by Lynne Olson
After docking at Hampton Roads, Virginia, on December 22, Churchill and his subordinates flew to Washington. The United States had been at war for two weeks. Congress, at Roosevelt’s request, had declared war against Japan on December 8; three days later, Germany and the United States declared war against each other. But, if the blazing lights of the capital that night were any indication, the conflict clearly was still remote to most Americans, psychologically as well as geographically. Pressing their faces against the plane’s windows like schoolboys, the members of Churchill’s party, accustomed to London’s Stygian nighttime darkness, marveled at the brilliant glow beneath them. To John Martin, Churchill’s principal private secretary, it was “one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.” To another Churchill staffer, Washington, “with its myriad dancing neon signs, looked like a fairy city.”
That same warmth and sparkle were apparent in the greeting given Churchill by Roosevelt, who, having surrendered to the prime minister’s sense of urgency, met him at National Airport. The president drove him back to the White House and installed him in an upstairs suite down the hall from FDR’s own bedroom. “We’re here as a big family, in the greatest intimacy and informality,” Churchill wrote delightedly to Clement Attlee, his deputy prime minister.
Roosevelt’s White House was noted for what Churchill called its “Olympian calm,” but with the prime minister in temporary residence, it seemed caught up in a whirlwind. Just as at Chequers and Ditchley, secretaries rushed around, and messengers, carrying red leather dispatch boxes, bustled to and fro. Churchill and Roosevelt wandered in and out of each other’s rooms at will and studied the war maps that the prime minister tacked up in the Monroe Room. Churchill celebrated Christmas with the Roosevelts, took part in FDR’s preprandial cocktail hours, shared most meals with the president, and, to Eleanor Roosevelt’s great dismay, kept her husband up until the early hours each morning, drinking brandy, puffing cigars, and talking endlessly about everything.
But, in at least one regard, the British leader did not follow his usual routine: he did not dominate the conversations or hold court at meals as he usually did at home. In some of their meetings to come, the two leaders would resemble “a pair of master showmen who were determined that no scenes would be stolen by the other,” as Secret Service agent Mike Reilly put it. “Being with them was like sitting between two lions roaring at the same time,” remarked Mary Churchill Soames. Yet in Washington, as during the Placentia Bay meeting, the prime minister played up to Roosevelt. Churchill “was always full of stories,” a friend of Mrs. Roosevelt’s noted, “but at meals, no matter how far apart the two were sitting or who was next to him, he tried to talk with FDR. The whole flow of Churchill’s conversation was directed at the President.” Lord Moran observed in his diary: “You could almost feel the importance he attaches to bringing the President along with him, and in that good cause he has become a very model of restraint and self-discipline.” At night, Churchill, thinking of himself as “Sir Walter Raleigh spreading his cloak before Queen Elizabeth,” insisted on pushing FDR in his wheelchair from the sitting room to the elevator as “a mark of respect.”
In their discussions, Churchill, to his great relief, found no trace of Roosevelt’s pre–Pearl Harbor caution and indecision. FDR’s resolution and determination to fight the war “with everything we’ve got” was echoed by that of the American people, who, in the words of Robert Sherwood, “cast off isolationism readily, rapidly, even gratefully—though perhaps not permanently.” Even more important in the prime minister’s eyes, the president declared that the defeat of Germany should be the Allies’ first objective. The two leaders agreed that a vanguard of American forces should be dispatched immediately to Britain—two Army units to defend Northern Ireland and several bomber squadrons to begin raids against Germany from British bases.
Roosevelt and Churchill also made an unprecedented decision: to bring their forces together under a unified command. In each theater of operations, a single commander would have authority over all British and American soldiers, sailors, and airmen, while a Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee would base itself in Washington to coordinate Anglo-American strategy. In addition, U.S.-British agencies would be created to control munitions, shipping, raw materials, food, and production. It was, George Marshall declared later, “the most complete unification of military effort ever achieved by two allied nations.”
True enough. But achieving that “complete unification of military effort” was an enormous, friction-filled struggle that would last until the end of the war. In its relatively short history, the United States, strictly speaking, had never been a true ally of any country. During World War I, President Wilson had declared his country “an Associated Power” rather than an Ally; in the field, General John Pershing, the head of the American Expeditionary Force, kept his troops as a separate entity under his command. The British, on the other hand, had had a wide variety of alliances over the centuries, many if not most conducted with mutual frustration and antipathy.
To some Americans, it seemed that the British, with their superior attitude, still looked on them as misbehaving colonists rather than as an independent, equal people. It was maddening to be treated like ignorant adolescents, who needed to be taken in tow by a wise, all-knowing mentor, who would educate them in the ways of the world. Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British ambassador to the United States in the mid-1930s, displayed such condescension when he wrote to the Foreign Office in 1937: “The United States is still extraordinarily young and sensitive. She resembles a young lady just launched into society and highly susceptible to a little deference from an older man”—meaning Britain, of course. Churchill used similar analogies himself, often comparing the United States to a skittish young woman who could be brought around to the right way of thinking by wooing and seduction.
THE DIVISIONS BETWEEN the two countries surfaced almost immediately during military staff talks in Washington. Their prime minister might have agreed to the American proposals for a unified command and a Washington-based committee to plan strategy, but the British brass were appalled by both ideas. What did the Americans, unready for war as they were, know about commanding allied forces? For that matter, what did they know about waging war?
“I have never seen so many motor cars, but I have not seen a military vehicle,” Field Marshal Sir John Dill, after his first few days in Washington, wrote to Alan Brooke, who had just taken over from Dill as chief of the Imperial General Staff. “And yet amid all this unpreparedness, the ordinary American firmly believes that they can finish off the war quite quickly—and without too much disturbance…. This country has not—repeat not—the slightest conception of what the war means, and their armed forces are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine.” (Dill would have been even more shocked if he had been in Washington on December 8, when all U.S. military officers were ordered to report to work in full uniform. Since most had worn mufti on duty in the pre–Pearl Harbor days, the corridors of the Army and Navy Building that Monday morning “were filled with officers [wearing] uniforms and parts of uniforms dating back to 1918…. Majors were in outfits they had bought when second lieutenants…. It was a rummage sale called to war.”)
Ironically, considering Dill’s initial skepticism about his country’s new ally, he would emerge as one of the key figures in preserving the unity of this fragile new union. At Brooke’s suggestion, Dill was named senior British member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington; his tact, charm, courtesy, and persuasiveness quickly won over American military leaders, particularly George Marshall, with whom he formed a close friendship. Time and again, the diplomatic Dill would help find solutions to the constant disputes between British and American military leaders. When Dill died of aplastic anemia in 1944, Marshall insisted that he be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, as he had wished. Although the burial of foreigners was banned at Arlington, Congress passed a joint resolution making an exception for the popular British
field marshal. The route of his cortege was lined with thousands of U.S. troops, and a witness at the graveside reported: “I have never seen so many men so visibly shaken by sadness. Marshall’s face was truly stricken.”
In the four years of the alliance, the U.S. Army chief of staff would develop no such rapport, however, with the acidic Brooke, his British counterpart. When Brooke, who stayed behind in London during the Washington meetings, learned that Churchill had agreed to a joint command headquarters in the U.S. capital, he was furious. “I could see no reason why, at this stage, with American forces totally unprepared to play a major part, we should agree to a central control in Washington,” he wrote in his diary.
But the conflict over unified command paled in comparison to the Anglo-American division over where to hit the Germans first—a fight that would rage for the next seven months. Marshall and his subordinates wanted to go straight for the German jugular—an invasion of France across the English Channel. They envisioned a massive buildup of American troops in Britain, followed by an assault on the Continent in the summer of 1943. If a collapse of Russia seemed imminent in 1942, then a less ambitious attack on France could be carried out to secure a beachhead.
“As is usual with the Americans, once having decided to go to war, they determined to fight a bigger and better war than ever was fought before,” Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, the British chief planner of D-Day, sardonically noted years afterward. The American strategy was based on a fundamental principle of the U.S. military dating back to the Civil War, the longest and most costly conflict in which the country had engaged to date. That principle—to destroy the enemy with overwhelming force as quickly as possible—was the strategy used by Union general Ulysses S. Grant in his drive against the Confederate army of Robert E. Lee.
Churchill, Brooke, and the rest of the British military were dumbfounded by what they regarded as the recklessness and amateurishness of the proposal. Didn’t the Americans realize that an invasion as early as 1942 would be sheer madness? How could the Allies return to Western Europe, with its twenty-seven German divisions, when American forces were still so paltry, both Allies were woefully ill-equipped and armed, not enough shipping existed to bring the huge numbers of men and supplies needed across the Atlantic, and amphibious landing craft were in such short supply? “One might think we are going across the Channel to play baccarat at Le Touquet or to bathe at Paris Plage!” Brooke snorted.
Churchill and his army chief believed that the first Allied strikes against Germany should take place in North Africa and other targets on the perimeter of Europe, to greatly weaken the Germans before going in for the kill. That kind of peripheral strategy was one to which the British, with its superior naval power and lack of large land forces, had subscribed for centuries. The murderous trench warfare of World War I was an exception for Britain; having lost more than 750,000 men in that four-year bloodbath, the country was determined that such a catastrophe would never be repeated. If a cross-Channel landing was to be carried out in the near future, the bulk of the troops would be British, as Churchill and Brooke well knew. “We had sustained disaster after disaster, and the skin of our teeth was wearing a bit thin,” observed Frederick Morgan. “Small wonder if those who bore the full responsibility were not overenthusiastic about sticking their necks out farther than they had ever stuck them out before.”
Marshall and the rest of the American military were unconvinced by the British arguments. They were sure that their ally’s plan for North Africa was simply a scheme to protect the British empire—to keep the Suez Canal safe and to safeguard Britain’s oil and other interests in the Middle East. “For Marshall, suspicion of British imperial designs under Churchill underlay every wartime scheme,” historian Stanley Weintraub has written. Marshall himself acknowledged after the war that “too much anti-British feeling [existed] on our side, more than we should have had. Our people were always ready to find Albion perfidious.”
ALTHOUGH MARSHALL AND Brooke remained unimpressed with each other for the duration of the war, they nonetheless had a good deal in common. They both were considered the preeminent figures in their country’s high commands and were the closest and most trusted military advisers to their heads of government. Each was a superb leader who made a vital contribution to ultimate victory. They shared many of the same personality traits—they were brusque, stern, obstinate, intensely private, impatient, and distinctly formidable.
But there was one key difference between them, of which both generals were acutely aware. Unlike Brooke, Marshall had never led troops in battle, despite his keen desire to do so. During World War I, he had been chief of operations for the 1st Infantry Division in France and later served on General Pershing’s staff. After holding virtually every important staff job in the Army, he became chief of staff on September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland. Over the next two years, Marshall embarked on a complete overhaul of the Army. With single-minded determination, he rooted out hundreds of senior officers he considered deadweight, handpicked the most promising new commanders, stepped up training, ordered massive maneuvers, created an armored division, and oversaw the introduction of a multitude of new weapons. Called “the epitome of the modern military manager,” he did all this in the face of stiff resistance from an isolationist Congress, as well as from some New Dealers within the Roosevelt administration. “Not even the president could intimidate Marshall, who never hesitated to disagree with Roosevelt when he thought his commander in chief was mistaken,” noted one historian.
Brooke conceded that Marshall was “a big man and a very great gentleman.” He saw “a great charm and dignity” in his American counterpart “which could not fail to appeal to me.” But, in the British chief’s mind, those favorable qualities were overshadowed by Marshall’s lack of battlefield experience and what Brooke viewed as the American’s ineptitude as a strategist.
By 1941, Brooke’s own experiences on the battlefield had made the very thought of war repugnant to him. In 1916, as a young lieutenant, he had fought in the horrific Battle of the Somme, which claimed a total of 420,000 British casualties, nearly 70,000 of them on the battle’s first day alone. After Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Brooke commanded a corps of the British Expeditionary Force in France and was given most of the credit for the successful evacuation of some 200,000 British troops from Dunkirk in June 1940. “By almost universal testimony, it was due largely to his skill and resolution that not only his own Corps but the whole BEF escaped destruction” in its retreat from the German blitzkrieg, wrote Sir James Grigg, the permanent head of the War Office. Shortly thereafter, Churchill sent Brooke back to France to take command of the remaining British forces in the western part of the country; he was forced to organize yet another evacuation when the situation became untenable and the French government capitulated to Germany. In July 1940, he was put in charge of British forces in England and oversaw the reorganization of Britain’s defenses, in anticipation of a German invasion of the island.
Having experienced the enemy blitzkrieg firsthand, Brooke was stunned when he discovered, during his first meeting with Marshall in the spring of 1942, that the Americans had no idea of the German fury lying in wait for Allied troops if they somehow managed an early landing in France. “I found [Marshall] had not begun to consider any form of plan of action and had not even begun to visualize the problems that would face an army after landing,” Brooke later wrote. “I saw a great deal of him throughout the rest of the war, and the more I saw of him, the more clearly I appreciated that his strategic ability was of the poorest.”
That was hardly the sharpest comment that Brooke, who concealed a seething, sensitive nature under a cloak of imperturbability, would make about Marshall. “Rather over-filled with his own importance,” read one of his many astringent diary entries about his American counterpart. Another was: “In many respects he is a very dangerous man.” (Although Marshall didn’t think much of Brooke either, he apparently was not as ou
tspoken in his disdain. In one of the few recorded instances where he revealed his feelings about Brooke, Marshall told Harry Hopkins that “although he may be a good fighting man, he hasn’t got Dill’s brains.”)
WHILE ALLIED COMMANDERS were debating the course of future operations in early 1942, a multitude of military disasters faced them in the present. America’s entry into the war was accompanied by one crushing Allied defeat after another. For Americans, the shock of losing much of the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor was followed by Japanese conquests of Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines. For the British, the situation was far worse. Vanquished earlier by the Germans in France, Greece, and Crete, they now lost their empire in the Far East and the Pacific to the Japanese, suffering, as they did so, some of their most humiliating military defeats in history.
On December 9, two of Britain’s biggest and best fighting ships—the battleship Prince of Wales, on which Churchill had traveled to his Placentia Bay meeting with Roosevelt, and the battle cruiser Repulse—were sunk by Japanese warplanes in the South China Sea, off the coast of Malaya. More than 650 men lost their lives. “In my whole experience,” Churchill said, “I do not remember any naval blow so heavy or so painful.”
On Christmas Day, Hong Kong fell, followed by Singapore, Burma, and Malaya. “We seem to lose a new bit of the Empire almost every day,” Brooke wrote glumly to a friend, “and are faced with one nightmare situation after another.” The surrender of Singapore, previously regarded as an invincible British bulwark in the Far East, was a particular shock to the country, which couldn’t understand how Singapore’s 85,000-man garrison could give up so readily. Speaking in the House of Commons, Churchill called it “the greatest disaster in British arms which our history records.” Malaya also was lost without the waging of a single major battle.
