1944
Miraculously, a few Jews inside Warsaw did survive. Some hid in the ruins of the ghetto, attacking German patrols when the opportunity arose. Some slipped out, escaping to the Aryan side. Others, rather than be captured, took cyanide pills. And even after the ghetto was demolished in September 1943, “a few individuals continued to live in dug-outs, totally cut off from nature, light, and human company.” News of the uprising spread. In the months that followed, the ghettos in Bialystok and Minsk rose up against the Nazis, as did prisoners at the killing centers in Treblinka and Sobibór. The attempts were futile and ended most often in more death, yet by the fall of 1943 Treblinka and Sobibór were being dismantled.
But perhaps the most poignant coda to the battle was this: two days after the uprising at Warsaw began, a radio message was wired from a secret Polish transmitter. Only four sentences were sent before the signal was cut. They ended with two words: “Save us.”
The message was received in Stockholm and then relayed around the world. But in London and Washington, no notice was taken. And in Bermuda, where the conference was under way, silence was the only reply.
MEANWHILE, AFTER A LONG struggle, the Allied armies continued to make stunning progress. The president’s single-minded pursuit of military victory was starting to pay off. The campaign in North Africa had come to a close on May 13, and the Allied victory was complete. As nearly a quarter million Germans and Italians were taken prisoner, the question now loomed: what next? That was on Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s minds as they once again met in Washington to hash out the details of the next phase of the war. This was the Trident conference. By this stage in 1943, sensing that the end was near, the British and the Americans were convening so frequently, in so many places, that it was as if they were actors in a touring theater production. In January, Roosevelt had met with Churchill, Giraud, and de Gaulle in Casablanca; in March, he had met with Eden in Washington; in May, he met with Churchill and the combined chiefs of staff; and Churchill, Marshall, and Eisenhower would also meet in Algiers at the end of May. Summer would bring no respite: Roosevelt and Churchill and their staffs would convene again in Quebec in late August, and once more at the White House in September. Then, these meetings would spread out across the global stage: Roosevelt and Churchill would of course fly to Cairo in late November; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would memorably gather in Tehran at the end of November; and finally, Roosevelt and Churchill would meet up once more in Cairo in early December.
Yet no matter how tiring his far-flung travels were, Roosevelt was inwardly triumphant and now looking ahead, pondering the broader questions of the historical record. He wrote to a good friend, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, the renowned poet, insisting that someone needed to capture the story of the global struggle, to re-create “the public pulse as it throbs from day to day . . . The processes of propaganda—the parts played by the newspaper emperors, etc.” He continued: “It is not dry history or the cataloging of books and papers and reports. It is trying to capture a great dream before it dies.” In this regard Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, played to Roosevelt’s great dream as well, recalling the harrowing trials that the American people underwent during the Civil War in the ghastly spring of 1864, when the United States pressed on despite the terrible losses in the Wilderness campaign. “We are facing,” Stimson told Roosevelt, “a difficult year at home with timid and hostile hearts ready to seize and exploit any wavering on the part of our war leadership.” For the moment, however, Roosevelt was not wavering, and as the Trident conference in Washington began, history took a backseat to military policy and the invasion of Italy.
For two weeks, he and Churchill wrangled with strategy—particularly the timing of the cross-Channel invasion. Here was Casablanca all over again. Old arguments were rehashed. Old biases were summoned up. Roosevelt and his staff were itching to assemble a large force in England and to hit the Germans directly with an assault through France itself; Churchill and his military advisers wanted to push on in the Mediterranean, prod Italy to quit the war, and then slug their way into Germany through what they referred to as Europe’s “soft underbelly.” The debates were intense and often acrimonious; at one point, a despairing Churchill threw up his hands and moaned that Roosevelt was “not in favor of landing in Italy. It is most discouraging.” But both sides had merit. For the Americans, the most fundamental criticism remained this: Italy was a path to nowhere. In this sense, to the American high command, the Italian campaign was a costly sideshow recalling the World War I song, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” In their view, an operation in Italy amounted to wishful thinking, the vain hope that Germany could be defeated by attrition. Even in the best-case scenario, once having taken Italy, the Allied armies still had to drive across the Alps to get to Germany. Nor, the Americans argued, was this a good use of resources: because of its jagged landscape, harsh weather, and treacherous mountain passes, Italy was ill suited to offensive maneuvers. Moreover, it would tie up many more Allied troops than it would Kesselring’s German divisions.
Yet the invasion of Italy was almost guaranteed by the massive commitment of armed forces in the North Africa campaign. The invasion of France could not really be waged until the spring of 1944—even Roosevelt knew this—so, once North Africa was stripped of Axis forces, it seemed counterproductive to haul the Allies’ mammoth war machine back to Britain. And Italy was a ripe target there for the taking. If the Allies did not move on into Sicily and Italy, it would be like the situation they had faced in 1942 all over again, just on a different continent: they would sit out the remainder of 1943 and much of 1944 doing little except firebombing “soft” targets—the Nazis’ cities and civilians—and “hard” targets such as rubber and oil facilities.
There were other benefits as well. By conquering Italy, they would conquer airfields that would allow Allied airpower to blast targets spread across the Balkans and Poland, including the sprawling network of factories so crucial to the Germans’ war machine. Finally, there was the all-important question of morale, which Roosevelt understood better than anyone else; here, Italy was a natural extension of North Africa. The Italian campaign in 1943 would demonstrate that the United States and Britain were finally on the offense on the Continent itself, and that liberation was merely a matter of time.
While they were deadlocked early on, Roosevelt sought to break the ice by taking Churchill to the wooded presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains, Shangri-La. There, Roosevelt spent a few hours with his stamp collection, and early the next day he invited Churchill for a relaxing fishing excursion nearby. These activities buoyed both Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s spirits, but nonetheless, they remained at an impasse on strategy. In the days that followed, Churchill paced up and down in his room, worked nights and slept during the day, and fretted constantly, until he was ready to go home. But suddenly, at the brink of the conference’s close, Roosevelt and Churchill each compromised. For his part, Churchill grudgingly agreed that the main effort would be the invasion of France—Overlord—and that it could not be postponed indefinitely. A target date—May 1, 1944—was established. Thus the military buildup in Britain for the great assault would be significantly accelerated. For his part, Roosevelt consented to move against Italy, but with the condition that they would use forces already dedicated to the Mediterranean—in that way, Italy would not detract from the cross-Channel attack. Once Sicily had fallen, seven divisions would be quickly shifted from the Mediterranean to France.
After Churchill departed on May 27, Roosevelt left for Hyde Park, where for three straight days he slept for ten hours a day.
As it happened, he would have at least two serious illnesses during the year. The first he wryly called “Gambia fever or some kindred bug,” which he told Churchill he had contracted in “that hellhole of yours called Bathurst”; with the second, he reported to Churchill that it was “a nuisenza to have the influenza.” After he recovered, he boasted to Churchil
l that he had felt like a “fighting cock” ever since.
But this was wishful thinking. There was more sickness to come.
MILITARILY, THINGS WERE NOW set in motion. Finally, the Italian campaign commenced. For days, Allied forces had been pouring out of Benghazi, Tripoli, Alexandria, Haifa, and Beirut. After that, the Allied bombing of Sicily opened up to soften enemy defenses. Meanwhile, the wind was gusting fiercely before the sun rose.
The invasion of Sicily began on July 10.
On the first day, 175,000 troops hit the beaches after braving forty-five-mile-per-hour winds. Within two days, nearly 500,000 men—along with tanks and landing craft—had come ashore, where they faced only 60,000 dumbfounded Germans. After its victories in North Africa, the British general Bernard Montgomery’s veteran Eighth Army was now the tip of the spear, driving through the east coast. There, it rapidly seized one of the prizes of antiquity, ancient Syracuse, before plowing into the vast and important Plain of Catania (la Chiana de Catania).
The Germans, under Field Marshal Kesselring’s command, put up a stiff resistance. Meanwhile, General George Patton’s indefatigable Seventh Army landed in the south, where it was to cover Montgomery’s left flank. Instead, Patton, independent-minded as ever, ignored orders and relentlessly proceeded to drive northwest, all the way to Palermo. Nothing could stop him, not rock ridges, not muddy valleys, and certainly not the Italian defenders, most of whom either surrendered or offered only a feeble fight. Thronging to their balconies, the Sicilians themselves greeted the invaders ecstatically, hanging white flags from their windows and handing out baskets of fresh fruit and bundles of freshly cut flowers.
The German troops, the cream of the Nazis’ army, were a different story. Slowly pulling back, they laid waste to bridges, desperately counterattacked, and positioned themselves to fight on every hilltop and crag. At the easternmost point of the island was the strategic objective: Messina. While Montgomery’s men slugged it out on the coast against fierce resistance, U.S. forces pushed forward. For their part, the American and British engineers were unstoppable. Working marvels, they heroically brought heavy equipment over narrow, primitive roads and laid down trestles over deep cavities.
Then, on July 17, the Allies began psychological warfare, air-dropping leaflets like confetti onto the streets of Rome and other once-Fascist cities; these messages were signed by Roosevelt and Churchill and were designed to increase the pressure on Italy to part ways with Hitler. The leaflets proclaimed: “Mussolini carried you into this war as a satellite of a brutal destroyer of peoples and liberties. Mussolini plunged you into a war which he thought Hitler had already won. In spite of Italy’s great vulnerability . . . your fascist leaders sent your sons . . . to distant battlefields to aid Germany in her attempt to conquer England, Russia, and the world. . . . The time has come for you to decide whether Italians shall die for Mussolini and Hitler—or live for Italy, and for civilization.”
As it turned out, the Italians were not ready to die for Mussolini or for Hitler. Under the blistering assault of the Allies, the morale of many Italians had already disintegrated. In towns across the country strikes and riots broke out, and Mussolini’s lock on power quickly began to ebb and crumble. Just two days later, on July 19, while Montgomery and Patton were pounding through Sicily, the Italian dictator met with Hitler at a resplendent country villa. The indignant Führer insisted that Sicily must become “another Stalingrad.” But the Fascist Grand Council would no longer have any of it. Before the sun began to climb on Sunday, July 25, the council held a hastily arranged meeting with Mussolini, at which there was a dramatic vote of no confidence. Within hours, Italy’s king, Victor Emmanuel III, summoned Mussolini to his palace, and angrily said, “At this moment you are the most hated man in Italy. The soldiers don’t want to fight anymore.” Emerging from the meeting, Mussolini was reeling; then he was promptly detained by his former allies, the carabinieri—Italy’s ancient national police—stuffed into an ambulance, and spirited off to confinement in a distant mountain resort in central Italy.
Long demoralized, the people of Italy were jubilant.
NOR WERE THEY THE only ones. After hearing the news of Mussolini’s arrest over the radio, Roosevelt, in high spirits, positioned himself before an array of microphones in the Diplomatic Reception Room to give his first fireside chat since February. He began speaking at precisely 9:25 p.m. “The first crack in the axis has come,” he boomed. “The criminal, corrupt fascist regime in Italy is going to pieces. The pirate philosophy of the fascists and the Nazis cannot stand adversity.” With military precision, he then outlined the “almost unbelievable” production by the democracies in comparison with that of 1942: 19 million tons of merchant shipping during the year; naval ships, 75 percent higher; munitions output, 83 percent higher; planes, an expected 86,000, nearly double the output for the previous year. He could not help boasting, yet he wisely tempered his words with realism. “The plans we have made for the knocking out of Mussolini and his gang have largely succeeded. But we still have to defeat Hitler and Tojo on their own home grounds. No one of us pretends that this will be an easy matter.”
As to Italy? “Our terms,” he said, “are still the same. We will have no truck with fascism in any way.”
And then came his final uplifting flourish, a retort to Goebbels’s fanciful speech in Berlin about the necessity for total war: “We must pour into this war the entire strength and intelligence and willpower of the United States.”
Meanwhile, in the days that followed, Roosevelt was preparing to quickly drive a wedge between Italy and Germany. His pragmatic side once again on display, Roosevelt signaled that he was ready to make a deal with the mercurial new premier of Italy, Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a figure in the mold of Darlan, who had already opened secret discussions with the Allies in Spain and Portugal. Putting aside his earlier pronouncement at Casablanca about the demand for unconditional surrender, Roosevelt hinted at favorable treatment for the people of Italy. He told the press on July 30: “I don’t care who we deal with in Italy so long as it isn’t a definite member of the fascist government, so long as we get them to lay down their arms, and so long as we don’t have anarchy.” Underscoring his desire to conclude a separate peace and bloody the Germans—and keeping in mind the sentiments of the active Italian American voters at home—he added, “Now his name may be a king, or present Prime Minister, or a mayor of a town or a village.”
He soon found out. Before dawn on September 3, 1943, British forces streamed onto the Italian mainland, and Roosevelt’s gambit paid off—for the time being. In an olive grove near Syracuse, the new Italian government changed its allegiance and “declared war” on the Nazis—then fled Rome in a panic. The Nazis promptly retaliated. Hitler, irate at the Italian double-cross, sent sixteen battle-hardened divisions screaming down the spine of Italy; they quickly poured over the Brenner Pass and just as quickly encircled Rome. And in a daring raid on the mountain resort in Abruzzi, ninety German glider paratroopers, led by the Waffen SS, kidnapped Mussolini and restored him to office. Meanwhile, Rome was occupied and the Italian army disarmed. At the same time, the Nazis seized all of Italy’s gold reserves, and Kesselring proclaimed Italy under German control. The Germans also began immediate persecution of any surviving Jews.
Six days later, the Allies struck back. On September 9, the shimmering sands of Salerno witnessed a stunning sight: American and British forces were landing en masse—actually, the Americans had disembarked at night—to begin their race for Naples. On the perimeter of the beachhead, the German coastal defense was fierce: thick smoke was everywhere, and the Americans faced thundering tank fire and heavy artillery. Meanwhile, the Germans cockily taunted the Allied troops, in English, over loudspeakers.
Counterattacking, Kesselring put up dogged resistance—he almost even split the American Fifth Army in two—while Rommel was dispatched to organize northern Italian defenses. It was not enough. Though Berlin radio boasted about the prospect of anoth
er Dunkirk, on October 1 Allied forces gained control of Naples, and the Germans were forced to conduct a hurried, painful retreat. From there, the Americans and British began making their way, over narrow roads and through rough terrain and weathered hilltop towns, toward Rome and Tuscany.
And with each slow, bloody yard as they worked their way north—Italy had suffered one of its most frightful winters in more than twenty years—the Allies were closer to being able to open up the second front with the invasion of France.
There was another considerable benefit. The Allies captured an invaluable complex of airfields at Foggia; this in turn provided them not simply with mastery of the skies, but also with fighter cover for the ground troops. It did one more thing. It enabled them finally to employ heavy bombers over the Balkans, over Austria, and even as far off as Poland.
Including the area around Auschwitz, some 620 miles away.
12
“The Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews”
AMID WARTIME SUMMITRY AND wartime strategy, sobering reports from the military fronts and nagging reports about Allied squabbles, and continuing troubles at home, Roosevelt invariably kept his composure. To be sure, as the war ground on there were times when his legendary patience was tried. “I get so many conflicting recommendations,” he once confessed, “my head is splitting.” Nor was he above grumbling about his own problems. And not a day went by without harrowing reports of bloody battles that left a trail of corpses everywhere. Nor was there a day when he couldn’t read about his own men, wounded or dead or taken prisoner. At sixty-two years of age, and after the unremitting complications of three years of war, he sometimes had bouts of lethargy or suffered from shortness of breath or an irregular heartbeat—or contracted debilitating influenza. But for the most part, to the American people he seemed indomitable. His energy, or rather his determination, did not wane. There was, as always, his broad smile and the infectious tilt of his head. There was his hearty laugh and his storytelling, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. And at his ritualistic cocktail hour, there was always his good cheer. True, he had to curtail some of his favorite relaxations. Where he once fiddled with his stamp collection for hours before bedtime, now he was forced to study reports about tank production or preparations for Normandy. Where he once could count on a late-afternoon dip in the White House pool, now, surrounded by aides and a mass of documents, he confronted a mountain of work that never seemed to quit—the memos; top-secret papers; personnel complaints; and letters from the public—some four thousand a day and never-ending. In his own way he was a tireless worker, but more than that, he was an incurable charmer. At times he seemed to revel in his own personal glory—a prima donna, he did not relish yielding the spotlight for long—but his political leadership was undeniable, and his ardor for the American people was unquestioned.