Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Unbeknown to the Americans, the British were also running a dress rehearsal for what was codenamed the Riviera Conference, with the permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander ‘Alec’ Cadogan, playing the role of Roosevelt, as he and Churchill strode along the cold and blustery deck of their 35,000-ton battleship, HMS Prince of Wales.22 These rehearsals allowed Roosevelt and Churchill to explore avenues, practise arguments, work out which démarches might be profitable and which unprofitable, and generally make a verbal reconnaissance of the various combinations and permutations that any future conversation could take. It focused their minds and lessened the danger of surprises. Both were to repeat this sensible practice before almost all of the great wartime conferences.

  The general good humour of the Placentia Bay meeting was protected by both sides staying off subjects–such as Britain’s Indian empire–that they knew would produce discord. There were also moments of humour: after Roosevelt had said that he couldn’t understand the British aristocracy’s concept of primogeniture and was going to divide his estate equally between his five children, Churchill explained that such a distribution was nicknamed ‘the Spanish Curse’ by the British upper classes: ‘We give everything to the eldest and the others strive to duplicate it and found empires. While the oldest, having it all, marries for beauty. Which accounts, Mr President, for my good looks.’23 Since Churchill’s father was a younger son, there was more modesty than mock-vanity in that remark than the President probably realized.

  After meeting Churchill on the USS Augusta on Saturday 9 August, Roosevelt reported to Suckley: ‘He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English Mayor LaGuardia! Don’t say I said so! I like him–and lunching alone broke the ice both ways.’24 Fiorello H. LaGuardia was the short, squat but hugely energetic Republican mayor of New York between 1934 and 1945 who had supported the New Deal and saw his city through the worst of the Depression. A half-Italian, half-Jewish dynamo and gangster-buster, he was then serving as Roosevelt’s first director of the Office of Civilian Defense.

  The discussions, which confirmed the general outlines of the ABC-1 Staff talks, and drew up some high-sounding war aims, were a great success. The Americans pledged to assist Russia ‘on a gigantic scale’ in co-ordination with Britain, to provide a capital ship and five-destroyer escort on north Atlantic convoys, to deliver bombers for use by Britain, and to take over anti-submarine patrols east of Iceland. On 11 August an exuberant Roosevelt reported to Daisy, ‘A day of very poor weather but good talks.’ At dinner with Churchill that night, ‘We talked of everything except the war! and he said it was the nicest evening he had had!’ This prompted Roosevelt to ruminate, ‘How easy it is to do big things if you can get an hour off! The various officers came after dinner and we are satisfied that they understand each other and that any future needs or conversations will meet with less crossed wires.’ This was unquestionably the case with Sir John Dill and his opposite number Marshall, who struck up a genuine friendship that was to prove invaluable to Anglo-American relations.

  On Tuesday 12 August, Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Joint Declaration, later known as the Atlantic Charter, defining the two countries’ ideals in the widest sense. These stated that the USA and Great Britain desired no territorial changes that did not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned, respected the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they lived, guaranteed equal access to trade, and so on. After what the President told Suckley was ‘a moving scene as they received full honours going over the side’, Churchill and his party bade farewell and the Prince of Wales left the Bay at 5 p.m.

  On his way back to Washington, Roosevelt sailed through Canadian seas that were feared to contain German U-boats. He also faced political risks once he arrived. The House of Representatives had only passed the bill to extend the Selective Service Act by 203 votes to 202, showing that isolationism and the America First movement were still powerful forces in American politics. At the next Cabinet meeting, after commending Churchill’s ability as a negotiator, Roosevelt joked: ‘But of course, you know Grandpa’s pretty good at trading too.’ ‘You want to look out, Mr President,’ someone around the table replied, ‘Churchill may be pulling your leg by letting you win the first round.’25

  Adolf Hitler said that Operation Barbarossa would make the world ‘hold its breath’, and he was right. The Wehrmacht had completed a land blockade of Leningrad by 8 September, and eleven days later took Kiev. By 1 October it was driving from Smolensk to Moscow, and a fortnight after that was only 26 miles from the Russian capital. Just as King Richard I is said to have gazed upon Jerusalem from afar during the Third Crusade, it was the closest they were to get.

  The immense Soviet defeats spawned a powerful movement in Britain for a ‘Second Front’, an Allied return to the Continent that would draw German troops off the USSR. By late September this had spread far wider than simply among members of the British Communist Party. In a debate in the House of Commons on 30 September, Churchill attempted to counter it: ‘If I were to throw out dark hints of some great design, no one would have any advantage save the enemy. If, on the other hand, I were to assemble the many cogent reasons which could be ranged on the other side, I should be giving altogether gratuitous reassurance to Hitler.’26

  The Sandhurst-educated Conservative MP for Eccles, Richard Cary, nonetheless insisted on a Second Front ‘now’, and was supported by the Independent Labour MP Colonel Josiah Wedgwood DSO and the Labour MP John Tinker, who said, ‘I hope to goodness we do not let it get into the minds of the Russian people that we are prepared to fight to the last Russian before risking any of our own people.’ The accusation–that the British had no intention of returning to the Continent and bearding the Nazi beast in its lair–was one that adherents of Marshall were privately to make against Churchill and Brooke before very much longer, and lasts to this day. With the Germans taking Kursk on 3 November, and mounting a second offensive against Moscow later in the month, Churchill’s subtle argument was not going to satisfy supporters of the Second Front for ever. At the time, Britain had no longer-term strategy than mere survival.

  As early as 28 September 1941, Churchill began considering replacing Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who had been CIGS only since Dunkirk. ‘He now has got his knife right into Dill and frequently disparages him,’ recorded Colville. ‘He says he has an alternative CIGS in mind: Sir Alan Brooke.’ Churchill knew that Dill had not actually done anything identifiably wrong as CIGS, and during the Dunkirk campaign he was considered to have done well in command of I Corps. Yet his cruel private nickname for him, ‘Dilly-Dally’, illustrates the lack of fire that Churchill blamed him for, and there was no personal empathy between the two men. Dill meanwhile regarded Churchill as an arch-meddler whose interventions had to be borne with as much patience as he could muster.

  In his published memoirs, Churchill gave no reason for not reappointing Dill beyond his sixtieth birthday, but an earlier draft of them mentioned the CIGS’s support for defending Singapore over Cairo during a row over grand strategy in May 1941. At another point that year, Churchill had said of the British High Command in the Middle East, ‘What you need out there is a court martial and a firing squad.’27 Dill only thought up his (hardly crushing) rejoinder–‘Whom would you wish to shoot?’–long after the meeting was over. Against the whip-like wit of Winston Churchill, such mild esprit de l’escalier was not enough. Brooke would have had a far sharper retort.

  Years after the war, David Margesson, who was secretary of state for war until February 1942, told Brooke that Eden had said to him, ‘Brooke will never get on with Winston,’ to which Margesson had replied that Churchill needed ‘a man who would present the military point of view without fear or favour’. The discussions preceding Brooke’s appointment were lengthy, before Churchill finally said: ‘Well, David, I’ll take him, after all you are secretary of state, but I warn you you may regret it, for I don’t think we’l
l get on.’ Margesson recalled that, some years afterwards, Churchill had admitted: ‘You were quite right, David, we owe you a lot. Brooke was the right man–the only man.’28 In a sense, though, they were both right.

  With Dill’s sixtieth birthday falling on Christmas Day, all Churchill needed to do was tell him that his appointment would not be renewed, as Dill had every expectation that it would be under the special conditions of wartime. On the evening of 17 November Churchill broke this news, offering to make Dill governor of Bombay and rather absurdly emphasizing that he would have ‘a bodyguard of lancers’ that would follow him everywhere, something that might have thrilled Churchill but meant nothing to Dill.

  After helping Dill draft a press statement to the Ministry of Information, John Kennedy noted that the CIGS seemed ‘very disturbed but I think not really unhappy and is glad that Brooke is taking over’. Kennedy thought that:

  the politicians do not quite realise what they have taken on in Brooke. So far as I know him he is rough and tough and rather impatient. It may be a change for the better in that respect. If he can cut down the time we spend in useless debate with the PM it will be good for the proper conduct of the war…We may be thankful that Brooke has been chosen to succeed him–it might well have been someone quite unsuitable.29

  Brooke achieved many things as CIGS, but right to the end of his time with Churchill he was still complaining of the hours wasted in ‘useless debate’.

  Brigadier Ronald Weeks was on Brooke’s special train when the telegram appointing him CIGS arrived at breakfast time on 18 November. ‘This is a frightful thing,’ said Brooke, ‘I don’t know how to tackle it.’ Weeks remembered that Brooke ‘disliked the idea of “pushing out Dill”, his great friend, and was nervous as to how to handle Winston Churchill’. There was no question that both duty and ambition compelled Brooke to accept the Army’s most senior post, of course, and he didn’t need to have any fears with regard to Dill. It was a publicly smooth transition with the minimum of press comment, although some newspapers ruefully commented that Dill turning sixty was a strange reason for his retirement, considering that the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Dudley Pound, was sixty-four and Churchill himself sixty-seven. In reply to Brooke’s letter accepting the appointment, Churchill wrote: ‘I did not expect that you would be grateful or overjoyed at the hard anxious task to which I summoned you. But I feel that my old friendship for Ronnie and Victor, the companions of gay subaltern days and early wars, is a personal bond between us, to which will soon be added the comradeship of action in fateful events.’30

  Sir James Grigg, permanent under-secretary at the War Office, who was ‘puzzled at Brooke’s great emotion at certain times’, told a post-war interviewer that Brooke ‘had tears in his eyes’ when saying farewell to Major-General Bernard Paget and his fellow officers at Home Forces HQ, and had ‘rushed from the room unable to finish his farewell’. This was all the more strange because Brooke had a rather low opinion of Paget and was responsible for replacing him with Montgomery as commander of 21st Army Group before D-Day. It nonetheless does testify to Brooke being a far more emotional man than he allowed himself to seem from the outside.

  In a sense, all of Brooke’s past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial. He arrived at the War Office for his first day as CIGS on Monday 1 December, and Kennedy found him ‘very quick and decided’. It was not the last time he was to apply that pair of adjectives to his new boss. Brooke settled into his new role immediately, especially in its most important aspect: the formulation of grand strategy. In his diary for 3 December he wrote: ‘I am positive that our policy for the conduct of the war should be to direct both our military and our political efforts towards the early conquest of North Africa. From there we shall be able to reopen the Mediterranean and to stage offensive operations against Italy.’ In a mood of distinct self-congratulation after the war, he commented that it was ‘interesting to note’ that already on his third day as CIGS ‘I had a clear cut idea as to what our policy should be…It is some gratification to look back now, knowing that this policy was carried out, but only after many struggles and much opposition from many quarters.’31

  Yet although Brooke did indeed adopt this strategy, which incidentally was already Churchill’s, it is also true that, as the distinguished military historian Professor Sir Michael Howard put it, ‘None of the British leaders, including Churchill and Brooke, were yet prepared to recommend where and how the decision should be forced–if indeed it had to be forced at all.’32 The phrase ‘against Italy’ certainly does not demonstrate that as early as 1941 Brooke envisaged a strategy in which Allied armies fought all the way up the Italian peninsula as far north as the River Po. If this was his scheme, he did not mention it again, even to his diary, for over a year.

  At first neither Admiral Pound nor Air Chief Marshal Portal much liked the idea of Brooke joining them as their Army colleague on the Chiefs of Staff Committee, since they thought him ‘too abrupt, over-forceful and tactless’.33 Occasionally described as ‘hawk-faced’ and ‘stoop-shouldered’, Brooke would look Churchill in the eye at meetings, say ‘I flatly disagree,’ and go on to give his reasons.34 It is true that Brooke was indeed, as Field Marshal Lord Bramall puts it, ‘impatient to a fault, even outdoing Churchill in this respect’, but very soon his colleagues on the Committee saw his qualities, and especially his readiness to stand up to Churchill.35 During arguments with the Prime Minister he would sometimes break a pencil in half, a surprisingly forceful–even almost threatening–gesture when closer than 4 feet from Churchill across the narrow green-baize table of the Cabinet Room. In this scion of the Fighting Brookes, the son of the intrepid Sir Victor, Churchill had at last found a CIGS with a determination to match his own.

  If he was tough on those above him, Brooke could be tough on those below too. ‘He was ruthless where he found anyone at fault,’ recalled Weeks, ‘and had no use for anyone who had fallen below his standards and had failed him.’ For example, in August 1942 he was sent a report on airborne forces which he found sub-standard and which he returned covered in the traditional green ink of the CIGS. Its hapless author found no fewer than thirteen paragraphs of Brooke’s corrections, the last, numbered ‘13’, heavily underlined and against it written: ‘A most suitable ending to a really lamentable effort.’36

  Brooke’s mere presence at the War Office galvanized those around him. In The Military Philosophers, the ninth volume of Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time, the hero Nicholas Jenkins is chatting in the great hall of the War Office, when his attention was:

  unequivocally demanded by the hurricane-like appearance of a thickset general, obviously of high rank, wearing enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. He had just burst from a flagged staff-car almost before it had drawn up by the kerb. Now he tore up the steps of the building at the charge, exploding through the inner door into the hall. An extraordinary current of physical energy, almost of electricity, suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS.

  Sackville Street was where Brooke sometimes used to go to relax at lunchtimes, to study ornithology books and prints at the antiquarian booksellers Sotheran’s, but Powell’s paragraph gives a sense of the pulse that Brooke’s presence used to impart to those around him the moment he entered the portals of the War Office on Whitehall.

  Because this book is about grand strategy, one should not assume that its four principals spent all, or even most, of their time considering it, even though it was the most important aspect of their duties. Roosevelt was head of state and had simultaneously to carry out those multifarious practical and ceremonial tasks connected with that role. He also spent much of his time overseeing the many government agencies driving the production revolution that turned America into, in his phrase, ‘the arsenal of Democracy’. Domestic politics did not end with the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Congress continued to send up bills for his approval. With sustained American ec
onomic prosperity now a war-winning weapon, the President had to concern himself with financial questions as much as at any time during the Great Depression.

  Nor could Churchill concentrate entirely on grand strategy, having similarly important domestic political calls on his attention. Surprisingly large amounts of time had to be spent honing his speeches, attending Commons debates, lunching with newspaper editors, visiting bombsites, factories and military encampments, watching weapons-testing, briefing the King, soothing the Tory Party (which he always feared secretly hated him), meeting ambassadors and foreign leaders, and–to an extent that tended to infuriate Brooke–involving himself in military tactics at a far lower level than grand strategy.

  The Cabinet which Churchill chaired furthermore regularly considered subjects far removed from the war, such as whether Noël Coward should be awarded a knighthood, or whether child allowances should be paid to the father or the mother. (Of the latter issue, ‘The Prime Minister, in his puckish mood, said it must be left to a free vote and he would not vote at all lest he lose the votes of the fathers or mothers.’)37 The most aggressive Cabinet row of the entire Second World War was not over a military subject at all, but over the £775 million surplus sterling balances that India had been allowed to build up by November 1944. Churchill was furious with the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, and demanded to know who ‘was responsible for piling up this vast debt against Great Britain’, calling it a ‘scandalous intrigue against this country’ and the ‘greatest financial disaster in our history’. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Anderson, explained that it had been due to ‘our current expenditure in India’, whereupon Churchill asked if there had been ‘No effort made to relieve us of a danger worse than the American debt’. He added that the situation was ‘terrible–how can you get out of a just debt? The day will come when whole position will be disastrous.’38 He blamed the situation on Wavell’s desire to be popular with the Indians, whereupon Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India, ‘told him not to talk damned nonsense’. According to a spectator, ‘This shook the PM considerably and there was no end of a row. Amery withdrew the actual words but not the sense of what he had said.’39 After that Anderson threatened to resign, saying, ‘I can’t go on if there is feeling in your mind that things are being mismanaged.’ Churchill then himself threatened to resign–‘The PM said he was ready to go etc etc’–as Admiral Cunningham, the First Sea Lord, put it.40 Of course neither man did resign, and their threats were not recorded in the anodyne report of the discussions in the official Cabinet minutes, but it was an indication of the non-military political crises that Churchill had to find time for on top of his consideration of grand strategy.41