Roosevelt (79 page)

Roosevelt was delighted with the plan. Capitalizing on the enormous build-up in supply and troops, it would permit crushing blows against Japan even while the war in Europe continued, and it would meet popular demands for a greater effort in the Pacific. After talking with Eisenhower and Halsey in Washington shortly after the new year began, the President told reporters that the greatest possible pressure would be brought to bear on the European and Pacific theaters simultaneously.

Glittering naval and amphibious feats had made this plan seem feasible. In November 1943 Marines and soldiers under Admiral Spruance had counterattacked on Makin and Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, now part of the Japanese outer defenses. War had rarely found a lovelier setting—curving ribbons of golden beaches and lowlands and coral reefs embracing placid lagoons, all brushed by warm winds from the encircling Pacific. But embedded under the sand and the rustling palm trees were hundreds of pillboxes built of concrete five feet thick, with roofs of iron rails laid on coconut logs, protected by outer walls of sand and coral ten feet thick. American planes and warships engulfed these tiny islands in flame; amphibious tractors ground toward shore with their machine guns firing; heavily laden Marines and soldiers stormed over the lacerating reefs and closed in on the enemy, only to see the strong points come alive and respond with withering, close-up fire. The only way to win was to advance foot by foot, enfilading pillboxes, pouring automatic fire into gun slits, lofting grenades, poling in TNT attached to long iron pipes, burning Japanese alive in their dugouts or flushing them out and gunning them down. On tiny Tarawa the Marines lost 1,000 dead and killed 3,000 of the enemy.

The Gilberts proved that American troops could capture powerful island bastions once they closed in on them—and that the Japanese Navy could not keep them away. The crucial step was the seizure of control of the central Pacific by Nimitz’s fast-growing Navy. By 1944 his carriers and cruisers were ranging almost at will in the vast area. Despite occasional disasters—the carrier
Liscombe Bay
was torpedoed with the loss of over two-thirds of her company—the fleet was big enough to feint widely dispersed attacks and then isolate a target and overwhelm it. In February Nimitz’s men seized key islands in the Kwajalein atoll. The Japanese made little effort to counter the heavy onslaught; Imperial Headquarters had decided to let the outlying garrisons conduct delaying actions while the main defense fell back to the perimeter of Timor—western New Guinea—Truk—Marianas. Kwajalein, key point in the atoll, was seized in several days of furious fighting the first week of February; Eniwetok atoll, only 1,000 miles from the Marianas, fell later in the month. The Eniwetok attack had been planned for mid-1944; Spruance had the mobility and the power to accelerate.

The President could be proud of his Navy, Forrestal reported to him during the Kwajalein fighting. The difference in the Navy’s teamwork now over 1942 was as of night and day. “It had the most meticulous plan…a substantial result at an astonishingly small cost….”

To the south and west Halsey and MacArthur were now accelerating their long climb up the twin ladders of New Guinea and the Solomons. American and Australian troops spent most of late 1943 subduing Japanese forces in southeastern New Guinea; then MacArthur leaped four hundred miles to Hollandia on the northern coast, outflanking 50,000 Japanese in between. Next he hopped another three hundred miles to seize Biak Island. Halsey’s forces captured New Georgia during the summer of 1943, gained naval control of the whole northern Solomons area, and he and MacArthur combined forces to seize the Admiralty Islands, bypassing the enemy bastion of Rabaul. Both ladders pointed directly at the Philippines.

In his map room the President studied the great blue charts of the Pacific showing the latest advances and dispositions. He knew that the British Chiefs of Staff were so impressed by his Navy’s Pacific operations that they were yearning for British fleet units to help out in the central Pacific and then take their place on MacArthur’s left flank. Though no less impressed, Churchill was urging his chiefs to put the main weight of the British effort against Japan not in the Pacific, and not even in Burma and China, but in Sumatra and Malaya, with an eye to the recapture of Singapore. In Asia, too, Churchill wanted an underbelly strategy,
with postwar aspects in view. So strongly did he feel, indeed, that he denied even understanding the Pacific plan adopted at Cairo—though he did not deny having initialed it—and this difference between Churchill and his chiefs became so acute during the winter of 1944 that they hinted they might resign.

Roosevelt made his own position clear to Churchill. “My Chiefs of Staff are agreed that the primary intermediate objective of our advance across the Pacific lies in the Formosa—China coast—Luzon area. The success of recent operations in the Gilberts and Marshall indicates that we can accelerate our movements westward.…I have always advocated the development of China as a base for the support of our Pacific advances.” Every effort, he went on, must be made to increase the flow of supplies into China, and this could be done only by increasing the air tonnage or by opening a road through Burma. He urged Churchill to give Mountbatten his energetic encouragement in the campaign in Upper Burma.

Roosevelt’s letter reflected a continued lowering of earlier American hopes that southern China could become the main base for the final assault on the home islands. As both Stilwell’s forces and the British took the offensive in northern Burma during the late winter of 1944, Roosevelt hoped to boost the airlift of supplies over the “Hump” and to push roads and pipelines into China. In personal letters to Roosevelt and Hopkins, Chennault was pleading for more supplies and promising that with them his Fourteenth United States Air Force could sink 200,000 tons of Japanese shipping a month along China’s coast.

“To one with your war experience and special mastery of naval strategy,” Chennault wrote to Roosevelt, “I need hardly point out that the Japanese position in South-east Asia and the South-west Pacific must soon fall, if Japan has not the shipping and air power to support them.” He contended that air attacks on shipping in the months ahead would be far more conclusive than strategic bombing of the homeland.

Roosevelt wrote a warm—and noncommittal—answer. “You are the Doctor,” he ended, “and I approve your treatment. Nevertheless, as a matter perhaps of sentimentality, I have had a hope that we could get at least one bombing expedition against Tokyo before the second anniversary of Doolittle’s flight. I really believe that the morale effect would help!”

The President shared the high hopes of the time for American air power on both continents. From Britain hundreds of B-17’s and B-24’s had been striking German targets throughout 1943, focusing on high-priority objectives such as the ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt and aircraft factories in Regensburg and Bremen. Some of the bombing had been brilliantly effective; other forays
had been tragically expensive—as in the loss of sixty out of 228 bombers attacking Schweinfurt in mid-October—and often the Air Force estimates of damage inflicted and enemy planes shot down were grossly exaggerated. This was not merely a public-relations effort; unwittingly inflated reports and hopes reached the Air Force command and the President himself.

By January 1944, indeed, hard-nosed British Intelligence officers were indicating that Goering’s fighter force was still increasing. Factories were smashed, workers killed, but the vital machine tools were dragged back into place and made to run again. The Germans were now dispersing their key war plants. This situation boded ill both for deep penetration bombing and for
OVERLORD,
which would require almost absolute command of the air. “My personal message to you,” Arnold wrote to the commanders of the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces on New Year’s Day, “this is a MUST—is to,
‘Destroy the Enemy Air Force wherever you find them, in the air, on the ground and in the factories.’ ”
The arrival of long-range fighters in early 1944 gave the bombers vitally needed protection over their targets. Late in February the skies cleared over Germany, and 3,300 bombers from the Eighth Air Force and five hundred from the Fifteenth dropped almost 10,000 tons of bombs, with the loss of 226 bombers. Early in March the Eighth bombed Berlin heavily, for the first time. But in the heart of Europe the Luftwaffe was still putting up fierce resistance.

Berlin, Anzio, Kwajalein, Burma—these were but pinpricks compared with the mighty thrusts in the east. In January 1944 the Russians broke the Leningrad blockade. In February and March Soviet troops outflanked several Nazi divisions in the Korsun salient on the Dnieper and in a “mud offensive” pushed toward Rumania. In April they liberated Odessa. The Russians now were killing and capturing Germans by the tens of thousands; their own losses were frightful as always. Stalin, who had politely seized every opportunity to congratulate Roosevelt on Allied successes during 1943, was silent during the early months of 1944. He, too, was waiting for
OVERLORD
.

A
T THE CENTER OF
a straining, throbbing nation in arms the White House in the winter of 1944 seemed more tranquil than a decade before. Under a mantle of new snow it showed the quiet of the storm center in its graceful aloofness from the hubbub around it. Visitors, remembering the bustle of grandchildren, ballet dancers, left-wing leaders, politicos, intellectuals, young friends of the Roosevelt children, noted Sistie’s and Buzzie’s Flexible Flyers standing unused in a litter of miscellany under the portico; the White House, with its pillars peeling a bit at the bottom, even seemed to need a coat of paint.

The people around the President changed but the structure of human relations around him had a kind of fixity. Hopkins was critically ill and out of commission all through the winter and spring, but Leahy partly took his place on military matters and Byrnes on domestic. Eleanor Roosevelt was traveling as much as ever—she was in Brazil on her thirty-ninth wedding anniversary—but Anna had come for a visit in the fall of 1943 and had decided to stay on to help her father. Marvin McIntyre was dead, but in February the President cheerily announced a “court-martial” for the gray, stooped, unflappable Hassett and presented him with a commission as full presidential secretary, clubbing him a “rare combination of Roget, Bartlett, & Buckle.” Grace Tully and the other secretaries helped preserve an atmosphere of unhurried efficiency. Fala was four and was given a cake, which he refused to eat for the benefit of the photographers.

Roosevelt still followed his old routine, reading and working in bed until late in the morning, whizzing off in his wheel chair to the oval office, dropping into the map room with Leahy to look over shifting military dispositions noted by flags and pins, seeing callers through the afternoon, dictating his pithy little letters for an hour or so, then returning to the mansion for cocktails and a late dinner. But the pace was a bit slower now, the anecdotes a bit longer, the visitors a bit fewer, the evenings a bit shorter.

On the morning of March 4, 1944 the President observed the
start of his twelfth year in office with a reception for two hundred in the East Room. The old warriors of the New Deal were there and the new warriors of the Pentagon and the Navy. Old Dr. Peabody, now eighty-six, in a full and vibrant voice asked divine help for “thy servant, Franklin” and to “save us from all false choices.”

The chief of the warriors was sixty-two and in the winter of 1944 he was ailing and tired. Days after he had recovered from his post-Teheran flu of January he was complaining of headaches in the evening. Those in the White House who saw him the most—especially Anna Boettiger and Grace Tully—became more and more alarmed about his condition. He seemed strangely tired even in the morning hours; he occasionally nodded off during a conversation; once he blanked out halfway through signing his name to a letter, leaving a long scrawl. Finally Anna spoke to Dr. McIntire. The Admiral, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, seemed concerned, too, but curiously resistant to talking with the President. Anna pressed him to speak at least to Eleanor. The upshot was that the President was persuaded to go, on March 27, 1944, to the United States Medical Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, for a check-up. Lieutenant Commander Howard G. Bruenn, a consultant in cardiology who was in charge of the Electro-Cardiograph Department, was detailed to examine him.

The young Navy doctor was called in so hurriedly that he had no time to look over the President’s medical records before greeting his distinguished patient. He quickly felt at ease, though, when Roosevelt came rolling down the corridor in his wheel chair, wisecracking with an old friend and waving genially to the nurses and patients who clustered in the hallways and peeked at him around corners. As the President was lifted to the examining table, he seemed to Bruenn neither disturbed by having to undergo examination nor annoyed by it—indeed, not especially interested in it.

It was Bruenn who was first surprised, then disturbed, and finally shocked as he conducted the examination and then rushed to check the earlier records. Not only was Roosevelt tired and gray of face, slightly feverish, able to move only with difficulty and with breathlessness, and coughing frequently—clearly suffering from bronchitis—but his basic condition was far more serious. Roosevelt’s heart, Bruenn found, while regular in rhythm, was enlarged. At the apex, Bruenn found a blowing systolic murmur. The second aortic sound was loud and booming. Blood pressure was 186/108, compared with 136/78 in mid-1935, 162/98 two years later, and 188/105 in early 1941. Since 1941 there had been significant increase in the size of the cardiac shadow. The enlargement of the heart, which was mainly of the left ventricle, was evidently caused by a dilated and tortuous aorta; and the pulmonary vessels were engorged.

Bruenn’s findings were grim: hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, cardiac failure.

Emergency conferences were held among McIntire, Bruenn, and other Navy doctors, with Drs. James A. Paullin and Frank Lahey brought in as consultants. It was obvious that the patient must be put on a regimen, but how much could a President—especially
this
President—be expected to follow the ordinary heart patient’s routine? One or two weeks of nursing care was suggested, but rejected because of the demands on the President. Bruenn urged that at least Roosevelt be digitalized; there was some resistance, but Bruenn insisted that if that were not done he could take no further responsibility for the case. The doctors finally agreed on a program: digitalis, less daily activity, fewer cigarettes, a one-hour rest after meals, a quiet dinner in the White House quarters, at least ten hours’ sleep, no swimming in the pool, a diet of 2,600 calories moderately low in fat, and mild laxatives to avoid straining.