Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  It had been Wedemeyer who, in September 1941, had drawn up the report later nicknamed ‘The Victory Program’ that stated that the US would need armed forces of nine million men to defeat a Germany that was victorious in Russia. Although this was leaked to the Washington Times-Herald on 5 December 1941, to the Administration’s profound embarrassment, once the Nazis had declared war on the US six days later it looked very different. Wedemeyer had nothing to do with the leak, and was able to assert that ‘General Marshall never doubted me’; soon afterwards he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel with a place on the Joint Staff.28

  On the same day that Marshall finalized the details of his Memorandum in Washington, 2 April, Eden lunched with Churchill, Harriman and Ismay in London, after which he confided to his diary that Churchill would ignore any political pressure to give up the Ministry of Defence: ‘He sees himself in Roosevelt’s position as sole director of war.’ Eden believed, however, that ‘It is not what the country wants, nor does it produce good results.’ Five days later he complained: ‘There is no day-to-day direction of the war except by Chiefs of Staff and Winston,’ and, in his opinion, the Chiefs of Staff ‘too readily compromise where issues should be decided and Winston’s unchecked judgment is by no means infallible’. Eden considered caballing with Lyttelton and Cripps, but the ‘difficulty is Winston is probably constitutionally incapable of working any other way’.29 Not being present at most Staff Conferences, Eden was unable to see that Brooke was in fact by no means too ready to compromise, but it is a sign of how hermetically the meetings with Churchill were sealed even from those in the upper echelons of British politics.

  That evening Kennedy had supper at the United Service Club with the Soviet military attaché, Colonel Skliarov, who it turned out had served in the same sector during the Russian Civil War, albeit on the opposite side. After dinner the colonel ‘opened up on the Second Front’, arguing that ‘all efforts should be concentrated on knocking the Germans out in the spring, and all risks taken.’ A vigorous discussion ensued. Reporting it afterwards in his diary, Kennedy ruminated upon the whole issue, a passage which, since he was the War Office’s most senior Planner, bears quotation at some length:

  If we could be sure that the Germans might be knocked out by a maximum effort this spring we could of course do enough to make them divert considerable forces to France. But the fundamental difficulty is that we cannot be sure. We had to carry on this war for over a year without the Russians. We may have to carry it on again without them. It would be the most colossal gamble in history to stake everything on this spring offensive. It could mean for us the sacrifice of the means of defence of the UK both at sea and on land, the sacrifice of everything in the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. For nothing less would provide the naval, military and shipping resources for a big European effort. In fact the gamble for us could be far bigger than it ever was for Hitler to attempt invasion of this country. We are not prepared to risk everything–and it would be everything–on this one throw.30

  True to the War Office policy of never allowing others to guess the true depth of British opposition to an early cross-Channel attack, Kennedy noted: ‘I did not of course say anything of this to Skliarov.’

  So far Brooke and Churchill had not been apprised of the Marshall Memorandum. Yet Washington reckoned without the ingenuity of Brigadier Dykes. On 4 April, he somehow ‘glanced at’ the seven-page Memorandum ‘unofficially’ and had passed a précis to the War Cabinet Office by the early hours of 5 April. Before the Modicum Mission even landed in Britain, therefore, Brooke knew what it was going to bring.

  We do not know how Dumbie Dykes managed to see the document, but he was clearly a resourceful fellow. Paul Caraway, who was the Joint Chiefs of Staff liaison officer with the British members of the Combined Chiefs, was asked after the war which papers the Americans were and were not allowed to show their British counterparts. ‘Certain of our top secret Intelligence information they were not allowed to see, because a lot of it came from undisclosed channels or wherever, much of it through the British without their knowledge, and so on,’ he explained. ‘For example, when we were preparing for a conference, the American positions were not disclosed, because we knew that the liaison people were instructed to report through their Joint Staff Mission, thus being able to checkmate some of our positions.’31 With Dykes as one of the senior secretaries of the Joint Staff Mission, that is precisely what happened to the Marshall Memorandum.

  That same day, 5 April, Kennedy was already recording in his diary that in the War Office it was ‘generally accepted that there can be no question of landing an army in France and holding a front for long’. Norway was ‘out of court’ owing to the impossibility of providing air cover for the supply ships and landing force. This was held to apply to Cherbourg, too. Kennedy quoted Brooke as saying that the most successful result that could be expected in Normandy would be to establish a front of 20 miles across the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula, which ‘Compared with the great Russian front…would be ridiculous’, and the Western Allies would ‘be the laughing stock of the world if we established such a front and held it up as a substantial contribution to the Russian war’. To emphasize this point, Brooke had a map drawn up for the War Cabinet that juxtaposed the present 1,500-mile-wide Russian with the proposed 20-mile-wide Cotentin front.

  ‘The Germans could turn on us at their leisure and wipe us out’, believed Kennedy. ‘We cannot afford to lose the twelve or twenty divisions required. Then there is the question of shipping which is also acute. It is liable to be forgotten that we are already containing very substantial German forces in Europe by the mere fact that this country is still holding out and that we hold a threat over the Germans.’32 It is easy to see the general line of opposition that the Planning Staff began to work on, once they received the main features of the Marshall Memorandum from Dykes.

  On their way over to Britain, Marshall’s and Hopkins’ Pan-American Clipper suddenly lost an engine, forcing the party to stay a night in Bermuda while another plane was flown over from New York. The War Office Planners in London were thus unexpectedly afforded a further twelve hours to draw up their detailed objections, which they put to good use. If Marshall had hoped to have any element of surprise when he presented his cross-Channel invasion plans to Churchill, Brooke and the War Cabinet, he had lost all chance of it by the time he and Hopkins finally reached London.

  PART II

  Engagement

  6

  Marshall’s Mission to London: ‘A momentous proposal’ April 1942

  Let’s have this straight for once and for all, Pim! British submarines sometimes, unfortunately, ‘fail to return’. But German U-boats are destroyed.

  Winston Churchill to Captain Richard Pim, head of the No. 10 Annexe Map Room1

  When Marshall, Hopkins, Wedemeyer and Hull arrived in London on Wednesday 8 April 1942, the battle-lines had effectively been drawn between the American High Command, who wanted an early–almost an immediate–cross-Channel attack, and the British, who believed this would be grossly premature and preferred to wait until Germany was weaker before taking the risk of returning to the Continent. Marshall and Brooke were to become the standard-bearers for these two, later bitterly opposed, points of view. It is not true, as some Americans–though not Marshall–were to allege, that the British never wanted the cross-Channel attack to take place at all. They did, but not until certain key criteria had been met, primarily the massive diminution of the Wehrmacht’s capacity to respond. Roundup was therefore for Churchill and Brooke rather like treachery had been for Talleyrand, a matter not so much of principle as of dates.

  Yet because the British desperately needed very substantial American forces in the British Isles to protect them against a German invasion should the Soviet Union suddenly collapse, as it was feared it might at any time, Brooke and Churchill could not simply heap contumely on the Marshall Memorandum, however misguided they might have thought it. Brooke could and did point out the
defects in the proposed operations, but only within the overall context of accepting them, especially Bolero, which proposed a massive build-up of American forces in the British Isles.

  For Churchill and Brooke always feared–even as late as the autumn of 1943–that if Roosevelt and Marshall came to believe that they opposed a cross-Channel operation outright, the Americans would switch their attention to the Pacific, adopting a Japan First policy instead. This would leave Britain in renewed and possibly mortal peril, a return to the cold winds of strategic isolation she had experienced in the twelve months between the evacuation of Dunkirk and Operation Barbarossa. Churchill and Brooke therefore had to undertake a precarious balancing act. Their opposition to the Marshall Memorandum had to be presented in such a way that the Americans nonetheless decided to go ahead with Bolero, and flood Britain with thirty divisions, of which six would be mechanized. There is a lively controversy over whether, as some historians have alleged, there was an element of actual deception about the British welcome of the Memorandum during the Modicum talks, and also whether there was also an element of bluff by the Americans in seeming to threaten to abandon Germany First if Roundup were not executed promptly.

  There was certainly a high level of suspicion about British motives within the American High Command, matched only by an equally lofty level of disdain for the Americans’ strategic expertise from their British counterparts. Neither of these augured well for Allied co-operation, not least because the Americans interpreted Brooke’s attitude towards them as insufferably patronizing. His manner seemed to convey the feeling that the Americans were simplistic novices in the world of grand strategy, rather than, as they saw themselves, Britain’s ultimate saviours. This was probably a valid criticism; even if Brooke was not intending to give that impression, his diary makes it clear that that was exactly how he felt.

  Brooke’s view of Marshall never really changed. ‘I saw a great deal of him throughout the rest of the war,’ he wrote once it was over,

  and the more I saw of him the more clearly I appreciated that his strategic ability was of the poorest. A great man, a great gentleman and great organizer, but definitely not a strategist. I found that his stunted strategic outlook made it very difficult to discuss strategic plans with him, for the good reason that he did not understand them personally but backed the briefs prepared by his staff.2

  The contempt that Brooke clearly felt for Marshall had to be kept from the Americans if at all possible, and the CIGS was not good at dissimulation. If Marshall sensed the disdain Brooke felt for his abilities, he at least did not show it. Although both Churchill and Brooke were of course personally welcoming to the members of the Modicum Mission, the Prime Minister hailed the Marshall Memorandum with salutations and fanfares while Brooke examined it under an unforgiving microscope but nonetheless eventually accepted it, as British self-interest dictated that he must.

  ‘The ultimate objective of all military operations is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces by battle,’ reads the US Army’s Field Service Regulations of 1923, the bible of American strategy. ‘Decisive defeat in battle breaks the enemy’s will to war and forces him to sue for peace.’ This was Marshall’s attitude towards war-fighting, and the message he intended to put over in London. It is the Clausewitzian approach to warfare, by which the enemy is relatively quickly brought to a decisive battle on the most important front. By contrast the British adopted an older concept, pioneered by the Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu, by which the enemy is worn down by peripheral attacks and only fully engaged once fatally weakened.

  ‘Pressured hourly to send men and resources to two divergent theaters,’ Pogue wrote of Marshall, ‘he saw the Middle East and the Mediterranean as peripheral areas…He feared the prospect of starving his forces in the Pacific to build up reserves in Britain that might be swallowed up in enterprises in Norway, North Africa or the Middle East or in small raids along the coast of Europe.’3 The American naval historian Rear-Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison likened the American and British strategies to ‘the massive thrust at the enemy’s heart’ versus ‘successive stabs around the periphery to bleed him to death, like jackals worrying a lion before springing at his throat’.4 Other military historians have employed the analogy of the picadors who weaken the bull with their lances before the matador finishes him off with banderillas and sword.

  Reminiscing on television in 1958 about the arguments he had had with the Americans, Brooke put his own view cogently. ‘The arguments mainly with Admiral King were connected with the relative effort to be put into the Pacific as compared with the effort to be put in Europe,’ he said, whereas those with General Marshall were about where in Europe that effort should go. ‘Was it to be put in a cross-Channel operation early on during the war or at a later stage? Were we justified in going into North Africa and on to Italy?…In our minds we felt that going across the Channel before the condition was ripe for it,’ continued Brooke, ‘before Germany had been ripened all round, ripened by the air action, ripened by forcing her to spread and distribute her forces throughout Europe, ripened by the action of Russia on the far side…might have had disastrous effects on the war.’

  Brooke’s sense of superiority was evident from his suggestion that ‘Having been involved in operations in France against the Germans, we were perhaps a little better able to gauge the strength of the Germans at that time and the difficulty of obtaining the necessary victories with partially trained troops against the highly efficient and experienced German forces.’5 Brooke was in effect claiming that the American attitude was over-optimistic, naive and born of not having yet faced the unbloodied Wehrmacht in battle, as he had. General Sir David Fraser believed that Brooke ‘reckoned that the Americans had no knowledge of the modern German soldier and seriously underestimated him’.

  Brooke’s experiences in France in the two BEF expeditions of 1940 had a deciding influence on the assumptions underlying his formulation of grand strategy in the Second World War, principally in convincing him that the French could not be relied upon and that the Germans were very formidable opponents indeed. Only very rarely is it possible to spot a word of criticism of the German fighting man from Brooke, and then only towards the very end of the war when they were conscripting children and the middle-aged. In some American eyes, this counted against him. ‘There were officers on Marshall’s staff’, recorded Pogue, ‘who believed that [Brooke’s] service in the costly campaigns of Flanders in World War I and in two evacuations of troops from France in World War II were not conducive to the aggressive strategy that they believed necessary for victory.’6 Pogue was being diplomatic; they constituted the majority, though this did not include Marshall himself.

  The Americans’ flying-boat touched down at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland on the morning of 8 April. On the flight Marshall read a 25-cent copy of H. G. Wells’ The Outline of History, given to him by his wife just prior to departure, which he handed on to Hopkins. They then flew on to Hendon Aerodrome where they were met by Churchill, Brooke, Portal and Pound. On the drive into London, Marshall was shown the bomb damage caused by the Luftwaffe in the Blitz. Brooke had come straight from a Chiefs of Staff meeting attended by General Bernard Paget of Home Command, Mountbatten and the head of Fighter Command, Air Marshal Sholto Douglas, in which they had put up what Brooke called ‘a thoroughly bad’ plan ‘to assist Russia through action in France’. He was perhaps not therefore in the best frame of mind to meet someone the sole purpose of whose journey was to propose precisely the same thing. Meeting the plane was purely a courtesy, because he had other meetings throughout the day and next saw Marshall at dinner that evening.

  According to Hopkins’ notes of the trip, from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Marshall presented the ‘broad outlines’ of his Memorandum to Churchill, who ‘indicated that he had told the Chiefs of Staff that, in spite of all the difficulties, he was prepared to go along’. Churchill repeated the objections that the Chiefs of Staff had put, ‘all of which we had heard in Washington b
efore coming to England’. Marshall was more optimistic about the interview than Hopkins, thinking that ‘Churchill went a long way and he, Marshall, expected far more resistance than he got’.7

  In explaining the fall of Singapore the previous month, Churchill simply said it had been ‘a mess’, which had been handled very badly; he offered ‘no explanation of the lack of resistance on the part of the British’. Churchill gave Marshall and Hopkins dinner at Downing Street at 8.30 p.m. that evening, with Brooke, Attlee, Eden and the deputy leader of the Labour Party Arthur Greenwood in attendance. Conversation was ‘in the main social’, with Churchill discussing the Great War and the American Civil War, and the assembled leaders, as Hopkins recalled, ‘never really getting to grips with our main business, although General Brooke got into it enough to indicate that he had a great many misgivings about our proposal’. What Hopkins guessed, but Marshall seems not to have, is that Churchill privately opposed an early Roundup and Sledgehammer just as much as Brooke.

  ‘Brooke made an unfavourable impression on Marshall, who thinks that although he may be a good fighting man, he hasn’t got Dill’s brains,’ was how Hopkins reported their first meeting.8 The American historian Robert Sherwood, who edited Hopkins’ papers, thought that that remark might have been made in unconscious resentment of Brooke for having replaced Marshall’s friend Dill as CIGS. Nor was Marshall alone in underestimating Brooke. ‘Just between ourselves now,’ General Handy told his SOOHP interviewer, ‘in our opinion, that is at the working level, Brookie wasn’t the smartest of the British…We didn’t think that he was really smart. Now maybe that was our prejudice, but we didn’t and down on the working level we rated Brookie right down near the bottom.’9