The Second World War (87 page)

As a result, Roosevelt was able to hold aloof from the business of directing war, an activity alien to his temperament. Such an aloofness was not granted to any of the other leaders. Churchill, of course, revelled in high command, dedicated his days (and nights) to war-making, had rooms, suites, even whole houses adapted to his needs as a wartime Prime Minister, preferred his ‘siren suit’ to any other garb (though he also kept handy his uniforms of an honorary air commodore and an honorary colonel of the Cinque Ports Battalion), demanded a constant diet of Ultra intelligence intercepts and lived in hour-to-hour intimacy with his military advisers. Hitler turned himself into a military hermit after the opening of Barbarossa, seeing few but his generals, even though he found their company grating. Stalin’s wartime routine conformed strangely in pattern to Hitler’s – secretive, nocturnal, troglodyte. Roosevelt scarcely altered his pattern of life at all after Pearl Harbor. Unthreatened by air attack, he continued to live at the White House, occasionally vacationing at Hyde Park, and there pursued a timetable that drove the methodical and purposeful almost to distraction. Marshall’s day was measured to the minute: his only relaxation was to visit his wife in his official quarters for lunch, which was served as he stepped on to the veranda from his staff car. Roosevelt lunched off a tray brought into the Oval Office, did not begin work until ten in the morning and took few telephone calls at night. According to Burns, there were a few fixed points in his week:

He saw the congressional Big Four – the Vice-President, the Speaker and the majority leader of each chamber – on Monday or Tuesday; met with the press on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings; and presided over a Cabinet meeting on Friday afternoons. [Otherwise] there seemed to be no pattern at all in the way that Roosevelt did his work. Sometimes he hurried through appointments on crucial matters and dawdled during lesser ones. He ignored most letters altogether. . . . He took many phone calls, refused others, saw inconsequential and dull people, and ignored others of apparently greater political or intellectual weight – all according to some mystifying structure of priorities known to no one, perhaps not even to himself.

This pattern, or lack of it, persisted from 7 December 1941 to 12 April 1945. Unlike Churchill, who was constantly on the move – to Paris (before the fall of France), to Cairo, to Moscow, to Athens (where he spent Christmas Day 1944 while the sound of gunfire between British troops and ELAS rebels rocked the city), to Rome, Naples, Normandy, the Rhine – Roosevelt travelled little. His mobility was, of course, limited by his physical disability, which was the result of poliomyelitis and which a discreet press disguised from its readership almost completely. Nevertheless he travelled when he chose, but during the war his travels took him only to Casablanca in January 1943, Quebec twice (August 1943 and September 1944), Hawaii and Alaska in the summer and Cairo and Tehran at the end of 1944 and Yalta, in the Russian Crimea, in February 1945. He saw nothing of the war at first hand, no bombed cities, no troops at the front, no prisoners, no after-effects of battle, and probably did not choose to; he directed American strategy as he had directed the New Deal – by lofty rhetoric and by rare but decisive strikes at the conjunctions of power.

There were effectively four decisive actions in all. The first was his endorsement of the ‘Germany First’ decision, advanced by Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, in November 1940, adopted by the Anglo-American ABC-1 conference of February-March 1941, agreed with Churchill at Placentia Bay in August, but enshrined as national policy only after Pearl Harbor, when Roosevelt, who might with his political heart so easily have yielded to the popular demand for vengeance on Japan, let his strategic head dictate that the greater should be beaten before the lesser enemy. The second was his settlement of the dispute between Marshall and the British in London in July 1942 on terms which authorised the Torch landing in North Africa, with all the dubious consequences that flowed from that expedition. The third was his insistence on the proclamation of ‘unconditional surrender’ at Casablanca in January 1943, a high-minded re-echoing of the terms on which the United States had conducted its war against the Confederacy. The last was his decision to distance himself from Churchill at the Yalta conference in February 1945 and deal directly with Stalin on the future of Europe.

There had been anticipations of Roosevelt’s Yalta initiative both at Placentia Bay, when Churchill had reluctantly accepted the more liberalising provisions of the Atlantic Charter – which in effect committed the British Empire to granting independence to its colonies – and at the Cairo conference, where Roosevelt had shown a typically ‘China lobby’ over-tenderness to Chiang Kai-shek. At Cairo the British had been persuaded to surrender their historic rights of extraterritoriality in China as a token of commitment to their belief in the nominal equality of Chiang’s leadership with that of the Western democracies.

Chiang Kai-shek was to let Roosevelt down. Contrary to the President’s expectations, he neither went through the motions to reform China’s political and economic structures – how could he have done, a realist might have asked, with the more productive half of his country in the hands of the enemy? – nor utilised American aid and American advice, supplied so liberally first by Stilwell and then, after Chiang had tired of Stilwell’s lecturing, by Wedemeyer, to maximise China’s fighting power.

By the time of Yalta, therefore, Roosevelt had privately written off Chiang; for form’s sake, China was elevated to permanent membership of the Security Council of the United Nations Organisation, whose institution and structure was decided at Yalta, but Chiang was accorded no fruits of the victory he had done so little to advance, certainly not the annexation of Indo-China he had been offered at Cairo. Poland too was written off at Yalta, though it had fought every day of the war since 1 September 1939, maintaining an army in exile which stood fourth in size among those opposed to the Wehrmacht, after the Russian, American and British; its eastern provinces, over-generously delimited in 1920, were permanently transferred to Russia at Yalta, though this Roosevelt-Stalin deal was an act less of political treachery than of political reality, since the Red Army already occupied the whole of Poland’s territory.

However, the most important of all decisions taken at Yalta, agreed directly between Roosevelt and Stalin, concerned the future conduct of the war in the Pacific. Roosevelt’s willingness to barter away the future of Poland and to finalise a division of Germany which accorded the Soviet Union an over-generous allocation of occupation territory was ultimately determined by his anxiety to engage the Red Army in the battle to defeat Japan. At the time of Yalta, the United States had neither yet assured itself that its nuclear-research programme would result in the successful test explosion of an atomic bomb nor advanced its forces to a point from which the land invasion of Japan might be undertaken. The amphibious assault on Iwo Jima was in preparation but had not been launched; the devastating fire-bombing of Japan had not begun. The Red Army’s commitment in Europe, on the other hand, was clearly almost at an end, and from western Russian the Trans-Siberian railway led directly to the border of Manchuria, where in 1904-5 Tsar Nicholas II’s army had suffered a humiliating defeat. The opportunity to avenge it stood high on the list of Stalin’s wartime priorities. When he might take the opportunity, however, was what preoccupied the American President. To ensure that he did so sooner rather than later motivated almost all Roosevelt’s initiatives at Yalta. The price he paid in the end was to discredit Churchill in the eyes of their joint Polish allies, to concede Russia rights over territory in sovereign China which were not America’s to grant, but ultimately to assure that the repossession of Japan’s conquests in the Pacific would not be bought at the cost of American lives alone. To a nation which had watched the heroic advance of the United States Navy, Marine Corps and MacArthur’s army divisions from New Guinea to the Philippines, the diplomatic price paid at Yalta – when the cost to a distant European state’s territory and to Britain’s good name was balanced against further American casualties – seemed a small one to pay.

In the six months of ‘running wild’ between Pearl Harbor and the expulsion of the British from Burma between December 1941 and May 1942, the Japanese had succeeded in what five other imperial powers – the Spanish, Dutch, British, French and Russians – had previously attempted but failed to achieve: to make themselves masters of all the lands surrounding the seas of China and to link their conquests to a strong central position. Indeed, if China is included among the powers with imperial ambitions in the western Pacific, Japan had exceeded even her achievement. The Chinese had never established more than cultural dominance over Vietnam, and their power had failed altogether to penetrate the rest of Indo-China, the East Indies, Malaya or Burma. In mid-1942 the Japanese had conquered all those lands, were preparing to establish puppet regimes in most of them, were also the overlords of thousands of islands which were
terrae incognitae
in Peking, and had joined their maritime and peripheral annexations to the broad swathes of mainland territory in Manchuria and China which they had seized since 1931.

In crude territorial terms the extent of Japanese power even in mid-1944 was one and a half times greater than the area Hitler had controlled at the high tide of his conquests in 1942 – 6 million against 4 million square miles. However, Hitler held down his empire by brute force of manpower, deploying over 300 German and satellite divisions at the battlefront and in the occupied lands. Japan, by contrast, deployed an army only one-sixth the size, with only eleven divisions available for mobile operations. The rest were committed to the interminable, enervating and (apparently) ultimately irresoluble war against Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese hinterland. This state of affairs left Japan in a fundamentally unbalanced strategic position. Though the map represented her situation as strong, since she occupied that ‘central position’ in the theatre of war which all military theorists have argued is the most desirable to hold, logistics pointed to a different conclusion. Intercommunication between many of the Japanese strongholds, particularly southern China, Indo-China and Burma, had always been difficult if not impossible by land because of the mountain chains which define their frontiers. Intercommunication by sea was wearisome and increasingly perilous because of the bold and effective depredations of the American submarine captains. Intercommunication between the Pacific and East Indian islands was menaced both by submarines and by American airpower, land- or carrier-based. Finally the Japanese army in China itself was effectively immobilised by the size of the country, its units committed to pacification or occupation – in which they were assisted by thousands of so-called ‘puppet’ Chinese troops belonging to the bogus government of Wang Ching-wei, set up in 1939 – and only rarely freed to undertake offensive operations against the Chinese armies proper.

Those armies belonged to two hostile camps, the army of the legitimate Kuomintang government commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, and the communist army of Mao Zedong. By a pre-war truce they had agreed to fight the Japanese instead of each other, but the truce was often broken, while the communist army was certainly more interested in letting Chiang’s troops exhaust themselves in battle with the foreign enemy than in helping them to victory. Their actions were quite unco-ordinated, in any case, for Mao’s base was in the distant north-west, around Yenan in the great bend of the Yellow River beyond the Wall where rivals to the central government had traditionally established themselves, while Chiang had been driven into the deep south, around his emergency capital of Chungking, 500 miles away. Between the two seethed the remnants of the warlord armies which had carved out their territories after the collapse of the empire in 1911; the Japanese made accommodations with them and also recruited from them puppet troops.

To both the warlord and puppet armies Chiang’s was militarily superior – but only barely so. In 1943 it was theoretically 324 divisions strong and therefore the largest army in the world, but in reality it consisted of only twenty-three properly equipped divisions, and those were small ones of only 10,000 men. For their equipment and supplies, moreover, they depended entirely on the Americans, who in turn depended upon the British to provide them with facilities to fly transport aircraft from India into southern China over ‘the Hump’, the mountain chain 14,000 feet high between Bengal in India and the province of Szechuan. These supplies had previously been delivered via the ‘Burma Road’ from Mandalay; but since the fall of Burma to the Japanese in May 1942 that route was closed. Chiang was dependent on the Americans not only for armament and subsistence but also for training and air support – provided by the few dozen aircraft of General Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, originally the ‘American Volunteer Group’ of pilots and machines supplied to China by the United States in 1941. He was, moreover, dependent on the Americans for his armies’ cutting edge, since the most effective element in his command was the American brigade-size 5307th Provisional Regiment, to become famous as Merrill’s Marauders. The man he had accepted as his nominal chief of staff, ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, displayed an impatience with the Chinese that was exceeded in degree only by his rudeness towards the British with whom he was co-operating.

The Japanese army in China, twenty-five divisions strong, was so successful in keeping Mao pinned in his ‘liberated area’ of the north-west and Chiang backed against the mountains of Burma in the south that for the first two and a half years of the Second World War in the East it was not under an obligation to mount mobile operations. It already controlled the most productive parts of the country, Manchuria and the valleys of the Yellow and Yangtse rivers, as well as enclaves around the ports of the south, Foochow, Amoy, Hong Kong and Canton, together with the key island of Hainan in the South China Sea. It was taking what it wanted from China, particularly rice, coal, metals and Manchurian industrial goods, was scarcely discommoded either by ‘resistance’ – from which any sensible Chinese held aloof – or by the operations of Chiang’s and Mao’s armies and, above all, continued to exercise by its presence in the country all the advantages of occupying the strategic ‘central position’.