had had serious qualms about devoting himself to weapons, suddenly found his last doubts removed as to whether he should work on the atomic bomb.
The next month the President established the National Defense Research Committee, composed of such luminaries as President James B. Conant, of Harvard, and Karl T. Compton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and at last extensive research on atomic fission with government funds was begun. Progress was slow. British scientists were also at work and were becoming somewhat more optimistic than their American counterparts. Early in October 1941 Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, reported to Roosevelt and Wallace the British view that a bomb could be constructed from U-235 that had been produced by a diffusion plant. Prognostications, he made clear, were still not definite. The President endorsed full interchange with the British and ordered policy considerations to be restricted to a small group composed of himself, the Vice President, Stimson, Marshall, Bush, and Conant. By the eve of Pearl Harbor the President’s orders were for full speed ahead. But, as usual, he was taking the experimental approach. If in six months the project was making definite progress, he would make available all the industrial and technological resources of the nation to bring about crash production of the atomic bomb.
By mid-1942 scientists were trying several different methods for extracting the U-235 isotope and plutonium. Harold C. Urey, at Columbia University, was conducting gaseous-diffusion research, physicists at the University of Virginia and the Standard Oil Company were studying the centrifuge method, and Ernest O. Lawrence was directing electromagnetic separation at Berkeley. Scientists at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, under Fermi, were working on plutonium research and planning to build the world’s first nuclear reactor. At this time there was still little to choose among the centrifuge, diffusion, and electromagnetic methods of separating U-235 and the uranium-graphite-pile and uranium-heavy-water-pile methods of producing plutonium. Conant, it was said, had the gambling spirit of the New England pioneers; and so did Roosevelt, who without evident hesitation approved tens of millions of dollars for pilot plants.
When Roosevelt and Churchill met at Hyde Park in June 1942 they apprised each other of their progress with “Tube Alloys,” the English code name for the atomic project. Churchill was relieved when the President indicated that the United States would assume the responsibility for development. The project was already outstripping the managerial and governmental resources of the scientists, and in this same month the President ordered the Army to undertake the atomic-bomb program. A new division was created within the Army Corps of Engineers to direct the construction of massive research plants and secret atomic cities. The Manhattan Engineering District was launched in August 1942.
The desperate need for speed gripped the minds of officials and scientists alike. Roosevelt and Churchill knew of the efforts the Germans were making to obtain supplies of heavy water—a sinister term, eerie, unnatural, Churchill felt. Conant, analyzing the imperfect intelligence available, concluded that the Germans might be a year, but not more, ahead of the Allies. “Three months’ delay might be fatal,” he said.