1944 by Jay Winik
“Our acts must be guided”: Message to Congress, September 21, 1939, 8 Public Papers and Addresses, 512–22. See also Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, American White Paper (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), 73ff; Smith, FDR, 438.
“I’m almost literally walking”: FDR to Lord Tweedsmuir, October 5, 1939, 2 FDR: His Personal Letters 934, Elliott Roosevelt, ed., 4 Vols (Ovoll, Sloan & Pearce, 1947–50), Smith, FDR, 439.
Admiral Ross McIntire: Smith, FDR, 445–46. McIntire became a stern monitor of Roosevelt’s health for the duration of the war. Here again we see the private eloquence of Roosevelt, though he remained reluctant to speak out publicly or expend too much political capital.
Churchill proposed laying poison gas: Churchill was always a whirlwind of ideas, some eminently practicable, some not. See Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 10–12. For two marvelous biographies, see Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life (Holt, 1992), and William Manchester, Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone (Delta, 2008), 3–36; BBC Dunkirk fact page, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1057312.shtml.
German forces prepared: For the German side of the picture, especially after Dunkirk, see the magisterial work by Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography (Norton, 2010), 557–59, hereafter cited as Kershaw, Hitler; Smith, FDR, 444–48. Of interest, the late historian Stephen Ambrose made the interesting point that Roosevelt should have intervened much more forcefully earlier on. This is a debate that still properly rages.
militarily Roosevelt was hamstrung: On America’s lack of preparedness, and the inadequacy of American troops, see Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 143; Smith, FDR, 428. Actually, Roosevelt feared the Western Hemisphere was in danger.
slapped his thighs: For this eerie scene, see especially Kershaw, Hitler, 561. The reader may also go to YouTube, which has clips of the Nazis marching through Paris and of a jubilant Hitler.
“the greatest warlord”: Kershaw, Hitler, 562. The general was Wilhelm Keitel. It is hard to overstate the degree to which a number of Hitler’s generals were transfixed by him.
showdown with the Soviet Union: I have heavily used Kershaw, Hitler, 566, 569.
smash Great Britain from the air: For an overview, I’ve drawn extensively from Stephen Ambrose and C. L. Sulzberger, The American Heritage New History of WWII (Viking Adult Press, 1997), 84, 87, 94–95, hereafter cited as Ambrose, American Heritage. For more on the Battle of Britain, see Miller, Masters of the Air, especially 1–24 on the heroics of the airmen.
“How much they can stand”: From Murrow’s broadcasts during the blitz, reprinted in Ambrose, American Heritage, 94.
not everyone loved: On the criticism of Roosevelt, I have closely followed MacGregor Burns, Soldier of Freedom, 388; I think he gets it just about right.
mounting problems at home: Ibid., 335, 388. This paragraph follows MacGregor Burns closely; he notes that in 1943, every week brought a new crisis at home—walkouts in railroads, wildcat strikes, miners’ strikes, etc. See also Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, which recounts the same incidents: Goodwin is particularly deft at pointing out the domestic obstacles that Roosevelt faced.
“We, who hate”: This vivid quote is from the Kansas Republican William Allen White, quoted in MacGregor Burns, Soldier of Freedom, 331.
“He wants to”: For a treatment of Roosevelt’s style of governance, see Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1979); MacGregor Burns, Soldier of Freedom, 351.
“hesitant and confused”: Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 8, 91. Schlesinger’s treatment of Roosevelt remains necessary reading to this day. To be sure, Walter Lippmann, however distinguished, was often erratic.
“The amusing thing”: MacGregor Burns, Soldier of Freedom, 249, and for the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial, 356–57.
Isaiah Berlin said of Roosevelt: Robert Rosen, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust (Basic Books, 2007), 434–35.
weekends at Shangri-La: I relied on MacGregor Burns, Soldier of Freedom, 254. On Camp David, see especially Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 385–86, which I drew on.
“a law unto himself” and “unanimous in their hate”: Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 8, 637. The Madison Square Garden speech may also be viewed on YouTube.
“Hell, a balanced budget”: Schlesinger, The Politics of Upheaval, 511, 553, 650. This comment, of course, represents a debate that remains unresolved.
In Tehran Roosevelt: Bohlen, Witness to History, 138–42. For more on this conference, see Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 429–42; Brands, Traitor to His Class 546–56; Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 471–78; Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 248–66. For “any kind of personal,” see Brands, 552. The intensity of the meeting is suggested by Bohlen’s observation that at this summit he worked harder than at any other time in his career. Brands, 552, makes the point about the lack of progress cementing a personal connection between the two leaders.
The leaders and their staffs: Churchill, Closing the Ring, 347; Bohlen, Witness to History, 141–42; Brands, Traitor to His Class, 549. Bohlen found Stalin surprisingly soft-spoken and very fluent in choosing just the right words.
“The Channel is such”: and this episode, see, for instance, Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941–1946 (Random House, 1975), 267; Brands, Traitor to His Class, 549; and Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 251.
the president’s Filipino cooks: Reilly, Reilly of the White House, 150, 180.
mixing cocktails: Ibid., 180; Bohlen, Witness to History, 143; Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 145.
more crucial issue of Germany: Bohlen, Witness to History, 143; Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 252–54; Brands, Traitor to His Class, 551. Regarding “access to the Baltic Sea”: Stalin, because of a mistaken interpretation, thought Roosevelt was talking about the Baltic states, not the Baltic Sea.
no words came out: Roosevelt’s health incident is found in Bohlen, Witness to History, 143–44; and Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 254, both of which I draw heavily upon.
his vision of a postwar world: See Bohlen, Witness to History, 144–45.
increasingly thorny issue: One can see here the three leaders jockeying more than ever for influence. Churchill, Closing the Ring, 363–65. On the monumental choice of Eisenhower, seemingly made at the last second, see also Michael Korda, “An Interview with George C. Marshall,” Forrest C. Pogue, October 5, 1956 (Marshall files, George C. Marshall Research Library, Virginia Military Institute, Lexington); and Mark Perry, Partners in Command (Penguin, 2007), 238–40. Roosevelt did say that Marshall was “entitled to have his place in history”: Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (Enigma, 2008), 770. Ultimately, Marshall was a victim of complicated politics within the military command structure, at home as well as with the Allies. As Perry points out, Roosevelt was slowly tilted away from Marshall’s candidacy. Roosevelt was hoping that Marshall himself, ever the good soldier, would make the decision to bow out. But Marshall, who very much wanted the command, hemmed and hawed, forcing Roosevelt to make the decision, in what was surely one of the most “uncomfortable meetings” (Perry, 240) in the history of American civil-military relations. These are Perry’s words, 240.
Now it was Stalin’s turn: Bohlen, Witness to History, 146; Churchill, Closing the Ring, 371–73.
He alternately “teased”: Reilly, Reilly of the White House, 181; Bohlen, Witness to History, 146–47; Churchill, Closing the Ring, 373.
“never tolerate mass executions”: Discussion and quotation are from Bohlen, Witness to History, 146–57; Churchill, Closing the Ring, 373–74; Brands, Traitor to His Class, 553; Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 258–61.
But it was Stalin who rose: For this charming vignette see Sarah Churchill, A Thread in the Tapestry, 66.
chose an opposite course: Roosevelt’s efforts to woo Stalin may be found in two sources that I draw heavily on, Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 264
first time in eleven years: Brands, Traitor to His Class, 580.
CHAPTER 2
“we have got” Antony Shaw, World War II: Day by Day (Chartwell, 2010), 133; The Suction Pump, March 8, 1944, PPA 1944–1945, 99–100. See also MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (Harcourt, 1970), 438. Around this time, Churchill was recovering from pneumonia, for which he was prescribed antibiotics and digitalis.
“The name ‘Roosevelt’ was a symbol”: and paragraph from Edward R. Murrow, In Search of Light: The Broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow 1938–1961, Edward Bliss Jr., ed. (Knopf, 1967), 90–95. This is from his haunting broadcast of April 15, 1945, from Buchenwald, also reprinted in Robert Abzug, American Views of the Holocaust, 1933–1945: A Brief Documentary History (St. Martin’s, 1999), 202.
mired in the invasion of Italy: See especially MacGregor Burns, Soldier of Freedom, 438–39, from which I borrowed the phrase “soldier’s hell”; W. G. F. Jackson, The Battle for Italy (Harper, 1967), 182–201; Ambrose, American Heritage, 359. Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944 (Holt, 2008), provides a superb account of the obstacles confronting the GIs and getting bogged down in the Italian campaign. See also Mark Perry, Partners in Command (Penguin, 2007), 272–378.
“the Purple Heart Valley”: Ambrose, American Heritage, 365.
largest amphibious invasion in history: Material on the background of the invasion is voluminous, and I’ve drawn extensively from it. See, for example, Perry, Partners in Command, 268–72, 277–98; Roland Ruppenthal, Logistical Support of the Armies, Volume 1, The European Theatre of Operations (Office of the Chief of Military History, 1953); Forrest Pogue, D-Day: The Normandy Invasion in Retrospect (University of Kansas Press, 1971); B. H. Liddell Hart, The Rommel Papers (Harcourt, Brace, 1953), 465; Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day (Simon & Schuster, 1959); Samuel Eliot Morison, The Invasion of France and Germany 1944–1945 (Little, Brown, 1959); MacGregor Burns, Soldier of Freedom, 473. Stephen Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of Dwight Eisenhower (Anchor, 2012), provides a condensed overview, along with Ambrose, American Heritage, both of which I heavily relied on. For more on the vast preparations, see, for example, Ambrose, Supreme Commander 412–13; see also Max Hastings, Overlord and the Battle for Normandy (Vintage, 2006), chap. 17. In Great Britain there was a joke that the Americans were sending over so many men and so much matériel that were it not for the barrage balloons, the island would sink into the sea.
GIs . . . crossed themselves: Ambrose, American Heritage, 413, 465.
presence of a red telephone: For the delicious details of red and green phones, see MacGregor Burns, Soldier of Freedom, 474.
“We cannot afford”: Ambrose, The Supreme Commander, 431; see also Stephen Ambrose, D-Day: June 6, 1944—The Battle for Normandy Beaches (Pocket Books, 2002), 68.
one of Hitler’s shrewdest: Erwin Rommel, The Rommel Papers, B. H. Liddell Hart, ed. (Harcourt, Brace, 1953); Ambrose, D-Day, 41, 588; Morison, The Invasion, 152–53. For a discussion of landing craft, see Gordon Harrison, Cross Channel Attack (Department of the Army, 1951), 59–63.
erected a formidable web: Hitler’s subsequent failure to use the panzer tanks would be among his worst decisions of the war, right up there with opening a second front against the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States. In this paragraph I draw heavily on Ambrose, American Heritage, 465. For more on the Atlantic Wall, see J. E. Kaufmann and H. W. Kaufmann, Fortress Third Reich: German Fortifications and Defense Systems in World War II (Da Capo, 2007), 194–223; and Alan Wilt, The Atlantic Wall: Hitler’s Defenses in the West, 1941–1944 (Enigma, 2004).
“The war will be won”: I draw particularly on Ambrose, American Heritage, 461–66.
all but a dying man: Time, May 29, 1944, 18; Tully, FDR, My Boss, 274; William Hassett, Off the Record with FDR (Rutgers University Press, 1958), 239, hereafter cited as Hassett, Off the Record. For an outstanding overview, see Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 491–92; Brands, Traitor to His Class, 581–84. In a marvelous documentary by David Grubin, FDR, on American Experience, PBS, 1994, we hear about Roosevelt falling out of his chair.
“tired and worn”: New York Times, March 26, 1944, 35; Hassett, Off the Record, 239; Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 492; Brands, Traitor to His Class, 579; Atkinson, The Day of Battle, 20.
“One trouble followed”: It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Roosevelt’s health was impaired during this period. Too often this has been overlooked or underplayed by historians. Yet there were some contemporary accounts questioning his health, and now there is some critical literature. See Stephen Lomazow, MD, and Eric Fettmann, FDR’s Deadly Secret (Public Affairs, 2009). For additional details about Roosevelt’s health, see James MacGregor Burns, “FDR: The Untold Story of His Last Year,” Saturday Review, April 11, 1970; “Did the US Elect a Dying President? The Inside Facts of the Final Weeks of FDR,” U.S. News and World Report, March 23, 1951; George Creel, “The President’s Health,” Collier’s, March 3, 1945; Karl C. Wold, “The Truth About FDR’s Health,” Look, February 15, 1949; Noah Frapericant, “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Nose and Throat Ailments,” Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Monthly, February 1957, 103–6; Rudolph Marx, “FDR: A Medical History,” Today’s Health, April 1961, 54; Richard Norton Smith, “ ‘The President Is Fine’ and Other Historical Lies,” Columbia Journalism Review, September–October 2001.
“I feel like hell”: See Jim Bishop, FDR’s Last Year (Morrow, 1974), 4; Smith, FDR, 603. Very good on this is the White House aide Hassett, Off the Record, 231, 233, 239–41. Significantly, as a sign of Roosevelt’s declining health, in July 1935, Roosevelt’s blood pressure was 136/75; on March 27, 1944, it was 186/108.
“very gray”: For this and the next two paragraphs, Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 494–95, drawn from her interview with Bruenn. For more on McIntire, who plays a central role in the drama of Roosevelt’s health and who frequently clashed with Dr. Bruenn, see Robert H. Farrell, The Dying President: Franklin Roosevelt (Missouri, 1978). “It was worse than I feared”: For more, see Howard Bruenn, “Examination Revealed,” Annals of Internal Medicine (April 1970), 580–81.
“The president’s color”: Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 494; Smith, FDR, 604; Lomazow and Fettman, FDR’s Deadly Secret, 101.
visibly suffering: Brands, Traitor to His Class, 581.
“The president can’t”: For this and following paragraphs, see Atkinson, The Day of Battle, 308; Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 495, 496; Smith, FDR, 603. Of note, Goodwin interviewed Bruenn on digitalis, which was considered by some a miracle drug but which could have serious side effects. By way of comparison, when Churchill had pneumonia he took a course of it as well. Lomazow and Fettman discuss the president’s wen at great length, as well as the fact that he had a prostate exam and that digitalis was used for congestive heart failure, in FDR’s Deadly Secret, 103–4. Bruenn had little advance notice that he would actually be treating Roosevelt, and at the outset was not provided with the president’s medical file.
“some sunshine and”: Smith, FDR, 603–5; Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 497. Smith and Goodwin provide two different dates. April 3 is the correct date.
completely in the dark: See Brands, Traitor to His Class, 581; Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 442. However, Lomazow and Fettman believe that Roosevelt was fully apprised of his condition, and that privately he was worried about it: FDR’s Deadly Secret, 104–5.
find ways to overcome obstacles: In April 1865, I make this point about leaders having to find a way during the Civil War. See also Atkinson, Day of Battle, 22.
Roosevelt stayed for a month: See especially “President Returns from Month’s Rest on Baruch Estate,” New York Times, May 8, 1944, A1. See also Lee Brockington, Plantation Between the Waters: A Brief History of Hobcaw Barony (History Pre
On any map: My discussion of Auschwitz—the town and its history—closely follows the excellent background in Sybille Steinbacher, Auschwitz: A History (Harper Perennial, 2005), 5–22, 22–23, 27, 89, 95, hereafter cited as Steinbacher, Auschwitz. An invaluable trip for any reader is to go to Auschwitz itself, to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, or to Yad Vashem in Israel.
“How old?”: The literature on the notorious selection process is vast. The reader may want to consult Elie Wiesel, Night (Hill and Wang, 2006), I; Wiesel vividly describes the process from his own personal experience. I’ve also used Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Touchstone, 1996), 18–22 and, for the train ride to Auschwitz, 16–19 (which includes “Luggage afterwards”).
After the selections: The discussion on Auschwitz here comes from extensive material on which I’ve heavily drawn. See Peter Hellman, The Auschwitz Album: A Book Based upon an Album Discovered by a Concentration Camp Survivor, Lili Meier (Random House, 1981), 166. See also Steinbacher, Auschwitz (for plunder specifically, 104–5); Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt, Auschwitz (Norton, 2002); Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz, 1940–1945 (Harper Perennial, 1994); Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Indiana University Press, 1998); Rudolf Hoess, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz (Da Capo, 1996); Primo Levi, Auschwitz Report (Verso, 2006); Laurance Rees, Auschwitz: A New History (Public Affairs, 2006). For the chilling world of the Sonderkommando, whose members were slaves twice over and forced to collaborate with the Nazis in the most horrific ways, or face immediate death, see Shlomo Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz (Polity, 2011); Rudolf Vrba, I Escaped from Auschwitz (Barricade, 2007). “The door was thick”: Lyric Winik interview with Hans Munch, Moment Magazine, October 1998, 60–61, 75–78.