This description of the Defence Committee meeting illustrates the superiority of Kennedy’s diary account over the officialese of the minutes, not least because it reveals that Churchill’s original position regarding the defence of Singapore was very far from the almost deliberately misleading War Cabinet record that ‘We did not wish to throw good men after bad.’ Kennedy was impressed with Brooke’s first two months in the job, observing that ‘Since Winston came back from America of course the strain has been greater,’ largely because he ‘cannot resist interference in details and a stream of rather nagging telegrams has already been directed upon Wavell. Brooke has a great sense of humour and his descriptions of meetings with Winston are very good fun.’
The first full meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff took place at its Washington headquarters in the old Public Health Building on Constitution and 19th Street–today the Department of the Interior, South–on Friday 23 January 1942, with Dill representing the British Chiefs of Staff. Although Admiral Pound, who had returned to London, was fully in favour of the Combined Chiefs of Staff system, he characterized the elaborate command and control system they had established with the Americans, when compared to the still relatively small US forces, as ‘plenty of harness but no horse’. Roosevelt and Marshall would soon be providing a stampede, however. Sometimes, though not on this occasion, Dill, Marshall and King would stay behind after the official session was over and once ‘the cloud of witnesses’ had departed to get down to the real, behind-the-scenes business.51
On 18 January 1942, in a memorandum to Roosevelt, Marshall identified what was for Brooke also a key aspect of the war, and one that the British believed justified the Gymnast operation. ‘The future effort of the Army is dependent on shipping,’ he wrote. ‘More shipping than is now in sight is essential if the national war effort is not be neutralised to a serious extent.’ Marshall estimated that by December 1942 there would be 1.8 million American troops ready for overseas service, and by the end of 1943 about 3.5 million. The Army therefore needed eighteen extra cargo ships per month solely for military use, to permit an overseas force of three-quarters of a million by the end of 1942, which was still less than half of those potentially available.
The 1943 naval construction programme, announced by the President in February and subsequently increased, was for 10.7 million tons of shipping, which would allow an overseas fighting force of 1.5 million men. ‘Immediate steps are urged to increase the tempo of the shipbuilding program to a much higher figure,’ wrote Marshall. ‘The maximum possibilities in this regard should be exploited.’ Throughout the war, the issue of shipping stayed at the very top of the strategists’ agenda, especially during the battle of the Atlantic. Without the necessary shipping capacity, the Allies simply could not undertake a cross-Channel attack, however much political will was there.
Yet on 1 February 1942 the German Navy unexpectedly introduced a fourth rotor wheel to their U-boats’ Enigma enciphering machines, a seemingly minor addition but one which was to defeat the best efforts of the cryptologists at Bletchley Park to crack the Kriegsmarine codes for the next ten months. The code had first been cracked in May 1941, but now the Royal Navy was once again largely sailing blind in the battle of the Atlantic. Hitherto, Ultra–the codename given by the British to information gained from the decipherment of German radio traffic–had revealed where and when the U-boats would be meeting their supply submarines, allowing the Royal Navy to rendezvous there in force. The increased tonnage and lives lost as a result of being deprived of Ultra suddenly threatened Britain’s chances of survival all over again. March 1942 was the worst month of the war so far in terms of Allied shipping losses, with no fewer than 273 merchant ships sunk, totalling 834,184 tons, up from less than four hundred thousand tons in December.
Even supposing that a successful Anglo-American landing in northern France had been possible militarily in 1942 or 1943, it would have demanded a vast flow of men and matériel to exploit any successes all the way to Berlin, which could not have been guaranteed while the battle of the Atlantic was still in the balance. Had German submarines prevented the reinforcement of the beachheads or future campaigns deep within France, it would have been disastrous for the Allies: as long as the battle of the Atlantic was undecided, an invasion could not be safely undertaken. Even after the German naval code was cracked again in December 1942, it took several months for the battle to turn in the Allies’ favour; indeed it was not until July 1943 that there was a full calendar month in which a greater tonnage of Allied shipping was launched than was sunk.52 Apart from a short spat between Marshall and King early in the war over the value of convoys, the politicians and Chiefs of Staff of both Britain and America were united over the best ways to win the vital battle of the Atlantic, which was for a strong protective cordon of warships surrounding the merchantmen, and as much air cover as land-based aerodromes could supply.
The decisions taken by commanders on the ground as a result of Ultra information were enormously improved tactically, but Allied grand strategy was also enhanced when it could be ascertained from decrypts that Hitler intended to defend Tunisia and Italy to the last man. An indication of what the Second World War would have been like had British scientists and mathematicians not early on built a special deciphering machine to unravel Enigma messages came during the Ardennes counter-offensive (the battle of the Bulge), which the Germans launched with complete radio silence and during which, in January 1945, they very nearly reached the River Meuse and split the Allied forces in two.
Far less sophisticated than Enigma was the code adopted in February 1942 between the British Staff officers Brigadier Vivian Dykes of the Joint Staff Mission secretariat in Washington and his friend Colonel Ian Jacob of the War Cabinet secretariat in London, as they began their weekly conversations by transatlantic radio-telephone. These kept the War Cabinet secretariat in London in touch with what the British were doing in Washington, beyond what could be communicated by telegraph. Despite being intended to protect anonymity, the names they gave to their principals showed a certain psychological insight into personality. Brooke, for example, was codenamed ‘Colonel Shrapnel’ and Marshall was ‘Tom Mix’, after the actor who had played a cowboy in 325 silent movies between 1910 and 1935. Mix was a Pennsylvanian who had served in the US Army during the Spanish–American War, but his name was probably chosen as code for Marshall because his screen persona was of the clean-cut decent all-American who always saved the day; it might also have reflected Marshall’s passion for cowboy fiction. The admirals got far less admiring codenames: King was ‘Captain Kettle’, Stark was ‘Tugboat Annie’ and Pound was ‘The Whale’.53 (The jokes didn’t all go one way though; behind his back his secretaries nicknamed Jacob ‘Ironpants’.)
‘Dumbie’ Dykes (nicknamed after a Sir Walter Scott character, the misanthropic Laird of Dumbiedykes, with whom he had nothing in common) was an attractive character who, as Jacob recalled, ‘had great fun over the CIGS, whose birdlike aspect and fast clipped speech lent themselves to caricature. I have never met a man who so tumbles over himself in speaking…All this, together with his constant habit of shooting his tongue out and round his lips with the speed of a chameleon, made him an easy prey to Dumbie’s imitative wit.’ A charming and popular Staff officer, and yet another diarist, Dykes was educated at Dulwich College, the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and Caius College, Cambridge, and had been temporarily blinded by mustard gas in the Royal Engineers during the Great War, after which he served in Ireland and India. He had suffered a tragedy when his infant son choked to death on a toy.
It was at the Staff College at Camberley between 1932 and 1934, whose commandant was then Sir John Dill, that Dykes discovered his aptitude for Staff work, becoming secretary of the Overseas Defence Committee from 1935 to 1938 and showing a ‘wonderful knack of spreading good humour and willing co-operation’. He was also expert at keeping minutes, and master of the way that the language of official committee minute-taking could b
e an exercise as much in obfuscation as in elucidation. He would write of ‘fixing up’ and ‘cleaning up’ the Combined Chiefs of Staff minutes.54
Dykes became director of plans at the War Office under Dill in 1940, escorted Colonel William J. ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the future head of the undercover Office of Strategic Services, on a tour of ten countries of the Mediterranean, and after Pearl Harbor joined the American Brigadier-General Walter ‘Beetle’ Bedell Smith as one of the two senior secretaries of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. They became friends and would drop into each other’s offices unannounced, asking questions like ‘What’s the matter with Uncle Ernie today?’ of the famously irascible Admiral King. Their relationship therefore mirrored that of their bosses Dill and Marshall.
Bedell Smith had been a Marshall acolyte since entering the Infantry School at Fort Benning in the early 1930s. ‘The ulcerous “Beetle” Smith was an intimidating character, not given to any declaration of emotion other than chronic bad temper,’ is the estimation of one historian. ‘Tough, profane, intolerant, large, self-educated–reputed to have started his career selling newspapers in the streets–but also loyal and discreet, he was a formidable operator.’55
In the early 1970s the US Army instituted a splendidly comprehensive oral-history project in which military historians were sent to the homes of retired admirals and generals to interview them about their wartime experiences. The verbatim transcripts of the Senior Officers Oral History Program (SOOHP) are lodged at the Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and constitute a treasure trove of anecdote and reflection. Of course retired soldiers tend to remember their old war stories with advantages, which needs constantly to be kept in mind, but nonetheless this gigantic historical resource is full of plums. In 1974 Tom Handy described to a SOOHP interviewer a conversation he had heard between Dykes and Bedell Smith over the draft minutes of one Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting:
BEDELL SMITH: ‘This sounds just fine; in fact it’s wonderful. There isn’t but one thing wrong with it.’
DYKES: ‘What’s that?’
BEDELL SMITH: ‘Hell, this isn’t what he said!’
DYKES: ‘I know damn well it isn’t, but it’s what he should have said. You see, these fellows won’t object if somebody writes down what he should have said.’56
For all that it might have been a sensible approach for the politicians and Staff, especially in the protection of their reputations, such exchanges make historians wary of relying too heavily on official accounts.
Dykes came from Dill’s entourage, and Dill knew that Dykes would defend him loyally. There were groups in the armies of both countries during the Second World War that almost approximated to the loose eighteenth-century concept of political parties, whereby loyal supporters and friends grouped around a more senior officer under whom they had served or studied at Staff college. Brooke, Montgomery, Auchinleck, Wavell and Dykes were very much of Dill’s clique; Marshall’s men included Bedell Smith, Eisenhower, Stilwell, Handy, Bradley, Hull and Matthew Ridgway, several of whom had trained under him at Fort Benning. This might have approximated to a cabal–and there were certainly accusations of favouritism–but it also guaranteed loyalty. (This closeness was to continue after death: George and Katherine Marshall’s grave in Arlington Cemetery is to be found under a tree in plot seven on Roosevelt Drive, not far from that of Dill, and on the next hill from Robert E. Lee’s Arlington House. The graves of Hull, Ridgway and Bedell Smith are in the same group, only a matter of yards from each other.)
Marshall had to work hard to persuade Roosevelt of the benefits of setting up a new Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. The President naturally feared that an overall war-planning body might impinge on his constitutional rights and duties as commander-in-chief. Divide and rule between the Army and Navy had worked well for chief executives before, whereas a Joint Chiefs of Staff system might unite and solidify service opinion in a manner that could become hard to overrule. In spite of Stimson’s and Marshall’s urgings, Roosevelt had hesitated for some time before accepting the need to appoint a Chief of Staff, but was brought around.
On Monday 9 February 1942 the American Joint Chiefs of Staff met for the first time. From April onwards they were chaired by Admiral William D. Leahy, who had been chief of naval operations from 1937 to 1939 before being brought out of retirement in 1940 to become US ambassador to Vichy France. Roosevelt had known ‘Bill’ Leahy from his days as assistant naval secretary in the Great War, and as well as chairing the Joint Chiefs of Staff he was chief of staff to the Commander-in-Chief (a post he held until 1949). Marshall had proposed Leahy knowing both that the President liked him personally and that a naval chairman would reduce opposition to the whole scheme from Admiral King, especially as the fourth member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be Arnold, who was technically Marshall’s subordinate (the Air Force remained part of the US Army until 1947).
Marshall found Leahy an impressive office, large secretariat and new quarters in the Public Health Building, close to where the Chiefs convened. ‘I told him where to sit when we next met,’ recalled Marshall. ‘King was furious when Leahy came in and sat down as presiding officer.’ But crucially he did not contest the issue. Marshall told Pogue that ‘Leahy was neutral enough for my purpose,’ but he was irritated when he acted too much as a presidential aide, going to political meetings with Roosevelt and not reporting back fully to him.57
Once inaugurated in early 1942, this four-man Joint Chiefs of Staff–comprising the Chief of Staff (Leahy), plus the chiefs of the Army (Marshall), Navy (Admiral Ernest J. King) and Army Air Force (Hap Arnold)–became Roosevelt’s principal military advisers and, in Stimson’s view, soon began to exercise ‘a most salutary effect on the President’s weakness for snap decisions; it thus offset a characteristic which might otherwise have been a serious handicap to his basically sound strategic instincts.’58 It also helped that each member stayed in situ for the rest of the war.
As part of the Senior Officers Oral History Program, General Paul Caraway, who served in the OPD between 1942 and 1944, was asked how Marshall had established personal dominance over the Joint Chiefs of Staff, despite not chairing it nor even enjoying an in-built voting majority over the two Navy men. ‘General Marshall by sheer force of character established a moral ascendancy over three very difficult old men, Leahy, Arnold and King,’ answered Caraway.
King wouldn’t give anyone the time of day. He’d sell you the time of day, but he wouldn’t give it to you. He was a strong man, and anybody who could establish any kind of ascendancy over him had to be good, and Marshall could get an agreement out of King. Marshall could get an agreement out of Arnold, although Hap was fighting everyone to show he was the biggest dog in the fight. Leahy went with Marshall almost all of the time.59
It helped that at meetings the President used to ask Marshall what he thought before asking Leahy or anyone else.
General Handy, who attended many Combined Chiefs of Staff and Joint Chiefs of Staff meetings as a senior Planner, agreed with Caraway about Marshall’s power inside the Joint Chiefs Committee: ‘He was the dominant character, there is no question about it. Now that doesn’t mean that King wasn’t a very strong character; he was.’ Marshall rarely used to resort to ‘pounding the table’, as King sometimes would, recalled Caraway, but he established his dominance nonetheless. King, one of whose daughters thought him ‘always angry’, on occasion went too far. Once, Marshall did indeed have to pound the table and tell the admiral, who was abusing Douglas MacArthur, ‘I will not have any meeting carried on with this hatred.’60
The British also saw Ernest King as immensely tough-minded, and recognized the strong degree of Anglophobia in his complicated psychological make-up. ‘A hard drinker, to the verge of alcoholism; a womaniser, despite having a happy family life, with six daughters and a son; tactless, petty and parochial; and a hot-tempered and rigid disciplinarian,’ is the uncompromising judgement of Field Marshal Lord Bramall.61 Set against that must be
the fact that he led the US Navy in America’s victory over Japan. King’s drinking was mentioned by Brooke alongside that of the Australian General Blamey and Marshal Voroshilov.62
A drunk could not have held down the job King did and have fought the inter-departmental battles he fought for so long. Early on, Jacob spotted him as ‘a very dominating personality, who looks as if he would be the man to inspire the American fleet with a strong and offensive spirit. He would be a difficult man to manage, and I should say might be easily roused to obstinacy and pig-headedness.’ Colville recalled that King was always ‘suspicious and resentful of Churchill’s undoubted influence’ with Roosevelt and Marshall.63 To make the atmosphere on the Joint Chiefs of Staff worse, King also resented Leahy, who tended to lean towards Marshall in strategic matters rather than his fellow sailor. Yet King had an ally in Roosevelt, whose secretary Grace Tully remarked that he was ‘the type of sea dog whom the President really liked and understood. He loved the stories of King’s toughness.’ After hearing that Senator Arthur Walsh of New Jersey, an old friend of King’s, had given the admiral the present of a blowtorch, Roosevelt wrote to King saying that ‘he understood the Admiral was so tough he cut his toenails with a torpedo net-cutter.’64
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