by Conrad Black
The Allies invaded Italy in September, the British and Canadians across the Strait of Messina on September 3, and the Americans, under General Mark Clark, at Salerno, thirty miles south of Naples, on September 9. King Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio surrendered to the Allies on September 8, and the Italian navy, including four battleships – after the flagship was sunk by German air attacks, killing 1,350 sailors, including the fleet commander – sailed to Malta and surrendered to the British. Churchill ordered that the Italians be treated with the utmost courtesy and cordiality and that it all be filmed to be shown to Italians and contrasted with the arrogance of the Germans. (Churchill, a mighty but gracious warrior, loved Italy, though he hated Mussolini, and was always as magnanimous in victory as he was fierce in combat.) The Germans seized Rome on September 10, and the king and Badoglio fled to Brindisi. German paratroopers sprang Mussolini on September 12, and on September 15 he purported to set up a fascist republic in the north of Italy with his capital at Salò as the Germans swiftly occupied Italy down to where the Allies had advanced a little north of Naples. On October 13, Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio declared war on Germany, making Italy the only country in the war to be a co-belligerent, at war, at different times, with and against both sides.
The year of conferences reached its climax with the Tehran Conference between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, from November 27 to December 7. It followed a somewhat absurd meeting between the American and British leaders at Cairo with Chiang Kai-shek and his Western educated, Christian wife, sister-in-law of the leader of China’s 1911 Revolution, Sun Yat-sen, and a member of the wealthy and influential Soong family. On the way to the conferences on the powerful new battleship Iowa, Roosevelt tore a map of Germany out of a National Geographic magazine in the admiral’s wardroom and marked out the postwar zones of Allied occupation he favoured, if any had to be agreed. He objected to a demarcation of postwar zones in Germany, because he thought that once Allied landings in Western Europe were successful and the Allies were across the Rhine, the Germans would fight like tigers in the east but surrender quickly in the west in order to be in the hands of the powers who would observe the Geneva Conventions for prisoners and the civilian population. This proved substantially accurate, but on the magazine map where he designated the zones, he had all three Allied zones meeting in Berlin, a pretty optimistic scenario given that the Allied landings in Northern Europe were more than six months away and the Russians were closing in on the Polish border.
A great presentation was put on for the Chinese in Cairo, at the end of which, in the words of Alan Brooke, British chief of the Imperial General Staff, “a ghastly silence” ensued. The Chinese had no comment at all. Chiang spoke in the political meetings, but then his wife translated, and Roosevelt and Churchill were never sure whose words they were really hearing. Mme Chiang had an elegant, silk-clad, feline appearance, and a slit in her long skirt revealed a shapely pair of legs. She was understood to have had an affair with Roosevelt’s late opponent Wendell Willkie. The Cairo meeting had its diversions, but as a substantive conference it was a mere prelude to the first trilateral meeting with the marshal-premier of the Soviet Union, whom Churchill described, not without admiration, as “the great revolutionary and military chief.”
The American legation at Tehran was located out of town, while the Soviet and British embassies were together downtown. For security reasons, Roosevelt was advised by his own people to accept the invitation to stay at one of the other two embassies, and he chose the Russian, ostensibly because it was bigger, and because he had not met Stalin and did not want to encourage the impression of lockstep Anglo-American collusion, but really because he wanted to lobby Stalin privately to help him force Churchill into the cross-Channel landings he favoured, rather than the charge up the Adriatic, or even a wild enfilade via Norway that Churchill proposed, as, despite previous promises at Casablanca, Williamsburg, and Quebec, he was still not eager to re-enter northern France. What now occurred was one of the great masterpieces of modern diplomacy, executed with consummate skill by Roosevelt. Shortly after Roosevelt arrived on November 28, Stalin asked to visit him, and after a few pleasantries Roosevelt asked Stalin his preference between Western Allied landings in northern France or the Adriatic, and Stalin was emphatic for France.
Roosevelt suspected that there had already been contact between Germany and Russia over a separate peace, and as Stalin confirmed a few days later, there had been, earlier that year at Stockholm, at German instigation. Roosevelt, as the only chief of state of the three of them (the president of the Soviet Union was Stalin’s old cat’s paw, Mikhail Kalinin, and Churchill was King George VI’s first minister), chaired the meetings, and after summaries of the different theatres, the next day, he asked Stalin to express his preference between the alternatives the British and Americans were considering. Stalin opted strongly, and in militarily learned terms, for Operation Overlord, supplemented some weeks later by landings in southern France. Churchill was blindsided by this invocation of Soviet preferences, and he tried to promote the value of bringing Turkey into the war and increasing activity in the Balkans. Stalin wasn’t hearing any of it and said the Turks would never be helpful and the Balkans were rugged country and a long way from Berlin. Churchill was startled and even slightly offended by the abrupt end run in what he took to be a long-playing game of attrition and passive resistance to American enthusiasm for the cross-Channel operation. The British suspected that Stalin favoured the plan only because he thought the Anglo-Americans would distract the Germans but be thrown into the sea by them, as the Germans had done to the British before, making it easier for Russia to advance farther into Western Europe. Roosevelt suspected the same thing, but unlike the British, he was confident that Allied air and armour superiority would prevail and turn it into a war of swift movement which the West would win. (Again, he was correct.) Roosevelt also correctly assumed that his rooms had been bugged by Stalin and spoke to his colleagues appropriately. Thus, Roosevelt recruited Stalin to do what ultimately disserved the Soviet leader as America’s great postwar rival, over the mistaken opposition of America’s great ally. This was what saved most of Germany, and possibly, given the strength of the French and Italian communist parties, those countries as well, from Soviet or Soviet-backed takeovers. Immediately after Tehran, Churchill and Roosevelt met with Kemal Atatürk’s successor as president of Turkey, Ismet Inönü, but Turkey declined to join the war, and Inönü made it clear that he had no interest in fighting the Germans. When Churchill mentioned that Inönü had kissed him when they parted, Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary, said, “That’s all we got out of him.”69 Roosevelt went on to Tunisia and Sicily, and with Churchill’s full concurrence he appointed General Dwight D. Eisenhower commander of Operation Overlord.
As a first stage in reorganizing the frontiers of Europe, it was agreed to move the western Soviet borders 250 miles into Poland, and to compensate Poland with 250 miles of Eastern Germany, but the agreement was kept absolutely secret, ostensibly to avoid agitating Polish American voters as the United States entered an election year. Roosevelt secured support for his proposed international organization, called the United Nations, which he intended as a method of disguising predominant American control in the postwar world by dressing it in international collegiality, and as a method of easing his isolationist countrymen into the world on the theory that it was a gentler place now than they had thought in the prolonged period of American withdrawal. In their communique at the end of the Teheran Conference, the Big Three proclaimed themselves “friends in fact, in spirit, and in purpose.” This was a serious liberty which conformed with Churchill’s assertion, in the most famous line of the conference, in another context, that “the truth deserves a bodyguard of lies.” Stalin better described their relations when he later told the Yugoslav communist leader Milovan Djilas that “Churchill would pick my pocket for a kopek; Roosevelt only dips in his hand for larger coins.”70
Canada’s most interesting soldier, General Andrew
G.L. McNaughton (1887–1966), was sent home in December 1943 in involuntary retirement as commander of the Canadian Army, ostensibly for health reasons, but in fact because he objected to breaking up the army of 125,000 that he had highly trained and prepared for the supreme battle in France, and which the political leadership wished to reduce in order to become more involved in the war in Italy; and because he was insufficiently subservient to the capable but overbearing British Army group commander for Commonwealth forces, General Montgomery; and because he did not join defence minister J.L. Ralston’s endless incantation for conscription. McNaughton was an original and intellectual general. He had been a chemistry professor at McGill University at the outbreak of the First World War, joined the army and rose quickly, and invented a technique for calibrating guns behind the lines and moving them forward precisely targeted from the opening of fire (Chapter 5). He became commander of the army in 1929 and concentrated on armour and advanced technology warfare, and in the depression commanded some of R.B. Bennett’s camps for the amelioration of the condition of the unemployed. McNaughton determined that the French Canadians and the Prairies should each have a regiment that was part of the permanent army, the Royal 22nd (the Van Doos) and the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. He proved to have an un-Canadian flare for the striking phrase. He was featured on the cover of Life magazine in 1939, and in 1940 he made the arresting statement that the Canadian Army was “a dagger pointed at Berlin.” Churchill wanted to send him on a private mission to Stalin in 1942, but Ralston in his jealousy and antagonism managed to incite the cautious old woman in King, a trait that was never hard to rouse, and King killed the mission.71 McNaughton objected to sending a division and a brigade of tanks to join the Sicily landings, not just to save casualties but because he wanted the maximum force in what would become the principal Western European theatre. He was overruled by Ralston, who sent a second division to Italy, after the 1st Canadian Division under General Guy Simonds had distinguished itself in Sicily, taken 562 dead, and captured Messina. Mackenzie King had convinced himself that Italy would produce fewer casualties than France, after the contrast between the rates of success and casualties at Dieppe and in Sicily. By the time the second Canadian division started up the Italian peninsula, it was facing Germans, not Italians, and it suffered almost 1,400 dead, taking the village of Ortona, near Naples, alone. The undersecretary of state, Norman Robertson, was advised by the Soviet military attaché in Ottawa, Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, that McNaughton’s technical study of improved precision in artillery fire was a classic text read in Soviet military academies with Charles de Gaulle’s pioneering texts on mechanized warfare.72 McNaughton was a soldier of great merit, but he was caught in a double political vortex: he did not join Ralston’s call for conscription, and he resisted the British ambition to perpetuate and amplify Mediterranean activities, which he regarded as a sideshow and a cynical and rather diffident British effort to protect its threadbare empire in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, while going through the motions for the benefit of the Russians, who were taking over 90 per cent of the casualties fighting the Germans. McNaughton agreed with the Americans that this course risked prolonging the war and eroding political support at home, and that it increased the risk of either a separate peace between Hitler and Stalin or a much larger Russian bite out of Western Europe, possibly including Germany and France, if the landings in northern France were not made earlier than the British wished. McNaughton was popular with Churchill as a scientific and bold and original general with dash and flare; popular with Roosevelt for his support of the French, rather than the Italian, avenue to Berlin; and popular with King for keeping the conscription pressure down. But he was sandbagged by Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, for his anti-Mediterranean views, supplemented by Ralston for his anti-conscription views. They seized on alleged confusion in a military exercise (called Spartan) to claim that McNaughton had weakened under the strain of the burdens he had been carrying and was not up to commanding the Canadian Army in action. King should have ignored the British and retained McNaughton, kept his army in England, saved casualties, and dismissed Ralston, but the political threat of the second conscription crisis in 1944 was greater and more immediate than these command issues in the army in Europe. King had a more complicated plan, and as usual outsmarted everyone with a combined military and political shuffle that was up to the highest standards of his creative chicanery. He acquiesced in the retirement of McNaughton but made it clear that McNaughton returned to Canada in the odour of political sanctity. Harry Crerar, a less flamboyant man, replaced McNaughton, but McNaughton was right: Italy was a comparative waste of Canadian resources.73
Mackenize King gave one of the most impressive speeches of his career, to the British Parliament on May 11, 1944, confirming the Allied war goals of world peace and the universal pursuit of equitably distributed prosperity, “the glory and the dream – are they not being realized at this very hour?” Yes and no.
Rome had fallen to the Americans and Canadians on June 5, and they were greeted as liberators, as they were throughout Italy, and blessed by Pius XII, an honour he had not given Axis soldiers.
As 1944 unfolded, the Russians moved westward toward Poland and Hungary and Bulgaria, over their devastated western constituent republics, against fierce and ingenious German resistance; the Americans advanced – island-hopping and stranding Japanese garrisons where they could because of increasing naval superiority – northwest from the Solomon Islands toward the Philippines and westwards in the Central Pacific toward the home islands of Japan; and the British, Americans, and Canadians moved slowly up the Italian peninsula, through rugged terrain where the advantage was to the defender, encountering the usual courage and determination of the German army. Churchill had sold Italy as the “soft underbelly of Europe,” even producing a drawing of a crocodile and its relatively vulnerable stomach for Stalin when he visited him in August 1942. But that was on the supposition that it would be defended by Italians. Nothing defended by Germans was taken easily, but the Allies were advancing on all fronts, and everyone, on both sides, awaited the landings in France.
D-Day was on June 6, 1944. Eisenhower, as supreme Allied commander, had three British service deputies: Montgomery was the battlefield commander; Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory was air commander; and Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who had evacuated the British, French, and Canadians from Dunkirk four years and one week earlier, brought the British, Canadians, and Americans back at Normandy. It was the greatest military operation in history, as 5,000 ships and 12,000 airplanes were involved and seven divisions were landed by sea and three by air, 132,000 fighting troops in one day. The landings were on five beaches, Juno Beach for the Canadian division; Gold and Sword for the three British divisions; and Omaha and Utah for the three American divisions; plus one British and two American airborne divisions, and a Canadian paratroop brigade. Within three weeks, more than a million men, 172,000 vehicles, and over 600,000 tons of supplies had been landed. Within three months, the Allies had landed over two million men and nearly 3.5 million tons of supplies at the Normandy beachheads. Stalin, whether he had expected the landings to succeed or not, spontaneously issued a statement at the end of June declaring that “the history of war does not know of another undertaking comparable to it for breadth of conception, grandeur of scale and mastery of execution.”74 This was nothing but the truth, and high praise from one to whom the praise of others did not come easily or often. There were only four Canadian divisions on the Western Front, but General Eisenhower generously recognized them as one of the seven distinct armies advancing toward Germany, although the French First Army had ten divisions; the British Sixth Army fourteen divisions; and the U.S. First, Third, Ninth and Thirteenth armies from fourteen to twenty divisions each.
It was no longer possible to pretend that Charles de Gaulle did not represent France, and Eisenhower reminded Churchill and Roosevelt that it would be helpful to secure for his ar
mies the active assistance of the one Frenchman who could be of general use to him. Churchill and de Gaulle had quarrelled so violently on the eve of D-Day that Churchill had shouted down the telephone to an aide that de Gaulle could not be allowed to re-enter France and was to be deported to Algiers, if necessary – and in a magnificent Churchillian flourish – “in chains.”75 De Gaulle was annoyed that Eisenhower’s statement made no distinction between France as a liberated country continuing the fight and a conquered country, and was becoming seriously exasperated at the failure of his allies to recognize him as the head of the French people. It was clear from his return to France a few days after the initial landing, and from his progress inland, that he was the repository of France’s hopes for a national renaissance. He was finally invited to Washington in early July and generously received by Roosevelt at the White House, and they patched up much of their previous lack of rapport.
He travelled on to, as he described it, “the beloved and courageous country of Canada.”76 Of King, de Gaulle wrote, “It was with pleasure that I again saw this worthy man, so strong in his simplicity.”77 (He was not as simple as de Gaulle imagined.) De Gaulle praised the Canadian war effort, military and industrial, the more so “because the country included two coexisting peoples not at all united, that the conflict was a remote one, and that none of the national interests was directly in question.”78 King and St. Laurent liked and respected de Gaulle, and there were none of the abrasions that had afflicted his relations in London and Washington. But King did not attempt to make any sort of common cause with France as a fellow striver for greater recognition from senior allies. De Gaulle’s talents at self-promotion, and his genius at advancing the French interest, if King had assisted it more directly, rather than offering his usual good offices with Churchill and Roosevelt, who were not going to be moved by anything King said on this subject, could have emboldened Canada to make itself less taken for granted by its senior allies, with whom it had conducted an intricate roundel now for nearly two hundred years. De Gaulle’s was a successful visit, but to some extent, for Canada, a lost opportunity also.
