Joseph E. Persico (33 page)

Attending the meeting with Churchill and Eisenhower was Ike's deputy, Major General Mark Clark, tall, confident in speech, manner, and bearing, and with a hawkish face that suggested the American eagle. Of course, General Mast should be courted into their camp by his military peers from the Allied side, all agreed. But insinuating a military mission into a French North Africa torn between pro-Nazi Vichyites, pro-Allied leaders, and fence straddlers was going to be risky. Suppose this contact exposed the imminence of Torch, thus destroying the critical element of surprise. And who should undertake this risk? The officer most familiar with the strategy of Torch, down to the nuts and bolts, was Mark Clark. Clark's immediate reaction was, “When do I go?” Eisenhower and Churchill agreed on one point that would immeasurably complicate Clark's task. Both leaders considered French security a sieve. Clark was to try to enlist Mast's support for Torch without revealing its time or place.

Five days later, on a moon-bright night and a smooth sea, the British submarine P-219, the
Seraph,
surfaced in the Mediterranean and glided within two miles of an isolated beach seventy-five miles west of Algiers. High above a steep bluff, a light shone in one window of an otherwise darkened house. General Clark and four high-ranking officers slid down the side of the
Seraph
into bobbing foldboats, collapsible wood and canvas craft. Before leaving London, Clark had written a letter to his wife, Renie, in which he said, “I am leaving in twenty minutes on a mission which is extremely hazardous but one . . . I have volunteered to do.” He had scrawled across the envelope, to “Mrs. M. W. Clark. Deliver only in the event that I do not return.” He and the men boarding the foldboats carried five- and ten-dollar gold pieces and the equivalent of $10,000 in French francs should they have to bribe their way back to safety.

By 6
A.M
. Clark's party, greeted by Robert Murphy, was conferring with General Mast in the remote house which belonged to the father of Lieutenant Jacques Teissier, a Mast aide, who had dismissed the Arab servants for the day. Clark repeated Murphy's exaggeration that the invasion force would total a half million men. Mast asked if so powerful a force might also land in the south of France to stave off a German takeover of the unoccupied territory. That, Clark replied, was logistically impossible. Mast then asked for two thousand rifles, ammunition, and grenades for his troops, and five days' advance notice of the invasion. Clark agreed to the weapons but still hedged on D-Day. Four and a half hours later, having made clear his willingness to side with the Americans, General Mast left.

For Clark, extricating himself proved the most hazardous part of the mission. French police had been tipped off by suspicious Arabs that something was going on at the Teissier house. As the policemen approached, Clark and his group snatched up the papers strewn around the living room and hid themselves in a sour-smelling wine cellar. The police arrived but did not search the cellar. After they left, Clark's party made it back to the beach only to encounter a raging surf. Clark's foldboat capsized. Down to the bottom went the gold he was carrying. Not until the middle of the following night did the general, by now semi-naked, soaked, and trembling with cold, make it back aboard the
Seraph
and ultimately to London. There, Eisenhower decided to risk alerting General Mast four days before the invasion. If Clark had succeeded, a major French force would not be cutting down GIs on the Algerian beaches.

On Saturday, November 7, FDR gathered Harry Hopkins and a handful of other trusted friends at Shangri-la. That evening, as the guests gathered for drinks and dinner, Roosevelt's habitual geniality was absent, supplanted by a palpable unease. Earlier, the President had marked a passage from the Thirty-ninth Psalm of the Book of Psalms that read, “O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more.”

The unflappable composure that FDR ordinarily exhibited was purchased at a high price. The fears that roiled beneath the aplomb can be glimpsed in a diary entry by Roosevelt's frequent companion, the devoted and undemanding cousin Daisy Suckley. “The P. had an awful nightmare last night,” Suckley wrote during a visit to the White House. “I woke out of a sound sleep to hear him calling out for help in blood curdling sounds!” The next morning at breakfast the President told Daisy, “I thought a man was coming through the transom and was going to kill me.” Suckley ended the entry, “I wondered why the SS [Secret Service] didn't rush in, but he says they are quite accustomed to such nightmares.”

That November evening at Shangri-la the sudden ring of a telephone shattered the muted conversation. The President took the receiver from Grace Tully with a visibly shaking hand. The War Department was calling. The President listened, nodding vigorously, and hung up. He surveyed his guests, suddenly beaming, the anguish banished from his face. “We have landed in North Africa,” he announced, and early casualty reports were low. “We are striking back.” He grinned.

Ironically, America's first offensive in the European war was not against the declared enemy, Nazi Germany, but against the nation's oldest friend, France. Nor was it the cakewalk predicted by the President's intelligence sources, including Donovan's OSS. Yes, the invasion had achieved total surprise. The first warning had been the throb of landing craft engines approaching the beaches. The deceptions succeeded too. As the forces landed, seven squadrons of German planes circled Cap Bon, three hundred miles from the nearest fighting, searching for a fictitious convoy, bound supposedly for Malta. But in answering the crucial question, would French forces resist the invasion? the Americans had been blinded by optimism. General Mast managed only to slow the French response to the landings in Algeria. But Allied troops had to fight their way ashore against fierce resistance, particularly in the port cities. Almost fifteen hundred Americans were killed, wounded, or missing in a stiff three-day engagement that cost the French triple that number of casualties. While the losses had not been catastrophic, Torch was hardly a dustup.

A week after the invasion, on November 15, a self-satisfied President called his cabinet together. At times it seemed that FDR had been the only believer in Torch. Now, in victory, he was not averse to taking the lion's share of the credit. The successful operation had combined strength with cunning. Torch confirmed another of the President's gambles. He had created the COI/OSS against the resistance of every military and civilian organization with a hand in intelligence. He had sensed in Bill Donovan—despite the latter's bent for stepping on toes, or because of it—the qualities of boldness and enterprise he wanted in a spymaster. He had stuck by Donovan when rivals wanted his head on a platter. And the OSS had played a respectable role in Torch. Colonel Eddy's team had amassed an Everest of logistical data on tides, currents, depth of ports, locations of bridges, tunnels, and airfields, placement of coastal guns, the strength and deployment of French forces, and the most favorable landing sites. On certain beaches, OSS agents, waiting to greet the troops, handed them French military maps and guided them inland. The enemy was where these agents said it would be, armed as predicted and in the numbers estimated. Bill Donovan's organization was now part of the military force, if still a decidedly junior partner.

*

The saboteurs' landing in the United States had confirmed FDR's nagging worry over subversion and fifth column infiltrators. That enemies could penetrate America's shores seemed to validate J. Edgar Hoover's repeated warnings to the President, echoed since 1938, that the Nazis had planted secret agents among the tens of thousands of Jews seeking to flee Germany. This possibility had shaped the President's priority, which was not so much to help refugees enter America, but to keep spies out, a posture questionable in hindsight, but reflective of FDR's state of mind at the time.

Still, his behavior had to be measured against startling intelligence the President was receiving on the plight of the Jews, even before the war in Europe had begun. Bill Bullitt, his former ambassador to France, had come into possession of a document smuggled out of Germany, which he sent to the White House marked “Secret and Personal for the President.” On March 12, 1939, over five months before the war had started, Bullitt managed to obtain the transcript of remarks made by Hitler at a secret meeting of German officers, government officials, and Nazi Party leaders. In the privacy of his inner circle, Hitler had revealed his timetable. Germany had already acquired the Czech Sudetenland through the 1938 Munich Pact. Within the week, the remaining rump of Czechoslovakia was to be seized. “Poland will follow,” Hitler announced. “German domination is necessary in order to assure for Germany Polish supplies of agricultural products and coal. As far as Hungary and Romania are concerned, they belong without question to Germany's vital space.” In 1940, certainly no later than 1941, Hitler assured his staff, “Germany will settle accounts once and for all with her hereditary enemy, France. That country will be obliterated from the map of Europe.” In his most brutal prediction, Hitler declared: “. . . [E]nemies of the German people must be exterminated radically: Jews, democracies and international powers.” Near hysteria marked his closing threat: “. . . We will settle accounts with the ‘dollar Jews' in the United States. We will exterminate this Jewish democracy and Jewish blood will mix with the dollars.”

Since it was impossible for FDR not to know what was happening to the Jews of Europe, the pertinent question is how he and his circle dealt with this knowledge. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a Jew, was as close to the President as any figure in the administration, and had been something of a one-man recruiting agency for the New Deal. Frankfurter was all too familiar with the historic odyssey of the Jews. His parents had left Austria when Felix was twelve and settled on the Lower East Side of New York. Reared in poverty, the boy nevertheless displayed his brilliance, graduating from City College at age nineteen and going on to Harvard Law School, where he subsequently joined the faculty. His devotion to FDR was total. He had even braved the disfavor of his colleagues to support the President's high-handed 1937 attempt to pack the Supreme Court. The Frankfurters still had relatives in Austria. In 1938, the year before Roosevelt elevated him to the Court, Frankfurter received word that his eighty-two-year-old uncle, Solomon Frankfurter, a distinguished Viennese scholar, had been hauled from his bed at 3
A.M
. and jailed by the Nazis. Frankfurter's first impulse had been to reach for the phone and call the President. But on second thought, he held back. Suppose the press got wind of the story and blew it out of proportion? Roosevelt was already attacked by his enemies as a tool of the Jews, even a Jew himself. Bigots parodied his New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Frankfurter decided instead to turn to the State Department to help win his uncle's release. He had chosen a poor ally. State's visa division was notoriously unsympathetic toward Jews. Frankfurter was advised that intervention was impossible. In desperation, he appealed to the American-born Lady Nancy Astor in London. In that period, before war broke out, her Cliveden set favored appeasing Hitler, and this stance gave her some influence with the German ambassador to England, who did arrange for Solomon Frankfurter's release. Roosevelt was never involved.

Even closer to FDR, Sam Rosenman also hesitated to go directly to the President with his family's problem. Rosenman had a refugee cousin living in America who came to him pleading for help in finding out what had happened to his wife and three children trapped in German-occupied Warsaw. Instead of going to Roosevelt, Rosenman chose to see Adolf Berle, a rare sympathetic listener at State, who tried to help.

It is fair to ask if the President could have done more to save Jews seeking refuge in the United States. The transcript Bullitt had sent him exposed Hitler's intentions. The Nuremberg laws were stripping Jews of their humanity. And the whole world knew of the anti-Semitic outrage of Kristallnacht. The answer to Roosevelt's conduct in the face of these facts lies in part in his earliest formation. He had been shaped in some degree by the genteel prejudices of his class. His wife, Eleanor, who grew in character to become a paragon of liberal virtues, had herself exhibited a fashionable bigotry when she was younger. After an evening with Bernard Baruch, when she was thirty-three, she wrote her mother-in-law: “The Jew party [was] appalling. I never wish to hear money, jewels or labels mentioned again.” FDR had named Jews, an ethnic group that then represented only 3 percent of the U.S. population, to 15 percent of his top administration posts. But as his son Jimmy once observed, FDR took his social companionship almost wholly from his own class. “I now think he travelled with that group as an escape, back to the world of Groton, Harvard and Hyde Park. These people had everything, so they didn't want anything from father,” Jimmy concluded. “He was more comfortable with them than he was with his political associates, who constantly pestered him with their problems.” Whatever his social preferences, Roosevelt remained foremost a politician who dared not get too far ahead of his constituents. Barely out of the Depression, still haunted by unemployment, most Americans were not eager to open the floodgates to job competition from immigrants, including oppressed Jews. A 1938 Roper poll posed the question, “What kinds of people do you object to?” The people most cited were Jews, singled out by 35 percent of the respondents.

The tight immigration laws in place since the twenties allowed for only 153,774 immigrants annually, of which Germany's quota was 25,957, a trickle compared to the flood of German Jews trying to reach America. At the State Department, these laws were applied not so much strictly as mean-spiritedly. Even unfilled quotas were bottled up and withheld from Jews seeking to flee Europe. Congress could be equally insensitive. A bill introduced in the House to make it easier for European Jews under age sixteen to get at least a tourist visitor's visa to America never made it out of committee.