‘I kept on feeling I had been transported back to the old days, and expected the Governor to appear at any moment,’ Brooke told his diary. He was also enchanted by the flower arrangements in the mansion, done ‘on historical principles’, and by the way clothes were laid out, the chessmen on a board, gloves on a table and books pulled out for reference, all ‘as if the house was inhabited’. There was undoubtedly a romantic, almost whimsical side to the flinty Ulsterman. They left at midnight, each in turn shaking hands with Fleming, the palace’s usher. Marshall later told Admiral Stark that his guests ‘appeared to enjoy it thoroughly, examining everything minutely and at great length. The Sea Lord and the Air Marshal even went swimming, in water too frigid to tempt anyone else.’40
On Sunday morning, after ham and eggs on the terrace, Marshall and Brooke became engrossed watching a robin redbreast feed her young in a pine tree. Marshall asked the innkeeper whether there were any orioles in that part of the world, and was told there were. They made a tentative plan to view some later. Marshall’s modesty also led to his asking for a less conspicuous pew than the Governor’s in Bruton Parish Church, where they all attended the Sunday-morning service. Admiral Pound read the lesson, St Matthew 6 verses 19 to 34, from a Bible donated by King Edward VII on the tercentenary of the founding of the Episcopalian Church in America. ‘Take therefore no thought for the morrow,’ he read; ‘for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.’ It was a perfect summation of the weekend.
Unfortunately, before Marshall and Brooke could go looking for orioles–‘Behold the fowls of the air’ had featured in Pound’s reading–Marshall and Portal were called off at 10.50 a.m. to see the President and Churchill at Shangri-La (now Camp David). They flew to Washington and then on to Hagerstown, Maryland, where they motored up into the mountains. One wonders what Brooke felt about the others conferring without him. Since the discussions were about Eisenhower’s reception of Marshall’s plans for Sicily, they did concern him, but Churchill probably did not want to interpose the CIGS into what was primarily an American matter. In 1955, Marshall recalled to a would-be biographer that he was ‘most impressed’ by Brooke and the other Britons that weekend.
Some swam, some occupied themselves in photography (Lord Wavell), but Alan Brooke, with his field glasses, devoted his time to a study of the Virginia birds in that locality. His persistence and his pleasure in his task were very appealing. We had been having a very hard time in Washington reaching agreements, but the weekend in Williamsburg with no business discussions cleared the air entirely.41
Back at the Inn there were mint juleps before Sunday luncheon–lobster salad, cold Virginia ham, cold roast turkey and crabflake soufflé–and then they returned to the airfield for the 160-mile flight back to Washington and a Chiefs of Staff meeting at 5.30 p.m.
In a novel, the Chiefs’ sojourn together would have brought a miracle breakthrough in negotiations, with spontaneous Anglo-American trust and unity breaking out the very next morning. The reality of global war was different. ‘Another very disappointing day,’ recorded Brooke, after a long strategy meeting on Monday 17 May, ‘which led us nowhere.’ He put this down to national characteristics, and the supposed fact that ‘the American mind likes proceeding from the general to the particular, whilst in the problem we have to solve we cannot evolve any form of general doctrine until we have carefully examined the particular details of each problem.’ Brooke had to admit, however, that the major problem ‘really arises out of King’s desire to find every loophole he possibly can to divert troops to the Pacific!’42
Trident is regarded as one of the most ill-tempered and rancorous of all the wartime summits, not least because after their perceived ‘defeat’ at Brooke’s hands at Casablanca the Americans were determined not to lose out again. Leahy had to admit to the Chinese representative in Washington, Dr T. V. Soong, that information regarding aircraft shipments to China could not be given him ‘because of the present unsettled state of the Staff conversations’.43 Only very slowly did the bare outlines of anagreement for a spring 1944 cross-Channel attack, to take place after an invasion of mainland Italy, emerge from the hard-fought negotiations.
‘The Americans are now taking up the attitude that we led them down the garden path taking them to attack North Africa!’ noted Brooke on Tuesday 18 May. ‘That at Casablanca we again misled them by inducing them to attack Sicily!! And now they are not going to be led astray again.’ Only half jokingly he added, ‘before long they will be urging that we should defeat Japan first!’ Re-reading his diaries after the war, Brooke admitted that it was ‘evident’ that he ‘went through a phase of deep depression’ during Trident. He blamed this on the Americans who ‘still failed to grasp how we were preparing for a re-entry into France through our actions in the Mediterranean’.
Yet again he listed the advantages of the Mediterranean strategy as having opened up that inland sea, ‘and in doing so had regained the equivalent of about a million tons of shipping’, taken a quarter of a million Axis prisoners in Tunisia–roughly the same number as were killed or captured at Stalingrad–and inflicted heavy losses at sea and in the air, opened the way for an attack on Sicily and Italy, forcing the enemy to defend southern Europe–‘a region of bad intercommunication’–and allowing the bombing of Germany from the south. Few of these, except the first and last, would have impressed Marshall, however. Prisoners would have been captured and damage inflicted, he believed, in a cross-Channel attack, where the communications in southern Europe would have been irrelevant. Similarly, if the Allies had won a foothold in Normandy, the bombing of Germany could have been carried out from airfields just as close as Foggia in Italy. The great advantage of Foggia, however, was that the Roumanian oil fields of Ploesti could be attacked, which was not possible from bases in Britain and Normandy. Most of the Wehrmacht’s oil came from Roumania.
American resentment manifested itself at Trident when, walking to a Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting with Brooke and Dill, Marshall said: ‘I find it very hard even now not to look on your North African strategy with a jaundiced eye.’ Brooke asked what he would have preferred. Marshall answered: ‘Cross-Channel operations for the liberation of France and advance on Germany, we should finish the war quicker.’ ‘Yes, probably,’ came Brooke’s rejoinder, ‘but not the way we hope to finish it!’44 Sharp-tongued ripostes like that were something of a speciality with Brooke, honed by his regular verbal jousting with Churchill.
‘It was quite evident that Marshall was quite incapable of grasping the objects of our strategy,’ Brooke noted for about the dozenth time as he re-read his diaries, ‘nor the magnitude of operations connected with cross Channel strategy…Any attempts to unduly push our strategy on Marshall had a distinct tendency to drive him into King’s Pacific Camp.’ This was wildly unfair: Marshall understood perfectly what Brooke was telling him over and over again; it was just that he disagreed with it. Furthermore, except for very briefly in July 1942–which, as we have seen, was almost certainly a bluff anyway–Marshall never reneged on Germany First.
Part of the explanation for Anglo-American tension might have lain in something as prosaic as the seating arrangements at Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings. At the back of the room sat large numbers of Planning officers and other experts, up to sixty of them, whose mere presence increased the antagonistic, even gladiatorial, nature of the encounters. The atmosphere has been compared to ‘a centre court tennis match at Wimbledon with tiers of supporting staff seated behind their principals’.45
Wednesday 19 May saw the toughest day of a tough conference. Both sides began the 10.30 a.m. Combined Chiefs meeting by criticizing the other’s papers on future strategy. Marshall then suggested the conference room be cleared for an off-the-record discussion between the two Staffs alone. Rather like a boxing match where the seconds leave the ring, the room emptied; tennis was replaced by pugilism. The six Chiefs remained, plus Leahy, Dill and a secretary whose pen was firmly holstered. ‘We then had hear
t to heart talk and as a result of it at last found a bridge across which we could meet!’ wrote Brooke. ‘Not altogether a satisfactory one, but far better than a break up of the conference!’
Brooke’s reminiscences about these off-the-record meetings, given to NBC in 1958, are worth reproduction in extenso:
At a long table on one side sat the American Chiefs of Staff with their secretary, on the other side we sat with our secretary and in the back of the room were a rather large number of staff officers–possibly thirty on either side. It rather weighted the atmosphere of the conference when you had sixty onlookers…A lot of the items on the agenda were settled quite easily but occasionally amongst the more difficult ones we argued up to a certain point where it became clear that we were going to have difficulties at arriving at agreement. Well, then, depending on who happened to be in the chair, either Marshall or I would suggest that we should have an off-the-record conference, and clear the room. By clearing the room of this rather heavy atmosphere, and by being able to take our hair down then and really thrash out the matter, we knew that we had to arrive at an agreement. It was no good going up and meeting the President and the Prime Minister and telling them we had failed to agree…Well, by approaches then of a rather more intimate [nature]–and that is a time when General Marshall always shone, he was always perfectly ready to discuss–he put his cards on the table and we put our cards on the table and we shuffled them round until we got some pattern out of it. And I felt always in those discussions there how fortunate we were to have a man of Marshall’s temperament, integrity and outlook generally, to arrive at these decisions, and how difficult it could have been had we had someone else in the chair…We both spoke the same language, but rather more than that…There’s rather more than a language between English-speaking people. I think it’s an English way of thinking that we have, and I found that Marshall had the same way of thinking that I had.46
Of course this was far from Brooke’s earlier phrenological view about how British and American minds worked in completely different ways.
Sure enough, by 6 p.m. on 19 May, before the American Chiefs entertained their British counterparts to dinner at the Statler Hotel, they had agreed that an initial assault force of nine divisions, growing quickly to twenty-nine, would be prepared for entry into France by 1 May 1944. Meanwhile, Eisenhower would exploit victory in Sicily in ways that ‘are best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces’.47 Although this did not quite amount to a written commitment to invade mainland Italy after Sicily, and the wording left Eisenhower as the ultimate arbiter, it seemed obvious that the only way to force an Italian surrender was to land troops. Even so, Brooke considered that the agreement on Italy had been ‘a triumph as Americans wanted to close down all operations in Med after capture of Sicily’.
It was at Trident that the British made the first of three binding decisions to launch a cross-Channel invasion in May 1944, and the price the Americans seem to have paid–off-the-record meetings really were just that–was an Italian campaign. Marshall finally had a firm date for Roundup–from now on called Operation Overlord–but it looked as if he and King might be reluctantly dragged behind Brooke’s chariot wheels, step by step all the way up to the Eternal City. Brooke was also bound, in the black-and-white of the final report, to allow the seven divisions to be removed from the Mediterranean on 1 November 1943.
Their first off-the-record meeting without advisers had been successful, and the technique was later to be used on several occasions when Marshall and Brooke, in Brooke’s words, ‘arrived at loggerheads. It always helped to clear the air.’ Brooke believed that, without the vast staffs present, Marshall felt less uneasy about ‘shifting from some policy he had been briefed on by his Staff lest they should think he was lacking in determination’. This too was unfair: Marshall was not the kind of man to be unduly influenced by a desire to retain the esteem of his Staff rather than doing what he thought right, and it ignores the fact that Brooke shifted significantly too, in a way his own Planners might deprecate, especially in agreeing a definite date for Overlord and relinquishing the seven divisions from Italy. Roosevelt was keen on getting a date for the cross-Channel operation by the end of the conference, so Brooke knew he could hardly hold out over furnishing one. Just as the 1942 mid-terms had influenced the Torch decision, so the looming 1944 presidential elections affected the Trident ones.
Brooke accepted that the Allies should discuss how far Italy needed to be penetrated, which proved a contentious issue for the rest of the war, the British generally wanting to push much further north up the peninsula than did the Americans (except Mark Clark).48 Whereas the Americans only ever saw the Italian campaign as a way of drawing off German divisions from France and Russia, and for setting up air bases in the Foggia Plains, the British believed it had a further inherent value as a gateway into various other places in Europe, including France, Austria and the Balkans. Yet they knew that when on 1 November 1943 Marshall came to demand his seven divisions for Overlord, the push northwards up Italy would necessarily be undermined.
The off-the-record discussion method was used again over Burma at the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting on Thursday 20 May, after there was a ‘complete impasse’ over the American desire to attack that country from the north-eastern Indian province of Assam, ‘contrary to all administrative possibilities’, so the British thought. The deal struck on that occasion was that ten thousand tons of supplies a month would be sent to China from India, and that an air offensive would be conducted against Burma from Assam, but there would be no land offensive in the short term. This agreement was reached just in time for the Combined Chiefs of Staff members to be serenaded by a Marine band at the White House, prior to the British Chiefs giving their American counterparts dinner. Further agreements were made the next day on American plans against Japan in the central Pacific, this time all on the record.
In his memoirs, Leahy listed the agreements made at Trident as: a twenty-nine-division cross-Channel invasion from England by 1 May 1944; an intensified combined bomber offensive against Germany; the attack on Sicily; the destruction of the Ploesti oil fields; the occupation of the Azores; ten thousand tons of supplies a month to be flown from India to China; the seizure of New Guinea and the Marshall, Caroline, Solomon and Aleutian Islands, and an air campaign against Burma.49 There was no written commitment to invade Italy in the final report of Trident, however, nor for any action elsewhere in the Mediterranean once Sicily had fallen.
When Brooke spoke of Allied troops’ inexperience and lack of manpower for Overlord, compared with possibilities in the Mediterranean, Marshall replied that the invasion of Italy would create a ‘vacuum’ for 1944. He bluntly stated that if the British ‘were committed to the Mediterranean, except for air power alone, it meant a prolonged struggle and one that was not acceptable to the United States.’50 The deal was clear if not written down: either both Italy and Overlord were to be undertaken, or neither was. Leahy might have been biased, but he was right in thinking that a pendulum had swung since Casablanca, when the British had gained all their desiderata to the Americans’ intense chagrin. Now, only four months later, ‘Roosevelt, who seemed to dominate the conference, finally obtained British approval in principle of his plans, including the 1944 invasion. He also succeeded in getting approval of a plan that was effective in keeping China in the war against Japan.’51 Roosevelt’s change of mind on Overlord at Trident led directly to the change of Allied policy, and the setting of the May 1944 date for the operation.
From 4.30 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday 24 May the Combined Chiefs of Staff were at the White House presenting their joint final report of agreements reached during the conference. Yet one aspect, an American proposal to attack Sardinia, Churchill now refused to accept, and instead spent an hour trying to extend the whole Mediterranean theatre into Yugoslavia and Greece, something the Americans would not entertain. He asked that the final decision be postponed until t
he next day. This hugely increased the Americans’ suspicion of British double-dealing, knowing as they did how closely and often Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff conferred. ‘The PM’s attitude is in exact agreement with the permanent British policy of controlling the Mediterranean Sea regardless of what may be the result of the war,’ a profoundly distrustful Leahy told his diary. ‘It has been consistently opposed by the American Chiefs of Staff because of the probability that American troops will be used in the Mediterranean Area at the expense of direct action against Germany.’52
Brooke was livid with Churchill, describing his behaviour as ‘tragic’. Having agreed the final report, and Roosevelt even having congratulated the Combined Chiefs on it, ‘Now at the eleventh hour he wished to repudiate half of it.’ Worse, some of his proposed alterations were on points that Brooke had conceded to Marshall in the course of their hard-fought and detailed negotiations in order to secure better ones. High-level pacts on global grand strategy were multi-layered and multifaceted. ‘He had no idea of the difficulties we have been through,’ complained Brooke, ‘and just crashed in “where angels fear to tread”.’
Brooke feared that Marshall and the Joint Chiefs would assume that he had ‘gone behind their backs in an attempt to obtain those points through Winston…and it was not possible to explain to them how independent Winston was in his actions.’ After the war Brooke recalled Churchill saying that he ‘always feared that we should “frame up” (he actually accused me in those terms one day) with the American Chiefs of Staff against him! He knew the Americans could carry the President with them, and he feared being opposed by a combined Anglo-American block of Chiefs of Staff plus President.’53 Far from ‘framing up’ with Marshall, Brooke said he was usually ‘at loggerheads with him over Pacific and cross Channel strategy’, but ‘Under such circumstances it may be imagined how complicated matters became!’ While Churchill feared Brooke and Marshall ‘framing up’ against him, Brooke was anxious lest Marshall think that he (Brooke) was not supporting Roosevelt and Marshall against Churchill, when in fact he was. Matters had indeed become complicated, and were about to get more so.
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