The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Off he went for thirty miles in a touring car on this sparkling day, escorted by the island’s governor-general, through battered Valletta and Ghajn Tuffieha and walled Mdina. Maltese peasants and tradesmen snatched the caps from their heads as the convoy sped by, saluting with a knuckle touched to the brow. By 4:30 that afternoon Roosevelt was back aboard Quincy, where Churchill eventually joined him for cocktails in the wardroom. The prime minister, having insisted on a leisurely bath, was half an hour late. The Charlie-Charlies also arrived, except for Hap Arnold, the Army Air Forces commander, recuperating at home from his fourth heart attack.

  To president and prime minister the chiefs reported “complete agreement” on Eisenhower’s plan for concluding the war in Europe. Churchill, who was uncommonly chatty even by his voluble standard, tendered advice about reserve divisions along the Rhine. He also proposed occupying as much of Austria as possible to keep the Russians at bay; the prime minister had long recognized that the maneuvering of armies would shape postwar politics, but this was the first time he had suggested positioning Anglo-American troops to impede Soviet expansion.

  Roosevelt nodded now and again but said little. At eight o’clock, dinner was served.

  * * *

  This amiable gathering concealed the most rancorous confrontation of the war between the British and American high commands. The donnybrook had begun innocently enough three days earlier, when the Combined Chiefs met at noon on Tuesday for the 182nd time since first making common cause in January 1942. Above Grand Harbour, in a former market building known as Montgomery House and made so noisome by kerosene heaters that the officers preferred to sit bundled in their overcoats, a SHAEF delegation led by Beetle Smith once more presented Eisenhower’s plan: destroy the enemy west of the Rhine, jump the river, then advance “into the heart of Germany” on two axes. Straightening the line along the Rhine, from Alsace to Holland, would forestall further German counterattacks by using the river as a defensive barrier while the Allies coiled for their final offensive. The entire U.S. Ninth Army would reinforce Montgomery in the north, Smith said; the second lunge toward Frankfurt and Kassel, by Bradley’s 12th Army Group, would help envelop the Ruhr from the south and deliver a right-hand roundhouse punch should the left hook of 21st Army Group be stymied.

  Again Field Marshal Brooke took on the role of naysayer. Thin, sallow, and round-shouldered, privately known as Colonel Shrapnel, Brooke was both formidable and easily parodied. “Men admired, feared, and liked him: in that order, perhaps,” the Economist magazine observed. His civil passions were homely and endearing: lake fishing, Cox’s Orange Pippin apples, mimicry, a bit of opera, wildlife photography (in which he was a pioneer), and, most especially, birds—he could go on and on about Knipe’s Monograph of the Pigeons. Raised in France, the youngest of nine children born to a baronet from Northern Ireland, he had hoped to become a physician. Instead, as a young soldier Brooke proved to be “a gunner of genius in the great barrage-duels of the First World War,” a biographer wrote. Exploiting both mathematics and psychology, he was particularly adept at the creeping barrage and a practice known as “searching back,” intended to catch unwary enemies as they emerged from cover.

  The tactic befitted the man. Never convivial, Brooke after another five years of world war was often dyspeptic and dispirited. “I don’t feel that I can stand another day working with Winston,” he had confided to his diary a few days earlier. “He is finished and gone, incapable of grasping any military situation and unable to get a decision.” But it was the cousins who most irked him, particularly as British clout dwindled and American influence grew. Now, as if again “searching back” at the Somme, he targeted Smith.

  The British chiefs, Brooke said in his clipped staccato, believed the Allies had “not sufficient strength available for two major operations.” One attack avenue must be chosen, and only one. Montgomery’s route in the north appeared “the most promising,” given its proximity to both Antwerp and the Ruhr. Bradley’s southern assault would dilute Allied strength by diverting bridging kit and other matériel. The Bulge had revealed the folly of Eisenhower’s broad-front strategy in spreading an attack too thin. “Closing up the Rhine on its whole length,” as SHAEF proposed, could retard the advance. Would Montgomery have to wait on the riverbank until the Colmar Pocket was eradicated? Until Bradley’s forces crossed the Roer and cleared the Saar?

  This argument had dragged on for five months, but Smith kept his poise to rally in defense of the SHAEF plan. Eisenhower intended to support “every single division which could be maintained logistically” in the north, he said, but topography required Montgomery to attack the Rhine on a narrow, four-division front that “might bog down” if confronted by Rundstedt’s residual host. Montgomery himself had acknowledged that barely two dozen divisions could be supported east of the Rhine in his sector until rail bridges spanned the river; Eisenhower was committed to supplying three dozen there, plus another ten divisions to exploit any breakthrough. But why should nearly forty other American and French divisions remain dormant when Germany clearly lacked sufficient strength to defend the entire Western Front? Putting all eggs in a single basket, Smith added, would be risky.

  Marshall concurred, warning that it was “not safe to rely on one line of advance only.” The session adjourned without agreement, and Smith hurriedly cabled Eisenhower in Versailles. The British “will insist on something in writing to clinch the fact that the main effort on the north is to be pushed,” he wrote; they also wanted assurances that an attack on the Ruhr would not be delayed “until you have eliminated every German west of the Rhine.” The supreme commander replied promptly:

  You may assure the Combined Chiefs of Staff in my name that I will seize the Rhine crossings in the north just as soon as this is a feasible operation and without waiting to close the Rhine throughout its length. Further, I will advance across the Rhine in the north with maximum strength and complete determination.

  This pleased Brooke not at all, given Eisenhower’s continued insistence on bifurcating his force. To his diary on Wednesday, Colonel Shrapnel confided, “When we met at 2:30 P.M. the situation was more confused than ever, as Bedell Smith had sent another wire to Ike which was also impossible and Ike had wired back. So we were again stuck.… I am feeling very tired, and old!”

  Worse was to come. As Brooke prepared to climb into bed at midnight in the San Anton Palace, Smith appeared at his door for further discussion. The conversation grew warm. Brooke wondered whether Eisenhower had “his hands too full,” and whether his headquarters was too far from the front. Was he in fact “strong enough” for the job, or too readily swayed by whichever commander had seen him last? “Goddamn it,” Smith barked. “Let’s have it out here and now.” For an hour they traded jabs, until spent by exhaustion and the late hour. “I think the talk did both of us good,” Brooke wrote before falling asleep, “and may help in easing the work tomorrow.”

  That was unlikely. Alerted by Smith to the late-night altercation, George Marshall had had enough. Not only did the British carping imply lack of faith in Eisenhower, but Brooke and his ilk appeared to champion Montgomery against his superior officer. “Please leave this to me,” Marshall told Admiral King.

  As the chiefs convened again on Thursday afternoon, February 1, Marshall asked that the room be cleared of all subordinate officers and note-takers. No sooner had Brooke taken his chair than Marshall bored in. Why were the British so worried about the influence that Bradley and Patton had on Eisenhower? What about Roosevelt’s influence? Did the British consider that pernicious, too? “The president practically never sees General Eisenhower, and never writes to him. That is at my advice because he is an Allied commander,” Marshall said, eyebrows knit and voice rising to a wrathful timbre. In fact the British chiefs could not be “nearly as much worried as the American chiefs of staff are about the immediate pressures of Mr. Churchill on General Eisenhower.” The prime minister never hesitated to hector the supreme commander direct
ly, day or night, circumventing the Combined Chiefs. “I think your worries,” Marshall declared, “are on the wrong foot.”

  He had not finished. Should the British succeed in interposing a ground commander between the supreme commander and his three army group commanders, Marshall intended to resign—or so he had told Eisenhower. Montgomery was behind much of this pother, Marshall charged; despite being given “practically everything he asked for,” including the U.S. Ninth Army, he plainly craved “complete command.” If truth be told, Montgomery was an “over-cautious commander who wants everything,” an “impudent and disloyal subordinate” who treated all American officers with “open contempt.”

  A stunned silence followed this tirade. After the war Brooke would write: “Marshall clearly understood nothing of strategy and could not even argue out the relative merits of various alternatives. Being unable to judge for himself he trusted and backed Ike, and felt it his duty to guard him from interference.” But Admiral Cunningham, the first sea lord, later observed that “Marshall’s complaint was not unjustified.”

  For now, American indignation carried the day. Brooke fell silent, the chiefs promptly agreed to endorse SHAEF’s master plan, and the last great internecine tempest of the war subsided. For another month, the British conspired to replace Tedder as deputy supreme commander with Harold Alexander, whom they considered more pliant despite Brooke’s dismissal of him as “a very, very small man [who] cannot see big.” Eisenhower, braced by Marshall, advised London that if Alexander should arrive at SHAEF from Italy, he would find few military duties to occupy him. Spaatz would succeed Tedder as senior airman in the west, and there would be “no question whatsoever of placing between me and my army group commanders any intermediary headquarters.”

  Few could doubt that the Americans now had the whip hand. “The P.M. was sore,” Kay Summersby jotted in her diary, “but E said he would get over it.”

  * * *

  Light rain spattered Luqa airdrome southwest of Valletta in the smallest hours of Saturday, February 3. A fleet of twenty-five transport aircraft, collectively known as Mission No. 17, stood beneath arc lights on the bustling flight line. Trucks and staff cars crept along the runway in search of this plane or that. Baggage handlers hoisted suitcases and crates into the bays—sealed boxes with secret documents bore black bands and yellow tags—while flight chiefs with clipboards carefully scrutinized the blue-and-white passes of the passengers clambering into the cabins. CRICKET was over; now would come ARGONAUT, a conference with Joseph Stalin at the Crimean resort of Yalta, on the Black Sea.

  Roosevelt in recent months had proposed venues from Scotland to Jerusalem. Stalin, pleading ill health and the demands of his great offensive against Germany’s Eastern Front, countered with Yalta, a proposal that sent Anglo-American officials paging through their Baedeker guides. “I emphasized the difficulties that this decision made for you, but that in consideration of Marshal Stalin’s health you were prepared to meet them,” W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, had written Roosevelt in late December. Among the difficulties cited, aside from the seven-hour, fourteen-hundred-mile flight from Malta to a remote locale and Roosevelt’s own precarious health: “toilet facilities will be meager [and] there are no bars”; travelers were advised to bring sleeping bags and ample “bug powder”; electric current at Yalta was an odd 330 volts; and the Turkish government had given overflight permission for Mission No. 17, but “cannot guarantee that the planes will not be fired upon.” To a man the president’s advisers had opposed his making such an arduous journey, but Roosevelt insisted. As his aide Harry Hopkins later remarked, “his adventurous spirit was forever leading him to go to unusual places.”

  Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to limit their respective entourages to 35 people; instead, a total of 700 were flying from Malta, with more descending on the Crimea by train from Moscow and others arriving by ship. The Americans numbered 330, among them 14 generals, 15 full colonels, 18 bodyguards, and 8 cooks and stewards. The British travel roster ran on for eleven pages, including 62 signalers, 58 Royal Marines, a catering captain, a pair of cinema operators, 5 map-room officers, and 17 members of Churchill’s personal staff. Each traveler had been told to “invent a suitable and plausible cover story to account for departure and absence” from home, and the British Board of Trade discreetly issued 2,400 ration coupons for purchases of clothing suitable for “a place abroad where the climate is cold.” Churchill alone requested an extra 72 coupons to buy new uniforms and underwear.

  In view of the rustic conditions anticipated at Yalta, the commissary list prepared by British provisioners for transport aboard Mission No. 17 included 144 bottles of whiskey, 144 bottles of sherry, 144 bottles of gin, 200 pounds of bacon, 200 pounds of coffee, 50 pounds of tea, 100 rolls of toilet paper, 2,500 paper napkins, 650 dinner plates, 350 tea cups and saucers, 500 tumblers, 100 wineglasses, 20 salt and pepper shakers, 400 sets of cutlery, 36 tablecloths, and 13 sugar bowls. Moreover, R.M.S. Franconia, bound for Yalta through the Dardanelles, carried a supplemental 864 bottles of whiskey and gin, 180 bottles of sherry, 20,000 American cigarettes, 500 cigars, and 1,000 boxes of matches. A separate shipment designated “Yalta Voyage 208” included several hundred bottles of Rhine wine, vermouth, Gordon’s gin, Johnnie Walker Red Label and King George IV whiskies, and 1928 Veuve Clicquot champagne, as well as 20,000 Chesterfield and Philip Morris cigarettes, 500 Robert Burns cigars, and a carton of toilet paper. For good measure, a consignment for Yalta entrusted to the British ambassador in Moscow included a dozen bottles of 1928 Château Margaux, cognac, beer, 10,000 Players cigarettes, and 48 bottles of White Horse, Black & White, and Vat 69 whiskies. No one would go thirsty. Churchill advised the White House that whiskey “is good for typhus and deadly on lice.”

  “We left Malta in darkness,” an Army colonel wrote, “like migrating swans.” The first plane lifted into the low ceiling at 1:50 A.M., blue flame spurting from the exhaust manifolds as the pilot pushed the throttle to full power on Luqa’s short runway. Other aircraft followed at ten-minute intervals. The flight plan would take these swans across the Mediterranean almost to German-occupied Crete, followed by a ninety-degree left turn over the Aegean, past Athens and Samothrace, before the planes crossed European Turkey and the Black Sea. With radio silence imposed, pilots extinguished their lights at takeoff. Passengers set their watches ahead two hours and tried to sleep.

  Churchill boarded a four-engine C-54 Skymaster provided him by the Army Air Forces; he claimed that British artisans had used five thousand animal hides to upholster the plush cabin. Huddled in his greatcoat, the prime minister resembled “a poor hot pink baby about to cry,” in the description of his daughter Sarah, who was in his traveling party.

  Down the flight line stood C-54 No. 252, named Sacred Cow, which would be making her maiden flight with a passenger identified on the manifest only as “The Admiral.” Soon a caged elevator hoisted Roosevelt in his wheelchair into the plane’s aft cabin. Churchill would later recall that the president’s face “had a transparency, an air of purification.” There was “a faraway look in his eyes.”

  Spitfire and P-38 fighter escorts already droned overhead. Aircrews in recent weeks had experimented to determine the lowest possible altitude that balanced safety and comfort: the flight would be made at 6,000 feet. The engines coughed and caught. Silver propellers whirred beneath a wet moon. At 3:30 A.M. Sacred Cow nosed into the night and banked to the east.

  A Fateful Conference

  WEDGED into a natural amphitheater between the Black Sea and the Crimean Mountains, Yalta seemed to have been built for drama. The towering peaks, bearing the gray scars of ancient avalanches, loomed above the town like “a vision of the Sierras,” as Mark Twain had written in The Innocents Abroad. Anton Chekhov, who wrote The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters at his villa in Yalta, observed in “The Lady with the Pet Dog”:

  The stories told of the immorality in such places as Yalta are to a great extent untrue �
�� tales of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair.… The town with its cypresses had quite a deathlike air, but the sea still broke noisily on the shore; a single barge was rocking on the waves, and a lantern was blinking sleepily on it.

  That sea—to the ancients, Pontus Euxinus, Sea Friendly to Strangers—had broken noisily on a shore occupied by Cimmerians and Scythians, Greeks and Genoese, Tartars and Russian princes. Two thousand annual hours of sunshine—comparable to Nice—suggested salutary conditions on the Crimean coast, and the first of three dozen sanatoriums for tuberculars and other invalids had been financed by progressive intellectuals, including Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. In 1920, by Lenin’s decree, Yalta became a workers’ spa, a proletarian paradise of fig, mulberry, and beech groves overlooking an inky sea of imponderable depth.

  Then came the Germans. Three years of warfare, including the epic siege at nearby Sevastopol, utterly despoiled the Crimea, and Stalin’s invitation to the Anglo-Americans had triggered weeks of frenzied efforts to make Yalta presentable. Thousands of Red Army soldiers filled bomb craters, refurbished gutted houses, and shoveled manure from nineteenth-century palaces that the Germans had used to stable their horses. Fifteen hundred rail coaches ran from Moscow, a four-day journey, bringing carpets, window glass, and even brass doorknobs, which the absconding enemy had sawed off and carried away. Chefs, waiters, chambermaids, maîtres d’s, linens, beds, curtains, dishes, and silverware were gathered from the Hotels Metropol, National, Splendide, and Moscow for duty at Yalta. Each night a Russian convoy swept across the Crimea, rooting through farmhouses, boarding rooms, and schools for shaving mirrors, washbowls, coat hangers, clocks, and paintings. Swarms of plasterers, plumbers, painters, electricians, and glazers worked around the clock. Five hundred Romanian prisoners-of-war planted shrubs and semitropical flowers in riotous profusion.