As for Churchill, Ian Jacob noted that ‘His view was clear. He wanted to take plenty of time. Full discussion, no impatience–the dripping of water on a stone. In the meanwhile he would be working on the President, and in ten days or a fortnight everything would fall into place.’ Churchill was not noted for his patience, but he unquestionably employed it at Casablanca. He was out to get agreement on a programme of operations for 1943 which some Planners thought ‘well beyond our powers, but which he felt was the least that could be thought worth of two great powers’. He wanted the expulsion of the Germans from the North African shore to be followed by the capture of Sicily, but he also wanted the reconquest of Burma, and the eventual invasion of northern France, ‘on a moderate scale perhaps’. Since something major had to give in order for these huge objectives to be realized, ‘Operations in the Pacific should not be such as to prevent the fulfilment of his programme.’6
The Joint Chiefs of Staff were therefore right to worry: a large Mediterranean commitment made possible by a Pacific slowdown was precisely what Churchill had in mind, and what they feared. Similarly Brooke was right to worry about an over-hasty return to the Continent in 1943, yet ‘The Chiefs of Staff were dismissed…and the rest of the evening was given to ice-breaking dinner parties.’ Brooke had been ordered by the Prime Minister not to show impatience, though later in the conference this was to prove beyond him. That evening Brooke dined with Marshall, and had a ‘long talk with him after dinner’. Sadly we do not know whether they locked horns or skirted the issues, but if they had argued Brooke would probably have mentioned it–doubtless scaldingly–in his diary. Exhausted, Brooke then stayed up late enough to prepare his opening address to the Combined Chiefs of Staff for the following day.
Between 14 and 23 January, the Combined Chiefs were to hold their fifty-fifth through to sixty-ninth meetings in the conference room just beyond the drawing room of the Anfa Hotel; no fewer than fifteen full-scale meetings in ten days. Jacob, who took the minutes for the Chiefs of Staff (his friend Vivian Dykes performed the same role for the Combined Chiefs), found it ‘a charming room, the semicircular wall being made chiefly of large windows’. There was a big table seating sixteen in the middle, and two smaller tables seating from four to six on each side.
Brooke set out his view of the global situation at 10.30 the next morning, Thursday 14 January, after which Marshall followed him, showing where they disagreed, which seemed like nearly everywhere. They stopped for lunch and began again at 2.30 p.m., when Brooke asked the Americans for their views on the war in the Pacific. Admiral King answered, and in Brooke’s view, ‘it became clear at once that his idea was an “all-out” war against Japan instead of holding operations.’ King was sixty-four at the time of Casablanca, and Jacob described him as ‘active, tall and spare, with an alert and self-confident bearing. He seems to wear a protective covering of horn, which is hard to penetrate. He gives the impression of being exceedingly narrow-minded, and to be always on the look-out for slights or attempts to “put something over” on him. He is secretive, and I should say he treats his staff stiffly and at times tyrannically.’7 The British had long before correctly identified him as their most serious opponent on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He proposed an allocation of the total Allied war effort that boiled down to 30 per cent for the Pacific versus 70 per cent for the rest of the world, whereupon Brooke pointed out that ‘this was hardly a scientific way of approaching war strategy!’ King replied that ‘It might be better knocking off the weaker brethren before finally tackling the main enemy,’ and maintained that a set percentage of Allied resources should be devoted to preventing Japan getting into an impregnable position. Brooke didn’t like the percentages idea, preferring to set specific targets–such as the reconquest of Burma and the capture of Rabaul or the Marshall Islands–for specific dates. Only once the targets were identified could the resources be allocated, he argued, with everything left over concentrated against Germany. He particularly feared that having too many escort vessels and landing craft in the Pacific theatre might ‘hamstring all operations elsewhere’.
King’s was probably just an initial bargaining position, and other accounts from strategists mention a 25/75 breakdown being acceptable to him, which in retrospect Brooke ought to have seized upon, however ‘unscientific’ it might have looked to that scion of Britain’s finest Staff colleges. Had it been possible to implement statistically, and some kind of formula probably could have been worked out, Britain would have been better off than with the ‘whittling’ off of resources to the Pacific that did in fact take place in surreptitious defiance of the official agreements made at Casablanca. ‘We are in the position of a testator who wishes to leave the bulk of his fortune to his mistress,’ said Portal of the situation. ‘He must however leave something to his wife, and the problem is how to decide how little he can in decency set apart for her.’8 It’s easy to see why people enjoyed working with the Chief of the Air Staff.
It became clear that the Americans wanted to advance their outpost line beyond the Solomon Islands to broaden their base of action and to get far more depth into their campaign against the Japanese Navy. As Dill had warned might happen, King openly expressed the suspicious (and deeply insulting) view that Britain ‘might not be wholehearted in taking [her] share of the Japanese War if it were left till after Germany’. The danger of China being forced out of the war by Japan was also stressed and it was agreed that it would be worth while making an advance into Burma from Assam in India in order to try to open the northern route to China, even though it might prove impossible to keep it open.
After much further discussion it was agreed to instruct the Joint Planners to examine and report on the minimum holding operations required in the Pacific. Hap Arnold remarked of this opening session that it was ‘not bad, everything seems to be smoothing out, I hope. British and us have not as yet put all cards on table, perhaps things will get worse then.’9 The meeting broke up for tea at 5 p.m., after which the Chiefs of Staff had a discussion with the British Joint Planners to instruct them on the line of action to take with their American opposite numbers. After that, Brooke went off bird-watching with Kennedy, and Arnold departed to see the refloated Vichy battleship Jean Bart, which had been hit with British 14-inch shells that, he recorded, had left ‘holes in bow and stern large enough to take a small bungalow’.
The presidential party–which included FDR’s sons Elliott and Franklin Jr, as well as Harry Hopkins and his son Robert–arrived on the afternoon of the 14th in six big planes escorted by fighters. At dinner at the Roosevelts’ villa that night, Admiral King, a heavy drinker, ‘became nicely lit up towards the end’ and got more and more assertive. With a thick voice and expansive gesticulations, he propounded his views on the best way to organize North Africa politically. This inevitably led to a clash with Churchill, who had failed to spot that King was drunk. ‘Most amusing to watch,’ was Brooke’s laconic comment on the scene.10 When an air-raid warning sounded at 1.30 a.m., the British and Americans all sat around the table illuminated only by six candles, before finally getting to bed half an hour later. When asked after the war if the Prime Minister ever ‘spoke from brandy’, Marshall said, ‘No, Churchill could hold it,’ adding that that was not always true of Admiral King.
The next morning, Friday 15 January, the news arrived that the Japanese were being driven from Guadalcanal; their expulsion from that island would be a significant American victory. At 8.45, ‘a lovely sunny morning’, Brooke and Kennedy walked down the beach and had a productive hour watching goldfinches, stonechats, warblers of all sorts, white wagtails and several types of waders on the sea-shore, including sanderlings, ring and grey plovers and turnstones. The Chiefs of Staff met later that morning to discuss ‘future projects to be put to the Americans’, and afterwards they met Churchill again. The Prime Minister advised that all the possibilities should be looked at and not just those for the Pacific, otherwise it might be like ‘carrying water from a well in a sieve
. There would be nothing left when we got home.’11 He was positive about the fighting in Tunisia, saying that ‘We had to wear the Germans down somewhere and it would be better if they came to us. We should have those in the bag eventually.’ He was right about that, largely because of Hitler’s refusal to entertain even tactical withdrawals. Of the prospect of a German invasion of Spain, Churchill repeated that ‘We had to fight the Germans somewhere and he did not mind whether it was France or in Spain or anywhere else.’ He approved an attack into Burma from Assam, and said that the Casablanca negotiations could not be rushed and would probably need ten days. Then he went off to lunch with the President. Kennedy meanwhile lunched with Harold Macmillan, who told him that when Churchill had advised him to rejoin the Army and Macmillan replied that he’d be more useful as a civilian, Churchill had said: ‘Yes, perhaps you are right. Between the bowler and the baton there is no middle course.’12
After lunch the Combined Chiefs of Staff returned to the relative merits of Roundup versus the Mediterranean. Brooke pointed out that the Germans now had forty-four divisions in France against a maximum of twenty-two Allied divisions which could be landed in the early stages, assuming the immediate transfer of landing craft from the Mediterranean, so any invasion would probably be defeated or confined to a beachhead.13 The Americans naturally did not accept this forecast, and relations were not improved by Brooke criticizing Eisenhower for a lack of co-ordination between the First and Eighth Armies in the failed operations against the Tunisian port of Sfax, which had been seized by the Germans in November 1942 and was held successfully by them until 10 April 1943.
At 5.30 p.m. the Combined Chiefs, along with Eisenhower, Alexander and Tedder, met Roosevelt and Churchill in the first of three plenary sessions–‘at which we did little’, recorded Brooke, ‘except that the President expressed views favouring operations in the Mediterranean’. Far from ‘little’, this was the first glimpse that, as with Torch, the Americans were split over strategy, and therefore might be prevailed over by isolating Marshall again. This time it would take much detailed argument, especially by Staffs, rather than the point-blank veto that Brooke had exercised in London back in July.
Wedemeyer, who considered Casablanca an almost personal defeat, claimed in his autobiography that on the second day of the conference Brooke had said that victory in the European Theatre might be possible by the end of 1943, but had then ‘let the cat out of the bag a little by saying we could “definitely” count on getting into Europe in 1944’.14 Yet in January 1943 Tunis had yet to be captured, so the odds on the Allied forces being moved to Britain for a cross-Channel attack before autumn were next to impossible, and the Channel became effectively impassable in late September. The German army in northern France was strong, not worn down by bombing or weakened by withdrawals to the Eastern Front, so Brooke was hardly letting any cats out of any bags with his remark.
Wedemeyer also alleged that Admiral King’s fear that strict adherence to Germany First might allow the Japanese to consolidate their gains in the Far East led him actively to support Operation Anakim, a proposed Anglo-American seaborne assault to recapture Burma from the Japanese, to be undertaken in late 1943. According to Wedemeyer, ‘King visibly annoyed the British, and they shifted uneasily’ at this advocacy of a major campaign there.15 While it is true that King annoyed the British throughout the Casablanca Conference, and they might well have shifted in their chairs, in fact they had also shifted their position over Anakim, and came out in its support.
Brooke irritated King generally, the admiral complaining that he ‘talked so damned fast that it was hard to understand what he was saying’. Jacob thought it more serious than that: ‘I think the CIGS’s extremely definite views, ultra-swift speech, and at times impatience made [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] keep wondering whether he was not putting something over on them.’ In light of what had happened over Sledgehammer, this was understandable.
After dinner that night Hopkins and Harriman visited Brooke, the former ‘in rather a bitter mood which I had not yet seen him in’, which provoked the CIGS’s ambiguous observation: ‘There is no doubt that we are too closely related to the Americans to make co-operation between us anything but easy.’ Perhaps, as Brooke probably meant to imply, the common language and culture were tending to cause more problems than they solved. Explaining Hopkins’ bitterness, his biographer Robert Sherwood wrote that Roosevelt’s confidant was ‘again disappointed and depressed by the further postponement of Roundup; he was always solidly with Marshall in the conviction that there was no really adequate substitute for the opening of a Second Front in France.’16 Might there also have been a scintilla of guilt in having effectively undermined the early Second Front when he had visited London with Marshall in July?
Wedemeyer was characteristically forthright on Torch:
After getting the African littoral, then the British maintained that you had to have Sicily because the enemy could occupy that and could jeopardize our lines of communication to the Middle East. Well, I would say…I don’t care what happens in the Middle East. Rommel could run rampant in Alexandria or Cairo or whatnot. What I wanted to do was to get quickly into the Ruhr and cut off the source of supplies for Rommel. He would die on a limb as I saw it.17 *
Meanwhile, over dinner in Roosevelt’s villa, Marshall and Eisenhower had to tell their commander-in-chief that he could not visit the front, as he had set his heart upon doing. Elliott recorded the difficult conversation, in which his father reminded his commanders that ‘he’d been up front in the last war, as assistant secretary of the Navy’, before insisting, ‘And I’m going up front in this one too.’ In fact Roosevelt had visited the Western Front for only a very few days in the Great War, mostly behind the lines, despite his regularly claiming over the years, quite untruthfully, to have seen a great deal first-hand of the ravages of that conflict.18 Of course, even had Marshall and Eisenhower known the truth about the President’s fantasies, they would hardly have exploded them. Instead the two generals merely exchanged a look, and went on eating. ‘Well?’ pursued Roosevelt. ‘Why the silence?’ ‘It’s impossible, sir,’ ventured Eisenhower. ‘Out of the question,’ agreed Marshall.19 The President tried to argue the issue, pointing out the lack of real danger and then suggesting that a fighter escort might protect him. The discussion ended only when Marshall concluded: ‘Orders are orders, sir. But if you give them, nobody in the US Army from us on down will take responsibility.’ Elliott recalled that Marshall ‘was very serious, and Father was very disappointed, but forced to agree.’ A compromise was reached by which Roosevelt instead reviewed three divisions of Patton’s troops north of Rabat.
‘There was a curious mixture of holiday and business in these extraordinarily oriental and fascinating surroundings,’ recorded Harold Macmillan of Casablanca in yet another against-regulations war diary.20 With his Balliol College, Oxford, classical education, Macmillan likened the Churchill–Roosevelt meeting to that of the Emperor of the East meeting the Emperor of the West in the later Roman Empire. Meanwhile Ian Jacob took away happy memories of Casablanca, especially of eating large juicy oranges for every meal, which had long been virtually unobtainable in England. He also recalled ‘sunshine on a diversity of beautiful colours, and oranges. The red soil, the blue sky, the sea with its perpetual surf, the white villas and farms, and the white mass of Casablanca town, the bougainvilleas, the begonia, and the green of orange grove and palm trees made a picture which one never tired of gazing at from the sunny roof garden.’
Between 10.30 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Saturday 16 January, Brooke tried to extol the positive advantages of his Mediterranean strategy. Of the US Chiefs, he wrote: ‘They can’t be pushed and hurried, and must be made gradually to assimilate our proposed policy.’ Jacob explained after the war that the Joint Chiefs of Staff agreed to the assault on Sicily (Operation Husky) only:
because we were representing to them that it was essential for the clearing of the Mediterranean and saving of shipping
, but they could not see the political and strategic importance of knocking Italy out of the war. They thought of the Mediterranean–and the opening of it–as a means of getting a shorter route to Burma and India, and to the Persian Gulf for Lend–Lease supplies to Russia. The idea of exploiting it to threaten Hitler’s southern flank appeared to them to be rather ridiculous.21
At another meeting from 3.30 p.m. to 5.15 p.m., Brooke thought he could spot ‘some progress’. Meanwhile, Churchill planned a reconciliation meeting between de Gaulle and Giraud, another object of the conference. Brooke dined that night with General Patton, whom he thought on first acquaintance ‘A real fire-eater and a definite character’, a good summation in both aspects.22
After the war, returning to a persistent theme, Brooke wrote that his job at Casablanca had been made ‘all the more difficult by the fact that amongst Marshall’s very high qualities he did not possess those of a strategist. It was almost impossible to get him to grasp the true concepts of a strategic situation.’ He yet again repeated the accusation that Marshall ‘preferred to hedge and defer decisions until such time as he had to consult his assistants. Unfortunately his assistants were not of the highest calibre, and Cooke was of a very low category.’ As for Patton, the post-war Brooke naturally considered him, like so very many other generals of the war, as ‘good for operations requiring thrust and push but at a loss in any operation requiring skill and judgment’.23 So ubiquitous was Brooke’s formula in his diaries that it unfortunately undermines the value of his individual estimations of people.
It is hardly surprising, considering these kinds of comments, confidential though they obviously were, that the Americans both detected Brooke’s contempt for their strategic abilities and resented it. In a long list of Brooke’s faults published in Moran’s controversial 1966 journals Churchill: The Struggle for Survival–including his matter-of-factness, straitjacketed mind, want of tact, and failure to appreciate Churchill’s achievement in ‘wooing the fickle Roosevelt’–the doctor–diarist argued that his gravest shortcoming was that ‘He did not get on with the Americans. His downright, direct speech, combined with his take-it-or-leave-it manner, did not help him to get his own way.’ Moran believed it was left to Dill ‘to bring Marshall into line’.24 There was much truth in this.
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