‘Another great difficulty is that if we go for the mainland of Italy we shall have to break it to the Americans that resources will be swallowed up which they want directed to the problematical invasion of France next spring, and to operations against Burma,’ Kennedy warned Brooke. ‘Of course the correct strategy is to continue to hammer Italy till she drops out of the war. It is childish to give up this object for anything else at the moment. But the Americans will not take this easily and another conference is essential to flog it all out.’ Brooke told Kennedy that at a Chiefs of Staff conference the previous week, ‘Winston held forth on this and said the Americans considered we had led them up the garden path in the Med–and a beautiful path it has turned out to be. They have picked peaches here, nectarines there, and we have done it all for them, etc, etc.’17 It was a joke that Churchill was to make quite often, but inadvisedly not always to Britons.
‘We are prepared to jump a bridgehead on the mainland at the earliest opportunity,’ General Alexander wrote to Churchill and Brooke on 22 July. Yet Marshall had still not been persuaded. Alexander’s biographer believes that the absence of any agreed post-Husky strategy meant that the wholesale capitulation of huge numbers of Germans in Tunisia was not repeated at Messina. Forty thousand Germans could be prevented from escaping across the Strait of Messina only by occupying the toe of Italy behind them, but ‘agreement to overlap the end of one campaign by the beginning of the next was not reached in time’.18 Because there was no written commitment at Trident to invade the Italian mainland, and Marshall had been reserved and cryptic about it at Algiers, the Germans managed to cross the Strait and escape. On 14 August Eisenhower admitted to Butcher that he had made a ‘mistake’ over ‘our super-cautious approach to Italy’, where ‘we should have made simultaneous landings on both sides of the Messina Strait, thus cutting off all Sicily and obtaining wholesale surrender.’19
Such an operation would not have been too difficult, either. In late July there were landing craft available and Allied air superiority was complete; the toe was barely defended except by some coastal guns. Had a single Allied corps advanced across the narrow peninsula and seized the ferry terminals north of Reggio, the whole of the Sicily garrison might have been captured.20 Yet any such landing on the Italian mainland would have involved a psychologically new departure of the war, one that needed the full agreement of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, which in effect meant Marshall.
As it was, the American and British strategists did agree on joint planning for Avalanche, much further up the leg of Italy, which Eisenhower put into active consideration before Palermo fell to Patton on 23 July. That day, Churchill rang Kennedy for casualty figures for the Sicilian campaign. Kennedy got them from the Adjutant-General’s statistical branch and read them over to the Prime Minister–1,000 killed, 1,700 missing, 4,000 wounded–saying it made a total of 5,600. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ said the Prime Minister immediately. ‘It is one thousand out.’ In fact it was 1,100 out, but Kennedy was impressed that Churchill’s mental arithmetic was fast enough to add the figures up while he was reading them out. (It later turned out that only seven hundred men were in fact missing.)
Mussolini fell on 24 July; isolated, bitter and depressed since El Alamein, he was voted out of office by his own creature, the Fascist Grand Council, by nineteen votes to seven. When he reported the result to King Victor Emmanuel, he was arrested, and Marshal Pietro Badoglio was asked to form a government. This released Churchill from the obligation made to Stimson not to move further north than Rome, as suddenly there was indeed the prospect of being able to ‘obtain a complete Italian capitulation, throwing open the whole of Italy’. After tortuous negotiations with the Italians, in the armistice finally signed at Cassibile on 3 September both Churchill and Roosevelt insisted that the Badoglio Government declare war on Germany, which it did six weeks later, to Hitler’s great fury.
On 30 July Brooke received from Kennedy an appreciation of the size of the Allied forces required if from thirteen to eighteen German divisions chose to make a stand on the 100-mile-wide Ravenna–Pisa line. Kennedy estimated that sixteen Allied divisions would be needed for Italy, including one in Sicily, assuming that the Germans needed to keep four or five in the Po Valley guarding their lines of communication through a hostile Italian population. Brooke added six divisions to this total, on the basis that ‘We had a similar number on the Tunisian front’ which was roughly the same length, but here the Germans were fighting closer to home and therefore could more easily reinforce Italy. These calculations meant that he would have to discuss with Marshall the rescinding of their agreement to return seven divisions from the Mediterranean to the UK on 1 November. ‘He is certainly against taking any chance and no doubt he is right,’ thought Kennedy.
In early August Kennedy was worried that ‘it will be extremely difficult to get the Americans to agree to an advance to the north of Italy. Marshall has always held that it would be a bottomless pit into which to fling resources and is still obsessed by the idea of invading France.’ Brooke never accepted that Marshall understood the British concept for the Mediterranean. Even in 1958, when NBC made a radio programme about Marshall, Brooke told the interviewer: ‘I look upon him more as a great organizer than a great strategist.’ (He pronounced it ‘strateegist’, with a long ‘e’.) He did at least add: ‘He was amongst the biggest gentlemen, and using that term in its very best sense, that I’ve ever met. [He had] a sense of extraordinary integrity. One could trust him with anything, simply…He treated his inferiors almost the same as his peers.’21
The need to agree the next stage of the Italian campaign meant that another major conference was badly needed, and in July the long-serving Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King generously offered to host it in Quebec the following month, to be codenamed Quadrant.
The night before he left for Canada on the Queen Mary on Thursday 5 August, Churchill spoke after dinner to Eden, who said that he thought the conference would ‘infuriate Uncle Joe’. Churchill accepted that it would but thought that ‘If we could persuade the Americans to help us form a line in the valley of the Po…and thus open a real Second Front, Joe might become more amenable again.’22 In fact, as we have seen, Stalin took Anglo-American co-operation for granted. Churchill’s answer showed what he wanted out of Quadrant. It was very substantially what Brooke wanted too. On their five-day Atlantic journey, the two men reviewed every aspect of their plans, ‘knowing that their reception by their American colleagues, although physically warm, would not necessarily be strategically welcoming’.23 Churchill also brought the Chindit leader Orde Wingate along to persuade the Americans that the British were serious in Burma.
On the train to the port of Faslane, 25 miles west of Glasgow where they were to board the liner, ‘a furious’ Brooke told Joan Bright, who had organized the accommodation, ‘with sharp clarity never again to allocate him a sleeping compartment right above the grinding train wheels’. He did not give her time to reply that she had naturally accorded him Compartment A as the right one for someone of his seniority. Minutes later Portal complained that she had put Wing-Commander Guy Gibson VC, the hero of the Dambusters Raid, into a second-class compartment, but, as she recalled, ‘the effects of this attack did not last so long as those produced by General Sir Alan Brooke.’24
During the voyage, Churchill invited the War Office Planners to prepare a strategy for the invasion of northern Sumatra, codenamed Operation Culverin. This was to be a key aspect of his strategy centred on the Bay of Bengal, based on retaking Rangoon, northern Sumatra and Singapore, which was completely at variance with the Far Eastern strategy that Brooke and the Chiefs of Staff wanted to pursue, 2,000 miles to the east in the Pacific. ‘Great show,’ recalled one of the Planners, Captain C. E. Lambe RN, of Churchill’s request, ‘he was drinking white wine, dressed in black dressing gown with golden dragons. Gave us a fine feed–everything just right–then patted us on the shoulders and said be good boys and write me a nice plan.�
�� They delivered it when they got to Quebec, along with a covering letter to Ismay declaring that the scheme was ‘no good’, signed by them all. Somehow Ismay failed to detach the letter from the plan and both went on to the Prime Minister. ‘When Winston saw our names,’ recalled Captain Lambe, ‘he roared: “The Joint Planners are suspended.”’25 They asked Ismay what this involved, and learnt that they ought to carry on exactly as before, but just toregard themselvesas suspended. (As we have seen, this suspension story has also been told in relation to Jupiter. Whichever operation it was, the episode clearly didn’t affect the future career of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Lambe, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff in the 1950s.)
On the journey over, Brooke persuaded Churchill not to present their Po strategy in terms of ultimately going either to Vienna or into the Balkans, which would only result in Marshall turning against the concept completely. The British argument for the advance to the Po was thus made on the sole ground of drawing off German divisions from Normandy. It was a sensible recommendation, and served Churchill well.
The Queen Mary docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the afternoon of Monday 9 August, and the British party took a special train to Quebec, arriving at 6 p.m. the next day. They occupied the fifteenth floor of the Château Frontenac hotel, a magnificent edifice which still completely dominates the Quebec skyline, and then every odd-numbered floor down to the lobby; the Americans took the sixteenth floor, and then every even-numbered floor downwards. The Combined Chiefs met in the Salon Rose on the second floor, a pink room with a fine view over the St Lawrence River, and press conferences were convened in the ground-floor coffee shop. Oranges were flown in from New York for the delegates’ juice, and the Canadian Government paid for everything. ‘We were spoiled,’ recalls Joan Bright, ‘even to a running buffet being set up in the foyer of the dining room for all those who could not forgo their tea and coffee breaks.’26
With a few days to go before the conference opened, Churchill headed off to Hyde Park for three days between 12 and 14 August, via the Niagara Falls. Since all three of the British Chiefs of Staff and Mountbatten were keen fishermen, they went to the lakes north of Quebec. At one point Mountbatten (he claimed) saved Dudley Pound from falling into a ravine. It was on that trip that the First Sea Lord’s failing powers became unavoidably apparent. ‘On the way back we had great difficulty in getting him back to the car,’ noted Brooke. ‘He seemed completely exhausted.’ It was considerably worse than that.
‘Both sides approached Quadrant in an exasperated mood,’ Field Marshal Lord Bramall and General Sir William Jackson write in their authoritative history of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, ‘verging upon outright mistrust of each other.’27 It was the third major Anglo-American strategy conference in only seven months, so exasperation might have played a part. That was no excuse for the unnamed Planner, however, who absent-mindedly left a file of top-secret strategy documents in the Salon Rose after a meeting. All the hotel employees had already been security-screened by the Canadian intelligence services, but nonetheless the blameless hotel bell-hop, Frank Brettle, who had found the file and immediately handed it to a Mountie, noticed that he was being followed for months afterwards.
One of the few fictional accounts of the Combined Chiefs of Staff to appear in literature can be found in the American author J. G. Cozzens’ 1949 novel Guard of Honor. In it, a USAAF general Joseph Nichols watches Roosevelt and Churchill confer with their Staffs at Quadrant, and notices how:
The object could not be simply to concert a wisest and best course. The object was to strike a bargain which was the congeries of a thousand small bargains wherein both high contracting parties had been trying, if possible, to get something for nothing; and if that were not possible, to give a little in order to gain a lot…Agreement was ordinarily resisted by mutual misrepresentation, and obtained by a balance of disguised bribes and veiled threats.28
This might have seemed a cynical view so soon after the war, but it was surprisingly accurate. Indeed, one of the complaints that Brooke made about Churchill’s sudden volte face on the penultimate day of Trident had been that by questioning his small deals the Prime Minister was jeopardizing the larger concessions he had wrung from Marshall.
Stimson, the US Secretary of War, was scheduled to be on holiday during the Quebec Conference, which shows how completely he had been eclipsed by Marshall in strategic decision-making. But he was due to meet Roosevelt at 1 p.m. on Tuesday 10 August, before the conference opened. After breakfast that day, he dictated a memorandum to Roosevelt which might have doubled as a resignation letter had discussions gone awry. It repeated the conclusions of the memorandum drawn up after the disastrous Dover train journey with Churchill, and insisted that Marshall rather than Brooke be given command of Overlord. ‘We cannot now rationally hope to be able to cross the Channel and come to grips with our German enemy under a British commander,’ the War Secretary wrote. ‘The Prime Minister and his Chief of the Imperial Staff [sic] are frankly at variance with such a proposal. The shadows of Passchendaele and Dunkerque still hang too heavily over the imagination of his government. Though they have rendered lip service to the operation, their hearts are not in it.’ By total contrast, ‘General Marshall already has a towering eminence of reputation as a tried soldier and as a broad-minded and skilful administrator.’29
Once the letter was typed up he signed it, and then showed it to Marshall, ‘in case he had any objections to it’. Marshall merely said that ‘he did not want it to appear’ that Stimson had consulted him about it, and the War Secretary replied that that was why he had signed the paper before showing it to him and he would not show it to anybody else. So armed, Stimson went to the White House and had ‘one of the most satisfactory conferences I have ever had with the President’. The reason was obvious: Roosevelt also preferred Marshall to Brooke.
The President invited Stimson to stay for a meeting with the Joint Chiefs at which he ‘went the whole hog’ on the subject of Overlord, insisting that ‘We should have more soldiers in Britain dedicated for that purpose than the British.’ They then discussed the best stance to take at Quebec, and Roosevelt made it clear that he wished to go ‘no further into Italy than Rome and then for the purpose of establishing [air] bases’. He confirmed that he wanted an American commander for Overlord, which must have pleased Marshall, who knew what Stimson had been discussing with FDR only moments earlier.
The Joint Chiefs emerged from the meeting ‘astonished and delighted at his definiteness’, upon which Stimson naturally congratulated himself. Brooke seems to have had no comprehension of this lobbying for a position he hoped was his, even though Frederick Morgan, who ran COSSAC, recalled that ‘throughout the summer there was continual hardening of unofficial opinion that the Supreme Commander would be George C. Marshall’, opinion of which Brooke could not have been unaware.30
The first Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting at Quadrant took place on Saturday 14 August, before which Dill had given Brooke prior warning that Marshall and both the other American Chiefs of Staff had ‘a feeling that the British are not standing firm enough to considered decision of Trident, and are tending too readily to depart from these decisions and to set aside the operations already agreed upon’. In particular Dill wanted Brooke to appreciate that, although the Joint Chiefs of Staff wished to force Italy out of the war, they would not countenance Pacific or Overlord operations suffering because of it. The conference thus started off with a Joint Chiefs of Staff position paper demanding a reiteration of the Trident promise to pull out the seven divisions by 1 November 1943, and stating that ‘The US Chiefs of Staff believe that the acceptance of this decision must be without conditions and without mental reservations.’31 For Brooke, the next day was even worse. Indeed, apart from the death of Janey, it was most probably the worst of his life.
Just before lunch on Sunday 15 August, Churchill sent for Brooke to come to the Citadel, where he was staying for the conference. Not far from the Château Fr
ontenac, the Citadel was a military stronghold from the eighteenth century, 200 feet above the St Lawrence River with magnificent views. To the south-west are the Plains of Abraham, where Wolfe defeated the Marquis de Montcalm in twenty minutes in a surprise attack that won Canada for the British Empire in September 1759, both of them dying in the process. Neither the view nor the glorious history was to provide much comfort to Brooke, however.
Churchill had just returned from a meeting with Roosevelt at which Hopkins had pressed hard for the appointment of Marshall as supreme commander for Overlord. ‘As far as I can gather Winston gave in,’ Brooke told his diary, ‘in spite of having previously promised me the job!!’ The Prime Minister asked Brooke how he felt about it and was told, with some understatement, that he ‘could not feel otherwise than disappointed’. They then discussed other appointments, including Eisenhower’s becoming US Army chief of staff in Marshall’s place, and Brooke said that he thought Mountbatten ‘lacked balance’ for the job of supreme commander of the newly formed South-East Asia Command. Brooke then realized that Mountbatten’s appointment had actually been a quid pro quo for his not getting command of Overlord, which only made the situation worse, as the two posts were in no way analogous.
After the war Brooke wrote of this shattering blow to his hopes, which had been so assiduously stoked by Churchill for so long. ‘I remember it as if it was yesterday as we walked up and down on the terrace outside the drawing room of the Citadel,’ he recalled. ‘Looking down on to that wonderful view of the St Lawrence River, and the fateful scene of Wolfe’s battle for the heights of Quebec. As Winston spoke all that scenery was swamped by a dark cloud of despair.’ He remembered how two months before El Alamein he had given up the chance of taking over Auchinleck’s command because he needed to guide Churchill, but with the broad global strategy now agreed he ‘felt no longer necessarily tied to Winston, and free to assume this Supreme Command which he had already promised me on three separate occasions’.32
Masters and Commanders Page 52
