Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  Churchill opened at Quebec by reasserting principled support for an invasion. But he pressed for an understanding that if, in the spring of 1944, the Germans deployed more than twelve mobile divisions in France, the operation should not take place. Sir Frederick Morgan, director of the Anglo-American COSSAC staff planning the invasion, suggested that if the Germans appeared capable of deploying more than fifteen divisions against the beachhead in the two months following D-Day, a landing should be deemed impracticable. When the Germans flooded the river plains around Caen a few days before the conference began, COSSAC’s operations division minuted: “The full implications of this have not yet been assessed755, but it is quite possible that it will finally ‘kill’ Overlord.” Brooke made plain his continuing scepticism about the operation’s feasibility.

  The British case was that the immediate strategic priority was to seize the chances of the moment in the Mediterranean, rather than to stake everything upon a highly dangerous and speculative cross-Channel attack. In war, they argued, circumstances were always changing. They were more realistic than the Americans, in their understanding that a decision to enter Italy was irrevocable: “If we once set foot on the Italian mainland,”756 wrote John Kennedy, “we are in for a big commitment … The Americans I am sure do not realise that limited operations in Italy eg against Naples, are impossible. We must either stop at the Straits of Messina or go the whole hog.” On August 17, Churchill received a characteristically triumphalist signal from Alexander: “By 10 am this morning, the last German soldier was flung out of Sicily.” The prime minister’s enthusiasm for his favourite general seldom flagged, and he applauded the Sicilian operations as “brilliantly executed.” Yet it had taken thirty-eight days for much superior Allied forces to expel less than three German divisions. Far from being “flung out” of the island, Gen. Albert Kesselring’s troops had been inexcusably allowed to withdraw in good order across the Straits of Messina with most of their vehicles, guns and equipment.

  At all the wartime conferences there was a notable contrast between the strains upon the principals, middle-aged and elderly men contesting great issues day and night, and the delights afforded to hundreds of attendant supporting staff who did not bear their responsibilities. The latter—staff officers, officials, clerks, ciphering personnel—worked hard at the summits, but also played hard. Duty officers were always in attendance upon the Teletype machines which rattled forth signals and reports around the clock. Typists composed minutes of that day’s meetings, and planners prepared drafts for the next. But it seemed miraculous to these young men and a few women to be delivered for a few weeks from rationed, battered, darkened England, to bask in bright lights and prodigious quantities of food and drink, all of it free. Most danced and partied enthusiastically through the nights, while their great men wrangled. The English visitors revelled in shopping opportunities unknown in Britain for four years.

  Events did more than changes of heart to patch up Anglo-American differences at Quebec. The known readiness of the new Italian government to surrender made it plain to Marshall and his colleagues that Allied forces in Sicily must advance into Italy. It seemed unthinkable to leave a vacuum, which the Germans could fill as they chose. The British, for their part, professed to endorse the Overlord plan presented by Morgan and the COSSAC team. There was much bickering about a cutoff date at which Allied divisions earmarked for France would have to be withdrawn from the Mediterranean, and thus about what objectives in Italy might feasibly be attained beforehand. Churchill, who dreamed of Allied armies driving towards Vienna, instead reluctantly endorsed a line from Livorno to Ancona by November, saying: “If we can’t have the best, these are very good second bests.” In the event, of course, Livorno and Ancona would not be taken until late June 1944. But in the heady days of August, the Allies still supposed that, once the Italians surrendered, the Germans would not make much of a fight for Mussolini’s country.

  When the conference ended on August 24, Ian Jacob wrote, “There seems to be general satisfaction, though I can’t see what has been decided which takes us much beyond Trident.” The “general satisfaction” was merely a matter of public courtesy. Brooke wrote, “The Quebec conference has left me absolutely cooked.”757 He subsequently acknowledged that758, at this time, he was close to a nervous breakdown. The Americans, for their part, were deeply unhappy about British conditionality towards Overlord. Churchill’s team had not for a moment abandoned their determination to keep the Allies deeply engaged in Italy, even at risk to D-Day. After a brief break at a mountain camp for fly-fishing—not a pastime which Churchill indulged with much conviction—he travelled to Washington, where he spent the next five days urging the need to hasten operations in Italy. On September 3, Italian representatives signed the surrender document at Cassibile, in Sicily, while at dawn units of Eighth Army landed on the Italian mainland north of Reggio. Five days later, the British 1st Airborne Division seized the port of Taranto without opposition, which Churchill dubbed “a masterstroke” in a laudatory signal to Alexander.

  On September 9, Mark Clark’s Fifth Army staged an amphibious assault at Salerno, precipitating one of the bloodiest battles of the campaign, and a near disaster. “It was like fighting tanks759 barehanded,” wrote an American infantry lieutenant colonel facing a panzer assault on the beachhead. “I saw riflemen swarm over the top of moving German tanks trying to shoot through slits or throw grenades inside. Other tanks would machine-gun them off. They ran over wounded men … and spun their treads.” In the first hours, Clark was sufficiently panicked to order reembarkation, until overruled by Alexander. At painful cost, a perimeter was established and held. That day, as German forces raced to occupy key strategic positions across southern Italy, the Italian fleet set off toward Malta to surrender. Its flagship, the battleship Roma, was sunk en route by German bombers, once again demonstrating the Luftwaffe’s skills against maritime targets. A mad Allied plan for a parachute assault on Rome was mercifully cancelled at the last moment. Even the Anglo-Americans at their most optimistic were forced to acknowledge that, against the Germans, such an adventure would prove disastrous.

  Churchill was mortified that, once again, he was in Roosevelt’s company when bad news came. He had held out to the president a prospect of easy victory in Italy. Now, instead, they learned of savage enemy resistance at Salerno. The British were naïve in anticipating that a surrender by Italy’s government must of itself deliver most of the country into Allied hands. Brooke had told the Combined Chiefs of Staff on May 13: “He did not believe Germany would try to control760 an Italy which was not fighting.” He and Churchill were importantly deceived by Ultra decrypts, which showed that the Germans intended to abandon most of Italy without a fight.

  In the event, however, and as so often, Hitler changed his mind. This was a direct consequence of the Allied armies’ poor showing, in German eyes, on Sicily and at Salerno. Anglo-American commanders and men exposed their limitations. Montgomery’s performance was no more impressive than that of Mark Clark. The Germans were astonished by the ease with which some British and American soldiers allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. Kesselring, the German commander on the spot, concluded that defending Italy against such an enemy might be less difficult than he had previously supposed. He reported accordingly to Hitler. The führer responded by ordering a vigorous defence of the peninsula, a task Field Marshal Kesselring—appointed German supreme commander in Italy on November 6—undertook with extraordinary energy and effectiveness. Allied fumbling of the first phase of operations in Italy thus had critical consequences for the rest of the campaign.

  In those days in America, Churchill became excited by a possible landing on the Dalmatian coast, using 75,000 Polish troops and possibly 2nd New Zealand Division. On September 10, Roosevelt departed for Hyde Park, leaving Britain’s prime minister installed in America’s capital: “Winston, please treat the White House as your home,” said the president generously, urging him to invite whomever he liked. Chu
rchill used this licence to the full, summoning Marshall to press upon him the case for hastening reinforcements to Italy. On September 14, at last he returned to Halifax, to board the battle cruiser Renown for home. His American hosts were glad to see him go. Their enthusiasm for his exhausting presence had worn as thin as their patience with his Mediterranean fantasies. Roosevelt’s secretary William Hassett wrote after their visitor’s previous Washington departure in May: “Must be a relief to the Boss for Churchill is a trying guest761—drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney, irregular routines, works nights, sleeps days, turns the clocks upside down … Churchill has brains, guts … and a determination to preserve the British Empire … He has everything except vision.” This was a view now almost universal within Roosevelt’s administration. Harry Hopkins told Eden, when the foreign secretary visited Washington, that the president—and indeed Hopkins himself—“loves W as a man for the war762, but is horrified at his reactionary attitude for after the war.” Hopkins spoke of the prime minister’s age, “his unteachability.”

  The leaders of the United States were justly convinced that a cherry-picking approach to strategy was over. British evasions over a cross-Channel attack were no longer justifiable. If the Western Allies were to engage land forces on the continent of Europe in time to affect outcomes before the Russians defeated Hitler on their own, Overlord must take place in 1944. Henceforth, commitments in Italy must be adjusted to fit the overriding priority of the invasion of northwest Europe, and not vice versa. Marshall and his colleagues could scarcely be blamed for their exasperation at the prime minister’s renewed pleas for a descent on northern Norway, and the fit of enthusiasm with which he was seized for operations in the eastern Mediterranean.

  It was widely expected both in Washington and London that Marshall would command Overlord. Churchill had broken it to Brooke at Quebec that his earlier insouciant offer of this glittering appointment to the CIGS was no longer open. It was foolish of both the prime minister and the general to have supposed that a British officer might be acceptable for the role; and even more so of Brooke, by his own admission, to sulk for several months about his disappointment. He possessed a sublime, and exaggerated, conceit about his own strategic wisdom. He had grievously injured himself in American eyes by prevarications about Overlord, even more outspokenly expressed than those of the prime minister. Brooke had no just claim to command of an operation which for months he had denounced as premature.

  Only an American could credibly lead this predominantly American crusade, but Roosevelt kept open until November his choice of appointee. Marshall wanted the job, sure enough. The chief of staff of the army indulged a brief fantasy763 that Sir John Dill might be his deputy, or even—if the British persuaded the president that one of their own should command—that the former CIGS might be supreme commander. Stimson wanted Marshall, because he believed that the chief of the army alone had the authority and strength of character to overcome the “mercurial inconstancy”764 of the prime minister.

  There was always a paradox about Churchill as warlord. On the one hand, he had a wonderful instinct for the fray, more highly developed than that of any of his service advisers. Yet his genius for war was flawed by an enthusiasm for dashes, raids, skirmishes, diversions, and sallies more appropriate—as officers who worked with him often remarked—to a Victorian cavalry subaltern than to the director of a vast industrial war effort. The doctrine of concentration of force, an obsession of the Americans’ and especially of Marshall’s, was foreign to his nature. Though Churchill addressed his duties with profound seriousness of purpose, he wanted war, like life, to be fun. This caused the American service chiefs, earnest men all, not infrequently to think him guilty of frivolity as well as of pursuing selfish nationalistic purposes.

  Brooke, meanwhile, was perhaps the greatest staff officer the British Army has ever known. But experience of fighting the Germans for four years with chronically inadequate resources had made him a cautious strategist, and by this stage of the war an unconvincing one. He shared the Americans’ impatience, indeed exasperation, with Churchill’s wilder schemes. But in the autumn of 1943 and indeed well into the winter, Brooke was joined to the prime minister in a common apprehension about Overlord. American resolution alone ensured that the operational timetable for D-Day was maintained. If Roosevelt and Marshall had been more malleable, the British would have chosen to keep larger forces in Italy, especially when Clark’s and Montgomery’s advances languished. D-Day would have been delayed until 1945.

  The Allies were now committed to take the port of Naples, and exploit northwards to Rome. Thereafter, they had uneasily agreed that the future of the Italian campaign should be settled in the light of events. John Kennedy wrote on September 3: “It will be interesting to see whether the Americans have judged the Mediterranean war better than we have.” He himself bitterly regretted the scheduled diversion of forces from Italy to Overlord: “But we cannot dictate and I doubt if we could have done more765 to persuade the Americans. They are convinced that the landing in France is the only way to win the war quickly, & will listen to no arguments as to the mechanical difficulties of the operation or the necessity of weakening & drawing off the Germans by means of operations in the Medn.” A month later, he was still writing about the arguments concerning “the Mediterranean versus Overlord strategy,” but the War Office seemed resigned to the likely triumph of the latter: “In the end I suppose that we shall probably go into France766 with little opposition & the historians will say that we missed glorious opportunities a year earlier etc. etc.”

  Beaverbrook had tabled a new motion767 in the House of Lords calling for a Second Front. Now, he allowed himself to be wooed back into government as lord privy seal by Churchill’s private assurance that the invasion was fixed for the following summer. Beaverbrook’s recall exasperated many ministers. Churchill spoke passionately of his friend to W. P. Crozier of the Manchester Guardian: “I need him, I need him768. He is stimulating and, believe me, he is a big man.” Sir John Anderson felt it necessary to call the ministerial grumblers to order. “He says we must not make things too hard for the PM769, who is conducting the war with great skill,” recorded Dalton. “The PM was very unhappy during the period when Beaverbrook was not one of his colleagues. He is a sensitive artist, attaching great value to ‘presentation’ and the quality of the spoken word. He likes to have around him certain people, whose responses will not be jarring or unwelcome. He has valued Beaverbrook for this for many years. We must not, therefore, be too particular, even if things are sometimes not done in quite the most regular or orderly way.” Beaverbrook’s irregularities included, at this time, assisting Randolph Churchill to pay his debts. Though such subsidy certainly did not influence the prime minister’s conduct towards him, it reflected a fundamentally unhealthy relationship, such as Beaverbrook contrived with many of his acquaintances.

  The Americans found much more substantial cause for complaint about the prime minister’s behaviour. Transatlantic debate remained dominated by British attempts to regard the Overlord commitment as flexible, and by U.S. insistence upon its inviolability. Given American primacy in the alliance which was now increasingly explicit, Churchill and Brooke must have known in their hearts that D-Day was almost certain to happen the following summer. But their attempts to suggest otherwise ate deeply into the fretwork of Allied trust. The Americans were wrong in supposing that Churchill’s policy was directed towards ensuring that Overlord never took place at all. The huge and costly infrastructure already being created in Britain to support an invasion of France—not least Churchill’s cherished Mulberry artificial harbours—disproved that allegation. The prime minister’s “inconstancy” related exclusively to timing, but was none the less injurious for that. As for the British public, Surrey court reporter George King was unimpressed by Churchill’s flowered phrases about the Italian campaign: “He says a Second Front is in existence770, but I can’t see it myself.”

  King’s impatience
with the progress of the war was widely shared. The left displayed astonishing venom towards the government. Communist Elizabeth Belsey, a highly educated woman of notable intellectual tastes as well as revolutionary fervour, remarked in a letter to her husband that the sudden death of Sir Kingsley Wood, the chancellor, “will save a piece of rope later on.”771 In September 1943 she wrote that she and friends “amused ourselves making lists of the people who ought to be shot first when the time for shooting comes … [Walter] Citrine [TUC general secretary], Morrison, Halifax, [Lord] Londonderry, Lady Astor, [Sir James] Grigg and a heap more.” She was disgusted by the hostility towards Russia displayed by the Polish exile government in London, and exulted at the deaths in a Gibraltar plane crash of its leader, General Sikorski, and the Tory MP Victor Cazalet: “No loss … I never did like having that Sikorski person on our side, did you?”772

  The Russians, of course, welcomed every manifestation of public dissatisfaction with Allied operations. On August 6, Pravda offered its readers one of its more temperate commentaries:

  It would be wrong to belittle the importance of allied military773 operations—the bombing of Germany by British and American air forces, and the importance of supplies and military material being provided to us. Nonetheless, only four German divisions opposed our allies in Libya, a mere two German divisions and a few Italian ones in Sicily. These statistics suffice to show the true scale of their operations as compared to those on the Soviet-German front where Hitler had 180 German divisions and about 60 divisions of his “allies” in the summer of 1942 … The armies of our British and American allies so far have had no serious encounters with the troops of Hitler’s Germany. The Second Front so far does not exist.