Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Because no president had served more than two terms, and in September 1939 Roosevelt apparently had only sixteen months left in office, it would have been inadvisable for Marshall to have become too closely associated with him. The job of Army chief of staff demanded political and diplomatic antennae at least as much as military skill, and in Marshall it found someone preternaturally endowed with them. He understood that the best way of dealing with Roosevelt was through a good-natured but not over-cordial formality, which chimed in naturally with his own personality. ‘I often saw the President and Marshall together and was left with the impression that FDR held Marshall in something like awe,’ Churchill’s confidant Brendan Bracken told Philip Graham, the owner of the Washington Post. ‘In George Marshall’s presence wisecracking and other flippancies were as much out of place as they would be at a solemn service in Washington Cathedral.’ (For his part, as late as 1949 Marshall couldn’t remember Bracken’s name, calling him ‘that tousle-headed Information minister’, and complaining that he had once congratulated him in front of an elevator operator on getting the Overlord command.)

  Marshall’s preferred form of contact with Roosevelt was by letter and memorandum. Subjects on which they corresponded during the war were, as one would expect, immensely varied, and included the use of hotels as military hospitals, press leaks from the staff of the Free French leader General Charles de Gaulle, the policy of bombing Germany during daylight, British demands for the recall of General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell from Burma, civil disorder during the Puerto Rican elections, parachute release harnesses, protection against jungle-scrub typhus, the discontinuation of Lend–Lease after the German surrender, senior promotions (which were always agreed to by the President), the frontal armour on German Tiger tanks, relations with the Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, length of tours of duty in Iceland, Turkish neutrality, German reprisals against American pilots, the defence of the Panama Canal from Commando raids, Congressional appropriations, the best way to contact Archduke Karl-Ludwig von Habsburg, whether Marshall should accept the Soviet Order of Suvorov (he did), presidential visits to Army camps, manpower bills, the morale division of the Office of Civil Defense, British pilot training in the US, the financing of Pan-American Airlines to build Latin American airfields, and very much else besides (although Marshall did not pass reports of Lieutenant Joseph W. Alsop Jr’s long and very painful-sounding history of syphilis on to the President, as Alsop’s mother was a niece of Theodore Roosevelt).44 Despite Marshall’s dislike of the use of his first name in professional situations, Roosevelt did sometimes write ‘Dear George’. More often a typed ‘Memorandum for General Marshall’ would have ‘FDR’ jotted at the end. Marshall would reply to ‘My dear Mr President’, although usually it started simply ‘Memorandum for the President’ and was signed ‘G. Marshall’ above the designation ‘Chief of Staff’. On occasion a proposal was approved with the simple note ‘GCM–OK go ahead–FDR’.

  Despite deliberately keeping a personal distance from his commander-in-chief, Marshall acknowledged the dangers of being professionally remote. Writing to Harry Hopkins in November 1942, he contrasted the British system–where Churchill saw his chiefs of staff almost daily–with the way that the President saw the Joint Chiefs separately, ‘and then the problem is, who summarizes what has occurred and provides a check to see the necessary instructions are sent around. I have often done this on my own initiative and later found out that someone else had been similarly active.’ Potentially worse were the ‘troubles we get into when we are not aware of what has happened between the President and the Prime Minister’, because ‘the British here are immediately informed of every detail’. Marshall also worried about ‘not knowing the nature of the President’s revisions of the drafts of messages we submit to him. All of these things may easily lead to tragic consequences.’45 Roosevelt conducted his own discussions on military strategy, sometimes without reference to Marshall, who resented it but who saw that the President–charming, organizationally haphazard, brilliant and extremely wily–needed very careful handling.

  An early insight into the way that Marshall did this is afforded by a private letter he wrote on 22 November 1939 to Major-General Asa Singleton, Commandant of the Infantry School, with suggestions for how to manage the President’s forthcoming visit there. ‘Whatever arrangement is made,’ Marshall counselled, ‘no one press him to see this or that or understand this or that; whatever is furnished him in the way of data [should] be on one sheet of paper, with all high-sounding language eliminated, and with very pertinent paragraphed underlined headings.’ If anything needed to be explained, ‘a little sketch of ordinary page size is probably the most effective method, as he is quickly bored by papers, lengthy discussions, and by anything short of a few pungent sentences of description. You have to intrigue his interest, and then it knows no limit.’46 It was the formula Marshall himself stuck to, even though it seems to apply more to a child with attention deficit disorder than to the chief executive of the United States.

  It certainly helped Marshall that Roosevelt’s first love and primary interest was the Navy, indeed on one occasion he remonstrated jokily: ‘At least, Mr President, stop speaking of the Army as “they” and the Navy as “we”.’47 FDR was far more willing to defer to Marshall than to his admirals, recognizing the limits of his own military competence. On the rare, but always significant, occasions that Roosevelt actually overruled Marshall, the reason was always political.

  The first thing that the new US Army Chief of Staff needed as the Wehrmacht blitzkrieged its way across western Poland was a US Army. One week into his new job, on 8 September, Marshall drafted a letter to the President arguing that in order to maintain ‘peace and neutrality in the midst of our troubled world’ the Regular Army had to be increased to 227,000 men and the National Guard reservists to 235,000 by immediate executive order. He warned that the Army’s first four infantry divisions were one-quarter under complement, and the remainder mere ‘skeleton organisations’. Furthermore, ‘Essential Corps troops are essentially non-existent.’ The National Guard was at half its regulation peacetime strength.48 Roosevelt was very receptive to Marshall’s demands, but hamstrung by a Congress that was still largely isolationist in temperament.

  If the occasion demanded it, especially after Hitler had attacked France and Belgium, by which time he had been in the job for eight months, Marshall was willing to take risks with the President. One such occurred on 11 May 1940, after Congress had decided to cut $10 million out of a$28 million appropriation budget for equipment to detect Japanese aircraft off the western coast of the United States. Marshall visited Henry Morgenthau to apprise him of the supreme importance of getting the full amount and, as he later recalled, ‘We went to see the President who, it was quite evident, was not desirous of seeing us.’ FDR gave Morgenthau some ‘rather drastic handling’, which Marshall assumed the President was laying on for his benefit, ‘because they [Roosevelt and Morgenthau] were old friends and neighbours’. When finally Morgenthau asked the President whether Marshall could put his case, Roosevelt replied: ‘Well, I know exactly what he would say. There is no necessity for me hearing him at all.’

  ‘Well, it was a desperate situation,’ remembered Marshall.

  I felt that he might be president, but I had certain knowledge which I was sure he didn’t possess or didn’t grasp. I thought the whole thing was catastrophic in its possibilities and this last cut just emphasized that point. So, recalling that a man has a great advantage, psychologically, when he stands looking down on a fellow, I took advantage, in a sense, of the President’s condition.

  Marshall walked over to Roosevelt’s desk and stood looking down at him, saying, ‘Mr President, may I have three minutes?…I don’t quite know how to express myself about this to the President of the United States, but I will say this, that you have got to do something and you’ve got to do it today.’49

  Of course these types of anecdotes have only one outcome, othe
rwise they would not be told by their heroes any more than by historians: Marshall got all he wanted and more. Equally obviously–in the light of what happened the following year–equipment for detecting incoming Japanese aircraft in the Pacific was about as prescient a spending priority as it was possible for Marshall to promote at the time. His direct method nonetheless shows his confidence by this point, as well as an element of ruthlessness in consciously taking advantage of the President’s disability. It was a tactic he was also to employ in a future encounter against an ill Winston Churchill.

  The case against Marshall, insofar as there is one, was neatly put by Colonel Ian Jacob, the Military Assistant Secretary to the British War Cabinet, who told the Australian historian and broadcaster Chester Wilmot in 1948:

  Marshall had been spotted as a bright boy when he served on Pershing’s Staff in World War One, but he was essentially a Staff officer rather than a commander, an organizer rather than a director of operations. He had little sense of strategy and no ‘feel’ of operations. He was a man of great integrity, high character and firmness of purpose. He automatically commands the respect of everyone. His modesty made him reserved and it was rather difficult to penetrate through this reserve.50

  Whether Marshall had a ‘feel’ for operations and a sense of strategy is a central question that this book will seek to answer.

  From June 1940, the US secretary of war was Henry L. Stimson, with whom Marshall built a close and strong working relationship. Stimson was seventy-seven and a strong advocate of military aid to Britain and of American military preparedness. As he was a leading member of the New York Republican establishment, a former secretary of war under Taft and secretary of state under Hoover, it was a clever bipartisan appointment by the President. In November 1942, by which time it was clear that Marshall completely dominated strategy-making at the War Department, ‘one of the less tactful hangers-on of the Administration’ asked Stimson how he liked being relegated to the position of ‘housekeeper’ for the Army.51 Stimson retorted that ‘the question was a foolish one, betraying a fundamental ignorance of the functions of a secretary of war’, but in fact it was fair, if a touch cruel. Marshall had effectively removed from the War Secretary the role that the incumbent had enjoyed since before Lincoln, that of being the president’s principal military adviser and a central contributor to strategic decision-making.

  The same month that Marshall was writing to General Singleton–November 1939–Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated a correspondence with Winston Churchill that was to have world-historical significance, and in the finest passages of its three published volumes attained far greater significance than those ‘pertinent paragraphs’ and ‘few pungent sentences’ that Marshall had recommended to the Infantry School commandant. Writing while Neville Chamberlain was still prime minister and Churchill was first lord of the Admiralty, Roosevelt said: ‘What I want you and the PM to know is that I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.’52 Grasping the opportunity with fervour, and signing himself ‘Former Naval Person’, Churchill responded with the first of 944 letters and telegrams over the next five and a half years. In all, Roosevelt sent 743.

  The publication the previous month of a new edition of Churchill’s book Great Contemporaries would have confirmed to Roosevelt that he was writing to an avowed admirer. In 1937, Churchill had originally published the collection of twenty-one witty and concise potted biographies of famous people, most of whom he had known personally, including figures as diverse as Kaiser Wilhelm II, George Bernard Shaw, Lawrence of Arabia, Marshal Foch, Clemenceau, Adolf Hitler (whom he twice nearly but never actually met), King George V and Lords Rosebery, Asquith, Birkenhead, Haig, Balfour and Curzon. For the October 1939 reissue, however, Churchill added four more essays, the last of which was entitled ‘Roosevelt from Afar’. ‘A single man whom accident, destiny or Providence has placed at the head of one hundred and twenty millions’, wrote Churchill, ‘has set out upon this momentous expedition.’ He prophesied that Roosevelt’s ‘success could not fail to lift the whole world forward into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age’.53 (Had Churchill genuinely recalled meeting Roosevelt at Gray’s Inn, he would surely have mentioned it in this essay, and possibly not used the words ‘from afar’ in the title.)

  Though it was more a gushing fan letter than an objective analysis of the New Deal, the piece did nonetheless contain very occasional barbs. In one sentence Churchill suggested that ‘the policies of President Roosevelt are conceived in many respects from a narrow view of American self-interest.’ As so often in Churchill’s writing there was also a detectable (and delectable) element of self-reference, especially in his description of Roosevelt as ‘trained to public affairs, connected with…history by a famous name…he contested elections: he harangued the multitude…He sought, gained and discharged offices of the utmost labour and of the highest consequence.’

  What Churchill admired above all in Roosevelt was his courage, the attribute that he exalted above all the others. At thirty-six, wrote Churchill, Roosevelt had been ‘struck down with infantile paralysis. His lower limbs refused their office. Crutches or assistance were needed for the smallest movement from place to place.’ Churchill also had a high regard for luck, and claimed–wrongly in fact–that at one moment in his 1932 race for the Democratic nomination, FDR’s victory had turned ‘upon as little as the spin of a coin’. This led Churchill to reach for hyperbole: ‘Fortune came along, not only as a friend or even as a lover, but as an idolator.’ Fortune and Churchill both, it seemed. Within a month of publication, this very public lauding of Roosevelt had paid off superbly with the arrival of Roosevelt’s first letter at the Admiralty.

  In another of history’s regular but nonetheless remarkable coincidences, Churchill became prime minister on the same day that Hitler unleashed his blitzkrieg in the west, Friday 10 May 1940. As Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, the head of Bomber Command since April, later recalled, the effect of having Churchill at No. 10 was instantaneous: ‘He put a bomb under Whitehall. From then till the end of the war he was constantly urging, driving, probing, restless in his search for new ways for getting at the enemy.’ Churchill would ring Portal up at all times of the day or night ‘and you had to be continually on your toes, always searching into your own mind for the means of improving the job you were set to do.’ Portal added that Chamberlain had had one telephone at Chequers, the prime ministerial country house in Buckinghamshire, and that was to be found in the kitchen, whereas Churchill ‘at once installed a whole battery on his desk and had them in constant use’.54

  On the same day that Downing Street braced itself for its new resident, Brooke was facing the whirlwind attack that hit his II Corps on the Franco-Belgian border. Although he had had eight months to prepare his largely raw and under-equipped divisions, and did so as well as possible, he was profoundly sceptical about the proposed strategy–codenamed Plan D–which required the Allied left wing, including the BEF, to advance into Belgium in an attempt to extend the Maginot Line of defence northwards along the River Meuse right up to the sea, to protect Antwerp and the Channel ports. What to do should the Germans attack around the western flank of the Maginot Line, and wheel through Holland and Belgium into France? Brooke thought that Gort (the plan’s originator) had been wildly over-promoted and regretted that the job had not gone to the commander of I Corps, his friend and mentor Sir John Dill (yet another Ulsterman). Brooke had confidence in his divisional commanders, Montgomery and Alexander, but not in the leadership, doctrine or morale of the French Army, an organization his upbringing allowed him to understand intimately.

  In his diary–which of course he ought not to have been keeping–Gort’s chief of staff Lieutenant-General Henry Pownall reported that his boss was ‘a bit depressed about [the] Corps Commanders, especially Brooke who has got a very defeatist frame of mind. I fancy he needs a rest, having done so much work in so many different capacities in t
he last four years.’ Pownall thought that Brooke was ‘always looking over his shoulder now and shows no confidence that he can withstand attack, especially by tanks’.55 The word ‘defeatist’ is a harsh one for one senior officer to use about another in wartime, but Brooke was certainly very doubtful about Plan D. ‘From the first Brooke disliked the concept of moving from prepared positions and meeting the German army in open warfare,’ records his biographer General Sir David Fraser, ‘for which he believed neither the Allied left wing’s equipment nor its tactical expertise to be adequate.’56

  The story of the May–June 1940 campaign is too well known to be rehearsed at length here, and the confusion over it is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that two of the best books on the Dunkirk evacuation are entitled Strange Defeat and Strange Victory. On one aspect of it, however, there are no two views: Brooke performed superbly. The collapse in the French sector around Sedan by 15 May and the extraordinarily rapid thrusts of the Wehrmacht panzer divisions, combined with the sudden capitulation of the Belgians on 28 May, left Brooke’s corps in serious danger of wholesale capture, from which he–through what Fraser describes as ‘a series of hazardous manoeuvres of great ingenuity and boldness’–managed to extricate it. In order to cover the gap left by the Belgians, he extended his left flank north of Ypres by sending Montgomery’s 3rd Division from south to north in darkness along minor roads close to the front. It got there just in time. He then defended the shrinking perimeter around Dunkirk, handing over his command to Montgomery–tears streaming down his cheeks–only when ordered to return across the Channel before the rest of II Corps, even though he ‘felt like a deserter not remaining with it till the last’. London needed him too much to risk his capture. Brooke was taken off the beach at Dunkirk on 30 May, along with 53,820 men that day, and over 338,000 in total.