Dwight Eisenhower played Contract Bridge to relax.  Terrence Reese, one of the game’s strongest players, has written: “You play chess with your brain, but in bridge your whole character and personality is expressed.“  Risk-taking and deception are critical to success, while judgment and decision-making are at the heart of the game.  A man grappling with the most daunting decisions a military leader could face enjoyed a game where he could take risks and make decisions for low stakes.

June 5 and June 6, 1944 were dates that provided the conditions that the Anglo-Canadian-American forces required for the massive Normandy landing.  The invaders wanted a night with a full moon when the tide would be halfway to full and still rising at dawn.  The incoming flood would aid the landing craft, while the less than full tide would expose hazards that the enemy had placed on the beach.  The moon would be full on June 6, nearly full on June 5.

The weather was miserable on June 5.  Eisenhower decided to wait another day.  If the weather worsened or failed to improve, the next dates with favorable tides would have been June 19 and 20, but there would have been a new moon on those dates, a disadvantage.  The pressure experienced by a person making the decision to proceed under these conditions cannot be imagined.

This was the largest sea-borne invasion force ever assembled.  The landing included 153,000 troops.  We Americans sometimes overlook the fact that the contribution made by the combined British and Canadian forces was greater than the American.  Britain sent more than 60,000 troops, while Canada provided some 20,000.  The Americans numbered about 73,000, the largest contingent but less than half of the total.

The one thing that almost all of the invaders had in common was language.  Apart from a few French paratroopers and liaison staff, the invasion force was Anglophone.  It has been said that the most important fact of the twentieth century was that Americans speak English.

This point was not lost on Charles de Gaulle.  He had no official position. The United States recognized the Vichy government, yet de Gaulle insisted that he spoke for France.  In the days before the invasion, de Gaulle and Churchill had argued about post-invasion politics.  Churchill’s final word was that Eisenhower was in charge of the invasion, so his decisions on political matters in the immediate post-invasion environment would stand.  If de Gaulle wanted to change that, he had to talk to President Roosevelt.

This proposal drove de Gaulle into a fury.  Why should he have to see Roosevelt about the restoration of the French government?  The upshot was that on the night of June 5-6, when Eisenhower had scores of things to worry about, when the first reports pointing to success or failure were only hours away, he had to deal with a ferociously angry Charles de Gaulle.

De Gaulle wanted to make a public announcement as the invasion unfolded.  Eisenhower explained that he himself would make the initial proclamation.  Eisenhower showed his visitor a copy of the printed text.  The document failed to mention French forces or de Gaulle himself.  De Gaulle was not pleased.  Nor was his mood lightened when Eisenhower offered de Gaulle the chance to broadcast following Eisenhower.  De Gaulle had no intention of speaking after anyone, much less an American general.

Eisenhower had arranged for a scrip currency denominated in Francs to be printed so that the troops could purchase supplies locally as the need arose.  De Gaulle said the Americans were counterfeiting.  Eisenhower intended to declare a provisional military government that would work with local political leaders until permanent arrangements were in place.  De Gaulle found this unacceptable; he intended to organize French politics on his terms.

At a later date, General Eisenhower wrote (I paraphrase): “Apart from the weather, no other element in the war gave me as much difficulty as the French.”  Those “other elements” included the Luftwaffe and the Wehrmacht.  The thought had undoubtedly occurred to General Eisenhower prior to the night of June 5-6, but I imagine de Gaulle’s behavior on D-Day helped to fasten the idea in Eisenhower’s mind.

Give de Gaulle credit for seeing past the fighting to the political situation as it would exist after the war.  He shared with Churchill and Stalin this view of war as “diplomacy by other means”.  The Allied invasion of France was not a purely military operation.  Churchill and Stalin also planned war strategy with the post-war political situation in mind.  The interplay of their ambitions, umpired by Franklin Roosevelt, produced a vector of forces that pointed at Normandy.  Still, there were alternatives that the Anglophones might have pursued.  One of those alternatives stemmed from the uncelebrated, barely remembered invasion of Italy that began in July 1943, eleven months before D-Day.

I was in London on business on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, June 6, 1984.  The commemoration in Normandy was elaborately done.  Thousands of American veterans made the trip.  On the day, Ronald Reagan made one of his finest speeches (“The Boys of Pointe du Hoc”).  My British colleagues were puzzled by the big deal the Americans were making of the fortieth anniversary of the event.

I thought I knew why.  Previous round-number anniversaries had provided an occasion first for the surviving political leaders, then in their turn the generals, and later the senior officers.  The fortieth anniversary was the moment for the men who had ridden the landing craft up to the shore, jumped into cold water, and stormed the beaches.  Or they had jumped out of planes or dropped bombs or fired at the shore from the armada that shepherded the invasion force.  The fiftieth anniversary might be more memorable still, but the warriors of 1944 were already in their 60s and couldn’t count on ten more good years.  The fortieth anniversary was the time to go.

At the time I didn’t ask why we were celebrating the invasion of Normandy while ignoring the earlier invasion of Italy.  Seventy-five years after this dramatic event, I would like to understand why the western allies chose to invade France at all.  The answers are not comforting.

Churchill had not favored a cross-Channel invasion.  The prospect of an attack through France must have conjured a repetition of the trench warfare that had bled Britain dry during the First World War.  Churchill preferred an attack through Italy, which he called the “soft underbelly of Europe”.  Italy offered an additional advantage.  Once the western allies had broken out of Italy, they could advance through the Hungarian Plain to attack Germany from the east.  German troops on the eastern front would be caught between the Anglophones on one side and the Soviets on the other.  The western allies had been active in Italy since July 1943 and were pressing northward during the planning and execution of the Normandy invasion.

Unfortunately, the Italian campaign was more difficult, the going slower and tougher than Churchill had anticipated.  The Allied command allowed itself to be sidetracked into liberating Rome when more important strategic targets were available.  In the Spring of 1944, the moment when the campaign could have succeeded, it suffered two setbacks.  First, additional forces were denied Italy and stockpiled in Britain in preparation for Normandy.  Second, forces were withdrawn from Italy to support Operation Sword, the invasion of France’s Mediterranean coast.  After the war, both the American commander in Italy, Mark Clark, and his German counterpart, Albert Kesselring, openly questioned the wisdom of weakening the Italian front in order to support an invasion of southern France, an area with little strategic importance.  The same could be said of the decision to divert forces from Italy to Normandy, although General Clark does not push this point.

Why invade two French coasts when success so much closer to the German frontier was possible?  The area in eastern Europe that would be occupied by the Anglophones if General Clark’s army had been able to break out to the north was where that other geopolitical strategist Josef Stalin intended to be operating during the late stages of the war.  He did not want anyone else getting there first.  From the moment that the United States entered the war, Stalin started calling for a second front.  When the western allies landed in north Africa, he continued the call.  The invasion of Italy did not satisfy him.  He did not consider Italy a “second front”.  The Normandy beaches are more than 700 miles west of the line that the western allies would have followed had they taken northern Italy and marched north toward Berlin from the east.

The decision to choose the high-risk invasion of a well-defended coast when Allied troops were already on the ground in Italy has set up a debate between the radical revisionist view of Diana West in her book “American Betrayal” and the conventional view that the Normandy invasion established the second front that ensured Allied victory in Europe in the Second World War.

An excellent defense of the conventional view comes from an unconventional source.  Conrad Black is a conservative who admires Franklin Roosevelt; his biography of FDR is subtitled “Champion of Freedom.”  Black points out that on the day the United States entered the Second World War, Japan, Germany, and Italy were governed by totalitarian dictatorships, while western Europe and vast territories in the Pacific were under military occupation.  At the end of the war, democracy was restored to France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Norway, while Italy, Germany (west of the Elbe), and Japan joined the club of liberal democracies.  Austria, once again independent of Germany, became neutral to accommodate the Soviets, as did Finland.  On this accounting, Mr. Roosevelt earned his subtitle.

A skeptic would note that when the treaties ending the First World War were signed, all of those nations were part of the community of liberal societies.  Japan had been an ally of Britain in the First World War and after the war wanted to continue its friendly relations.  (Britain declined the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty in 1922 at the insistence of the United States.)  Germany was a model republic (on paper), while France’s Third Republic was at the peak of its power.  Italy was soon to prove an exception when the life-long socialist Benito Mussolini instituted Fascism, a movement very similar to what would be called National Socialism in Germany and (after diluting the German version’s anti-Semitism and racism) Democratic Socialism in other places.  Italy aside, the skeptic could note that by 1945, the United States had done nothing more than achieve par.  It had recovered the ground that had been gained in 1919 and later lost.

However, achieving par in western Europe had come at a terrible cost in eastern Europe.  Communist control of Soviet territory was tenuous in 1919.  By 1945, Communist control of all of the Soviet Union was complete, the three Baltic republics had been digested courtesy of the 1939 treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the area of Soviet control had moved to the Elbe.  Even then, Stalin wanted more.  At the 1945 Allied conference in Potsdam, a Berlin suburb, an American official (Averill Harriman) asked Stalin why he looked glum at a moment of historical triumph.  Stalin’s reply was that “Alexander the First [the Czar who helped to defeat Napoleon] got to Paris.”

In contrast to the conventional and near-worshipful view of Roosevelt held by Mr. Black, Ms. West believes that the U.S. conducted the Second World War under the influence of Soviet agents.  She is convinced that the diversion of forces from Italy to Normandy was the work of Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s Grand Vizier and, what is more, that Hopkins was a Soviet agent.

That the Roosevelt administration was honeycombed with Soviet agents is well-documented, although it is too often overlooked in the adulatory coverage afforded to Mr. Roosevelt by journalists and historians.  I have written before that the problem with conspiracy theories is that they require their advocates to force the facts to fit the theory.  They work backwards from conclusions reached before any evidence has been evaluated.

The belief that hundreds of Soviet agents held positions of influence in the Roosevelt administration does not suffer from these defects.  It is supported by plentiful eyewitness, physical, and documentary evidence that has held up under scrutiny and is internally consistent.  In fact, the behavior characteristic of the conspiracy theorist – dismissal of evidence that does not support a deeply held conclusion – is exhibited by those who deny that the conspiracy existed.

The existence of a Soviet network of spies active within the Roosevelt administration does not establish that Harry Hopkins was part of that network nor that he was acting at the direction of Soviet spymasters when he used his influence to carry out Stalin’s preferred role for US forces in Europe.

The Roosevelt worshipers will dismiss the possibility out of hand.  After all, Roosevelt was a “champion of freedom”.   It might disturb that camp to learn that Roosevelt was unconcerned about espionage in his administration.  In September 1939, Adolph Berle, an Assistant Secretary of State charged with managing internal security, disclosed to Roosevelt a report that Berle had received from an eyewitness (Whittaker Chambers) naming some two dozen Soviet agents who held posts in the administration.  One of the names was Laughlin Currie, a member of Roosevelt’s White House staff.  Incidentally, Chambers’s accusations have been confirmed by independent evidence, although the effort took decades in some cases.

Roosevelt’s reaction was to shoot the messenger.  Berle reported that the President had told him to “jump in the lake”.  (It seems that Berle was cleaning up his boss’s language.  Reading between the lines, it appears that Roosevelt’s actual suggestion involved a biologically impossible act.)  It is sobering to learn that the President was unworried about traitors even among his personal staff.  Still, that doesn’t mean that Hopkins was a spy.

There are at least two reasons for believing that Hopkins was not a Soviet agent.  First, Hopkins is mentioned in several intercepted Soviet dispatches (the “VENONA” telegrams), but always as an “asset” never as an agent.  Second, and more generally, achieving the pro-Soviet tilt of U.S. foreign policy during the Roosevelt administration required more than the efforts of some 500 Soviet agents, no matter how hard they may have worked on behalf of their adopted country.  That policy was the result of consensus, not conspiracy.  Consider a small sampling of the evidence:

• When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Roosevelt’s first impulse was to find a way to help the Soviets. In July 1941, he dispatched Harry Hopkins to Moscow to assess whether the Soviets would benefit from material aid from the United States.  Unsurprisingly, the Soviets were able to convince Hopkins that American aid would be well used.  But what need was there to take sides at all?  The United States was not at war; it was officially neutral.  Two murderous versions of the socialist vision had been allies from August 1939 (when the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed) right up to the moment that the German attack began on June 22, 1941.  The Soviets had invaded Poland as agreed in their treaty.  They had actively supplied Germany with materiel and foodstuffs right up to the day Germany attacked.  What reason was there to favor one of these deviants over the other?  The standard answer is that the Soviets were able and willing to kill German soldiers.  That leaves unsaid that the Germans were able and willing to kill Soviet soldiers, who were just as dangerous.  And let us remember that both of these tyrannies were fully prepared to liquidate civilians on a massive scale and did so.
• In 1940, as the Soviets were absorbing eastern Poland, they murdered some 20,000 Polish officers. Stalin, ever the strategic thinker, did not like the idea of that many Polish patriots with proven leadership ability getting in the way of the permanent subjugation of Poland to the Soviet yoke.  Killing the Polish officers solved that problem.  When the bodies were discovered (still during the war) the Soviets blamed the atrocity on Germany.  The United States played along, in order not to upset an ally.
• After the war, high-ranking German officials were held to account for conspiracy to commit a “crime against peace” (among other things). The Soviet Union was one of the conspirators.  Would Germany have invaded Poland in 1939 without the assurances contained in the Nazi-Soviet Pact?  The answer is unknowable, but the fact is that Soviet diplomats and political figures ought to have been in the dock at Nuremberg rather than at the prosecutor’s table.  There was no practical way to put them on trial but there was no need to allow them to prosecute crimes that they themselves had committed and had facilitated.
• Also after the war, the Soviets demanded the return of some 500,000 Soviet soldiers who had ended up in the control of western governments via wartime contingencies. A return to the Soviet Union meant certain death for these unfortunates.  Even so, the western allies accommodated Stalin’s demand for their return.

The last two examples date to the Truman administration, supporting the thesis that the pro-Soviet tilt of U.S. foreign policy during this period cannot be attributed solely to the efforts of agents of the Soviet regime.  The policy preference in favor of the Soviets was far more deeply ingrained and more corrosive than can be explained by the work of spies, even if the network included moles prepared to do the bidding of their Soviet clients.

It did not require a spy in a key position in the Roosevelt administration to steer the Anglo-Canadian-American forces toward Normandy and shortly afterwards to the Rhone.  The western allies wanted to repay the sacrifices made by the Soviet armed forces and the Soviet people themselves.  Those sacrifices cannot be overlooked.  The Soviets suffered casualties in the millions, many times the casualties of the United States.  But anyone who thinks that Josef Stalin shed tears over those lost to the German invasion and swore that those honored dead will not have died in vain is mistaken.

The Normandy invasion fits the pattern of the many other accommodations made to the Soviets and to Josef Stalin particularly once the United States and the Soviet Union found themselves on the same side in a war against Germany.  It suited Stalin’s purpose to keep the western allies occupied on the beaches of France while his forces pushed forward month by month through the end of 1944 and the first five months of 1945.  U.S. war plans always contemplated an invasion of France.  The Americans wanted allied troops in France headed west.  I have never seen a satisfactory explanation for why a massive Allied army moving northeast out of Italy would not have better served the cause.  Stalin’s geopolitical calculations and American sentiment outweighed Churchill’s original objections.  And Churchill has swallowed his objections.  By this time Churchill had adopted a policy of full-blown appeasement when it came to Stalin’s demands.

The second front that Stalin had demanded was opened at dawn on June 6 by an armada of some 6.000 ships carrying the largest amphibious invasion force ever assembled or likely to be assembled again.  As we know, they accomplished their mission.  Eisenhower was a master of logistics and planning.  He kept a fractious group of military commanders focused and under control.  The troops were brilliantly trained and demonstrated courage beyond our understanding as they swarmed ashore against an entrenched, battle-hardened enemy.  Their success on that day was well-earned and stands as one of the great military achievements of all time.

But imagine if that same force and all of the planning, training, courage, and fighting spirit that stormed Normandy had instead been applied to the Italian campaign.  We cannot know what would have happened on the path not chosen, but the opportunity was available to defeat Germany on terms that held Soviet tyranny within the boundaries it occupied at the moment in 1939 when it began to conspire with Germany to make war.