The President went the whole hog on the subject of ROUNDHAMMER. He was more clear and definite than I have ever seen him since we have been in this war and he took the policy that the American staff have been fighting for fully. . . . I could see that the military and naval conferees were astonished and delighted.
—Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
President Roosevelt’s train arrived back in Washington at 7:40 a.m. Monday, August 9, coming to a halt on the track underneath the Bureau of Engraving.1 The members of the fishing party dispersed to their offices for the start of what would be an intense and decisive week. As they set the U.S. position for the Quadrant Conference, their activities quickly merged into the rhythm of consultations by the military chiefs and other principals who had not left Washington,
Vannevar Bush called Harry Hopkins at the White House an hour and a half into the business day. Bush requested and received an appointment to report orally and deliver the papers from his negotiation with Sir John Anderson on the drafted secret agreement on atomic weapons research and policy.2
Across the Potomac at the Pentagon, Secretary of War Stimson had returned to his office in the Pentagon from a weekend at his family home on Long Island, New York, at 9:35 a.m. Monday. Anticipating the separate meetings each would have with the president, Stimson and General Marshall met for almost an hour.3 As Stimson took a telephone call from Harry Hopkins, who was reporting back on his discussion with FDR in Canada, Marshall joined a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.4
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were meeting that day for the 102nd time, with Leahy, Marshall, King, and Arnold attending along with thirty-nine other officers. The JCS agreed on the position that they would present to the Combined Chiefs of Staff for “consideration,” Admiral King’s choice of wording with Marshall’s agreement, for adoption by the Combined Chiefs of Staff at the Quadrant Conference.5 Titled “Strategic Concept for the Defeat of the Axis in Europe” and built on the conclusions in General Handy’s August 8 paper, the JCS-recommended European strategy was forwarded to the CCS as “CCS 303.”6 Handy’s paper itself was made required reading for all of the U.S. delegates to the Quebec Conference and, prior to Quadrant, was used by Marshall to communicate to Roosevelt the opportunity cost should the Allies fail to concentrate their forces promptly for a cross-Channel attack.7
In a continuation of tactics to control the meeting with the British, CCS 303 was organized to adhere to the agenda for Quadrant submitted by the JCS on July 27. This called for discussing first the overall strategic concept and undertakings in its support. This was a discussion that the British Chiefs of Staff preferred not to have at the start of the conference.
CCS 303 began with an overview of the enemy’s strategic situation and United Nations strategy. The authors concluded that the Axis leadership probably was shifting its actual priority to ending the war on satisfactory terms and that they still possessed “strong defensive power” with which to achieve that. If the Allies’ choice of strategy permitted their enemy the option, “A defensive strategy on the part of the Axis might develop into a protracted struggle and result in a stalemate on the Continent.” In the circumstances before the Allies, CCS 303 concluded, “It is imperative, therefore, that the Allied Powers penetrate to the heart of the fortress of Europe, come to grips with the enemy, and thus bring about the early and decisive defeat of the Axis.”
Complementing this argument for how to confound the enemy’s likely intention, CCS 303 addressed the Allies’ strategy options as an evolutionary choice. One option was the strategy of attrition that maritime power Britain historically favored and which the JCS considered to be rooted in the Napoleonic Wars. The other option was founded on the surging potential of land and air forces that reinforcement from North America could bring to bear. CCS 303 called for moving beyond hopes to effect a political-economic collapse of the Reich through attrition to choose, instead, direct assault for victory by a military result.
CCS 303 observed that comparative weakness early in the war was what had compelled the United Nations, then, to follow an opportunistic strategy of attrition. Now, argued the paper, the rapidly improving strength and position of the Allies relative to the Axis “demand an abrogation of opportunistic strategy and require adoption of and adherence to sound strategic plans which envisage decisive military operations conducted at times and places of our choosing—not the enemy’s.”
Turning from general to specific strategy options, affirmation of cross-Channel attack or expanded operations in the Mediterranean, the paper called for the CCS to choose at the Quebec Conference one of these as the dominant military strategy for the European theater. The JCS did not shrink from stating the choice to the British bluntly. On one hand, if the decision was that conditions in the Mediterranean justified putting the primary effort there, CCS 303 argued, then the Allies should concentrate strength in the Mediterranean and “concurrently . . . provide only sufficient forces in the British Isles to secure this important base and make available opportunistic forces to cross the channel if a German collapse should occur.” Left unstated, but obvious for the British COS to conclude, was that this choice would mean no more than a reinforced U.S. corps (three divisions plus support) would be left in the United Kingdom with the number of USAAF long-range bombers perhaps, or perhaps not, equivalent to the force then conducting with the RAF the Combined Bomber Offensive. Also left as an unstated expectation was that the United States then would promptly direct increased attention and resources to the Pacific.8
CCS 303 called for reaffirmation, on the other hand, of the Trident decision in favor of the cross-Channel invasion as the primary strategy. CCS 303 declared that “Operation OVERLORD, carefully synchronized with the Combined Bomber Offensive, if given whole-hearted and immediate support, would result in an early and decisive victory in Europe” (underlined in the original). The balance of the sixteen-page paper set out prioritized operational elements of this cross-Channel invasion-based strategy. The paper specifically supported the Trident-agreed transfer of seven battle-experienced divisions from the Mediterranean to Britain for Overlord. After describing the options, the paper also recommended the invasion of southern France, in support of Overlord, with forces already in the Mediterranean.9
To prepare Stimson for his meeting with Roosevelt on Tuesday, Harry Hopkins crossed the Potomac for lunch and a discussion in the secretary’s office that stretched into two hours. Their purpose, at Stimson’s invitation, was to go over Stimson’s August 4 “Brief Trip Report” and Hopkins’s account of Roosevelt’s reaction and receptivity when he discussed it with the president in Canada.10 Despite having had ample time in Canada for discussion of Churchill’s coincident and colorful appeal for prompt action to invade Italy, Ambassador Winant’s cable calling into question Churchill’s facts, and Stimson’s memorandum, Hopkins had found that the president’s reaction at the time had been inscrutable.
At Stimson’s request, General Handy joined the luncheon meeting for thirty-five minutes near its end.11 Having attended the JCS meeting and being intimately familiar with its output as the author of the source paper, Handy was well prepared to outline to the secretary of war and Hopkins the JCS’s adoption of the strategy recommendation for Quadrant earlier in the day.
The Joint Chiefs’ strategy paper, CCS 303, and the strong summation that Stimson withheld from his evidentiary August 4 memorandum, but which he intended to make to FDR the next day, bore the hierarchical and substantive differences in content to be expected between a military staff to military staff position and a cabinet member’s political-military recommendations to the president. What they shared in common was a two-part thrust: decide firmly on one dominant strategy for the European theater at the Quadrant Conference and reaffirm the cross-Channel invasion. Remaining to be seen was whether the convergence of these recommendations from the military chiefs and the cabinet member could win Roosevelt’s unequivocal commitment before the president met again with Churchill in four days’ time.
At the White House, the many tasks awaiting Roosevelt that Monday included lunch with Secretary of State Cordell Hull to discuss a very full foreign policy agenda. After Hull left, and as Stimson, Hopkins, and Handy were meeting, Roosevelt met with his Army chief of staff, General Marshall.12 Their discussion would stimulate Marshall’s concern about the strength of the president’s commitment to Overlord.
Roosevelt spoke to Marshall on the allocation of divisions to Overlord and to operations in the Mediterranean. The president stated his support for transferring seven combat-experienced divisions to Overlord from the Mediterranean but inquired about replacing them with a transfer to the Mediterranean of seven more divisions from the United States.13 Roosevelt’s query tested the limit of what could be done logistically to establish the required concentration of forces on one decisive axis of attack into Europe by May 1, 1944, then the date for the cross-Channel attack from the United Kingdom.
This raised in Marshall’s mind an immediate concern. The Quadrant Conference was just over the horizon and FDR’s preliminary meeting with Churchill was four days away. On one hand, the question implied that the president might not yet be persuaded that the time was at hand to affirm, once and for all, a dominant Allied strategy for the European theater. The strategy selected would govern the allocation of forces. Therefore, on the other hand, the president, by his question to Marshall, might also have been putting a test of resolve to his military chiefs before he confronted Churchill.
From that morning’s meeting of the JCS, Marshall knew that the U.S. chiefs were firm in their position that future operations in the Mediterranean should be conducted within the capacity of forces already deployed there—less the seven divisions to be transferred to Overlord and not to be replaced in the Mediterranean. Immediately, upon returning from the White House to his office in the Pentagon, Marshall directed Major General Handy in precise, written detail to prepare no later than 11:00 a.m., August 10, a written answer to FDR’s questions about troop lift possible for Priceless (the Mediterranean) and Overlord.14 Marshall’s direction to Handy anticipated the JCS meeting at noon on August 10 to prepare for their meeting with FDR later that afternoon and to set tactics the U.S. chiefs would employ in discussion with their British counterparts at Quadrant.15
By close of business, ahead of schedule, Marshall had his answer from Handy, based on options worked up by the Army chief of transportation. In essence, the answer was that movement of an additional seven divisions from the continental United States to the Mediterranean could be done under the most optimistic assumptions (no loss or further diversion of troop ships) if based on the May Trident commitment of 1.3 million U.S. troops in the UK, but not responsive to the new requirement for 1.4 million troops for Overlord and Pointblank. Handy recommended that full sealift be allocated to achieve a force of 1.4 million U.S. troops in Britain by May 1, 1944, for Overlord and Pointblank as the most effective contribution to the strategy for Europe. Handy noted that the representative of General Eisenhower, then commanding in the Mediterranean, had said that seven additional divisions would be nice to have but were not needed there. Handy’s memorandum showed that transfer of an additional seven divisions from the United States to the Mediterranean would result in more divisions there than in Britain for Overlord, figures that are underlined by hand on Marshall’s copy of the document.16
As Handy developed the response to FDR’s query about divisions for the Mediterranean, Marshall and Stimson met twice more that afternoon to review Marshall’s meeting with the president that day and “re: W. House conf” for the next day.17
Stimson wrote in his observations of these days that he was becoming even more convinced that an Allied strategy dependent on Overlord meant that “we must insist on getting an American commander and the only American commander we can probably get to be accepted by the President is George Marshall. I was very much interested to find as I went over with Harry Hopkins the suggestions in my mind that he agreed with every step and with my final conclusion.”18
In parallel with preparation of FDR for the next round of military strategy debate, the atomic sharing issue moved into its next stage: updating the president. Shortly after 5:00 p.m., Dr. Vannevar Bush had his meeting with Harry Hopkins at the White House.19 Bush briefed Hopkins on the outcome of his talks with Sir John Anderson on the proposed secret U.S.-UK atomic sharing agreement. Bush left with Hopkins the then-current draft of the information sharing agreement with its implementing process arrangements and the cover letter Bush wrote to Roosevelt on August 7. Bush’s cover letter drew particular attention to the four political-military policy points that, at Bush’s insistence, he and Anderson had left to the president and Churchill to negotiate directly.20 Bush’s meeting with Hopkins fulfilled his task in the “simultaneous” transmission of results of their negotiation to FDR, as would Anderson with Churchill as soon as they met in Quebec.
Meetings about Quadrant among the U.S. principals churned on in Washington through Monday when the Queen Mary, carrying Churchill and the huge British delegation to Quadrant, docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia. That afternoon the British boarded special trains to Quebec City.21 Averill Harriman left Churchill at Halifax to travel to New York City. There Harriman would visit with family and consult with Hopkins before joining FDR and Churchill at Hyde Park for the “preliminary talks.”22
Monday evening, Hopkins dined with the president at the White House.23 From the day’s meetings, Hopkins could relate the latest information on both U.S. preparations for Quadrant and the state of negotiation on an Anglo-American atomic agreement. Hopkins’s meeting with Stimson had shown the president’s adviser the consensus of agreement among Roosevelt’s military advisers and commanders on strategy for Europe and their negotiating strategy for the conference. From Vannevar Bush, Hopkins had received an oral report and papers on the proposed secret agreement on British participation in atomic weapons research and subsequent policy. Significantly, the account of the Bush-Anderson negotiation conveyed to FDR its limited scope and what had been left to be settled directly between FDR and Churchill. Thus the president concluded his day knowing that his secretary of war and military chiefs were aligned on a strategy for Europe and objectives for Quadrant and that the central points of the atomic agreement, so desired by Churchill, were Roosevelt’s to negotiate.
A mile and a half to the northwest at hilltop Woodley, his historic estate overlooking Rock Creek Park and the city, Henry Stimson was dining with his aide, confidant, and companion on his recent trip to Britain and North Africa, Harvey Bundy.24 The day’s events must have been prominent in their dinner discussion. From his meeting with Harry Hopkins that day to go over the president’s reception of the August 4 trip report and, undoubtedly, Marshall’s report on his meeting with FDR that afternoon, Stimson was pessimistic. He doubted the strength of FDR’s commitment to Overlord with the Quadrant Conference beginning soon and FDR’s next meeting with Churchill sooner still. Roosevelt went to bed at the White House with good reason to be confident about the chiefs’ resolve and his own negotiating position. On the heights of Woodley Park, however, Stimson went to bed troubled.
Tuesday morning, August 10, Henry Stimson arrived at his office in the Pentagon. Having slept little through a hot night, he faced a challenging day. Stimson worked through his fatigue to dictate a new letter to the president again stating the heart of his August 4 report. Stimson had decided that his best course was to present his views on these critical matters to FDR in writing at their White House lunch.25
Compressed to a quarter of the length of his earlier report, Stimson’s August 10 letter to the president concentrated on his essential conclusions from his trip to Britain and North Africa. From his meetings with Hopkins and Marshall the previous day, Stimson worried that FDR still had not fully appreciated the critical need for decisive and timely leadership in the meeting with Churchill and the conference that drew ever closer.
First among Stimson’s points was that the Allies “cannot now rationally hope to be able to cross the Channel and come to grips with our German enemy under a British Commander.” As his reasons, Stimson cited the years of defeats suffered by the British since 1939, the memory of British Empire combat casualties in World War I (almost one million killed), and the knowledge he saw as pervasive among senior British operational commanders that their prime minister and their chiefs could not put their heart into a cross-Channel assault. In an interesting choice of phrasing between two men deeply involved in their churches, Stimson then stated his second point: the strategy difference between the United States and the United Kingdom “is a vital difference of faith.” The United States believed in massed U.S. and British Empire forces striking across northwestern Europe into the heart of Germany. The United Kingdom believed in eventual German political and economic collapse brought on by a strategy of attrition and aerial bombing. Third, in the circumstances, Stimson urged that it was time for FDR to “assume the responsibility of leadership.” Stimson wrote that the Allies “cannot afford to begin the most dangerous operation of the war under halfhearted leadership.” Two years ago, he said, Churchill had offered the United States leadership of the Alliance. The time had come, Stimson declared, that the British offer to the United States of leadership “should be accepted—if necessary insisted on.” Fourth, Stimson concluded that “the time has come when we must put our most commanding soldier in charge of this critical operation at this critical time.” That soldier, Stimson said, was George Marshall.26
After the letter was typed, Stimson read it again and signed it. Particularly because of Stimson’s recommendation of Marshall for supreme command of the Allied forces, but also honoring the distinction between advice to the president from a cabinet member and that from a chief of staff of the Army, only then did he call General Marshall into his office to read the letter. Marshall raised no major objection to the letter, but he did not want an appearance of Stimson having consulted with him before writing it. Stimson told the chief of staff that this was why he had signed the letter first.27
On this morning, in contrast to one week earlier, Marshall could view the balance of Stimson’s renewed call for the president to press the American strategy for Europe confident that the Joint Chiefs and U.S. military staffs were in agreement. The American planners were united with the Joint Chiefs in support of one primary strategy. Preparations for the military’s afternoon meeting with FDR and for Quadrant continued. The memorandum concerning Allied Forces available in the Mediterranean, prepared by General Handy at Marshall’s direction to answer the president, was forwarded by Marshall to Admiral Leahy at the White House.28 The secretary of war took counsel from his aide, Harvey Bundy, in Stimson’s office “re: White House appointment.”29
At noon, the second special train taking members of the U.S. delegation to Quebec City departed Washington Union Station.30 Also at noon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sat down to prepare for their meeting with Roosevelt at the White House meeting at 2:00 p.m.
This 103rd meeting of the JSC had a certain anxiety about it, stimulated by FDR’s question to General Marshall about sending seven more divisions from the continental United States to the Mediterranean to replace the divisions being sent to the UK for Overlord. Marshall told the JCS of his concern that neither FDR nor Churchill understood the near-term disruption to the war effort caused by switching resources back and forth between regions or the “far reaching effect on the shipping and production resources of the United States.” Admiral King added that sending seven more divisions from the United States to the Mediterranean would “curtail planned Pacific operations” where shipping already had been withdrawn in support of Bolero-Sickle. Marshall thought the divisions, which would not arrive in the Mediterranean before June 1944, “would constitute in reality an expeditionary force available for use in the Balkans.” Having reestablished unity within their own staff only days earlier, and with a meeting with FDR less than two hours away, the Joint Chiefs were uncertain about their commander in chief’s intent.31
At 1 p.m., Stimson joined Roosevelt for lunch in the Oval Office. Stimson began by reminding Roosevelt of the substance of his August 4 trip report, which he found the president “had very thoroughly in his mind.”32 Stimson then handed FDR his new letter. FDR, Stimson recorded, “read it through with very apparent interest, approving each step after step and saying finally that I had announced the conclusions which he had just come to himself.”33 Apparent was that Stimson’s earlier trip report, conveyed to FDR and discussed by Hopkins at Birch Island, had indeed achieved the decisions Stimson sought. Confirming Marshall’s strategy for presenting them, Roosevelt had made the recommendations his own.
Roosevelt and Stimson’s meeting then turned to other matters including “current negotiations [with the British] about the atomic bomb.” Stimson recalled that FDR “at once said that that was all settled.” Settled they were only in the sense that Bush and Anderson had clearly defined terms of the agreement that could be reached only between Roosevelt and Churchill themselves and that, as the president knew, remained an open issue. Then, acting on the advice that Harvey Bundy had given him, at the strong urging of Vannevar Bush, Stimson raised concern about the second of four points in Churchill’s proposal: that each government should agree not to use atomic bombs against each other. Roosevelt “did not think there was enough danger in that to make it worthwhile to amend it,” according to Stimson, not venturing into the implied need for a treaty instead of an executive agreement. This suggests that FDR was ready to accept Churchill’s points in an agreement to resume atomic information sharing and was holding his assent for the time and terms FDR found favorable.34
FDR had more fulsome and current information on the atomic negotiation than Stimson at this point, having the benefit of Hopkins’s account to him the night before of Bush’s status report. FDR also had been told by Hopkins that Churchill would receive a similar report from Anderson of what still remained to be agreed upon between the two of them. The negotiation was developing along the outline charted by Churchill and Stimson in their July 22 London meeting with the points of substance (versus process) left, at Bush’s insistence, for Roosevelt and Churchill to negotiate directly. Within the span of three weeks, Stimson had participated in a meeting with first one of the leaders and then the other in which unsettled issues of the cross-Channel attack strategy and Anglo-American cooperation on atomic bomb research and postwar policy had arisen in intense and immediate, if unremarked, proximity.35
The time for the start of Roosevelt’s 2:00 p.m. meeting with his JCS brought their lunch to an end. President Roosevelt invited civilian Secretary of War Stimson to stay for the FDR’s meeting with the JCS as their commander in chief. Leahy, King, Marshall, Arnold, and the JCS secretary, Brig. Gen. John Deane, entered the Oval Office together.36
To the delight of the JCS and growing satisfaction of Stimson, Roosevelt affirmed to the chiefs in detail, point by point, the substance that they had been advocating. FDR endorsed reaffirmation of a cross-Channel attack in 1944 as the primary Allied strategy for victory in Europe. Not discussed, however, was the secretary of war’s recommendation to the president of George Marshall for Supreme Allied Commander. FDR did say unequivocally that he wanted an American commanding the Allied forces. To support the basis for that, he directed the JCS to have the full complement of U.S. troops, then set at 18.5 divisions and their support, in the United Kingdom and operationally ready by D-Day.
By August 10, the “troop basis” (goal) for U.S. forces in the UK by D-Day, then May 1, 1944, had increased to 1.4 million.37 To fulfill Roosevelt’s directive, given Bolero’s existing shortfall, the armed forces would move well over one million troops, plus millions of tons of weapons, equipment, and materiel, across the Atlantic in less than eight months.
Roosevelt, known for his inscrutability, had given his lieutenants direction with clarity and definition on the issue of strategy for Europe that had been mired in uncertainty and contention for more than a year. No one in the Oval Office that afternoon could doubt that embedded in their commander in chief’s direction was an assertion of U.S. leadership of the alliance against the Axis. The chiefs and Stimson were elated. Briefed on the meeting by Stimson on his return to the office, Bundy concluded that FDR had at last embraced the cross-Channel assault-based strategy for victory, Overlord.38
Beyond the strategy, its commander, and forces to implement it, Roosevelt also had signaled good reason for confidence in the strength of his direction to his chiefs. His message was one that Stimson and Marshall quickly could grasp. This was not necessarily so for others.
Writing for his memoir from what he was told by participants after the meeting, Gen. Albert Wedemeyer, an early planner and advocate for the cross-Channel assault strategy, quoted FDR as saying in the meeting with the JCS and Stimson that it was “unwise to plan military strategy based on a gamble as to political results.” In Wedemeyer’s opinion, “the remark made very little sense.”39
Actually, the remark gave good evidence that FDR grasped the heart of the matter, Stimson’s “vital difference of faith.” In his briefing to FDR at Shangri-La on July 25, Marshall had argued for an Allied strategy based on direct action for a military result over one based, as Churchill advocated, on indirect action seeking to cause internal German political-economic collapse. Stimson had set out the evidentiary basis for this difference in his August 4 trip report, which FDR had discussed with Harry Hopkins at Birch Island, and stated the distinction directly in his lunch with the president just concluded. By his remark, FDR showed that he embraced not just the strategy of direct military attack but also the reason at its foundation.
Yet there remained for the chiefs and the secretary the anxious hope for FDR’s new certainty to endure. As expressed in Stimson’s diary, “If he can only hold it through in the conferences which he is going to have with the Prime Minister.”40 The first test of that would be FDR’s meeting with Churchill at Hyde Park in less than two days.
As the JCS and Stimson returned across the river to their Pentagon offices, the third of the U.S. Quadrant delegation’s four trains departed for Quebec City.41 At 6 p.m., the British Quadrant Delegation arrived in Quebec City.42
The following day, Marshall took action on the president’s directive. He responded to FDR’s instruction to have a preponderance of U.S. divisions in the UK on the target date for Overlord by committing to deploy not 18.5 but a full 19 divisions to the UK by that date. He compared this force to the 14 (including 4–5 Canadian) divisions to be under British command on D-Day. Marshall noted to FDR that in the Overlord buildup in France to 60 Allied divisions, there would be 42 U.S., 13 British, and 5 Canadian divisions.43 To Marshall, his memorandum was a critical step to reassure Roosevelt, who would be seeing Churchill at Hyde Park the next evening, August 12, for two days of meetings before the president and prime minister went to Quadrant.
Through the Army General Staff’s Operations Division, General Marshall then sent an encrypted message to Allied Headquarters in Algiers. Noting the participation of General Eisenhower’s representative, Brig. Gen. Lowell Rooks, who had said an additional division from the United States would be nice to have for garrison duty but not necessary, Operations Division summarized the opinion of JCS and the Joint Planning Staff: forces then committed to the Mediterranean, minus the seven divisions to be transferred to Britain for Overlord, would be adequate to attain the Allies’ three desired goals. These were to occupy Italy up to a line north of Rome, seize Sardinia and Corsica, and make a diversionary effort into southern France from the Mediterranean in May or June 1944. In the message, Marshall told Eisenhower that the JCS and the planners “estimated that 10 divisions will be sufficient to contain any remaining German forces in Italy, unless Germany sends large reinforcements to the peninsula, and that there will be available 14 offensive divisions and adequate combat aircraft to launch a combined amphibious and overland assault on Southern France in coordination with the main effort of the initial 29 divisions across the channel.”44
In a section marked for his personal attention, Marshall asked for Eisenhower’s views. Nevertheless, by this message, Marshall sealed the transfer of 7 divisions out of Eisenhower’s command in the Mediterranean and back to the British Isles for Overlord. Later in the year, the German Wehrmacht would test in Italy the wisdom of the OPD planners and the JCS.