FDR - Jean Edward Smith [362]
It was during the TRIDENT conference that Roosevelt recognized he could not conduct the war and manage the home front at the same time. As soon as the conference ended and Churchill returned to England, FDR announced the establishment of the Office of War Mobilization with Supreme Court justice James F. Byrnes as director. Byrnes was a consummate Washington insider. A former congressman and senator from South Carolina—and one of the few southerners who consistently supported the New Deal—he stepped down from the Court at Roosevelt’s behest to head the mobilization effort. With an office in the east wing of the White House adjacent to Admiral Leahy’s, Byrnes became the final arbiter of home-front decision making. “Your decision is my decision,” FDR told Byrnes, “and there is no appeal. For all practical purposes you will be assistant President.”18
On July 10, 1943, Allied forces invaded Sicily in the largest amphibious operation of the war.* Because of the shaky performance of the U.S. II Corps in North Africa, the principal task was assigned to General Montgomery’s veteran Eighth Army, which was to attack northward along Sicily’s east coast and seal the island exit across the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland. Patton’s Seventh Army would cover Montgomery’s left flank. But when Montgomery bogged down sixty miles short of Messina, Patton seized the initiative, sliced through western Sicily, and captured the city of Palermo on July 22. The Seventh Army then wheeled east along Sicily’s north coast and after heavy fighting arrived at Messina August 17, shortly before Montgomery. The Seventh Army’s relentless offensive resolved whatever doubts military planners had about the combat-worthiness of American troops. But it arrived too late in Messina to prevent the Germans and Italians from evacuating some one hundred thousand troops, together with most of their vehicles and equipment.
Three days after Patton took Palermo, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy triggered a coup in Rome, dismissed Mussolini as prime minister, and ordered him into custody. To replace Il Duce the King appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the ranking member of the Italian armed forces, a Darlan-like figure fully prepared to fight or parley, whichever course seemed more advantageous. While assuring Hitler that Italy remained loyal to the Axis, Badoglio opened secret negotiations with the Allies in Lisbon.
Roosevelt paid lip service to unconditional surrender. “Our terms to Italy are still the same,” he told the nation in a fireside chat on July 28, 1943. “We will have no truck with Fascism in any way, in any shape or manner.”19 Privately he told Churchill, “we should come as close to unconditional surrender as we can, followed by good treatment of the Italian populace.”20
Like Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio, Roosevelt was ready to cut a deal. He not only wished to end the fighting but recognized the need to accommodate the nation’s large Italian-American community. Asked at his press conference on July 30 whether the United States would negotiate with Italy’s new government, the president ignored his previous insistence on unconditional surrender. “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 they get them to lay down their arms, and so long as we don’t have anarchy. Now his name may be a King, or a present prime minister, or a Mayor of a town or a village.”
Q: Mr. President, you wouldn’t consider General Badoglio as a Fascist, then?
FDR: I am not discussing personalities.21
Churchill was equally eager to negotiate. Separating Italy from Germany had been a goal of British diplomacy for at least a decade, and Winston had no qualms. “I will deal with any Italian authority which can deliver the