Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  EIGHTEEN

  Overlord

  In the fifth year of Britain’s war, all those concerned with its direction were desperately tired: ‘It’s not the hard work, it’s the hard worry,’ said Robert Bruce Lockhart, head of the Political Warfare Executive. After a ministerial meeting presided over by Churchill, Dalton wrote: ‘I sense that Woolton and a number of the rest are almost completely exhausted.’ To the British public the wait for D-Day, decisive milestone in the war in the west, seemed interminable. The Ministry of Information, in one of its regular opinion surveys, described domestic morale in the spring of 1944 as ‘poor’, not least because of public apprehension about invasion casualties. ‘Spirits remain at a low level,’ reported the ministry’s monitors on 14 April.

  More and more workers flaunted disaffection. Industrial stoppages soared. February found 120,000 miners on unofficial strike in Yorkshire, 100,000 in Wales, and several hundred thousand more elsewhere. Even the president of the miners’ union suggested that Trotskyite agitation was playing a part. Miners’ strikes abated in April after a reconstruction of wages, but there were also stoppages among gas workers and engineering apprentices. Some 730,000 man-hours were lost in one Scottish aircraft factory. At another firm in August 1944, 419,000 hours were lost when workers rejected a management proposal that women should manufacture textile machinery—the firm’s normal business—while men continued to make aircraft components. On 8 April 1944, the British embassy in Washington reported to London about American public opinion: ‘Considerable disquiet is being evidenced over general political situation in England. This has centred mainly round Churchill’s demand for a [parliamentary] vote of confidence, through continuing coal and shipyard strikes, alleged evidence of failures of party truce…are being taken as indications that all is by no means well. Press reports give impression that there is deep dissatisfaction over domestic policy and that British public no less than American is apprehensive over apparent lack of Allied unity.’

  The British and American peoples would have been even more alarmed had they known of the acrimony which overtook relations between Churchill and his chiefs of staff in the spring of 1944. Ironically, given that the prime minister’s interest in the Japanese war was desultory, this was provoked by argument about operations in the Far East. Churchill had become obsessed with the desire to commit all available British forces, including the powerful fleet earmarked to join the Americans in the Pacific, to a ‘Bay of Bengal’ strategy for the recapture of Burma and Malaya. He was especially enthusiastic about a prospective landing on Sumatra, to provide a stepping stone. He threatened to impose this plan on the chiefs of staff, against their implacable opposition, by exercising his prerogative as Minister of Defence. On 21 March, Brooke wrote of a meeting with Cunningham and Portal: ‘We discussed…how best to deal with Winston’s last impossible document. It is full of false statements, false deductions and defective strategy. We cannot accept it as it stands and it would be better if we all three resigned sooner than accept his solution.’

  It was a measure of the extravagance of Churchill’s behaviour, and of the exhaustion of the chiefs at this time, that they should have discussed resignation in the shadow of D-Day. The prime minister had never visited the Far East, knew nothing of conditions there, and seldom acted wisely in his occasional interventions in a hemisphere where Allied operations were overwhelmingly dominated by the US. In the event, a compromise was fudged. The British projected a campaign against the Japanese, launched from Australia through Borneo. A minor-key version of this was executed by Australian forces in the summer of 1945. Relations between the chiefs of staff and the prime minister steadied in the weeks following the awful March 1944 meetings as the minds of these strained and weary men focused on the overpowering reality of impending invasion of the Continent.

  Churchill’s misgivings about Overlord persisted until D-Day. Sir Frederick Morgan, the D-Day planner whose rancour was increased by being denied an operational role in the landings, said later: ‘Until the invasion of NW Europe was actually demonstrated to be successful, I believe [the prime minister] had the conviction it could not succeed.’ This is an overstatement and oversimplification, but there is no doubt of Churchill’s unhappiness about Allied deployments. All through the spring of 1944 he chafed at the inadequate resources, as he perceived it, committed to Italy, and about continuing American insistence upon Anvil, the planned Franco-American landing in southern France. Ironically, after so many clashes between Churchill and his chiefs of staff, they were now brought together by opposition to US European strategy. ‘Difficulties again with our American friends,’ Brooke wrote on 5 April, ‘who still persist in wanting to close down operations in Italy and open new ones in the south of France, just at the most critical moment.’ The same day, Churchill minuted the chiefs: ‘The campaign in the Aegean was ruined by stories of decisive battles in Italy. The decisive battles in Italy were ruined by pulling out seven of the best divisions at the critical time for Overlord.’

  On 19 April he talked of the invasion to Cadogan: ‘This battle has been forced upon us by the Russians and the United States military authorities.’ The diplomat, who spent some hours that day in meetings with the prime minister, was dismayed by his rambling: ‘I really am fussed about the PM,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘He is not the man he was twelve months ago, and I really don’t know whether he can carry on.’ When the Dominion prime ministers met in London on 1 May to begin a nine-day conference, Canadian premier Mackenzie King joined South Africa’s Jan Smuts in paying tribute to Churchill’s achievement in having deflected the Americans from a D-Day in 1942 or 1943. Churchill freely avowed to the Dominion leaders that he himself would have ‘preferred to roll up Europe from the southeast, joining hands with the Russians. However, it had proved impossible to persuade the United States to this view. They had been determined at every stage upon the invasion in North-West Europe, and had consistently wanted us to break off the Mediterranean operations.’

  The range of problems besetting the prime minister was as daunting as ever, especially when others saw in him the same exhaustion as did Cadogan. ‘Struck by how very tired and worn out the prime minister looks now,’ wrote Colville on 12 April. Churchill was full of fears about the likely cost of Overlord, though he wrote cheerfully to Roosevelt that day, asserting that he did not think losses would be as high as the pessimists predicted: ‘In my view, it is the Germans who will suffer very heavy casualties when our band of brothers gets among them.’ The prime minister had never liked Montgomery, whose egoism and crassness grated on him. Now he told the War Office that the general must abandon his noisy round of public receptions and civic visits. In particular, Churchill recoiled from Monty’s proposal to hold a ‘day of prayer’ and to ‘hallow’ Britain’s armed forces in advance of D-Day at a grand religious service during which the king’s coronation regalia would be paraded. Such an occasion, thought Churchill, would be more likely to demoralise the invasion forces than inspire them.

  Intelligence warned that Hitler’s secret weapons, flying bombs and rockets, would soon start to fall upon Britain. There was continuing difficulty with the Americans about the Free French: Washington refused to concede authority in France to De Gaulle following the invasion. Churchill agreed that it would be prudent to keep the intractable general in Algiers until the last moment before D-Day. He chafed unceasingly abut the stalemate in Italy, both at Anzio and around Monte Cassino. Again and again, Allied forces suffered heavy casualties in assaults frustrated by Kesselring’s stubborn defenders. Greek troops and sailors in Egypt mutinied, calling for communist participation in their own leadership. An ugly armed confrontation took place. Churchill insisted on rejection of the mutineers’ demands. The revolt was suppressed after a British officer was killed.

  The Foreign Office and service chiefs urged the prime minister to curb his telegraphic bombardment of Roosevelt about strategic issues. Churchill now favoured additional landings on the Atlantic coast simultaneous
with Overlord. Dill cautioned him on 24 April: ‘The president, as you know, is not military-minded.’ Appeals to Roosevelt were simply referred to Marshall, who must be irked by attempts to circumvent him. The British lost an important battle with Washington about pre-invasion bombing of French rail links. Churchill and the war cabinet opposed extensive attacks, which were bound to kill many French civilians. Eisenhower and his staff insisted that a sustained interdiction campaign was essential, to slow the German post-D-Day build-up. Roosevelt and Marshall agreed, and were surely right. The RAF joined the USAAF to mount raids by night and day in the weeks before 6 June, which inflicted damage of critical value to the Allied armies, at the cost of around 15,000 French lives. In the course of the whole war, Allied bombing killed 70,000 French people, against 50,000 British who died at the hands of the Luftwaffe.

  Relations with the Russians had grown icy. Moscow accused the British of intriguing against them in Romania. Churchill wrote bleakly to Eden on 8 May: ‘The Russians are drunk with victory, and there is no length they may not go.’ In the preceding six months, 191 British ships had carried more than a million tons of weapons and supplies to Russia, at last matching the scale of deliveries to the need. But there was no gratitude from Stalin. Wrangles about Poland persisted. Churchill again urged the London Poles to show themselves less intractable. He perceived how little leverage they possessed, with the Russians on the brink of overrunning their country, and Washington apparently indifferent.

  The British won a notable victory that spring by repulsing a Japanese offensive in north-east India, against Imphal and Kohima. This, however, increased tensions with the Americans. They intensified demands for a major offensive into north Burma, to open the land route into China. Churchill deplored the prospect of a campaign in steaming, fever-ridden jungles, to no purpose that he valued. But, in the absence of US shipping for amphibious landings in South-East Asia, Slim’s Fourteenth Army was indeed committed to invade north Burma.

  On 14 May there was good news from Italy. Alexander’s Diadem offensive broke through the German line, a notable contribution being made by General Alphonse Juin’s French colonial forces. On the 23rd, the Anglo-Americans launched their breakout from the Anzio perimeter. Churchill urged on Alexander the importance of cutting off Kesselring’s retreat, a much more important objective than the seizure of Rome. General Mark Clark disagreed, however. His US Fifth Army drove hard for the Italian capital, diverting only a single division to impede the enemy’s withdrawal. So skilful were German disengagements, in Italy as later in north-west Europe, that it is unlikely Clark could have stopped Kesselring even had he committed himself wholeheartedly to do so. But he did not. The liberation of Rome on 4 June prompted celebration among the Allied nations for a symbolic victory, but its strategic significance was small. As everybody concerned from the prime minister downwards should have perceived, the Italian capital was a mere geographical location. Kesselring was once more able to establish a defensive line. The Italian campaign continued as it had begun, in frustration and disappointment for its commanders and above all for its principal sponsor, Winston Churchill.

  The prime minister seems quite wrong to have supposed that the Allied cause would have profited from an increased Italian commitment in 1944. For all Churchill’s personal enthusiasm for Alexander, the Guardsman was an inadequate commander whose chief virtue was that he worked amicably with the Americans, as Montgomery did not. He seldom pressed a point, because he rarely had one to make. The terrain of Italy favoured the defence, which Kesselring conducted brilliantly. It was right for the Allies to take Sicily in July 1943, right to land and fight in Italy two months later. It was essential, once committed, to sustain a limited campaign there until 1945. But the Americans were correct, first to insist upon Overlord, then to accord its interests overwhelming priority. It is hard to believe that the forces later diverted to Operation Anvil would have achieved commensurate results if they had been retained in Italy. The Germans were too good, the battlefield unsuited to Allied purposes. Moreover, with the northern French rail net wrecked by bombing, Marseilles later proved a vital logistics hub for all of Eisenhower’s armies, a channel for 40 per cent of their supplies up to December 1944.

  The prime minister thus expended capital in a struggle with Washington that he was bound to lose, and deserved to. He might have fared better in some of his trials of strength with the US in 1944 had he not chosen to challenge his ally on so many fronts. On 4 June, following the news of Rome’s fall, he cabled Roosevelt: ‘How magnificently your troops have fought. I hear that relations are admirable between our own armies in every rank there, and here certainly it is an absolute brotherhood.’ It is necessary for great men at great moments to say such things to each other, but Churchill’s rhetoric stretched truth to its limits. The American journalist John Gunther put the matter more realistically when he wrote in a contemporary book about Overlord: ‘Lots of Americans and British have an atavistic dislike of one another.’

  The best that can be said about Anglo-American relations in 1944—and it is a very important best—is that at operational level, the two nations’ armed forces worked adequately together. The men on the spot knew it was vital that it should be so. The Americans liked some senior British officers—Portal, Tedder, Morgan, Montgomery’s chief of staff De Guingand—even if they found it hard to relate to others such as Brooke. Cunningham, for the Royal Navy, observed that he found it easier to get along with America’s soldiers than with her sailors, above all the glowering chief of naval operations, King. The US admiral never forgave the British for rejecting a request for the loan of an aircraft-carrier for Pacific operations at a desperate moment in 1942, after the Americans had several times made their own ‘flat-tops’ available to support British purposes in the west. But if it is acknowledged that all alliance relationships are profoundly difficult, there remains much cause for admiration and gratitude for the manner in which US and British armed forces made common cause between 1942 and 1945. Eisenhower, who privately liked the British a good deal less than his geniality caused them to suppose, deserved much of the credit.

  The troubles of the alliance were most conspicuous at its summit. Churchill, speaking of Allied deception plans, famously observed that truth is so precious that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. He might have said the same about his relationship with the US. Benign deceits were indispensable. In May 1942, when criticism of his leadership was at his height, a letter-writer to The Times suggested that instead of being prime minister, Churchill should fill ‘a place that has long been vacant in our body politic; it is the post of Public Orator’. The proposal was mischievous, but this was a role which Churchill indeed filled to supreme effect in conducting Britain’s dealings with the US. In his speeches between 1940 and 1945 he created a glorious fiction of shared British and American purposes. He never hinted to his own public, still less the transatlantic one, his frustrations and disappointments about the policies of Roosevelt, any more than he did about those of Stalin. Roosevelt, in his turn, largely reciprocated. The key to understanding the wartime Anglo-American relationship is to strip aside the rhetoric of the two leaders and acknowledge that it rested, as relations between states always do, upon perceptions of national interest. There was some genuine sentiment on Churchill’s side, but none on Roosevelt’s.

  As D-Day approached, Churchill’s attitude was bewilderingly complex, perhaps even to himself. He thrilled to a historic military operation, the success of which would go far to fulfil every hope he had cherished since 1940. He emphasised to his own people, as well as to the Americans, that Britain was wholeheartedly committed. He took the keenest interest in every detail of the invasion plans, and personally originated the Mulberry artificial harbours which were to be deployed off the Normandy coast. But he never ceased to lament the consequences of the huge commitment to Eisenhower’s campaign for that of Alexander in Italy. He knew that the United States would dominate operations in north-west Europe once th
e Allies were ashore. The British war effort would attain its apogee on 6 June. Thereafter, it must shrink before the sad gaze of its chieftain. At the British Army’s peak strength in Normandy, Montgomery commanded fourteen British, one Polish and three Canadian divisions in contact with the enemy. The US Army in north-west Europe grew to sixty divisions, while the Red Army in mid-1944 deployed 480, albeit smaller, formations. Seldom was less than two-thirds of the German army deployed on the eastern front. Throughout the last year of the war, Churchill was labouring to compensate by sheer force of will and personality for the waning significance of Britain’s contribution.

  For all his declarations of optimism to Roosevelt and Marshall, and at the 15 May final briefing before the King and senior Allied commanders at Montgomery’s headquarters, St Paul’s School in West London, he nursed terrible fears of failure, or of catastrophic casualties. Every rational calculation suggested that the Allies, aided by surprise, air power and massive resources, should get ashore successfully. But no one knew better than Churchill the extraordinary fighting power of Hitler’s army, and the limitations of the citizen soldiers of Britain and the United States, most recently displayed at Anzio. His imagination often soared to heights unattained by lesser mortals, but also plunged to corresponding depths. So often—in France and the Mediterranean, at Singapore, in Crete, Libya, Tunisia, Italy—his heroic expectations had been dashed, or at least limply fulfilled.

  If, for whatever reason, D-Day failed, the consequences for the Grand Alliance would be vast and terrible. Hitler’s defeat would still be assured, but no new invasion could be launched until 1945. The peoples of Britain and the United States, already tired of war, would suffer a crippling blow to their morale, and to confidence in their leader. Eisenhower and Montgomery would have to be sacked, and replacements identified from a meagre list of candidates. This was a US presidential election year. Disaster in Normandy might precipitate defeat for Roosevelt. At Westminster and in Whitehall there were already plenty of mutterings that Churchill himself was no longer physically fit to lead the country. ‘I’m fed up to the back teeth with work,’ he growled to his secretary Marion Holmes on the night of 14 May, ‘so I’ll let you off lightly.’ Though his fears about Overlord were unlikely to be fulfilled, and his apprehensions were magnified by his burdens and exhaustion, who could blame him for allowing them to fill his mind? What seems most remarkable is the buoyancy and good cheer with which, in the last weeks before D-Day, he concealed black thoughts from all but his intimates.