DURING THE BRIGHT AUTUMN days of 1942, while Roosevelt was fighting inflation, touring the country, and waiting out an election, he watched the fast-shifting fortunes of war on two distant fronts that soldiers, through sheer doggedness, were making into turning points of history. Despite the mixed reports, the President could write to King George in mid-October that “on the whole the situation of all of us is better in the Autumn of 1942 than it was last Spring, and that while 1943 will not see a complete victory for us, things are on the upgrade while things for the Axis have reached the peak of their effectiveness.” One front was Stalingrad; the other, Guadalcanal.
Certainly the Germans felt that they were surpassing the peak of their effectiveness on the great plains between the Don and the Volga during these fall days. Late in August, General Friedrich Paulus’s Panzer divisions fought their way into the northern suburbs of Stalingrad; soon the Luftwaffe, in the heaviest strike since the first night’s attack on Russia, was pouring incendiaries on the Volga city and sending up such flames that a newspaper could be read at night forty miles away. Like a huge magnet, some death instinct seemed to be drawing German and Russian soldiers to Stalingrad. Having moved from Rastenburg to Vinnitsa, Hitler instructed his generals that “the vital thing now was to concentrate every available man and capture as quickly as possible the whole of Stalingrad itself and the banks of the Volga.” On the same day the Russians ordered the citizens of Stalingrad to “barricade every street, transform every district, every block, every house, into an impregnable fortress.”
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.
The political uncertainties vastly compounded the danger. Stalin, no novice in such matters, had expressed some doubts about the political soundness of TORCH. Pétain and/or Darlan might give way under savage threats from Hitler and order resistance to the death against all invaders. Franco might allow Hitler’s divisions to plunge down into Africa; he might try to close the Strait of Gibraltar and cut the invasion lifeline; he might open up with his own guns on Gibraltar, which was to be both the command post and the staging area for the operation. Clearly the political and military aspects of the enterprise had to be closely intertwined, but Murphy, who continued to direct the political effort in the field, was wholly ignorant of the conduct of war, and Eisenhower, who recognized the inseparability of political and military factors, felt that politics was the job of politicians, not of soldiers.
The President was not unwilling to keep both the political and the military strings in his hand. Nowhere were the strings so tied together as in decisions on targets and composition of the invading forces. After American and British staff officers became deadlocked on these problems during August, Roosevelt and Churchill stepped in—and promptly came into direct conflict with each other. Their exchanges spelled out their differences—and their talent for dispelling them.
Churchill to Roosevelt, August 27, 1942: “We are all profoundly disconcerted” by the American Joint Chiefs of Staff proposal to throw the weight of the assault against Casablanca. “It seems to me that the whole pith of the operation will be lost if we do not take Algiers as well as Oran on the first day.” The crucial thing was to move quickly east to Tunisia before the Germans could reinforce it. Casablanca might easily become an isolated failure. If a choice had to be made between Algiers and Casablanca, Churchill favored attacking the former and dropping the latter.
Roosevelt to Churchill, August 30: “I feel very strongly that the initial attacks must be made by an exclusively American ground force, supported by your naval, transport, and air units. The operation should be undertaken on the assumption that the French will offer less resistance to us than they will to the British.” He would need a week after the landing to secure the nonresistance of the French. “Then your force can come in to the eastward.” It would take German air and parachute troops at least two weeks to get to Algiers or Tunis. Meanwhile British troops would be ashore, without much opposition, it was to be hoped, and moving east. The landings must be near Casablanca and Oran; possibly there could be a third.
Churchill to Roosevelt, September 1: “We could not contest your wish, if you so desire it, to take upon the United States the whole burden, political and military, of the landings.” But would not the British participation be revealed quickly? How would Americans be distinguished from British? “In the night all cats are grey.” What if high surf prevented disembarkation on Atlantic beaches? And if a political bloodless victory should go amiss—and the bungled attack on Dakar two years back had been a sad case of cluttering things up with “preliminary conciliatory processes”—would Roosevelt have enough trained forces to do the job directly and simply?
Roosevelt to Churchill, September 3: “Your willingness to cooperate by agreeing that all initial landings will be made by United States ground forces is appreciated.” True, British participation would soon be discovered, but this would not have quite the same effect as British forces making the first beach landings. “Bad surf conditions on the Atlantic beaches is a calculated risk.” In view of Churchill’s urgent desire that Algiers be occupied simultaneously with Casablanca and Oran, he proposed to add Algiers, with 10,000 American troops, if the British could supply the additional forces.
Churchill to Roosevelt, September 3: “We have spent the day looking into physical possibilities.” Accepting Roosevelt’s general outline, he proposed that Casablanca be reduced by 10,000 or 12,000 troops and the other landings strengthened.
At this point he composed a despairing letter to Hopkins. What was behind all the difficulty? The President’s enterprise was being wrecked bit by bit, Eisenhower and his staff officers in London were distressed, every day’s delay was helping the Germans forestall the venture.
Roosevelt to Churchill, September 4: “We are getting very close together.” He was willing to reduce the Casablanca force by 5,000 men. “Since a similar reduction was made in original Oran assault force, this releases a total of British and United States combat loaders for some 10,000 men for use at Algiers.”
Churchill to Roosevelt, September 5: “We agree to the military layout as you propose it. We have plenty of troops highly trained for landing. If convenient, they can wear your uniform. They will be proud to do so.” He put away the letter to Hopkins.
Roosevelt to Churchill, September 5: “Hurrah!”
Churchill to Roosevelt, September 6: “O.K., full blast.”
He had very good reason, Roosevelt felt, to ask that American troops be the more visible forces on the beaches. Over six months before, Intelligence officials had visited Cantril at Princeton to ask his help in gauging French attitudes toward the Americans and the British. Cantril’s new assignment was a challenging one. He would have to gauge likely opposition to, or co-operation with, an American landing without his investigators revealing their goal. Northwest Africa, with its split populations and ethnic diversity, would have been a challenge to the pollster under the most controlled conditions. Opinions of various populations would have to be weighted in terms of their importance in relation to a possible landing. Interviewing could not be straightforward, but would have to be indirect and guarded, for suspicion must not be aroused. Despite all the difficulties, a group of Americans in North Africa under Cantril’s absentee direction were able to conduct 142 usable interviews. Although the sample was askew, the returns clearly indicated that an American landing would meet less resistance than an Anglo-American invasion, because of Vichy suspicion of British imperialistic aims and memories of Anglo-French rivalry. The study also led to a proposal that the American voice most known and respected in France—that of Franklin D. Roosevelt—speak to the French in French just after the landing.
The date for the attack was another problem. Originally Roosevelt had set it for some time in October, with October 30 the latest. Discussing TORCH with Marshall, he held up his folded hands in mock prayer and said, “Please make it before Election Day.” But the expansion of the operation caused Eisenhower and his colleagues to postpone it until November 8, five days after the election. Roosevelt took the delay gamely. This was a decision that rested with Eisenhower, he told friends, not with the Democratic National Committee. He doubtless had few illusions, however, about an automatic relation between an African landing—which might, after all, fail—and votes for Democratic candidates for Congress. He was probably content to settle for the plaudits he would receive for “rising above politics.”
At the moment he was more interested in French African politics. He coached Murphy on the reasons to give the French for the invasion. Murphy must state that information had been received of Axis plans to intervene in French North Africa, that American troops would land to protect French sovereignty and administration, that no change in the existing French administration was planned, that the Americans hoped for and would welcome French assistance—and would guarantee salaries, death benefits, and pensions for French officials who helped the enterprise.
“You will restrict your dealings to French officials on the local level, prefects, and the military,” Roosevelt admonished Murphy. “I will not help anyone impose a Government on the French people.” Murphy returned to Africa hoping he could enlist General Henri Giraud, who had been captured by the Germans in 1940 and had escaped two years later, to arouse support for the Allies. But he was specifically authorized to negotiate with Darlan if necessary. Churchill said that much as he hated Darlan he would crawl on his hands and knees a mile if Darlan would bring over the French fleet. De Gaulle was to be left completely out of the venture.
Anxiety mounted in Washington and London during the final days. A new battle commander in Egypt, Bernard Montgomery, launched a heavy counterattack against Rommel on October 23, and for a week the armies grappled with each other inconclusively. Battles were also raging in Stalingrad and in the Solomons. Then, from the United States and from the British Isles the vanguard of a fleet of over six hundred ships carrying an assault force of 90,000 men plowed through the Atlantic. The task force of over one hundred ships sailing directly from the United States moved across the Atlantic like a drunken sailor, now pointing toward Dakar, now toward Britain. A British fleet of three battleships, two carriers, and twenty-one cruisers and destroyers covered the Oran and Algiers task forces.
Eisenhower was now at his Gibraltar command post deep in the cold, dripping tunnels of the Rock. So discouraged during previous weeks that he could barely put on a confident mien, he was now having the most anxious night of his whole military career. At the last moment Murphy had asked that the invasion be postponed because political prospects seemed poor, but it was much too late; the vast machinery had long been set in motion. Stimson had spent sleepless hours in bed wondering if Hitler would strike through Spain. Marshall was on edge. Steve Early heard about the invasion just before it started. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “why couldn’t the Army have done this just before election!”
Roosevelt was at Shangri-La on Saturday night, November 7, with Hopkins and a few friends, as the invasion was starting in the early hours of the morning, African time. He was tense and preoccupied. The telephone rang. Grace Tully answered. It was the War Department. The President’s hand shook as he took the receiver. He listened intently, then burst out:
“Thank God. Thank God. That sounds grand. Congratulations. Casualties are comparatively light—much below your predictions. Thank God.”
He put down the receiver and turned to the group.
“We have landed in North Africa…. We are striking back.”
War is the grand totalizer. The fits of luck and chance that make or break single operations tend to be canceled out in the numberless collisions of vast and extended forces. Roosevelt’s luck rose with the military landings in Africa, which evaded almost all the perils that the soldiers had feared, and fell with the political operation, on which he had lavished such effort and thought.
In the early hours of November 8 troops scrambled ashore from a dozen target points along the shoulder of Northwest Africa from south of Casablanca to east of Algiers. Some landings went according to plan, and the troops moved quickly inland against little or no resistance; in other places boats got lost and milled around, soldiers were landed miles from their objectives, and fire fights broke out with the French defenders. But luck prevailed: the Atlantic surf was amazingly calm: the U-boats had been successfully feinted off; the French troops, although quickly rallying to action at some points, suffered from strategic surprise. Key airports and installations fell quickly into Allied hands. And the sheer numbers and spread of invading troops made up for the hasty training and inadequate equipment.
The Commander in Chief was present in his own way. A letter from him to his troops was handed out on all ships just before disembarkation: “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives: the freedom of the lives of those you love.…” A few Frenchmen were startled to hear in the early hours the voice of Franklin Roosevelt over BBC London, in French: “My friends, who suffer day and night, under the crushing yoke of the Nazis, I speak to you as one who was with your Army and Navy in France in 1918. I have held all my life the deepest friendship for the French people.…I know your farms, your villages, and your cities. I know your soldiers, professors, and workmen.…I salute again and reiterate my faith in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” He asked the French to aid the invasion. “Vive la France éternelle!”
At this point Roosevelt’s man in Algiers was appealing to the Frenchmen’s “self-interest and national ideals”—and running into trouble. Murphy had planned that as the landings began at Algiers he would inform the local French authorities that a huge American force was invading Africa and that General Giraud was on hand to take charge. Two things were going wrong early in the morning of the eighth—neither Giraud nor the Allied troops had arrived. And unexpectedly the highest-ranking Frenchman at the moment in Algiers was Admiral Darlan, who was visiting his son, who was ill with polio. Only Darlan could act for Pétain. At first the Admiral was furious when Murphy told him the situation. Apparently the Americans were as stupid as the British, he said. But when Murphy intimated that half a million troops—only a several-fold exaggeration—were descending on the continent, Darlan’s indignation gave way to Gallic realism, or at least self-interest. He told Murphy he would co-operate if Pétain approved.
In Vichy, far to the north, the old Marshal received the American Chargé d’Affaires. Roosevelt, “as the Chef d’Etat of the United States to the Chef d’Etat of the Republic of France,” had sent him a message. The Germans had “neglected no opportunity to demoralize and degrade your great Nation,” Roosevelt said. They were planning to invade and occupy French North Africa and would then threaten the Americas. He was hoping for the co-operation of the French authorities in North Africa. Pétain’s answer, composed by Laval and others, was ready for the Chargé. The Marshal had learned of the Allied aggression with stupor and sadness. Roosevelt was attributing false intentions to his enemies. He had always declared he would defend the empire; he would keep his word. The honor of France was at stake.
“We are attacked; we shall defend ourselves; this is the order I am giving.” Actually, the Marshal’s feelings were far more mixed than his words, but he was as constricted as ever. Shortly, he broke diplomatic relations with the United States—but also authorized Darlan to act in his behalf.
In the fog of politics French officers groped for instructions and order. By midafternoon of the eighth, with Algiers almost surrounded, its coastal batteries overrun, its forts under siege, Darlan agreed to the capitulation of the city. It was different elsewhere. Two cutters with a mixed commando force had stormed Oran harbor before dawn; both had been destroyed, with the loss of all but a handful of the force. Troops made rapid progress ashore at Oran, but the French were resisting and by evening were preparing counterattacks for the next day. The heaviest fighting erupted on the Atlantic beachheads. Noguès, in Casablanca, assumed from first reports that the attack was merely a commando raid; he ordered resistance. After some amateurish landings that produced endless delay and muddle, American troops ran into heavy French gunfire as they pressed into the main cities.
The most dramatic action was a sea battle off Casablanca—“an old-fashioned fire-away Flannagan” between surface vessels, it was called by Samuel Morison, the combat historian present. French warships sortied from the harbor against the big American fleet; Jean Bart, the uncompleted French battleship lying immobile in the harbor, spoke with her fifteen-inch guns; American battleships, cruisers, and destroyers poured fire on the hapless French flotilla, sinking or disabling the Jean Bart at her berth and a dozen other warships. Among the numerous American sailors winning commendation that day was Lieutenant Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., a gunnery officer on a destroyer.
During the following days young Roosevelt’s father, who had returned from Shangri-La to the White House, would doubtless have swapped his place for his son’s in a simple fire-away Flannagan. Reports from Algiers and Gibraltar were indicating a political situation of mounting complexity and danger. On November 9 Eisenhower’s deputy, General Mark Clark, arrived in Algiers, amid a Nazi bombing raid, with the hope of ending hostilities. Giraud arrived, too, with a long-time “promise” from Roosevelt that he would be top man in North Africa. Clark met with Darlan the next day. The American General, like his chief in Gibraltar, abhorred the political aspects of the war. He divided the French leaders into good guys and those he code-named, in reports to Eisenhower, YBSOBS—“yellow-bellied sons-of-bitches.” Clark’s overwhelming way had its immediate impact; Darlan wanted to wait for more definite orders from Vichy as to a cease-fire, but under Clark’s pressure he sent directives in the Marshal’s name to Oran and to Morocco, where Noguès ordered a cease-fire just in time to avert a heavy American attack.
It was one thing for Clark, with his bigger battalions, to obtain an armistice, something else to gain Roosevelt’s real objective-active French assistance in attacking Germans and Italians to the east. In his continuing negotiations with Clark, Darlan had some high cards: his seeming embodiment of the will and confidence of the Marshal; his influence over the officers, bureaucrats, and colons who ran France’s African domain; his ability to draw things out in contrast to Eisenhower’s desperate need to get Northwest Africa pacified and the French mobilized for the push into Tunisia before the Germans gained a foothold there. The French fleet at Toulon was the big pot in the game. One thing was rapidly becoming clear: American Intelligence had been grievously wrong in thinking that Giraud had strong support, existing or potential, among the French. He was simply dismissed as a dissident. Happily Giraud himself came to realize his political impotence and was willing to take military command in Africa under Darlan’s headship.
While Clark and Darlan negotiated, Hitler acted with his usual dispatch. Meeting with Laval in Munich, the Führer demanded that Vichy at once make Tunisian ports and air bases available to the Axis. Laval proclaimed his fanatic hostility to Bolshevism—but only the Marshal could grant Hitler’s request. The Führer gave immediate orders. At midnight that evening—November 11—motorized German units stabbed across the armistice frontier and swept through southern France without resistance. Italian divisions moved into southeastern France and Corsica. The Axis took steps to fortify Tunisia, even at the expense of Rommel’s army retreating west under harrying attacks from Montgomery’s desert troops.
Hitler’s gulp of the rest of France broke the impasse in Algiers. While Pétain publicly ordered Darlan to continue fighting, the Admiral could claim that the Marshal was acting under duress and in any event was sending out secret orders countermanding his public ones. Negotiations were soon concluded. Eisenhower, who made a brief trip to Algiers, Clark, and Murphy agreed with Darlan, Giraud, and other local French leaders that Darlan would be the political chief and would retain his command of naval forces; the French would actively help liberate Tunisia, and other matters would be left to further negotiations. To the Americans on the scene it seemed to be a safe and sensible arrangement—certainly nothing that could produce an explosion back home.
“Prostitutes are used; they are seldom loved. Even less frequently are they honored.” The Darlan deal was only the latest and worst of a long series of concessions and bargains that had weakened and were still weakening democratic resistance. “The United States has only one claim on the allegiance of the peoples of the world: an honest and courageous democratic policy.” Africa had produced a “historic clash between two theories of political behavior—the ‘quarterback’ or opportunist theory, long indorsed by the President, and the theory which insists upon the importance of a thought-out, consistent political line.” But what doubtless appeared a reasonable military expedient was proving a costly political blunder. Darlan was America’s first Quisling. Appeasement was winning out. These were the words of Freda Kirchwey, editor and publisher of the Nation, but also the sentiments of a host of liberals, idealists, and independents when they got news of the Darlan deal. Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Thompson raised sharp and influential voices. Feeling was even stronger in liberal and left-wing circles in Britain. In both countries opposition developed in high councils of state. Concerned about the effect of the deal on de Gaulle’s status and morale, Eden wrangled with Churchill to the point where the Prime Minister shouted, “Well, Darlan is not as bad as de Gaulle anyway!” In Washington, Stimson was so alarmed at the reaction that he invited his best liberal friends—Morgenthau, Frankfurter, MacLeish—to his home and argued for the military value of the deal. Morgenthau was not placated. He passionately denounced Darlan as a man who had sold thousands of people into slavery, as a violent British-hater; no, the price was too high. The Secretary of the Treasury seemed to Stimson so “sunk” that he was almost for giving up the war. If Frankfurter had any misgivings about the deal, there is no record of his having communicated them to the President.
Stimson performed a bigger service for the President that evening. He heard from Elmer Davis that Willkie was about to address the New York Herald Tribune Forum and to denounce American leaders for promising freedom to the French people and then putting their enslaver in control of them. “Shall we be quiet when we see our government’s long appeasement of Vichy find its logical conclusion in our collaboration with Darlan, Hitler’s tool?” Reaching his fellow Republican by telephone less than an hour before he was to speak, Stimson implored him to delete the critical passage or otherwise jeopardize the lives of 60,000 soldiers. Willkie lost his temper, denounced Stimson for trying to control his freedom—but after exhausting his reservoir of profanity he agreed to tone down his speech. As delivered, it merely pummeled that battered old punching bag, the State Department. The President listened to Willkie’s broadcast and later telephoned Stimson to congratulate him.
By the iron laws of mutual hostility, the more the Americans embraced Darlan in Algiers, the more they alienated de Gaulle in London. The Free French leader, at first exhilarated by the landings in Africa, turned cold toward the invaders as they parleyed with the men of Vichy. He felt that the Darlan deal was politically shortsighted, tactically ineffective, and an American ploy for postwar supremacy. “What remains of the honor of France,” he proclaimed, “will stay intact in my hands.” He called on Admiral Stark and tendered a one-sentence note: “The United States can pay traitors but not with the honor of France.” Stark refused to accept it. Churchill was caught between his desire to sustain the soldiers in the field, his policy of recognizing de Gaulle and working with him, and the revulsion against Darlan among the people and even within his own government. Somehow he managed to back Eisenhower while making clear that the Darlan deal was essentially an American undertaking.
At first Roosevelt seemed unmoved by the furore. He received from Eisenhower a strong cable explaining that if Darlan was repudiated, French armed forces would resist passively and perhaps actively—and the possibility of getting the French Navy out of Toulon intact and of winning French military assistance in France would be gone. Impressed by this cable, Roosevelt read it to Hopkins with such superb emphasis that it seemed to Sherwood, sitting by, as if he were making a plea for his European commander before the bar of history. But as the tumult over Darlan mounted, Roosevelt was compelled to issue a public justification. “I have accepted General Eisenhower’s political arrangements made for the time being in Northern and Western Africa.” He understood and approved the widespread feeling that in view of the history of the last two years no permanent arrangement should be made with Darlan. “We are opposed to Frenchmen who support Hitler and the Axis. No one in our Army has any authority to discuss the future Government of France and the French Empire.
“The future French Government will be established, not by any individual in Metropolitan France or overseas, but by the French people themselves after they have been set free by the victory of the United Nations.
“The present temporary arrangement in North and West Africa is only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle.” It was designed to save lives and to speed the attack on Tunis. He had asked for the abrogation of all laws inspired by Nazi governments or ideologists.
At the same time Roosevelt assured Eisenhower that he appreciated his difficulties, did not question his actions in any way, and that the General could be sure of Roosevelt’s complete support-but that Eisenhower should keep in mind:
“1. That we do not trust Darlan.
“2. That it is impossible to keep a collaborator of Hitler and…a fascist in civil power any longer than is absolutely necessary.” He asked that Darlan’s movements be watched and his communications supervised.
Brave words—and yet they masked Roosevelt’s sharp disappointment over the political problems in Africa. The operation had been a stirring success militarily, with American casualties amounting to less than 1,500, and a bracing fillip for the people back home, but celebration of this was dimmed by the criticism. When Morgenthau, still depressed after his visit with Stimson, came to the White House to say that North Africa was “something that afflicts my soul,” Roosevelt gave him the usual argument of military expediency and went on to quote an “old Bulgarian proverb of the Orthodox Church: ‘My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.’ ” Roosevelt liked the proverb so much he repeated it both to Churchill and to the press, adding to the reporters, “Mind you, this is okayed by the church.”
The trouble was that Roosevelt had as little desire to walk with the devil as had the people he led. Rosenman could not remember a time when he was more deeply affected by a political attack, or resented his critics more, especially since so many of them were usually his supporters. At times he refused to discuss the matter at all; other times he read aloud with bitterness some columnist’s criticism. It did not help that Stalin later approved the Darlan deal on the ground that military diplomacy must be able to use not only the Darlans but “Even the Devil himself and his grandma.” That was doing the Bulgarian one better, but Roosevelt preferred to clothe his policies in idealism, because fundamentally he was an idealist.
Still, he was also a practical man, and the final irony of the expedient North African policy was that the expediency failed in major respects. The French did resist initially, causing and sustaining casualties. It was hoped that Darlan could bring over the French fleet in Toulon, but when the Germans closed in on the naval base late in November the French scuttled their fine battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. It was hoped that the French would actively help in the Tunisian campaign, but they proved unwilling or unable to lend decisive assistance. Above all, it was hoped that an early cease-fire would enable the Allies to make a quick thrust into Tunisia, but the Germans got there first, the weather turned foul, and soon the Americans and British were stalled on the Tunisian front. If the Darlan policy had been effective as a way of achieving major short-run military goals, it was far less rewarding, and even probably a handicap, in achieving long-run or even middle-run strategic objectives. Darlan’s assassination in Algiers the day before Christmas 1942 relieved Roosevelt of the person but not the problem.
So Roosevelt and his soldiers were left with a gnawing worry about the price that might be paid, impossible to estimate, in disappointment and chagrin among anti-Nazi French inside and outside their country, and among free peoples everywhere who wondered just how far one could walk with the devil, how often, and at what price.
“The President becomes more and more the central figure in the global war, the source of initiative and authority in action, and, of course, of responsibility.” So wrote Hassett in his diary toward the end of November 1942. Hassett, who was as close to his chief as a valet and only a shade less iconoclastic, went on: “A little impatient at delay in offensive against Tunis and Bizerte. ‘Why are they so slow?’ he queried. But still calm and composed, always at his best, as the first year of the war draws to a close. Still unruffled in temper, buoyant of spirit, and, as always, ready with a wisecrack or a laugh, and can sleep anywhere whenever opportunity affords—priceless assets for one bearing his burdens, which he never mentions. No desire to be a martyr, living or dead.”
Buoyancy—this was the quality that struck Roosevelt’s staff and friends during the anxious months of planning, waiting, and managing during late 1942. Despite Hassett, he was often ruffled—by reporters, by critics, by delays—but he was quick to recover. As always he found strength in friends, anecdotes, banter, the daily routine of visits, dictating letters, signing documents with the broad-pointed pen he had given Hassett.
And always the darting interest, the instant response, the nimble recovery, the endless curiosity, the quick, almost automatic self-protectiveness. He instructed his naval aide to tell the Navy band that the “Star-Spangled Banner” should be played with fewer frills. He asked his wife to cut down the food bill in the light of the new income-tax law, especially in the large portions served at meals brought up to the study. “I know of no instance where anybody has taken a second help—except occasionally when I do—and it would be much better if I did not take a second help anyway.” He wrote to Admiral King, who had informed him primly that he would shortly be sixty-four and hence retirable, “So what old top? I may even send you a birthday present!” (And he did—a framed photograph of himself.) He dunned neighbor Morgenthau for his annual dues ($750) to the Dutchess County Democratic party. He sent his half-niece a transcription of his grandmother’s Hyde Park diaries, confessing that neither he nor his niece would have found Hyde Park life sixty years back very exciting. He thanked Fred Allen for sending him a coffee bean, which had ended his anguished coffeeless breakfasts and “made the sun come out”; otherwise he would have resigned as Commander in Chief and taken appointment as a sergeant major in Brazil, where he could have coffee six times a day. He told Ickes, who had invited himself to lunch and threatened to bring his own food, that he would fall into the clutches of the Secret Service and that the President would rather go out to “dine with my old farmer’s wife named Jane.” He wrote to Herbert Bayard Swope—signing the memo with Grace Tully’s initials—that the President would never speak to him again.
“He is affronted and insulted by your suggestion that his French is ‘as good’ as that of Winston. Furthermore, the President’s accent is not only infinitely superior but his French profanity is so explosive that you had better not be within a half mile of him when it goes off.” If Swope was such a linguist, he could go to Albania, where the third front was to be established. “Incidentally, a little bird tells us that the pulchritude of the Albanian mountain females is an added attraction. When do you want to shove off?”
He was pleased when Eleanor Roosevelt planned to visit England and he listed people she must see—mainly top royalty. “People whom you should see if they call on you”—more royalty, and a few commoners, including Eduard Beneš, of Czechoslovakia. He wrote letters for her to King George VI and to Queen Wilhelmina. To his wife’s query as to whether she should take anything to King George and Queen Mary and to Churchill he replied, “No.”
On Thanksgiving Day he invited the leaders of his war government—Cabinet members, Army and Navy chiefs, war agency heads, along with the Supreme Court—to worship with him at a special service in the East Room. There he read his Thanksgiving Proclamation. “…Yes, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” the President intoned in a soft, hushed voice. To David Lilienthal, sitting near him, he looked like one of the senior wardens of his little church at Hyde Park, drawing up his eyebrows as he read the words, singing almost soundlessly the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Afterward he greeted people cheerily, sometimes boisterously, taking their hands in his huge grip, saying a word to their wives like a minister at the church door after the service.
He had much to give thanks for. It looked as though the turning point of the war had at last been reached, he told the Herald Tribune Forum. Despite his annoyance about the flap over Darlan, the weeks after the invasion were a time of solace for the President. “I am happy today in the fact that for three months I have been taking it on the chin in regard to the Second Front and that that is now over,” he wrote his old Navy chief, Josephus Daniels. He had the pleasure of sitting back in his chair, puffing contentedly on a cigarette, telling reporters about the long process of planning TORCH, lecturing them mildly on how a second front could not just be bought in a department store, ready-made. He even scored with the columnists. It seemed as though the United Nations had a grand strategy after all, some of them decided, what with American forces drawing the Japanese into the Solomons, the Russians overextending the Germans in the Caucasus, and then the pincers closing on the enemy in Africa. Roosevelt was one of the greatest war presidents, with a grasp of total and global strategy, Major George Fielding Eliot wrote.
If the war seemed at a turning point toward the end of 1942, Roosevelt seemed—a year after Pearl Harbor, two years after his decision for Lend-Lease, halfway through his third term—to be facing a turning point, too. For two years he had been stressing war problems and playing down long-run economic and social issues. He had usually evaded questions about planning for the postwar period. Now, in the first flush of victory, he seemed to be thinking more about future social and economic problems, at home and abroad.
New Dealers had been worried that fall. The town seemed, more than ever, full of big businessmen who now seemed to be running things rather than denouncing things in the Chamber of Commerce Building across from the White House. The President gave an “honorable discharge” to the old Works Progress Administration—symbol of the “Second Hundred Days” of Roosevelt’s progressivism at the height of its fervor and turbulence in 1935—and dropped one or two other New Deal agencies. Democratic leaders, according to Washington reporters, were privately conceding that great blocs of labor, farm, and independent votes had gone Republican; the President had lost his political touch, having failed in his two key aims of saving Norris and defeating Dewey; Congress was already in revolt; old New Dealers like Morgenthau, Wallace, and Ickes were unpopular, worn out, fumbling. There were reports—true this time—that Henderson would be out by Christmas.
A sense of defeat hung over Washington, Lilienthal felt—not of military defeat, but of the purposes for which Americans had been told the war was being fought. He sensed a disorganization of spirit, a vacuum at the center that was being filled with reaction, weariness, cynicism. His fears deepened when he went in to see the President in mid-December about some proposals to have lame-duck Senator Norris visit the Tennessee Valley and the Arkansas and other possible river-valley developments, and report back to the President. He suggested that Norris might also report on the possible role of TVA’s abroad, where there was intense interest in Roosevelt’s experiment.
The President was leery. No, he said, we had better leave the foreign thing out; the other night an NAM speaker had said that the administration had in mind a TVA on the Danube. Lilienthal did not contest the point. He left the White House with a heavy heart. He had heard the stories that the President was interested only in a military victory. “Godamighty”—it was true. One speech before the National Association of Manufacturers—and the man pulled away from the fundamental proposition of America’s interest in the welfare of the rest of the world.
Lilienthal had left so that Roosevelt could lunch alone with Norris; then he returned. He seemed to find a changed man. Roosevelt had told Norris that he wanted him to report on the Tennessee Valley project and what it meant to the future of America and to other parts of the world. Lilienthal was elated. He confessed to the President that he had left his office discouraged. Roosevelt leaned back in his chair. He looked as Lilienthal remembered him in the past, when he had fought back against his enemies and usually won. He had, thought Lilienthal, the handsomest fighting face in the world.
“I am going to fight back. I’m not going to take this lying down.” Roosevelt had his jaw stuck out. Lilienthal was standing, worried, knowing that Leahy and Marshall were waiting to come in. “I’m really going to tell this next Congress.” His speech would lay out a program that would give them and the country something to chew on. “Those boys in Guadalcanal and in Africa—does this Congress propose to tell them they are going to come back to fear about jobs, fear about the things a man can’t prevent, like accident, sickness, and so on? Well, they will have a chance to go on record about it, to divide on that political issue.” And as the President got off point after point, he would grin or wink. Lilienthal shook hands to go, but the President was keyed up and went on talking. Lilienthal was aroused, too, and blurted out something he had been aching to say but never expected to have the chance to—that it was when the President took the offensive that the people were with him.
Christmastime came, with parties at Hyde Park for soldiers guarding the Commander in Chief’s home; then the President and First Lady returned to Washington for Christmas itself. On New Year’s Eve they had their usual small party for close friends, and as usual toasted the United States of America. The company drank to the President; he in turn toasted his wife as the one who made it possible for him to carry on; at his suggestion glasses were raised to friends and family in far-off parts of the world. Then the President offered a new toast: “The United Nations.”