While the naval victory in the Pacific was a most welcome reversal of fortune against the Japanese, it promised nothing in the war against Hitler. Churchill’s visit had not clarified the way forward. Stimson and Marshall were unyielding in their conviction that only a cross-Channel assault that relieved the Russian front, defeated Hitler’s armies, and brought an end to Nazi rule in Germany would guarantee a victory. Churchill had no quarrel with their strategy, but believed timing was critical. “No responsible British military authority has so far been able to make a plan for September 1942 which had any chance of success,” he told the president. Moreover, he feared that a premature assault would likely end “in disaster” and “would decisively injure the prospect of well organized large scale action in 1943.”
Yet Churchill did not think that they could “afford to stand idle in the Atlantic theatre during the whole of 1942.” He was mindful of pressure from Douglas MacArthur and U.S. naval chiefs to focus on the Pacific front. When Texas congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, temporarily commissioned a lieutenant commander in the Navy, traveled to Australia to tour the fighting front for the president and joined a perilous bombing mission against Japanese forces in New Guinea, MacArthur awarded him a Silver Star in return for promising to press Roosevelt for a stronger commitment to the Pacific fighting. It was soon described as the most talked-about and least deserved medal in U.S. military history. The invasion of Europe would have to wait until 1943.
Losses on the northern route to Murmansk in northwest Russia on the Barents Sea added to the urgency of helping the Russians. When only a quarter of a convoy’s supplies made it to the Soviet port at the beginning of July, Churchill informed Stalin that they would have to suspend shipments along this corridor. They would try to make up for the deficit by increasing the rail traffic through Persia, but it was impossible to close the gap fully. Churchill implored Stalin, addressing him as “my comrade and friend,” to understand that “there is nothing that is useful and sensible that we and the Americans will not do to help you in your grand struggle. The president and I are ceaselessly searching for means to overcome the extraordinary difficulties which geography, salt water and the enemy’s air power interpose.” But Stalin, whose own forces were making such great sacrifices, had little sympathy for British efforts to limit their losses.
For Roosevelt, dealings with the Soviet dictator illustrated Churchill’s observation that the only thing worse than having allies is not having them. Stalin opposed a project to deploy three divisions of Polish troops to the Middle East, fearing that it would undermine his goal of preventing postwar Polish independence. Churchill’s insistence that a Polish army would be to their “common advantage” did not overcome Stalin’s reluctance to support a potential anti-Soviet force. Roosevelt did not want to press the Soviets on issues like better relations with Poland’s exile government in London or the treatment of Polish Jews in the Soviet Union, including Jewish Socialist Workers leaders Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich, who were arrested by the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Police, as German agents and disappeared in the Soviet penal system, where they were executed. Moreover, in the summer of 1942, Stalin, suspicious of Western intentions, delayed for months granting permission for U.S. military personnel to fly desperately needed planes to Soviet airfields in Siberia. Even Roosevelt’s warnings that he had “tangible evidence” of Japanese preparations “to conduct operations against the Maritime Provinces of the Soviet Union” did not sway him.
With Rommel following his victory at Tobruk by an invasion of Egypt, and the Germans seizing Sevastopol and then Voronezh in south central Russia, a frustrated Roosevelt spent several days in Hyde Park and during the first week of July at a new presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin National Forest 75 miles from Washington. The compound included a cottage with guest rooms and other houses for overnight members of the president’s party and soon became a frequent hideaway, which Roosevelt described as his Shangri-La. His trips there and to Hyde Park were kept secret—allegedly to thwart potential enemy attempts on his life, but also as a guard against suspicions of his declining health or capacity to deal with daunting wartime challenges.
At the Maryland retreat, he took comfort from both the bucolic vistas and the companionship of adoring women. He freely admitted that he loved to be surrounded by attractive women who were openly flirtatious with and affectionate toward him. “Nothing is more pleasing to the eye than a good-looking lady, nothing more refreshing to the spirit than the company of one, nothing more flattering to the ego than the affection of one,” he said. Daisy, of course, was chief among them, but he also had a special relationship with Crown Princess Martha of Norway. She and her husband and two young children had become temporary exiles in the United States in 1940 after the Nazi conquest. Attractive, vivacious, and full of youthful charm, she endeared herself to the president, especially with her adroit ways of making him feel as if he was the center of the universe.
His affectionate relations with Daisy and Princess Martha formed a sharp contrast to what had become an increasingly tense relationship with Eleanor. Although she had become a liberal mainstay of his administration, drawing the support of millions of women and minorities, she had also become something of a rival. In June 1942, Odell Waller, a young black Virginia sharecropper who had killed his white landlord in an act of self-defense, was convicted of murder by an all-white jury and sentenced to die in the electric chair. A written appeal from Waller to Eleanor to urge the governor to grant him clemency, coupled with an outpouring of protest from African Americans citing the case as a classic example of Southern racism, moved her to ask Franklin to press the governor to commute the sentence. Roosevelt agreed to her request and passed the letter he sent the governor along to Eleanor with a plea for recognition for having done “good.” Eleanor acknowledged his letter as “grand,” but was frustrated by his refusal to follow it up with additional pressure. She became angry with Harry Hopkins, who was acting as a buffer for the president, when he refused to plead her case with Franklin for a last-minute intercession with the governor. It led to a very unpleasant argument that depressed Eleanor and added to the burdens besetting the president.
Although most newspapers and commentators agreed that domestic political conflicts should be suspended in wartime, the clash of beliefs about the role of government remained as robust as ever. Roosevelt saw no reason to let Republicans take advantage of his focus on the war and at the end of July began trying to influence the 1942 congressional elections and the 1944 presidential race. He wrote Tony Biddle, the offspring of a wealthy Philadelphia family and ambassador to Norway, who had taken up residence in London: “A lot of good people in Pennsylvania are anxious to have you . . . come home to make one or two speeches in behalf of the ticket in Pennsylvania this fall—in September, if possible.” At the same time, he enthusiastically favored a trip for Wendell Willkie that would take him to the Middle East, Russia, and China. Not only could he serve as a good will ambassador or “special representative of the President,” but his excursion would also deter him from mounting another presidential campaign that could jeopardize a possible Roosevelt fourth term. When the New York Herald Tribune criticized Roosevelt for ignoring war work to spend “a lot of time on the New York political situation,” he complained that he had “the skin of a rhinoceros,” but felt compelled to correct the paper’s “false statement.”
His impatience with political opponents boiled over at the beginning of September when he spoke to the International Student Assembly in a radio talk addressed at young people around the globe. He urged them to stand fast against the Axis nations, who would deprive them of a better future. But he could not resist slamming the “handful of men and women, in the United States and elsewhere, who mock and sneer at the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter. . . . They play petty politics in a world crisis. They fiddle with many sour notes while civilization burns.”
On the trip back to Washington from one of his retreats in July, he impressed Daisy as “funny & relaxed.” He enjoyed teasing her and had “a wonderful time seeing me act my part of prim spinster!” As soon as he arrived at the White House, however, he told Daisy that he was “going to have an awful day . . . I am going over to my office & will spend the day blowing up various people.” But ever the optimist, he also told her that “underneath” things were “not as bad . . . as they look.” He found some comic relief in a letter Eleanor forwarded to him from a well-meaning correspondent suggesting that America drop bee, hornet, and wasp hives on enemy lines, which would force the Germans to retreat “in utter confusion.” Roosevelt remarked that this fellow had “bees in his bonnet.”
In July, he sent George Marshall, Harry Hopkins, and Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of naval operations, to London to organize invasion plans. Above all, he wanted “a quick agreement with the British that would enable U.S. ground forces to confront the Germans sometime in 1942,” preferably in October, but by November at latest. He hoped the assault could take place before the November elections, but he did not press the point with his military ambassadors.
Because Churchill remained adamantly opposed to a landing in France that fall, the group finally settled on an incursion into French North Africa, codenamed TORCH. Churchill cabled Roosevelt on July 27 of their decision and the imperative for secrecy. Marshall was a reluctant supporter, but Roosevelt was “very happy in the result” of the decision to launch an offensive that could not only defeat Rommel but convince Stalin of Anglo-American determination to destroy Hitler. “I cannot help feeling that the past week represented a turning point in the whole war,” he told Churchill. “He is not as despondent about the war as he was, some time ago,” Roosevelt told Daisy, yet his countenance betrayed his anxieties. “The P. has heavy worries about the world just now,” Daisy recorded in August, “& when in repose, his face is over serious & drawn. His moments of relaxation are few.”
No Allied leader, however, faced more immediate wartime challenges than Stalin. At the end of July, the effort to combat the German offensive was costing the Soviets thousands of lives. That it took greater courage to retreat than to advance was accepted wisdom for Soviet troops, who were under orders from Communist apparatchiks pressing them to mount offensives against superior German forces. The news that the British were temporarily suspending convoys and could not reveal the “time and place” of an invasion incensed Stalin. What are the Allies contributing to the war effort? Stalin sarcastically asked. The Soviets were giving blood, the British time, and the Americans money.
Roosevelt, who sympathized with Stalin’s complaint, urged Churchill to handle him “with great care. We have got always to bear in mind the personality of our ally and the very difficult and dangerous situation that confronts him. No one can be expected to approach the war from a world point of view whose country has been invaded. I think we should try to put ourselves in his place.” Without identifying where the assault would occur, he wanted Churchill to assure Stalin that they had “determined upon a course of action in 1942.” He then wrote Stalin directly, informing him of Wendell Willkie’s visit to the Middle East and Moscow in September, which he described as a way to convince Muslim countries to join in resistance to the Nazis, who would endanger “their greatest hopes for the future.” He described Willkie as “heart and soul with my Administration in our foreign policy of opposition to Nazism and real friendship with your government.” He also expected the visit to “be of real benefit to both of our countries if he can get a firsthand impression of the splendid unity of Russia and the great defense you are conducting.” Willkie’s trip to Moscow was a gesture partly intended to boost Soviet morale in the interim before U.S. troops directly struck at Hitler’s forces in Africa.
Difficulties with Chiang Kai-shek compounded worries about Stalin’s faith in Anglo-American support. At the close of July, Roosevelt received an “urgent” and “strictly confidential” message from Chiang, lobbying him to pressure Churchill into granting India its independence, which Chiang saw as a symbol of emerging independence for all Asia, including China. Roosevelt instantly sent the message to Churchill, who urged Roosevelt to do his “best to dissuade Chiang Kai-shek from his completely misinformed activities.” Roosevelt counseled Chiang against any action that would undermine current arrangements in India. But, as Roosevelt told Churchill, it was important to give Chiang the impression that his requests received “friendly consideration. I fear that if I did not do so he would be more inclined to take action on his own initiative, which I know you will agree might be very dangerous at the moment.”
On August 12. Churchill flew to Moscow, accompanied by Averell Harriman, for a three-day conference. Since he would be delivering Stalin the news about a peripheral invasion of North Africa rather than a cross-Channel attack in 1942, Churchill felt as if he was “carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole.” But determined to convince the Russian leader of the Allies’ commitment to break Hitler’s power, Churchill plunged into four hours of talks immediately after his arrival. The first two hours of their exchange “were bleak and somber.” As soon as he began describing plans for “the ruthless bombing of Germany” and TORCH, Stalin “became intensely interested.” An amused Harriman watched a rapport develop between the two leaders as they animatedly foresaw the destruction of “most of Germany’s important industrial centers.” Stalin also warmly endorsed the North African invasion, saying, “May God prosper this undertaking.” The description of the invasion, Churchill advised the president, “seemed a great relief” to the Russians. “All ended cordially,” he added, believing that he could now convince Stalin “of our ardent desire . . . to get into battle heavily and speedily.”
But by the following day their conversations had become unpleasantly hostile. The group argued for two hours, “during which [Stalin] said many disagreeable things, especially about our being too much afraid of fighting the Germans . . . ; that we had broken our promises about ‘Sledgehammer’ [the invasion of France]; that we had failed in delivering the supplies promised to Russia and only sent remnants after we had taken all we needed for ourselves.” When Churchill refuted Stalin’s contentions, protesting that “there was no ring of comradeship in his attitude,” he predicted with great animation that they could win the war if “we did not fall apart.” Stalin, Churchill reported, exclaimed that “he liked the tone of my utterance.”
Stalin then launched into a description of powerful trench mortars that he offered to share and then asked, probing to see if Churchill would reveal anything about Anglo-American research on atomic explosives, if Churchill would agree to share this most closely guarded secret. Although the Americans and British were nowhere near completing the atomic project, Churchill’s failure to mention this research, which the Soviets were well aware was in progress, confirmed Stalin’s distrust of his allies. Churchill suspected that Stalin’s sudden shift in attitude may have been prompted by his Politburo associates’ pressing him to take a harder line with the prime minister, but he came away convinced that “in his heart, so far as he has one, Stalin knows we are right.” Most important, Churchill saw no indication of a Soviet surrender and believed that Stalin was confident of victory.
On August 18, three days after Churchill departed Moscow, Roosevelt cabled Stalin about a “toehold in the Southwest Pacific” gained by the invasion of the Solomon Islands. He expected to press the advantage they had established but emphasized, “I know very well that our real enemy is Germany and that our force and power must be brought against Hitler at the earliest possible moment. You can be sure that this will be done, just as soon as it is humanly possible to put together the transportation. The United States understands that Russia is bearing the brunt of the fighting and the losses this year. We are filled with admiration of your magnificent resistance. Believe me when I tell you that we are coming as strongly and as quickly as we possibly can.”
Just as he sought to rally the Soviets with encouraging news, he did the same on the home front to inspire determination to make the sacrifices and meet the demands of the war. On September 7, in a Labor Day speech, he related the heroic self-sacrifice of a naval aviator who gave up his life in the battle of the Coral Sea to destroy a Japanese ship. The selflessness of this pilot was meant to serve as an inspiration to all Americans who were now being asked to hold down inflation on food, which was running at an economically destructive 3 percent a month, and to pay taxes to meet the costs of fighting the war. “Battles are not won by soldiers or sailors who think first of their own personal safety,” Roosevelt said. “And wars are not won by people who are concerned primarily with their own comfort, their own convenience, their own pocketbooks. . . . All of us here at home are being tested—for our fortitude, for our selfless devotion to our country and to our cause.”
In appealing for “fortitude” and “selfless devotion,” Roosevelt was implicitly describing his own personal commitments to bearing presidential burdens. When Morgenthau listened to him describe the struggles the Russians faced in fighting Hitlerism, he was impressed with the president’s ability to “state these facts coolly and calmly whether we win or lose the war, and to me it is most encouraging that he really seems to face these issues, and that he is not kidding himself one minute about the war. That, to me, seems to be the correct attitude for a commander-in-chief.”
Roosevelt’s speech was partly a response to the appalling fact that great numbers of Americans had “no clear ideas of what the war is about.” “To win this war,” the anthropologist Margaret Mead declared, “we need the impassioned effort of every individual in the country. . . . The government must mobilize people not just to carry out orders but to participate in a great action and to assume responsibility. . . . We gotta feel we have victories in us.” The Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) promoted civilian commitment to the war effort with rationing, scrap drives, and blackouts, all of which served to remind Americans across the country that they were fighting a war in which everyone had a part to play.
Although Roosevelt believed that his Fireside Chats remained an effective weapon in mobilizing public support against the isolationists, who remained anti-British, anti-Russian, and anti-Roosevelt, he knew that personal appearances were also a valuable means of informing Americans about war aims and of stimulating national unity. To this end, on September 17, he embarked on a two-week cross-country trip to visit the factories producing planes, ships, tanks, and other weapons. The journey, which he made in a ten-car train, also gave him a feeling of actively promoting the war effort. His presence was not only a way of thanking the troops and workers devoted to the fight for U.S. freedom and security but also a way to heighten his own sense of direct participation in the struggle. The chance to escape the daily grind of Washington politics and to relax with those closest to him shaped his commitment to the excursion as well. He was “keyed up and rather excited over getting away on this trip,” Daisy thought. He was also “afraid . . . that something might happen to keep him from going.”
He was much relieved when his entourage boarded the train at 10:00 in the evening. Eleanor accompanied him as far as Chicago, but Franklin’s old friend and former law partner Harry Hooker, Daisy, and Laura Delano, his flamboyant fifty-seven-year-old cousin, accompanied him throughout the tour. He greatly enjoyed their company, telling them, “You’re the only people I know that I don’t have to entertain.” As compelling for him, they were delightful companions: Both the women were “charming, witty, intelligent, and full of fun.” He also loved their affinity for dogs, including Fala, a sixteen-month-old Scottish Terrier that Daisy had given him as a gift in August 1940 and had become the president’s constant companion.
The trip was kept a secret, or at least hidden from the mass public, until he returned to Washington. He wanted to avoid the usual hullabaloo that the press and local politicians would raise if they had advance notice of his arrival in the cities he planned to pass through along the way. There were to be “no publicity, no parades, no speeches,” he told advisers and the three reporters and eight photographers, who covered the journey and who were sworn to silence until it ended. Roosevelt also wanted to avoid any claims that he was on a 1942 campaign tour, while still expanding Democratic support in the coming elections.
For Franklin and Eleanor, it was a deeply satisfying trip. At each stop he would appear at defense plants and military bases on short notice in an open car, where startled workers and troops clapped, cheered, and waved with “broad smiles on their faces” and exclaimed, “Geez, it’s the President!” Franklin took special satisfaction in seeing the most advanced tanks roll off the assembly lines in Detroit’s former auto factories. He visited cartridge manufacturing plants in Minnesota, the Great Lakes Naval Training station outside of Chicago, and a turbine factory in Milwaukee. When Daisy walked Fala at a station stop outside Bismarck, North Dakota, a little girl was startled when she read his dog tag: “Fala, The White House, Washington, D.C.” They proceeded to a naval training station in Idaho, an Army base in Tacoma, a Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington, and the Boeing aircraft plant in Seattle.
At Henry Kaiser’s shipyard in Portland, Oregon, he joked with the assembly line workers, “You know, I’m not supposed to be here today. I hope you will keep it a secret.” The California leg of the trip included appearances at bustling shipyards and aircraft factories; a naval hospital in San Diego, where wounded seamen were excited to meet the president; and the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, where trainees were preparing to ship out to fight the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. Heading east across the southern tier of the United States, the Roosevelt party stopped in Uvalde, Texas, where he visited former vice president John Nance Garner, who patted the president on the head and said, “God bless you, Boss.” The train then crossed the state, stopping at some of the airfields that were training Army Air Force men being sent to England to fly bombing raids against German targets. At the navy yard in New Orleans, “a relaxed & cheerful” president visited the Higgins boat plant, which produced the craft that would become the principal vehicle for transporting men and equipment in amphibious assaults. Roosevelt remarked on how he had to battle to free Higgins from its normal production to build these innovative vehicles.
By the end of the trip Roosevelt had traveled nearly nine thousand miles over a two-week period and was able to witness firsthand the facilities that gave meaning to his promise to make America “the arsenal of democracy.” The country’s factories were producing 10,000 tanks a month, ten times the German output, while Boeing was manufacturing 12,677 B-17 bombers, the aptly named “Flying Fortress” and mainstay of the air campaign against Hitler’s Germany and ultimately Japan’s home islands. The Kaiser shipyards were breaking every record for production and won Roosevelt’s praise for “wonderful work,” as did their head, Henry Kaiser, whom he called a “dynamo.” As important, in the nine months after Pearl Harbor, the armed services swelled nearly fourfold from 1.6 million to 5.4 million. It was a fighting force that neither Germany nor Japan nor Italy could hope to match in determination and equipment. “The whole thing is an extraordinary achievement,” Daisy noted.
At the same time that Roosevelt marveled at the country’s productive genius, Eleanor found much to celebrate in the emergence of women and African Americans as vital contributors to the country’s factories and armed services. The prejudice against them did not disappear, especially across the South, where segregation remained a fixed part of blacks’ daily life. But to Eleanor’s delight, Franklin publicly acknowledged the “large proportion of women employed doing skilled manual labor running machines.” In the coming year, he expected the number of women working in the country’s war plants to equal the number of men, and he condemned the bias that barred women and blacks from essential war work, insisting, “We can no longer afford to indulge such prejudices or practices.” Rosie the Riveter, the topic of a popular song, became a national icon who was lauded as “the woman behind the man behind the gun.” At the height of the war as many as 20 million women formed a part of the work force, and 350,000 served in the armed forces.
While Roosevelt could privately boast that “American reserves and American planes and tank production are at least up to all reasonable schedules,” he felt compelled to acknowledge that “the controlling factor is to get these reserves and munitions to the scene of actual fighting.” With the Burma Road still under Japanese control, for example, flying supplies into China over the Himalayas was a daunting challenge that cost American lives and planes and undercut promises of building a robust Chinese fighting force. The perilous northern convoy route to Murmansk as well remained an imperfect way to supply Russia’s armies.
Despite these obstacles, his cross-country trip deepened Roosevelt’s belief in the country’s wherewithal to win the war. He mentioned to his companions several times that “this was the most restful & satisfactory [trip] he had ever taken.” On October 1, the day after he returned, he announced to the press that he had seen “an amazing example of what can be done with proper organization, with the right spirit of carrying it through, and proper planning.” He recounted the many defense facilities and training camps he had visited in the eleven states to which the group had traveled. He brimmed with praise for the women workers handling all sorts of technical jobs and for the spirit of commitment to build the most advanced weapons coming out of the factories and shipyards. He declared himself entirely satisfied with the 94 or 95 percent output of what had been projected would be the total for the year. He praised the popular determination to hold down inflation and emphasized the apolitical nature of his trip. Yes, he had seen the governors of the eleven states they had passed through, but no senators or congressmen running for office or local or state candidates.
While he could not have been more emphatic about his detachment from the coming November elections, he couldn’t resist throwing a barb at the “doubting Thomases” in Congress and the press who argued that the defense plants wouldn’t be able to achieve half of what they had actually accomplished. He described how the spirit of unity and support flourished everywhere except in Washington, D.C. He ended his press conference with a political attack on members of Congress, the press, and the administration who were undermining the war effort by self-serving pronouncements. That his eye was in fact firmly focused on the November elections was made evident by his correspondence with Churchill, in which he stressed the importance of making the North African invasion appear to be an American offensive, which he hoped would generate fresh and timely enthusiasm for his party.
Compounding these problems, his press conferences gave evidence of something that neither he nor the journalists remarked on. He responded to almost all the reporters’ questions by asking them to repeat themselves. Almost sixty-one in the fall of 1942, Roosevelt seemed to have experienced a loss of audio capacity. His physical health was declining, though it was not yet evident to the journalists who usually saw him twice a week. And even if it had been, they would have been reluctant to report any physical decline. He was the country’s most important leader in the midst of a world war that threatened America’s future, and no one wanted to undermine public morale by suggesting that health problems imperiled the president’s ability to lead.
In a Columbus Day, October 12, Fireside Chat to the nation, Roosevelt lauded the “unbeatable spirit” he found across the country, praised the men and women who were producing the sinews of war, decried the prejudice that barred African Americans, women, and the elderly from making a valued contribution to the war effort, counseled against the influence of “typewriter strategists” and Axis propaganda, called for an expansion of the draft to eighteen-year-olds, warned that acts of criminal savagery by Nazi leaders would be punished in time, and urged the importance of not just fighting the war but also preserving the postwar peace. “It is useless to fight a war unless it stays won,” he said.
In celebrating the work of blacks and women and denouncing the bias that limited their contributions to the war effort, Roosevelt’s rhetoric outran the actualities of knocking down barriers to their participation in the conflict. This was especially the case for a significant number of blacks in the military. While there were black Army units and black air squadrons, the War Department and joint chiefs refused to integrate black and white troops and rejected suggestions that black officers lead black troops. The Navy was especially resistant to any sort of combat role for African Americans and was content to have them serve as mess men, working as cooks and servants for officers. A Navy study concluded that “the enlistment of Negroes (other than as mess attendants) leads to disruptive and undermining conditions.” Roosevelt pressed the Navy to change its policy, but it insisted that any sort of integration would undermine “teamwork and discipline.” In response, Roosevelt asserted that the one-tenth of American citizens who happened to be black deserved a chance to serve their country. In light of the heroics of Dorie Miller, a black mess man on a battleship at Pearl Harbor who won a Navy Cross for carrying his wounded captain to safety and manning a machine gun to shoot down a Japanese plane, the Navy was forced into accepting a larger role for African Americans, but only on the condition that they remain segregated from whites.
Domestic divisions were only a small part of Roosevelt’s agenda in the summer and fall of 1942. On August 7, U.S. forces landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, where they expected to achieve a quick victory over Japanese troops. Instead, in naval combat U.S. and Australian forces suffered a severe defeat: Four cruisers and two destroyers were sunk and another cruiser was damaged. The battle for Guadalcanal took on special significance when, five days after the Marines landed, twenty of them on patrol were “ambushed, shot, and bayoneted” by Japanese troops pretending to surrender. The incident became infamous as an example of Japanese deceit on the battlefield and was used to justify atrocities against surrendering Japanese soldiers. The struggle to control the island, a tropical rain forest that bred disabling illnesses among the troops, was centered on control of an air base the Marines had named Henderson Field. The battle would last for six months until February 1943 and demonstrated to Roosevelt just how difficult defeating Japan would be.
When he returned from his inspection tour, he faced hard decisions about Germany and Russia. He was eager to send U.S. forces into combat in North Africa as soon as possible while helping the Russians withstand the Nazis’ summer offensive. Questions of when and where to land troops dominated the cable traffic between Washington and London. Roosevelt was convinced that the Vichy French would be much less inclined to oppose an American invasion in French territory than one led by the British, and the prime minister did not object to having the United States take on “the whole burden, political and military, of the landings.” But Churchill wondered if the United States would “have enough American trained and equipped forces to do this all by themselves,” since the plan now was to land at Casablanca in Morocco and Oran and Algiers in Algeria. With the burden of decision on the offensive now entirely in Roosevelt’s hands, Churchill told him in mid-September, “In the whole of TORCH, military and political, I consider myself your Lieutenant.” However great this responsibility, Roosevelt believed it essential for the public to see U.S. troops engaged in the fighting, which he hoped would have a significant impact in fostering a national sense of participation in the war.
While Churchill and Roosevelt moved ahead on invasion plans, new problems erupted over the convoys to Murmansk when German planes and ships operating from Norway imperiled the supply vessels and their escorts. Churchill wanted to plan an assault on German forces there, codenamed JUPITER, to drive them back from the Norwegian coast or at a minimum compel them to weaken their eastern front by transferring men and supplies to northwestern Europe.
On September 15, as Roosevelt was preparing for his cross-country inspection tour, Churchill gave him the bad news that it seemed “almost impossible to fit in another convoy before TORCH.” Should they decide against attempting one, Churchill asked the president to help him with Stalin, who seemed certain to complain loudly about a British refusal to risk additional losses when the Russians were then engaged in defending Stalingrad. Roosevelt promised to “do everything I can with Stalin.” At the same time, his commitment to TORCH prevented him from sending more aircraft to fight the Japanese in the Solomon Islands or from supporting expanded air raids from Britain on Germany. The demands of TORCH also meant they would not be able to send another convoy to Russia until January. In the midst of his trip, Roosevelt insisted that they not pile up new issues with Stalin by telling him about delayed shipments until absolutely necessary. He had every hope that a successful assault on North Africa and the defeat of German forces there would help ease their difficulties with Moscow, especially since his chiefs had advised him that TORCH would delay a cross-Channel attack until 1944. Disagreements with Churchill, who favored peripheral assaults, such as the strike on Norway, also loomed over an invasion of France—whether it came in 1943 or after.
While Roosevelt’s highest priority was to ensure the success of TORCH, sustaining the Russian front was never far behind. He told Churchill it “is today our greatest reliance and we simply must find a direct manner in which to help them other than our diminishing supplies.” He considered it essential to take all possible risks to do so rather than “endanger our whole relations with Russia at this time.” He was especially disturbed by a telegram from Stalin at the beginning of October describing the deterioration of the defense of Stalingrad and the dangers it posed to Russia’s whole southern front. Whatever they wrote Stalin, Roosevelt cautioned Churchill, it was essential to phrase their messages so “as to leave a good taste in his mouth.”
Wendell Willkie had eased some of the tensions with the Soviet leader by his visit to Moscow in September, having given a sympathetic hearing to Stalin’s “complaints about insufficient deliveries of aircraft.” Moreover, Willkie had flattered him with compliments about his popularity among his people. Why, he was being so democratic, Willkie observed, that he might open the way to elections that could cost him his job. According to Willkie’s account, Stalin laughed heartily at his guest’s joke.
By October 8, though TORCH was still a month away and there was little evidence of a reduction in German forces on the eastern front to meet a threatened assault in the west, Churchill convinced Roosevelt to tell Stalin “the blunt truth” about the delayed convoys. He thought they could soften the blow somewhat by informing him of their plans to put an air force in the Caucusus and of their expectations that the combination of TORCH, a British offensive in Egypt against Rommel’s armies, shipments of additional fighter aircraft to Russia, and the dispatch of single supply ships rather than convoys would bring some relief to Stalin’s southern front. When the British chiefs wrote Churchill that “the Russian army is, to-day, the only force capable of defeating the German army” and that it was “the war in Russia which is most rapidly sapping Germany’s strength,” Churchill told them, “I hope Stalin will not see this.” But that was an assessment that Roosevelt subscribed to as well, convinced that encouraging words could make a difference, he told Stalin, “Everyone in America is thrilled by the gallant defense of Stalingrad and we are confident that it will succeed.”
As they moved into the second half of October, Roosevelt was optimistic about the prospects for TORCH, though the continuing fight for Guadalcanal also troubled him. He worried that “the large concentration of Japanese forces may drive us out,” and told Churchill: “Every day we are killing a number of Jap ships and planes, but there is no use blinking the fact that we are greatly outnumbered,” or that the demands of TORCH were reducing the number of men and amount of matériel going to the Pacific. Still, because he understood how essential it was to boost U.S. morale and gain the initiative by defeating the Japanese on Guadalcanal, he ordered that “every possible weapon” be sent there. In response, U.S air, land, and naval units flowed to the Pacific in greater abundance than Roosevelt had actually wanted. By the close of the year, nine of the seventeen divisions and nineteen of the thirty-six air groups sent overseas were fighting the Japanese.
At the same period in October, with his eye on the coming congressional elections, he sent Eleanor on a good will trip to England. Because she was one of the most public symbols of his administration’s liberal partisanship, he wanted her out of the country as a sign that, as commander in chief, he was keeping out of politics. Moreover, in the days directly before the election, he urged Churchill to keep her “official business to a minimum.” He had been promoting an apolitical message from the first day of the war. “I would say it is about time,” he told a pre-election press conference, “for a large number of people—several of whom are in this room—to forget politics. . . . We read altogether too much politics in our papers. . . . They [the people] haven’t waked up to the fact that this is a war. Politics is out. Same is true in Congress.” In this, he had Willkie’s cooperation. The titular head of the Republican Party had made his nonpartisanship clear when he left the country on his world tour during the 1942 political season. Roosevelt was determined not to repeat Woodrow Wilson’s mistake in 1918 by calling for a Democratic Party victory to maintain control of Congress. He hoped that his stratagem of a nonpolitical approach to the elections and his suspension of overtly political activism would ensure his continuing and possibly even expanded control of the House and the Senate.
Even if Roosevelt had wanted to intervene in the elections, pressing war business kept him preoccupied and on edge. The fighting in Guadalcanal, in which he advised Churchill that U.S. forces were “hard-pressed”; his conviction that production of escort vessels, merchant ships, and especially fighter planes was falling short of what was needed for the following year; and anxiety that Stalin might be considering a negotiated settlement with Hitler all worried him. Stalin’s silence in response to Churchill’s messages about providing planes for the southern front and asking for Russian assistance on the convoy route left Churchill “perplexed.”
Roosevelt was no less concerned, but his inveterate optimism gave him the wherewithal to see beyond the dark moments demoralizing so many others. On October 27, he cabled Churchill, “I am not unduly disturbed about our respective responses or lack of responses from Moscow. I have decided they do not use speech for the same purposes that we do. . . . I feel very sure the Russians are going to hold this Winter and that we should proceed vigorously with our plans both to supply them and to set up an air force to fight with them. I want us to be able to say to Mr. Stalin that we have carried out our obligations one hundred percent.”
When the polls closed on November 3, the outcome was typical of a midterm election. After ten years of Democratic governance, the electorate was receptive to granting Republicans greater power. Helped by a low turnout—only half the number of people who had voted in 1940 went to the polls—Republicans made significant gains: Their House delegation increased by 44 seats, only 13 short of a majority, while their Senate contingent grew by 9 seats. Though Democrats continued to hold a 59 to 37 seat advantage in the upper house, they no longer had the lopsided majority of the previous decade. With the North African offensive four days away, the battle for Guadalcanal still at issue and even in some doubt, families frustrated by wartime rationing of gasoline, meat, coffee, and other foodstuffs, and unions irritated by wage controls, the electorate was in no mood to rally behind Roosevelt.
Three days after the vote, he put the best possible face on the outcome. When asked at a press conference, “How do you account for the election results?” he replied with a grin and a wave of his cigarette holder: “I know very little about this election.” Would the Republican gains make any difference in his attitude? a reporter inquired, trying to draw him out. “I assume,” he blithely answered, that “the new Congress would be as much in favor of winning the war as the Chief Executive himself.” His secretary William Hassett “found the President in high spirits.” He just seemed to be glad that the election was over and showed “not a trace of the post election gloom which, according to his enemies, should encircle him.” He told Ambassador John Winant in London, “I hope the country will forget politics for two years. That, however, is an almost impossible miracle.” As someone who was consistently aware of his impact on public opinion, he never lost sight of politics.
For all his optimism and refusal to be overtly political in domestic affairs, Roosevelt was enough of a realist to see that he confronted great obstacles in adjourning politics or, more important, winning the war.
In the run-up to the North African invasion, he clashed with Churchill over how to calm Spanish and Portuguese concerns about British threats to their African possessions. Roosevelt wanted them to understand the invasion as being strictly “under American command,” while Churchill thought that candor about British participation was the best way to “remove any suspicions about the object of our concentrations at Gibraltar.”
Roosevelt believed that keeping the United States in the forefront was even more essential in assuring the French that “the allies seek no territory and have no intention of interfering with friendly French authorities in Africa.” In November 1940, he had appointed Admiral William D. Leahy ambassador to Vichy France. It was a calculated attempt to have a prominent U.S. military leader persuade Marshal Henri Pétain, France’s eighty-four-year-old World War I hero and Vichy chief of state, to resist German pressure to join the Axis side in the war. Roosevelt particularly hoped that diplomatic relations with Pétain’s government could dissuade it from resisting the North African invasion. Roosevelt’s “Vichy gamble,” as some called it, opened a conflict in Washington between the Board of Economic Warfare, under the aegis of Vice President Henry Wallace and Milo Perkins, an associate from the Agriculture Department, and Hull’s State Department, who battled over providing supplies to the Vichy French in North Africa, which State favored as a way to head off opposition to an invasion and the board saw as aiding the Axis. The dispute reached the White House, where Roosevelt sided with Hull.
Tensions also arose with Charles de Gaulle, who led Free French resistance to Vichy and the German occupation. Roosevelt took pains to ensure that de Gaulle was kept in the dark about the November attack, as he was certain any sign of collaboration with de Gaulle would signal Free French involvement in the North African campaign and trigger a militant Vichy response. De Gaulle was already at odds with the U.S. decision to maintain diplomatic relations with Vichy, which he viewed as a betrayal of France’s future. Although Churchill gave de Gaulle sanctuary in London and recognized his Free French authority, he accepted Roosevelt’s judgment about denying him a part in the invasion or recognizing him as the legitimate head of North Africa’s French colonies. During a visit to London in July, when Marshall and King refused to share any information with de Gaulle about U.S. plans, he walked out of the meeting in a huff. By now de Gaulle had come to suspect that the Allies were planning a North African assault, which only deepened his hostility to Roosevelt and Washington’s Vichy accommodation and marked the beginning of a feud that would continue throughout the war. For Roosevelt, de Gaulle represented a France that had failed to mount a defense against the Germans and was unworthy of a central role in the war councils or discussions shaping Europe’s future. For his part, de Gaulle regarded the president as an opportunist who was dismissive of France’s history and potential contribution to a Nazi defeat.
Problems with Spain, meanwhile, continued to simmer in the weeks before the launch of TORCH. When the U.S. ambassador reported Spanish threats to enter the war on Germany’s side if the United Nations invaded North Africa, Roosevelt passed the report along to Churchill. American interference in a matter Churchill considered under British control angered him. Fortunately, tensions between the Allies evaporated after the invasion on November 8 made it clear that Francisco Franco’s warnings were no more than an empty threat.
The differences over Spain underscored Churchill’s concern at Britain’s growing dependence on the United States—not only for the wherewithal to fight the war but also for Britain’s future role in world politics. However much he appreciated the vital U.S. support, Churchill understood that the war was draining Britain of its resources, undermining its empire, and consigning it to a greatly diminished influence on the world stage. On October 31, in a cable to the president, Churchill lamented the approach of “our last remaining reserves of manpower” and Britain’s “deteriorating maritime strength.” “All our labour and capacity is engaged in the war effort,” he told Roosevelt. “. . . We have lost enormously in ships used in the common interest, and we trust to you to give us a fair and just assignment of your new vast construction to sail under our own flag.” He cited Britain’s dependence on U.S. food stores, explaining that “our stocks are running down with dangerous rapidity.” In his closing, which was as much an expression of distress as a statement of support for the invasion, he wrote: “I pray that this great American enterprise, in which I am your lieutenant and in which we have the honour to play an important part, may be crowned by the success it deserves.”
Roosevelt was not insensitive to the price Britain was paying in both power and influence. He could not miss Churchill’s irony in describing himself as the president’s lieutenant and in his mentioning “the honour to play an important part” in the invasion, when in fact British naval and infantry forces were slated to make a significant contribution to the offensive. His dispatching Eleanor on a four-week visit to Britain was intended not only to distance her from the congressional elections but also to demonstrate American regard for Churchill and the British people. “I confide my Missus to the care of you and Mrs. Churchill. I know our better halves will hit it off beautifully,” he wrote the prime minister on October 19, two days before Eleanor made the somewhat perilous flight to England. Feted by the king and queen and housed at Buckingham Palace, Eleanor endeared herself to the English and received unanimous praise for her courage in facing the danger from German attacks in England. The fifty-eight-year-old Eleanor was a whirlwind of activity: On November 1, Churchill reported that “Mrs. Roosevelt has been winning golden opinions here from all for her kindness and her unfailing interest in everything we are doing. . . . We are most grateful for her visit and for all the encouragement it is giving to our women workers. I did my best to advise a reduction of her programme . . . but I have not met with success, and Mrs. Roosevelt proceeds indefatigably.” She visited Dover and Canterbury, which were in range of German artillery and bombers. (The day after she left Canterbury it suffered a heavy daylight raid.) Roosevelt glowed with satisfaction over the “almost unanimously favorable press” she received in the United States and hoped it would pay dividends in the upcoming congressional voting. More important, her visit underscored Roosevelt’s genuine regard for Churchill and all the British were doing in the war.
During 1942, no ally was more consistently irritating or troubling than Chiang. The loss of Burma and his unwillingness to follow Stilwell’s advice on how to mount an offensive against the Japanese tested Roosevelt’s patience. The differences between Chiang and Stilwell were so sharp, General Claire Chennault, the head of the American Volunteer Air Group in China, reported, that Chiang would have had Stilwell shot if he were a Chinese general. Stilwell complained that Chiang “made it impossible for me to do anything,” and secretly called him “the Peanut,” deriding him as a “stupid, gutless” wonder with no interest in anything beyond his own power and grandiosity. During the spring, Chiang had complained to Roosevelt about China’s peripheral role in joint staff conferences and supply decisions, protesting that “China is treated not as an equal like Britain and Russia, but as a ward.” In response to a Japanese offensive in southern China in May, Chiang had threatened “an undeclared peace involving cessation of hostilities.” He wanted to know if and when U.S. aid would arrive, declared that China’s faltering war effort was at its “most crucial stage,” and warned that a collapse might be imminent. Given his other wartime commitments, Roosevelt had little to offer beyond reassurances of future supply deliveries and a role for a great-power China in postwar world affairs. But Roosevelt’s promises impressed Chiang as little more than rhetoric. Stilwell wired: “The Generalissimo wants a yes or no answer whether the Allies consider this Theater necessary and will support it.” Chiang again cautioned that the Chinese fighting front would collapse unless three American divisions were sent to India to recapture the Burma Road. In response the United States assigned five hundred combat planes to fight the Japanese in China and began shipping five thousand tons of supplies a month over the Himalayas. Roosevelt did not reply directly to Chiang’s demands but urged him to understand that the United States was “doing absolutely all in our power to help China win this war.”
Stilwell, who found himself in the middle of this dispute between the two leaders, especially resented the pressure being placed on him from the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang “to be a Chinese, a stooge that plugs the U.S. for anything and everything they want.” They tried to win him over by arranging his promotion to full general, but Stilwell knew better, noting in a diary, “The hell they are.” Given Stilwell’s resistance to act as a lobbyist for China’s demands, Chiang pressed Roosevelt to make Stilwell totally subordinate to him and to transfer his control over Lend-Lease supplies entirely to him.
Counseled by Marshall and limited by the demands the fighting in the Middle East, the Pacific, and the coming African offensive made on U.S. resources, Roosevelt continued to resist the pressure from China. Mindful of how starved the CBI theater would remain, Stilwell remarked wryly, “Peanut and I are on a raft, with one sandwich between us, and the rescue ship is heading away from the scene.” He was all too aware that “the Chiang Kai-shek regime is playing the USA for a sucker, . . . that it is looking for an Allied victory without making any further effort on its part to secure it; and that it expects to have piled up at the end of the war a supply of munitions that will allow it to perpetuate itself indefinitely.” Chiang’s strategy was guided by the old Chinese adage: Let the barbarians fight the barbarians. He expected the Americans to take responsibility for defeating the Japanese while he prepared to battle his old domestic enemy, Mao Tse-tung’s Communists. Although Roosevelt saw no way to meet Chiang’s demands, he believed it essential to keep him engaged in the war. A Chinese collapse would not only free several Japanese divisions to join the fighting in the Pacific but also demoralize Americans who considered China their best ally—a nation that, unlike Britain, had no colonial history, and, unlike Russia, had a government allegedly aspiring to imitate that of the United States. When Roosevelt briefly considered removing Stilwell, observing, “I cannot help feeling that the whole situation depends largely on the problem of personalities rather than on strategic plans,” Marshall dissuaded him, arguing that Stilwell was “a troop leader rather than a negotiator or supply man who would only serve to promote harmony in Chungking.”
In the fall of 1942, all the battlefield uncertainties across Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Russia, combined with domestic divisions, led Roosevelt to wonder why he had fought so hard to win a third term. As the congressional elections had demonstrated, national divisions remained as sharp as ever. Unlike Britain, China, and Russia, where lives were being lost on battlefields and home fronts alike, Americans were insulated from the terrors of air raids destroying their cities, but they worried that they might suffer the same fate as London and Berlin. Nonetheless, the politics of postwar arrangements were very much the topic of current debate. Vice President Henry Wallace weighed in with a speech promising a “people’s peace” that would mark the dawn of “the century of the common man.” Reluctant to see another round of idealistic preachments calling for an end to realpolitik and the initiation of universalism under collective security, conservatives called Wallace’s idealism “globaloney.” Adolf Berle in the State Department mocked Wallace’s world vision as needing “gods to run it. I don’t know how it is with you,” he told an English official, “but here in Washington there is quite a bottle-neck in archangels.”
Although Roosevelt hardly wanted a divisive domestic argument over postwar international politics, he took some satisfaction in noting that for the first time in their history, Americans felt compelled to think about distant regions of the world. He wrote Joseph Alsop, his cousin and a prominent columnist, who was heading to China to join General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, “What a privilege it is to be alive in this particular day and age! Until now almost every practical philosophy and ideal has been confined to national thinking or perhaps regional planning. I wonder what your classmates at school would have thought of you if you had announced that you would be part and parcel of American military operations in Africa, Asia and Polynesia. If I had suggested that at Groton in 1900 they would have put me down as more unorthodox than I actually was.” Yet Roosevelt knew that such isolationist thinking still flourished, and so he sent word to Clark Eichelberger, the head of the League of Nations Association, who wished to revive discussions about creating an international organization, advising him, “for heaven’s sake [don’t] do anything specific at this time.” He told Harry Hopkins that he “was determined not to go to the Senate with any treaty before the end of the war,” which he feared would undermine the consensus he believed essential to the war effort.
At the same time, however, he was quietly pondering how to organize the postwar world in order to keep the peace for more than twenty years—the time that had passed between the two world wars. In a conversation with Grace Tully and Sam Rosenman in mid-November, he proposed that the League of Nations change its name to “The United Nations Association” and that world peace become the responsibility of four key nations or “four policemen”—Britain, China, Russia, and the United States. He also suggested that Eichelberger put out a trial balloon of these ideas “without associating him with them.” He then told Jan Smuts, the president of South Africa, that he was eager to discuss with him “plans now for the victorious peace which will surely come,” including a system of trusteeships he intended to propose for former colonies that were not yet ready for self-governance. At the end of November, in what Daisy described as a “momentous” conversation during a visit to Hyde Park, Roosevelt expressed his determination to meet with Churchill and Stalin in order to begin discussing postwar plans: He hoped they would agree to his notion of a group of four international powers who would use their authority and power to prevent acts of aggression, promote universal disarmament for everyone but the four peacekeepers, and endorse ultimate self-determination for former colonies. He saw his plan as a combination of Wilson’s idealism and hardheaded realism.
During the first week of November, however, Roosevelt had been focused on the imminent commencement of TORCH. The campaign represented the first great U.S. offensive against Hitler’s armies, and he was desperately concerned to see it succeed. On Friday, November 6, on the eve of the invasion, he led a procession to Shangri-La with Harry Hopkins, Grace Tully, Daisy, and military aides. Although Daisy was given no details about the attack, Roosevelt offered broad hints that something serious was about to take place and said that they might have to return to Washington suddenly—no doubt concerned that a faltering assault might require his presence in the White House Map Room, where he could closely monitor developments. He was especially concerned that U-boats might sink some of the six hundred ships carrying the 90,000 troops and weapons staging the attack; that the Atlantic seas off Morocco and Oran, which could produce fifteen-foot waves, might imperil the landing; and that German and French resistance might repel the invaders.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the fifty-two-year-old U.S. officer commanding the operation from a tunnel under the Rock of Gibraltar, shared the president’s anxiety. A significant amount of chaos had attended the preparation for the landing of the untested troops, who were thrown into combat with much hope and no battlefield experience. Eisenhower himself, who was an up-through-the-ranks career officer, had had no previous testing in battle. Burdened with every conceivable modern warfare tool in their knapsacks that U.S. factories could produce, some of the troops drowned in the struggle to get ashore from the landing craft. But the bulk of the invaders reached the beaches unopposed. When Roosevelt took a call from the War Department with the first reports of the attack, his hand shook as he lifted the receiver to his ear. His relief was evident as he put down the phone and exclaimed, “Thank God. Thank God. We have landed in North Africa. Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back.”
Despite some Vichy French resistance, the Anglo-American forces captured Oran, Algiers, and Casablanca within three days. “I am happy today,” he wrote Josephus Daniels, “. . . for three months I have been taking it on the chin in regard to the Second front and that is now over.” A simultaneous British victory at El Alamein in Egypt with the capture of 36,000 German troops, Rommel in retreat, and the emergence of Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery as a celebrated British war hero sparked fresh optimism. Churchill caught the spirit of renewed hope when he said, “Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Along with the success, however, the invasion triggered new controversies and tensions. Determined as ever to discourage Vichy forces from opposing the Allies, Roosevelt sanctioned an agreement with Admiral Jean Darlan, the Vichy commander in chief. Darlan was fortuitously present in Algiers on the day of the attack, visiting a gravely ill son, and so was in a position to halt his troops’ resistance. Eager to respond to a German occupation of Vichy France in retaliation for limited French opposition to the invasion, and a commitment to grant him political control across French North Africa, Darlan agreed to cooperate with the Allies.
The arrangement provoked a firestorm of anger and opposition in both Britain and the United States. Describing it as “a sordid nullification of the principles for which the United Nations were supposed to be fighting,” critics warned against a compromise peace with Germany and Japan that would leave fascists in power. Because Roosevelt continued to see de Gaulle as a divisive influence and because General Henri Giraud, the Frenchman Roosevelt had identified as an alternative future leader to de Gaulle and Darlan, was proving to be difficult to manage, Roosevelt tried to fend off detractors by declaring, “We are opposed to Frenchmen who support Hitler and the Axis. . . . The future French Government will be established not by any individual in metropolitan France or overseas, but by the French people themselves after they have been set free by the victory of the United Nations.” In the meantime, he publicly rationalized the collaboration with Darlan by quoting an old Balkan proverb: “My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.” He also told the public that it was “only a temporary expedient justified solely by the stress of battle.”
Churchill warned Roosevelt that the Darlan pact might be doing “serious political injury . . . to our cause . . . by the feeling that we are ready to make terms with local Quislings.” (Vidkun Quisling was Norway’s Nazi collaborator.) Churchill also advised Roosevelt that “His Majesty’s Government are under quite definite and solemn obligations to De Gaulle and his movement. We must see they have a fair deal. It seems to me that you and I ought to avoid at all costs the creation of rival French Émigré Governments each favored by one of us. We must try to fuse all anti-German French forces together, and make a United Government.” De Gaulle haughtily declared, “The U.S. can pay traitors but not with the honor of France. What remains of the honor of France will stay intact in my hands.” The Nation magazine condemned Roosevelt for embracing a “prostitute.” The deal drove Henry Morgenthau into a depression, and he told Roosevelt that it was “something that afflicts my soul.” Stimson accepted that the arrangement with Darlan had provided “enormous benefits,” but had dishonored the administration.
Sam Rosenman recalled that Roosevelt “showed more resentment and more impatience with his critics throughout this period than at any other time I know about. . . . At times he bitterly read aloud what some columnist had written about them, and expressed his resentment.” He was painfully distressed at being accused of cozying up to Fascists and Nazis, whom he despised. He lost his temper when two de Gaulle supporters complained about the Darlan deal, shouting at them: “Of course I’m dealing with Darlan since Darlan’s giving me Algiers! Tomorrow I’d deal with [Vichy Premier Pierre] Laval, if Laval were to offer me Paris!” Since the arrangement reduced combat, saved lives, and forced the repeal of some Vichy laws discriminating against Jews, Roosevelt could not understand the outcry against his policy. Churchill summed up the problem by telling Roosevelt: “Not only have our enemies been thus encouraged, but our friends have been correspondingly confused and cast down.”
Over the next six weeks, the controversy subsided as the Allies advanced across North Africa; Vichy broke relations with the United States; Stalin endorsed the deal, saying defeating Germany made arrangements with “even the Devil himself and his grandma” justifiable; and, on Christmas Eve, a young French monarchist shot and killed Darlan. But the alliance would cast a shadow of suspicion over Roosevelt’s intentions and leave deep wounds that would affect his future dealings with the French.
Pressured by Hitler, Pétain summoned more than 300,000 German and Italian troops to defend Tunisia as U.S. forces pushed east from Morocco and Algeria and British forces led by Montgomery and buoyed by their victory at El Alamein advanced on Tunisia from Libya to the west. The initial tank battles with the superior Nazi panzers demonstrated that the Germans might now be on the defensive but that they remained a formidable enemy. Although Eisenhower saw U.S. operations as in violation of “every recognized principle of war,” he would use them as object lessons for all future tank battles. From these early skirmishes, Eisenhower and his subordinates took instruction on what would bring them victory in Africa in the opening months of 1943.