Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Nor had Brooke ever been philosophically opposed to the Roundup–Overlord operation, as Americans like Stimson, King, Handy, Wedemeyer, Hull and Elliott Roosevelt alleged; he had just been opposed to crossing over too early. Furthermore, he had resolutely not done what a number of other generals might have in his position, which was to change his tune and extravagantly champion Overlord in the hope of securing its command for himself. He had put his professional judgement first, and had paid a very high price for it. If he had commanded on D-Day, it is likely that the name of Brooke would be as famous as that of any Allied general of the Second World War, indeed as famous as Marlborough’s or Wellington’s.

  What made it worse for Brooke was Churchill’s reaction. ‘Not for one moment did he realize what this meant to me,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘He offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were one of minor importance!’ Churchill, who always wanted to lead great armies himself, simply must have felt Brooke’s disappointment, not least because it was verbally expressed to him on the Citadel terrace that afternoon. Stiff-upperlipped, upper-class, Ulster-born senior soldiers of the early 1940s were perhaps the very last people in the world ever to allow their emotions to show; they were about as far from the touchy-feely as it is culturally, socially and generationally possible to be. Yet Churchill cannot have failed to notice Brooke’s profound dismay just because he did not remonstrate with him, or remind him that he had thrice offered him the post.

  Of course we only have Brooke’s word for it that the Prime Minister offered no word of consolation, but it is clear that the CIGS deeply resented it. For him the incontrovertible fact that many more Americans were due to take part in Overlord, and should therefore be commanded by one, ‘did not soften the blow, which took me several months to recover from’. In fact Brooke never truly recovered from it at all, certainly not by the time of the publication of The Turn of the Tide in 1957, which contained severe criticisms of Churchill that effectively severed their relations. For the legendarily tough-minded ‘Colonel Shrapnel’, who suffered fools not at all, it might be thought that he only received what he had spent years dishing out, but as Moran put it: ‘In that moment there was revealed to Brooke the crushing indifference of these monolithic figures to the lower forms of life.’33

  It was not only the deed itself that Brooke minded so much, but the fact that ‘the only reference to my feelings’ in the fifth volume of Churchill’s war memoirs, Closing the Ring, published in 1952, was the single phrase that he ‘bore the great disappointment with soldierly dignity’.34 In an earlier draft Churchill had written: ‘I had to break the news to Brookie. He was bitterly pained, but bore it all as a soldier should. Not one word escaped him.’35 Churchill explained in his memoirs that politically Roosevelt could not have allowed a foreign commander for an army that was expected to exceed two million men, a majority of them American. As Leahy put it in his autobiography, ‘I would have had no personal objection to Brooke, but if he or any other Englishman had been named to the post, there would have been a storm of criticism in our country.’ In the earlier draft of his memoirs, Churchill also gave a more Machiavellian explanation for the decision:

  I had the fear that if a bloody and disastrous repulse were encountered, far bigger than the first day’s battle in the Somme in 1916, there might be an outcry in the United States. It would be said that another result would have attended the appointment of an American general. I therefore made my mind up on the voyage over to propose to the President that he should choose the general to whom so much would be confided. If he refused, our position would be invulnerable.36

  These two passages were edited out just before publication, which was very damaging to Brooke’s subsequent relations with Churchill.

  Stimson, called from vacation to Quebec on 22 August, was told by Roosevelt that ‘Churchill had voluntarily come to him and offered to accept Marshall for the Overlord operation.’ In another conversation, Churchill ‘said he had done so in spite of the fact that he had previously promised the position to Brooke and that this would embarrass him somewhat, but he showed no evidence of retreating from his suggestion.’ Stimson recalled, ‘I was of course greatly cheered up.’37

  Would Brooke have made a good supreme commander? Sir James Grigg was doubtful, telling an interviewer after the war that his utter disdain for popularity or public relations–let alone public opinion–would have counted against him. ‘A successful commander in the field must be able to command the imagination of his troops and impress his personality on them,’ argued Grigg. ‘It was doubtful if Brooke had the patience or understanding to do this; rarely did he inspire affection because he was too insular and rarely proffered friendship.’38 The lengths to which some commanders went to create charismatic personae for themselves–Montgomery, Mountbatten, MacArthur and Patton foremost among them–were always dismissed by Brooke as mere ‘stunts’. Meanwhile, several rumours went around the War Office about why Brooke had not been chosen, the most fanciful of which was recorded by Kennedy, who wondered ‘if it can be true that’ Brooke had ‘offended Mrs Roosevelt by some remark about niggers. Less surprising things have happened before.’39

  Four decades after the decision, Jock Colville recalled that ‘Roosevelt was determined the commander should be American, even though neither Marshall nor Eisenhower had Brooke’s experience or strategic brilliance.’ A devil’s advocate–and there was no shortage of them in the Pentagon–might have pointed out that Brooke’s last two forays on the Continent had both ended in humiliating evacuations. The restriction of the choice of supreme commander of Overlord to Americans was a clear signal that the Atlantic balance of power had shifted, and for all his enthusiasm and bulldog spirit, Churchill was simply not in a strong enough political position vis-à-vis Roosevelt to award the post to Brooke, even though he had thrice promised it him. When it came to the ultimate decision-making moment, however, as is clear from several sources, including Ismay’s interview with Pogue–‘Churchill on his own initiative told FDR that the commander should be an American’–there was no contest.40 Brooke’s subsequent behaviour at the time of the publication of his memoirs was self-defeating–even, to some, reprehensible–but it was entirely understandable.

  PART III

  Estrangement

  15

  From the St Lawrence to the Pyramids: ‘All this “Overlord” folly must be thrown “Overboard”’ August–November 1943

  I suppose that when working with allies, compromises, with all their evils, become inevitable.

  General Sir Alan Brooke, August 19431

  Only moments after being dealt his terrible disappointment at lunchtime on Sunday 15 August 1943, Brooke had to attend a Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting at 2.30 p.m., which lasted for ‘3 very unpleasant hours’. Marshall argued that, if Overlord did not have ‘overriding priority’ over Italy and everywhere else, then ‘in his opinion the operation was doomed and our whole strategic concept would have to be recast’. This was of course simply the same old threat to dump Germany First in favour of the Pacific. He further insisted on the seven divisions being removed from Italy by the agreed date. Brooke reiterated that the Mediterranean and cross-Channel operations were not in competition but rather intimately connected, the former being intended to draw off German forces from the latter.

  The fact that he had just heard that an American–therefore probably Marshall–would take the post he coveted, and had doubtless made private plans for, cannot have helped Brooke’s temper, and he predictably noted in his diary of Marshall: ‘It is quite impossible to argue with him as he does not even begin to understand a strategic problem!’ Both Marshall–the boy crying ‘Wolf!’ over Japan yet again–and Brooke, mistaking plain disagreement for strategic ignorance, were starting to sound like stuck gramophone records by the late summer of 1943. That evening Brooke dined alone with his thoughts, after which he spoke to Dill, who had earlier found Marshall ‘most unmanageable and
irreconcilable, even threatening to resign if we pressed our point’. That ‘point’ was explained in one sentence by Brooke: ‘By giving full priority to the cross Channel preparations you might well cripple the Italian theatre and thus render it unable to contain the German forces necessary to render the cross Channel operation possible.’2

  Marshall definitely himself dated what he later called his ‘big break’ with Brooke to his own insistence that the seven divisions come out of Italy in order to ‘solidify on a practical basis for the landings in Normandy’. With Overlord intended to number from twenty-seven to twenty-nine divisions, these therefore made up one-quarter of the entire force, and were thus indispensable. He nonetheless told Pogue years later that he had ‘a great sympathy for the British in their situation’, because ‘there was the fact that I hadn’t commanded troops. Brooke had commanded II Corps in France when he was sent over after the first withdrawal to establish a line to defend the Brest peninsula. He had done all these things and, while I had been chief of operations in an army in the First War, I had done nothing like that. So they felt I didn’t understand the problems.’3 Marshall was sensitive enough to spot this, yet tough enough not to let it affect him. (In fact Brooke had commanded II Corps in the Dunkirk campaign, not the Brest peninsula, when he had commanded the whole of the Second BEF.) Asked by NBC in 1958 what would have happened if Marshall had been in charge of Overlord, Brooke took a few seconds before answering, diplomatically: ‘That’s a very difficult question to answer. There are so many ifs…You get led on from one if to another if, and I don’t think one gets very far with them.’

  On Monday 16 August, Brooke and Marshall returned to the Trident system of off-the-record meetings. The secretaries and Planners left the Salon Rose, and for three hours after 2.30 p.m. the Combined Chiefs undertook ‘the difficult task of finding a bridge’. These discussions were ‘pretty frank’, with Brooke opening by saying that ‘the root of the matter was that we were not trusting each other’. He went on to accuse the Americans of doubting the British commitment ‘to put our full hearts into the cross Channel operation next spring’, while for their part the British were not certain that the Americans ‘would not in future insist on our carrying out previous agreements irrespective of changed strategic conditions’. This was a veiled reference to the seven divisions due to be withdrawn from the Mediterranean theatre only eleven weeks hence.

  ‘In the end I think our arguments did have some effect on Marshall,’ noted Brooke, though not on Admiral King. Brooke was feeling the strain, stating that since that was his sixth meeting with the American Chiefs, ‘I do not feel that I can possibly stand any more!’4 At one stage during the Quebec Conference, Marshall and Dill even discussed the possibility of the Combined Chiefs of Staff taking a vote every time a division needed to be moved anywhere.5 It was never tried, but shows how far down the atmosphere of mistrust had descended.

  Captain Lambe pointed out the best riposte to the American accusation that the British were never serious about Overlord, telling Pogue in February 1947:

  Vast amounts of construction work had to be done–hard roads, railways to beaches, exits, fuel and storage tanks, railway sidings. The amount of construction in southern England was terrific. It is interesting to note that millions of pounds were spent from early 1943 onwards, when there was only COSSAC Staff; millions spent on a plan which had not been approved.

  Lambe believed that if the Supreme Allied Commander had chosen to attack anywhere other than Normandy, the logistics by then dictated that ‘he couldn’t have’.6

  Roosevelt arrived in Quebec on the evening of Tuesday 17 August, the same day that the US 3rd Division under Patton took Messina, ending the Sicilian campaign. Basil Liddell Hart believed that the mainland of Italy was invaded primarily because Sicily was cleared in mid-August, by which time it was too late for anything in the Channel, and Sicily was so close to Italy that it really chose itself. ‘It was the logic of events resulting from loss of time more than logic of argument,’ he argued, ‘which swung the Allied strategy.’7 There were other reasons too. When Lieutenant-General Morgan presented COSSAC’s plans for Overlord at Quebec, Brooke observed that they required the Luftwaffe to be drastically weakened in France, the number of German divisions in France and Holland to be reduced, and communications between Germany’s two fronts to be severely disrupted. Simultaneously, Arnold supported Brooke’s plan for invading Italy by saying that the capture of the huge Foggia airfields near Naples would allow the USAAF and RAF to bomb all of southern Germany, 60 per cent of German fighter-production factories and all the major east–west road and rail connections through Germany, while drawing off Luftwaffe units from the west. Morgan and Arnold thus effectively made Brooke’s case for him.

  Although Brooke constantly admonished Marshall in his diary for failing to appreciate the connection between the Mediterranean and cross-Channel strategies, as early as the first day of the conference Marshall emphasized the connection between the European and Pacific theatres. For him the reconquest of Burma was always a far higher priority than it was for Brooke, despite Burma being a British colony and the gateway to India. This was because Marshall believed that China was on the verge of being forced out of the struggle altogether, with potentially disastrous long-term implications for the war against Japan. Only by opening up and keeping operational the northern Burmese–Chinese connection known as the Burma Road, he thought, and by flying in supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army, could China be sustained. Brooke, by contrast, believed China had no choice but to stay in the war almost come what may, considering what Japan had inflicted on her since 1931, that the Chinese could absorb almost any amount of punishment, and certainly any supplies that were sent. He was not impressed with Chiang Kai-shek’s contribution to the war, and thought that major efforts in Burma should wait until Germany was defeated. His agreement to undertake Anakim had been reluctant, hedged with reservations, a quid pro quo for other concessions, and conditional on the United States providing most of the shipping and landing craft.

  On 17 August, Brooke also stated that MacArthur’s plan to thrust up the northern tip of the Vogelkop–the peninsula of western New Guinea–ought to be curtailed in order to release men and matériel for Overlord.

  Since, together with Admiral Nimitz’s attack from Hawaii through the Gilbert and Marshall Islands to Palau, MacArthur’s was the major offensive towards recapturing the Philippines, Marshall and especially King profoundly differed from Brooke over this too.

  Meanwhile, Churchill was still pressing hard for an attack on the northern tip of Sumatra, codenamed Operation Culverin. Rather condescendingly Brooke wrote that ‘Winston…had discovered with a pair of dividers that we could bomb Singapore’ from Sumatra, ‘and he had set his heart on going there.’ Brooke believed Sumatra to be an unsuitable place for any long-term projects against the Malay States, and told the Prime Minister at a meeting at the Citadel at noon on 19 August that ‘when he put his left foot down he should know where the right foot was going to’. In the cold black and white of print, that does not look too rude, but we cannot know the tone of voice and the body language that accompanied it. The result was that Churchill lost his temper completely and shook his fist in Brooke’s face, saying: ‘I do not want any of your long term projects, they cripple initiative!’8

  To have a fist shaken in one’s face is even more of an aggressive act than breaking pencils in half during meetings, but Brooke kept calm and ‘agreed that they did hamper initiative’, but nonetheless told him that ‘I could not look upon knowing where our next step was going as constituting a long term project!’ Coming from that meeting, Brooke went straight into one of the Combined Chiefs in which, because it became so ‘heated’, he and Marshall ordered their Staffs to leave yet again for an off-the-record discussion. ‘After further heated arguments in our closed session we ultimately arrived at an agreement,’ Brooke recalled at the end of what he called ‘Another poisonous day!’9

&n
bsp; There then occurred one of the classic moments of the history of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, which also underlines how intractable, hard fought and confrontational these meetings had become. After the agreement was reached with Marshall, Mountbatten asked to be allowed to demonstrate an invention codenamed Habbakuk, a self-propelled floating airfield made entirely of Pykrete, a mixture of ice and wood pulp named after its British inventor Geoffrey Pike. These artificial islands, it was hoped, could be used by fighter squadrons to give close support to the invasion troops in Normandy. To demonstrate Habbakuk’s superior attributes over a normal iceberg, Mountbatten had one block of ice and one of Pykrete rolled in to the Salon Rose, whereupon he theatrically produced his gun and announced that he was going to fire at each of the blocks in turn, in order to demonstrate their different defensive qualities. ‘As he now pulled a revolver out of his pocket,’ recalled Brooke, ‘we all rose and discreetly moved behind him.’ Firing at the ice merely produced ‘a hail of ice splinters’, as expected, but when Mountbatten shot at the Pykrete the bullet ricocheted off, and ‘buzzed round our legs like an angry bee!’ When the shots were heard outside the room, one of the Staff officers who had left at the start of the off-the-record meeting exclaimed: ‘Good heavens, they’ve started shooting now!!’10