After returning to Paris, and following an extended detour to Italy, where he was again fêted as a senior statesman and had an opportunity to catch up with an old New York political friend, Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, serving as a captain in the Army Air Corps, Roosevelt resumed his inspection tour of France.
At the bustling port of Bordeaux, the American presence was everywhere. The U.S. Army was in command of all the docks, which extended up the banks of the Gironde for almost two miles. The wharves were crowded with ships, traveling cranes, railroad tracks, freight cars, and storehouses, handling the colossal influx of materiel pouring in on a daily basis to feed and equip the nearly two million uniformed Americans in France. At Pauillac, near the mouth of the Gironde, he inspected the huge air station built and manned by the American Navy. When he learned that the unassembled aircraft shipped over from America had proved unfit to fly, he fired off a blistering cable to Washington reporting “present conditions are scandalous.” At Bassens, another busy American station about five miles from Bordeaux, he ran into more old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Astor, and he spent the night at their home.
Then it was down the Loire to Saint-Nazaire, where FDR was particularly eager to inspect the five U.S. naval guns which had recently arrived from the States, and which were in the process of being mounted on railroad cars. These huge 14-inch guns were the heaviest mobile artillery being used by the Allies. Each gun was sixty feet long, weighed ninety tons, and hurled fourteen-hundred-pound projectiles as far as twenty-five miles. They were sea-going guns, originally designed for battlecruisers; but when it became clear that American battlecruisers were not going to play much of a part in the war, someone suggested that the guns be mounted on railway cars for use on land. Roosevelt had seized on the idea and immediately became its chief proponent. It was his enthusiasm that had been responsible for the acceptance of the extraordinary proposal.
The Baldwin Locomotive Works had built the specially designed mounts and carriages in record time. Each gun had its own railroad train, made up of a regular Baldwin locomotive and its tender; the huge gun car; three construction cars, one fitted with a crane and another with material for the emplacement of the gun; two ammunition cars; a workshop; a fuel car; three berthing cars for the crew’s living quarters; a kitchen car; and a car for the officers in charge. All crew members were Navy personnel, and each car had “USN” stenciled on its side. An American flag flew from the top of the gun car.
All five guns were under the command of Rear Admiral Charles P. Plunkett. Roosevelt and his naval aide, Captain Edward McCauley, were waiting for Plunkett outside the headquarters building, when they saw him approaching, dressed in a U.S. Army khaki uniform, like the Marines they had seen at the front. He wore two stars on each shoulder, indicating the rank of either a major general or a rear admiral.
As Plunkett came within hearing distance, Roosevelt turned to McCauley with a wink and asked loftily, “Captain McCauley, who is this major general?”
“Mr. Secretary, this is Admiral Plunkett, commanding the Naval Battery guns,” McCauley answered.
“Admiral,” Roosevelt said sternly, “you are out of uniform.”
Plunkett, a tough, hardnosed veteran, was momentarily nonplussed by Roosevelt’s reprimand, and began to explain why it was impossible for him or his men to wear the easily soiled whites or the heavy navy blue uniform for what was essentially railroad work, and how he had petitioned Washington for permission to wear khakis but had received no response. A smiling Roosevelt assured the admiral that he had only been joking, and immediately gave him the necessary authority for the change in uniform. In return, he asked Plunkett for an equally unorthodox favor.
He explained to the admiral that he was determined to get into uniform as soon as he returned to America and he wished to do so as a Navy officer. But he also wished to serve at the front, and in this war few U.S. Navy officers were seeing action of any kind except convoy duty. Plunkett and his men, however, were going to the front, and Roosevelt asked if he could join them. Plunkett thought about it for a moment and countered with request of his own: since Roosevelt spoke French, could he provide Plunkett with enough swear words to force a French train into a siding when the admiral needed to move his guns forward? Roosevelt laughed, and then “with certain imaginative genius … handed him a line of French swear words, real and imaginary, which impressed him greatly,” whereupon Plunkett promised to take Roosevelt on as a lieutenant commander.
Over the following week, Roosevelt kept up the same whirlwind pace, going north to Belgium—or at least to the 235 square miles of Belgium still in Allied hands—where he was presented to the Belgian king. In the same week he managed to survive two air raids and several German artillery bombardments, to witness from land a sea fight between destroyers and a U-boat just off the beach, and to hold long talks with the British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, and the American General John J. Pershing. Then it was time to get back to England and his own pet project, the North Sea Barrage.
The Roosevelt party, traveling in a special train furnished by the Royal Navy, traveled north overnight, and arrived at Invergordon on the east coast of Scotland on the morning of August 30. It was one of the two American advance bases that had been set up to lay the thousands of sea mines—manufactured in the United States and assembled in Scotland—that would form the barrage, stretching in a fifteen-mile-wide swath across the 240 miles of the North Sea from the Orkney Islands to Norway. The operation was being carried out by a fleet of American minelayers that had been specially equipped to handle the attenuated electrical mines. The actual laying of the Barrage had started in June 1918, and most of it had been completed by the time of Roosevelt’s inspection.
As soon as their train arrived, Roosevelt and his team were ushered on board the USS Roanoke, one of the converted minelayers, and taken out for a demonstration of mine-laying techniques. The squadron of minelayers, protected by an escort of cruisers and destroyers, and traveling at top speed, could drop off the mines at the rate of one every twelve or fifteen seconds, and in the course of thirteen expeditions of two days each, the Americans laid 56,600 mines over the 240-mile width of open sea.
The mines, each with an anchor to hold it in place and a buoy to keep the antenna vertical, took their places automatically as the unit hit the water and lay at 300-foot intervals in three tiers, the first at a depth of 45 feet, the second at 160 feet, and the third at 240 feet. As more of these three-tiered rows were put down, the Barrage was built to a thickness of many miles, requiring from one to three hours for a submarine to traverse it. Each mine contained 300 pounds of TNT, set to explode whenever metal brushed against the wire antenna suspended between its buoy and the mine. Before the close of the war, 22 million pounds of TNT and 50 million feet of wire cable went into the manufacture of this barrier of high explosives. After the war, Admiral Sims would look back on the North Sea Barrage in wonder. “Nothing like it had ever been attempted before,” Sims wrote. “The combined operation involved a mass of detail which the lay mind can hardly comprehend.”
By any measure, Roosevelt’s European trip had been an unalloyed triumph. Over a period of two months, he had seen and heard, experienced and accomplished, everything he could have wished for. He had seen the devastation of war and been close enough to the action to undergo air raids and be fired upon by enemy artillery. He had dealt with every issue involving the U.S. Navy in Europe, from the strategic relationships with the Royal Navy to the deployment of U.S. destroyers at Queenstown, and from the serious production problems at the Navy aircraft assembly base at Pauillac to the morale issues of U.S. Marines dressed in Army khaki. And to top it off, he had seen the completion of his most prized project, the North Sea Barrage, and had even secured, through Admiral Plunkett, a place at the front as a commissioned officer of the United States Navy.
Throughout his long weeks of travel, he had been accorded every formal honor, including state dinners, official briefings, and private meetings with every Allied leader, political, military, and royal. It was this last achievement that is probably the most telling achievement of his trip—that he was treated more as a head of state than an assistant secretary of the Navy—for it suggests just how important the Roosevelt name was in 1918, and how closely Franklin was perceived as an embodiment of Theodore, a younger, equally authoritative, spiritual reincarnation of the former president.
But there was a price that Roosevelt had paid for such a triumph. He had pushed himself relentlessly from the time of his arrival, meeting a schedule of state and social obligations that overwhelmed everyone else in his party, and his body, always susceptible to illness and minor breakdowns, had at last succumbed to exhaustion. Bound for home at last, he fell ill with double pneumonia and collapsed into bed in his stateroom on board the Leviathan and barely left it for the entire voyage. When the ship finally docked in Hoboken, he was still gravely ill, and Eleanor and his mother, forewarned of his condition, met the ship with a hired ambulance. He was carried ashore on a stretcher and transported as quickly as possible to his mother’s house in Manhattan, because his own house next door had been rented out while he and Eleanor lived in Washington.
Soon after his return, he was gratified by a brief but heartfelt note from Sagamore Hill:
Dear Franklin,
We are deeply concerned about your sickness, and trust you will soon be well. We are very proud of you. With love,
Aff. Yours Theodore Roosevelt
A few days after his arrival, Eleanor was dutifully unpacking his extensive luggage, which contained everything from elaborate formal wear to fishing gear, along with official papers and correspondence. Among the latter she came upon a group of letters addressed in a familiar hand. With a shock, she realized they were love letters from Lucy Mercer. As she read the letters, “the bottom dropped out of my particular world,” she told biographer Joseph Lash many years later, “and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”
What happened next remains something of a mystery to this day. We know that Eleanor confronted Franklin and offered him his freedom if he wished to continue the relationship with Lucy, but should he—for the sake of the children—wish to keep the family together, he must never see her again. Franklin’s mother was far less lenient in her reaction. She told him that if he chose to desert his wife and five children, she would never forgive him, would never give him another dollar, and he would never inherit Springwood, the Hyde Park home he so loved.
Louis Howe was consulted, and he made the painful but obvious observation that a divorce would be the end of his political career.
After considerable soul-searching, Franklin agreed to give up Lucy and try to rebuild his marriage with Eleanor. What is generally overlooked is the fact that he did not immediately agree to Eleanor’s terms, lenient as they were. It took him a long time. One might assume that Franklin Roosevelt, so profoundly ambitious, so keenly aware of his position in life and so determined to take full advantage of it, would have very quickly seen that his relationship with Lucy Mercer, no matter how gratifying it might be, simply had to be sacrificed to his future White House aspirations. But in fact there was no quick decision. It was a long, wrenching process, and clearly Franklin must have agonized over the prospect of losing Lucy.
Eleanor had to return to Washington to put the children into school, while Franklin went north to Hyde Park to recuperate. Weeks later, in the middle of October, with the decision to give up Lucy somehow made, Franklin and Eleanor returned together to Washington and a strained future.
We are left to wonder: what if they had decided to divorce? What if he had chosen Lucy and, with her, the end of his political career? Rarely, if ever, has a domestic decision between two private people held such profound consequences for the future of so many billions of people the world over.