Getting to V-Day
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Getting to V-Day Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War By Eric Larrabee Harper & Row. 723 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of...
...Roosevelt took other questionable steps as well, including settling for a 90 (in actual practice 89) division army and thereby making the margin of victory in Europe exceedingly thin...
...Roosevelt's readiness to exercise it in fact and in detail and with such determination...
...Larrabee is not always consistent, however, particularly in his analysis of Roosevelt's relationship with MacArthur...
...Roosevelt, 'Just how does the President think?' She replied, 'My dear Mr...
...Larrabee's second proposition is that Roosevelt made few mistakes conducting the War, and none that mattered greatly in the end...
...Hedecides.' Roosevelt was undeniably forceful, able, and intelligent to a degree, but his was not a syllogistic or logical mind, given to sequential reasoning, not a linear mind in McLuhan terms but a mosaic one, suited for the discerning of patterns and syntheses, 'for knowing all kinds of diverse things at once in a flash,' at which, as Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins put it, he could be 'almost clairvoyant.' " In sum, then, Commander in Chiefs a book of strong opinions that historians will in many instances feel compelled to challenge...
...Here is an example that is, moreover, the best brief summary of how Roosevelt's mind worked that I know of: "Trying to follow the President's thought processes could be a wearing task...
...Yet, as Larrabee is at pains to establish, MacArthur did not deserve these appointments...
...He is alert to the intimate relationships between war and politics...
...Hundreds of thousands of civilians were burned to death in the process, raising a moral issue the author shrugs off by saying that "war is war...
...Larrabee knows this, having read Russell F. Weigley's brilliant study Eisenhower's Lieutenants, yet fails to consider the implications...
...It is finely, at points lyrically, written...
...He has read widely and knows the major criticisms of Roosevelt's wartime leadership expressed by participants then and historians since...
...He points out that the general owed a great deal to FDR, for despite MacArthur's extreme ambition and conservative views he was given the command of all U.S...
...To focus excessively on what one might dispute, though, would be to lose sight of Commander in Chiefs outstanding merits...
...At the same time, it has an energy, intelligence and verve that inspire admiration...
...Larrabee writes: "What are we to make of this strange man, so endowed by nature with the stuff of greatness and with faults that should have been trivial but instead turned sour and disabling...
...Larrabee acknowledges that Roosevelt was mistaken twice: once in the case of France as a consequence of his unwarranted animosity toward Charles de Gaulle, and the second time because of his perverse insistence that Nationalist China was a great—or potentially great— power...
...He often summarizes them before ruling in the President's favor...
...Larrabee cannot admit as much, because to do so would require him to concede flaws in the President's leadership and thus spoil the book's thesis...
...Army historian, whom Larrabee quotes as follows: "Franklin Roosevelt was the real and not merely a nominal Commander in Chief...
...The author thinks Roosevelt's other decisions could scarcely have been improved upon...
...Commander in Chief is not, as the title suggests, concerned exclusively with President Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Someof his best chapters, especially those on Roosevelt and Eisenhower, make this abundantly clear...
...Their contributions to victory were marginal, but their extreme costs central, to the American War effort...
...The following passage should make that clear, and in addition demonstrates his admirable style...
...In the course of these chapters Larrabee discusses the evolution of strategy, describes certain military actions, and passes judgment on men and issues...
...forces in the Philippines and subsequently made Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Theater, a post created especially for him...
...More likely, FDR gave MacArthur a theater of his own because the general's overwhelming—and largely undeserved —popularity was such that he couldn't be denied a major command...
...He has a gift for the telling phrase, and the telling quotation...
...As a human being he was a shell of tarnished magnificence, a false giant attended by real pygmies...
...Secretary of War Henry L.] Stimson, in a memorable phrase, said it was 'very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around an empty room.' John Günther once asked Mrs...
...Navy, and made numerous errors while taking credit for gains won by others...
...In fact, he uses quotations not merely to ornament his work, as many do, but to advance his arguments...
...The first was aptly stated by an official U.S...
...Though simple, Larrabee's argument is not simplistic...
...He had the need to disturb the universe, which is a great gift, but too often he ended by disturbing other people, whose needs and achievements he seemed not to recognize...
...He had no generosity in sharing the stage of history, no easiness in the presence of other actors...
...Since the Navy would not serve under MacArthur, the Pacific was divided into two theaters, causing problems also, albeit perhaps fewer than if MacArthur had been placed in charge of the whole area...
...It comes after an explanation of how MacArthur surrounded himself with sycophants—having a court, not a staff, as Marshall told him to his face...
...indeed, he understands, however much Americans prefer to deny it, that ultimately war is politics...
...He had the hunger that can never be satisfied: always to have been right, always perfect, always admired...
...Every President has possessed the constitutional authority which that title indicates, but few Presidents have shared Mr...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Finally, it reminds us that there were real giants in those days, the likes of which have not been seen again...
...Larrabee has a feel for the period that owes something to his military service in the War, yet is not explained by it...
...Except for a Prologue and an Epilogue, the text consists of 10 chapters that are each devoted to a different prominent figure—Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Ernest J. King, Henry "Hap" Arnold, Alexander A. Vandegrift, Douglas MacArthur, Chester W. Nimitz, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Joseph W. Stilwell, Curtis E. LeMay...
...There is a hollowness here, a lack of centrality, of commitment and conviction beyond the self that could have redeemed what is otherwise empty posturing...
...Gunther, the President never "thinks...
...He further endorses the bombing of Germany and Japan, possibly the most dubious enterprises of all...
...No one has sketched MacArthur better than Larrabee does...
...But surely even in wartime there are limits beyond which civilized people may not go, and terror bombing exceeded them...
...His thesis is a simple one, consisting of two propositions...
...His defense of the Philippines was calamitous, he treated Australia shamefully, feuded with the U.S...
...In the event FDR was saved from mishandling France by Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, leaving only China as an absolute policy failure...
...Of Great Britain standing alone against Hitler's Europe in 1940, Larrabee observes: "From end to end that island burned with a white flame in those days, and it lit the world...
...the record must be rewritten—at whatever cost to truth—until there was only one major figure, one guiding genius, one hero...
...Always there was the inability to leave history alone...
...it deals, rather, with decision making as a collective process...
...Larrabee justifies the President's retention of MacArthur on the grounds that he had to be kept overseas, lest he become "a symbol for the Fascist-minded among Americans to rally around....' This would have been an exceedingly weak, and even dishonorable, motive...
...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" This superb book will give much pleasure to anyone who is curious about America's part in World War II...
Vol. 70 • May 1987 • No. 7
