Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  In June 1958, Brooke went to the London office of the American broadcast network NBC in order to record his reflections on Marshall. In his clear, clipped, upper-class voice, he recited the events of sixteen years before, concluding that ‘Acts of that nature bound us together. We were bound to have differences and we had many differences during the war, but we were always able, even after the most heated discussions in conference, to walk out arm-in-arm and go to lunch together still exactly the same friends.’11

  The Oval Office meeting continued until 5 p.m. on 21 June, and then continued throughout the morning of the 22nd, finally coming to much the same conclusions as before on every subject except Gymnast, namely that ‘Plans and preparations for the Bolero operation in 1943 on as large a scale as possible are to be pushed forward with all speed and energy.’ Over Gymnast, however, whereas the Combined Chiefs of Staff had comprehensively rubbished the operation among themselves, the six men now agreed that ‘plans will be completed in all details as soon as possible’, with forces to be employed in Gymnast to come from Bolero units that had not yet left the United States.12 Churchill’s attempt to move the entire direction of the Anglo-American war effort from north-west Europe to North-west Africa was well under way, although Marshall and Brooke were still far from convinced.

  Since Churchill, who had been in Hyde Park during its composition, had not seen the Combined Chiefs of Staff memorandum on Gymnast, it had to be decided whether or not he should be shown it. Ismay and Jacob felt that in view of the conclusions just reached at the White House, ‘no good purpose would be served’ by submitting it, and Brooke agreed.13 Marshall had already given it to FDR, but Churchill did not see it.

  Roosevelt and Churchill expressed themselves in favour of operations ‘in France or the Low Countries’ in 1942, but only if Brooke and Marshall could agree upon what Churchill called ‘a sound and sensible plan’.14 Yet both Roosevelt and Churchill well knew that Brooke would simply not agree a plan for any cross-Channel attacks in 1942 beyond minor raids. This somewhat disingenuous form of words therefore allowed Roosevelt and Churchill to seem to be supporting something that they knew would never happen, in which case Gymnast would be the only alternative.

  Ismay’s minute of the meeting was a veritable masterpiece of misleading prose. Marshall could have had no cause for complaint until the end of the second paragraph, where the full extent of his having been outmanoeuvred must have become apparent. ‘If, on the other hand,’ wrote Ismay of the two cross-Channel operations, ‘detailed examination shows that, despite all efforts, success is improbable, we must be ready with an alternative.’15

  That alternative was made all the more pressing by the Tobruk news. ‘The possibilities of French North Africa (Operation Gymnast) will be explored carefully and conscientiously,’ continued Ismay, ‘and plans will be completed in all details as soon as possible. Forces to be employed in Gymnast would in the main be found from Bolero units that have not yet left the United States.’16 The effect of Gymnast on the cross-Channel operations was thus obvious from the start. Ismay’s wording effectively killed off Sledgehammer, pushed back Roundup and resuscitated Gymnast, which had otherwise been moribund and was opposed by Marshall and Brooke.

  If Roosevelt hadn’t come round to Gymnast on his own by the time that Churchill announced he was visiting Washington–as Stimson suspected that he had–then Churchill converted him at Hyde Park, and the rest of his protestations about supporting Sledgehammer and an early Roundup was essentially window-dressing for Marshall’s benefit. As Sir David Fraser puts it, the agreement of 21 June merely ‘paid lip service to Sledgehammer’.17 In the television series The World at War, Mountbatten claimed it had been he who had converted Roosevelt to Gymnast. He said the President had told him: ‘My nightmare would be if I was to have a million American soldiers sitting in England, Russia collapses and there’d be no way of getting them ashore.’18

  There is evidence to suggest that Roosevelt favoured Gymnast long before his supposed conversion by Mountbatten in June 1942. In late October 1941, after representing Britain at the International Labour Organization in New York, Clement Attlee flew to Washington to stay with Lord Halifax, and in the course of his visit he was invited by the President for a short cruise on the presidential yacht. Attlee later recalled that Roosevelt had taken down an atlas and, putting his finger on Algiers, had said, ‘That is where I want to have American troops.’19 The story is reminiscent of the Duke of Richmond being told by Wellington at the famous ball in Brussels that he would stop Napoleon’s advance at a small village which the Iron Duke marked with his thumbnail on a map, called Waterloo. Nonetheless, Attlee was no fantasist, and Roosevelt, as he put it, ‘had had experience in the Navy Office and his mind took a broad sweep of world strategy’.

  In 1956, Marshall was frank about the political imperatives behind Gymnast: ‘We fail to see that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained,’ he told Pogue. ‘That may sound like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought. People demand action. We couldn’t wait to be completely ready. Churchill was always getting into side shows…But I could see why he had to have something.’20 Much more was this true of his own President than of the Prime Minister. General elections had been suspended for the duration of the war in Britain, but in America the Democratic Party faced difficult mid-term Congressional ones in November 1942.

  As well as a political desire to see American troops fighting German ground forces in 1942, Roosevelt was convinced by reports he was getting from US consular authorities across North Africa, especially Algeria, that the French authorities might actually welcome an American landing. Nonetheless, many Americans preferred to assume that Churchill’s rhetoric had somehow seduced Roosevelt; Stilwell adopted characteristically forthright language when he noted in his diary: ‘Besides being a rank amateur in all military matters, FDR is apt to act on sudden impulse. On top of that he has been completely mesmerized by the British, who have sold him a bill of goods…The Limeys have his ear, and we have the hind tit.’21

  Marshall told Stimson that there had been a ‘good deal of pow-pow and a rumpus up at the White House’. He said that Churchill had been ‘particularly disturbed’ by some remarks that Roosevelt had made to Mountbatten ‘about the possibility of having to make a “sacrifice” cross-Channel landing in 1942 to help the Russians’. According to Marshall, ‘Churchill started out with a terrific attack on Bolero as we had expected…The President, however, stood pretty firm.’ Hopkins told Stimson that ‘Marshall made a very powerful argument for Bolero,’ managing to dispose of ‘all the clouds that had been woven about it by the Mountbatten incident’.22

  Had Roosevelt really ‘stood pretty firm’ on 21 June, or had he and Churchill tacitly agreed at Hyde Park that Gymnast would by default have to be the major operation of 1942? Might ‘the American Houdini’ have been miming support for Roundup and Sledgehammer in order to lull Marshall, Stimson and the Joint Chiefs? The circumstantial evidence suggests that Roosevelt, who had been talking loosely about a diversionary strategy ever since March, had come around to Churchill’s way of thinking, or at least had appreciated that since Roundup and Sledgehammer–which in White House parlance had been shortened to Bolero–could not be mounted without Churchill’s and Brooke’s enthusiastic support, which was clearly not on offer, so another offensive operation must be considered, and of the limited options available Gymnast made the most sense.

  For all that Brooke and Churchill were cast in the role of mendicants in the White House on 21 June, receiving welcome munitional charity from Marshall, they were not about to relent on their opposition to an early cross-Channel operation. The spontaneous gesture of the armoured division was gratefully accepted, but the Britons soon got down to undermining the ‘momentous proposal’ that Churchill had agreed to with such seeming enthusiasm only two months earlier. The official historian of British grand strategy for this period, J. R. M. Butler, described 21 June 1942 as ‘The Day of the Dupes’.23
Churchill visited the USA fifteen times in his life, but this was the most important of all.

  At dinner at the White House that night, after the climactic moment in the afternoon, Brooke, Marshall, Churchill, Roosevelt and five others stayed up until 1 a.m. discussing global strategy, finally getting round to the Middle East. Brooke recorded that he and Churchill ‘accepted offer of American Armoured Division for Middle East’ believing that ‘This may lead to a USA front in the Middle Eastern at expense of the European front.’24 It was exactly what FDR, Churchill and Brooke wanted–but Marshall didn’t. The British had effectively used their own vulnerability as a trump card, somehow trading on their very weakness after the fall of Tobruk to get what they wanted.

  That long day was not yet over for Marshall. At the end of his fourth and final meeting with the British, Roosevelt asked him to stay on in his office after everyone else had gone off to bed. To Marshall’s ‘consternation’ the President then suggested sending a large American force to take control of the entire region between Teheran and Alexandria, including the whole eastern Mediterranean seaboard and Levant. Marshall told Stimson he was ‘terribly taken aback’ by this new and very unwelcome development and almost lost his temper with the President. Not trusting himself to hold his tongue if the conversation continued much further, Marshall politely declined to discuss such an important subject so late at night, turned and left the room.25

  One can imagine the tremendous frustration for the Army Chief of Staff, exhausted after a long day of meetings and negotiations, seeing a strategy, which he had proclaimed publicly and only very recently at West Point, now subtly undermined by the President and the British, despite his immense generosity in offering to help plug the gap between Rommel and Egypt. Then in the early hours he had been asked by his commander-in-chief–seemingly off the cuff–to consider a massive deployment of American troops in a huge and entirely unfamiliar part of the world (there are 1,250 miles between Teheran and Alexandria) very far from Berlin. The wonder is that this ‘reserved and courtly Pennsylvanian’ did not react more aggressively to his boss’s midnight musings. Had MacArthur, Patton or King been the dominant figure among the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Roosevelt would probably have been the one ‘terribly taken aback’ by their response. ‘Roosevelt had a habit of tossing out new operations,’ Marshall told Pogue years later. ‘I called it his cigarette lighter gesture.’ At that, Marshall made an expansive move of his hands as though gesticulating with a cigarette lighter.

  The next morning Marshall sent Roosevelt a memorandum entitled ‘American Forces in the Middle East’. The President had praised the view of the US military attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner F. Fellers, who had repeatedly urged American intervention in the Middle East. Marshall wrote: ‘Fellers is a very valuable observer but his responsibilities are not those of a strategist and his views are in opposition to mine and those of the entire Operations Division.’26 With regard to the United States locating large ground forces in the Levant, ‘It is my opinion, and that of the Operations Staff, that we should not undertake such a project. The controlling reasons are logistical, serious confusion of command (further complicated by strong racial and religious prejudices), and the indecisive nature of the operation.’

  The points Marshall made were cogent. The south-west Pacific was 8,000 miles away from Washington, the central Pacific 6,000, Alaska 2,000, the Caribbean 1,000, Greenland and Iceland 2,000. To support large forces in the Middle East would ‘deny the probability of assembling American forces of decisive power in any theater in this war’. It would, Marshall argued, only be of use in:

  gaining a foothold on the southern but indecisive fringe of the European continent. We would still be a long distance from Germany, with extremely difficult natural intervening obstacles. You are familiar with my view that the decisive theater is Western Europe. That is the only place where the concerted effort of our own and the British forces can be brought to bear on the Germans. A large venture in the Middle East would make a decisive American contribution to the campaign in Western Europe out of the question. Therefore, I am opposed to such a project.27

  ‘All day and half the night they have gone on since the news of Tobruk came through,’ Hopkins told Moran, who noted: ‘Winston has battled with the Americans; he has not allowed the facts, damaging as they are, to handicap him.’ Moran saw Roosevelt as ‘The big man on the American side in this dismal time’, whose ‘brain goes on working as if it were packed in ice’. But the President’s ‘prop’, insofar as he needed one, was Marshall, who had ‘seen the British collapse in the Middle East end in the success of the PM’s efforts to postpone a Second Front. A smaller man would have turned sour.’28 Instead it was Stimson, Wedemeyer and later Hopkins who turned very sour over the seemingly indefinite postponement of Marshall’s plans.

  On 22 June, at another meeting at the White House, Churchill told Stimson that the British Planners all thought a cross-Channel attack impossible in 1942, and that if it went ahead the carnage would be like the Great War. Stimson felt Roosevelt spoke ‘with the frivolity and lack of responsibility of a child’ during this sombre discussion. Meanwhile Brooke and Marshall went into the implications of sending an American armoured division to serve in the Middle East. Marshall’s offer had been made promptly, but the working out of the details took much longer than Churchill later recollected in his memoirs. The command was earmarked for General George S. Patton Jr of the Desert Training Center in California. Only after it was pointed out that the unit couldn’t get into action until October was the offer altered–to the relief of Brooke, who foresaw huge organizational difficulties in having an American division in the middle of the Eighth Army–to three hundred Sherman tanks and one hundred self-propelled 105mm gun-howitzers, to be sent by fast convoy.29

  Marshall was as good as his word, despite the unpopularity of the decision in the US 1st Armored Division, which had only just taken possession of the three hundred brand-new tanks. The tanks and guns were shipped out to the Middle East post-haste, arriving in time to play an important part in the victory of El Alamein four months later. When one of the transport vessels containing seventy tanks was torpedoed, Marshall immediately made up the numbers for the next shipment, without even telling Brooke what he had done. ‘Any mistrust which there may have been in those early days between the British and American chiefs of staff did not extend to their political masters,’ recalled Ismay, pointing out that under normal circumstances the request for more tanks would have been sent by Auchinleck to Brooke, who would have got on to the US War Department, whose ‘probable reaction’ would have been to promise the next consignment to come off the production line, before discussions began about the shipping required. In this instance, Roosevelt and Marshall cleared the way within days.

  In explaining his actions to his advisers, Marshall discounted generosity as having been a motive. Instead he explained that the tanks and guns had been given in order ‘to hold the British to their promise to mount Roundup’.30 Yet of course great operations perhaps costing thousands of lives are not affected by gratitude for generous gestures, and it would have been naive of Marshall’s advisers to believe that they would be. The interesting point was that Marshall’s advisers were too hard-hearted, or sceptical of the British, or doubtful of Auchinleck’s chances of using the tanks to good effect, or irritated by the American 1st Armored Division being deprived of the Shermans, to respond positively to the offer unless it was cloaked in the motive of advancing American interests.

  On the morning of Wednesday 24 June Churchill, Brooke, Marshall, Stimson, Dill and Ismay arrived by air-conditioned train at Fort Jackson in South Carolina, where they reviewed the sixty thousand troops that had been stationed there since the Great War-era military camp had been reopened in September 1941. Marshall wanted to impress on Churchill and Brooke the battle-readiness of the troops earmarked for Roundup. Both men undoubtedly got the message, but as Churchill put it in his memoirs, ‘I consistently pressed my view that it
takes two years or more to make a soldier.’ As with so much of Churchill’s six-volume history, this possibly had a degree of hindsight to it, since Overlord did indeed take place two years after the visit, to the very month.

  The commander at Fort Jackson, Major-General Robert L. Eichelberger, recalled in his autobiography, Jungle Road to Tokyo, that his assignment had been to put on a corps demonstration of the 8th, 30th and 77th Divisions for his British guests. Generals Marshall, Eisenhower and McNair (commanding Army Ground Forces) had each ‘impressed on me, in turn, the importance of making a good military showing; at the moment I did not just know why.’31 Many years later Marshall told him ‘why that successful demonstration was so important. Up until that time Churchill had refused to believe the Americans capable of raising an army of sufficient size or excellence to manage a cross-Channel invasion in the foreseeable future.’

  Eichelberger put on demonstrations undertaken by ten thousand men from infantry and paratroop units, as well as manoeuvres by seventy-four tanks, on a day that was ‘infernally hot, hot almost beyond belief’. Churchill said it reminded him of his days as a subaltern in India. The Prime Minister particularly enjoyed operating a walkie-talkie for the first time, and the use of live ammunition in the machine-guns excited him. Out of the six hundred parachutists of the 503rd Airborne Regiment who jumped, there were only three casualties.

  ‘Nothing was left to chance,’ recalled Eichelberger. ‘A printing plant in Columbia had clanked all night to provide programs for the demonstration. Chemicals had been applied to the road to keep down the dust. I had been warned that Churchill’s health was such that he should be spared the spinal rigors of a jeep ride; and a kindly motor-car dealer in Columbia gave us without charge the use of a convertible coupé.’ As it was, Churchill ‘hopped in and out of the car and walked at such a tremendous pace that most of the faithfully following entourage had to run to catch up.’