BY JUNE 4 ALL seemed ready for OVERLORD. Landing ships built on Lake Michigan and floated down the Illinois River and the Mississippi were packed beam to beam in the ports of southern England. Long ugly LST’s constructed in California, their front ends gaping wide like hungry alligators, devoured tanks, trucks, bulldozers. Along pleasant English lanes, under blooming English elms, stood strange amphibious vessels, track to track; barrel-shaped metal containers of ammunition; stacks of bombs; enormous reels of cable; tires, wheels, wooden cases stacked twenty feet high. Rows of Mustang fighters, newly shorn of their protective grease, stood wing to wing on small fields behind the coast. Hundreds of new locomotives and thousands of freight and tanker cars lined the green valleys, waiting to be used in France.
In the dusk mile-long convoys moved down the English roads and disgorged men onto the quays. Soldiers in assault jackets bent under their loads: rifle, life preserver, gas mask, five grenades, a half-pound block of TNT with primacord fuse; and K rations and C rations stuffed into their packs and jackets. The men slowly filed onto the transports and took their positions near their assault craft. The first to land would be the section leader and five riflemen with M-1’s; then a wire-cutting team of four men, also with rifles; followed by four search-nose cutters, two Browning automatic rifle teams of two men each, carrying nine hundred pounds per gun; two bazooka teams of two men each; four sixty-millimeter mortarmen with fifteen to twenty rounds; a flame-thrower crew of two men; five demolition men with pole and pack charges of TNT; a medic and the assistant section leader.
The great attack, which had hung in the balance so many times as Roosevelt and Churchill forsook it for Africa, as American admirals drained sea power and landing craft into the Pacific, as Italy insistently sucked in troops, was now itemized and “finalized” and blueprinted on thousands of battle orders, landing schedules, and beach plans. For fifty miles along the Bay of the Seine stretching westward to the Cotentin Peninsula sections of beaches were marked off and code-named—Sword, Juno, Gold, Omaha, Utah. A million and a half Americans, another million British and Canadians, tens of thousands of Norwegians, Danish, French, Belgian, Czech, Polish, and other troops, waited on their landing craft in sealed-off sectors across the south of England, and in supporting areas behind. Nine hundred warships, ranging from PT boats to twenty-six battleships and heavy cruisers, 229 LST’s and 3,372 landing craft, and 163 air bases would mount and support the onslaught; 124,000 hospital beds were ready.
The top command post of this massed and balanced power lay in a hazel coppice a few miles north of Portsmouth dockyard, in a nondescript trailer remarkable only for a red telephone for scrambled calls to Washington and a green one for a direct line to 10 Downing Street. This was Eisenhower’s headquarters. A mile away was Southwick House, an old country mansion where formal conferences took place; nearby was the caravan of General Montgomery, ground commander of the assault phase. General Omar Bradley’s assault headquarters was established near Bristol.
On the far shores waited the Germans. They had long expected an attack across the Channel in the spring of 1944—just when and where they were not sure. Most of the Wehrmacht tactitians anticipated an onslaught between the Seine and the Scheldt; in a flash of intuition Hitler at one point predicted the Cotentin Peninsula as a likely target, but his intuition later flicked up other possibilities. The Führer and his generals had long argued over defense strategy. Demanding “fanatical energy,” Hitler had ordered the Atlantic Wall—almost a coastal Maginot Line—to be armed and concreted in order to prevent the invader from gaining a beachhead. He directed his western Commander in Chief, Gerd von Runstedt, to throw the enemy back into the sea by a quick and massive counterattack. Runstedt preferred to rely on the proved tactics of rapid maneuver behind the front, with mobile infantry and powerful armored units deployed to overwhelm the enemy beachheads. Sensing Runstedt’s doubts, Hitler had assigned Rommel to the Western Front, with special responsibilities for coastal defense. The old commander of the Afrika Korps would have liked a mobile defense in depth as well, but knowing the air power of the Allies and the poor quality of his troops, many of whom were either young and undertrained or battle weary from service in Russia, he concentrated on beach defenses. By June the Channel beaches were peppered with half a million steel piles, wooden stakes armed with mines, interlocked iron bars, and “Belgian gates,” huge slanting gates braced by girders, all connected with barbed wire.
The enemy assault must be liquidated within a few hours, Hitler demanded. This would prevent the re-election of Roosevelt, who, “with luck, would finish up somewhere in jail.” Churchill, too, would be finished, and the Allies would never dare launch another invasion of France.
Only the weather was not ready. When Eisenhower met with his commanders early Sunday morning, June 4, forecasters warned of high winds and heavy cloud. Montgomery was ready to go ahead, but when the others demurred, Eisenhower ordered the operation postponed, even though some ships had to be called back. The prospects improved by evening. For a day or two the weather would be tolerable, though by no means ideal; then it would close in again. The airmen were dubious; Montgomery again said, “Go!” For long minutes Eisenhower agonized. Postponement would bring grave risks, too. How long, he wondered, could he leave the operation hanging on the end of a limb. “I’m quite positive we must give the order.…I don’t like it but there it is….” Then, “O.K. We’ll go.”
These words loosed the most formidable amphibious assault the world had ever known. After rendezvousing in a great circle south of the Isle of Wight, warships and transports, landing ships and smaller craft moved in orderly never-ending streams toward the south. Flanking the Utah-bound column was the graceful Augusta, with General Bradley in the skipper’s cabin occupied by Roosevelt at Argentia. Barrage balloons lofted above the ships on cables guarded the LCI’s against enemy air attack. Paratroopers, their faces blackened, sat shoulder to shoulder hugging their parachutes in the transport planes above the Channel. The roar of bombers going out, Edward R. Murrow broadcast from London, was so powerful and triumphant he imagined he heard the strains of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Soon after midnight the paratroopers were floating down in the dark over the low, flat pastures of the Cotentin Peninsula; assault waves were milling around in the launching area and moving toward Utah, Omaha, and the “British” beaches to the east. Warships poured shells and rockets onto beach targets. Boats roared toward the shore; tanks churned through heavy seas, some of them foundering; men waded for hundreds of yards toward the beaches. Some drowned; some were shot down and died in little paroxysms of red foam; some cowered behind obstacles at the water line; some were annihilated as they tried to sprint up the beach. But most made it and dug in under the heavy protection of low bluffs or sea walls, and many of these pressed on.
Roosevelt had spent the weekend with a small entourage at Pa Watson’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia. Watching him, Miss Tully felt that every movement of his face and hands betrayed his tenseness. During the weekend he had perused his Book of Common Prayer for a D-day invocation. He returned to the White House Monday morning and that evening went on the air not to pray for the invaders but to salute the fall of Rome, the symbol of Christianity, of authority, and now of Allied victory. He dwelt at length on the degrading effects of fascism as compared to the greatness of the Italian people in both Italy and the United States. But his mind was on the military significance. “One up and two to go!”
And now D day was crowding hard on the event. Even while marking the fall of Rome, Roosevelt had known that ships and troops were streaming across the Channel. He stayed in touch with the Pentagon during the night. At four in the morning the White House operator began waking up staff members with the news. First reports were fragmentary and bewildering, but by the time of his regular press conference in the morning the President was relaxed and even gay. As the correspondents—almost two hundred strong—crowded in, he was joshing with his aides, and Fala was wriggling on his back on the couch.
“Well, I think this is a very happy conference today,” Roosevelt began. “Looking at the rows of you coming in, you have the same expression as the anonymous and silent people this side of the desk who came in just before you—all smiles!” He had little definite to report—only that the invasion was up to schedule, “and as the Prime Minister said, ‘That’s a mouthful.’ ”
How was the President feeling? “Fine—I’m a little sleepy!”
In the evening he led the nation in prayer. He prayed first for “our sons, pride of our Nation….Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again….” And he prayed also for the people at home, for stout hearts to wait out the long travail and to bear sorrows that might come. “Give us Faith in thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; faith in our united crusade….”
Enough things went wrong on D day to lend suspense to the occasion and drama to the retelling. The paratroopers were badly scattered; scores of gliders were shot down or lost their way; on Omaha Beach the invaders ran into unexpected enemy strength and were slaughtered in the water and on the beach; heavy seas slowed operations along all the beaches. But in fact the invasion was not in jeopardy. The long wait until the Germans had been weakened in the east, the stupendous build-up, the elaborate planning by Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were now paying off. Strategy was now dominating tactics. By the end of D day, with almost continuous thickets of ships disgorging war power along miles and miles of coast, the immediate issue was all but resolved.
The Germans were not only overwhelmed; they also were deceived, outwitted, and caught flat-footed. Their radar had been so mercilessly shelled that only a handful of radar pieces were operating on the eve of D day, and most of them were foiled by devices that simulated a different landing. The weather that had worried Eisenhower seemed too rough to the enemy to permit amphibious operations. Rommel was not even near the front; he had left on June 5 to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. The Führer was so certain that the first landings were a feint that he delayed the dispatch of two Panzer divisions. But even if he had known the date of D day, he could not long have held off the Allies. He had inadequate sea power and air power to challenge the invaders on the Channel or over it. And in the face of massive Allied attacks on railroads, bridges, highways, and marshaling yards, he lacked enough maneuverability to deploy even the forces he had.
The hurricane of fire could be slowed but not stopped. British troops assaulted Caen, which Montgomery now used as the pivot of a great wheeling movement by the Americans to the west. From eastern beaches Canadians moved inland to cut the highway from Caen to the west. The Germans held out tenaciously in the city, which became the center of a furious struggle for weeks. From Utah and Omaha beaches American forces pushed their way slowly south and west in the crucial effort to cut off the Cotentin Peninsula and seize the port of Cherbourg. Progress was agonizingly slow, for this was bocage country, where the thick hedges and ditches that enfolded the fields gave ideal protection to the Germans. But the troops inched ahead. Supporting them from the ocean was a continuous relay of ships, which unloaded half a million men in the first ten days. Then storms disrupted the supply lines, but on the Fourth of July Marshall passed on to his chief a report from Eisenhower that the millionth man had just been landed that morning. Slowly the Americans converged on Cherbourg, whose commander had received the usual Hitler order to stand and die, and, after a combined ground-sea attack, broke into the city. The port was found so blasted and mined that it could not be used for weeks. This delay made all the more urgent the two complete artificial harbors—the Mulberries—that were towed across the Channel in huge sections. One Mulberry was torn to pieces in the terrible gales, but the other was properly installed out from the beach and provided a roadstead to receive ocean-going vessels.
All this Roosevelt watched with admiration; he could have no direct part in it. Neither could Churchill, but at least he could visit the beaches. He reported to Roosevelt on his “jolly day”: “…After doing much laborious duty we went and had a plug at the Hun from our destroyer, but although the range was 6000 yards he did not honour us with a reply….You used the word ‘stupendous’ in one of your early telegrams to me. I must admit that what I saw could only be described by that word….The marvellous efficiency of the transportation exceeds anything that has ever been known in war….We are working up to a battle which may well be a million a side….How I wish you were here!” The President could only reply that he wished he were, too, and that when he did get over he could land alongside the Quai of Cherbourg.
Roosevelt faced the responsibilities of war if not the experience of it. Hard on the heels of OVERLORD—probably the most impressive combined operation ever conducted by allies—came one of the sharpest disagreements ever between Washington and London. The issue was ANVIL, the invasion of southern France. The Italian suction pump had already delayed ANVIL and robbed it of its original purpose of taking pressure off Eisenhower’s forces in the weeks after D day. Eisenhower still wanted ANVIL, in order to bring heavy strength from the Mediterranean up through the Rhone Valley to support his ultimate campaign for the Ruhr. The British flatly opposed shifting divisions from Italy to southern France at a time when Alexander had finally seized Rome and was driving north. Churchill cabled to Roosevelt late in June: “Let us resolve not to wreck one great campaign for the sake of another. Both can be won.”
Roosevelt’s long reply bluntly answered the British and underscored his strategy for the West.
“…I agree with you that our over-all strategic concept should be to engage the enemy on the largest scale with the greatest violence and continuity, but I am convinced it must be based on a main effort, together with closely coordinated supporting efforts directed at the heart of Germany.
“The exploitation of ‘Overlord,’ our victorious advances in Italy, an early assault on Southern France, combined with the Soviet drives to the west—all as envisaged at Teheran—will most certainly serve to realize our object—the unconditional surrender of Germany….
“I agree that the political considerations you mention are important factors, but military operations based thereon must be definitely secondary to the primary operations of striking at the heart of Germany….
“Until we have exhausted the forces in the United States, or it is proved we cannot get them to Eisenhower when he wants them, I am opposed to the wasteful procedure of transferring forces from the Mediterranean to ‘Overlord.’ If we use shipping and port capacity to shift forces from one combat area (the Mediterranean) to another (‘Overlord’) it will certainly detract from the build-up of ‘Overlord’ direct from the United States, and the net result is just what we don’t want—fewer forces in combat areas.
“My interest and hopes center on defeating the Germans in front of Eisenhower and driving on into Germany, rather than on limiting this action for the purpose of staging a full major effort in Italy. I am convinced we will have sufficient forces in Italy, with ‘Anvil’ forces withdrawn, to chase Kesselring north of Pisa-Rimini and maintain heavy pressure against his army at the very least to the extent necessary to contain his present force. I cannot conceive of the Germans paying the price of ten additional divisions, estimated by General Wilson, in order to keep us out of Northern Italy….
“At Teheran we agreed upon a definite plan of attack. That plan has gone well so far. Nothing has occurred to require any change. Now that we are fully involved in our major blow history will never forgive us if we lost precious time and lives in indecision and debate. My dear friend, I beg you to let us go ahead with our plan.
“Finally, for purely political considerations over here, I should never survive even a slight setback to ‘Overlord’ if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”
The military disagreement between the two leaders reflected basic differences over grand political strategy. While denying any strategic interest in the Balkans, Churchill was clearly interested at the least in securing military positions on the Istrian Peninsula that could make possible a major advance against Vienna through the Ljubljana Gap. At the moment, he was less intent on a definite Balkan commitment than in broadening his strategic options, in part as a counter to Soviet power rumbling in from the east. More and more, Churchill had become concerned with postwar political implications. Roosevelt wanted to win the quickest possible military victory; he was worried also about Stalin’s reaction to the abandonment of ANVIL and about the political risk he ran at home if people came to feel that the troops and landing craft he had withheld from the Pacific had been used in Europe in a Balkan adventure.
Even after this insistence on the original plan, Churchill appealed again to Roosevelt, and separately to Hopkins, who was now convalescing in his Georgetown home. The Americans remained adamant, partly because they had information from Eisenhower that in the final pinch the British would give in. Grumbling that His Majesty’s government would go ahead with the project only under solemn protest, Churchill finally agreed to ANVIL. He visited the Mediterranean at the time of the invasion and could not refrain from boarding a British destroyer to watch the assault troops boating in toward their landing in the Gulf of Saint-Tropez. Having “done the civil” to ANVIL, however, he did not change his mind about its strategic value, even after General Alexander M. Patch’s American and French divisions streamed ashore on August 15 over weak opposition and advanced so rapidly north, with the help of the French Resistance, that OVERLORD and ANVIL linked arms within a month of the southern landings. Years later the Prime Minister was still lamenting that the forces in Italy had been denied their chance to disable the Germans and very possibly reach Vienna before the Russians, “with all that might have followed therefrom.” Roosevelt and his planners felt that they were thoroughly vindicated by the military success of ANVIL—a success all the sweeter after the doubts of their British comrades.
Just as the descent of his armies onto Africa in the fall of 1942 had confronted Roosevelt with the conflicts of the Mediterranean world, now his forced entry into France made the political problems of Europe more immediate and insistent. Most visible on the horizon was the towering problem of Charles de Gaulle.
Roosevelt’s relations with de Gaulle and his Committee of National Liberation had hardly changed since the awkward encounter in Casablanca a year and a half before. Time and again the President insisted that he would not make commitments to the Gaullists that might jeopardize the freedom of the French people to decide their own political fate after their liberation. De Gaulle, certain that he embodied the independent will of the French people, was determined to establish such clear legitimacy before liberation that neither his foes in France nor his reluctant allies outside could gainsay him the role he wished to play. Sheer personal dislike still sharpened the relations between him and Roosevelt. Each viewed the other as a prima donna seeking personal power and the spotlight.
De Gaulle’s icy rigidity was a force in itself; it produced a kind of glacial flow that ground down his adversaries even as they resisted. On the last day of 1943 Roosevelt complained to Churchill that “De Gaulle and his Committee have most decidedly moved forward by ‘the process of infiltration’—in other words, here a little, there a little.” Slowly the General rendered Roosevelt’s man Giraud impotent, first by excluding him from any real political power, then by edging him out of the committee, and finally by sacking him as Commander in Chief—all without creating a major clash with the President. Roosevelt had ways of showing his disapproval. When he turned over a destroyer escort to the French at the Washington Navy Yard, with many a fine reference to the Bonhomme Richard, French-American friendship, and all the rest, he pointedly gave it to the French Navy, with not a reference to de Gaulle, the National Committee, or even the French government. In the face of threats from Algiers to repudiate the Allies’ planned invasion currency for France, Roosevelt personally went over the scrip’s design. He objected to the words “République Française” on the proposed notes and wanted to print in the middle, in color, the French flag supported by the American and British flags on each side. Angrily de Gaulle accepted what he called “de la fausse monnaie.”
Nothing, indeed, at this point so easily provoked Roosevelt as the issue of de Gaulle. When Eisenhower deferentially suggested that from his information from agents and escaped prisoners of war there seemed to be only two groups, Vichyites and Gaullists, Roosevelt told Marshall that Eisenhower “evidently believes the fool newspaper stories that I am anti-deGaulle, even the kind of story that says that I hate him, etc., etc. All this, of course, is utter nonsense. I am perfectly willing to have deGaulle made President, or Emperor, or King or anything else so long as the action comes in an untrammeled and unforced way from the French people themselves.” He cited an example, “which I happen to know about” of an old-time mayor in a little French town in occupied France who was doing a splendid job, but the committee already planned to replace him with an unsuccessful politician who was probably a porch-climbing robber.
How did Eisenhower know that there were only two groups? Roosevelt went on. He had overlooked the biggest group of all—the people who didn’t know what it was all about.
“It is awfully easy to be for deGaulle and to cheer the thought of recognizing that Committee as the provisional government of France, but I have a moral duty that transcends ‘an easy way.’ It is to see to it that the people of France have nothing foisted on them by outside powers. It must be a French choice—and that means, as far as possible, forty million people. Self-determination is not a word of expediency. It carries with it a very deep principle in human affairs.” Roosevelt also felt that de Gaulle was on the wane politically.
So on the eve of the supreme adventure of liberating France the Allied relationship with the Free French ranged between acrimony and absurdity. Churchill, who had tried to mediate between Roosevelt and de Gaulle, had invited the Frenchman to be present in England for D day. The General arrived but was so prickly about his real and fancied grievances that a private conference between the two ended in a flat statement by Churchill that if there was a split between de Gaulle’s committee and Washington he would almost certainly side with the Americans, and a final remark by de Gaulle that he quite understood that.
Still, with thousands of Anglo-Americans about to pour into France in a grand crusade, it was clear that relations must be patched up. Eisenhower kept insisting that something must be done to cope with the scores of civilian problems that would rise. Through the good offices of the British, de Gaulle and Roosevelt were persuaded to agree to a visit by the General to Washington. To be sure, Roosevelt did not want to take the initiative in inviting him, nor the General the humiliation of asking to be invited, but Downing Street called on all its diplomatic finesse to arrange a meeting with neither an invitation nor an acceptance.
Externally de Gaulle’s trip to Washington was a great success. Guns boomed out a salute; the President, his family, and his Cabinet greeted him at the White House; Roosevelt addressed him in French. There followed a round of festivities and ceremonials, capped by a state dinner where Roosevelt not only toasted de Gaulle as “our friend” but lambasted the journalists in Algiers and Washington who made trouble between leaders. The climax of the meeting was Roosevelt’s decision to recognize the French Committee of National Liberation as the de facto authority in the civil administration of France.
Privately the exchanges were less meaningful. De Gaulle felt that Roosevelt was condescending, even if graciously so, in his long monologues about a future peace based on trust and good will. And Roosevelt, who in his toast to de Gaulle had once again asserted that there were no problems that could not be settled by sitting around the table, must have sensed that the General was impervious to genteel bribes or blarney.
Yet the immediate issue was resolved, and just in time. After cutting and battering through the bocage country during July, the American First Army captured Saint-Lô. The new Third Army, under General Patton, then turned one corps into Brittany to mop up and another to move east in a huge wheeling operation linked with the First Army, under General Courtney H. Hodges. Repulsing do-or-die counterattacks ordered by Hitler, the Americans raced east and then turned north to link up with English and Canadian forces, trapping thousands of Germans. The road to Paris was now open. As the Nazis fled and the Resistance began taking over, de Gaulle’s troops made their ceremonial entrance into the tumultuous city, and soon the General himself marched down the boulevards before ecstatic throngs.
“The joy that entered the hearts of all civilized men and women,” Roosevelt announced in Washington, “can only be measured by the gloom which settled there one June day four years ago when German troops occupied the French capital….”
There was joyful news from the east as well. Shortly after D day, Stalin had cabled to Roosevelt that soon the Red Army would renew its offensive, and he hoped that this would be of substantial help to Allied operations in France and Italy. On June 23, the day after the third anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Russia, over a million Red Army troops surged forward across a 450-mile front in Byelorussia. Within a week the Russians had broken through the enemy front in half a dozen places, trapped a huge number of Germans, and captured Minsk; during July the Red Army plunged on, with slowing momentum, destroying a score of German divisions, moving into Poland, and seizing Lublin and Brest-Litovsk.
Once again Roosevelt faced the problem of Poland, but now more urgently than ever. Polish-American editors and politicians in New York and Detroit and other cities were threatening to turn their constituents against Roosevelt in the fall if he failed anti-Communist Poles in their hour of need. Early in June the President held discussions in Washington with Prime Minister Stanislaus Mikolajczyk of the Polish government in London. At a state dinner for the Prime Minister he talked about the problem of borders; he had been looking over sixteen maps that morning, the President said, and they showed that in the last three centuries Poland had included most of Russia and a good part of Germany and Czechoslovakia. “Therefore,” he went on, “it is rather difficult to untangle the map of Poland.” So he and the Prime Minister had been talking about broader matters, “getting away from the mere questions of whether this town will be on this side of the line or that side of the line.”
Roosevelt then sounded Stalin out on seeing Mikolajczyk in Moscow, but the Marshal was cool. A few weeks later Stalin informed Churchill and the President that since the Polish organization in London had turned out to be “ephemeral” and impotent, he was recognizing the new Polish Committee of National Liberation recently formed by Warsaw Poles. He was willing to see Mikolajczyk, but only if he approached him through the National Committee.
Not only did the President fear Stalin’s design for Poland and the political reaction in the United States, but also he and Hull were apprehensive that Europe was already veering toward the sphere-of-interest and balance-of-power doctrines that Hull in particular felt had had such iniquitous consequences. The problem was emerging in Poland and, most dramatically, in that classic sphere of interest the Balkans. Halifax had questioned Hull at the end of May on the proposition that London and Moscow reach an agreement that Russia would have a controlling interest in Rumania and the British in Greece. The Secretary responded with a lecture on proper principles of international relations. At the same time Churchill put the matter to Roosevelt as a temporary arrangement.
The President replied that he understood the immediate military necessity but feared that the natural tendency for such decisions to extend to other than military fields would be strengthened by Churchill’s action and would result in the division of the Balkans into persisting spheres of influence. Churchill answered that it would be best to follow the Soviet lead in Rumania, considering that neither he nor Roosevelt had any troops there anyway, and that Greece was Britain’s old ally. The President reluctantly agreed to a trial of three months, “making it clear that we are not establishing any post-war spheres of interest.”
At this time the public relations between Roosevelt and Stalin were at their most cordial. In the spring Russian soldiers and civilians had been grumbling that a second front now would be too easy and too late, but Stalin in his May Day 1944 order gave full credit to Allied operations in Italy and the bombing of Europe. Only a combined blow could smash Hitlerism, he warned. After waiting prudently for a week following D day, the Marshal acknowledged the “brilliant success” of the Allies, adding that “the history of war does not know of an undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale, and mastery of execution.”
Privately, attitudes were somewhat different. On the eve of the Allied landing in Normandy, Stalin had received Milovan Djilas, from Tito’s headquarters. Urging the Yugoslavs not to frighten London with their Communism, he went on: “Perhaps you think that just because we are the allies of the English that we have forgotten who they are and who Churchill is….
“Churchill is the kind who, if you don’t watch him, will slip a kopeck out of your pocket. Yes, a kopeck out of your pocket! By God, a kopeck out of your pocket! And Roosevelt? Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins….”
Strategy in Europe called for mass, focus, unity of purpose, singleness of command. Strategy in the Pacific was prone to dispersion, opportunism, shifting purposes, competing arms and commands. If as an administrator Roosevelt had long tended to parcel out authority among several subordinates and let them compete with one another, he was now surpassing himself in the Pacific and the Far East. In the great arc stretching ten thousand miles from northeast of Japan to the southwest, Nimitz commanded the northern and central Pacific, MacArthur the Southwest Pacific, and Stilwell and Chennault in the China-Burma-India theater, and each of these pursued his own tactics and relied on his own special combination of services and arms.
The immediate issue lay between Nimitz and MacArthur. As Nimitz’s amphibious troops speared into the Gilberts and Kwajalein and Eniwetok, and as his task forces ranged farther and farther west with impunity, the Admiral became more confident of his power to promenade directly across the Pacific to the Marianas, Formosa, and the China coast. Not only would he bypass small island bastions such as Truk, but he saw no reason that troops should run the risk of bogging down in great land masses such as the Philippines. With his carriers achieving greater range, with a growing fleet of supply ships that could provision the Navy at sea, with B-29’s building that could fly immense distances, he proposed to leap along a small number of steppingstones on the shortest route to Japan.
MacArthur had rolled the Japanese back over a thousand miles from their farthest penetration; he had routed them on small islands and big ones alike. Above all, he had a promise to redeem—the return to the Philippines. He looked on the Navy plans with a cold eye. A direct attack across the Pacific, he told the Joint Chiefs, would degenerate into a spate of separate sea-borne attacks against positions defended in great depth. Carrier-based aviation could not overcome enemy planes swarming out from big land bases. An attack from his theater, on the other hand, “departs from the base that is closest to the objectives and advances against the most lightly organized portion of the enemy’s defenses, effecting a decisive penetration. It is the only plan that permits an effective combination of land, sea, and air power.” Heavily defended areas could be bypassed and allowed to fall of their own weight.
Doubtful that the Joint Chiefs would support him, MacArthur proposed that he come to Washington so that he could confront the Pentagon and appeal to the President. For months Roosevelt had held off making the strategic decision; he had not even mediated between the Army and the Navy. The argument and the tentative plans swung back and forth as events blocked certain lines of strategy and unfolded others. Pacific strategy was less the controller of events than the product of them.
And of the enemy. The Japanese Navy had been following a cautious policy for almost two years, mainly because its carrier groups had been smashed at Midway and replacements eroded away in later encounters, especially in the Rabaul area. But Imperial Headquarters had not lost its will to fight. It was still hoping for the one big naval battle that would decide mastery of the central Pacific. The critical occasion would come when the Americans tried to penetrate the key defense perimeter running from the Mariana Islands through the Palaus and the Vogelkop to Timor. The most opportune situation would be to catch the American Navy when it was conducting an amphibious landing and was tied down to the committed troops.
This decision of the Japanese precipitated one of the great naval battles of the war, for it was precisely the Marianas on which the eyes of King and Nimitz were fixed. The major islands—Guam, Tinian, and Saipan—at the foot of the 425-mile chain were big enough to serve as advance naval and air bases in penetrating the western Pacific. They were 1,600 miles from Tokyo, near enough for the huge B-29’s to make a round trip to the enemy homeland with several tons of bombs. And Guam, lost to the Japanese in the dark hours after Pearl Harbor, lay waiting to be liberated. Recognizing the attractiveness of the Marianas to the foe, Imperial Headquarters during early 1944 ordered about 45,000 troops into the islands. Even though American submarines picked off a dozen or more transports and freighters headed for Saipan, drowning about 3,600 troops and sinking the arms and equipment of another 4,000 or 5,000, the Marianas—especially Saipan, with 30,000 troops—were heavily defended by June 1944.
Early that month, while a great invasion force was storming Normandy beaches, another big amphibious force, of over five hundred warships and beaching craft and 125,000 troops, two-thirds of them Marines, was converging on Saipan from bases several thousand miles away. Early on the cool, bright morning of June 15, following heavy but ineffective bombardment by a dozen battleships and heavy cruisers standing six miles out to sea, am-tracs packed with Marines churned from the landing ships, clambered over the barrier reefs, and ground up the beaches into the scrubby trees beyond. Despite heavy enfilading fire and much confusion, the Marines were well inland by nightfall, but Japanese counterattacks on D day and the next day were so effective that rosy hopes of capturing Saipan in a few days were soon dashed.
The main counterattack was now forming far out to sea. Admiral Toyoda, from his flagship in the Inland Sea, commanded the Combined Fleet to attack the enemy in the Marianas area and annihilate the invasion force. The Emperor himself warned his soldiers and sailors that “if Saipan is lost, air raids on Tokyo will take place, therefore you absolutely must hold Saipan.” Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa commanded nine carriers, five battleships, thirteen cruisers, twenty-eight destroyers, 430 carrier-based aircraft; Admiral Spruance could muster a fleet almost twice as big. On the morning of June 18, exploiting his planes’ greater range, Ozawa dispatched wave after wave of bombers and fighters from his carriers against Spruance’s battle formations, which were as tightly organized as a Wild West caravan defense, with carriers in the middle protected by a ring of interspersed battleships, cruisers, and destroyers.
Then came the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” Ozawa’s planes ran into a curtain of fire from the big ships and their protecting Hellcats. Picket destroyers miles away could see Zeroes “falling like plums.” The American planes had heavier armor, more firepower, better-trained pilots. Only one of the American surface vessels was even damaged. Ozawa had depended heavily on shore-based aircraft from Guam, but the tables were turned when Spruance sent Helldivers and Avengers over the island and not only smashed planes on the field but also pockmarked it so deeply that Japanese carrier-based aircraft that survived the dogfights crashed on trying to land there. On this day and the next Ozawa lost three carriers, including his own flagship, to American planes and submarines. By the time he took refuge at Okinawa, about four hundred of his carriers’ planes had gone down.
Freed from the threat of counterattack, the Marines, now joined by army troops, proceeded with the tedious, bloody advance across Saipan. The days of quick conquests were over; the Japanese were dug into jungles and ridges and were flushed out at a heavy price—a bitter foretaste of battles to come. After three weeks the Japanese, pressed into the northern reaches of the island, were still able to mount a desperate banzai attack that overnight killed or wounded almost 1,000 men in a single army regiment. But this was a last spasm; by July 9 Saipan was “secured.” Over 14,000 Marines had been killed or wounded.
Within two weeks Marines and soldiers invaded Guam, which fell after more hard combat, and Marines captured Tinian. The Battle of the Marianas was over; already Seabees and army engineers were clearing great tracts of jungle and cane field for runways that soon would be lofting B-29’s toward Japan. Far to the southwest MacArthur had captured Biak and was assaulting Noemfoor, islands off the northern reaches of New Guinea that could serve as steppingstones to the Philippines.
The capture of Saipan would be of the highest importance to future offensives against Japan, Roosevelt cabled to Churchill during the operation. If he regretted that he could not have been with the Prime Minister on his visit to Normandy, the President was consoled by the thought that in a few weeks he would get close to his own war in the Pacific. On July 20, while the national Democratic convention was concluding its proceedings in Chicago, the Commander in Chief, from a high bluff, was watching 10,000 amphibious troops conduct a landing exercise at the huge Navy and Marine Corps base at San Diego.
The next evening Roosevelt and his party—Leahy, McIntire, Rosenman, and aides—boarded the heavy cruiser Baltimore, destination Honolulu. Guarded by air patrols and six destroyers, the grim, stripped-down cruiser traveled under wartime conditions, no lights showing. The President read and slept a good deal. The only casualty on the trip was Fala’s dignity as a result of the crew’s fattening him with tidbits and snipping locks from his hair to send home as souvenirs.
Rows of ships with men standing smartly at attention in their whites greeted the Commander in Chief in Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and a brace of naval and military officers clambered up the gangplank to welcome the President; only MacArthur was missing. After an uneasy delay the President and his party were about to disembark when an automobile siren wailed, a huge open car rolled onto the dock, circled, and drew up at the gangplank—and out stepped MacArthur, in leather windbreaker, creased suntans, and jaunty gold-braided cap. Suddenly summoned from Australia for a military conference with the President—his first meeting with the Commander in Chief in seven years—he had arrived with only one aide and with no reports, plans, maps, or charts, but with a determination to appeal to the highest authority for his plan to redeem the Philippines. The Marianas campaign had not settled Pacific strategy but only sharpened the old dispute.
In a cream stucco mansion overlooking Waikiki’s rolling surf Nimitz and MacArthur argued their differences in front of Roosevelt and Leahy. Those differences were sharp but not profound. Tracing distances on a huge chart with a long bamboo pointer, Nimitz once again proposed bypassing the Philippines and moving direct to the attack on Formosa, and MacArthur once again urged the liberation of the Philippines and the bypassing of Formosa. But Navy strategists saw dire problems in assaulting Formosa without securing the Philippine flank, and army planners recognized that it was not a matter of either taking the Philippines or bypassing them, but of which islands in the archipelago to take, in what sequence, on what dates, and with what forces.
In such a situation Roosevelt was at his best, skillfully placating both the Admiral and the General, steering the discussion away from absolutes, narrowing the differences. MacArthur was at his most persuasive with Roosevelt when he took the stand that America had a moral responsibility to redeem its promises to liberate the Filipinos and to free imprisoned Americans. He claimed later that he also told the President—in a private session—that if their Filipino “wards” were left to languish in their agony, “I dare say that the American people would be so aroused that they would register most complete resentment against you at the polls this fall,” but that the President had already made his decision, stating: “We will not bypass the Philippines. Carry on your existing plans. And may God protect you.”
Roosevelt asked MacArthur to stay on to take a ride with him around the island. With Leahy and Nimitz they drove in an open car through streets lined with saluting servicemen and cheering Hawaiians, while Rosenman and Secret Service men worried about a well-placed bomb. The Commander in Chief reviewed the Army’s famous 7th Infantry Division, saw wounded men unloaded from an ambulance plane that had just flown in to Hickam Field from the Marianas, watched a combat team make a simulated attack on a house, and kept remarking on the transformation of Oahu since his visit ten years before, when he witnessed an exercise in which, as he recalled, seven of the twelve World War I tanks broke down, and half the trucks.
At a naval hospital Roosevelt asked to be wheeled through wards occupied by men who had lost arms and legs. He wanted to display himself and his useless legs to these boys who would have to face the same bitterness as he had for twenty-three years, Rosenman wrote later.
After three strenuous days on Oahu the President and his original military party reboarded the Baltimore and headed almost due north to Adak. For five days the cruiser plowed north in steadily worsening weather. Cables from Washington and the fighting fronts followed, with reports of heavy fighting and steady progress in France and Italy. And with some grievous news, too—that President Manuel Quezon was dead, a few months short of the planned liberation of his country; that Missy LeHand had finally died after her long illness; that Joseph Kennedy’s oldest son, Joe Jr., had been killed in an air attack on German submarine pens.
In Adak the President found intense activity at a nearly completed advance base. He talked to officers and men at the naval air station. “Gentlemen, I like your food. I like your climate.” Much laughter. “You don’t realize the thousands upon thousands of people who would give anything in this world to swap places with you.” Incredulity. It was standing operating procedure in the Aleutians to call the theater the worst iced-over hellhole a man could be stationed in. But here was the Commander in Chief dwelling at length on Alaska as a new frontier for settlement by ex-servicemen after the war. The Alaskan coast, he went on to say, reminded him of the waters off Maine and Newfoundland he had known as a boy. The weather was familiar, too—continuing wind and rain and fog along the Alaskan coast and all the way back to Bremerton.
For the trip back, the President and his party, including Fala, changed to a destroyer, but their weather luck did not change. It was so foul that on the train crossing the country on the way back to Washington Roosevelt dictated a long complaint entitled “Mary Had a Little Lamb—1944 Version,” which blamed the Navy for the “low” that had encouraged Admiral McIntire, the President said, to use a new word with almost every sentence.
To observe the superb co-ordination of arms and of units in mock combat, to cause the face of a wounded soldier to light up with surprise and pleasure, to lie in his bunk in the skipper’s cabin and feel the engines of the great cruiser strain and pound underneath him, to find Pearl Harbor immensely expanded, with ships and docks back in service, to explore with Nimitz and MacArthur the imposing alternatives in the Pacific—never had Roosevelt assumed the role of Commander in Chief more intensely than in his days in the Pacific. He had not invited Marshall or King or Arnold to take part in the Honolulu conferences; this time the President wanted to deal with his theater commanders alone, except for Leahy. He would be tested in the fall as chief executive and chief politician; he also wanted—indeed, he preferred—to be tested as Commander in Chief.
He relished the title, according to Hull. The Secretary wrote later that at a Cabinet dinner, when Hull was to propose a toast, the President asked him please to try to address him as “Commander in Chief,” not as “President.” Admiral King wrote, also much later, that a few weeks before the Honolulu meetings Leahy had come to his office and said that the President would like to have King cease using the customary term “Commander in Chief” of both the United States fleet and the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, and to change the designation to commander of each individual fleet. Thus there would be but one Commander in Chief. Was this an order or a request? King asked. It was not even a request, Leahy said, but he knew that the President would like to have it done. King concluded that Roosevelt simply wanted to play up his role in an election year.
But it was more than that. Roosevelt not only assumed the role of Commander in Chief, but he embraced it and lived it. Just as he liked to tell reporters about his own journalistic days (mainly on the Harvard Crimson), or farmers that he was a tree grower, or businessmen that he had been in various financial ventures, so he would be a soldier among soldiers. But the feeling of involvement in the military role probably went much deeper; partly because that role was so crucial for a nation at war and partly because he felt keen deprivation at not having seen active service in World War I. He wanted to be a soldier, a professional. It had not been enough to be Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the first war; he had been desperately anxious for service overseas. It was not enough to be President of the United States; he must be symbolically in uniform.
One result was a close rapport between the President and his military chieftains. He often volunteered the observation that he had never overruled his staff. “We haven’t had any basic differences,” he said, referring to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “and even haven’t had any minor disagreements.” This was true only in the narrow sense that the Joint Chiefs may never have come up with a firm and final plan that was flatly vetoed by the Commander in Chief; in fact, he had overridden the advice of military advisers in deciding on the invasion of Africa and in other decisions, and many a showdown was averted because the military men knew the President’s views and never allowed disagreements to come to a head. The significant fact is that the President saw such a congruence and even boasted about it. In the occasional real disputes between the President and the Chiefs, he tried to win his way by quiet pressure and maneuver; he would not permit a showdown.
Even when the President felt strongly about an issue for political reasons, he was reluctant to overrule the military. Such an issue was the noncommissioning of Fiorello La Guardia. Son of an army bandmaster, reared on western army posts, proud of his World War I service as an aviator, the Mayor had been eager to join Eisenhower’s civil-affairs staff. The “Little Flower” saw a great role for himself in Italy, but in any event he wanted to be in uniform, especially that of a brigadier general.
Roosevelt cabled to Eisenhower asking him to put La Guardia on his staff. Eisenhower agreed but complained to the War Department. Stimson and Marshall intervened at the White House just in time to try to persuade the President not to make La Guardia a brigadier general, but to commission him a colonel and send him to Charlottesville for civil-affairs training. “Eternal vigilance is the price of efficiency in this curious Administration,” Stimson grumbled. When McCloy told the Mayor of the decision, La Guardia came to Washington to see Stimson. The Secretary reported to Roosevelt on the interview that had followed.
“1. I told him that there were two lines, of which he could follow either but not both. He could be a soldier or he could be a propagandist. He couldn’t do both. The Army does not handle propaganda.
“2. As a friend I strongly advised him to remain in his present pulpit of the mayoralty and to use his influence with Italians from there; that his words would carry much further than if he was a civilian soldier, let alone a make-believe General….”
Roosevelt replied in the stiffest letter he had ever sent a senior Cabinet member.
“Frankly, I think you have this LaGuardia business all wrong.
“I do not agree with your paragraph #1 wherein you told him that he could be a soldier or he could be a propagandist and that he could not be both.
“In view of my knowledge of literally hundreds of officers that you have commissioned out of public life who are neither soldiers or propagandists, I do not see how you could offer him one of the two alternatives….
“I do not like your second paragraph wherein you suggested that he ought not to be a make-believe General. In the strict sense of the word, you have a great many make-believe Generals….
“I do not think that LaGuardia wants ‘adventure.’ I think that is imputing a motive to him which is not strictly fair to him. Like most people wth red blood, he does hope he can get war service….”
Stimson answered with a long placating letter, but did not retreat an inch. A month later Roosevelt spoke up for La Guardia in a brief conversation with Stimson, though only mildly, and a few months later was still talking to the Secretary about a possible reconsideration. But La Guardia never got his commission.
Even when the President might have had a gust of public feeling behind him he refrained from interfering in military matters. He refused to intervene when an army general, in a much-publicized action, punished soldiers who had “yoo-hooed” at him while he was playing golf. When reporters pressed him to comment on the hubbub over Patton’s slapping two soldiers in Sicily, the President reminded them of the story about Lincoln, who had said when informed that his successful commander drank, “It must be a good brand of liquor.” Nor did he intervene later when Patton avowed that Britain and the United States would run the world of the future. For a highly political man Roosevelt had shown remarkable restraint in influencing the selection of generals. Even Stimson had granted that his record “was unique in American war history for its scrupulous abstention from personal and political pressure.” At the same time, as Commander in Chief, he did not hesitate to propose specific ideas and changes to the military. He personally authorized the Navy to take extra risks in Atlantic convoying because of the need for emergency tonnage in Africa. He queried King as to whether carrier catapults had been brought into action in Pacific fighting, and Knox and Leahy as to the relative merits of several destroyers as against one heavy cruiser in protecting carriers. He suggested that carriers cope with suicide air attacks by improvising masts and wire on flight decks to be raised and lowered quickly, like barrage balloons. He gave special instructions to both the Army and the Navy about the need to rotate personnel. Yet in making these interventions—especially to the Navy—the Commander in Chief seemed to be acting as a leader of the team rather than as a civilian outsider.
Nor, in contrast to some of his predecessors, did he overturn many sentences following courts-martial. The exceptions are notable. He was vastly amused, in reviewing the dismissal from the Marine Corps of a young second lieutenant, to discover that the young man had simply allowed a sergeant to shoot a “limping” calf for a steak meal, outside the naval reservation at Guantanamo. The President put him on probation for a year—“This man must be taught not to shoot calves”—and seemed surprised that Marine Corps headquarters was distressed. He also put on probation a Navy nurse who had gone absent without leave at Norfolk in order to join her sailor husband for a delayed honeymoon. Hassett pleaded leniency for her. It was arbitrary to refuse her request to join her husband for a honeymoon, he argued. “It was arbitrary for her to go A.W.O.L.,” the President countered.
From the start the President had protected his role as Commander in Chief. In appointing Leahy he had made clear that the Admiral would be a leg man, a collector of military advice, a summarizer—“whatever’s necessary from the point of view of the Commander in Chief.” The reporters did not quite understand. Would Leahy be Chief of Staff to the United Nations strategic command?
“He will be Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief….”
“He will definitely be chief of staff?”
“To the Commander in Chief,” the President put in amid laughter.
“Yes, sir.”
“Of the Army and Navy, Mr. President?”
“No. To the Commander in Chief.” More laughter.
The President’s job description was so predictive of what Leahy would do for the rest of the war that years later the Admiral used it to describe his work at the White House. Perhaps it was not strange that Leahy’s assignment remained much the same over the years, for Roosevelt’s whole command structure was remarkably stable. He did not hire and fire commanders as Lincoln did. The men who started out with him—Stimson, Marshall, King, Arnold, Leahy—were with him at the end. Only Knox and Stark were missing, the first because of his death, the second a casualty of feeling after Pearl Harbor. Even substituting Marshall for Eisenhower was for the President too much of a disruption of a settled array of relationships.
How, then, did Roosevelt withdraw from this comfortable interplay when political and strategic considerations demanded? The paradox of civil-military relations, William Emerson has pointed out, is that “in the strategic sphere, in all that concerns the structure and deployment of military forces, political leadership must be responsive to technical military opinion and advice, but it must, at whatever cost, shape and direct the military instrument to support and serve its own purposes. ‘War,’ as Clausewitz pointed out, ‘has its own grammar but not its own logic.’ ” The framers of the Constitution had given the President, as Alexander Hamilton said, “the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral of the confederacy,” and events since 1787, including the revolution in war making, had enormously broadened the Commander in Chief’s military powers and political responsibilities. He could delegate some of these powers but not, ultimately, the responsibility.
Roosevelt tried to resolve the paradox—to the extent he recognized it—by splitting his military role from his political. As Commander in Chief he left major military planning decisions in the hands of his Joint Chiefs and military planners. His differences with his chiefs over military policy arose not because he was following political objectives and they were pursuing military ones, but because of differing views as to correct military policy. In the months before and after Pearl Harbor he was bent on bringing about that concert of Anglo-American power that would best contain Hitler, while his chiefs were more concerned with husbanding American war production for their poorly equipped forces. The Joint Chiefs themselves were none too united, with Marshall eager to build up ground power in Britain, King naval power in the Pacific, and Arnold air power everywhere. Even so, most of the military disagreements between the President and his chiefs occurred in the early and middle phases of the war. As the war progressed the military thinking of Commander in Chief and Joint Chiefs converged, partly because of their increasing rapport, but mainly because the military build-up and Soviet as well as American military needs now called for the strategy that the Chiefs had long pressed—a central blow at Germany through France.
Meantime Roosevelt pursued some of his political goals separately. He clung tenaciously—almost fanatically—to his unconditional-surrender doctrine in the face of misgivings even among the military. He not only rejected their queries but seemed to reject the very notion that the military had a right to raise them. This seemed a bit odd, since the military would have to apply the doctrine in the first stages of surrender, and since the President’s great precedent for the doctrine was a confrontation between two generals.
It was he, the Commander in Chief, who would do the coordinating of the political and the military. Such co-ordination called for an almost philosophical detachment in the White House, a capacity to look at things whole, to avoid the dangers of immediacy, opportunism, expediency, piecemeal planning. But to the extent that Roosevelt immersed himself in the role of the soldier and of the Commander in Chief, he was unable to take that balanced and comprehensive view of things that properly arrayed the military against the political, the short-run against the long, the psychological against the operational, the principled against the expedient. And he had no strategic staff in the White House to help him do this. Hopkins had served in this capacity to some degree, but he was too much of an operator like the President, and toward the end too ill and exhausted, to satisfy such a vital need.
Still, if Roosevelt and his fellow soldiers sought victory for its own sake too keenly, it was in part because the American people wanted a simple military victory. For most Americans, as Louis Morton has said, “war was an aberration, a nasty business to be got over with….Postwar politics only complicated the problem and delayed the end. Beat the bully and bring the boys home—that was the American approach to war.” And to make military victory the highest goal of the nation, as Morton further suggests, both constricts strategy and overburdens the armed forces.
Roosevelt’s role as Commander in Chief contrasted significantly with Churchill’s. The Prime Minister met frequently with his Joint Chiefs—often twice a day—and badgered them with chits that went into major details of planning and tactics. As his own Minister of Defence he felt free to communicate directly with theater commanders and to advise them on operations, though generally he left final decisions with the men in the field. Churchill was more disposed than Roosevelt to bring new men into top command positions. Valid or not, his military plans and political goals were closely related. Roosevelt seldom held formal meetings with his Joint Chiefs of Staff, though he was in close touch with them individually and through Leahy. He rarely pressed and never hectored them. The apparent result was considerable autonomy for the JCS, but only within a community of outlook long nurtured between the Commander in Chief and his fellow soldiers in the Pentagon and Navy Building.
Stalin on this score resembled Churchill more than Roosevelt. Major and sometimes minor battle plans were cleared with the Kremlin, though younger generals coming to the top of the heap on the basis of performance won more and more freedom of initiative. Marshal Georgi Zhukov found Stalin clearheaded, businesslike, and willing to be differed with. Stalin, according to Isaac Deutscher, was in effect his own commander in chief, minister of defense, quartermaster, minister of supply, foreign minister, and even his own chef de protocole. Neither Stalin nor Roosevelt imposed military dogmas or blueprints on his commanders; both acted as arbiters and adjusters. Stalin’s donning of a marshal’s uniform bespoke his solidarity with the Red Army, while Roosevelt symbolically donned uniform in becoming a soldier among soldiers.
Hitler prodded and harangued and bullied his generals. He followed operations minutely and intervened daily, sometimes hourly. If Roosevelt occasionally complained that his military planners were conservative and exaggerated the difficulties, Hitler castigated his to their faces as incompetents, cowards, nincompoops, and he sacked generals who retreated in violation of his orders. Hitler made himself Commander in Chief of the Army—“a little matter of operational command,” he told General Franz Haider, “something anyone can do”—as well as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.
Still, whatever small difficulties the President had with the military could not compare with Hitler’s. In July, as it became clear that the Allies were in France to stay, the disaffection among German officers erupted in a plot to kill the Führer. The bomb went off in the conference room at the Wolfsschanze headquarters; Hitler survived.
The President got news of the attempt just before leaving San Diego for his journey to Honolulu on the Baltimore. He had a flicker of hope that the German “revolt” might get worse, but reports arrived that Hitler had quickly established control of the situation. Three days before, Premier Tojo had resigned, with his entire Cabinet, on the announcement of the fall of Saipan. Roosevelt could not be dismissed by an Emperor or deposed by ministers or generals. But he was the only military commander who could be sacked by the voters. As his destroyer neared Puget Sound his mind was on the presidential election, which was already well under way.