Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (76 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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An extended conference between Churchill and Roosevelt was very cordial and deferred the resolution of the differing views on the timing of an invasion of Western Europe. The British thought the American leaders oversimplified the creation of large and capable fighting forces and the Americans thought the British too cautious and unaware of the power of American mass production, of both the sinews of war and of combat-ready troops. They also considered the British overly traumatized by the bloodbath on the Western Front in World War I. The Americans expected France to be cleared almost as quickly as it was occupied, and in an overwhelming counter-application of air power and mechanized forces.
The Japanese advanced quickly in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies and 70,000 British surrendered to Japanese forces of inferior numbers on February 15. The Japanese had occupied all of the island of Java, including the capital of the Dutch East Indies, Batavia, by March 9, the day they also occupied the capital of Burma, Rangoon. They moved on from Java into New Guinea. In the Philippines, the Japanese occupied Manila on January 2, but MacArthur conducted a skillful retreat in the Bataan Peninsula, from his headquarters on the rocky island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay. MacArthur defeated the Japanese invading force in late January and the invasion stalled for a month while reinforcements were brought in. MacArthur left Corregidor and arrived in Australia on March 17, after following a direct order from Roosevelt to withdraw personally, having ignored his first order to do so. He insisted on going by torpedo boat, rather than a submarine, to demonstrate that the Japanese naval blockade could be broken.
The renewed Japanese offensive cleared Bataan on April 9 and forced the surrender of Corregidor and its garrison of 11,500 by MacArthur’s successor, General Jonathan Wainwright, on May 6. The American defense had lasted five months, a respectable performance in the circumstances, especially compared with the British fiasco in Malaya and Singapore and the earlier debacles in Western Europe against the Germans. Roosevelt awarded MacArthur the Congressional Medal of Honor, America’s highest combat decoration. Marshall, an old rival of the recipient, sponsored the award, and MacArthur had been tenacious and agile after losing his air force on the runway, but it is hard to reject the suspicion that Roosevelt was partly motivated from concern for MacArthur’s ability to cause political problems by blaming Roosevelt for the fall of the Philippines, even though American strategists from Mahan on had considered the islands indefensible from a Japanese attack. (It remains a mystery why the Corregidor forces weren’t substantially or entirely evacuated, at least to Mindanao, where they could have joined Filipino guerrillas whom the Japanese never succeeded in eliminating.)
On April 18, in a strike personally commissioned by Roosevelt, General James A. Doolittle flew B-25 bombers off an aircraft carrier, briefly bombed a completely astonished and unprepared Tokyo, and continued on to land in unoccupied China. On arrival in Australia, MacArthur took command of the Southwest Pacific theater and scrapped the Australian plan to defend Australia in the interior of that country. He said Australia must be defended in the Solomon Islands and that the Japanese must not be allowed to set foot in Australia. This proved to be the correct strategy The Japanese were forced to delay their offensive in New Guinea by the Battle of Coral Sea, May 7–8, conducted entirely by carrier forces, with the ships out of sight of each other. It was a narrow American victory, although the United States lost the large aircraft carrier
Lexington
. The Japanese lost one carrier and two others were damaged, and it lost almost a hundred aircraft, to 69 for the United States. This forced Japan to defer its attack on Port Moresby, New Guinea, from where it was proposed to invade Australia. On June 3–6, 1942, the United States, having now cracked the Japanese naval codes, anticipated the attack on Midway Island, caught the Japanese force changing from bomb-loaded to torpedo-loaded planes below decks when the Japanese had belatedly discovered that there were American carriers in the area, and sank four Japanese aircraft carriers, losing only one of their own. It was one of history’s decisive naval battles and forced Japan back in the Central Pacific, and assured the safety of Hawaii. The Australians stopped the Japanese advance on Port Moresby in September, and the Americans launched their main offensive to push them back from Australia with their attack on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in August. This struggle continued to February 1943, and included several naval battles that ultimately led to a decisive American victory on land and sea. (Several of the new American battleships, rushed to completion, performed very capably in these actions and won gunnery duels with Japanese capital ships, and sank two of them.)
The Russians pushed the Germans back to the Ukraine and western Russia from January to the end of April. There were extensive Anglo-American summit and staff conferences in April and May, as the two groups of leaders differed about the timetable of a return to Western Europe. Churchill, visiting Washington, was assuring Roosevelt and Marshall of the tenability of the British position at Tobruk, Libya, in May, when a message was brought in for Roosevelt, which he handed on to Churchill without comment, advising that the British and Australian garrison there had surrendered, to a smaller investing force of Rommel’s. Roosevelt’s only comment was “What can we do to help?” and he and Marshall dispatched 600 Sherman tanks to Egypt on fast freighters around the Cape of Good Hope. They proved very valuable, but not until Rommel, a very agile commander, pushed the British and Commonwealth forces back to El Alamein, about 100 miles west of Cairo. The British held here, on a fairly narrow front between the Mediterranean and the Qattara Depression, which was practically impassable. In the air war, Britain, which had been fighting for its life in the skies of England two years before, now began 1,000 bomber raids over German cities, starting with Cologne on May 30, 1942, Essen in the Ruhr industrial heartland the next day, and the port of Bremen on June 25. The British staged another of their fruitless coastal raids, at Dieppe on August 19, with 6,000 mainly Canadian troops, almost 60 percent of whom were killed, injured, or taken prisoner.
Marshall proposed an attack of 40,000 in northern France, and Churchill argued that they would be repulsed and crushed by the Germans and he was not prepared to make such a sacrifice just to please Stalin, who was agitating for a western front. Churchill proposed attacks in the Mediterranean, starting with North Africa, and Roosevelt eventually agreed to this, and imposed the decision on Marshall, who feared, with some reason, that the British were trying to suck the Americans into Africa, Italy, and the Balkans, and avoid a cross-Channel attack into France and on to Germany. That intelligent fear did not excuse him from the terrible idea that anything useful could be accomplished by landing 40,000 men in France, where the German Wehrmacht would have eliminated them in quick time, a rare conceptual blunder by the American chief of staff (also the chairman of the Combined Allied Military Chiefs, putting him ultimately at the head of the combined U.S.—British Commonwealth forces of 25 million men).
Marshall and Hopkins were sent to London, and Roosevelt, who generally deferred to Marshall, ordered him to be more cooperative with the country’s principal ally. He recognized that until the United States had the preponderance of Allied forces in the theater, it was going to be difficult to take control of theater policy away from the British. The argument in favor of North Africa was to attack Rommel’s rear, take away Pétain’s empire there and probably set the Germans on the Vichy regime in unoccupied France, increase pressure on Mussolini, send a cautionary message to Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal not to consider any derogation from neutrality, and increase the flow of supplies to Russia through the Dardanelles and the Middle East. Roosevelt hoped to launch the attacks, called Torch, in Morocco and Algeria in late October, before the midterm elections, but declined to accelerate the timetable when Marshall advised that a full rehearsal would be necessary, which would push the landings into November.
The Germans defeated the Russians before Kharkov in May and launched their summer offensive, emphasizing a drive to the Caucasus oil fields in the south, on June 28. They moved steadily east, crossed the Don River, and reached Stalingrad on the Volga on August 22, 1942. Ten days later, having captured Sevastopol, in the Crimea, after an eight-month siege, they attacked amphibiously into the South Caucasus. American and even British supplies were flowing into the Soviet Union in vast quantities, and Churchill embarked on a “raw task” in August, making the hazardous trip to Russia, via Gibraltar and south and then east across the Sahara to Cairo, where he appointed Generals Harold Alexander and Bernard L. Montgomery as commanders in Egypt. As agitation for independence in the vast Indian Empire had flared up again, Churchill also boldly ordered the imprisonment of the Indian leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. He was tackling all the raw tasks at once. Churchill then went on to Moscow via Tehran. Churchill’s chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, stared out of the aircraft window and detected only one Soviet slit trench barring the way to the German armies approaching the Caucasus.
This was the first meeting between Churchill and Stalin. Churchill bluntly told Stalin there would be no landings in Western Europe in 1942, but attempted to interest Stalin in the North African landings. Stalin picked up the purpose of such landings instantly but excoriated Churchill for, in effect, cowardice, along with Roosevelt, for being afraid to face the Germans in serious combat. He said the Red Army was taking 10,000 casualties a day and asked why the British were “so afraid of the Germans.” Churchill improvised a response that Eden (who had been recalled to government by Chamberlain and was now Churchill’s lieutenant), Brooke, and the American ambassador to the USSR, Averell Harriman, considered the greatest speech of his entire long and brilliant career as a forensic orator and debater. He reminded Stalin that he (Stalin) and Hitler had started the war, that Britain and its Commonwealth were left completely alone for a year to cope with the Germans, and that he and Roosevelt were rendering every assistance they could to the Russians, having warned Stalin of the impending German attack and been ignored by him, and that he had not come this distance to be insulted, but rather to create a working relationship, as the Allies were sure to win if they did not fall out between themselves.
Churchill’s interpreter was unable to translate the torrent of words (and Churchill fired him that evening), but Stalin’s interpreter, Vladimir Pavlov, persevered and finally Stalin stood up, raised his arm, and said that he didn’t really believe Churchill but deferred to his unconquerable spirit. The visit closed with an amicable drinking bout until 3:30 in the morning, and Churchill took off at dawn for the long return via Tehran. Stalin said he had prepared a nasty surprise for the German drive to the south, but Brooke believed the Germans would overwhelm the Russians, as Marshall believed the Germans would win the battle for Egypt and take the Suez Canal. The civilian leaders, Churchill and Roosevelt, thought differently, on both fronts, and were correct.
3. THE TURNING OF THE TIDE
 
All of the chief theaters came to a head in November 1942. On November 4, Montgomery launched a preparatory artillery offensive and then a general attack at El Alamein that forced Rommel back out of Egypt by November 12. On November 8, MacArthur’s former chief aide, and Marshall’s former chief of war planning, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commanded the Torch landings, at Casablanca, Morocco, and Oran and Algiers, Algeria. The Anglo-American forces were largely embarked directly from the United States, and made a relatively uncontested descent on French North Africa, as the Vichy forces put up token resistance before concluding that the tides of war indicated that too strenuous a resistance would be inappropriate. The slippery, political French admiral, Jean François Darlan, was in North Africa visiting his son, who had been stricken with polio. In order to shut Vichy down, as Pétain, despite Roosevelt’s efforts to placate him by invoking what Churchill called “the rather tired pieties of World War I,” ordered resistance, Roosevelt had Darlan appointed as nominal governor in North Africa (and had his son treated at his Warm Springs Polio Foundation in Georgia). A French military-political farce ensued: de Gaulle was the only French leader apart from Pétain who had any support, but the Americans were trying to support General Henri Giraud, a limited but patriotic escapee from Nazi imprisonment, while handing titular authority to Darlan, a former Vichy premier. Churchill’s chief of the defense staff, Brooke, accurately summarized the three: “Giraud has integrity but is not intelligent; Darlan is intelligent but has no integrity; and de Gaulle has high intelligence and high integrity, but an impossible and dictatorial personality.”
The Germans invaded Vichy France, and the French fleet at Toulon scuttled itself rather than join the Allies or be captured by the Germans, or even sail to a neutral port. It was, as de Gaulle wrote, “the most sterile suicide imaginable.” The British and American forces entered Tunisia on November 15 to try to cut off Rommel’s retreat. They were too late for that and the battle of Africa was reduced to a fierce and prolonged rearguard action by the Germans in Tunisia. The political confusion was rationalized somewhat by the assassination, by a French monarchist, of Darlan on Christmas Eve, 1942. (The monarchists were an eccentric faction in French affairs 112 years after the final overthrow of the Bourbons.) Roosevelt had some friends to the White House on New Year’s Eve, and privately screened the about-to-be-released film
Casablanca
, starring two of his most fervent Hollywood supporters, Humphrey Bogart and Claude Raines. He was about to depart for a conference with Churchill, de Gaulle, and Giraud at Casablanca, and expressed the humorous concern that he might encounter as cynical and confused a group of Frenchmen as the epic film depicted.

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