Franklin and Winston's Excellent Road Trip: Churchill and FDR Overnight in Marrakesh

Churchill Showing FDR the Sunset at Marrakesh

As I noted in my post yesterday on the closing of the Casablanca Conference 70 years ago, as soon as the morning press conference was over, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt set out on an overnight excursion to Marrakesh. Churchill had loved to visit Marrakesh to paint before the war, and wanted to show the always fascinating city to his American counterpart. Let Churchill begin the tale (sources for the quotes at the bottom of the post):

The President prepared to depart. But I said to him, "You cannot go all this way to North Africa without seeing Marrakech. Let us spend two days there. I must be with you when you see the sunset on the snows of the Atlas Mountains." I worked on Harry Hopkins also in this sense. It happened there was a most delightful villa, of which I knew nothing, at Marrakech which the American Vice-Consul, Mr. Kenneth Pendar, had been lent by an American lady, Mrs. Taylor. This villa would accommodate the President and me, and there was plenty of outside room for our entourages. So it was decided that we should all go to Marrakech. 

Churchill writes as if it was spontaneous but since the villa had been arranged and US troops lined the road for 150 miles, one presumes some pre-planning.

Roosevelt and I drove together the one hundred and fifty miles across the desert — it seemed to me to be beginning to get greener — and reached the famous oasis. My description of Marrakech was — "the Paris of the Sahara," where all the caravans had come from Central Africa for centuries to be heavily taxed en route by the tribes in the mountains and afterwards swindled in the Marrakech markets, receiving the return, which they greatly valued, of the gay life [not what it means today —MCD] of the city, including fortune-tellers, snake-charmers, masses of food and drink, and on the whole the largest and most elaborately organised brothels [exactly what it means today —MCD] in the African continent. All these institutions were of long and ancient  repute.

It was agreed between us that I should provide the luncheon, and Tommy was accordingly charged with the task. The President and I drove together all the way, five hours, and talked a great deal of shop, but also touched on lighter matters. Many thousand American troops were posted along the road to protect us from any danger, and aeroplanes circled ceaselessly overhead . . .

Averell Harriman,who was along for the excursion, remembered the road trip this way (his memoirs refer to himself in the third person):

As soon as the press conference was over, the two were off to Marrakesh with Hopkins and Harriman, the Prime Minister's son Randolph, Hopkins' son Robert, Admiral [Ross T.] McIntire [Roosevelt's personal physician] and an entourage of aides. It was a four-hour drive of 150 miles through the desert, the dusty road lined with American soldiers standing at attention while fighter planes swept overhead. The British had prepared a picnic lunch of hard-boiled eggs, sandwiches and mince pies to eat along the way. 

If Harriman remembered the details of the lunch, Harry Hopkins remembered the alcohol in his diary:

At 1.15 we drove to Marrakesh — picnic lunch on the way. Everyone tired but relaxed. As the British had fixed up the lunch we had plenty of wine and Scotch.

Churchill continues the tale:

In the evening we arrived at the villa, where we were very hospitably and suitably entertained by Mr. Pendar. I took the President up the tower of the villa. He was carried in a chair, and sat enjoying a wonderful sunset on the snows of the Atlas. [See the photo at top.]  We had a very jolly dinner, about fifteen or sixteen, and we all sang songs. I sang, and the President joined in the choruses, and at one moment was about to try a solo. However, someone interrupted and I never heard this.

Hopkins and others at least visited the town, including what anyone who has seen Marrakesh will recognize as the Djemaa al-Fnaa':

We were put up at the villa of the late Moses Taylor — very pleasant. Our host was a young archaeologist named Pendar (Louise had once rented his flat in Paris) — he was one of our secret agents in N. Africa prior to the landings. Averell [Harriman], Randolph [Churchill], Robert [Hopkins, Harry’s son] and I went to visit a big fair — storytellers — dancers — snake-charmers — and 15,000 natives. Very colorful. The great trading market was near — but nothing much to sell — tho thousands ever milling thru. Dinner was good — army style — company aglow — much banter — Churchill at his best.

Harriman remembered more about the dinner conversation that evening:

At dinner that evening in the extraordinarily beautiful Moorish house of Mrs. Moses Taylor, then occupied by Kenneth Pendar, one of [Robert] Murphy's special agents, there were speeches, songs and toasts. Pendar took the head of the table, seating Roosevelt on his right and Churchill on his left. Harriman sat beside Roosevelt, and Hopkins next to Churchill.

It was the President's habit to shift gears conversationally when he preferred not to discuss weighty matters. This time he expounded to Pendar and Harriman his views about independence for Morocco on the Philippine pattern. He talked of compulsory education, of fighting disease through immunization and of birth control. "Occasionally," Harriman noted, "the P.M. interjected a pessimistic-and realistic-note. He doesn't like the new ideas but accepts them as inevitable."

Here again, as in their disagreements over India, Roosevelt and Churchill did not march to the same drumbeat. The Prime Minister made no secret of his determination to preserve the British Empire, although he knew that would be difficult. Roosevelt enjoyed thinking aloud on the tremendous changes he saw ahead-the end of colonial empires and the rise of newly independent nations across the sweep of Africa and Asia. "I felt his objectives were right," Harriman said. "I think he had a belief that his prestige, both personally and as President of the United States, was so great that he could influence the trend. He recognized the rise of nationalism among the colonial peoples. He also recognized that Churchill was pretty much a nineteenth century colonialist. So he said some of these things partly to jar Churchill but also from a fundamental belief that the old order could not last. All this was surely in Churchill's mind when he later said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."

Throughout this, their final evening together, Churchill kept looking for an opportunity to talk privately with Roosevelt. But the seating arrangement, to Churchill's great annoyance, made a tete-a-tete impossible. "Roosevelt rather liked the idea," Harriman recalled, "that he did not have to go through with this talk. He always enjoyed other people's discomfort. I think it is fair to say that it never bothered him very much when other people were unhappy."

Harriman had earlier hinted that Churchill wanted to discuss further the "unconditional surrender" term decided at Casablanca.

Pendar, the American Vice-Consul and an archaeologist as well as one of Robert Murphy's agents in Vichy North Africa before the Torch  landings, was living in the Villa Taylor, owned by the widow of Moses Taylor of Rhode Island. Legend has it that when Mrs. Taylor, a staunch Republican, learned FDR had stayed in her villa, she resolved never to stay there again.

Hopkins and Harriman stayed up well past midnight drafting cables for Stalin and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek about the Casablanca decisions.  Roosevelt was to fly back to Casablanca; Churchill was to stay on in Marrakesh a few days. Churchill remembered:

My illustrious colleague was to depart just after dawn on the 25th for his long flight by Lagos and Dakar and so across to Brazil and then up to Washington. We had parted the night before, but he came round in the morning on the way to the aeroplane to say another good-bye. I was in bed, but would not hear of letting him go to the airfield alone, so I jumped up and put on my zip [often referred to as his "siren suit'], and nothing else except slippers, and in this informal garb I drove with him to the airfield, and went on the plane and saw him comfortably settled down, greatly admiring his courage under all his physical disabilities and feeling very anxious about the hazards he had to undertake. These aeroplane journeys had to be taken as a matter of course during the war. None the less I always regarded them as dangerous excursions. However all was well. I then returned to the Villa Taylor, where I spent another two days in correspondence with the War Cabinet about my future movements, and painting from the tower the only picture I ever attempted during the war. 

The trip had occupied the afternoon of January 24 through the morning of January 25, 70 years ago.

Sources for the quotations above:

Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate,(Vol. IV of The Second World War, 1950), US Edition, pp. 694-695.
W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Hitler and Stalin, 1941-1946,  (1975), pp. 191-192.
Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (based on Harry Hopkins' papers), (1948), p. 694.

January 24, 1943: The Casablanca Conference Ends with an Awkward Handshake

A number of times this month I've posted about the 1943 Casablanca Conference which took place 70 years ago. Today marks the day it ended. The conference had accomplished a number of things: allowed for extensive US-British military planning, including the decision to invade Sicily when the war in North Africa was over; issued a declaration that the Allies were fighting for the "unconditional surrender" of the Axis (which became controversial); and brought about a working (barely) relationship between the two rival French generals, each with huge Gallic egos, Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle.

As the Conference ended — cloaked in secrecy due to the presence of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill — the press was flown down from Allied HQ in Algiers for the first time, and were startled to discover the two allied leaders were in Morocco. There were photo opportunities with the President, the Prime Minister, and the two French leaders:

Giraud, Roosevelt, de Gaulle, Churchill at Casablanca

More famous by far than that photo, however, is the clearly uncomfortable one of the (forced, and after considerable US pressure on Giraud and British pressure on de Gaulle) handshake between Giraud and de Gaulle:

This version of Casablanca did not end with "the beginning of a beautiful friendship"; the two French generals could not stand each other. But Giraud was favored by the Americans, though de Gaulle had sometimes reluctant support from Churchill. Giraud outranked de Gaulle and had disagreed with his theories of tank warfare; while de Gaulle deferred to his higher rank, he worked to undermine him until he emerged as the victor by early 1944. The handshake is visibly uncomfortable. I suspect it will remind many Middle East hands of another handshake, the one at the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993:

Or perhaps this awkward handshake in Italy in 2009:

After the end of the news conference/photo op, Churchill, who loved Marrakesh and frequently went there to paint, took Roosevelt off to the Moroccan desert city for an overnight jaunt to show his American colleague its beauty. But that's a tale in its own right, and will be one of my posts tomorrow.

The Moroccans at the Casablanca Conference: the Sultan Dines with FDR and Churchill: Did FDR Support Moroccan Independence?

In my post yesterday on the 70th anniversary of the Casablanca Conference, I said that it was "in, but not of" Morocco, and that Moroccans were excluded from the  bubble in which it took place. That was not of course, 100% true: Morocco was a French Protectorate, not a colony, and its ruler was technically Sultan (later King) Mohammed V (Muhammad V). (I've posted previously about General George S. Patton's impressions of the Sultan.) Ceremonially speaking, at least, he was the host of the Conference (though not involved in the negotiations), and on January 22, President Franklin Roosevelt hosted a banquet in honor of the nominal host. (But read on: there's some evidence FDR was sending an anti-colonial message to the French by hosting the Sultan) Photos of this event seem few and far between, and this is the only one I could find, but it shows most of the key players and offers a good introduction to talking about the banquet.

On the couch: Sultan Mohammed V, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Back row from left: Gen. George S. Patton (US Military Commander in Morocco), Robert Murphy (US diplomatic representative in French North Africa), Harry Hopkins (Roosevelt aide and personal friend), Moroccan Crown Prince Moulay Hassan (future King Hassan II, then 13), General Charles Noguès (French Governor-General of Morocco), the Moroccan Chief of Protocol, the Moroccan Grand Vizier, Lt. Col. Elliott Roosevelt (the President's son), Roosevelt's Naval Aide Captain John L. McCrea.

General Patton's diary offers one memory of the evening:

At dinner  . . .  President, Sultan, Protocol, self, Crown Prince. Elliott Roosevelt, Nogues, Hopkins, Murphy. Grand Vizier, Churchill. No wine, only orange juice and water. Churchill was very rude, the President was great, talking volubly in bad French and really doing his stuff. After dinner we had [motion] pictures and more talk . . .

I rode with Sultan and Grand Vizier to house of latter. On way Sultan said, "Truly your President is a very great man and a great friend of myself and of my people. He shines by comparison with the other one."[presumably Churchill] . . .

Nogues was delighted that the P.M. was such a boor. [The Patton Papers. Vol. II. p. 158]

General Noguès, by the way, was a Vichy holdover who had vacillated so much in negotiation with the Americans that General Eisenhower reportedly referred to him as "General No-Yes."

Harry Hopkins' notes add some color:

The Sultan arrived at 7:40, which caused me to put on my black tie for the first time on this trip. He had expressed a desire to see the President alone prior to Churchill's arrival at eight, and he came loaded with presents — a gold dagger for the President, and some gold bracelets for Mrs Roosevelt, and a gold tiara which looked to me like the kind the gals wear in the circus, riding on white horses. I can just see Mrs. Roosevelt when she takes a look at this. The Sultan wore white silk robes. Apparently the etiquette prohibits the drinking of liquor publicly, so we had nothing alcoholic either before, during, or after dinner. I fortified myself an hour earlier, however.

Also, no part of a pig may be eaten, and the Sultan didn't smoke. He had a young son there with a red fez on, which he kept on while eating. He was a kid about thirteen who seemed quite bright. [Moulay Hassan: the future King Hassan II, reigned 1961-1999.]

. . . Churchill was glum at dinner and seemed to be real bored. . .The President gave the Sultan his picture in a handsome silver frame.  and a good time seemed to be had by all, except the Prime Minister. [Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 689-690]

Churchill had apparently just met with de Gaulle; that, combined with the absence of alcohol and tobacco (which Churchill normally considered essentials at dinner), might explain his mood, as our next quote also suggests.Though Churchill's massive six volume memoir of the war is far more extensive than other memoirs, I find no mention in it of the dinner at all.

The Patton and Hopkins anecdotes give us lots of color and Orientalist exoticism. Robert Murphy, writing many years later in his 1964 memoir,  Diplomat Among Warriors,  offers a very different, anti-colonialist spin:

The evening of the day De Gaulle arrived in Casablanca, just before he and Roosevelt were to meet with each other for the first time, the President gave a dinner in honor of the Sultan of Morocco. This affair was entirely Roosevelt's own idea. He had not forgotten the reluctance of General Nogues to deliver his letter to the Sultan at the time of the landings, and one of the first things the President asked me to do was to arrange an intimate little dinner at his villa. The Sultan was accompanied by his eldest son, and the other guests were Nogues — who was invited as the Sultan's Foreign Minister under the French Protectorate — Churchill, Macmillan, Marshall, Patton, Hopkins, Elliott Roosevelt, and me. [Other memoirs don't mention George C. Marshall's or Macmillan's presence, nor is he in the photo. Harold Macmillan might have been left out but it's unlikely Marshall would not have been in the photo when his subordinate Patton was, nor can I find any evidence in his biographies that he attended.] In deference to the Sultan's Moslem code of behavior, no alcoholic beverages of any kind were served before, during, or after the dinner. Perhaps it was this rare abstinence which caused the British Prime Minister to be unnaturally glum throughout the evening, or perhaps he remained silent because he regarded the whole occasion as deliberately provocative.

The President began the serious conversation by expressing sympathy with colonial aspirations for independence, and soon he was proposing to the Sultan that arrangements should be made after the war for American-Moroccan economic co-operation. Nogues, who had devoted his career to fortifying the French position in Morocco, could not conceal his outraged feelings. Hopkins observed that Nogues seemed to be uneasy "because he knows we may throw him out any minute." I suggested to Hopkins, "Perhaps the President’s approaches to the Sultan also aggravate Nogues’s fears about American designs on the French Empire. From the point of view of any imperialist — including De Gaulle and Churchill— the President’s conversation with the Sultan could seem subversive." With an impatient shrug, Hopkins changed the subject.

Of course, De Gaulle's informants told him about the President's overtures to the Sultan. and this increased the General's distrust of Roosevelt. Although it was De Gaulle, and not the Americans, who eventually threw Nogues out of his position in Morocco, De Gaulle saw eye to eye with Nogues on what De Gaulle has described as Roosevelt's "insinuations" to the Sultan. De Gaulle recorded in his memoirs that the Sultan remained loyal to France in spite of Roosevelt's interference . . . (Diplomat Among Warriors, 172-173)

The Sultan would be deposed later, not by de Gaulle. and then returned to power and be elevated to King on Moroccan independence. Though ignored by diarists at the time, Roosevelt's probing the Sultan for future post-colonial relations is characteristic of his known attitudes.

[An editorial addendum since I'm an editor and all: I've kept all spellings as in the original. None of the Americans put the accent on Noguès (though the "General No-Yes" joke only makes sense if you pronounce it Noguès), and Murphy insists on "De Gaulle" rather than the more correct "de Gaulle."]

The Casablanca Conference Convenes

Casablanca 1943: Behind FDR and Churchill are the Combined [US-UK] Chiefs of Staff: US Army Air Forces Chief Hap Arnold, Admiral Ernie King, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall; British First Sea Lord Fleet Admiral Sir Dudley Pound;  Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir  Charles Portal (later Viscount Portal of Hungerford); Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee General Sir Alan Brooke (later Viscount Alanbrooke); and Chief of Combined Operations Vice Admiral Louis Mountbatten (later Earl Mountbatten of Burma)

I've already foreshadowed the 70th anniversary of the Casablanca Conference in a couple of recent posts. 

Today marks the beginning of the Conference in the Anfa resort area on January 14, 1943. The Conference was in, but very much not of (or about), Morocco. Sultan Muhammad V was not among the participants. It was essentially an Anglo-American summit with a French subtext, as the Allies sought to reconcile the two hostile figures seeking to lead the French abroad: Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud. But the main purpose was to allow the Combined Chiefs of Staff of the UK and US to meet in purpose, as well as FDR and Churchill. Stalin had also been invited, but in late 1942 the Red Army had broken through at Stalingrad and surrounded the German VIth Army Group, which was now starving and cut off but ordered by Hitler to fight to the last man. Stalin felt he couldn't travel.

Some video:

 

The Conference is mainly remembered today for the US-British insistence on "unconditional surrender" by the Axis (which would cause some problems later on), and for the de Gaulle-Giraud meeting, shown in the photos at bottom, which I'll blog more about later as it occurred at the end of the Conference. It was the first Roosevelt trip abroad (excluding Canada) while in office and the first by any US President during wartime. It was also the first of the summits to be held in the Middle East (Cairo and Tehran would follow). Like them, it took place in a bubble isolated from the Moroccans all around it.

Giraud, FDR, de Gaulle, Churchill

Stiff handshake: Giraud meeting de Gaulle

January 11, 1943: FDR Leaves for North Africa

FDR aboard the Dixie Clipper on return flight from
Casablanca, toasting his 61st birthday (Jan 30, 1943)

January 11, 1943: Seventy years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt prepared to become the first US President to leave North America during wartime. He was also about to become the first sitting US President to visit the Arab world, although he would have thought of it as French North Africa. (Ulysses S. Grant had visited Egypt after his Presidency, as had Teddy Roosevelt, who'd also been there as a young man on a world tour, but no President had gone while in office.) (If I've missed any Presidents leave a comment.)

On  New Year's Eve, I noted how FDR had enjoyed an inside joke by showing his guests the film Casablanca, though the imminent Casablanca Conference was of course a tightly held secret, since the President, Winston Churchill, and all the US and UK Chiefs of Staff would be crossing an ocean full of German U-boats and meeting in a city that had been controlled by Vichy only weeks before.

A Pan Am Clipper

The trip itself was roundabout and difficult. Roosevelt took his train to Miami, Florida, where they met two Boeing 314 Clipper flying boats on loan from Pan Am. Roosevelt used the Dixie Clipper,which had been the first to provide regularly scheduled commercial trans-Atlantic air service in 1939. His closest advisers traveled with him, while the rest of the party boarded the sister ship, the Atlantic Clipper. On the 11th, the two planes flew to Trinidad. Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt's personal Chief of Staff, who had been US Ambassador to Vichy and was needed for his expertise on France, stayed behind in Trinidad with a fever from influenza. The planes flew the next day to Belem, Brazil, then crossed the Atlantic to Bathurst (now Banjul) in Gambia (then a British colony). They dined aboard the USS Memphis, which was in port. From there a military C-54 flew the party to Casablanca.

Roosevelt, who had not flown for some years, was having a grand time. According to Harry Hopkins, who traveled with him:

I sat with him, strapped him in, as the plane rose from the water — and he acted like a sixteen-year-old, for he had done no flying since he was President.

Hopkins also noted that they served cocktails aboard the Clipper.

Next week, I'll discuss the anniverserary of the Casablanca Conference in greater detail.

Roosevelt reviews troops in Morocco

New Year's Eve, 1942/43: FDR's North African Inside Joke

Seventy years ago today, December 31, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt prepared to celebrate New Year's Eve in the White House with a gathering of family and close friends. The festivities included the showing of a new film that had had its premiere but was not yet in general release, so few would have known of it beforehand.

Meanwhile, in the previous week plans had been firmed up for what had to be one of the closest-held secrets of the war: in the coming weeks Roosevelt was to leave on his first wartime trip outside North America. He was planning to travel secretly in a roundabout way by seaplane and aircraft to recently liberated North Africa, Winston Churchill would also be there, as would the US and British Chiefs of Staff. Security of the secret summit, code-named SYMBOL, had to be absolute. Germany would love to intercept either of the two men.

General Eisenhower, the Allied Commander in North Africa, had been asked to find a suitably secure place (in territory held by Vichy only weeks before). Two days before New Year's Eve, Eisenhower reported to General Marshall:

Reconnaissance by Churchill's secretary and [Gen. Bedell] Smith's representative have found a very suitable site for operation "Symbol." It consists of a hotel surrounded by a group of excellent villas situated five miles south of Casablanca and one mile inland. Area is detached and lends itself to segregation and can be guarded easily. Airfield is two miles away and is suitable  for B-24s except in very rainy weather . . .

The site, at a resort area known as Anfa, was chosen, and thus once it became public, SYMBOL would be better known as the Casablanca Conference.

Roosevelt, of course, could not reveal any of this to most of his New Year's Eve guests. Some did notice that his New Year's Eve toast, usually "To the United States of America," added the phrase, "and the United Nations" [that is, the Allies]. Some guests may have noted this, but few of them could have been aware of his little inside joke. The new film he screened that night, not yet in general release, was a wartime romance with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. It was called Casablanca. You may have heard of it.