Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (136 page)

Only rarely during the war was Roosevelt required to make snap decisions. Typically he had weeks or months to weigh his options. This was one of the rare times. “What can we do to help?” he asked Churchill.

“Give us as many Sherman tanks as you can spare, and ship them to the Middle East as quickly as possible,” Churchill said.

Roosevelt sent for Marshall and asked him whether any tanks were available. Marshall replied that the Shermans were just coming off the production lines. The first few hundred had been issued to America’s own armored divisions. “It is a terrible thing to take the weapons out of a soldier’s hands,” Marshall said. But when Roosevelt made plain that he wanted the British to have the tanks, the staff chief didn’t object. He volunteered that he could probably find some self-propelled guns as well.

“To complete the story,” Churchill recalled, “the Americans were better than their word. Three hundred Sherman tanks, with engines not yet installed, and a hundred self-propelled guns, were put into six of their fastest ships and sent off to the Suez Canal. The ship containing the engines for all the tanks was sunk by a submarine off Bermuda. Without a single word from us, the President and Marshall put a further supply of engines into another fast ship and dispatched it to overtake the convoy. ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed.’”

A
N EVEN GREATER
gift was Gymnast. No decision was reached between Bolero and Gymnast during Churchill’s visit, but the prime minister’s fear for the Suez Canal shifted the balance from the former to the latter. Roosevelt knew perfectly well he couldn’t order Bolero to proceed unless Churchill assented; without the British government’s enthusiastic support, any operation based in Britain would be doomed from the start. Roosevelt made a calculated decision to humor Churchill, partly from genuine concern for a wartime comrade but partly in the belief the humoring would pay off in the end.

Roosevelt’s good humor extended beyond the issue of a second front into an arena of warfare that hadn’t existed a few years earlier. A decade before the First World War, Albert Einstein had asserted the equivalence of mass and energy and provided an equation (E = mc
²
) connecting the two. Several months prior to the Second World War, Otto Hahn observed what Einstein had predicted, when the German chemist split uranium into lighter elements amid a burst of energy. The publication of Hahn’s result prompted Einstein, encouraged by fellow physicist Leo Szilard, to write to Roosevelt. In a letter dated August 2, 1939, Einstein explained the recent developments and warned that a determined government could employ them to produce “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” The German government apparently agreed, for it had embargoed exports of uranium from mines in Czechoslovakia. The United States, Einstein told Roosevelt, would be remiss not to commence research in this critical new field.

Roosevelt, impressed by Einstein’s reputation and logic, authorized a small program that proceeded slowly but gained momentum, confidence, and scientific support during the next eighteen months. In the autumn of 1941 a committee of the National Academy of Sciences recommended a crash program of atomic development. Roosevelt assented, and the group that would direct what came to be called the Manhattan Project held its inaugural meeting on December 6, 1941.

Meanwhile scientists in Britain began their own atomic effort. The “Directorate of Tube Alloys” pushed forward along lines that paralleled those of the Americans. The work succeeded well enough that Churchill, at the time of his June 1942 visit to Washington, had to decide whether to move from research to production. It was a big step, one he wasn’t sure Britain could handle—at least not alone.

He raised the matter with Roosevelt on June 20 at Hyde Park. “Our talks took place after luncheon, in a tiny little room which juts out on the ground floor,” Churchill remembered. “The room was dark and shaded from the sun,” but it was still, from an English point of view, oppressively warm. “My two American friends”—Hopkins sat in—“did not seem to mind the intense heat.” Churchill explained the progress British scientists had made, and how they were convinced a bomb by war’s end was feasible. Roosevelt responded that American scientists were proceeding well, too. Churchill proposed an Anglo-American collaboration. “I strongly urged that we should at once pool all our information, work together on equal terms, and share the results, if any, equally between us.”

Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s offer. Roosevelt wasn’t a hard bargainer, generally believing that good will warranted leaving something on the table at the end of a negotiation. In this case it was unclear what any bargaining would be about. The atom bomb project might yield nothing at all. Even if it succeeded, it would produce something no one had ever seen, and no army or air force ever deployed.

The next question was where the production facilities should be located. Yet the question was no sooner asked than it was answered. They couldn’t be in Britain, which wholly lacked the fissionable materials bomb making required. Transporting uranium across the Atlantic made little sense given the danger from U-boats and the other demands on Allied shipping. Churchill considered Canada and went so far as to contend, after the fact, that had Roosevelt declined his offer, “we certainly should have gone forward on our own power in Canada.”

It didn’t come to that. Roosevelt wasn’t going to let the bomb building out of the United States. With no publicity, and with nothing committed to paper between them, the president and the prime minister put their two countries into the joint business of developing a bomb that would transform warfare forever.

A
S THE PROSPECTS
for an early second front in Europe dwindled, Roosevelt’s advisers began to mutter among themselves about reconsidering the Europe-first strategy. They were itching to fight, on grounds strategic, political, and personal. The longer the United States remained on the sidelines, the stronger the Axis grew. The longer the American public had nothing to cheer about, the more likely support for the war would dwindle. And the longer the army’s officers remained in their headquarters, as opposed to being on the battlefield, the more distant their chances for distinction and promotion.

Stimson later claimed that the War Department’s planning for a Pacific offensive in 1942 was a bluff, intended to push Roosevelt toward a decision in favor of invading France. Perhaps it
was
a bluff, to him. But Marshall, whose sense of professional decorum put him above such ploys, and Admiral Ernest King, whose irascibility was legendary, weren’t bluffing. “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King,” Dwight Eisenhower vented in his diary after a typical session with the admiral. “He’s the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person, which means he’s a mental bully.” King had an imperial vision of the navy’s importance among the services. “The navy wants to take all the islands in the Pacific, have them held by army troops, to become bases for army pursuit and bombers,” Eisenhower said. “Then the navy will have a safe place to sail its vessels.” But King was a fighter, which appealed to Roosevelt, the more so when King presented what he called “an integrated, general plan of operations” for the Pacific. “We have now—or soon will have—‘strong points’ at Samoa, Suva (Fiji), and New Caledonia (also a defended fueling base at Bora Bora, Society Islands),” King informed Roosevelt. “A naval operating base is shortly to be set up at Tongatabu (Tonga Islands) to service our naval forces operating in the South Pacific. Efate (New Hebrides) and Funafuti (Ellice Islands) are projected additional ‘strong points.’” Roosevelt located all these places on his map of the South Pacific. “Given the naval forces, air units, and amphibious troops, we can drive northwest from the New Hebrides into the Solomons and the Bismarck Archipelago,” King continued. “Such a line of operations will be offensive rather than defensive—and will draw Japanese forces there to oppose it, thus relieving pressure elsewhere.”

Roosevelt received King’s recommendation in early March; two weeks later he promoted the admiral to chief of naval operations. During April and May, as the likelihood of an early Channel crossing diminished, King contended that any postponement in Europe would free up resources for the Pacific campaign. Roosevelt listened carefully, and in June, on the last day of Churchill’s visit to Washington, the president approved the offensive, which would begin with an attack on the obscure island of Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands.

C
HURCHILL CUT SHORT
his visit to return to London to face a censure vote in Parliament. A noisy minority was demanding answers about the military situation in North Africa. Although Churchill was confident of defeating the motion, he judged its mere raising an affront to his leadership, and he determined to crush it. Roosevelt could count votes, even at a transatlantic distance, almost as well as Churchill could, and he too expected the prime minister to survive handily. But he recognized that the prime minister would be distracted till the insurgents were defeated, and in any event he wished to know just how strong Churchill was.

Quite strong, as matters proved. The no-confidence motion was beaten by 475 to 25. “Good for you,” Roosevelt congratulated Churchill upon learning the news.

Churchill, heartened by his parliamentary victory, proceeded to drive a stake through the heart of an early second front in Europe. “No responsible British General, Admiral, or Air Marshal is prepared to recommend Sledgehammer as a practicable operation in 1942,” he wrote Roosevelt. The invasion itself would be risky, and a beachhead, if established, would be difficult to defend. The mere effort would jeopardize greater plans. “The possibility of mounting a large-scale operation in 1943 would be marred if not ruined.” The United States and Britain must shift their attention to North Africa. “Gymnast is by far the best chance for effective relief to the Russian front in 1942…. Here is the true second front of 1942.”

Roosevelt finally agreed. But he knew his military men did not. He could simply have ordered them to get on board with Gymnast, knowing that Marshall was a good enough soldier to have acquiesced without further complaint and that King had the Pacific campaign to keep him busy. Yet he preferred that they be persuaded, by the same logic that had persuaded him. “You will proceed immediately to London as my personal representatives for the purpose of consultation with appropriate British authorities on the conduct of the war,” Roosevelt directed Marshall and King, who would be accompanied by Hopkins. Certain principles ought to inform the London consultation. “We should concentrate our efforts and avoid dispersion…. Absolute coordinated use of British and American forces is essential…. All available U.S. and British forces should be brought into action as quickly as they can profitably be used…. It is of the highest importance that U.S. ground troops be brought into action against the enemy in 1942.” For the record, Roosevelt still supported an early western front in Europe. “In regard to 1942, you will carefully investigate the possibility of executing Sledgehammer. Such an operation would definitely sustain Russia this year. It might be the turning point which would save Russia this year.” Even so, he didn’t rule out alternatives. “If Sledgehammer is finally and definitely out of the picture, I want you to consider the world situation as it exists at that time, and determine upon another place for U.S. troops to fight in 1942.”