Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  The Combined Chiefs of Staff was the clearest manifestation of this development: acting not only as the transatlantic advisory body to the two elected leaders, but as the de facto strategic command center of the forces of the United Nations. Churchill was therefore unapologetic in claiming it would be a “most foolish and improvident act on the part of our two Governments, or either of them, to break up this smooth-running and immensely powerful machinery the moment the war is over. For our own safety, as well as for the security of the rest of the world, we are bound to keep it working and in running order after the war—probably for a good many years, not only until we have set up some world arrangement to keep the peace but until we know that it is an arrangement which will really give us that protection we must have from danger and aggression”—a protection “we have,” as Britons, “already had to seek across two vast world wars.”

  In all but name this was a warning not only to Hitler, but to Stalin: that the English-speaking democracies of the world should—and would—hold together to confront and defeat tyranny and the evils of a police state. “Various schemes of achieving world security while yet preserving national rights, tradition and customs are being studied and probed,” the Prime Minister acknowledged: a search to develop a system more durable and effective than the League of Nations. “I am here to tell you,” he declared, though, “that whatever form your system of world security may take, however the nations are grouped and ranged, whatever derogations are made from national sovereignty for the sake of the large synthesis, nothing will work soundly or for long without the united effort of the British and American peoples.”

  “If we are together,” Churchill declared, “nothing is impossible. If we are divided all will fail,” he warned. How proud Americans and Britons could be, then, “young and old alike” to live at a time in the story of man when “these great trials came upon it”—and had found, he declared, “a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave.”6

  The speech even contained the most stunning suggestion: that not only should Britons and Americans continue their military alliance after the war, but even resume a “common citizenship.”7

  While there was little enthusiasm expressed in America for common citizenship—the United States, after all, having waged a revolutionary war to achieve independence from the British Empire—Churchill’s remarks, at the very moment when cables were being exchanged between the President’s Map Room and the Kremlin regarding the need for high-level U.S., British, and Soviet meetings, were welcomed by newspapers in America, England, and United Nations countries. An initial meeting of the Big Three’s foreign ministers was in the works for October; then a Big Three summit to be held hopefully in November or December, 1943 . . .

  Beyond the imminent amphibious Allied assault at Salerno and airdrop on Rome, then, there were larger issues at stake.

  The United States was at last entering upon its manifest destiny not only as a world power, but as the leading power of the free world, Churchill accepted—and while no one knew which way France and other occupied countries would eventually turn, there was no doubt as to where he, the President’s “ardent lieutenant” and “representative of the British War Cabinet,” stood.

  It would not be easy. “The price of greatness is responsibility,” Churchill solemnly warned at Harvard. “Let us go forward in malice to none and good will to all. Such plans offer far better prizes than taking away other people’s provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future,” the once-implacable British imperialist maintained, “are the empires of the mind.”8

  Such a bold assertion of Anglo-American solidarity would not stop Stalin from controlling those eastern and central European countries the Soviet armies might well overrun, as they combined with the United States and Britain to defeat the forces of the Third Reich. It left no doubt, however—whether in Hitler’s mind, Goebbels’s, or Stalin’s—that the Western Allies, led by the United States and Britain, would not rest until the evils of the Third Reich were ended, and in the aftermath that they would remain united: intent upon blocking any attempt by Stalin to expand into western Europe a Soviet empire of gulag and fear.

  51

  A Tragicomedy of Errors

  WHILE CHURCHILL GAVE his support to the notion of a new, internationalist America, General Eisenhower faced the problem of the military and political prosecution of the current war in the Mediterranean.

  It did not go quite as planned. Indeed, blame for the near-catastrophe that befell the Allies in Italy ultimately rested with the two commanders in chief in Washington, historians would rightly aver1—for the failure to make clear to Eisenhower that his task was merely to occupy southern Italy while the Overlord invasion of northern France was prepared permitted the most dangerous optimism and false hopes to spread among the senior ranks of U.S. and British forces in the Mediterranean.

  Thus the tragedy unfolded.

  Churchill, so magnificent in his appreciation of the larger forces of history and tyranny, once again demonstrated an impetuous military opportunism—an aspect of his character he had never been able to control. Without General Brooke at his side in Washington to restrain him, he yearned for the Allies to swiftly seize Rome, as in the days of the Caesars—rightly seeing in it a prize whose capture would electrify both the free and the occupied countries of the world. The image across the world evoked by Italian unconditional surrender and the Allied occupation of Rome would be the second “crack in the Axis” that the President had spoken of in Ottawa.

  These were understandable political and moral ambitions for the Allies—achievements that would impress the Soviets (who were still nowhere near evicting the German armies from the USSR).

  Unfortunately, neither agenda took account of the Wehrmacht’s likely response. Nor did it account for the invidious dilemma into which it placed Badoglio’s Italian government: whether the country was to be destroyed alongside the Germans—or by the Germans.

  As the days of early September passed, then, the various headquarters in the Mediterranean suffered a fatal lack of clear strategic direction from the President, the Prime Minister, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The President favored only a limited Allied military campaign, but was less than clear where it should end—whether in the south of Italy, in order to secure the important all-weather Foggia airfields, or as far as Rome. In fact, in a moment of levity, having summoned the chiefs to the White House to discuss the “strategic situation in light of Italian collapse,” he suggested that “a new slogan should be adopted” for the campaign in Italy: “Save the Pope”!2 He was not anxious to go further, however, lest the buildup for Overlord be compromised.

  By contrast the Prime Minister wanted to drive right up to the mountains of Tuscany, and there “establish a fortified line to seal off the north of Italy; a line prepared in depth which Italian divisions should help us man and so strong that it would make it very costly for the Germans to do anything effective against us.” In the meantime, he urged, the Allies should do everything in their power to seize the Dodecanese islands such as Rhodes and put pressure on Turkey to enter the war.3 The Allies would then possess a huge staging post in southern Europe to strike, in the event of a German collapse, toward southern France, the Balkans, Greece, or even northern Italy through the so-called Ljubljana Gap and Austria.

  Behind the rejoicing over the recent conquest of Sicily and the first Allied boots on the mainland of Europe, across the Messina Strait—where Italian forces simply fled, and British Eighth Army troops had only to follow retreating Wehrmacht survivors of the Sicilian campaign—the real situation for the Allies began, in all truth, to border on the farcical.

  “He is host & hostess & housekeeper all in one,” Daisy reflected of her hero, the President—for it seemed really amazing with what ease Roosevelt had switched from a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House to arranging trips of his English guests to Williamsburg, Virginia, o
r from reviewing British Eighth Army progress with General Ismay, at Hyde Park, to showing his guests his library before they finally left. Major military forces—land, sea, and air—were being committed to battle in the Mediterranean, but without clear and realistic strategic objectives passed down the Allied chain of command, the situation in the Mediterranean became daily more complicated.

  Tasked with obtaining, if possible, the unconditional surrender of all Italian forces in Italy, southern France, the Balkans, and Greece, General Eisenhower had begun parleys with the emissaries of Marshal Badoglio, while having to decide what to do about General Patton’s latest scandal (a report by the U.S. chief medical officer in the Mediterranean claiming Patton was psychologically and behaviorally unfit to command U.S. forces after striking battle-traumatized soldiers);4 planning and commanding an invasion of Italy with limited resources (since Overlord was now to have logistical priority) and unclear strategic objectives; and having to meld as supreme commander in the Mediterranean the international ground, navy, and air force contributions to that uncertain challenge.

  In the Torch invasion and campaign, the Allies had made a plethora of errors—errors that had taken place in an area occupied only by Vichy troops. This had permitted the U.S. and supporting British troops to establish themselves in overwhelming force before Hitler could react. In Husky, again, only two German divisions were on hand to repel boarders—even Hitler conceding it would be impossible to hold Sicily for more than a few weeks. But now, as the Allies prepared to invade the mainland of southern Europe in considerable force and from two different directions, the challenge changed. Montgomery had already complained on August 19 that his “Baytown” landing across the Messina Strait had no strategic objective; when pressed, Eisenhower’s land forces commander, General Alexander, could only say Montgomery was to “engage enemy forces in the southern tip of Italy,” and thus give “more assistance” to “Avalanche”—the four-division assault on Salerno, three hundred miles away on Italy’s west coast, near Naples.

  Three hundred miles, Monty had whistled! “If Avalanche is a success, then we should reinforce that front for there is little point in laboriously fighting our way up Southern Italy,” his headquarters staff had protested—vainly. For his part, Montgomery, having faced the cream of the Afrika Corps since the battle of Alamein, was deeply skeptical whether Avalanche, south of Naples, would be the sort of walkover that Eisenhower and Alexander’s headquarters assumed. Or Mark Clark—the as-yet-untested commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, tasked with the amphibious assault there. “The Germans had some 15 Divisions in Italy and at least four could be concentrated fairly quickly against the 5 American Army,” Montgomery wrote in his diary after listening to Clark’s presentation of the Avalanche plan.5 He vigorously disputed, as the Allies’ most professional if slow field commander, any idea of an easy run. So did the swifter Patton, when shown the task given to Clark. Given the hills surrounding the beautiful beaches, the “avalanche” might well come to a halt on the shore without chance of reaching Naples—let alone Rome.

  As if this was not all, the plan—pressed by General Marshall—to land U.S. airborne troops on Rome was even less prudent; indeed Giant II, as it was code-named, was arguably one of the most ill-conceived near-blunders of the entire war.

  General Eisenhower later confided that he “wanted very much to make the air drop on Rome,” and was so “anxious to get in there,” at Marshall’s urging, that he removed the Eighty-Second Airborne Division from Mark Clark’s Avalanche invasion force for the purpose. Somewhat surprised, General Matt Ridgway was thus ordered by the Allied commander in chief Mediterranean to drop his Eighty-Second Airborne Division on the Italian capital instead.6

  Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Bedell Smith—a brilliant staff officer, but wholly ignorant of combat—proved equally naive, not only then but even after the event. He considered it would have been a “bold move, and it would have caught the Germans off balance”—causing Field Marshal Kesselring to retreat “immediately . . . Caught by the surprise of the American airborne landing in Rome and with his communications cut, Kesselring would have been compelled to retire to the North, and to abandon all southern and central Italy,” Smith later asserted.7

  At West Point, such boldness might have been lauded—in theory. Would the Italians, even if they were ordered to surrender to the Allies by Marshall Badoglio, actually lift a finger, however, to challenge let alone fight the Germans, who had two armored divisions surrounding Rome, and more approaching? Although General Alexander had browbeaten General Castellano, Badoglio’s secret representative, into promising four divisions of Italian troops to aid Ridgway’s assault from the sky, Montgomery certainly remained deeply skeptical. The “Italians won’t do anything” he predicted—and Ridgway and his artillery director, General Max Taylor, feared the same. Indeed—though trashed after the war by both Bedell Smith and general Eisenhower’s intelligence chief, Brigadier Kenneth Strong—Ridgway and Taylor refused to commit thousands of their paratroopers’ lives to a wild plan, concocted in an “all night session” in a tent in Sicily, without further research.8 General Taylor and a companion—Colonel William Gardiner—were therefore authorized to go behind the enemy lines, in advance of the airborne drop, to interview the commander of all Italian forces in Rome.

  Transported in disheveled uniforms—posing as POWs being taken from the coast at Gaeta to the outskirts of the capital, then in an ambulance with frosted windows to the Italian War Office in Rome—Taylor and Gardiner only got to see General Carbonari at 9:30 p.m. on September 7, roughly twenty-four hours before the 150 C-54 paratroopers’ planes of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division were due to take off from Sicily. A draft Instrument of Surrender—approved by President Roosevelt and by Prime Minister Churchill—had been signed on behalf of Badoglio on September 3, but had been held back in order to give the Germans no chance of preempting the Eighty-Second Airborne’s drop on Rome, or Clark’s invasion at Salerno, at dawn on September 9.

  The paratroopers, however, did not go in—mercifully. Once Taylor reached Rome, General Carbonari explained that there were twelve thousand German paratroopers and twenty-four thousand men of the German Third Panzer Grenadier Division, with tanks, encircling the city. The American landing area was twenty miles from Rome; only two U.S. battalions could be airlifted in the first wave, and the Italian divisions had ammunition for only a few hours fighting—if that.

  Taylor and Gardiner were agog. General Alexander, a Brit, had predicted Clark’s land forces would reach Rome from Salerno, hundreds of miles away, in only three—five, at maximum—days, to relieve them.9 It was a prediction near-criminal in its credulity—and cavalierness. Without genuine Italian assistance from the four Italian divisions, Taylor foresaw, the Eighty-Second’s airdrop would be a bloodbath: an American one. He rightly demanded to see Marshal Badoglio—who, when roused from his bed, was even more defeatist, Taylor found.10

  Badoglio had seen no fighting since 1940, and now disavowed the very Instrument of Surrender he had authorized by cable—saying he had not signed it, and had only given way to temporary telephone agreement when General Alexander threatened his emissary to destroy Rome by bombing. His representative in the negotiation “did not know all the facts,” he told Taylor; “Italian troops cannot possibly defend Rome.” In fact he predicted grave “difficulties” for the Allies if they landed at Salerno, given the number of German troops in the area and those streaming down with more tanks from the north. When Taylor tried the same tactic as General Alexander—threatening to bomb the Eternal City, unless the Italians carried out the proposed surrender—Badoglio merely looked at him. “Why would you want to bomb the city of the people who are trying to aid you?”11

  Trying—but not very hard. Certainly not hard enough to save the Eighty-Second Airborne Division from extinction.

  There followed a veritable tragicomedy of errors as Taylor’s secret wireless signals to Eisenhower’s headquarters and to General Rid
gway, in Sicily, failed to get through. By the time Eisenhower called off the operation—sending Alexander’s American deputy, General Lemnitzer, in person to Sicily to stop it—more than fifty C-47s with their paratroop companies were already in the air, circling the departure airfield. Firing an emergency warning flare, Lemnitzer—crammed behind the pilot in a British Beaufighter—managed to land with the cancel order, and the planes were instructed by radio to return to base.

  It was a near-run thing.

  But for Mark Clark’s Fifth Army there was no cancellation or reprieve as, like the cavalry in the famous Charge of the Light Brigade, they were convoyed through the night toward the beaches of Salerno, and a most unwelcome welcome.

  52

  Meeting Reality

  TOUCHING DOWN AT dawn on September 9, 1943, the Western Allies finally met reality. It was to be the most venomously contested amphibious invasion since Dieppe—contested by major Wehrmacht forces.

  With the assent of the President and the Prime Minister, the “unconditional surrender” of all Italian forces had finally been announced on Allied radio in Algiers by General Eisenhower at 6:30 p.m. on September 8, in order to give the Germans the least possible time to man the beaches at Salerno. There was no confirming announcement on Rome radio by Marshal Badoglio, however—and for ten minutes it looked as if the Allies would have egg as well as blood on their faces.