Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  The Times adopted a complacent view of the status of Britain’s leader at the Casablanca conference, news of which was given to the public only after the principals departed: ‘Mr Churchill…takes his place at the President’s side with equal and complementary authority. The light now beginning to break wherever allied forces are engaged shows his stature enhanced by the deep shadows through which his country has passed.’ There was a deceitful assertion in the newspaper’s report that De Gaulle and Giraud ‘have come together in the utmost cordiality’.

  Churchill perceived Casablanca as a great success. He was charmed by Roosevelt’s geniality, though Harriman claimed that he was distressed by the president’s announcement to the press at the close of the conference that the Allies would insist upon the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers: ‘He was offended that Roosevelt should have made such a momentous announcement without prior consultation and I am sure he did not like the manner of it. I had seen him unhappy with Roosevelt more than once, but this time he was more deeply offended than before. I also had the impression that he feared it might make the Germans fight all the harder.’ These remarks have bewildered historians. In reality, the president had discussed unconditional surrender with Churchill before his announcement. The prime minister, in his turn, signalled prior warning to the war cabinet in London.

  If he was indeed irritated with Roosevelt, it was probably a matter of emphasis. There could be no possible negotiation with the Nazi regime, but Churchill might have liked to leave a margin of hope in the minds of prospective German anti-Nazis that their nation could expect some mercy if Hitler was deposed. Just before Pearl Harbor, in November 1941, Churchill reminded the cabinet that when Russia was invaded, ‘we had made a public statement that we would not negotiate with Hitler or with the Nazi regime’. He added that he thought ‘it would be going too far to say that we should not negotiate with a Germany controlled by the Army. It was impossible to forecast what form of Government there might be in Germany at a time when their resistance weakened and they wished to negotiate.’ It is likely that in January 1943 his view had not changed much about the desirability of a constructive vagueness in the Allies’ public position towards non-Nazi Germans, even following the vast accession of American strength, and the transformation of the war.

  At Casablanca, Harriman told the president of Churchill’s apparent distress about unconditional surrender. Roosevelt seemed unmoved. Likewise at dinner with the prime minister, he mused aloud about independence for Morocco, compulsory education, fighting disease and other social crusades. Churchill displayed impatience. Harriman believed that Roosevelt talked as he did for the fun of provoking the old British Tory. ‘He always enjoyed other people’s discomfort,’ wrote the US diplomat. ‘It never bothered him very much when other people were unhappy.’ As at all their encounters, Churchill strove to create opportunities for tête-à-tête conversations with the president, but found it increasingly difficult to catch him alone. Roosevelt had grown wary of Churchill’s special pleadings, impatient of his monologues, and was probably also mindful of Marshall’s resentment about any strategic discussion from which the chief of the army was absent.

  In the months that followed Casablanca, such disaffected figures as Albert Wedemeyer made no secret of their anger at the manner in which a strategy had been approved by their president against the wishes of US armed forces chiefs. They believed that British enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations was driven by imperialistic rather than military considerations. This remained their view through the ensuing two years. Such sentiments became known in Congress and the media, and were responsible for much future cross-Atlantic ill temper. But Marshall, with notable statesmanship, acknowledged the decisions graciously. He strove against the anti-British sentiment widespread among America’s soldiers, writing to the army’s public relations chief shortly after Casablanca, urging him to counter the ‘insidious business of stirring up ill-feeling between the British and us’.

  The conference broke up with fervent expressions of goodwill on all sides. Churchill gave his staff his usual instruction when it was time to pack, borrowed from memories of the back end of theatre programmes: ‘Wigs by Clarkson.’ The prime minister and president drove for four hours to Marrakesh, where they installed themselves at the Villa Taylor. That evening, as the sun was setting amid the snowclad Atlas mountains, Churchill climbed to the roof to savour the scene, which had much moved him on a peacetime visit six years earlier. Now he insisted that the president must share the experience. Two servants locked hands to form a chair on which the president was carried up the winding stairs, ‘his paralysed legs dangling like the limbs of a ventriloquist’s dummy’, as Charles Moran noted cruelly. The prime minister murmured: ‘It’s the most lovely spot in the whole world.’

  It seems open to doubt whether Roosevelt gained equal pleasure from an experience which emphasised his own incapacity. Churchill could be notably insensitive to the vulnerabilities of others. Amid delight about winning his battle for the Italian commitment at Casablanca, he allowed himself to express an enthusiasm for Britain’s ally which few of Roosevelt’s conference team would have reciprocated: ‘I love these Americans,’ he told his doctor, ‘they behave so generously.’ Yet never again would his enthusiasm be so unqualified. If there had been a period of real intimacy between the US president and the British prime minister in 1941-42, when Roosevelt in some measure deferred to Churchill’s experience of war, thereafter their relationship became steadily more distant. Mutual courtesies, affectionate rhetoric, were sustained. But perceptions of national interest diverged with increasing explicitness.

  Before the two leaders parted, they dispatched a joint cable to Moscow outlining the conference decisions. ‘Whatever we decided to undertake in 1943 would have to be represented to Stalin as something very big,’ wrote Ian Jacob. The Soviet warlord was now told that there would be a landing in Europe ‘as soon as practicable’. Neither leader supposed, however, that their studied vagueness would fool Moscow. ‘Nothing in the world will be accepted by Stalin as an alternative to our placing 50 or 60 divisions in France by the spring of this year,’ observed Churchill. ‘I think he will be disappointed and furious.’ The prime minister was correct. To Marshal Georgy Zhukov, by now his most trusted commander, Stalin vented his anger about the inadequacy of Allied aid: ‘Hundreds of thousands of Soviet people are giving their lives in the struggle against fascism, and Churchill is haggling with us about two dozen Hurricanes. And anyway those Hurricanes are crap—our pilots think nothing of them.’

  There was one important aspect of the Casablanca conference, and indeed of Allied strategy-making for the rest of the war, which was never expressly articulated by Western leaders, and is still seldom directly acknowledged by historians. The Americans and British flattered themselves that they were shaping policies which would bring about the destruction of Nazism. Yet in truth, every option they considered and every operation they subsequently executed remained subordinate to the struggle on the eastern front. The Western Allies never became responsible for the defeat of Germany’s main armies. They merely assisted the Russians to accomplish this. For all the enthusiasm of George Marshall and his colleagues to invade Europe, it remains impossible to believe that the US would have been any more willing than was Britain to accept millions of casualties to fulfil the attritional role of the Red Army at Stalingrad, Kursk, and in a hundred lesser bloodbaths between 1942 and 1945. Roosevelt and Churchill had the satisfaction of occupying higher moral ground than Stalin. But it is hard to dispute the Soviet warlord’s superior claim to be called the architect of victory.

  Roosevelt took off for home on 25 January. Churchill lingered, and in those surroundings which he loved created his only painting of the war, a view of the Atlas mountains. Then he embarked upon one of his most energetic rounds of wartime travelling, which pleased chiefly himself. Brooke was obliged to cancel a cherished scheme for two days’ sightseeing and a Moroccan partridge shoot, to accompa
ny his master to Turkey. The cabinet opposed this expedition, which ministers considered futile. Churchill overruled them, hankering to revive his grand design, which had foundered in 1941, to raise the Balkans against Hitler. He also rejoiced in the exhilaration of touring the Mediterranean as a victorious warlord, after the humiliations and frustrations of earlier years.

  Arrived at the Cairo embassy early on 26 January, he recoiled from the ambassadress’s offer of breakfast tea, demanding instead white wine. Brooke described the scene with fastidious amazement: ‘A tumbler was brought which he drained in one go, and then licked his lips, turned to Jacqueline [Lampson] and said: “Ah! that is good, but you know, I have already had two whiskies and soda and 2 cigars this morning”!! It was then only shortly after 7.30am. We had travelled all night in poor comfort, covering some 2300 miles in a flight of over 11 hours, a proportion of which was at over 11,000 ft., and there he was, as fresh as paint, drinking wine on top of two previous whiskies and 2 cigars!!’ In Cairo, Churchill held significant conversations with his former historical researcher, the Oxford don William Deakin, now an SOE officer handling Yugoslavia. Deakin described the modest help being dispatched to the royalist General Mihailovic and his Cetnik guerrillas. He briefed the prime minister for the first time about the significance of Josef Broz, ‘Tito’, who led a rapidly growing force of some 20,000 insurgents whom SOE believed to be less communist than they appeared. Deakin’s views were supported by Ultra intercepts already known to Churchill, revealing German belief that the communists represented a much more substantial military threat than the Cetniks.

  The prime minister endorsed approaches to Tito, and Deakin himself was soon parachuted to the Croat leader’s headquarters. Unbeknown to the British, the partisan chief spent the spring of 1943 parleying with the Germans about a possible truce that would free his forces to destroy Mihailovic. Nazi intransigence, however, obliged the partisans to fight the Axis. The British, and especially officers of SOE, were guilty of persistent delusions about Tito’s politics. But they were right about one big thing: Hitler’s determination to defend Yugoslavia and its mineral resources caused him to deploy large forces in a country well-suited to guerrilla operations. There, as nowhere else in occupied Europe outside Russian territory, internal resistance achieved a significant strategic impact.

  The military contingent in Churchill’s party set off for neutral Turkey clad in borrowed and absurdly ill-fitting civilian clothes. Churchill’s visit to President Ismet Iononu on 30 January was no more successful than the cabinet had anticipated. The Turks were full of charm and protestations of goodwill. Always fearful of Stalin, they valued British good offices to dissuade the Russians from aggression on their northern border. In the stuffy railway carriage in which the two sides met, the British were half-embarrassed, half-impressed by Churchill’s insistence on addressing the Ankara delegation in his fluent but incomprehensible French. It would have made no difference had he spoken in Chinese. The Turks were uninterested in joining the war. Why should they have done so? It might be true that the Allies now looked like winners. But since the Anglo-Americans had no designs on Turkey, it was surely prudent for that impoverished nation to maintain its neutrality. Brooke fretted about the security risks to the prime minister, on an ill-guarded train in the middle of nowhere. Local rumour had broadcast news of the visit far and wide. The CIGS searched out Churchill’s detective, whom he discovered eating a hearty supper in the dining car: ‘I told him that the security arrangements were very poor and that he and his assistant must make a point of occasionally patrolling round Winston’s sleeper through the night. He replied in an insolent manner: “Am I expected to work all night as well as all day?” I then told him that he had travelled in identical comfort with the rest of the party, and that I was certainly not aware that he had even started working that day.’

  But the visit passed off safely until Churchill’s Liberator, taxi-ing to take-off on his departure, bogged down on the runway at Adana. The prime minister made comic personal attempts to direct recovery operations, with much gesticulation to the Turks about the plane’s sunken wheel, before having recourse to a spare aircraft. Back in Cairo on 1 February, he learned of the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Cabling to congratulate Stalin, he enthused about ‘a heavy operation across the Channel in August’, involving seventeen to twenty British and US divisions. The Russians could scarcely be blamed for adopting a cynical view of their allies when the prime minister sought to sustain this charade within days of settling an entirely different agenda at Casablanca. He flew on to Montgomery’s headquarters outside Tripoli. In a natural amphitheatre at Castel Benito, he addressed soldiers of Eighth Army. ‘After the war,’ he said, ‘when a man is asked what he did it will be quite sufficient to say “I marched and fought in the Desert Army.” And when history is written…your feats will gleam and glow and will be a source of song and story long after we who are gathered here have passed away.’ With tears in his eyes, he took the salute as 51st Highland Division passed in review before him through the streets of Tripoli, led by its pipers. He visited the New Zealand Division and eulogised Freyburg, its commander.

  In Algiers on 6 February, he told former Vichyite military leaders that ‘if they marched with us, we would not concern ourselves with past differences’. At last the British were successful in achieving recognition for De Gaulle in North Africa. General Giraud was replaced as principal French authority by a national committee of uneasily mingled Gaullists and Giraudists. American distaste for De Gaulle persisted. But Washington grudgingly acknowledged that the Free French, whose soldiers had been fighting the Axis powers while Vichy’s men collaborated with them, must be permitted some share in determining their nation’s future.

  At this, the end of Churchill’s Mediterranean odyssey, he mused aloud about the possibility of his own death. Ian Jacob noted his remarks: ‘It would be a pity to have to go out in the middle of such an interesting drama without seeing the end. But it wouldn’t be a bad moment to leave—it is a straight run-in now, and even the cabinet could manage it.’ His words were significant for two reasons. First, he knew as well as any man how plausible it was that he should die on one of his wartime air journeys, as so many senior officers died. Two members of the Casablanca secretariat were killed when their plane was lost on the journey home, news which Brooke ordered to be temporarily withheld from Churchill when it came through on the eve of his own flight to Turkey. General Gott, the Polish General Sikorski, Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, together with Arthur Purvis, the head of Britain’s Washington purchasing mission, were only the most prominent figures killed on RAF wartime flights—interestingly, hardly any prominent USAAF passengers fell victim to similar misfortunes. Churchill observed, when a North African take-off was delayed by magneto failure, that it was nice of the magneto to fail on the ground. So indeed it was.

  He was right also to perceive that the most critical period of his leadership was at an end. Many dramas still lay ahead, but Britain no longer faced any danger of falling victim to Nazi tyranny. The course was set towards Allied victory. Back in London on 11 February 1943, making a Commons statement about Casablanca, he observed that Great Britain and the US were formerly peaceful nations, ill-armed and unprepared. By contrast, ‘they are now warrior nations, walking in the fear of the Lord, very heavily armed, and with an increasingly clear view of their own salvation’. Mindful of the resurgent U-boat threat in the Atlantic, he stressed the sea as the principal area of danger. In response to a foolish question about what plans existed for preventing Germany from starting another war, he replied that this would provide fit food for thought, ‘which would acquire more precise importance when the present unpleasantness has been ended satisfactorily’.

  It would be absurd to describe Churchill, in the early spring of 1943, as having become redundant. But after three years in which he had done many things which no other man could, he was no longer vital to Britain’s
salvation. If in 1940-41 he had been his nation’s deliverer, in 1942-43 the Americans owed him a greater debt than they recognised, for persuading their president to the Mediterranean strategy. His strategic judgement had been superior to that of America’s chiefs of staff. Hereafter, however, his vision became increasingly clouded and the influence of his country waned. For the rest of the war Churchill would loom much larger in the Grand Alliance as a personality than as leader of its least powerful element. Henceforward, never far from the minds of both Roosevelt and Stalin was the brutal question which Napoleon asked about the Pope: ‘How many divisions have the British?’

  FOURTEEN

  Out of the Desert

  In 1943, to Winston Churchill and to many British, Russian and American people, it sometimes seemed that the Western Allies spent more time talking than fighting Hitler’s armies. Granted, large forces of aircraft battered Germany in a bomber offensive of which much was made in newspapers and cables to Stalin. The Royal Navy, with growing strength, assurance and success, was still waging a vital defensive struggle to hold open the Atlantic convoy routes. US forces fought savage battles with the Japanese in the Pacific. But this was the last year of the war in which shortage of resources severely constrained Anglo-American ground action. In 1944 a vast array of ships, planes, weapons and equipment generated by US industrial mobilisation flooded forth onto the battlefields, arming Allied forces on land, at sea and in the air on a scale such as the world had never seen. Until then, however, Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s armies engaging the Axis remained pathetically small in comparison to those of the Soviets.