In ‘The Atlantic Front’, Churchill emphasized the importance of supplying Russia ‘without fail and punctually’, of an Anglo-American expeditionary force landing in North-west Africa in 1942, and of the movement of American troops and bomber squadrons to Northern Ireland ‘as a powerful additional deterrent against an attempt at invasion by Germany’. His next memorandum, ‘The Pacific Front’, was somewhat over-optimistic, expressing the hope that Singapore might hold out ‘for at least six months’, while admitting the possibility that it might not. In ‘1943’, he envisaged that the whole of the northern African littoral and the eastern Mediterranean ‘would be in Anglo-American hands’, after which a ‘footing’ might be established in Sicily and mainland Italy, with the hope that Italy might be knocked out of the war. Ultimate victory, however, could come only with ‘the defeat in Europe of the German armies’, aided by ‘internal convulsions’ in the Reich produced by heavy aerial bombing, ‘economic privations’ and a collapse in morale.
Overall, it was necessary ‘to prepare for the liberation of the captive countries of Western and Southern Europe by the landing, at suitable points, of British and American armies strong enough to enable the conquered populations to revolt’. This he timed for the summer of 1943, with victory coming at the end of 1943 or in 1944. Two days later, in ‘Notes on the Pacific’, Churchill foresaw ‘the burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs’ as the means of persuading the people of Japan to sue for peace. The danger would be if the United States were to concentrate on defeating Japan before Germany, which would absorb American manpower and supplies–he predicted a ten-million-man US Army–and preclude the early reconquest of Europe. In order to forestall this, the Americans should be encouraged to fight a naval, but not land-based, struggle against Japan ‘to regain their naval power in the Pacific’, while their armies were committed to defeating Germany.6
Portal recalled in 1948 that ‘On the way over on the ship we worked out our approach to the Americans and, thanks to the President, we managed to sell them the “Germany First” idea right away.’7 This was unfair to Marshall and Roosevelt, since they had quite independently come to favour that strategy and did not need to have it ‘sold’ to them at all. In the event of a war on two fronts, such as the one the Axis had forced upon them, the American service Chiefs and Commander-in-Chief had already decided to defeat Germany first.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom Marshall had promoted to brigadier-general and brought in as head of the War Plans Division of the General Staff, was to explain to Pogue in 1947: ‘In any consideration of global strategy the one dominant factor was that until Germany was defeated a large proportion of British land, sea and air forces would be tied down to the British Isles. For this reason it was necessary to defeat the Axis in Europe in order to release British forces for action.’ Eisenhower agreed with Admiral Stark’s original assessment in ‘Plan Dog’ that the defeat of Germany would make the defeat of Japan a matter of time, whereas the defeat of Japan would not materially weaken Germany.
It is true that Churchill’s plans for defeating the Axis–WW1–amounted to one of the great state papers of the war, and have prompted some historians to observe that the Prime Minister’s ‘conceptual reach, at best, far surpassed that of his professional advisers, including Brooke’.8 But the memorandum produced by Marshall and Stimson for Roosevelt’s use during Arcadia also explicitly recognized the Germany First policy, stating that notwithstanding the attack in the Pacific, ‘Our joint war plans have recognised the North Atlantic as our principal theater of operations should America become involved in the war’. The first thing was to ensure ‘the preservation of our communications across the North Atlantic with our fortress in the British Isles covering the British fleet’.9
In general, Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s ‘peripheral’ view of how to win the war–by blockading and bombing Germany, while containing it with small raids and an attack on North Africa–before finally returning to the Continent for the knockout blow once it had been weakened in Russia. FDR appreciated the advantages of such a strategy, as well as the political dangers of any setback resulting from a military reverse on the Continent. Marshall, Stimson, Eisenhower, Hull and Handy, however, preferred the ‘Ulysses S. Grant’ view that it should be done with a full frontal assault on Germany via France as early as possible. (The commander of the Federal forces in the American Civil War was thought of as personifying the direct as opposed to peripheral military strategy because of his plans for the invasion of the South.) Yet the President could be swayed, or it seemed as if he could be. As he told Henry Morgenthau: ‘Nothing could be worse than to have the Russians collapse. I would rather lose Australia, New Zealand or anything else than have the Russians collapse.’10 Even though he could never have said so openly–any more than Roosevelt could–Churchill agreed. Yet, unlike the Americans, Churchill and Brooke did not think that Russia could necessarily be saved by an early Second Front anyway.
Marshall drew up another memorandum for Roosevelt that made it clear that he was ready to undertake an attack on North Africa at very short notice, on the assumption that Vichy France would ‘invite the United States and Great Britain jointly to occupy and defend North Africa’. One Marine division of eleven thousand men could be ready to embark for Casablanca at ten days’ notice by 15 January 1942, along with 160 fighter planes and 114 bombers, with another infantry division of twenty-one thousand men and one armoured division of thirteen thousand to be ready at ten days’ notice after 15 February. Anti-aircraft units could be supplied by the British. ‘The US Army is prepared to reinforce the foregoing initial contingent with air and ground forces to the extent necessary to maintain its position in North Africa against probable Axis attack,’ the general told the President.11
Marshall was thus prepared to undertake an operation on the Atlantic seaboard of North-west Africa in early 1942, always provided that the French would not oppose such a landing. Of course once it became clear by mid-1942 that Vichy would indeed fight back everything changed, but this was nonetheless indicative that Marshall was not always diametrically and philosophically opposed to the concept of large numbers of Americans ever arriving in North Africa, as is sometimes suggested.
Churchill arrived in Washington on Monday 22 December, and was given offices in the White House across the corridor from the President. They saw each other constantly. ‘He is the only head of state whom I have ever received in the nude,’ the Prime Minister later told Lord Halifax. With Churchill’s WW1 paper accepted and the outlines of grand strategy already agreed at Placentia Bay–at least in the widest possible sense and in the short term–the conference tackled the much thornier question of which organization should be ultimately responsible for carrying it out. A body was needed to ensure the most intimate and smoothest co-operation between the British and American High Commands. Marshall appreciated that the ultimate decision-making body–to be named the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee–needed to consist of those who would be responsible for putting those decisions into effect. In Stimson’s words, Marshall ‘insisted that the Combined Chiefs should in fact be chiefs, and not merely elders of the council’.12
Hitherto, American strategy was not made by the commanders of each service working together in the same committee. Part of the reason Marshall wanted to institute a Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee to mirror the British Chiefs of Staff Committee was his recognition that the way the British High Command had been organized since the early 1920s gave them an undoubted edge in military planning, a lead that he was determined to minimize as time went on. Brigadier-General Thomas Handy, who like Marshall had graduated from VMI, served in the War Plans Division from 1936 to 1940 and returned there in 1941. The next year he was promoted to major-general and became assistant chief of staff in the new, revamped Operations Division (OPD) at the War Department. Working closely with Marshall as a senior Planner throughout the war, he ended up as a four-star deputy chief of staff. ‘After Pearl Harbor the Prime Minis
ter descended on Washington with a whole gang of people,’ Handy recalled of Arcadia. ‘We were more or less babes in the wood on this planning and joint business with the British. They’d been doing it for years. They were experts at it and we were just starting. They’d found a way to get along between the services.’13 Marshall essentially tried to copy that successful formula.
Certainly, Colonel Ian Jacob was shocked by the haphazard nature of the American system before Marshall created the Joint Chiefs of Staff. ‘To our eyes, the American machine of Government seems hopelessly disorganized,’ he recorded of a meeting in the White House Cabinet Room on the first day of Arcadia. ‘The President, to start with, has no proper private office. He has no real private secretary, and no secretariat for Cabinet or military business.’ A stickler for efficient staff procedure, indeed something of a martinet, Jacob was no less astonished by how relaxed the American style of government was. ‘The President sat at his desk, with the Prime Minister in a chair on his left hand side, and the rest of the company perched on chairs and sofas in a rough semi-circle facing him,’ he recalled of one Oval Office meeting. ‘No tables or anything, and very awkward looking at maps or taking down notes.’ The meeting was also attended by Fala, the President’s Aberdeen terrier, ‘who suddenly started barking, and had to be ejected, just as the PM was in the middle of an oration’. It was far more of a country-house-weekend way of doing things than the crisp, clipped formal efficiency of the War Cabinet Office, and it could not survive the rigours of global war. Marshall was right to adopt the British Staff system in its place. ‘The Americans are like we were in the days of Jackie Fisher and Kitchener,’ concluded Jacob, harking back to the naval and army chiefs of the Great War. ‘Personalities each pushing their own ideas, and no real co-operation…They will get all right, but they have a hell of a lot to learn.’14
At one meeting held at the Federal Reserve building on Christmas Eve 1941, there was no agenda, and the first thing that Admiral Stark, who as the senior American officer present was in the chair, did was to run through the notes he had made at the previous day’s meeting. In Britain these would all have been circulated beforehand. ‘General Marshall had also dictated, on his return to his office, his idea of what had happened,’ wrote Jacob, surprised that this had not been done by a junior secretary. ‘We of course had our minutes prepared, and it was a complete waste of everyone’s time to go all over the ground again. Not to mention the waste of effort on the part of these Chiefs of Staff to have themselves to go back and put down an account of the meeting.’15
The upshot of all this was the realization by the British that the way to achieve results with the Americans was, in Jacob’s words, ‘to give up all idea of proceeding in an orderly way in accordance with our own machinery, and to deal directly with individuals’. One man going directly to Marshall or Arnold, he believed, would ‘achieve much more than any discussion with their Chiefs of Staff in session’. What Jacob did not know was that Marshall was fully aware of the organizational shortcomings of this system and was busy fashioning one based on that of the British. Before it was in place, however, there was a farcical situation by which ‘The Director of Plans of their Army, after attending a meeting of the Joint Planning Committee, had to go back and tell General Marshall about it; then he had to attend a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff at which the JPC paper was taken, and on return to his office he had to dictate a note on what took place at that meeting.’16
The senior US Army member of the Joint Secretariat of the Combined Chiefs of Staff was Colonel Paul Robinett. Born and educated in Missouri, he had volunteered for the Army in 1917 but was rejected as underweight. He nonetheless persisted, and was finally commissioned into the 1st Cavalry and assigned to the Mexican frontier. An outstanding horseman, Robinett had been in the US equestrian team at the 1924 Paris Olympics. It was his assignment as an ADC to General Malin Craig that put him on the fast track for promotion, involving a course at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in 1932–3. Spells at Harvard, in the Military Intelligence (G-2) section of the General Staff and finally in Marshall’s secretariat followed, so by the time of the Arcadia Conference he was an established high-flier. He also kept a (hitherto unpublished) daily diary, which was not against US regulations.
Robinett agreed that the first Arcadia meeting had been badly organized by the Americans, and blamed Lieutenant-Colonel Lawrence Higgins of the foreign liaison section of Military Intelligence, who had not even ascertained beforehand how many people were likely to attend. Instead of initially choosing the imposing board room of the Federal Reserve, Higgins allotted the meeting to Rooms 2064–2066, which proved too small and had to be changed at Robinett’s insistence. ‘It must have been embarrassing to General Marshall when he saw what had been done,’ wrote Robinett. ‘But Higgins was supposed to know something about conferences, for he had been a member of the foreign service.’17 (For someone who had worked in Washington, Robinett retained a touching faith in the efficiency of the State Department.)
‘The British sat on the south side of the table and the Americans sat on the north side,’ recalled Tom Handy of these meetings at the Federal Reserve. ‘The Secretaries sat at the end of the table. After the administrative people had been posted on the outside, the conference settled down to business.’ Handy thought the British Chiefs ‘not very impressive. First Sea Lord Admiral Pound is lame…Field Marshal Dill is a fine appearing man of average physique but looks old and tired. Air Chief Marshal Portal is swarthy, eagle-beaked and young. His keen eyes are alert to everything about him.’ These were not unfair assessments. Robinett later wrote that the British secretariat, ‘unlike the American, was a working team’ under Jo Hollis. Handy thought the ablest member of the Chiefs of Staff was Portal, but as for Pound, ‘He went through a couple of those conferences and never opened his mouth.’18
One of Marshall’s major problems at Arcadia was Roosevelt’s habit of getting into almost ad hoc meetings with the British without any American minders being present, which wound up discussing important policy issues. Robinett recalled that on one occasion the President ‘was wheeled in’ to a room at the White House and, ‘without his advisers, participated in a meeting with the British. The upshot of the conference was a directive to the Combined Chiefs of Staff for a meeting at 4pm, signed by Brigadier Hollis, to consider the diversion of reinforcements now en route to the Philippines in case MacArthur was unable to receive them.’19 Whereas the American Chiefs of Staff had had no time to study the directive, the British had heard all the discussions that led up to it and had copies of the directive before they met. Brooke was fortunate that the mirror situation–in which Churchill invited himself into a meeting of the US Joint Chiefs and blithely agreed to call a Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting to approve a policy the British Chiefs had not approved–was utterly unthinkable.
Now, the British system of having the executive officers in charge of each of the services also being the chief policy advisers to the Government was adopted, and Marshall also insisted on the staff for the new Anglo-American body producing a continuous record of consideration and decision and directive. This made the body ‘an executive committee for the prosecution of a global war’, rather than just an ad hoc body that met whenever the British and American service Chiefs happened to be in the same city at the same time.
Marshall believed that the new body needed, for security and political reasons, to be based in Washington. This was why he devised the concept of a Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee which would consist of the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the American Chiefs, themselves brought together in a new body named the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When the three British members of the Chiefs of Staff were in London, as of course they would be for the day-to-day running of the war, they would each be represented by very senior British officers in Washington, but also collectively by the Chief of the British Joint Staff Mission, who would be Field Marshal Sir John Dill.
This was utterly
revolutionary and flung the British into a ferment. For the first time in history the overall decision-making body for the British armed forces, with ultimate powers over when, where and how Britons would fight, would be based outside the United Kingdom. It required careful persuasion of Churchill by Roosevelt and Marshall, and Marshall first had to persuade Roosevelt and Stimson, who both suspected that they were being required to give up powers to Marshall.
Marshall recognized that the existing system, whereby the US Army and Air Force on one side and the US Navy on the other individually made policy that they then tried to persuade the British to adopt, was grossly inefficient and potentially damaging. There were many pitfalls along the way, but the Combined Chiefs of Staff system was an inspired idea, and made a significant contribution to victory. The Combined Chiefs would have a Joint Secretariat and a Joint Planning Staff which would co-ordinate the activities of the Planning Staffs of the Chiefs of Staff and Joint Chiefs of Staff in London and Washington respectively.20 It looked complicated on paper, but it worked in practice because there was the will on both sides that it should do so–and the prospect of failure was too dire to contemplate.
Yet, even after Churchill had been persuaded, Brooke remained fundamentally opposed to the whole concept. If a body ‘to coordinate supply matters, overseas military movements, and broad military strategy’ were based in Washington, he assumed, the United Kingdom would lose powers of initiation and perhaps eventually even of veto, whatever the paper guarantees of equality. Brooke instead wanted a mirror committee in London, but the other Chiefs understandably feared that these two committees would be bound either to duplicate bureaucratically or to clash disastrously. Churchill decided to try Marshall’s idea out for a month. It was a classic Whitehall manoeuvre, as it is notoriously more difficult to disinvent an idea once it is already in operation than to mount opposition to an untried concept, and the issue never arose again.21 Brooke’s physical distance from the discussions, and being so new to his position, left him too weak to impose a veto. Furthermore his fellow Chiefs of Staff, including their chairman Dudley Pound, were willing to try it out.
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