Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (128 page)

Nothing of business had been put on the evening’s agenda, but discussion inevitably turned to the war. Several issues demanded resolution. The first entailed strategic priorities, in particular whether the war in Europe and the Atlantic took precedence over the war in Asia and the Pacific. Churchill and his military men thought it did although, after the destruction of the
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse,
with less confidence than before. They recalled that the Americans had concurred in this opinion for several months. But that was before Pearl Harbor, which created a new political dynamic in America. As solicitous as Roosevelt had shown himself to be of American public opinion, Churchill couldn’t help worrying that Europe might not loom so large in American strategic thinking as it had.

A related issue involved the nature of Anglo-American collaboration. Both Roosevelt and Churchill remembered the suspicions and outright hostility that had developed during the First World War when British and French generals demanded that American troops be employed as reinforcements in British and French units, under British and French command, and America’s generals had refused. The squabbling had diminished the effectiveness of the anti-German coalition and probably prolonged the war. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill wished to repeat the experience. But how best to prevent it—how most efficiently to coordinate the American and British war efforts—required careful thinking and possibly vigorous discussion.

At a higher level than either military strategy or command coordination was the matter of war aims. During the First World War, Wilson had insisted on America’s being an “Associated” power rather than an Allied power; his diffidence reflected his refusal to fight for the imperial purposes that motivated Britain and France. Roosevelt and Churchill had dealt with some of these issues at the Atlantic Conference, but the Atlantic Charter left a great deal unsaid. In any event it committed only the Americans and the British. The anti-Axis ranks included the Soviet Union, China, and several other countries. A statement of purpose on the part of all of them was desirable, almost necessary.

Other questions were logistical. Now that the Americans were themselves fighting, would they be able and willing to continue supplying the recipients of Lend-Lease at the pre–Pearl Harbor level? Assuming agreement on the priority of Europe and the Atlantic, how might American military and naval power be brought most effectively to bear? How soon could American troops start fighting the Nazis? And where?

These last questions inspired much of the table talk that night at dinner. Since June 1940 France had held an anomalous position between Germany and Britain. The Wehrmacht occupied the north and west of the country, while the south was governed by the regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, headquartered at Vichy. Pétain took care not to provoke Hitler, which meant that his policies were mildly to egregiously collaborationist. But he wasn’t a Nazi, and presumably he had the best interests of France at heart. Of greater concern to Roosevelt and Churchill, he controlled what remained of the French fleet and of France’s overseas empire, including French North Africa.

Hitler’s decision to let Pétain govern Vichy France reflected the reality that there were only so many German troops, and most were currently occupied in Russia. Yet Germany’s Russian offensive had stalled for the winter about the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and many observers wondered how long Berlin would tolerate such independence as Vichy exercised.

The question came up at the Roosevelt-Churchill dinner. “There was general agreement that if Hitler was held in Russia he must try something else, and that the most probable line was Spain and Portugal en route to North Africa,” Churchill reported to the war cabinet, in the only contemporary account of the evening. “There was general agreement that it was vital to forestall the Germans in North Africa.” The emphasis on North Africa indicated the importance of that region for Mediterranean transit, which linked Britain to India, and also the prospect that North Africa would be where American troops would first enter the fight against Germany. “The President said that he was anxious that American land forces should give their support as quickly as possible wherever they could be most helpful, and favoured the idea of a plan to move into North Africa.”

Nothing was decided that evening, and Churchill retired to his bedroom on the second floor of the White House, which became his home for the next three weeks. Harry Hopkins was across the hall, and just beyond Hopkins’s suite the prime minister directed his support staff to re-create a version of the map room at his command headquarters in London. Roosevelt admired the maps and became a regular visitor; he subsequently ordered the establishment of his own map room downstairs.

The president and the prime minister swapped bedroom visits. Both began their days working in bed, although Roosevelt’s day typically commenced earlier than Churchill’s. Sometimes Roosevelt would roll into Churchill’s room; sometimes Churchill would pad into Roosevelt’s. In either case the smoke from Roosevelt’s cigarettes would mingle with the heavier fumes of Churchill’s cigars, and ashes would fly as each man punctuated his sentences with a jab of his favorite form of tobacco.

Hopkins later dined out on a story of a Roosevelt visit to Churchill’s bedroom that caught the prime minister emerging from his bath with not even a towel between his rosy, rotund flesh and the historic atmosphere of the White House. Roosevelt modestly apologized and started to wheel himself out. Churchill proclaimed that neither apology nor departure was necessary. “The Prime Minister of Great Britain,” he said, “has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.”

Robert Sherwood wondered at Hopkins’s version and asked Churchill about it. Nonsense, Churchill replied. He never greeted the president without at least a towel. Besides, he said, “I could not possibly have made such a statement as that. The president himself would have been well aware that it was not strictly true.”

T
HE DISCUSSIONS
became more businesslike with the arrival of the supporting casts. Certain large questions were disposed of readily. Churchill and the British were delighted to discover that however much Pearl Harbor may have jolted the American people, it hadn’t swayed the president or the American military from the conviction that Europe was the central theater in the war against the Axis. “Our view remains that Germany is still the prime enemy and her defeat is the key to victory,” a paper jointly produced by the American and British chiefs of staff averred. “Once Germany is defeated, the collapse of Italy and the defeat of Japan must follow…. Therefore it should be a cardinal principle of A-B”—American-British—“strategy that only the minimum of force necessary for the safeguarding of vital interests in other theaters should be diverted from operations against Germany.”

Somewhat thornier was the structure of American-British collaboration. George Marshall would be the quiet hero of America’s war before the conflict ended; he started earning his reputation at the Washington conference. “As a result of what I saw in France”—during the First World War—“and from following our own experience, I feel very strongly that the most important consideration is the question of unity of command,” Marshall told a meeting of the American and British officers. The group had been talking tactics, and although the discussion had been friendly it hung up on various details. Marshall contended that the hang-ups would recur—and be multiplied for each theater of the war—without unity of command. “I am convinced that there must be one man in command of the entire theater—air, ground, and ships. We cannot manage by cooperation. Human frailties are such that there would be emphatic unwillingness to place portions of troops under another service. If we make a plan for unified command now, it will solve nine-tenths of our troubles.”

Marshall’s British counterparts weren’t so sure, and neither was Churchill. The British guessed that, given America’s advantage over Britain in troop numbers and armament, the theater commanders would tend to be American. Sir Charles Portal, the chief of the Royal Air Force, argued that decisions regarding force allocation and similar matters were better made by the “highest authority”—namely the national governments. “When the allocation is decided upon, the directive has been formulated, and the forces allotted, everything else moves smoothly.”

Churchill approached the command question in a meeting with Roosevelt. He conceded that unity of command was well and good where there was a “continuous line of battle,” as there had been in France during the First World War. But the current situation in the Pacific was different. The scattered condition of the forces and fighting dictated that decisions would have to be made from central headquarters, presumably Washington.

Roosevelt responded that Washington wasn’t receiving good intelligence from the Pacific theater. “The reports we are getting from the Far East are very sketchy,” he said. A commander on the spot would certainly do better.

Churchill rejoined that a commander on the spot would do worse. “In some cases the troops are separated by a thousand miles,” he said. At that distance a commander lacked the personal touch that made theater command advisable. He also lacked the broad perspective a commander based in Washington would have.

At this point in the conversation Max Beaverbrook handed a note to Harry Hopkins. “You should work on Churchill,” Beaverbrook’s note said. “He is being advised. He is open-minded and needs discussion.”

Hopkins took the first opportunity to buttonhole Churchill. “Don’t be in a hurry to turn down the proposal,” Hopkins said. The prime minister might be pleasantly surprised by the theater commander the president had in mind.

“I was complimented by the choice,” Churchill said of Roosevelt’s nomination of Sir Archibald Wavell, the commander of British imperial forces in India. But the prime minister wasn’t immediately convinced. “It seemed to me that the theatre in which he would act would soon be overrun and the forces which could be placed at his disposal would be destroyed by the Japanese onslaught.” Yet after Hopkins orchestrated an informal meeting between Churchill and Marshall, at which the American general reiterated his arguments for unified command with the quiet sincerity that informed all his recommendations, Churchill allowed himself to be persuaded. “It was evident that we must meet the American view,” he remarked later.

As part of the same deliberation, the Americans and British decided to establish a Combined Chiefs of Staff, consisting of the joint chiefs of staff of the British and American military establishments or their proxies. The headquarters of the Combined Chiefs would be in Washington. This arrangement favored the American side, in that the American principals would normally be present at Combined Chiefs meetings while their British counterparts would often be represented by deputies. But the headquarters had to be somewhere, and Washington, besides being the capital of the stronger power, was more centrally located between the two major theaters of the war.

Some thought was given to including a Soviet representative on the combined staff. But the possibility was no sooner raised than it was dismissed. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill knew Stalin, and they saw no reason to let the Soviet dictator in on any more information than was necessary. Besides, they reasoned that the Russians had their hands full battling the Germans. Sending a top general to Washington would take that officer away from where he was needed. Finally, the Soviets weren’t at war with Japan, which put them in a different position than the Americans and the British. So the Soviets weren’t invited. As matters turned out, Stalin didn’t complain.