Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Roosevelt sent a thirteen-paragraph reply to Churchill the next day, 29 June, urging that the Combined Chiefs of Staff directive authorizing Anvil be issued immediately. ‘My interest and hopes center on defeating the Germans in front of Eisenhower and driving on into Germany rather than limiting this action for the purpose of staging a full major effect in Italy,’ he wrote, before saying specifically,

  I cannot agree to the employment of United States troops into the Balkans…History will never forgive us if we lose precious time and lives in indecision and debate. My dear friend, I beg of you let us go a head with our plan. Finally, for purely political considerations over here, I should never survive even a slight set-back to Overlord if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.

  It was relatively rare for Roosevelt to plead in aid domestic political pressures over military operations, but he had an election to fight four months hence.

  Churchill’s reply on 1 July was anguished. Even though he began with the first person plural–‘We are deeply grieved by your telegram’–he soon slipped into more intimate vernacular, saying that this was ‘the first major strategic and political error for which we two are responsible. At Teheran you emphasized to me the possibilities of a move eastward when Italy was conquered.’ He claimed that ‘No one involved in these discussions has ever thought of moving armies into the Balkans,’ but stated that Istria and Trieste were strategically and politically important positions, ‘which, as you saw yourself, very clearly might exercise profound and widespread reactions, especially now after the Russian advances’. Finally Churchill stated that:

  If you still press upon us the directive of your Chiefs of Staff to withdraw so many of your forces from the Italian campaign and leave all our hopes there dashed to the ground, His Majesty’s Government, on the advice of their Chiefs of Staff, must enter a solemn protest…It is with the greatest sorrow that I write to you in this sense. But I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement.34

  That is precisely what Marshall had feared, and was one of the reasons Churchill did not meet the President at all throughout the nine months between December 1943 and September 1944, despite having seen him thrice in seven months in 1943. Churchill’s force of personality was blunted once it was translated on to printed telegraph slips or blared over transatlantic scrambler telephone lines, with gaps between each crackling transmission. He ended his telegram: ‘I need scarcely say that we shall do our best to make a success of anything that is undertaken.’ Privately, Lascelles noted that ‘Winston is very bitter about it, and not so sure that he really likes FDR.’35

  On Saturday 1 July, Roosevelt gave Marshall the necessary orders to proceed with Anvil, telling Churchill, ‘I always think of my early geometry–a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.’ His decision underlined the paramountcy of the United States by the summer of 1944. Yet it is worth asking objectively, with the historian’s luxury of hindsight, who was right: was Anvil a useful employment of so many divisions so far from the main struggle hundreds of miles to the north? Churchill and Brooke might have been muscled into it by Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower and–at one remove–Stalin, but they were right to resist, because the military logic for Anvil was questionable and its results limited. Although one hundred thousand Germans surrendered in that campaign, they were not all high-quality troops, and Patton had got to Dijon, 300 miles from the Normandy beaches, on 12 September, before the Anvil force arrived from the south.36

  ‘Please accept my cordial greetings for Independence Day,’ Brooke wrote to Marshall on Tuesday 4 July. ‘The operations now proceeding in Europe show the complete understanding and mutual trust existing between the USA and the British Armies both fighting for the ideals which you are celebrating today.’ It was a good-natured gesture after a bruising defeat, during which Brooke had on at least three occasions toned down telegrams from Churchill which if sent would have caused deep offence to Roosevelt and Marshall, who had now shown beyond doubt that they were in the political and military driving seats. ‘The trouble is the PM can never give way gracefully,’ observed Cunningham. ‘He must always be right and if forced to give way gets vindictive and tries by almost any means to get his own back.’37 Neither Marshall nor Brooke believed that ‘complete understanding and mutual trust’ had characterized their dealings over Anvil during the previous fortnight, but what was needed was some pleasant-sounding hypocrisy. At Cabinet that day, Churchill complained of ‘Differences with Americans. History will approve the use that the Allies have made of the Mediterranean.’38

  Churchill’s bitterness over the Anvil defeat is evident from his minute to the Chiefs of Staff of 6 July. ‘Let them take their seven divisions,’ he wrote, ‘let them monopolize all the landing craft,’ before adding, ‘I hope you realize that an intense impression must be made upon the Americans that we have been ill-treated and [are] furious…If we take this lying down, there will be no end to what will be put upon us. The Arnold–King–Marshall combination is one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen.’39 Churchill reproduced the first part of this acidic memorandum in his war memoirs, although not of course the final sentence.

  That evening the British Chiefs underwent a ‘frightful meeting with Winston’ lasting four hours until 2 a.m., which Brooke described as ‘quite the worst we have had with him’. Although he wrote that fairly often, this one–a meeting of the Defence Committee–was indeed the worst of the war. The Prime Minister was very tired as a result of his Commons speech about the V-1 threat, and emotional over his defeat by the Americans over Anvil, and according to Brooke ‘he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody, and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped.’40

  In the course of the meeting, Brooke accused Churchill of belittling Montgomery and Alexander, the former for being over-cautious–the key town of Caen in Montgomery’s sector had still not fallen–and the latter for not having simply outflanked Monte Cassino back in May. A discussion on the Far East degenerated into a row over all the old subjects, especially Culverin, and Churchill wound up by falling out with Attlee and ‘having a real good row with him concerning the future of India!’ The Chiefs withdrew from the meeting ‘under cover of this smokescreen just on 2am, having accomplished nothing beyond losing our tempers and valuable sleep!!’ After the war Brooke added that Churchill had been ‘infuriated, and throughout the evening kept shoving his chin out, looking at me, and fuming at the accusation that he ran down his generals’.

  Cunningham agreed with Brooke’s assessment, lamenting that ‘the PM was in no state to discuss anything. Very tired and too much alcohol…he was in a terrible mood. Rude and sarcastic.’ The admiral hoped that Churchill’s ‘obstinacy and general rudeness may be the last flurry of the salmon before you get the gaff into him’.41 It was not. Another diarist present that night, Anthony Eden, wrote that Churchill clearly hadn’t read the strategy paper they were discussing ‘and was perhaps rather tight’. He recorded an exchange that went:

  BROOKE: ‘If you would keep your confidence in your generals for even a few days, I think we should do better.’

  CHURCHILL: ‘When have I ever failed to support my generals?’

  BROOKE: ‘I have listened to you for two days on end undermining the Cabinet’s confidence in Alexander until I felt I could stand no more. You asked me questions, I gave you answers, you didn’t accept them and telegraphed to Alexander who gave the same answers.’42

  There was more in the same strain, with ‘Winston protesting vehemently’. Eden thought Churchill ‘was clearly deeply hurt on his most sensitive spot, his knowledge of strategy and his relationship with his generals’. The Foreign Secretary, who regularly took Churchill’s side against Brooke, nonetheless concluded: ‘Altogether a
deplorable evening which couldn’t have happened a year ago. There is certainly a deterioration.’43

  Alexander, who had considerable personal charm, had commanded the rearguard at Dunkirk and the retreat of the British Army in Burma before becoming C-in-C successively of the Middle East and of the 18th Army Group in North Africa. Churchill liked him personally, not least because he was a fellow painter and Old Harrovian, but he did abuse his generalship. Brooke and Cunningham, by contrast, abused Alexander only to their own diaries–as ‘a void’ and ‘not a good general’ respectively–and doubtless also to each other.

  In early July, Sir John Dill suffered a mild heart attack, and Marshall arranged that he be taken to the military hospital in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, for a proper rest-cure. He had previously suffered rectal bleeding, and his haemorrhoids were removed by injection, causing severe anaemia which was only recognized late. Writing from hospital to Brooke about a problem that had arisen over Stilwell, Dill said: ‘It is odd how that charming person Marshall can fly off the handle and be so infernally rude. Also he gets fixed ideas about things and people which it is almost impossible to alter. I am so very sorry that I was not there when the Anvil question came up, but I fancy he was pretty fixed on Anvil and most likely impossible to move.’ It was a new and rare side to Marshall, and so Dill’s ‘oil-can’ had been needed more than ever, but tragically it turned out that his illness was mortal.

  On 10 July, the day after Caen finally fell, Churchill reported to the War Cabinet that Overlord’s ‘daily discharge’ in Normandy amounted to twenty-five thousand men, seven thousand vehicles and 30,000 tons of stores. He was concerned about German soldiers who were captured shortly after setting delayed-action mines that killed Allied troops, and suggested that they should be warned that they would be personally ‘held responsible’ if they did not reveal where these booby-traps were.

  After Brooke had reported on the situation in Normandy, Churchill said that the fighting there had drawn in German reserves, and that twenty-nine Allied divisions (fifteen American, fourteen British Commonwealth) were presently engaging twenty-three German. Altogether British and Canadian casualties came to twenty-six thousand out of a total of sixty-four thousand Allied, and 51,393 prisoners had been taken. Nonetheless, Churchill emphasized that ministers should ‘Not encourage people to expect war to end this year. No right to count on it…Don’t minimize what we [must] do.’

  After the fall of Caen, the Germans continued to put up strong resistance at Saint-Lô, which did not fall to the US XIX Corps until 17 July, after which the British and Canadians pushed south and east of Caen with the support of thousand-bomber raids. It was another month, however, on 18 August, before the Falaise gap was closed by the Allies, trapping the Germans south of the Normandy battlefield. After that it was only a matter of a week before Paris was liberated.

  Although it had been left pending since the furious exchange of memoranda in late March, when neither side accepted defeat but wished to avoid resignations and sackings on the issue, Far Eastern strategy could not be long ignored. The total dichotomy in thinking between Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff over defeating Japan was once again laid bare at a Defence Committee meeting on 14 July, after which Cunningham wrote that they had been ‘treated to the same old monologue’ about how much better it was to take the tip of Sumatra and then the Malay Peninsula and finally Singapore than to join with the Americans to fight Japan in the south-west Pacific. The First Sea Lord assumed that the politicians were ‘obviously frightened of the Americans laying down the law’ about what was to happen ‘to the various islands, forts and other territories’ once Japan was defeated.

  The way to ensure the Empire’s proper treatment in the final peace treaty, thought Cunningham, was to stick closely to the Americans in their long campaign from Australia to the Japanese mainland, but Churchill, Attlee and Eden ‘will not lift a finger to get a force to the Pacific; they prefer to hang about the outside and recapture our own rubber trees.’44 It was during that meeting that Attlee passed Eden a note saying of Churchill’s chairmanship: ‘Two hours of wishful thinking.’ Cunningham was wrong about the Foreign Secretary supporting Culverin, since Eden actually felt that because Sumatra ‘is remote from the centre of conflict we shall be regarded by Americans as having played virtually no part in defeat of Japan’.45

  On 16 July Marshall wrote to Lieutenant-General Jacob L. Devers, the commander of Anvil, that ‘If the forces in Italy bog down on the Pisa–Rimini Line, we should not long delay putting the Fifth Army divisions into the fight in southern France. I hope that Alexander will quickly get into the Po Valley. Then the Fifth Army, or portions thereof, could be moved into France, possibly some of it moving overland…The important thing is that we push Anvil to the utmost as the main effort in the Mediterranean.’46 Here was another row waiting to happen, for on the same day in London Cunningham recorded a Chiefs of Staff meeting at which Churchill was ‘in a very sweet and chastened mood probably remembering last Thursday’–when he had been drunk–and there was ‘Much discussion on whether it was wise to try to bind the American Chiefs of Staff to leave the present forces less the Anvil contingent in Italy to enable Alexander to plan his forthcoming campaign to carry the Pisa–Rimini Line on a firm basis’. The British Chiefs were ‘rather against it’ as it might put ‘bad ideas’ of using the Fifth Army in Italy ‘as a reserve for Anvil’. Yet from Marshall’s letter it was clear that they had indeed already started to think that way.

  Casualty numbers from the V-1 campaign given to the War Cabinet on 24 July were ‘thirty thousand-odd of whom four thousand odd killed’. Children who had returned to the cities from the countryside were evacuated all over again, and despite the success in Normandy, national morale suffered. The nightly bombing, with its effects of sleeplessness and general strain, needs to be borne in mind when considering the ill-tempered mood that often descended on crisis meetings during this stressful time. The Cabinet War Rooms began to be used regularly again for almost the first time since the Blitz, and their stuffy atmosphere–especially with Churchill’s cigars, Bevin’s cigarettes, Attlee’s pipe and so on–cannot have helped.

  In the east, the Russians crossed into Poland on 23 July. It was a genuine cause for celebration, because few guessed at the time that they would stay there for forty-five years. Nevertheless, at a Chiefs of Staff meeting on 26 July centred on British post-war security it was assumed that Germany needed to be included ‘in the Western powers organisation’ and ‘It was generally agreed that Russia would be the only danger in the foreseeable future.’47 Churchill agreed, telling Charles Moran, ‘Good God, can’t you see that the Russians are spreading across Europe like a tide; they have invaded Poland, and there is nothing to prevent them marching into Turkey and Greece!’ Operation Anvil he described as ‘Sheer folly’, lamenting that the ‘ten divisions could have been landed in the Balkans…but the Americans would not listen to him.’ Moran concluded that Churchill was ‘distraught, but you cannot get him down for long.’ He sat up in bed as his speech quickened and he expounded on how ‘Alex might be able to solve this problem by breaking into the Balkans. Our troops are already in the outskirts of Florence. They would soon be in the valley of the Po.’ Churchill’s promise to Roosevelt on 1 July that ‘No one involved in these discussions has ever thought of moving armies into the Balkans’ therefore was obviously completely misleading.

  In common with other operations, such as Roundup/Overlord and Super-Gymnast/Torch, for security reasons Operation Anvil was renamed Dragoon just before it took place. The joke went around that the word was chosen because Churchill felt he had been dragooned into it. Writing to General Maitland Wilson (‘My dear Jumbo’) on 2 August, Brooke blamed Alexander for the failure to persuade the Americans: ‘Alex’s wild talk about his advance on Vienna killed all our arguments dead!’ Brooke then dilated very perceptively upon the loss of British influence in Washington. Dill’s illness ‘had a great deal to say to it’, he thought,
but there ‘is more to it than that’. The Americans ‘now feel that they possess the major forces at sea, on land and in the air’, and with ‘all the vast financial and industrial advantages which they had enjoyed from the start’ they were in a far stronger position. ‘In addition they now look upon themselves no longer as the apprentices at war, but on the contrary as full blown professionals. As a result of all this they are determined to have an ever increasing share in the running of the war in all its aspects. I can assure you that we are watching these unpleasant new developments very carefully.’48 Brooke allowed himself a rare bout of over-optimism when he told Maitland Wilson that now the Normandy operation had broken through into Brittany, ‘It becomes more evident every day that the Bosche is beat on all fronts. It is only a matter of how many more months he can last. I certainly don’t see him lasting another winter.’

  As if to underline Brooke’s earlier point, that same day the Director of the US Bureau of the Budget, Harold Smith, wrote to Roosevelt to report: ‘It is highly probable that by the end of September we shall have a total army strength in excess of eight million.’ With private soldiers (GIs) in the US Army receiving $50 per month, corporals $66, sergeants $78 and master-sergeants $138, Smith’s financial concerns were legitimate, even for an economy as strong as that of the United States. So on 15 August the President asked Marshall for a memo ‘on this matter of over-strength of the Army’. A week later Marshall replied in detail, admitting that the Army was 5 per cent over-strength, at 8.05 million, but the reason was a deliberate recent increase of 150,000 to meet the expected casualties in the Overlord and Anvil landings.