Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  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 May 19 the British accepted a target date of May 1, 1944, for a landing in northern France by twenty-nine divisions. Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan was appointed to lead the COSSAC (“chief of staff to the supreme Allied commander”) staff, which would plan the invasion. The outcome, Churchill cabled to Attlee on May 21, 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 May 21, “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 imaginable738. 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 May 26, 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 aircraft739 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, a British plane, on much the same course, 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 chief of staff of the U.S. 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 between 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.”740

  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,741” 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 June 4, Churchill flew home to Britain in a 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 might 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 June 24: “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 arguing742 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,”743 Clark Kerr cabled from Moscow on July 1, 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 July 2: “In my view there is an undercurrent of uncertainty744 [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 reporter George King agreed with Beaverbrook: “When Mr. Churchill received the freedom of London745 last week,” he wrote on July 7, “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 incredible746, unforgivable, indeed inadmissible, that the Russian can be so successful. This is the attitude of the W[ar] O[ffice].”

  On July 10, 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 two 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 A
xis 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 July 13 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 July 16, 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 amid 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,”747 observed Macmillan laconically, “are naturally contradictory and conflicting.” He and Ike’s chief of staff, Walter 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 July 19 he told the Chiefs of Staff that he now had doubts whether the forces available in Britain by May 1, 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 northern Norway.

  Oliver Harvey wrote admiringly in his diary on July 24 about the firmness with which Churchill had dismissed a proposal from Henry Stimson, visiting London, to advance the May 1 D-Day date: “On this, I’m thankful to say748, 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 ill-timed. 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 fuelling American mistrust and resentment. Back in May, Brooke had written, expressing exasperation with perceived American inconsistency of purpose, “Agreement after agreement may be secured on paper749, 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 lead Allied planning for Overlord, later became embittered when he perceived himself marginalised before D-Day eventually took place. Yet his postwar private observations cannot be wholly discounted. “I firmly believe,”750 he told U.S. 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.” Morgan expressed his conviction 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.” Morgan thought far more highly of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff and of Eisenhower than of the British leadership: The “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 July 19 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 approaching maturity, and the Germans so much weakened by the Red Army. While a mere eight British and American divisions were fighting the only Allied land campaign against the Germans in Sicily, where the Allies lost six thousand killed, four million Russians and Germans had been locked in a death grapple at Kursk, which cost Hitler a decisive defeat and half a million casualties.

  Churchill’s new strategic vision embraced some wild notions. On July 25, 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.

  He persuaded Washington that a new summit was now needed, to settle plans for Italy. This meeting, Quadrant, was to be held in Quebec. On August 5, 1943, he stood on the platform at Addison Road Station, in west Kensington, singing, “I go away / This very day / To sail across the sea / Matilda.” Then his train slid from its platform northwards to Greenock, where his two hundred–strong delegation boarded the Queen Mary, once more bound for Canada. Churchill landed at Halifax on August 9, and remained in North America until September 14, by far his longest wartime sojourn there. Since it was plain that the big decisions on future strategy would be taken by Americans, as usual he sought to be on the spot, to deploy the weight of his own personality to influence them. While the Combined Chiefs of Staff began their debates in Quebec, Churchill travelled by train with his wife and daughter Mary to stay with Roosevelt. At Niagara Falls, he told reporters: “I saw these before you were born. I was here first in 1900.” A correspondent asked fatuously: “Do they look the same?” Churchill said: “Well, the principle seems the same. The water still keeps flowing over.”

  At Hyde Park it was stifling barbecue weather, and grilled hamburgers and hot dogs were served. Churchill fumed about reports of Nazi mass killings in the Balkans. He sought to interest the president in the region, with little success. Then the two leaders travelled to join the discussions of their Chiefs of Staff. The venue had been chosen to suit common Anglo-American convenience, without much heed to the fact that it lay on Canadian soil. Moran wrote that Canada’s premier, Mackenzie King, resembled a man who has lent his house for a party: “The guests take hardly any notice of him751, but just before leaving they remember he is their host and say pleasant things.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull was permitted by Roosevelt to make one of his rare summit appearances at Quadrant, not much to his own satisfaction. Unwilling to share Churchill’s late hours, one midnight Hull announced grumpily that he was going to bed. The prime mi
nister expressed astonishment: “Why, man, we are at war!”

  Stalin was making threatening demands for a Russian voice in the governance of occupied territories. He cabled from Moscow, demanding the creation of a joint military commission, which should hold its first meeting in Sicily. In Quebec, Churchill warned the Americans of “bloody consequences in the future … Stalin is an unnatural man. There will be grave troubles.” He was correct, of course. Thereafter, the Russians perceived the legitimisation of their own conduct in eastern Europe. Since the Western Allies decreed the governance of territories which they occupied, the Soviet Union considered itself entitled to do likewise in its own conquests.

  But the central issue at stake at Quebec was that of Overlord. The Americans were implacably set upon its execution, while the British continued to duck and weave. Wedemeyer wrote before the meeting that it was necessary for the U.S. Chiefs to advance a formula which would “stir the imagination and win the support752 of the Prime Minister, if not that of his recalcitrant planners and chiefs of staff.” Marshall’s biographer Forrest Pogue remarks of Churchill in those days: “As usual, he was full of guile.”753 This seems to misread the prime minister’s behaviour. Opportunism and changeability, rather than studied cunning, guided most of his strategic impulses. Yet there is no period of the war at which American dismay754 about British behaviour seems better merited than autumn 1943, as Eden and others acknowledged. Churchill and his commanders had always professed themselves committed to launching an invasion of Europe in 1944. At the Casablanca and Washington conferences, the British had not argued against Overlord in principle, but merely fought for delay. Now, it seemed, they were altogether reneging.