The Second World War

by John Keegan

  Churchill could not treat the Americans thus, least of all King or Marshall. King was as tough as leather; Marshall seemed as impassive as a marble statue and intimidated even Roosevelt (as he intended – Marshall had made a resolution never to laugh at any of the President’s jokes). As a guest at the table of American Lend-Lease largesse, moreover, it was not merely for diplomatic reasons that Churchill had to dissimulate, reason and prevaricate where, on his own ground, he would have demanded and dictated. The product of American war industry would have gone elsewhere – as landing ships and craft, which belonged to Admiral King’s empire, did during 1942-3 – if he had not succeeded in falsely persuading Marshall during 1942 that the British War Cabinet was as eager as the American Joint Chiefs of Staff to launch a Second Front at the earliest possible moment. Churchill’s exercise in inter-allied diplomacy had to be based on an entirely different approach from that which he used in managing and manipulating his cabinet and Chiefs of Staff Committee in England. By a brilliant stroke of perception, he found it in the methods his own staff officers used against him when they wished to delay one of his favoured schemes or dissuade him from a plan they judged impracticable – to agree in principle at the outset and then to drown the idea in a sea of reasoned objection.

  Churchill feared the Second Front because it would succeed only if it was launched in such overwhelming force, under such devastating bombardment from the sea and air, that the Atlantic Wall and its defenders would be crushed by the impact; and he knew that neither the force nor the support would be available in 1942. In December 1941 he visited Washington for the Arcadia conference, where for the first time the British and Americans met as joint combatants to agree strategic aims. From the tone of the meeting Churchill judged that Marshall was hostile to his own inclination to sustain pressure on Germany in the Mediterranean (the one sector in which the British had found success) but favourably disposed towards maintaining a strong Allied military presence in the Pacific (the ill-fated ABDA) for which he actually proposed a British general, Wavell, as commander. The best outcome of the Arcadia conference was that it led to the establishment of a Combined Chiefs of Staff, composed of the British Chiefs of Staff and the American Joint Chiefs of Staff; the worst, in a paradoxical sense, was that it ensured American military endorsement of Churchill and Roosevelt’s private ‘Germany First’ agreement and so brought Marshall to London in April 1942 ardent to agree a timetable. Churchill and Alan Brooke, depressed by German successes in the desert and pessimistic about Russia’s ability to survive the fall of the Crimea and the Donetz basin, temporised to the best of their ability. By reasoned argument they talked down Marshall’s support for Operation Sledgehammer, an invasion of France in 1942; by more devious means they won support for Bolero, the continuing American build-up of forces in Britain. Despite ‘winning charm, cold persuasion, rude insistence, eloquent flow of language, flashes of anger and sentiment close to tears’, Churchill failed to engage Marshall’s enthusiasm for the operation later to be known as Torch, an invasion of North Africa. Marshall’s ‘reiteration, pressure and determination’ commited both sides to Roundup, a Second Front in 1943.

  Churchill and the Americans

  Churchill had conceded much ground to Marshall in April, but he won some of it back when he visited Washington in June. Because of the prevailing disparity between German and Allied strengths, a cross-Channel invasion in 1942 would certainly have ended in catastrophe, and he rightly remained opposed to any such undertaking. By reasoned argument he made Sledgehammer look naively reckless and so engaged Roosevelt’s interest in Torch (at that time codenamed Gymnast). Churchill argued that, if Bolero brought large numbers of American troops to Britain, Roosevelt’s electors would expect them to be employed. Since they could not take part in a Second Front in 1942, why not use them in an interim operation in North Africa before the moment for Roundup came about in 1943? Roosevelt was half persuaded and in July sent Marshall to London again to thrash the matter out. Marshall was now in a headstrong mood. British resistance to an early Second Front had so incensed him that he had considered throwing his weight behind King’s and MacArthur’s commitment to the Pacific. Although that was only a bargaining manoeuvre on Marshall’s part, King meant business and as he accompanied Marshall to London on 16 July Churchill found the next four days were devoted to perhaps the hardest-fought strategic debate in the war.

  It produced deadlock, with the American Joint Chiefs of Staff demanding the Second Front that year and the British Chiefs of Staff and War Cabinet refusing to relent. The two sides agreed to lay their cases before Roosevelt, thus confronting the President with a requirement for a decision of a sort he did not usually take; in straightforward military matters he normally allowed himself to be guided by Marshall. Marshall ought therefore to have carried the day. Churchill, however, had got round his flank. Not only had he planted much doubt in the President’s mind during his visit to Washington in June. He had subsequently reinforced it through the unofficial channel of communication provided by the comings-and-goings of Roosevelt’s private emissary, Harry Hopkins. Hopkins had originally had reservations about British wholeheartedness that were almost as severe as Marshall’s; he had been won round, however, by a concerted diplomatic offensive waged by Churchill, cabinet and Chiefs of Staff together. Lobbied by Churchill and Hopkins, Roosevelt now decided to present his Joint Chiefs of Staff with a range of choices which excluded a Second Front and among which Torch was the most attractive. When Marshall settled for this North African landing, Roosevelt enthusiastically endorsed his choice and then and there set the target date for 30 October (in the event it was launched on 8 November).

  The Casablanca Conference

  Churchill had therefore got his way. As he realised all too well, however, his victory was only an intermediate one. He was still committed to a Second Front in 1943 and, unless German strength declined or Allied strength increased by an improbable degree, he also knew that he would have to find a way of extricating Britain from that commitment in the coming year. For the moment the heat was off; but he knew the temperature of debate would shortly rise again, all the more so because for the first time since 1940 operations had begun to run the Allies’ way. Though the Wehrmacht was driving deep into southern Russia, the Japanese had nevertheless been checked and, at Midway, defeated, the U-boats’ ‘Happy Time’ off the American east coast had been brought to an end, the desert army had held Rommel on the border of Egypt and the bombing campaign was gathering weight against Germany. This run of success was to continue. In October General Bernard Montgomery – not Churchill’s first choice for command of the Eighth Army – won the Battle of Alamein, in November the Anglo-American army made its landing in North Africa and in the same month Paulus’s Sixth Army was surrounded at Stalingrad. By the time that Churchill, Roosevelt and their chiefs of staff met again at Casablanca, on ground just won by Eisenhower, the weakening of Germany which Churchill had conceded would be grounds for launching the Second Front in 1943 was a fact.

  Moreover, since last meeting Roosevelt and Marshall, he had been to Moscow during August and there had also given hostages to Stalin, not exactly a promise to invade France in 1943 but a strong indication that an Anglo-American army would. Casablanca, the conference codenamed Symbol, therefore proved almost as difficult a meeting for Churchill as that in London the previous July. He realised that if King and the ‘Pacific school’ were to be defeated – and despite ‘Germany First’ the number of troops under MacArthur’s command now equalled the number under Eisenhower’s command in Europe, at about 350,000 in each theatre – he would have to enthuse Marshall for a ‘follow-on’ operation to Torch, preferably the invasion of Sicily; yet he could do so only if he succeeded in convincing him that Sicily would not obstruct a Second Front and that Britain held good to its promise of the previous year. It was an almost insoluble diplomatic problem, since Churchill could not frankly reveal to his allies his fears that a cross-Channel invasion might still fail,
even in 1943. The fact that the problem was solved, after five days of disagreement, was due almost exclusively to superior British diplomatic technique. The British party had come prepared. They had brought their own floating communications centre, a fully equipped signals ship, so that they operated as an extension of the government machine in London. Long experience in the administration of empire had taught them the pitfalls which await politicians, officials and service chiefs who have not agreed a common position in anticipation of events; unlike the Americans, they did not have to thrash out their internal disagreements as they went along. Finally, they were masters of words. Air Chief Marshall Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff and probably the cleverest service leader on either side, eventually devised a verbal formula which seemed to concede what everyone wanted. Since he knew what was in Churchill’s mind and the Americans were still muddled in theirs, the Americans grasped too eagerly at his formula and went home satisfied – to repent at leisure. The statement permitted the Torch armies to proceed to Sicily as soon as the North African campaign was terminated. That was almost the only provision about which Churchill cared, since he understood that an involvement in Sicily would preclude the launching of the Second Front in 1943. The Americans regarded the Sicily commitment as only one among many and persisted in the delusion that a Mediterranean strategy need not detract from the attack on the Atlantic Wall. It would take them nearly a year to discover that even their enormous and expanding war machine could not yield enough resources to sustain both commitments.

  Casablanca yielded other decisions of importance, including the proclamation, at Roosevelt’s insistence, that the only terms the Allies would accept from Germany, Japan and Italy were those of ‘unconditional surrender’. The Sicily decision, however, was the crucial provision and one, moreover, which the Americans would find it increasingly difficult to modify as 1943 unfolded. The course of events, rather than British diplomatic ingenuity, was to be the cause of that. At the Trident conference in Washington in May 1943, the Americans arrived ‘armed to anticipate and counter every imaginable argument of the British and backed by ranks of experts whose briefcases bulged with studies and statistics’, according to General Albert Wedemeyer of the US Army War Plans Division. Wedemeyer, who had been at Casablanca, summarised the American experience there: ‘We lost our shirts . . . we came, we listened and we were conquered.’ They were determined not to lose again and would in future outdo the British at the game of preordination. Their detailed preparations ought to have won them the match at Trident, but during the course of the conference Alexander signalled from Tunis that the Anglo-American army was victorious and that its soldiers were ‘masters of North Africa’s shores’. This euphoric signal, and Churchill’s skilful over-bargaining for an extension of the Mediterranean campaign into the Balkans, persuaded the Americans to endorse the Sicilian expedition as a safer alternative. The Sicily campaign began in July, and events there determined that they should then give their agreement to the invasion of mainland Italy. Marshall and his colleagues approached the Quadrant conference, held at Quebec in August, in what he had laid down should be ‘a spirit of winning’: no further diversion from the Second Front whatsoever. However, during the course of Quadrant news arrived from Sicily of Italy’s impending offer of surrender. This first outright defeat of one of the Axis partners, and the prospect it offered of being able to establish a front on the Italian mainland close to one of Germany’s frontiers, undermined the Americans’ commitment to the purity of a Second Front strategy yet again. Eisenhower was authorised to launch the operation, sketched in at Trident in Washington, to put an Anglo-American army ashore in Italy; but it was to be limited to the south and its purpose was to divert German strength from the sector chosen for the Second Front, now codenamed Overlord.

  The Quadrant decision was not quite the end of Churchill’s protracted effort to put back the landing on the north coast of France until such time as he felt sure it would succeed without grievous loss. Eisenhower’s advance up the Italian peninsula went further than Marshall intended, before troops were finally withdrawn to take part in the invasion of France via the southern route. Quadrant was, however, the last occasion on which Churchill could propose any diversion of force at all from the Second Front. The Americans had absolutely rightly set their face against Balkan adventures, since not only geography but the Wehrmacht’s own difficulties in campaigning against Tito should have dissuaded him from such notions. Nevertheless the Americans ought to have set even stricter limits on the Italian campaign, which ultimately came to serve Germany’s purpose better than that of the Allies. After Quadrant, they did quash all Churchill’s efforts to diversify the Mediterranean strategy. Thereafter it was to be Overlord and only Overlord, and Churchill could wriggle away from it no further. At Trident he had agreed to the appointment of a chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander, charged to prepare the Overlord plan. At Quebec he had conceded that the Supreme Allied Commander should be American. The irony was, however, that as events and American insistence drove him ever closer to biting the bullet Britain’s teeth grew blunter. ‘The problem is’, Churchill minuted to his Chiefs of Staff on 1 November 1943, ‘no longer one of closing a gap between supply and requirements. Our manpower is now fully mobilised for the war effort. We cannot add to the total; on the contrary it is already dwindling.’ Oppressed by this sense of decline, Churchill could still not bring himself to name the date for an event he accepted could no longer be postponed. Neither Roosevelt nor even the stony-faced Marshall as yet pressed him to face the inevitable. That would be left to the implacable Stalin, whom all three were to meet at Tehran in November.

  EIGHTEEN

  Three Wars in Africa

  The First World War came to Africa three days after the outbreak in Europe when the German west coast colony of Togoland was invaded and swiftly occupied by British and French forces from the Gold Coast and Senegal; the Kaiser’s three other colonies, with the exception of German East Africa in which the redoubtable von Lettow-Vorbeck sustained a guerrilla resistance to the end, were brought under Allied control soon afterwards. The Second World War, by contrast, came to Africa piecemeal and with delay. For that there was good reason: one result of Versailles had been to transfer sovereignty over Germany’s former African colonies to Britain, France and South Africa by League of Nations mandate; and while Italy, which had extensive African possessions on the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, was allied to Germany, nevertheless it did not enter the war against Britain and France, both also major colonial powers within the continent, until June 1940. Although Hitler retained a colonial governor-in-waiting on his ministerial staff, he had made no move in the meantime to extend his war-making southward across the Mediterranean. Indeed, until Italy declared for him, he had no means with which to mount offensive operations into Africa, and, unless Mussolini tried but failed there, he had no cause.

  Germany’s defeat of France, in which Italy played an ignominious and Johnny-come-lately part, provided Mussolini with the stimulus to reach for laurels in Africa. Pétain’s armistice with Hitler left Vichy in control of the French empire as well as the French navy and armed forces, and therefore neutralised the French forces on the fringes of Mussolini’s empire – the Troupes spéciales du Levant in Syria and Lebanon and the great Armée d’Afrique in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. Further, when the armistice provoked the British into attacking and crippling the French main fleet at its moorings at Mers-el-Kebir on 3 July 1940, killing 1300 French sailors in the process, after its admirals had refused to sail it out of Pétain’s hands, the resulting bitterness ensured that the French forces would lend no support at all to their former allies. In July, therefore, Mussolini struck at the British where the Italian forces in Africa were strongest and theirs weakest. On 4 July units from the Italian garrison in Ethiopia occupied frontier towns in the Anglo-Egyptian condominium of the Sudan, on 15 July they penetrated the British colony of Kenya, and between 5 and 19 August they occupi
ed the whole of British Somaliland on the Gulf of Aden.

  Italy’s ability to move so audaciously against the East African territories of what was still the world’s greatest imperial power was determined by the otherwise uncharacteristic disparity of strength prevailing between the two in that corner of the continent. After the recent conquest of Ethiopia, still only superficially pacified, Italy maintained there and in its older colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland an army of 92,000 Italians and 250,000 native troops supported by 323 aircraft. The British, by contrast, deployed only 40,000 troops, most of them local, and 100 aircraft. Britain’s local forces included the soldierly and loyal units of the Somaliland Camel Corps, the Sudan Defence Force and the Kenya battalions of the King’s African Rifles, but they were wholly outnumbered by the enemy and outclassed in equipment. The 10,000 troops in the French enclave of Djibouti were loyal to Vichy (and would remain so until they were persuaded to come over after the North African landings in November 1942).