Forged in War by Warren F. Kimball

Author:Warren F. Kimball
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062034847
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1997-04-17T21:00:00+00:00

We’ve got the whole world in our hands.

CHAPTER 8

“A New Heaven and

a New Earth”

December 1943-December 1944

One day during Roosevelt’s journey across the Atlantic aboard the USS Iowa, the ship conducted an antiaircraft drill using live ammunition in order to show off the “veritable curtain of fire” that would “greet” enemy aircraft. During the drill a torpedo accidentally fired from the tubes on the USS William D. Porter, one of the destroyers escorting the president’s ship, and headed straight for the Iowa. Warned by a radio message, lookouts spotted the torpedo’s wake, and the Iowa maneuvered to avoid. The torpedo had no primer, but even if it had hit the heavily armored battleship and exploded, there was little chance of a single torpedo’s inflicting serious damage or threatening the lives of the president and his party. FDR treated the episode as a lark and breezily ordered that no punitive action be taken, certainly saving the career, if not the life, of the Porter’s captain, given Admiral King’s volcanic temper.1

But what if the torpedo had hit the Iowa? What if Franklin Roosevelt had died as a result of the mishap? “If” history is best left to novelists, but a little speculation may illustrate the amount of room to maneuver the Big Three had as they gathered to meet at Teheran in late November 1943. This would have been before the 1944 presidential election, meaning that Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Harry Truman’s predecessor, would have become President. Whatever effect a “President” Wallace would have had—and it might have been considerable—FDR’s policies had both hemmed in any successor and at the same time failed to provide clear direction.

The second front, already being planned, could be “vetoed,” but only by Stalin. Military events on the Russian front and in Italy did not provide the Anglo-Americans with the leverage needed to go against Stalin’s wishes—unless they no longer viewed Hitler and Germany as their primary enemy and did not care whether or not the Soviet Union entered that war against Japan. In that theater China’s military ineffectiveness had prompted a shift in strategy. Instead of an invasion of Japan from China, planners were assuming an island-hopping campaign, strategic bombing, and invasions of the Philippines and/or Formosa (Taiwan). That military strategy meant that U.S. and British military forces would not be in China at war’s end.

As for the postwar world, FDR’s policy of promoting cooperation with the Soviet Union and creating a condominium of the four policemen that would restrain both Soviet expansionism and British (European) imperialism could well have died with Roosevelt. His concept was vague, ill defined, and full of distinctions so subtle (or ignored) that even his closest advisers were uncertain about how it would work, and Henry Wallace was far from a close adviser. Even FDR had difficulty describing the difference between a sphere of influence and his notion of regional responsibility. Eleanor Roosevelt’s earlier warning that the conception was “fraught with danger” remained on the mark. What would keep the major

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