December 7, 1941
Cordell Hull was in his office at noon on Sunday when he received a call from Nomura. Could he and Kurusu come by at 1:00 to discuss Japan’s response to Hull’s latest proposal? Hull said fine. When 1:00 came, Nomura called again. Could the meeting be postponed to 1:45? Hull agreed. The two men didn’t arrive until 2:05 and were made to wait in a conference room.
Earlier, US intelligence had intercepted the Japanese response to the Hull Note, so Hull already knew it was a complete rejection of the US proposal. It was going to be a very tense and unproductive meeting, he thought gloomily. He felt that the Japanese were no longer negotiating in good faith, and short of an intervention by the emperor in response to Roosevelt’s message—still to be delivered—there was no hope of a resolution.
Just as he was preparing to greet Nomura and Kurusu, Hull received a call from FDR. There was a report, not yet confirmed, of a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The normally calm Hull felt a sense of outrage. If the report was true, what were Nomura and Kurusu doing in his office? FDR told him to go ahead with the meeting and make no mention of the attack.
Nomura and Kurusu entered Hull’s office and handed him the documents.
He sat scanning them, trying to calm his emotions, but in the end his anger got the better of him. He stared down the two men in disgust. “I must say that in all my conversations with you during the last nine months I have never uttered one word of untruth,” he said. “This is borne out absolutely by the record.” He waved the papers at them. “In all my fifty years of public service, I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined today that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”
The men appeared stunned. Nomura began to speak, but Hull cut him off, motioning them to the door. (One version of the meeting had Hull cussing them out, but he denied it.)
Were Nomura and Kurusu in on the plot? Had they been pretending to negotiate while Japan prepared for the surprise attack? In his memoir, Kurusu tried to rebut the accusation that he and Nomura knew about the attack, writing that they only found out when they returned to the embassy after the aborted meeting. “It was then that we heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor,” he wrote. The staff was in a state of shock—“We blankly stared at each other and could think of nothing to say.” Some had tears in their eyes, and in Kurusu’s description a sense of failure hung over the room.
But Hull was scathing in his account, issuing a statement: “At the very moment when representatives of the Japanese Government were discussing with representatives of this Government, at the request of the former, principles and courses of peace, the armed forces of Japan were preparing and assembling at various strategic points to launch new attacks and new aggressions upon nations and peoples with which Japan was professedly at peace, including the United States . . .”
News that Pearl Harbor had been bombed had come to FDR at 1:40 P.M., while he was lunching with Hopkins. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox informed him of a radio message from Honolulu ending with the words “This is not a drill.” After the attack was confirmed, FDR called for Early and gave him a statement for immediate release to the wire services, which he read to them in a conference call at 2:30: “This is Steve Early at the White House. At 7:55 A.M. Hawaiian time, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attacks are continuing . . .” Reporters interrupted, wanting details of the dead and injured, but Early did not have them.
By the time of Early’s announcement, the Pearl Harbor attack was nearly over and the worst of the destruction had already been suffered. It had been launched at 7:55 A.M. Hawaiian time (12:55 P.M. in Washington), but the signs had appeared earlier, seen only by two privates who had been manning a radar center north of Oahu. George Elliott and Joseph Lockard had been getting ready to go off duty at 7:00 when they had noticed what appeared to be the approach of incoming planes on their radar. They had decided to notify the Information Center and had gotten a switchboard operator on the line. He had told them he was the only one there and didn’t know what to do. He’d said he’d find someone, and a couple of minutes later a lieutenant had called back. “The lieutenant said to forget it,” Elliott recalled in his later testimony to Congress. They continued to follow the radar until the sightings disappeared in the blackout area about twenty miles offshore. Then they closed down the station and went to breakfast. Soon after, the planes were overhead.
Robert E. Thomas, Jr., the officer in charge of the antiaircraft battery on the USS Nevada, woke to loudspeakers blaring “General quarters! General quarters! All hands man your battle stations!” When he climbed to his station, he saw a stunning scene. “Overhead were flights of high-level bombers coming down battleship row,” he remembered in an oral history of the attack. “As I watched, the USS Arizona, just three hundred feet ahead of us, erupted in an enormous flash and thunderous blast that knocked me twenty feet backwards and onto my back.”
With no senior officers on board, Thomas and others quickly began to move the Nevada out of the harbor. Thomas said, “As we cleared the burning Arizona, the harbor became visible to us. Good God! The West Virginia was awash and burning, the Oklahoma had capsized, the California was listing and afire, and the Pennsylvania, in Dry Dock, was burning.” Just as he was absorbing the scene, the Nevada was torpedoed. Fifty of the crew were killed and a hundred others injured, including Thomas.
As the ships burned, survivors plunged overboard, but that did not save them. Massive fuel spills had set the water on fire, and they burned alive in the water.
Marine Albert Berger was on guard duty at the main gate that sleepy Sunday morning when he saw planes flying overhead with foreign insignia he didn’t recognize. “I could see the pilots. . . . They were looking right down on us. . . . They were dropping the bombs. They came in, waves of airplanes, and they were bombing everything they could—all the ships.” Berger was stunned and traumatized. “I was a youngster,” he said, remembering that day. “I was only eighteen years old. . . . I didn’t know how to cope with it. And there was nobody there to tell me how to cope with it.”
Hickam Field, the massive air base adjacent to Pearl Harbor, which was considered the jewel of Pacific defense, was demolished in a direct attack. “All but essential personnel were granted off-base pass requests” that weekend, recalled Master Sergeant John H. Koenig. “Thirty-nine hours and fifty-five minutes later, the United States was humiliated beyond belief. The billion-dollar fortress of the island of Oahu, the strongest fortification in the world, was in near-shambles. No U.S. military installation had suffered such mass destruction since the founding of the country in 1776.”
Within two hours, the attack was over, leaving 2,335 dead: 2,008 navy personnel (1,177 from the Arizona), 218 army, 109 marines, and 68 civilians. There were 1,143 wounded. The Pacific Fleet in Hawaii was nearly obliterated.
FDR CALLED HIS CABINET together, and the press gathered outside as congressional leaders began arriving at the White House for meetings. Richard Strout, a correspondent with the Christian Science Monitor, was especially struck by the presence of California senator Hiram Johnson, a particularly avid isolationist. “What a sight. The great isolationist, Hiram Johnson, grim-faced, immaculately dressed, stalks across our little stone stage on the White House portico. All the ghosts of isolationism stalk with him, all the beliefs that the US could stay out of war if it made no attack.”
In England, Ambassador Winant and Harriman were dining with Churchill at Chartwell, his country home, on December 7. Harriman observed, “The Prime Minister seemed tired and depressed. He didn’t have much to say throughout the dinner and was immersed in his thoughts, with his head in his hands part of the time.” As the dinner ended, Churchill’s valet arrived with a radio, so they could listen to the BBC newscast. The report about Pearl Harbor came across the airwaves. Revived from his gloom, Churchill bounded from the table, shouting that he would declare war on Japan. Winant calmed him down, telling him that they must get a confirmation before taking such a drastic step.
Churchill called Roosevelt. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?”
“It’s quite true,” the president said wearily. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”
Churchill gave the phone to Winant, who listened with horror to the news.
When he hung up, Churchill told him of his intention to ask the House of Commons for a declaration of war against Japan the next day. (He would send a message to FDR, offering to delay his announcement so the United States could declare war first, but he received no reply, so he went ahead, making the United Kingdom the first nation to declare war on Japan.)
Churchill was relieved that the United States would now be forced into the war and said as much in his memoirs. However, a US war with Japan presented potential problems for his own fight with Hitler. He worried that Lend-Lease materials would no longer be available or would be substantially diminished and that he’d have less support, not more, from the United States.
At the White House, FDR continued his meetings throughout the day. At 5:00, he summoned Tully to his study for dictation. He sat calmly at his desk, grim and determined as he lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. “Sit down, Grace. I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.”
Tully sat, and the president took another drag from his cigarette and began to speak slowly and deliberately:
Yesterday comma December 7 comma 1941 dash a day which will live in infamy dash the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan period paragraph.
He went on to dictate the entire message, which he wrote himself without speechwriters. The dictated version remained intact, except for edits he added in his own pen as events continued to unfold.
Throughout the evening, meetings with the cabinet and military leaders continued. FDR told them it was the gravest moment since Lincoln had announced a civil war in 1861. He said there was no choice but to declare war—indeed, with its attack, Japan had already declared war on the United States.
As night fell, crowds gathered in Lafayette Park across from the White House. UPI correspondent A. Merriman Smith described the scene: “They seemed to be waiting for someone to come out of the White House and tell them it was all a bad dream. Cars by the hundreds drove by as slowly as traffic officers would permit, the occupants hanging from the windows just to stare at the graceful old white structure which all of them had seen many, many times before.”
James had been at the White House for most of the day, and he helped his father to bed late that night. He lingered to speak privately to Roosevelt. James, who was a captain in the Marine Corps Reserve, serving as a liaison between Marine Headquarters and the Office of the Coordinator of Information, which would become the Office of War Information, had been angling for an overseas assignment. James insisted that he must now be assigned to combat, even though he had health problems. FDR did not try to talk him out of it. He knew, with sadness and a degree of pride, that all his sons would want to fight. He recalled his own disappointment at having been denied the opportunity to fight during the First World War.
James would get his wish, serving in the Pacific theater. Elliott, whose poor eyesight made him officially unfit for combat, signed a waiver allowing him to serve despite his disability, and became a pilot. He’d fly more than three hundred combat missions, eyesight be damned. Franklin, Jr., would rise to become commander of a destroyer in the Pacific. And John, the youngest, who had joined the navy in early 1941, also served in the Pacific.
Their father would now be their commander in chief.
The following day, Roosevelt stood before Congress and delivered his response to the attack, five hundred words that pierced through the chamber with brevity and precision. Hull had urged him to give a longer speech, outlining the history of the negotiations and how they’d failed. Roosevelt ignored the advice, knowing that this was a moment to strike with a dagger, not explain like a professor.
Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.
It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.
Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.
Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation.
As Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.
But always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.
With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December seventh, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
“There was none of Churchill’s eloquent defiance in this speech,” Sherwood observed. “There was certainly no trace of Hitler’s hysterical bombast. And there was no doubt in the minds of the American people of Roosevelt’s confidence. I do not think there was another occasion in his life when he was so completely representative of the whole nation.”
The House of Representatives and the Senate quickly approved a declaration of war against Japan, with a near-unanimous vote. There was only one vote in opposition, from Montana Republican Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in Congress. A lifelong pacifist, she had also opposed the United States’ entry into World War I. This time was different, her colleagues argued—to no avail. At the last moment, fellow Republican Everett Dirksen begged her to at least vote “Present,” to avoid standing in opposition. She refused, and her “No” echoed through the solemn chamber, a jarring note.
On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, leading to a US declaration of war with Germany and Italy. This time the vote in Congress was unanimous. Rankin quietly voted “Present.” She was so unpopular afterward that she chose not to run for reelection.
The war now upon the United States, Roosevelt didn’t have time to second-guess his approach to the Japanese conflict leading up to December 7. But there were plenty of critics doing the job for him. Many openly suggested that Roosevelt had welcomed the attack on Pearl Harbor because it had given him an excuse to enter the war. There was no direct evidence of that. However, commanders in Hawaii later testified to Congress that they had deliberately left been in the dark about the Japanese intentions and had been provided only selective intelligence reports from Japan. “We had no information that an air attack on Pearl Harbor was imminent or probable,” Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel testified, not hiding his anger and frustration. “Knowledge of the intercepted Japanese dispatches would have radically changed the estimate of the situation made by me and my staff.” He offered a sobering thought of what might have been: “Even on the morning of December 7, four or five hours before the attack, had the Navy Department for the first time seen fit to send me all the significant information . . . my light forces could have moved out of Pearl Harbor, all the ships in the harbor would have been at general quarters, and all the resources of the fleet in instant readiness to repel an attack. . . . The Pacific Fleet deserved a fighting chance.”
Perhaps FDR and the War Department were intent on playing out their bad hand and seeking resolution in the final hours. Perhaps they had accepted the inevitability of an attack but were convinced that it would not happen at Pearl Harbor. Perhaps FDR erred by trusting those who had repeatedly proven themselves to be untrustworthy. In Roosevelt: From Munich to Pearl Harbor: A Study in the Creation of a Foreign Policy, Basil Rauch speculated in 1950 that Roosevelt might have been the victim of his own political calculations, writing, “The Roosevelt administration failed to estimate the extreme daring and foolhardiness in aggression of the Japanese leaders. Roosevelt himself was accustomed to accusations that he exaggerated the scope of Axis designs; his error turned out to be that he underestimated the scope.”
Now that the United States was in the war, Churchill was eager to iron out the issues of command and strategy with the president. On December 14, he set out for Washington on the British battleship HMS Duke of York, accompanied by Harriman. The Prince of Wales, the ship that had carried Churchill to his meeting in Newfoundland, was not available for duty. It had been sunk by Japanese torpedoes as it was heading to Singapore in late October. Churchill wondered aloud whether it had been bad judgment to send the Prince of Wales, such a valuable battleship, to the east but added that it was no time for regrets.
The trip to the United States was a battle in itself, against the stomach-wrenching forces of tumultuous seas. Most people on board were seasick, with Churchill popping seasickness pills the entire time. The ship finally arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, on December 22, and Churchill flew to Washington National Airport, where FDR was on hand to greet him and escort him to the White House. Amazingly, the president had failed to tell Eleanor of the visit until that very day. She buried her resentment with a gently chiding notation in her daily column: “It had not occurred to him that this [visit] might require certain moving of furniture to adapt rooms to the purposes for which the Prime Minister wished to use them.”
That evening, they gathered in the president’s study for drinks. Churchill despised mixed drinks, preferring whiskey or champagne. But FDR was so proud of his martinis that the prime minister couldn’t bear to insult him. He accepted a martini and then found a way to excuse himself. He went into the bathroom, took the olive out, poured the drink down the sink, replaced it with water, and put the olive back in.
Near the end of dinner, FDR raised his glass of champagne. “I have a toast to offer—it has been in my head and on my heart for a long time. Now it is on the tip of my tongue: to the Common Cause!”
FDR admired many aspects of Churchill’s character, but he found his rigidity hard to take. He confided to Eleanor that he didn’t expect Churchill to have a long political career after the war because of his conservatism. “He likes the world he lived in too much.” That amused Eleanor, who thought her husband was likewise inclined. Both men had trouble in their own countries. As the journalist Alistair Cooke observed, “It would be so much easier if Roosevelt would go to England and become Prime Minister and we’ll have Churchill as President,” because everybody in the United States loved Churchill and everybody in England loved Roosevelt.
The historian Jon Meacham noted that despite any difficulties, the two were perfectly matched for the times that called upon them to serve. “Churchill did something FDR couldn’t do,” he said. “Churchill stood alone, stared across the Channel, and said, ‘Hitler has gone that far and would go no farther.’ Roosevelt did something Churchill couldn’t do. He shrewdly managed American public opinion to a moment when the greatest democracy was willing to . . . defend its values in a foreign land. They couldn’t have done what they did without each other.”
Churchill would remain at the White House until January 14, save for a side trip to Canada to address Parliament. The Roosevelts attempted to celebrate a somewhat normal Christmas with their high-level guest. As in most other American households, the ordinary rituals of the season seemed to take on a deeper significance for them. They, too, would be watching their children go off to war.
As night fell on Christmas Eve, they stood with Churchill on the South Portico of the White House for the lighting of the national Christmas tree:
“There are many men and women in America—sincere and faithful men and women—who asked themselves this Christmas: ‘How can we light our trees?’” Roosevelt said. “. . . ‘How can we meet and worship with love and with uplifted hearts in a world at war, a world of fighting and suffering and death?’” He had the answer: “Our strongest weapon in this war is that conviction of the dignity and brotherhood of man which Christmas Day signifies.”
Christmas Day began with a church service, followed by a feast that to the British guests felt lavish. The table was laden with traditional fixings: roast turkey with chestnut dressing, sausage-and-giblet gravy, beans, cauliflower, a sweet-potato casserole, cranberry jelly, a grapefruit salad, and rolls. For dessert, there were plum pudding with hard sauce, ice cream, coffee, salted nuts, and assorted bonbons.
Churchill retired early to work on a speech he would give to a joint session of Congress the following day. It was only the third time in US history that a foreign leader had made such an address. Standing before a packed chamber, with observers crowding the ramparts, he began with a reminder of his American roots: “If my father had been an American and my mother British instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own. In that case this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.”
He spoke heatedly about the evil of Japan and that country’s certain miscalculation: “What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible that they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?”
His speech lasted thirty minutes, and at the end the chamber rose in thunderous applause as Churchill gestured with a “V” for victory. It was a thrilling day, but amid the excitement that evening Churchill suffered what might have been a heart attack, or close to one. Doctors ordered six weeks of bed rest. He ignored them and went on.
Day after day, FDR and Churchill met alone and with advisers, plotting a way forward. The conference was code-named Arcadia. Due to the extreme secrecy of the meetings, no official record was made, so it’s hard to know exactly what was said. (Even Churchill was uncharacteristically circumspect in his memoirs.) No doubt high on the agenda was the extent of the United States’ engagement in the war and in what arenas. Roosevelt and his military advisers had the task of organizing war efforts on two different fronts; it’s doubtful that he made any firm promises.
Mostly the value of the meeting was the chance for the two men to take each other’s measure and figure out how they would work together. Right away it became apparent that there was some friction in their schedules. Churchill was a night owl who did his best work late, often not going to bed until 1:00 or 2:00 and then remaining in bed until late into the morning. Eleanor worried that his schedule placed undue pressure on Roosevelt. “My husband . . . was so burdened with work that it was a terrible strain on him to sit up late at night with Mr. Churchill after working until 1 or 2 A.M. and then have to be at his desk early the next day while his guest stayed in his room until 11 A.M.”
Long hours were spent discussing the shape of the world after war and how nations could be protected from future men like Hitler. The two men discussed what name they would give to an organization of nations allied against fascism. The morning following one such late-night discussion, FDR was inspired by an idea. Excited, he wheeled himself to Churchill’s room and burst in, announcing “United Nations!” Churchill was just coming out of the bathroom, drying himself with a towel, and he was stark naked. Embarrassed, FDR apologized profusely.
Churchill harrumphed and said magnanimously, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has absolutely nothing to hide from the President of the United States.”
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER DID not often show his temper, but the chaos of the War Department in Washington during the early days of the war set his nerves on edge. “There are lots of amateur strategists on the job, and prima donnas everywhere,” he complained in his diary.
His mood was made worse by his personal frustration at once again being passed up for command duty at the front. When General Marshall had summoned him to Washington days after Pearl Harbor to assist him at the War Department, he had been disappointed. The man who could not have imagined he’d be president a decade later felt sidelined. All around him throngs of men were being drafted or rushing to enlist, forming a military force of nearly two million. They were leaving on ships for Europe and the Pacific, along with their hastily promoted commanders. Once again, he was left behind. He worried he’d grow old and gray in the army without ever having seen combat, hardly what he’d had in mind when he’d set off for West Point thirty-one years earlier. Every war needs its administrators as much as its warriors, and he knew that intellectually, but emotionally it was a blow. Nevertheless, he realized he had value in Washington as a strategic planner, and he swallowed his resentment to do his job under the command of Marshall, whom he admired more than any other general.
If Eisenhower was perturbed by the mess they were in, he was in good company. Marshall, who was responsible for overseeing a military apparatus that was mired in bureaucracy and clearly unprepared for a global war, didn’t always hide his frustration. Eisenhower noted in his diary, “Anger cannot win, it cannot even think clearly. In this respect Marshall puzzles me a bit. I’ve never seen a man who apparently develops a higher pressure of anger when he encounters some piece of stupidity than does he. Yet the outburst is so fleeting, he returns so quickly to complete ‘normalcy,’ that I’m certain he does it for effect.”
On Marshall’s shoulders was the burden of structuring a massive force to defeat Hitler in the west and the Japanese in the Pacific and Far East. He didn’t have even months of leeway to ease into the fight. During their evening walks, Marshall’s wife, Katherine, would patiently listen to him describe his overwhelming problems, writing “I was listening to a man steeling himself to carry a burden so tremendous in magnitude and so diverse in its demands that it was difficult to imagine how one man could carry it alone.” Marshall might have been frustrated and privately gloomy, but he tried to keep his doubts away from his staff, believing it his duty to appear decisive and confident even as he saw daily evidence that the United States’ war machinery was in need of an extensive overhaul, with little time to accomplish the task.
With FDR in the White House angling to be his own director of war and Churchill posing as the forceful and outspoken expert on a battlefront he’d been engaged in virtually alone, Marshall had to avoid being sucked into a forced abdication of his independent views. In meetings, he was reserved and dignified; he tried to evade informal chatter, and he disliked personal dinners or other settings with the president that could lead to agreements he wasn’t ready to make. With quiet reserve, he focused on cutting out the noise and deciding which course was best.
When necessary, Marshall had no trouble standing up to Roosevelt. He’d set the precedent back in their first meeting in 1939, after he had become army chief of staff. FDR had been in his usual mode, rallying the room for a strategy of military buildup that fell short of critical details. He had asked all present whether they thought it was the right plan, and everyone in the room had agreed until he reached Marshall.
“Don’t you think so, George?” the president had asked.
“I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with you at all,” Marshall had replied, leaving Roosevelt briefly speechless.
After the meeting Morgenthau had joked to Marshall, “Well, it’s been nice knowing you.”
FDR liked to have his way, as did Churchill, but both men reluctantly recognized how much they needed a man like Marshall.
While the War Department reorganized itself to meet the challenge, Americans were growing unnerved by what seemed a lack of action. They’d not expected a chess game of deliberate, strategic moves. They’d counted on the United States to hurl itself into the fight, applying brute force in the Pacific to beat back the Japanese. That wasn’t happening. Meanwhile, Japan was continuing to expand its control of the Pacific. An attack on Manila had forced General MacArthur and his forces, US and Filipino, to flee to Bataan, leading Roosevelt to pull MacArthur from the Philippines and send him to Australia. The forces in Bataan, now under the command of General Jonathan Wainwright, would fight a losing battle, surrendering in April. Nearly eighty thousand American and Filipino prisoners of war were subjected to a grueling and inhumane sixty-six-mile march known as the Bataan Death March. Many died on the march; others condemned to near starvation and subhuman conditions in the POW camps would not survive the war.
Japan was casting a wide net. In February, Singapore, Great Britain’s stronghold in the east, fell to the Japanese, and sixty-two thousand Allied troops were taken prisoner. It was an unexpected disaster for the British fighting forces, who had underestimated Japan’s preparedness and the skill of its forces. It was a major defeat, one in a series of many.
Further rattling US citizens was the appearance in February of a submarine off the coast of California, which emerged to fire shells at the coast. The prospect of direct attacks on our shores was alarming to a nation still numb from Pearl Harbor. People were demanding protection, and in the heat of the moment, the prime target was the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Rumors and suspicions began to spread rapidly about the possibility of those Americans having a hidden loyalty to the Japanese cause. Were there spies in their midst who were working with the enemy? Suddenly everyone of Japanese ancestry looked suspicious, without regard to evidence of patriotism or lack thereof. The hysteria grew into an outcry in the west that spread to Washington. Congressmen from western states were demanding government action. Secretary of War Henry Stimson met with FDR and proposed a solution that would have been unthinkable in ordinary times: relocating Japanese Americans away from the coast for the duration of the war. FDR told him to do what he deemed necessary. Despite opposition by Attorney General Francis Biddle, Henry Morgenthau, and even FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Roosevelt went forward with the plan; on February 19, 1942, he signed an executive order to remove Japanese Americans from “military exclusion zones” on the West Coast. More than 120,000 citizens were ordered from their homes and taken to inland internment camps, their civil rights suspended.
The internment of Japanese Americans would be a permanent stain on FDR’s war record. It seems unlikely that he thought there was a real threat—and if so, why not intern German Americans or Italian Americans as well? More likely, with opinion polls showing 93 percent of Americans supporting internment, it was a political calculation. FDR needed Americans to get behind him in the war effort, and if that meant sacrificing a small segment of the population, so be it.
As an early test of FDR’s war leadership, the decision was troubling. FDR, who prided himself on being a defender of the rights of people and the rule of law, who had been high minded at Arcadia about the democratic promise of the world to come, blundered into a grievous abandonment of human rights. It was Stalin’s Communist regime that preached that the end justifies the means. Not the United States.
Decades after the war, two Republican presidents would try to make amends. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued a formal apology to Japanese Americans, saying, “not only was the evacuation wrong, but Japanese-Americans were and are loyal Americans.” In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, giving reparations to families of the interned and stating that “here we admit a wrong; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”
However, in the winter of 1942, the public mood was bitter and scared. One blow after another was dispiriting. “Americans had become accustomed to thinking that they could lick any nation with one hand tied behind their backs,” Rosenman observed. But it already looked as if they were losing. FDR decided he needed to give a fireside chat in the form of a tutorial on the war. Calling Hopkins, Rosenman, and Sherwood together, the president told them he wanted to ask newspapers to print maps of the world in preparation for his fireside chat on Washington’s Birthday. “I am going to ask the American people to take out their maps,” he said. “I’m going to speak about strange places that many of them have never heard of—places that are now the battleground for civilization. . . . I want to explain to the people something about geography—what our problem is and what the overall strategy of the war has to be.” He thought that if he could explain it in layman’s terms, “I am sure that they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.”
It was a challenge to the speechwriters to get the tone and the explanation just right. Americans must be helped to understand that the United States wasn’t an isolated nation, needing only to protect its own shores. To win against the global Axis Powers, the nation needed a global strategy. The Nazis might seem far away on the other side of the world, but their progress across the globe endangered our shores.
On air, FDR told the American people to look at their maps and follow along. He explained that the Allies must act in concert for victory to be possible. Pulling resources from the British and the Russians would have a dire cascading effect, allowing Hitler to conquer Turkey, the Near East, and North Africa. That in turn would give the Nazis a clear route to South America, then on to the United States. At critical points in the journey, the Nazis and Japanese could actively join forces to overwhelm the Allies. He spoke of a “battlefield for civilization” and urged Americans to be patient and resolute.
So what was the plan? Under consideration was an invasion of northern France, code-named Operation Roundup, which would be a direct and dramatic attack at the heart of the Nazi front. A second possibility was Operation Sledgehammer, a cross-Channel assault. Stalin was in favor of either approach, as long as it could occur in 1942 and pull German resources away from the Soviet Union. Churchill was skeptical that either plan could be executed before 1943. Meanwhile, Marshall and Eisenhower were urging a Pacific-first strategy against the Japanese, and public opinion seemed to be in their favor. Roosevelt refused to consider it. He believed that the United States must make a dramatic assault against Hitler, so the world would see its determination and strength.
Behind the scenes, FDR had to face the true nature of the Allied collaboration. The Allies were not just one big happy, united family. Each nation had its own ambitions and larger purpose, and they were not always in alignment. In the Soviet Union, Stalin wasn’t an entirely trustworthy ally; he was essentially operating on his own, with the aid but not the influence of the Allies. Success against the Nazis would undoubtedly allow the Soviet Union to extend its reach, causing potential problems down the road. And what if Stalin, with his back to the wall, gave in and formed an alliance with Germany to save what was left of his country?
The United States and Great Britain were constantly playing a game of “Which of these three is not like the other?” when it came to the Soviet Union. At best in the new world order they sought to create, the Soviet Union would have to be kept on a leash. The old proverb “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” surely applied. But the Western Allies were painfully aware that Stalin had complete control over his government and could essentially do as he pleased. The Western leaders had no such free rein.
Also troubling to FDR was the fact that Great Britain had its own empire to protect, fighting for freedom while protecting colonialism. For example, FDR’s open support for India’s independence didn’t sit well with Churchill, and many Indians were so determined to end British rule that they supported Germany and Japan. FDR was advocating a postwar world in which every nation would be independent. But that future was a dream, maybe a distant one, and today’s battles were being waged not in dreams but in an increasingly desperate reality.
WILLIAM STANDLEY HAD NEVER expected to find himself in the Soviet Union. A retired admiral in the US Navy and a longtime friend of FDR, he became a reluctant but loyal envoy when the president called him back into action as the new ambassador to the Soviet Union. His predecessor, Laurence Steinhardt, had not been a favorite of Stalin, who had complained to Harriman about Steinhardt’s apparent disrespect for the Soviet government and his “defeatist” attitude about its potential to win against the Nazis. Hoping to mollify Stalin, FDR appointed Standley.
When Standley arrived at his new home at Spaso House, the residence of the US ambassador in Moscow, he would soon learn that being ambassador in that secretive country often meant cooling his heels out of the loop. From the start, he had problems learning critical plans, even from his own government. With Harriman and Hopkins conducting ad hoc diplomacy, Standley found he was often the last person to know what was going on.
He didn’t even have the advantage of local immersion. There was virtually no contact with ordinary Russians. Not unexpectedly, conditions were harsh; the entire nation was under strict food rationing, and eggs and meat were rare commodities for most people. Even the embassy staff had to scrape for food—although they were in far better shape than the locals. Regular food shipments from the United States, stocked in a commissary, helped. The embassy staff also kept chickens on the grounds for eggs and occasional meat.
In contrast to the daily deprivations, official receptions were almost vulgar in their abundance—“We were handsomely wined (or vodka-ed) and dined,” Standley wrote. He described a regular “battle of the vodkas,” with eight or ten different kinds served, along with a variety of wines and sumptuous foodstuffs.
For Standley’s first meeting with Stalin, twelve days after his arrival, he was shown into a conference room with a large, gleaming table. Stalin was seated at one end. Standley’s first impression was that Stalin didn’t take the meeting too seriously; his expressive eyes were showing a glint of humor and question, as if to demand, What do you want? Throughout the meeting, Standley noticed that Stalin was an inveterate doodler. As the ambassador gave a flowery prepared greeting from Roosevelt—“The president wishes me to express to you his admiration for the magnificent courage, fortitude and resourcefulness shown by the Red Army and the Russian people”—he watched Stalin, head bent, doodling what appeared to be “lopsided hearts of all sizes and positions.” Only after the translator had conveyed Standley’s message did Stalin stop doodling. He raised his head and peppered Standley with his grievances, among them the persistent difficulty of receiving shipments of Lend-Lease supplies. There was no question that it was a problem. Traveling treacherous waters to the Soviet Union, the ships were often torpedoed and the shipments lost. But Stalin suggested that that was only a part of the problem. US suppliers didn’t want to take orders from the Soviet Union, he complained. They’d rather take orders from Great Britain. Standley could do little but assure Stalin that he would do what he could to improve the situation.
As the meeting concluded, Stalin rose from his seat and shook hands with Standley. “If I can be of any help to remove obstacles to good American-Soviet relations, call upon me at any time,” he said with a polite smile.
“Thank you, Mr. Stalin,” Standley replied and added, somewhat flippantly, “If I can be of any help to you in killing Germans, please let me know.”
Stalin frowned. “The Russians are killing many, many Germans at the front,” he said gravely. “The poor Germans have orders that they must not retreat, must not give way to us a single inch. The result is that we are killing them like pigs. There is just nothing else to do with Germans but kill them.”
Standley didn’t react, but he might have noted the irony of Stalin’s words. After all, Stalin himself had ordered a no-surrender policy for his troops, ruling that surrender was tantamount to treason against the Motherland and punishable by death. Nor was defeat acceptable. Early in the war he’d had commanders of failed missions executed and their families punished. Stalin believed that the chief cause of failure in battle was lack of nerve. An army determined to defeat Hitler would defeat Hitler.
In late May, Stalin sent foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov to Washington. Molotov, full faced with a tight little mustache and hard eyes peering through rimless glasses, was an old Stalin ally from the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he’d been a brutal henchman of the Great Purge, personally ordering the deaths of hundreds of citizens deemed disloyal. Now he was the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union. Like Stalin, he had abandoned his birth family name, Skryabin, choosing Molotov, which meant “hammer.” Roosevelt privately called him “Stone Ass.”
His arrival in Washington was shrouded in secrecy, under the name “Mr. Brown.” He was housed in the Rose Suite at the White House, where Churchill had stayed after Pearl Harbor. Eleanor recalled that when a valet had unpacked his bags, he had found a sausage, a loaf of black bread, and a loaded pistol. “The Secret Service men did not like visitors with pistols,” she wrote in a rare burst of humor, “but on this occasion nothing was said. Mr. Molotov evidently thought he might have to defend himself and also he might be hungry.”
The situation in the Soviet Union was desperate, and Roosevelt and Churchill were concerned that the Soviet Union might drop out of the war. They could well imagine a scenario in which Stalin, facing the prospect of defeat, would turn around and become Hitler’s ally. Standley didn’t think that was likely. “Stalin had all the aces and the jokers in the pack in our games of diplomatic poker,” he observed, “because he knew that we had to play the game with him on his terms. I don’t think he ever had any intention of picking up his chips and quitting the game—although our State Department boys and the Boss and Harry Hopkins worried about that possibility.”
Even so, it was FDR’s instinct to be as accommodating as possible to Molotov, lest any crack form in the alliance. Apart from the continuing issue of the shipment of materials to the Soviet Union, Molotov’s main goal was to win Roosevelt’s agreement on a second front in the war during 1942, which would pull Nazi troops and resources away from the Soviet Union. Roosevelt was also restless and wanting to make a big move. Marshall wasn’t too sure. For one thing, the suggestion on the table, a cross-Channel assault on France, was a high-risk strategy and might be impossible to put together that year. For another thing, there was Churchill, who didn’t support a cross-Channel invasion. But Roosevelt was so intent on accommodating Molotov that he urged Marshall to agree to a second front, staying vague about the exact details and timeline. Molotov left Washington with his promise. The plan was to begin a buildup in Great Britain to a location outside London, code-named Operation Bolero, for the cross-Channel assault, Sledgehammer; and, if conditions were right, Roundup—a full invasion of northern France.
Across the ocean, Churchill was fuming. A cross-Channel invasion in 1942, he felt, would be suicidal. His military advisers were warning him that they didn’t have the landing craft to launch the full-on attack that would be needed. If they went ahead and then failed, it would be a potentially fatal blow to Allied interests and would make Hitler even stronger in Europe. Undoubtedly, it would also be the end of Churchill as prime minister. Although he had won a near-unanimous vote of confidence in the House of Commons in January, he couldn’t count on that support if Great Britain appeared to be losing the war.
Churchill was pushing another idea, a mission code-named Operation Gymnast, a joint British-US invasion of French North Africa. On June 17, he left London for the United States to make his case in person. The trip, aboard the Boeing Bristol flying boat, took twenty-seven hours before landing on the Potomac River late in the evening of June 18. The following day, Churchill flew to Hyde Park, where FDR greeted him at New Hackensack Field, the Hudson Valley regional airport, which had been commandeered by the military during the war. Driving his hand-controlled Ford convertible, FDR sped to Hyde Park over the high, winding roads above the Hudson River, devilishly delighting in the rattled nerves of his passenger.
Tucked into the luggage of one of Churchill’s aides was a memo from the secretarial pool of the British War Rooms, typed on official paper and titled “Operation Desperate.” Written in early May, it had been meant as a lighthearted gesture, but given the conditions in Great Britain, it was actually deadly serious. The memo read:
In view of the recent changes in the Government policy of distribution of coupons, we have examined the situation, and the following conclusions have been reached:
(a) The limitation of supplies in the U.K. has resulted in the following acute shortages—
(i) silk stockings;
(ii) chocolates;
(iii) cosmetics.
(b) The lack of those vital commodities is regarded as extremely serious, and may, in consequence, become a source of extreme embarrassment. This must be avoided at all costs.
(c) It is felt that immediate steps should be taken to explore the possibilities of U.S. resources.
2. In the light of the above, it is considered that the most expedient method of implementing the proposal in (c) would be the early dispatch of a mission to the U.S.A.; a Force Commander has already been appointed, in anticipation of instructions.
When Churchill’s party returned to England, a cache of requested items was on board, and the secretaries were delighted to find Operation Desperate a complete success.
Roosevelt was in a good mood. The United States was finally on the offensive against Japan and had scored a major victory against the Japanese at Midway, an atoll of two critically positioned islands in the middle of the Pacific. Although the Americans had appeared to be outgunned, they had had the advantage of advance intelligence and had known about the attack beforehand. When Japanese warships had arrived, they had been ready. After a fierce two-day battle, the Japanese had been forced to retreat. Not only had the victory struck a military blow to Japan, destroying four of its carriers and more than three hundred aircraft and killing 3,500 Japanese, it had effectively halted Japan’s march through the Pacific and would be considered one of the most decisive battles in the war. Although the war in the Pacific would continue for three more years, by holding on to that critical gateway, the Americans established a dominance and put Japan on the defensive for the remainder of the war.
Once settled at Hyde Park, Churchill aired his opposition to Sledgehammer and Roundup, at least in 1942, and pushed the North Africa strategy. Roosevelt and Churchill also made a critical decision, barely noted at the time, about whether to continue the development and testing of tube alloys—the eventual atom bomb.
After two days in Hyde Park, Roosevelt and Churchill returned to Washington by train to continue their discussions. While meeting with Churchill in the Oval Office, FDR received a note with devastating news for the British and the Allied cause: Tobruk had fallen. Tobruk was a vital port city in eastern Libya that had been the centerpiece of Middle East strategy since 1940, when British, Australian, and Indian forces had grabbed it from the Italians. Tobruk was a gateway to Egypt and the Suez Canal, and the Germans, under the command of General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps, had continued a drive to take it back. Rommel had finally succeeded. After he read the painful news, FDR gently broke it to Churchill. The prime minister slumped in his chair, so devastated he could barely speak. “Defeat is one thing, disgrace is another,” he later wrote of that moment, describing it as “one of the heaviest blows” of the war.
“What can we do to help?” Roosevelt asked with genuine sympathy and concern. Churchill roused himself to ask FDR to send as many Sherman tanks as he could spare to the Middle East. There was no question about not responding. Although Roosevelt knew he’d take some flack at home for making such a large investment in the Middle East, he also realized he needed to do it for his friend and partner.
The defeat served to confirm Churchill’s view that a North Africa invasion should be launched as soon as possible. Now the strategic sense of it was coming into focus. If Rommel were allowed to continue storming on to Egypt and Turkey, the whole region would be lost, cutting off access to the Allies. An Allied victory in North Africa would undermine Hitler’s sweeping progress and give the Allies an opening to continue on to Italy and into Europe. Secondarily, Churchill argued, it would provide relief to the Soviet Union—although it was doubtful that Stalin would see it that way. Churchill began referring to the plan as “the true second front,” hoping to make that case.
Sherwood noted that Churchill’s push for a North Africa invasion might have been remarkably prescient, given the result. But, he added, at the time the US joint chiefs thought the proposal was more of the same from Churchill, who had an “incurable predilection for ‘eccentric operations,’ which had guided him in the First as well as the Second World War; he preferred operations which depended on surprise, deception and speed, in terrain . . . where there was not sufficient room for huge ground forces to be deployed.” North Africa fit the bill perfectly. By the end of the Roosevelt-Churchill conference, it had been decided to pursue the North Africa strategy, renamed Operation Torch.
Eisenhower had already been tasked with preparing a report, “Directive for the Commanding General European Theater of Operations,” which would now include North Africa. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d be in charge. Earlier, Marshall had said as much. Speaking of promotions during the war, Marshall had bluntly told Eisenhower that although others were recommending him for command, he believed in promoting men from the field, not from staff positions. Marshall’s words stung, and Eisenhower angrily replied, “General, I’m interested in what you say, but I don’t give a damn about your promotion plans as far as I’m concerned. I came into this office from the field and I am trying to do my duty. . . . If that locks me to a desk for the rest of the war, so be it!”
Perhaps it had been a test. When Eisenhower handed his report to Marshall, he was shocked when Marshall told him, “You may be the man to execute it. If that’s the case, when can you leave?” By June 24, Eisenhower was in London, preparing to lead the joint force in preparations for Operation Torch.
Once in Great Britain, Eisenhower was struck by two things: one was the “acute lack” of trained troops and equipment, a situation that needed to be remedied immediately. The second was the conviction that Torch must be so overwhelming in force that the surprise attack would completely neutralize the opposition. With only months to plan and execute the operation, he had to act fast to get things into shape.
The problems were immeasurable, both large and small. When the first shipment of materials for the invasion arrived in England, Eisenhower was horrified to discover that none of the crates or boxes was labeled. That presented an enormous and immediate challenge. “Confronted by the awful headache of opening boxes, checking items, and re-crating them, our supply people undoubtedly wished that war had never advanced beyond the bow and arrow,” he wrote.
A larger matter of command involved integrating the US and British troops under one banner. The British were battle hardened; the Americans were new to the fight. But Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed that an American, Eisenhower, would run the show, and he was determined to make sure that the troops would work seamlessly together. He told his men, “I will clamp down on anyone who tries to start any trouble between the Americans and British under my command. There will be neither praise nor blame for the British as British or the Americans as Americans. We will fight it shoulder to shoulder. Men will be praised or blamed for what they do, not for their nationality.”
It was left to Churchill to travel to Moscow in August 1942 and explain to Stalin that there would be no second front in Europe in 1942, a mission he described as “like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole.” It was his first meeting with the dictator for whom he had previously voiced such great contempt. His wife, Clementine, referred to it as a meeting “with the ogre in his den,” and she wasn’t far off the mark, in Churchill’s opinion. As his plane approached Moscow, Churchill glumly reflected on what lay ahead. “I pondered on my mission to this sullen, sinister Bolshevik State I had once tried so hard to strangle at its birth, and which, until Hitler appeared, I had regarded as the mortal foe of civilised freedom,” he wrote of his feelings. “What was it my duty to say to them now?” Seeking collaboration, he was nonetheless repelled by the Soviet state, even the conditions of his lodging, which “was prepared with totalitarian lavishness.”
Meeting with Stalin at the Kremlin for the first time, Churchill understood the gravity of a moment that would bring him together with a man he had always despised. In the nearly four-hour meeting, with Harriman at his side, Churchill tried to explain the reasoning behind the decision to delay a direct assault on the continent.
Stalin, who, Harriman observed, looked older and grayer than during their first meeting, openly berated Churchill, repeating the dead-eyed standard he used with his own forces, blaming the Allied losses on a spinelessness and an unwillingness to take risks. “You must not be so afraid of the Germans,” he lectured Churchill as the prime minister sat grim-faced before him. Later, Churchill complained to Molotov: “Stalin will make a great mistake to treat us roughly when we have come so far.” Molotov placidly replied, “Stalin is a very wise man. You may be sure that, however he argues, he understands all. I will tell him what you say.”
Stalin argued strongly but without emotion against the decision to delay a second front until Churchill stopped him cold, telling him the decision was final and it would do him no good to argue. Stalin’s attacks on the courage of the British were hurtful, but Churchill kept his cool. “I repulsed all his contentions squarely, but without taunts of any kind,” he wrote of their conversation. He even allowed that he forgave Stalin his harsh remarks about the courage of his army because he understood the bravery of the Russian army.
When the conversation switched to a discussion of Torch, Stalin became more interested, especially after Harriman assured him, “President Roosevelt, in spite of his serious preoccupations in the Pacific, looks upon the European theater of war as his principal concern. He will support it to the limit of the resources at his disposal.”
Stalin, realizing that he would not succeed in getting his second front just yet, became a little less abrasive in his manner. The meeting ended cordially with an invitation to Churchill and Harriman to join him for dinner the following night.
Harriman, for one, understood Stalin’s mood. “They were really desperate,” he said of the Soviets. “Stalin’s roughness was the expression of their need for help. It was his way of trying to put all the heat he possibly could on Churchill. So he pressed as hard as he could until he realized that no amount of additional pressure would produce a second front in 1942. He had the wisdom to know that he could not let Churchill go back to London feeling there had been a breakdown.”
According to National Archives papers released for the first time in 2013, Churchill and Stalin did have a heavily lubricated meeting of the minds after dinner on the final evening. Late at night Churchill was invited to Stalin’s private room to continue their discussion. Alexander Cadogan, Churchill’s undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, went looking for the prime minister at 1:00 A.M. and entered Stalin’s room. “There I found Winston and Stalin, and Molotov who has joined them, sitting with a heavily-laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a sucking [sic] pig and innumerable bottles. What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage. Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine. Everyone seemed to be as merry as a marriage bell.”
They continued to talk until 3:00 in the morning, when Churchill had to leave to prepare for the flight back to England. He was in a positive frame of mind, Cadogan reported. “I think the two great men really made contact and got on terms. Certainly Winston was impressed and I think that feeling was reciprocated.”
Colonel Ian Jacob, the military assistant secretary to the British war cabinet, who was also with Churchill, was less sanguine. He didn’t believe a friendship with Stalin was possible. He wrote in his diary, “I should say that to make friends with Stalin would be equivalent to making friends with a python.”
ROOSEVELT WAS A WAR president now, and his aides often chafed at his preternatural calm and viselike grip on power and decision making. Whereas Churchill wore his heart on his sleeve and paraded his views and emotions every chance he got and Stalin remained remote and inscrutable, constantly taking jabs at the Western Allies from afar, Roosevelt tried to project a steadier hand—at his desk in the Oval Office every morning and throughout the day, ushering advisers in and out, visiting the basement map room twice a week to get thorough briefings on the war. He thought of himself as his own secretary of state and often made unilateral decisions over the heads of his advisers.
At the same time, he acknowledged needing a primary adviser to coordinate the army, navy, and air force operations. In July, he appointed Fleet Admiral William Leahy as chief of staff to the commander in chief, US Army and Navy. Unlike modern presidential chiefs of staff, Leahy’s job was related primarily to the military. The sixty-seven-year-old former chief of naval operations had also served as governor of Puerto Rico and ambassador to France after the Nazi takeover—a thankless job if ever there was one. FDR thought Leahy’s experience and seasoning would make him an ideal power broker to the big egos of the military command. And he was comfortable with Leahy. Their relationship dated back to FDR’s years as assistant secretary of the navy, when Leahy had commanded the secretary’s dispatch boat and they’d become friends. “He said [at a press conference] that I would be a sort of ‘leg man’ who would help him digest, analyze, and summarize a mass of material with which he had been trying to cope singlehandedly,” Leahy recalled.
Despite the best efforts of the staff, the White House was a glum place, with heavy blackout curtains draped on the windows and gas masks stashed under desks. A fallout shelter built in the basement was a constant reminder of how close the war could become. The battlefields of war might have seemed distant, but after Pearl Harbor, no one disputed that the fight could reach the United States.
Everything was shrouded in a veil of secrecy, especially the president’s movements. Early sternly informed the press corps, “Nothing must be printed or broadcast about the movements of the president without authority. Think of him as a battleship and report his movements just as carefully as you would the position of one of our battleships.”
The situation could get claustrophobic.
Roosevelt knew that a president needs opportunities to get away, if not from the workload, at least from the setting. Before the war, those excursions had occurred on his beloved Potomac, where he could be “at sea,” catered to by his reliable crew of Filipino stewards. As often as he could, he took the yacht up to Hyde Park. But the war had changed all that. Security officials agreed that it was just too dangerous for FDR to be out on the water, where the threat of U-boat attacks was ever present. He was forced to abandon his seafaring retreats and look for a site on land. Sixty miles north of Washington in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland were several recreation sites that had been part of a WPA project during the Depression. In April 1942, he’d taken a drive up to the mountain to look at the sites. Arriving at the topmost area, called Camp #3, FDR exclaimed, “This is my Shangri-La!”
There were already cabins scattered around the property, and the government set about doing renovations, including remodeling the central cabin, which would be reserved for the president. Whenever he could get away, Roosevelt drove up to Shangri-La to oversee the work. The result was beautiful while still having a rustic flavor of the country. It had the added advantage of being a secure site, manned by naval officers with marines patrolling the mountainous perimeters and staffed by Roosevelt’s Filipino crew from the Potomac. Roosevelt christened it a navy installation, the USS Shangri-La. (The rustic style and tight security remain to this day at the presidential retreat, which was renamed Camp David during Eisenhower’s presidency.)
At Shangri-La, FDR was often accompanied by military aides, along with Tully and Suckley. Between scouring official papers, making calls, and consulting with advisers, he loved to sit on the screened-in back patio and work on his stamps. In the evenings, the stewards would serve fine meals, after which he and his guests and aides would sit and play cards (Grace Tully was a demon at poker) and tell stories. As a storyteller, FDR was unmatched. He took great delight in the oddities of life and relished the telling of tales, maybe true, maybe not, that sent his audience into spasms of laughter—sometimes at the expense of his wartime counterparts.
Always on hand to advise and console was Harry Hopkins. He was FDR’s chief global representative, although he was frequently ill, often looking like a ghost, yet somehow managing to rise to every occasion. It was Hopkins who brought Churchill into line. It was Hopkins who eased tensions with Stalin. “I have been present at several great conferences where twenty or more of the most important executive personages were gathered together,” Churchill wrote. “When the discussion flagged and all seemed baffled, it was on these occasions he would rap out the deadly question, ‘Surely, Mr. President, here is the point we have got to settle. Are we going to face it or not?’ Faced it always was, and, being faced, was conquered.”
A widower living in the White House with his daughter, Diana, Hopkins was always by Roosevelt’s side. But in 1942, their close personal connection would change somewhat when Hopkins fell in love with a vivacious fashion writer and editor, Louise Gill Macy. They were married at the White House in Roosevelt’s Oval Study on July 30, 1942, and, in spite of Eleanor’s trepidation, chose to live together in the White House, with Diana. Despite his continued physical proximity, Hopkins’s new marriage left Roosevelt lonelier than ever.
Too often those days, his Scottish terrier, Fala, was the president’s sole close companion. Eleanor was more absent than ever. She had purchased an apartment on Washington Square in Greenwich Village, New York, and she regularly spent two days a week there, doing business in the city. She secretly exulted in the independence and privacy it gave her. At the same time, she had increasingly become FDR’s most valuable ambassador to the nation, not just with her daily columns but also with her frequent travels to meet the populace in person. The shy, retiring wife of old was a distant memory. She had truly come into her own. And although she often found herself in disagreement with her husband—over Japanese internment, for example—she practiced marital diplomacy and never publicly aired her contrary views.
In September, mindful of the upcoming midterm elections, FDR asked Eleanor to accompany him on a two-week train journey to visit defense plants and military facilities across the United States, and she reluctantly agreed to set aside her own jammed schedule to go with him at least as far as Chicago. The trip was top secret; Eleanor’s daily columns made no mention of it, and the press was left behind to wonder where the president was.
In Detroit they witnessed the dramatic metamorphosis of the car industry—American commercial can-do applied to winning the war. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, the automaking “Big Three,” had turned over their production lines completely to war operations, literally embodying the “arsenal of democracy.”
The tour carried FDR all the way west to Fort Lewis in Washington State and the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Seattle, ending at the Boeing plant, which would produce nearly 100,000 planes for the war effort.
At the naval hospital outside Seattle, the president asked that his car be parked outside the front entrance, so he could personally greet the war wounded, who came by foot and in wheelchairs to shake his hand.
AFTER MONTHS OF PREPARATION, Operation Torch was on for November 8. The plan was to simultaneously invade three ports: Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, and Oran and Algiers, beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, with an advance on Tunis to follow. The command center where Eisenhower would direct the battle was deep inside the Rock of Gibraltar, which was a perfectly situated fortress between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. British and US convoys would stage at Gibraltar, a British possession on the southern tip of Spain, then move out to their separate destinations. Major General George Patton would command an all-American force heading to Casablanca, judged to be the most difficult of the three landings. The Oran force, led by Major General Lloyd Fredendall, would also be American, with an escort by the British navy. Algiers would be a combined US-British force under the command of US major general Charles Ryder. The three landings would occur simultaneously in a surprise attack. “We were gambling for high stakes,” Eisenhower recalled.
FDR would have liked to see Torch launched before the midterm elections, thinking it would boost Democrat wins, but it was not to be. November 3 came and went with substantial losses to Democrats in both Congress and the statehouses. However, the Democratic Party held its control of the House and Senate, albeit by narrower margins. Roosevelt told Tully that it was just as well the elections had come before Torch; otherwise he’d have been accused of playing politics with the war.
On November 5, Eisenhower flew from London to take his command post in Gibraltar, with the cover story that he was traveling to Washington. Deep inside the cavernous subterranean interior of the Rock, a makeshift operations center had been set up in the tunnels, and there Eisenhower began his final preparations. He would later call it “the most dismal setting” he had encountered during the war. He wrote:
The eternal darkness of the tunnels was here and there partially pierced by feeble electric bulbs. Damp, cold air in block-long passages was heavy with a stagnation that did not noticeably respond to the clattering efforts of electric fans. Through the arched ceilings came a constant drip, drip, drip of surface water that faithfully but drearily ticked off the seconds of the interminable, almost unendurable wait that always occurs between the completion of a military plan and the moment action begins.
Despite all that, he felt a certain sense of awe at finding himself at the historic fortress at a critical point in the war. “I simply must have a grandchild,” he wrote in his diary, “or I’ll never have the fun of telling this when I’m fishing, gray-bearded, on the banks of a quiet bayou in the deep South.”
Worries about the poor weather forecast and a concern that the secrecy of the mission might be blown consumed him. But his greatest anxiety was the unknown factor of the Vichy French. After France had surrendered to Germany, two governments had been formed. The resistance government, the Free French, was under the direction of Charles de Gaulle, who was in London. The Vichy French, collaborating with the Nazis, were more influential in Europe and had a heavy presence in North Africa. In Algiers to visit his son, who had been stricken with polio, Vichy admiral Jean-François Darlan, a loyal Hitlerite, was on the scene and in control of the Vichy French troops, and Eisenhower knew that if Darlan called on his forces to fight the Allies, it could mean a long and bloody battle.
As it was, the French animosity toward the British was so intense that Torch was fronted as a largely US operation. According to Leahy, “There was some discussion in the Joint Chiefs meetings about dressing up British soldiers in American uniforms and painting United States insignia on British planes.” The idea never came to fruition. “It simply isn’t done by professional soldiers,” he noted curtly.
At 1:00 on the morning of November 8, the Allies landed. Monitoring their progress from Gibraltar, Eisenhower was heartened to learn that there was less resistance than had been expected, although the fighting continued and was far from over.
Driving to Shangri-La with FDR the day before the landings, Tully had noticed that the president was nervous and on edge. She didn’t know that Torch was imminent, but as she watched him throughout the day and into the next, she could see his anxiety growing. He would say only that he was awaiting an important message.
Finally the call came from Washington, and Tully noticed FDR’s hand shaking as he took the phone.
He listened intently, said nothing as he heard the full message, then burst out:
“Thank God. Thank God. That sounds grand. Congratulations. Casualties are comparatively light—much below your predictions. Thank God.”
He dropped the phone and turned to us.
“We have landed in North Africa. Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back.”
With the fight ongoing, Eisenhower knew that Darlan still had the power to summon more forceful opposition. He hoped to do an end run around Darlan by elevating French military hero General Henri Giraud, who had escaped after two years in a German prison camp and joined Eisenhower at Gibraltar. Giraud was difficult. When offered a leadership position in the invasion in the hope that he could garner the support of French forces in North Africa, Giraud insisted that he would take no position lower than commander of the entire operation—Eisenhower’s job. Eisenhower was forced to spend precious time wrangling with the general, and in any case, it made little difference. When Giraud finally broadcast an order to French forces to stop fighting against the Allies, the Vichy commanders dismissed him out of hand. Now Eisenhower was left with a terrible trade-off.
With Giraud’s effort a failure and Vichy forces putting up resistance, Eisenhower recalled Churchill telling him in colorful terms before he left England, “If I could meet Darlan, much as I hate him, I would cheerfully crawl on my hands and knees for a mile if by doing so I could get him to bring that fleet of his into the Allied forces.” So with his deputy, Major General Mark Clark, Eisenhower worked out a deal with Darlan: if he called on his forces to stand down, the Allies would support his authority in North Africa. The “Darlan deal,” as it was called, worked. Darlan was true to his word and ordered the French military to cease fighting; some even joined the Allies. Without Vichy resistance, the success of Torch was accomplished within days, allowing Eisenhower to strike out for Tunisia, the next target in North Africa. The Tunisian campaign would not go as smoothly as Torch. Large numbers of German forces were there to mount a defense. From his headquarters in Algiers, Eisenhower shuttled back and forth to the front. It was “a time when we worked harder, I think, than we ever had before,” he recalled. He knew they could not afford to underestimate the challenge of fighting an entrenched German force—“Once the Nazis have taken a position, they organize it for defense within two hours,” he warned his commanders. Tunisia was a critical pathway in the Mediterranean and the access point to Italy and southern Europe. The Nazis would not give in easily.
As Eisenhower battled on in Tunisia, back in the United States there was outrage over the Darlan deal. How could Eisenhower elevate a man who collaborated with the Nazis? If nothing else, it was a public relations nightmare, and Eisenhower was taking a lot of heat. Roosevelt was deeply concerned until he received a cable from Eisenhower, carefully outlining the necessity of making that temporary arrangement. Roosevelt cabled back that Eisenhower had his full support, based on the fact that he was on the ground and knew best. But he added that Darlan must be monitored very closely.
Despite Roosevelt’s cautious support, the storm over the Darlan deal did not abate. Churchill was also upset, perhaps having forgotten his earlier comment to Eisenhower. In his view, making an arrangement with Darlan was tantamount to collaborating with the Nazis. Eisenhower might have felt some regret for stepping into that political minefield. But the ultimate result was as he’d hoped.
Darlan’s role in governing ended up not being an issue; he was assassinated on Christmas Eve. Although a lone assassin was arrested and executed, people were left to wonder if the Americans, British, or de Gaulle had been behind his death. God knows it solved a big problem for all involved. Pragmatically, Churchill wrote, “Darlan’s murder, however criminal, relieved the Allies of their embarrassment at working with him, and at the same time left them with all the advantages he had been able to bestow during the vital hours of the Allied landings.”
Delighted with the progress of the North Africa campaign, Churchill nonetheless memorably warned, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
A hoped-for meeting of the “Big Three” in early 1943 was not to be. Stalin had once again declined to join FDR and Churchill, citing pressing matters at home, where the Soviet Union was engaged in a cataclysmic battle with the Nazis in Stalingrad, which would exact more than a million Soviet military casualties. FDR and Churchill decided that it still made sense for them to meet, along with their combined chiefs of staff, to discuss the next steps in the war. To Hull’s dismay, FDR chose to leave him at home, wanting to focus on military issues. The setting was the Anfa Hotel outside Casablanca. It was a beautiful modern building, surrounded by palm trees, on a hill overlooking the city. Well-appointed villas on the property would house FDR and Churchill, while their staffs stayed at the hotel.
On January 9, Roosevelt and Hopkins left Washington on a train bound for Miami, where they would take a flight south to Brazil and then across the Atlantic. Secrecy was so great that the usual civilian crew and attendants were replaced by Filipino sailors from Shangri-La. Roosevelt was secured in a specially built armored car designed for safety and comfort.
Taking copious notes on the trip, Hopkins described every step along the way, beginning with the president’s excitement at flying once again. He hadn’t been on a plane since his trip to the convention in 1932, and he would become the first sitting president to fly. As they lifted off in the Boeing 314 flying boat, the “Dixie Clipper,” early on the morning of January 11, Hopkins observed that FDR “acted like a sixteen-year-old.”
Changing planes to a Douglas C-54 in West Africa, Roosevelt arrived in Casablanca on the afternoon of January 14. Marshall and other staff were already in place, as was Churchill, who had suffered through a rough flight in a B-24 bomber. He’d also left England in top secrecy, his flight booked in Harriman’s name.
Dinner was a happy family affair. Two of Roosevelt’s sons, Elliott, now a lieutenant colonel, and Franklin, Jr., a lieutenant, had been summoned to join their father, as had Churchill’s son, Randolph, a captain, and Hopkins’s son Robert, a sergeant.
Despite whispers about special privileges in the midst of war, it was a rare opportunity to be together with loved ones.
Eisenhower, annoyed to be called away from the Tunisian campaign, flew in on a B-17. “The plane was rated ‘battle-fatigued,’” he would recall. “And it did look tired. The designation meant that the plane had been on bombing missions and had not had proper maintenance.”
As the plane flew over the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, one engine began to fail, followed by a sputtering of the second engine. In fear that the flight was doomed, everyone on board was ordered to put on parachutes. At the last moment, the pilot was able to get one of the engines working, and it limped into Casablanca without the need to abandon the flight in midair. The relieved Eisenhower noted, “With an anxious thought for an old football injury, I was delighted that I did not have to adopt this method of disembarkation.” Later Eisenhower was chagrined to receive a report that the plane had been scrapped. They’d come that close to disaster.
Wearily, Eisenhower joined the conference. Struggling in Tunisia, beset by political blowback from the Darlan episode, and suffering from a lingering bad cold, Eisenhower wasn’t feeling his best. “Ike seems jittery,” Roosevelt confided to Hopkins.
Eisenhower was frustrated by the distraction of French political problems. He hated politics and admitted to having little understanding of the ins and outs of the French power equation. But the problem had followed him to Casablanca, where the French situation was a main topic of discussion.
Invited to meet privately with Roosevelt, Eisenhower might have expected to be called on the carpet for subjecting the president to Darlan-related public relations problems. Instead, the president consoled and encouraged him and even joked that they’d simply had to convince people they weren’t turning fascist. Eisenhower found the president’s mood upbeat and credited his excitement to being out of the country for the first time in his presidency, save for Newfoundland. “Successful in shaking loose for a few days many of the burdens of state, he seemed to experience a tremendous uplift from the fact that he had secretly slipped away from Washington and was engaged in a historic meeting on territory that only two months before had been a battleground,” Eisenhower wrote of their meeting. Later, sitting with Churchill, Eisenhower was cheered by his vote of confidence. It seemed that the British were fully on his side. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Marshall was fighting for him, convincing Roosevelt to promote him to a four-star general.
Once back in the United States, Roosevelt would praise Eisenhower in a speech at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “I spent many hours in Casablanca with this young general, a descendent of Kansas pioneers,” he said. “I know what a fine, tough job he has done and how carefully and skillfully he is directing the soldiers under him.” Eisenhower might have laughed at the depiction of him as a “young general.” He was fifty-two.
The strategy going forward was a matter of intense debate. Stalin was still demanding a second front in Europe in 1943, and Marshall, too, was pushing for a cross-Channel operation sooner rather than later. Churchill was equally certain that an invasion of France could not be ready until 1944. The plan favored by Roosevelt and Churchill was victory in Tunisia, allowing the Allies to press on to southern Europe via Sicily.
The key decisions made about 1943 priorities included: the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky) under the command of Eisenhower, accelerated bomber strikes on Germany, continuation of food, supplies, and armaments to the Soviet Union, accelerated air attacks on Hitler’s U-boats at sea, and a continuation of troop buildup in Great Britain for the eventual invasion of France.
Hopkins was worried that the plan seemed less ambitious than many had hoped. He visited Churchill in his villa and found the prime minister in a pink bathrobe drinking a bottle of wine for breakfast. Hopkins admitted to Churchill that he thought their plans “seemed to me like a pretty feeble effort for two great countries in 1943.” Marshall certainly agreed. But Churchill was adamant about the wisdom of the strategy to delay a direct assault on western Europe until they had strengthened their position.
More time than anyone would have liked was taken up with the issue of French leadership in the aftermath of Darlan’s assassination. Giraud and de Gaulle had been invited to join the conference, and FDR and Churchill hoped to enlist their agreement in forming a governing partnership. That was the best-case scenario in a situation with lousy choices. According to FDR’s son Elliott, the president thought Giraud was “a dud of a leader.” And he didn’t trust de Gaulle, who was imperious and stubborn, more interested, he thought, in personal power than in the future of France. Churchill was even more vehement in his feelings about de Gaulle. The two men had a long history of mutual contempt, and Churchill suspected de Gaulle of having fascist leanings. It seemed like a long shot that de Gaulle would agree to a power-sharing arrangement with Giraud. FDR compared the two to an eager bridegroom (Giraud) and an unwilling bride (de Gaulle) who must be persuaded to consummate a marriage.
At first de Gaulle, who was deeply miffed that he’d deliberately been left out of intelligence on the Torch landings and enraged by the Darlan deal, declined the invitation to come to Casablanca. “De Gaulle is on his high horse,” Churchill grumbled to Roosevelt. “Refuses to come down here.”
Knowing that de Gaulle’s operation was funded primarily by the British, Roosevelt snapped, “Who pays for de Gaulle’s food?”
“Well, the British do,” said Churchill.
“Why don’t you stop his food and maybe he will come.”
Something like that happened. Churchill was able to force de Gaulle’s attendance by indicating that Great Britain might withhold funds for his Free French movement. He arrived in Casablanca near the end of the conference.
Giraud, who had been present for most of the conference, was equally unimpressed with the idea of sharing power with de Gaulle. Harriman noted that each man came with a plan designed to put himself at the top. “Each Frenchman offered the other the privilege of serving under him,” he wrote. “De Gaulle said, ‘You will be Foch, I Clemenceau’ [a reference to Premier Georges Clemenceau and the insubordinate Marshal Ferdinand Foch after World War I—an odd and unflattering comparison]. Giraud offered a War Committee of three, himself as head.”
To everyone’s relief, on the last day of the conference, the two men set aside their conflicts in favor of the compelling need to defeat Hitler. Roosevelt quickly arranged a photo opportunity, with the four of them—Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Giraud—together in apparent unity. The stunned Frenchmen, feeling duped but having no choice, gamely shook hands for the cameras.
The press had finally been allowed inside, and about fifty newsmen sat cross-legged outside FDR’s villa as the president and then Churchill described the conference and the Allies’ military readiness in glowing terms. In his remarks, FDR made a statement that would become the keynote of the conference:
Another point. I think we have all had it in our hearts and heads before, but I don’t think that it has ever been put down on paper by the Prime Minister and myself, and that is the determination that peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power.
Some of you Britishers know the old story—we had a General called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister’s, early days he was called “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan. That means a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.
Churchill didn’t necessarily agree with the concept of unconditional surrender—and was quick to say it hadn’t been his idea. But he stood by FDR, based on his belief that negotiations with Hitler were and always would be impossible. FDR later admitted to Hopkins that the idea of unconditional surrender had come at the last minute. “We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together,” he said, “that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee—and then suddenly the press conference was on.”
The hasty choice of words and the notion of unconditional surrender would inspire heated public debate. It had never before been US policy to obliterate the political systems of enemies, only to win the fight. Many experts worried that such a bold declaration of no negotiations for peace would lengthen the war. And if the purpose of unconditional surrender was the destruction of philosophies based on conquest and the subjugation of peoples, how, then, to view the Soviet Union under Stalin? Roosevelt was understandably reluctant to address this contradiction. In truth, if defeating the Axis Powers was the goal, he had little choice. But he had to worry about how Stalin would use the spoils of war to harden his hold on his region and beyond.
As the conference ended and Roosevelt prepared for the long journey home, Churchill, in his most persuasive voice, implored, “You cannot come all this way to North Africa without seeing Marrakesh. . . . I must be with you when you see the sunset on the snows of the Atlas Mountains.” Roosevelt agreed, and he and Churchill made the 150-mile trip across the desert by car. In the evening of their arrival at a lavish privately owned American villa, Roosevelt was carried to the villa’s tower, where he sat with Churchill and watched the sunset glowing on the snowy caps of Mount Atlas, just as Churchill had described it.
FDR arrived home to more heartening news. The Russians had triumphed at Stalingrad, after an epic battle. Apparently, one prediction of Churchill’s seemed to have come true. Back in May, he’d reminded his citizenry that Hitler’s apparent dominance in the Soviet Union was deceiving. “He forgot about winter,” he had boomed in a radio broadcast. “There is a winter, you know, in Russia. For a good many months the temperature is apt to fall very low. There is snow, there is frost, and all that. Hitler forgot about this Russian winter.” In the end, the cold, exhausted, dispirited German forces were defeated.
“Victory, however, made Stalin no more genial,” Churchill noted. Newly emboldened by that significant victory, Stalin dug in his heels and demanded to be taken seriously. He’d run his end of the war much as he pleased, supported by aid from the Allies. But he didn’t feel they were giving his needs full respect. The second front in Europe was a promise his counterparts had dangled in front of him time and again, only to pull it away with vague excuses. He wanted more, and he wanted it soon.
Indeed, as thrilling as the German defeat at Stalingrad was, it came at a heavy price, with casualties, both military and civilian, measuring in the millions. How much longer could Stalin hold off the Germans? And although the United States and Great Britain had scored significant victories in Italy and the Pacific, it was a critical moment in the war, when complacency and bad choices could turn into defeat. Most important, the Allies had yet to confront the Germans in western Europe, the setting where the war would be won or lost. As the Allied nations looked toward 1943, there was a grave awareness of being at the brink of the war’s final, most decisive movement. They couldn’t afford to get it wrong.