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PERHAPS THE GREATEST IRONY of the 1942 Second Front/Torch imbroglio was Stalin’s reaction.
Secretary Stimson, the U.S. chiefs of staff, and the senior generals in the War Department had all claimed that Torch would not aid the Russians. Winston Churchill, flying to Moscow to tell the Russian leader the news that no Second Front would be mounted in France that year, but that instead, U.S. landings would be substituted in Northwest Africa, was understandably apprehensive. Bravely he ventured, on August 12, 1942, to the heart of the Soviet Union—a country whose Communist forces he had himself tried to destroy in 1920, after World War I. With Russian backs to the wall in the Caucasus—Hitler’s legions having crossed the Don and now aiming to take Stalingrad—it felt as if he was “carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole,” in the Prime Minister’s immortal later phrase.1 “We were going into the lion’s den,” one general recalled, “and we weren’t going to feed him.”2 Fortunately, however, Churchill was traveling to the Kremlin with the personal representative of the president of the United States, Averell Harriman.
Reading the cables Harriman sent him from Russia, the President considered Churchill’s mission to have been nothing short of heroic. As soon as Harriman returned to the United States, the President said he wanted to see him and hear his firsthand account, in person.
Two weeks later, on August 30, 1942, Averell Harriman duly drove to lunch with the President, together with the President’s two speechwriters, Robert Sherwood and Sam Rosenman. The President was at his new summerhouse retreat: the USS Shangri-la, as Roosevelt called it.
The rustic mountain camp consisted of “a number of rudely constructed, small pine cabins, each of two or three rooms,” which did not impress Judge Rosenman—especially the President’s hut. “It was furnished with the most rudimentary kind of secondhand furniture, most of which had come from a navy storehouse where unwanted and well-used furniture had been accumulated over the years,”3 he sniffed.
The President didn’t mind; the cabin was as Spartan as the rooms of his beloved presidential yacht, the USS Potomac, but possessed something forbidden on the steamer (a converted coast guard cutter): rugs. “The rugs,” Rosenman recorded, however, “had come from the same place and were in a bad state of repair.”
The view, Judge Rosenman allowed, was magnificent. “The President occupied a bedroom looking out through the woods over a beautiful valley. To it was attached one of the two bathrooms. The other three bedrooms were double bedrooms but none of them had space for more than two simple metal beds, a dresser, and a chair. These three bedrooms were all served by one bathroom. The door to the bathroom never quite closed quite securely, and the President laughingly used to warn each of his guests of that fact; but the door was never repaired.”4
Most of all Rosenman was amazed at the President’s buoyant mood, when the war seemed to be going so badly. The Germans, Rosenman had been informed, had by now advanced more than five hundred miles on the Eastern Front, capturing half a million Russian troops. They had already reached the peaks of the Urals: poised, it seemed, to race to the Caspian Sea, seize the crucial Caucasus oil wells, and threaten northern Iran. In North Africa Erwin Rommel, promoted to field marshal by the Führer following his capture of Tobruk, was bringing up hundreds of new and improved long-barreled Mark IV panzers as well as lethal 88mm antitank guns for his final assault on Alexandria, Cairo, the Suez Canal—and then on, if successful, to Palestine.
In the Pacific, Americans were fighting fiercely for a toehold on Guadalcanal, where on August 8–9 they had suffered a naval defeat so great it had had to be kept from the public: no fewer than four Allied cruisers—three American and one Australian—being sunk in the Savo Sea by the Japanese, who suffered no losses at all. . .
Questioned at Shangri-la by the President, Harriman assured him the Germans had still a huge task on their hands—contradicting reports of the War Department’s head of intelligence, who was currently predicting the imminent fall of Stalingrad to the Germans.5 The Russians would hold, Harriman assured the President—whatever Secretary Stimson and the men in the War Department might say to the contrary. “Averell gave a lucid analysis of the situation,” Sherwood recalled Harriman’s verbal report, “and then firmly predicted that Stalingrad would not fall, and that the battle could conceivably end in a major military disaster for the Germans.” As far as the Ural Mountains were concerned, “He thought the Russians could prevent the breakthrough which would have cut them off from the Caucasian oil fields and given the Germans a clear road into Iran and the Middle East”—for Stalin had assured Harriman and Churchill he could hold both Baku on the Caspian Sea, and Batum on the Black Sea, for the next few months, when the approaching winter snow would “greatly improve their position.”6 Better still, Mr. Stalin had even confided to Harriman that he was planning a huge counteroffensive that would stun the Germans.
This was greatly encouraging to the President, who listened to his personal emissary’s blow-by-blow account of the three-day series of summit meetings in the Kremlin with intense fascination—and sly amusement. Churchill had first off “announced the decision to give up Sledgehammer without mincing words.” Stalin, in response, had been rude to the point of deliberate insult, Harriman related—“Stalin gave him hell,” and “without mincing words” derided “the timidity of the democracies in comparison to Russia’s sacrifices.”7 A tyrant by nature and struggle, Stalin could not resist denigrating the pathetic British military performance in the war so far—sneering at the Royal Navy’s failure to protect its convoys to Murmansk, scorning the failure of the British Army to beat the Wehrmacht in open battle. War was war, he had grimly pronounced; to win a battle, one must be willing to accept huge casualties.
It was then that Churchill, according to Harriman, had delivered his tersest riposte.
“War is war,” the Prime Minister acknowledged, “but not folly.”8
The President, at Shangri-la, was utterly delighted by the phrase—and by Winston’s refusal to be bowed by the Russian’s ill-mannered rebuke. Or to be tempted to pack his bags, once Harriman put his mind at rest by passing him a note, in which he pointed out that this was merely par for the psychopath’s bullying course. The next day, Harriman had promised the Prime Minister, the Russian monster would be all sweetness and roses.
The President “appeared to enjoy hearing about Churchill’s discomfiture in those long reproach-filled sessions,” Harriman later told his ghostwriter, Elie Abel9—for there, but for the grace of God, the President might well have been: attempting to explain in person to the Soviet dictator why neither the United States nor Great Britain were willing to make good on their promise of a Second Front in France that fall.
About the President’s substitute invasion plan—Torch—however, the Russian leader had been, to even Churchill’s astonishment, almost ecstatic.
Churchill, according to Harriman, had gone on to explain, after delivering the bad news, that there was good news, too. The Americans were, indeed, coming—within weeks!
At this the dictator had changed his tune entirely. By way of metaphor, the Prime Minister had described the President’s substitute strategy as akin to dealing with a crocodile: instead of hitting the critter on its hard snout, it was best to cut into its “soft underbelly.” Moreover, this would be far more than a mere slash: for the invasion that would be mounted by American and British forces would number a quarter of a million men: more troops than Hitler had sent into the Caucasus—dispatched separately from the British Isles and the United States with massive air and naval cover.
Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, General Arnold, Admiral King, General McNarney, General Handy, General Wedemeyer—all had sought to persuade the U.S. commander in chief that Torch was a mistake and would not help the Russians in any way in their hour of need. Instead, according to Harriman, the Russian dictator had instantly grasped how the U.S.-led invasion could change the whole dynamic of the war against Hitler.
As Prime Minister Mackenzie King subsequently heard the story, via the Canadian defense minister who’d met with Winston Churchill in London, “Stalin had approved strongly” of Torch. “He had thought for 10 minutes after Churchill had proposed it, and then was greatly pleased. This of course is to be the second front that will be opened this year.”10
The description of Stalin’s response given to Mackenzie King, though given to the President weeks later, was certainly in line with the detailed minutes of the summit meeting, taken down at the time by a stenographer and used by Churchill in his own cables from Moscow to the President in Washington. According to the typed minutes of the meeting, which Harriman then showed the President at Shangri-la, “Mr. Stalin appeared suddenly to grasp the strategic advantages of ’Torch.’ He saw four outstanding advantages” of the operation:
Reflecting on this extraordinarily positive response, the President had shaken his head at the irony. Stalin had required but ten minutes to recognize the way Torch would turn the tide of World War II, whereas it had taken the War Department more than a year! Moreover, the most senior U.S. generals were reputedly still trying to sabotage the operation, by ordering preparations for Bolero to continue in England without interruption, even at the risk of compromising the success of the Torch operation.
However, Stalin’s next remark had been, if anything, even more astonishing.
Turning to the President’s personal representative, Stalin had said to Churchill and Harriman—as Harriman now told Roosevelt—“May God help this enterprise to succeed.”12