Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (79 page)

Read Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership Online

Authors: Conrad Black

The Allies invaded the mainland of Italy with the British thrust across the Strait of Messina on September 3, followed on September 9 by American landings under General Mark Clark at Salerno, 30 miles south of Naples. What ensued was almost as farcical as the pell-mell events in North Africa among the French political factions after the Allied landings at the end of 1942. The Italians, under the king and Badoglio, had surrendered to the Allies on September 8. The Italian navy, including 4 battleships, 5 cruisers, 12 destroyers, and 33 submarines, surrendered to the British, mainly at Malta, between September 8 and 10, despite German air attacks that sank the battleship
Roma
, on which the fleet commander, Admiral Carlo Bergamini, and 1,350 sailors, perished. Churchill, always as magnanimous in victory as he was implacable in combat, and a lover of Italy, directed that the Italian ships be received with the utmost respect and courtesy, and that the whole process be filmed for projection in Italy to contrast British with German treatment of Italians. The Germans seized Rome on September 10, and Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio fled to Brindisi. German paratroopers sprang Mussolini on September 12, and on September 15 he proclaimed a Fascist republic in the areas of the hasty German occupation of Italy. On October 13, the king and Badoglio declared war on Germany, making Italy a co-belligerent, the only one of the scores of countries engaged in World War II that had been on both sides of the war.
The first senior three-power meeting took place at the foreign ministers’ conference in Moscow from October 19 to 30. This was the only time that Roosevelt allowed Hull to deal with senior British and Soviet officials. Eden and the Soviet foreign commissar, Vyecheslav M. Molotov, were present, and Stalin met with the foreign ministers several times. The invasion of Italy, capture of Naples, toppling of Mussolini, and surrender of Italy and its switching to the Allied side all somewhat placated Stalin, who, after the victories of Stalingrad and Kursk and the continuing Red Army drive westward, was, in any case, less concerned about the activities of the Western Allies. He had constantly to decide whether he sought the weakening of Germany from Western attacks in France and Italy, or their continued abstention from a major offensive in the west to facilitate a greater Russian seizure of Central and even Western European territory, depending on the progress of the Russo-German War. The conference reaffirmed Anglo-American determination to invade France in 1944, failed to make much progress on the issue of who was to govern Poland after its anticipated liberation by the Red Army, set up a tripartite European Advisory Commission in London to determine the future of Germany, and envisioned an international organization of “peace-loving nations . . . for the maintenance of international peace and security.”
The continuous British concurrences in plans to invade France in May 1944 were misleading, and the Americans, including Secretary of War Stimson, who visited London in August 1943, told Roosevelt that the “shadows of Passchendaele and Dunkerque hang too heavily over” the British, who were giving the cross-Channel landing only “lip service.” He said they still felt that Germany could be “beaten by attritions,” but that sort of “pin-prick warfare” would not “fool Stalin.”
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It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the British leaders were scarred by their experience of the Western Front in World War I and also their fear of the German army. As the casualty figures from Stalingrad and Kursk demonstrated, the Germans did have an astonishing aptitude for war, and it is little wonder that Churchill and Roosevelt were grateful to be able to leave most of the ground war against Germany to the inexhaustible reserves of manpower of the Soviet Union, where the most brutal conscription and military discipline were imposed, and Stalin’s totalitarian regime was not overly concerned with casualties, as long as the Soviet Union could translate battle deaths into expanded territory.
The British still thought the Americans blasé about the implications of conducting war with Germany, though by now they acknowledged the overwhelming strength of the Americans in armor and in the air, as well as a numerical manpower advantage on the ground. Roosevelt thought that once the Western Allies were established in France and rolling east, the Germans would fight to the last cartridge in the east but surrender relatively easily in the west, to benefit from the comparative civility of the Western Allies, who observed the Geneva Convention, as Germany did with them, in contrast to the unspeakable reciprocal savagery on the Eastern Front, where nearly five million prisoners of war were murdered, the majority by the Germans. The American encounters with the Japanese were somewhat similar to the Eastern Front, as the Japanese did not observe the niceties with prisoners, and preferred to die than to be captured. As at Guadalcanal, at Tarawa on November 20 to 23, 1943, Nimitz’s 35,000 marines took about 10 percent casualties, while the Japanese suffered almost 100 percent casualties, with nearly 4,000 dead and only 17 men taken prisoner. This pattern would become steadily more pronounced and the numbers of defenders larger as the Americans closed in on the home islands of Japan.
7. THE CAIRO AND TEHRAN CONFERENCES
 
This year of conferences reached its climax at the Cairo and Tehran conferences, between November 22 and December 1, 1943. Both Western leaders approached the conferences on large warships, Roosevelt on the new and very powerful battleship
Iowa
, and Churchill on the sleek and venerable battle cruiser
Renown
. Churchill was fluish and Brooke recorded that he was in foul humor, threatening dire consequences if the Americans did not support his Mediterranean ambitions. (At one point, Churchill, in night attire, shouted out the window of the governor’s residence in Malta to startled passersby to be quiet and to stop disturbing his rest.)
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Roosevelt opposed any efforts by the recently established European Advisory Commission to demarcate occupation zones in Germany because of his theory, which he explained to his staff in a shipboard meeting en route, that, once across the Rhine, the Allies might be able to conduct “a railroad invasion of Germany with little or no fighting,”
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as the Germans gave way while fighting fanatically in the east. He tore out a map from a copy of
National Geographic
magazine in the admiral’s wardroom and marked out with a pen the zones of occupation that would be acceptable if there had to be any. He had the Western and Russian zones meeting at Berlin.
Roosevelt disembarked at Oran and flew to Cairo via Tunis, where he conferred with Eisenhower, and Churchill docked at Alexandria. The Cairo Conference began November 22 with an absurd meeting with the Chinese, led by Chiang and his scheming, feline wife. The Burmese theater commander, Mountbatten, gave a confident presentation (without use of side arms, unlike at Quebec), and when Brooke invited the Chinese to comment, there was what he called “a ghastly silence.” The Chinese had had advance copies of Mountbatten’s presentation, but had no idea how to respond to it. Brooke suggested they withdraw and consider if they had any questions and comments. It was a complete shambles, but Roosevelt, though he recognized Chiang’s limitations, wanted to make the conference a success for him, to strengthen his hand opposite the Japanese and the Communists. A communiqué was eventually issued promising increased assistance to Chiang.
The Americans wanted to give Chiang the plum of taking the Andaman Islands, but the British dismissed this as nonsense, and Churchill championed his latest hobby horse, the taking of the Mediterranean island of Rhodes, which, he claimed, would help bring Turkey into the war. At one point, Churchill grasped Marshall by the lapels and exclaimed, “Muskets must flame.” Marshall replied, at a distance of six inches, that “Not one American is going to die on that Goddamned beach,” Rhodes. There were pleasant dinners on American Thanksgiving Day and Churchill was impressed that the United States provided a turkey dinner for all 12 million of its servicemen, wherever they were in the world. Roosevelt sang the Marine Corps anthem, accompanied by a military band. Brooke, a churchgoer, dutifully attended an American Thanksgiving service at the Cairo Anglican cathedral, which he described as “a sad fiasco” (unlike the service he had attended at Williamsburg, where he found the liturgy and homily acceptable and the women well turned-out). But these outings did improve and stabilize the ambiance.
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After fierce arguments, neither Rhodes nor the Andaman operation was pursued.
The British and Americans left the Chinese behind and flew to Tehran to meet Stalin. After one night at his legation outside the city, and a Soviet claim that they had uncovered a plot to kill all three leaders, Roosevelt accepted Stalin’s rather than Churchill’s invitation to stay in his embassy, as his own security detail had recommended he move into the city center. Ostensibly he chose the Soviet embassy because it was roomier, but in fact because Roosevelt was relying on Stalin to resolve the Overlord/Italy debate once and for all. He feared that Stalin might, after his Stalingrad and Kursk victories, support Churchill’s plans for activities in the Balkans, in order to have a clearer path through Germany and into France. He arrived at the Soviet embassy on November 28, and Stalin immediately requested to visit him in his rooms. Roosevelt correctly assumed that his suite was bugged, that all conversation would be recorded, and that the personnel assigned to serve him (who were obviously carrying firearms) were secret police. In fact, Stalin had entrusted the task of recording conversations to the son of his much-feared police minister, Lavrenti Beria. Even Stalin described the bugging to young Sergio Beria as “delicate and morally reprehensible.”
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Roosevelt spoke with his suspected auditor’s sensibilities in mind. The Grand Alliance was off to an uneasy start. Sergio Beria later wrote that Stalin assumed that Roosevelt thought he was being overheard. Stalin questioned Beria very closely about Roosevelt’s tone of voice and exact words. Beria claimed that he recorded Churchill beseeching Roosevelt not to commit to a date for Overlord, and Roosevelt telling Leahy that he was not going to “pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the British Empire.” Roosevelt liked and admired Churchill but thought him a romantic, and not a man in close touch politically with his countrymen, trying to maintain an empire that could not long survive. With Stalin, an extremely cunning and ruthless cynic, it was, from the start and to say the least, scarcely a relationship of mutual trust.
At this first meeting, Roosevelt and Stalin were accompanied only by their interpreters, the redoubtable Pavlov and the deputy chief of the Russian desk and future eminent American diplomat Charles E. Bohlen. The contrast between the leonine patrician Roosevelt in an elegant blue suit in his wheelchair, and the five-foot, five-inch Stalin, with bushy hair, sallow, pockmarked complexion, a partially deformed left arm, unruly mustache, and stained and broken teeth, could hardly have been greater. After a discursive review of de Gaulle, whom Stalin sagely described as “an authentic representative of the soul of France,” though “unrealistic” (Stalin had never met him at this point), and India, about which Stalin did not take the bait and said that the castes and cultures of the subcontinent made it very complicated (Roosevelt had for a time bombarded Churchill with gratuitous comments about the need for Indian independence, a meddlesome distraction he should not have inflicted on the British leader in the middle of the war), there came the most important moment of the conference. Roosevelt casually presented the northern France (Overlord) option and the Balkan option favored by Churchill, and Stalin emphatically confirmed his preference for Overlord. Though buoyed by the turn of fortunes on the Eastern Front, as Roosevelt had hoped, Stalin still felt he needed a main Allied effort in the west to be sure of victory in Europe, from which he would gain more than from a negotiated separate peace, toward which, as Stalin was about to confirm, there had been overtures from the Germans. Of course, any peace between Germany and Russia could always be torn up without notice again, as had been the last one.
After a few minutes, they adjourned their meeting for the first plenary session. As the only chief of state present, Roosevelt was the chairman of all meetings (Stalin’s innocuous rubber-stamp president Mikhail Kalinin and King George VI were the analogues). All three leaders made opening statements referring to their great opportunity and duty, and Roosevelt gave a summary of the military situation in all theaters from the American standpoint, concluding with “the most important theater, Europe.” He spoke of Overlord as a strong American commitment, and said that it was delayed to May 1 only because the English Channel is “such a disagreeable body of water.” He blamed prior delays on difficulties with collecting enough landing craft. He said that for reasons of manpower, the British and Americans had to choose to some extent between committing forces to Overlord or to the Mediterranean and would be governed by what Stalin and his chief of staff, Marshal Klimenti Voroshilov, said would be of greater use to the Soviet Union. (Voroshilov was an old Bolshevik loyalist of Stalin’s completely out of his depth trying to match strategic military insights with Brooke and Marshall.)
 
WWII Atlantic. Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History
 

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