Even as Allied leaders in Casablanca were struggling to resolve their differences in pursuit of a common purpose, the senior American commander in Tunisia and his top armor lieutenant had, with remarkable speed, cultivated a deep mutual hostility. Staff officers were surprised, then perplexed, then alarmed at this inauspicious development, explicable only in terms of personal chemistry and human folly.
“The Touch of the World”
THE Emperor of the West arrived in Casablanca at 6:20 P.M. on Thursday, January 14, 1943, tired but exhilarated after the five-day journey from Washington. With the gray in his cheeks offset by the glint in his eye, Roosevelt was bundled into a mud-smeared sedan for the circuitous drive to Anfa Camp. Installed in Villa Dar es Saada, the president welcomed Churchill for the first of ten meals and forty-three hours of conversation they would share in Casablanca. An air-raid warning after midnight required them to finish the colloquy by candlelight before Roosevelt finally went to bed at three A.M. “Winnie is a great man for the status quo,” he mused, smoking a final cigarette in his uptilted holder. “He even looks like the status quo, doesn’t he?”
Preserving the status quo ante bellum—particularly in maintaining His Majesty’s empire—was very much part of the British scheme and, in keeping with Churchill’s plan, the prime minister wooed Roosevelt while his military lieutenants wooed the American joint chiefs. At 2:30 P.M. on January 15, a dozen of the most senior generals and admirals in the Anglo-American alliance strolled back from lunch to a high-ceilinged, semicircular banquet room off the main corridor of the Anfa Hotel. Full of sunbeams and the fragrance of cut flowers, the room was dominated by a large rectangular table. Sentries guarded the door, where a neatly printed placard read: “Business: Chiefs of Staff Conference.” This would be the third session of the combined chiefs in Casablanca, and before returning to the paramount issue of a global war strategy they were to hear from General Eisenhower this afternoon on the Tunisian campaign and his plan for Operation SATIN.
Poor Eisenhower: yet another room filled with bemedaled generals whose military plumage bespoke battlefield exploits greater than his own. He looked haggard, thanks to his high blood pressure, the purple bags beneath his eyes, and the lingering grippe—exacerbated by chain smoking—that had kept him in bed for four days after Christmas. “Ike seems jittery,” Roosevelt later commented. The flight from Algiers this morning had hardly been restful. Two engines on Eisenhower’s Flying Fortress had failed and the passengers spent the last fifty miles of the flight standing at the exits with parachutes on, ready to jump. As he strode to the head of the table the British eyed him curiously, still intrigued by how such a man could emerge from lowborn obscurity to hold this high command.
He spoke without notes. Yes, there had been setbacks in Tunisia, unfortunate delays. The roads were bad, the weather horrid, the mud unspeakable. A single dirt runway needed 2,000 tons of perforated steel matting to make it mud-proof, but to carry that matting required the total cargo capacity of the North African rail system for at least a day. British and American soldiers had learned valuable combat lessons. As for the French—and here Eisenhower took his revenge for those long hours in the Gibraltar tunnel—they had the misfortune of being led by General Giraud, who “might be a good division commander but has no political sense and no idea of administration.” In a final plunge of the knife, Eisenhower added that dealing with the late Darlan had been easier.
The SATIN offensive, scheduled to begin in a week, looked promising. “At first, operations on the right flank were looked upon primarily as a diversion,” Eisenhower said. “But it now seems probable that it will be possible to advance on Sfax and hold it with infantry, while withdrawing the 1st Armored Division as a mobile reserve further to the rear.” If successful, SATIN would cut the Axis forces in half.
Watching this performance with heavily lidded eyes was General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff and among the greatest soldiers of the war. Immaculate, punctilious, utterly fluent in French, Brooke came from a family of Northern Ireland baronets known as “the fighting Brookes.” With brilliantine-black hair and a face as pinched as an ax blade, he had narrow shoulders, spindly legs, and the unnerving habit—as described by an admirer—of “shooting his tongue out and round his lips with the speed of a chameleon.” He had been mentioned in dispatches six times in the Great War, but his charmed life had changed in April 1925 when he rolled his Bentley on a slippery road, breaking his own leg and his wife’s spine; she died a few days later.
“I very much wish I could have been finished off myself at the same time,” Brooke wrote. Increasingly taciturn and withdrawn, he developed a pronounced stoop and a perpetual frown. Remarriage brought new happiness—for decades, Brooke wrote his second wife lyrical love letters, always signed “Your devoted old Alan”—without rectifying the stoop, the frown, or the taciturnity. “Colonel Shrapnel” ’s signature phrase was a blunt “I flatly disagree,” often accompanied by the snap of a pencil. In January 1943, he was fifty-nine years old. Birding was his greatest civil passion, and he could treat The Truth About the Cuckoo like Holy Writ. This very morning, prowling the beach with his field glasses, Brooke had jubilantly spied a goldfinch, a stonechat, sanderlings, and a ring plover, all carefully recorded in his journal.
Such sightings did not distract him from the task at hand. As the officer largely responsible for extracting the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in 1940, Brooke was disinclined to underestimate German ferocity, and he flatly disagreed with what he privately described as Eisenhower’s “ridiculous plan” for SATIN. As for Brooke’s opinion of the commander-in-chief himself, his diary entry for December 28, 1942, was unsparing: “Eisenhower as a general is hopeless! He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I am afraid, because he knows little if anything about military matters.”
Now Brooke pounced on Eisenhower like a hawk on a pigeon. How, he asked, would the II Corps drive to the sea be coordinated with Anderson’s First Army in the north and Montgomery’s Eighth Army in Libya? If Anderson was bogged down for two more months, would not Arnim’s forces “thin out in the north and defeat the Sfax forces in detail?” Montgomery was still a week from reaching Tripoli, and Eighth Army would be “quite immobilized” until the shattered port there could be reopened. Rommel no doubt “would react like lightning” to any attack on Sfax that threatened his logistics lifeline. The Desert Fox still had an estimated 80,000 German and Italian troops, Arnim 65,000. Would not II Corps risk being trapped between Arnim and Rommel, with little prospect of help from Anderson or Montgomery? In fact, an Ultra decrypt today had disclosed that Rommel’s 21st Panzer Division had already begun moving north into Tunisia.
Eisenhower tried to regroup in the face of this onslaught, but he got no help from the American chiefs, Hap Arnold, Ernest King, and Marshall. The latter appeared somnolent after a heavy lunch and had yet to open his mouth. “Fredendall’s plan,” as Eisenhower called it, envisioned Ward’s 1st Armored Division as a counterpunching force to stave off Rommel. Eisenhower faced “the dilemma of either allowing the troops in the north to deteriorate by remaining inactive in the mud, or suffering some losses through keeping them active.” The latter, he believed, “was the lesser of the two evils.” Even so, he looked forward to discussing the issue further and “to make any necessary adjustments in the plan.”
Eisenhower saluted and left the room with the grim look of a man in full retreat.
The British and American chiefs of staff or their deputies had met fifty-six times since an initial strategy session in January 1942, but Casablanca revealed that they were still not speaking the same language. They reached quick agreement at Anfa on several matters, including the need to bolster Stalin’s Red Army, to concentrate air attacks against the German homeland, and to suppress marauding U-boats, whose number had doubled in 1942. But the preeminent issues were how to divide Allied war resources between the Pacific and Atlantic wars, and where the n
ext blow should fall. On these vital questions, no unity obtained. It is axiomatic that commanders in conference tend to be on their best behavior and therefore at their least useful. The first few days of SYMBOL demonstrated that they could also accomplish little while behaving badly.
No sooner had Eisenhower left the conference room than Brooke resumed the dripping of water on stone that Churchill required. He believed that “final victory in the European theater before the end of 1943” was possible. Repeating arguments he had made in earlier sessions, he also maintained that Japan’s offensive power had already been blunted and that Tokyo’s defeat was certain once Germany surrendered. But if the Germans were allowed to defeat the Soviet Union, the Third Reich could become impregnable. Therefore, the Allied strategy should be not just to defeat Germany first, as Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed a year earlier, but to put the overwhelming weight of Allied resources into the European theater.
But where to strike next? The American inclination was to “strike directly at the heart of the enemy over the shortest possible route”: a cross-Channel assault on the north coast of France aimed at Berlin. Yet—and here those red leather folders from the Bulolo reappeared, to reveal wondrously precise studies and statistics—the Germans had forty-six divisions in France and the Low Countries, plus another eleven available nearby in Germany. Moreover, good east-west rail lines in northern Europe would allow the Wehrmacht to shuttle seven more divisions from the Russian front to the west in two weeks. By September 1943, the latest prudent date for a cross-Channel invasion before bad weather intruded, the Allies could stage twenty-five divisions at most in Britain, hardly an invincible force; also, shipping and landing craft shortages meant that the initial assault wave against the fortified Atlantic Wall would be limited to six divisions, although Eisenhower’s own planners in London had recently recommended at least twelve.
All of which argued for further Mediterranean operations, starting in Sicily. The island had five hundred miles of mostly unfortified coastline. As Churchill had told Stalin, “Why stick your head in the alligator’s mouth at Brest when you can go to the Mediterranean and rip his soft underbelly?” Owing to the flimsiness of the Italian rails, vulnerable to Allied air attack, the Wehrmacht could move only one reinforcing division south in two weeks. Knocking Italy out of the war, the British estimated, would cost Germany fifty-four divisions and more than 2,000 planes. And reopening the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal would save the Allies the equivalent of 225 ships, Brooke concluded—a huge bonus in a global war where shipping was often more precious than manpower. The red folders snapped shut.
As Brooke had listened to Eisenhower with predatory patience, so Admiral King listened to Brooke. Easily the most pugnacious of the three American chiefs—fittingly, he had an anchor tattooed on one forearm and a dagger on the other—he had been described by one admirer as “a formidable old crustacean.” Bibulous and lecherous, with a foghorn voice that could be heard the length of a carrier deck, King was “always ready to find Albion perfidious,” in Marshall’s phrase, and the admiral smelled perfidy in this room amid the hibiscus and hair oil. The Pacific was his theater, and he would not step back. King has “his eye on the Pacific. That is his eastern policy,” a British admiral concluded. “Occasionally he throws a rock over his shoulder. That’s his western policy.”
King threw a rock. He did not object to Sicily per se, but he believed that the British did “not seem to have an overall plan for the conduct of the war.” Their dismissal of the Pacific was simply anathema. Tokyo was replenishing its empire with raw materials from conquered territories, he asserted, and fortifying an inner defensive ring in the East Indies and the Philippines. Bitter fighting with flamethrowers and grenades would persist on Guadalcanal for nearly another month, and a comparably bitter campaign was just ending in Papua New Guinea, where American and Australian casualties exceeded 8,000. In the far north, a small American force had just landed on Amchitka to begin reclaiming the Aleutians; that campaign would last until summer.
Like Brooke, King recycled arguments made in earlier sessions; the discussions were beginning to seem circular. The admiral considered it “necessary for the united nations to prevent the Japanese having time to consolidate their gains.” Of nine fronts now engaged by Allied forces, four were in the Pacific. Were the British aware that only 15 percent of the Allied war effort was being channeled into the Pacific? That proportion, King believed, should be doubled.
If not precisely a lie, the 15 percent statistic was certainly not the truth. More than half of U.S. Army forces overseas and one-third of the combat air groups were arrayed against Japan; virtually all U.S. Marines overseas—now four divisions, and growing—also served in the Pacific. At least three times as many ships were required to transport and sustain troops in the vast Pacific as were needed in the Atlantic.
No matter: it was “essential to maintain the initiative against the Japanese and not wait for them to come against us,” King argued. As for Brooke’s rebuttal—that the Allies lacked sufficient resources to wage all-out war against both Japan and the European Axis—King shrugged. Hap Arnold and Marshall remained silent. The session broke up before five P.M.
Battle lines had been drawn. Brigadier General Albert C. Wedemeyer, a War Department planner who so distrusted the British that he secretly tape-recorded meetings with their officers, bitterly opposed further dabbling in the Mediterranean. “If we subscribed to the British concept,” Wedemeyer warned the American chiefs after the meeting, “we should disperse our forces in an area which is neither vital nor final.” But a cross-Channel invasion in 1943 looked unlikely without a change of heart in London.
Brooke recorded his assessment of the day’s events later that night. In an uncharacteristically fraternal diary entry, he wrote: “There is no doubt that we are too closely related to the Americans to make cooperation between us anything but easy.”
Casablanca lay a thousand miles from any battlefield, but the casualty roll here was growing. SATIN had been mortally wounded; Eisenhower’s reputation was injured, if less grievously. “Deficient of experience and of limited ability,” Brooke concluded in his diary. Word soon circulated that the Tunisian offensive had been scrubbed. Clark told Patton that the British were simply trying to garner all the glory in Tunisia by excluding Americans from the final kill. “If so,” Patton wrote in his diary, “it is too terrible for words.”
After his humiliating performance in the hotel conference room, Eisenhower slowly walked beneath the coconut palms to Villa Dar es Saada. The president wanted to see him at four P.M. Precisely what Eisenhower should do now in Tunisia, particularly with II Corps, was as uncertain as his own future. “His neck is in a noose and he knows it,” Butcher would write two days later. Despite Marshall’s efforts to give Eisenhower rank comparable to the senior British field generals’, Roosevelt balked at awarding him a fourth star. Harry Hopkins recorded the private exchange at Anfa:
The President told General Marshall that he would not promote Eisenhower until there was some damn good reason for doing it, that he was going to make it a rule that promotions should go to people who had done some fighting, that while Eisenhower had done a good job, he hasn’t knocked the Germans out of Tunisia.
And now Marshall himself was irked at Eisenhower’s limp showing before the combined chiefs.
Sitting in his zebra-skin living room, Roosevelt ruminated at length on the improbability of France regaining her prewar stature. After wondering aloud “what I’m going to do with Tunisia after the war,” he quizzed Eisenhower on the campaign.
“Well? What about it? What’s your guess?”
“Sir?”
“How long it’ll take to finish the job?”
Eisenhower hesitated. The president seemed far too sanguine about fighting in the Tunisian winter.
“With any kind of break in the weather, sir, we’ll have ’em all either in the bag or in the sea by late spring.”
“What’s late spring
mean? June?”
Eisenhower nodded. “Maybe as early as the middle of May. June at the latest.”
He had committed himself. Victory in Africa by mid-May.
That night Eisenhower lingered in Patton’s villa until 1:30 A.M., confiding his anxieties. “He thinks his thread is about to be cut,” Patton wrote in his diary. “I told him he had to go to the front. He feels that he cannot, due to politics.”
Brooke’s deputy, General Sir John Kennedy, observed of Churchill: “He is difficult enough when things are going badly, more difficult when nothing is happening, and quite unmanageable when all is going well.” Despite frictions within the military councils, SYMBOL was going very well in the prime minister’s estimation; if not unmanageable, he was certainly ubiquitous. Escaping from the Anfa compound on January 16, he was found strolling the beach near the El Hank lighthouse, pockets bulging with seashells. During another beachfront expedition, he came upon several American sailors with a guitar; at his request, they serenaded him with “You Are My Sunshine.” Walking back to Villa Mirador after a late-night dinner, Churchill was challenged at three A.M. by a young sentry from North Carolina who bellowed, “Corporal of the guard! I have a feller down here who claims he is the prime minister of Great Britain. I think he is a goddamn liar.”
Mornings, he lounged about in a pink gown, nipping breakfast from a wine bottle or studying his traveling collection of military maps. Eventually dressing in his coverall “zip rompers,” he played countless hands of bezique, or watched field marshals build sand castles and skip stones into the surf. “Come and see my maps,” he urged. “Will you have a whiskey?” Long past midnight he debated issues large and small with his minions, whose bleary yawns he dismissed: “Very well, if you don’t care about winning the war, go to sleep.” He tended “to view with contempt suggestions that did not originate with himself,” a British general observed, and when challenged he huffily replied, “You have grown fat in honors from your country, and now you betray her. All you want is to draw your pay, eat your rations, and sleep.” Excessive civility annoyed him, too. “We don’t get paid to be polite to each other,” he snapped. All in all, he was having a wonderful time.
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