Seventy-Five Years Ago: FDR's Last Mission

USS Quincy (CA 71), seen here in San Francisco Bay after her return from the Western Pacific in the fall of 1945, was home to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and key members of his administration during a month-long, 14,000-mile diplomatic mission from January 23 to February 27, beginning and ending in Newport News, Virginia. (Naval History and Heritage Command image)

By M.C. Farrington
HRNM Historian

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s last, and longest-lasting, diplomatic mission began in secrecy.

At about 10:20 pm on January 22, 1945, the President slipped out of an entrance under the Bureau of Printing and Engraving Annex opposite the National Mall from the White House, where he had been sworn in for his fourth term four days before. Roosevelt boarded a train and traveled through the night, coming to a stop before dawn at Pier Number Six within the sprawling U.S. Army Port of Embarkation in Newport News. The cruiser USS Quincy (CA 71) had been waiting there since 5:37 in the afternoon the day before. Marines who had been patrolling the pier since five that morning watched the President and over 25 people in his entourage, accompanied by 10 Secret Service agents, board.

Captain Elliott M. Senn, Quincy’s commanding officer, noted, “By request, no honors, other than sideboys, were rendered the President as he arrived aboard.”

After a working party of dozens of Sailors loaded baggage aboard Quincy, Roosevelt gave Captain Senn the order to proceed. One minute later, Quincy cast off her lines and headed for Chesapeake Bay. Although by this time the Battle of the Atlantic was largely over, the task force performed its mission as though an attack could ensue at any moment. 

After passing through the Thimble Shoal Channel, Task Group 21.5 assembled with Quincy as its flagship.  Joining them for the first part of the 4,883-mile journey to the island of Malta were USS Satterlee (DD 626), USS Herndon (DD 638), and USS Tillman (DD 641), which formed an antisubmarine screen while the cruiser Springfield (CL 66) fell in behind Quincy for the journey to Bermuda.

Satterlee detached from the group late on the 23rd, followed by Herndon and Tillman on the morning of the 26th. At Bermuda they were replaced by Task Unit 21.5.3., comprised of USS Carmick (DD 493), Doyle (DD 494), and Endicott (DD 495) for the second part of the journey to Malta, which took them to a point 300 miles south of the Azores. There, Springfield was replaced on the 28th by TU 21.5.4 comprised of the cruiser Savannah (Cl 42) and the destroyers Baldwin (DD 624), Frankford (DD 497), and Murphy (DD 603).

Despite some false alarms over unsubstantiated U-boats on January 29, for the most part the sea itself proved the most formidable adversary to many in Roosevelt’s entourage, including his daughter Anna Roosevelt Bottiger and her husband John.

The sea, however, didn’t faze the President.  A lifelong sailor and naval enthusiast and Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Woodrow Wilson's administration over two decades before, Roosevelt took particular delight in the modifications that had been made to the great warship in the months before his transit.

Allied leaders pose in the courtyard of Livadia Palace, Yalta, during the Argonaut conference in early February 1945. Those seated are (from left to right): Prime Minister Winston Churchill (UK); President Franklin D. Roosevelt (USA); and Premier Josef Stalin (USSR). Also present are  Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, R.N., Air Chief Marshall Sir Charles Portal, R.A.F. (both standing behind Churchill); and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, USN, (standing behind Roosevelt). Note ornate carpets under the chairs. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives.

Quincy had been selected to transport Roosevelt to the Argonaut conference more than three months before, and in September extensive work was done to the cruiser in Boston to make her wheelchair accessible. Two special gangplanks and an elevator were added to the vessel and two custom-built boats were also added for Roosevelt’s use in Malta and the other diplomatic initiatives he would pursue on the over 14,000-mile journey.

“The sea was moderate,” recalled Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, FDR’s chief of staff, “and we made a speed of twenty-one knots with a zig-zag course to avoid submarine attack; covered by destroyer escorts, lights out at night, and no radio communications at any time.”

Capt. Senn recalled later that Roosevelt "was not disturbed at all by the first few days of rough seas out of Newport News, and was a merry guest on January 30, when rival bakers aboard [Quincy] baked five grand cakes for the occasion."  On that day and the day following, the destroyers Laub (DD 613), Nields (DD 616) and Champlin (DD 601) joined the task force for the final leg of the journey to Malta. 

The ships and their crews, most of which like USS Quincy were battle-hardened veterans of operations from Operation TORCH in North Africa in November 1942 to NEPTUNE on D-Day in June 1944, helped make possible FDR's status as one of the "Big Three" convening at a former Imperial Russian palace in the Crimea.

“During our ten days’ cruise at sea on the ‘Quincy,’ the President held daily conferences on problems expected to arise at the Crimea meetings,” wrote Leahy. And the potential problems were formidable indeed.   

Before the airborne leg of the journey was to begin, however, the first order of business was to meet the other friendly member of the three, Winston Churchill, who was waiting in Malta.  Their relationship grew close in August 1941 after Roosevelt slipped away from Washington DC on a supposed fishing trip and resurfaced in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland aboard the cruiser USS Augusta (CA 31), where he met Churchill who had arrived aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales. The Atlantic Charter they released after the Arcadia conference detailed intentions for a postwar world which they hoped to codify at Yalta.  That is, if the two could agree upon actually meeting Marshal Josef Stalin there.    
During the journey radio silence had to be broken in order to address Churchill's protests about the venue for the Argonaut conference.  Earlier he had told presidential advisor Harry Hopkins "that if we had spent ten years on research, we could not have found a worse place in the world than [Yalta]..."

Despite their differences during nearly a dozen wartime meetings, Churchill, who wore his blue British colonel's uniform during most public events at the time, was waiting aboard HMS Orion which approached to starboard of Quincy as the cruiser entered Grand Harbor on the morning of February 2.  According to Quincy's Dictionary of American Fighting Ships entry, "The Royal Marine band mustered on her fantail struck up the 'Star Spangled Banner,' and the prime minister doffed his hat and waved to the president, who cheerfully responded in kind. Maltese manning small boats swarmed around the ship to watch the historic occasion, and thousands more gathered along the hillside. Quincy moored starboard side to Boat House Wharf, French Creek, at 1001."

British Foreign Secretary Sir Anthony Eden later recalled: 

As the great warship sailed into the battered harbor, every vessel was manned, every roof and vantage point crammed with spectators.  While the bands played and amid so much that reeked of war, on the bridge, just discernible to the naked eye, sat one civilian figure... All heads were turned his way and a sudden quietness fell.  It was one of those moments when all seems to stand still and one is conscious of a mark in history.

It had not been an easy journey for Prime Minister Churchill, who developed a temperature of 102 as he flew from London on the 29th in a C-54 Skymaster Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold had lent him. Despite this, he seemed back to normal and, while somewhat irascible, was otherwise in good health.     

Prime Minister Winston L. S. Churchill of the United Kingdom. Portrait inscribed to USS Quincy (CA 71), when Churchill was on board at Alexandria, Egypt, February 15 1945, for post-Yalta conferences with President Roosevelt. (Naval History and Heritage Command image)

Roosevelt, by comparison, was in far graver shape, even with the rest he had been able to get aboard Quincy during the voyage from Newport News.  Vice Admiral Ross McIntire, FDR's personal physician, had vouched for the President's vitality during his recent successful campaign against Governor Thomas Dewey, but accompanying the President aboard Quincy along with Commander Howard Bruenn, a cardiologist, McIntire knew that his health was deteriorating rapidly.  An exam conducted nine months before at Bethesda Naval Hospital found that the 62 year-old Roosevelt had acute bronchitis, heart disease, failure of the left ventricle of the heart, as well as skyrocketing blood pressure.  A decade after receiving an average reading of 136 over 78, the President's blood pressure reading before Yalta had reached a life-threatening 240 over 130.   

From the left, Vice Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, who in 1942 led U.S. Amphibious forces from his headquarters at the Nansemond Hotel in the Ocean View section of Norfolk, confers with President Roosevelt along with Admiral Harold Stark, Commander, Naval Forces Europe, in Malta after the President's arrival.  (Naval History and Heritage Command image)  

“Later there was much adverse comment in the American press about the condition of the President’s health,” wrote Adm. Leahy long after the conference, “but in working with him every day I saw no sign of deterioration of his physical or mental condition either at sea or ashore after we reached Europe.”

Despite the physical distance between them, the Soviet Union and the United States were closer than they had ever been at that moment, largely due to FDR's policies, yet it could be argued that because of this closeness the Soviets took the American president's generosity for granted. During FDR’s first term, American diplomatic recognition had been extended to the Soviet government for the first time.  Millions of dollars in aid and equipment, including naval vessels and aircraft, had been given to the Soviets since the American entry into the war.  At the time Roosevelt left Hampton Roads for Malta, Soviet pilots were receiving training for some of their new American-made maritime patrol aircraft just south of Hampton Roads at Naval Air Station Elizabeth City.

This excerpt from the forthcoming book Churchill: A Graphic Biography by Vincent Delmas and illustrated by Christophe Regnault and Alessio Camardella, illustrates the dilemma faced by the British prime minister at Yalta regarding Poland's fate after the war. Stalin's army had completely overrun and occupied Poland before the Argonaut conference at Yalta even began. (Greenhill Books/ Dead Reckoning)

Despite benefiting from American Lend-Lease largesse, not to mention their opening of a second front in Continental Europe through the invasions of Italy and both Northern and Southern France to drain German strength from their eastern front, the Soviets wanted much, much more. To get it, Soviet agents working for the American government had penetrated the military’s secret Manhattan Project to steal nuclear weapon technology.  Diplomatic secrets were also highly prized.  Among the diplomatic contingent flying from Washington to Yalta with Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius was Deputy Director of the Office of Special Political Affairs, Alger Hiss, who was also secretly working for the Soviet cause.

Whether Hiss nudged American diplomatic tactics at Yalta or merely informed the Soviets about his government’s negotiating positions during the talks is unclear. His cover would be blown by Time Magazine editor (and former Communist courier) Whittaker Chambers in 1948, but his denials were so convincing that the American public remained divided about his status for nearly half a century.  That is, until the Venona diplomatic intercepts of Soviet diplomatic communications declassified in the mid-1990s left little room for doubt. 


After meeting with Churchill and myriad other British and American officials throughout the day on February 2, FDR boarded a specially modified Army Air Corps VC-54C Skymaster known officially as The Flying White House, and unofficially as the Sacred Cow, at 3:30 the following morning for the seven-hour flight from Luqa Airport in Malta to Saki in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, from which the President would endure yet another five-hour journey along winding mountain roads to Yalta, finally arriving at the Livadia Palace at a little after 6 pm, local time.

The diplomatic give-and-take (or lack thereof) during the following week would make Argonaut the most controversial of the wartime conferences between the "Big Three," but another diplomatic mission conducted by FDR before sailing back to Hampton Roads aboard Quincy would have an even longer-lasting impact upon American foreign policy as well as the American economy.