Joseph E. Persico (53 page)

Hoover used his closeness to Hopkins to point out the superiority of his organization in the espionage field. He sent a “Dear Harry” message that he knew Hopkins would forward to FDR and in which he described how a truly professional espionage organization performed. He cited as an example the FBI's control of the Abwehr's Long Island shortwave radio station. “The Germans believe that this station is operated by one of the agents whom they dispatched to the United States,” Hoover noted, “but the Bureau has controlled this circuit and operated it for several years.” He added “a rather amusing sidelight on the Bureau's operations,” quoting a message the Abwehr control post in Hamburg had radioed to the compromised station: “Best wishes for 1945 and many thanks for your very valuable cooperation.” Next, Hoover began pouring poison directly into Donovan's well. “As of possible interest to you and the President,” he wrote to Hopkins, he had received word from an informant inside the OSS that Donovan was plotting a propaganda blitz. “The well known American writer, John Steinbeck, author of
The Moon is Down, Of Mice and Men,
” he claimed, “even has been charged with keeping abreast of OSS accomplishments so that he will be in a position to write a book exploiting these experiences when the proper time comes.” Not only was Donovan a publicity hound, Hoover charged, but he was dishonest as well. “OSS intends, according to this source, to represent to the American people that it sends its own members across the lines into enemy territory, although this is not actually the case since, because of many blunders committed by that service, Allied Supreme Headquarters about May of 1944 instructed the OSS Espionage Section to refrain from dispatching any more agents into enemy territory.” The last charge was not true. But Hoover was not too scrupulous about the venom employed.

On November 27, FDR led his retinue to Warm Springs for his longest rest since Pearl Harbor and to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with polio patients. The Secret Service first delivered him in his armored car via backstreets to an obscure railroad siding in the basement of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing Annex on Fourteenth Street. Reporters making the trip had been directed at the last minute to street corners where they would be picked up. They were not told their destination. At the siding, the President boarded his private car, the armored
Ferdinand Magellan
with three-inch-thick windows and weighing nearly twice as much as an ordinary Pullman. The
Ferdinand Magellan
was preceded by a pilot train running one mile ahead to scout any danger to the presidential party along the route. At FDR's request, the engineer rarely exceeded thirty miles an hour. The President said he liked to be able to watch the towns and farms pass by. The truth was that he could not brace his feet, and at faster speeds the swaying of the train pained his thin buttocks.

Back at the White House, running the Map Room was Colonel Richard Park Jr., thirty-three, a politically astute second-generation Army officer who had previously served as an assistant military attaché in Moscow and as Pa Watson's White House assistant. Park owed his appointment as Map Room chief to the maneuvering of his sponsor, General George Strong. Park's duties put him in almost daily contact with Roosevelt, and the colonel would later claim that on December 18, “the day the late President departed for Warm Springs, he authorized me to make an informal investigation of the Office of Strategic Services and report on my findings and conclusions.” Something rings tinny in Park's claim since on that date the President was not leaving for Warm Springs, but en route back to Washington. Park may at some point have received one of FDR's offhand oral assignments to “take a look at the OSS,” though nothing to that effect exists in writing. This opening, nevertheless, was seized upon by Strong and the anti-Donovan cabal in military intelligence as a heaven-sent opportunity finally to polish off the OSS. But FDR's behavior hardly suggests a leader unhappy with his spy chief. At roughly the same time that Park claims to have received this assignment, the President approved a second star for Wild Bill, elevating him to the rank of major general and boosting the salary finally approved for him by $2,200. However seriously, or specifically, or if at all, FDR had directed Park to poke into the OSS, the colonel began to catalogue the agency's sins with relish.

Donovan, optimistic as ever, kept skating along like a man who does not hear the ice cracking. He felt buoyed these days, not threatened. In a note to a government procurement office he wrote, “Cadillac automobile is essential for use in official capacity.” While Colonel Park was indicting his organization, Donovan was amassing proof of its indispensability. Those who rejected the OSS, he maintained, did so at their peril. He could cite Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges's First Army, where his agents had been treated like stepchildren. When the First needed more space on Normandy invasion ships, the OSS team was bumped. When OSS personnel did land, they found themselves without rations, quarters, or transportation, and banned from First Army headquarters. Over the next several months, the OSS was essentially kicked out of that Army. And then, on December 16, the Germans had stunned the Allies, striking through the Ardennes in operation
Wacht am Rhein,
Watch on the Rhine, an offensive that history would record as the Battle of the Bulge. Several factors contributed to the complete surprise the Wehrmacht achieved against First Army positions. Among them, Donovan believed, was the removal of the eyes and ears that the banned OSS detachment could have provided. Ultra, ironically, also contributed to the First's being caught flat-footed. British codebreakers had proved so predictive of German actions for so long that when they intercepted nothing foretelling a drive through the Ardennes, it was assumed nothing would happen. Bletchley Hall had not detected the buildup because German communications, in effect, went off the air. Prior to the offensive, Wehrmacht orders were issued over telephone land lines or hand-delivered by motorcycle. Nature, at this hour, favored the Wehrmacht as thick fog hid the massive German buildup from Allied reconnaissance planes.

On the very day the Germans burst through the Ardennes, Allen Dulles reported from Bern that Hitler was so ill that Himmler, Goebbels, and Martin Bormann, the Führer's secretary, had usurped his powers. “Himmler proposes to keep him in the upper background as a sort of [President Paul] von Hindenburg,” Dulles cabled Washington. But Hitler was still in charge of his destiny, and Dulles could not have been more wrong.

On December 19, President Roosevelt, accompanied by his cousin Daisy Suckley, was back in the White House after three weeks at Warm Springs. For the previous two days he had been receiving depressing reports from the Map Room describing the Ardennes breakthrough. Germany was supposed to be beaten, driven backward onto its own soil and incapable of conducting an offensive. That fall, GIs strung along a front running from Belgium to the Swiss border had talked of returning home by Christmas. And then the panzers had exploded out of the forest. In its stealth and sweep, Hitler's bold stroke was something of a European Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt now stayed glued to the charts covering the Map Room's walls, following grim-faced officers who moved red pins forward, representing German forces, and green pins back, representing the American army. Casualties were steep. The initial ferocity of the assault practically annihilated the American 28th and 106th Divisions. FDR did not question his commanders as to why they had been so completely caught off guard. He did not meddle in military maneuvering. He was somber, but remained calm. “In great stress, Roosevelt was a strong man,” observed General Marshall, another model of self-control.

*

Late in December, with the Battle of the Bulge still raging, the President summoned Henry Stimson to the White House. The secretary of war brought with him a six-foot Army officer with cold blue eyes, heavy jowls, and a swelling waist. General Leslie Groves gave an overall impression of heaviness—heavy of features, of girth, of purpose. He was a West Pointer and a get-it-done Army engineer who had overseen construction of the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, in a record sixteen months. He now ran the Manhattan Project. Groves, whose only vice appears to have been fueling his boundless energy with frequent candy bars, was sketched neatly by a fellow engineer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, as “the biggest sonovabitch I've ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals. He had an ego second to none. . . . He had absolute confidence in his decisions and he was absolutely ruthless in how he approached a problem to get it done.”

The President studied this bulldog figure as he and Stimson discussed the disaster in the Ardennes. The bloodshed was appalling, and before the battle ended, over twenty-one thousand American GIs would die. Obviously, the Wehrmacht retained a sharp sting. As soon as an atom bomb could be ready, FDR said he wanted it dropped on Germany. Groves, for once, seemed nonplussed. But he quickly recovered and said that bombing Germany posed a serious risk. What risk? the President wanted to know. If the bomb turned out to be a dud, Groves warned, the Germans would then have a model to build one of their own, including unspent fissionable material. A failure would be the next thing to handing the Germans an atomic bomb. Furthermore, the discussion was academic, Groves pointed out, since a workable bomb was still months away. Were Groves's arguments sincere or a rationale to conceal a veiled racism? Oddly, while worrying about a dud falling into the hands of the Germans, he expressed no such concern about the Japanese.

Japan, all along, had been targeted to feel the fury of the first atom bomb. When FDR and Churchill had met in the President's snuggery at Hyde Park the previous September to discuss the weapon and to disparage Niels Bohr, they signed an aide-mémoire that read: “. . . [W]hen a ‘bomb' is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.”

The exponential destructiveness of an atomic weapon began to raise moral issues beyond those posed by conventional modes of killing. Just before the shock of the Bulge, Alexander Sachs, who had first brought the possibility of an atomic bomb to Roosevelt's attention in 1939, came again to the White House. Between the two compulsive talkers, Sachs managed to keep FDR quiet long enough to read from a memorandum he had prepared. “Following a successful test,” he noted, “there should be arranged (a) a rehearsal demonstration before a body including internationally recognized scientists from all Allied countries and, in addition, neutral countries supplemented by representatives of the major faiths; (b) that a report on the nature and the portent of the atomic weapon be prepared by the scientists and other representative figures; (c) that, thereafter, a warning be issued by the United States and its allies in the Project to our major enemies in the war, Germany and Japan, that atomic bombing would be applied to a selected area within a designated time limit for the evacuation of human and animal life, and finally (d) in the wake of such realization of the efficacy of atomic bombing, an ultimatum demand for immediate surrender by the enemies be issued, in the certainty that failure to comply would subject their countries and peoples to atomic annihilation.” As Sachs finished reading, FDR raised a few points he wanted clarified, all the while nodding in seeming agreement. As Sachs later described the end of their conversation, he urged the President, “For God's sake tell someone” about conducting a nonlethal test, to which Roosevelt answered that he would have Pa Watson look into the matter. Sachs left the White House believing that when the bomb became operational it would be demonstrated first against an unpopulated target, giving the enemy fair warning to surrender and save its people from mass slaughter. Sachs also left that day aware of something he had not observed before, long pauses in the President's speech in which FDR “was there, yet in a sense not there.”

No evidence exists that Roosevelt ever did anything about Sachs's plea for a nonlethal demonstration. To the contrary, Jimmy, his son and frequent aide-de-camp, recalled, “Only I know that my father was prepared to drop an atom bomb on Japan.” No reason existed for FDR to expect a swift end to the war in the Pacific. The Japanese had yielded every beach, jungle, and cave on Pacific atolls grudgingly, producing horrendous casualties on both sides. FDR was shown an interview that an Argentine diplomat who had served in Tokyo later gave to an American colleague. The Argentine reported, “Regarding the morale of the Japanese people . . . there was complete confidence in victory—indeed of victory's having been achieved. . . . The Ministry of Information has launched a slogan of a ‘hundred-years war' and this has been accepted without criticism by the rank and file.” The Argentine provided another curious insight into the effect of the war on Japanese culture: “Since 1943 the government has increasingly applied puritanical measures with the result that both the prostitutes and the geishas have enormously diminished in number; the geishas have diminished by ninety percent from about 40,000 to 4,000.”

Germany's capacity and intention to develop nuclear weapons remained unknown to the Allies. By 1943, the thorough Leslie Groves had created his own intelligence operation to find out where the enemy stood. Either intentionally or unthinkingly, he called the operation Alsos, the Greek word for “grove,” and put it in charge of Boris T. Pash, a former high school teacher, now in Army G-2, a trim, tough, balding, and flamboyant Slav who had previously earned a reputation for hunting down Communists. Pash took his Alsos team to Europe close behind the advancing troops. While Paris was still being liberated, Pash raced under German gunfire to the Radium Institute on the rue Pierre Curie to seize whatever nuclear material or research he could find. He ransacked a German physics lab on the grounds of the Strasbourg Hospital. He and his team pored over reams of captured documents. “We studied the papers by candlelight for two days and nights until our eyes began to hurt,” Pash later wrote. “The conclusions were unmistakable. The evidence at hand proved definitely that Germany had no atom bomb and was not likely to have one in any reasonable form.” The British concurred. A report issued in January 1944 by the Directorate of Tube Alloys found, “The Germans are not in fact carrying out large scale work on any aspect of T.A. [atomic weapons]. . . . [T]he German work is now confined to academic and small scale research.”