No Ordinary Time, Page 59

  • • •

  The 1942 off-year elections took place in an atmosphere decidedly unfavorable to the administration. Polls recorded a general dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war at home and abroad.

  Recent news from the Far East had been depressing. In August, the navy had chosen the mountainous island of Guadalcanal for its first offensive in the Pacific. Though the marines had made a successful landing, they soon encountered fierce opposition and were still engaged, two months later, in grisly combat with the Japanese. Losses on both sides were sickeningly high. On the Eastern front, after ten weeks of bloody, hand-to-hand fighting in homes, factories, attics, and cellars, the German drive on Stalingrad was still moving forward. Americans, unaware of Roosevelt’s plans for the invasion of North Africa, were frustrated by the apparent lack of movement on a second front.

  At home, many people had grievances: farmers complained about walking twenty miles to their county rationing board for a few gallons of kerosene; small businessmen found the burden of regulation heavy; Southern whites viewed the rising racial unrest with alarm; housewives failed to see the warrelated necessity of many rationed items; union organizers were upset by the ceilings on wages.

  Displeasure with the system of rationing was heightened on October 31, when, just three days before the election, OPA Administrator Leon Henderson announced that, in three weeks’ time, coffee would be rationed at the rate of one cup a day for each person over fifteen. The announcement sent a major shock through the country, where eighty-three million Americans considered themselves faithful coffee drinkers, consuming an average of three cups per day. Since coffee had first appeared in seventeenth-century America, when New Amsterdam burghers began to drink it at breakfast instead of beer, it had become an integral part of daily life.

  The problem, the OPA tried to explain, was the scarcity of ships: the ships that were being used to haul coffee from Central America and Brazil were needed to carry weapons and soldiers abroad. It all made sense, but the loss was immediate and deeply felt. “So far,” a woman from New York wrote, this has been “the wartime measure to have affected one the most.”

  It was thus an irritated public that went to the polls on Tuesday, November 3. With the pundits predicting a Republican sweep in the Congress, the president was “under no illusions,” White House aide William Hassett remarked, “as to the outcome of the result.” In Hyde Park, a heavy rain fell as Roosevelt entered the white frame town hall, just off Main Street in the village, to cast his vote. In contrast to other years, when he was accompanied by his wife, his mother, and Missy LeHand, this time, Hassett noted, he was all alone. For Missy, still in her sister’s house in Somerville, this was the first election in almost two decades in which she was unable to cast her vote along with the president. Wanting him to know she was there in spirit, she had sent a telegram to Hyde Park earlier that morning: “I am fighting for you.”

  As the president approached the registration desk to begin the familiar routine, the chairman of the election board, J. W. Finch, peered up over his spectacles. “Name, please?” he asked with a straight face. “Roosevelt,” the president replied, with a twinkle in his eye; “I think that’s what I said last time.” Indeed, he had been saying it for nearly forty years at the same place. “Not so big a vote today,” the president observed, upon learning that only 174 of his neighbors had voted so far. “No, a little slow, so far,” Finch replied.

  The light turnout in Hyde Park was repeated in districts everywhere. The vote proved to be the smallest since 1930, totaling only one-half the number of voters who went to the polls in the last presidential year, 1940. The low turnout favored the Republicans, who picked up forty-four seats in the House, nine seats in the Senate, and a number of governorships. Though the Democrats still retained a slim majority in both houses, there were immediate signs, U.S. News reported, “that an unofficial coalition was in the making between anti-New Deal Democrats and Republicans to pluck all budding social reforms from future war legislation.”

  Though Roosevelt was not happy with the results, he was glad the election was over. “Found the President in high spirits,” Hassett recorded on Wednesday morning, “not a trace of the post election gloom which, according to his enemies, should encircle him . . . No bitter word toward anyone.” Indeed, at his press conference that Friday he made only one reference to the elections, saying he assumed that “the new Congress would be as much in favor of winning the war as the Chief Executive himself.”

  • • •

  The weekend after the election, the president went to Shangri-la, the presidential retreat in the woods of Maryland, about seventy-five miles from Washington. The rustic camp, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps as a summer camp for boys and girls in the thirties and later known as Camp David, had been fitted out for the president’s use in the summer of 1942 after he was told that, with a war on, it was no longer advisable for him to cruise the open waters on his presidential yacht. The retreat consisted of six oak cabins connected by a series of dirt paths. The principal cabin, used by the president and his guests, had a combination living and dining room, a kitchen, four bedrooms, two baths, and a screened-in stone porch at the edge of the woods. Roosevelt chose the name Shangri-la to express his appreciation of the reinvigorating effects of the time he was able to spend in the secret paradise, away from the turmoil and confusion of Washington, D.C. Settled comfortably on his porch, overlooking the valley, the president was able to relax, arranging his stamps, playing solitaire, reading, talking with friends.

  This weekend, however, the president was uncharacteristically tense. His face wore a strained and uneasy look; his buoyancy was diminished. The invasion of North Africa was scheduled to begin on Sunday, November 8, and he was worried. “He knew that it was largely because of his insistence that this invasion was taking place,” Sam Rosenman observed, “that on the next day many American lives might be lost,” and “he was concerned—deeply.” He had ordered the risky endeavor over the opposition of his service chiefs. Aware that he was showing his anxiety, he told Grace Tully simply that he was expecting an important message.

  Four thousand miles away, stationed in a command post deep in the tunnels under the Rock of Gibraltar, where the blackness was only partially pierced by feeble electric bulbs and the damp air was stagnant, General Eisenhower was having an equally rough time. This was not the operation he would have chosen; never had anyone undertaken a night landing on a hostile coast so far from home base. Yet, as the commander of the invasion, he was responsible for the lives of the seventy thousand Americans who were steaming through the Atlantic on six hundred ships. Among these was the president’s son FDR, Jr., a gunnery officer on the destroyer Mayrant. Furthermore, since the convoy was under radio silence, there was no way to tell exactly where it was or if it had been spotted by the menacing line of German submarines that stretched the length of the Middle Atlantic.

  Zero hour was sunrise, Sunday morning, November 8, which was Saturday night at Shangri-la. The ever-changing plans called for a three-pronged assault against French North Africa, from Algiers in the mid-Mediterranean to Oran and Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Africa. Only twelve days out of 365 were fit for debarkation at Casablanca and Oran; the rest of the year, the heavy fifteen-foot-high breakers of the Atlantic surf would make it impossible to land, tossing the ships about like matchwood.

  Political ambiguities aggravated the military danger. For months, Roosevelt and his advisers had wrestled with alternative ways to convince the French that the invading force was intended to liberate, not conquer America’s former ally. If the Vichy French forces in North Africa opposed the landing with their full strength, a great many lives would be lost and there would be little hope of gaining control. Indeed, aware of the importance of securing some sort of acceptance by the French, Roosevelt insisted that the initial attacks be made by an exclusively American ground force. “The operation should be undertaken on the assumption that the French will offer
less resistance to us than they will to the British,” he had written Churchill. “We agree,” Churchill responded. “We have plenty of troops highly trained for landing. If convenient, they can wear your uniform. They will be proud to do so.”

  The troops that were heading toward North Africa were carrying with them an astonishing array of material. “This is just to let you know,” supply chief General Somervell wrote Eisenhower on the eve of the invasion, “that we have been giving everything we have to outfitting your organization, both here and in England. God knows Ike we wish you the best of luck and outstanding success. The country needs one badly.”

  In this first encounter with the enemy, the army was determined that American boys have the best equipment their country could give them: the new streamlined Sherman tanks, new multiple gun mounts, amphibious tractors, submachine guns, and a revolutionary rocket launcher named “bazooka” which had so impressed the commander of II Corps, General George Patton, when he first saw it tested, that he demanded it be issued to his troops even though there was no time to teach them how to use it. The ground commanders also insisted on providing each soldier with a staggering supply of items designed to ensure maximum comfort. These included extra wool blankets, sun and dust goggles, dust respirators, mosquito bars, head nets, magnifying glasses, black basketball shoes, rubber boats, bed socks, hip boots, stepladders, and bicycles.

  The proliferation of materials had made the loading process in the States a nightmare. At Newport News, Virginia, the central clearing point for the ships, thousands of men were needed to sort through the badly marked crates of stuff that arrived from army supply centers across the land. At one point, twenty-five railway cars were needed just to carry the barracks bags of a single regimental combat team. Unschooled in logistics, inexperienced loaders invariably stored the small-arms ammunition and other cargo needed first in the deepest holds of the ships. Heavy equipment that should have gone into bottom stowage arrived later and was put on top instead.

  The chaos of the loading process would be duplicated at the other end, when the time came to unload the ships and send the troops ashore. “It was as though some gigantic overhead scoop full of supplies had suddenly emptied its contents,” one military observer noted. “Nothing had been stacked. One box was simply dumped on top of another.” Everywhere one looked, there were “boxes, crates, ammunition and gasoline drums piled and scattered.”

  As the hour of the invasion approached, the tension on the ships mounted. Africa had never seemed so dark and mysterious to the ancient sea-rovers, naval historian Admiral Samuel Morison observed, as she seemed that night to these seventy thousand young men, the great majority of whom had been civilians in 1940 with absolutely no experience at sea.

  To make matters worse, the men were so burdened by weapons, ammunition, and equipment—some of the barrack bags were reported to weigh as much as 180 pounds—that they could hardly move, much less run to shore. “I realize,” one officer wrote, “that the great American public may not like the idea of their sons going to war without a complete wardrobe akin to the one which Gary Cooper might have in Hollywood, but I also know he can’t wrestle it around in North Africa.” Indeed, several soldiers were drowned in the landing simply because they were unable to regain their footing after being rolled over by a wave. As the rest of the troops struggled through the surf, more and more stuff was jettisoned. By daybreak, the beaches were strewn with water-soaked bags and ruined equipment.

  Had the president been aware of the chaos that attended the American landings, his anxiety would have been even greater. As it was, a thousand times over in that long day, with tense and uneasy eyes, he had glanced at his White House phone, waiting for a call to tell him the invasion had begun. Finally, shortly before 9 p.m., Saturday, November 7, the phone rang. Grace Tully took the call and told the president that the War Department was on the line.

  As he reached for the phone, Tully vividly remembered years later, his hand was shaking. He listened intently for several minutes without saying a word. Despite all the difficulties, luck had prevailed. The Atlantic surf was unusually calm. The first wave of landings was accompanied by a minimum of loss. “Thank God. Thank God,” the president said. “That sounds grand. Congratulations. Casualties are comparatively light—much below your predictions. Thank God.” With a broad smile on his face, he put down the phone and turned to his guests. “We have landed in North Africa,” he said. “Casualties are below expectations. We are striking back.”

  Exultant, the president prepared a message to the nation announcing the successful landing of the American troops. This was the news for which so many had been waiting for so long, General Somervell observed. The U.S. had at last taken the offensive on a large scale. “America is on the march. Not a defensive march. Not a part time campaign. Not a small sector. This is the real thing, the biggest of its kind ever attempted.” General George Marshall’s wife, Katherine, was in Washington Stadium attending a night football game when the president’s announcement came over the public-address system. Suddenly Mrs. Marshall understood why her husband had been so preoccupied. The crowd of twenty-five thousand went wild. “Like the waves of an ocean,” she wrote, “the cheers of the people rose and fell, then rose again in a long sustained emotional cry. The football players turned somersaults and handsprings down the center of the field; the crowd went wild . . . . We had struck back.”

  “This is it. Those were the words that raced through the mind of the nation at 9 o’clock on the night of Saturday, November 7th,” Newsweek observed. “The U.S. had at last taken the offensive on a major scale. In a nation where the sting of defeat had gone deeper than most citizens would admit, this was the best of all possible news. From one end of the country to the other there spread a feeling that now the United States was going to show the world—as it had always done before.”

  “They followed the North African campaign in the newspapers and on the radio,” Winston Estes writes in Homefront. “Names of places they dared not try to pronounce became familiar to them. They located a map. They examined action photos in the newspapers.” The war had entered their homes.

  As if the tide were turning everywhere, the news from the British forces in Egypt was equally positive. At El Alamein, with the help of the three hundred Sherman tanks Roosevelt had sent after the fall of Tobruk, the British Eighth Army, under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, had finally gained the offensive. Thirty thousand German soldiers had been taken prisoner; Rommel was in full retreat. All over Great Britain, Eleanor noted in her column, church bells pealed to celebrate the victory. “Now, this is not the end,” Churchill told his people. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Steve Early remarked as euphoria swept the land. “Why couldn’t the Army have done this before the election!”

  In fact, the original date for the attack had been sometime in October, the 30th at the latest. “Please make it before Election Day,” Roosevelt had pleaded with Marshall, folding his hands in a mock prayer. But when Eisenhower and his commanders decided to postpone the operation until November 8, five days after the election, Roosevelt didn’t say a word. This was a decision that rested with Eisenhower, he told friends, not with the Democratic National Committee.

  The euphoria in the States was short-lived. The luck that had accompanied the military phase of the landings disappeared when the politics set in. On the night of the landings, Roosevelt had broadcast a message to the French people in North Africa. “We come among you to repulse the cruel invaders who would remove forever your rights of self government . . . . We come among you solely to defeat and rout your enemies. Have faith in our words. We do not want to cause you any harm.”

  To buttress America’s case that this was a liberation rather than an invasion, arrangements had been made by Roosevelt’s man in Algiers, Robert Murphy, for General Henri Giraud, the French general who had recently escaped from a German prison camp, t
o accompany the American troops and take charge. But when Giraud’s arrival was delayed, Murphy turned to the former commander-in-chief of the French navy, Admiral Jean-François Darlan, who happened to be in Algiers visiting a sick son. Darlan had collaborated with the Nazis when the Germans invaded France; now, once again, he bowed to superior force and agreed to cooperate with the American authorities. Though the British did not like the idea of negotiating with a representative of Vichy France, Murphy and Eisenhower believed Darlan could be useful in persuading local French forces to join the Allies. In France, however, the Vichy government, under Marshal Henri Pétain, refused to cooperate. “We are attacked,” he announced. “We shall defend ourselves; this is the order I am giving.” The confusion was compounded when General Charles de Gaulle, speaking from London for the Free French Forces, bitterly denounced Darlan. “The U.S. can pay traitors but not with the honor of France,” he proclaimed. “What remains of the honor of France will stay intact in my hands.”

  The Darlan deal was vigorously denounced in the United States as well, particularly in liberal circles. “Prostitutes are used,” Freda Kirchwey wrote in The Nation. “They are seldom loved. Even less frequently are they honored.” What appeared to Eisenhower and his commanders as a reasonable military expedient to reduce the fighting by the French was now seen as a serious political error, a form of appeasement. Suddenly, Stimson admitted, “the enormous benefits which that deal brought to us in the immediate laying down of the arms of the French were as nothing compared with the sacrifice in dealing with a member of the Vichy government.” In Washington, Henry Morgenthau was apoplectic. “Poor Henry was sunk,” Stimson observed. “He was almost for giving up the war which he said had lost all interest for him.”

  Roosevelt was enraged by the mounting tide of criticism, particularly since it came from those who generally supported him. Sam Rosenman later said he had never seen the president so deeply affected by a political attack. “He showed more resentment and more impatience with his critics throughout this period than at any other time I know about. He so sincerely detested Fascism and Nazism that the charges of undue and unnecessary collaboration with some former Fascists in North Africa were painfully distressing.” At times he seemed obsessed by his critics, reading aloud every word of every unfavorable column; at times he refused to talk about North Africa at all, taking escapist pleasure in leisurely dinners and long drives in the country with Princess Martha.