Roosevelt (78 page)

And always—for all the politicians—loomed the portent of the fall, the ultimate test by ballot. What would Roosevelt do? At the White House correspondents’ dinner, the President threw back his head and roared as Bob Hope gabbed away: “I’ve always voted for Roosevelt as President. My father always voted for Roosevelt as President….”

It was widely assumed in Washington that Roosevelt would run for a fourth term only if the war was still on by summer 1944.
Many Americans thought the war would be over and won by that time, but the President himself had always been loath to predict an early victory. “We have got a long, long road to go,” he told visitors early in March 1944. “We are going to win the war—it is going to take an awfully long time.”

The President spoke at a time when the war in Italy—the only active Allied front in the West—was going badly. Inching up the long valleys north of Naples, Mark Clark’s Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army, with polyglot elements from other nations, had fought their way through the Germans’ winter line and had come up hard against the Gustav Line, anchored in jutting, snow-covered mountains. Here was a soldier’s purgatory—rough, brushy terrain cut by gullies and stream beds and flanked by rocky terraces, knife-edge cliffs, broken ridges, all of which favored the defenders. The sunny days of Calabria had given way to weeks of pelting rain and wet snow that turned fields into swamps and quagmires. The drenched, shivering soldiers crouched in foxholes or thigh-deep in swamplands were an ironic symbol. The kind of draining, positioned warfare that Churchill had abhorred in the plains of France was appearing again in the mountains of Italy. When Clark’s 36th Division tried to force the Rapido River, south of Cassino, footbridges were blown up by mines or gunfire even while being erected; rubber boats sank under small-arms fire, and the few men who got across were trapped in barbed wire, mines, and machine-gun and shell fire. The 36th took 1,600 casualties in three days—and was not across the Rapido.

Churchill was dismayed but unmoved by the deepening stalemate in Italy. He would not change the Italian strategy, but would adjust other strategy to it.
OVERLORD,
he professed, still had highest priority, but must everything be subordinated to the “tyranny” of the cross-channel attack? As he saw the problem, the campaign in Italy was the vital counterpart to the main operation in France. He was still critical of the “American clear-cut, logical, large-scale” style of thought. “In life people have first to be taught ‘Concentrate on essentials’…but it is only the first step. The second stage in war is a general harmony of war efforts by making everything fit together….”

Though still feverish from pneumonia, Churchill had thrown himself into a battle to resuscitate the campaign in Italy. The stagnation on that front was scandalous, he told his Chief of Staff. A ray of hope was that Eisenhower planned an end run—an amphibious flanking attack behind the Germans at Anzio, thirty-eight miles south of Rome, conjoined with a renewed attack on the Gustav Line. Churchill was elated by this plan for a “cat claw.” The rub was that fifty-six LST’s destined for Britain and
ERLORD
would have to be held in the Mediterranean for the operation. Churchill sent a long, pleading letter to Roosevelt. The Italian battle could not be allowed to stagnate and fester, he insisted. A vast half-finished job could not be given up. The cat claw should decide the Battle of Rome and perhaps even destroy much of Kesselring’s army. If this opportunity was lost, the Mediterranean campaign of 1944 would be ruined.

Once again Roosevelt confronted a Churchillian squeeze play in the Mediterranean; once again his Chiefs of Staff and planners worried about the suction pump; once again the President gave in. He did remind the Prime Minister that under the Teheran pledges he could not agree without Stalin’s approval to any use of forces or equipment elsewhere that might delay or hazard the success of
OVERLORD
or
ANVIL.
“I thank God for this decision,” Churchill wired back, “which engages us once again in wholehearted unity upon a great enterprise.”

The cat claw struck Anzio on January 22. At first things went well. Undetected by the Germans, American and British assault troops met little resistance and quickly moved several miles inland. Unloading proceeded briskly. At this moment Kesselring’s reserves were committed in the battle against the major Allied attack to the south, and for a few intoxicating hours a lunge through to Rome seemed possible. Then came Hitler’s order of the day that the Führer expected the “bitterest struggle for every yard” for the sake of political consequences—the defense of Rome. The Anzio “abscess” must be liquidated. Ordering his Gustav Line troops on the defensive, Kesselring skillfully deployed his crack regiments into the Anzio perimeter. German divisions started moving down the boot of Italy. Fearing encirclement if they dashed toward Rome, the invaders fortified their beachhead positions and dug in. The attackers thus became the defenders. In the south the Allies stalled again below the formidable heights of Cassino. Roosevelt told reporters the situation was very tense.

Churchill was appalled at the failure to exploit Anzio. The wildcat hurled onto the shore, he complained later, had become a stranded whale. At least the whale was there to stay; heavy Nazi counterattacks came dangerously close to overrunning the beachhead, but the defenders hung on. It was clear that deadlock once again would grip the Italian front, that more men and supply would be needed, that the suction pump would speed up again. Once again tactics were colliding with strategy. It had been evident for some time that
OVERLORD
must be postponed until about the end of May. Now the British, who had never been very enthusiastic about
ANVIL,
were insisting that the planned invasion of southern France be scrapped or put off so that the full
Mediterranean thrust would remain concentrated in Italy. German strength would be contained and bled below the Alps.

Roosevelt met with his Chiefs of Staff to consider this major proposal for altering the attack against Fortress Europe. The JCS saw the request as the latest in a long series of British efforts to favor the Mediterranean—efforts that seemed all the more curious now that the soft underbelly had turned out to be so hard. The President was mainly concerned with the political implications. He feared Soviet reaction to a cancellation of
ANVIL;
he did not want even to raise the matter at this point, when the usual rumors were flying around that Moscow (or Washington, or London) was seeking a separate peace with Berlin. Certainly
ANVIL
could not be scrapped without consulting Moscow first. The only immediate solution to the problem was to postpone a solution. In London, Eisenhower, ever the adjuster, worked out a formula that favored a further build-up in Italy but kept
ANVIL
alive.

The President confronted an even more crucial matter of strategy. During the long months of the early Italian campaign doubts had been rising among American military planners, and even more among British, as to the effectiveness of unconditional surrender. American army men at first accepted the presidential declaration without serious question, since it provided a definite, clear-cut goal of defeating the enemy decisively without getting into complex political and psychological problems. By early 1944 it became clear that Nazi propagandists were using the declaration as proof that the Allies were bent on exterminating the German nation and enslaving the German people. Intelligence officers in both London and Washington were becoming more and more doubtful about the doctrine, especially in view of the need to undermine Nazi resistance to the invasion of France. Late in March 1944 the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked the President to retreat from his uncompromising stand and to make clear now that the Allied intention was not to destroy the German people or nation but, rather, the German capacity for military conquest.

The Commander in Chief was adamant. With one eye on possible Soviet reaction to weakening on unconditional surrender, he told his chiefs:

“…A somewhat long study and personal experience in and out of Germany leads me to believe that German Philosophy cannot be changed by decree, law or military order. The change in German Philosophy must be evolutionary and may take two generations.” He was opposed to reconstructing a German state that would undertake peace moves. This might bring a period of quiet, but then a third world war.

“Please note that I am not willing at this time to say that we
do not intend to destroy the German nation. As long as the word ‘Reich’ exists in Germany as expressing a nationhood, it will forever be associated with the present form of nationhood. If we admit that, we must seek to eliminate the very word ‘Reich’ and what it stands for today.”

Of course, the President said to Hull a few days later, there would have to be exceptions, “not to the surrender principle but to the application of it in specific cases.” This, he added, was a very different thing from changing the principle. “Germany understands only one kind of language,” he told Hull.

The President’s harsh attitude toward Germany was not unaffected by a growing burden on the world’s conscience. This was the agony of the Jews.

By January 1944 Morgenthau had been pressing Hull for months to move more vigorously on the complex actions needed to save thousands of Jews in their perilous refuges from Rumania to France. He had told Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long to his face that the impression was all around that “you, particularly, are anti-semitic”; Long had denied it. At the turn of the year there was a flurry of activity in the State Department, but when Morgenthau visited Hull on January 11, 1944, he found the old man depressed and perplexed by the refugee situation. Morgenthau asked Randolph Paul to report on the urgency of the situation.

“Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews,” Paul entitled his blunt indictment. It began: “One of the greatest crimes in history, the slaughter of the Jewish people in Europe, is continuing unabated.” He went on to charge that State Department officials had not only failed to use governmental machinery to rescue Jews from Hitler but also had used that machinery to prevent the rescue of Jews, had hindered private efforts, and had willfully covered up their “guilt.”

Morgenthau soon confronted the President with his own version of this report, which he had shortened but not tempered. Paul and John Pehle, the young head of Foreign Funds Control, accompanied their chief to the White House. Roosevelt, Morgenthau later told his staff, “seemed disinclined to believe that Long wanted to stop effective action from being taken, but said that Long had been somewhat soured on the problem when Rabbi Wise got Long to approve a long list of people being brought into this country many of whom turned out to be bad people….” But Morgenthau’s anguish and Pehle’s specific data impressed the President. The Secretary had brought along the draft of an executive order creating a War Refugee Board to take operations away from the State Department. Roosevelt approved the idea and asked Morgenthau to
discuss it with Undersecretary of State Stettinius. Morgenthau did that very afternoon, and Stettinius approved.

Roosevelt acted within the week. He announced the establishment of the War Refugee Board, with Pehle as Acting Executive Director. “It is the policy of this Government,” the executive order began, “to take all measures within its power to rescue the victims of enemy oppression who are in imminent danger of death and otherwise to afford such victims all possible relief and assistance consistent with the successful prosecution of the war.” Composed of the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and War, and armed with funds and both legal and moral authority, the new board went right to work. It was fearfully late—in many cases too late. But at last the administration was putting some drive and persistence into the vast rescue operation.

“YOUR MOVE, TOJO”

December 14,1943, © Low, reprinted by permission of
The Manchester Guardian

Within two months, indeed, Morgenthau could come to the White House with a hopeful progress report. His chief was keenly interested, but even while Morgenthau was talking about refugees, the President was thinking about the implications for Palestine. He was calculating how he could induce the British to promise publicly that if the Refugee Board actually brought Jews out of Europe, London would let them go to Palestine. “You know,” the President said to Morgenthau, “the Arabs don’t like this thing.” Neither did Morgenthau—he was not a Zionist—but he, Stimson, and Pehle persuaded the President to support emergency refugee shelters in the United States. Fearing opposition on the Hill, the President took steps to bring 1,000 refugees from Italy to an emergency shelter in Oswego, New York—and then simply announced his plan to Congress.
The suction pump was still working in the Pacific, too. At the close of the second Cairo Conference Roosevelt and Churchill had initialed a revised plan for defeating Japan. The pivot of strategy would no longer be a mere holding operation around the vast Japanese perimeter, or a counteroffensive based on hopping from one island to the next, or even the long-planned major thrust through Burma and China. The planners now proposed a line of attack as bold and direct as
OVERLORD
itself—a massive amphibious operation sweeping across the western Pacific, outflanking and isolating big enemy bases, blockading the home islands by sea and air, and then closing in for the final assault. The Pacific advance would be two-pronged. The advance along the New Guinea-Netherlands East Indies-Philippine axis would proceed concurrently with operations to capture the Mandated Islands. The two series of operations would be mutually supported.