Roosevelt's Centurions: FDR and the Commanders He Led to Victory in World War II

647 Pages·2013·6.06 MB·English

by  Joseph E. Persico

Copyright © 2013 by Joseph E. Persico
Maps copyright © 2013 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House,
an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Persico, Joseph E.
Roosevelt’s centurions : FDR and the commanders he led to victory in World War II / Joseph E.
Persico.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN: 978-0-67964543-6
1. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945—Military leadership. 2. Generals—
United States—History—20th century. 3. Admirals—United States—History—20th century. 4.
World War, 1939–1945—United States. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns. 6. World War,
1939–1945—Diplomatic history. I. Title.
E806.P467 2012
973.917092—dc23
2011048698
www.atrandom.com
Jacket design: Joe Montgomery
Jacket photograph: FDR Library
v3.1
Preface
W at the highest levels
ARS ARE DIFFERENT NOW, BUT THE HUMAN FACTORS AND FORCES
change little. The story of Franklin Roosevelt and his top military
command sheds light on the perennial issues that confront America
when we are challenged. How should we fight our foes? Where and
when? At what price? Who decides the wisest course when the best
minds disagree? Who should be our allies? And what do we fight for?
FDR answered the final question in his last testament. On Wednesday,
April 11, 1945, the day before he died, Franklin Roosevelt was at work
on a Jefferson Day speech: “Today we are part of the vast Allied force—a
force composed of flesh and blood and steel and spirit—which is today
destroying the makers of war, the breeders of hate in Europe, and in
Asia.” But FDR always looked ahead; he was a man of the future, and the
world to come was on his mind. “Today, science has brought all the
different quarters of the globe so close together that it is impossible to
isolate them one from another,” he wrote, accurately predicting the
emergence of the global civilization that has become the reality of the
twenty-first century.
The leaders he chose to fight for his ideals seem distant now, either
Olympian—Eisenhower, MacArthur, Patton—or dimmed by time—
Marshall, Arnold, King. Yet each of these men held the lives and
destinies of young Americans and the course of democracy itself in their
hands. Who they were and how they did what they did—how they
fought and how they thought—repays our attention, for they were at
work in the greatest war in the history of man.
And at the center—always at the center, in command, smiling yet
steely—was Franklin Roosevelt. Now seen as a marble man, a demigod,
he was in fact all too human, and to understand him as he was—a man,
not a myth—arms us well to judge his successors as they struggle with
issues of war and peace and power.
Had he lived another day, he would have told America: “Today we are
faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must
cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples,
of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at
peace.”
That is the world that the commander in chief and his centurions
fought for. Their story is told here.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1 • The Day We Almost Lost the Army
Chapter 2 • An End of Neutrality
Chapter 3 • From Barbarossa to the Atlantic Charter
Chapter 4 • An Undeclared War
Chapter 5 • Pearl Harbor
Chapter 6 • The President and General MacArthur
Chapter 7 • Philippines Lost, China on the Brink
Chapter 8 • Europe a Debate, Pacific a Victory
Chapter 9 • North Africa: FDR Versus the Generals
Chapter 10 • Sea War, Air War
Chapter 11 • Torch: The Political Education of Dwight Eisenhower
Chapter 12 • The Home Front
Chapter 13 • Unconditional Surrender
Chapter 14 • From Pacific Islands to Desert Sands
Chapter 15 • Italy Invaded, Germany Blasted
Chapter 16 • From Tarawa to Tehran
Chapter 17 • D-Day
Chapter 18 • MacArthur Versus King: FDR’s Decision
Chapter 19 • Europe: Broad Axe Versus the Spear
Chapter 20 • Stilwell Leaves China, MacArthur Returns to the Philippines
Chapter 21 • From the Home Front to Yalta
Chapter 22 • Leveling Japan, Invading Okinawa
Chapter 23 • To Take Berlin?
Chapter 24 • Death of the Commander in Chief
Chapter 25 • Anatomy of Victory
Photo Insert
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Maps
Bibliography
Source Notes
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
Introduction
O M 4, 1933, F D R East Portico of the
N ARCH RANKLIN ELANO OOSEVELT STOOD ON THE
Capitol behind a massive Great Seal of the United States. Four rows of
dignitaries, many arriving in black silk top hats, took their places behind
him. His son James had been positioned strategically should the
paraplegic president, supported only by leg braces, begin to fall. FDR’s
hand rested on the Roosevelt family’s 1686 Bible as Supreme Court chief
justice Charles Evans Hughes swore in the thirty-second president of the
United States. Along with the civilian powers and duties of the office
that Roosevelt assumed that day, he became, under Article II, Section II
of the Constitution, “the commander in chief of the Army and Navy of
the United States.” Ironically, and admirably in a democracy, this oath
usually places a military amateur over the most star-studded generals
and admirals in uniform. Roosevelt reveled in the authority. Throughout
his life, he had displayed an interest in military matters. As a boy he had
indulged dreams of attending the Naval Academy at Annapolis, but his
doting mother could not bear the thought of long separations from her
only child. As a birthday present, FDR once presented his grandson
Curtis Roosevelt with the Navy bible, Jane’s Fighting Ships. His love of the
sea reached its fullest expression when, at age thirty-one, President
Woodrow Wilson appointed him assistant secretary of the navy. When
the United States entered the First World War in 1917, he pleaded with
Wilson to be allowed to resign and get into uniform, but the president
turned him down. Nevertheless, against the resistance of his superior,
navy secretary Josephus Daniels, FDR managed to wangle a mission to
the Western Front in the summer of 1918. While there he wore a
vaguely military dress of his own design, khaki pants tucked into leather
puttees, a gray knee-length coat, a French army helmet, and a gas mask
looped around his neck. Though never under fire, he described in a letter
home the aftermath of battle. After slogging through oozing mud and
around water-logged shell holes, he wrote of “discarded overcoats, rain-
stained love letters … and many little mounds, some wholly unmarked,
some with a rifle stuck bayonet down in the earth with a tag of wood or
wrapping paper hung over it and a pencil scrawl of an American name.”
Fifteen years later, as president, even as he wrestled with the
economic tailspin of the Great Depression, FDR, alarmed by the rise of
Nazism, fascism, and Japan’s imperial ambitions, fought to increase
military spending, eventually winning congressional approval for a $4
billion creation of a true two-ocean Navy. In 1938, while the country
slipped back into the economic doldrums, the president angled for
congressional approval to build 20,000 war planes annually. When in
1940 his Army chief of staff, General George Marshall, lobbied for funds
to double the size of an Army that ranked somewhere between those of
Portugal and Bulgaria, FDR doubled the request.
On September 1, 1939, a transatlantic phone call from William Bullitt,
the U.S. ambassador to France, woke the president from a deep sleep to
alert him that Germany had invaded Poland. The second world war in a
generation had begun. Soon Roosevelt began to unravel the Neutrality
Laws that had tied his hands from aiding the Allies fighting against
Hitler. When in late December 1940 an anxious Winston Churchill
informed him that Britain, facing imminent invasion, was nearly flat
broke and “we will no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and
supplies,” FDR hatched, in the unknowable recesses of his imagination, a
scheme for giving Britain fifty overage destroyers which he justified by
obtaining in exchange several bases of minimal usefulness. This
decidedly unneutral act was followed a year later by Lend-Lease, which
allowed America to pour billions in arms and equipment into Britain and
the Soviet Union, employing the flimsy rationale that the “loaned”
material would be returned after the war. In July 1941 he imposed an
oil embargo on fuel-short Japan, which, it can be argued, contributed to
the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor.
To keep the sea lanes open to Britain, FDR stretched the definition of
the Western Hemisphere to limits that would have astonished President
James Monroe and his doctrine. In a fireside chat in September 1941,
Roosevelt revealed how far he was prepared to go, telling his radio
listeners, “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait
until he has struck before you crush him.” The press quickly branded his
words the “Shoot on Sight” policy. In effect, the president had launched
an undeclared war against Germany on the high seas.
Thus by the time that Japan struck Pearl Harbor on December 7,
1941, and Germany declared war on the United States four days later,
Franklin Roosevelt was already a commander in chief firmly in control
of the nation’s war-making apparatus like no president since Abraham
Lincoln during the Civil War. FDR wore the mantle as comfortably as the
battered, upturned fedora that had become his trademark. In his address
to a joint session of Congress the day after Pearl Harbor, seeking a
declaration of war, he underscored his military powers, saying, “as
commander in chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all
measures be taken for our defense.” At a cabinet dinner, he turned to his
secretary of state, Cordell Hull, who was about to introduce him, and
told Hull to present him not as president, but as commander in chief.
Roosevelt’s direction of America during the war must be judged by
how well he performed the three roles he assumed. The first was as
recruiter in chief, choosing the generals and admirals he deemed capable
of winning a war. How apt were his selections of Marshall to run the
Army, Admiral Ernest J. King to command the Navy, General Henry H.
“Hap” Arnold to build an Air Force, Dwight D. Eisenhower to command
the invasion of Western Europe, and other figures in key roles, Generals
Douglas MacArthur, Omar Bradley, and Joseph Stilwell among the most
prominent? He valued the sober, sensible workhorses, like Marshall and
Eisenhower, but he was also drawn to the show horses with the dash and
panache of a George S. Patton, or a Mark Clark, perhaps as a vicarious
escape from his own immobility. He directed the war from an
environment of controlled chaos, largely self-created. His secretary of
war, Henry L. Stimson, only slightly exaggerating, noted, “He has no
system. He goes haphazard and scatters responsibility among a lot of
uncoordinated men and consequently things are never done.”
Secondly, FDR must be judged as strategist in chief. He was not a
military meddler in a league with Churchill, who poked his nose into the
smallest details and fired generals left and right. Roosevelt was largely
content to have the professionals wage the tactical war. But, on the
strategic level, he retained for himself the consequential decisions. If,
however, he felt a military chief was foot-dragging or wrong, he did not
hesitate to step in, as when he pressured a resistant Admiral King to