Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (24 page)

Roosevelt’s presence was incidental to the combat, but it was essential to his political future. He had chosen not to fight, but he couldn’t miss the fighting. Already he imagined how he would present himself after the war: as one who had seen the carnage, who understood what war did to a country and a people. It wouldn’t be the same as having fought, but it was something.

His excuse for making the trip was that the navy had dozens of installations in France and Britain, and the marines—that proudest branch of navy warriors—were playing a pivotal role at the front. Roosevelt argued to Josephus Daniels that the Navy Department needed to dispatch a representative to the battle zone to inspect the men and facilities. The secretary was too essential in Washington to be gone the several weeks a proper tour would require; the assistant secretary must go. Daniels assented.

Roosevelt left Brooklyn on July 9 aboard the
Dyer,
a new destroyer. In calmer times the navy gave new vessels thorough shakedown cruises before putting them into service; amid the press of the war the
Dyer
’s crew shook her down on the crossing to Europe. “It is pretty rough,” Roosevelt wrote on the third day, in a journal he kept of the trip. “Even the troop ships roll and pitch…. One has to hang on all the time, never moving without taking hold with one hand before letting go with the other. Much of the crockery smashed; we cannot eat at the table even with racks, have to sit braced on the transom and hold the plate with one hand.”

To avoid attracting German submarines, the ships of the convoy darkened their lamps at night. From the
Dyer
’s position at the starboard quarter of the convoy, Roosevelt could just discern the “great black lightless masses” of the vessels; he pronounced the effect “very weird.” The fourth day began with a call to battle stations. Roosevelt raced to the bridge. “The lookout in the foretop had reported a vessel ahead, quickly reporting another and another and another until we began to wonder if we had run into the whole German fleet,” he recorded, catching his breath. Closer inspection revealed something less threatening but by no means reassuring. A twenty-eight-ship convoy of American merchantmen out of Norfolk was crossing the path of Roosevelt’s convoy from south to north. Had the encounter occurred many minutes earlier there likely would have been blood on the water. “We would have run through them in the dark at eighteen knots and some bad smash-up would almost surely have followed.” Convoy schedules and routes were carefully arranged to prevent such collisions, but mishaps occurred. Roosevelt made a note to improve the scheduling procedure.

Northeast of the Azores the convoy entered the active submarine zone. A predawn alert sent Roosevelt hurtling out of bed. “This is the second time I have sprinted for the bridge in pajamas and bare feet. I realized my costume today and apologized to Poteet”—the
Dyer
’s captain—“before descending, but he said it made an excellent and distinctive uniform for a flag officer as long as the Secretary of the Navy does not try to change it to the old-fashioned night-gown and carpet slippers.” Roosevelt’s regular attire was distinctive enough. “I wish I could travel all the way in my destroyer costume—my own invention—khaki riding trousers, golf stockings, flannel shirt, and leather coat. It does not soil or catch in things!”

The
Dyer
landed at Portsmouth and Roosevelt proceeded to London, where the British admiralty put him up at the Ritz. The next morning he met with Sir Eric Geddes, the First Lord of the Admiralty. They talked of the joint Anglo-American antisubmarine efforts, and Geddes informed him of a new British program to fit certain warships with flat decks for launching and catching airplanes. The concept was experimental but promising, Geddes said.

Roosevelt spent two fascinating hours with British naval intelligence officers. “Their intelligence department is far more developed than ours,” he concluded. “This is because it is a much more integral part of their Office of Operations.” He determined to remedy the problem once back in Washington.

He conversed at length with George V. “The King has a nice smile and a very open, quick and cordial way of greeting one. He is not as short as I had expected, and I think his face is stronger than photographs make it appear.” The interview ran half an hour over the scheduled fifteen minutes. “He was a delightfully easy person to talk to, and we got going so well that part of the time we were both talking at the same time.”

Roosevelt met with Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who impressed him with his “tremendous vitality.” Lloyd George in peacetime had polarized British politics; in wartime he taught Roosevelt—and others—a valuable political lesson. “The Conservatives who used to despise him as a demagogue, the Liberals who used to fear him as a radical, and most of the Labor people who now look on him as a reactionary, may hate him just as much as ever and be unwilling after the war to trust reconstruction to his hands. But they will stand by him just as long as his administration keeps the winning of the war as its only political aim.”

Roosevelt addressed the Anglo-American Luncheon Club, and attended a dinner gathering of the British imperial war ministers, where he was introduced to Britain’s Lord Curzon, Canada’s Sir Robert Borden, and South Africa’s General Jan Smuts, each of whom greatly impressed him. “A really historic occasion,” Roosevelt called it. He also met Winston Spencer Churchill, who did not impress him—at least not enough for him to mention Churchill in his journal of the trip. Churchill reciprocated the neglect, forgetting the meeting until he was reminded of it by Roosevelt decades later.

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31 Roosevelt left London for France. He crossed the Channel and landed at Dunkirk, which anchored the British presence in France. “I had no idea that the British were sending in so many supplies through this place,” he wrote. The Germans were fully aware of Dunkirk’s importance and had been blasting it with artillery for three years, and more recently with airplane-delivered bombs. “There is not a whole house left in this place…. I did not see one pane of glass in the town, and almost every house-front is pock-marked by fragments of shell.”

Roosevelt’s party drove to Calais, where German planes had been trying out new, very large bombs, weighing more than a thousand pounds. “These have smashed things up over a large radius,” he wrote. “I saw a spot where one had landed in the middle of a street—about six houses on each side of the street were completely wrecked by it and many people killed.”

In Paris, Roosevelt met French prime minister Georges Clemenceau. “I knew at once I was in the presence of the greatest civilian in France,” Roosevelt recorded. “He did not wait for me to advance to meet him at his desk, and there was no formality such as one generally meets. He almost ran forward to meet me and shook hands as if he meant it, grabbed me by the arm and walked me over to his desk and sat me down about two inches away. He is only 77 years old, and people say he is getting younger every day. He started off with no polite remarks because they were unnecessary, asked me three or four definite questions about our naval production and what I thought of the effect of the submarine campaign on the troop transportation.” Roosevelt’s answers satisfied Clemenceau, who turned to the current state of the fighting. “He jumped up, took me over to a big map with all the latest troop movements and showed me the latest report from General Degoutte, covering progress north of Château-Thierry up to one hour before.”

Roosevelt had never been so close to wartime command, and he was mesmerized. “He launched into a hair-raising description of the horrors left by the Boche in his retreat—civilian population carried off, smashing of furniture, slashing of paintings, burning of houses—and he said, ‘These things I have seen myself,’ for the wonderful old man leaves his office almost every Saturday in a high-powered car, dashes to some part of the front, cheered by troops everywhere he passes, visits a Corps Commander, travels all night, goes up a good deal closer to the actual battle line than the officers like, keeps it up all day Sunday, and motors back in time to be at his desk on Monday morning.”

Clemenceau paused, as if to let Roosevelt catch up. “Then, still standing, he said: ‘Do not think that the Germans have stopped fighting or that they are not fighting well. We are driving them back and will keep them going back because we are fighting better, and every Frenchman and every American is fighting better because he knows he is fighting for the right and that it can prevail only by breaking the German Army by force of arms.’ He spoke of an episode he had seen while following just behind the advance—a Poilu and a Boche still standing partly buried in a shell hole, clinched in each other’s arms, their rifles abandoned, and the Poilu and the Boche were in the act of trying to bite each other to death when a shell had killed both. And as he told me this he grabbed me by both shoulders and shook me with a grip of steel to illustrate his words, thrusting his teeth toward my neck.”

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the German army had tested the troops of the American Expeditionary Forces in the Second Battle of the Marne. For three days the Germans pressed forward, but on July 18 the Americans retaliated furiously at Château-Thierry with a coordinated artillery and infantry counterattack. They forced the Germans to yield the ground just taken and, more significantly, demonstrated that the Americans could fight effectively. With ten thousand Americans pouring into France every week, Château-Thierry signaled the beginning of the end for Germany.

Roosevelt approached the Marne in early August. Soldiers clogged the road: French reinforcements heading into battle, German prisoners being led away. This was Roosevelt’s first sight of the enemy. “They did not impress me as being physically unfit, but there is an awful contrast between the amount of intelligence in their faces compared with the French Poilus.” From Meaux to Château-Thierry, civilian French refugees brought traffic nearly to a standstill. They had fled the German onslaught; now they were returning to their homes, or what they hoped would still be their homes. “They went with big carts drawn by a cow or an ox and a calf trotting behind, bedding, chickens, household goods, and children, and sometimes a grandmother, piled on top, all of them taking it perfectly calmly, remembering always their good fortune in having got away before the arrival of the Boche, ready to start in again even from the ground up, but constantly impressing upon their children what the Boche has done to northern France in these four years.”

On reaching Château-Thierry, Roosevelt was struck by the failure of the French, who had retaken the town ten days earlier, to rebuild any of the bridges over the Marne. Soldiers, animals, and vehicles had to cross on rickety floating bridges. The problem appeared to be a shortage of steel. Roosevelt jotted another note to himself: “Forethought in providing bridge steel would have made a better record.”

Roosevelt toured the battlefield. He was no military expert, but as he surveyed the ground he began to grasp what the fighting there had been like. “We walked to the edge of the woods and looked east. No wonder this was the key to the salient. In front the ground, while rolling, was in general lower and more open, and even a civilian’s eye could see that the few wooded higher points could be turned without offering half the defensive strength of the jungle we were about to enter.” Immediately beyond lay the makeshift graves of German soldiers, whose unclaimed bodies had been interred beneath humble wooden crosses. Farther on were graves with slightly different crosses marking fallen Frenchmen and Americans. The ground itself was frozen into angry billows tossed up by the exploding artillery shells. Merely walking across the battlefield was a physical and emotional ordeal. “We had to thread our way past water-filled shell holes and thence up the steep slope over outcropping rocks, overturned boulders, downed trees, hastily improvised shelter pits, rusty bayonets, broken guns, emergency ration tins, hand grenades, discarded overcoats, rain-stained love letters, crawling lines of ants, and many little mounds, some wholly unmarked, some with a rifle stuck bayonet down in the earth, some with a helmet, and some, too, with a whittled cross or wrapping paper hung over it and in a pencil scrawl an American name.”