Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  The adoption of the memorandum, first by Marshall and then by Roosevelt–though not in writing–and then by the US Joint Planning Committee, meant that the United States had an outline plan to use during the secret, arm’s-length Anglo-American Staff talks, codenamed ABC-1, which were about to start. No such talks could be organized before Roosevelt’s third inauguration on 20 January 1941, because during the election campaign he had promised American parents that ‘Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’

  Churchill told Jock Colville emphatically that Roosevelt ‘would win the election by a far greater majority than was supposed and he said he thought America would come into the war. He praised the instinctive intelligence of the British press in showing no sign of the eagerness with which we desired a Roosevelt victory.’ Four days after that prediction, Roosevelt did indeed win re-election over the Republican candidate Wendell Willkie by 449 electoral votes to 82. Churchill went on to say, his ruminations punctuated with bursts of the song ‘Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree’, that ‘he quite understood the exasperation which so many English people feel with the American attitude of criticism combined with ineffective assistance; but we must be patient and we must conceal our irritation.’9 His own private irritation was evident from his complaint the next month that ‘We have not had anything from the United States that we have not paid for, and what we have had has not played an essential part in our resistance.’10

  In 1941, some 84 per cent of the munitions used by British and Commonwealth forces originated in Britain. The system called Lend–Lease, whereby American arms were sold to Britain on generally favourable borrowing terms, accounted for only 1 per cent at the time, and the British paid cash for a further 7 per cent under pre-Lend–Lease contracts. So in the last nine months of 1941 Britain received 2,400 aircraft and 951 tanks from the USA, or the equivalent of six weeks’ output from British factories.11 It was useful, obviously, but not so much as to make a great difference militarily. Where the $14 billion of Lend–Lease aid by the time of Pearl Harbor did help, however, was in Britain’s overall financial and food situation. On New Year’s Day 1941, Colville, listening to Churchill composing a ‘forceful’ telegram to Roosevelt on Britain’s financial predicament, thought that the Prime Minister ‘obviously fears that the Americans’ love of doing good business may lead them to denude us of all our reasonable resources before they show any inclination to be the Good Samaritan’.

  From his appointment as commander-in-chief Home Defence, Brooke attended meetings of the War Cabinet Defence Committee, a combination of service Chiefs and their political ministers, at least on matters that impinged on his brief. On 10 January 1941, for example, he had discussed there Italian operations in Africa and German naval operations in the North Sea, ending with a long list of the manpower and matériel deficiencies he faced.12 Even if the memory of their Le Mans conversation had dimmed, Churchill was thus well aware of Brooke’s direct manner, his habit of speaking very fast, and his strength of character. He was not always impressed, however, writing to the Secretary for War David Margesson and Dill the next day to say that Brooke’s contribution ‘did not seem to be at the level of the discussion’, and was ‘not very illuminating’. He complained that, instead of talking about his strategy for using twenty-five divisions and two thousand guns to counter-attack the expected German invasion, Brooke had merely delivered a list of equipment shortfalls, of which Churchill was ‘well aware’. Dill was due to retire as CIGS on Christmas Day 1941: had he done so at the beginning rather than the end of the year, it is safe to assume that Brooke would not have got his job.

  Warned by Dill of this threat to his advancement, Brooke acted quickly. A fortnight later he was writing to Churchill about Operation Victor, an anti-invasion exercise in which Neasden power station and the Metropolitan Water Works were captured by two ‘German’ brigades and thirty light tanks that were landed in London by parachute, but were then fully engaged by his Home Forces. This was much more Churchillian fare, and prompted the Prime Minister to inform Harry Hopkins and Dill that when the invasion came his broadcast to the nation would end with the words: ‘The time has come: Kill the Hun!’ Soon afterwards Brooke was again invited to stay at Chequers, where he brought an epidiascope or magic lantern to give a lecture on Operation Victor to Clementine Churchill, the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the Labour leader Clement Attlee, about which the Prime Minister was ‘very flattering’.

  Brooke would not put his commitment to his career over his obligations to the High Command, however. In the late summer of 1940, Churchill tried to use him to outmanoeuvre the Chiefs of Staff Committee–Dill, Pound and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal–over Operation Ajax. Having failed to convince the Chiefs of its merits, which he needed to do before it became strategic policy, the Prime Minister sent for Brooke to come to Chequers. ‘Then in front of the Chiefs of Staff’, Brooke recalled years later, ‘he ordered me to prepare an expeditionary force out of my resources for the capture of Trondheim,’ and gave him a week in which to do it. Brooke said that he would need the Commanders-in-Chief of the Home Fleet and Bomber Command, the Minister of Transport and several other high officials to help him in the planning, all of whom Churchill promised would be put at his disposal.

  The British and French had captured Trondheim and Narvik under Churchill’s orders in April 1940, only to be forced to evacuate them by superior German forces. Luftwaffe superiority had cost the Royal Navy dear in that campaign, although it had been the parliamentary debate over that disaster that had, paradoxically enough, brought Chamberlain down and Churchill into the premiership. The idea of returning to Norway only a matter of months later, without air superiority and with the Germans in complete control of the entire coastline, was anathema to War Office Planners.

  After seven days Brooke came to the same conclusions that the Chiefs of Staff had, that the operation was unfeasible, mainly because of the lack of aircraft carriers to provide the necessary support. When he reported this to Churchill, he ‘received a very unpleasant welcome!’ The Prime Minister later tried to persuade the Canadians to undertake the operation, but failed in this too. As well as apprising Brooke of the fundamental impracticality of Ajax–later codenamed Operation Jupiter–the experience also alerted him to the readiness of Churchill to try to bypass the service Chiefs to get his way. In retrospect, far from being the wasted week that it must have seemed at the time, it was one well spent.

  Relations between Churchill and Brooke improved in the spring of 1941. In a radio broadcast of 9 February, in which he quoted Longfellow’s lines from ‘The Building of the Ship!’, Churchill declared that he had ‘the greatest confidence in our Commander-in-Chief, General Brooke, and in the generals of proven ability who, under him, guard the different corners of our land’. The next day he toured Brooke’s headquarters in the reinforced-concrete basement of the Office of Works near the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall, and then invited Brooke up to the No. 10 Annexe, the rooms on the ground floor of the same building almost directly upstairs where Churchill lived for much of the war instead of in Downing Street. He showed Brooke his drawing room and dining room, Mrs Churchill’s bedroom and bathroom, his own bathroom, and even the kitchen and scullery. After the war, Brooke recalled that, fitted out with elaborate anti-bomb devices, special ventilators, telephones, message conveyors and map rooms, his ‘was in every way an excellent battle headquarters, with only one fault, namely its proximity to Winston!’13

  Brooke later remembered his stay at Chequers on the night of Sunday 9 March 1941 as ‘one of the first occasions on which I had seen Winston in one of his really lighthearted moods’. Churchill’s friend and scientific adviser Lord Cherwell was also staying, and Brooke recorded that there was much ‘flippant’ conversation about metaphysics, solipsists and higher mathematics, not subjects that naturally lend themselves to flippancy. After dinner Churchill played martial tunes on a gramophone while giving his guests a display of arms drill with an el
ephant gun in the Great Hall. His simulated bayonet practice left Brooke convulsed with laughter; after the war he wondered to himself what Hitler would have thought of it all. Churchill–who was wearing a light-blue siren suit, which Brooke thought looked like ‘a child’s “rompersuit”’–had bronchitis, and so went to bed at the record early hour of 11.30 p.m. The ice was broken, and it is well to remember, when Brooke’s relations with Churchill later became stormy and exasperated, that there had been pleasant moments too.

  Later that month, in discussions about whether reinforcements should be sent to the Middle East, Churchill put Brooke’s demands not to let troops out of the country down to the natural desire ‘that every General should try to keep as many troops as possible in his own hands’, but ‘We must not get too invasion-minded.’14 Churchill knew from intercepted German messages in late March 1941 that an invasion was definitely off the Wehrmacht’s agenda, and he had been impressed by Brooke’s willingness to allow large numbers of troops and tanks to leave Britain in the summer of 1940 to protect the Nile Valley. ‘When real risks arise in other quarters, risks will be run with courage here,’ wrote Churchill, ‘as they have been in the past.’ If he saw Brooke as willing to run them–as he had shown when the invasion threat was far higher–it could only have redounded to Brooke’s credit.

  Brooke also learnt how to stay silent at opportune moments. At a dinner at Chequers in late April 1941, attended by Margesson, Ismay, Cherwell and Churchill’s daughter-in-law Pamela (née Digby, later Harriman), the Prime Minister kept everyone up till 3.30 a.m. and got into a heated argument with Major-General John Kennedy, the Director of Military Operations at the War Office (and one of the men who had sat outside the window at Le Mans). Kennedy had intimated that there would be worse things strategically than the loss of Egypt, which Churchill took as unacceptably defeatist, saying that he should be made an example of, and citing Admiral Byng’s execution by firing squad in 1757.

  In his diary, kept surreptitiously like all the many others, Kennedy complained that Brooke completely failed to intervene on his behalf, ‘although I knew I had said nothing with which he did not agree’. Had Kennedy the opportunity to read Brooke’s own diary entry, where the discussion was dismissed as ‘a rather pompous discourse on strategy’, he might have expected less, but his superior officer also had two other reasons for remaining silent.15 The first was that he had a large number of important matters to discuss with Churchill the next day–including pressing manpower and tank shortages–and the second was of course that he did not want to be perceived by Churchill as defeatist himself, which might have been fatal to his chances of promotion to CIGS in due course. Afterwards Brooke wrote effusive thanks to Churchill for his ‘great kindness for giving him the opportunity of discussing the problems and putting some of the difficulties’ to him, adding, ‘These informal talks are of the greatest help to me.’

  In late January 1941, Marshall’s view of the likelihood of ‘American boys being sent into foreign wars’ became startlingly evident when the press discovered that the War Department had placed an order with a Cleveland metallurgy firm for four million small discs on which soldiers’ names and enlistment numbers would be stencilled, known as ‘death tags’ or ‘dog tags’. Marshall tried to explain that they needed two million because each soldier would be required to have two, but in an army of just over a quarter of a million men that argument seemed wanting. ‘The whole procedure is routine and the number involved is not large considering the constant use being made of these tags,’ Marshall told the President, who would nonetheless have been deeply embarrassed by such a revelation had it emerged before the election.16 What it did show was that Marshall had high ambitions for the future size of the US Army, ambitions that in the event were to be massively exceeded.

  In March, the ABC-1 Staff talks were satisfactorily concluded. After fourteen sessions in Washington over two months, American and British Planners agreed the strategy that would be adopted in the event of the United States entering the war. Germany would be defeated first, Allied interests in the Mediterranean would be maintained and the Pacific theatre would stay on the defensive until victory was secured in the west. This was to form the kernel of Allied grand strategy, once the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 catapulted the USA into the Second World War.

  Meanwhile, the damaged British aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious was repaired in a US shipyard despite America’s strict neutrality laws. At that time no fewer than eight thousand RAF pilots were being trained in the United States, and by October 1941 the Joint Staff Mission in Washington numbered two hundred military personnel, their duty to interpret the views of the British Chiefs of Staff to the US Chiefs of Staff and to keep Anglo-American planning up to date. By the end of the war these tasks required no fewer than three thousand people. In their role of keeping in constant touch with the Plans, Operations, Intelligence and Communications branches of the American service departments, the Joint Staff Mission grew to be huge, though not unwieldy.17

  Although Roosevelt publicly opposed the employment of convoys, which might involve American vessels firing at German ones, he was in favour of ‘patrols’ that could protect American against aggressor vessels, which often amounted to much the same thing. One such patrol of 10 April 1941 entailed the destroyer USS Niblack, while rescuing the Dutch survivors of a merchantman, dropping three depth charges on the U-boat that had torpedoed it. The following day the President told Churchill that he was extending the patrol area to 25 degrees west longitude, a position midway between the western bulge of Africa and the eastern bulge of Brazil. The Royal Navy therefore effectively no longer had to worry about patrolling the western Atlantic.

  This strained US naval resources and Marshall strongly advised the President to move some of the Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor on the Hawaian island of Oahu into the Atlantic instead. Marshall was certain that, with heavy bombers and new pursuit planes, American forces were such that the Japanese would not attack. This was, of course, terrible advice, which Roosevelt anyhow turned down since American relations with Japan were at a critical stage, and the removal of ships would be seen by Tokyo as a sign of weakness. The following month, Marshall made an equally dire prediction when he informed the President that ‘The island of Oahu, due to its fortifications, its garrison, and its physical characteristics, is believed to be the strongest fortress in the world. With this force available a major attack against Oahu is considered impracticable.’18

  Churchill described the German invasion of Russia on the night of Saturday 21 June 1941 as ‘the fourth climacteric’ of the war, the others being the fall of France, the battle of Britain and the passing of the Lend–Lease Act. ‘Trust him to find a word no one else had ever heard of,’ commented one of his lady-typists.19 Hitherto the only British grand strategy worthy of the name depended upon blockading Germany, aerial bombardment and attempting to foment revolt in Europe, none of which held out realistic hope of victory over the Nazis. Now Operation Barbarossa so altered the geo-strategic situation that it made it imperative for Roosevelt, Churchill and Marshall–Brooke was still only commander-in-chief of Home Forces–to meet face to face to co-ordinate plans to assist Russia against Germany and deter Japan from attacking in the Far East. After Brooke had estimated to the War Cabinet that Hitler’s invasion of Russia could cost Germany as many as two million casualties, Churchill commented: ‘It came from God–we did nothing about it.’ The Prime Minister added that the ‘War can’t end in 1942 but optimistically in 1943.’20 Far too optimistically, as it turned out.

  On 24 July at Downing Street, first Harry Hopkins and then Churchill spoke to Roosevelt on the telephone, but the President forgot he was not using the scrambler device, and said ‘some things about a certain rendezvous which he afterwards bitterly regretted’. That was Placentia Bay on the southern coast of Newfoundland. The following day Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt to say that Europe would be liberated ‘when the opportunity is ripe’ by an imposing
quantity of tanks being landed ‘direct onto beaches’ by specially adapted ships. ‘It ought not to be difficult for you to make the necessary adaptation in some of the vast numbers of merchant vessels you are building so as to fit them for tank-landing fast ships,’ he added. Even three years before D-Day, therefore, the methods of victory were being contemplated, confounding later accusations that Churchill ‘never’ wanted to invade Normandy.

  In a nine-page handwritten letter on 4 August to his cousin and confidante Margaret ‘Daisy’ Suckley, who lived close to him in Dutchess County, New York, Roosevelt described how he had been secretly transferred from his presidential yacht the Potomac on to the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, and, with another cruiser and five destroyers as escort, had made his way to Newfoundland. The Potomac had continued to fly his presidential flag once he’d left her, in order to maintain the deception: ‘Even at my ripe old age I feel a thrill in making a getaway, especially from the American Press.’21

  The presidential flotilla arrived at Placentia Bay at 6 a.m. on Thursday 7 August 1941. The next day Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s special representative to Britain, and the Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles arrived by plane and the Americans staged what Roosevelt called ‘a dress rehearsal conference’ before the British arrived, which included General Marshall, Hap Arnold of the USAAF, two very senior American admirals, Harold Stark and Ernest J. King, and seven others. ‘All set for the Big Day tomorrow,’ Roosevelt told his cousin about his meeting with Churchill.