CAIRO, TUNIS, CARTHAGE, WASHINGTON
DECEMBER 1943-MAY 1944
‘We’ve got to do something with these bloody Russians.’
CHURCHILL
THE PRESIDENT HAD TWO KEY decisions to make in Cairo before returning to Washington. The first was whether to go ahead with the landing in Burma he had promised Chiang Kai-shek. The second was whether to appoint Marshall to command Overlord.
Though concerned about the effect of cancellation on Chiang and Chinese morale, Roosevelt gave ground little by little to those who thought the Burma operation was a waste of resources needed elsewhere. At 5 p.m. on 5 December he told the American Chiefs of Staff that he had decided to end the ‘argumentation’, and call off the landing. Like his backing for Torch rather than Sledgehammer, it was a sensible outcome. But, just as the decision in 1942 had been awkward to break to Stalin, so Roosevelt needed to exercise care in informing Chiang, who had not been told of the Teheran decisions for security reasons. A message drafted by Roosevelt and Hopkins spoke only in general terms of ‘a combined grand operation on the European continent giving a fair prospect of terminating the war with Germany by the end of the summer of 1944’. As a result, the requirement for heavy landing craft in Europe made the Burma action impracticable.1
The next morning, Joseph Stilwell, who had stayed in Cairo during the Teheran summit, took a political adviser from China, John Paton Davies, to talk to Hopkins about China. Looking frail, the aide was in bed under a green counterpane. He said China should be made into a great power, though the British preferred to re-build Japan. Just before lunch, Roosevelt called in the two men for a half-hour conversation that showed the difficulty of pinning him down, and the hazy nature of his thinking on the nation he wanted to be the Fourth Policeman.2
Stilwell asked about policy towards China.
‘Well, now, we’ve been friends with China for a gr-e-e-at many years,’ the President replied, according to the general’s diary.
What would the United States do if Chiang’s regime disintegrated? Davies enquired.
‘How long do you think Chiang can last?’ the President countered.
‘A fresh Japanese offensive might overturn him.’
‘Well, then we should look for some other man or group of men, to carry on.’
There was no obvious successor, they said. Any alternative rulers ‘would probably be looking for us,’ Stilwell observed. Though neither knew it, this was just what was happening. A group of young officers who wanted to keep Chiang as a figurehead but get rid of the more corrupt and inefficient of his associates had planned to kidnap him on his return from Cairo, and force him to act as they wished. They hoped for US backing. But the secret police discovered the plot, and sixteen of the plotters were executed.
The Chinese really liked the Americans, but not the British, Roosevelt went on. ‘Now, we haven’t the same aims as the British out there. For instance, Hong Kong. Now, I have a plan to make Hong Kong a free port: free to the commerce of all nations – of the whole world! But let’s raise the Chinese flag there first, and then Chiang can the next day make a grand gesture and make it a free port. That’s the way to handle that! I’m sure that Chiang would be willing to make that a free port, and goods could come through Siberia – in bond – without customs examinations.’
Hauling the conversation back to Burma, Stilwell observed that Chiang would have trouble explaining to his people the failure of the Allies to do as Roosevelt had promised. ‘We need guidance on political policy on China,’ he insisted.
‘Yes, as I was saying, the Chinese will want a lot of help from us – a lot of it,’ Roosevelt responded, only to veer off into a lengthy tale about an occasion on which the Prime Minister, H.H. Kung, had asked him for a $50-million loan to develop China’s transport system. He talked about a scheme to buy up Chinese currency on the black market to raise its value. When Hopkins came in and switched the talk to Japan, Roosevelt told anecdotes about an ancestor of his who had been to Japan when the Mikado had been without power. At other points, he rambled on about his forebears who had traded in China. As he drove off with Davies, Vinegar Joe held his head in his hands. ‘A brief experience with international politics confirms me in my preference for driving a garbage truck,’ he reflected.
Chiang took more than two weeks to tell Roosevelt that the decision to renege on the pledge made in Cairo had ‘given rise to serious misgivings on all sides’. As a result, he would not go ahead with a planned offensive into northern Burma from south-west China. Never known for his consistency, the Generalissimo did, in fact, allow the attack to take place, under Stilwell’s command and with the participation of the American commando force set up following the Quebec summit known as ‘Merrill’s Marauders’. After two months, it took a Japanese base, and opened the Ledo Road for supplies to reach China by land.3
Stilwell was made a four-star general, one of only five in the US Army. But his relations with the Nationalist leader reached rock-bottom as he sought to reform the Chinese army. Chiang fought a determined battle for his autonomy while the adviser lambasted the regime for ‘greed, corruption, favouritism, more taxes, a ruined currency, terrible waste of life, callous disregard of all the rights of men’. The cure for China, he decided, was the elimination of the Generalissimo. He recorded that, in Cairo, Roosevelt had been ‘fed up with Chiang and his tantrums and said so. In fact he told me in that Olympian manner of his: “If you can’t get along with Chiang and can’t replace him, get rid of him once and for all. You know what I mean. Put in someone you can manage.”’ But no such person was to be found, and the Nationalist leader hung on, waiting for America to defeat Japan so that he could turn back to the elimination of the Communist rivals he had been pursuing since 1927.
To many, the appointment of George Marshall to command Overlord seemed a foregone conclusion. But the President dithered.4
In two years of war, he had come to treasure the Chief of Staff for his skills, integrity and loyalty. Politically, he was a huge asset. Even the President’s most vociferous critics respected him. Time magazine was about to name him Man of the Year. ‘He armed the Republic’ read the cover line while the story inside declared that ‘the secret of American democracy is the stuff Marshall is made of’. However, the general’s respect for the political process made him awkward to deal with in a system where people usually pushed their own case. If he had made clear his preference for going to Europe or staying in Washington, Roosevelt could have followed his lead. But Marshall insisted that this was a matter for his Commander-in-Chief. Still, his wife had started packing.
Sent by the President to see the general on Sunday 5 December, Hopkins told his good friend that Roosevelt was ‘in some concern of mind’ about his appointment to command Overlord. Marshall replied that he would go along with whatever the President wanted. The conversation must have been especially opaque. Hopkins did not know what Roosevelt wanted. Marshall refused to reveal what he wanted. The two men parted in a fog of uncertainty.
The next day, at Churchill’s behest, the President and Prime Minister went on a trip to the Pyramids and the Sphinx. Almost casually, Roosevelt said he had decided he could not do without Marshall in Washington. So Eisenhower would command Overlord. Was this acceptable to the British? he asked. The Prime Minister replied positively. He may have thought that the diplomatic Ike would be easier to get on with than the steely Marshall.
That afternoon, the President called in the Chief of Staff. After beating round the bush, he asked the general what he wanted to do. Marshall said Roosevelt should act as he wished in the best interests of the United States, and not consider his feelings. At which, Roosevelt blurted out, ‘I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of Washington.’
Churchill thought Roosevelt believed that Overlord, on its own, was not a big enough job for Marshall, who deserved overall command in Europe. So he preferred to keep him in Washington. Eisenhower had put great stress on cooperation with the British and was, as the President told Elliott, ‘the best politician among the military men. He is a natural leader who can convince other men to follow him.’ He also had experience of commanding major amphibious operations – and he had Marshall’s backing. The Army Chief of Staff accepted the end of his hopes of leading Overlord without a word. The presidential log recorded the second Cairo meeting as having been in ‘delightful weather’ though ‘the mosquitoes and flies were bothersome’. Three rounds of talks were held with the Turkish President, Ismet Inonu, to try to bring Ankara into the war on the Allied side. Inonu kissed Churchill on the cheek as he left, but there was no commitment, as Stalin had forecast at Teheran. After Eden remarked that a kiss on the cheek was not much of a result for fifteen hours of discussions, the Prime Minister told his daughter: ‘The truth is I’m irresistible. But don’t tell Anthony, he’s jealous.’5
Getting Roosevelt alone, Churchill raised the matter of Britain’s gold and sterling balances, which had been rising. The American plan for the post-war financial system would have capped them at $1 billion; the Treasury in London felt this would hobble recovery. The President was non-committal.
At 8.30 on the morning of 7 December, Roosevelt flew westwards to Tunis to meet Eisenhower. The general had received a garbled message from Marshall referring to a change of assignment. He thought this meant returning to Washington to take over his patron’s job. But, as soon as he met Eisenhower, the President told him: ‘Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.’
‘Mr President, I realise such an appointment involved difficult decision,’ came the reply. ‘I hope you will not be disappointed.’
Despite Churchill’s positive reaction, the War Cabinet in London predicted that public opinion would be ‘surprised and rather uneasy’ to hear that Eisenhower had got the job, rather than Marshall. The ministers also insisted on the senior British role for Montgomery instead of Harold Alexander, a step Churchill accepted on the grounds that the victor of El Alamein was a public hero.
Harriman was nervous that Stalin might react badly to the command decision, given his high opinion of Marshall. Handing a message with the news to Molotov, he asked how soon he could get the Soviet leader’s views. The Foreign Minister picked up the internal Kremlin telephone, and, after stuttering that he hoped he was not disturbing the Georgian, relayed the information. ‘Marshal Stalin is satisfied with this decision,’ Molotov told the ambassador. ‘He considers Eisenhower a general of experience, particularly in directing large forces and amphibious operations.’ To reassure Moscow of Western strategy after Teheran, Roosevelt sent messages about the cancellation of the landing in Burma and to say that he and Churchill had decided to give the highest priority to the bombing offensive against Germany – a five-day aerial attack on Hamburg killed 42,000 people and set the city alight.
On the 1,300-mile flight from Teheran to Cairo, the Prime Minister had sat with his head in his hands, his cigar out, seemingly lost in thought, too weary to read. Though clearly exhausted, he kept insisting that he must go to Italy to see General Alexander. Moran told him this would be madness. ‘You don’t understand,’ Churchill stormed. ‘You know nothing about these things…. We’ve got to do something with these bloody Russians.’6
In Cairo, he had a bad attack of diarrhoea as well as a head cold. After taking his frequent baths, he made no effort to dry himself, but lay on his bed wrapped in a towel. When Harold Macmillan went to see him in the evening, he was in bed – quite usual for the morning but not for 6 or 7 p.m. Lunching with Brooke at a small card table among the flower beds of the garden of the palatial British Embassy, he said he felt very flat, tired and had pains across his loins. Wearing a grey siren suit and a vast sombrero, he swatted flies, and spoke inconclusively about the Mediterranean command, telling the CIGS he should be made a Field Marshal – the promotion was announced on 1 January. Despite this, ‘Shrapnel’ recalled the meal as a nightmare.
Churchill was still weary as he flew to Tunis in his converted York bomber on 11 December to meet Eisenhower. When they landed, there was no welcoming party. Getting out of the plane, he sat on his ministerial boxes, took off his hat and looked gloomily around. Cold wind blew in his hair; his face shone with sweat. His plane had landed at the wrong aerodrome. Getting into Eisenhower’s car after finding the right airfield, he told the general: ‘I am afraid I shall have to stay with you longer than I had planned. I am completely at the end of my tether.’ Arriving at the American’s headquarters, he collapsed into the first chair he reached.
Churchill moved into a villa outside Tunis called the White House, with large rooms and terraces. Unable to sleep on the first night, he went to his doctor’s room, swathed in a dressing gown. ‘I’ve got a pain in my throat, here,’ he said, putting his hand below his collarbone. ‘It’s pretty bad.’ In the morning, the pain had gone but he had a temperature of 101. Moran cabled to Cairo for nurses and a pathologist. When they arrived, the patient’s temperature had dropped to 99. ‘What have you been up to?’ he said to the doctor. ‘I’m not ill, and anyway what’s wrong with me?’
An X-ray showed a considerable opaque area at the base of the left lung. ‘Do you mean I’ve got pneumonia again?’ Churchill asked impatiently. Indeed, he had. His temperature and pulse rose, and the doctor prescribed an antibiotic sulphonamide. The patient then complained that his heart ‘feels to be bumping all over the place’. Moran’s account mentions only prescribing pills known as M&B from their manufacturer’s name, in which he had great faith. But the head of a British Quaker Ambulance Unit later recounted that his team had treated the Prime Minister with penicillin flown out from an experimental laboratory in Oxford. When the question of where the needle should be inserted came up, according to this colonel, Churchill replied that he had ‘an almost infinite expanse of arse’. If this is correct, it would have made the British leader a guinea pig in the use of penicillin on humans.
Through it all, the patient insisted on working, even when his temperature rose again to 101, writing a long message to the War Cabinet on command issues. Sitting by his bed, Sarah read Pride and Prejudice to him. At one point, he told her, ‘Don’t worry; it doesn’t matter if I die now, the plans for victory have been laid, and it is only a matter of time.’ Randolph and Clementine flew in. ‘He’s very glad I’ve come, but in five minutes he will forget I’m here,’ she told Moran.
‘Am stranded amid the ruins of Carthage,’ Churchill cabled Roosevelt. ‘With fever which has ripened into pneumonia … I do not pretend I am enjoying myself.’ That day, Macmillan recorded in his diary that Churchill had a heart attack. Moran told the minister he had thought the British leader was going to die. Three days later, Churchill’s temperature returned to normal, making him more difficult to handle; at one point, Moran told his patient not to shout at him, and walked out of the room. As he recovered, the British leader fired off messages to London and bombarded Macmillan at his office in Algiers with telephone calls, sometimes getting so excited that the minister thought he was going to have an apoplectic fit.
On Christmas Day, he presided from his bed over a conference of Mediterranean commanders, including Eisenhower, who flew out afterwards. Wearing his quilted blue-and-gold dragon dressing gown, he then left his room for the first time since falling ill, and lunched with Clementine, Sarah, Randolph, Macmillan and six generals. Soup, turkey, plum pudding and champagne were served. That evening, he ate in his room, but came down afterwards to join a buffet supper for Coldstream Guards at the villa. He was, Macmillan noted, ‘in capital form’.
As he recuperated, Churchill’s mind focused on the blocked Italian front. He fixed on an amphibious operation as the way forward. On Boxing Day, he sent a message to the British Chiefs of Staff mooting the idea of putting off the landing in northern France until 6 June – the first time this date was mentioned. He then cabled Roosevelt: ‘Having kept these fifty six L.S.T.s [landing craft] in the Mediterranean so long, it would seem irrational to remove them for the very week when they can render decisive service. What, also, could be more dangerous than to let the Italian battle stagnate and fester on for another three months? We cannot afford to go forward leaving a vast half-finished job behind us. If this opportunity is not grasped we must expect the ruin of the Mediterranean campaign of 1944.7
Waiting for the response from the White House, Churchill flew with Clementine and Moran to Marrakech where he received the welcome news that the Royal Navy had sunk the German battlecruiser Scharnhorst, off Norway. He sent Stalin a message about the victory and saying his health was better. ‘I shake your hand firmly,’ the Soviet leader replied.
The British Chiefs of Staff thought Washington would veto the new Italian landing, and Churchill recalled ‘the dull, dead-weight resistance, taking no account of timing and proportion that I had encountered about all Mediterranean projects.’ However, on 28 December, the President agreed, while insisting that the schedule set for the landing in northern France must be adhered to. As so often, Roosevelt was seeking to have his cake and eat it. But Churchill eagerly grasped this as a sign of renewed Anglo-American partnership. ‘I thank God for this fine decision, which engages us once again in whole hearted unity upon a great enterprise,’ he replied. The Italian operation was given the name of Anzio.
Still extremely weak, he lay in bed for eighteen hours a day, and could not summon up the strength to use a painting kit flown out for him. With his old friends Beaverbrook and the Duff Coopers, plus Moran’s son, who had all joined the party, he was driven on picnics in the Atlas Mountains -at one, local children picked up the scraps of food the visitors left behind. On another occasion, when Churchill could not manage to climb up a steep, rocky path, Diana Cooper folded the picnic tablecloth into a rope, and put it round his stomach. A detective and Moran’s son pulled him up from the front while the doctor and Duff Cooper pushed him from behind. Another member of the party carried his cigar.8
He invited de Gaulle to spend the night at the villa; the reply was that the general would only sleep in an official French residence. Still, the Frenchman came to lunch. Duff Cooper noted in his diary that he was stiff and unhelpful, but thawed after two hours of conversation. De Gaulle spoke English while Churchill used French. ‘Now that the General speaks English so well he understands my French perfectly,’ remarked the Prime Minister.9
Churchill was also visited by the Czechoslovak leader, Eduard Beneš, who was on his way back to London from Moscow. Talks with Stalin had convinced him that the Soviets would work with the London Poles if ‘irreconcilable reactionaries’ were purged from the administration in exile. The Kremlin no longer wanted to extend Bolshevism, and would conclude treaties that respected governments in the region, he believed. According to Beneš, Churchill was enthusiastic, saying that, when he got to London, he should contact Eden and, jointly, they should urge the London Poles to accept the offer from Moscow.
There was a somewhat testy exchange with Roosevelt about giving Italian ships to the Soviet Union, ending with agreement that Moscow should get a battleship, a cruiser, eight destroyers, four submarines and 40,000 tons of merchant shipping. More seriously, the timing of Overlord raised its head once again. Eisenhower came to Marrakech for talks and a dinner, at which he was in a very bad temper because his chauffeur and mistress, Kay Summersby, was not invited. (Roosevelt’s son, Franklin Jr, had developed a fancy for the driver, but the President’s intuition told him where her affections lay after seeing her with the general.) Churchill sent a cable to the White House, invoking military opinion to say that the full moon at the beginning of June looked like marking the earliest practical date. ‘If now the June date is accepted as final I do not feel that we shall in any way have broken faith with [Stalin],’ he added. ‘The operation will anyhow begin in May with feints and softening bombardments, and I do not think U.J. is the kind of man to be unreasonable over forty-eight hours.’ Even so, he advised that Stalin should not be told for several weeks.10
Roosevelt replied that his understanding was that the Soviet leader had been given a promise of Overlord in May, supported by a landing in the South of France. No decision should be made at this point to defer operations. ‘I think the psychology of bringing this thing up would be very bad, in view of the fact that it is only a little over a month since the three of us agreed on the statement in Teheran,’ the President added. Churchill blithely replied: ‘I am very glad to see that we are in complete agreement.’ Manifestly, they were not but, once again, the Prime Minister sought refuge in the pretense of accord.
On 14 January 1944, the Prime Minister began the journey home, stopping in Gibraltar and then sailing in a warship to Plymouth. He had been away for more than two months. The War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff ‘really seemed quite glad to see me back,’ he recalled in his memoirs. On his return, he told his old friend Lady Violet Bonham-Carter of his realisation at Teheran of ‘what a small nation we are’. Then he made his remark about being ‘the poor little English donkey’ between the Russian bear and the American buffalo, but ‘the only one of the three, who knew the right way home.’11
In Washington, domestic troubles awaited Roosevelt when he got back, including threats of major steel and railway strikes. At an off-the-record meeting with journalists, George Marshall made an unusual – and unusually heated – political intervention, swearing at the strikers and banging his fist on the desk as he warned that the stoppages might endanger hundreds of thousands of military lives. As it turned out, the effects were less drastic, particularly after Roosevelt granted the War Department power over train tracks. But Marshall found himself in the middle of a storm when his remarks were leaked in the press. Further angered by protests at the way US troops were using flame-throwers in the Pacific, he made a broadcast in which he stressed that ‘our soldiers must be keenly conscious that the full strength of the nation is behind them’.12
Roosevelt passed on his satisfaction at the Teheran summit in his Christmas Eve broadcast in which he referred to Churchill’s illness, and added ‘the heart felt prayers of all of us have been with this great citizen of the world’. He called Stalin ‘a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humour … I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia, and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people – very well indeed.’ In his last press conference of the year, he said that America had switched from being ‘Dr New Deal to Dr Win the War’.
But domestic politics continued to intrude. A storm blew up after he vetoed a pro-business congressional tax bill, saying it would ‘rob the needy to enrich the greedy’. The Senate Majority leader resigned in protest, and was then re-elected by his peers. The veto was overridden by a vote of 72 to 14. Stalin might regard the President’s talk of Congress as a smokescreen, but Roosevelt knew otherwise – and had to ensure bipartisan support for his war policy.
Showing his concern not to give hostages to electoral fortune and despite his desire to foster relations with the Kremlin, he turned down a suggestion for a swap of intelligence teams with Moscow. Harriman considered this a considerable breakthrough, but Roosevelt instructed him to tell Stalin that ‘for purely domestic political reasons which he will understand it is not appropriate – just now – to exchange these missions’. Harriman concluded that he feared the presence of an NKVD mission in Washington in an election year, could have been embarrassing.
Though Roosevelt was visibly tired when he got back from Teheran, his doctor, Ross McIntire, said in his end-ofyear report that he had enjoyed ‘one of the best years since he entered the White House’. This was a lie, particularly at the moment it was issued. His patient knew that if the truth of his condition was made known, he was likely to find himself ruled out of a fourth term. So the news was kept under wraps, with Roosevelt referring to his complaints simply as ‘the grippe’. In fact he was suffering from a persistent cough and cold symptoms, and abdominal pains. His face turned sickly grey and he sweated heavily. His wife feared that he was succumbing to invalidism. White House staff found him looking tense and tired. His secretary, Grace Tully, noticed him nodding off over his mail during dictation with his mouth open and his sentences left unfinished.13
For Hopkins, the return from Teheran marked a momentous point in his personal life. After three years in the White House, he took up a residence with his new wife, Louise, at a small and cosy house in Georgetown – his enemies charged, falsely, that he had used his influence to be given a refrigerator for the kitchen. During a party there on 1 January 1944, the aide drooped, and went up to bed. He was suffering from influenza, but a hospital examination suggested something more serious – his weight was down to 126 pounds. After a month in a naval hospital, he was told to rest in Florida, while doctors argued about whether he should have a stomach operation.14
The day before he took the train south, Hopkins composed a letter to his younger son, Stephen, a marine who was taking part in a Pacific island landing. Characteristically, the aide minimised his own problems. ‘It has been nothing serious but I seemed to have had more difficulty in bouncing back this time … Do write if you get a moment, but I presume you will be pretty busy … so I will not expect to hear from you. At any rate you know that I wish you the best of luck.’
The letter was never delivered. As he travelled to Florida, Hopkins received a telegram from Roosevelt telling him that Stephen had been killed in action and had been buried at sea. ‘I am confident that when we get details we will all be even prouder of him than ever. I am thinking of you much. F.D.R.,’ the message concluded.
Stephen Hopkins had been hit by a sniper’s bullet the day before his father had written to him. Aged eighteen, he was carrying ammunition to an isolated machine-gun unit. ‘Harry, this war has hit you very hard,’ John Dill wrote. ‘I know of no one who has done more by wise and courageous advice to advance our common cause. And who knows it? Some day it must be known. George Marshall and I have been talking today of the great part which you have played and are playing. So may this sorrow not weigh you down too much and may you soon be fit and well to rejoice your friends and continue your great work.’
Marshall suggested that Hopkins’s other son, Robert, who was serving in Italy, should be temporarily removed from the thick of the fighting. ‘I hope you will not send for him,’ Hopkins replied. ‘The last time I saw him in Tunis he said he wanted to stay until we get to Berlin.’
Churchill sent a scroll engraved with Stephen’s name and a quotation from the last scene of Macbeth:
Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt:
He only liv’d but till he was a man,
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
To Roosevelt, Churchill wrote of the man he first met in London three years earlier: ‘He is an indomitable spirit. I cannot help feeling anxious about his frail body and another operation. I shall always be glad for news about him for I rate him high among the Paladins.’
Returning to Washington, Hopkins insisted on a stomach operation to determine if he had cancer. ‘OK boys, open ’em up,’ he said as he was wheeled into the operating theatre. ‘Maybe you’ll find the answer to the Fourth Term.’ No cancer was found, and the surgeons repaired Hopkins’s intestines as best they could. Marshall arranged for him to convalesce at an army centre in West Virginia. Critics seized on this as an example of cronyism. The complaint died the death it deserved, and Marshall wrote to Hopkins, urging him to ‘be more careful, to conserve your energy and not to overdo and I am also prepared to damn you for your cigarettes, your drinks, and your late hours. Confine your excesses to gin rummy.’
Hopkins had turned down a proposal from the President to increase his annual salary from $10,000 to $15,000 because of the criticism this could bring against his master. But he now accepted a raise to $12,000. A letter from Roosevelt advised that the first thing for him to focus on was ‘connect up the plumbing and put your sewage system into operating condition. The second is … that you have got to lead not the life of an invalid but the life of common or garden sense.’ He did not want him to show his face in Washington until the middle of June at the earliest, he wrote, adding: ‘Tell Louise to use the old fashioned hat-pin if you don’t behave.’
On 21 January 1944 the US Fifth Army carried out the Anzio landing in Italy Churchill had conceived. Though the Germans were taken by surprise, the dilatoriness of an American army corps in advancing from the beach enabled the Wehrmacht to regroup and pour in reinforcements, pinning down the allied troops. Meanwhile, the Germans were showing their skills by holding the British in bitter fighting in rocky inland terrain around strong fortifications at Monte Cassino. Both were the kind of highly professional performances which had contributed to British caution about landing in Northern France. However, the Pacific yielded better news as planes from US carriers pummelled the Mariana Islands in preparation for a Marine attack on Saipan.
Set on pressing ahead with the relationship he believed he had with Stalin at Teheran, Roosevelt told Harriman to inform the Soviet leader that he was hopeful of finding a solution to the problem of Poland, which would be kept out of ‘politics’. He thought the Kremlin should give the London government-in-exile ‘a break’.15
Moscow agreed to a plan for shuttle-bombing of Germany by US planes from its territory. An American embassy official who was taken to see a grisly display of the corpses dug up at Katyn, designed to show that the Germans were responsible, found that ‘on balance, and, despite the loopholes, the Russian case is convincing’. The Kremlin provided some intelligence information about Japan, and Stalin told the ambassador of a peace feeler from Tokyo, to which the reply had been: ‘Go to the devil.’
On 14 February, Roosevelt sent a memorandum to the Secretary of State laying down that: ‘Russia continues to be a major factor in achieving the defeat of Germany. We must therefore continue to support the USSR by providing the maximum amount of supplies which can be delivered to her ports. This is a matter of paramount importance.’ Lend-Lease to Moscow was set to rise by 200 per cent, with planned delivery of 7,800 planes, 4,700 tanks, 170,000 vehicles and other supplies, including six million pairs of shoes. Beyond that, Molotov asked Harriman if Washington would be ready to help post-war Soviet reconstruction. With the backing of Hull and Hopkins, Roosevelt told the ambassador to open preliminary discussions about a $500-million loan at 2–3 per cent annual interest repayable over twenty-five to thirty years.
This was not simply altruistic. Harriman thought it could give Washington leverage with Moscow, and pointed out that the United States could obtain ‘a competitive advantage’ in the Soviet Union to provide orders for US companies at a time when domestic demand fuelled by the war effort would be tailing off – two decades earlier, he had been one of the first American businessmen to look for opportunities in the Bolshevik heartland. Just as the huge American build-up to fight the war had capped the New Deal recovery, so the Soviet Union could ensure continued peacetime prosperity for the USA. ‘It will certainly be of enormous value in cushioning the shock from war to peace if we are prepared to put into production Russian orders immediately on the cessation of hostilities,’ Harriman wrote. A note from Hull in the spring named Dupont, General Electric, Westinghouse, the Radio Corporation of America and the Standard Alcohol Company as among firms which were in talks with the Russians, or were about to do so.
Moscow submitted a list of requirements totalling $1 billion. Washington drew up a draft list of supplies ranging from metals and chemicals to live animals, tractors, office machinery, plumbing equipment and light fittings. But the proposal ran into problems over the extension of Lend-Lease after the end of the war, while the Treasury objected to making a loan at a lower rate of interest than the federal government paid to raise money. The new Soviet ambassador in Washington, Gromyko, complained that getting what Moscow wanted out of the Americans was like pulling teeth.
While some of his subordinates had reservations about the relationship Roosevelt was seeking with Moscow, a more generally held view was that the most likely coming conflict was between Britain and the Soviet Union. ‘It would seem in the highest degree unlikely that Britain or Russia, or Russia alone, would be aligned against the United States,’ Admiral Leahy wrote to Hull. So, ‘it is apparent that any future world conflict in the foreseeable future will find Britain and Russia in opposite camps.’ The USSR would be the stronger of the two, Leahy went on. America might be able to defend Britain, but could not, under existing conditions, defeat Russia. ‘In other words, we would find ourselves engaged in a war which we could not win even though the United States would be in no danger of defeat and occupation.’ So the utmost efforts should be made to get Moscow and London to cooperate. That meant, Leahy concluded, Washington should avoid making any agreements with Britain without consulting the USSR since this ‘might well result in starting a train of events that would lead eventually [to] the situation we most wish to avoid.’
Churchill had drawn comfort from Roosevelt’s agreement to the Anzio landing, even if it turned out to be far from the quick success he had envisaged, but a series of Anglo-American differences surfaced on other issues.
The Prime Minister invoked difficulties in Italy to modify his support for the landing in the South of France on the grounds that it would draw off troops. He told Marshall the new Italian campaign had sucked in eight more German divisions, so ‘there has been cause for rejoicing as well as disappointment’. If more troops were allocated to France, they should go to the west of the country where they would be closer to the Normandy landings, he wrote to Hopkins. To which the reply was simple: ‘It would be a great mistake to change strategy now.’16
Then there was the question of whether the Free French should be involved in the Normandy landings. ‘It is very difficult to cut the French out of the liberation of France,’ Churchill wrote to the President ten days before the operation. Roosevelt replied that he hoped de Gaulle would help, but ‘without being imposed by us on the French people as their Government’. Nor did Roosevelt agree with London’s argument that bombing of railway targets in France should be modified because collateral damage to civilians would sow ‘a legacy of hate’ and turn the population against Overlord.
There was also a tussle over the Italian government. Churchill defended King Victor Emmanuel and Marshal Badoglio while Roosevelt wanted new men, whom he eventually got with the abdication of the monarch and the entry of new ministers, including the Communist Palmiero Togliatti. Further east, Churchill warned the President against sending a military mission to the pan-Serb Chetnik resistance in Yugoslavia since the British had decided to back Tito. (Randolph Churchill had parachuted in to meet the Communist leader and was appointed to head the British military mission to Croatia – the plane flying him there crashed, killing ten of the nineteen people on board and injuring him.)
There was, in addition, an Anglo-American difference over the future occupation of Germany, where each country wanted a zone in the north. Detailed discussions on the issue were held in the European Advisory Commission (EAC) set up after the Foreign Ministers met in Moscow. The Russians backed a British plan which left Berlin in the Soviet area. Though the city was to come under an Allied Control Commission, no provisions were made to guarantee access for the West.
Eden viewed the London-based commission as a key element in his country’s post-war influence and a forerunner to a regional council for the continent. But Washington wanted to limit its authority, seeing it as detracting from Roosevelt’s global body. Hull found British ideas about the EAC ‘frankly disturbing’, insisting that it should restrict itself to drafting surrender terms for Germany and working on the control mechanism for defeated enemy countries.
The divergence was so great that Ambassador Winant told the State Department it should be concealed from the Russians. The Americans dragged their feet, taking more than six months even to comment on a British draft of the surrender terms, and ensuring that the EAC never lived up to Eden’s hopes. Halifax attributed the American attitude to a desire to retain the centre of war planning in Washington.
Reflecting his intention of bringing US troops back from Europe as soon as possible after the end of hostilities, Roosevelt told Churchill he was ‘absolutely unwilling to police France and possibly Italy and the Balkans as well. After all, France is your baby and will take a lot of nursing in order to bring it to the point of walking alone.’
It was a line Roosevelt would repeat, speaking of West European countries as Britain’s post-war ‘children’. He greatly overrated London’s ability to fulfil such a role, but he was adamant. ‘I do not want the United States to have the postwar burden of reconstituting France, Italy and the Balkans,’ he wrote. ‘This is not our natural task at a distance of 3,500 miles or more. It is definitely a British task in which the British are far more vitally interested than we are.’ That did not denote a return to isolationism, but it was a major threat to Churchill’s wish to keep an American presence in Europe to balance Soviet power – in May, he spoke to Eden of his worry about the ‘Communisation of the Balkans and perhaps of Italy’.
Just as he had attributed Stalin’s toughening during the talks in Moscow to forces operating behind the scenes in the Kremlin, so Churchill now developed the notion that negative signals from the White House were the doing of Roosevelt’s advisers. ‘I cannot believe that any of these telegrams come from the President,’ he told Eden at one point. ‘They are merely put before him when he is fatigued and pushed upon us by those who are pulling him about.’ As for the attitude Britain should adopt, he added that ‘all this frantic dancing to the American tune is silly. They are only about their own affairs and the more immobile we remain the better.’
He had fresh cause for disappointment when Roosevelt turned down his proposal that the two of them spend Easter together in Bermuda. Instead, the President suggested a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff. That was not what Churchill had in mind. A meeting of the Chiefs would not be worth holding ‘without your being there’, he wrote. Apart from the desire not to risk arousing Stalin’s suspicions of an Anglo-American cabal, the President had a very good reason for not wanting to travel – his health.
On 27 March, at the urging of the Roosevelt family, the naval physician Ross McIntire had approached Dr Howard G. Bruenn, a heart specialist, and asked him to examine the President. Bruenn was to make his conclusions known only to McIntire. As Roosevelt prepared to leave the White House for the hospital, his doctor asked him how he was. ‘I feel like hell,’ was the reply.17
He was suffering from an accumulation of physical ailments, and what is known as ‘post-polio syndrome’ which affects some survivors after two or three decades of living with their condition, bringing together muscular atrophy and traumatic stress disorder as the whole physical system starts to fall apart. Bruenn found hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, congestive heart failure and chronic bronchitis. Roosevelt’s blood pressure was 186/108. He had anaemia and signs of long-standing pulmonary disease, breathing trouble and could not lie flat without discomfort. His heart disease and high blood pressure ‘made his lifespan questionable’ the doctor added.*
Bruenn recommended that he should take to his bed for one or two weeks, reduce appointments, and follow a special diet. McIntire rejected this because of the demands on the President, and agreed only to some rest and cough syrup with codeine. Roosevelt’s bright, attractive daughter, Anna, gave up her job with a newspaper in Seattle to move into the White House to tend to her father.
McIntire kept the state of the President’s health secret, and did not tell the patient how ill he was. Nor did Roosevelt appear to want to know – he never questioned Bruenn about the frequency of his visits or asked why he was being given digitalis treatment or furnished with a special bed with a raised head to ease breathing.
The simultaneous illnesses of Roosevelt and Hopkins meant that two of the three men who guided the American war effort were out of commission, while the Prime Minister across the Atlantic was recovering from the most serious illness of his life. Though he began to drink more heavily at dinners in the Kremlin, only Stalin was in reasonable physical shape as the Red Army pushed to the border with Estonia, destroyed Nazi forces on the Dnieper River, advanced into Romania and lifted the siege of Leningrad after 900 days and the death of a million inhabitants. In the spring, Soviet forces moved into the Crimea, retaking Odessa and Sevastopol. That signalled the end of Hitler’s dream of obtaining huge supplies of food and raw material, as well as an endless stream of slave labour, by extending German frontiers in the east as America had done in its west. The Soviet advance also made the question of the post-war settlement in eastern Europe even more pressing, while the emergence of anti-government groups in Italy and a looming three-sided conflict in Greece involving Communists, Royalists and another resistance group showed just how tough the post-war situation threatened to be.
Poland loomed as the trickiest of these situations. At the end of January, Churchill met the London Poles to tell them, ‘The British Government takes the view that Poland must be strong, independent and free’, before quickly adding, in-line with the discussion in Teheran, ‘from the Curzon Line to the Oder.’ He warned Stalin against interfering in the future Warsaw government. ‘I feel like telling the Russians that personally I fight tyranny whatever uniform it wears or slogans it utters,’ Churchill remarked in March. This attitude worried Roosevelt, who thought the Kremlin might suspect a bid by Britain to install a government which ‘rightly or wrongly they regard as containing elements irrevocably hostile to the Soviet Union’.18
Stalin was obdurate. When Clark Kerr saw him in early February bearing tobacco and a pipe as presents, he had to listen to two hours of denunciation of the government-in-exile and a demand for the removal of three of its leading members. In a further discussion, Stalin sniggered at the London Poles in what the envoy described as ‘a dreary and exasperating conversation’. The Soviet Embassy in London briefed newspapers with anti-Polish information. When Churchill told the Commons that territorial settlements must await the end of the war, Stalin accused him of reneging on the Teheran agreement, and of ‘renouncing the liberative character of war of the Soviet Union against German aggression’. On April Fool’s Day, he sent a lengthy cable to Downing Street saying that earlier messages from London and a statement by the ambassador ‘bristle with threats against the Soviet Union’. Accusing Churchill of backsliding on the Curzon Line, he concluded: ‘I fear that the method of intimidation and defamation, if continued, will not benefit our co-operation.’ Clark Kerr raised the possibility of being recalled to show London’s displeasure, but Churchill backed off from further confrontation.
With Poland put on the shelf for the time being, Britain and the Soviet Union moved towards a de facto accord that Britain would control events in Greece, where Churchill was intent on blocking the Communist resistance movement, while the Soviet Union would have a free hand in Romania, which Stalin saw as part of his country’s cordon sanitaire. The dictator would have liked a formal agreement on this, but the British, knowing the inevitable American reaction to territorial agreements, steered clear of any such thing.
Starting to feel better, Roosevelt decided to rest on the South Carolina estate of his friend, the financier Bernard Baruch. He told reporters he had thought of going to Guantánamo Bay, but decided against it because ‘Cuba is absolutely lousy with anarchists, murderers, et cetera, and a lot of prevaricators.’ The stay at Baruch’s estate was meant to last for two weeks but stretched to twice that length. Roosevelt went fishing and cruising. He cut his smoking from twenty or thirty cigarettes a day to five or six, limited his cocktails to one-and-a-half a night, and adopted a low-fat, 1,800 calorie diet. He was cheered by the presence of his mistress, Lucy Rutherfurd. But he suffered gall-bladder trouble, and, on a visit, Eleanor found that he had no pep. He did no work on his stamps, nor did he read the detective novels he took with him.19
Still, when he got back to Washington his face had a better colour and he looked less weary. In a letter to Hopkins, he said he planned to take life more easily, spending three days a week in the capital, moving for the rest of the time between Hyde Park, Shangri La and sailing on the Potomac. ‘I had a really grand time at Bernie’s – slept twelve hours out of twenty four, sat in the sun, never lost my temper and decided to let the world go hang,’ he added. ‘The interesting thing is the world didn’t hang.’ Still, Baruch advised White House staff to conduct important business in the morning and it was noticed that, in Cabinet, the President was flippant and ill-informed.
In mid-May, Allied troops advancing overland in Italy finally linked up with the force at Anzio, and thus could start the drive on Rome. The Italian fighting meant there were insufficient forces to mount the landing in the South of France as planned. On 14 May, at Roosevelt’s suggestion, the Western leaders sent Stalin a message telling him this. The reply was emollient: ‘You can best decide how and in what way to allocate your forces. The important thing, of course, is to ensure complete success for “Overlord”.’
When Harriman visited him in the White House on 17 May, the President was bubbling over with messages for Stalin. But with less than a month to go to Overlord, Churchill was still worried. Speaking to Harriman as he travelled through London, he noted that ‘if Overlord failed, the United States would have lost a battle, but for the British it would mean the end of their military capability.’20 Taking John McCloy from the US War Department to the bombed-out House of Commons, he recalled how many of his contemporaries had died in the ‘hecatombs of World War One’. Writing to Stalin after visiting Eisenhower’s headquarters, the Prime Minister noted ‘the difficulties of getting proper weather conditions’. Speaking to Brooke, he observed that while he ‘could still sleep well, eat well and especially drink well,’ he did not jump out of bed as he used to do. As for Roosevelt, Churchill added that the President was ‘no longer the man he had been’.
* Post-polio syndrome was not generally recognised in Roosevelt’s day. His exercise regime was likely to have made matters worse by exacerbating atrophy. The phenomenon is examined in Marc Shell, Polio and its Aftermath (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 206–8.)