Did this mean he was in on it? Former diplomat and Yale professor Robin Winks believes that is probably the case. He notes that OSS agent Carlton Coon, the renowned Harvard anthropologist, was linked to the Darlan murder through Bonnier membership in an anti-Vichy commando unit Coon was training. Additionally, Coon had owned the particular type of Colt pistol Bonnier used on Darlan.
8
According to Cave Brown, Winks, and
others, Coon “was an advocate of political assassination as an instrument of the state.” In a later report to Donovan, he proposed “an elite corps of [OSS] assassins,” just as Bazata claims existed.
9
The world was now “too small” to continue on its course by “trial and error,” Coon wrote. A secret group of capable decision makers should be authorized to eliminate problems as soon as they appear. “If such a body existed in 1933,” he wrote, “its members could have recognized the potential danger of Hitler and his immediate disciples and have killed [them].... A body of this nature must exist undercover. It must either be a power unto itself, or be given the broadest discretionary powers by the highest human authorities.”
10
Popular historian Stephen E. Ambrose asked,
Was Darlan’s murder the first assassination for the American secret service [OSS-CIA]? Was Ike himself in on the plot?.... At the time, in 1942, few Americans would have believed it possible for their government to be involved in such dastardly work; a generation later, however, millions of Americans would take it for granted that if there was foul play and the predecessor of the CIA was in the area, and if the Americans benefited from the foul play, then the OSS must have been involved.
11
Whatever the truth, getting rid of Darlan eradicated a major political problem for the Allies; Roosevelt, and Eisenhower in particular. Nogues was eventually removed, and, combined with Darlan’s assassination, the protests at home quieted.
But Patton’s administrative actions, such as those with Nogues, were not the only irritants to his superiors.
Supremely confident—at least in public—Patton was always outspoken. He was no different in North Africa. Given command
of the Seventh Army, the U.S. part of the upcoming Sicilian campaign, Patton consistently disagreed with Eisenhower about planning and tactics and was openly hostile about Eisenhower’s perceived deference to the British. At lunch in Tunisia with deputy theater commander Everett S. Hughes, writes David Irving in
The War Between the Generals
, Patton “described Eisenhower as crazy and too British in the combat zone.”
12
Hughes went back to his headquarters and confidentially wrote, “How [Patton] hates the British.”
13
In fact, for whatever reasons—wanting to keep the Allied coalition together, believing the British were more experienced, or that he simply was intimidated—Eisenhower and his staff did show preference for the British, allowing them to dominate the planning. Irving, himself a Brit, writes that the Sicilian campaign “was a textbook example of how alliances should
not
operate. The Americans were treated as greenhorns who could not be trusted with a lead role in a campaign. The British laughingly assigned the Seventh Army to guard the rear—as Patton put it—of Montgomery’s Eighth Army as it advanced victoriously around the island.”
14
Patton was livid. Aware of the resentment which permeated his American commanders, Eisenhower, according to Patton’s diary, gathered his generals at Algiers and then singled out Patton, declaring, “George, you are my oldest friend, but if you or anyone else criticizes the British, by God I will reduce him to his permanent grade and send him home.” Later, according to Patton biographer Martin Blumenson, Eisenhower thought twice and sent a tactful letter to Patton stressing that while he was a prized and needed fighting general, he had “a ready and facile tongue,” and seemed to act on impulse rather than on “study and reflection”
15
—a charge that belied Patton’s lifelong study of battles and history and almost encyclopedic knowledge of same. Patton responded in his diary, “He [Eisenhower] means well and I
certainly have thus far failed to sell myself in a big way to my seniors.”
16
Finally, he challenged superiors, even national leaders, to their faces.
In mid-January 1943 the first summit meeting of Allied leaders since their seizing of the initiative in the European War was held at Casablanca, Patton’s territory. Patton acted as one of the guides and hosts, conducting tours and dining with Roosevelt and Churchill, two of the “Big Three” leaders there to plan the war’s future conduct. Stalin was the third of the Big Three. He had been invited but could not come, he said, because of the fighting at Stalingrad which, after much struggle in the previous months, was finally culminating in a Soviet victory. One of the major announcements from the week-plus summit was the declaration at an ending press conference that the Allies would only accept “Unconditional Surrender” from Germany. This was an important concept to Roosevelt—and controversial. He was convinced, having had to deal with ingrained German militarism as an assistant secretary of the navy in World War I and now fierce Nazi aggression in World War II, that it was a perpetually warlike nation and that only its total destruction would end the German threat to world peace. In this view he was supported and prompted by aides such as Secretary Morganthau who had made the persecution of Jews under the Nazi regime one of his primary wartime concerns. As Michael Beschloss in his recent book
The Conquerors
details, eventually Roosevelt, egged on by Stalin, would call for the castration of German males and execution of fifty thousand of their leaders. Roosevelt, like Morganthau, hated the Germans and wanted to see them punished.
However, not everyone agreed on the unconditional surrender. Churchill and Marshall, for instance, rightly feared that the
declaration would end all hopes of an early peace through secret negotiation with anti-Hitler Germans and cause many more Allied deaths because it would force Germans to fight “to the bitter end.” But their disagreement was in private, not even shared with FDR at the time. In fact, writes Thomas Fleming, in
The New Dealer
’
s War
, although privately “dumbfounded by FDR’s [public] announcement,” Churchill, in “what may well have been his finest hour as a political performer... chimed in [at the press conference] with a hearty endorsement” of the policy.
17
Not so Patton. To those who would listen, he argued, “Look at this fool unconditional surrender announcement. If the Hun ever needed anything to put a burr under his saddle, that’s it. He’ll now fight like the devil because he’ll be ordered to do so. They’ll do that, the Germans—hold out when there isn’t even the ghost of a chance . . . . [Victory] will take much longer, cost us more lives, and let the Russians take more territory. Sometimes, we’re such God-damned fools, it makes me weep.”
18
But it was his attitude toward the Soviets that drew the greatest concern.
Roosevelt was absolutely steadfast in his belief that the Soviet Union’s government was, at its heart, benign and should be dealt with as a friend and partner needed after the war to bring peace to the world. How much of this stemmed simply from his Left leanings and how much on intelligence he was getting—or not getting—is not clear. But Stalin, he said, was basically a good person, just rough around the edges, and one whom he could “handle” with his own personal charm.
19
He had always had a soft spot for the Soviets.
When Roosevelt and the New Deal swept into power after the election of 1932, one of the main foreign policy changes made by FDR’s administration was granting diplomatic recognition to the
fledgling communist nation. Until then, because of the USSR’s vow of world revolution and its vehement denunciation of capitalism, few Western countries had been willing to give them such powerful status. But the economic ills of the Depression had, by 1933, when the New Dealers took office, made communism more palatable, even fashionable in certain circles, especially amongst intellectual elites like those in the universities. Over a million Americans voted for either the communist or socialist candidates in 1932
20
—this at a time when the country’s population was less than half of what it is today.
ay
Roosevelt, somewhere in that Leftist spectrum, saw the Soviet Union at least as a deserving market which would be opened to the U.S. by the new recognition. Enhanced relations of any kind never materialized, however, for a variety of reasons, chief among them the fact that the Soviets used their new status to infiltrate spies and foment unrest in the U.S., especially within labor, which led to public criticism, most vocally from the Right. But FDR, perhaps influenced
az
by powerful cover-ups of the true situation in Russia,
21
continued dogmatically in his favorable view of the communist dictatorship. For instance, in 1939, when his internal security advisor, Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state, handed him a well-sourced report stating that Morganthau aide, Harry Dexter White, and Lauchlin Currie, his (FDR’s) own personal advisor, were both Soviet spies, he exhibited
no interest, and even got mad and forbade mention of the problem. “He seem[ed] to have dismissed the whole idea of espionage rings within his administration as absurd,” write Andrew and Mitrokhin in
The Sword and the Shield
. “Equally remarkable, Berle [who wasn’t a fan of the Soviets] simply pigeon-holed his own report. He did not even send a copy to the FBI until the Bureau requested it in 1943.”
ba
22
When Hitler turned on his Soviet ally and invaded the USSR in 1941, Roosevelt promptly sent Harry Hopkins, his close aide of like mind, to Moscow to work out a lend-lease deal in order to help the besieged country as quickly and strongly as possible.
Once the U.S. and USSR were allies, Roosevelt’s benevolence towards the Soviets knew few bounds. They were bearing the brunt of the fighting against the Germans, he emphasized. The Allies should be grateful. Russia was the “key to defeat of Germany.”
23
The U.S. must do everything it can to aid and cooperate with the Soviets. To Donovan, he said “Bill, you must treat the Russians with the same trust you do the British. They’re killing Germans every day, you know.” When Navy Secretary Frank Knox balked at hiring communists as radio operators, FDR admonished that the communism that toppled the Tsar “had practically ceased to exist in Russia. At the present time their system is much more like a form of the older socialism . . . .”
24
The Torch operation in North Africa had been a fulfillment of an FDR promise to Stalin that the Allies would provide a second major battle front in the war as soon as possible in order to divert German resources from their Russian campaign. The Soviets must
be placated as much as possible, he and the War Department further argued, because the Allies needed them to enter the war against Japan. This was something Stalin had so far declined to do because, he said, he did not also want to be fighting on two fronts—the West and the Pacific.
Roosevelt was like a passionate schoolboy in his courting of Stalin.
Sword and Shield
authors Andrew and Mitrokhin quote how FDR, in order to win favor with the inscrutable dictator, had no pangs ridiculing his friend Churchill at the upcoming Tehran summit in November 1943. “Winston got red and scowled, and the more he did so, the more Stalin smiled. Finally, Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw.... I saw the light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me.... I called him ‘Uncle Joe.’ He would have thought me fresh the day before . . . but he came over and shook my hand. From that time on our relations were personal . . . . We talked like men and brothers.”
25
Patton, of course, disapproved. Did he make his feelings about the Soviets known in North Africa? I have not been able to find any public record of his doing so, but it does not mean it did not happen. He had plenty of chances to give his anti-Soviet views, not only with his own staff, who certainly were aware of his opinions, but with the high-ranking officers in the Allied commands in North Africa with whom he had daily contact, and even with Roosevelt, Hopkins (whom Patton called “pilot fish”
bb
and FDR’s “boyfriend” because of his attachment to the president), and General Marshall, each of whom he spent ample time alone with during the Casablanca talks. At least twice, according to his diaries, he was alone with Roosevelt, talking “for about thirty minutes” in one
instance (January 19, 1943 entry) and then for “two hours” (an October 17, 1945 entry in which he recalled the earlier trip) as he drove the president back from a seaside lunch. “We talked history and armor. . . .Then he got on to politics . . . .”
26
Did Patton hold his tongue? Not likely. That was not his style. And since he was praised by conferees, his confidence to speak out must have been high. The trip was a chance to influence the highest decision maker. But even if he just listened, Roosevelt, who relished the clandestine and always had a silent agenda and private sources of information—as most in his position would—certainly knew Patton’s opinions. It was his job, and his advisors’ jobs, to know. That was one of the reasons he had established the OSS, which basically was his own private intelligence service, as opposed to using the military intelligence services which were parochially beholden to the admirals and generals. Donovan reported only to FDR, and occasionally, the War Department. So it may not have been coincidence that it was just several weeks after the Casablanca meeting, in early February 1943, that Eisenhower had summoned his generals to Algiers to order them not to talk badly about the British. Also prohibited in the gag order was any criticism of the Soviets.
27