The Day of Battle (5 page)

To escape both official Washington and social Washington, Marshall bundled the Combined Chiefs onto a pair of transport planes for a weekend in southeast Virginia. Landing at Langley Field, the men squeezed into eight waiting Army staff cars and motored up Route 17 for a tour of the Yorktown battlefield, where the British professed—amid guffaws—not to recall “the name of that chap who did so badly here” in 1781. Then it was on to Williamsburg, the meticulously restored former colonial capital.

If Washington had been atwitter, Williamsburg seethed with excitement at the visitation. Lawns had been trimmed, hedges clipped, honeysuckle cropped. At the Williamsburg Inn, linen and china emerged from wartime storage crates, and the silver was polished and repolished. Carpenters built a new table to seat thirteen diners and adjusted the floodlights to illuminate the dogwoods. Someone managed to circumvent government restrictions
on Freon to procure the only two tanks of refrigerant south of Richmond: the inn would be pleasingly air-conditioned.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had financed Williamsburg’s resurrection, got wind of the visit and assigned various servants to oversee dinner preparations. Appalled to learn that inferior cream might be used to make the ice cream, Rockefeller ordered a fresh urn dispatched from his estate at Pocantico Hills in New York, along with select fruits and cheeses, while his private club in Manhattan prepared fresh terrapin à la Maryland, which required two days of simmering. Terrapin, cream, fruit, cheese, and a consignment of sherry all were tucked into the upper berth of a Pullman car at Penn Station by an overburdened butler, who staggered off the train in Richmond four hours later and continued with his bounty to Williamsburg by limousine.

Shortly before five
P.M
. on Saturday, May 15, the convoy of chiefs turned off Queen Street onto Duke of Gloucester Street before stopping at the old Capitol building, where they were greeted by a black doorman in colonial livery. Having admired the rubbed woodwork and the portrait of young George Washington, they strolled to the Raleigh Tavern for finger sandwiches and cinnamon toast in the Daphne Room, washed down with tea and highballs. Then it was on to the inn, where fires crackled in the twin lobby hearths—Freon be damned—and bourbon juleps were served in goblets made by a local silversmith. Dinner, at 8:15, included Rockefeller’s menu, plus crabmeat cocktail, Virginia ham, beaten biscuits, and a 1929 Heidsieck Dry Monopole champagne. All agreed that the strawberry ice cream was divine.

After coffee and brandy, Marshall rousted the visitors for a midnight excursion to the colonial governor’s palace, brilliantly lighted with hundreds of candles in each room and throughout the gardens. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, lost his way in the topiary maze and called for help from the other chiefs, who rushed to the rescue only to get lost themselves, with much boyish chortling.

Sunday morning, after breakfast on the terrace, the chiefs played croquet on the lawn or went swimming in borrowed trunks. Brooke, who was mulling whether to spend £1,500 for a forty-five-volume set of
Gould’s Birds,
tromped off with his field glasses in search of catbirds and hairy woodpeckers. Before heading to the airfield for the return flight, the high command filed into Bruton Parish Church, where ushers escorted them to General Washington’s pew. Parishioners jammed the sanctuary, clogging the twin transept aisles with folding chairs after the pews filled. Dudley Pound, who was suffering from an unsuspected brain tumor and had but a
few months to live, had been asked to read the scripture. Stepping to the lectern, he thumbed to the sixth chapter of Matthew and sang out, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” Pound finished in a strong voice:

While the chiefs went south, Roosevelt and Churchill headed north. With Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins also in the limousine, and a motorcycle escort clearing the road, the motorcade rolled up Massachusetts Avenue before angling out of the capital on Wisconsin Avenue toward the presidential retreat called Shangri-La—later renamed Camp David—in the Catoctin Mountains of central Maryland. Spying a billboard for Barbara Fritchie Candy, Roosevelt recited a couplet from John Greenleaf Whittier’s ballad about the legendary Civil War heroine who defied passing rebel troops by waving the Stars and Stripes from her window.

To the president’s amazement, Churchill then “gabbled the whole poem,” all sixty lines—“She leaned far out on the window-sill, / And shook it forth with a royal will.” Soon the Roosevelts and Hopkins were punctuating the prime minister’s cadences with the refrain: “Shoot, if you must…”

For three days they unbent in the serene glades of Shangri-La, napping in the log cabins, angling for brook trout, discussing the hot tramp of Confederate troops through these hills toward Gettysburg eighty years earlier. Another guest, Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna, wrote her husband on May 14 that Churchill “picks his teeth all through dinner and uses snuff liberally. The sneezes which follow the latter practically rock the foundations of the house…. I admired his snuff box and found it was one that had once belonged to Lord Nelson.” Often the president sat by a window with his beloved stamp collection; when Churchill’s pleas grew too insistent for more tanks or more planes, more this or more that, Roosevelt would cut him short by holding a stamp specimen to the light and murmuring, “Isn’t this a beauty from Newfoundland?” On other occasions, to relieve the president from the “Winston hours,” an aide would summon Roosevelt to an imaginary phone call.

They had much in common besides their ultimate responsibility for saving the world. They shared passions for secrecy, skulduggery, and military
history. Roosevelt “loved the military side of events,” one subordinate wrote, “and liked to hold them in his own hand,” while Churchill seemed to fancy himself the reincarnation of his famous ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, the victor over the French at Blenheim in 1704. Despite his current resistance to Churchill’s Italian gambit, the president had his own “diversionist tendencies” and harbored a fascination for the Mediterranean nearly as lurid as the prime minister’s. Neither ever forgot, or tried to forget, the agony that war had brought to so many. (Marshall routinely sent Roosevelt brilliantly colored graphics detailing the latest combat casualty figures, “so that it would be quite clear.”) Certainly the president’s admiration and affection for Churchill ran deep. “Isn’t he a wonderful old Tory to have on our side?” he once asked.

And yet: Churchill could draw near and no nearer. Convivial and charming, Roosevelt at his core remained opaque, mysterious, unknowable in what one aide called “his heavily forested interior.” Trying to follow his thought process, Henry Stimson said, was “very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around an empty room.” Seldom did he issue orders; rather, he intimated that he “wished to have things done.” No politician ever was better at resolving problems by ignoring them; Roosevelt could elevate inaction to an art form. Yet on more than twenty occasions he rejected the advice of his military brain trust to follow his own instincts, as he had done in deciding to invade North Africa the previous November. “Not a tidy mind,” one British observer noted, and the American chiefs could only agree. “The president,” Eleanor once said, “never ‘thinks’! He
decides
.”

He reduced his own political philosophy to two nouns: democrat and Christian. A bit more nuanced were his inalienable Four Freedoms—of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear—which he had articulated in the State of the Union message of January 1941. Months earlier, he had begun to dream about the postwar world, and if he kept Churchill at arm’s length it was partly because his vision did not include the restoration of colonial empires. Surely he had spoken from the heart in telling the prime minister, “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.” Yet there was also cold conviction in Roosevelt’s observation to his son Elliott: “Britain is on the decline.”

America was ascendant, and Roosevelt had reason to hope that his countrymen possessed the stamina to remake a better world: a forthcoming Roper opinion poll, secretly slipped to the White House on Thursday, revealed that more than three-quarters of those surveyed agreed that the United States should play a larger global role after the war. Nearly as many believed that the country should “plan to help other nations get on their
feet,” and more than half concurred that Americans should “take an active part in some sort of an international organization with a court and police force strong enough to enforce its decisions.” The president found it equally heartening that 70 percent approved of his war leadership and two-thirds favored him for reelection in 1944 if the world was still at war.

But if Britain was on the decline, so was Roosevelt personally, as he no doubt realized. Those who had seen him at Casablanca were dismayed at how frail he now looked, and all the pretty stamps in Newfoundland could not fully restore him. “Something at once attractive and pathetic in this man,” a British diplomat wrote in his diary. “The great torso, the huge and splendid head, the magnificent frame, immobile, anchored to a sofa or a chair, carried from room to room.” Roosevelt said little about his health, other than to grouse over a recurrent sinus condition. It was just another secret to keep.

Negotiations resumed at 10:30
A.M
. on Monday. Camaraderie and good fun promptly popped like soap bubbles, and for three days the deadlock persisted as the military chiefs haggled. Brooke and his British colleagues renounced both imperial designs in the Mediterranean and any peripheral strategems; rather, they argued, an Italian campaign “in the spirit of the chase” would exploit a Sicilian victory, unhinge Rome, and unbalance Berlin. The Americans refused to concede, and declared that no U.S. ground or naval forces would be released for combat beyond Sicily. Marshall, whose beetling brows gave him a stern Old Testament look, reminded the chiefs “that in North Africa a relatively small German force” had fought an irksome rearguard campaign for six months; a German decision to fight in Italy “might make intended operations extremely difficult and time consuming.”

Nearly three dozen aides and staff officers hovered behind the chiefs, rifling through documents or pulling out those red leather folders to prove this point or dispute that assertion. By 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon, Marshall had reached his limit. The chiefs were scheduled to meet Roosevelt and Churchill at the White House in two hours; to confess that the high command remained at loggerheads would likely mean ceding strategic planning to the president and prime minister, a prospect horrifying to every man in epaulets. Marshall proposed that the room be cleared except for the chiefs. The supernumeraries filed out; ninety minutes later, the door reopened, and on the mahogony table lay an agreement.

It was a curious compromise, because compromise it was. A cross-Channel attack would be launched—the target date was fifty weeks away: on May 1, 1944—“to secure a lodgement on the Continent from which
further offensive operations can be carried out.” To help assemble the twenty-nine divisions required for such an invasion, soon to be code-named
OVERLORD
, four American and three British divisions would be transferred from the Mediterranean after the Sicilian campaign to staging bases in Britain. As for the Med, the Allied commander-in-chief in North Africa, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was instructed to plan whatever operations following the conquest of Sicily seemed “best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces.” The chiefs calculated that Eisenhower eventually would be left with twenty-seven divisions and 3,600 aircraft to continue his war against the soft underbelly, although a direct invasion of Italy was not specified.

The baby had been cut in half, a solution perhaps satisfying to the disputants but rarely auspicious for the baby. As the officers collected their papers and snapped shut their briefcases, a grumble of thunder rolled across Washington. Rain soon lashed the city from the west, breaking the heat.

TRIDENT
had another week to run. If the central disagreement had been finessed, a dozen other issues required resolution, from shipping allocations to operations in the Pacific. The social round also continued without mercy. At a reception on the South Lawn of the White House, the Marine Band played Stephen Foster airs and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” while guests sipped iced coffee and stared beyond the fence at tourists who stared back. During a British embassy luncheon on May 22, Churchill, fortified with whiskey, declared that he expected “England and the United States to run the world…. Why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority?” The bemused vice president, Henry A. Wallace, accused the prime minister of advocating “Anglo-Saxondom
über Alles
.” Churchill waved away the charge. “We Anglo-Saxons”—he pronounced it
schaxons
—“are the only ones who really know how to run the show.” Poor Brooke left the luncheon to get a haircut and tumbled down fourteen stone steps; battered and bruised, he found consolation in the purchase of two rare bird books discovered in a local shop.

Rarely content and never quiescent, Churchill now threatened to overplay his hand. He kept Roosevelt up until 2:30 in the morning of Monday, May 24. (After
TRIDENT
, the exhausted president would flee to his Hyde Park estate and sleep ten hours for three consecutive nights.) Later that day the prime minister sought to repudiate the compromise reached by the chiefs, because it failed to specifically advocate an invasion of Italy. He also raised the notion of a continued attack into Yugoslavia and Greece. To Lord Moran, his personal physician, Churchill added, “Have you noticed that the president is a very tired man? His mind seems closed. He seems to
have lost his wonderful elasticity…. I cannot let the matter rest where it is.”