I AM GOING TO FIGHT back,” the President had exclaimed to David Lilienthal. “I’m really going to tell this next Congress.” But as the time for his address to Congress neared, he shifted toward a more conciliatory role, in part because public-opinion studies indicated that people would respond favorably to a co-operative attitude toward Congress. He knew that 1943 would be a transitional sort of year—not one of desperate defense like most of 1942, but not yet the year for all-out attack, and certainly not the year for victory. He had decided it was time to talk about postwar hopes and policies, but he could not forget that the November elections had left him with the biggest Republican-Southern Democratic opposition he had yet faced.
Greeted by two minutes of applause as he made his slow way to the rostrum on January 7, 1943, he launched into a long speech that seemed to play on every note and mood.
He was confident. “The period of our defensive attrition in the Pacific is drawing to a close. Now our aim is to force the Japanese to fight. Last year, we stopped them. This year, we intend to advance.” In Europe the main task during 1942 had been to lessen the pressure on Russia by compelling Germany to divert some of its strength west. North Africa had opened up what Churchill had called the “under-belly” of the Axis, the President said.
He was belligerent. “I cannot prophesy. I cannot tell you when or where the United Nations are going to strike next in Europe. But we are going to strike—and strike hard. I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them”—and here the President bit off the names of possible targets in a rhythmic, mocking tone—“in Norway, or through the Low Countries, or in France, or through Sardinia or Sicily, or through the Balkans, or through Poland—or at several points simultaneously. But…we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly….Yes, the Nazis and the Fascists have asked for it—and—they—are—going—to—get—it.”
He was conciliatory. He praised workers, farmers, and even owners and managers for their war effort. He denied that Washington was a “madhouse”—except in the sense that it was the capital city of a nation that was fighting mad. He apologized for the number of complicated forms and questionnaires. “I know about that, I have had to fill some of them out myself.”
He was a bit more apologetic. There had been criticism of the war-production effort and much of it had had a healthy effect, he said. Some production goals had had to be adjusted downward, and others upward; airplane and tank production had fallen short numerically of the 1942 goals. But the over-all record would give no aid and comfort to the enemy. “I think the arsenal of democracy is making good.”
Above all, he wanted to talk about the peace. He reminded the Congress of his message on the Four Freedoms two years earlier. Soldiers would not be willing to come home to a bogus prosperity, to slums, or the dole, or selling apples on street corners. “I have been told that this is no time to speak of a better America after the war. I am told it is a grave error on my part.
“I dissent.
“And if the security of the individual citizen, or the family, should become a subject of national debate, the country knows where I stand.”
But it was of little account, he went on, to talk of attaining individual security if national security was in jeopardy. “Undoubtedly a few Americans, even now, think that this Nation can end this war comfortably and then climb back into an American hole and pull the hole in after them. But we have learned that we can never dig a hole so deep that it would be safe against predatory animals.” The President did not spell out postwar means and ends, but he made clear that he would not repeat the mistake of World War I of seeking a formula for permanent peace based on “magnificent idealism” alone.
And he was eloquent.
“I tell you it is within the realm of possibility that this Seventy-eighth Congress may have the historic privilege of helping greatly to save the world from future fear,” he said in closing.
“Therefore, let us all have confidence, let us redouble our efforts.
“A tremendous, costly, long-enduring task in peace as well as in war is still ahead of us.
“But, as we face that continuing task, we may know that the state of this Nation is good—the heart of this Nation is sound—the spirit of this Nation is strong—the faith of this Nation is eternal.”
The President submitted a “total war” budget that embodied his big plans. The figures were breath-taking. Current fiscal-year spending was running at seventy-seven billion; in the next fiscal year the federal government would spend one hundred billion dollars. More than ten million people had been added to employment rolls or the armed forces in two and a half years; another six million would be needed during calendar 1943. Sensing Congress’s mood the President said that nonwar expenditures had been reduced two billion from the 6.5 billion of fiscal 1939—but “we are fast approaching the subsistence level of government.” He called for more taxes, but “I cannot ask the Congress to impose the necessarily heavy financial burdens on the lower and middle incomes unless the taxes on higher and very large incomes are made fully effective.” The President asked again for a limitation of $25,000 a year on salaries.
Indeed, beneath the conciliatory Roosevelt was the same old political warrior with his dislike of columnists, carping Congressmen, and conservative critics. He could not help noting that the applause that had repeatedly punctuated his earlier remarks on war policy petered out when he stressed domestic issues toward the end. Congress clearly would be a problem—at least until the next election.
Around this time Roosevelt saw a poem by Howard Dietz, in PM, about Clare Boothe Luce, wife of publisher Henry Luce, a playwright, beauty, newly elected Republican Representative from Connecticut, and a recent critic of the administration for trying to fight a “soft war.”
O Lovely Luce—O Comely Clare!
Do you remember—way back there—
Holding your lacquered nails aloft,
“The war we fight,” you said, “is soft.”
And while the vote hung in the balance
You turned the trick with all your talents. You were the keystone brave and buoyant. By Lucifer, were you clarevoyant!
Time marches on….
And so did the verse, for another six stanzas, evoking the gallant deeds of Eisenhower and the rest in the no-longer-soft war. It was a bit crude, and Roosevelt loved it. He had long since fallen out with Henry Luce; only recently he had asked Welles to file a formal protest with Luce on any articles in Time, Life, and Fortune that “hurt the Good Neighbor policy with Latin America or tend to promote disunity among any of the United Nations….”
“Can’t you find a freshman Congressman on our side,” he now wrote to McCormack, enclosing the verse, “who will wait his chance until the first time Clare talks and then quote this poem?” But no soldier in the House sprang to answer this summons by the Commander in Chief to perform such an ungallant act.
Two days after his address to Congress the President left for Casablanca.
“The Axis powers knew that they must win the war in 1942—or eventually lose everything,” the President had told Congress in his January 7 message. “I do not need to tell you that our enemies did not win the war in 1942.” It was a piece of Rooseveltian understatement, but much of the press in 1943 was not so restrained. The Axis was on the run. It was now only a matter of time. Hitler was licked.
The drop in Nazi fortunes did seem dramatic and irreversible. In October 1942 Hitler had seemed a military colossus. To the east his forces held two vast chunks of Soviet territory, now labeled Reich Kommissariat Ostland and Reich Kommissariat Ukraine. Toward the far southeast his troops had raised the Swastika on Mount Elbrus, the highest alp in the Caucasus, seized the Markop oil fields, and readied their advance toward the Caspian Sea. To the north Norway was occupied, Sweden isolated, Finland militarily allied, and the Nazis were still mauling the Russia-bound convoys in the northern seas. To the west Hitler ruled northern France and even the Channel Islands, and his U-boats and raiders were scoring spectacular successes in the Atlantic. To the south the Mediterranean had become virtually Mare Axeum, and the Balkans were held tight in the German-Italian grip, except for guerrillas, whom Berlin dismissed as bandits. Rommel’s forces had awaited orders to advance on Alexandria. Hitler at this point could well indulge the intoxicating thought of pushing through Iran or Egypt—or both—to India and a link-up with Japan.
Then the fall. In four climactic weeks, from Montgomery’s counteroffensive during the last days of October and the successful North African landings to the pinching off of Stalingrad in late November as flanking Red Army troops joined forty miles to the west on the Don bend, Hitler’s strategy seemed to have collapsed. His own fanatical stubbornness seemed to compound his difficulties. “I won’t leave the Volga!” he screamed to his staff, but after a desperate effort to relieve the city, twenty-two German and two Rumanian divisions were left to freeze and die in Stalingrad. He demanded that Rommel hold his coastal strip along the Mediterranean, and his response to TORCH was to prepare to stand in North Africa rather than abandon it. In his hour of need his associates acted like fair-weather friends: Franco looked on blandly while the Americans invaded Africa; the French scuttled their fleet at Toulon; the Turks seemed responsive to Churchill’s lures and blandishments. Even the submarine offensive in the Atlantic was taking a turn for the worse by the end of 1942.
Yet, just as the press had exaggerated Hitler’s strength in his heyday, they exaggerated his plight after his fall. He was able to consolidate his position on the Eastern Front after Stalingrad, and the insistence of the Americans on invading Africa so far to the west was giving him time to fortify Tunisia. His U-boats would soon be stepping up their Atlantic attack to the point where Roosevelt feared that cross-channel prospects and even the security of Britain were threatened. He had the priceless advantage of holding interior lines of control of the immense land mass he had won.
Then, too, the invasion of Africa had left Hitler with a boon—the realization that the Allies could not invade northern France for some time, and hence the freedom to move troops to the Eastern Front, which to the Führer remained the crucial war. Invasion of Fortress Europe would be hard for his enemies—especially for the Anglo-Americans, who would have to win Africa and then move into the underbelly, which looked far less soft to Hitler than to Churchill. If the Führer’s strategy of blitz and annihilation and conquest was now bankrupt, a strategy of dividing and exhausting his enemies might still save the day.
For such a strategy Hitler’s strongest weapon was the trait that drove his generals to despair—his merciless determination to deny requests to withdraw, to sack wavering commanders, to make his soldiers stand and die. Thus he could exact the heaviest cost from his enemies. His own resolution and ruthlessness never seemed to waver. During the day he listened, now stonily, now furiously, to the reports from the fronts; dispatched orders on minute tactical matters; berated his aides and his commanders for their stupidity, their cowardice, their refusal to fight to the end and then shoot themselves. In the evening he was more relaxed, sitting around the dinner table with exhausted and often bored officers. Hour after hour his monologues rambled on about Germany’s royal family, bureaucrats, industrialists, intellectuals, the Catholic church and all its components—popes, “parsons,” Isabella (“the greatest harlot in history”)—St. Petersburg, Hungarians, lawyers—all of whom he despised. And about peasant girls, soldiers, Mussolini, babies, and skilled workers, of whom he approved.
Often he talked about his rivals—about Roosevelt, a “half-caste” who behaved like a “tortuous, pettifogging Jew”; about Churchill, the “raddled old whore of journalism,” the “unprincipled swine”; about Stalin, “half beast, half giant,” “an ascetic who took the whole of that gigantic country in his iron grasp.” He talked about the Russian people, whom he loathed; about the English, whom he half hated, half admired; about the Americans, for whom he had contempt mixed with a little fear. And always he returned to the Jews, the root of all evil.
In Moscow the half beast, half giant was savoring, at the start of 1943, only part of the satisfaction that was his due after the Battle of Stalingrad. His troubles seemed to come now from his friends. His comradeship with Churchill had deteriorated sharply since their skittish intercourse in Moscow in August. A galling and ever-present issue was the desperate convoying of supplies around the North Cape of Norway through the Arctic Sea to Murmansk. In September PQ-18 had started out with a huge naval and air escort—a new auxiliary aircraft carrier, destroyers, and a score of torpedo bombers. Although the Soviets dispatched long-range bombers and fighters from their end, only about two-thirds of the merchantmen in this convoy got through. With TORCH coming up, the British had decided they must suspend northern convoying. Churchill so informed Stalin. The latter’s reply was crushing in its brevity: Churchill’s message had been received. “Thank you.”
But the sovereign issue was always the second front. As the Wehrmacht columns lunged toward the Caucasus and coiled around the Volga, Stalin grimly pondered the pledges he thought he had received earlier in the year. His bitterness spilled out for public view in his speech of November 6, 1942, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution. In his usual didactic way he asked and answered questions. “How are we to explain the fact that the Germans were…able to take the initiative in military operations this year and achieve substantial tactical successes on our front?” Because the Germans and their allies had been able to muster all their available reserves and shift them to their Eastern Front. But why were they able to do this? “Because the absence of a second front in Europe enabled them to carry out this operation without any risk.” He dwelt on the 240 Nazi and satellite divisions fighting on the Russian front. And how many divisions were the British engaging on the Libyan front? “Only four—yes, four—German and eleven Italian divisions.”
He went on, ominously: “It is often asked: But will there be a second front in Europe after all? Yes, there will be; sooner or later, there will be. And there will be one not only because we need it, but above all because our Allies need it no less than we. Our Allies cannot fail to realize that since France has been put out of action, the absence of a second front against fascist Germany may end badly for all the freedom-loving countries, including the Allies themselves.”
Still, when the Anglo-Americans landed in Africa, the Kremlin could not conceal its pleasure. Stalin wired to Churchill that he was highly pleased with his success in Libya and the successful launching of TORCH. The news was dispatched to the embattled Red Army, with evidently good effect. Later in the month Stalin even sent Churchill birthday greetings. But the sovereign issue remained. Within a week of sending his birthday card, Stalin cabled another message: What was Churchill’s answer to his earlier query about the opening of a second front in Western Europe in 1943?
But even in the darkest days before Stalingrad the Kremlin probably was thinking of the implications of the delayed second front for the long run. Russia’s shouldering of the burden could pay off later. “To define the direction of the basic blow means to predetermine the nature of operations in the whole period of war, to determine nine-tenths of the fate of the whole war,” Stalin had written. “In this is the task of strategy.” The reluctance of the West to strike that basic blow could have crucial postwar effects, Kremlin strategists doubtless reasoned. Brooke had noted in Moscow that Stalin was a realist if there ever was one. “Plans, hypotheses, future possibilities, mean nothing to him, but he is ready to face facts, even when unpleasant.” And much as he wanted a second front, Stalin, it can be judged, knew that unpleasant facts also bore welcome opportunities.
Winston Churchill had contemplated opportunities of a different sort in the turbulent fall months of 1942. His mind was alive with possibilities, alternatives, contingencies, choices. Would the Nazis break the back of the Red Bear this time? Or, on the contrary, might the Wehrmacht collapse from its own bleeding arteries and open up the Continent for a quick invasion from the West? In either event, might Stalin make a separate peace? Would Montgomery hold, and then beat back the Afrika Korps? Would TORCH bring a secure foothold, and how quickly could the Allies consolidate their position and move east to Tunisia? Would Hitler reinforce his bracketed legions in Africa?
Churchill’s eye darted along the Mediterranean, with all its enticing problems and openings. Would Franco intervene? Could Malta hold out? Could Turkey be brought into the war? As the weeks passed, some of his questions were answered by events, but the same events opened up new alternatives. Was Sicily the logical access point to the underbelly? What about Sardinia, even Corsica?
Nor did Churchill lose sight of ROUNDUP—a plan for a relatively early cross-channel attack—as he gazed at the churning events in the Mediterranean. To the chagrin of his military men he suddenly—indeed, while the African landings were proceeding—told his Chiefs of Staff that it would be “most regrettable to make no more use of the success of ‘Torch’ and Alamein in 1943 than the occupation of Sicily and Sardinia.” “If Africa was going to be used as an excuse to lock up great forces on the defensive,” he said, “better not to have gone there at all.” Would the Russians be content with “our lying down like this during the whole of 1943, while Hitler has a third crack at them”? He was still for ROUNDUP, though put off until August. But he did not want the Anglo-American armies stuck in North Africa. It was a springboard, not a sofa.
Brooke was appalled at this turnabout. Had not the Americans warned that TORCH would probably preclude ROUNDUP in 1943? The PM “never faces realities,” Brooke complained to his diary; “at one moment we are reducing our forces, and the next we are invading the Continent with vast armies…. He is quite incorrigible and I am quite exhausted….” Yet the soldiers sensed that their chief’s strategic volatility would probably produce another shift in his goals. And they knew that on one matter neither he nor they would ever change their minds: British soldiers must never again go through the stalemate and the blood bath of World War I.
Strategically Churchill focused on one area: Europe—Atlantic Europe, Western Europe, coastal Europe. “I must admit that my thoughts rest primarily in Europe—the revival of the glory of Europe, the parent continent of the modern nations and of civilization,” he had written to Eden two weeks before TORCH, during an exchange on postwar plans. “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe….”
In the fall of 1942 Roosevelt was playing an even more improvised game of strategy than Churchill. The former naval person at least had his rough priorities and clear antipathies—notably his bent toward peripheralism and his categorical refusal to risk heavy losses in France. Aside from Atlantic First, Roosevelt had not even these rough guidelines. His reluctance to make a clear strategic commitment was one reason for the bog in which the American military planners were floundering even while the soldiers were planning and executing TORCH.
From Roosevelt’s standpoint, however, decision and commitment were impossible while so many imponderables ruled the battle scene. One puzzle was Churchill himself. Over and again the Prime Minister had been warned by the American military, in early and mid-1942, that an invasion of North Africa in the fall of 1942 precluded any heavy cross-channel invasion in 1943. Churchill had seemed to accept this fact cheerfully. Thus it seemed strange that he should reverse himself in the fall and demand of his staff that ROUNDUP be kept alive. Actually his reversal was due to the changed military situation as he perceived it. The pessimism of the American staffs about a cross-channel attack had stemmed, he felt, from fear that Russia would be so crippled by 1943 that Hitler could shift scores of divisions to France and swarm over the Anglo-American invaders. But by fall 1942 it was evident that the Russians were holding their own and would compel the Wehrmacht to husband almost its total strength on the Eastern Front. Churchill had another factor in mind. He feared that a postponement of ROUNDUP would lead to an overdiversion of American troops and war supply to the Pacific. These considerations led him during the fall to call for a reassessment of the whole strategic situation; they did not make him a firm partner of the President in global decision making.
But if Churchill’s evolving strategy was not wholly clear to the President, Stalin’s was almost opaque. Not that the Chairman’s main point was dim; his strident calls for a second front sounded like fire bells in the White House. Other business between Roosevelt and Stalin, however, seemed mired in ambiguity and suspicion. Anxious to bolster the Russians in every way possible except an immediate cross-channel attack, Roosevelt and Churchill had proposed to Stalin that they put a force of bombers and fighters under Soviet strategic command on the increasingly critical Caucasus front. The Kremlin seemed to welcome the idea. The offer was contingent on developments in the Middle East, and especially on the North Africa fronts. When it became necessary to suspend regular convoys to Murmansk, Roosevelt decided that the offer should be made without conditions. “The Russian front today is our greatest reliance,” he reaffirmed to Churchill.
Difficulties arose over specific arrangements. The Russians, it developed, for various military and political reasons did not want whole units on Soviet territory; they wanted planes. In mid-December Roosevelt wrote to Stalin that he was not clear as to the state of affairs, but he was still willing to send air units with American pilots and crews, which would operate by units under army commanders but would be under general Soviet command. Stalin replied that the air units were no longer necessary—but would Roosevelt kindly expedite the dispatch of fighters, without crews, under the regular program?
The President encountered similar difficulties, complicated by Soviet neutrality toward Japan, in trying to set up an Alaska-Siberia airplane ferry route. One conclusion seemed inescapable to the frustrated Americans: their Russian comrades were far more interested in bombers than in brotherhood.
By December 1942 several of the imponderables facing Roosevelt had evaporated. The Northwest African foothold had been secured, with Rommel now pulling back toward Tunisia. Spain had stayed neutral. The final effort to drive Axis troops out of Africa was taking longer than expected, but a rough timetable could be set. The Red Army was not only holding but counterattacking. The Japanese were being contained in the Pacific; they were still at peace with Russia. But as some crucial questions and options closed for Roosevelt, others opened up. Did Soviet victories make a cross-channel attack more urgent, or less? Should the Anglo-Americans stand fast on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, where they could protect the east-west sea links, or should they move north? If the latter, where? Try to knock Italy out of the war, or strike farther east, against the Balkans or the Greek isles?
For Roosevelt, tactical developments had outrun strategic decision making. A year after Pearl Harbor he had no definite battle plan. And in the absence of strategic commitments all sorts of other plans, pressures, demands, interests had wider play. The striking example was the Pacific. Despite all the decisions for Atlantic First, by the end of 1942 more than half the American divisions overseas were deployed in the war against Japan. The “limited” offensive moves against the Japanese had brought day-to-day commitments and sudden crises, as in the Solomons, that put heavy pressure on the Washington planners for piecemeal diversions of strength to the Pacific. The pressure was all the heavier in the absence of a set strategic plan that established iron priorities and grimly precluded dispersion.
Clearly strategy making was overdue. “I believe that as soon as we have knocked the Germans out of Tunisia we should proceed with a military strategical conference between Great Britain, Russia and the United States,” Roosevelt wrote to Churchill late in November. He proposed that their military chiefs meet with a Soviet delegation in Moscow or Cairo. Churchill agreed on a conference but not of just the military people; Russian generals, he said, would simply refer every major question back to Stalin. And all the Soviet chiefs would do would be to demand a second front. Why shouldn’t the heads get together?
After some hesitation Roosevelt agreed. He proposed a meeting in mid-January of the Big Three, accompanied by small military staffs, to take place south of Algiers or in or near Khartoum. “I don’t like mosquitoes.” He questioned Churchill’s idea of Marshall stopping off in London on the way. “I do not want to give Stalin the impression that we are settling everything between ourselves before we meet him. I think that you and I understand each other so well that prior conferences between us are unnecessary….” Roosevelt concluded: “I prefer a comfortable oasis to the raft at Tilsit.”
The prospect of a Big Three meeting delighted Churchill. It was the only way of making a good plan for 1943, he wired; at present there was none on the scale or up to the level of events. He still hoped that American and British military staffs could meet in advance, so that there would be some definite plans. “Otherwise Stalin will greet us with the question, ‘Have you then no plan for the second front in Europe you promised me for 1943?’ ”
Roosevelt believed that Stalin would agree to meet, but he was wrong. The dictator said that he could not leave his country during major military operations—and he said nothing about Roosevelt and Churchill coming to the Soviet Union. He was “deeply disappointed,” Roosevelt replied; what about March 1? Back came the cool answer: “front matters” would not permit this even in March. Could they not discuss questions by correspondence, Stalin inquired, until they were able to meet? “I think we shall not differ.” Stalin must have reflected on the opportunity he was losing to press the second front face to face with the other leaders. “I feel confident,” he went on, “that no time is being wasted, that the promise to open a second front in Europe, which you, Mr. President, and Mr. Churchill gave for 1942 or the spring of 1943 at the latest, will be kept and that a second front in Europe will really be opened jointly by Great Britain and the U.S.A. next spring.”
Thus Stalin threw the gauntlet into the meeting without even attending it. Roosevelt suggested to Churchill that the two of them confer anyway. England was out as a meeting place “for political reasons.” He wanted to get out of the political atmosphere of Washington for a couple of weeks. In Stalin’s absence they would need no foreign-affairs people with them, because their work would be essentially military. What about Casablanca as the spot? The military men could precede them by a few days and clear the ground. “Yes, certainly,” Churchill answered. “The sooner the better…”
At the conference, Roosevelt knew, the British would have a plan and stick to it. Churchill and his chiefs did indeed busy themselves with staff papers that argued strongly for a vigorous follow-up to TORCH, in order to knock Italy out of the war and, they hoped, bring Turkey into it, and to give the Axis no respite. The cross-channel attack would be a basic but long-run project to be conducted by August or September 1943 if conditions permitted. The American planners were busy, too, and came up with their old emphasis on cross-channel first. As a secondary goal—and doubtless as a partial bluff against the British—offensive and defensive operations should be continued against the Japanese in the Pacific and in Burma. The Mediterranean was not even mentioned. In their response a week later the British stuck to their guns.
On January 7, 1943, just before leaving for Casablanca, Roosevelt met with his chiefs for a final planning session. It soon developed that not only were the American and British chiefs still divided, but also the American Chiefs of Staff were not wholly agreed among themselves. King wanted to maintain constant pressure against the Japanese to prevent them from consolidating their conquests. Arnold, as always, stressed air power. Marshall suggested a limited cross-channel operation sometime after July 1943. Roosevelt, still hoping to avoid a definite decision, proposed a compromise that would prepare for operations both in the Mediterranean and across the channel while a commitment was postponed for a month or two. Marshall was unhappy with this notion.
The meeting adjourned with no decision. On the eve of a showdown with the British the Commander in Chief was still evading a strategic commitment.
Late Saturday evening, January 9, 1943, Roosevelt, Hopkins, McIntire, and a small party boarded the presidential train at the secret siding near the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The President was gay and relaxed. He was about to see a new continent, Churchill, combat troops. And he would travel by plane for the first time since his famous flight to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1932. He would be the first President to fly, the first to leave the United States in wartime, and the first since Lincoln to visit an active theater of war. To take a trip, to enter a war zone, to create precedents—no combination of events could make Roosevelt happier.
On arriving in Miami early on Monday morning, after a long sleepy Sunday chugging through the Carolinas and Georgia, Roosevelt laughed with Hopkins over the realization that the “unbelievable trip” was actually taking place.
Long before dark the Pan American Clipper taxied out of the harbor at Miami and, with Roosevelt and his party strapped in their seats, took off toward Trinidad. The President missed nothing. He asked the pilot to fly over the Citadel in Haiti; scanned the jungle of Dutch Guiana; glimpsed the Amazon where it widens out sharply; noted the merchant ships off the Brazilian port of Belém. Then came the long overnight hop to Bathurst, in British Gambia, where the flying boat landed in the big harbor at the mouth of the Gambia River. Here the cruiser Memphis was waiting to berth the President overnight. Hoisted to the deck, the Commander in Chief landed hard on his stern when one of the men carrying him slipped. Next morning the President was driven through the old slaving port of Bathurst to the airport. He noted ragged, glum-looking natives. “Dirt. Disease. Very high mortality rate,” he told his son Elliott later.
A Douglas C-54 flew the presidential party from Bathurst over the snow-capped Atlas Moutains and into Casablanca. Mike Reilly and Elliott were waiting. The camouflage was thrown off the ramp, the President was whisked into an armored car, and soon he was driving through a small Eden of green parks and marvelous flowers to the Anfa Hotel, the site of the conference, a high white structure with a nautical shape, wide balconies, and a view of the dazzling blue Atlantic. The hotel and its environs had been converted into a military compound, surrounded by heavy wire, guarded by a zealous armored battalion under the nervous command of General George S. Patton, Jr., and protected further by antiaircraft batteries and radar-equipped British night fighters. The President was installed in a large bungalow. His bedroom, with its drapes and frills, was obviously that of a French lady. Roosevelt looked around and whistled. “Now all we need is the madame of the house.” Churchill’s bungalow was fifty yards away, and soon the Prime Minister was over for a drink before dinner. Roosevelt invited Churchill and his military chiefs—Brooke, Pound, Mountbatten, Sir Charles Portal—to dine with him and his own chiefs and aides.
The party that night went on until early morning, when an air-raid alarm sounded, lights were doused, and the men sat around the table with their faces lighted by candles. Throughout the evening the talk ran fast and free—talk of war, of families and friends, of Stalin, of the French. It was a relaxed and merry company. But the good cheer was a bit artificial, for earlier in the day the Combined Chiefs at their first meeting had found themselves in flat disagreement over strategy.
It was the same old dispute, but now more urgent than ever. At the first meeting Brooke had spoken for an hour, laying out the British proposals—proposals to clear the North African shore and then capture Sicily, meantime building up strength in England for a cross-channel attack when the time seemed propitious. Then Marshall took a categorical stand for a major cross-channel attack in 1943 and against diversions elsewhere. After lunch Brooke invited King to present the Pacific situation. The Chief of Naval Operations was only too eager to do so, because he felt that the British neglected the other side of the globe. He warned that the Japanese were consolidating their gains and that without greater help Chiang might pull out of the war. He proposed that 30 per cent of the war effort—twice the current proportion, he estimated—go to the Pacific and 70 per cent to the other fronts. The British remarked that this was hardly a scientific way of setting war strategy.
During the conferences over the next few days Marshall doggedly stuck to his proposal of securing Africa and then immediately concentrating on the cross-channel attack. He argued against fighting the war on a day-to-day, opportunistic basis, against taking uncoordinated tactical steps that did not fit in with the “main plot.” Every diversion, he contended, acted like a suction pump against the main effort.
The odds were heavily against Marshall. The British Chiefs were united and formidable. They had brought a command ship with ample staffs and communications and had docked her in the harbor as a back-up facility. They had met long and often to unify their position. They had Dill in to brief them on the American outlook. On the eve of the first Combined Chiefs conference they had met with the Prime Minister, who had set out the line he wanted them to follow with the Americans. Roosevelt’s corporal’s guard of military chiefs and aides, on the other hand, was divided. Whatever their general support for beating Germany before Japan, King could not help being drawn to the Pacific, with its great naval potential, and Arnold to the prospect of building up a huge bomber offensive in the United Kingdom while the cross-channel attack was delayed. All the planners worked amid a quiet, intense competition for scarce war supply. It seemed to one of the British present that the United States Army and Navy had divided the world, with the latter taking the Pacific, and that allocation of resources was a game of grab between the two sides.
Only one man could turn the odds in Marshall’s favor—his Commander in Chief. Roosevelt seemed to hold a position midway between Marshall and Churchill, midway between wanting to thrust at the underbelly and thrust across the Channel. While he consistently viewed ROUNDUP as the main effort, his fancy was taken by immediate, opportunistic ventures, especially when Churchill was there to suggest them. In drilling his staff on dealing with the Americans, the Prime Minister had advised them to take plenty of time, to allow full discussions and not to be impatient—“like dripping of water on a stone”—and he would pursue the same tactics with the President. He did, but Roosevelt was hardly adamantine. The British approach had long appealed to him, because it kept major options open, allowed for quick and even cheap victories, might knock Italy out of the war, kept American troops active and moving, and provided the Russians with at least the semblance of a second front. By the fourth day of the conference Churchill could report to his War Cabinet that Roosevelt strongly favored the Mediterranean as the next step. The President did not indicate any less support of ROUNDUP. By taking his middle position he was able to go along with the British, placate Marshall, and assure Eisenhower that he firmly adhered to the basic concept of cross-channel and that he looked on the Mediterranean operation only as support for the main thrust.
After ten days of sometimes heated discussions the Combined Chiefs presented their agreed-on plan in a full-dress meeting to Roosevelt and Churchill. The plan was an order of priorities. Ironically, at the top of the list was neither the underbelly nor cross-channel, but maintaining security of sea communications in the Atlantic; the ghost of Atlantic First still hovered over the strategists. Second priority was aiding Russia. Third was operations in the Mediterranean—specifically the capture of Sicily. Next came cross-channel, and then the Pacific. The British were elated. They felt they had won almost every point of contention. Brooke was disappointed that the plan made no mention of Italy, but he could console himself with the thought that events would dictate this as the next move, just as the pouring of troops into Africa had made Sicily the next logical step.
The question of command was more easily resolved. Even though his troops were now bogged down in the Tunisian mud, Eisenhower had so impressed both his military associates and his political masters with his capacity to lead and unify an inter-Allied headquarters that there was little question of his retaining top command. Some of the British—especially Brooke—were concerned about his lack of combat experience, but these worries were assuaged when General Sir Harold Alexander was made Eisenhower’s deputy, with direct command of combat forces, and Arthur W. Tedder and Sir Andrew Cunningham were given executive command of the air and naval forces respectively. Marshall wanted Eisenhower to be a full general, to rank with the British leaders, but Roosevelt said that he would not promote Eisenhower until he had done some real fighting and knocked the Germans out of Tunisia. However, he soon relented, and Eisenhower got his fourth star.
Roosevelt had hoped that he could avoid political issues at Casablanca and focus on military. But throughout the conference he was entangled with the toughest kind of political problem—French factionalism—and at the end he initiated a doctrine that would have immense political implications.
The specter of de Gaulle had hung over the conference from the start. To much of the French underground, and to partisans of the Free French everywhere, he remained the proud if touchy leader and symbol of French resistance. He was free to enunciate the noble ideals of French patriotism and grandeur while Giraud and other French chiefs in Africa had to make compromises with their Anglo-American conquerors, Vichyites, and military necessity. Eisenhower, handicapped by his political inexperience and by conflicting orders from the State Department, had just given an office to Marcel Peyrouton, an anti-Laval Vichyite. Once again roars of disapproval had sounded in America and Britain. Roosevelt had called Darlan a temporary expedient, and he had now been delivered of Darlan by an assassin; why were he and Churchill, liberal organs protested, still playing with fascist collaborators in the war against fascism?
Sensitive to these outbursts even while pooh-poohing them, Roosevelt felt that the solution was obvious—get de Gaulle and Giraud together at Casablanca and let them hammer out an agreement on the provisional leadership of the fighting French pending the liberation of France, the re-establishment of the French Republic, and a fresh determination of leadership by the French people. It was easy for Eisenhower to produce the “groom,” Giraud, but the “bride” in London seemed frigid and unprocurable. De Gaulle had his reasons. He had contempt for the Peyroutons and the whole crew of Vichyites and defeatists. Above all, he wanted to maintain the symbol of French authority and glory, unbroken by the armistice and the Vichy regime, that could protect French interests against both enemies and allies until the time of liberation. He was willing—indeed, had asked—to parley with Giraud separately, but the notion of making a forced visit to an Anglo-American camp to conduct business with another Frenchman deeply offended him.
Roosevelt and Churchill were equally determined that de Gaulle should come to Casablanca. Churchill asked Eden in London to tell the General in effect that if he did not, the President and the Prime Minister would proceed without him and would bypass his movement. Grumbling, de Gaulle came, but he proved as stubborn as ever. In his talks with Churchill and Giraud he was unyielding; he would not deal with Giraud as long as Algiers harbored Vichyite officials, and he wanted top political control, while Giraud as number two could command the reborn French Army. Suspicion of de Gaulle was so strong among the Americans that Mike Reilly and other agents stood outside Roosevelt’s room, guns in hand, while de Gaulle poured out his bitterness. Still no agreement.
By now Roosevelt and Churchill were indignant with the tall man. The President told friends that de Gaulle compared himself with Joan of Arc at one moment and Clemenceau the next; this was an exaggeration, but de Gaulle by his very bearing produced caricatures of himself in other leaders’ eyes, just as he did in cartoonists’ sketches. Yet Roosevelt and Churchill had to admire the Frenchman. The President was taken by a spiritual look in his eyes. Churchill could not help reflecting that this arrogant man, a refugee, an exile from his country under sentence of death, completely dependent on British and American good will, with neither funds nor foothold, still defied all.
During this stalemate there occurred a curious incident. Murphy and his British counterpart, Harold Macmillan, had been hurrying from villa to villa trying to patch up a compromise, to no avail. Giraud had been willing to sign almost any agreement so that he could concentrate on military matters, but de Gaulle was still adamant. The conference was nearing its end, and Roosevelt and Churchill were worried about returning home with the French still divided and Darlanism still an issue. On the last day of the conference Giraud stopped in to see Roosevelt. He brought two documents that dealt in part with military and economic matters, the product of much earlier discussion, but contained political provisions that promised every facility to Giraud to reunite “all” Frenchmen fighting against Germany and gave Giraud “the right and duty of preserving all French interests in the military, economic, financial and moral plane” until the French people could ultimately set up a constitutional government of their own. The President rapidly looked through these documents and signed them. Thereby he upset the elaborate matrimonial negotiations that he and Churchill had been conducting between Giraud and de Gaulle and he committed Churchill to Giraud without the Prime Minister’s approval or even knowledge. Consternation resulted when London and Washington learned of Roosevelt’s action later; Churchill had to alter the agreement quietly to restore the balance between the two Frenchmen.
Why had Roosevelt signed the documents? One theory was that he was simply piqued by de Gaulle, but the President had dealt with more exasperating men than the Frenchman without losing his sang-froid. Another explanation is more plausible—that the documents were a pressure ploy against de Gaulle, that they constituted the shotgun for the proposed forced marriage—but it is not clear that the bride, the reluctant partner in this match, ever knew of the shotgun. Several at Casablanca had other explanations. They felt that Roosevelt was remarkably gay and lighthearted at the meetings. He seemed to Macmillan in a happy holiday mood; “he laughed and joked continually.” Macmillan’s feelings might reflect British reserve, but Eisenhower and Murphy also noted independently that the President was lighthearted, even frivolous.
Certainly the President was in a happy holiday mood when after a week of conference duty he was able to get away to visit American troops in the field. He had hoped to be allowed to visit the front, but his military chiefs resisted this notion. The President settled for a 110-mile automobile excursion to Rabat, where he lunched in the open on ham and sweet potatoes with 20,000 soldiers of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, while a band played “Alexander’s Rag-Time Band” and “Deep in the Heart of Texas” against a stiff wind. Afterward he inspected the 9th Infantry Division, where he “felt closer to having tears in my eyes than any other time,” he told reporters, because these men were headed toward the front. Later he motored on to Port Lyautey, inspected the old Moorish fort where French defenders had held out under intense bombardment by the American Navy, and laid wreaths at both the American and the French cemeteries. The President was amused on the trip back by the antics of Reilly and his crew, in the lead jeep, pretending to see planes in the sky or to fall out of their vehicle in order to divert the attention of bystanders from the armed sedan that followed.
Roosevelt seemed in an equally lighthearted mood the following night when he entertained the Sultan of Morocco and the Sultan’s son. Dressed in flowing white silk robes, the royal visitors presented their host with a high tiara for his wife—and Elliott was sure that his father winked at him as they both thought of Eleanor presiding over a White House function with this golden object perched atop her hairdo. Churchill was glum at the start, what with the Moslem ban on drinking, and his gloom deepened as the President used the occasion to talk to the Sultan about colonial aspirations toward independence and the end of imperialism after the war. Macmillan felt that the President’s performance was provocative, and Murphy worried that de Gaulle might hear of this attempt to woo the royalty of French Morocco.
The Casablanca Conference came to both a climax and a conclusion on the same day, January 24, 1943. During much of the previous night Roosevelt, Churchill, Macmillan, Murphy, and Hopkins had still been trying to frame a compromise formula that both de Gaulle and Giraud would support. In the morning Roosevelt had signed Giraud’s documents. Churchill at this point was working on de Gaulle, to no avail. Roosevelt then saw the Frenchman and talked with him in urgent terms, equally to no avail. For a time it was a game of Cox and Box in Roosevelt’s villa as the contestants and aides shuttled in and out. By noon Roosevelt had had enough—and reporters and photographers were gathering outside in high hopes of major announcements. After their aides managed to get the two Frenchmen into Roosevelt’s villa at the same time, Roosevelt and Churchill put the heaviest kind of pressure on de Gaulle. Finally he agreed to sign a memorandum of unity with Giraud.
At this point Roosevelt acted with his usual nimbleness. What about a picture? The whole party moved out onto the terrace, and the principals sat down in four chairs. Would de Gaulle and Giraud shake hands? The Generals stood up and gingerly held hands while the cameras clicked and whirred and Roosevelt and Churchill looked on with ill-concealed satisfaction. Then the Frenchmen left to compose their communiqué.
It was a typically Rooseveltian performance. Now at Casablanca, as so often in Washington, he had symbolically “locked up” the disputants in a room and forced an agreement. But here, as so often before, the image of unity was more impressive than the substance. That afternoon de Gaulle and Giraud duly put out an eloquent but vague declaration of unity, but the final irony was that after all Roosevelt’s talk of the shotgun marriage, no baby was born or even conceived. The Generals parted still in dispute over substance.
With the Frenchmen gone from the courtyard, Roosevelt and Churchill proceeded with the press conference. Roosevelt spoke first. He described the close unity of the Americans and British at the meetings, the determination of the military staffs to give all possible aid to the “heroic struggles of China.” Then he paused.
“Another point. I think we have all had it in our hearts and our heads before, but I don’t think that it has ever been put down on paper by the Prime Minister and myself, and that is our determination that peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power.
“Some of you Britishers know the old story—we had a General called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister’s, early days he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, or Japan. That means a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.” The other United Nations, he added, felt the same way.
Churchill was surprised. He and Roosevelt had discussed unconditional surrender briefly and he had exchanged views with his War Cabinet, especially on the question of whether Italy should be included. But he did not know that Roosevelt planned to announce it—and announcing it was the crucial step. In explaining his statement somewhat later, the President said that getting de Gaulle and Giraud together had been so difficult it reminded him of Grant and Lee—“and then suddenly the press conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant ‘Old Unconditional Surrender’ and the next thing I knew I had said it.” Actually the doctrine had not been born as spontaneously as Roosevelt implied, for a State Department advisory group had made known to him its consensus view that unconditional surrender should be imposed on Germany and Japan. It was the publicizing of the policy, with its critical implications for grand strategy and political warfare, that surprised Roosevelt’s British comrades—and indicated again his euphoric mood at Casablanca.
That euphoria was hardly dimmed in the last hours of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s African safari. Churchill insisted that the President drive with him to Marrakesh, which Churchill described as famous for its fortunetellers, snake charmers, and brothels—and for an incomparable view of the Atlas Mountains. So the two men drove 150 miles over the desert, talking shop and touching on lighter matters, while American troops stood at attention along the highway and fighters hovered overhead.
The sun was setting as they reached their villa at Marrakesh. Churchill climbed to the roof to see the evening light on the snowcapped peaks and purple foothills and urged Roosevelt to come up. Servants made a chair with their arms and carried the President up the winding stairs, his legs dangling like the limbs of a ventriloquist’s dummy. In the evening the President and the Prime Minister dined with a jolly company of a dozen or so. The two leaders made affectionate little speeches to each other; the President toasted the King; Churchill sang, and Roosevelt joined in the choruses.
“I love these Americans,” Churchill remarked to his physician before dinner. “They have behaved so generously.” Next morning, in slippers and a bright robe covered with dragons, the Prime Minister drove with the President to the airfield and saw his friend off on the long journey home.
The President was running a little fever by the time he reached Bathurst and the waiting Memphis, but the next day he insisted on taking a trip up the Gambia on a seagoing tug. Once again he was struck by the bad health and living conditions in the British colony; Africa would be a problem for years to come, he told reporters on returning. Next day the President flew to Liberia for lunch with President Edwin Barclay; then he reviewed American Negro troops and was gawked at by natives clustered outside their high grass huts. Then the long flight across the South Atlantic to Brazil, where he conferred at length with President Getulio Vargas on an American destroyer and reviewed troops from a jeep.
He was hollow-eyed and tired by now; the long hours in the air had been distressing, for flying “affects my head just as ocean cruising affects yours!” he wrote to his wife. He was glad to board his train for the trip back to Washington.
By now Stalin had received a message that Roosevelt and Churchill had painstakingly drawn up at the end of the Casablanca Conference. The message told in some detail the plans for the next few months, plans which, “together with your powerful offensive, may well bring Germany to her knees in 1943.” Britain and America would keep the pressure on Japan, sustain China, push the Axis out of Africa, clear an effective passage through the Mediterranean, bombard Axis targets in southern Europe, “launch large-scale amphibious operations in the Mediterranean at the earliest possible moment,” and step up the bomber offensive from Britain against Germany. Several times the message referred to the paramount objective of re-entering the Continent, but there was no date. This would happen “as soon as practicable.”
In the Kremlin, Stalin listened to the translation of this note with a stony face. He turned to Molotov. Had they set a date? No, Molotov ejaculated—not yet, not yet. Stalin remained impassive. He waited out the day, and on January 30 sent thanks to Roosevelt and Churchill for “your friendly joint message” and added: Just when would the concrete second-front operations take place?
Almost two weeks later Churchill replied for Roosevelt and himself. They hoped to expel the quarter-million Axis troops from eastern Tunisia during. April, if not earlier. After that they intended to seize Sicily, in July at the latest; after that they would stage an operation in the eastern Mediterranean, probably against the Dodecanese. These operations would take 300,000 or 400,000 men and all the shipping and landing craft in the Mediterranean. The cross-channel attack would come in August or September. There was a slight hedging here. Shipping and assault landing craft would be “limiting factors.” And the timing “must of course be dependent upon the condition of German defensive possibilities across the Channel at that time.”
Stalin’s reply was frosty. It appeared, he said, that operations in Tunisia had been set back to April. But it was now, when the Soviet troops were keeping up their broad offensive, that Anglo-American action in Africa was imperative. And to hammer Hitler from both directions the cross-channel attack must take place much earlier. Stalin here made a hard thrust:
“According to reliable information at our disposal, since the end of December, when for some reason the Anglo-American operations in Tunisia were suspended, the Germans have moved 27 divisions, including five armored divisions, to the Soviet-German front from France, the Low Countries and Germany. In other words, instead of the Soviet Union being aided by diverting German forces from the Soviet-German front, what we get is relief for Hitler, who, because of the let-up in Anglo-American operations in Tunisia, was able to move additional troops against the Russians.”
Roosevelt cabled a conciliatory response. He shared Stalin’s regret that the Allied effort in North Africa had not gone according to schedule. Heavy rain and poor transportation had been the trouble. He realized the adverse effect of the delay on the common effort and he understood “the importance of a military effort on the continent of Europe at the earliest date practicable in order to reduce Axis resistance to your heroic army.” But again there was a slight hedge. The cross-channel attack would go ahead as fast as transportation facilities could be provided.
It was not the best of times for the three leaders. Stalin’s troops were exhausted. In a mighty effort they recaptured Kharkov in mid-February, then lost it again as the Soviet counterattack petered out and the front stabilized. Churchill had been stricken with pneumonia after returning from his North African and Mid-Eastern journey. Roosevelt, too, had been ill. And at the time he wrote his February 22 letter, he was undergoing the doleful experience that other chiefs of state had known before him—he had received reports of his troops’ first real brush with German ground power.
Hitler had followed through on his decision to reinforce Axis strength in Africa. In December and January Nazi troops and supplies had flowed through Italy and Sicily to the ports and airfields of Bizerte and Tunis. Skimming over the water at 150 feet, Junkers and huge, six-engined Messerschmitts carried in hundreds of tons of war supplies every day. By the end of January 110,000 troops—almost three-quarters of them German—had arrived in Northwest Africa to bolster Rommel’s last-ditch stand. The Allies were now paying the price of having secured their rear by landing so far to the west of Tunisia. The Germans jabbed at the British, French, and American troops, and then dug in. By mid-February the British commanded the northern sector, the French the central, and the American II Corps the southern, on an almost straight north-south line, with Axis troops to the east; and the British were advancing along the Mediterranean shore from Tripoli.
It was here in this strange and melancholy land, with its jumble of flattened knolls, low escarpments, open desert, draws, gullies, and cactus, that American soldiers had their baptism of fire. Knowing that the Allies would steadily consolidate their positions, Rommel suddenly struck out at II Corps units on February 14. At last American troops experienced the famed German deployment of tanks, artillery, and dive bombers. They counterattacked bravely but suffered from poor intelligence and communications, faulty map reading, and amateurish deployment—in short, from inexperience. After probing and encircling American forces in a series of hard thrusts, the Germans broke through the Kasserine Pass on February 20. They took thousands of Americans prisoner and destroyed or captured large quantities of weapons. Soon, however, Rommel’s forces began to run into bad weather and stiffened Allied defenses; they withdrew back through the Kasserine Pass, taking satisfaction in having knocked the Americans off balance and having disrupted Allied plans farther north. “Hate to disappoint you,” Alexander wired to Churchill on February 27, “but final victory in North Africa is not just around the corner.”
From the Kremlin, Stalin watched these events narrowly. When Churchill reported to him the “sharp local reverses” of February and hinted that clearing the Axis out of Africa was now hoped for by the end of April, Stalin could not conceal his anger. In mid-March he cabled to Roosevelt and Churchill:
“…At the height of fighting against the Hitler troops, in February and March, the Anglo-Saxon offensive in North Africa, far from having been stepped up, has been called off….Meanwhile Germany has succeeded in moving from the West 36 divisions, including six armored ones, to be used against Soviet troops.” Once again he listed the broken promises of the second front.
“…I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught….”
“Grave danger.” What did Stalin mean? That the Soviet front might collapse before the Anglo-Americans ever got into Europe? That United Nations unity in war and peace might be injured beyond repair? That he might go it alone, militarily and diplomatically? That he might even make a deal with Hitler? Roosevelt and Churchill pondered these questions. Then at the end of March the already glacial relations between Moscow and the West turned even colder when Churchill informed Stalin of another Anglo-American decision.
The trouble lay in the Atlantic. Allied losses by the end of 1942 had exceeded construction by well over a million tons. Heavy gales in the North Atlantic had frustrated the U-boats during the early weeks of 1943, but in March the wolf packs began again to score heavily against the convoys. The most perilous point was the northern reaches of Norway, where the Germans had poised the Tirpitz, the Scharnhorst, and other warships. Churchill did not dare put his Home Fleet at the mercy of enemy U-boats and shore-based bombers, and he feared that if one or two of his battleships were knocked out of action, the whole command of the Atlantic would be jeopardized.
For the Prime Minister there was only one solution: postpone all convoys to Russia. The President concurred on canceling the scheduled March convoy, but he urged that Stalin not be informed until August or September that all convoys must be suspended. The news would be a heavy additional blow for the Kremlin, he argued, and nobody could be sure of the situation four or five months hence anyway. Churchill waited a week, but after Stalin sent a couple of congratulatory notes about impending Tunisian operations, he manfully decided to break the news. On March 30 he described to Stalin the situation in the North Atlantic and stated that “orders have, therefore, been issued that the sailing of the March convoy is to be postponed.” He and Roosevelt were greatly disappointed, he went on. “At the same time we feel it only right to let you know at once that it will not be possible to continue convoys by the northern route after early May, since from that time onwards every single escort vessel will be required to support our offensive operations in the Mediterranean, leaving only a minimum to safeguard our lifelines in the Atlantic.” If the attack on Sicily went well and the Atlantic situation permitted, “we should hope to resume convoys in early September.” Meantime he and Roosevelt would try to increase the flow of supplies by the southern and Pacific routes.
It was a jolting blow to the Kremlin, and an infuriating one. Postponement of the second front had been serious enough, but the Allies had always contended that at least they would get war supplies to the Russian front, where troops were engaging the Germans on a huge scale. Now, to have the crucial northern supply route cut off—and cut off to support a Mediterranean operation that the Kremlin considered at best a feeble substitute for a cross-channel attack, and at worst a means of evading it! Stalin’s answer was laconic.
“I regard this unexpected step as a catastrophic cut in the delivery of strategic raw materials and munitions to the Soviet Union by Great Britain and the U.S.A., because the Pacific route is limited in shipping and none too reliable, and the southern route has small clearance capacity, which means that those two routes cannot make up for the cessation of deliveries by the northern route. It goes without saying that this circumstance cannot but affect the position of the Soviet troops.”
Even in his bitterness, though, Stalin could not help taking pleasure in North African developments. He had always deprecated plans and contingencies and stressed the need of simply killing and trapping masses of Hitlerites and fascists. And this is what Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s men were doing by early spring of 1943.
Everything still came hard in Africa. Hitler was determined, now that he had allowed Rommel to withdraw across North Africa, that the Afrika Korps and its reinforcements would make a long and vigorous stand by launching forceful spoiling attacks on Allied positions. He ordered that the rate of supply across the Mediterranean be doubled and even tripled. Early in March Rommel threw four furious attacks against the Eighth Army and lost over two-score tanks to Montgomery’s massed antitank artillery. Soon after, the “Desert Fox,” ill and dispirited, gave up his command and left for his homeland, never to return to Africa. Later in the month the Eighth Army attacked Axis forces dug in on the Mareth Line, originally a French defense system built to ward off the Italians. Montgomery’s frontal attack failed, but New Zealand and other units made a wide flanking movement that routed the foe and forced him to move up toward his Tunisia bastion.
American troops made contact with an Eighth Army patrol in a joyous union early in April. The two armies that had started 2,000 miles apart, Churchill noted, were at last joined together. In an effort to rejuvenate II Corps, which was still licking its wounds from the February setbacks, Eisenhower had put Patton in command. In April, with Patton driving and goading his commanders, II Corps’ armored and infantry units tried to push eastward to the sea and thus cut off Axis troops moving up the coast under pressure from Montgomery to the south. Despite Patton’s colorful leadership, the attack faltered, and most of the Germans managed to make good their retreat northward. Some in the British command now wanted to send II Corps divisions into rear areas for more training, or at least to parcel them among the more experienced corps, but Marshall and Eisenhower would have none of it. They insisted that the corps be preserved as a unit and given a chance to be in on the final victory, learning the art of battle while it fought. Alexander concurred, but had the whole corps leapfrog north to a new sector adjoining the Mediterranean.
By the end of April Allied troops had compressed German and Italian forces into a shrinking area of northern Tunisia. Escape had been cut off; it was now, as Churchill said, “scrunch and punch.” British and American fighters were pouncing on convoys of Axis air transports, bringing down fifty planes one day, fifteen another, thirty another. Hitler’s commanders were scouring the Italian coast for small craft and fishing boats, to little avail. Early in May Allied armored troops punched through the German defenses, entered Tunis, and then lunged north to link up with American forces that were overrunning Bizerte. After valiant fighting, the enemy units began to disintegrate. The victors were amazed to see long lines of Germans driving in their own trucks and carts in search of prisoner-of-war cages. Almost a quarter-million prisoners were taken, about half of them German. The victory of Tunisia, Churchill felt, could hold its own with Stalingrad.
Early in April Hitler and Mussolini had met at Berchtesgaden. They were still hopeful. A month later, back in his Eastern Front headquarters, Hitler knew that the African situation was hopeless. He stood by his decision. “Naturally,” he said to some officers, “I have tried to reckon whether the undertaking in Tunis, which eventually led to the loss of both men and equipment, was justified. I have come to the following conclusion; by the occupation of Tunisia we have succeeded in postponing the invasion of Europe by six months. More important still, Italy is as a result still a member of the Axis.” If he had not stood in Tunisia, he went on, the Allies would have landed in Italy unopposed and pushed up to the Brenner Pass, with German resistance weakened again because of the Russian break-through at Stalingrad. “That would inevitably have led rapidly to the loss of the war.”
Stalin could make the same calculation. The capture of Tunisia had taken much longer than his allies had expected, and he could not but consider the implications for the second front. But facts—especially Hitlerites killed—were the main thing, and now the Anglo-Americans were slaying Germans. At the height of the battle he told Churchill he hoped he would capture as much booty as possible, as well as finish off the enemy and take prisoners. At the end he wired to Roosevelt: “I congratulate you and the gallant U.S. and British troops on the brilliant victory which has resulted in the liberation of Bizerte and Tunis from Hitler tyranny. I wish you further success.”