5

Supreme Command

ON DECEMBER 26, 1941, Winston Churchill suffered a minor heart attack while in the White House and was sent to Florida by the President to recuperate for a week. Roosevelt, whose patience had at times been sorely tried by the Prime Minister’s visit, was relieved. “It always took him several days to catch up on sleep after Mr. Churchill left,” Eleanor Roosevelt later wrote, concerned for her husband’s rest.¹

Churchill’s stay in the White House certainly proved exhausting for the President, the First Lady, and for the White House staff. Plans for offensive action—especially the President’s “great pet scheme” for U.S. landings in Northwest Africa—had had to be put on the back burner while the Japanese rampage in the Pacific dominated all military planning and operations. Many ideas were nevertheless advanced—perhaps the most important of which was the President’s notion of a new declaration of principles by the Associated Powers.

The document’s final maturation, indeed the President’s whole method of bringing a project to fruition, amazed the Prime Minister’s military assistant, Colonel Jacob—symbolized in the “mess” he saw in the President’s study on the second floor of the White House. The President “leads a most simple life,” Jacob described in his diary. “He moves about the White House in a wheeled chair. His study is a delightful oval room, looking South, and is one of the most untidy rooms I have ever seen. It is full of junk. Half-opened parcels, souvenirs, books, papers, knick-knacks, and all kinds of miscellaneous articles lie about everywhere, on tables, on chairs, and on the floor. His desk is piled with papers and alongside his chair he has a sort of bookcase also filled with books, papers and junk of all sorts piled just anyhow. It would drive an orderly-minded man, or a woman, mad. The pictures on the walls are fine, mostly prints or paintings of ships. There are also good bookcases round the walls, and the furniture is not bad. But the effect is ruined by the rubbish piled everywhere. It is rather typical of the general lack of organization in the American Government.” As a proud English bureaucrat, Jacob found the “British Governmental machine” to be, by contrast, “like a motor car or even a train. Provided a reasonably efficient driver is in charge it will go. The American Government is not a machine at all. The various parts are not assembled into a working whole. The President is in the position of a patriarch, with a rather unruly flock, and much depends on the actual men who actuate or influence the various sections of that flock. The patriarch also relies to a great extent on sheep dogs, who are his stand-by, but are regarded with fear and suspicion by the sheep.”²

One of the sheep dogs was Bill Donovan, a lawyer whom the President had put in charge of a “kind of super intelligence organization,” the Office of the Coordinator of Information, forerunner of the OSS (and later the CIA). Another was Harry Hopkins, “a frail anaemic man of great honesty and courage, who lives permanently in the White House and is the President’s constant companion. . . . Hopkins is usually to be seen in a magenta dressing gown and pyjamas. Other examples of the President’s peculiar method of working are the personal representatives he sends about the place, such as [former ambassador William C.] Bullitt in the Middle East. These report to him direct, and to our way of thinking are irresponsible meddlers.”³

When Lord Halifax went to the White House to discuss a draft of the revised Atlantic Charter with President Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, he too was bewildered. “They are the most amazing people,” he noted in his own diary, “in the way of what seems to us most disorderly and unbusinesslike methods of working. But somehow the result comes out not too badly and they seem quite happy working like that. It would drive me to drink,” the ascetic Catholic reflected. “While the draft [charter] was being retyped Harry Hopkins took me to wait in his bedroom while he dressed, his bedroom serving as bedroom and office. It is the oddest menage I have ever seen.”⁴

 

Equipped with his own silk Chinese-dragon dressing gown and beloved romper suit, Winston Churchill had fitted almost seamlessly into this strange ménage, however. He had certainly made himself at home. “Now, Fields,” he had instructed the President’s head butler, who at six feet three towered over the Prime Minister. “We want to leave here as friends, right? So I need you to listen. One, I don’t like talking outside my quarters; two, I hate whistling in the corridors; and three, I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne and 90 year old brandy before I go to sleep at night.”⁵

In the end, Churchill stayed at the White House almost a month rather than his planned week. The First Lady might resent Churchill’s heavy, all-day drinking and late hours, as well as his egoism, but the President seemed glad of his company, and never once complained—even when he and Churchill clashed over Roosevelt’s desire to include India as a British Dominion in the proud list of nations subscribing to his declaration of the Associated Powers. “Being convinced that complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom,” the draft text began, “and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands . . .”

Churchill would not, however agree to India as a signatory beside the Dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—in fact, the Prime Minister refused even to agree to the inclusion of India as a colony. To the President’s relief, though, the text of his joint declaration was accepted by the governments of some twenty-six nations in all, including the Soviet Union—despite, to the President’s delight, his insistence upon the inclusion of religion as a freedom for which the signatories were fighting. “Let’s get it out on Jan 1,” Roosevelt penned with relief on December 30, 1941, in a note to Harry Hopkins. “That means speed. FDR.”⁶

Awakening on the morning of New Year’s Day, prior to a church service in Alexandria to which he was taking Churchill and the British ambassador, then to the laying of a symbolic wreath on President Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, the President had a final brainwave, however.

 

Dressing quickly with the help of his valet, the President shifted to his wheelchair and rushed to the Rose Room, where Churchill was staying, to tell him: the revised Atlantic Charter, which currently had no formal name, should be called “A Declaration by the United Nations.”⁷

Outside Churchill’s door, however, stood W. R. Jones, an assistant to Colonel Jacob. Though an admirable clerk, Mr. Jones had, as Colonel Jacob noted with amusement in his diary, “a most peculiarly pompous and over-correct way of speaking. He never can get a perfectly straightforward sentence out. If you ask him where Brigadier Hollis [Jacob’s immediate boss] has gone, instead of saying ‘I’m afraid I don’t know,’ he will say ‘I fear it is not within my knowledge where the Brigadier may be at the moment.’” Conveying a message from Colonel Jacob to the Prime Minister, Jones had been told that the Prime Minister was in the bath. Jones had therefore waited in “the central passage” on the second floor, “and stood looking about for a few moments, when what should he see coming towards him but the President in his wheeled chair, unaccompanied by anyone. Jones stood rooted to the spot, and the President addressed him saying:

“‘Good morning. Is your Prime Minister up yet?’

“‘Well, Sir,’ said Jones, ‘it is within my knowledge that the Prime Minister is at the present moment in his bath.’

“‘Good,’ said the President, ‘then open the door.’

“Jones accordingly flung open the bathroom door to admit the President, and there was the Prime Minister standing completely naked on the bath mat.

“‘Don’t mind me,’ said the President, as the Prime Minister grabbed a towel.

“Jones’ day was made,” Jacob recorded. “Not only had he seen the inside of the White House, but he had spoken to the President and seen a meeting between him and the Prime Minister in quite unique circumstances.”⁸

Jones certainly had—the two leaders working in what Churchill would correctly call “closest intimacy” as they discussed the new name for the signatories to the upgraded Atlantic Charter: the United Nations.⁹

 

President Roosevelt’s next great achievement during Churchill’s time at the White House was his success in junking Secretary Hull’s idea of a Supreme War Council and creating, instead, an official (yet never formally instituted, in writing or in law) military body to carry out his directions as commander in chief: the so-called Combined Chiefs of Staff. With its headquarters in Washington, the new body would translate the President’s military policies into combined action by the forces of the United States and Britain, as well as subsidiary contingents. Moreover, to make the new system work, the President decided on General Marshall’s advice that it would be best to appoint supreme commanders in each theater of combat fighting the Axis powers, to command the Allied air, naval, and ground forces.

This notion of supreme theater commanders had arisen at the meeting between the U.S. and British military chiefs of staff on Christmas Day. General Marshall had proposed the idea—a single commander directing not only the “air, ground and ships”¹⁰ of his own nation in the region, but all the combatant forces of the nations contributing to the campaign. The President, still scarred by the dysfunctional, fragmented performance of the three armed services at Pearl Harbor, then leaped at the idea of such “unity of command” at a meeting at the White House on the morning of December 27, as Secretary Stimson recorded in his diary¹¹—indeed, he had driven it through against the opposition not only of Admirals King, Stark, and Turner, but of Prime Minister Churchill, as Colonel Jacob noted in his diary.

“When the idea was first put forward there was almost universal opposition,” Colonel Jacob wrote when he returned to England, “and the Prime Minister expressed his doubts about the wisdom of such a system as General Marshall proposed to set up. The U.S. Navy were also against it. General Marshall, however, had backing from the President, whom he had convinced that unity of command would be the only solution of the Far East troubles, and that nothing could be worse than having several independent commanders of different nationality, especially in a theater where interests are divergent.”¹²

Churchill’s opposition had initially threatened to derail the idea. General Marshall then put forward a suggestion the President thought inspired, politically: namely to appoint, as the first such supreme commander in the Far East, a British general! The President had therefore sent Marshall in person to convince Churchill—which Marshall did, proposing that the supreme commander should be General Sir Archibald Wavell, the current commander in chief in India. “This very naturally put a different complexion on the affair,” Colonel Jacob noted, “as it was hard for the Prime Minister to refuse to back a principle which was undoubtedly attractive in theory and which was to be applied in a way which recognized the pre-eminence in the field of choice of a British general.”¹³

The die was thus cast—even Colonel Jacob being amazed at his deeply conservative Prime Minister’s apostasy. Churchill’s acquiescence was, however, followed by an even more revolutionary innovation: namely that the Combined Chiefs of Staff would be headquartered not in London but in Washington, D.C.—a decision that the Prime Minister meekly accepted, but which Jacob, on his return to England, found had raised the hackles of every English patriot in the War Office. “Special body in Washington to control [military] operations under PM and USA president,” General Sir Alan Brooke, the owl-faced new chief of staff of the British Army, sniffed in his diary on December 29, 1941.¹⁴ The “special body” would doubtless comprise General Marshall, Admiral Stark, Admiral King, and General Arnold—leaving the British chiefs of staff with only “representation” at the Combined Headquarters in Washington, invested in a single British officer, yet to be appointed. “The whole scheme wild and half-baked,” Brooke had snorted.¹⁵ To Brooke’s further chagrin the Prime Minister had then cabled Acting Prime Minister Attlee from the White House, saying it was, in effect, a done deal—with Allied supreme commanders for different theaters of war. Churchill, moreover, had made no attempt to conceal the origin of the idea. “Last night President urged upon me,” Churchill explained, “appointment of a single officer to command Army, Navy, and Air Force of Britain, America and Dutch.”¹⁶ Since the “President has obtained the agreement of the American War and Navy Departments” to the scheme,¹⁷ and since the first Allied supreme commander was to be General Sir Archibald Wavell, the British cabinet could do little else than wring their hands.

General Brooke had been mortified, having been promoted to be his nation’s CIGS, only to discover his war-making powers would be entirely dependent on decisions made in Washington. “The more we looked at our task the less we liked it,” he noted not only of the supreme commander business but of the very idea of a global command headquarters in the U.S. capital—recalling later that he “could see no reason why at this stage, with American forces totally unprepared to play a major part, we should agree to a central control in Washington.”¹⁸ There was nothing Brooke could say, at least aloud, however—the British cabinet “forced to accept PM’s new scheme,” as Brooke had lamented, “owing to the fact that it was almost a fait accompli!”¹⁹

It was—the more so, moreover, when reports had come in of the President’s State of the Union address to Congress on January 5, 1942—a speech in which the President had announced arms production goals that had made it clear the United States would win the war by industrial output alone.

“Plans have been laid here and in the other capitals for coordinated and cooperative action by all the United Nations—military action and economic action,” the President had declared. “Already we have established, as you know, unified command of land, sea, and air forces in the southwestern Pacific theater of war. There will be a continuation of conferences and consultations among military staffs, so that the plans and operations of each will fit into the general strategy designed to crush the enemy. We shall not fight isolated wars—each Nation going its own way. These 26 Nations are united—not in spirit and determination alone, but in the broad conduct of the war in all its phases.

“For the first time since the Japanese and the Fascists and the Nazis started along their blood-stained course of conquest they now face the fact that superior forces are assembling against them. Gone forever are the days when the aggressors could attack and destroy their victims one by one without unity of resistance. We of the United Nations will so dispose our forces that we can strike at the common enemy wherever the greatest damage can be done him,” the President had warned. “The militarists of Berlin and Tokyo started this war. But the massed, angered forces of common humanity will finish it.”

“Victory,” however, “requires the actual weapons of war and the means of transporting them to a dozen points of combat. It will not be sufficient for us and the other United Nations to produce a slightly superior supply of munitions to that of Germany, Japan, Italy, and the stolen industries in the countries which they have overrun,” Roosevelt had pointed out. “The superiority of the United Nations in munitions and ships must be overwhelming—so overwhelming that the Axis Nations can never hope to catch up with it. And so, in order to attain this overwhelming superiority the United States must build planes and tanks and guns and ships to the utmost limit of our national capacity. We have the ability and capacity to produce arms not only for our own forces, but also for the armies, navies, and air forces fighting on our side.”

Thereupon the President had openly announced astronomical figures for U.S. military output. “I have just sent a letter of directive to the appropriate departments and agencies of our Government, ordering that immediate steps be taken:

“First, to increase our production rate of airplanes so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 60,000 planes, 10,000 more than the goal that we set a year and a half ago. This includes 45,000 combat planes—bombers, dive bombers, pursuit planes. The rate of increase will be maintained and continued so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 125,000 airplanes, including 100,000 combat planes.

“Second, to increase our production rate of tanks so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 45,000 tanks; and to continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 75,000 tanks.

“Third, to increase our production rate of anti-aircraft guns so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall produce 20,000 of them; and to continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall produce 35,000 anti-aircraft guns.

“And fourth, to increase our production rate of merchant ships so rapidly that in this year, 1942, we shall build 6,000,000 deadweight tons as compared with a 1941 completed production of 1,100,000. And finally, we shall continue that increase so that next year, 1943, we shall build 10,000,000 tons of shipping.

“These figures and similar figures for a multitude of other implements of war will give the Japanese and the Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished in the attack at Pearl Harbor.”²⁰

Listening, the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, rubbed his eyes. Could the President be serious? “[C]ertainly if they can make the figures to which they have hitched their wagon on the supply side come out,” he noted in his diary with a mix of incredulity and new confidence, “it will be prodigious.”²¹

In London, however, General Brooke could only pray the British Empire would hold fast long enough for the United States, with its prodigious output of men and materiel, to save it.

 

As the veritable new Allied commander in chief in Washington, then, the President successfully imposed his will in the first days of January 1942, not only on his own staff but upon his new primary ally, and in an almost magical way: overcoming his dissenters by dint of his seemingly effortless goodwill, common sense, charm, and positive spirit.

With Churchill’s departure on January 14, however, the President suddenly found himself alone in the White House—a relief, but the Prime Minister’s absence also created a distinct vacuum. The President realized, in fact, that he missed his British counterpart. Short, squat, bald, chubby-cheeked, Churchill had exuded not only cigar smoke but a fierce, indomitable energy, whatever setbacks he faced. And with his retinue of personal and military staff, he had left, too, an unforgettable image of a traveling chieftain—especially the sight of his staff unrolling the Prime Minister’s world maps and charts, marked up with the latest information on British and enemy forces.

In honor of his departing guest, the President, his aides learned, decided to set up in the White House his own Map Room, modeled on the Prime Minister’s portable headquarters. It would not, however, be in the Monroe Room—to Eleanor’s understandable relief. And definitely not in the underground headquarters or bunker that the President’s advisers were urging be constructed in the White House, modeled on Churchill’s War Rooms in London.