"The Quarrels of Brothers"

As Secretary of War from the pre-Pearl Harbor Lend-Lease campaign until after V-J day, Elder Statesman Henry L. Stimson never wavered in two firm convictions. One was that ultimate victory could be assured only by a cross-Channel invasion of Europe. The other was that the sooner the invasion came the better. In the first excerpts from his wartime autobiography, published in the January issue of the Ladies' Home Journal,* 80-year-old Henry Stimson this week gave his account of the battle he fought for adoption of his strategy.

"Lingering Predilection." From the outset, Stimson's major opponents were the two sometimes brilliant, always compelling men who ran the war from Washington and London. Though both Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had early accepted the War Department's Operation BOLERO (a 50-division cross-Channel assault by the summer of 1943), "neither of the two had been fully and finally persuaded."

In Churchill's case, it was a question of caution. On three separate occasions he tried to sidetrack BOLERO for a less risky venture. The last time, Stimson wrote angrily in his diary: "As the British won't go through with what they agreed to, we will turn our backs on them and take up the war with Japan." In Roosevelt's case, it was a question of "some operation in 1942" and a "lingering predilection for the Mediterranean." The resulting compromise was the invasion of North Africa, a bitter disappointment to Stimson, but "the only operation that satisfied both."

Single Yardstick. Despite his dissatisfaction with the North African invasion, Stimson supported it once it was launched. When Wendell Willkie was preparing to go on the air to attack the Eisenhower-Darlan agreement, Stimson grabbed for his telephone. "I told him flatly that if he criticized the Darlan agreement at this juncture he would run the risk of jeopardizing the success of the United States Army in North Africa and would be rendering its task very much more difficult."

To Stimson, every decision could be measured by a single yardstick: did it help knock Germany out of the war? The best news he had heard after two years of war was the message Franklin Roosevelt carried home from Teheran in 1943: "I have thus brought OVERLORD (the Normandy landings plan) back to you safe and sound on the ways for accomplishment."

No Apologies. Single-minded Henry Stimson makes no apologies for his yardstick, which actually was big enough to measure only one phase of the global war, and inadequate for calculating the political possibilities. Thus he scorns Churchill's preference for "the right hook," which Stimson contends was intended only as a war of attrition in Italy and the Balkans, but which could actually have changed the course of history in Central Europe.

With his yardstick poised over the Germans, he had little left over for the Pacific. To Stimson, the island-hopping campaign toward Japan had to take second place, the China-Burma-India campaign "a poor third." Despite this poor-relation treatment for Asia, Stimson grew increasingly bitter both over British failure to press the ground fighting in Burma and the opposition of U.S. airmen, who wanted to step up the assault by air. He also showed little sympathy for the fight of the Chinese Nationalists, who were not only battling the Japanese, but then as now stood as the main bulwark against Communism in Asia.

Of the Chinese, Stimson says: "They passed their days and nights in pleading for clouds of airplanes and swarms of tanks, constantly insisting to the Western World that 'America must help her faithful ally.' But they would not help themselves." Of Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, he says: "An ignorant, suspicious feudal autocrat with a profound but misconceived devotion to the integrity of China and to himself as her savior."

"Honeyed Words." Single-minded Mr. Stimson is now inclined to forgive & forget his troubles with the British. "When all the arguments have been forgotten," he wrote, "this central fact will remain. The two nations fought a single war, and their quarrels were the quarrels of brothers." As for the Russians, "in their own strange way they were magnificent allies. They fought as they had promised and they made no separate peace."

By the same rule, Secretary Stimson measured the men with whom he had to deal. In an inevitable comparison between the two Roosevelts, Stimson unhesitatingly chose his old friend Teddy. "He would have been able to brush aside the contemptible little group of men who wailed of 'warmongers' and in the blunt strokes of a poster painter he would have demonstrated the duty of Americans. Franklin Roosevelt was not made that way. With unequaled political skill he could pave the way for any given specific step, but in so doing he was likely to tie his own hands for the future, using honeyed and consoling words that would return to plague him later."

But Stimson's final judgment of F.D.R. was somewhat kinder: "The Army never had a finer Commander in Chief. ... As a wartime international leader he proved himself as good as one man could be--but one man was not enough to keep track of so vast an undertaking . . . [or] to keep all the threads in his own hands. One man simply could not do it all, and Franklin Roosevelt killed himself trying."

*Written in the third person by Yaleman McGeorge Bundy, now a junior fellow at Harvard University, son of Stimson's onetime assistant, Harvey H. Bundy. The full memoirs will be released in book form (On Active Service) by Harper in April.

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