Joseph E. Persico (63 page)

Operation Sunrise began to provoke an extraordinary exchange between the leaders of two presumed allies. Molotov, besides rejecting Soviet officers as mere observers, was now demanding that the talks be called off completely if the Russians could not take part. On March 24, FDR sent a “Top Secret” cable to placate Stalin. In it, he was not above dissembling. He told Stalin, “The facts are as follows: some few days ago unconfirmed information was received in Switzerland that some German officers were considering the possibility of arranging for the surrender of German troops… in Italy.” He reminded Stalin that the Soviet government had immediately been informed of this development. Ignored in this message was the fact that two of Field Marshal Alexander's high-level officers had already been dispatched incognito to Switzerland to meet with General Wolff. FDR also maintained that if an enemy facing American troops appeared willing to surrender, his generals were bound to pursue the opportunity. “It would be completely unreasonable for me to take any other attitude or to permit any delay which must cause additional and avoidable loss of life in the American forces.” He appealed to Stalin “as a military man” to understand his reasoning. FDR reminded the Soviet leader that his position was no different than Stalin's upon the recent entrapment of German troops by the Red Army at Koenigsberg and Danzig, a Russian matter in which FDR had no reason to involve the United States. Secretary of War Stimson put it more bluntly to the President. The surrender of German armies in Italy was, he said, “a matter in which Russia has no more business than the United States would have at Stalingrad.”

Stalin's response was swift and the harshness of tone shocking. “I agree to negotiations with the enemy,” he cabled Roosevelt, “only in the case where these negotiations will not make the situation easier for the enemy, if there will be excluded a possibility of the Germans to maneuver and to use these negotiations for shifting their troops… to the Soviet front… . I have to tell you,” Stalin went on, “that the Germans have already used these negotiations… in shifting three divisions from Northern Italy to the Soviet front.” As for Roosevelt's analogy of Koenigsberg and Danzig, Stalin curtly dismissed it. The Germans in these sectors were surrounded, he said, and “if they surrender, they will do it in order to avoid annihilation. They could not be shifted elsewhere.” As for the Italian front, Stalin could not understand “why representatives of the Soviet command were refused participation in these negotiations and in what way could they cause inconvenience to the representatives of the Allied Command.” Stalin's reaction was not entirely paranoid. The Soviet leader understood that if the German army did surrender in Italy, every soldier, gun, and tank not immediately penned in by the Allies could be expected to be thrown against the Russians.

The shrillness of Stalin's message alarmed Roosevelt. He fired back, “I must repeat that the meeting in Bern was for the single purpose of arranging contact with competent German military officers and not for negotiations of any kind.” He intended to set Stalin straight on one further point: “I feel that your information about the time of the movements of German troops from Italy is in error.” He acknowledged that three German divisions had indeed been shifted from Italy to the Russian front. But “the last division of the three started moving about February 25, more than two weeks before anybody heard any possibility of surrender” in Italy. Roosevelt was so taken aback by Stalin's hostility that he asked Harriman to find out if the words represented the Soviet leader's thinking or merely that Stalin had signed a draft originating in the Kremlin bureaucracy. Harriman reported back that both the words and the sentiments were Stalin's. The President, who believed he could woo and win anybody and who had invested so much capital in charm and persuasion to establish mutual trust with the Soviet dictator, now began having second thoughts. His fear, he confided to an associate, was that “Stalin has been deceiving me all along.”

The Soviet leader was not yet finished. On April 3 he fired an even more brutal salvo. He cabled FDR regarding the peace maneuvering in Italy: “You insist there have been no negotiations yet. It may be assumed that you have not been fully informed.” Not only had negotiations been held, Stalin insisted, but the German commander on the western front “has agreed to open the front and permit Anglo-American troops to advance to the East, and the Anglo-Americans have promised in return to ease for the Germans the peace terms.” This was not the first time that Stalin's deep-dyed distrust had surfaced. In March the American 9th Armored Division had been astonished to find the Ludendorff railroad bridge across the Rhine near the town of Remagen intact and had poured troops across it. The Russians did not regard this breakthrough as an American military triumph. German thoroughness and efficiency were legendary. How was it possible, the Russians reasoned, that the enemy had not blown a bridge pointing straight into Germany's heartland, unless they
wanted
the Americans to cross it? Stalin regarded the bridge's capture as further proof, as he put it to FDR, that “the Germans on the Western front have in fact ceased the war against England and the United States. At the same time they continue the war against Russia.” The fact that Hitler had had four officers responsible for the loss of the bridge shot and that the Luftwaffe had bombed it into the Rhine were merely inconvenient facts interfering with Stalin's preconceptions.

An angered FDR called in Admiral Leahy and General Marshall to help him draft his reply to Stalin's cable of April 3. “I have received with astonishment your message,” the response began, “containing an allegation that arrangements which were made between Field Marshal Alexander and Kesselring, 'permitted the Anglo-American troops to advance to the East and the Anglo-Americans promised in return to ease for the Germans the peace terms!' “Roosevelt repeated his argument that thus far no actual negotiations had taken place. “… [Y]our information,” FDR went on, “must have come from German sources which have made persistent efforts to create dissention between us… . If that was Wolff's purpose in Bern your message proves that he has had some success. Frankly,” Roosevelt concluded, “I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”

Stalin now held out a slim olive branch. Three days after the President's retort, he cabled back, “I have never doubted your honesty and dependability… .” But he was still not done pressing his major premise, that Russia was being abandoned to carry on alone. The Germans, he noted, “continue to fight savagely with the Russians for some unknown junction, Zemlianitsa in Czechoslovakia, which they need as much as a dead man needs poultices, but surrender without any resistance such important towns in central Germany as Osnabrück, Mannheim, Kassel. Don't you agree that such a behavior of the Germans is more than strange and incomprehensible.” He had one more charge to unload. Back in February, he claimed, General Marshall had tipped off the Red Army staff to expect major German attacks at two points, in Pomerania and at Maravska Ostrava. Instead, the Germans struck in a completely different sector southwest of Budapest, “one of the most serious blows in the course of the war… .” Here Stalin was accusing the chief of the American Army not simply of bad faith but of treachery. These exchanges marked the nadir in the three and a half years of wary alliance and threatened to create the only outcome that could give Hitler any hope of salvation, a rupture between the East and the West.

FDR still faced the threat that Hitler would hole up in the Alps for a fanatic Armageddon. In the midst of the Roosevelt-Stalin countercharges over Operation Sunrise, General Marshall sent the President an estimate on April 2 that the “will to fight of these [German] troops will depend largely on whether Hitler and his subordinate Nazi leaders, or the German High Command will have transferred their headquarters into the 'redoubt' area. If Hitler does so, a fairly formidable military task requiring a considerable number of divisions may still confront the Allies… .” Now was hardly the time to risk the alliance, especially since the Russians had made their first installment on their promise at Yalta to enter the war against Japan. On April 5 they broke their peace pact with the Japanese. Through a Magic decrypt it was as if FDR were in the room in Moscow when the Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, delivered the blow to the Japanese ambassador, Naotake Sato. Sato answered, hopefully, “The Japanese government expects that even after the abrogation of the treaty by the Russian government there will be no change in the peace in the Far East from what it has been in the past.” Molotov gave a chilling answer: “At the time when this treaty was concluded Russia was not yet at war with Germany… . After that Japan began war with England and America which are allies of Russia.” And, as Molotov well knew, the Americans, pursuing Project Hula, were already well along in turning over ships and training Soviet seamen to enter the war in the Pacific.

Chapter XXIX

“The Following Are the Latest Casualties”

THE PRESIDENT was at Warm Springs when he learned that Russia had broken its peace treaty with Japan. He now believed the Soviets genuinely meant to enter the Pacific war. A few days before, on March 29, he had brought two willing conscripts to his Georgia retreat, Daisy Suckley and Laura Delano, a maiden lady, the youngest sister of FDR's mother, known in the family as Polly. Eleanor Roosevelt was booked solid with appointments in Washington and New York and had begged off on the Georgia trip. FDR had tried earlier to recover his flagging energy at his customary refuge, Hyde Park, but it had not worked. He slept poorly in the raw Hudson Valley spring weather and told his wife, “It's no good. I must go to Warm Springs.” He then boarded the train at Highland Falls for an interim stop in Washington, his four hundredth trip as president, over half a million railway miles logged by a man who could not take a step unaided. As the train was pulling out of the station, he instructed his staff to have the engineer keep the train's speed even lower than usual, down to twenty-five miles per hour to minimize the rocking and swaying.

Traveling with the President from Washington to Warm Springs was Lieutenant Commander Bruenn, the Navy cardiologist who over the past year had become a fixture in the Roosevelt entourage. Bruenn had started his White House duties as a staunch Republican, but had fallen under the Roosevelt spell. By now, he both treated and idolized his patient. The doctor well understood the reason for the President's chronic fatigue, his lapses of memory, and episodes of mental confusion. His heart had become enlarged by the struggle to pump blood through hardening and ever narrowing arteries. These shrinking passageways delivered less sustenance to the brain, especially sugar, producing the consequent loss in ability to think, to concentrate, to absorb fresh information. The President exhibited a classic case of arteriosclerosis.

After a few days at Warm Springs, FDR felt and looked better. The company of Daisy, with her crocheting, and Polly, with her ceaseless prattle of Dutchess County gossip, created a comfortable aura familiar to him since boyhood. Being at Warm Springs among other paralytic patients at the thermal baths had another appeal. Here FDR was part of the majority, where to be crippled and to live with pain was the norm, not the exception. Daisy and Polly had accommodated themselves to the visible contradiction in Franklin's life, his failing health and his unfailing spirits. After Bruenn and an assistant put the President to bed at night, Daisy wrote in her diary, “The Drs. love this little time with F. [Franklin] for while he is getting ready for bed, he tells them stories. We can hear the laughter from the living room.” When FDR was finally alone, she and Polly would enter his bedroom with a little nourishment before he turned out his light. She described this moment in an entry in her diary that she later crossed out: “I get the gruel and Polly and I take it to him. I sit on the edge of the bed and he ‘puts on an act:' he is too weak to raise his head, his hands are weak, he must be fed! So I proceed to feed him with a teaspoon and he loves it.”

The President also confided to Daisy his private plans once the war ended. As she recorded this moment, “He took half his evening gruel and then decided to smoke a cigarette—he talked seriously about the S. Francisco conference, and his part in World Peace, etc. He says again that he can probably resign some time next year when the peace organization—the United Nations—is well started.”

On the day he received word of the broken Soviet-Japanese peace pact, the President settled into the cottage's small parlor and resumed working with Grace Tully on his overflowing in-basket. He withdrew from it a memorandum from Isadore Lubin. The energetic Izzy was supposedly an economic advisor to the President; but like Lauchlin Currie and others in the inner circle, Lubin performed as an administration handyman for a chief who was more comfortable with versatile New Dealers than with specialist bureaucrats. Lubin had gone to bat again for Bill Donovan in the latter's floundering campaign to create a postwar spy service. FDR read from Lubin's memo, “As you probably know, the idea of having a centralized intelligence service, as proposed by General Donovan, has stalled in one of the subdivisions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” In a model of understatement, Lubin further observed, “The difficulty seems to lie in the fear of certain agencies of the government that they will not be permitted to play their part in the proposed set up.” What had actually happened was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had indeed studied Donovan's postwar proposal and wanted no part of it. As Admiral Leahy tactfully put it to the President, “. . . [T]he possible advantages to be gained by the reorganization of intelligence activities and the establishment of a central intelligence service at this time are outweighed by the known disadvantages.”

Lubin's memo to the President suggested a solution to the intelligence impasse: Lock representatives of the relevant agencies in a room and, “. . . a frank, across-the-table discussion would eliminate some of the difficulties.” Lubin had attached a memorandum for FDR to send to Donovan giving the general authority to convene this no-holds-barred session. Grace Tully thought that FDR seemed remote and distracted as he glanced over Lubin's draft. He initialed his approval with a hand shaking so badly that he almost dropped his pen.

Upon receiving FDR's okay, a revived Bill Donovan instantly sent out a call for the gathering of twelve federal agencies concerned with intelligence. In the meantime, he felt secure enough to take off for a brief inspection trip to the new OSS headquarters in Paris. While he was gone, Attorney General Francis Biddle returned the first fire. Biddle noted that the current intelligence arrangement among the Army, Navy, and FBI worked just fine. “I should think that system should be built on rather than developing a new organization . . . in the middle of the war,” Biddle urged the President. He recoiled at Donovan's congenital brashness, commenting that an “intelligence agency should be organized quietly and not in the manner suggested.” Biddle's response was only the first wave in a tide of rejection rising from the federal bureaucracy to swamp Donovan's call for a meeting.

At 7:30
P.M.
on April 11, Henry Morgenthau Jr. arrived at the Warm Springs cottage and found the President mixing drinks, his withered legs tucked beneath a card table. Among the guests, along with Daisy and Polly, were the Russian artist Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff, there to paint the President's portrait, and Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Morgenthau later described his reaction to FDR that night: “I was terribly shocked when I saw him, and I found that he had aged terrifically and looked very haggard. His hands shook so that he started to knock the glasses over, and I had to hold each glass as he poured out the cocktail. . . . I found his memory bad, and he was constantly confusing names.” Nevertheless, the President recovered his spirits by the time he was wheeled to the dinner table. There he began a stream of amused gibes about the cottage's furniture, which had been manufactured in a burst of New Deal industry by a firm Eleanor had created at Hyde Park. Morgenthau raised his pet issue of the fate of postwar Germany. “A weak economy for Germany means that she will be weak politically,” he told the President, “and she won't be able to make another war.” The mention of Germany launched the President into a shaggy staple from his fund of anecdotes, one about the German minister of finance, Hjalmar Schacht. Schacht had come to see him in the thirties, the President said, “three or four times saying that the Germans were going broke and they never did!” He then began talking about his forthcoming trip to San Francisco for the creation of the United Nations. “I am going there on my train,” he told his guests gaily, “and at three o'clock in the afternoon I will appear on the stage in my wheelchair, and I will make the speech.” He clasped his hands in mock reverence. “And then they will applaud me, and I will leave and go back on my train, go down to Los Angeles and dump my daughter-in-law, and I will be back in Hyde Park on May first.” As FDR spoke, Morgenthau noted, he went at his dinner of veal and noodles and a dessert of a waffle topped with ice cream and chocolate sauce with a gusto not seen for weeks.

The next day, the President was again occupied with Donovan's organization, this time the still-dangling Operation Sunrise pursued by Allen Dulles. He read a dispatch from Averell Harriman in Moscow in which the ambassador admitted that he had not yet delivered FDR's latest message to Stalin on the secret surrender. In it Roosevelt had adopted a conciliatory tone, thanking the Communist czar for explaining the Soviet viewpoint and stating that, as far as he was concerned, the recent unpleasantness had faded from memory. The President forgivingly characterized the acidic exchanges over the past days as a “minor misunderstanding.” Harriman explained why he had held up the delivery: “I respectfully request that the word ‘minor' as a qualification of ‘misunderstanding' be eliminated. I must confess that the misunderstanding appeared to me to be of a major character and the use of the word ‘minor' might well be misinterpreted here.” Harriman had missed the point, Roosevelt said in dictating a brusque reply to the ambassador. “It is my desire,” he cabled Harriman, “to consider the Bern misunderstanding a minor incident.”

Also in his in-basket was another memorandum from Bill Donovan describing new peace feelers from Nazis prepared to abandon Hitler's sinking ship. This latest transmission, pouched to the President from Washington, relayed Allen Dulles's report that Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp, governor of Bavaria, and his clique were “prepared to do everything in their power to cut short warfare in Bavaria.” Dulles had also obtained disquieting news from Epp. “The redoubt is becoming a reality,” he reported. “Large quantities of supplies are accumulating in the Salzburg area, prominent personages are arriving, and the local population is being evacuated. There are indications that the OKW [the German High Command] is being transferred from the Bendlerstrasse, Berlin, to Bad Reichenhall. . . .” But if the OSS would deal with him and his cohorts, Epp had said, they were prepared to stop the buildup of the Redoubt. This message would be the last of seventy-five hundred pages that Donovan had showered upon the President, roughly five a day for every day since FDR had first brought Wild Bill into his administration.

The intelligence out of Bern lay in the in-basket still unread at noon on April 12 as FDR posed before Madame Shoumatoff's easel. For all his decline, he was still a striking man. The double-breasted gray suit and bright red tie she had suggested complemented his color and for the moment, he actually seemed to glow. Shortly after 1
P.M.,
Daisy Suckley put down her crocheting, rose, and positioned herself near the fireplace, where she could see in an oval mirror what Shoumatoff had painted so far. She sat back down smiling, knowing she had outfoxed the artist, who did not want anyone to see the portrait until it was finished.

As she later recorded the next moments in her diary, “I glanced up from my work. F seemed to be looking for something: his head forward, his hands fumbling. I went forward and looked into his face: ‘Have you dropped your cigarette?' He looked at me with his forehead furrowed in pain. He put his left hand up to the back of his head and said: ‘I have a terrific pain in the back of my head.'” Roosevelt had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. He lingered, unconscious, for another two and a half hours and then died.

Eleanor Roosevelt, upon being informed at the White House, sent a message to her four sons in the military: “Darlings, Pa slept away this afternoon. He did his job to the end as he would want you to do. Bless you. All our love. Mother.” The next afternoon, the
New York Post
ran its daily column, “Today's Army-Navy Casualty List.” “The following are the latest casualties in the military services, including next of kin,” it began. The first listing read:

Roosevelt, Franklin D. Commander-in-Chief. Wife, Mrs. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. The White House.

All FDR's wars, overt and covert, were ended.