Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  The British committed thirteen divisions to North Africa, the Americans six. Of these formations, eight would land in Sicily. Some eleven British divisions in varying states of manning and under-equipment remained at home, training for operations in France or wherever else the prime minister decided to commit them. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of British troops were scattered along the North African littoral, and throughout Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Persia and India. These performed logistical and garrison functions of varying degrees of utility, but were not, as Churchill often reminded Alan Brooke, killing Italians, Germans or Japanese. The US Marine Corps was deployed in the Pacific, while General Douglas MacArthur directed a modest army contingent in Australia and New Guinea. In 1943 the latter campaign was dominated by three Australian divisions. A huge Indian Army in India, supplemented by British units, pursued desultory operations, but seldom that year proved able to deploy more than six divisions against the Japanese. At a time when Stalin and Hitler were pitting some 200 apiece against each other in the east, it is scarcely surprising that the Russians viewed their allies’ Mediterranean activities with contempt.

  Most Anglo-American historians agree that a D-Day in France in 1943 would have been a disaster. It is only necessary to consider the ferocity of the resistance the Germans mounted in Normandy between June and August 1944 to imagine how much more formidable could have been their response to an invasion a year earlier, when Hitler’s power was much greater, that of the Allies much less. But it infuriated the Russians that the British and Americans exercised to the full their luxury of choice, such as Stalin lacked after June 1941, about when to engage a major German army. It is possible that the Allies might have got ashore in France in 1943, and stayed there. But the casualties of the campaign that followed would have been horrendous, dwarfing those of north-west Europe in 1944-45. While the Russians fought most of their war beneath the triple goads of patriotism, compulsion and indifference to human cost, the Anglo-Americans were able to husband lives until their industrial resources could be deployed to overwhelming advantage. They chose to deploy far smaller front-line ground combat forces in proportion to their national populations than either Russia or Germany. David French, author of an acute study of the British Army in World War II, observes: ‘In absolute terms the British reduced their casualties simply by abstaining for long periods of the war from fighting the kind of intensive land battles in which they were bound to incur heavy losses.’

  On 13 February 1943, when it was still hoped that the North African campaign could be wound up within a month, Churchill was exasperated to hear that the Sicilian landing could not take place before July. He cabled Hopkins in Washington: ‘I think it is an awful thing that in April, May and June, not a single American or British soldier will be killing a single German or Italian soldier while the Russians are chasing 185 divisions around.’ He, like the British people, was acutely conscious of the Russians’ losses and—increasingly—of their victories in the Caucasus, at Kharkov and Stalingrad. He cabled Stalin constantly about the progress of the RAF’s bomber offensive, and assured him mendaciously that the French invasion plan was being ‘kept alive from week to week’. When the chiefs of staff asked him to press Moscow for information about Russian military plans, he demurred: ‘I feel so conscious of the poor contribution the British and American armies are making…that I should not be prepared to court the certain rebuff which would attend a request for information.’ In a flush of impatience, he asked his chiefs if the British could launch Husky, as the Sicily operation was now codenamed, on their own. No, was the firm reply. But in asking the question, Churchill discredited American suspicions that he was reluctant for his soldiers to fight.

  February’s defeat at the Kasserine pass in Tunisia, where a German thrust drove back in rout superior US forces, had no strategic significance. Within days Eisenhower’s troops had regrouped and regained the lost ground. But it dealt a decisive blow to hopes of an early end of the campaign. On 27 February, Alexander reported on the state of US forces and the three French divisions, mostly colonial troops, now joining the campaign: ‘Americans require experience and French require arms…Hate to disappoint you, but final victory in North Africa is not (repeat not) just around the corner.’

  It was a perverse feature of the war, that while the British people sustained warm admiration for Russian achievements, they seldom displayed the same generosity towards Americans. The Grand Alliance spawned a host of Anglo-Soviet friendship groups in Britain, but few Anglo-American ones. A Home Intelligence report of 14 January 1943 declared: ‘At the time of Pearl Harbor, public interest in the US received a momentary stimulus which soon declined and has (in marked contrast to the attitude to Russia and things Russian) remained low ever since.’ When news of the Kasserine battle was released in Britain, Violet Bonham Carter recorded in her diary a friend’s story of meeting a vegetable seller in Covent Garden who said: ‘Good news today, sir!’ ‘Have the Russians done well?’ ‘No—the Americans have got the knock.’ This, asserted Bonham Carter, represented ‘the universal reaction’ to news of the reverse that had befallen Eisenhower’s armies. A best-selling novel of the time was How Green was My Valley; Attlee jested unkindly that Alexander in North Africa was now writing a sequel, How Green is My Ally. Churchill deleted from a draft of his memoirs a February letter to the King in which he wrote: ‘The enemy make a great mistake if they think that all the troops we have there are in the same green state as are our United States friends.’ Americans were irked to read the findings of a Gallup Poll that asked British people which ally was making the greatest contribution to winning the war. Some 50 per cent answered ‘Russia’, 43 per cent ‘Britain’, 5 per cent ‘China’, and just 3 per cent ‘the United States’.

  The British knew that the war was a long way from ending, and were resigned to that prospect. But after more than three years of bombardment, privation and defeats, weariness had set in. It is hard to overstate the impact of the blackout on domestic morale. Year after year, throughout the hours of darkness the gloom of Britain’s cities was relieved by no visible chink of light. As the novelist Anthony Powell observed, few people’s tempers were as sound in 1943 as they had been in 1939. The British were deeply sensitive to American triumphalism, of which echoes wafted across the Atlantic from these allies who still ate prodigiously and had never been bombed. Harold Macmillan wrote with lofty disdain about the Americans around him in the Mediterranean: ‘They all look exactly alike to me—like Japanese or Chinese.’

  Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam lamented news of a later US battlefield success: ‘I am told that our efforts are scarcely noted in the American press. I fancy that the Americans after this war are likely to be more swollen-headed and tiresome than after the last; they may well be more troublesome to us than the Russians.’ In their hearts, all these men knew that their country could accomplish nothing without the US, that only American resources made the defeat of Hitler possible. But it was sometimes hard to avoid indulging ungenerous sentiments, amid British consciousness that the struggle was reducing their own society to penury, while America grew relentlessly in wealth and might. If many upper-crust British people hoped that the Soviets and Nazis would destroy each other in the course of the war, most Americans seemed well pleased by the prospect of the British Empire becoming a casualty of victory.

  The Russians expressed renewed impatience about lack of progress in the Mediterranean. Stalin cabled Churchill: ‘The weight of the Anglo-American offensive in North Africa has not only not increased, but there has been no development of the offensive at all, and the time limit for the operations set by yourself was extended.’ The Soviet leader said that thirty-six German divisions were being redeployed from the west to the eastern front, an unimpressive testimonial to Anglo-American efforts. Churchill persuaded himself that this show of anger reflected the influence of the Soviet hierarchy. He still cherished delusions that he possessed a personal understanding with Stalin, interrupted only when
other members of the Moscow politburo demanded a harsher line with the imperialists. Anglo-Russian relations worsened again when the Admiralty insisted on cancellation of its March convoy to Archangel. German capital ships posed a continuing threat off north Norway, while British naval resources were strained to the limits by Mediterranean and Atlantic commitments. In early spring, for the last time in the war Allied decryption of U-boat signals was interrupted, with shocking consequences for several Atlantic convoys—forty-two merchant ships were lost in March, against twenty-six in February.

  Churchill sought to placate Moscow by promising a dramatic increase in aircraft deliveries via Persia, and 240,000 tons of supplies in August. But once again, British assurances were unfulfilled because of shipping and convoying difficulties. Stalin cared nothing about these. Why should he have done? He saw only that his armies were being called upon to destroy those of Hitler, aided by more Western words than action. After the war, Brooke expressed surprise about his own diary: ‘It is rather strange that I did not refer more frequently to the news from Russia.’ Indeed it was. More than two million Russian soldiers—and millions more civilians—died in 1943, while British and American forces fighting the Germans lost around 70,000 killed, including bomber aircrew. In Moscow’s eyes, it seemed characteristic that the Allies should again suspend supplies to Russia, where the real war was being fought, for the convenience of their own marginal operations in North Africa. Hugh Dalton asked Britain’s Moscow ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, if there was a danger of the Russians making a separate peace with Hitler: ‘He says he would not rule this out, if we continue to seem to them to be doing nothing to help.’

  Anglo-Soviet relations were further soured by the Germans’ April announcement of the discovery of thousands of bodies of Polish officers killed by the Soviets in 1939 at Katyn, near Smolensk. On the 15th Churchill told General Sikorski, the Poles’ leader in Britain: ‘Alas, the German revelations are probably true. The Bolsheviks can be very cruel.’ In the Commons smoking room, when Duff Cooper and Harold Nicolson mentioned Katyn to the prime minister, he answered tersely: ‘The less said about that the better.’ He urged Sikorski not to make much publicly of the story, to avoid provoking Moscow. Amid Polish rage, this warning went unheeded. The ‘London Poles’ publicly denounced the Russians, who promptly severed relations with them and announced the creation of their own Polish puppet regime. Churchill warned Stalin sharply that Britain, in its turn, would not recognise Moscow’s Poles. Lines were now drawn. Moscow was bent upon a post-war settlement that brought Poland into a Soviet-dominated buffer zone. Churchill expended immense energy and political capital throughout the next two years in efforts to prevent such an outcome. Yet nothing could alter geography: Warsaw lay much closer to the armies of Stalin than to those of Churchill and Roosevelt.

  It might be supposed that, in those days, Churchill’s daily existence was eased by the facts that many of the big decisions were taken, his critics had been put to flight by battlefield success; Britain’s survival was no longer in doubt. But there was no relaxation for a man who had chosen personally to direct the war effort, in the midst of a global struggle, and whose existence was entirely focused upon hastening Allied victory. Ian Jacob described him in bed of a morning: ‘Sawyers brings the breakfast; then Kinna is sent for to take something down; meanwhile the bell is rung for the Private Secretary on duty who is asked for news, & told to summon someone, say CIGS or Pug. Then it is the candle for lighting cigars that is wanted. Then someone must get Hopkins on the phone. All this while the PM is half-sitting, half-lying in his bed, breathing rather stertorously, & surrounded by papers.’

  Elizabeth Layton, one of Churchill’s typists, remarked that he hated any of his staff to speak, unless they had something of substance to say. ‘There is nothing in the world he hates more than to waste one minute of his time,’ she wrote to her parents. ‘He is so funny in the car; he may dictate, or he may just think for the whole hour, mumbling and grumbling away to himself; or he may be watching the various things we pass, suddenly making little ejaculations like “Oh—look at the lambs”, or “What kind of aeroplane is that”—to which little reply is expected. I think he knows now that I have learned not to waste his time by making any fool observations, which one might have felt obliged to break the silence by doing.’ That weekend, Churchill was at his most benign. ‘We had good news about Tunisia,’ Layton wrote to her parents, ‘so the boss was in a good temper, and really I’ve seldom had such fun. He was very nice to us all and treated us like human beings for once! Poor man, don’t think I ever blame him for not doing so—it is so understandable.’

  The prime minister displayed no appetite for a respite from responsibility, and welcomed companionship only to provide himself with an audience. For all his sociability, paradoxically Churchill remained an intensely private person. Moran thought that he kept his own counsel, ‘sharing his secret thoughts with no one…There is no one to whom he opens his heart. Brooke is too cold and critical; he always seems to be doubtful of the P.M.’s facts and often throws cold water on his pet projects.’ Alexander, by contrast, was a notably skilled flatterer. The accommodating Guardsman listened patiently to the prime minister’s monologues. When he himself responded, ‘He is always so reassuring,’ in Moran’s words, ‘always so sure that the P.M.’s plans are right.’ The companionship of courtiers and visitors sufficed to assuage Churchill’s restlessness only for short periods. He was driven by a constant hunger for movement, action and the company of other great men, with whom he could advance great matters.

  It had become plain that, even if other factors proved favourable, landing craft would be lacking for a French D-Day in 1943. Lack of shipping also made it necessary to abort a proposed amphibious landing in Burma. Churchill wanted to ensure that the Americans persevered with his Mediterranean strategy, and were neither deflected towards the Pacific nor persuaded to hold back their forces for a later descent on France. He was shocked and angry when he learned that Eisenhower had said that news of two German divisions deployed in Sicily might make it necessary to abort Husky. On 8 April he minuted the chiefs of staff that he was bewildered about how the American general could therefore have professed himself so eager for a 1943 invasion of France across the Channel, ‘where he would have to meet a great deal more than two German divisions…I trust the chiefs of staff will not accept these pusillanimous and defeatist doctrines, from whomever they come.’

  John Kennedy wrote, as he watched the prime minister compose one such missive: ‘I had never seen him dictate before, and it was most interesting. He mouthed and whispered each phrase till he got it right, & then said it aloud to the typist.’ Churchill suggested another meeting with Marshall and Hopkins in North Africa in April, but neither the war cabinet nor the Americans favoured such a rendezvous. Instead, he decided to go to Washington again. On 4 May he set off from London to Clydebank, and thence onward aboard the great liner Queen Mary to New York.

  Throughout the first half of the war, Britain confronted predicaments rather than enjoying options. Henceforward, however, vastly improved circumstances conferred opportunities, promoted dilemmas. The North African campaign was at last approaching a close. On 8 May, British forces entered Tunis, and the Americans took Bizerta. Once more Britain’s church bells rang for victory. At Casablanca the Americans had endorsed an overwhelmingly British vision for further Mediterranean operations. The two subsequent Anglo-American conferences of the year, codenamed Trident and Quadrant, were dominated by British efforts to sustain the US commitment made in January. Some of the contortions of Marshall and his colleagues reflected a desire to gain control of the Allied agenda, to resist British wishes simply because they were British. It seemed to the Americans intolerable that when their cash, supplies, aircraft, tanks and soon manpower would overwhelmingly dominate future Allied operations, Churchill and his colleagues should dictate the nature of these.

  Each side also cherished its own unrealistic delusions. For
instance, the Americans were uninterested in amphibious operations in South-East Asia, because these would contribute nothing towards fulfilling their principal strategic interest in the region, that of assisting Chiang Kai-shek’s ramshackle war effort in China. On Churchill’s part, he sailed to America in May determined to resist entanglement in the fever-ridden jungles of Burma, eager instead for ‘an Asiatic Torch’—possible landings on Sumatra, Java or Malaya, all fanciful. Shrewd strategists, notably including the British General Bill Slim, understood that the American drive across the central Pacific would be the key element in Japan’s defeat. British operations in Burma were chiefly designed to ‘show willing’ to the US, which goes far to explain the prime minister’s cynicism about most things to do with the Asian war.

  Churchill and his commanders were justified in their insistence that operations in Sicily, and thereafter some further exploitation in Italy, were indispensable. He told the chiefs of staff at a meeting aboard the Queen Mary on 10 May: ‘The greatest step we could take in 1943…would be the elimination of Italy.’ But the British woefully underestimated the difficulties of conducting a campaign on the mainland, and the likely strength of German resistance. They were rash enough to urge upon the Americans a view, reflecting their experience against Mussolini’s troops in North Africa, that occupying most of Italy would be easy.

  The Anglo-American armies needed to learn manifold lessons about command structures, air support and large-scale opposed amphibious landings. These the Mediterranean provided in 1943. But when the Russians were fighting huge and bloody battles in the east, it is unsurprising that American officers recoiled from the prospect that their own ambitions for the coming year should be so modest. Many senior figures in the US Army doubted that the British were sincere about supporting a French D-Day even in the spring of 1944. Marshall and his colleagues, and indeed Roosevelt, were apprehensive that once the Allies got themselves into Italy, they would not easily extricate the forces which it would be essential to shift to Britain before the end of the year.