Armageddon - Max Hastings [9]
While Roosevelt’s life reflected the highest ideals, he was a much less sentimental and more ruthless man than Churchill. Roosevelt possessed, claims his most recent biographer, “a more perceptive and less romantic view of the world than Churchill.” This proposition is justified insofar as Roosevelt recognized that the days of empires were done, while Churchill’s heart refused to accept the signals of his brain that it was so. Yet any claim of Roosevelt’s superior wisdom becomes hard to sustain convincingly in the light of the president’s failure to perceive, as Churchill perceived, the depth of evil which Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union represented. It may be true that the Western allies lacked the military power to prevent the Soviet rape of eastern Europe, but posterity is entitled to wish that Roosevelt had allowed himself to appear less indifferent to it.
The British considered that neither the president nor the U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, for all his greatness as lead manager of America’s war effort, exercised the mastery of strategy that was needed to finish the war quickly. “As [Roosevelt’s] grip slackened during the last year of his life,” argues one of the best historians of Anglo-American relations at this period, “. . . the President became in some ways a liability in terms of the effective conduct of United States and Allied business . . . his refusal to face the facts concerning his own state of health . . . suggest, not so much heroism, as is usually argued, but irresponsibility and an undue belief in his own indispensability, if not a love of power.” Even if this verdict is too harsh and ignores the likelihood that an elected replacement president in January 1945 would have been less impressive than Harry S. Truman, it is hard to dispute the assertion that Roosevelt’s judgement was flawed, his grasp upon events visibly slipping, from his 1944 re-election campaign until his death in April the following year.
Yet American vision about the most important strategic decision of the western war, the assault on the continent, had proved superior to that of the British. As late as the winter of 1943–44, Churchill continued to fight a rearguard action for his cherished Mediterranean strategy. He pursued the chimera of penetrating Germany through Italy and Yugoslavia. He remained instinctively anxious to defer an invasion of north-west Europe, which he feared could become a bloodbath reminiscent of the First World War. Painful experience of the limitations of Allied forces against those of the Wehrmacht, the greatest fighting machine the world had ever seen, dogged his consciousness. The prime minister always acknowledged that a confrontation in France must come sooner or later. But he remained uncharacteristically dilatory about its timing. General* 2 Sir John Kennedy, Britain’s Director of Military Operations, wrote after the war that he doubted whether the invasion of Normandy would have taken place before 1945 but for the insistence of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff: “American opinion on the landing in France in 1944 was, without a shadow of doubt, ‘harder’ than ours.” Franklin Roosevelt could claim personal credit for insisting that D-Day should take place when it did. Marshall, likewise,