During the day further despatches were brought to Churchill about Tobruk, prompting him to tell Eichelberger, over a lunch of celery-heart salad and ‘several’ Martinis, that he wished he had a field commander of Rommel’s calibre. In the afternoon, wearing headphones to listen to the air–ground communication for the parachute drop, Churchill heard an impatient commander say over the airwaves, ‘Goddammit, I told you what to do!’ Stimson was shocked; Churchill roared with laughter. Brooke found something to laugh at too; after Sawyers was invited by Marshall to join the lunch party, he drank too much and would not let Churchill pass him on the plane ride home unless he turned down the brim of his panama hat, which Churchill, ‘rather red and looking angry’, duly did.32
Marshall was soothed by the positive reactions of his British visitors to what had been achieved by the US Army in the six months since Pearl Harbor. Of all the British contingent that day, Ismay was the least impressed, afterwards telling Churchill that ‘it would be murder to pit them against continental soldiery’, meaning the Wehrmacht. Churchill agreed the US troops ‘were still immature’ although ‘magnificent material who would soon train on’.33
Brooke concluded that the American system of individual and elementary training seemed excellent, ‘but I am not so certain that their higher training is good enough, or that they have yet realized the standard of training required.’34 After the war, he added: ‘They certainly had not–and had a lot to learn! I next met them in Northern Ireland, and they still had a lot to learn, but seemed to prefer to learn in the hard school of war itself. As a result they learned a great deal more in North Africa!’ This reference to the American defeat at Kasserine Pass would have been spiteful if Brooke had not followed it up with the remark that, with Americans, ‘in the art of war, as in polo, lawn tennis, golf etc, when they once got down to it they were determined to make a success of it.’35
Despite the hospitality of Fort Jackson, Anglo-American relations were not completely back on track. ‘One further incident is worthy of record,’ wrote Jacob in his diary of the conference, ‘as it very nearly wrecked the harmony of the last day.’ On 24 June, an Anglo-American Air Agreement, covering the transfer of American planes to Britain under Lend–Lease, had been signed by Arnold and the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff, John Slessor, and also initialled by the President, before it was discovered that the Joint Chiefs of Staff (except of course Arnold) actually opposed it. By lunchtime on 25 June there was ‘a feeling abroad’ that the Agreement had reached the President through Churchill rather than from the proper source, namely the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jacob put it bluntly: ‘They were accusing us of sharp practice.’ The accusation was that Slessor had persuaded the Prime Minister to take the Agreement to the President and that he had initialled it before the Joint Chiefs of Staff had even been able to examine it. The British secretariat of the Combined Chiefs of Staff had been told that Arnold was submitting the Agreement simultaneously to the President, and they had ‘naturally assumed that Arnold had squared his colleagues and masters’, just as Slessor had the British Chiefs.
When all this was explained to Marshall, Arnold confessed to having given the Agreement to FDR without informing him or Admiral King, but said it was only because Slessor had been ‘anxious to get everything finished’ by the time the conference broke up the next day. ‘This rather lame excuse may or may not have been believed by Marshall and King,’ recorded Jacob, ‘but in any case our name was cleared of suspicion. The US Chiefs of Staff then found themselves in the position of being unable to do anything but accept what the President had already initialled.’ For Jacob the whole incident was ‘only one more illustration of the extraordinary lack of coordination in the direction of the US Services’. It beggared belief that Arnold got to the point of signing an important international protocol and getting presidential approval for it without clearing it beforehand with Marshall and King.
The incident had other implications, however. The speed with which the suspicion ‘got abroad’ among the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Brooke and Churchill had in effect suborned the President did not bode well for the future. Similarly the assumption that Roosevelt could be so easily ‘got at’ by Churchill. As the British party took off on board the Bristol from Anacostia at 11.30 on the evening of 25 June, Marshall, Stimson and King might have been forgiven for thinking that they had left a fifth columnist behind, in the shape of a president who seemed fully wedded to the idea of Gymnast, an operation they thought too risky to undertake, and also certain to delay Roundup.
Stimson–whose attitude towards the Prime Minister is evident from his diary entry: ‘Marshall and I had Churchill on our necks for three days’–even suspected that Roosevelt might have been responsible for the whole Argonaut visit from the very start. In his autobiography he stated that although the initiative for the meeting clearly came from Churchill, ‘he might well have acted on the basis of an indication that the President was not completely certain about the wisdom of Bolero,’ despite its having been ‘the brain-child of the US Army’.36 This was shrewd, for that indication almost certainly came during the Mountbatten meeting, although it was not so much Bolero–the US build-up in the United Kingdom–that Roosevelt had his doubts about, as the two early cross-Channel operations that were intended to follow from it.
Ian Jacob told Chester Wilmot in 1948 that the Argonaut negotiations in Washington had been ‘pretty sticky’, because they had agreed:
that Bolero should continue full blast until 1 September but we never seriously contemplated using these forces for a cross-Channel invasion that year. Our idea was to get them onto our side of the Atlantic so that they would be committed for the war against Germany, and we hoped that if we had the forces in England we could persuade Roosevelt to use them in Africa…Unfortunately once again because we had agreed to Bolero and had accepted cross-Channel in principle, the Americans thought we were willing to go into France that year.37
There, in black and white, is Jacob’s admission that Churchill and Brooke had deliberately misled Roosevelt and Marshall into thinking that if the United States poured troops into the United Kingdom in 1942 they might be used to attack France that year, when in fact they had no intention of allowing that to happen. Perfidious Albion, good strategy, clever footwork–whatever it was, many key Americans were deceived about British intentions.
Historians have long debated Stimson’s accusations–which were indignantly denied by soldiers and statesmen at the time–and Brooke’s biographer denies that Marshall had been misled. Yet Wilmot’s record of the interview of Jacob lodged in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London makes it quite clear what Churchill and Brooke were up to, and few were in a better position to know the truth than he.
Gymnast was the codename given to a landing by Americans alone on the Moroccan coast, while Super-Gymnast was a landing on the Algerian and Moroccan coasts by both the British and Americans; it was Super-Gymnast that was eventually to be renamed Operation Torch. Marshall recalled of Roosevelt: ‘When I went to him with Torch, he put up his hands’–at which Marshall raised his own hands in an attitude of prayer–‘and said, “Please make it before Election Day.”’ However, when it became clear that there might not be quite enough time for this, Roosevelt never complained (although his veteran press officer Steve Early certainly did). The Torch landings in fact took place on 8 November 1942, five days after the mid-terms.
General Handy was blunt on why Roosevelt decided on Gymnast in June 1942: ‘Of course, we had to do it because the President wanted us to get some place to use the Army. We were building up a sizable army and we didn’t really have any place to use it.’ General Hull was blunter still: ‘That, you see, was an election year.’38 As for Churchill, Hull suspected that he had wanted Anglo-American landings in North Africa ‘from the very beginning. I can’t swear to that, but he was having difficulty in Northern Africa.’
In his memoirs Churchill attempted to depict Sledgehammer as
little better than a suicide mission. ‘Out of many plans the fittest might survive,’ he wrote in the fourth volume, The Hinge of Fate, effectively claiming that the operation succumbed in a Darwinian struggle against the better plan of Gymnast. ‘I did not have to argue against natural selection myself. It fell of its own weakness.’39 In fact Sledgehammer fell because only Marshall wanted it enough, Roosevelt and Churchill actively preferring Gymnast.
A fabulously ill-informed NBC interviewer who was hoping to make a programme about the ‘friendship’ between Brooke and Marshall in 1958, naively asked Brooke the moronic question: ‘The differences between you and George Marshall were not major, were they?’ After an understandably long pause, Brooke replied:
They were major in the early part of the war and insofar as they affected the time at which we should start the liberation of France, as to my mind any attempt at carrying out this operation before we were really ready for it might have resulted in a ghastly catastrophe. I considered in the early stages Marshall had not quite appreciated all the difficulties that would arise and his ideas of this early crossing were not of the best, and that is where our main differences occurred…As things turned out I think finally we came across exactly at the right time, and I do not think we could have done that crossing earlier in the war.40 *
When explaining to themselves Churchill’s and Brooke’s reasons for not wanting to cross the Channel in 1942–when after all the Germans had not yet built the ‘Atlantic Wall’, concrete defensive fortifications all along the western European seaboard–the Americans kept returning to the experiences that they assumed the Prime Minister and CIGS had both undergone between 1914 and 1918. Charles Moran–unhelpfully, even disloyally–went so far as to warn Marshall that Churchill was ‘fighting the ghosts of the Somme’. Wedemeyer could be relied upon to be far ruder than Moran, of course, in his diagnosis of what he called Churchill’s ‘lamentable deficiencies as a strategist’. After 1941, he contended that ‘the problem was to restrain the pseudo strategist in Churchill’ which he considered ‘inherent in his islander’s psychology’ and ‘conditioned by his experience in World War One’.41
Writing in 1955 to a would-be biographer of Brooke, Marshall said that the CIGS had:
had a hard schooling in the battles of the Somme in earlier years and had suffered the shock of the highly modernized Nazi Army. This, for a year or more in our earlier negotiations, made it difficult for him to meet our theory and battle inexperience with his practical and rather desperate experience. All this washed away as the war developed, and we came more and more into mutual understanding.42
It was a diplomatic way of explaining their clashes, and except for the last sentence was insightful about Brooke’s thinking. The Somme had indeed been such a cataclysmic event in recent British experience that it would have been extraordinary if had not affected the outlook of the large number of British Planners–including Brooke and Kennedy–who had fought there.
The Pentagon developed the view that, because of their terrible bloodletting in the Great War, the British would commit only to relatively small-scale diversionary attacks. ‘The British are a great people, you know, but they hit around the edges,’ explained General Handy to his SOOHP interviewer. ‘Some of the British thinking was affected by what happened in World War One. Our losses weren’t even in the same class as the British and the French…We figured that if you were going to lick the Germans the only way to do it was to face up to them and fight them, and the British maybe wanted to do it some other way.’43 While it is quite true that the Americans suffered 50,500 battle deaths in the First World War, against 908,300 from the British Empire and 1,357,800 from France, the OPD made far too much of that, and eventually assumed that the British secretly opposed a cross-Channel invasion on that basis.
Put at its crudest, the hack-historian Leonard Mosley, an employee of Lord Beaverbrook, wrote that if the cross-Channel operation had to happen, Churchill ‘was determined that the more fecund United States should provide the cannon fodder. And that meant postponing any cross-Channel operation until American troops were ready to make up the bulk of the invading force.’44 It was a disgraceful accusation not supported by the facts; Churchill no more saw American troops as cannon fodder than he did the British. Ismay meanwhile readily accepted that the Americans ‘suspected that we were haunted by memories of Passchendaele and the Somme and that we would always shrink from undertaking an assault on Fortress Europe. This suspicion persisted for a very long time, and lay at the root of future misunderstandings.’45
Churchill himself fully admitted being haunted by the ghosts of the Somme and in Closing the Ring he wrote of Roundup: ‘The fearful price we had had to pay in human life and blood for the great offensives of the First World War was graven on my mind. Memories of the Somme and Passchendaele and many lesser frontal attacks on the Germans were not to be blotted out by time or reflection.’46 Furthermore, since the horrors of those days, Churchill pointed out, ‘The firepower of the defence had vastly increased. The development of minefields both on land and in the sea was enormous.’ Set against that were the great advantages of air supremacy and paratroopers’ ability to disrupt counter-attacks from behind enemy lines, neither of which existed in the Great War.
Yet it wasn’t so much returning to Passchendaele and the Somme that worried British strategists in 1942–4 as the Dunkirk and Brest campaigns of the summer of 1940. Rommel’s and Guderian’s seemingly unstoppable blitzkrieg campaign across France featured more in their fears–especially Brooke’s and Dill’s–than the mud and blood of Flanders of a quarter of a century before. Even more recently, April 1941 had seen the British make a sacrificial attempt to help Greece and being ignominiously flung off the Continent once again as a result. Memories of these humiliations naturally served to work against Sledgehammer a mere fourteen months later.
Some senior OPD members understood this, of course. ‘The British had a bloody nose from Dunkirk,’ recalled Hull.
They were leery of amphibious operations against a main force like a landing against Germans in France. Churchill was a great man, but as a strategist, I think, you can criticize him…He was responsible for Gallipoli…he was always thinking about what he called ‘the soft underbelly’ of Europe…Hewas responsible for the Greek débâcle when he put troops in there…All during the war he was thinking of landing troops in the south.47
The problem with such easy explanations is that they imply irrationality on behalf of the British, even at its worst a form of cowardice.
When Marshall was asked by Pogue after the war whether Churchill’s insistence on a Mediterranean strategy was due to a desire to vindicate Gallipoli, his answer was indicative of the American misunderstanding of Churchill’s true views regarding Roundup. ‘No, I think it was not Gallipoli, but the fact that he was opposed to the Channel crossing. He had a horror of bodies floating in the Channel…The dominant thought is that they didn’t think we were capable of manufacturing the troops.’48
A much fairer criticism of Churchill and Brooke was that they were willing to fight not to the last American, but rather to the last Russian. ‘If his willingness to allow the Russians to bleed the German Army was cynical,’ the distinguished military historian Max Hastings has written, ‘it was a great service to his own country.’49 Hastings is right, and for all the inescapable admiration for the Red Army’s sacrifice, there was much less genuine sympathy for it among the British High Command than among the public at large. The senior strategists recalled Stalin’s non-aggression pact with Hitler that lasted up until the evening of Barbarossa itself. In September 1945 Grigg and Kennedy agreed that Stalin’s ‘claim to have won the German war single-handed’ was ‘silly’, because ‘Hitler not Stalin was our friend in bringing Russia into the German war.’ (Brooke was profoundly anti-Bolshevik and Kennedy had fought against them in the Russian Civil War.)
Yet it was fortunate that the Americans provided a counterpoint to the British strategy, for by 1944 the Allie
s needed to go further than Churchill’s and Brooke’s strategy of ‘probe, jab, bomb, subvert’. As Samuel Eliot Morison put it: ‘The elephant does not like mice, but a thousand mice cannot kill an elephant.’
‘It has been a very interesting trip and real good value,’ Brooke wrote in his diary while on the flight back between Newfoundland and Stranraer. ‘I feel now in much closer touch with Marshall and his staff and know what he is working for and what his difficulties are.’ A primary difficulty was clearly Admiral King, who Brooke now appreciated had a Pacific-based outlook quite opposed to Marshall’s European one. As for Roosevelt, Brooke acknowledged he had ‘wonderful charm’ but he was not about to be admitted to that small, elite circle–Smuts, Stalin, himself and later MacArthur–who Brooke thought really understood strategy. ‘I do not think that his military sense is on a par with his political sense,’ he wrote of the President. ‘His conceptions and plans are not based on a full grasp of all the implications.’
Brooke admitted that he had found it difficult in the first few meetings to know how much importance to attach to the President’s strategic ideas, and also he ‘did not know how Marshall would react’ to them. With Roosevelt and Churchill planning grand strategy on their own at Hyde Park, in the Map Room and even seemingly in the bathrooms of the White House, Brooke found it ‘difficult at first to carry on business with Marshall. However, I finally got on sufficiently intimate terms with him to discuss freely with him the probable reactions of both President and Prime Minister to the plans we were discussing,’ and vice versa. Brooke wrote these comments while sitting on the Clipper only a few feet away from Churchill, who he noticed was mouthing the phrases of the speech he was writing for the forthcoming debate of no confidence in the House of Commons.50
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