by Max Hastings
For most of August, Marshall continued to agitate against Torch. From the moment Churchill first mooted the North African scheme back in December, the chief of the army had been willing to indulge it only if US troops could land unopposed, with Vichy French acquiescence. The Americans were fearful that if they were obliged to launch an amphibious assault, the Germans would swiftly reinforce North Africa through Franco’s Spain, isolating any US forces deployed east of the Straits of Gibraltar. It is important to emphasise that in the late summer of 1942 the American chiefs believed that the British were doomed to lose Egypt. This would free Rommel’s army to turn on a US invasion force. Marshall not only disliked committing American soldiers to the Mediterranean theatre: he feared that a campaign there could fail. A cynic such as Alan Brooke might have contrasted unfavourably the US chief of the army’s insouciance about the perils of an abortive British descent on France with his sensitivity about the prospect of an unsuccessful American one on North Africa.
The Torch commitment represented one of Churchill’s most important victories of the war. He had persuaded Roosevelt to impose a course of action on his chiefs of staff against their strongest wishes. As for the president, this was his most significant strategic intervention, one of the few occasions when he acted in earnest the part of commander-in-chief, instead of delegating his powers to his military advisers. The two national leaders displayed the highest wisdom. Roosevelt’s decision was driven by the same political imperatives that Churchill recognised. Marshall later acknowledged this, saying of the US chiefs of staff: ‘We failed to see that a leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. The people demand action.’ Fulfilment of this requirement was matched by the president’s acknowledgement that if the British did not choose to land in France in 1942, they could not be made to do so. At this stage also, Roosevelt was much more ready than in subsequent years to be influenced by Churchill’s judgement. The US would land only an initial 70,000 men in North Africa, though thereafter these would be progressively reinforced. In 1942 a significant proportion of Marshall’s available forces were committed to home defence of the United States, though it was hard to see who might mount an invasion.
The British sought to salve bruised US Army sensibilities by offering a strong endorsement of its ambitions for a landing in France in 1943. But Marshall knew that once American forces were fighting in the Mediterranean, it would be hard to get them out again in time for an invasion of France the following year. In the formal document decreeing the North African commitment, CCS94, the chiefs of staff acknowledged ‘that it be understood that a commitment to [Torch] renders Roundup [an invasion of France] in all probability impracticable of successful operation in 1943’. Only much later did some prominent American soldiers grudgingly concede that Churchill might have been right; that his and Roosevelt’s commitment to Torch saved the Allies from a colossal folly. And this was only when the US Army had experienced for itself the savage reality of fighting the Wehrmacht.
TWELVE
Camels and the Bear
Churchill travelled to the Middle East in austere and dangerous discomfort. ‘What energy and gallantry of the old gentleman,’ marvelled Oliver Harvey, ‘setting off…across Africa in the heat of mid-summer.’ This was true enough, but masked the reality that for the rest of the war Churchill was much happier in overseas theatres of war than amid the drabness of Britain, where he found scant romance, increasing pettiness and complaint. Though he cherished a vision of fortress Albion, its reality became increasingly uncongenial. Before his departure, the prime minister discussed with Eden whether another minister should join his party: ‘He felt the need for company, especially in Moscow.’ Here was a glimpse of Churchill’s loneliness when he faced great challenges. He yearned for the comradeship of some peer figure such as Beaverbrook in whom he could confide, with whom he could exchange impressions and jokes. This time, however, it was decided that he should take in his entourage only civil servants and soldiers, Alan Brooke foremost among them. They would be joined for the Moscow leg by Averell Harriman, whose presence was designed to ensure Russian understanding that what the British asserted, the Americans endorsed, and by Sir Archibald Wavell, who had served in Russia in 1919 and spoke the language.
They travelled aboard a Liberator bomber which possessed desirable virtues of performance—range, speed and altitude—but none of the luxuries of the Boeing Clipper. Somewhat to the embarrassment of Britain’s airmen, the safety of the prime minister was entrusted to a young Atlantic ferry pilot named Bill Vanderkloot, who hailed from Illinois. Vanderkloot was deemed to possess temperament, navigational skills and long-range experience which no available home-grown British pilot could match. The American admirably fulfilled expectations. His plane, however, was a cramped and unsuitable conveyance for an elderly man upon whose welfare, in considerable degree, the hopes of Western civilisation rested. It was so noisy that Churchill could communicate with his fellow passengers only by exchanging notes. The flight was long and cold. They made an African landfall over Spanish Morocco, then struck a course which took them well inland before turning east over the desert, flying high and using oxygen. In his mask, wrote one of the plane’s crew, Churchill ‘looked exactly as though he was in a Christmas party disguise’. He sat in the co-pilot’s seat, reviving a host of youthful memories as they approached Cairo: ‘Often had I seen the day break on the Nile.’ Once on the ground, he began a long, painstaking grilling of soldiers and officials about the desert campaign, the army and its commanders.
All that he saw and heard confirmed his instincts back in London. Ever since 1939, visitors to Egypt had been dismayed by the lassitude pervading the nexus of headquarters, camps, villas, hotels and clubs that lay along the Nile. An air of self-indulgent imperialism, of a kind that confirmed the worst prejudices of Aneurin Bevan, persisted even in the midst of a war of national survival. ‘Old Miles [Lampson, British ambassador to Egypt] leads a completely peacetime existence, a satrap,’ wrote Oliver Harvey scornfully. ‘He does no work at all.’ The habits and complacency of peacetime also prevailed in many military messes. In 1941 Averell Harriman, no ascetic, was shocked by the indolence and luxury he saw around him on his first visit to Cairo. A year later, too many gentlemen still held sway over too few players. The former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, passing through Egypt, perceived a ‘lackadaisical’ attitude to the war which was ‘painful’. Auchinleck had repeatedly disappointed Churchill’s hopes. The good soldiers in the Middle East were tired. A staff officer wrote from Egypt in July 1942: ‘There seem to me to be too many people at home who have had no war—through no fault of their own—and too many people out here who have had too much war.’
The desert army continued to suffer grave technical and tactical deficiencies. The cavalry ethos still dominated armoured operations, despite the frequent failures of British tanks’ attempts to destroy German ones. ‘The Auk’s’ formations seemed unable to master the Afrika Korps’ art of using anti-tank guns to stop British armour before committing its own Panzers. The shoddiness of British industrial production was exposed when home-built tanks were offloaded in Egypt. Their bolts proved to have been only hand-tightened at the factories, and most had been inadequately packed and loaded for ocean passage. Weeks of labour were necessary in the workshops of the Nile Delta before armoured vehicles were fit for action. American Grant tanks, which now equipped some British armoured units, mounted a 75mm sponson gun capable of destroying German Panzers, but were otherwise outmatched by them. New Shermans were still in transit from the US.
Auchinleck’s troops had been outfought again and again. British defeats in 1940-41 had been attributable to circumstances beyond commanders’ control: pre-war neglect, lack of air support and German superiority. The failures of late 1941 and 1942, however, reflected culpable weaknesses. The two ablest airmen in Cairo, Arthur Tedder and ‘Maori’ Coningham, talked frankly to Churchill and Brooke about their perceptions of the army’s short
comings. Colonel Ian Jacob noted in his diary during the Cairo visit that there had been ‘far too many cases of units surrendering in circumstances in which in the last war they would have fought it out…The discipline of the Army is no longer what it used to be…There is lacking in this war the strong incentive of a national cause. Nothing concentrate has replaced the old motto “For King and Country”. The aims set before the people…are negative, and it still does not seem to have been brought home…that it is a war for their own existence.’ War correspondent Alan Moorehead agreed: ‘In the Middle East there was, in August, a general and growing feeling [among the troops] that something was being held back from them, that they were being asked to fight for a cause which the leaders did not find vital enough to state clearly. It’s simply no good telling the average soldier that he is fighting for victory, for his country, for the sake of duty. He knows all that. And now he is asking, “For what sort of victory? For what sort of a post-war country? For my duty to what goal in life?” ’
If this was indeed true—and Moorehead knew the desert army intimately—then the prime minister himself deserved some of the blame. It was he who, despite the urgings of ministers, refused to address himself to ‘war aims’, a post-war vision. Instead, he held out to British soldiers the promise of martial glory, writing to Clementine from Cairo: ‘I intend to see every important unit in this army, both back and front, and make them feel the vast consequences which depend upon them and the superb honours which may be theirs.’ In supposing such things to represent plausible or adequate incitements for citizen soldiers, Churchill was almost certainly mistaken. But it was not in his nature to understand that most men cared more about their prospects in a future beyond war than about ribbons and laurels to be acquired during the fighting of it.
In Churchill’s eyes the first priority in Egypt was, as usual, to identify new commanders. By 6 August he had made up his mind to sack Auchinleck. The general received his dismissal ungraciously, and harboured bitterness for the rest of his life. Dill blamed Churchill for the Middle East C-in-C’s failure, claiming that the prime minister ‘had ruined Auchinleck…he had dwarfed him just as he dwarfs and reduces others around him’. This charge says more about Dill’s limitations, as a shop steward for unsuccessful British generals, than about the prime minister’s. Of course Churchill had harried Auchinleck. It has been suggested above that the general’s failure in part reflected institutional weaknesses in the British Army. But ‘the Auk’ had been the man in charge through a succession of operations abysmally conducted by subordinates of his choice. British failure to defeat the Afrika Korps at Gazala in May-June 1942 reflected gross command incompetence. It was surely right to dismiss Auchinleck.
Churchill’s first impulsive thought for his replacement was Alan Brooke. The CIGS was much moved by the proposal, but wisely and selflessly rejected it. He perceived himself as indispensable at the War Office—and he was right. The prime minister’s next choice was Lt. Gen. William ‘Strafer’ Gott, who had gained a reputation for dashing leadership from the front, but in whom Brooke lacked confidence. Since 1939 the prime minister had been convinced that Britain’s armed forces lacked leaders with fire in their bellies, and had sought to appoint to high command proven warriors, heroes. In this he was often mistaken. Steely professionalism was needed, rather than conspicuous personal courage. There is something in the observation of the Russian writer who asserts that ‘Courage often proves to be the best part of the man who possesses it.’Many of Churchill’s favourite warriors lacked intellect. In 1940 he had elevated Admiral Sir Roger Keyes to become Director of Combined Operations. Keyes had conceit and a talent for bombast, but was otherwise quite unfit for his post, as Churchill was obliged to recognise the following year. Keyes’s replacement, Mountbatten, caught Churchill’s imagination by his exploits at sea. But the Royal Navy deemed ‘Dickie’ an indifferent destroyer flotilla leader, and admirals were disgusted that glamour, fluency and royal connections secured his meteoric promotion. Freyburg failed in Crete. Another Churchillian favourite, Maj. Gen. Sir Edward Spears, was responsible for many difficulties in relations with the Free French, especially in his role as senior British representative in Syria.
In 1942, Churchill chose Admiral Sir Henry Harwood to succeed Andrew Cunningham as naval C-in-C Mediterranean. Harwood had won the prime minister’s approval by leading his cruiser squadron in the December 1939 Battle of the River Plate against the pocket battleship Graf Spee, but for all his undoubted courage he was a notoriously stupid officer whose removal soon became necessary. Yet Churchill’s enthusiasm for naval heroes remained undiminished. When Dudley Pound died in September 1943, Churchill wanted Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser to replace him as First Sea Lord. Naval officers thought Fraser dim, but Churchill perceived him as a fighter. When the navy instead insisted on Cunningham, who had often locked horns with the prime minister, Churchill said petulantly: ‘All right. You can have your Cunningham, but if the Admiralty don’t do as they are told I will bring down the Board in ruins even if it means my coming down with it.’
Gott was yet another officer who commended himself to the prime minister because he had made a name as a thruster, yet it is most unlikely that he was competent to command Eighth Army. Fate intervened. En route to Cairo to receive his appointment, Gott’s plane was shot down and he was killed. Instead Brooke’s nominee, Sir Bernard Montgomery, was summoned from a corps command in England to head Eighth Army. Churchill had met Montgomery on visits to his units, and was impressed by his forceful personality, if not by his boorish conceit. But in accepting his appointment to the desert, the prime minister was overwhelmingly dependent on the CIGS’s judgement. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander, a brave, charming but unassertive Guardsman who had recently presided over the British retreat from Burma, was appointed C-in-C Middle East. The prime minister, who found ‘Alex’ congenial and reassuring, expected him to play a far more important role in shaping future operations than Montgomery. Several senior subordinate officers were also earmarked for sacking and replacement.
Having set in motion wholesale change at the top, Churchill departed from Cairo on the most taxing stage of this epic excursion. He was to meet the Soviet Union’s warlord, and deliver the unwelcome news that the Western Allies had determined against launching a Second Front in 1942. After a brief stopover in Tehran, on 12 August he made a 101/2-hour flight to Moscow, accompanied by his personal staff and Averell Harriman. A few hours after landing, Churchill was summoned to the Kremlin. He asked Harriman to accompany him: ‘I feel things would be easier if we all seemed to be together. I have a somewhat raw job.’
In truth, and as surprisingly few historians show recognition of, Stalin was already aware of all that Churchill feared to tell him. Whitehall and Washington were alike deeply penetrated by communist sympathisers. Among the most prominent, John Cairncross served as Lord Hankey’s private secretary, with access to war cabinet papers until Hankey’s sacking in 1942, when he was transferred to Bletchley Park. Anthony Blunt served in MI5, while Guy Burgess and Kim Philby worked for SIS. Donald Maclean had access to key Foreign Office material, especially concerning research on the atomic bomb. In the US government—which was anyway lax about securing its secrets from the Russians—Harry Dexter White worked for Henry Morgenthau, Nathan Silvermaster for the Board of Economic Warfare, Alger Hiss for the State Department. Harry Hopkins talked with surprising freedom, though surely not ill intent, to a key NKVD agent in the United States. Throughout the war, a mass of British and US government reports, minutes and decrypted Axis messages was passed to Moscow by such people, through their controllers in London and Washington. As a result, before every Allied summit the Russians were vastly better informed about Anglo-American military intentions, than vice versa. So much material reached Stalin from London that he rejected some of it as disinformation, plants by cunning agents of Churchill. When Kim Philby of SIS told his NKVD handler that Britain was conducting no secret intelligence operations in the Soviet Union, Stalin
dismissed this assertion with the contempt he deemed it to deserve. Molotov and Lavrenti Beria, the Soviet intelligence and secret police chief, frequently concealed from their leader accurate intelligence which they believed would anger him.
Yet in August 1942 Stalin was thoroughly briefed about Western Allied strategy, thanks to the highly placed Soviet agents in London. He had been told of the fierce Anglo-American arguments about the Second Front. On 4 August Beria reported:
Our NKVD resident in London sent the following information received from a source close to the English General Staff: A meeting about the second front took place on 21 July 1942. It was attended by Churchill, Lord Mountbatten, General Marshall and others. General Marshall sharply criticized the attitude of the English…He insisted that the second front should be opened in 1942 and warned that if the English failed to do this the USA would have to reconsider sending reinforcements to Great Britain and focus their attention on the Pacific. Churchill gave the following response to General Marshall: ‘There is not a single top general who would recommend starting major operations on the continent.’ A further meeting on the second front took place on 22 or 23 July 1942. This was attended on the English side by Churchill, Mountbatten and the chiefs of staff; on the American side by Marshall, Eisenhower and others. The participants discussed a plan for the invasion of the continent which has been developed by English and American military experts…English chiefs of staff unanimously voted against and were supported by Churchill who declared that he could not vote against his own chiefs of staff. NKVD resident in London also reported the following, based on information from agents which had been also confirmed earlier by a source close to American embassy: on 25 July the British war cabinet agreed that there should be no second front this year.
