Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  The Combined Chiefs of Staff system involved all institutions and players ceding some autonomy for the common good, which everyone–other than Brooke, who was never wholly reconciled–was willing to do. Perhaps those who sacrificed the most were those smaller Allied nations, especially of the British Commonwealth, who made large relative contributions in terms of troops and financial commitments yet had no seats on the Committee. When soon after its inception the Free French leader Charles de Gaulle demanded that France should have a seat on the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Ismay replied that if Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Belgium, Denmark and Norway also had the right to be represented, ‘the only place we could have a meeting is the Albert Hall’.22

  From January 1942 until his untimely death in November 1944, Sir John Dill was Churchill’s personal representative in Washington, but also that of the Chiefs of Staff as head of the British Joint Staff Mission. He was thus also the de facto British ambassador for all matters military, while the real ambassador, Lord Halifax, concentrated on the diplomatic and non-military aspects of Anglo-American relations. The British Chiefs of Staff and American Joint Chiefs of Staff were to coalesce as the Combined Chiefs of Staff at ten Roosevelt–Churchill summits and on three other occasions during the war, but otherwise Dill stood in for the British Chiefs of Staff at all CCS meetings, and was thus a key figure in the higher direction of the war.

  Dill did not initiate military policy, but was invaluable in guiding it. By suggesting that he stay in Washington after Arcadia, Brooke might have been merely attempting to soften the blow of Dill’s recent demotion, and in accepting this advice Churchill may have been acting from similar motives. Whatever the reasons, nothing could have been more effective in creating good relations between the American and British military staffs there. In his sincerity, modesty, frankness, integrity and self-discipline, Dill in many ways resembled his friend George Marshall.23 This amity between Marshall and Dill transcended simply that of comrades thrown together by force of circumstance. The Marshalls invited the Dills to intimate dinners of family and neighbours at Dodona, such as Thanksgiving, went on holiday and attended church together.

  In this respect, it was fortunate that Churchill had left Brooke to ‘mind the shop’, because it allowed Dill to establish close and friendly relations with Marshall that lasted the rest of his life. This closeness, however, sometimes worried Brooke who, like others in the Chiefs of Staff, feared that his friend and mentor might have ‘gone native’ in America. But it is just as likely that Britain benefited as much from Marshall’s willingness to trust Dill as vice versa. Brooke acknowledged in 1958 that Dill had ‘acted as a great link between Marshall and myself’. Link is one word: another might be shock-absorber. The creation of a buffer between the volatile British CIGS and his American counterpart was later to be invaluable, because Dill proved expert at engineering ways out of seeming deadlocks that did not damage the amour propre of either man. What Ismay did in smoothing the often rocky relations between Brooke and Churchill, therefore, Dill managed for relations between Brooke and Marshall.

  Marshall’s institution of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could not, however, wholly alter the disorganization in the American system which Jacob had commented upon so tartly. Roosevelt’s desire to retain power closely in his own hands, and to keep Administration officials competing for his favour, led him to adopt methods that seem incredibly byzantine, even administratively dysfunctional, to modern eyes. ‘Mr Roosevelt was always very sensitive about the reports on the conduct of his own affairs,’ Marshall recalled after the war. ‘He didn’t want a record of cabinet meetings. He didn’t give us the messages he was sending half the time. He would communicate with Churchill…and I would be wholly unaware of it, though it directly affected the affairs of the army and the air and maybe the navy.’ The way that Marshall found out what Roosevelt was telling Churchill was often through Churchill’s sending copies of the President’s telegrams to Brooke who sent them on to Dill, who, unbeknown to Churchill and Brooke, then showed them to Marshall. It was an absurdly roundabout way of keeping tabs on one’s own commander-in-chief. ‘Dill would come over to my office,’ Marshall reminisced, ‘and I would get Mr Roosevelt’s message…Otherwise, I wouldn’t know what it was. I had to be careful that nobody knew this…because Dill would be destroyed in a minute if this was discovered.’24

  Knowing the dangers involved, Dill would not physically hand over to Marshall a hard copy of the messages, but would sit opposite him at his desk and read them over to him instead. ‘This was quite a risky thing for Dill,’ Marshall pointed out, ‘but he realized that we just had to have the information. Why should the British Chiefs of Staff have it–it was from our President–and the American Chiefs of Staff not have it? It was just Mr Roosevelt’s desire for secrecy.’ However irregular, even underhand, this system might have been, it worked both ways, for as Marshall went on to explain: ‘Dill would frequently get messages from Mr Churchill and ask him to ascertain General Marshall’s possible view of this. Dill would come over and read me Mr Churchill’s communication. Then he and I would make up the reply.’ Marshall readily acknowledged that it was ‘a rather curious set up’, but that it was also ‘a very effectual one in this business, because these were all strong men–Mr Roosevelt and Mr Churchill–and the coordination of these matters was of vital importance.’25 In this and many other ways, Dill would prove a good deal more useful to transatlantic relations than if he had been packed off to Bombay, with or without his bodyguard of lancers.

  The distinguished historian of the Dill–Marshall relationship and co-editor of Brooke’s wartime diaries, Professor Alex Danchev, has discovered that the extent of Dill’s and Marshall’s willingness to share secret information went further than Marshall was willing to admit, even to his trusted biographer. ‘Dill showed Marshall virtually all the Chiefs of Staff telegrams he received, including those “For His Own Information”,’ we now know, as well as many of the Joint Staff Mission messages and his personal replies sent to London, in addition to private telegrams and letters from his regular correspondents, for example Brooke and Wavell. ‘Churchill’s “hot ones” were immediately discussed à deux, and in Dill’s absence simply taken to Marshall’s office by the senior secretary of the JSM, rather as if the US Chief of Staff were on the regular British distribution list.’26 If Brooke had suspected this was happening, his fear that Dill had ‘gone native’ would have been understandable.

  On occasion Dill would warn Marshall of issues that were in early stages of development; one telegram had the message appended: ‘The question dealt with in the attached is not ripe to put to you officially but I always like you to know the shape of possible things to come.’ Dill believed that the earlier that Marshall knew about something, the less likely it was that he would cause problems when the issue had sufficiently ‘ripened’ into prospective action. Meanwhile, Marshall kept Dill, who intimately understood the intricacies of his relations with Roosevelt, Hopkins and Stimson, in close touch with what he was doing. Neither man liked surprises.

  Harry Hopkins was a key figure in Roosevelt’s entourage, especially during the earlier part of the war, as the President’s confidant, sounding-board, scout and emissary. Ian Jacob described Hopkins as:

  a frail anaemic man of great honesty and courage, who lives permanently in the White House and is the President’s constant companion. Dumbie [Brigadier Vivian Dykes of the Joint Staff Mission] calls him ‘the disused prawn’ and the name certainly describes his lanky figure, bent back…and rather fish-like expression. He has no official appointment, though he has been nominated to various functions connected to Lend–Lease administration.

  Jacob believed Hopkins to be ‘a real friend of Great Britain, and it is a mercy that we have such a man as the President’s chief familiar’. In a Tudor or Stuart court, Hopkins would have been termed a favourite.

  On 27 December, Marshall presented to Pound and Portal his plan for a single unified command covering a
vast area in the Pacific, stretching across India, Burma, the Philippines and Australasia. He formally proposed Wavell as supreme commander, accepting that ‘With Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and British and Dutch islands at stake, it would be difficult for Great Britain to accept an American for this post.’ Even Admiral Ernest J. King, the Chief of the US Naval Staff, who prided himself on his defence of American autonomy, supported the idea.

  In Stimson’s phrase, the Royal Navy ‘kicked like bay steers’ against having a unified command imposed upon them, let alone the equally horrendous concept of having their ships ultimately being commanded by Wavell, a soldier. Yet the meeting ended with the Combined Chiefs of Staff agreeing to present a joint proposal to Roosevelt and Churchill in favour of the idea. ‘The chief of the naval planners rushed to the door to shake hands with me and put his arm around me, which surprised me,’ Marshall told Robinett fifteen years later. ‘And Dill followed and threw his arms around me, and still another one acted explosively.’27 For all this obvious–and rather unBritish–enthusiasm, Churchill and Brooke had yet to be convinced.

  Churchill discussed Marshall’s plan with Roosevelt at the White House that evening, saying that it was probably too geographically wide an area of operations for one man to control successfully, and contrasting it to the responsibilities of the last supreme commander, Marshal Foch, who only had to concentrate on the area between the Vosges and the Channel when he had taken over in March 1918. The analogy was imperfect, since Foch had to relay all orders through the national commands, which was not what Marshall was proposing at all.

  It is unclear whether the key meeting between Churchill and Marshall took place on the morning of 27 or 28 December–the sources conflict, and frankly it is immaterial–but whichever it was, the Prime Minister was in bed shortly before noon, suffering from an attack of angina pectoris, deficient oxygenation of the heart muscles. Marshall found him ‘propped up in bed with his work resting against his knees’ with ‘the ever-present cigar in his mouth or swung like a baton to emphasise his points’.28

  Marshall used the opportunity to impose himself on Churchill, just as he had once before with the President. ‘Aware from his talks with Roosevelt that a man on his feet had an advantage in an argument,’ Pogue wrote of the encounter, ‘the General walked up and down as he talked.’ (Anyone capable of taking advantage of presidential polio would not baulk at prime ministerial angina, but of course there is no certainty that this tactic had the slightest effect on men as stratospherically self-confident as FDR and Churchill, whatever Marshall might have thought.)

  Churchill took refuge on this occasion, as on others, in Elizabethan historical analogy, but he was clearly given short shrift. ‘I told him I was not interested in Drake and Frobisher,’ recalled Marshall, ‘but I was interested in having a united front against Japan, an enemy which was fighting furiously. I said if we didn’t do something right away we were finished in the war.’ Churchill went off for a bath, where much important prime ministerial thinking was done, only to return with the delphic remark that Marshall would have ‘to take the worst with the best’.29

  Marshall readily admitted to enjoying listening to Churchill, and to learning much from him. The Prime Minister would regularly deliver mini-lectures on the historic things that had happened in places they visited, as he was to do in Downing Street in a dinner à deux with Marshall later that year, but he soon found that Marshall was never bowled over by his rhetoric as others sometimes could be. (Admiral Stark was similarly suspicious of Churchillian oratory; whenever he heard it, he said, he kept his hand on his watch.)30 At Arcadia, Marshall instead started to exercise a fascination over the Prime Minister. ‘There were few people who could mesmerise Churchill,’ Colville later recalled; ‘Marshall was one of those few who came close to doing so.’ Hopkins went further, alleging that Marshall was ‘the only general in the world whom Churchill is afraid of’.31

  Churchill telegraphed to the Cabinet on 28 December that Roosevelt had ‘urged’ the idea of unity of command and that Marshall had ‘pleaded case with great conviction’, and furthermore ‘it is certain that a new far-reaching arrangement will have to be made…Marshall has evidently gone far into detailed scheme.’ He ended by saying that he would receive Pound’s and Portal’s views and then give the Cabinet their conclusions. Yet, instead of waiting for London’s response to this revolutionary démarche, Churchill had another conversation with Roosevelt and cabled again later that same day: ‘I have agreed with President, subject to Cabinet approval, that we should accept his proposals, most strongly endorsed by General Marshall.’ He insisted that the War Cabinet decide before 1 January, urging acceptance of ‘this broad-minded and selfless American proposal, of merits of which as a war-winner I have become convinced’.

  Back in London, however, Brooke was profoundly sceptical, describing the scheme as ‘wild and half-baked’. He suspected that Churchill had been outmanoeuvred by Roosevelt and Marshall, and that Wavell was–in Dill’s words–merely being set up to be ‘responsible for the disasters that are coming to the Americans as well as ourselves’. If Brooke had travelled to Arcadia rather than being left to mind the shop, Marshall would have found it much harder selling the American–British–Dutch–Australasian (ABDA) unified command structure for the Pacific theatre, let alone the idea of a Washington-based Combined Chiefs of Staff.

  Once Roosevelt and Churchill had approved the ABDA scheme, recalled Jacob, ‘It did not take long for the British Chiefs of Staff and the American Navy to come into line, though the former urged strongly that the Commander should be American. They foresaw disasters in the Far East.’32 These fears were overruled, however, and the principle was accepted and strongly recommended to London, where the War Cabinet–which then consisted of Eden, the Lord President of the Council Sir John Anderson, the Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the Labour Party Clement Attlee, the Minister of Supply Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of State Oliver Lyttelton, the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison and the Minister without Portfolio Arthur Greenwood–could do nothing but accept the Prime Minister’s fait accompli. Although Anthony Eden had resigned from the Chamberlain Government over appeasement in 1938, had been secretary for war in Churchill’s first ministry and was foreign secretary by December 1940, as well as Churchill’s heir apparent, it is surprising what little influence he had on strategic decisions during the Second World War. His was the main voice in Churchill’s inner circle arguing for close connections with the Russians, but otherwise he seems to have played next to no part in the day-to-day creation of British grand strategy.

  ‘It is, of course, an unequal contest,’ observed Moran, who since he was not a government official had the right to keep a diary, although in his case its publication of intimate doctor–patient details possibly contravened his Hippocratic Oath. ‘Our Chiefs of Staff miss Brooke, whom we have left in London picking up the threads. The peace-loving Dill is no substitute. What he lacks is the he-man stuff.’ Over the issue of having the Combined Chiefs of Staff based in Washington, Moran noted that ‘Marshall remains key to the situation. The PM has a feeling that in his quiet, unprovocative way he means business, and that if we are too obstinate he might take a strong line. And neither the PM nor the President can contemplate going ahead without Marshall.’33

  As Planning discussions about the attacks on the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts of North-west Africa, now codenamed Gymnast, progressed, General Joseph Stilwell–a protégé of Marshall’s and an expert on China–began to notice Marshall’s support for it wavering. On New Year’s Day 1942, Stilwell, who was originally slated to command the American part of the assault, recorded in his diary that at the outset Marshall had seemed so much in favour that he had ‘brushed aside’ the argument that U-boats might wreck the operation, arguing that the attack convoy would be so well guarded by air and surface defences that ‘subs can’t get in’, and citing the inability of US submarines to sink the ‘Jap troopships all around the Philippines’. Stilwell’
s conclusion was characteristically scatological: ‘The War Department is just like the alimentary canal. You feed it at one end, and nothing comes out the other but crap.’34

  Yet at a three-and-a-half-hour ‘pow-wow’ on 3 January, only forty-eight hours later, Stilwell found that Marshall, Arnold and the senior Planning Staff officers, including the tall, gangling Mark Clark, the Chief of the War Plans Division Leonard Gerow and the Assistant Chief of Staff for Supplies Brehon Somervell, were all now opposed to Gymnast because of the fear that the Germans would march through Spain and cut off the American expedition at the Straits of Gibraltar. Meanwhile the profoundly Anglophobic Stilwell sneered that the ‘Limeys claim that Spain would “bitterly oppose” Germans. What rot. The Boches own the country. Franco must pay the bill for his [Spanish Civil] war.’

  Portal’s assurances that an American air attack area around Casablanca could be carried out with relatively few squadrons were denounced by the ultra-suspicious Stilwell as ‘too transparent for words, but Our Big Boy [Roosevelt] has swallowed it…I also asked George [Marshall] what the basic US objective was in going over there. He said to protect the Mediterranean sea lane, which, if it could be used for convoys, would “quadruple the available British shipping.” I don’t see it.’35 Stilwell summed up the American Planners’ fears about Gymnast in a meeting with Stimson: ‘All agree that the means are meagre, the transport uncertain, the complications numerous, the main facts unknown, the consequences serious.’ It was true that an opposed attack from the United States across the Atlantic on to the North-west African coastline would always involve great danger, and the American Planners were right to view it as a risky undertaking.