Roosevelt (104 page)

It was the most brutal message Stalin had ever sent Roosevelt;
it was also the most portentous. The surrender discussions had incited the fear that had dominated Soviet strategy for over a decade—the fear that the fascist and capitalist powers would combine against Russia. Everywhere Stalin looked events seemed to be conspiring in that direction: the shift of German troops to the east; the furious defense by the Hitlerites of obscure towns in the east while they yielded big cities to the Anglo-Americans in the west; the mysterious discussions with Wolff in Switzerland, and the stubborn refusal to let the Russians take part. And always there was the secret Allied development of an atomic weapon. Roosevelt was the tool of Churchill—the same Churchill who had tried to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution at birth.

Once again Roosevelt responded indignantly. He had received his message with astonishment, he told Stalin. He asked the same trust in his own truthfulness as he had always had in the Marshal’s. Could the Russians believe that he would settle with the Germans without Soviet agreement? It would be a tragedy of history if, just as victory was within their grasp, such lack of faith should prejudice the entire undertaking after all the colossal losses.

“Frankly,” he concluded, “I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”

There could be no question now—the edifice of trust and good will and neighborliness that Roosevelt had shaped so lovingly was crashing down around him. The same Stalin who was making these horrendous accusations was practicing power politics in Poland, withholding Molotov from San Francisco, and doubtless planning to use the veto to disrupt the United Nations. And Roosevelt was innocent of Stalin’s charges; he had neither the will nor the capacity to indulge in labyrinthine maneuvers at this point. But his innocence had a dangerous edge. He was being tripped again by his old tendency to compartmentalize military and political decisions. Because to him military negotiations need not have political implications, he did not see what Stalin saw: that any discussion with the enemy, on any kind of time schedule, inevitably created certain political possibilities and blocked others.

For a moment Stalin sensed that he might have gone too far in upbraiding the President. He assured Roosevelt that he did not question his trustworthiness, but then he repeated all his arguments. Time was running out. Stalin’s latest message on Poland was dated April 7, 1945.

Brilliant Allied victories amid deteriorating coalition politics—that was the strategic plight of Asia, too, in the late winter of 1945.

In mid-February a fast carrier force under Spruance slipped through thick weather to a point seventy miles from the Japanese coastline and sent several hundred bombers over Tokyo. It was the first naval attack on the capital since Doolittle’s raid. Next day a huge amphibious force appeared off Iwo Jima, a tiny island which, with its three airfields, flat surface, and steep mountain at one end, was like a stationary aircraft carrier seven hundred miles from Japan. On D day—February 19—seven battleships and an armada of cruisers and destroyers smashed the beach areas with the most concentrated prelanding bombardment of the Pacific war. The defenders had mainly fortified the higher ground inland, however, and as soon as the bombardment lifted and the assault craft hit the beaches, the Marines were pinned there under withering fire. The attackers held on and began the bloody business of blowing and burning out deep underground strong points. Over 6,000 Marines died during the next five weeks of cave-to-cave fighting, along with virtually all the 21,000 defenders. Kamikazes sank an escort carrier and crippled the fleet carrier
Saratoga.

Iwo Jima proved that the American Navy could seize enemy territory within a few hundred miles of the Japanese mainland and thus thrust its line of steppingstones almost to the heartland; it also demonstrated that the enemy could exact a fearful price for a few square miles of volcanic ash. Roosevelt, returning from Yalta, could feel vindicated in paying a price for Soviet participation in the Asian war.

It was this same price, however, that was causing unrest in Chungking during the weeks after Yalta. Rumors were circulating through the capital that the independence of China had been gravely compromised by a deal between Roosevelt and Stalin. Hurley felt he must return to Washington to ascertain from the President his long-range plans for China. He left in mid-February, with General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had succeeded Stilwell as Chiang’s Chief of Staff.

Hurley had other reasons to see his chief. After a promising start, his mediation between the Nationalists and the Communists had collapsed. In November he had won Yenan’s adherence to a five-point agreement providing for “unification of all military forces in China for the immediate defeat of Japan” and for a new coalition government “of the people, for the people, and by the people” that would control all the military forces in the country,
including the Communist. Triumphantly Hurley had brought to Chungking not only the draft agreement, but Chou Enlai himself to take part in the negotiations, only to be accused by the Nationalists of having been sold a bill of goods. To agree to a coalition government, the Generalissimo said, would be to acknowledge total defeat. In return he offered a three-point proposal that would recognize the Communists as a legal party in exchange for control by the Nationalist government of the Communist armed forces. The Communists turned this down fiat on the ground that they were simply being asked to surrender. The indefatigable Ambassador managed to persuade the two sides to resume talks. All in vain. The distrust was too deep.

“China is in a dilemma,” Stettinius summed it up to the President early in January. “Coalition would mean an end of Conservative Kuomintang domination and open the way for the more virile and popular Communists to extend their influence to the point perhaps of controlling the Government. Failure to settle with the Communists, who are daily growing stronger, would invite the danger of an eventual overthrow of the Kuomintang….”

Hurley had troubles of his own. He had become convinced that the Foreign Service officers in China not only held different views from his own but also were sabotaging his relations with the State Department. He was certainly right on the first point. In contrast to the Ambassador, who liked Chiang, had confidence in the long-run survival and improvement of his government, and, with Wedemeyer, came to believe he was making a fair fight against the enemy, the China hands, who had had far more opportunity to observe, deemed Chiang and the Kuomintang ineffective, corrupt, reactionary, insensitive to the misery around them, incapable of reform, and not only unable to fight the Japanese but also unwilling to do so because they were hoarding their men to fight the Communists after the war. Late in February the Chargé d’Affaires at Chungking reported to Stettinius that American aid to the Nationalists was threatening to drive Yenan closer to Russia, that China was headed toward a disastrous civil conflict, and that Washington should deal directly with and aid Yenan. This message arrived at the State Department while Hurley was in Washington and led to a confrontation between Hurley and officials of the Far Eastern office.

So it was an indignant Ambassador who reported to the President. Just what happened when he went to the White House twice during March is not wholly clear. He said later that he wanted a showdown with the Commander in Chief but “when the President reached up that fine, firm, strong hand of his to shake hands with me” and Hurley found in his hand a “loose bag of bones” and saw
the wasted face, he lost some of his nerve. Apparently the President was in better shape than he looked, for he scoffed at Hurley’s worries and stated vigorously that he had not surrendered the territorial integrity or political independence of China. “You are seeing ghosts again.” He was loath to let Hurley have the Yalta documents on the Far East, but Hurley insisted on seeing them, and in a later meeting the Ambassador felt—or so he testified later—that the President seemed less confident about the agreements and had decided that Hurley should see Churchill and Stalin to discuss them. The President stuck to the basic policy of giving military aid only to Chiang, but he urged Hurley to continue to conciliate the Communists and he approved representation for Yenan on the Chinese delegation to the San Francisco Conference. Hurley left the White House satisfied that he had been thoroughly sustained in his fight with the young China hands.

Thus passed a last opportunity for Roosevelt to abandon his China strategy. Yet despite all the illusions that dominated American thinking about China it was not ignorance or stupidity or illness that was the prime source of Roosevelt’s continuing gamble on Chiang. It was a combination of Utopian hopes for the possibility of Chinese unity, stability, progress, and democracy, Western-style, and of hard-nosed military planning to minimize American casualties in the conquest of Japan.

Hurley had hardly left Washington for his trip to London and Moscow when Americans were once again reminded of the need for Soviet help in the final struggle. On April 1 Marine and army divisions swarmed ashore on Okinawa, the largest island in the Ryukyus and a threshold to the East China Sea. It was the most daring move in the Pacific campaign, for Okinawa lay only four hundred miles east of the China coast and barely 350 southwest of Kyushu itself. The invaders had an April Fool’s surprise when they met little resistance the first day. But during the following week, as the infantry pushed south through choppy terrain, they encountered the most formidable defenses in their Pacific experience. Losses mounted appallingly as hardened Marines and soldiers ground their way through endless mazes of mutually supporting strong points.

Several hundred Japanese aircraft from the home islands also attacked the invaders. Most were shot down, but enough kamikazes slipped through to cause heavy losses, especially among destroyers and picket ships. Twenty-two of the first twenty-four suicide crashes were effective. Clearly Japanese fanaticism was intensifying as the Americans drove closer to Kyushu and Honshu. More sharply than ever the Commander in Chief and the men in the Pentagon confronted the question: If a few Japanese divisions and a handful of suicide planes could exact such a price in defending an outlying
island, what would happen when the Americans attacked the heartland?

By early April it seemed likely that the atomic bomb would be finished in time to use against Japan if not against Germany. Would this make the difference? Scientists were becoming more and more worried about the prospects of dropping the bomb on civilians, the lack of international control of information, the still-pervasive secrecy. Bush and others were pressing Stimson to support a general pooling among nations of all scientific research to prevent secret plans for weapons, but Stimson wanted to give the Russians information about the weapon only on the basis of a “real”
quid pro quo.
He seemed to draw back a bit after a long talk with his aide, Harvey Bundy, during which the two went “right down to the bottom facts of human nature, morals and government,” Stimson noted in his diary, but the Secretary was still divided between continuing secrecy and international sharing and control. So was Roosevelt, who wanted to put off a decision until the first bomb was tested. Einstein wrote a letter to the President introducing Leo Szilard, who raised the portentous atomic questions of the future. This time Roosevelt did not respond.

Early in April Bohr returned to the United States and prepared for the President a new memorandum against atomic secrecy and distrust. He asked Halifax and Frankfurter how the statement could be brought to the President’s attention. The Ambassador and the Justice decided to discuss the matter in the privacy of Washington’s Rock Creek Park. They planned to meet on April 12.

Wedemeyer, as well as Hurley, visited the White House in March—characteristically Roosevelt had his two China lieutenants in separately—and he was even more disturbed than the Ambassador by Roosevelt’s drawn face and drooping jaw. But on one point at least the President was clear and emphatic. He was going to do everything possible to grant the people of Indochina their independence from France. He instructed Wedemeyer not to hand over any supplies to the French forces operating in the area.

Independence for Indochina had become a near-obsession of the President’s during the past year or two. He told Stalin at Yalta that he had in mind a temporary trusteeship for Indochina, but that the British wished to give it back to France, since they feared the implications of a trusteeship for their own rule in Burma. De Gaulle, he said, had asked for ships to carry Free French forces to Indochina. Was he going to get them? Stalin asked. The President answered archly that he had been unable to find any ships for de Gaulle.

Indochina seemed to engross the President on the way home
from Yalta. For two whole years, he told reporters, he had been terribly worried about that country. He recounted his Cairo talk with Chiang, who had said that the Chinese did not want Indochina but that the French should not have it. Roosevelt had proposed the temporary trusteeship idea, he told reporters. “Stalin liked it. China liked the idea. The British don’t like it. It might bust up their empire….” Wilhelmina, he went on, was planning to give Java and Sumatra independence soon, New Guinea and Borneo only after a century or two. The skulls of the New Guineans, the Queen had explained, were the least developed in the world.

Churchill, a reporter remarked, seemed opposed to a policy of self-determination. He had said that the Atlantic Charter was not a rule, just a guide. He seemed to be undercutting it. The President agreed.

“The Atlantic Charter is a beautiful idea,” he said. Did he remember the speech, a reporter asked, that Churchill had given about not being made prime minister to see the Empire fall apart?

“Dear old Winston will never learn on that point. He has made his specialty on that point. This is, of course, off the record.”