Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (154 page)

But there were arguments against the bombing. In the first place, it would certainly kill some of the very people the Allies sought to save. Little imagination was required to predict that Hitler’s propagandists would display the bodies of those killed by the bombing and blame the Allies for many more Jewish deaths. Roosevelt was serious about bringing the war criminals to justice, and he didn’t want to spoil the evidence of their guilt. In the second place, bombing the camps or the rail lines would require the diversion of scarce resources. American and British bombers were fully employed during 1944 striking targets that contributed to the German war effort. To send planes over Auschwitz might well cost the lives of Allied soldiers. Finally, there was no guarantee bombing the camp would do any good. The rail lines could quickly be rebuilt, and the killing of Jews might be accomplished by other means.

How much of the argument Roosevelt heard, and how fully he participated in it, is unclear. John McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, told a journalist decades later that Harry Hopkins informed him during the summer of 1944 that Roosevelt had been urged by some Jewish leaders to order the bombing but that, in Hopkins’s words, “the Boss was not disposed to.” Hopkins asked McCloy to staff the request out. McCloy said he had already done so. The air force had rejected the bombing request on cost-benefit grounds. McCloy gave the negative report to Sam Rosenman, and, in McCloy’s words, “that was the end of that.” McCloy added, in his retrospective interview, that he “never talked” to Roosevelt about the subject.

But McCloy subsequently changed his story. He told Morgenthau’s son that he had indeed spoken to Roosevelt about bombing Auschwitz. The president, according to this later version, himself refused the request. He said the bombing would be ineffective and would appear to make the United States complicit in the killings. “We’ll be accused of participating in this horrible business,” Roosevelt told McCloy.

Which version, if either, is true is impossible to tell. The contemporary record is silent on the subject. What
is
clear is that the bombing did not take place and that it did not take place because Roosevelt did not want it to. He knew bombing was an option, and he could have overridden objections from the War Department, as he had overridden the department regarding the timing of the second front. But he thought bombing would be a mistake. Whether he spoke through Hopkins or McCloy, directly or indirectly, the decision—like every other important decision of the war—was his.

O
NE REASON
R
OOSEVELT
refused to countenance any distraction from the war against Hitler was that the struggle was reaching a critical phase. “Yesterday on June 4, 1944, Rome fell to American and Allied troops,” the president told the country in his only Fireside Chat of the year so far. “The first of the Axis capitals is now in our hands. One up and two to go!” The president dilated on the historical significance of Rome’s surrender and on the fact that troops from several of the United Nations—America, Britain, France, Canada, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa—took part in the fighting. He added, “Our victory comes at an excellent time, while our Allied forces are poised for another strike at Western Europe—and while the armies of other Nazi soldiers nervously await our assault.”

He could have said more on this last point, but doing so would have betrayed the greatest secret of the Allied war thus far. Roosevelt needed all his skills as an actor to concentrate on the radio script at hand, for he knew that even as he spoke the troops that had been training for the invasion of France were filing into the boats that would ferry them across the Channel. Aircraft loaded with paratroops were winging through the dark toward their drop zones behind the German lines. Within hours the world would know whether the largest amphibious operation in history was a success or a failure. If a success, it would mark the first step toward the liberation of France, and it would signal the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. If a failure, it would devastate Allied morale, perhaps causing Stalin to conclude that the Americans and British were as hapless as they had often seemed faithless. It would give Hitler’s regime a new lease on life. Not incidentally, it would mean the end of hope for Europe’s Jews.

But Overlord was not a failure. The first waves of American and British soldiers hit the beaches of Normandy after dawn on June 6. At Omaha Beach the Americans suffered heavy casualties, but at several other locations the German resistance was less formidable than Eisenhower, Marshall, and Roosevelt had feared. Within a few hours the heart-clutching phase of uncertainty had passed. The Allies secured a beachhead, and suddenly the sea, which had been their enemy, became their friend. With their control of the air and waves, they could transport attacking troops to the front faster than the Germans could reinforce the defenders. Within two weeks some 600,000 American and British soldiers had landed in Normandy, and the drive toward Paris began.

“M
Y
L
ORD
! All smiles, all smiles!”

Roosevelt hadn’t slept much after his radio address announcing the fall of Rome. He waited by the phone for word from the War Department that the troops had landed. It came in pieces, but by half past three—Washington time—on the morning of June 6 the news was official. The president received regular updates from then until his afternoon press conference. As the reporters—a record crowd of nearly two hundred—filled the room, he couldn’t help noticing how happy they all seemed.

“You don’t look like you’re so solemn yourself, Mr. President.”

“No, I’m not so solemn, I suppose,” Roosevelt replied, laughing. “I think this is a very happy conference today.”

“Mr. President, how do you feel about the progress of the invasion?”

“Up to schedule. And as the Prime Minister said, ‘That’s a mouthful.’” More laughter.

“Mr. President, how long have you known that this was the date?”

“I have known since”—Roosevelt paused for effect—“I would say Teheran, which was last December, that the approximate date would be the end of May or the very first few days of June. And I have known the exact date just within the past few days. And I knew last night, when I was doing that broadcast on Rome, that the troops were actually in the vessels, on the way across.”

A reporter asked why, if the decision was made so long ago, the invasion had occurred only now.

“Did you ever cross the English Channel?” the president asked.

“Never been across the English Channel.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“Tide? Is it largely a question of—”

“Roughness in the English Channel, which has always been considered by passengers one of the greatest trials of life, to have to cross the English Channel. And, of course, they have a record of the wind and the sea in the English Channel; and one of the greatly desirable and absolutely essential things is to have relatively small-boat weather, as we call it, to get people actually onto the beach. And such weather doesn’t begin much before May.”

“Well, was weather the factor, sir, in delaying from the end of May until the first week in June?”

“Yes, yes. After the June date was set, there was only an actual delay of one day.”

“Was it timed to come after the fall of Rome?”

“No, because we didn’t know when Rome was going to fall.”

“
I
THINK WE
have these Huns at the top of the toboggan slide, and the full crush of the Russian offensive should put the skids under them,” George Marshall wrote Roosevelt a week after D-Day. Marshall almost never employed such informal language with the president, but the success of Overlord and the launch of the biggest Soviet offensive of the war thus far made him feel almost giddy.

Joseph Stalin was more restrained but hardly less optimistic. The Soviet dictator told Averell Harriman—as Harriman related to Roosevelt—that the Anglo-American invasion of France was “an unheard-of achievement, the magnitude of which had never been undertaken in the history of warfare.” Writing to Roosevelt directly, Stalin said, “It rejoices all of us and makes us confident of future successes.”

Churchill kept his emotions more fully in check. Some of his restraint doubtless reflected his long-standing resistance to the Channel crossing and his concern that things might yet go wrong. But in addition he had to deal with Charles de Gaulle. The French general realized that his homeland was about to be liberated by the American and British armies, and he sought to ensure that he rode at their head. “It is remarkable,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt in exasperation, “as he has not a single soldier in the great battle now developing.” The prime minister said he was doing all he could with de Gaulle. But if he reached an impasse, he might send the general to Washington. “I think it would be a great pity if you and he did not meet,” Churchill asserted wryly. “I do not see why I have all the luck.”

Roosevelt smiled as he read the prime minister’s lament. “He may visit Washington at the end of this month,” the president offered. “But there is no indication yet that he will be helpful in our efforts in the interest of his country.”

Roosevelt’s offer was an inexpensive gesture, as he knew that de Gaulle wouldn’t leave the French theater of operations. Meanwhile the president explained the glad tidings from France to the American people—and tried to keep the tidings from sounding
too
glad. “While I know that the chief interest tonight is centered on the English Channel and on the beaches and farms and the cities of Normandy,” he declared in another Fireside Chat, “we should not lose sight of the fact that our armed forces are engaged on other battlefronts all over the world.” The situation in Europe, to be sure, was as promising as anyone could hope. “Germany has her back against the wall—in fact three walls at once! In the south, we have broken the German hold on central Italy…. On the east, our gallant Soviet allies have driven the enemy back from the lands which were invaded three years ago…. And on the west, the hammer blow which struck the coast of France last Tuesday morning, less than a week ago, was the culmination of many months of careful planning and strenuous preparation.” Yet it was a long way from Normandy to Berlin. Those months of planning and preparation would be followed by months of fighting and dying. And Tokyo was even farther away, in terms of the time and effort it would take American forces to get there. “We are on the offensive all over the world, bringing the attack to our enemies,” Roosevelt said. The attack must continue, to its ultimate global conclusion.