The Conquerors by Michael R. Beschloss

Author:Michael R. Beschloss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

ON SATURDAY, March 3, at 12:40 P.M., Roosevelt saw Stimson, who wrote in his diary, “Very generous of him, because it was cutting into his lunchtime.”

Stimson was troubled by the “terrible and probably unnecessary” killing of perhaps fifty thousand people during the previous month’s Allied bombing of Dresden. The German city had been bombed under a British plan to provoke chaos by disrupting the stampede of refugees from the latest Soviet offensive. In his diary, Stimson noted that the city, known for its china and architecture, was the capital of Saxony, “the least Prussianized part of Germany,” which should be “the center” of a new, “less Prussianized” Germany that would be “dedicated to freedom.”

Stimson reminded the President that Eisenhower had agreed to serve as military governor of Germany for a few months after surrender. But then he would step aside. With the Allies smashing into German territory, Eisenhower’s successor had better be named “at once.”

Roosevelt had sometimes fantasized that he himself would “like to try” being military governor. He reminded Stimson, who required no reminder, that he had studied in Germany “in the old days, before she was corrupted.” He would love “to try to bring her back to the old Germany of Schiller and Goethe and the old Emperor.”

During the summer of 1944, when Morgenthau had heard that McCloy was interested in the job, he indignantly asked Harry Hopkins how, with prewar clients like Westinghouse and General Electric, McCloy could “deal with such companies’ big claims against postwar Germany.” Eisenhower backed McCloy’s candidacy, but Stimson told McCloy that he could not afford to lose him.

Hull had suggested James Byrnes of South Carolina, director of the Office of War Mobilization. Agreeing that Byrnes would be “sufficiently tough,” Roosevelt had offered him the job. But Byrnes had wanted to be Secretary of State. He excused himself on grounds that he couldn’t speak German.

Stimson suggested his Under Secretary, Robert Patterson, a former federal judge who still wore the belt he had snatched from a German soldier he had killed in World War I. Roosevelt had agreed that Patterson’s “judicial poise, ability and character” would serve him well. Morgenthau thought the idea was “perfectly swell.”

But now, in March 1945, Stimson told Roosevelt that after the Battle of the Bulge, the Pentagon must completely revise its production program. He needed Patterson to oversee it “without scandal or delay.” He had decided that the right man for Germany was General Lucius Clay, Byrnes’s deputy at War Mobilization. He told Roosevelt that the military governor should be a soldier, at least during the early occupation.

Clay was a military man, an engineer and “a most effective organizer,” with deep experience in Washington politics and logistics, which reflected the Pentagon’s aversion to letting Germany founder. In the fall of 1944 he had helped Eisenhower break a dangerous logjam at Cherbourg, allowing enough goods to flow through that vital port to hasten the Allied advance.

McCloy had established in advance that Clay was willing to make ample use, if necessary,

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