by Max Hastings
It was a perverse feature of the war that while the British people showed fervent 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 January 14, 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!”718 “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 army. 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.719 Churchill deleted from a draft of his memoirs a February letter to the king, in which he wrote: “The enemy make a great mistake720 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 percent answered721 “Russia;” 42 percent “Britain;” 5 percent “China;” and just 3 percent “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 morbidly 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 me722—like Japanese or Chinese.”
Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam lamented news of a later U.S. battlefield success: “I am told that our efforts723 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 United States, that only American supplies—albeit dearly purchased—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 equally enthusiastic about 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 northern 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 Iran, 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 on rereading his own diary: “It is rather strange724 that I did not refer more frequently to the news from Russia.” Indeed it was. Some 2.3 million Russian soldiers—and millions more civilians—died in 1943, while British and American forces fighting the Germans lost around 70,000 killed, including aircrew. In Moscow’s eyes, it seemed characteristic that the Western 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 out725, 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 April 15 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.”726 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 postwar 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, and 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 breakfast727; 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 hates728 more than to waste one minute of his time,” she wrote to her parents.
“He is so funny in the car729; 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 news730 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 one731 … 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 skilled flatterer. The accommodating Guardsman listened patiently to the prime minister’s monologues. When he himself responded, “he is always so reassuring,”732 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 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 April 8, 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 before733, 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 May 4, 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, and promoted dilemmas. The North African campaign was at last approaching a close. On May 8, British forces entered Tunis and the Americans took Bizerta. At Casablanca, the Americans had endorsed an overwhelmingly British vision for further Mediterranean operations. The two subsequent Anglo-American conferences of 1943, code-named Trident and Quadrant, were dominated by British efforts to sustain the U.S. 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 still seek to dictate the nature of these.
Each side also cherished its own delusions. For instance, the Americans were uninterested in amphibious operations in Southeast Asia, because these would contribute nothing towards fulfilling their only 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 United States, 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 May 10: “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 U.S. 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 be able to easily extricate the forces which it would be essential to shift to Britain before the end of the year.
During Churchill’s first days in America, he visited Roosevelt’s retreat at Shangri-La in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and delivered another magnificent oration to Congress on May 19. 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 one734. 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?”735 he demanded of Moran. “His mind seems closed; he seems to have lost his wonderful elasticity.” While 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 prewar U.S. 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’ jackhammers. 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 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 encounter 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 May 13, made remarks whi
ch 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, which was quite impossible “unless almost the entire bulk of the German Army736 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 incapable737 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 extreme caution, indeed pessimism. Brooke’s reputation as a strategist is significantly damaged by his remarks at the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting on May 13. 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.
