Free Too Bad to Die by Francine Mathews Page A

not about friends. Still less was it about the Old World draining the strength of the New. He’d helped the British as much as possible with his Lend-Lease Agreement—even though he’d had to bludgeon Congress to release a bunch of mothballed American destroyers not worth the dry docks they were rotting in—because England was the last wall standing between New York and Hitler. Once Hitler was dead or defeated, England would be irrelevant. Roosevelt knew the country was nearly bankrupt; the pound was tied to gold reserves that were almost exhausted. It would be a decade, at least, before the British economy recovered—if it ever did.
    He could understand Winston’s obsessive focus on the European theater. Europe was Winston’s world. He was a self-appointed guardian of a way of life that had committed collective suicide in Belgium thirty years ago. But Roosevelt’s theater was the entire globe. His ships and men were drowning in the Pacific, fighting a hydra that formed and re-formed in successive island jungles, with the specter of an eventual land invasion of Japan he could not begin to contemplate. Roosevelt wanted the European war finished, soon, before his men and arms were exhausted, so that he could annihilate the threat in the East.
    That meant a massive Channel crossing and landing in France in the next six months. Stalin needed it, and so did he. A steel hammer blow on Hitler’s western flank, so that the man was surrounded. The landing might fail, of course—it might be a hideous mess of men and machines blown to pieces on the beaches. But if the Allies did it right—with enough force, enough will, and Americans running the show—they’d drive Hitler back into his last Berlin bunker.
    Roosevelt could see the hesitation in Winston’s eyes. The bulldog thrust of his lower lip. The almost childish stubbornness to have his way. He’d watched English soldiers go down in death countless times before, on his orders, and he did not want the most daring attack of the war to end in disaster. Winston’s stakes were high—if Overlord failed, England would be mortally vulnerable. He was pushing an alternative plan: pepper the Nazis with smaller skirmishes all over Europe. Eat away at their edges. Roosevelt knew Winston’s approach would prolong the German war machine for another year at least. He didn’t have time to let Hitler die a slow death. Neither did Stalin. The fate of his Pacific war could not be decided by Winston’s dithering.
    We’re not pulling his chestnuts out of the fire, Roosevelt thought mutinously. It was a pet phrase of his. Because the British Empire is finished.
    The postwar world would fall between two poles—Russia and the United States. Communism and Democracy. East and West. Stalin and whoever replaced Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He could not go on being president forever. He was sixty-one years old, and the job was wearing him out. It was an open question whether he’d run for a fourth term in the spring, but he hated leaving the war unfinished. One more reason Overlord mattered. He might be able to leave office if Hitler was defeated.
    His valet helped Franklin stand and lifted his right leg gently to the level of his waist. Then he slipped a pajama leg over the foot. Elliott could have done this sort of thing for his father, but Elliott was drinking in the salon downstairs with Alex Kirk and John Boettiger. Winston and his girls had gone home for the night. The PM’s bronchitis was worse every day. Even Pug Ismay had caught it now. Roosevelt smiled mirthlessly. He could probably track all kinds of liaisons just by recording who came down with a cough. Espionage was too easy.
    Espionage.
    The valet lifted his left leg into the trousers. Offered Franklin his pajama shirt. He was twitching it over his shoulders, safely back in his chair, when there was a knock at the door.
    â€œCome in.”
    Sam