Joseph E. Persico (34 page)

The saga of the SS
St. Louis
illustrates the atmosphere of the era. The Hamburg-Amerika liner, carrying 930 Jewish refugees, left Germany for Cuba on May 13, 1939, before the war in Europe began. At Havana, however, Cuban officials refused to allow more than a handful to disembark. The captain then circled the Florida coast for days, close enough for the passengers to glimpse the lights of Miami, while negotiators sought permission to land the refugees. State and immigration authorities applied laws prohibiting the landing with chilling exactitude. The refugees dispatched a telegram to President Roosevelt pleading for help. It went unanswered. The
St. Louis
returned to Europe, where its passengers were resettled in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Many who landed in countries soon to be occupied by Hitler ultimately perished in the Holocaust.

The President believed that the answer to the Jews' dilemma lay outside the United States. “The whole trouble is in England,” he told Henry Morgenthau. Palestine was the obvious place to resettle Jewish refugees, FDR suggested. But the British would do nothing that might antagonize Middle East Arabs. Unable to overcome the resistance within the country and within himself to deal with the plight of European Jewry, Roosevelt thrashed about in futile speculation. As the situation worsened, Morgenthau came again to the President to see if something might be done. FDR offered that maybe the Jews could be settled in the Cameroons, on Africa's western coast, where they would find “some very wonderful high land, table land, wonderful grass and . . . all of that country has been explored and it's ready.” FDR mentioned that he had tried to talk the president of Paraguay into taking in more Jews. He also suggested to Morgenthau an idea that demonstrated a certain bleak clairvoyance: “I actually would put a barbed wire around Palestine, and I would begin to move the Arabs out of Palestine. . . . There are lots of places to which you could move the Arabs. All you have to do is drill a well because there is this large underground water supply.”

As for early reports of Nazi barbarism, a seed of doubt existed in Roosevelt's mind sown by memories of alleged German atrocities during World War I. The kaiser's armies, depicted in the Allied press as bullnecked Huns, were accused of torturing the wounded, slaughtering innocent civilians, and impaling Belgian babies on the points of their bayonets for sheer sport. All had turned out to be British-inspired fabrications.

Well into the war, on May 27, 1942, Donovan was feeding the President information confirming FDR's early judgment that the British had been the impediment to rescuing the Jews. A movement was afoot to form a Jewish army in Palestine that would fight with the Allies. Unwise, Donovan's experts cautioned. The State Department went further and drafted a release for the President to issue that read: “The post-war settlement cannot be prejudiced by commitments at the present time in respect of an army for Palestine which would be exclusively Jewish.” With Operation Torch in the planning stage at the time, how could the interest of hapless Jews compare to the need not to rile millions of Arabs living from North Africa to the Middle East? the opponents of a Jewish army argued.

In England, the war, instead of increasing sympathy for the Jews, was having a contrary effect, according to further intelligence that Donovan supplied to the President. “From Midland and London areas and from police duty room reports,” Donovan noted, “an increase in anti-semitism, said to be due principally to the frequent occurrence of Jewish names in news of black market cases. Other reasons cited for the increase or prevalence of anti-semitism are the many current stories of Jewish evasion of duties and regulations.”

On July 10, 1942, John Franklin Carter delivered to the White House reports written by eyewitnesses to the horrors of daily life in concentration camps in Poland and Lithuania. One account described the mass electrocution of Jews in a place called Belzec. Bill Donovan's people contributed further to the catalogue of horrors. His agents interrogated steamship passengers landing in New York, one of whom, a banker who had fled Berlin in November 1941, gave a harrowing account of how the Nazi regime went about rounding up Jews and transporting them to the camps.

Solid intelligence of what was happening to the Jews mounted as Ultra intercepted Nazi dispatches. Decrypts forwarded to Churchill included a report from Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, an SS general operating in occupied Russia, sent to his superior in Berlin. Dated July 18, 1941, it read: “Yesterday's cleansing action in Slonim, carried out by Police Regiment Centre, 1,153 Jewish plunderers were shot.” Three weeks later Bach-Zelewski informed Berlin, again in code: “Up to today, midday, a further 3,600 have been executed. . . . Thus the figure of executions in my area now exceeds 30,000.” No records exist indicating whether or not these decrypts reached FDR as well as Churchill. Curiously, in the stream of secret messages passed directly between them throughout the war, no substantive mention was ever made of the atrocities against the Jews.

After the North African landings succeeded, the President went to Casablanca and, in a meeting with the French resident general at Rabat, delivered an astonishing opinion. “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions—law, medicine etc.—should be limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population,” he urged. “This plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews.” He had echoed the rationale that the Nazis had carried to barbaric limits.

After the war, after images had been burned into the world's consciousness of skeletal, hollow-eyed concentration camp survivors and heaps of pallid corpses bulldozed into mass graves, it is difficult to accept that Roosevelt could not have done more for the Jews. But these images were yet to come. And, late in the day, he did do more. At the time Hitler took power, 525,000 Jews lived in Germany. Of these, nearly three quarters managed to get out before the war. The largest number, nearly 105,000, were allowed into the United States. By late 1941, in contrast to the dismal fate of the
St. Louis
's passengers, ships were permitted to debark Jewish refugees in the United States. One, the Portuguese
Serpa Pinta,
arrived in New York one week after Pearl Harbor, and was allowed to land all its passengers, almost entirely Jewish refugees. The harsh truth is that, after 1940, once Hitler had conquered much of Europe, it was as if a massive gate had clanged shut imprisoning millions of Jews and other victims of the Third Reich. Once that gate closed, little could be done to rescue them. Ideas were put forth. One stratagem, still widely cited, was that Allied bombers could have struck the rail lines leading to major death camps, such as Auschwitz. This seemingly simple solution ignored certain realities. Throughout the war, the Germans were to display a dismaying swiftness in restoring rail lines just hours after a bombing. And when lines were ruptured, the Jews and other Nazi victims were marched to their deaths.

On December 8, 1942, FDR finally and publicly condemned the Nazi extermination of the Jews and declared America's policy—those perpetuating mass murder would be dealt with as criminals when the fighting ended. In the meantime, Roosevelt's principal response to ending the mass murder of the Jews was to win the war.

Chapter XVI

An Exchange: An Invasion for a Bomb

THE BETRAYAL of the greatest secret of the war, the development of the atomic bomb, follows a sinuous path leading to Winston Churchill.

On June 19, 1942, FDR sat waiting in his Ford Phaeton convertible alongside a rudimentary landing strip near Hyde Park. He watched a small aircraft drop from a cloud-dappled sky and come to a bumpy halt practically next to the car. Out stepped a short figure of comfortable bulk waving an outsized cigar. Winston Churchill was making his second wartime visit to the United States. He entered the passenger side of the car, and the President, with a bucking takeoff, started to demonstrate how the manual controls worked, as he whipped the car around the family estate. They spurted past Springwood, the Roosevelt home, and came to a halt on a grassy bluff behind the house affording a stunning panorama of the Hudson River Valley. FDR backed out and darted into the thick woods carpeting the decline between the house and the river. He took sudden twists and turns through familiar terrain, trying to give the Secret Service the slip. Noticing Churchill's uneasiness at his extravagant whipping of the steering wheel, FDR told him not to worry. He had biceps that a boxing champion had once envied, he said, and asked Churchill to feel his muscle while he steered with the other hand.

After the drive and lunch, they retired to a small, stuffy room off the portico, FDR's “snuggery.” The President pointed out a recent installation, an RCA television set with a twelve-inch screen and magnifying mirror to enlarge the picture, a model introduced at the 1939 World's Fair. After an initial look at the flickering images beamed from New York City, the President had quickly lost interest in the set. The Prime Minister seated himself alongside the President in the small room which was almost filled by FDR's desk, and which he described as “dark and shaded from the sun.” After reviewing the current military situation, Churchill edged the discussion toward something troubling him. Research on the atomic bomb was now well under way. Churchill asked where they ought to construct the large-scale uranium-processing plants vital to the bomb's development. Britain had already been battered from the sky by the Luftwaffe, and “vast and conspicuous factories” there, as Churchill put it, would offer irresistible targets. Canada might do, he suggested. But, as he later recorded of their talk, he was relieved “when the President said he thought the United States would have to do it.” That matter settled, Churchill brought up Britain's right to full partnership in the pursuit of atomic weapons.

The Prime Minister had every reason to expect parity. Separate operations would amount to wasteful duplication that neither Britain nor America could afford. Besides, the British considered themselves leading the United States in nuclear physics, and in a position to help, rather than be helped by their American colleagues. Two American physicists, Harold Urey and G. B. Pegram, had gone to England in the fall of 1941 and been given free run of British laboratories. What the British had shared with their American colleagues had been decisive in persuading FDR that a bomb was feasible. And it was FDR who had first written Churchill urging that they develop the bomb together, a joint project code-named Tube Alloys.

After the two leaders met at Hyde Park, the partnership seemed to be sailing smoothly until storm warnings arose early in 1943. The Manhattan Project was now under the direction of a security-obsessed Brigadier General Leslie Groves, who wanted the rules changed in mid-game. His intermediary was the eminent Dr. James Conant, chairman of the National Defense Research Committee. Conant presented the new U.S. position to Wallace Akers, director of the British Tube Alloys project, at the very moment that Akers had come to America expecting to share atomic secrets. On January 7, Conant handed the Briton a memorandum that read: “[I]nterchange on design and construction of new weapons and equipment is to be carried out only to the extent that the recipient of the information is in a position to take advantage of this information in this war.” The British might still be carrying out theoretical physics, but under the present arrangement they would not actually be building the bomb. That part of the enterprise belonged to the Americans. Therefore, there was no need to tell British physicists how a bomb might be constructed. Toughness in wartime, with allies or enemies, came easily to Conant. Serving with the Army Chemical Warfare Service in World War I, he had been in charge of manufacturing the deadly gas lewisite. Conant expressed General Groves's position that bringing in the British simply increased the risk that the secrets of the Manhattan Project might be compromised. Besides, the project's guardians believed that the United States had a proprietary interest in the bomb since millions upon millions of American taxpayer dollars, not British pounds, were underwriting the project.

Upon learning that FDR approved the restrictive new policy, Churchill objected vociferously. On February 16, 1943, he rose from his sickbed to fire off a complaint through Roosevelt's confidant Harry Hopkins, a straight shooter whom Churchill knew would relay his displeasure to the President. “The War Department is asking us to keep them informed of our experiments,” Churchill wrote Hopkins, “while refusing altogether any information about theirs.” The message was signed “Prime” and classified “Secret.” Churchill evidently felt that he had been too gentle, and followed up the next day with another message to Hopkins marked “Personal, Immediate and Most Secret.” The Prime Minister now charged FDR with bad faith. “There is no question of breach of agreement,” he said. He cabled Hopkins yet a third time, complaining that the change “. . . entirely destroys the original conception of a coordinated or even jointly conducted effort between the two countries.” The Americans had chucked the British concept of fair play and reneged on a deal.

The issue was batted back and forth over the next several months. Late in May 1943, Churchill again came to America, sailing the
Queen Mary,
whose lower decks carried proof of rising Allied fortunes, thousands of German and Italian prisoners of war captured in North Africa. The Prime Minister bypassed the British embassy and chose to stay again at the White House, where he could work his will directly on FDR. The imperiled Tube Alloys partnership was still much on his mind. Vannevar Bush had become the President's shield in deflecting British ire. On May 25, Bush and Harry Hopkins met with Lord Cherwell, Churchill's friend and chief science advisor, who had accompanied the Prime Minister. Cherwell told the Americans that it was the PM's intention to build his own weapon, a profligate duplication of resources, if the Americans continued to balk at sharing the bomb-manufacturing process. Further, should lack of cooperation slow the program, Churchill feared that the Germans could win the atomic race and threaten Britain and America into submission. He was only slightly less appalled by the prospect that the Russians might get the bomb first. Cherwell frankly confessed another British motive. His government wanted to share in all atomic secrets so that Britain would also emerge as an atomic power after the war.

Churchill thus far had stubbornly resisted Roosevelt's pressure for a second front to be spearheaded by a massive assault across the English Channel. The issue might appear unrelated to the PM's insistence on full British partnership in the quest for an atomic weapon, but the two became intertwined. Privately, Churchill disparaged the cross-Channel strategy, now code-named Overlord, as “impossible [and] dangerous.” At one point, he told General Eisenhower, with tears in his eyes, of his nightmarish visions of an English Channel choked with Allied corpses. So obvious was British foot-dragging that the American general, Albert Wedemeyer, concluded the British “never had any intention of executing a cross channel operation if they could avoid it.” On the evening after Hopkins, Bush, and Lord Cherwell met, Churchill unexpectedly began tempering his objections to Overlord. And a conciliatory FDR began brushing aside the dire warnings of Vannevar Bush and the others opposed to sharing atomic research.

A month later, on June 24, FDR summoned Bush to the White House where, over one of Mrs. Nesbitt's uninspired lunches, they again discussed Tube Alloys. Where did they now stand? the President wanted to know. Bush stuck by his earlier position, telling a nodding FDR that the British still need not be told anything, “since our program is not suffering for lack of interchange . . . and the British had practically quit their efforts.” Henry Stimson buttressed Bush's argument. The secretary of war advised Roosevelt that since Americans were doing nine tenths of the work, why give away ten ninths of the secrets? But Harry Hopkins appealed to the President's conscience. “I think you made a firm commitment to Churchill,” he reminded FDR, on July 20, “. . . and there is nothing to do but go through with it.”

Vannevar Bush, unaware that the influential Hopkins had reached FDR, had gone to England still thinking his mission was to see how little the United States could give away to the British. While in London, he received a coded message from the President, sent immediately after Hopkins had spoken to Roosevelt, containing fresh instructions. “Dear Van, while I am mindful of the vital necessity for security in regard to this,” FDR began, “I wish . . . that you renew, in an inclusive manner, the full exchange of information with the British government regarding Tube Alloys.”

On August 17 the President and Prime Minister met again, this time in Quebec. There, Churchill withdrew completely his objections to Overlord. Stimson described the Prime Minister as “magnificent in reconciliation as he was stubborn and eloquent in opposition.” But was it all one-sided? A dividend that Churchill extracted for ending his opposition to Overlord was formal affirmation that Britain and America were full atomic partners. On the same night that he withdrew his objection to the cross-Channel strategy, the PM and President closeted themselves in their quarters in Quebec's Citadel. When they emerged, Churchill had in hand that rarity, a written agreement between himself and FDR “to bring the Tube Alloys project to fruition at the earliest moment. . . . This may be more speedily achieved if all available British and American brains and resources are pooled.”

Churchill's bulldog tenacity had paid off, but Bush, Conant, and other U.S. atomic policy advisors were still unhappy at sharing America's expensively gained secrets. Conant suggested a compromise: “It would be in the best interests of the total war effort to have professor [James] Chadwick and perhaps one or two other British subjects come to the United States and join Dr. Oppenheimer's work.” This concession would mean that instead of America exporting the Manhattan Project, British brains would be imported to strengthen it in the United States. Churchill snatched at the opportunity and immediately had British Tube Alloys officials assemble a small team of physicists to travel to that compound of drab buildings sprouting at Los Alamos in the New Mexico desert, the heart of the Manhattan Project. Among them was a slight, high-domed, bespectacled and reclusive thirty-two-year-old bachelor selected for his expertise in resolving a tough obstacle to atomic fission, the separation of uranium 235. The man was Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs, a German-born alien living and working in England and a dedicated Communist. As a result of Churchill's pressuring Roosevelt to make Britain a full partner in building the bomb, Klaus Fuchs would eventually gain entry into General Groves's atomic fortress of Los Alamos.

*

The most persuasive argument propelling FDR into the exorbitant and uncertain quest for an atomic bomb was his fear that Germany would get there first. As he had told Alexander Sachs three years before, “[W]hat you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up.” Nazi persecution had driven distinguished Jewish physicists into exile and ultimately to the Manhattan Project. Still, plenty of brainpower remained in Germany, where the uranium atom had first been split in experiments at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1938. Otto Hahn, Carl von Weizsäcker, Max von Laue, and, above all, Werner Heisenberg, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his work in quantum theory and nuclear physics, were all in Germany conducting atomic research. Though, as Albert Speer had said, Hitler had a slim grasp of the fundamentals of physics, the Führer counted an atomic bomb among the
Wunderwaffen,
the wonder weapons, he expected to hurl against Germany's enemies. Hitler told Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in September 1942 that Germany was developing a secret explosive so powerful that it “would throw a man off his horse at a distance of over two miles.”

On April 4, 1943, Vannevar Bush was horrified by a story appearing in
The New York Times.
Under a headline reading,
NAZI HEAVY WATER LOOMS AS WEAPON,
the
Times
reported that Allied saboteurs had blown up the huge electrochemical Norsk-Hydro plant at Rjukan in Nazi-occupied Norway. The plant produced a “queer chemical known as ‘heavy water' . . . and it can be used in the manufacture of terrifically high explosives” by splitting the atom, the article read. Bush sent the story, along with a hastily scribbled note, to Harry Hopkins, chiding him for urging FDR to share atomic secrets. “The attached clipping shows what can happen when control is loose and security insufficient,” Bush wrote. In an I-told-you-so tone he reiterated his position: “Knowledge be given only to those who really need it.”

The
Times
article indicated how far along the Germans were in atomic science. But what was the likelihood that Germany might win the atomic race? Hitler and his arms czar, Speer, essentially had to depend on the Nobel laureate Heisenberg to advise them on the probability of readying an atom bomb in time for the war. Heisenberg was a loyal German but no Nazi and had refused to join the party. According to Thomas Powers, chronicler of Heisenberg and the German atomic program, “At every point during the argument where his voice can be heard, he is saying two things—yes, a bomb is theoretically possible; no, it can never be built in time to affect the outcome of the war.” Speer claimed after the war, no doubt self-servingly, that he feared, even if the energy of the atom could be released, it might not be contained. “Professor Heisenberg had not given any final answer to my question whether a successful nuclear fission could be kept under control with absolute certainty or might continue as a chain reaction,” he noted. Hitler, too, he maintained, feared releasing the genie of the atom. “Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star,” Speer recalled. Thus, at the very time in the summer of 1942 that FDR was ordering full speed ahead on the Manhattan Project, Speer recalled, “. . . [W]e scuttled the project to develop an atom bomb.” Henceforth, Heisenberg and his colleagues were scaled back to investigating the potential of atomic energy rather than atomic weaponry. Consequently, when two hundred B-17 Flying Fortresses took off from England to bomb the already sabotaged Norsk-Hydro plant, they were flogging a dead horse. With Germany out of the game, the rush to produce an atomic bomb had turned out to be a race with only one entry. The raid may have been most notable for exploding the myth of surgical pinpoint bombing. Of 1,006 bombs dropped, only twelve damaged the target, but twenty-two Norwegian civilians were killed.