by Max Hastings
Beaverbrook preened himself before Halifax about the huge quantity of fan mail he claimed to be receiving. His egomania fed extravagant ambition. The ambassador recorded in his diary that Beaverbrook told him: “I might be the best man to run the war559. It wants a ruthless, unscrupulous, harsh man, and I believe I could do it.” It is possible that, at a time when there was widespread clamour for the Ministry of Defence to be divorced from the premiership, Beaverbrook saw himself in the former role. Yet he demonstrated notable naïveté about strategic realities, given that he was privy to so much secret information about British weakness. When challenged about the difficulties of providing air cover for an early landing in France, Beaverbrook asserted that this could be provided by Beaufighters. Any man who supposed that twin-engined aircraft like these could contest air superiority with German Bf-109s showed himself unfit to participate in strategic decision making. Monstrously, Beaverbrook threatened that his newspapers would campaign for recognition of Stalin’s claims in eastern Europe and the Baltic states. Yet Churchill never lost faith in his friend, nor expelled him from his circle, as Clementine so often urged him to do. The prime minister’s loyalty to “the Beaver” was as ill-deserved as it proved unrewarding.
Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, arrived in Britain for talks on May 21, 1942. Following his first encounter with the prime minister he reported to Moscow: “Concerning the second front, Churchill made a brief statement560 during the morning session, stating that the British and American governments are in principle committed to mounting such an operation in Europe, with maximum available resources, at the earliest possible date, and are making energetic preparations for this.” After subsequent meetings, however, at which the British made much of the practical difficulties of staging an invasion of the Continent, he told Moscow that it would be rash to expect early action. Molotov was a grey bureaucrat so slavishly loyal to Stalin that during the purges of the 1930s, he signed an arrest order for his own wife. By such means he, almost alone among prominent old Bolsheviks, had escaped the executioners and clung to office. It must have strained to the limits Churchill’s submission to political imperatives to entertain such a man at Downing Street and Chequers, which the Russian remembered chiefly, and contemptuously, for its lack of showers.
If further evidence was needed of Beaverbrook’s mischief-making, Molotov reported on May 27, following two encounters with the press lord: “He advised me to push the British government [for an invasion], and assured me that Roosevelt is a proponent of the second front.” Beyond Russian secretiveness, Churchill was also obliged to contend with Moscow’s susceptibility to fantasies. Stalin appeared sincerely to believe that Japanese aircraft were being flown by German pilots, and that the British had for some unfathomable reason provided Japan with 1,500 combat aircraft.
Molotov’s main business in London was to negotiate a treaty of alliance. He was dismayed by British refusal to meet the demands which Russia had been making ever since entering the war, for recognition of its hegemony not only over the Baltic states, but also over eastern Poland. Stalin, however, was less concerned. He cabled Molotov on May 24, telling him to accept the vaguely worded draft about postwar security offered by Eden: “We do not consider this a meaningless statement561, we regard it as an important document. It does not contain that paragraph [proposed in a Russian draft] on border security, but probably this is not so bad as it leaves our hands free. We will resolve the issue of frontiers, or rather, of security guarantees for our frontiers … by force.” Much more serious, in Russian eyes, was the perceived inadequacy of British arms shipments. Stalin emphasised the need for fighters and tanks, especially Valentines, which had proved best suited, or least unsuited, to Russian conditions. The British, however, remained evasive about increasing the strength of their convoys to Archangel. Joan Beaumont, one of the most convincing analysts of wartime Western aid to Russia, has written: “It is the irony of the commitment to the Soviet Union562 that while … consensus on its necessity grew in the first half of 1942, so also did the obstacles in the way of putting this into effect.”
Grandiose American promises of aid—initially 8 million tons for 1942–43, half of this food—foundered on the Allies’ inability to ship anything like such quantities. By the end of June 1943, less than 3 million tons had been delivered of a pledged 4.4 million. Joan Beaumont again: “Considerable though these achievements and sacrifices were563, they seemed poor in contrast to the promises which had been made … At the time when the Russian need was greatest, the assistance from the West … was at its most uncertain.” There was special Soviet bitterness about British refusal of repeated requests for Spitfires. The most strident of Russia’s propagandists, Ilya Ehrenburg, denounced to his millions of Soviet readers the fact that the Allies were “sending very few aircraft, and not the best they have either.”564 The Russians claimed to be insulted on discovering that some Hurricanes they received were reconditioned rather than new. Given the indifferent quality of planes and tanks provided, Moscow began to focus its demands upon trucks and food.
Molotov flew on from London to Washington, where the White House butler reported to Roosevelt that Russia’s foreign minister had arrived with a pistol in his suitcase. The president observed that they must simply hope it was not intended for use on him. Following a meeting at the White House on May 30, Molotov displayed in his report to Moscow a frustration at Roosevelt’s evasive bonhomie that would have struck a chord with the British. Dinner, the Russian complained, “was followed by a lengthy but meaningless conversation … I said that it would be desirable to engage at least 40 German divisions at the Western front in the summer and autumn of this year. Roosevelt and Marshall responded that they very much wanted to achieve this, but faced immediate shipping difficulties in moving forces to France.” The Russian pleaded that, if there was no Second Front in 1942, Germany would be much stronger in 1943. “They offered no definite information.”565 However, the president said that “preparations for the second front566 are under way … he, Roosevelt[,] is trying to persuade the American generals to take the risk and land 6 to 10 divisions in France. It is possible that it will mean another Dunkirk and the loss of 100,000–120,000 men, but the sacrifices have to be made to provide help in 1942 and shatter German morale.”
Stalin cabled again on June 3, first rebuking Molotov for the brevity of his reports. The Soviet leader said that he did not want to be told mere essentials. He needed trivial details as well, to provide a sense of mood. “Finally, we think it absolutely necessary567 that both [British and American] communiqués contain paragraphs about establishing the second front in Europe, and state that full agreement had been reached on this issue. We also think it necessary that both communiqués should include specifics on deliveries of material from Britain and the USA to the Soviet Union.”
Here were the same imperatives pressing Stalin as had weighed upon Churchill in 1940–41. First, and as the Russian leader acknowledged568 in his cables to Molotov, it was vital to persuade Hitler that there was a real threat of an Allied invasion of France, to deter him from transferring further divisions to the Eastern Front. Second, morale was as important to the peoples of the Soviet Union as to those of the democracies. Every gleam of hope was precious. Stalin nursed no real expectation that Anglo-American armies would land on the Continent in 1942. But, just as Churchill in 1940–41 promoted in Britain much higher expectations of American belligerence than the facts merited, so Stalin wished to trumpet to the Russian people Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s assurances that a Second Front was coming, even though he did not himself believe them. Should the British and Americans later breach such assurances, this would provide useful evidence of capitalist perfidy. For embattled Russia in the summer of 1942, “later” seemed scarcely to matter.
Back in London on June 9, Molotov met Churchill once more, before the signing of a treaty of alliance. If the Russian’s purpose was to promote discord between London and Washington, he was by no means unsucces
sful. The prime minister was much disturbed when Molotov told him of Roosevelt’s aspirations for the postwar world, including international trusteeship for the Dutch and French empires in Asia, and enforced disarmament of all save the Great Powers. Then the foreign minister outlined his exchanges at the White House about the Second Front: “I mentioned among other things569 that Roosevelt agreed with the point of view that I had set forth, i.e., that it could prove harder to establish a second front in 1943 than in 1942 due to possible grave problems on our front. Finally, I mentioned that the president attached such great importance to the creation of a second front in 1942 that he was prepared to gamble, to endure another Dunkirk and lose 100,000 or 120,000 men … I stressed however that I thought the number of divisions which Roosevelt proposed to commit insufficient, i.e., six to ten.
“Here Churchill interrupted me in great agitation, declaring that he would never agree to another Dunkirk and a fruitless sacrifice of 100,000 men, no matter who recommended such a notion. When I replied that I was only conveying Roosevelt’s view, Churchill responded: ‘I shall tell him my view on this issue myself.’” Oliver Harvey recorded the same conversation: “Roosevelt had calmly told Molotov570 he would be prepared to contemplate a sacrifice of 120,000 men if necessary—our men. PM said he would not hear of it.”
Molotov said years later: “We had to squeeze everything we could get571 out of [the Western Allies]. I have no doubt that Stalin did not believe [that a Second Front would happen]. But one had to demand it! One had to demand it for the sake of our own people. Because people were waiting, weren’t they, to see whether help [from the Western Allies] would come. That sheet of paper [the Anglo-Soviet agreement] was of great political significance to us. It cheered people up, and that meant a lot then.”
The Anglo-Soviet treaty signed on May 26 merely committed “the High Contracting Parties … to afford one another572 military and other assistance and support of all kinds.” But in Moscow after Molotov’s return from London, Pravda reported, “The Day is at hand when the Second Front will open.” On June 19, the newspaper described a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, whose members were told that the accords reached between the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States reflected the fact “that complete agreement had been achieved about the urgency of opening of the second front in Europe in 1942.” This announcement, said the paper, was received with protracted applause, as was a subsequent statement that “these agreements are of the highest importance for the nations of the Soviet Union, since the opening of the second front in Europe will create insurmountable difficulties for Hitler’s armies on our front.” All this was untrue, and well understood to be so by Stalin and Molotov. But among so many other deceits, what was one more, deemed so necessary to the spirit of the Russian people? And in this case, the Russians were entirely entitled to declare that the Americans, and in lesser degree the British, were making promises in bad faith.
Molotov, in old age, asserted that he found Churchill “smarter”573 than Roosevelt:
I knew them all, these capitalists574, but Churchill was the strongest and cleverest … As for Roosevelt, he believed in dollars … He thought that they were so rich and we so poor, and that we would become so weakened that we would come to the Americans and beg. This was their mistake … They woke up when they’d lost half of Europe. And here of course Churchill found himself in a very foolish predicament. In my opinion, Churchill was the most intelligent of them, as an imperialist. He knew that if we, the Russians, defeated Germany, then England would start losing its feathers. He realized this. As for Roosevelt, he thought: [Russia] is a poor country with no industry, no grain, they are going to come and beg. There is no other way out for them. And we saw all this completely differently. The entire nation had been prepared for the sacrifices, for struggle.
This was, of course, a characteristic Soviet ex post facto exposition of what took place in 1942–43. But Molotov seems right to have perceived in the Americans’ behaviour a fundamental condescension, of the same kind that underlay their attitude towards Britain. It was rooted in a belief that when the war was won, U.S. primacy would be unchallengeable by either ally.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his old friend George Patton on July 20, 1942: “This war is still young.” For Americans, this was true. But the British, after almost three years of privation, defeat, intermittent bombardment and enforced inaction, saw matters very differently. Washington was seeking to browbeat Churchill into sacrificing yet another British army with token American participation, as a gesture of support for the Soviet Union. Marshall’s cardinal mistake was failure to perceive that the scale of a battle in France was beyond the power of the Allies to determine. They might seek to launch a minor operation, but the Germans could mass forces to translate this into a major disaster. Marshall never acknowledged that even the fully mobilised U.S. Army of 1944–45 never became large enough to defeat even the one-third of Hitler’s forces then deployed on the Western Front, until these had been drastically weakened by the Russians.
There was never the smallest possibility that the prime minister and his generals would accede to the U.S. proposal for 1942. “I do not think there is much doing on the French coast this year,” the prime minister minuted the Chiefs of Staff on June 1. Britain in mid-1942 had fifteen divisions in the Middle East, ten in India and thirty at home, few of the latter battle-ready. None of the fifteen first-line infantry divisions in the Home Forces was fully equipped, while nine “lower establishment” formations were in worse case.
Churchill was enraged by a Time magazine article that described Britain as “oft-burned, defensive-minded,” and wrote to Brendan Bracken: “This vicious rag should have no special facilities here.”575 The British embassy in Washington reported to London: “Advocacy of a second front has increased576 largely as a result of the Russian reverses. An influential section of editorial opinion … has been insisting that the danger of such an operation now is more than outweighed by the greater danger likely to arise if it is delayed.” The British were constantly provoked by manifestations of American ignorance about operational difficulties. A U.S. officer at dinner in London577 one night demanded of a British general why more fighters were not flown to Malta, to protect Mediterranean convoys. The visitor was oblivious of the fact, irritably explained by his host, that Malta was far beyond the range of Spitfires or Hurricanes flying from Gibraltar.
The British were increasingly troubled by the difficulties of conveying their views to an American leadership of which both the political and military elements seemed resistant to its ally’s opinions. A British official in Washington wrote to London in May 1942: “No Englishman here has the close relationship578 with Hopkins and the President which are necessary. There is no one who can continually represent to the White House the Prime Minister’s views on war direction. The Ambassador does not regard it within his sphere. Dill dare not as he would ruin his relationship with the US chiefs of staff if he saw Hopkins too often.” Brig. Vivian Dykes of the British military mission wrote: “We simply hold no cards at all579, yet London expects us to work miracles. It is a hard life.”
Churchill concluded that only another personal meeting with Roosevelt could resolve the Second Front issue, or, more appropriately, the alternative North African landing scheme—Operation Torch—in Britain’s favour. He took off once more with Alan Brooke, in a Boeing flying boat. By the afternoon of June 19, he was being driven around Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate, tête-à-tête with his host. Here was exactly the scenario which Churchill wanted, and which the U.S. Chiefs of Staff deplored. Their commander-in-chief was communing alone with Britain’s fiercely persuasive prime minister. Churchill wrote in his memoirs that the two men thus got more business done than at conferences. This was disingenuous. What he meant, of course, was that he was free from impassioned and hostile interventions by Marshall and his colleagues. At Hyde Park, the prime minister was enchanted to be treated as “family,” though his staff sometimes overreached t
hemselves in exploiting guest privileges. Private secretary John Martin was sternly rebuked580 by Roosevelt’s telephonist, Louise Hachmeister, when she found him ensconced in her master’s study, using the president’s direct line to Washington.
On June 20 at Hyde Park, Churchill handed Roosevelt a masterly note on strategy. Arrangements for a landing in France in September were going forward, said the prime minister. However, the British continued to oppose such an operation unless there was a realistic prospect of being able to stay. “No responsible British military authority581 has so far been able to make a plan for September 1942 which has any chance of success unless the Germans become utterly demoralised, of which there is no likelihood. Have the American staffs a plan? If so, what is it? If a plan can be found which offers a reasonable prospect of success His Majesty’s Government will cordially welcome it and will share to the full with their American comrades the risks and sacrifices … But in case no plan can be made in which any responsible authority has good confidence … what else are we going to do? Can we afford to stand idle in the Atlantic theatre during the whole of 1942?” It was in this context, urged Churchill, that a North African landing should be studied.
That evening, the president and the prime minister flew to the capital. They were together at the White House when a pink message slip was brought to Roosevelt, who passed it wordlessly to Churchill. It read: “Tobruk has surrendered, with 25,000 men taken prisoner.” Churchill was initially disbelieving. Before leaving Britain, he had signalled to Auchinleck, stressing the importance of holding the port: “Your decision to fight it out to the end most cordially endorsed. Retreat would be fatal. This is a business not only of armour but of will power. God bless you all.” Now, the prime minister telephoned Ismay in London, who confirmed the loss of Tobruk, together with 33,000 men, 2,000 vehicles, 5,000 tons of supplies and 1,400 tons of fuel. A chaotic defence, left in the hands of a newly promoted and inexperienced South African major general, had collapsed in the face of an unexpected German thrust from the southeast. The debacle was characterised by command incompetence, a pitiful indolence and lack of initiative among many units. Maj. Gen. Hendrik Klopper’s last signal from Tobruk was an enigmatic study in despair: “Situation shambles … Am doing the worst. Petrol destroyed.”
