Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (143 page)

A certain civilian-military friction among the young males aggravated the usual mixture of racial and ethnic antagonism. Sailors and soldiers assaulted the zoot suiters, ripping their clothes off and cutting the long hair that completed the look. “We’ll destroy every zoot suit in Los Angeles County before this is over,” one seaman vowed. Evidence of police favoritism toward the military men prompted the Mexican government to complain, causing the mayor of Los Angeles in turn to tell Mexico City to butt out. “They are Los Angeles youth,” Fletcher Bowron asserted, “and the problem is purely a local one.” Bowron went on to say, “We are going to see that members of the armed forces are not attacked. At the same time, we expect cooperation from officers of the Army and Navy to the extent that soldiers and sailors do not pile into Los Angeles for the purpose of excitement and adventure and what they might consider a little fun by beating up young men whose appearance they do not like.”

Bowron’s warning prompted the military to restrict the movements of the soldiers and sailors. Civil and military police stepped up patrols, and the rioting gradually ended. An uneasy calm settled over the city, and Angelenos returned their attention to the war against the Axis.

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to comment on the domestic disturbances. Before the war he would have felt pressure to say something, perhaps to take action. But the war liberated him from all manner of issues he preferred to avoid. With the world in the balance, few could fault him for delegating lesser matters to subordinates.

The fate of the world preoccupied the president during 1943. Roosevelt had hardly returned from Africa when British foreign secretary Eden arrived on his doorstep. Roosevelt didn’t know Eden well, except that he seemed quite a different sort from the half-American Churchill. Yet he and Roosevelt got on famously. “Anthony spent three evenings with me,” the president informed Churchill midway through Eden’s visit. “He is a grand fellow and we are talking everything from Ruthenia to the production of peanuts!” In fact Roosevelt found Eden easier to work with than Churchill, as the president teasingly hinted to the prime minister: “We seem to agree on about 95 percent of all the subjects—not a bad average.”

Roosevelt and Eden did indeed range widely, but they spent most of their time envisioning Europe at the war’s end. They agreed that Russia would demand changes in the prewar status quo. Eden predicted that Stalin would insist, at the least, on incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union. Roosevelt concurred, although he remarked that this would provoke “a good deal of resistance in the United States.” The president didn’t imagine he could prevent Stalin from taking the Baltics. “Realistically,” he said, “the Russian armies will be in the Baltic states at the time of the downfall of Germany, and none of us can force them to get out.” But Roosevelt didn’t intend simply to give the Baltic issue away. “We should use it as a bargaining instrument in getting other concessions from Russia.”

Such concessions might involve Poland. Eden and Roosevelt agreed that the Polish question could well be the most difficult to resolve. Poland’s boundaries would have to be reconfigured, although neither Roosevelt nor Eden thought geography would be the sticking point. The real problem was the makeup of the postwar Polish state. A Polish government in exile currently operated out of London, and it was even more obstreperous than de Gaulle’s Free French. “The Poles are being very difficult about their aspirations,” Eden told Roosevelt. “Poland has very large ambitions after the war…. Privately they say that Russia will be so weakened and Germany crushed that Poland will emerge as the most powerful state in that part of the world.”

Roosevelt acknowledged Poland’s desires—and the unlikelihood of their being realized. He couldn’t say so publicly, as it would stir up Poles in America, but Poland’s fate at the war’s end would be decided by the great powers, not by the Poles. And it would be part of a larger settlement with broader goals. “As far as Poland is concerned,” Roosevelt said, “the important thing is to set it up in a way that will help maintain the peace of the world.”

The Polish question hinged on the German question. And the heart of the German question was whether there would be a single Germany after the war or multiple Germanys. The Russians, Eden supposed, would opt for the multiple versions. “Stalin has a deep-seated distrust of the Germans,” Eden said. “He will insist that Germany be broken up into a number of states.”

Roosevelt agreed that Germany must be dismembered. Prussia, in particular, must be split off. “The Prussians cannot be permitted to dominate all Germany.” But he didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of Versailles, in which the victors imposed a settlement that Hitler eventually used against them. “We should encourage the differences and ambitions that will spring up within Germany for a separatist movement and, in effect, approve of a division which represents German public opinion.”

To Eden, Roosevelt spoke for the first time at length of his hopes for the international organization that would manage the peace settlement. Churchill had been promoting a European council, with responsibility for regional security. Roosevelt rejected the plan as divisive and distracting. The president favored a single body—emerging from the wartime United Nations—divided into two parts. The larger part would be advisory and would include every independent country that wanted to join. “This body should be world-wide in scope,” Roosevelt said. The smaller part, by number of countries, would be where the true power lay. “The real decisions should be made by the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and China, who will be the powers for many years to come that will have to police the world.”

Eden agreed that the United Nations should be global in membership. And he didn’t dispute the need for guidance by the great powers. But he doubted that China was ready for such a role. He thought the Chinese would probably have to fight a revolution among themselves before their problems were sorted out. In any event, he said, he “did not much like the idea of the Chinese running up and down the Pacific.”

But Roosevelt insisted. Some country had to police Asia, and it obviously couldn’t be Japan. Moreover, promoting China would yield diplomatic dividends. “China,” the president predicted, “in any serious conflict of policy with Russia will undoubtedly line up on our side.”

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who would be lining up with whom played a central role in talks between Roosevelt and Churchill a few weeks later. Yet it wasn’t Russia against the West that worried Roosevelt’s advisers; it was Roosevelt against them. “I fear it will be the same story over again,” Henry Stimson recorded in his diary. “The man from London will arrive with a program of further expansion in the eastern Mediterranean and will have his way with our Chief, and the careful and deliberate plans of our staff will be overridden. I feel very troubled about it.”

Stimson and the military men had been working on Roosevelt since Casablanca for a commitment to a particular date for the cross-Channel invasion. “The United States accepts the strategic concept that the war will be won most speedily by first defeating Germany,” the American joint chiefs of staff reiterated ahead of Churchill’s visit. “Defeating Germany first involves making a determined attack against Germany on the Continent at the earliest practicable date…. All proposed operations in Europe should be judged primarily on the basis of the contribution to that end.” This was nothing new, of course, but the fact that it had to be restated revealed the concern on the part of Stimson and the chiefs that the president hadn’t been convinced—at least not convinced sufficiently to withstand Churchill’s arguments in the direction of the Mediterranean.

The talks started promisingly, from Stimson’s point of view. Churchill performed as expected. There were no differences of opinion between the British and the Americans, the prime minister said, merely questions of “emphasis and priority.” He proceeded to emphasize the Mediterranean, declaring that the immediate objective was to “get Italy out of the war by whatever means might be the best.” The defeat of Italy, Churchill predicted, would “cause a chill of loneliness over the German people and might be the beginning of their doom.”

Roosevelt responded more forthrightly than Stimson had feared. The president wondered aloud whether the early defeat of Italy would be an unmixed blessing. “Italy might drop into the lap of the United Nations, who would then have the responsibility of supplying the Italian people.” He himself, he said, had “always shrunk from the thought of putting large armies in Italy.” A major offensive there could easily bog down. “This might result in attrition for the United Nations and play into Germany’s hands.” At the least, the cost of occupying Italy must be examined before any commitment to an invasion could be made.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt said, preparations for the invasion of France “should begin at once.” After two years of talking, the American and British governments should settle on “a concrete plan to be carried out at a certain time.” A Channel crossing, the president said, should be “decided upon definitely as an operation for the spring of 1944.”

The principals adjourned to let their subordinates fight things out. George Marshall asserted that Italy would suck the life from a second front in France. Any operation “invariably created a vacuum in which it was essential to pour more and more means.” An invasion of Italy would commit the British and Americans through 1943 and “virtually all of 1944.” Such a commitment would have serious consequences. “It would mean a prolongation of the war in Europe, and thus a delay in the ultimate defeat of Japan, which the people of the United States would not tolerate.” Marshall put the matter as directly as he could: “We are now at the crossroads. If we are committed to the Mediterranean…it means a prolonged struggle and one which is not acceptable to the United States.”

Marshall’s navy colleague William Leahy, who held the post of chief of staff to the commander in chief, chimed in to assert that the Pacific could “not be neglected.” It was too vital to American strategy. “Immediate action” was necessary to keep China in the war. For this reason, if no other, “the war in Europe must be brought to a rapid decisive close at the earliest possible date.”

Leahy’s comment gave Alan Brooke an opening for a counterattack. The chief of the British imperial staff fully agreed that the war in Europe must be ended as swiftly as possible. This was why Italy was so essential. “Only by continuing in the Mediterranean can we achieve the maximum diversion of German forces from Russia,” Brooke said. Focusing on France would take time, giving the Germans a chance to catch their breath. No major operations would be possible “until 1945 or 1946,” far too late to do Russia any good.

Charles Portal, the chief of the British air staff, supported Brooke, declaring that a follow-through in Italy was essential to the success of a Channel crossing. Absent the relief provided by an Italian front, the Red Army might break. The Germans then would be able to send nearly all their troops west to oppose an invasion of France.

For day after day the two sides pounded each other with a verve that, some of the participants must have reflected, ought better have been applied against the Axis. They discussed certain other matters, for diversion almost as much as for anything else. They considered how many bombers might be employed from Britain against targets in Germany and what those targets ought to be. They argued how best to assist China and what balance of blockade, bombardment, and direct assault would be required for the ultimate defeat of Japan. But always they came back to the central question of Italy versus France.