Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  During Churchill’s first days in America he visited Roosevelt’s retreat at Shangri-La in the Alleghenies, and delivered another magnificent oration to Congress on 19 May. When Halifax, at the Washington embassy, fussed that after the war the Americans might demand repayment of Britain’s Lend-Lease debt, Churchill said truculently: ‘Oh, I shall like that one. I shall say, yes by all means let us have an account…but I shall have my account to put in too, and my account is for holding the baby alone for eighteen months, and it was a very rough brutal baby…I don’t quite know what I shall have to charge for it.’ He was dismayed, however, by a perceived decline in Roosevelt’s health. ‘Have you noticed that the President is a tired man?’ he demanded of Moran. ‘His mind seems closed; he seems to have lost his wonderful elasticity.’ If it was true that the president’s health was declining, the real significance of his changed mood was that he was less amenable to Churchill’s blandishments.

  The prime minister would have been even more troubled had he known that at this very moment the president was secretly pursuing a bilateral meeting with Stalin, excluding Churchill, through the good offices of the pre-war US ambassador to Moscow, the egregious Joseph E. Davies. Davies, like Stafford Cripps, was a devoted admirer of the Soviet Union. During his time in Moscow he sought to persuade his wife that volleys she heard as NKVD firing squads executed victims of the purges were mere construction workers’ jack-hammers. Davies formed a large art collection from works sold to him at knockdown prices by the Soviet authorities, looted from galleries or confiscated from murdered state enemies. His outrageous and adulatory memoir of his time in Russia was made into a 1943 Hollywood movie, Mission to Moscow, using a script authorised by himself. In May, Roosevelt provided a USAAF aircraft to fly Davies to Moscow carrying prints of the film for Stalin’s edification. Though this deplorable figure failed to arrange the meeting Roosevelt sought, the president’s willingness to employ him reflected shameless duplicity towards Churchill.

  The combined chiefs of staff, meanwhile, were locked in close, tense, almost continuous sessions under Marshall’s chairmanship. Brooke on 13 May made remarks which stunned and appalled the Americans. Dismissing prospects of an early invasion of France, he said that ‘no major operations would be possible until 1945 or 1946, since it must be remembered that in previous wars there had always been some 80 French divisions available on our side…The British manpower position was weak.’ Marshall responded icily: ‘Did this mean that the British chiefs of staff regarded Mediterranean operations as the key to a successful termination of the European war?’ Sir Charles Portal interjected, in a fashion surely designed to limit the damage done by Brooke’s brutal assertion, that ‘If Italy was knocked out this year, then in 1944 a successful re-entry into NW Europe might well be possible.’ British scepticism, said Portal, focused on the notion that a force of twenty to twenty-five divisions could achieve important results across the Channel on the Continent of Europe ‘unless almost the entire bulk of the German Army was in Russia or the Balkans’.

  Brooke once again emphasised that the Red Army alone possessed sufficient mass to engage the full weight of the Wehrmacht: ‘Russia was the only ally in possession of large ground forces and our strategy must aim to help her to the maximum possible effect.’ He wrote in his diary that night: ‘It was quite evident that Marshall was quite incapable of grasping the objects of our strategy nor the magnitude of operations connected with cross-Channel strategy.’ The CIGS found the Trident conference one of the most gruelling and depressing experiences of his war. The exchanges that day illustrated his deep caution, indeed pessimism. Brooke’s reputation as a strategist is significantly damaged by his remarks at the combined chiefs of staff meeting on 13 May. Though Marshall was often wrong in 1942-43, thereafter it was Brooke whose judgement was suspect. If the British view prevailed, it was hard to imagine that D-Day would take place in 1944. Never since December 1941 had the two allies’ military leaderships seemed so far apart.

  Yet as the Americans fought back, the British gave ground. At last, Brooke’s team acknowledged a ‘firm belief’ that conditions for an invasion of France would exist in 1944. On the 19th the British accepted a target date of 1 May 1944 for a landing in northern France by twenty-nine divisions. Lt.Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan was appointed to lead the COSSAC* staff, to plan such an invasion. The outcome, Churchill cabled to Attlee on 21 May, was agreement that Britain should have ‘a free hand’ in the Mediterranean until November 1943. Success in Sicily would be exploited to advance the elimination of Italy from the Axis until concentration and redeployment of forces for the French landings began. Brooke wrote, after a meeting with Roosevelt and Churchill at the White House on 21 May: ‘I do not think they realised how near we were to a failure to reach agreement!’ He observed four days later that such conferences were

  the most exhausting entertainments imaginable. I am convinced they do a lot of good in securing great understanding between us, and yet—they fall short insofar as our basic convictions remain unaltered. King still remains determined to press Pacific at the expense of all other fronts. Marshall wishes to ensure cross-Channel operation at expense of Mediterranean. [I still feel] that Mediterranean offers far more hope of adding to final success. Portal in his heart feels that if we left him a free hand bombing alone might well win the war. And dear old Dudley Pound when he wakes up wishes we would place submarine warfare above all other requirements…And Winston?? Thinks one thing at one moment and another at another moment. At times the war may be won by bombing…At others it becomes essential for us to bleed ourselves dry on the Continent because Russia is doing the same. At others our main effort must be in the Mediterranean…with sporadic desires to invade Norway and ‘roll up the map in the opposite direction to Hitler’! But more often he wants us to carry out ALL operations simultaneously!

  Churchill was at his most ebullient by the time he and Roosevelt parted. At a final press conference at the White House with Roosevelt on 26 May, he delighted the assembled correspondents by clambering onto a chair and giving his famous two-fingered V-sign. Then he boarded a Boeing Clipper for Algiers via Gibraltar, accompanied by George Marshall and Brooke. The three travelled together to brief Eisenhower about the conference decisions. En route, the aircraft was struck by lightning, awakening Churchill from a deep sleep. He wrote wryly: ‘I had always wondered why aircraft did not mind being struck by lightning. To a groundsman it would seem quite a dangerous thing.’ On the day of their later return from Gibraltar, on much the same course, a British plane whose passengers included the film star Leslie Howard was shot down by a German fighter, with the loss of all on board. If the hazards of many wartime flights were unavoidable, that of Churchill and his party to Algiers surely entailed extravagant risk. Had the US chief of the army perished with the prime minister and CIGS, the blow to the Grand Alliance would have been terrible indeed. The party arrived safely, however. As they neared the Rock, Brooke was curiously moved to see the prime minister, wearing what he described as a yachting cap, peering eagerly down through the clouds with a cigar clenched beneath his lips, looking out for the first sight of land. The soldier, so often exasperated by his master, perceived this as a glimpse of his ‘very human & lovable side’.

  Churchill spent eight happy days in Tunisia and Algeria, on one of them addressing a great throng of British troops in the ancient amphitheatre at Carthage. ‘I was speaking,’ he told guests at dinner that night, ‘from where the cries of Christian virgins rent the air while roaring lions devoured them—and yet—I am no lion and certainly not a virgin.’ Eisenhower and Montgomery expressed confidence about planning for the Sicilian landing. Marshall, however, made it plain that he was determined to reserve judgement about future Italian operations until the outcome of the Sicilian campaign became clear.

  On 4 June, Churchill flew home to Britain by Liberator. Four days later he offered a survey of the war to the House of Commons which was justly confident, though Marshall and his colleagues mig
ht have disputed his sunny portrayal of Anglo-American relations: ‘All sorts of divergences, all sorts of differences of outlook and all sorts of awkward little jars necessarily occur as we roll ponderously forward together along the rough and broken road of war. But none of these makes the slightest difference to our ever-growing concert and unity, there are none of them which cannot be settled face to face by heart-to-heart talks and patient argument. My own relations with the illustrious President of the United States have become in these years of war those of personal friendship and regard, and nothing will ever happen to separate us in comradeship and partnership of thought and action while we remain responsible for the conduct of affairs.’ Here was, of course, an expression of fervent desire rather than of unfolding reality.

  If Churchill expressed satisfaction about the progress of the war, Stalin did not. He cabled Roosevelt, copied to Churchill, to express dismay at Anglo-American postponements of D-Day, then wrote direct to the prime minister on 24 June: ‘It goes without saying that the Soviet Government cannot put up with such disregard of the most vital Soviet interests in the war against the common enemy.’ Two days later, Churchill responded by dispatching one of his toughest messages of the war to the Russian leader: ‘Although until 22nd June 1941, we British were left alone to face the worst that Nazi Germany could do to us, I instantly began to aid Soviet Russia to the best of our limited means from the moment that she was herself attacked by Hitler. I am satisfied that I have done everything in human power to help you. Therefore the reproaches which you now cast upon your Western Allies leave me unmoved. Nor, apart from the damage to our military interests, should I have any difficulty in presenting my case to the British Parliament and nation.’ He was growing weary of the Russians, writing a fortnight later: ‘Experience has taught me that it is not worthwhile arguing with Soviet people. One simply has to confront them with the new facts and await their reactions.’

  Yet many British citizens sympathised with the Russian view. ‘I am the last to plead Stalin’s case,’ Clark Kerr cabled from Moscow on 1 July, but it seemed to the British ambassador that the weakness in the British position lay ‘not in our inability to open this second front but in our having led him to believe we were going to’. Beaverbrook, still chronically disloyal, wrote to Henry Luce, overlord of Time magazine, on 2 July: ‘In my view there is an undercurrent of uncertainty [in Britain] whether an attack on Italy can, so far as Russia is concerned, attain the proportions of a real Second Front. The public are convinced that the chance has now come to take the fullest advantage of Russian successes. And no operation in the West which left unaffected the German dispositions in the East would for long meet with popular favour.’ Surrey court shorthand-writer George King agreed with Beaverbrook: ‘When Mr Churchill received the freedom of London last week,’ he wrote on 7 July, ‘he said it seemed clear that “before the leaves of autumn fall, real amphibious battles will be in progress.” One hopes so, because much as all must dread the casualties, the Allies owe such an action to Russia and the slaves of Europe.’ Oliver Harvey wrote from the Foreign Office: ‘To some of the Government it is incredible, unforgivable, indeed inadmissible, that the Russian can be so successful. This is the attitude of the W[ar] O[ffice].’

  On 10 July, Allied forces landed in Sicily under the command of Britain’s Sir Harold Alexander. In Washington and London, ministers and generals knew that Husky was marred by all manner of blunders, great and small. The airborne assault was shambolic. Anglo-American command arrangements remained confused throughout the campaign. Italian troops showed no desire to fight seriously, but the three German divisions on the island displayed their usual high professionalism in resisting the attacks of Alexander’s much superior forces. The British and American publics, however, knew little about the bungles. They perceived only the overriding realities that the landings were successful, and that within weeks Axis forces were driven from Sicily. Brooke, who had been profoundly worried about Husky because it reflected a British design, experienced a surge of relief. Churchill, rejoicing, urged the chiefs of staff on 13 July to plan ambitiously for follow-up operations in Italy: ‘Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest bug, from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee.’ He wanted early amphibious landings, even before Sicily was cleared, directed against Naples and Rome. On 16 July he told Smuts: ‘I believe the President is with me: Eisenhower in his heart is naturally for it.’

  Macmillan pitied Eisenhower, attempting to fulfil his role as Mediterranean supreme commander amidst a constant bombardment of cables marked ‘private, personal and most immediate’, and emanating variously from the combined chiefs of staff, Marshall, Roosevelt, Churchill direct, Churchill through the Foreign Office, or Eden through the Foreign Office. ‘All these instructions,’ observed Macmillan laconically, ‘are naturally contradictory and conflicting.’ He and Ike’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, endeavoured to sort and reconcile such communications and decide which should be acted upon.

  Even as Churchill enthused about the prospects in the Mediterranean he began to waver again about Overlord, as D-Day in France would henceforward become known. On 19 July he told the chiefs of staff that he now had doubts whether the forces available in Britain by 1 May 1944 would suffice for a successful landing ‘in view of the extraordinary fighting efficiency of the German Army, and the much larger forces they could so readily bring to bear against our troops even if the landings were successfully accomplished. It is right for many reasons to make every preparation with the utmost sincerity and vigour, but if later on it is realised by all concerned that the operation is beyond our strength in May and will have to be postponed till August 1944, then it is essential that we should have this other consideration up our sleeves.’ He urged them to dust down Jupiter, his long-cherished scheme for a descent on north Norway.

  Oliver Harvey wrote admiringly in his diary on 24 July about the firmness with which Churchill had dismissed a proposal from Henry Stimson, visiting London, to advance the 1 May D-Day date: ‘On this, I’m thankful to say, the PM will refuse absolutely to budge. On military affairs he is instinctively right as he is wrong on foreign affairs. As a war minister he is superb, driving our own Chiefs of Staff, guiding them like a coach and four, applying whip or brake as necessary, with the confidence and touch of genius.’ Even though Stimson’s proposal was indeed misguided, Harvey’s accolade was illtimed. Churchill’s renewed foot-dragging showed him at his worst. For eighteen months he had staved off Marshall’s demands for early action in France. The British had the best of the arguments, at the cost of feeding American mistrust and resentment, which now ran deep. Back in May, Brooke had written, expressing exasperation with perceived American inconsistency of purpose: ‘Agreement after agreement may be secured on paper, but if their hearts are not in it they soon drift away again.’ Yet Marshall and his colleagues could have applied the same strictures to the British, with at least equal justice.

  Lt.Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, appointed by the chiefs of staff to plan Overlord, later became embittered when he perceived himself marginalised before D-Day eventually took place. Yet his post-war private observations cannot be wholly discounted. ‘I firmly believe,’ he told US historian Forrest Pogue in 1947, ‘that [Churchill and his chiefs] returned from Casablanca fully determined to repudiate the agreement that they had been forced there to sign with the Americans [for an invasion of France]…Apart from a mere dislike of the project, the British authorities proceeded to make every possible step to impede progress in NW Europe by diverting their forces, as unobtrusively as possible, to other theatres of war.’ He expressed his opinion that his own appointment was made in the expectation that he would eventually be sacrificed ‘as a scapegoat when a suitable excuse should be found for withdrawing British support from the operation’. Morgan cited the scepticism about Overlord of Admiral Cunningham, whom he quoted as saying: ‘I have already evacuated three British armies in the face of the enemy and I don’t propose to evacuate a fourth.’ Mo
rgan thought far more highly of the US chiefs of staff and of Eisenhower than of the British leadership: ‘On Br side…had suffered long series of disasters and had become casualty conscious to a very high degree. Br manpower sit. in a state of bankruptcy. Inconceivable that Br could play other than minor part in…reconquest of Europe from the Germans.’

  The Americans did not, of course, read the prime minister’s 19 July minute to his chiefs. But from the late summer of 1943 onwards they perceived continuing British wavering about D-Day which they were now implacably—and rightly—committed to override. Churchill’s hesitation about an invasion in 1944 reflected an apprehension about the fighting power of an Anglo-American army against the Wehrmacht which was unworthy of the Grand Alliance now that its means were growing so great, its huge mobilisation at last approaching maturity.

  Churchill’s new strategic vision embraced some wild notions. On 25 July, Mussolini resigned and Italy’s government fell into the hands of King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The Italian dictator’s fall prompted Churchill to revive one of his favourite schemes, a descent on Italian-occupied Rhodes, designed to drag Turkey into the war. This ambition would precipitate a minor disaster later in the year, the Dodecanese campaign. Churchill’s standing in American eyes would decline steadily between the summer of 1943 and the end of the war, and he himself bore a substantial share of responsibility for this. It is true that his wise warnings about the future threat posed by the Soviet Union were insufficiently heeded. But this was in significant part because the Americans lost faith in his strategic judgement.