Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (5 page)

FROM TIME TO TIME
, Roosevelt managed to escape from Washington and spend several days or even weeks at sea, sailing or fishing. He was good at both, and he genuinely enjoyed them. Ashore, even the most routine activities were difficult and occasionally humiliating, especially when it involved his having to be carried from one place to another. At sea, however, he could maneuver a sailboat with a simple command and a hand on the tiller; he could land the biggest of fish from his fighting chair using his powerful arms and shoulders, developed from years of compensating for his ruined legs. Immune to seasickness, he may also have derived satisfaction from the fact that while others struggled, often unsuccessfully, to maintain their dignity as the boat swooped and plunged through the waves, he always remained master of himself. Because some of his advisors could not match this aplomb in the midst of an active sea, they often dreaded invitations to accompany him.
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Roosevelt’s offshore vacations were frequent enough that the press took little notice of it when in August 1941 the White House announced that the president was leaving on another fishing trip. On August 3 he boarded the presidential yacht
Potomac
at New London, Connecticut, and headed out
to sea. After dark, however, the
Potomac
rendezvoused with U.S. Navy warships off Martha’s Vineyard, and the president and his entourage transferred to the heavy cruiser
Augusta
, which then turned toward Canadian waters. The next day, as the presidential party steamed northward, reporters on chartered boats off Martha’s Vineyard watched through binoculars as a man wearing an old sweater, sporting pince-nez glasses, and with a cigarette holder clamped firmly in his teeth sat at the stern of the
Potomac
with a fishing pole in his hands. The reporters sent daily bulletins ashore announcing that the president was enjoying his vacation. Even the Secret Service was fooled.
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The elaborate charade was designed to mislead both the Germans and the opposition press, for Roosevelt was on his way to meet the British prime minister in Placentia Bay, on the south coast of Newfoundland near Argentia. The meeting was Roosevelt’s idea. It was a measure of how much the Anglo-American relationship had evolved since the ABC staff talks back in March. Whereas on that occasion he had remained aloof, he was now willing, even eager, to meet personally with Churchill, who more than anyone else personified Britain’s resistance to Hitler’s war machine. In addition, Roosevelt was the kind of face-to-face politician who was confident in his ability to affect events by the force of his personality. He wanted to take the measure of Churchill, to ensure that this “former naval person” understood American policy, and he also looked forward to hearing Churchill provide one of his already famous analytical disquisitions on the course of the war to date.

On August 9, the
Augusta
and the rest of the American squadron, which included a battleship and no fewer than seventeen destroyers, was anchored in Placentia Bay in a dense fog. Around noon, an enormous gray shape materialized out of the mist as the newest
King George V–class
Royal Navy battleship
Prince of Wales
cruised slowly into the anchorage. Displacing 44,000 tons and bristling with ten 14-inch guns, the
Prince of Wales
was the newest and largest of the Royal Navy’s warships, and she still bore the scars of her recent successful fight with German battleship
Bismarck
. The fact that Churchill had chosen her to carry him to the rendezvous with Roosevelt was a measure of just how crucial he believed this meeting was.
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Roosevelt sent his naval aide, Captain John R. Beardall, over to invite Churchill and his staff to dine on board the
Augusta
that night. It was not to be a formal state dinner, the president told Beardall, just an informal gathering where he and the prime minister could talk comfortably. Churchill accepted, of course, and the evening was a great success. The two heads of government got on splendidly, and Churchill did not disappoint those who had anticipated a detailed and vivid
tour d’horizon
of the war.

The next morning, Roosevelt returned the visit by attending church services on board the
Prince of Wales
. Symbolically, at least, this was the high point of the conference. The officers and men of the two naval services sat together on the broad deck of the
Prince of Wales
and sang familiar hymns in a common language. It was Roosevelt himself who urged the inclusion of the Navy hymn “Eternal Father” with its reference to “those in peril on the sea.” Afterward, Roosevelt toured the big new battleship, which was fated to be sunk only four months later in the South China Sea by Japanese bombers. Both men reveled in the tour, with Churchill acting the role of guide, showing off the crown jewel of the Royal Navy—
his
Royal Navy—while Roosevelt, an apt and eager student of all things naval, did not have to feign interest. A witness recalled that both the president and prime minister had “a fine time.”
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The formal meetings themselves were mostly anticlimactic. Churchill urged Roosevelt to issue a hard-line ultimatum to the Japanese. He had his own purposes in doing so, of course, but Roosevelt demurred. Far from seeking a “back door to war,” Roosevelt wanted to keep the Japanese at arm’s length until Hitler could be dealt with. He told Churchill that rather than back the Japanese into a corner, he wanted to give them a “face saving out.” In the end, Roosevelt sent Japan a somewhat ambiguous note proclaiming only that “further steps in pursuance … of military domination” would compel the United States to safeguard its “legitimate rights and interests.”
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During the lengthy Atlantic crossing to Newfoundland, Churchill had prepared a position paper on how the war should be run if and when the United States got into it. His paper envisioned a war characterized by blockade, bombing, subversion, and propaganda. By isolating Germany
from the outside, bombing it continually from the air, and constantly appealing to the citizens of the occupied countries to rise up, Churchill implied that Hitler’s empire could be so weakened that it would collapse of its own dead weight. The document paid lip service to “landing forces on the continent,” but only after Germany was on its last legs. Churchill hoped, even expected, that blockade, bombing, and subversion would “destroy the foundation upon which the [German] war machine rests—the economy which feeds it, the morale which sustains it, the supplies which nourish it … and the hopes of victory which inspire it.” Churchill sent copies of this document to Marshall, Stark, and Major General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps.
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At the meeting of the senior officers the next day, the Americans exhibited a palpable coolness to Churchill’s vision. To his suggestion that heavy bombers be given the highest production priority, Stark objected that this seemed inappropriate given that shipping was in such peril. Both Stark and Marshall found it odd that there was little mention of aid to the Soviet Union. Did the British not expect the Russians to hold out? The Americans worried, too, that Churchill’s proposals contained only a vague reference to a possible land campaign on the continent, and then only when Germany was tottering and near defeat. It may have been Marshall who wrote this sentence in the American response: “Wars cannot be finally won without the use of land armies.”
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Despite these apparent fissures in the Anglo-American war planning, the real significance of the meeting at Argentia was the personal connection made between the heads of government, and the only real news to emerge from it was the announcement of the Atlantic Charter. After the moving church service on Sunday, August 10, Roosevelt had suggested to Churchill, “We could draw up a joint declaration laying down certain broad principles which should guide our policies along the same road.” That night, Churchill dictated the first draft of such a declaration, citing eight principles that would guide a postwar settlement, including “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” While offering few specifics, it outlined a vision for a peaceful and prosperous post-war world.
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The conference at Argentia marked a new milestone in the emerging Anglo-American partnership. From the first appointment of uniformed observers to England in 1937 to the secret staff talks in January through March 1941 and now the convivial exchanges on board
Augusta
and
Prince of Wales
, the United States had become as committed as a neutral nation could be to a strategic blueprint—however vague—for the defeat of Germany. It would begin with securing the Atlantic supply line, then ramp up into a massive bombing campaign while the Anglo-American partners assembled the men and matériel necessary for an eventual attack on Germany itself. When and where that invasion would take place were issues that were unaddressed.

Then on December 7, 1941, Japan attacked the United States.

WITHIN MINUTES
of Frank Knox’s phone call on that historic day, White House operators were summoning cabinet members for an emergency meeting. Stark called the president to confirm the attack, adding that the reports so far indicated that it had been a severe one, with substantial American losses in both ships and men. Roosevelt dictated a news release for the public. At three o’clock he met with the men of what would soon come to be known as his war cabinet: Marshall, Betty Stark, and the two service secretaries, Stimson and Knox, plus in this case Secretary of State Cordell Hull. As a rule, Roosevelt tended to work around Hull, who was never a member of the White House inner circle. His presence now was mostly a product of the fact that only moments before, Hull had met the Japanese negotiators in his office to receive their formal reply to the latest American peace proposal. Before they arrived, Roosevelt had called him with the news of Pearl Harbor. The president told Hull to receive the Japanese reply without comment, then coolly “bow them out.” Hull, however, had been unable to remain mute. After reading the Japanese note with the two Japanese delegates standing in front of his desk, Hull looked up and said, “I have never seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehoods and distortions—infamous falsehoods and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today that any Government on this planet was capable of uttering them.”
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For Roosevelt and his advisors, it was now no longer a question of contingency war planning. The contingency had arrived. Roosevelt instructed Stark to fight back, and the order to “execute unrestricted submarine and air warfare against Japan” went out to the fleet that first day. Longer-range plans, however, were now muddied. So much of the strategic planning of the past two years had focused on Germany and on cooperation with Britain to achieve Hitler’s defeat. All of the men who now sat in Roosevelt’s Oval Study had been part of that planning, and all of them still believed that Hitler was the more dangerous foe. They also believed it was more than likely that the United States would be at war with Germany soon enough. For now, however, more detailed planning would have to await events.
³⁶

Later that evening, after a meeting with his cabinet and another with the leaders of Congress, Roosevelt called his personal secretary, Grace Tully, into the Oval Study. “Sit down, Grace,” he said. “I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.” He spoke slowly and deliberately, voicing the punctuation marks: “Yesterday comma December seventh comma …” When he finished, he told Tully to type it up double-spaced so that he could edit it. She was back in only a few minutes, and Roosevelt bent over the text with a pencil in his hand. He read the first sentence: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history …” As serious a student as he was of world history, he felt the sentence lacked the impact he sought. He crossed out those words and above them wrote the single word “infamy.”
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W
INSTON CHURCHILL GOT THE NEWS
later that night. He was spending the weekend at chequers, the estate in Buckinghamshire, north of London, that had served as the country home of British prime ministers since 1917. As it happened, he had just finished having dinner with two Americans: John G. “Gil” Winant, the U.S. ambassador, and Averell Harriman, whom Roosevelt had sent to England to coordinate Lend Lease shipments.
*
After dinner, Churchill switched on a small portable radio (a gift from Harry Hopkins) to hear the latest war news. The three men listened to reports about events in Russia and Libya. Then, near
the end of the broadcast, there was an obscure reference to a Japanese air raid on American shipping in Pearl Harbor—or was it Pearl River? The fleeting reference and the fact that the story had not led the news was confusing. What exactly had happened? When Churchill’s valet, Frank Sawyers, came in to clear the table, Churchill asked him about it, and Sawyers confirmed it. “The Japanese have attacked the Americans,” he said. Churchill came out of his chair, pacing about the room and declaring that he would call the Foreign Office that very minute to arrange for a declaration of war against Japan. It was Winant who suggested that perhaps he should first call Washington. And so Churchill went to his study and placed a call to the White House. After a few minutes Roosevelt came on the line. “Mr. President, what’s this about Japan?” Churchill asked. “It’s quite true,” Roosevelt told him. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”
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