The Yanks Are Coming! (34 page)

Ted insisted on landing with the first assault wave at Utah Beach. Hobbling along with a cane—he had arthritis and a heart condition (which he kept secret)—he was the oldest man on the beach, the only general to land with the first troops, and the only soldier to have a son (Quentin II) landing on another Normandy beach (Omaha). He calmly directed the assault, and when General Barton came ashore, certain that the insanely brave Roosevelt must surely be dead, he was astonished to see his friend not only alive but prepared to give him a thorough briefing on the progress of the attack. General Omar Bradley thought Roosevelt's performance the most courageous he had ever seen. Orders had been prepared for Roosevelt to take a new command as a major general when he died of a heart attack on 12 June 1944. He was awarded the Medal of Honor, posthumously, in 1944; his father received a posthumous Medal of Honor in 2001. The only other father and son to win Medals of Honor were another veteran of World War I, Douglas MacArthur, and his father, Arthur MacArthur.

As with the First World War, Kermit was impatient to get into the Second, and rather than wait for America's entry he finagled a commission in the British army with the help of Winston Churchill. Between the wars Kermit had been a global adventurer, helped build a steamship company, and proved himself a gifted writer. But the
Great Depression was more than a financial calamity for him—it was an apt phrase to describe his own mental state. Kermit had become a profound alcoholic, to the cost of his marriage and his health. Back in uniform he was usually sober, and could still do good work. But his body was too ravaged to keep him in uniform long. He served with the British in Norway and North Africa before being sent home with a medical discharge (which he contested).

He sought a commission in the American Army and insisted that he be given an assignment that offered a chance of combat. Being a Roosevelt, he got it, with General George Marshall assigning him to Alaska, where he accompanied bombing raids against the Japanese and helped train an Aleut and Eskimo militia. It rejuvenated him for a while, but his body rapidly failed. A forcibly retired captain in the British army, a barely functioning major in the American Army—with, he thought, little hope of seeing combat—he committed suicide on 4 June 1943 with a Colt .45 pistol.

BOOKENDS

Archie, though considered 100 percent disabled from his wounds in the First World War, would not be denied an opportunity to fight in the Second. Between the wars he had been an oil and financial executive. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he employed sheer Rooseveltian gumption to be commissioned a lieutenant colonel and awarded a combat command in New Guinea, where he proved he still had the audacious Roosevelt fighting spirit. Archie was fearless in the face of enemy fire. He told one young soldier who was cowering while Roosevelt stood erect, “Don't worry. You're safe with me. I was wounded three times in the last war, and that's a lucky charm.” It was for a while, at least, before an enemy grenade
exploded into the same knee that had been hit with shrapnel in France. He served in New Guinea from 1943 to 1944 and was invalided out of the service, the only American soldier to be declared 100 percent disabled in two wars. He returned to his brokerage business and dabbled in right-wing causes. In 1971 his wife died in a car crash, in which he was driving, and he secluded himself in Florida, where he died in 1979.

All the brothers were valiant, each in his own way, and it was their father, and their experiences in the Great War, that defined them. In 1918 Ted remarked, “Quentin's death is always going to be the greatest thing in any of our lives.” That he was right was confirmed by his sister Alice, who wrote a half century later, “All our lives before and after have just been bookends for the heroic, tragic volume of the Great War.”
¹⁶

PART V

THE VICTORY

CHAPTER TWENTY

IN DUBIOUS BATTLE

T
he fighting wasn't over. While American troops on the Western Front celebrated the end of the Great War, in the frozen depths of northwest Russia, American doughboys—and their de facto allies, British, Canadians, and French—were fighting against the Bolsheviks. The number of Allied troops involved was relatively small,
¹
but the fighting was fierce, even if their mission was confused, not least because of the usual wavering of President Wilson. But the goal of more clear-sighted leaders, like Churchill, was sound—to strangle the monster Bolshevism in its cradle.
²

To Churchill, the Bolsheviks represented a greater threat to civilized Europe than did the reeking tube and iron shard of the Kaiser's
Reich. Bolshevism, he declared in the House of Commons, was “not a policy; it is a disease. It is not a creed; it is a pestilence.” The Germans had smuggled Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin into Russia “in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.” Churchill's policy after Germany's surrender was to “Kill the Bolshie and Kiss the Hun” because, as he noted in April 1919, “Of all tyrannies in history, the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, and the most degrading.”
³

Such virile language was certainly not in Wilson's repertoire, but the American president was eventually and temporarily browbeaten by British, French, and Italian support for intervention in the summer of 1918. After the Bolshevik Revolution, which removed Russia from the war, the British, French, and Italians were intent on reestablishing an Eastern Front. After the German surrender in November 1918, Churchill continued to press the cause of combating the Bolsheviks, but he did not carry a majority of the British Parliament or the sentiments of a war-weary British people. Yet his warnings, as the victors set about establishing peace after the Great War, were prescient. If the Bolsheviks succeeded, if the monarchist White Russians were not restored to power, then a new and terrible regime dedicated to international revolution, and possibly allied with German militarism and even Japanese nationalism, would extend “from Yokohama to Cologne in hostility to France, Britain, and America.”
⁴

Wilson, unlike Churchill, was no friend of monarchy and had welcomed the liberal socialist revolution of March 1917. After the Russian provisional government—led first by the liberal Prince Lvov and then by the socialist Alexander Kerensky—was deposed by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution, he remained hopeful. While
Wilson disdained the lawlessness and violence of Bolshevism, he trusted that it might be moderated, that it was an understandable if extreme reaction to the authoritarianism of the Russian czar.

BREST-LITOVSK

There was, however, a practical wartime problem. The Bolsheviks, unlike the provisional government, were eager to exit the World War so they could concentrate on slaughtering their opponents at home. They reached an armistice with Germany and the Central Powers in December 1917, which culminated in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, officially withdrawing Russia from the Great War, turning over vast swathes of czarist Russian territory and its resources to the Germans, and freeing forty German divisions to join the Western Front. Some, including French prime minister Georges Clemenceau and British prime minister Lloyd George, considered the Bolsheviks de facto allies of the Germans. The Bolsheviks had repudiated all debts, leaving French investors—not just financiers, but more than a million average Pierres—with a collective several-billion-dollar fortune of now-worthless government bonds that had been meant to put a ribbon on the diplomatic ties between czarist Russia and the French Republic. Moreover, the Bolsheviks' internal reign of terror appalled those who did not embrace Bolshevism—as many unfortunately did—as the inevitable wave of the future. In the estimate of author William Manchester, the subsequent Russian Civil War of 1917 to 1922, “the Bolshevik holocaust—five years of fighting, pestilence, and famine—cost fifteen million lives,”
⁵
nearly as many as were lost globally in the Great War.

Wilson was not entirely blind to Communist excesses or to pragmatic Allied interests in Russia. Before the German surrender, those
interests had included the reestablishment of an Eastern Front and the recovery of Allied military supplies that could fall into the hands of the Germans—or into the hands of the Bolsheviks who might give them to the Germans. Churchill wanted direct military intervention on the side of the White (pro-monarchist and other anti-Communist) Russians against the Reds, something that was not on Wilson's agenda.

But Wilson could let his liberal heart bleed a little for the Czech Legion, a body of troops now marooned in Russia yet still willing to fight for the Western Allies in the hopes of winning national self-determination for Czechoslovakia (part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) after the war. The Bolsheviks had initially agreed to let the Legion evacuate to Vladivostok and from there make its way to France. But under pressure from the Germans, Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik commissar of war, reneged on the agreement. He gave orders to disarm the Legion, deny its men rail transport, and otherwise prevent them from fighting for the Allied cause. The Legion then determined to slug its way out. Wilson thought it appropriate to help them.

IDEALIST INTERVENTION

On 17 July 1918, Wilson issued an
aide-mémoire
to the Allied ambassadors, which, in the words of historian John Toland, “preached idealism and disinterestedness while ignoring reality.”
⁶
Wilson underlined his previous, and to some degree continued, opposition to intervention in Russia, stating that it was “the clear and fixed judgment of the Government of the United States . . . that military intervention would add to the present sad confusion in Russia rather than cure it, injure her rather than help her, and that it
would be of no advantage in the prosecution of our main design, to win the war against Germany. It cannot, therefore, take part in any such intervention or sanction it in principle.” He, then, confusingly, authorized a limited intervention: “Military action is admissible in Russia, as the Government of the United States sees the circumstances, only to help the Czecho-Slovaks consolidate their forces and get into successful cooperation with their Slavic kinsmen and to steady any efforts at self-government or self-defense in which the Russians themselves may be willing to accept assistance.” Wilson then added to the confusion by saying that the only legitimate role for Allied or American troops would be “to guard military stores which may subsequently be needed by Russian forces and to render such aid as may be acceptable to the Russians in the organization of their own self-defense.”
⁷
Nowhere did Wilson say which Russians were to be aided. The Czech Legion, meanwhile, with about sixty thousand men, had essentially annexed Siberia to itself, and unlike President Wilson, the Legion had no qualms about allying itself with the White Russians: when the Legion seized Vladivostok, it raised the Czar's flag.

The American commander destined for Vladivostok was Major General William S. Graves. As British author and fellow major general Clifford Kinvig has noted, “If ever there was a commander who regarded his instructions as a cage rather than springboard it was General Graves.”
⁸
His instructions were merely Wilson's
aide-mémoire
, delivered to him in a sealed envelope at a train station by Secretary of War Newton Baker, who dallied no longer than to say, “This contains the policy of the United States in Russia which you are to follow. Watch your steps; you will be walking on eggs loaded with dynamite. God bless you and goodbye.”
⁹
This, surely, would have been enough to confuse any man, let alone an officer who had
hoped to see, and was better suited to, straightforward action against a straightforward enemy on the Western Front.

General Graves assembled an American army of more than eight thousand men at Vladivostok. The city hosted a cosmopolitan array of uniforms, including British, French, and Italian, but in small numbers—except that is, for the Japanese, who landed more than seventy thousand soldiers and swiftly assumed command of all Allied troops, save for those of the affiliated power, the Americans. An ally of Britain and France, but a recent combatant against the Russians (in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905), Japan's was the only government, beside the contending Russian forces, that had territorial designs on Siberia. These were inhibited, however, by the necessity of keeping in step with Japan's Western allies. Indeed it seems that part of President Wilson's calculation in sending American troops to Siberia was to dissuade Japanese annexations of Russian territory.

ADVANTAGE REDS

Graves faced a situation for which chaos would be a polite word. Aside from the Czech Legion, Siberia was awash with disparate White armies, unaffiliated independent warlords and raiders, Cossacks, freed prisoners of war, and of course the Reds. Because they controlled the Russian heartland, were united by a clear ideology, and could commandeer peasants and provide guaranteed meals to soldiers (who might otherwise starve), the Reds had the advantage over the White Russians, whose leadership and armies were divided and who represented an awkward coalition ranging on a political spectrum from monarchist to socialist to freebooter. Graves dismissed the local White Cossack leader, for instance, as a “murderer, robber, and a most dissolute scoundrel.”
¹⁰

The British, Canadians, French, and Italians, despite numbering only about five thousand men, were eager to join the White Russians against the Reds. This Graves would not do—or at least not until his men were forced into fighting the Bolsheviks. Graves was charged with protecting the Trans-Siberian Railway for the Czech Legion. The Bolsheviks attacked the Americans in the summer of 1919, prompting Graves to finally make common cause with the Allies and the Whites in a short, limited, anti-Bolshevik campaign.