24

Stimson’s Bet

NEITHER THEN NOR LATER did Marshall concede that the President, in his role as U.S. commander in chief, was demonstrating a greater military realism in devising Allied strategy in 1942 than his U.S. Army chief of staff.

In the meantime, however, the President wished to make sure there would be no misunderstanding—or ill will. Gymnast would not succeed unless the War Department got behind the plan wholeheartedly. He therefore wanted Marshall and King to see for themselves, in person, how impossible an imminent Bolero operation was—not because the British were cowards, but because Hitler’s forces were waiting, and the Allies could not, that year, assemble preponderant force to ensure its success. Drawing up in his own handwriting General Marshall’s and Admiral King’s instructions for their mission to London on July 16, Roosevelt gave the document to Harry Hopkins, who was to fly with them—and make certain they stayed to the script.

Paragraph nine was direct and to the point. “I am opposed to an American all-out effort in the Pacific against Japan with the view to her defeat as quickly as possible,” the President made clear. Yet some form of Second Front was desirable that year, since Hitler—whose troops were smashing their way deep into the Caucasus, as well as toward the gates of Cairo, at Alamein—would otherwise be given time to achieve total control of Europe. “It is of the utmost importance that we appreciate that the defeat of Japan does not defeat Germany and that American concentration against Japan this year or in 1943 increases the chance of complete [Nazi] domination of Europe and Africa.” On the other hand, “Defeat of Germany means the defeat of Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life.”¹

There was to be no switch to the Pacific.

 

Successive military historians would extol General Marshall as the great architect and “organizer” of American military operations in World War II: a “titan”² whose strategic grasp and patient handling of his commander in chief would, like Marshall’s opposite number in London, General Alan Brooke, entitle him to the highest pantheon in military history.

Such accolades were understandable with regard to a man of noble character—especially in countering the excessive admiration, even adulation, garnered by World War II field generals such as Eisenhower, Patton, Montgomery, and MacArthur. Certainly with regard to Marshall’s administrative achievement there would be every reason to laud his record in World War II. But as to his strategic and tactical ability, such tributes were way off the mark.

As commander in chief, the challenge for Roosevelt was thus how to marshal Marshall: how to direct, encourage, and support his work at the War Department, while stopping him from losing the war for America. While Marshall and King journeyed to London on their presidential mission, therefore, the Commander in Chief decided now to put his coup de main into action—in their absence.

Ambassador Leahy, emerging from dental hospital, was summoned to see the President on July 18, 1942. The admiral would not only be his military assistant, the Commander in Chief announced, but his new chief of staff, or deputy. As the sole senior military officer supporting the American invasion of French Northwest Africa, Leahy was critical to the President’s success in avoiding American defeat on the beaches of mainland France that year, and instead adopting the President’s preferred course: U.S. landings in Vichy-held Northwest Africa, before the Germans could occupy the area. Leahy was therefore instructed by the President to become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Not only a member, in fact. He was, the President laid down, to be the chairman of the Combined Chiefs of Staff—speaking for the Commander in Chief.

Before submitting his formal resignation as U.S. ambassador to Vichy France, Leahy was asked first, however, to do everything in his power at the State Department, where Leahy still had an office, to ensure the United States did not side with General de Gaulle, leader of the Free French, lest this lead to a hostile Vichy response to an American landing in Morocco and Algeria, as it had done when de Gaulle’s Free French forces had attempted to assault Dakar, in 1940. This, in a meeting with the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, Leahy promptly did. (“Conferred with Secretary of State Hull regarding the advisability of maintaining diplomatic relations with the French Government in Vichy,” Leahy noted in his diary).³

Four days later, on July 22, Leahy then transferred his papers from the State Department to the Combined Chiefs of Staff Building, at 1901 Constitution Avenue, and “took up my duties as Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States,” as Leahy proudly wrote in his daily diary, “which duties included presiding over the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Chiefs of Staff.”⁴

By the time Marshall and King returned from England, the coup would be complete: the Commander in Chief’s own man in control of the Combined Chiefs.

 

In the meantime, the Marshall-King mission fared badly at the hands of the British. The officers were forbidden by the President to use bluff or blackmail by threatening an American switch to a “Pacific First” strategy. Without the threat, they found, as the President knew would happen, that the British were wholly opposed to a cross-Channel invasion that year for the soundest of military reasons: namely, that it would fail.

In Washington, Secretary Stimson, on July 23, was stunned. Initial cables from Marshall had seemed as if the American chiefs were making headway, he had thought.⁵ “A very bad jolt came this morning at nine thirty in the shape of a telegram from Marshall,” he recorded in his diary, however—a cable “saying the British War Cabinet had definitely refused to go on with Sledgehammer and that perforce negotiations were going on along other lines.”⁶

Stimson knew exactly what “other lines” signified.

 

“I went at once over to the White House,” Stimson recorded, “and got into the President’s room before he was up”—only to find he was too late. The President “had received his telegrams to the same effect last night and had replied to them.”⁷

There was little that the war secretary could say or do. “Apparently Marshall tried hard to carry his point,” dropping all pretense of switching U.S. priority to the Pacific, while “offering to give up an attempt on the Pas de Calais,” which the British said would be suicidal, “and to take instead another place” on the French coast, such as Brittany, using it as a quasi-permanent cross-Channel bridgehead through the winter—Sledgehammer. “But the British were obdurate and Marshall had informed the President that we would be unable to go with any Sledgehammer attack without their cordial cooperation.”

This was exactly as President Roosevelt had anticipated. “The President had telegraphed expressing his regrets but saying American troops must get into action somewhere in 1942. He then suggested in order of their priority a number of places to the south, each of which seemed to me to be a dangerous diversion,” Stimson lamented, “impossible of execution within the time we have.”⁸

Stimson was now hopelessly outfoxed. He had been living, he began to realize, under a delusion in thinking Marshall was making headway with the British over a cross-Channel assault—an initial landing to be made in the fall of 1942, then reinforced in 1943, followed by a drive on Berlin.

Stimson had even met up with Frank Knox, to see if he could obtain his support and extend the strategic struggle to members of the cabinet. With the navy secretary by his side he had then approached the U.S. secretary of state, the most senior member of the administration, and had given Mr. Hull a grand tour d’horizon militaire, telling him the United States had enough forces to launch a cross-Channel attack and continue fighting in the Pacific, but not enough to chase their own President’s red herrings. A “diversion of strength to an African expeditionary force would be fatal to both,” he told the secretary of state, who seemed to have little or no idea what Stimson was talking about. Nor did Secretary Knox—who looked bemused by Stimson’s “rather long-winded explanation,” of current army and navy plans—Bolero, Sledgehammer, Roundup, et al.—which the navy secretary “has thus far been unable to assimilate,” Stimson noted with irritation.

Stimson had been “amazed again at how little he [Secretary Knox] knows about the plans of his own people. This time I hope I got it across,” he added, “and, when I parted with Knox on the street after we had left Hull’s office, he expressed his warm appreciation of the entire situation and said he would back us up. We shall need him for we never can tell what is going to happen in the White House, although I hope that the President will this time stick to his confession of faith as to Bolero.”⁹

With the arrival of Marshall and King’s cable reporting the British war cabinet’s latest rejection of a cross-Channel invasion that year, however, the bottom fell out of Stimson’s strategic world. Given his open attempts to turn members of the cabinet against the President, he was deeply embarrassed—in fact, after several hours trying to calm down, on his return to the War Department, Stimson dictated a formal letter to the President, deploring the “fatigued and defeatist mental outlook of the British government,” and had it couriered to the White House.¹⁰

The letter was as ill conceived as it was jejune. In a last-ditch effort to save Marshall’s preferred strategy, he now urged the President to authorize Marshall and King to insist the Allies put all their eggs in one basket: discard the idea of a cross-Channel attack in 1942, but concentrate all efforts on preparing at least for a 1943 invasion of France—with no question of any “diversions” to Africa. American forces—“young vigorous, forward-looking Americans”—would, he claimed, have “a revolutionary effect” on the British. He even cabled General Marshall to tell him what he had written the President.

Stimson’s appeal fared as badly as the chiefs’ argument in London, however—as Stimson recognized when there was a knock on his door the next morning, July 24, 1942.

In came four-star Admiral Bill Leahy, the new military chief of staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, who had arrived to talk to him—on the instructions of the President.

 

Stimson, a first-class prosecutor, did not propose to go down without a fight. He attempted to give Leahy, before the admiral could tell the secretary to get in line with the President’s wishes, a brief history of the cross-Channel project since the previous December, hoping to turn Leahy against the Commander in Chief.

As Stimson claimed to Leahy, Marshall had gotten apparent British acceptance of the scheme on his last trip to London, in April, but then “Churchill had come over and tried to break it in June; and how we had rounded him up and again gotten his acceptance; and how he had jumped the boundary for the third time.”¹¹

Stimson’s ranch metaphors had little effect on the new chief of staff, however—a full admiral, a former U.S. ambassador to Vichy France, and a supporter of Roosevelt’s plan to invade Vichy French Northwest Africa, not German-occupied France. “I also gave him a copy of my last letter to the President about continuing the influx of men and munitions into Britain and he read it. But he dropped remarks which confirmed my fears that the President was only giving lip service to Bolero,” Stimson confessed in his diary that night, “and that he really was thinking of Gymnast.”

Stimson was at last correct—Leahy noting in his own diary that he returned from Stimson’s office to the White House for an interview with the President “in which we discussed the practicability of ’Gymnast’ in 1942.”¹²

 

Matters were now moving fast. As Stimson dined quietly with his wife at his Woodley Mansion home, there came the “long awaited message from London giving the arrangement arrived at by the conference”: Gymnast.

To me “it was most disappointing, not to say appalling,” Stimson confided, “for Marshall and Hopkins had apparently been compelled, in order to get an agreement, to agree to a most serious diversion of American troops.”¹³ Not only were United States forces to embark on landings in French Northwest Africa, but the plan was to be enlarged! Instead of being just the President’s plan for U.S. landings in Morocco and Algeria, the British—the very people who would not land troops across the English Channel—would contribute twenty thousand troops to back up the American landing at Algiers.

Stimson’s heart sank. With a sickening sense of doom, he went over the cable with Marshall’s deputy, General McNarney, who was with him, and “analyzed it, he agreeing with my analysis, and then after he had gone I got the President on the telephone and gave him my views.”

It was fruitless to object. The President was at least compassionate in victory. “He said that he was strongly opposed to the giving up of Bolero but I could see,” Stimson noted, “that nevertheless he was anxious to go on with Gymnast. And I felt in my soul that the going on with Gymnast would necessarily destroy Bolero even in 1943 and throw us on the defensive.”¹⁴

The President, by contrast, was clearly delighted. Far from fearing it would put the United States on the “defensive,” he thought his plan would put America on the offensive—a shot that would be heard round the world in the next few weeks.

“The President asked me to come to the White House bringing Arnold and McNarney to meet him and Admiral Leahy at 11:30 tomorrow Saturday,” Stimson recorded.¹⁵

The President, it appeared, had truly taken over as commander in chief.

 

Henry Louis Stimson was nothing if not obstinate—a trait that had made him a fortune as a trial lawyer, but something of a millstone as secretary of war. He still thought he could, at the last hour, deflect the President from his preferred course, and therefore now “hurried down to the Department” early on July 25, where he “dictated an analysis of my views,” as he called it¹⁶—driving with Generals McNarney and Arnold to the White House and handing his latest memorandum to the President, who received him with his new chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, standing behind him.

The President did not even look at it. He had, he announced, “decided that the going on with Sledgehammer this autumn was definitely out of the question,” Stimson recorded.¹⁷ The President had already telegraphed to Marshall, King, and Hopkins “that he accepted the terms of the agreement they had negotiated with Churchill except that he wished a landing made in Gymnast not later than October 30”—i.e., before the November congressional elections.¹⁸ Hopkins was instructed to tell the British prime minister it was now “full speed ahead” on Gymnast—which was renamed “Torch” that day.¹⁹

It appeared to be a done deal—yet still Stimson objected to the idea, as did the senior air and army officers who had accompanied him to the President’s office. “McNarney, Arnold, and I pointed out to him the dangers of the situation produced by this operation as contrasted with an operation in the Pacific.”²⁰

The Pacific? This was, given the weakness of King and Marshall’s amateurish paper on the merits of a “Pacific First” strategy, a mistake. In any event it was of no avail. “I cross-examined him as to his realization that his decision on Gymnast would certainly curtail and hold up Bolero,” Stimson added—and with complete frankness the President “admitted that it would,” thus delaying, therefore, an eventual cross-Channel operation until 1944.²¹

Stimson was mortified. Pointing to his memorandum, he said he wanted it to be placed on record that he, the secretary of war of the United States, completely opposed the U.S. landings in Northwest Africa—indeed, in perhaps the single most dramatic gesture of the war’s direction since Pearl Harbor, Stimson took up the President’s offer to wager on the outcome of the landings: Stimson betting, in effect, against the success of his fellow Americans.

“I told him,” Stimson recorded in his diary, “I wanted this paper read at the time when the bets were decided”—i.e., when the landings were made, that fall. “The decision,” Stimson recorded, “marks what I feel to be a very serious parting of the ways.” The secretary of war was distraught. “We have turned our back on the path of what I consider sound and correct strategy,” he lamented, “and are taking a course which I feel will lead to a dangerous diversion and a possible disaster.”²²

 

Stimson’s bleak “prophecy,” as he referred to it afterward, was dire: that Russia would likely be conquered by the Germans that very year. As a result, if the United States went ahead with the invasion of Northwest Africa, a “large portion” of American troops would be left “isolated in Great Britain, Africa and Australia”—leaving “a Germany victorious over Russia” and “free to turn its forces on us.”²³

In the light of history, Stimson’s prediction said little for his acumen. The war secretary’s own preferred strategy for America was, if anything, even more fanciful. If the British would not mount a Sledgehammer version of a Second Front that year, he now felt the United States should switch all its forces to the West Coast of America, leaving only enough U.S. forces “consolidated” in Britain to be able to launch an “overwhelming attack on Germany if and when that time finally arrives”—while in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Far East the United States should seek “check-mating Japan’s attack against Iran and India; falling on Japan’s back in Siberia; and opening access to China through Burma.”²⁴

Japan’s attack against Iran and India? Like the President, Admiral Leahy could only rub his eyes in disbelief when he read the war secretary’s memorandum.

The Japanese, the admiral knew, had withdrawn their navy to home waters after their devastating defeat at Midway in June 1942; they would not be able to replace their sunken aircraft carriers for years. A successful invasion of India from the Burmese border or in the Indian Ocean was now unlikely, given the amount of air power the United States had diverted to protect the British. Moreover, how Stimson hoped to get Stalin to permit U.S. forces to move into Siberia and thereby risk Russian forces having to divert their efforts into a war with Japan, at a time when Soviet forces were only holding the German armies by the skin of their teeth, or how they might miraculously reopen the road to China through Japanese-held Burma, was beyond Leahy’s comprehension. As Leahy noted laconically in his own diary that evening, the two-hour meeting that was held “with regard to a second front in 1942” had been lamentable. Secretary Stimson and his War Department team had been utterly and wholly negative. The President demanded, as Leahy noted, not pique but action: “an effort in the ’Gymnast’ plan this Fall.” But “the Army was not favorably disposed.”²⁵

Adamantly opposed would have been a better description. Marshall and Stimson seemed to have infected the entire senior staff of the War Department. General Eisenhower, who had arrived ahead of Marshall in London to take command of U.S. troops in Britain in preparation for a cross-Channel Bolero attack, even went as far as to call the July 22 cancellation of Sledgehammer “the blackest day in history.”²⁶

 

Stymied in their efforts at the White House, Secretary Stimson and Generals McNarney and Arnold returned to the War Department on July 25 to lick their wounds.

The next day, July 26, found the war secretary “very depressed.” To his shame, he would never admit to the President that he, Roosevelt, had been right. Nor would he apologize, or make good on his bet. In his memoirs, written after the President’s death, he glided over the saga,²⁷ unwilling to be reminded of his great protest in July 1942, in which he had thought of himself as a sort of Revolutionary orator, adopting the language and nobility of the Declaration of Independence. “They have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity,” the famous text had described the British under King George III. “We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.”

Stimson had certainly felt the same way.

Even when reading over his diary, in private, after the war’s end, Stimson remained surprisingly churlish. “As I look back on this paper,” he wrote of his infamous bet and memorandum, “it seems clear that the one thing which saved us from the disaster” that he’d forecast “was:

 

1. the unexpected victory of Russia at Stalingrad
2. enormous luck in landing in Africa
3. success over submarines.”²⁸

 

 

Given that the Russian success at Stalingrad took place months after Operation Torch, as did Allied success against the U-boat menace, this was ungracious.

At Woodley Mansion, meantime, Stimson confided to his diary his sense of foreboding at “the evil of the President’s decision. It may not ripen into immediate disaster. What I foresee is difficult and hazardous and very likely successful attempts made to attempt a landing in northwestern Africa”—to be followed, however, by an American failure, since “even when obtained, it will be a lodgement more or less like that of the British at Gallipoli in 1915—troops suffering constant attacks from the German air force and possibly German and Spanish land troops.”

Stimson’s mix of bravado, pessimism, and abject fear had reduced him to a wreck. He now worried for the safety of General Marshall, who was returning by air to Washington in poor flying weather. “On the whole this is written on a blue Monday morning,” he confessed on July 27, 1942—and his mood only got bluer the following afternoon, when Marshall’s Stratoliner arrived from London and the secretary of war was given the “full story of what happened”—“a somber tale and I see very little light in it,” the war secretary noted.²⁹

Knowing that Stimson had spoken not only for General Arnold but for General Marshall, General McNarney, and most senior staff officers at the War Department, the President was acutely aware, in the White House, that he needed to change not only their minds but their hearts: to rally them to his Northwest Africa cause if the landings were to succeed.