No Ordinary Time, Page 52

  Eleanor experienced both relief and sorrow as she watched Hick fall in love with another woman. Knowing that her friend was happy lessened her guilt about the pain she had caused when she no longer needed Hick as Hick needed her. Yet, at the same time, there had undoubtedly remained a secret pleasure in knowing how passionately Hick loved her. And now that love had turned to someone else.

  • • •

  The war would be won, the president said again and again that spring, only if the incalculable force of American democracy could be let loose, if people scattered throughout the land came to feel that their individual skills and talents were an essential part of the common endeavor. A host of separate images prevailed: workers in aircraft factories assembling planes; welders at dockyards building ships; miners in West Virginia digging coal; farmers in Kansas planting crops; pilots at airfields learning to fly; sailors in the Atlantic dodging German submarines; soldiers in the Pacific fighting the Japanese. Roosevelt understood that the challenge was to find a way of binding these men and women together in the shared enterprise of total war.

  To this end, he submitted to Congress in late April a seven-point economic program, including heavier taxes, war bonds, wage and price controls, and comprehensive rationing—designed to ensure, as he put it, “an equality of sacrifice.” Explaining the program to the people in his second wartime fireside chat, he said that, though not everyone could have the privilege of “fighting our enemies in distant parts of the world,” or “working in a munitions factory or a shipyard,” there is “one front and one battle where everyone in the United States—every man, woman and child—is in action . . . . That front is right here at home, in our daily tasks.

  “To build the factory, to buy the materials, to pay the labor, to provide the transportation, to equip and feed and house the soldiers and sailors and marines, and do all the thousands of things necessary in a war—all cost a lot of money, more money than has ever been spent by any nation at any time in the long history of the world.” When the government spends such unprecedented sums, he explained, the money goes into the bank accounts of the people. “You do no have to be a professor of math or economics to see that if people with plenty of cash start bidding against each other for scarce goods, the price of these goods goes up.” For that reason, a system of rationing and price control was needed. Henceforth, by the action of what came to be known as the “General Maximum Price Regulation,” all prices would be effectively fixed for the duration of the war. The ceiling price of each item would be the highest price charged for that item in March 1942.

  To bolster his call for shared sacrifice, he told the story of Captain Hewitt Wheless, a B-17 pilot who came from a small town in Texas with a population of 2,375. Wheless had just been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for downing seven Japanese planes in a single mission that pitted him against eighteen Japanese zeros. During the lopsided attack, one engine on the American bomber was shut down, one gas tank was hit, the oxygen system was entirely destroyed, the radio operator was killed, the gunner was crippled, and the engineer’s right hand was shot off. Still, the fight continued until the Japanese squadron ran out of gas and turned away. With both engines now gone and the plane practically out of control, the B-17 returned to its base and made an emergency landing. “As we sit here at home contemplating our own duties,” he concluded, “let us think and think hard of the example which is being set for us by our fighting men.”

  Ten days later, Captain Wheless stood before a cheering crowd of eighteen thousand Boeing employees in the Seattle plant where the B-17 was produced. For an entire hour, not one rivet gun sounded; the deep boom of the drop hammer was stilled. It was the first time in months that work in the plant had come to a stop, as men in overalls and women in slacks heard a replay of the president’s speech over the loudspeaker. When Wheless stepped to the microphone, he made it clear that he owed his life to the B-17, “the Queen of the Sky,” and to the workers standing before him. “The men operating the planes don’t want all the credit,” he told the enthusiastic crowd. “I want to thank you for myself and a lot of other pilots who more or less owe their lives to your design and workmanship. Continue the good work and together we can’t lose.”

  • • •

  The continuing need to sustain national morale against the backdrop of military reverses in the Far East led Roosevelt that April to endorse a risky raid on Tokyo by a force of sixteen B-25s under the leadership of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the president had told his military chiefs that, despite the distances involved, a way had to be found to carry out a retaliatory raid on Japan. A much-needed lift to American spirits would be achieved, Roosevelt calculated, if a direct blow could be struck at the heart of Japan. Plans were drawn to launch a raid from a ship positioned some six hundred miles from the coast of Japan. It would be the first time heavily loaded bombers had ever taken off from a navy carrier. The question was whether the deck of the largest carrier was large enough to propel a fleet of B-25s.

  On April 18, the day of the raid, the sea was rough. Doolittle was the first to take off. As he started his engines, heavy waves broke over the deck, sending cascades of spray along the sides of his twin-engine plane. If the plane was unable to get airborne, it would drop off the deck and be sliced in half by the sharp edge of the bow. At the far end of the carrier, carefully gauging the rise and fall of the deck, the flight-deck officer waved his checkered flag as a signal for takeoff to begin. Doolittle pushed his throttles forward, and the bomber waddled slowly down the deck. Standing nearby, a navy pilot shouted that the plane wasn’t going to make it. But the wheels came off the deck just in time, and the plane took off without a hitch. Within an hour, the remaining fifteen planes were also in the air.

  Doolittle and his squadron reached Tokyo shortly after noon; they dropped their bombs and then flew on to China. Though the physical damage from the raid was comparatively light, the psychological damage was enormous. The Japanese government had promised the people of Japan that their homeland would never be attacked. The Doolittle raid had shown that the empire was not invulnerable after all. When the news of the raid was broadcast throughout the world, everyone wanted to know where the planes had come from. Delighting in the mystery, Roosevelt smiled broadly. “They came from a secret base in Shangri-la,” he said, referring to the mythical land in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

  It was the first good news from the Pacific theater. Telegrams of support flooded the White House. “I hope my two boys in the army have a similar opportunity,” Mrs. T. J. Dykema of Pittsburgh wrote. “Give us more Doolittles and we will take our chances in the west,” James Jordon of Oregon telegraphed. Even Stimson, who had been doubtful about this “pet project” of the president’s, agreed the daring raid had had “a very good psychological effect in the country both here and abroad.”

  Moreover, through a series of strange twists and turns, the Doolittle raid led to the Battle of Midway. As the American bombs fell on Japanese soil, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander-in-chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, who had planned the attack of Pearl Harbor, strengthened his resolve to prevent any future penetration of Japan’s perimeter. At his insistence, the decision was made to send an overwhelming force of ten battleships, four aircraft carriers, and seventy destroyers, 185 ships in all, to seize Midway Island, the farthest outpost of the Hawaiian chain.

  Had the Japanese fleet been able to catch the much smaller American forces unawares, there is little doubt that Yamamoto would have achieved his aim. But because the navy had broken the Japanese code, Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Chester Nimitz had an incalculable advantage, allowing him to concentrate his planes, carriers, and men at precisely the right points, waiting to pounce at precisely the right time. Nimitz launched his strike on June 4, 1942, just before the Japanese fleet reached Midway. Catching Yamamoto totally by surprise, the attack destroyed all four Japanese carriers, one heavy cruiser, three battleships, and 372
aircraft; thirty-five hundred Japanese sailors were killed.

  The battle at Midway, Admiral King later observed, was a major turning point, “the first decisive defeat suffered by the Japanese Navy in 350 years. It put an end to the long period of Japanese offensive action and restored the balance of naval power in the Pacific.” But victory at Midway was offset at Corregidor, where, on May 6, despite a valiant effort to hold out, American troops had been forced to surrender. “With broken heart and head bowed in sadness but not in shame,” General Jonathan Wainwright wired the president, “I go to meet the Japanese commander.”

  The situation looked bleak on the Russian front as well. With the coming of spring, the Germans had launched a vast new offensive to defeat the Red Army. Refreshed and resupplied, the German army was pushing fast toward Leningrad in the north and Rostov and Stalingrad in the south. To ease the pressure, Stalin was demanding a second front in France; only simultaneous offensives in the East and the West, he argued, could vanquish Hitler.

  By spring, officials in both Washington and London were engaged in daily discussions over the feasibility of a second front. That a massive concentrated force in Western Europe would be necessary to defeat Hitler was axiomatic to both General Marshall and the new War Plans Division chief, General Eisenhower. For weeks, with the strong backing of Henry Stimson, Marshall and Eisenhower had been arguing against a piecemeal scattering of Allied forces. “We’ve got to go to Europe and fight,” Eisenhower urged, “and we’ve got to quit wasting resources all over the world—and still worse—wasting time. If we’re going to keep Russia in, save the Middle East, India and Burma; we’ve got to begin slugging with air at West Europe; to be followed by a land attack as soon as possible.”

  Preliminary plans for a cross-Channel attack were presented to the president at the end of March. The plans called for a massive assault across the Channel by April 1943 (Operation Bolero). A more limited emergency operation (Operation Sledgehammer) was designed for the fall of 1942, to be employed if the Red Army was at the point of imminent collapse. Stimson feared that the president lacked “the hardness of heart” to commit himself wholly to this concentrated effort, which required resisting requests for troops in other theaters of the war. “The same qualities which endear him to his own countrymen,” Stimson mused, “militate against the firmness of his execution at a time like this.” Marshall, too, was concerned about the president’s inability to reject appeals for other good purposes; he had a habit, Marshall observed, “his cigarette-holder gesture,” of tossing out new operations in response to new information from troubled areas.

  But when Marshall completed his presentation, the president not only endorsed the cross-Channel plan, but decided to send Marshall and Hopkins to London to secure Churchill’s agreement. As Hopkins packed his bags, Roosevelt arranged for a naval doctor to accompany him to London to protect him from overexertion, and directed Marshall “to put Hopkins to bed and keep him there under 24-hour guard by army or marine corps” while he got some rest.

  Churchill’s wife, Clementine, was delighted to see Hopkins once again. “Oh how glad I am that you are back once more,” she told him, “to encourage, to cheer, to charm us. You can’t think what a difference it makes to Winston. He is carrying a very heavy load and I can’t bear his dear round face not to look cheerful and cherubic in the mornings, as up to now it has always done. What with Singapore and India . . . we are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation.”

  The discussions with Churchill went surprisingly well. For months, Churchill had been arguing against an all-out attack on Hitler’s Europe, preferring a series of peripheral operations, in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North Africa. But now, as he listened to Marshall and Hopkins, Churchill knew that their arguments for a second front carried the weight of the president’s convictions. “What Harry and George Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and mind in it,” Roosevelt had wired Churchill. Before the first day’s discussions were over, Hopkins had wired an optimistic report to Roosevelt. Churchill’s conciliatory mood puzzled Canada’s MacKenzie King. “It was not like him to agree, almost as it were, without a fight,” King noted. “He may have decided that the time has not yet come to take the field as an out and out opponent of a second front.”

  Emboldened by Churchill’s apparent support for the cross-Channel attack, Roosevelt cabled Stalin to ask if Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov could come to Washington to discuss Allied plans for a second front to relieve the situation in Russia. A delighted Stalin replied that Molotov would come to Washington in three weeks.

  While Hopkins was in London, Churchill received a report that Louis Johnson, Roosevelt’s emissary to India, was trying, with Roosevelt’s knowledge, to negotiate with Gandhi’s Congress Party a military agreement that would commit the nationalist forces to join with British defenders to stop Japan’s westward advance. In return, the nationalists were asking for some measure of immediate self-government to motivate the Indian people to feel they were defending their own freedom. On hearing the news, Churchill was furious. India was Britain’s colony, and no one, not even his great friend Franklin Roosevelt, was going to tell Britain how to resolve the tangled situation. For two hours, Hopkins reported, Churchill walked around the room issuing a string of invectives.

  At 3 a.m., long past the time when he was supposed to be in bed, Hopkins was still listening to Churchill. Churchill said that he would be ready to resign on the issue, but that if he did the War Cabinet would simply continue his policy. He then wrote to Roosevelt: “Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart, and would surely deeply injure both our countries at the height of this terrible struggle.” Once Roosevelt saw that pressing Churchill on India would do serious damage to Anglo-American relations, he dropped his efforts.

  Molotov arrived at the White House on Friday afternoon, May 29. Since Eleanor was in West Virginia for a commencement at the school at Arthurdale, a stag dinner was prepared that evening for Molotov, Roosevelt, and Hopkins. Two interpreters were also present. To the eyes of the president’s butler, Alonzo Fields, Molotov had “an owlish, wise look” on his face, accentuated by his chubby cheeks, his stubby mustache, and his round glasses. On occasion, Fields noted, “his eyes would dart around with the glint of a fox waiting to spring on his prey.” The need for continuous translation made conversation difficult, frustrating Roosevelt’s desire to get to know Molotov. Moreover, whenever the conversation seemed about to open up, Molotov brought it back to the second front, insistent on securing a definite commitment from the Americans for the cross-Channel attack. So unswerving did Molotov prove, content to sit in his chair for hours on end sticking to his argument, that Roosevelt later nicknamed him “Stone Ass.”

  During the entire Molotov visit, one State Department official observed, the president and his advisers were “head-down in their desire to make the Soviets happy.” Before Molotov arrived, Roosevelt had sent a memo to his Joint Chiefs, declaring that “at the present time, our principal objective is to help Russia. It must be constantly reiterated that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis material than all the 25 united nations put together.”

  “The fact that the Russians were carrying so heavy a load led to a guilt complex in our relations,” Russian envoy Charles Bohlen observed. The guilt increased with the dark picture Molotov painted of the fighting on the Eastern front; in recent weeks, the Russians had suffered devastating defeats at Kharkov and Kerch, and it was clear that Sevastopol could not hold out much longer. The German army was now only eighty miles from Moscow.

  Desiring to placate the courageous Russians, who were engaged every hour of every day with Hitler’s finest troops, while American and British troops were fighting only on the periphery, Roosevelt asked Marshall, in Molotov’s presence, whether “developments were clear enough so that we could say to Mr. Stalin that we were preparing a second front.” When Marshall said yes, Roosevelt told Molotov to
tell Stalin that “we expect the formation of a second front this year.” Though Roosevelt’s pledge did not specify when or where the second front would take place, Molotov was jubilant. The ice was broken. The president felt he was actually getting chummy with his Russian visitor.

  Molotov was put up in the family quarters, in the room Churchill had occupied across the hall from Hopkins’ room. Though Eleanor returned to the White House too late to join the Molotov party for dinner, she conversed with Molotov in her sitting room before going to bed. Earlier in the evening, Molotov had told Hopkins that he wanted to meet Mrs. Roosevelt, and though it was past midnight, Hopkins had brought him to Eleanor’s room. Eleanor later remarked that she liked him immediately. She felt he was “an open, warm sort of person.” They talked about women in Russia.

  The following day, as Molotov greeted members of a Russian plane crew, Eleanor joined Franklin for a review of the Memorial Day parade. As the first soldiers passed, Roosevelt applauded with enthusiasm. Eleanor was glad to see the new types of equipment on exhibit, but in contrast to her husband, who enjoyed the spectacle immensely, she found it difficult to forget that killing was the object of the lavish weapons on display. Indeed, earlier in the month, she had taken public issue with her husband when he called for a series of parades to accompany different groups of draftees to camp. “American boys on their way to war don’t love a parade,” she had countered. “There’s no glamour to this war.”

  As reports of Roosevelt’s meeting with Molotov reached London, along with the implied promise of a “sacrificial landing” in 1942 if the Russians faced imminent collapse, Churchill decided to fly to the United States immediately. For, just as MacKenzie King had suspected, beneath his apparent support for a second front when he talked to Hopkins and Marshall in London, Churchill remained adamantly opposed to the idea of a direct assault on the Continent. Unable to fight off the ghosts of the Somme, where the British had lost sixty thousand men in a single day, he was determined “to go round the end rather than through the center.” As he looked around him in the House of Commons, he once told special envoy Averell Harriman, “he could not help but think of all the faces that were not there,” the faces of men destined to lead Britain who had never returned from the trenches. To order yet another direct assault on the Continent seemed to Churchill equivalent to consigning a new generation to death on the battlefield.