Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  Churchill’s duplicity, in other words, arose not from a perfidious British effort to extend British imperial influence, as some U.S. generals such as Admiral Leahy posited at the time, but from a genuinely held belief that Overlord would fail. And, conversely, out of a genuine belief that opportunistic Allied operations in the Mediterranean—especially if Turkey could be persuaded to join the Allies—would succeed.

  In both matters Churchill would be proved utterly wrong. As the historian of Churchill’s memoirs, David Reynolds, would write, Churchill was profoundly if understandably deceitful in writing his fabled account of that fateful summer and autumn2—but the Prime Minister was not insincere in his faith in a Mediterranean rather than a doomed Normandy strategy. His was a faith based not only upon fear of failure in northern France, but also a deep and abiding fear of Russian motives and intentions—and in this respect the President was just as concerned. It was certainly something that he was taking very, very seriously as on August 16, 1943, Roosevelt set forth from the secret siding near the White House at 8:20 p.m. to join the Prime Minister in Quebec.

  By the time the President’s train arrived in Quebec, via Montreal—where Fala’s presence on the platform banished any attempts by the Secret Service to maintain secrecy3—on the evening of August 17, 1943, the Combined Chiefs of Staff of the United States and Britain had been at loggerheads for three days, and were getting close, he was informed, to homicide.

  General Brooke, chairing the Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings (since they were being held on “British,” or non-U.S., soil), felt he was being driven almost out of his mind by American unwillingness to see the connection between operations in the Mediterranean and Overlord. “I entirely failed to get Marshall to realize the relation between cross Channel and Italian operations, and the repercussions which the one exercises on the other,” Brooke noted in exasperation on August 15. “It is quite impossible to argue with him as he does not even begin to understand a strategic problem.”4

  This was the pot calling the kettle black. If anything, the reality was the reverse. Brooke’s obstinate insistence, along with that of his irrepressible prime minister, upon overambitious Allied operations in Italy would, just as Marshall had feared, become a near-fatal drag on trained Allied manpower and logistical support for Overlord, as well as incurring a far higher Allied death toll than was necessary. Had Brooke devoted himself to how best to achieve the maximum German commitment of troops and reserves in the Mediterranean by the minimum of effective Allied operations, the course of World War II for the Allies would have been far better served. Far from later acknowledging his mistake, Brooke—who was promoted to the rank of field marshal in 1943 and then raised to the peerage as Lord Alanbrooke in 1946—would go to his grave in 1963, arguing he’d always been right: that the German defense of Italy and the casualties the Werhmacht suffered by the summer of 1944 had contributed mightily to Overlord’s success.

  This was ridiculous. The Western Allies were to suffer 312,000 troops killed, wounded, and missing—including 60,000 Allied deaths—in the eighteen-month Italian campaign, without ever getting much further than the Po. The Wehrmacht would suffer 434,000 casualties, including 48,000 men killed in Italy by May 19455—but though it did keep German divisions from the Eastern Front, it had little or no effect upon Overlord, since the Germans would have been forced to keep troops stationed across southern Europe (as they did in Norway) in fear of invasion, whatever happened in Normandy. It would become a heavy price in blood, destruction, and civilian misery to have paid for British strategy—a strategy based on a fatal illusion, or delusion: that the Allies would be able to achieve great things in a country that was ideally suited to defense, not offense.

  The fact was, as Churchill’s military biographer, Carlo D’Este, would write, Churchill and Brooke had utterly failed to predict “the casualties that would be incurred” by their obsession with warmaking in Italy. “During their twenty months in Italy the Allies fought one bloody battle after another, for reasons no one ever understood,” D’Este would lament. “Allied strategy in Italy seemed to be not to win, but rather to drag out the war for as long as possible,” he would write in retrospective frustration, a tragedy that “simply distracted the Allies from their real task: crossing the English Channel and opening the endlessly delayed second front.”6

  Nor was this hindsight. Marshall’s understanding of the “strategic problem,” far from being ignorant, as Brooke described it, was prophetic—and Marshall’s unrelenting argument with the British chiefs of staff was greatly to his credit in counseling caution before sending tens, even hundreds of thousands of men—American, British, Canadian, French, Polish, and others—to their deaths in Italy and southern Europe. In this respect Brooke’s diary gave but a glimpse of the fierce altercations and traded accusations coloring their meetings.

  Brooke was implacable. “Dined by myself as I wanted to be with myself!” he noted on August 15, after hearing he was no longer to command Overlord, and having learned from Field Marshal Dill that General Marshall, now the presumed supreme commander-to-be, was “threatening to resign if we pressed our point” on overambitious Mediterranean operations. The next day Brooke himself was near resignation—“Marshall has no strategic outlook of any kind, and [Admiral] King has only one thought and that is based on the Pacific,” he penned in his special green ink—the traditional color reserved for chiefs of the Imperial General Staff in Britain. The Combined Chiefs had had to ask all secretaries, stenographers, and planners to leave the room, and had argued for three hours without agreement. “This is the sixth of these meetings with the American chiefs that I have run,” Brooke noted, “and I do not feel that I can possibly stand any more!”7

  Admiral Leahy was certainly stunned by the extreme acerbity. “The British and U.S. Staffs today got into a very frank discussion of a difference of opinion as to the value of the Italian campaign to our common war effort against Germany,” Leahy recorded in his diary that night. He felt Marshall’s willingness to go ahead with occupation of southern Italy to secure the Foggia airfields, from which the U.S. Army Air Forces could bomb southern Germany and the Ploesti oil fields in Romania, was “very positive in his attitude toward the Mediterranean committment [sic],” but Brooke seemed ungrateful, and dissatisfied. When Brooke suggested the Combined Chiefs divert Allied forces on their way out to the Far East and the Pacific to mount a bigger campaign in Italy, King’s language lit the borealis lights. “Admiral King was very undiplomatic to use a mild term for his attitude,” Leahy confided.8

  Admiral King was once again reaching the end of his tether. If the British devoted too much effort to Italy, then the “build up in England would be reduced to that of a small Corps” for Overlord, as Brooke mocked King’s approach—in which case King would favor “the whole war [being] reoriented towards Japan.”9

  It was small wonder. Ignoring King, Brooke had argued for an immediate, major Allied campaign in Italy to reach as far north as Turin and Milan. Not content with those objectives, Brooke had even pressed to “retain” in the Mediterranean three of the seven battle-hardened divisions earmarked for Overlord, and perhaps all seven, if German resistance in Italy was fierce . . .10

  Marshall was almost apoplectic at this, causing Brooke to grudgingly admit, under pressure, that “‘battle experienced’ troops were required for Overlord” if it was to succeed.11 Brooke remained furious, however, noting that night, “It is not a cheerful thought to feel that I have a continuous week of such days ahead of me!”12

  The American chiefs felt the same.

  As the Combined Chiefs of Staff discussions became ever more strident, Brooke had descended into the foulest of moods. He later confessed that “it took me several months to recover” from what he called the “blow” at being passed over for the cross-Channel supreme command13—something doubly disappointing since he had begun to yearn to get away from the Prime Minister, he confessed, and be able to command troops in battle once again.

>   The imminent arrival of the President had made it imperative that the chiefs come to an accord, however. Though the British team pushed the struggle over strategy to the very brink on August 16, 1943, they finally and reluctantly gave in. The decisions made at the Trident Conference in May would stand. Overlord would, they confirmed, be top Allied priority—and the seven battle-hardened divisions the President wanted would be transferred from the Mediterranean to Britain by November. Whatever could be achieved in Italy in the interim would be undertaken jointly by the Allies with remaining forces in the Mediterranean, on an ad hoc basis, to keep as many German forces away from France and Russia as possible—but under no circumstances were operations to be considered in the Balkans or elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

  There were, besides, equally important decisions still to be reached concerning Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The difference of opinion over strategy in Europe was therefore papered over at the conference. It was not a perfect result, but better than an outright split.

  Meeting the President on his arrival in Quebec and bringing him up to speed regarding the recommendations of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Leahy told him of the long days of contention—and the result.

  As Lieutenant Elsey later recalled, Leahy was very much the President’s lynchpin. “He was already at Quebec, and Roosevelt looked to him, in the summer residence of the governor general, the Citadel, as the top dog. Roosevelt looked to him rather than reaching out to King, Arnold, and Marshall. Leahy was the channel of communication from the chiefs to FDR. He, Leahy, really was the chief of staff to the President, and was dealt with as such, and Roosevelt saw relatively little of the Joint Chiefs during the Quebec Conference. Things came to him from Leahy, their views.”14

  The President, after all, had not come to Quebec to do their job. In truth he’d come for a very different reason.

  45

  A Longing in the Air

  PRIOR TO THE President’s arrival in Canada, a team from his White House Map Room had traveled to the Citadel in Quebec to set up a map room there, as Lieutenant Elsey afterward explained. They were “standing by the President’s map room on his arrival at the Citadel to acquaint him with all the latest developments of the war. War reports had been radioed to the train during our trip up from Washington, but a more complete picture was available here for the President. The Prime Minister had his own map room in another part of the Citadel.”1 Special telephone communications with Washington and the White House had also been set up, “so that the President was never out of instantaneous communication with Washington.” “Direct telegraph wire service,” also, “was available between the Citadel and the White House.”

  Once the President was established in the Citadel, the wires grew hot with new cables—for the President was found to be batting drafts of a big speech back and forth with Judge Rosenman and Robert Sherwood, his speechwriters in Washington. On August 14, before leaving, he’d told them he wanted something he could broadcast to the whole world from Ottawa, on the eve of what looked like imminent Italian collapse and surrender. As he’d explained, he’d set the strategy and the timing of Overlord in stone. Though there would be much fighting still to be done, the war was moving into a new gear, political as well as military—and it was time to speak to the people of the United Nations: to make sure the moral aims and objectives of the Western Allies were clear and noble, before their first soldiers set foot on the mainland of Europe, early in September.

  Before the President could give his speech, however, his Map Room received a very different kind of cable—this time from Moscow.

  The telegram was from Marshal Stalin, dated Kremlin, August 22, 1943. It was not friendly.

  Having refused every invitation to meet with the President for the past ten months, the Soviet dictator now declared he was fed up with the Soviet Union being treated as “a passive third observer” of agreements made by the United States and Britain with liberated countries, as well as with others “dissociating themselves” from Hitler. “I have to tell you that it is impossible to tolerate such a situation any longer,” the quasi-emperor cabled. “I propose to establish,” he declared, a three-power military-political “Commission” to handle such matters, immediately, “and to assign Sicily as the place of residence of the Commission.”2

  Stalin’s arrogant new signal from Moscow made the President “mad,” Harriman recalled, as it did Mackenzie King.3 When, two days later, Stalin sent another cable, yet again turning down the President’s invitation to meet at Fairbanks, Alaska, but demanding that a “Soviet Representative” be part of Eisenhower’s secret negotiations with the Badoglio government for unconditional Italian surrender, the President became doubly incensed.

  Except for his epistolary relationship with Stalin, the President had come to feel proud of the way his war strategy since Pearl Harbor had played out—thus far. He’d even treated Churchill with extraordinary patience and good humor when the Prime Minister had gotten into an interminable argument over Sumatra, after the President’s arrival.

  Sumatra?

  “Mr. Churchill strongly advocated the establishment of an allied aviation base on the north end of Sumatra instead of the west coast of Burma,” Leahy had protested, amazed at the Prime Minister’s chutzpah. Instead of helping reestablish Burmese road communications with China—which Chiang Kai-shek considered vital for U.S. supplies—Sumatra would offer the prospect of air cover for a British invasion of Singapore, Churchill had argued: an objective that had never hitherto been raised before the Combined Chiefs. Even General Brooke had cringed. The Prime Minister’s latest obsession had led to distracting arguments that continued for three long days—leaving Brooke furious and ashamed of his boss. An assault on Sumatra had never been seriously examined by the British chiefs—in fact the idea had only come to Churchill on the transatlantic voyage to Canada, Brooke railed in his diary, “in a few idle moments,” yet here was the Prime Minister “married to the idea that success against Japan can only be secured through the capture of the north tip of Sumatra”—and “wants us to press the Americans for its execution!” The Prime Minister was acting like “a peevish temperamental prima donna,” and proving “more unreasonable and trying than ever this time.”4

  Churchill would not give up his bone of contention, however—as if in lockjaw. Not even the President had been able to silence him on the subject. When the two leaders went on a quick fishing trip for the day in Laurentides Park, forty miles from Quebec, on August 20, and in the governor-general’s cabin were eating the small trout they’d caught, Averell Harriman witnessed the sight of Churchill still going at the subject hammer and tongs with the President—who responded with glass and silverware.

  There was simply insufficient shipping for such a venture, the President patiently pointed out to Churchill, even if they wanted such a strategy—which they didn’t. Reopening the supply route to China was the real priority. The President “used most of the glasses and salt-cellars on the table making a ‘V’-shaped diagram to describe the Japanese position” from western China to the South Pacific, “indicating the advantages of striking [Japan] from either side.” Instead of laboriously trying to “remove the outer ones,” such as Singapore and Sumatra, “one by one,” the Allies should, the President said, simply go for the enemy’s jugular—“thereby capturing the sustaining glasses” behind the outliers—Roosevelt corralling the glassware with a sweep of his hand.5

  Churchill had remained unpersuaded, though—the argument mirroring, Harriman later reflected, their earlier “disputations over striking across the Channel or in the Mediterranean. Roosevelt once again favored the straight-line approach,” Churchill the peripheral.6 As the President shared with Mackenzie King, however, Winston’s military misjudgments might be truly appalling, but they were vastly outweighed by Churchill’s profound political wisdom: wisdom that would be crucial in the next phase of the war—especially when both men saw the tone of Stalin’s cable. The war against Hitler
, and then Hirohito, was set—but avoiding future war with Russia was not.

  Despite the war of words traded by the chiefs of staff at the Château de Frontenac, then, the irony was this: that an extraordinary measure of harmony seemed to persist between the President and the Prime Minister—both of them staying in the Citadel, where they lunched and dined together every day.

  What the President, in contrast to his chiefs, recognized was that the very unity of the Allies was being tested—not merely by the challenge of defeating the forces of Hitler and Hirohito in battle, but by the need to deal with Stalin. And that the Western Allies must not fail this test.

  To the world, the Allied summit at Quebec in the summer of 1943 thus held a symbolic importance far outweighing any recommendations the Combined Chiefs of Staff might make: an alliance that must be seen by the world as growing closer and closer, not further apart. Though it could not be revealed to the public, possession of an atomic bomb, if nuclear fission worked, would give the Western Allies huge authority in ensuring a world free of German- or Japanese-style militarism and aggression—or Russian. The President had even gotten British acceptance of the draft Joint Four-Power Declaration he’d asked Sumner Welles to draw up in writing before his meeting with Churchill at Hyde Park, together with a suggested United Nations Protocol document.7 All in all, this was a tremendous achievement for such an alliance between the Old World and the New: an achievement the President was determined to emphasize in the speech he intended to deliver in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. And Stalin’s rude new cables only made him the more determined to make it strong.