Against the locusts, Marshall, Arnold, and King stood nearly naked. They had pared down the military contingent to the Army’s head of supply, Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell; Savvy Cooke, King’s planner; Wedemeyer; and a few others. They had little information at their disposal, other than what they and their assistants carried in their briefcases or in their heads. Worst of all, while Churchill and his warlords had a settled plan of action, President Roosevelt had not firmly backed any strategy at the January 7 White House meeting, principally because the Joint Chiefs had offered him none.22
Since the British held most of the cards, the only question was how much, if anything, they would concede toward a future cross-Channel invasion. They had been enthusiastic about ROUNDUP in 1943 when Marshall and Hopkins were in London, but now they were ready to sidetrack ROUNDUP for another Mediterranean jaunt. As Air Marshal Portal privately quipped to his fellow Britons, “We are in the position of a testator who wishes to leave the bulk of his fortune to his mistress. He must, however, leave something to his wife, and his problem is to decide how little he can in decency leave apart for her.”23
Roosevelt’s Three Musketeers held their line against the Mediterranean strategy. Marshall argued vehemently that the Soviet Union needed a true second front, as Roosevelt had promised Molotov the year before. Mediterranean actions, he warned, would become a “suction pump” pulling landing craft and men from their primary mission: the conquest of Germany. Operations in the Pacific and Burma would also suffer if the Allies committed themselves to “interminable” operations on the Continent’s periphery.24
General Brooke thought he glimpsed military politics behind Marshall’s insistence on ROUNDUP. He told his diary Marshall “has found that King, the American Admiral, is proving more and more of a drain on his military resources, continually calling for land forces to capture and hold bases. On the other hand MacArthur in Australia constitutes another threat by asking for forces to develop an offensive from Australia. To counter these moves Marshall has started the European offensive plan and is going 100% all out on it! It is a clever move.” 25
Brooke launched a vigorous counterattack against ROUNDUP. An invasion could not be mounted until late in the year, leaving the Allies fighting in France during the wet and winter seasons, when air cover would be limited and armored mobility impaired. The number of landing craft then available would not support a large invasion force, and no more than twenty-three divisions would be available by September 15—hardly a serious threat when Hitler had almost two hundred divisions arrayed against Stalin in the east.26
On the other hand, an invasion of Sicily would give the Allies air bases covering southern Italy. That alone might prompt the wobbly Italian government to sue for peace. If Italy surrendered, Hitler would be forced to pull large forces off the Russian Front and send them down the Italian boot. Additional bombers could be concentrated in England for the strategic bombing campaign over Germany—a carrot Brooke dangled for General Arnold—while Admiral Pound claimed that opening the Mediterranean would allow Allied shipping to India to go through the Suez Canal rather than around the Cape of Africa, an effective savings of 225 cargo ships. King found this angle enticing.27
Through a three-day campaign of repetition, argument, and attrition, Marshall saw the ground slipping beneath his feet. Eisenhower privately warned him that an invasion of France would require a mammoth commitment—possibly more than the Allies could spare for that year—and Roosevelt appeared lukewarm to any particular strategy. In sharp contrast to the year before, nightmares of early defeat had vanished; the combination of Midway, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Tunisia appeared to have staved off German or Japanese victory. But recognition of the vast resources needed to parry the Axis on these far-flung fronts drove away hopes for a rapid victory on the Continent. The optimism of July had been replaced by January’s stark realization that the war would not be won quickly or easily.
By the fourth day of battle, Marshall was prepared to give the British what they wanted. The ground war in the Mediterranean would continue after Tunisia was captured, and the next major target would be Sicily. ROUNDUP, the Americans conceded, was too great a stretch for 1943.28
• • •
During lulls between meetings, the American and British chiefs held social gatherings—dinners, luncheons, and cocktail hours where they mingled informally and steered clear of talk of war. Brooke’s passion, they discovered, was birdwatching, while Marshall’s was gardening. Ian Jacob, the British secretary, wrote in his diary, “British and Americans met round the bar, went for walks down to the beach together, and sat around in each other’s rooms in the evenings. Mutual respect and understanding ripen in such surroundings, especially when the weather is lovely, the accommodation is good, and food and drink and smokes are unlimited and free.” 29
Social hours gave Admiral King a better look at the men he was dealing with. Portal, he thought, was the most intelligent of the group—certainly smarter than Arnold—while Admiral Pound seemed groggy except when naval matters cropped up. He disliked General Brooke. “He talked so damned fast that it was hard to understand what he was saying,” King recalled. That was one of the nicer things King said about him.30
The meetings also reinforced British impressions of the Ohioan. Jacob told his diary, “King is well over sixty, but active, tall and spare, with an alert and self-confident bearing. He seems to wear a protective covering of horn which it is hard to penetrate. He gives the impression of being exceedingly narrow-minded and to be always on the lookout for slights or attempts to ‘put something over’ on him. He is secretive, and I should say he treats his staff stiffly and at times tyrannically. . . . His manners are good as a rule, but he is angular and stiff and finds it difficult, if not impossible, really to unbend.” 31
While King was a man of few words and fewer hobbies, the British learned he could provide entertainment value when he let himself splice the main brace too handsomely. “King became nicely lit towards the end of the evening,” Brooke told his diary. “As a result he got more and more pompous and, with a thick voice and many gesticulations, he explained to the President the best way to set up the political French organisation for control of North Africa. This led to many arguments with the P.M. who failed to appreciate fully the condition King was in! Most amusing to watch.” 32
• • •
At the negotiating table, Churchill’s lieutenants found King less amusing. He was the British bugbear, the monster that comes out of the closet at night and carries off little children’s landing craft. “Unless you tied him down, he felt it was quite all right to run off to the Pacific with all his craft,” remarked Portal. One British admiral mused, “King is said to have his eye on the Pacific. That is his Eastern policy. Occasionally he throws a rock over his shoulder. That is his Western policy.”33
At Casablanca, King’s Pacific eye fixed on two strategic issues. The first was the allocation of ships, planes, and fighting men between the Asian and European theaters. As if announcing a mathematical fact, King claimed a mere 15 percent of all Allied resources were going to the Pacific, and he wanted that number raised to 30 percent. A 30 percent allocation, he said, would be enough to get the Navy west of Truk, the Japanese stronghold in the Central Pacific. Thirty percent might even get them to the Philippines. Once their ships were that far west, the Navy could slice through Japan’s supply lines and eventually hit the Home Islands.*34
Second, to weaken the Japanese “front door” in the Pacific, King asked the British to attack Japan’s “back door,” Burma. The proposed operation to open this door, code-named ANAKIM, was an amphibious landing near Rangoon on the Burmese coast.
The logic behind ANAKIM was as winding as the Burma Road itself. Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist army was too poorly equipped to threaten the Japanese forces in mainland China. Its supply lines from the United States ran through the southern port of Rangoon, up Burma�
��s Irrawaddy River valley to the Burma Road, and east along the Burma Road to Chiang’s camp at Kunming. When the Japanese invaded Burma, they severed that vital artery; now, the only way to get anything into China was by flying from India over the treacherous “Hump” of Nepal—land of the Himalayan mountains whose 25,000-foot peaks and sudden downdrafts were as deadly to aircrews as German 88s were to bombers over Berlin.
The capture of Rangoon, combined with a Chinese drive to the south, would reopen Chiang’s Burma Road supply line. Liberally supplied with American weapons trucked up the Burma Road, the generalissimo’s 3.8 million levies could tie down the huge Japanese Army occupying eastern China—keeping them out of the “American” Pacific.35
Brooke, Portal, and Pound wanted nothing to do with Burma, and they shifted in their chairs uneasily as King held forth on ANAKIM. The immediate obstacles, in their view, were a lack of naval power in the Bay of Bengal to protect the landing fleet and the ever-present shortage of landing craft.
ANAKIM became a triangular standoff: Chiang refused to attack Japan’s army in Burma until the Royal Navy controlled the Bay of Bengal; the demands of the Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns ruled out naval control of the Bay of Bengal; and the British refused to mount ANAKIM unless Chiang agreed to attack Japan’s army in Burma. ANAKIM, concluded Brooke, was a dead issue until late 1943, at the very earliest. The war against Germany was and must remain everyone’s top priority.36
Never a patient man in conference, King saw perfidy in Albion’s reluctance to launch ANAKIM. The British chiefs seemed more interested in preserving their empire in the Mediterranean than in defeating Japan, and he was getting tired of his Pacific being shortchanged. His face reddening, he opened the door to a question no one had been rude enough to ask: How much help did the British intend to give the United States in the Pacific after Hitler was defeated?37
King’s question was a slap in the face of British honor, and the implication that the British would abandon the Americans once Germany surrendered could not go unanswered. Brooke and Portal indignantly replied that His Majesty’s Government was fully committed to the defeat of all Axis powers, including Japan, and the meeting ended on a sour, divisive note.
Worried lest doubts linger in Roosevelt’s mind, Churchill vehemently assured the president, “If and when Hitler breaks down, all of the British resources and effort will be turned toward the defeat of Japan. Not only are British interests involved, but her honor is engaged.” He offered to sign a treaty to this effect, but FDR shook his head. Churchill’s word was good enough.38
• • •
The accumulated stress of four days spent sitting around a crowded, narrow table began fraying the men’s nerves. On the morning of January 18, the sixth meeting of the Combined Chiefs began unraveling over King’s proposed Pacific offensive until Portal stepped into the role of peacemaker. He tactfully suggested that the British had perhaps misunderstood the Americans, who were not trying to shift the war’s focus from Germany to Japan.
Marshall heartily agreed with Portal, but added that he was anxious not to get stuck in the Mediterranean while MacArthur’s men were short of ammunition, aircraft, and ships. King, in a conciliatory mood, assured the British chiefs that he was only aiming to lay a foundation for the eventual defeat of Japan, not steam into Tokyo Bay in 1943. The United States was not going to throw too much at Hirohito while Hitler and Mussolini were going concerns.39
As Eisenhower reflected ten days later, “One of the constant sources of danger to us in this war is the temptation to regard as our first enemy the partner that must work with us in defeating the real enemy.” Brooke eyed King and Marshall with suspicion, and he demanded an explicit agreement that the Americans would stop moving west in the Pacific once MacArthur captured Rabaul. Neither King nor Marshall would agree to this limitation, which the Americans considered drastic and unnecessary. The two sides remained deadlocked, and the morning meeting ended in a fog of distrust and animosity.40
During an early-afternoon break, Field Marshal Dill visited Brooke in his hotel room and had a candid talk with him about the consequences of stubbornness. Dill was a close personal friend of Marshall, a frequent dinner guest at the general’s home, and he held the respect of both sides. He provided the British perspective to Marshall, and he could articulate the American view to London without being perceived as selling out to the colonists.41
Sitting in Brooke’s room, Dill convinced Brooke that the Americans, for political reasons, would not budge on the Pacific. They felt they had to give MacArthur and Nimitz some flexibility to move west if the opportunity arose, and they could not afford to let anyone accuse them of shortchanging the soldiers and marines in the Pacific theater. And if the Combined Chiefs remained deadlocked on the subject, the whole lot of them would have no choice but to refer the matter to Roosevelt and Churchill. “You know as well as I do what a mess they would make of it,” Dill said.42
Brooke had worked with Churchill long enough to imagine the Frankenstein monsters he would create if left to his own devices. He later reflected, “Winston never had the slightest doubt that he had inherited all the military genius from his great ancestor Marlborough! His military plans and ideas varied from the most brilliant conceptions at one end to the wildest and most dangerous ideas at the other.” While British policy was remarkably realistic—often much more so than the plans of their cousins—the prime minister’s strategic attention deficit sometimes sent the Empire into places best left alone. One British staffer joked, “Some Americans are curiously liable to suspect that they are going to be ‘outsmarted’ by the subtle British—perhaps that is because we sometimes do such stupid things that they cannot take them at face value but suspect them of being part of some dark design.”43
Faced with the horror of letting politicians decide military strategy, Brooke relented. Portal prepared a draft memorandum permitting the Americans to “maintain pressure” on Japan and “retain the initiative” in the Pacific. They would be free to push westward through Rabaul, the Marshalls, and the Carolines, so long as they could do it with forces already allocated to the theater. In return, the British insisted that the Americans stop at Rabaul and the Carolines for 1943, so as not to jeopardize their ability to land in France if opportunity knocked. Operations in Burma would remain “on the books,” as Brooke put it, but a final decision on ANAKIM would be deferred until summer.44
The British chiefs presented their proposal to Marshall and King during the afternoon session. The U.S. chiefs huddled over the document like corporate lawyers reviewing a contract—which, in a sense, it was. After carefully reading the fine print, they agreed to Portal’s compromise.45
At four o’clock, the Combined Chiefs gathered with their leaders in Roosevelt’s villa to outline their agreement to invade Sicily, bomb Germany, sink the U-boats, study Burma, and take Rabaul, the Marshalls, and the Carolines. To their relief, neither Roosevelt nor Churchill offered any changes. The Allied course for 1943 was finally settled.46
So they thought.
• • •
As the Combined Chiefs were drafting their final memorandum, Roosevelt took an inspection tour to Rabat, eight-five miles up Morocco’s Atlantic coast. He had told Marshall and Eisenhower that he wanted to visit the troops. In the last war, he said, he had been up to the front as assistant navy secretary, and he would visit this one, too.
Marshall and Eisenhower told him a trip to the front—central Tunisia—was out of the question. Even Eisenhower was an unwelcome guest at any place the Germans could reach. The Army would have to allocate so much fighter, armor, and infantry protection for the visiting V.I.P. that it would jeopardize operations against the Boche elsewhere. Roosevelt tried to argue the point, but Marshall shut down the discussion by telling Roosevelt that if he issued those orders, no one in a U.S. Army uniform could take responsibility for his safety.47
Roosevelt backed down sullenly and
settled for a consolation prize, a trip to General Clark’s encampment near Rabat. Accompanied by General Patton and a small entourage, FDR rode in the back of a command jeep and reviewed soldiers of Clark’s Fifth Army. Men standing at attention broke into huge grins when they saw the “old man” nodding at endless lines of olive drab powdered in road dust. The sights and sounds of the hard, boisterous youths of the Ninth Infantry Division, with whom he lunched, infused Franklin Roosevelt with a fresh ray of optimism—that spark he and Churchill threw off that first night at the White House. “Those troops, they really look as if they’re rarin’ to go,” he told his son Elliott. “Tough, and brown and grinning.”48
•
Soldiers in Tunisia, however, were not grinning. Lieutenant General Eisenhower’s disorganized rush to the critical ports of Tunis and Bizerte had sputtered out in late November, and Hitler had poured men, artillery, tanks, and aircraft into “Fortress Tunisia.” Nestled behind the forbidding Dorsal Mountains and protected by a moat of gooey rainy-season mud, Fifth Panzer Army and Rommel’s Deutsch-Italienische Panzerarmee fended off blows from Eisenhower to the west, and from General Bernard Montgomery to the east.49
Marshall had loyally supported Eisenhower through his education as a supreme commander, but the situation in Tunisia required a shake-up in the command structure. General Montgomery’s British Eighth Army was driving from Libya toward Eisenhower’s force. The command structure had become too complex for Eisenhower to handle everything by himself, so the Combined Chiefs agreed to create a new army group under British General Sir Harold Alexander. Eisenhower would remain “supreme commander,” coordinating land, sea, and air forces, and Alexander would run the land battle.
American Warlords Page 29
