26

A Failed Mutiny

TORCH “WAS ONE OF THE VERY few major military decisions of the war which Roosevelt made entirely on his own and over the protests of his highest-ranking advisers,” the President’s speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, later wrote. The President “insisted that the decision had been made and must be carried through with expedition and vigor.”¹

Sadly, it was not—for though the Commander in Chief might insist, the War Department could desist.

“On no other issue of the war,” reflected Forrest Pogue, the doyen of American World War II military historians, “did the Secretary of State and the Chief of Staff so completely differ with the Commander-in-Chief. Their distrust of his military judgment, their doubts about the Prime Minister’s advice, and their deep conviction that the TORCH operation was fundamentally unsound persisted,” Dr. Pogue admitted candidly, “throughout August” of 1942.²

Harry Hopkins’s biographer noted the same. “It is evident,” Sherwood chronicled after the war, “that even after Hopkins, Marshall and King returned from London on July 27, there were further attempts to change the President’s mind about the North African operation.”

That Secretary Henry Stimson, General George Marshall, and so many of the “top brass” in Washington would continue to press for the potential fiasco of a cross-Channel venture in 1942, while at the same time exaggerating the danger of failure in terms of the President’s French Northwest Africa project, did not say a great deal for their military judgment at this stage of the war. Instead of knuckling down to the Commander in Chief’s “full steam ahead”³ order at the end of July, Secretary Stimson and General Marshall continued, as Marshall’s biographer recorded, “by a fine splitting of hairs to insist that the final decision had yet to be made and that preparations for SLEDGEHAMMER,” an immediate cross-Channel attack, “must be continued.”⁴

This was, in the circumstances, disgraceful. In London the Prime Minister even attempted a ploy to buy General Marshall off, at long distance; in a cable to the President, Churchill suggested that General Marshall be appointed to command the eventual cross-Channel attack, while Lieutenant General Eisenhower—who seemed more amenable—should take command of Torch, the impending North Africa operation.

The President, having confided to Stimson that Bolero would probably not be mounted in 1943, given the paucity of naval vessels, did not even raise the matter with Marshall—who was far too important to him as U.S. Army chief of staff at home.

Roosevelt’s dismissal of Churchill’s suggestion masked, however, a deeper concern. In truth the Commander in Chief had lost faith in Marshall’s judgment and objectivity as a military commander, however much he admired him as an individual and administrator. Appointing him to command, even from his perch in Washington, the planning for the Second Front landings might only encourage Marshall to pursue a course which, in 1942, the President had come to view as unrealistic. With rumors rife in Washington of a staff revolt at the War Department, and reports of a grave disagreement between the President and his military advisers leaking into the press, Roosevelt began to have real concerns about Marshall’s loyalty and willingness to subordinate himself to civilian leadership. Relations between the two men became frosty, despite the summer heat—the President worried that Marshall, like Secretary Stimson, was turning the entire War Department against him and thus sabotaging the success of the Torch undertaking. In truth, Marshall declined for two entire weeks in August to give Lieutenant General Eisenhower, in London, an official directive to plan and carry out the Torch invasion of French Northwest Africa.

Time was wasting—the second wave of Hitler’s renewed panzer attack in Russia, Fall Blau, having reached the Don on July 5, and Operation Edelweiss, to seize the all-important oil wells of the Caucasus, had begun on July 23 with 167,00 men, a thousand aircraft, over a thousand tanks—and 15,000 oil workers in tow.

Somehow the President had to show his armed forces and the world that he was not only in command but confident of American victory. A suicidal Second Front mission was not going to achieve it, whatever Marshall or Stimson maintained. Firing either or both of them might send a message of presidential determination. Given the “distrust” of his Torch plan throughout the War Department, however, this would not have aided preparations for the North Africa venture; nor, to be sure, was it the President’s preferred modus operandi.

Once again, Roosevelt swallowed deeply and ignored the rumblings of discontent on the Mall. By remaining absolutely and irrevocably intent upon seeing through Torch, Roosevelt felt certain the gathering momentum of operational planning, preparations, and necessary training would gradually overcome his doubting Thomases, steering them toward his goal: American combat in or on the threshold of Europe, in a secure area, one where green U.S. troops and their commanders could be blooded and learn the business of modern combat without inviting catastrophe or risking a major setback to the expectations of freedom-loving people across the globe.

 

If General Marshall was less than supportive of his Commander in Chief in August, Secretary Stimson, for his part, was reaching a point of despair. Returning from his vacation on August 7 he found the War Department “hard at work on plans for Gymnast [as he still called it] and, as they go into them more and more, the preparations which we have been so carefully making for Bolero and Sledgehammer are being cut and delayed, the shipping reduced and the shipments [to Britain] of men put off or diminished. In fact, if Gymnast goes through, Bolero is out of the window at least until 1944,” he noted in his diary, “and that seems to me a dreadful thing.”⁵

To the Commander in Chief it did not. At a cabinet meeting in the White House the President attempted to convey a sense of unity in the administration. The United States had taken over direction of the war and was preparing to deliver a first great blow upon the enemy that would reinvigorate the free—and occupied—world. “During the meeting,” however, “the President said that he was much troubled by charges which had appeared in some of the papers that he and Churchill were running the war plans of the war without regard to the advice of their military advisers.”⁶

This was not far short of the truth—but the President was not to going to admit to such an assertion in front of his full cabinet. Rather, he intended his next remark to be a shot across Stimson’s—and Knox’s—bows. “It was a matter evidently on his mind and he put it up before [Navy Secretary] Knox and myself apparently to silence us,” Stimson recorded in his diary that night—the President claiming, as Stimson recorded, that he was in complete accord with his war and navy people, and that he never, ever intruded as commander in chief, except to arbitrate “when the Army and Navy differed and it was necessary for someone to decide between them.”⁷

There was little the secretary could do about such lies—amazed at the President’s ability to say such things with a straight face. Yet it worked: the President able to manipulate the members of his administration into doing what he wanted, even against their will or better judgment, and then sweep everyone along on a tide of goodwill and common purpose. Franklin D. Roosevelt had, in Stimson’s thoughtful account that night, “the happy faculty of feeling [at one with] himself and this was one of the most extreme cases of it that I have ever seen because he must know that we are all against him on Gymnast,” the secretary sighed, “and yet now that is going to be the first thing probably which is done, and we are all very blue about it.”⁸

 

Far from being rested by his vacation, Stimson began to panic.

Sinkings of Allied merchant ships by German U-boats were reaching record numbers. News from the Pacific was no better: a battle royal taking place at Guadalcanal, in the southern Solomon Islands, where American Marines had seized the newly cleared Japanese airfield, daring the Japanese to retaliate in force—which they did.

Turning seventy-five that fall, Henry Stimson, despite being a first-rate lawyer, had not the flexibility and energy of a younger man. Once again, in his diary, he recounted for his own edification the sorry history of Torch, the “President’s great secret baby”—charting yet again the way the President had “hankered and hunkered” to revive the “evil” plan each time General Marshall and the War Department had knocked it down. “Today the whole thing came into my conversations with [Generals] Marshall, Lovett and Handy and all of them feel strongly against Gymnast,” Stimson noted with a sort of perverse satisfaction on August 7.⁹

Given that Averell Harriman, the President’s personal emissary, was already on his way with Prime Minister Churchill to brief Joseph Stalin personally on the impending Torch operation, Stimson’s efforts to find a way to stop the operation were becoming seriously dysfunctional. And detrimental to America’s war effort.

The scene was, in fact, little short of tragic at such a critical moment of the war. In Stimson’s tortured mind, however, the fact that the decision to mount Torch had “decisively” been taken on July 28 and that the British prime minister—approaching sixty-eight years of age and having already suffered a mild heart attack—was flying halfway across the world to explain the Torch operation to Stalin, was of no consequence. As Stimson saw it, Churchill had become the éminence grise behind America’s president, and thus America’s Public Enemy Number One.

The President’s silencing words in cabinet also rankled. On his return from the cabinet meeting in the White House Stimson thus began, in the quiet of his office on Constitution Avenue, to mull over yet another official letter of protest to Roosevelt: one that would either stop the President in his tracks, or at least prove to the world, later, that the President had refused to take his chief military advisers’ advice.

 

If the war secretary was to come out and openly oppose the President, he wanted “to be sure I am on solid ground.” Taking the army chief of staff aside, Stimson had a “careful talk with Marshall over the strategic situation, getting our teeth right into it and into each other—a very frank talk and a rather useful one,” the secretary confided to his diary that night. As Churchill prepared to fly on from Cairo to Moscow to tell Stalin in confidence about Torch, Stimson thus asked General Marshall point blank if he, Marshall, “was President or Dictator” of America, “whether he would go on with Gymnast and he told me frankly no.”¹⁰

Marshall as president or dictator? Such language, exchanged between the country’s most senior military officials on August 9, 1942, was sailing close to sedition—as even Marshall began to recognize the following day, when the war secretary showed him exactly what he had in mind.

 

Colonel Stimson’s draft “Letter to the President” as U.S. secretary of war on August 10, 1942, took Marshall’s breath away—for Stimson, having for months insisted on the most perilous American invasion of mainland France, across the English Channel, was now suggesting that Torch, the U.S. invasion of French Northwest Africa, was even more perilous.

Beginning “Dear Mr. President,” Stimson acknowledged that, thanks to “the refusal of the British to join us in going forward” with a cross-Channel attack in 1942, the chiefs of staff of the U.S. Army had agreed to substitute an invasion of French Northwest Africa. However, “intensive studies of the conditions and effects involved in the Torch proposal” by the War Department had led the secretary to take the same stance toward Torch as the British had done to the idea of a cross-Channel attack: to say no.

“I am now credibly informed that, in the light of these studies and of the rapidly unrolling world situation now before us, both the Chief of Staff and the General Staff believe that this operation should not be undertaken. I believe it to be now their opinion that under present conditions the Torch undertaking would not only involve serious danger of our troops meeting an initial defeat, but that it could not be carried out without emasculating any air attack this autumn on Germany from the British Isles and would postpone the operation known as Roundup [the invasion and conquest of France] until 1944. Furthermore, being an essentially defensive operation by the Allied Force, it [Torch] would not in any material way assist Russia.”

These were bold assertions. Again Stimson urged the President to cancel the Torch landings—indeed any landings in Europe or in Africa. Instead he called for an application of all U.S. energies on concentrated air attacks on Germany, “with sufficient effectiveness to affect the morale of Germany more effectively than any of the other proposals which could be carried out this year. I earnestly recommend that before an irrevocable decision is made upon the Torch operation you should make yourself familiar with the present views of these your military advisers and the facts and reasons that underlie them.”¹¹

 

Throughout June and July Stimson had decried the British for being “defeatist” and lily-livered for not daring to mount a cross-Channel Second Front that year, relying merely on their RAF thousand-bomber “terror” raids—which shocked the world but showed no sign of denting German civilian or military morale, in fact only seemed to make the Germans more determined to support the Führer. Now Stimson was not only talking up the sole strategy of Allied bombing efforts, but recoiling at the prospect of “initial defeat” if U.S. troops attacked a region on the threshold of Europe where there were virtually no German troops!

A more defeatist protest to the President, two weeks after the “definitive” decision over Torch had been made, could not have been drafted. General Marshall was embarrassed by it—especially given the manner in which Secretary Stimson was intending to speak for Marshall and his colleagues. “He takes an even severer attitude towards the President than I do,” Stimson noted in his diary, “but he pleaded with me not to send it,” the secretary admitted, as “he thought it would put him (Marshall) in the position of not being manly enough to do it himself.”¹²

In the whole of World War II the United States would never come closer to a military mutiny—which had certainly not been General Marshall’s intention. The President was the U.S. commander in chief. Marshall was a serving officer—a soldier. He had been given an order by the Commander in Chief, and it behooved him to carry it out, however much he might disagree with it, as the President well knew. Or resign. Marshall therefore begged the secretary not to send the letter. Stimson retorted by accusing him of “welching” on their opposition to the President’s “evil” plan. Marshall was incensed. To Stimson’s chagrin, Marshall now made clear he had no intention of making such a protest in his role as U.S. Army chief of staff—neither in writing nor in person. He would have no truck with talk of being president or dictator of the United States.

Seeing Stimson’s crestfallen face, however, Marshall took pity on the secretary—who meant well, and had been devoted to the best interests of the U.S. Army since his appointment in July 1940. Marshall therefore assured the secretary “that I could rest confident that he and the Staff would not permit Gymnast to become actually effective if it seemed clearly headed to a disaster.”¹³

 

General Marshall was not alone in stepping away from Stimson’s revolt. To Stimson’s added chagrin, Secretary Knox, the following day, also withdrew any presumed support for an official protest, mutiny, or further machinations against the President. The doughty Colonel Knox, who had served with courage in Cuba in 1898 with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and again as an artillery major in World War I in Europe, was “less worried about Torch than I was,” Stimson noted—admitting that, as secretary of the navy, Frank Knox was, by contrast, “more worried about Sledgehammer than I was.”¹⁴

With this evaporation of support, Stimson decided he had best shelve his “Letter to the President.”

The possible mutiny was over, for the moment at least. In high dudgeon the secretary went away for another two weeks’ vacation.

Given what was awaiting the five thousand brave but inexperienced Canadians who had been assigned to Operation Jubilee, the mini-version of Sledgehammer that Churchill had felt compelled to authorize nine days later in order to silence men like Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, and the senior officers of the War Department, Colonel Knox had had every reason, however, to be worried.