What irritated Brooke most, he admitted, was being summoned to No. 10 ‘when undressed and about to get into his bath at midnight as often happens. Then usually to find that there is nothing definite to answer–only bluster to an indefinite conclusion.’ He wound up saying that ‘It is very hard to stick to important principles in late sittings. Sometimes you feel you must give way on something. Then in the morning you wake up and think “Now what did I do last night–was I too weak?”’18 With Alan Brooke, the answer was almost certainly no.
In early December 1942 the Allies suffered grave setbacks in Tunisia as the Germans counter-attacked successfully at Tébourba and forced the First Army under Anderson on to the defensive. Eisenhower had poured as many troops as he dared into the eastward move, and another attempt was made later in the month, but rain, mud, lack of supplies but principally exceptionally tough Axis resistance prevented the capture on 22–24 December of the strategically important ‘Longstop’ Hill which controlled the Madjerda valley in Tunisia. The realization that the race for Tunisia had been lost led to renewed fears in the British War Office that Eisenhower was not ‘skilful enough in command’. Nonetheless, Kennedy assumed that ‘Rommel would be finished off in a couple of months,’ and the Planners needed to agree what to propose to do next.19
It was at that point that Churchill made noises favouring Roundup, and produced, in Kennedy’s words, ‘a directive the gist of which was that we must stop our Mediterranean operations about June next and concentrate here again for an invasion of France’. The Chiefs of Staff were summoned to discuss this with him the same afternoon, where Brooke ‘gave it him pretty straight and said he would ruin everything by a premature attack in France’. Brooke claimed that the Germans had forty divisions to oppose Roundup–although some historians today dispute that figure–but just as importantly there was still a serious shortage of landing craft and other shipping necessary to get the forces over in time.
‘CIGS is quite determined to go flat out in the Med,’ recorded Kennedy.
We can waste the German strength there and tackle him on equal or better terms in outposts like Sardinia, Sicily, tip of Italy, Crete. We cannot develop an offensive on both fronts. The essential condition for France is still a crack in German morale and strength. Italy may be knocked out of the war by a combination of landing attacks and bombing. The Balkans are a weak spot for the Axis. If we can get near enough to bomb the Roumanian oilfields and cut the Aegean and Turkish traffic (chrome, etc) we can go far to hamstring the Germans…The Americans must meanwhile pour in here as fast as shipping will allow so that we may seize the opportunity to get back on to the Continent when the time is ripe. There is a real opportunity that the Germans may collapse within a year.20
Except for the over-optimistic last sentence, that was a fairly good appreciation of the way the next two years of the Second World War did develop, but at the time it must have seemed to Brooke that knowing Marshall’s desire for Roundup he had to work hard to get Churchill back on to the Mediterranean track, hence his giving ‘it him pretty straight’ at the meeting.
After a conversation with Archibald Clark Kerr, the British Ambassador to Moscow then on home leave, on the evening of 9 December, Brooke noted that it had corroborated ‘all my worst fears, namely that we are going to have great difficulties in getting out of Winston’s promise to Stalin, namely the establishment of a western front in 1943!’ That month, when the Western Allies faced only 6 German divisions in Africa, the Russians were fighting 183 on the Eastern Front.21 Clark Kerr argued that, without a Second Front to relieve him, Stalin might seek a separate peace agreement with Hitler, which the Führer would be mad to refuse. Brooke utterly discounted the possibility, however, as being domestically impossible for either dictator. In this he was being optimistic: the totalitarian dictators had signed a pact before and could have done so again.
The certainty that there would be another full-scale clash over grand strategy with Marshall was confirmed two days later, when a message arrived from Dill ‘giving insight into Marshall’s brain’. According to this excellent source, Marshall wanted ‘to close down’ all offensive operations in the Mediterranean once the Germans were expelled from North Africa, and then concentrate everything on Roundup, combined with a possible move through Turkey.22 This was to be the next great area of disagreement between Brooke and Marshall. At the time it seemed that, despite Brooke’s straight talking, Churchill agreed with the American more than with him. Brooke received a large Smithfield ham from Marshall, ‘as a US contribution to your Christmas dinner. I hope it reaches you in good condition. With it go my Christmas greetings with the hope that jointly we may have much to celebrate in the New Year.’ Included was Mrs Marshall’s recipe for its cooking. Brooke replied on Christmas Day with thanks for both ham and recipe, and added: ‘may all your hopes and ours for the New Year be fulfilled.’23 Sadly, they couldn’t both be.
Brooke was right that the titanic struggle between Stalin and Hitler over Stalingrad rendered it very unlikely that they would make peace; it would have meant Hitler giving up his eastern conquests, which was inconceivable. Yet to support the quarter-million-strong German Sixth Army trapped inside Stalingrad from the air would have taken 700 tons of supplies a day, and although Göring vaingloriously promised to provide this, it proved impossible, with only a fraction of that ever arriving. The blizzards and windchill factor reduced General Friedrich Paulus’ forces trapped within what they called the Kessel (cauldron) to frostbite and starvation, with most of the habitable buildings in the city already destroyed by the German bombing offensive that had rendered it a moonscape wilderness of rubble. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s efforts to relieve Paulus collapsed by 13 December, having got to within 35 miles of the city.
British strategists were cognizant of the enormous differences of scale between the war in the east and that in North Africa, and thus between the Russian and Western contributions to victory. As Kennedy wrote in May 1943 of the German Army Group A’s bridgehead on the Taman peninsula, south of the Sea of Azov, ‘It is a curious reflection that the Taman bridgehead is about the same size as the Tunisian final front and the number of Germans in it is about equal. Yet the Taman bridgehead is tiny in comparison with the whole Russian front.’24 The rout of the Italian divisions on the River Don between 16 and 20 December ensured that Manstein’s Eleventh Army would not now have another opportunity to try to relieve Stalingrad. Germany’s Operation Winter Storm–an unfortunate title considering what the weather was wreaking on the German defenders in Stalingrad–had failed.
At the War Cabinet of 14 December, Churchill asked if there was any truth to the story of a wholesale massacre of Jews in Poland ‘by mass electrical methods’. Eden replied that there was ‘Nothing direct, but indications that it may be true’, although the method could not be confirmed. Eden said that they did ‘Know that Jews are being withdrawn e.g. from Norway and sent to Poland, for some such purposes evidently’.25 He announced a joint declaration that committed the Allies to punishing Nazi war criminals.
Dill was meanwhile writing to Churchill about Marshall’s thoughts, which could not but provide further worries for Brooke. In a ‘Personal Important Most Secret Cypher Telegram’, he reported that Marshall was ‘very encouraged to know that your thoughts and his are running on the same lines, but he has made it clear to me that until he sees the full development of operations in North Africa and has the views of Eisenhower, his opinion as to our future strategy cannot be firm.’ Nonetheless Marshall was ‘more and more convinced’ that they should undertake ‘a modified Roundup’ before the summer of 1943. This would be possible only if, instead of exploiting Torch in the Mediterranean, ‘we start pouring American forces into England’. Marshall thought that that would be ‘much more effective’ than invading either Sicily (Operation Husky) or Sardinia (Operation Brimstone).
Roundup, Marshall felt, would be less costly in shipping, would be ‘more satisfying to the Russians’, would engage
many more German air forces, and would also ‘be the most effective answer to any German attack through Spain’. It sounded as though, far from having no ‘firm’ idea of the next stage as he claimed, Marshall’s plans for 1943 were fairly well advanced. Of course it was precisely the size of the Luftwaffe in the west that made Roundup so impractical for Brooke, who also–rightly as it turned out–discounted the idea of a German advance through Spain, and for whom satisfying the Russians was at best a tertiary consideration, especially now that the German Sixth Army had been comprehensively encircled in Stalingrad with negligible prospects of escape.
‘Marshall would, of course, have liked to discuss these questions with you and the Chiefs of Staff,’ Dill told Churchill, ‘but as American and British ideas now appear to be so close there is, he considers, less need for such personal discussions.’ Indeed, Marshall was convinced that another high-level conference would be ‘a mistake’ because it might ‘make the Russians feel that they had been cut out of the decision-making’ and ‘were being asked to sign on the dotted line’, something they would ‘resent bitterly’ with possible long-term consequences. He also felt that the existing Anglo-American liaison channels–that is, Dill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff–ought to ‘clear our Anglo-American strategy in broad outline’ before another rendezvous, which Marshall thought ought to be Moscow rather than London. ‘I would add’, Dill told Churchill, ‘that these ideas as well as those on strategy have been given to me most privately “off the record”. They have not been discussed with the President.’26
Marshall was therefore communicating with Churchill behind Roosevelt’s back, but was he being entirely straightforward? Since he knew that Brooke did not support Roundup, either ‘modified’ or of any other kind, taking place before the autumn of 1943, it was obviously untrue that ‘American and British ideas now appear to be so close’ that a bilateral meeting was unnecessary. Marshall’s stated reason against a meeting, that he did not want the Russians to suspect collusion, was either naive or not the true reason. Of course the Soviets assumed that the Western democracies would forge policy together, indeed they were surprised later in the war when it seemed to be no longer so.
Since Marshall was anything but naive, it is far more likely that he was going behind Roosevelt’s back in order to collude with Churchill in agreeing that there should be no meeting between himself and Brooke before the next conference–which would in fact take place in Casablanca rather than Moscow–because he knew that British and American ideas over Roundup were not at all close, and thanks to Dill’s briefing he saw a way of splitting Churchill from Brooke. Furthermore, until quite late in the war he feared that Churchill would persuade Roosevelt into further diversionary courses of action. Oliver Harvey recorded on 15 December, ‘The PM and the American General Marshall are veering back to a Second Front this year, with increasing bombing against Germany, while leaving the Mediterranean action limited to the bombing of Germany, without invasion, opening the sea lanes to Egypt and bringing Turkey in if possible.’ As for a major conference, Stalin ‘refuses to leave Russia’; meanwhile ‘The PM is hankering after a meeting with the President…whilst trying to keep Stalin reassured.’27
The next evening saw another major policy discussion between Churchill and Brooke over a 1943 Roundup. With Portal, Pound, Eden, Mountbatten and Ismay also present, Brooke warned emphatically that the rate and scale of the American build-up in Britain were inadequate to allow a successful cross-Channel landing in 1943. He pointed out that the ‘magnificent’ German rail routes in western Europe would bring many more German troops to north-west France than the Allies could land during the same period. Instead, he preferred to try to hold forty German divisions in north-west Europe ‘by the threat of a cross-Channel operation’ while actually pursuing an Italian and ‘perhaps’ a Balkan strategy (the southern thrust into Austria via Yugoslavia).28
Churchill fully accepted Brooke’s facts and figures, but argued that a cross-Channel landing in 1943 ‘was still the better strategy, if only adequate forces for a successful re-entry to the Continent could be assembled in this country’. He said he was ‘prepared to agree’ with Brooke’s assessment that the figures proved this could not happen in 1943, and thus agreed with their conclusion, but ‘with the proviso’ that the figures were ‘confirmed in discussion with the Americans’. So there was no hope for an attack unless the Americans ‘could vastly improve’ on the number of troops, planes and landing craft they provided. They could; Operation Overlord in June 1944 was to involve more than eleven thousand aircraft and over five thousand ships.
‘If we were to adopt the Roundup policy we should have to shut down the Mediterranean very soon,’ stated Kennedy, who saw Brooke the morning after the meeting. ‘Even if we did we could not concentrate a force strong enough in the UK to give us the smallest chance of tackling the Germans on equal terms in France by the autumn of 1943.’ The time issue hung heavily on Brooke, because ‘In the meantime the Germans would have five or six months’ respite.’ Brooke concluded, and Kennedy fully agreed, that ‘The best and only way to engage the Germans, to wear them down, and to relieve the pressure on the Russians, is actively in the Mediterranean–especially against Italy.’ But how was he going to sell this policy to Churchill, Roosevelt and Marshall, who each seemed actively to want Roundup the following year?
The answer was that Churchill was not as wedded to a 1943 Roundup as he seemed. Brooke had gone off to the meeting ‘rather apprehensively and armed with quantities of statistics of shipping movement and German facilities for movement’, but told Kennedy afterwards that ‘to his surprise the PM had accepted the case as put forward’. Kennedy suspected that the Prime Minister had argued against Brooke primarily ‘so that he might firstly be sure himself that the calculations had been thoroughly worked out and secondly that he might know the case au fond in order to be able to convince the Americans’.29 If so, it would not have been the first time that Churchill had employed such devil’s advocacy. It is perfectly possible that, during the whole period that Brooke felt he needed to convince Churchill, all the Prime Minister was really doing was making the CIGS check and sharpen his arguments, the better for them both to prevail when next they met Marshall.
November and December 1942 saw a series of long, seemingly hard-fought meetings by which Brooke slowly brought Churchill round to the Mediterranean strategy. ‘Churchill and Brooke slugged it out, toe to toe, until Brooke won,’ records Pound’s biographer. ‘Churchill was deeply concerned that he had promised Stalin a second front in 1943, and even though Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff had reached agreement, Brooke was continually haunted by the worry that Marshall might win Churchill back to Roundup.’30 Despite that, Brooke continued to scorn Marshall, telling Kennedy after the Staff Conference of 16 December ‘that Marshall, who is still advocating Roundup, was no strategist and that his whole experience had been rather dealing with politicians and in organising the Army. He argued only on what would be put ashore on the beaches and in the ports in France but had no idea what was to be done next and what the plan of campaign should be and what the chances were of carrying it out.’
The trouble with having no set agreement for the next stage of the war, or even an agreement on whether to have a conference in order to hammer out an agreement, was that it impeded all longer-term preparations. In a War Cabinet discussion on building programmes for aerodromes, for example, the Minister of War Production, Oliver Lyttelton, needed to know, as he put it: ‘Is Bolero to stand, or be modified?’ There were 510 aerodromes then in use in the United Kingdom, with a further 106 under construction and 56 more projected, and important decisions needed to be taken soon. ‘Should we make Bolero provision or not?’ asked Bevin, who as minister of labour also needed to find an extra 115,000 men if so. Grigg said that Bolero was projected to involve nearly half a million men by April 1943, so the discussion then turned to the competing claims for building resources. At that point, Churchill admitted that the ‘Scale o
f Bolero needs re-examination.’
When Bevin reported that the recruitment of Land Girls–young female volunteers to work in agriculture–was being held up because of lack of housing, Churchill suggested a 20 per cent cut in airfields, and ordered that no new ones be built without further instructions. He stated that the maximum number of US divisions to be stationed in Britain by August 1943 would be fifteen. ‘We are preparing for twenty-seven divisions,’ he said (the full Roundup figure). ‘If they aren’t here till August, they won’t be any use.’31 Grigg asked whether, in terms of storage and hospital accommodation, the Planners might ‘Assume not more than 65% of Bolero [would be] needed in ’43?’ and this was then accepted by the War Cabinet. Here was a strong indication that Churchill was not committed to Roundup in 1943, even though he could not intimate that fact to Marshall.
That Christmas Marshall sent Roosevelt and Churchill two identical 4-feet-diameter globes for their offices. The President set his up directly behind his chair, so ‘I can swing around and figure distances to my great satisfaction.’32 On 19 December, Churchill made his Saturday-morning call to Eden, conjecturing about his next meeting with the President. ‘The delay is maddening as no plans for the future can be made meanwhile,’ he complained. ‘I don’t know whether to stand on my head or sit on my tail.’ Two days later X Corps of the Eighth Army recaptured Benghazi, the first time they had held it since January.
The War Cabinet of 21 December considered the question of making Rome an ‘open city’–that is, free from bombing on account of its religious, cultural and historical significance–which Churchill did not mind doing, but only because in his view there was ‘Nothing much in Rome worth bombing.’ ‘Yes, [the] railway,’ replied Brooke, and Portal added that vulnerable marshalling yards were just outside the city, which Grigg (wrongly) thought impossible to bomb without hitting the Eternal City itself.33 Rome itself was spared, in the end, although the marshalling yards were bombed.
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