Joseph E. Persico (45 page)

Their betrayal of their nation's secrets seems malevolent after forty years of Cold War conditioning. But during the war years, their political godhead, the USSR, was America's ally in the struggle against Nazism and fascism. They judged their actions not as treasonous, but simply as a way of making sure that the ally was not shortchanged. Roosevelt was highly sensitive to the fact that the Red Army was losing eight Ivans for every Allied soldier killed in battle. He told Donovan, “Bill, you must treat the Russians with the same trust you do the British. They're killing Germans every day, you know.” As a gesture of solidarity, the President asked John Franklin Carter to get for him a recording of a Red Army marching song he liked. “Pappy thought American words could be put to the one he had heard about,” Carter noted in his diary. How much different were their meetings with and deliveries to Soviet agents, the American spies could argue, than Roosevelt and Churchill's conferences with Stalin and military aid sent to the Soviet Union? Did they not all serve the same end?

What FDR felt about the nature of communism was best revealed in a note he sent to his Navy secretary, Frank Knox. They had been discussing hiring radio operators who were known Communists. Roosevelt was not opposed. “The Soviet people in Moscow,” he told Knox, “are said to have little liking for the American Communists and their methods—especially because it seems increasingly true that the communism of twenty years ago has practically ceased to exist in Russia. At the present time their system is much more like a form of the older Socialism, conducted, however, through a complete dictatorship combined with an overwhelming loyalty to the cause of throwing every German out of Russia.”

Not everyone in the administration was as sanguine about the USSR as Roosevelt. Adolf Berle described himself as “[h]aving had my fingers burned in Russian affairs several times in my life.” Berle felt no hesitation at blocking the Soviets. When they asked to send engineers into American war plants, he warned: “The list of the military secrets requested itself shows very efficient espionage.” He noted in his diary: “. . . [T]he engineers they have wished to let in the plants are the same ones who were doing espionage for Russia and Germany” until the Nazis attacked the USSR. As far as Berle was concerned, “The Russian denouement is unpredictable. There might be a Peace of Brest-Litovsk,” he warned the White House, referring to Russia's dropping out of the fight against Germany in World War I.

The Army, Navy, and FBI, guided by Berle, allowed Soviet engineers into the United States to inspect only lend-lease equipment destined for the Soviet Union, and not another gun. It was not until the spring of 1944 that the United States shared the Norden bombsight with the Red Air Force. At one point, Russian navy officials asked the Soviet foreign office to pressure the U.S. embassy in Moscow not only to deliver “specifications of the latest [American] battleship, cruiser, destroyer, and submarine,” but to provide the American Navy's secret coding devices. The U.S. naval attaché in Moscow, a Captain Duncan, upon learning of the request, warned Washington that only misplaced “sentiment or plain stupidity” could favor the Russians' request.

How close the Soviets came to penetrating the American government at the highest level is suggested in Vice President Henry Wallace's alleged intentions should he ever become president. Wallace is said to have planned to appoint Laurence Duggan as his secretary of state and Harry Dexter White as his secretary of the Treasury. Given that FDR did not live out his final term, only Harry Truman's displacement of Wallace as vice president in 1944 derailed this possibility.

Chapter XXI

If Overlord Fails

AS 1944 opened, the fifth year of the war for Britain, the third for the United States, the great guessing game was on: Where and when would the Western Allies strike the inevitable blow against the Nazi-held continent, the second front? In the meantime, the offensive from the air continued to deliver fearsome punishment to Germany. City after city lay in ruin. In four consecutive raids on Hamburg, 50,000 civilians were killed and 800,000 left homeless. German towns were being incinerated at a rate of two per month. Given this relentless leveling, strategists pondered whether the enemy might be defeated more cheaply from the air than by a massive bloodletting on the ground. Early in the year, President Roosevelt received an imaginative assessment commissioned by General Hap Arnold. Arnold had asked several of the country's leading historians to review “all secret and confidential intelligence in our possession.” The scholars, including Carl Becker of Cornell, Henry S. Commager of Columbia, and Dumas Malone of Harvard, concluded, “. . . [T]here is no substantial evidence that Germany can be bombed out of the war. . . . Surrender will come when, through lack of adequate air defense, Germany finds herself unable to maintain ground operations. . . .” In short, the war had to be won by the foot soldier; airmen could only speed the day.

Bill Donovan forwarded to FDR an Allen Dulles appraisal drawn from Fritz Kolbe and other anti-Nazi Germans traveling between their homeland and Switzerland. “The OSS representative in Bern sees no evidence that the German morale has been greatly affected by recent bombings. . . . There is no longer any such thing as morale in Germany, as we normally use the term,” Dulles reported. “There are in Germany millions of tired, discouraged, disillusioned, bewildered, but stubbornly obedient people who see no alternative other than to continue their struggle.”

Hitler's detachment from reality was evident in a Magic decrypt of a cable Ambassador Oshima sent to Tokyo at the height of the Allied bombings. While thousand-plane armadas were turning Germany's cities into rubble and ash, Oshima reported that Hitler had ordered his armaments minister, Albert Speer, to proceed at once with a plan for rebuilding Germany as soon as the war was won. Speer, a realist, put together a team of urban planners and went through the motions in order to indulge his Führer's fantasy, while continuing to build tanks, guns, and planes.

The code word Overlord, thanks to Cicero, was now known to the enemy, but it existed in a vacuum, revealing neither time nor place. FDR's military staff advised him that, if the Allies were to achieve tactical surprise, the invasion site and the moment had to be concealed from the enemy until four hours before the troops hit the beaches. Should the Germans divine the plan as little as forty-eight hours in advance, Overlord was doomed. The feints, twists, and deceptions of Bodyguard and Fortitude remained crucial.

An unhappy, though talented actor in the Fortitude charade was one of FDR's favorite generals. The President had known George S. Patton Jr. since the latter's days as a dashing cavalry officer at Washington's Fort Myer. Patton was widely quoted around the capital for his response after spending the night in the company of a beautiful woman not his wife. “A man who does not screw will not fight,” was the general's defense. Two weeks before the North African invasion, FDR had invited Patton to join him at the White House to hear what a soldier whose intelligence and bluntness he admired thought about Operation Torch. Soon after the desert victory, Patton regaled the President with a cabled account of a tea given by the sultan of Morocco. “During the tea some screams were heard followed by two shots,” Patton wrote the President. “The Sultan excused himself and walked out with great dignity and after a while returned. . . . He said that one of the panthers in the museum had made a very beautiful leap . . . and started to eat up one of the ladies of the harem, but some of the guards had shot it.” Patton closed, “The lady was only cut on the throat, and it made little difference as she was not a wife but a concubine. With this slight interruption the tea went on.” Finishing Patton's account, FDR told his secretary, “This report must be kept secret until after the close of the war. . . . Patton is a joy and this report of his first days in French Morocco is a classic.”

But by 1944, Patton's armor was badly tarnished. His brilliant generalship in North Africa and Sicily had been overshadowed by his slapping of two GIs hospitalized for combat fatigue. Eisenhower, consequently, sidelined him. On D-Day, Patton would not be storming the beaches of France with his onetime subordinate General Omar Bradley or with his detested rival Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Instead, the proud, haughty, theatrical soldier would serve as a decoy, a star in the Fortitude deceptions.

Two massive army groups, Montgomery's 21st and what would later become General Omar Bradley's 12th, began assembling in southern and southwestern England for the cross-Channel strike. A third force, the First United States Army Group, FUSAG, supposedly massing in southeastern England opposite the Pas de Calais, was commanded by Patton. One hitch spoiled the FUSAG command for this ambitious soldier. Its genuine units were not under his command but actually under his rivals, Bradley and Montgomery; and the armies he did command were fictitious, except for the Third Army, which was still in the States. To foster the impression that he commanded real troops, Patton moved around England with conspicuous secrecy. He made fire and brimstone speeches to authentic units, cautioning the GIs, on one occasion, “A man must be alert all the time if he expects to stay alive. If not, some German son of a bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of shit!” And after they had beaten the Germans, he told the GIs, they were going to lick those “purple-pissin' Japs!”

Stalin, at Tehran, had agreed to perform as an accomplice in Bodyguard. Russia's assignment was to leak intelligence suggesting that the Red Army could not possibly launch a major offensive on the eastern front until at least July; and the Western Allies added clues that D-Day could not take place until the landings could be coordinated with a Russian campaign. The Russians even agreed to make actual diversionary raids at misleading sites. For all the cooperation the Soviets offered, however, the Western Allies dragged their feet in confiding the D-Day secret to their partner. The initial policy had been to say nothing. As late as November 1943, the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed General John R. Deane, heading the American military mission in Moscow, “. . . [D]etails for the preparation for the operation Overlord should not be disclosed to the Russians.” But this exclusion proved impractical after the deal made at Tehran to coordinate D-Day with a Soviet offensive in the East. Stalin demanded to be told the precise details and date of the invasion. On April 14, 1944, Churchill sent a cable asking FDR, “Would it not be well for you and me to send a notice to Uncle Joe [Stalin] about the date of Overlord?” Roosevelt cabled back that a message had already been sent to General Deane and to British General Brocas Burrows in Moscow instructing them to inform the Russians, “. . . [I]t is our firm intention to launch Overlord on the agreed date” May 31, which might be pushed back or forward a day or two depending on first light, the tides, the moon, and the weather. The President added that Burrows and Deane should “pay a handsome tribute to the magnificent progress of the Soviet armies” to encourage Stalin to begin carrying out the simultaneous attack.

The Russians, though reluctantly let into the secret, did make one extraordinary contribution to Overlord. Over a year before, the Red Army had mauled Germany's 320th Infantry Division, capturing its codes and classified documents. The 320th was the force that had smashed Allied troops at Dieppe on August 19, 1942, during a small-scale landing launched to test German coastal defenses in France. After bloodily beating off the landing force, the 320th's officers prepared a critique of all the mistakes the Allies had made, a virtual how-not-to manual. The Russians turned over this analysis to the British, who shared it with the Americans. An Army G-2 officer described the critique of Dieppe as “probably the most important document exploited in preparation for D-Day.”

Kept from the D-Day secret was another presumed ally. General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the French Committee of National Liberation, was now operating out of Algiers. The proud, sensitive De Gaulle had, by the spring of 1944, managed to alienate both Roosevelt and Churchill by styling himself the head of the French government-in-exile. The two leaders were willing to accept De Gaulle as commander of Free French forces and of the French resistance, but they resented his presumption that he led France. So annoyed was Roosevelt with De Gaulle's arrogance that at one point he suggested the imperious general be arrested and kept under guard. Churchill declared, “We call him Joan of Arc, and we're looking for some bishops to burn him.”

FDR cabled Churchill about the Free French, “Personally, I do not think that we can give military information to a source which has a bad record of secrecy.” The Prime Minister agreed, telling FDR that De Gaulle should not be allowed to leave Algiers for London until “D-Day at dawn.” Still, keeping De Gaulle in the dark proved ticklish. As Churchill advised FDR, “The resistance army numbers 175,000 men.” These underground fighters were counted on, once Overlord was launched, to blow up bridges and rail lines, to harass German troops from the rear, to do everything possible to slow the shift of enemy reinforcements to the invasion beaches. At an opportune moment, Roosevelt and Churchill wanted De Gaulle to go on the air to appeal to the French people to support the invasion. But, kept in the dark as Overlord's stepchild, the Frenchman was not eager to cooperate. Making De Gaulle privy to the operation too soon, however, risked having the crucial date leaked to the French underground, which the Germans had penetrated. Telling him too late would negate the value of his appeal to his countrymen. In the end, FDR and Churchill agreed that De Gaulle should be brought to England, but not until twenty-four hours before D-Day, to be briefed by Eisenhower. Ike was to lead him to believe that the assault on the Normandy beaches was only a diversion. The misled De Gaulle grudgingly agreed to make the broadcast to his people.

FDR worried about another soft spot in security. Obeying the old adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, many Irish, in their hatred for the British, behaved sympathetically toward Germany. Early in the war, FDR had been angered by Irish prime minister Eamon de Valera's refusal to grant the United States anti-submarine bases on Ireland's west coast. Now, with Overlord approaching, Bill Donovan reported to Roosevelt, “[A] great deal of information pertaining to Allied activities in England and Ulster comes from the German embassy in Dublin.” Fritz Kolbe, in scanning the Nazi foreign office correspondence which he passed to Allen Dulles in Bern, reported that German diplomats in Dublin had managed to identify six hundred air installations in England involved in Overlord.

When FDR learned that agents of the German intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), equipped with wireless radios, were parachuting outside Galway, he decided that Irish neutrality had been stretched far enough. He found particularly disconcerting that every move of the U.S. XV Corps, stationed in Ulster and preparing to transfer to England for Overlord, was reported to the German General Staff by Abwehr agents in Ireland. FDR instructed the American ambassador, David Gray, to deliver a note to President De Valera charging that Irish neutrality “continues to operate in favor of the Axis powers.” The note ended with Roosevelt's demand that the Irish shut down the German and Japanese embassies in Dublin, seize their radios, and sever diplomatic relations with Tokyo and Berlin. De Valera, as much the politician as FDR, knew how far he dared push his countrymen in a tilt toward Britain. Consequently, Roosevelt's pressure only partially succeeded. Police from the Irish Special Branch did raid the Axis missions in Dublin and seize their radios. But the Irish government did not end its relations with Germany or Japan.

That unimpeachable source, Ambassador Oshima, continued as Roosevelt's unwitting eyes and ears, revealing the prized secret of the enemy's strength. Early in 1944, Oshima saw Hitler and, as usual, faithfully reported to Tokyo the Führer's words. In this conversation, Hitler confided to him, “Now as for the question of the second front in the west; no matter when or at what point it comes I have made adequate preparations for meeting it. In Finland we have seven divisions; in Norway, twelve; in Denmark, six; in France, including Belgium and the low countries, sixty-two. . . . I have got together as many armored divisions as possible; among them are four SS Divisions and the Hermann Goering Divisions, so you see what I have been able to do in the way of preparing. But how vast is that sea coast! It would be utterly impossible for me to prevent some sort of landing somewhere or other. But all they can do is establish a bridgehead. I will stop, absolutely, any second front in the real sense of the word.” Hitler described his trump card. “Then too, there is that revenge against England. We are going to do it principally with rocket-guns. Everything is now ready. Practice shows that they are extremely effective. . . . I cannot tell you just when we will begin, but we are going to really do something to the British Isles.” Oshima pressed for more detail on the second front and asked, “Does Your Excellency have any idea where they may land?” “Honestly, I can say no more than that I do not know,” Hitler answered. “For a second front, beyond any doubt, the most effective area would be the Straits of Dover, but to land there would require great readiness and its difficulty would be great. Consequently, I don't think that the enemy would run such a risk. On the other hand, along the Bordeaux coast and in Portugal the defenses are relatively weak, so this zone might be a possibility.” Wherever the blow was struck, Hitler assured his ally, “We Germans have plenty of plans, and listen, I don't want you to say anything about them to a living soul.”