Similarly, George Marshall was kept busy on very many other matters than grand strategy, although according to his meticulously kept engagement diary for 1943, the Army Chief of Staff attended no fewer than fifty-six Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings that year–usually a 1 p.m. lunch followed by a 2.15 p.m. meeting–and forty-two Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings in Washington as well. There had been plenty more meetings, of course, during the total of ninety days that he spent abroad that year. He visited the White House only thirty-two times in 1943, and not always for military meetings with the President, but also for occasions such as lunches, dinners and receptions for dignitaries including Madame Chiang, the President of Haiti and the Foreign Minister of Brazil. He also gave seven off-the-record press conferences and one on the record.
Although he took four days off with a cold, Marshall went home to Leesburg for only nineteen days in 1943, and officials would occasionally motor out to see him there. Most of the rest of his time was taken up with meetings with generals–who usually got half an hour each–and a large array of senators, admirals, ambassadors and Cabinet members. There were also memorial services, the Foreign Relations Committee, speeches, radio addresses, congressional groups and of course visits to military bases around the country. He would watch propaganda films, such as Frank Capra’s Battle of Tunisia, before they were released, and lunch with important figures such as the British Ambassador Lord Halifax, Harry Hopkins (four times), General Pershing (thrice) and the Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The Duke of Windsor for some reason got one-and-three-quarter hours of his time on one of his visits from the Bahamas, otherwise he tended to grant people interview slots of fifteen minutes each.42 The reason why Marshall tended to minimize social functions during the war was well illustrated after a relatively small White House dinner in honour of Anthony Eden in the spring of 1943. On the way back to Leesburg, he showed Katherine eight place-cards, on the back of each of which he had noted requests made by various guests. The subsequent correspondence complying with these favours required thirty-two letters and several telegrams.43
The man who had the most time to think about Allied grand strategy was Brooke, who, although he was responsible for running the entire British Army, was expert at delegation. The duties of the CIGS ranged across the entire gamut of war-making, but foremost among them were evolution of grand strategy, appointment of field commanders, allocation of manpower, the equipment and deployment of the Free French, Poles, Dutch, Belgians and Czechs, and the organization of tactical air forces in support of land operations, as well as the protection of sources of raw materials. By far the most important, however, was the first, the provision of an overall global blueprint for how to win the war.
So time-consuming was this primary task that Brooke left the financial, administrative and organizational aspects of the Army to the Secretary of State for War, David Margesson up to February 1942 and thereafter Sir James Grigg, elevated from civil servant to Cabinet minister. Since Grigg got on well with Brooke, but also with his vice-CIGS, Archibald Nye, and the new deputy CIGS, Ronald Weeks, the traditional distrust that had long existed between the military and political sides of the War Office largely disappeared. Brooke could concentrate on strategy and the all-important task of advising Churchill. He was respected in the War Office for being excellent at delegation and almost never got caught up in the details of day-to-day military operations. Like other talented and hard-working individuals at the top of their professions, he only did what only he could do.
On Thursday 4 December 1941 Brooke had his first indication of what life was going to be like as CIGS, when, during a Staff Conference that started at 10 p.m., Churchill’s naval plans for raiding Italy were turned down because of the Chiefs of Staff’s preoccupations with Japan. ‘At midnight Winston banged his papers on the table and walked out,’ Brooke told Kennedy the next morning, ‘complaining the Chiefs frustrated him in all his offensive projects.’ Brooke, who had what Kennedy called ‘a delicious talent for mimicry’, gave his staff ‘a most amusing’ account of Churchill’s surprise exit.44 The Chiefs were right to be preoccupied by Japan, however, as events that Sunday confirmed with the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The defeat of Italian forces in Libya in early 1941 had persuaded Hitler to despatch General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps there in the spring, and by the end of the year General Sir Claude Auchinleck had seemingly been out-fought by the ‘Desert Fox’, whose troops had better tanks and a far better anti-tank gun, the dual-purpose 88mm. Despite Auchinleck having an enlarged army of two corps, his tendency to divide his forces and commit them piecemeal compounded what were at times heavy losses. This in turn meant that the Prime Minister was often in moods alternating between mere ill-temper and what he himself called ‘black dog’ depression. ‘This Libyan “fiasco” is the immediate problem,’ Kennedy wrote at this difficult time. ‘Winston is very depressed. He had built so many hopes on this offensive.’45
The British were right to hold their nerve, as Rommel’s bold out-flanking movement towards Egypt did not come off, and Auchinleck regained the initiative and relieved the first siege of Tobruk, prior to pushing the Germans back across Cyrenaica all the way to El Agheila on the Gulf of Sirte, from where their offensive had originally been launched in March. Visiting Churchill to discuss the Libyan situation on 5 December, Kennedy found him ‘looking pale and rather unwholesome’ seated alone at the Cabinet table with his back to the fire in his air-force-blue siren suit, an extinct cigar in the ashtray with half an inch of ash attached. ‘But he was in fairly good heart, having apparently got over his fit of depression.’ Of the Far East, Churchill told Kennedy that ‘The Japs were fools if they come in. Hong Kong will be gone soon, I suppose, he added mournfully.’ (It fell on Christmas Day.) The relief of Tobruk by Auchinleck on Sunday 7 December 1941 was not destined to be remembered by history, however, because on that ‘day of infamy’ all attention was riveted by events half a world away.
Before Pearl Harbor, Churchill had been hoping for a maritime incident similar to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 to bring America into the war, especially once the US Navy was acting more and more proactively in protection of Lend–Lease ships all the way from Greenland to the Azores. As for Japan, Kennedy recorded that ‘Winston always felt Japan would be unlikely to come in and if she did we could leave her to America.’46
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt went to the rostrum of the House of Representatives to ask for a declaration of war, denouncing the ‘unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan’. The vote took thirty-three minutes, with only the Montanan Republican pacifist Jeannette Rankin dissenting. Simultaneously both Houses of the British parliament voted for war on Japan also. At the United Service Club that evening, Kennedy was unimpressed when he heard Churchill broadcast on the subject: ‘He was either very tired or not quite sober. He spoke badly. I wish we had someone in sight in case he breaks up. It is frightful to be so dependent upon a man who is so old and of such luxurious habits.’47
On 10 December 1941, just before Germany declared war on America, Churchill told the War Cabinet:
We must address a substantively new situation to that which existed last week. Germany is about to declare war against the US. Japan has attacked Great Britain & the US and placed the right battle group at the right spot, but the US has not lost all her ships, although there has been a disaster in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor was taken by surprise, maltreated…Japan is in complete control from Cape Horn to Vancouver. In a sense they can…land at any particular island or place–a situation no one supposed would occur. We will have to put up with a lot of punishment till the situation can be brought around.48
Yet he was able to discern that, for all the short-term dangers, in the long run the attack would redound to Britain’s benefit:
Looking past the first phase, the real situation is vastly improved, nothing can compare to the US in warfare and now she has to fight for her life. So far as Russia is concerned, Hitler
has suffered a colossal defeat which may be turned into colossal disaster, from Leningrad to [indecipherable] German armies are in a frightful condition: mechanised units frozen, prisoners taken in rags, armies trying to stabilise, Russian air superiority. Germany is busted as far as knocking out Russia is concerned. The tide has turned and the phase which now begins will have gathering results. What to face in the Indian & Pacific Oceans we cannot tell. Hong Kong will fight to the death. But we must devise a different kind of warfare and get more ships. It is a bad time but that must not daunt us or inflict doubt upon us in any vital way. They may attack Indian coastal towns, we have lost command of these waters. We and the US will take some time to regain it…I must meet the President quite soon. There should be no anxiety about the eventual outcome of the war. The finger of God is with us. We must keep our word to Roosevelt, in spite of the fact we don’t get enough help from the US.
Asked whether Britain should make an appeal to the Russian dictator Marshal Joseph Stalin to declare war against Japan, Churchill answered, ‘He’s holding off so much I’m not going to ask him to come into this war. He would not be able to bring back his Siberian army. The battle on the Russian front is going to break the heart of Germany. It would be a mistake to bring them in at this moment. It suits us, it is true, but nothing can compare to the way it suits us in smashing of German armies.’ When someone suggested that Churchill should visit Marshall, or that Pound should ‘go and concert a policy’, the Prime Minister agreed that ‘the two Staffs must meet’ soon. He added that he didn’t ‘think you will get a large Japanese force landed in Australia’, but considered raids possible against Canadian islands and the Californian coast.
Later that evening the news came through of the loss of HMS Prince of Wales (which had conveyed Churchill to Placentia Bay only four months before) and HMS Repulse, sunk by Japanese dive-bombers off Malaya, further underlining how important it was for the Western Allies to co-ordinate their strategy because an American aircraft carrier might have saved them. With Japan’s entry into the war, noted John Kennedy, there would be fewer supplies to send to the Middle East for the next spring offensive, and convoys round the Cape of Good Hope would become more precarious. ‘The importance of North Africa is therefore greater than ever,’ he concluded. ‘If we could get the whole North African shore and supply the Middle East through the Mediterranean we should be much happier.’49 Yet could the United States be encouraged to help in an operation so very far from where they had been attacked in the Pacific?
Lunching in late March at the Carlton Grill restaurant, where Kennedy was outraged that the bill for two with a bottle of burgundy came to £5, Ismay said that Churchill was ‘tired and irritable and difficult’, and Kennedy complained of the way that ‘Winston seems to suck the vitality out of his entourage like a leech,’ and how ‘very difficult and dictatorial’ Churchill had been about the detailed movements of troops, especially the sending of the 18th Division to reinforce India. ‘Brooke had great difficulty in stopping him sending it to Burma to carry out a sweep behind the Japanese into Siam. He would not realise that the country in Burma, with its mountains and jungles, was quite impassable for a British mechanised division and furthermore no administrative facilities have been built up for British troops.’50 It was to be one of very many clashes between Brooke and Churchill where the Prime Minister was convinced that War Office Planners such as Kennedy were deliberately stymieing his vision by their lack of imagination.
Of course Hitler’s suicidal declaration of war on the United States–literally so, as it turned out–suddenly and radically altered the relationship between Britain and America, whose leaders immediately realized that they needed to confer again as soon as practicable, if possible before the month was out. No longer was Britain an imploring supplicant to a neutral power. Now, she and America were in a common Manichean struggle. Brooke enjoyed relating that, hearing Admiral Pound still speaking of the United States with the careful phraseology of the pre-Pearl Harbor days, Churchill had turned to him and ‘with a wicked leer in his eye’ had said, ‘Oh! That is the way we talked to her while we were wooing her, now that she is in the harem we talk to her quite differently!’51
3
Egos in Arcadia: ‘The tremendous hold the Limeys have on Our Boy’ December 1941–February 1942
From the very start of our alliance after Pearl Harbour the President and General Marshall, rising superior to powerful tides of public opinion, saw in Hitler the prime and major foe.
Winston Churchill, The Hinge of Fate1
On Saturday 13 December 1941, the brand-new battleship HMS Duke of York left the River Clyde to sail to America for a conference codenamed Arcadia. Aboard were Churchill, Pound and Portal, as well as Brigadier Leslie ‘Jo’ Hollis and Colonel Ian Jacob of the War Cabinet secretariat. Dill also went along, even though he was no longer CIGS, because of his intimate knowledge of strategy. Yet Brooke was left behind ‘to mind the shop’, as the phrase then went, and also to ‘read himself into’ his new job, with Ismay staying to assist him. ‘How I hated being left behind!’ Ismay recalled. In an early draft of his third volume of war memoirs, The Grand Alliance, Churchill originally wrote: ‘I was anxious that Brooke should remain in London in order to grip the tremendous problems that awaited him.’2 Although this was removed by the time of publication in 1950, it seems to have been the real reason. (Eisenhower claimed in his book Crusade in Europe that Brooke had attended the Arcadia Conference, but that was not the case.)3
Although it was indeed important for Brooke to be in London, reporting to the War Cabinet about the terrifyingly rapid Japanese advance across south-east Asia, his absence from Washington cut him out of the vital decisions that were being made there. He approved of some, such as the Germany First strategy for the defeat of Germany before concentrating on Japan, but vehemently opposed others, such as the plan to impose ‘unity of command’ in all theatres, whereby a single supreme commander would be given ultimate operational control over all Allied forces in each geographical region. Being absent and thus unable to argue his case, or to stiffen the opinions of Pound and Portal, meant that Brooke was reduced to complaining furiously and impotently after they got home. While in London, Brooke gave orders for a scorched-earth policy to be carried out in those areas of the Far East–principally Penang, Borneo and Sarawak–through which the Japanese were marching, seemingly unstoppably.4
One of the major lessons that Marshall learnt from Pearl Harbor was, in Stimson’s words, ‘the importance of unity of command; all the armed forces in any one area must have a single commander.’ Stimson felt ashamed that it should have taken such a catastrophe to teach the War Department (and principally himself) something so obvious, considering what had already befallen British arms in North Africa, France, Greece and Crete. ‘It was only by the force and tact of General Marshall’, he recalled in 1949, ‘that unity of command was established in all outposts,’ which in the Far East necessitated compromises with the British, Australians, New Zealanders and Dutch.5
To have one single supreme commander in each theatre of the war, who had overall control over the land, sea and air forces of all the Allied powers, might seem obvious in retrospect, but at the time it involved each nation giving up long-established and much-prized autonomy of action. Marshall considered it a necessity, however, and first sold the idea to Roosevelt before persuading an initially reluctant Churchill at Arcadia, employing the ‘big bribe’ that General Wavell should be the supreme commander for the whole of the Far East theatre. Brooke was never persuaded of its merits and was not even present to put forward his objections, but was forced to go along with it because he was outnumbered three to one by Roosevelt, Churchill and Marshall.
Unity of command was to be a vital issue, once the US contribution to the war effort out-compassed that of the British Commonwealth, as both Marshall and Brooke had already calculated that it eventually would. (By late 1943, US warplane production would be equal to that of Germany and Russi
a combined, and over three times that of the UK.) These key commands–in particular the future supreme Allied commands in North Africa, the Pacific and north-west Europe–would in the long run have to go to Americans. It might be too cynical to ascribe such Machiavellian thinking to Marshall less than three weeks after Pearl Harbor, but he did champion a system that was eventually to work hugely in the United States’ favour.
The grand strategy Arcadia agreed was summarized in a document written by Churchill entitled WW1, which was to represent the Allied overall position until superseded by another document, CCS 94, in August 1942. This enshrined the concept of Germany First. Crossing the Atlantic in the Duke of York, Churchill dictated four great memoranda in only five days, ‘The Atlantic Front’ on 16 December, ‘The Pacific Front’ on 17 December, ‘1943’ on 18 December and ‘Notes on the Pacific’ on 20 December. Once accepted in principle by the Chiefs of Staff–Pound had the next-door cabin–this immense feat of intellectual effort and foresight made up WW1.
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