Roosevelt arrived at Portsmouth, on the south coast of England, on July 21, and was met by a solicitous group of Royal Navy admirals who treated him as an honored guest and drove him up to London in a Rolls-Royce. He was delighted by all the attention, but, as he wrote later, “Personally I think it is because they wanted to report as to whether I was house-broken or not.”
Thus began a week in which every waking moment seemed to be crowded with significant events. Over the next few days, he had several long confidential and fruitful conferences with Sir Eric Geddes, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and Admiral of the Fleet Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, the First Sea Lord, during which he learned that a new antisubmarine-net barrier had been designed for closing the English Channel to U-boats; that six million tons of shipping a month was being convoyed by British escort vessels, which was twenty-four times the amount convoyed by all other Allied navies, including that of the United States; and that certain large British fighting ships were being fitted out as “airplane ships,” with clear decks for the takeoff and landing of wheeled aircraft (the U.S. Navy had experimented with aircraft carriers as early as 1910). He spent three highly interesting and educative days with Geddes in an inspection trip to Queenstown, Ireland, headquarters of an Anglo-American naval command that would supply more than ninety percent of the escorts for 360 convoys during the war. Overall, he was highly impressed by the magnitude and ingenuity of the British naval effort.
Returning to England from Queenstown, he made further inspections of British and American installations and attended more conferences with British and American officers at the Admiralty and at the U.S. Navy headquarters in London. He learned of a disagreement between the American Admiral William Sims and the British Admiral David Beatty, regarding the laying of the North Sea mine barrage. Beatty, who had led the Royal Navy at Jutland, disliked the barrage intensely and insisted that extensive gaps be left in it for the passage of British ships. Sims, now fully converted to the North Sea project, insisted that the line of mines run unbroken from Scotland to Norway. Roosevelt cabled Washington, urging the Navy Department to firmly support Sims.
He spent the weekend of July 27 as guest of his old friends the Waldorf Astors at Cliveden, their grand country estate outside London. Early Monday morning, July 29, he motored to London to begin the most memorable two days of his stay in England— indeed, two of the most memorable days of his life. He was delighted and flattered by his private audience with King George V at Buckingham Palace. “The king has a nice smile and a very open, quick and cordial way of greeting one,” he wrote Eleanor. “He is not as short as I had expected, and I think his face is stronger than photographs make it appear.” When Roosevelt mentioned “something about having been to school in Germany and having seen their preparations for the first stages of the war machine,” the king said that he too had gone to school in Germany for a year, and then, “with a twinkle in his eye,” adding, in reference to his cousin the Kaiser, “you know, I have a number of relations in Germany, but I can tell you frankly that in all my life I have never seen a German gentleman.” The king told Franklin that he had just had a nice letter from Uncle Ted, which led him to speak with much sympathy about the loss of Quentin Roosevelt, TR’s youngest son, who had died when his airplane was shot down at the front. “This type of interview is supposed to last only 15 minutes,” Roosevelt noted proudly, “but it was nearly three quarters of an hour before the king made a move.”
There followed a luncheon given for him and Geddes by the Anglo-American luncheon club, at which both he and Geddes spoke; then, in the afternoon, a visit to London’s principal YMCA, where he spoke “to a great gathering of American soldiers, with a sprinkling of Canadians, Anzacs and our blue jackets.” That evening, he attended, as a prominent guest, “one of the famous Gray Inn’s dinners, a really historic occasion in honor of the war ministers,” at which he heard Lord Curzon speak “most wonderfully for an hour,” and, after listening to responses to Curzon by a Canadian and by General Jan Smuts of South Africa, was himself unexpectedly called upon to speak, “to my horror.”
It was at this dinner that Roosevelt first met Winston Churchill, newly appointed Minister of Munitions. It was not a cordial encounter. Churchill was patronizing and dismissive of Roosevelt, probably as a result of drink. Years later, in 1939, Roosevelt would tell Joseph P. Kennedy: “I have always disliked [Churchill] since the time I went to England in 1918. He acted like a stinker at a dinner I attended, lording it over all of us.…” In a subsequent conversation with Kennedy, he added that Churchill had been “one of the few men in public life who was rude to me.”
The next day, at a luncheon given him at the American Embassy, he had a “very good time” with Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who is “just like his pictures; thick set; not very tall; rather a large head; and rather long hair; but what impressed me more than anything else was his tremendous vitality.”
Throughout that week in London, the British treated Roosevelt at every turn as a very important person. He was given direct access to all the most significant members of government and society, and was treated as an honored guest everywhere. The fact that his name was Roosevelt undoubtedly weighed heavily in his favor, and was at least as significant as his secondary position in the American Navy Department, but what may have been just as important to the British was the fact that he was indeed “house-broken.” He had Old World manners, a sense of values with which they could identify, and a degree of finesse that only a handful of American political figures could match.
On Wednesday morning, July 31, he and his party traveled to the coast and at noon arrived at the Dover headquarters of Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, commandant of the naval district through which the great bulk of troops and materiel were pouring from the British Isles into Belgium and France. After lunch with Sir Roger and Lady Keyes, he boarded a new British destroyer. “As I came over the side my flag was broken out at the main,” he reported proudly, “the first time this sort of thing has ever happened on a British ship,” and made the two-hour run to Dunkirk, during which he and his party witnessed a special demonstration of Britain’s new “artificial fog,” laid by highspeed P-boats (patrol boats, similar to destroyers).
As they approached Dunkirk during the last ten miles of their crossing, they passed through an Allied minefield, “with which I had something to do in the summer of 1917,” Roosevelt reported smugly, and which had proved to be highly effective. “Sir Roger Keyes told me that he did not think more than five submarines had passed through the channel since January 1.”
At Dunkirk he had his first direct view of the actual fighting war. For three years, the town had been bombed virtually every night that flying was possible. It also lay within long-range shelling distance of the front, and regularly took fire from the German artillery. That night he slept in a château outside Calais, which had been heavily damaged by bombs. By evening of the following day, August 1, he was luxuriously housed in the Hotel Crillon, in Paris, as a guest of the French government.
His reception in Paris was in every way a repeat of the triumphant welcome he had received from the British. On his first full day in the city, he managed to squeeze in interviews with the minister of foreign affairs, as well as President Raymond Poincaré and the fiery Premier Georges Clemenceau, who “almost ran forward to meet me and shook hands as if he meant it; grabbed me by the arm and walked me over to his desk and sat me down about two inches away. He is only 77 years old and people say he is getting younger every day.” He then attended a luncheon at the Élysée Palace in honor of Herbert Hoover, who had recently arrived in Europe to organize food distribution. That evening, they attended a special American program at the Folies Bergère.
The next day being Saturday, he took time off from official duties to catch up on various family members residing in Paris. “I went for Aunt Dora at noon and with her went out to Neuilly to see Cousin Hortense Howland, then back to pick up Cousin Charlie Forbes Gaston.” After lunch, he called on Marechal Joseph Joffre at the École Militaire. “We had a delightful and intimate talk about the days in May 1917 when our decision to send a really great army to Europe hung in the balance.… I think he felt, and rightly so, that only a small part of the million and a quarter Americans now in France would be here had it not been for his mission at the outbreak of the war.”
Then it was tea with more Americans, including his Cousin Archie—Archibald Bulloch Roosevelt, Theodore’s third son—who was serving as a captain in the 26th Infantry Division and had established a “splendid record,” as Franklin reported with a tinge of envy.
The next morning, Roosevelt and his eight-man entourage piled into two cars to visit the front. The date was August 4, the start of France’s fifth year of war, and as they traveled out of Paris they passed scenes of carnage everywhere. At Château-Thierry, where the U.S. Marines had distinguished themselves, they tramped through what had been known as the Bois de Belleau until the French changed the name to the Bois de la Brigade de Marine in honor of the heroic fight they had put up.
On the following day, Roosevelt inspected a battalion of the Fifth Regiment of Marines. “The majority were in the khaki of the army, their own olive drab having been worn out long ago. The replacement troops were eagerly recognizable by the olive drab. It gave one a pretty good idea of the heavy casualties which had taken place in the last fighting near Soissons.” The Marines had suffered about forty percent casualties at Belleau Wood and another twenty percent soon after, at Soissons.
Roosevelt commented that the Marines in the army khaki could scarcely be distinguished from the Army troops. Marine General John A. Lejeune said he wanted his men to wear the Marine Corps’ globe and anchor symbol on their collars to distinguish them, but that he lacked the authority to give such an order. Roosevelt immediately understood the important morale boost such an order would give the men, and enthusiastically concurred: “I told him I would assume responsibility and then and there issued an order that this device be worn in recognition of the splendid work of the Marine Brigade.”
Before returning to Paris, the group motored on to Verdun, scene of one of the bloodiest engagements of the war where, in a battle that raged from February to December 1916, over 300,000 French and German soldiers were killed, and where at least another half million were wounded. The fighting ended in a stalemate, with each army in control of the same territory it had held at the start. Roosevelt and his party proceeded across the River Meuse to the famous battlefield. They were supplied with helmets and gas masks, since German artillery still contested the area. On their way, they passed huge cemeteries that reached to the horizon, “thousands and thousands of graves tightly packed together … only a few hundred yards short of the actual fighting line.” The battlefield itself “didn’t look like a battlefield, for there was little or nothing to see … there were no gashes on these hills, no trenches, no tree trunks, no heaps of ruins … this earth had been churned by shells, and churned again … trench systems and forts and roads have been swallowed up in a brown chaos.”
The French colonel who was their guide pointed out where the village of Fleury had once stood. “Not even a brick on the tumbled earth could verify his statement.” When the awed Americans stopped to take pictures, the colonel hurried them along. He had noticed German observation balloons to the north, which would have undoubtedly have spotted them, and he warned that they would soon be the target of German artillery. Sure enough, moments later they heard “the long whining whistle of a shell … followed by the dull boom and puff of smoke of the explosion” at the point they had just left.
Franklin Roosevelt’s tour of the front lines in August 1918 is central to any understanding of him as a future war leader. He was shaken by the high casualty figures of the Marine Corps and by the grim horror of the butchered landscape and the almost endless rows of graves at Verdun. It was the only time in his life that he experienced modern war at first hand, and the memory of it left a deep and profound impression that would influence his thinking about war forever. In 1936, as president, he shared his feelings with the public in a famous speech at Chautauqua:
I have seen war ... I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen two hundred limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of one thousand that went forward forty-eight hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.
The tour of the front would have generated other consequences as well. The ugly, pointless horror of the battlefield stood in stark contrast to the romantic concept which had always been central to Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy, that war was somehow a noble enterprise. In the days following FDR’s tour of the front, it would have been natural for him to reflect on the fact that if America had declared war after the Lusitania sinking, as TR had demanded and FDR had secretly wanted, many of those graves would have likely been filled with American doughboys. Would America’s earlier involvement in such a frightful, meat-grinding land war have been an appropriate response to a single U-boat attack on an ocean liner of a belligerent power? Whether Franklin was conscious of it or not, the visit to Verdun would permanently redefine his unquestioned admiration for Uncle Ted.