War and Remembrance (82 page)

Roosevelt’s solution of his problems can be starkly stated. The formula that won world empire for the U.S.A. was twofold:

1. Germany First.
   
2. Shed German blood by shedding the blood of others.
   

How Roosevelt did it will be an enduring study for political and military historians.

Roosevelt’s people did not share his aim of “Germany First.” They wanted to avenge Pearl Harbor. As Wake Island and the Philippines fell to yellow-skinned attackers, the racial outrage of the Americans grew intense.
Thousands of Japanese Americans were thrown into concentration camps, precisely like Jews behind the German lines, and for precisely the same reason: they were wartime security risks. The weepy indignation with which Roosevelt protested our security measures concerning the Jews was not in evidence on this matter.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
The Nisei were abominably treated because of war hysteria. They were not murdered en masse, they all survived the war, and they got their property back. It was an indefensible business, but the distinction seems to escape General von Roon.
—
V.H.

Moreover, the President soon discovered that war was not all beer and skittles.
^*
Along his Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean, our U-boats played havoc at night, when the glow from the brightly lit coastal cities set up the targets. Strident calls for arms and action poured in on Roosevelt from the retreating Philippine defenders, from the forces in Hawaii, from the hard-pressed Chinese, from England’s home front, from the British in Africa, Burma, Australia, India, and — loudest and ugliest — from the Soviet Union. Yet American war production was not in gear, and Roosevelt had his own army and navy to equip. He was in trouble.

Still, the Anglo-American planners had to go to work on a second front. The American General Staff officers, who had yet to smell gunpowder, were thinking in textbook terms: force the Channel coast as soon as possible, and smash across the northern plains to Berlin. But the British hated that notion. They proposed operations in Norway, in North Africa, in the Middle East; anywhere, in fact, but where we stood in force. Let the Red Army grind up the Wehrmacht; and if that meant a weak postwar Russia, all the better!

The “transatlantic essay contest” between the two staffs, as it came to be known, swayed back and forth. Roosevelt allowed the letters, memoranda, visits, and conferences to run on and on. He never strongly backed General Marshall in the American proposal:

1. A vast buildup of men and supplies in Britain;
   
2. A contingent scheme for an emergency landing in France in 1942, if Russia seemed about to collapse;
   
3. Otherwise, an all-out cross-Channel attack in 1943.
   

Roosevelt did not push for this because something very different was in his mind.

The Battle of Midway set him free to destroy Germany in his own fashion.

Before that, with an all-triumphant Japan menacing his rear, he could make no big move against us. Had Yamamoto won at Midway — as by all the odds he should have — public opinion would have forced Roosevelt to go all-out in the Pacific. But with the great Nimitz-Spruance victory in hand, he could devote his “forested mind” to winning world rule with other people’s blood. In effect, this meant at all costs keeping the Soviet Union in the war.

Franklin Roosevelt’s basic plan for winning the Second World War was to take Germany from the rear with a brute mass of Russian troops.
Everything else was secondary. He saw his main chance cold and straight. Militarily, it was a clear and brilliant plan; and brilliantly, alas, did it work.

This explains his hardheaded distribution of American supplies. He starved his Pacific forces so that they barely made it through the fierce Guadalcanal campaign, while he lavished matériel on the ungrateful and ever-demanding Russians through the Persian Gulf and the northern route. And he amply supplied the British in Egypt via the Cape of Good Hope and the Red Sea, while Rommel’s stalled army withered under Hitler’s neglect. Thus Roosevelt made sure that when his raw troops went ashore in French North Africa against feeble Vichy opposition, our tough and dashing Afrika Korps would be embroiled at a disadvantage, two thousand miles away at El Alamein.

Moreover, he skillfully put the blame on the British for reneging on the second front in France.

He allowed the “transatlantic essay contest” to drag on until Marshall reported to him from London that the two staffs were stalemated. Admiral Ernest King had long been pushing for a turn to the Pacific; and the frustrated and infuriated Marshall, a stiff autocrat in the George Washington image, advised the President that an all-out shift to the Pacific was the only answer to British obduracy.

This was the moment Roosevelt had been playing for. In his lordly fashion, he notified his Joint Chiefs through his gray eminence, Harry Hopkins, that it would be wrong to “pick up our dishes and leave.” Roosevelt loved to use homely phrases to mask his subtle machinations. The western Allies had to fight the Germans somewhere in 1942, to keep faith with Russia. If the British were really all that cautious and battle-worn, why, he would
graciously give in and accept one of their proposals: French North Africa was all right with him.

Marshall warned that opening the Mediterranean theatre meant cancelling the cross-Channel attack in 1943; but in soldierly fashion he did Roosevelt’s bidding. So Torch took form as a concession by Roosevelt to the British, when in fact it was just what he wanted.

TRANSLATORS NOTE:
General von Roon here ventures into mind reading. Mr. Roosevelt as I observed him —sometimes from close at hand —was an astute improviser, solving problems day by day with common sense, and a good grasp of historical facts and logistical limits. For the long view he was smart enough to trust long heads like Marshall and King, which sufficed.
—
V.H.

Churchill shouldered the responsibility to bring Stalin the bad news, for Roosevelt was ostensibly “giving in” to him, by sending the American army into an operation which could not fail. French North Africa was the softest of touches. Not one German soldier faced the invaders. It was out of Luftwaffe range. All Roosevelt had to worry about was French “honneur” (which his deal with the arch-collaborator Darian neutralized), and some freak of weather or tides that might drown some of his G.I. Joes, or wet their feet and give them pneumonia as they plodded ashore. True, the logistical mounting of the armada was impressive. Mass production and organization were and still are the American forte.

In Moscow Stalin vented much rage on Churchill; but of course he was not really angry. It was all political show. Stalin always tended to defer genially to Roosevelt; possibly because, being the world’s greatest mass murderer himself, he bowed to this master politician who could get others to do his slaughter for him.

In an engaging passage of his history, Churchill describes how Stalin, after treating him with barbarous rudeness at a long Kremlin conference, invited him to his private apartment, called for wine and vodka, invited in Molotov as a butt for jokes, and had a jolly midnight snack of a whole roast suckling pig; of which Churchill, who had a splitting headache, declined to partake. The picture lingers — the relish of the arch-Bolshevik consuming a pig, and the weary nausea of the aged arch-imperialist.

The British were wise to balk at the landing in France at that time. The Dieppe raid in August, when we killed or captured most of the Canadian raiders, suggests the warm welcome that would have awaited the Anglo-Americans, especially the neophyte G.I. Joes, in a landing attempt in France
in 1942 or even 1943. But in the North Africa landing they had exactly the tea party that Roosevelt planned; they did, that is, until Rommel crossed the vast deserts after El Alamein and gave them their first rude taste of real war.

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
Roon deliberately belittles the largest, most difficult, most successful long-distance sea-borne invasion in history. If it looked easy, that was because it was well planned and well executed. It could have been a gigantic Gallipoli.
—
V.H.

* * *

S
HE
threw herself into his arms. The dangling pouch struck her hip. The blow, the hard embrace, the warm eager kiss on her mouth, all scarcely registered, she was so shattered and dazed.

“Where’s the boy?” Byron asked.

Clutching his hand, unable to talk, trying to infuse all her astounded love in her grip, she pulled him past the dining room down the gloomy halls. A romp was going on in the back of the flat: laughing and shouting boys were chasing squealing girls around a big bedroom. On the bed one little girl sat holding a baby in a clean blue jumper.