The Day of Battle Read online

  Elsewhere in this global war, the ebb and flow of battle was less decisive. In the Pacific, Japan had been driven from Guadalcanal and Papua; Japanese reinforcements had been badly whipped in the Bismarck Sea in February; and American forces on this very day, May 11, were landing on Attu in the Aleutians, a far-corner fight that would obliterate the Japanese garrison of 2,500 at a cost of more than a thousand U.S. lives. American fighter pilots on April 18, again thanks to a timely radio intercept, ambushed and killed Admiral Isokoru Yamamoto, architect of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet Japan held firm in Burma, and still occupied ports, coastal cities, and much farmland in China, as well as Pacific islands from the Kuriles to the central Solomons. Tokyo had embraced a defensive strategy of attrition and stalemate in hopes of breaking the Allies’ will and keeping the Soviet Union out of the Pacific war.

  On the Eastern Front, the war retained the immensely sanguinary character that had prevailed since Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Here, too, the tide had turned against the Axis, which less than a year earlier had invested the suburbs of Leningrad and Stalingrad and stood but a few hours’ drive from the Caspian Sea. The Germans had lost thirty divisions since January, most of them at Stalingrad or in Tunisia, a loss equivalent to one-eighth of Hitler’s total order of battle; tank numbers had dropped in the past three months from 5,500 to 3,600. A Soviet counteroffensive recaptured Kursk, Rostov, and the entire eastern shore of the Sea of Azov. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister for the Third Reich, described the Führer’s despair in his diary on May 9: “He is absolutely sick of the generals…. All generals lie, he says. All generals are disloyal. All generals are opposed to National Socialism.”

  And yet: the Red Army remained more than three hundred miles from Germany’s eastern border, facing two-thirds of the Wehrmacht’s combat strength. Hitler still commanded three hundred German divisions, plus ninety more from satellite armies. The pummeling of German industry and cities with vast bomber fleets showed promise but had had skimpy results so far, in part because much of America’s airpower had been diverted from British bases to Africa. All of continental Europe, except for neutral Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and Sweden, remained under the Axis boot, from the Bay of Biscay to the river Donetz, and from the North Cape to Sicily. Some 1.3 million forced laborers toiled in German factories, while another quarter million slaved on Atlantic Wall fortifications along the vulnerable west coast in France and the Low Countries; countless others deemed worthless or dangerous were herded into concentration or extermination camps, including a quarter million French, of whom only 35,000 would survive.

  The next Anglo-American blow—after victory in North Africa—had been decided five months earlier, in Casablanca at the last big strategy conference. Operation HUSKY was summarized in twenty-one words by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the amalgamation of American and British commanders who directed the war for Roosevelt and Churchill: “An attack against Sicily will be launched in 1943 with the target date as the period of the favorable July moon.” The largest island in the Mediterranean lay only a hundred miles from Tunis, off the toe of the Italian boot, and its invasion would provide a postscript to the African campaign. American strategists had been leery of waging war in the Mediterranean since even before the November 1942 landings in northwest Africa; Roosevelt triggered that campaign by siding with Churchill and overruling his own generals, who argued that Allied power should instead be concentrated in Britain for a direct lunge across the English Channel toward Berlin. The American high command at Casablanca agreed to support HUSKY because the capture of Sicily would further safeguard Mediterranean shipping and perhaps divert Axis strength from the Soviet front; it would also provide air bases for bombing Italy and other targets in occupied Europe, and might cause weak-kneed Rome to abandon the war by abrogating its “Pact of Steel” with Berlin, formalized in May 1939.

  Beyond Sicily, however, there was no plan, no grand strategy, no consensus on what to do with the immense Allied army now concentrating in the Mediterranean. For this reason, the TRIDENT conference had been convened in Washington. Churchill had harbored ambitions of a campaign on mainland Italy for nearly a year; in early April he petitioned Roosevelt to go beyond Sicily, which he decried as “a modest and even petty objective for our armies…. Great possibilities are open in this theatre.” Knocking Italy from the war “would cause a chill of loneliness over the German people, and might be the beginning of their doom.” Sensing Yankee reluctance, he had warned Harry Hopkins on May 2 of “serious divergences beneath the surface” of Allied comity; privately, he told King George VI of his determination to battle the “Pacific First” advocates in Washington, where many demanded a stronger American effort against Tokyo.

  “We did not come here with closed minds or rigid plans,” Churchill had dictated during the passage from Gourock in preparing his opening argument for the TRIDENT talks. His musings, pecked on that silent Remington across 10 Downing Street stationery, included “Objective 1: Get Italy out of the war” and “Never forget there are 185 German divisions against the Russians…. We are not at present in contact with any.” And the heart of the matter: if Sicily fell “by the end of August, what should these [Anglo-American] troops do in the seven or eight months between this and a first possible BOLERO [the staging in Britain for a cross-Channel invasion of western Europe]? We cannot afford to have idle armies while the Russians are bearing such a disproportionate weight.”

  Beneath his brass lay a supplication. Forty-five months of war had stretched Britain as far as she would stretch. More than 12 percent of the British population now served in the armed forces; with national mobilization nearly complete, severe manpower shortages loomed if the war dragged on, particularly if it required storming the glacis of Festung Europa across the Channel. British battle deaths already exceeded 100,000, with thousands more missing, 20,000 merchant mariners lost, and another 45,000 dead in the United Kingdom from German air raids.

  Salvation lay here, in America. The green and feeble U.S. Army of just a few years earlier now exceeded 6 million, led by 1,000 generals, 7,000 colonels, and 343,000 lieutenants. The Army Air Forces since mid-1941 had grown 3,500 percent, the Army Corps of Engineers 4,000 percent. A Navy that counted eight aircraft carriers after Pearl Harbor would have fifty, large and small, by the end of 1943. More cargo vessels would be built this year in the United States—a Liberty ship now took just fifty days, from keel laying to launch—than existed in the entire British merchant fleet. Just today, perhaps as a subtle reminder to Churchill before his arrival, Roosevelt had publicly announced that “production of airplanes by the United States”—86,000 in 1943—“now exceeds that of all other nations combined.” Of $48 billion in war supplies provided by the United States to its allies, two-thirds would go to Britain.

  The first eighteen months of war for the United States had been characterized by inexperience, insufficiency, and, all too often, ineptitude. A long seasoning, still unfinished, was required, a sorting out: of strong from weak, effective from ineffective, and, as always, lucky from unlucky. That sorting and seasoning continued in combat units and among those who commanded them. The New York Times’s veteran military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, after a long trip through the war zone, had concluded on this Tuesday morning’s front page that “the greatest American problem is leadership: the Army so far has failed to produce a fraction of the adequate officer leadership needed.” As for the average GI, Baldwin added, he “is not mentally tough or sufficiently determined. Part of his heart is in it, but only part.”

  Yet at home, where the productive capacity of the American industrial base approached full mobilization, the process was more advanced. The country had heaved itself from the ways of peace to the ways of war, galvanized as never before and perhaps never again. A final automobile had emerged from American production lines on February 10, 1942; supplanting it in 1943 would be thirty thousand tanks—more than three per hour around the clock, and more in a yea
r than Germany would build from 1939 to 1945. The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company now made compasses and deicers instead of pianos and accordions, International Silver turned out Browning Automatic Rifles rather than tableware, and various lipstick, typewriter, and hubcap manufacturers produced, respectively, cartridge cases, machine guns, and helmets. Similar conversions occurred throughout the economy, which this year would also make 6 million rifles, 98,000 bazookas, 648,000 trucks, 33 million sets of soldiers’ cotton drawers, 61 million pairs of wool socks. And on, and on, and on.

  So, too, had the war infiltrated every kitchen, every closet, every medicine cabinet. Sugar, tires, and gasoline had been rationed first, followed by nearly everything else, from shoes to coffee. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” became a consumer mantra. Plastic buttons replaced brass; zinc pennies supplanted copper. To save fifty million tons of wool annually, the government outlawed vests, cuffs, patch pockets, and wide lapels; hemlines rose, pleated skirts vanished, and an edict requiring a 10 percent reduction in the cloth used for women’s bathing suits led to the bikini. Regulation L-85, issued by the War Production Board, not only rationed natural fibers but also limited fabric colors to those approved by the Dyestuff Advisory Committee, including honor gold, valor red, and gallant blue.

  German prisoners might order curtains from Sears, Roebuck but the catalogue no longer offered saxophones, copper kettles, or plows. A bobby pin shortage forced hairdressers to improvise with toothpicks, while paint-on hosiery replaced vanished silk with the likes of “Velva Leg Film Liquid Stockings.” Nationwide, the speed limit was thirty-five miles per hour, known as “victory speed.” A government campaign to salvage toothpaste tubes—sixty tubes contained enough tin to solder all the electrical connections in a B-17 bomber—resulted in 200 million collected in sixteen months. “Bury a Jap with scrap,” posters urged, and elaborate charts informed Americans that 10 old pails held sufficient steel for a mortar, 10 old stoves equaled 1 scout car, and 252 lawn mowers would make an antiaircraft gun.

  But all those recycled mowers and toothpaste tubes, all the warships and planes and wool socks, would pay off only if they were flung into the proper battles, in the proper campaigns, guided by a proper, war-winning strategy. And such a strategy did not yet exist.

  No place in America had been more transformed by war than Washington, which the Ferdinand Magellan entered from the northeast with a hypnotic clack-clack-clacking shortly after six P.M. “The once sleepy southern city of charm and grace on the Potomac has burgeoned into the frenzied capital of the world,” fumed the Washington Times-Herald. “Lobbyists, propagandists, experts of every species, wealthy industrialists, social climbers, inventors, ladies of uneasy virtue and pickpockets infest the city.”

  To this panoply now were added a prime minister and his retinue of more than a hundred generals, admirals, clerks, bodyguard detectives, and Royal Marines. At 6:45 P.M., a convoy of limousines rolled from the White House grounds and turned south. Seven Secret Service agents sat in squad cars along the route, including an agent posted at the top of an inconspicuous ramp on Fourteenth Street, which sloped to a subterranean rail spur under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. As the train lurched to a stop in a squeal of brakes, the limousines pulled onto the platform. Lifted from the lead vehicle and placed in a waiting wheelchair, Franklin Roosevelt scanned the Magellan’s rear passenger compartment. His gray pallor, the wattled neck, the bagged and hazy eyes, all the fretful symptoms of stress and age seemed to vanish at the sight of Churchill clumping forward in his improbable yacht squadron uniform. The president beamed, the prime minister beamed, and the conclave that would search for that war-winning strategy to save the world was under way.

  But first the visitors must be settled, and this was no simple task. “If the war lasts much longer, Washington is going to bust right out of its pants,” Life magazine had warned in January. Five months later, the busting was well advanced. The city’s twelve thousand hotel rooms were always booked, forcing some visitors to find shelter as far away as Philadelphia. Houseboat colonies sprouted on the Potomac River, and sprawling hamlets of shabby temporary houses, known as demolishables, spread through the District of Columbia and its suburbs. There would be no houseboats or demolishables for the British delegation, of course: Churchill took a suite at the White House, and the rest of the delegation was shoehorned into the Statler Hotel, the Wardman Park, the British embassy, and various other hostels and private houses. Sixteen Royal Marines marched off to a U.S. Army barracks, sweating miserably in the clinging humidity that entitled British diplomats in Washington to “tropical post pay.”

  Churchill could sense that the country had indeed changed since his previous visit eleven months earlier, and so had its capital. The Pentagon, which in 1942 was still under construction across the river in Hell’s Bottom, now stood complete as not only the world’s largest office building, but also “the largest feeding operation under one roof in the world” (55,000 meals a day for 35 cents each). All those well-fed, poorly housed War Department bureaucrats were busier than ever. One wit proposed a new government motto—“Exhaustion is not enough”—and on Pennsylvania Avenue a makeshift information center for visiting contractors and businessmen was known as “the Madhouse.” This month, the War Manpower Commission had announced plans to induct twelve thousand men into the military every day for the rest of the year, with childless married men called to the colors for the first time and those with children certain to be drafted soon. Perhaps not coincidentally, the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, disclosed that his agents had arrested more than five hundred draft dodgers in twenty cities, with warrants outstanding on three thousand others.

  Among other signs of these frenzied times: thirty-five “rumor clinics” had been established across the country “to investigate malicious and meaningless rumors,” which would be vetted by college professors—apparently immune to scuttlebutt—whose findings would be reported in local newspapers. There was such a crying need for lathe operators, machinists, and leather workers that some help-wanted ads even solicited “White or Colored”; a government press release urgently seeking skilled typists for the war effort contained forty-six errors on a single page. The Office of War Information reported that a recent plea for fine blond hair—used in weather instruments and optical equipment—had resulted in such a cascade of golden tresses that no further donations were needed.

  Amid the mania and the melodrama, one notable addition had been made to the Washington landscape four weeks before Churchill’s arrival. He could have seen it from his White House digs, looking past the fading azaleas and beyond the Washington Monument to a grove of cherry trees framing the Tidal Basin. There, the memorial to Thomas Jefferson had been dedicated, an elegant neoclassical temple sheltering a nineteen-foot statue of the third president—temporarily cast in plaster, because the War Production Board needed the bronze. Jefferson’s manifesto, chiseled in marble, summarized perfectly the animating sentiment of the men who would begin meeting tomorrow in search of a path that could carry them to war’s end: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

  They got to work at 2:30 P.M. on Wednesday, May 12, in Roosevelt’s oval study, a snug hideaway above the Blue Room. Nautical paintings and etchings decorated the walls, and a bearskin covered the floor. The president sat in his armless wheelchair greeting Churchill and the ten other men—mostly from the Combined Chiefs—who joined that first session. Roosevelt’s massive desk, positioned away from the windows by the Secret Service, held a blue lamp, four cloth toy donkeys, a stack of books, an inkpot, a medicine bottle, a small clock shaped like a ship’s wheel, and a bronze bust of the First Lady, which had somehow escaped the scrap collectors.

  Five months earlier, American strategists had left the Casablanca conference convinced they had been outfoxed by the British, who were better prepared and had been unified in their determination to continue the Mediterranean strategy
begun with the invasion of North Africa. To avoid another humiliation, the Yanks before TRIDENT had bombarded the British with position papers; they also drafted more than thirty studies on various war policies and doubled the size of the U.S. delegation. In searching for “a grand design by which to reach the heartland of Europe” in decisive battle, American planners scrutinized potential portals to the continent, from the Iberian Peninsula and southern France to Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Still, almost to a man they favored the most direct route across the English Channel.

  The president’s brain trust also worked hard to overcome what many considered the biggest obstacle to American strategic hegemony: Roosevelt himself, and his evident willingness to be swayed by Churchill’s honeyed oratory. “The man from London…will have his way with our Chief, and the careful and deliberate plans of our staff will be overridden,” the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told his diary on May 10. “I feel very troubled about it.” The U.S. Joint Chiefs had conferred with Roosevelt at the White House three days earlier and had wrung from him a vow to press the British for commitment to a cross-Channel invasion of Europe. Driving home the point, a Joint Chiefs memo reiterated the Pentagon’s “antipathy to an invasion of the Italian mainland,” while warning that the British “are traditionally expert at meeting the letter while avoiding the spirit of commitments.” Roosevelt replied with a three-word scribble across the margin that echoed Churchill’s minute on the Queen Mary: “No closed minds.”