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IF ANYONE QUESTIONED, LATER, just how it was that Roosevelt remained so deeply confident of victory in the fall of 1942, after such a summer of reverses for the United Nations, they need only have looked to the President’s trip across America that September.
“So I think he has had a real mental rest, & is now ready to go back & ’talk turkey’ to a good many people—He can talk from what he has seen with his own eyes,” Daisy Suckley noted1—for the President knew now, beyond all doubt, that the United States was ready to win the war, whatever it took. He did not want Torch to be “delayed by a single day,” as he wrote in a cable to Churchill from his train—and certainly not by diverting troops to a landing in Norway, as Churchill was suggesting once again, to mollify Stalin over the cancellation of further convoys to Murmansk, in view of the heavy casualties. Nor did he see a need to tell Stalin in advance that the latest convoy, PQ 19, would not sail. “I can see nothing to be gained by notifying Stalin sooner than is necessary and, indeed, much to be lost,” he cabled. Torch, he was more and more certain, would change the whole dynamic of the war: would give the United States and United Nations the global initiative. “We are going to put everything in that enterprise and I have great hopes for it. . . . I am having a great trip. The training of our forces is far advanced and their morale excellent. Production is good but must be better. Roosevelt.”2
Dimly, even Winston Churchill began to face up to what was obvious to the rest of the world: that the United States would not only win the war for the Western Allies, but was set to become the dominant world power thereafter.
No sooner had the President returned from his inspection trip than Churchill cabled Roosevelt to question the incredible numbers that the American Production and Resources Board had given the British for U.S. military production—output amounting to some seventy-six thousand tanks by 1943, enough to equip two hundred U.S. divisions.
“This appears to me to be a provision on a scale out of all proportion to anything that might be brought to bear on the enemy in 1943,” Churchill telegraphed in alarm. It was clear to him that if Great Britain was intending merely to cauterize Hitler’s Europe by more ad hoc raids—operations like Mountbatten’s “Operation Plough” mini-landings in snowbound Norway, or Rumania, or Northern Italy3—the President was not. Nazi Germany, Roosevelt was certain, would not be felled by pinpricks but by a sequence of ever-greater amphibious landings that would unroll the true military potential of the United States.
Churchill, having predicated his whole strategy for British survival in World War II upon his alliance with the United States, could hardly complain—and to his credit, beyond his mild protest over American über-production and Roosevelt’s insistence on Torch being, in its initial phases, a completely U.S. operation of war, he didn’t. When General Brooke, the British Army CIGS, protested against Averell Harriman’s recommendation that U.S. teams take over the Persian port and railroad system, which would result in British forces in Iran becoming wholly dependent on America, Churchill had rounded on Brooke with the words: “In whose hands could we be better dependent?”4
The fall of 1942 thus marked, in effect, the turning point in the evolution of the modern world, as the British Empire wound down. Though Churchill might shortly declare in public his refusal to preside over its liquidation, the fact was, Great Britain was now to become, to all intents and purposes, the staging post of American power in Europe.
Reluctantly but with dignity, the Prime Minister—who had shown no mercy in putting down protest riots in India, where it was estimated that some 2,500 Indians were killed, 958 were recorded as having been flogged, and 750 government buildings destroyed5—accepted his new role. When the President instructed Harriman to return to London in mid-September to make clear to Churchill he wanted no further changes to Torch, and to insist it remain an American, not binational, operation, the Prime Minister gave way with little more than a murmur of protest.
“I am the President’s loyal lieutenant,” Churchill said to Harriman in person6—and in a cable direct to the President on September 14, 1942, the Prime Minister repeated his expression of fealty in writing. “In the whole of TORCH, military and political, I consider myself your Lieutenant,” he wrote, “asking only to put my viewpoint plainly before you. . . . We British will come in only as and when you judge expedient. This is an American enterprise in which we are your help mates.”7
As Harriman cabled the President that same day, the Prime Minister “understands fully that he is to play second fiddle in all scores and then only as you direct.”8
Great Britain, which had once ruled more than half the earth, was now fated to play a subordinate role to the United States—a momentous comedown, but better than becoming junior partner, puppet, or quisling of Hitler’s Third Reich, as the Vichy French had done. Besides, there was the very thrill of imminent battle, which could not fail to excite the warrior in Winston Churchill.
Ultra intelligence—decrypts of top-secret German military signals that Churchill loved to see raw and uninterpreted by his staff—was revealing the Nazis had no conception of what was about to hit them. Exultant, Churchill cabled Roosevelt on September 14, 1942, saying he was counting “the days” to “Torch”9—the more so since his own recent British landing, Operation Jubilee, had proven yet again an utter and bloody disaster.