Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (134 page)

A much bigger blow landed two weeks later. The Japanese, trying to build on their string of victories, sent a task force against Australian-held Port Moresby in New Guinea, hoping to secure the southern flank of their Pacific empire and provide a base for attacks against Australia. American and British intercepts revealed the outlines of the operation, and the American naval command dispatched an aircraft carrier group to block Japan’s advance. In the five-day Battle of the Coral Sea, culminating on May 7 and 8, planes from the opposing carrier groups revealed the future of naval warfare by bombing and strafing each other’s ships while the vessels themselves never made direct contact. Japan won on points, taking out the American carrier
Lexington
in exchange for a smaller carrier of its own. But the American side claimed both a strategic victory, for repelling Japan’s southward advance and keeping the southern sea lanes open, and a moral triumph, by demonstrating that the Japanese weren’t invincible after all.

The Americans landed a still heavier blow another month later. The Japanese sent four carriers and seven battleships to seize Midway Island northwest of Hawaii. The broader purpose of the operation was to draw the core of America’s fleet, in particular the carriers that had escaped the attack on Pearl Harbor, into a battle that would decide the fate of the Pacific for years to come. The Battle of Midway did just that, although not as the Japanese intended. As before, American cryptanalysts deciphered the Japanese messages, allowing Chester Nimitz, the American commander, to anticipate the Japanese actions. For four days in early June, planes from each side battered the ships of the other. The Americans had the greater success, and when the smoke cleared the Japanese had lost four carriers and some two hundred aircraft, against one carrier and a hundred planes for the Americans. The Japanese were forced to retreat.

If the Battle of the Coral Sea had slowed Japan’s momentum, the Battle of Midway reversed it. The loss of Japan’s carriers at Midway did far more damage to Tokyo’s ability to project power than the loss of the American battleships at Pearl Harbor had done to America’s might. Almost at once the United States gained the naval advantage in the Pacific. Given America’s industrial superiority over Japan, the American lead would only grow.

A
ND YET,
as satisfying as the naval victories over Japan were, they didn’t give Roosevelt what he needed most. Germany remained the primary enemy, and Germany remained beyond reach. Until America took the war to Europe, victory would be a distant dream.

How to get to Europe was the crux of discussion, debate, suspicion, and recrimination among the Allies for more than two years. Roosevelt’s military advisers contended that the shortest route was the best. The United States, in concert with Britain, should build up forces in England for a thrust across the Channel to France. Germany would defend France, and the battle would be joined.

Churchill and the British proposed a different strategy. In their thinking, a cross-Channel invasion was too risky. France was too well defended. Better to strike at the Mediterranean underbelly of the Axis. American and British forces should land in North Africa and occupy the southern shore of the Mediterranean, from which they could cross to Italy and eventually drive into Germany from the south. In the meantime, securing the Mediterranean would protect the British position in Egypt and the lifeline to India.

Most of the arguing over where to strike took place between the American and British governments, but an interested third party—and recurrent participant—was the government of the Soviet Union. For Stalin and the Russians, the primary concern was relieving the pressure on the eastern front. Whatever required the Germans to transfer the greatest number of troops away from the East was the best strategy for the Allies. And nothing, in Stalin’s view, would draw off more Germans than an Anglo-American invasion of France, as soon as possible. Anything else would hardly be worth the bother.

Roosevelt’s position on the second front shifted and wobbled. At times he heeded the cross-Channel counsel of his own advisers, at times the Mediterranean entreaties of Churchill. A president of a different personality and leadership style—a Theodore Roosevelt, for example—might have decided the matter at once and pressed forward with implementation. But Roosevelt left the question open for many months. Some of his hesitation reflected the changing military context, but most revealed his perception that Allied decisions had to come by consensus. Each of the three countries played a different but vital role in the war, giving each of the three leaders, in effect, a veto over important aspects of Allied strategy.

The United States remained the arsenal of democracy—and of communism, in the case of the Soviet Union. By directing supplies to this theater or that, America could shape the course of the war. Given time, the United States would build the most powerful military machine in history, with the capacity to crush almost any foe—but not by itself. America would continue to need its allies, who would supply much of the manpower to wield the weapons, and die in the process.

Britain possessed a formidable navy, a respectable army, and an empire that, though restive in places, still provided London a global reach. Most irreplaceably, Britain would serve as the springboard for the invasion of France, whenever it happened to come.

The Soviet Union’s role was to keep Hitler occupied and to kill Germans—lots and lots of Germans. Every German who died on the eastern front was one fewer the Americans and British would have to fight themselves, when their turn came.

Given the complementary nature of these functions, consensus was the only feasible form of Allied decision making. And consensus suited Roosevelt perfectly. He had always preferred to persuade, cajole, and manipulate people rather than to browbeat or intimidate them. His approach had worked with the diverse domestic factions that came together behind the New Deal; Roosevelt assumed it would work with the oddly matched international coalition that was fighting the Axis.

But it drove his advisers to distraction. Stimson and Marshall had gotten a taste of the Roosevelt style in the initial meetings with Churchill at Washington, and they nearly gagged on it. The flavor didn’t improve much during the rest of the war. Roosevelt’s lieutenants naturally wanted him to make the decisions they thought best for the country, but, failing that, they simply wanted him to
make
decisions. Yet as often as he seemed to make a decision, he would revisit and reconsider it.

D
URING THE SPRING
of 1942 Marshall and the American military chiefs seemed to have won the second-front argument. Roosevelt indicated his preference for an early invasion of France by sending Marshall and Harry Hopkins to London to sell the policy to Churchill. Hopkins carried a note from the president to the prime minister. “What Harry and Geo. Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and
mind
in it,” Roosevelt said. “Your people and mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, and these peoples are wise enough to see that the Russians today are killing more Germans and destroying more equipment than you and I put together.”

Hopkins and Marshall arrived in England on the morning of April 8 and went straight into a meeting with Churchill. “Marshall presented in broad outlines our proposals to the Prime Minister,” Hopkins recorded. Marshall considered the session a remarkable success. “He thought that Churchill went a long way,” Hopkins wrote. “He—Marshall—expected far more resistance than he got.”

Yet Churchill wasn’t convinced. He escorted Marshall and Hopkins to a meeting with Britain’s service chiefs. The prime minister applauded the “momentous proposal” the Americans had brought from the president. To such a plan, he said, the British government could only assent. Yet he couldn’t help pointing out the complications it would raise for British policy. The great concern at the moment was the threat that German forces thrusting through the Middle East would join up with Japanese forces driving west across the Indian Ocean. To ignore this threat, and to devote excessive manpower and materiel to a premature invasion of Europe, would be a grave mistake. Alan Brooke, the chief of the imperial general staff, seconded Churchill’s concern. If the Japanese gained control of the Indian Ocean, Brooke said, the southern supply route to Russia would be lost, with the collapse of Russia itself possibly to follow. Inasmuch as the major purpose of a western front in Europe was to relieve the pressure on the Russians, the proposed operation would be bizarrely misguided.

Hopkins rose to rebut the British reservations. If the American people had their way, he said, the United States would focus its efforts on Japan, which had attacked American forces and territory directly. But the president, on the counsel of his military advisers, had made a basic decision to “direct the force of American arms against Germany.” The president had brought the American public around to his way of thinking, and now they wished to fight—“not only on the sea but on land and in the air.” And Europe was where such fighting could best be done.

Churchill thanked Hopkins for his forceful statement. The prime minister looked past his own and Brooke’s reservations to declare that the British and American governments had achieved “complete unanimity” on general strategy and now could “march ahead together in a noble brotherhood of arms.” Planning for a “great campaign for the liberation of Europe” should move forward with the “utmost resolution.”

Hopkins and Marshall left the meeting confused. Were they to heed Churchill’s assurances or his reservations? They conveyed their confusion to Roosevelt on their return to America. The president determined to stress the positive. “I am delighted with the agreement which was reached between you and your military advisers and Marshall and Hopkins,” the president wrote Churchill. “They have reported to me on the unanimity of opinion relative to the proposal which they carried with them…. I believe that this move will be very disheartening to Hitler and may well be the wedge by which his downfall will be accomplished.”

Roosevelt refused to be diverted by a letter from Churchill himself. The letter affirmed Churchill’s “whole-hearted” support for the European operation, but it appended “one broad qualification” relating, as in the London meetings, to the Middle East and Indian Ocean. “It is essential that we should prevent a junction of the Japanese and the Germans,” Churchill said. “Consequently, a proportion of our combined resources must, for the moment, be set aside to halt the Japanese advance.”

Perhaps Roosevelt believed events of the next few months would prove Churchill’s fears of an Axis link across the bottom of Asia as groundless as he thought them to be. Perhaps he relied on his powers of persuasion to bring Churchill around to an early assault on France. Perhaps he judged that by seizing on Churchill’s statement of support for the European operation he could start the machinery required to make the operation happen and that once the machinery kicked into motion there would be no stopping it. In any event, he exuded only encouragement. “I am very heartened at the prospect, and you can be sure that our army will approach the matter with great enthusiasm and vigor,” he wrote Churchill. He added, for good measure: “I feel better about the war than at any time in the past two years.”