by Max Hastings
The most notorious episode at the conference arose from Stalin’s brutal jest about shooting fifty thousand German officers once the war was won, followed by Roosevelt’s rejoinder that forty-nine thousand would suffice. Elliott Roosevelt, one of the president’s sons, rose to say that he cordially agreed with Stalin’s proposal, and was sure that the United States would endorse it likewise. This caused Churchill to storm from the room in disgust. The Russians soothed the prime minister, but it was a grisly moment. When Stalin made his sally, Churchill knew him to be responsible for the cold-blooded massacre of at least ten thousand Polish officers—the true figure was almost thirty thousand—as well as countless of his own people. Moreover, the U.S. president’s willingness to join the joke suggested a heartlessness which was real enough, and which shocked the British leader. Finally, Elliott Roosevelt’s intervention was intolerable. It was a curiosity of the war that great men saw fit to take their children on missions of state. Randolph Churchill’s presence in North Africa, and everywhere else, was an embarrassment. Jan Smuts and Harry Hopkins both brought their sons to Cairo for Sextant. But none matched the crassness of the president’s offspring. Churchill knew that, to sustain the Anglo-American relationship, he must endure almost anything which Roosevelt chose to say or do. But that moment in Tehran was hard for him. Marshall said of Stalin at the conference: “He was turning his hose on Churchill835 all the time, and Mr. Roosevelt, in a sense, was helping him. He [FDR] used to take a little delight in embarrassing Churchill.”
Cadogan recorded the distress836 of the British delegation when Roosevelt seemed willing to endorse almost everything Stalin proposed. When the future boundaries of Poland were discussed, Averell Harriman was dismayed by his president’s visible indifference. Roosevelt wanted only enough to satisfy Polish-American voters, which was not much. Soviet eavesdroppers reported to Stalin837 Churchill’s private warnings to Roosevelt about Moscow’s preparations to instal a Communist government in Poland. According to Sergo Beria, Roosevelt replied that since Churchill was attempting to do the same thing by installing an anti-Communist regime, he had no cause for complaint.
The U.S. leader was much more interested in promoting Soviet support for the future United Nations organisation, an easy ball for the Russians to play. They indulged Roosevelt by ready acquiescence, though even Stalin expressed scepticism about the president’s vision of China joining Russia, Britain and the United States to police the postwar world. Harriman perceived the danger of flaunting before the Russians Roosevelt’s carelessness about eastern European borders. The relentless advance of Stalin’s armies would have rendered it difficult for the West to stem Soviet imperialism. Churchill was by now reconciled to shifting Poland’s frontiers westwards, compensating the Poles with German territory for their eastern lands to be ceded to Russia. That proposal represented ruthlessness enough. But the president’s behaviour went further, making plain that Stalin could expect little opposition to his designs in Poland or elsewhere.
Roosevelt, bent upon creating a future in which the Great Powers acted in concert, seemed heedless of reality: that Stalin cared nothing for consensus, and was interested only in licence for pursuing his own unilateral purposes. Among the American team, Charles Bohlen and George Kennan of the State Department shared Harriman’s misgivings about Roosevelt’s belief that he shared a world vision with Stalin. The prime minister’s fears for the future began to coalesce. “That the President should deal with Churchill838 and Stalin as if they were people of equal standing in American eyes shocked Churchill profoundly,” wrote Ian Jacob.
Yet most of Roosevelt’s delegation left the summit basking in a glow of satisfaction created by the formal commitment to Overlord, so long desired by both the United States and Soviet Union. The persistent evasiveness of the British on this issue irked even the most Anglophile Americans. The Tehran experience afterwards yielded one of Churchill’s great sallies, no less pleasing for its misplaced self-belief. The meeting, he said, caused him to realise how small Britain was: “There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little English donkey who was the only one … who knew the right way home.”
Stalin was highly satisfied with the Tehran talks. He perceived himself as getting all that he wanted. He thought the president a truth-teller, as Churchill was not, and told the Soviet high command on his return to Moscow: “Roosevelt has given a firm commitment839 to launch large-scale operations in France in 1944. I think he will keep his word. But if he does not, we shall be strong enough to finish off Hitler’s Germany on our own.” After Kursk, his confidence was justified.
Eden thought the 1943 meetings with the Russians the most satisfactory, or least unsatisfactory, of the war, before the steep deterioration of relations during 1944, when Soviet expansionism became explicit. But the British delegation at Tehran deplored the manner in which the Big Three’s discussions roamed erratically across a wilderness of issues, bringing none to a decisive conclusion save that Churchill would thereafter have found it difficult to escape the Overlord commitment. Cunningham and Portal declared the conference840 a waste of time. The British were especially dismayed that no attempt was made to oblige the Russians to recognise the legitimacy of the Polish exile government in London in return for Anglo-American acceptance of Poland’s altered borders.
After Tehran, Churchill cannot have failed to understand how little Roosevelt cared for Britain, its interests or stature. Not for a moment did the prime minister relax his efforts to flatter and cajole the president. But it became progressively harder for him to address the United States than Russia. With Stalin, Churchill continued to seek bargains, but his expectations were pitched low. The American relationship, however, was fundamental to every operation of war; to feeding the British people; to all prospect of sustaining the empire in the postwar world. It seems extraordinary that some historians have characterised the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill as a friendship. To be sure, the prime minister embraced the president in speech and correspondence as “my friend.” “Every morning when I wake,”841 he once said, “my first thought is how I can please President Roosevelt.” But much of what FDR served up to Churchill between 1943 and 1945 was gall and wormwood.
From Tehran, while Roosevelt went home to Washington Churchill flew to Cairo. He was tired and indeed ill, yet meetings and dinners crowded in upon one another. He rebuked Mountbatten by signal for demanding the services of 33,700 fighting soldiers to address 5,000 Japanese in the Arakan region of Burma—“the Americans have been taking their islands842 on the basis of two-and-a-half to one. That your Generals should ask for six-and-a-half to one has produced a very bad impression.” He dined at the embassy on December 10 with a party which included Smuts, Eden, Cadogan and Randolph Churchill, then took off at one a.m. for Tunisia. His York landed at the wrong airfield, where Brooke saw him “sitting on his suitcase in a very cold morning wind843, looking like nothing on earth. We were there about an hour before we moved on and he was chilled through by then.”
After another brief flight, they landed again, this time in the right place, and he was driven to Maison Blanche, Eisenhower’s villa near Carthage. On December 11, he slept all day, then dined with Ike, Brooke, Tedder and others. He went to bed in pain from his throat. At four a.m., Brooke was awakened by a plaintive voice crying out “Hulloo, Hulloo, Hulloo.” The CIGS switched on a torch and demanded crossly: “Who the hell is that?” His beam fell upon the prime minister in his dragon dressing gown, a brown bandage around his head, complaining of a headache and searching for his doctor. Next day Churchill had a temperature, and Moran telegraphed for nurses and a pathologist. He was diagnosed with pneumonia.
Through the days which followed, though he continued to see visitors and dispatch a stream of signals, he lay in bed, knowing that he was very ill. “If I die,” he told his daughter Sarah844, “don’t worry—the war is won.”
On December 15, he suffered a heart attack. Sarah read Pride and Prejudice aloud to him. News of Churchill’s illness unleashed a surge of sentiment and sympathy among his people. A British soldier in North Africa wrote in his diary: “We all hope and pray845 that he will recover. It would be a great thing if Mr. Churchill will live to see the victorious end to his great fight against the Nazis.” On the afternoon of the seventeenth, Clementine Churchill arrived, escorted by Jock Colville, who had been recalled from the RAF to the Downing Street secretariat. The new antibiotics were doing their work. While the prime minister remained weak, and suffered a further slight heart attack, he no longer seemed in peril of death. On the nineteenth Clementine wrote to her daughter Mary: “Papa much better today846. Has consented not to smoke and to drink only weak whisky and soda.”
He was now fuming about the “scandalous … stagnation” of the Italian campaign, and especially about the failure to use available landing craft to launch an amphibious assault behind the German front. He urged Roosevelt to give swift consideration to British proposals for new command arrangements in the Mediterranean, now that Dwight Eisenhower had been named to direct Overlord. Roosevelt would almost certainly have given this role to Marshall, had the British been willing to agree that the chief of staff of the army should become super commander-in-chief of all operations against the Germans, in the Mediterranean as well as in northwest Europe. But Churchill and Brooke were determined to preserve at least one key C-in-C’s appointment for a British officer. The president was unwilling to spare Marshall from Washington merely to lead Overlord. On those terms, he preferred to keep Marshall at home, as overall director of the U.S. war effort.
The British Chiefs of Staff wanted Maitland Wilson to succeed Eisenhower as Mediterranean supremo, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder to become Ike’s deputy for Overlord. Churchill favoured Alexander for British commander on D-Day—as also did Eisenhower. The War Cabinet demurred, urging Montgomery in deference to public opinion as well as military desirability. Surprisingly, Churchill acceded to their view. This was certainly the right appointment, for Montgomery was a much superior general. But it was unusual for Churchill to allow himself to be baulked by ministers on a matter of such importance. Most likely, willingness to allow Alexander to remain in Italy reflected the importance which he attached to operations there. He believed, mistakenly, that “Alex” could provide the impetus he perceived as lacking. Macmillan strongly urged847 Alexander’s appointment, noting that Maitland Wilson had been Middle East C-in-C for a year, yet had done nothing to galvanise the slothful British war machine in Egypt. The Americans finally acceded to British wishes for Alexander to take over in the Mediterranean, precisely because they attached much less importance to Italy than to Overlord.
On December 22, the British Chiefs of Staff signalled from London that they supported Churchill’s proposal for a new amphibious assault in Italy. Initial planning assumed that there was only enough shipping to move a single division, while both Churchill and the Chiefs wanted to land two. On Christmas Day, Eisenhower, Maitland Wilson, Alexander, Tedder and Cunningham converged by air upon Carthage from all over the Mediterranean to discuss plans for Operation Shingle, a descent on the coast at Anzio, just south of Rome, provisionally scheduled for January 20. The meeting endorsed a two-division initial assault, subject to the proviso that it should not threaten the May date for Overlord.
On December 27, Churchill flew to Marrakesh for a prolonged spell of recuperation. “I propose to stay here in the sunshine,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “till I am quite strong again.” On his second day at the Villa Taylor, to his surprise and delight, he learned that the president had approved Shingle, subject only to renewed emphasis upon the sanctity of the French invasion date. This, however, was now to be put back a month, until June, at the insistence of Eisenhower and Montgomery. Having studied the D-Day plan for the first time, they were convinced that additional preparation, as well as a reinforced initial landing, were essential. The new date would fall in the first week of June. Churchill was hostile to the use of the word invasion in the context of D-Day: “Our object is the liberation of Europe848 from German tyranny … we ‘enter’ the oppressed countries rather than ‘invade’ them and … the word ‘invasion’ must be reserved for the time when we cross the German frontier. There is no need for us to make a present to Hitler of the idea that he is the defender of a Europe we are seeking to invade.” This was, of course, one semantic dispute which he lost.
On January 4, 1944, he wrote to Eden: “I am getting stronger ever day … All my thoughts are on ‘Shingle,’ which as you may well imagine I am watching intensely.” His convalescence in Marrakesh ended on January 14. He flew to Gibraltar, where Maitland Wilson and Cunningham gave him a final briefing on the Anzio plan. Then he boarded the battleship King George V to sail home. On the night of January 17 he landed at Plymouth, where he boarded the royal train, which had been sent to fetch him. Next morning, after an absence from England of nine weeks, he reached Downing Street. He cabled Roosevelt: “Am all right except for being rather shaky on my pins.” Arriving at Buckingham Palace for lunch with the king, a private secretary asked if he would like the lift. “Lift?” demanded the indignant prime minister. He ran up the stairs two at a time, then turned and thumbed his nose at the courtier.
The House of Commons knew nothing of his return until MPs looked up in astonishment in the middle of Questions, then leapt to their feet and began shouting, applauding and waving order papers. Harold Nicolson described how cheer after cheer greeted him
while Winston, very pink849, rather shy, beaming with mischief, crept along the front bench and flung himself into his accustomed seat. He was flushed with pleasure and emotion, and hardly had he sat down when two large tears began to trickle down his cheeks. He mopped clumsily at himself with a huge white handkerchief. A few minutes later he got up to answer questions. Most men would have been unable, on such an occasion, not to throw a flash of drama into their replies. But Winston answered them as if he were the young Under-Secretary, putting on his glasses, turning over his papers, responding tactfully to supplementaries, and taking the whole thing as conscientiously as could be. I should like to say that he seemed completely restored to health. But he looked pale when the first flush of pleasure had subsided, and his voice was not quite as vigorous as it had been.
Churchill retained his extraordinary ability to hold the attention of the House through long, discursive assessments of the war. After one such, he suddenly leaned across to the Opposition and demanded casually: “That all right?”850 MPs grinned back affectionately. His mastery of the Commons, wrote Nicolson, derived from “the combination of great flights of oratory with sudden swoops into the intimate and conversational.”
On the afternoon of January 19, Churchill presided at a Chiefs of Staff meeting, during which he urged commando landings on the Dalmatian coast, to progressively clear of Germans the islands off Yugoslavia. His hopes for Anzio were soaring. He spoke of forcing the Germans to withdraw into northern Italy, or even behind the Alps. Then Alexander’s armies would be free to pursue towards Vienna, strike into the Balkans, or swing left into France. Two days later, as the American Maj. Gen. John Lucas’s corps prepared to hit the beaches in Italy, the U.S. Fifth Army staged crossings of the Rapido River south of Rome. Churchill cabled to Stalin: “We have launched the big attack against the German armies defending Rome which I told you about at Tehran.” By midnight on January 22, thirty-six thousand British and American troops and three thousand vehicles were ashore at Anzio, having achieved complete surprise.
Yet through the days that followed, news from Italy turned sour. The Rapido crossings proved a disaster. The Germans snuffed out each precarious American bridgehead in turn. Kesselring acted with extraordinary energy, recovering from his astonishment about Anzio to concentrate troops and isolate the invaders. Four Allied divisions were soon ashore, yet going nowhere. As the Germans poured fire into the shallow beachhead, British and
American soldiers manning their foxholes and gun positions found themselves trapped in one of the most painful predicaments of the war. “We did become like animals in the end,”851 said a soldier of the Sherwood Foresters. “You were stuck in the same place. You had nowhere to go. You didn’t get no rest … No sleep … You never expected to see the end of it. You just forgot why you were there.”
Casualties mounted rapidly, and so too did desertions. Nowhere from the beach to the front line offered safety from bombardment. The Luftwaffe attacked offshore shipping with new and deadly glider bombs. “It will be unpleasant if you get sealed off there and cannot advance from the south,” Churchill wrote to Alexander on January 27. On February 8, he signalled to Dill in Washington, “All this has been a disappointment to me.” It was true that German forces were tied down in Italy which would otherwise be fighting elsewhere. “Even a battle of attrition is better than standing by and watching the Russians fight. We should also learn a good many lessons about how not to do it which will be valuable in ‘Overlord.’” But these were poor consolations for what was, indubitably, one of the big Allied failures of the war.
Anzio was the last important operation which sprang from the personal inspiration of the prime minister. Without his support, neither Eisenhower nor Alexander could have persuaded the American Chiefs of Staff to provide means for such a venture. It reflected his passion for what Liddell Hart called “the strategy of indirect approach,” the exploitation of Allied command of the sea to sidestep the difficulties of frontal assault amid some of the most difficult terrain in the world. In principle Shingle was valid. But, to an extraordinary degree, commanders failed to think through a plan for what was to happen once the troops got ashore. In this, the weakness of the Anzio operation closely resembled that of Churchill’s other notorious amphibious failure, at the Dardanelles in 1915—as American corps commander Maj. Gen. John Lucas852 suggested before it began. Alexander, as commander-in-chief, must bear responsibility for the inadequacy of strategic planning for Shingle. He and his staff grossly underestimated the speed and strength of the German response, believing that the mere threat to Kesselring’s rear would cause him to abandon the defence of his line at Monte Cassino. They never identified the importance of quick seizure of the hills beyond the Anzio beaches, a far more plausible objective than a dash for Rome. The Americans, always sceptical, displayed better judgement about the landing’s prospects than the British.
