PART 5: ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA:

I do not believe any worse words could have been used...Unconditional Surrender...what a punk,asshole has so much blood on his hands,it has become UTTERLY ridiculous,and as a country,we STILL suffer the direction it set the country on!!...Might is NOT always Right...

ROOSEVELT'S ROAD TO RUSSIA

By GEORGE N. CROCKER

Earth is sick And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words Which States and Kingdom! utter when they talk Of truth and justice. 

WORDSWORTH

PART THREE 

Wastebasket Road: 

Casablanca to Yalta 

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace, and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war. 

WINSTON CHURCHILL in 1930 

(In his early autobiography, 

A Roving Commission) 

Chapter X 

CASABLANCA 

IN 1943, BEFORE he had ever met Marshal Joseph Stalin, President Roosevelt said to William C. Bullitt: 

I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work for a world democracy and peace.1 

Mr. Bullitt had been the American Ambassador in Moscow and in Paris and was well informed on European history and politics. He was a man of deep patriotism. One may imagine the amazement, if not.dismay, with which he heard these words from the lips of the President of the United States. From that moment on, he feared for the safety of Western civilization. 

Early in 1942, President Roosevelt served notice on Prime Minister Winston Churchill of his plan to ingratiate himself with Stalin and of ·his intention ·to brook no interference with this design. He served the notice in writing: 

I know you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all  your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do SO.2 

This was a stern caveat to Mr. Churchill and all of his "top people." Throughout the war, in all the delicate and fateful decisions that were to be made, Winston Churchill had to take account of Roosevelt's attitude toward Stalin. Since his own country was in so many ways dependent upon American assistance, he was often in a position of discreet, if uncomfortable, deference to the President, who was patently a man of implacable sentiments and a capacity for vindictiveness when crossed. 

During 1942, aid to Russia, by order of the President, had top priority in the beehive of activity that was Washington, D.C. Anyone who worked in the old Munitions Building in those days or in the new, sprawling Pentagon, gradually spreading its wings on the other side of the Potomac, and who had anything to do with the allocation of war supplies will remember, perhaps with a touch of irony, the sanctity that seemed to surround the "Russian requisitions." No doubt Mr. Roosevelt was right that Stalin "thought he liked him," as he boasted to Churchill. But at this point, Stalin's fondness for Mr. Roosevelt could only be based on the latter's manifold bounties to the Soviet Union, for he had never yet come face to face with the famous Roosevelt personal charm. Mr. Roosevelt, manifestly, was confident that the Russian dictator would "like" him even better if he could meet him in the flesh. Toward the end of the year, his desire for a meeting with Stalin was so ardent that Stalin could easily interpret it as a passion to be patiently nurtured. 

The Russian was superbly wary. Twice he turned down what Hopkins called the President's "urgent invitations" to a Big Three conference, pleading that he was too busy directing his armies to absent himself "even for a day." Since the tide on the Russian front had already turned against the -German invaders and since Mr. Roosevelt offered to fly to Khartoum or to some other place convenient to Stalin, it seems most likely that Stalin simply did not consider the timing propitious, from his standpoint, for such a conference. He was doing well as things were. American weapons, airplanes, vehicles, even machinery for factories, were pouring into the Soviet Union in prodigious quantities. He had not had to commit himself to anything specific. There is a Russian word-vynoslivost, "lasting a thing out"- for a quality said to be congenital in the Tartar-Slavs and which was not lacking in Joseph Stalin. Why should he risk a personal conference at this point? In a few weeks the German failure at Stalingrad would culminate in a debacle. He could stride into a later conference as a military hero, which, as he had good reason to anticipate, would only increase the President's adulation. He was in no hurry to enjoy the pleasure of Mr. Roosevelt's company, for in the middle of December, in declining for the second time, he wrote to him: "I too must express my deep regret that it is impossible for me to leave the Soviet Union either in the near future or even at the beginning of March.... So far I do not know what exactly are the problems which you, Mr. President, and Mr. Churchill intend to discuss at our joint conference. I wonder whether it would not be possible to discuss these problems by way of correspondence between US."3 Mr. Roosevelt's ardor was not cooled by this rebuff. On the contrary, his assiduity to please Stalin was to grow even more feverish. Meanwhile, he decided to have a conference with Churchill in January in North Africa. 

General John R. Deane,whose conclusion was based on his personal observations in dealing with the Russians during the war (he was two years in Moscow), wrote that "in Russian eyes, the war with Germany and Japan was only the first phase in the ultimate struggle between Communism and Capitalism.')4 The real enemy was the whole capitalistic world. It was, of course, the business of the President of the United States to know that also." The same conclusion was compelled by· the writings of Lenin and Stalin, which could not have escaped the attention of the President and certainly not that of Harry Hopkins. These gentlemen could also have known, if indeed they did not, what Hitler plainly perceived, i.e., that the Soviet dictatorship, having consolidated its power, was, in the fourth and fifth decades of the twentieth century, inflamed with an ambition for expansion in Europe and Asia that dwarfed the ancient hopes of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine and that but bided an opening. 

Joseph Stalin could hardly have done better for his cause if he had attended the Casablanca Conference in person. There, Franklin D. Roosevelt did him two favors. One was tentative, but the other was final and of historic importance. For the first time he threw cold.water on the incipient British plan to strike at Germany through the Balkans and thus frustrate the postwar domination of central and eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. This issue was to arise again later. 

Roosevelt pronounced "unconditional surrender" as the only condition which could bring the wars in Europe and Asia to a close. This meant that Germany and Japan, the two nations whose geographical position and historic roles made them the only bulwarks against Communist expansion, were not only to be defeated but were also to be made prostrate. This, in the words of Lord Hankey, "removed the barriers against communism in Europe and the Far East and greatly decreased the security of the whole world."5 Hanson W. Baldwin has said that it was "perhaps the biggest political mistake of the war."6 For the United States and many other nations, it was a calamity.' 7[No shit Sherlock DC]

If Franklin D. Roosevelt had been sent to the Casablanca Conference by Stalin as a personal envoy, he could not have served his principal more faithfully. In effect, he said so himself. According to his son Elliott, who was present at the time, he hatched up the phrase "unconditional surrender" one day while having lunch and then bared his thoughts on it in these precise words: 

"Of course, it's just the thing for the Russians. They couldn't want anything better. Unconditional surrender," he repeated, thoughtfully sucking a tooth. Uncle Joe might have made it up himself." 8 

There is, by common agreement, one subject on which Elliott Roosevelt had intimate, man..to-man knowledge: his father's feelings toward Stalin and the Soviet Union. We are fortunate to be given this insight. 

Of course the President took Harry Hopkins with him to Casablanca. They went together by train to Miami, in the greatest secrecy, and then flew to Africa via Trinidad. En route, Hopkins wrote his usual diary..like notes. "I shall always feel," he said, "that the reason the President wanted to meet Churchill in Africa was because he wanted to make a trip.... He liked the drama of it. But above all, he wanted to make a trip."9 However, there was need for a conference somewhere. A military program for 1943 had to be decided upon. As Hopkins wrote, "On the assumption that we are going to drive the Germans out of Africa it became clear to me that there was no agreed-upon plan as to what to do next. We had to strike somewhere-across the Channel, at Sardinia, Sicily or through Turkey. But where ?"10 Harry had his own ideas. They definitely excluded Turkey or any place contiguous to the Balkans. 

The war was going well everywhere. In the Pacific area, the strangle hold of the Japanese navy had been broken. In the Battle of the Coral Sea in May, 1942, the American fleet sank fifteen Japanese warships, including an aircraft carrier and four cruisers. This was followed in June by the great victory at Midway, where four Japanese aircraft carriers, three cruisers, and three destroyers went to the bottom. In the naval battle off Guadalcanal in November, the Japanese lost a battleship, eight cruisers, six destroyers, and a large number of transports. In all of these engagements, American losses were proportionately small. In Washington, preference was given to the European and African theaters, and General Douglas MacArthur was obliged to beg for logistical support for his amphibious operations in the Pacific; but there was no longer any doubt that Japan's desperate gamble was doomed. She could not sustain the communications and transportation upon which her new empire depended. Her ultimate defeat was a matter of timing. 

Likewise, Hitler's bold gamble in Russia looked like a failure. Napoleon's disaster of 1812 was being re-enacted, but this time the Germans were the victims of Russia's inhospitable vastness. The summers of 1941 and 1942 had passed, and the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe had not achieved their victory. On the contrary, it was now the Russians who were on the offensive. Churchill wrote in a military memorandum on December 3, 1942: "The Russians have not been defeated or weakened in the campaign of 1942. On the contrary, it is Hitler who has been defeated and·the German Army which has been very grievously reduced. General von Thoma [a prisoner of the British in Egypt] was heard to say that the one hundred eighty German divisions on the Russian front are in many cases little more than brigades."11 The Sixth German Army was encircled at Stalingrad, and its destruction was imminent. (On January 31, 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad ended with the capture of Field Marshal von Paulus and sixteen of his generals, together with all that remained of the surrounded forces-a German disaster which Churchill says "ended Hitler's prodigious effort to conquer Russia by force of arms and destroy Communism.")12 

The war in the air over Europe had simmered down to a grim fulfillment of the terror-breathing words hurled by Churchill the previous June-words which surpassed, in their promise of indiscriminate horror, any precedent in the annals of human warfare: 

I may say that as the war advances, German cities, harbors, and centers of production will be subjected to an ordeal the like of which has never been experienced by a country in continuity, severity, and magnitude.13 

Neville Chamberlain, Churchill's predecessor, had shrunk from unrestricted bombing of civilian targets, as had Hitler until the R.A.F.. initiated it. The Luftwaffe had been conceived as an instrument of tactical offensive to assist fast-moving armies.. When Warsaw and Rotterdam were bombed, German armies were at their gates. As Captain Liddell Hart (Britain's foremost military analyst) points out, "Bombing did not take place until German troops were fighting their way into these cities and thus conformed to the old rules of siege bombardment."14 A decision by the British Air Ministry on May 11, 1940, not the villainy of Adolf Hitler, originated "total war." It was this decision that instituted the mass destruction of civilian populations by aerial bombardment for its own sake. It implemented the new plan of warfare conceived by British experts in 1936 when the Bomber Command was organized. All this has been revealed in two extraordinary books by British authors of unimpeachable authority. The one book, proudly bearing the title Bombing Vindicated, was written by'J. M. Spaight, C.B.., C.B.E., former Principal Secretary of the Air Ministry. The other, written by the wartime Chief of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, is called Bombing Offensive.15 As Spaight confirms, Hitler had been genuinely anxious to reach an agreement with Britain "confining the action of aircraft to the battle zones" and had reluctantly undertaken to retaliate not earlier than three months after the R.A.F. had commenced unrestricted bombing of the German cities. Air Marshal Harris, it seems, had only contempt for the Luftwaffe chiefs; they had not provided themselves with armed bomber planes designed for attacks on enemy civilian populations. They got into that game, as he puts it, "much too late in the day."16 

In the early period of the war, Churchill fumed, not because Hitler dropped bombs on English cities, but because he did not. General de Gaulle, in his memoirs (published in 1955), describes Churchill's frustration: 

I can still see him at Chequers one August day, raising his fists toward the sky as he cried: "So they won't come!" 

"Are you in such a hurry," I said to him, "to see your towns smashed to bits?" 

"You see," he replied, "the bombing of Oxford, Coventry, Canterbury, will cause such a wave of indignation in the United States they'll come into the war." 

Craftily, Churchill provoked the Germans to bomb England. "Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany," Spaight writes. "There was no certainty, but there was a reasonable probability that our capital and our industrial centers would not have been attacked if we had refrained from attacking those of Germany." 

By the time Winston Churchill set out for the Casablanca Conference in January, 1943, the Luftwaffe's blitz on English shores had long since failed (as Spaight and Harris explain, the Germans were never prepared for such warfare). On the other hand, no German in all of the Reich could go to bed at night without a gnawing fear in his heart that British planes would drop bombs on his house before morning. At bases in England, our own air force was readying a mammoth daylight bombing campaign to pulverize whatever the British did not demolish. 

In North Africa, another German defeat was almost sealed. On November. 7, 1942, the British Eighth Army chased Rommel's troops 240 miles westward to the Libyan frontier. The next day, United States forces landed at Algiers, Casablanca, and Oran. They were soon joined by the British First Army in eastern Algeria, and the combined· armies assaulted Tunisia. Tobruk and Bengasifell as the pincers closed. The great expedition into French North Africa, known as TORCH and under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was achieving all of its objectives. In December, Hitler recklessly poured reinforcements into Tunisia, which slowed the Allied timetable, but in January, at the Casablanca Conference, General Eisenhower was able to give assurances that the enemy would be pushed out of all North Africa in the near future. 

The question then was: "Where do we go from here?" As Hopkins wrote, "We had to strike somewhere.... But where?" The possible alternative that it might not be necessary to go anywhere, that a way might he sought and found to end the carnage, did not lie within his consideration at any time. The Bishop of Chichester had been approached in Stockholm by two anti-Nazi Germans who asked him to find out whether the British and American governments would negotiate for peace with a German democratic government if the Hitler regime were overthrown. As the Bishop disclosed after the war, he tried to elicit this information but was unable even to get a response. All moves toward peace were peremptorily brushed aside. 

It is now known that the senior officers of the German army were ripe for rebellion.17 There was an opposition to ,Hitler led by General Ludwig Beck, former chief of the German army's general staff, and Carl Goerdeler, a former mayor of Leipzig. These were men of unquestioned moral stature. Active commanders like von Kluge and von Manstein foresaw where Hitler's policy was leading Germany. Admiral Canaris, General Oster, and the valiant Count von Stauffenberg were among the long list of deeply perturbed figures who longed to kill or depose Hitler and to end the war on some honorable terms. To succeed, they needed some encouragement from outside. This they never got. 

Was there a malevolent jealousy behind the Allied attitude? A fear that the Hitler regime might be extirpated by the German people and the crusaders left too soon without a crusade? It was known in the Pentagon and in the White House that Adolf Hitler was tottering on the brink of an abyss of discontent in his own country. General Albert C. Wedemeyer, who was at General Marshall's elbow in those days and was taken to Casablanca with him,·tells us: "No attempt was made by the Western Allies to divide the Germans by offering Hitler's enemies decent terms of peace-this in site of the fact that British and American intelligence agents w re aware that Hitler was faced with the opposition of men hiding some of the highest appointments in the Army, Navy, a d Civil Service."18 

The handwriting on the wall was clear: Hitler had blundered into a war against three gigantic powers that he could not win. The United States ad not yet had time to bring her full strength to bear, yet Germany was already losing. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt were all sure of her defeat. 

The men in the Kremlin had begun to scent victory months before. They were looking toward the shape of things after the war. In the early months of 1942, they had tried to get from the Churchill government an advance confirmation of title to lands they had seized in 1939 and 1940. These included eastern Poland, part of Finland, an the three Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which they wanted to absorb outright. They also wanted a secret agreement recognizing Russia's claim to a slice of Romania. All of this would have been revolting to public opinion in the United States, if not in Great Britain. Churchill and Eden, after hearing from President Roosevelt, explained this to Molotov in London in May, and the matter was then quickly shelved and kept out of publicity.19 After all, in.lhe United States people were still making orations about the Atlantic Charter. 

To such men as Stalin and Molotov, it was axiomatic that the manner and timing of the inevitable defeats of Germany and Japan, respectively, would have a crucial bearing on the residua of power in the postwar world. It was not difficult to discern how the Russian bread could best be buttered. The Soviet Union and the Communist cause could best be advanced if 

1. The major British and American war effort would be a frontal attack on Germany through France; 

2. British and American forces would keep out of central and eastern Europe, allowing Russian armies to conquer, or "liberate," and then to plunder and Communize Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkan area, and as much of Germany as possible; 

3. The war would not end by negotiation, either with the Hitler regime or any other German government, for such a negotiated peace would forestall the march of Soviet troops into the heart of Europe; 

4. The Japanese war would be prolonged until after the collapse of Germany, so that Russia would be free to enter it at the last moment, seize as spoils all the Japanese war supplies and industrial machinery in Manchuria, and proceed to exploit to her own advantage the power vacuum which the surrender of the Japanese would leave in northern China and Korea. 

In April, 1942, President Roosevelt had sent Harry Hopkins, accompanied by ·General Marshall, Roosevelt's Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to London to inform the British that he had come to a decision on two points. First, the main priority in the use of America's armed might was to be given to the war against Germany, with the crushing of Japan to be postponed. Second, the major military. project was to be a cross-Channel invasion of Europe on a big scale in 1943 (code name ROUNDUP), to be preceded by a smaller assault on the French coast in 1942 (SLEDGEHAMMER) to·draw German strength away from the Russian battlefield. 

On this occasion, Hopkins said, at a meeting with Churchill and the top British military and naval people, that "if public opinion in America had its way the weight of American efforts would he directed against Japan."20 But public opinion in America was not to have its way. It was to be cavalierly disregarded. (Yet there was prescience in the public's leaning. If the defeat of Japan had come swiftly, while Russia was engaged in Europe, the postwar fate of Asia would have been different, and millions of Chinese who were deceived into thinking that it was Russia who finally defeated the Japanese would have had a clearer view of history.) 

On May 29, Molotov arrived in Washington and was whisked to the White House. After preliminary pleasantries, Mr. Roosevelt happened to mention certain Japanese naval concentrations of which he had news. Molotov hastened to say that Hitler was the chief enemy. Mr. Roosevelt got the point immediately and reassured his guest that he had brought the United States into line. Samuel H. Cross, professor of Slavic languages at Harvard, was present taking notes. According to his record of the conversation, this colloquy took place: 

To Mr. Molotov's remark that Hitler was the chief enemy, the President noted his agreement and mentioned his repeated statements to the Pacific Conference that we should remain on the defensive in the Pacific until the European front was cleared up. It had been difficult, he added, to put this view across, but, in his opinion, it was now accepted.21 

Naturally, this pleased Molotov. 

Now Molotov had just been to London, where Churchill had told him about preparations for SLEDGEHAMMER.. and ROUNDUP. But Molotov had sensed a wavering which disturbed him, as though Churchill had some reservations in his mind. He wanted a commitment, so he went to work on Roosevelt. The day before Molotov's arrival in Washington, the President had received a disconcerting cable from the Prime Minister. It mentioned Norway and North Africa as possible places of operations against the Germans. This cable, says Sherwood, "provided the first danger signal to Roosevelt . . . that British thinking was beginning to veer toward diversionary operations far removed from the main point of frontal attack across the Channel."22 Nevertheless, Roosevelt gave his approval to this public statement, which Molotov wrote and which appeared at the end of the discussions: "In the course of the conversations full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942." In the context of the President's talks with Molotov, this, of course, referred to SLEDGEHAMMER, a crossing of the Channel. However, as Molotov passed through London again on his way home, Churchill, although paying lip service to SLEDGEHAMMER, was careful to hand Molotov an aide-memoir saying he could not promise it. 

In July, 1942, the British had decided that the time had come to "bury" SLEDGEHAMMER. Churchill confesses in his memoirs that he had never expected it to be carried out.23 It would have been a bloody sacrifice undertaken to draw German divisions away from the Russian front. He had no stomach for this. He now informed Roosevelt that no responsible British general, admiral, or air marshal thought it practicable. In spite of this, Roosevelt sent Hopkins and Marshall to London with instructions to push for it. This time the British stood firm. Marshall reached a deadlock in his talks with the British chiefs of staff. Hopkins made a note of his own feelings on hearing this: "I feel damn depressed." The President was cabled for new instructions, and this time he capitulated and accepted the alternative plan advocated by Churchill, the invasion of North Africa (GYMNAST, later renamed TORCH). 

The reason Harry Hopkins had felt "damn depressed" was that he had a premonition-as no doubt the British did also that a large-scale adventure into the Mediterranean would mean the postponement of ROUNDUP in 1943, which would not please the Kremlin. General Eisenhower later wrote that a major factor in all American thinking at that time was a lively suspicion that the British contemplated the agreed-upon cross Channel concept with distaste and with considerable mental reservations.24 

In January, 1943, when the President and Hopkins left for Casablanca, they had reason to fear that the postponement of ROUNDUP might be indefinite. Churchill had sent Roosevelt a message which contained this ominous paragraph: 

The paramount task before us is, first, to conquer the African shores of the Mediterranean and set up the naval and air installations which are necessary to open an effective passage through it for military traffic; and, secondly, using the bases on the African shore to strike at the under-belly of the Axis in effective strength and in the shortest time.25 

What did "under-belly" mean? Did Churchill have any adventures toward the Balkans up his sleeve? That way of getting at the enemy would not be compatible with the Russian pattern of victory at all. General Marshall, who throughout the war was the unfailing spokesman, at the staff level, of the Roosevelt/Hopkins line of policy, was well briefed to oppose it. He had been sent to Casablanca ahead of the President to meet with British staff officers. Three weeks before, he had told Field Marshal Sir John Dill in Washington (and Dill at once tipped off Churchill) that he was "getting more and more convinced that we should be in a position to undertake a modified 'Round-up' before the summer [of 1943] if, as soon as North Africa is cleared of Axis forces, we start pouring American forces into England instead of sending them to Africa for the exploitation of 'Torch.' "26 One of the reasons Marshall had given for such an operation was that it would be "more satisfying to the Russians." (None of the reasons was convincing to the British.) 

Winston Churchill was sometimes devious in his war communications, with the result that he was not infrequently suspected of secretly favoring one course of action while paying lip service to another. But he had been in one of his more undissembling moods one night the previous November when he sat talking "the greater part of the night" with American Ambassador Winant and General Walter Bedell Smith. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden was also present. Smith reported the conversation to General Marshall, who unquestionably passed it on to the White House. Churchill, said Smith, appeared to be cooling on the ROUNDUP plan for northern France. He was also reluctantly abandoning the idea of an expedition to northern Norway, for which the Americans had shown no inclination. However, his mind was running to the thought of getting Turkey into the war with her forty-five divisions of superior fighting men, to be armed and equipped by the Allies for an invasion of the Balkans.27 Since it could not be contemplated that Turkey would tackle the Germans alone in the Balkans, this portended sending an Anglo-American expeditionary force to that part of Europe. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt could, of course, easily see the long range strategy behind such a gambit. He liked it not. And when he went to the Casablanca Conference in January, it was definitely not one of his purposes to help build a rampart of strength on the southwest flank of the Soviet Union. (As history would unfold, the Turks would one day have American weapons put hastily in their hands-and the Greeks, too-but that was not to be done while Roosevelt was alive.) 

The American people were unaware that their President was on his way to Africa to make grave decisions there, with Harry Hopkins in constant attendance. If they had known, this latter circumstance might have caused them some concern. They were far from sure that Hopkins was the right kind of ballast for the President's mental bark on such a mission. But their anxiety might have been assuaged if they could have been told,and if it had been true,that Harry was so deep!y conscious of the responsibility which his influence with the President imposed upon him that he spent the four days en route to Casablanca in careful study and humble meditation. It would have comforted them to think that he was not only fortifying his understanding of the complex forces which underlay the war but was also doing some soul-searching-to detect and expel from his own mind any impulse deleterious to his country's best interests, any error of historical perspective, or any pertinacity which might color his judgment. [And in this Hopkins failed miserably DC] 

Actually, it would appear from his own notes that Harry (he was Harry to everybody) was mainly preoccupied with the details of the flights, the scenery, playing gin rummy, reading detective stories, and the beverages which were made available for his and the President's consumption. He did mention, rather casually, talking once to the President "about our pending conference," but he did not bother to write down what he had said to the President or what the latter had said to him. On the other hand, he recorded-with that eccentric sense of values which permeated all his note-taking-having cocktails at Trinidad and "a first-class rum drink" in the middle of the afternoon at Belem, where he "wangled two bottles" to take along. And when they departed after this pleasant interlude, he was pleased to note that "they serve cocktails on this flying boat." 

The conference was held at Anfa, a suburb of Casablanca, where a large hotel offered splendid accommodations for the British and American staffs and big meeting rooms. There was, on the grounds, a villa for the President. It was Modern and had a lovely garden and a swimming pool. "The President, Elliott and I are staying here," Harry observed. Churchill had another villa some fifty yards away. Elliott's book says that Harry "went over to bring him back to our place for dinner," 

but Harry, shifting the emphasis, put it this way: "I went over to bring him back for a drink before dinner." While having the "drink before dinner," Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harry-"the three of us"-"had a long talk over the military situation." The British and American chiefs of staff, in the big hotel across the road, were evidently similarly engaged, for just before dinner Harry went scouting and happily came upon them. "I found them all having a cocktail." They were invited to dine at the President's villa. 

There was a distinguished and, it may be inferred, merry company at the table that night. Besides the President, the Prime Minister, Harry, and Elliott, there were General Marshall, Admiral King, and General Arnold-the heads of the u.s. Army, Navy, and Air Force-and their British counterparts, General Sir Alan Brooke, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, and Air Chief Marshall Sir Charles Portal, plus Lord Louis Mountbatten and Averell Harrilnan. "There was," wrote Harry, "much good talk of war." This went on for some hours and covered a wide field of politics, diplomacy, and military subjects. Elliott only listened, but he was not idle. He later wrote: "I busied myself filling glasses."

The Casablanca Conference was lengthy. The President was there ten days. On the military problems faced, Elliott Roosevelt's book has this to say: "Still an open issue was the cross Channel invasion, at that time referred to as ROUNDUP, the second front in 1943. As always, during all our conversations, the Americans were forcing the issue, the British holding back." This is roughly true, but a sharper focus is obtained from the memoirs of Churchill, Generals H. H.Arnold and Mark Clark, the official reports of General Marshall and Admiral King to the Secretaries of War and Navy, and Sherwood's account (based on the Hopkins papers). The Combined Chiefs of Staff had been in session three days before President Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins arrived. General Marshall was still faithfully and stubbornly arguing for the invasion of northern France in 1943. To the British, however, this was out of the question. They had brought up Sardinia, Sicily, Italy, Crete, the Dodecanese Islands, the mainland of Greece, and Turkey for consideration. And the American Chiefs of Staff were, as Sherwood observes, "by no means unanimous," for Admiral King and General Arnold balked at going along with Marshall's idee fixe. 

More days of argument followed. The upshot was that Roosevelt yielded to the overwhelming weight of professional opinion. ROUNDUP was postponed until 1944. With respect to the Mediterranean area, he would only approve an attack on Sicily (Operation HUSKY). He refrained from any commitment beyond that. General Eisenhower was to command HUSKY, but no orders were issued to him for following, it up. This solution was obviously a compromise. 

Sherwood states that Hopkins was again "disappointed.and depressed" by the postponement of ROUNDUP. Stalin and Molotov had been persistently calling for the embroilment of Anglo-American forces in France, and 1942 had slipped by without it, through no fault of President Roosevelt. Now there was to be another year's delay. Hopkins had been right in his premonition that TORCH, which the British had promoted so astutely, would have this consequence. However, one thing had been accomplished at the Casablanca Conference: such a splash of cold water had drenched British speculations about American and British troops heading for the mainland of Greece or Turkey and up through the Balkans that the idea was stunted in its infancy. 

Mr. Roosevelt was at the high pitch of his wartime ebullience. "The Casablanca trip was grand," he bubbled in a letter to his son John, like a bon vivant describing a Mardi Gras ball.28 The Sultan of Morocco, in white silk robe, came to dinner, bringing a gold dagger for the President and gold bracelets for Mrs. Roosevelt. General Charles de Gaulle, pouting because a rival Frenchman, General Giraud, was not in bad graces, was summoned from London and made to pose, shaking hands, with Giraud in front of a battery of cameras, a publicity stunt intended to conceal the enduring enmity between the two French factions. Roosevelt wrote to George VI that he wished the King could have come.29 It all fed his tendency to be grandiose. John Gunther recalls: 

He behaved in some ways like a conqueror and lord of the earth when he reached Africa, giving out decorations almost as a monarch does; he talked about the French empire as if it were his personal possession and would say·things like "I haven't quite decided what to do about Tunis."30 

The finale, on the tenth day, was the famous Casablanca press conference, which the New York Times called "the most informal ever held." The scene was the garden of the gleaming white villa. On two white leather chairs sat the President, smoking a cigarette in a long holder, and the Prime Minister, puffing a cigar. Correspondents and cameramen sat on the green lawn at their feet. Red flowers were in profusion. The great smile was flashed with delight when somebody presented Mr. Roosevelt with a Morocco-bound portfolio containing the signatures of all persons who had talked and visited with him at the villa. He said he would place it in his library at Hyde Park. It was on this occasion that the President announced that he and Churchill were determined to accept nothing less than unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The joint communique had not included this. 

It has always been suspected that Roosevelt pulled. this card out of his sleeve. Churchill's round head was seen to nod, but four and one-half years later (July 21, 1949), in a debate in the House of Commons, he confessed: 

I was there on the spot and had to rapidly consider whether the state of our position in the world was such as to justify me in not giving support to it. I did support it but it was not the idea I had formed in my own mind. 

In his memoirs, he says that he heard the President's words "with some feeling of surprise."31 He also says: "General Ismay, who knew exactly how my mind was working from day to day, and was also present at all the discussions of the Chiefs of Staff when the communique was prepared, was also surprised." 

The subject had indeed "cropped up" before ("at meal times," Churchill recollected),32 but, he explains, "it was natural to suppose that the agreed communique had superseded anything said in conversation." According to the Hopkins papers, Roosevelt himself later absolved Churchill of responsibility for the unconditional-surrender statement at the press conference. Indeed, he even suggested that it was unpremeditated on his part. These are his own words: 

We had so much trouble getting those two French generals together that I thought to myself that this was as difficult as arranging the meeting of Grant and Lee ... and then suddenly the press conference was 011, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant "Old Unconditional Surrender" and the next thing I knew, I had said it.33 

Thus, it seems, are great decisions made. 

Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to the President, in his book I Was There, calls the principle of unconditional surrender "a surprising development of the Casablanca Conference." He considered it unwise.34 The reaction of Secretary of State Hull, when he heard about it, is also revealing. He says he was told that the Prime Minister "was dumbfounded." He, Mr. Hull himself, "was as much surprised as Mr. Churchill." He opposed it, but "there was nothing we could do except to follow·it.  It was to rise ... to plague US."35 

Louis P. Lochner, translator and editor of the Goebbels diaries, states that after the German defeat at·Stalingrad in the winter of 1942"43, few responsible officers believed in victory and the German people regarded the war as lost.36 Goebbels and Goring thought that Hitler had aged fifteen years since the war began; he had become a morose recluse. "He sits in his bunker, fusses and broods." (This was written on March 2, 1943.) Why did his people fight on? 

The German generals·have talked. So have the people. The Goebbels propaganda machine equated "unconditional·surrender" with "total slavery."37 As one English military historian has written, "Gagged by this idiotic slogan, the Western Allies could offer no terms, however severe. Conversely, their enemy could ask for none, however submissive."38 Hitler's road to chaos was left open; all others were blocked off. 

In grim fact, what did Roosevelt's demands foredoom? Many have traced, with sober analysis, the inexorable import of his words, so impetuously spoken in the garden at Casablanca.39 In epitome, Major General J. F. C. Fuller puts it thus:

First, that because no great power could·with dignity or honor to itself, its history, its people and their posterity comply with them, the war must be fought to the point of annihilation. Therefore, it would take upon itself a religious character and bring to life again all the horrors of the wars of religion. 

Secondly, once victory had been won, the balance of power within Europe and between European nations would be irrevocably smashed. Russia would be left the greatest military power in Europe, and, therefore, would dominate Europe. Consequently, the peace these words predicted was the replacement of Nazi tyranny by an even more barbaric despotism.40 

And so, for more than two years more, the Germans fought on, with the courage of despair. On the other side of the world, Roosevelt's words hung like a putrefying albatross around the necks of America and Britain. They led, in the words of Lord Hankey, to "the culminating tragedy of the two atomic bombs in Japan." By mid-1943, the Japanese knew they would lose the war and prayed for any face-saving way to accept defeat. But no; the carnage had to continue, even after Emperor Hirohito informed the Supreme War Direction Council that the war should be ended on any terms short of unconditional surrender.41 The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki followed. 

With the garden scene, the conference at Casablanca ended. Then Churchill insisted that Roosevelt see Marrakech, which he described as "the Paris of the Sahara." They drove 150 miles across the desert to spend the night at Marrakech in "a most delightful villa." Their "entourages" were brought to Marrakech, too. This city, Churchill instructs us in his memoirs, is famous for its "gay life," including "the largest and most elaborately organized brothels in the African·continent." 

Harry Hopkins liked "the picnic lunch" en route. "We had plenty of wine and Scotch," his notes say. But we discover in the Churchill memoirs that this differed from the ordinary picnic in another respect: "Many thousand American troops were posted along the road to protect us from any danger, and airplanes circled ceaselessly overhead." The cost of this merry excursion to "the Paris of the Sahara" could not have been written in less than six figures. 

There was "a very jolly dinner," and "we all sang songs." The next morning, the President flew home. The Prime Minister stayed two more days, painting from the tower of the villa a picture of a sunset on the snows of the Atlas Mountains. Mr. Roosevelt had done his painting back in Casablanca. It was on the canvas of history, with ineradicable pigment.