Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  In the absence of the principals, the discussions had gone on. Despite the agreement on Europe first, the strategic implications of the policy left plenty of room for dissension. There was a critical shortage of sealift for Europe, and Marshall argued that the problem was not that of finding troops. There were plenty of troops for both theatres. The problem was finding the shipping. It was proposed that the troops destined for Iceland and Northern Ireland be cut from 8,000 and 16,000 men to 2,500 and 4,000 men respectively, allowing 21,800 to be sent to the Far East. There were ramifications implied in any such decision. Marshall himself was concerned that the diversion of shipping to the Pacific would cut Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union by 30 per cent. Stilwell observed the discussions: ‘All agreed on being disgusted with the British hogging all the material: quite willing to divide ours with us, but never any question of putting theirs in the pot.’1

  When these staff proposals were brought back to Roosevelt and Churchill, the Prime Minister was alarmed, particularly by the impact on the Russians. There was not, at this stage, a lot to separate the PM and the President on Russia: both were fairly well disposed towards Stalin. Roosevelt consistently dismissed the idea that Russia wanted to dominate Europe. Like Churchill, he took the view that the Soviet leader was not unconstrained: they both thought that their Russian opposite number was controlled by others more extreme than he. Sometimes Molotov was thought to be this powerful influence, at other times ‘a council of commissars’ or simply, as Churchill described them, ‘the Soviet Leaders, whoever they are’.2 At a less personal level, Roosevelt thought that Russia had to be drawn into a closer relationship with the West, so that she could be one of the world’s policemen. Roosevelt’s views were broadly those of his entourage. The Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, identified a distinction between America’s ‘sane and practical liberalism’ and Churchill’s ‘conservatism’.3

  Before the principals came to adjudicate on the shipping issue, Roosevelt returned to the North African offensive. He embarrassed Churchill by forcing an admission that Auchinleck’s battle against Rommel was not going well. At an informal meeting over dinner on the evening of 12 January, when FDR was absent, it was clear that neither Stimson nor Marshall was in favour of immediate action in North Africa.

  The discussions did finally turn to shipping. The meeting closed with Roosevelt’s confirmation of the figures that Marshall had proposed, but with Beaverbrook and Hopkins told to find more ships for Russia. At dinner at the British Embassy that night there was a degree of discord. The high point was reached when the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, turned to the matter of Imperial Preferences and the Ottawa Accords of 1932. He proposed that an ‘Agreement to discard the Empire tariff and trade program’ be included in the Lend-Lease contract. Churchill was not amused and refused even to consider the proposal. Roosevelt denied that Lend-Lease was being used as a lever to overturn Imperial Preference, but he was not remotely credible. Churchill relished American slang, which he could deploy to good effect. He must have been tempted on occasions to echo Roosevelt’s famous remark of 1928, when he was told that he could stand as Governor of New York while continuing with therapy for his legs: ‘Don’t hand me that baloney’.

  The remaining meetings of the conference were disturbed by strong undercurrents. Many Americans felt that American war production was being developed to protect Britain and her Empire, rather than to safeguard America’s own Pacific interests. The Anglophobic Stilwell complained about the consensus around an invasion of North Africa. The Limeys ‘shot off their faces as if they were our delegates and not theirs’.4 He did not approve of the idea that British troops in Northern Ireland were to be replaced by Americans. It would then be ‘home to jolly old England, thank you’.

  On the British side Dill wrote to Wavell, ‘As for war, my own belief is that [the Americans] don’t know the first thing about it. And yet as you know only too well, they are great critics. How they have the nerve to criticise anyone beats me. However they do. At present our relations with the Americans could not be better, but we are in the honeymoon phase. When we settle down to married life things will, I fear, be very different.’5

  The most difficult discussions were on supply and the structure of command. On supply, Churchill proposed two ‘Combined Allocation Committees’, one in London and one in Washington, ‘each caring for the needs of the allies for whom [the host nation] has accepted responsibility’. Marshall was greatly angered by what appeared to him to attack the concept of the single Combined Chiefs of Staff sitting in Washington.

  The concept of the Combined Chiefs of Staff originated from a proposal by Pound. He may have had in mind a body to control the Far Eastern theatre, rather than the war as a whole. In the event, the former was established in the shape of ABDA, an American, British, Dutch and Australian joint body, commanded by Wavell.

  Churchill had envisaged Wavell, shipped off to India, ‘sitting under a pagoda tree’ in the Indian sun, but the Americans insisted that he be appointed to the command. Churchill had not wanted him and Roosevelt had preferred an American, ideally Macarthur. He said that the commander should be an American because ‘An American would be accepted more readily by the Australians and the Dutch than any Britisher’. It was Marshall who demanded Wavell, on the basis that it had to be a British commander in view of British and Commonwealth dominance in the theatre and of the fact that Wavell was much the most experienced among the British commanders in the area. Churchill, in Washington at the time, wired to London: ‘You will be as much astonished as I was to learn that the man the President has in mind is General Wavell’.6 Apart from the choice of Wavell, the British were also against the concept of unity of command in the Far East, because of the distances involved. America got her way, and ABDA came into existence in January 1942. It did very little. Churchill’s assessment of Wavell’s suitability for running an Allied Command was in the event more or less vindicated.

  Brooke, left behind in London during ARCADIA, was characteristically critical of ABDA: ‘The whole scheme [is] wild and half-baked and only catering for one area of action, namely Western Pacific, one enemy, Japan, and no central control.’

  The more significant joint command, the Combined Chiefs, would include the heads of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, representing their respective service chiefs. The Americans had to reform their command structure to provide their component in the CCS Committee. To do so they established the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which included the Army Chief of Staff, Marshall, and the Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet, King. The American Air Force had not been represented in the former Joint Board, but to match the numbers of the British, Marshall included on the JCS General Arnold, Commanding General of the US Army Air Forces, despite the fact that there was technically no such thing as an American Air Force.

  Churchill regarded the establishment of the Combined Chiefs of Staff as the most important result of ARCADIA. Unlike ABDA the Combined Chiefs worked well. The Committee was very much the personal achievement of Churchill and Roosevelt, although a fairly informal one. Indeed Churchill never did give any formal approval to their functions, and Roosevelt’s endorsement was a scribbled note, ‘OK, FDR’. The service chiefs on both sides were fairly unenthusiastic. The chief American naval planner, for instance, Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, complained about ‘large unwieldy bodies … in which British officials would be given half the total authority for matters now solely under American control’. When the British delegation returned to London and Brooke learned what had happened, he said that his colleagues had ‘sold our birthright for a plate of porridge’. He continued to resist any combined element in areas that he regarded as primarily British responsibilities, such as Burma.7

  Brooke’s special complaint was that the CCS should be based in the United States. In fact, after the secret American–British Conversations of early 1941, there had been a clutch of British officers permanently based in Washington, nominally military advisers to the B
ritish Supply Council. They met with a corresponding American component.

  The British all had nicknames, Admiral Sir Charles ‘Tiny’ Little, General Sir Colville ‘Chicken’ Wemyss and Air-Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris. The addiction to nicknames seems to have persisted once these secret contacts were replaced by the CCS. Its staff officers were Brigadier Vivien ‘Dumbie’ Dykes and the American Brigadier-General Walter Bedell ‘Beetle’ Smith. ‘Dumbie’ Dykes had further nicknames for the Combined Chiefs themselves. General Marshall was Tom Mix, Admiral King was Captain Kettle, Admiral Stark was Tugboat Annie, Brooke was Colonel Shrapnel and Admiral Pound was the Whale. By this time the British Joint Staff mission was a huge organisation with almost 3,000 people working for it.

  It was also a very efficient organisation, which was able to deliver highly professional results in terms of presentational and negotiating skills. By contrast, Dykes, for example, found his American opposite numbers ‘completely dumb and appallingly slow’.8 From the President down, Americans felt they always lost their arguments with the British. Roosevelt might say more or less sardonically that he always got 20 per cent of what he wanted, and his allies 80, but others took their defeats less philosophically. Many resented the superiority of their junior partner. A Senate report of 1943 talked of ‘smart, hard-headed Britons … daily outwitting, ousting and frustrating the naïve and inexperienced American officials’.9 For the British it was for the moment all very gratifying, but resentments were being built up for which they would pay.

  Churchill also proposed that Dill remained in Washington as his representative and with access at the highest levels in America. Marshall saw this as an opportunity for Churchill to interfere in the chain of command, which was to be directed from Washington. Churchill’s objective was indeed to ensure that he himself had access to the President, without having to go through the Chiefs of Staff – or indeed the British Military Mission in Washington. Dill wrote to Wavell: ‘It is odd that Winston should want me to represent him here when he clearly was glad of an excuse to get me out of the CIGS job. We disagreed too often …’10 Marshall had no reservations about Dill at a personal level, but told the President that as a matter of principle he did not want an ‘additional level of authority’ interposed between the Combined Chiefs and their political masters. The American team wanted the Combined Chiefs to be the ultimate and sole source of military advice.

  The nature of Dill’s appointment in Washington was the subject of considerable negotiation between the two countries. Eventually he fulfilled two roles, the first openly and the second, in theory at least, secretly. The first was as Head of the British Joint Staff Commission in Washington, in which capacity he represented the views of the British Chiefs to the Combined Chiefs in America. In the second capacity he was a direct and personal link between Churchill and Roosevelt and Hopkins. The constitutional intricacies of his relationship with the Chiefs of Staff collectively and the Heads of the Joint Staff Commission in Washington individually were potentially Byzantine, but in practice Dill facilitated communications enormously and helped to avoid innumerable conflicts.

  As so often in these conferences, a decision was deferred and ultimately fudged. The eventual draft, an American one, made no reference to Dill at all, either as Churchill’s representative or as one of the Combined Chiefs. It was only after ARCADIA that the device was arrived at of settling Dill’s position as Churchill’s representative in a document separate from that appointing him to the Chiefs of Staff Committee.

  In Washington Dill enjoyed an Indian summer, at least as effective as he had been in Whitehall, working closely with the American service chiefs and senior members of the administration. When he died in November 1944 he was buried in Arlington Cemetery with great pomp and ceremony. He was the only foreigner to have received such an honour. The pall-bearers were the United States Chiefs of Staff. One observer said, ‘I have never seen so many men so visibly shaken by sadness’.

  The contribution that Dill made to the effective prosecution of the war was enormous. His days in America were very different from what Churchill had planned for him as Governor of Bombay, with his bodyguard of lancers.

  Reconciling the status of the Combined Allocation Committees with the principle of the supremacy of the Combined Chiefs was finally achieved to Marshall’s satisfaction: both Committees were subordinate to the Combined Chiefs. There had to be unity of command.11 Agreement was not however achieved without great heat at the second-last staff conference of ARCADIA on 13 January. The Americans had been briefed that British proposals ‘will probably have been drawn up with chief regard for support of the British Commonwealth. Never absent from British minds are their post-war interests, commercial and military. We should likewise safeguard our own eventual interests.’12

  The most difficult part of the negotiations was left to last. One outstanding supply issue remained. The mechanics for the sharing of war materials had proved to be extraordinarily difficult and was not dealt with until the final full session of the conference at 5.30 p.m. on 14 January. It was common ground that a Raw Materials Board would report directly to President and Prime Minister. Alongside it there was to be the Munitions Assignment Board (or Munitions Allocation Committee). Originally it was to be divided into two equal parts, one in Washington under Hopkins and one in London under Beaver-brook. The Board was to be at the same level as the Combined Chiefs. At five o’clock, half an hour before the final session was to begin, Marshall told Roosevelt that he would resign rather than try to plan operations if a body over which he had no control could refuse to furnish material. Hopkins, who had strangely not been consulted, supported Marshall, and said that he would not chair the Washington committee if Marshall’s argument were not accepted. FDR could not oppose their combined position, and at 5.30 p.m. he told Churchill that there was to be ‘a common pool’ for war materials and that it would be controlled by the Combined Chiefs.

  The war was to be run from Washington, and running it, amongst other things, meant controlling the material of war. Roosevelt softened the blow by proposing that war resources be controlled by a board operating under the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee ‘in a manner similar to the arrangement for unity of command in the south-west Pacific area’. It was a loose form of words and it did not appeal to Churchill. It did not leave him in control of British munitions allocation. He finally agreed that it ‘be tried out for a month’. Then if necessary there could be a redraft. Roosevelt was delighted to have found a way of avoiding a decision: ‘We will call it a preliminary agreement and try it out that way’.

  Even before ARCADIA concluded, Moran wrote in his diary that the Prime Minister had ‘wanted to show the President how to run the war. It had not worked out quite like that’. George Marshall had dominated the proceedings ‘in his quiet, unprovocative way’. Hopkins, who might have been expected to be on side after his long exposure to the Churchillian phenomenon, had tended to support Marshall and American interests in general. The conference took so much out of him that he collapsed at the end of it and had to spend two weeks in the Navy Hospital.

  Before that Hopkins was able to send a letter to Clementine: ‘You would have been quite proud of your husband on this trip’: he had been ‘ever so good natured’, had not taken ‘anybody’s head off,’ and had eaten and drunk ‘with his customary vigor’.13

  Roosevelt’s valediction to Churchill was encouraging: ‘Trust me to the bitter end’. Churchill had obtained from ARCADIA one of his objectives: all-out American commitment. The Prime Minister also returned without having had the fact of American superiority in the alliance rubbed in his face. It would be a year before Roosevelt clearly emerged as the leader of the alliance, after the Casablanca Conference. The reality of American power was however clear enough. Churchill had wanted a commitment to Germany First, but he had that before the conference even opened, thanks to Hitler’s gratuitous declaration of war. He also had to establish a truly unified war effort. That was achieved,
but not with him at the centre and not in London.

  As early as March 1942 he was reminded that he was not the pivotal figure he had been, when the Combined Chiefs postponed the immediate activity in North Africa which Churchill had sought at ARCADIA. The Combined Chiefs of Staff system took much control away from him and though he would subsequently try direct lobbying of the President, and indeed of others, including Eisenhower and Marshall, the principle of the CCS Committee, as it had been established at ARCADIA, remained in place throughout the war. Combined air operations or combined war at sea in the Atlantic appealed to Churchill: they would have been more within his geographical sphere of influence. He did not get them.

  Despite the fact that Europe was to be first, immediately after Pearl Harbor America transferred large numbers of her escort vessels to the Pacific. Between December 1941 and August 1942, Dönitz’s ‘grey sharks’ made 184 patrols and sank 609 ships with a gross tonnage of 3.1 million tonnes in American waters, losing only 22 U-boats. The United States did not bring full naval and air power to bear on the war in the Atlantic until March 1943.

  After a final dinner (English lamb pie) on Wednesday 14 January, Churchill returned to Britain by flying boat after an absence of thirty-six days. As they approached home, the Boeing clipper was briefly lost in fog. In the War Memoirs, Churchill recorded that the aircraft was mistaken for a hostile bomber and that six Hurricanes had been sent up to shoot it down. It was a good story, but not part of the official flight record. In little matters as well as great, truth could be adjusted for the sake of the story he wanted to tell.

  Part III

  ‘Beneath these triumphs lie poisonous politics and deadly international rivalries… . The misery of the whole world appals me.’

  (Churchill to Clementine, 1945)