Prior to his first wartime conference with Nimitz in San Francisco just before the Battle of the Coral Sea, King had selected an area commander for the South Pacific. This was not to be his most enlightened personnel decision. The man he chose as commander in chief, South Pacific (COMSOPAC) was Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley. A 1906 graduate of Annapolis, one year behind Nimitz, Ghormley had a well-deserved reputation as a skilled planner and thoughtful strategist. While his sea duty included tours in cruisers and battleships, his record was heavy with staff work in Washington, including a stint as assistant chief of naval operations. Since August 1940, Ghormley had been in Great Britain as a special naval observer. But the very fact that Ghormley was still in London when replaced by banished ex-CNO Harold Stark in the spring of 1942 and knew little about the South Pacific should have been a warning flag.

And there were others. Ghormley had been director of the War Plans Division when Bill Leahy was CNO. Despite Leahy’s strong efforts to plan for the threat of a two-ocean war, Ghormley had disappointed the chief by pessimistically reporting that the navy could not wage “an offensive naval war simultaneously in the Atlantic and the Pacific.” Now, faced with exactly that task, it was unclear whether Ghormley’s outlook had changed.⁶

Apparently, Nimitz’s first choice for the South Pacific assignment had been Admiral William S. Pye, Kimmel’s temporary relief and still in command of Pacific battleships. To naval aviator King, Pye’s battleship affinity was a problem, and having no fondness for another possible candidate, Frank Jack Fletcher, King insisted on Ghormley. This was somewhat unusual in that King—rarely one to forgive past transgressions, particularly against himself personally—had been haughtily denied access by Ghormley to key British-American agreements upon assuming command of the Atlantic Fleet.⁷

While King and Nimitz would ultimately work well together in pursuit of the final objective of victory, the Ghormley appointment was representative of the fact that they brought two very different styles to the table. King seized on Nimitz’s years with the Bureau of Navigation and thought him somewhat of a “fixer” because of it—ready to smooth things out rather than make waves as was King’s style. King “respected Nimitz’s judgment and solicited his advice” on personnel matters, but when Nimitz was content to give an officer the benefit of the doubt, King thought Nimitz was much too lenient. A common Nimitz expression was “That fellow is doing all right,” but to King that was damning with faint praise.⁸

By contrast, the general public perception of King was that he demanded “nothing less than perfection of performance from his subordinates” and habitually reserved his infrequent pats on the back for officers who solved problems by attacking.⁹ King “could never understand why people in command were so touchy about kicking people out.”¹⁰

Nimitz told King in their first conference that he wanted BuNav to take the lead in the assignment of Pacific Fleet officers, but behind the scenes and in between their subsequent conferences, Nimitz had frequent discussions about personnel options with BuNav chief Randall Jacobs, a longtime Nimitz friend.¹¹ Publicly, Nimitz was frequently content to let BuNav and/or King make any controversial assignments and then blame either for any required dismissals. In Ghormley’s case, however, even the congenial Nimitz would give him very little rope.

As much as King was doing to shape overall strategy, there was another admiral who was about to reenter the inner councils of American military policy. It is remarkable that out of the military names readily associated with World War II, two of the men who did the most to advance grand strategy are largely unknown to the general public—King and William D. Leahy. Nimitz and Halsey would come to overshadow them in the public’s eye because they held more glamorous, media-rich battlefield commands. But Leahy and King participated in the major strategic decisions that ultimately directed Nimitz and Halsey’s tactical roles.

Leahy’s primary task as ambassador to Vichy France had sounded as simple as it was complex: make friends with Pétain and keep him and the few Frenchmen still loyal to him from completely selling out to the Germans. Despite the bleak global picture at the beginning of 1942, Leahy had been optimistic. The Allied forces were indeed spread thin, but the ambassador found that the prospects “for free people” were “much better at the beginning of this year than they were twelve months ago.” America and its allies, Leahy wrote, were “leagued together in a common interest” to defeat those nations engaged “in a barbarous war… imposing their will on inoffensive peoples.”¹²

But Leahy was becoming increasingly frustrated with his role of coddling the mercurial French. “The barometric French opinion,” Leahy advised Roosevelt soon after Pearl Harbor, “has reacted to [America’s entry into the war] with a leaning over toward our side of the question but with reservations and with preparations to jump back on a moment’s notice.”¹³

In mid-February 1942, Leahy delivered to Pétain what amounted to an ultimatum from Roosevelt. Vichy France must give official assurance to the United States that no military aid would be given to Germany or Italy and that French ships would not be used to move Axis troops and supplies between the continent and North Africa. Otherwise, Leahy would be recalled “for consultation,” diplomatic jargon that a change in relations was likely.

When British bombers struck Renault and Ford automobile plants outside occupied Paris a few weeks later, Admiral Jean-Louis Darlan, the commander of the French fleet, reacted in a rage of Anglophobia. Appealing to Leahy’s membership in the shared naval fraternity, Darlan expressed outrage at Roosevelt’s demands and Great Britain’s attacks on what were now, in fact, German-controlled factories. Noting that his defeated country had been placed in “a painful situation,” Darlan did not refrain from attempting to bully Leahy. “I did not believe,” Darlan lectured the ambassador, “that the Government of a nation which owes its independence in great part to [France] would take advantage of this fact to treat it with scorn.”¹⁴

Leahy responded immediately without consulting Roosevelt. Yes, they were brothers of the sea, Leahy told Darlan, but the United States was now “involved in a total war in defense of its existence as a free nation.” His government would prosecute that war aggressively “in order to secure a complete victory.” Under those circumstances, it was unreasonable to expect it “to look with complaisance upon the provision by a friendly nation of any assistance whatever to the military efforts of the enemy powers.” In other words, Leahy was telling Darlan, use the French fleet to aid Germany at your peril.¹⁵ When Roosevelt learned of Leahy’s reply, the president heartily concurred, calling it “absolutely perfect.” Still, he was not yet prepared to recall Leahy in the face of ever closer cooperation between Vichy France and Germany.¹⁶

Roosevelt, while sympathetic to Leahy’s increasingly tenuous position, was swayed by the advice of the Joint Chiefs. Militarily, Marshall, King, and Arnold saw Vichy France and its North African colonies as the Allies’ “last bridgehead to Europe,” and they urged the president to “postpone as long as possible any evidence of change in our relations with France.” As for Leahy, who perhaps was thinking that he might be more useful in a direct military role, the chiefs recommended that he stay in France. FDR concurred, writing to Leahy, “To hold the fort as far as you are concerned is as important a military task as any other in these days.”¹⁷

Leahy’s continued presence in Vichy was to have one terrible personal consequence. Bill and Louise remained very close. Theirs was a continuing love affair and Louise’s only rival for Bill’s attention was their granddaughter, little Louise, upon whom Bill doted. As a navy wife and hostess, Louise graciously and effectively supported Bill’s career and garnered much admiration and respect for her performance of the social roles required of diplomats’ wives. Fluent in French, she was particularly well received during this trying year in Vichy.

On April 6, 1942, the day after Easter, Bill and Louise went for a two-hour drive in a wooded area outside Vichy and found the countryside “bursting into its spring activity.” White anemones were so thick that they carpeted the forest floor and Leahy hastened to pick a large bouquet for his wife. The next evening, Louise entered the local clinic for a hysterectomy that French doctors advised could not be postponed until her pending return to the United States. The procedure seemed to go well.

Then, on April 16, upon hearing that the pro-German Pierre Laval was to become the new head of the Vichy government, Roosevelt cabled Leahy his recall and said he could return to the United States as soon as Louise was fit to travel. But things unraveled. On April 21, two days after the Laval government was officially announced, sixty-six-year-old Louise Harrington Leahy suffered an embolism while still recovering in the hospital. She died quite suddenly, with her husband at her bedside.

Bill Leahy’s personal reserve was legendary. His penchant for avoiding in his diary all but the rarest glimmer of emotion would prove a frustration to his later biographers. But upon Louise’s death, his words of tribute to her and the expression of the despair he felt were as human and emotionally vulnerable as Leahy ever allowed himself to appear in print.

“Louise was a great lady,” he wrote, “a remarkably successful Ambassadrice [sic], and an outstanding representative of America in Europe. She was accepted with enthusiasm and admired by all classes from members of the Royal family to the peasants who… all admired her understanding sympathy and innate goodness.” As for his own loss, her death “has left me not only crushed with sorrow, but permanently less than half efficient for any work the future may have in store for me and completely uninterested in the remaining future.”¹⁸

“Dear Bill,” cabled FDR, “My heart goes out to you in the overwhelming loss which has come to you in a difficult and distant post of duty so far away from the legion of friends who loved Mrs. Leahy dearly.” But even these heartfelt wishes from a man Leahy had known almost thirty years and who was now president of the United States could not lift the deep gloom that hung over him.¹⁹

Leahy came home, haggard and worn, to the house at 2168 Florida Avenue, N.W., in Washington that he and Louise had bought in 1927 upon his promotion to rear admiral. Living there alone this soon was out of the question, and he briefly settled on 19th Street, at the home of his daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Leahy, and her father, Dr. Robert S. Beale. Leahy’s son, William Harrington Leahy, by now a lieutenant commander, was in London as an assistant naval attaché to the American ambassador, and his and Elizabeth’s children, thirteen-year-old Louise and five-year-old Robert Beale Leahy, provided pleasant distractions.

On June 3, Louise was buried in Arlington National Cemetery following an overflow service at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, where they had been members for many years. Leahy met with FDR two days later and was told to take a rest. Instead, he spent several miserable weeks in a dismal office at the State Department completing reports on the situation in Vichy. Then on Monday, July 6, Leahy answered the telephone in his office and heard a familiar voice asking him to come to the White House for a noontime conference.

Upon Leahy’s arrival, Roosevelt told him that he would be recalled to active duty and appointed the president’s senior military adviser. FDR did not take the decision lightly, nor had he arrived at it quickly. For six months, America’s war machinery had haltingly labored to transition from small numbers and an almost country club pace—witness the Marshall-to-King memo regarding Pacific strategy—to the constant urgency of increasingly massive and complex global operations. Roosevelt was reluctant to relinquish or in any way diminish any of his powers as commander in chief, but it was increasingly clear that the information he received and the orders he gave had to pass through a common gatekeeper on whom he could rely.

Heretofore, Marshall, King, and Arnold had jockeyed for time with the president as they needed decisions, but as the war pace picked up, they sought more frequent contact. Conversely, any military advice that the president desired required one or more chiefs to appear at the White House at all hours of the day. At that July 6 meeting with Leahy and at lunch the following day, Roosevelt outlined a position that would have daily contact with the three chiefs of staff and summarize reports flowing from them to the president. He would be the president’s personal representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What was less clear at this point was how much command authority Leahy would carry, with presidential directives flowing in the opposite direction. “He did most of the talking,” Leahy recalled of FDR in these two sessions, adding perceptively, “He always did.”²⁰

Among those strongly supporting Leahy’s new role was George Marshall. The army chief of staff had been encouraging Roosevelt to appoint a chief of staff over all military services since the JCS first met formally in February 1942. Marshall had promoted this as a necessary step to focus unity of command and coordinate the three branches. In Marshall’s mind, it was definitely a military position.

When Roosevelt had countered that he as president and commander in chief was in fact his own chief of staff, Marshall patiently explained to him “in great frankness that it was impossible to conceive of one man with all of his duties as president being also, in effect, the chief of staff of all the military services.” The presidency “was a superman job,” Marshall admitted, but he “didn’t think that even the exaggeration of the power of Superman would quite go far enough for this.”²¹

Leahy visited with Marshall shortly after his return from France and heard him voice the same need for such a coordinating position. Not that Leahy lacked support from Roosevelt, but Marshall’s strong recommendation of him for the role may have encouraged Roosevelt to make the appointment. In fact, it was Marshall who talked with Leahy about what his exact title should be, deciding on “Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army and Navy.” But by the time FDR met with Leahy on July 18 and officially gave him the post, it was clear that Leahy was to be the president’s personal representative on the JCS first and foremost and, second, a neutral chairman arbitrating service rivalries and focusing military efforts.

Secretary of War Stimson thought that Marshall’s proposal of Leahy as JCS chairman, rather than Marshall himself, was done with “great magnanimity and self-effacement,” but shrewd Marshall undoubtedly realized that King would resist his elevation. Naval officer Leahy, as a fourth member of the JCS and its chairman, would counter any and all claims King might have about the navy’s underrepresentation. “I thought,” Marshall correctly surmised, “the Navy couldn’t resist [Leahy], and from what I had learned I was willing to trust Leahy to be a neutral chairman.”²²

Leahy’s next stop was with King. The admiral had indeed been “holding out against the idea of a White House military adviser” primarily because he assumed it would be an army man and as such “detrimental to the interests of the Navy.” But when Marshall initially suggested Leahy to King, it put the matter in an entirely different light. “If he will take it,” King told Marshall, “it will be all right with me.” King now told Leahy the same thing and pledged his support. Years later, King told his biographer that he had “always liked Leahy” because he had taken such a firm stand against the Japanese after they sank the Panay.²³

Roosevelt announced Leahy’s recall to active duty and his appointment as chief of staff to the commander in chief at a press conference late on the afternoon of July 21. Leahy did not attend. If FDR meant to downplay the move, the press would have nothing of it. “Mr. President, can you tell us what the scope of Admiral Leahy’s position will be?” asked a reporter. The president repeated the title he had already announced. “Will he have the staff of the Army, Navy and Air also under him?” fired another. In jaunty FDR fashion, the president replied that he didn’t have “the foggiest idea,” and besides, the question had “nothing to do with the ‘price of eggs.’ ”

Far more substantively, Roosevelt then denied rumors that Leahy’s return to Washington was somehow connected to the usual speculation about British and American plans for a second front against Germany—the first being the Soviet Union’s lone stand in the east. The president then answered a question about rubber shortages at home, but other reporters would not let go of the Leahy appointment. Roosevelt was asked if it would mean that the president would “take a more active part in the strategic conduct of the war.” FDR laughed and said that would “be almost impossible.”

Almost casually, Roosevelt said that he spent an “awful lot of time” scrutinizing war strategy, and having a chief of staff to summarize reports, gather information for him, and maintain direct contact with various agencies—not just the military—would save him valuable time. Then, using a term that the assembled reporters knew well but that was not necessarily a compliment, the president said that Leahy would help do his “leg-work.”²⁴

“The President was cagey, as he always was in dealing with the newsmen,” Leahy noted afterward, “and did not tell them very much.”²⁵ If anything, this lack of information fueled rumors as to the scope of Leahy’s assignment. The New York Herald Tribune tried to have the last word the next day: “All of Washington was speculating as to just how much power had thus been conferred on the sixty-seven-year-old diplomat and Navy officer and whether, in fact, it meant that he was to be America’s war lord of the second front.”²⁶ Time got closer to the truth. If “Generalissimo Leahy was a legman, the editor was still Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”²⁷

As usual, Roosevelt also had a political motive behind this military move. Public outcry for a reorganization of the nation’s military had not abated, and while Roosevelt denied that Leahy was to be “a supreme commander of all the American forces,” there was definitely some truth to a British report that Leahy’s appointment managed “to take some of the wind out of the sails” of the movement to name MacArthur supreme commander of armed forces.²⁸

MacArthur had his hands full in the South Pacific, and favorable reactions to Leahy’s appointment seemed to accomplish FDR’s secondary purpose. Emphasizing Leahy’s sterling reputation in Washington circles, George Fielding Eliot, military affairs correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, confessed that while “it is true that his duties are but vaguely defined at present… the personality of the man is a sufficient guaranty that he will find a means of discharging his duties… to the immense benefit of the country he has served so well.”²⁹ Further singing Leahy’s praises, Walter Lippmann of the Washington Post pronounced him clearly the most qualified candidate, “so much so that many have begrudged the time he spent in Vichy when he was so obviously needed in Washington.”³⁰

Whatever Leahy’s evolving role, Roosevelt desperately needed a steadying hand between his geopolitical considerations and the military’s implementation of overall strategy. Despite his professed enthusiasm for King’s Pacific offensive earlier in the spring, Roosevelt wanted to commit American troops to Europe in 1942 in part because of continued lobbying from Churchill but also because he clearly saw the need to support the Soviet Union.

Western perspectives, particularly when subsequently colored by Cold War tensions, frequently understate the Soviet Union’s critical role in defeating Nazi Germany. Roosevelt, however, recognized it immediately. On June 26, 1941, just four days after Hitler invaded his gargantuan neighbor, FDR wrote Leahy, still in France. “Now comes this Russian diversion,” Roosevelt characterized the move. “If it is more than just that it will mean the liberation of Europe.”³¹

A year later, 4.5 million German troops that might engage the Allies elsewhere were far from defeated but increasingly mired in Russia’s expanse. Roosevelt and Churchill wanted them to stay there and the Soviet Union to remain an active Allied combatant. King’s March 5, 1942, memo on Pacific strategy also recognized that America’s “chief contribution” to Russia would “continue to be munitions in general,” although that would not keep him from occasionally bristling when aircraft and ships were diverted to the effort.³²

Thus, in late June 1942, Marshall dispatched Dwight Eisenhower, who in just sixteen months had jumped from colonel to lieutenant general as Marshall’s right-hand man, to London to confer with their British counterparts and implement Roosevelt’s goal of American troops in combat in Europe before the end of the year. Roosevelt strongly preferred Operation Sledgehammer, a small-scale, cross-Channel invasion of Europe. It was meant to establish a British-American bridgehead for future operations on the continent, but more important, it would distract Germany from a victory on the Eastern Front that might take the Soviet Union out of the war.

Eisenhower, however, found nothing but chaos in London. The buildup of American forces there (code-named Bolero) was only beginning, and the British evidenced a lack of both planning and desire to prepare a cross-Channel invasion of any sort. The British instead trotted out Operation Gymnast, a previously discussed invasion of Morocco on the north coast of Africa. Neither Marshall nor Eisenhower supported such a circuitous route into Europe, and they looked around for yet another alternative. King was all too happy to provide one by pushing for additional forces in the Pacific.

Leahy was not quite a member of the Joint Chiefs, but Marshall and King had been working well together in implementing King’s proposed Pacific strategy. Now they momentarily became the ultimate teammates by jointly advising Roosevelt that if the British prevailed and the United States undertook any operation except the buildup of troops in Great Britain in anticipation of Sledgehammer or some other direct European attack, “we are definitely of the opinion that we should turn to the Pacific and strike decisively against Japan; in other words, assume a defensive attitude against Germany, except for air operations; and use all available means in the Pacific.” Marshall may well have been bluffing the British, or even Roosevelt, but King was dead serious.³³

Not so fast, said FDR. If at least one of his military chiefs was bluffing, the president decided to call it. From the quiet of Hyde Park on Sunday morning, July 12, Roosevelt ordered an immediate, same-day estimate of the men and materiel necessary to implement this all-out Pacific alternative and the impact the same would have on operations in the Atlantic. Marshall scurried to Washington from his country home in Leesburg, Virginia, to join King in gathering what, given the time constraints, was only a cursory overview.

Just two days after reading it, having known full well in advance that his opinion would not be changed, Roosevelt hand-wrote a draft in response. “My first impression,” FDR scrawled, “is that it is exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do following Pearl Harbor. It does not in fact provide use of American troops in fighting except in a lot of islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next… It does not help Russia or the Near East. Therefore it is disapproved.”³⁴

Two days later, Roosevelt ordered Marshall and King to depart for London immediately, along with presidential confidant Harry Hopkins. They were to seek Eisenhower’s advice as the man on the scene and then get the British to commit to a definite plan. “Sledgehammer is of such grave importance,” Roosevelt wrote the trio in his instructions, “that every reason calls for accomplishment of it.” But if the British position remained immovable and an invasion of the European mainland was “finally and definitely out of the picture,” the president directed his chieftains to determine another place for U.S. troops to fight in 1942. Among Roosevelt’s suggestions was the Middle East, which Marshall and King found even more appalling than Gymnast as a potential quagmire and lacking in strategic merit.³⁵

“It will be a queer party,” chief of the British Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke predicted beforehand, “as Harry Hopkins is for operating in Africa, Marshall wants to operate in Europe, and King is determined to stick to the Pacific!” Brooke would side with Hopkins, who appears to have taken his cue from Churchill. That did not, however, keep Hopkins from assuring Roosevelt, “Marshall and King pushed very hard for Sledgehammer, I wanted you to know.”³⁶

But in the end, the British could not be moved, and Gymnast, a thrust into North Africa, prevailed. Eisenhower characterized the abandonment of Sledgehammer as “the blackest day in history.” He was no less pleased that North Africa would be the alternative, fearing that it could only lead to a “further dispersal of the Allied forces.” But within a month, Eisenhower had his orders to become supreme commander of the combined Allied landings in North Africa, now renamed Torch.³⁷

But Marshall and King were not quite finished lobbying FDR. When they returned to Washington, they stressed to Roosevelt that embarking on Torch necessarily canceled Sledgehammer, as well as Operation Roundup, a planned full-scale invasion of Europe in the spring of 1943. The president remained adamant about Torch but characteristically failed to accept that it was a trade-off for the others. On July 30, the American Joint Chiefs met with their British counterparts in the first session of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that Leahy chaired. Marshall and King still thought there was room to negotiate on Torch, in part because the outcome of the summer battles raging on the Eastern Front was still in doubt and there had been no formal abandonment of Sledgehammer or postponement of Roundup.

But now there was another player in the room. Far more than simply mediating disputes between the American services, Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief, soon made it abundantly clear that he was indeed the president’s man on the spot. Leahy told the Combined Chiefs that Roosevelt and Churchill considered the agreement on Torch in the late fall of 1942—less than four months away—to be final. When Marshall and King protested that no irrevocable decision had been made despite the discussions in London, Leahy assumed his role and assured them he would discuss the matter with the president.

That same evening, Leahy delivered Roosevelt’s answer to Marshall and King. “Very definitely,” the JCS minutes recorded Leahy reporting, Roosevelt, “as Commander-in-Chief, had made the decision that Torch would be undertaken at the earliest possible date.” The president considered it “our principal objective,” and assembling the means to carry it out would “take precedence over other operations,” including delaying the American buildup in Great Britain (Bolero) and hampering King’s operations in the Pacific.³⁸

Meanwhile, King and the U.S. Navy had certainly not forgotten about the North Atlantic. King knew firsthand, both from his World War I days and more recently from the tensions of 1941, that German U-boats sinking Allied merchantmen were as much or more of a threat to the war effort than a clash of giant battleships. The number of Allied ships lost to U-boats reached an all-time high in July 1942, and during the first six months of the year American merchant losses alone to enemy action exceeded the total losses during World War I. The Germans indeed remembered how close they had come to winning the war at sea, and they were determined to do so this time. Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic “the dominating factor” of the war. “Never for one moment could we forget,” he wrote in retrospect, “that everything happening elsewhere, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome.”³⁹

King readily agreed with Churchill about the desperateness of the situation, particularly along the Atlantic Coast of the United States. Flaming ships sinking within sight of East Coast cities were not only a major blow to the flow of war supplies, but such events also had the dismal secondary effect of torpedoing American morale. King and the navy in general came under criticism for not organizing convoys for all shipping.

Even Roosevelt lectured King by memo, saying, “Frankly, I think it has taken unconscionable time to get things going.” King politely agreed but pointed out that while their mutual goal was “to get every ship under escort,” that result would require upwards of one thousand seagoing escort vessels, essentially destroyer escorts, or corvettes. It was simply going to take time for American industry to produce those ships, and in the meantime—still doing the best with what he had—King concentrated convoys in the most dangerous areas, including the dreaded Murmansk and Archangel runs to support Russia. These Arctic convoys were principally Great Britain’s responsibility, but British ship commitments and heavy losses there worked to pull U.S. resources from the North Atlantic and stretch King’s forces that much thinner.⁴⁰

And they were made thinner still when King begrudgingly agreed to spare enough ships to protect the troop convoys that were soon assembled in Virginia and sent across the Atlantic for the much-debated invasion of North Africa. Torch was, in fact, a series of landings from French Morocco, on the Atlantic coast, eastward into the Mediterranean to Oran and Algiers in French-controlled Algeria. “This African adventure,” as Leahy termed it privately, “had long been under consideration by President Roosevelt” and went off surprisingly well.⁴¹

French admiral Darlan, who despite his earlier outburst at Leahy was no friend of the pro-German Laval, had managed to keep the French fleet out of Axis hands. As the Torch invasion force bore down on the North African coast, Darlan was in Algiers visiting a son who was very sick with polio. After the Allied landings met with initial Vichy French opposition, Darlan ordered opposition to cease. This caused considerable confusion throughout Vichy. For several days, conflicting orders to fight or surrender were given before Germany quickly occupied the remainder of France. The end result was that the French fleet was scuttled at Toulon before it could fall into German hands, and the Allies—with Free French forces a part of the effort—established a front in North Africa from which to relieve pressure on British forces in Egypt by attacking the rear of Erwin Rommel’s vaunted Afrika Korps.

As Roosevelt told Eisenhower, who led the assault, “Our occupation of North Africa has caused a wave of reassurance throughout the Nation not only because of the skill and dash with which the first phase of an extremely difficult operation has been executed, but even more because of the evident perfection of the cooperation between the British and American forces.”⁴²

Upon sailing for Africa, Eisenhower had already expressed to Admiral King his own “very real and deep appreciation for the magnificent support that has been given to me by you personally and by all elements of the United States Navy with which I have come in contact.” Considering King’s other commitments, especially the battles then raging in the South Pacific, Eisenhower was “particularly appreciative of your action in standing by original commitments.”⁴³

It was hardly that harmonious, but Torch provided the United States with a valuable testing ground for men and machinery, and it lent a particularly American feel to the conflict. Leahy would later say that Roosevelt “never made a single military decision with any thought of his own personal political fortunes,” but that public recollection seems entirely in keeping with Leahy’s “loyal soldier” persona and not with Roosevelt’s always-calculating political agenda.⁴⁴

Torch was originally scheduled for October 30, 1942, a few days before the midterm elections. With far more candor, Marshall recalled briefing FDR on preparations for Torch and the president holding up his hands in an attitude of prayer and remarking, “Please make it before Election Day.” When the landings were later postponed until November 8, a week after the election, Roosevelt did not complain, however, and “never said a word.”⁴⁵

With typical understatement, Leahy showed in hindsight that he perfectly understood his role with FDR: “It has been said that Roosevelt ordered ‘Operation Torch’ in the face of opposition from his senior advisers. I never opposed the North African invasion. I told the President of the possibilities of trouble, but it looked to me like a feasible undertaking.”⁴⁶ Certainly, Torch was the first test of the wartime partnership of Roosevelt and Leahy and only the beginning of their work together on deciding the course, one that would include dealing with avowed enemies as well as difficult allies.