by Walter Reid
After Casablanca, when he was ill and running a temperature of 102 degrees, Churchill wrote to the King saying that he ‘put far more confidence in Giraud than in [de Gaulle] … The insolence with which [de Gaulle] refused the President’s invitation (and mine) to come and make a friendly settlement at Casablanca may be founded on stupidity rather than malice. Whatever the motive, the result has been the same …’8
There is an intriguing picture of de Gaulle a day or two after these events. He went with Macmillan (less buttoned-up than usual on this occasion) on a trip to the seaside. ‘I bathed naked in the sea at the far end of the Roman city; de Gaulle sat in a dignified manner on a rock, with his military cap, his uniform and belt. Then we had a nice little supper at the inn with the excited patron.’9
Soon afterwards Giraud’s influence on the Committee began to wane. He made the mistake of going to America for a lengthy holiday. Macmillan’s attempts to keep the FCNL working well for the benefit of the allies were made much more difficult by America’s insistent interference in details of its work and in its composition. In his very moderate and sanitised account, Macmillan allowed himself to speak of ‘the folly of the President in basing his policy towards France on the support of individuals rather than principles.’10
The problem about de Gaulle was that his behaviour was founded on imagined insults, an exaggeration of slights and a failure to rise to see what was important and what was not. His fear that France would not return to honourable independence – if the Allies won – was quite unrealistic. The US State Department may have had, briefly, an idea of post-war Europe in which France would be just one of a number of insignificant players, but for Churchill and the Foreign Office it was essential that France would resume a crucial and powerful role in post-war Europe.
It was at Casablanca that Roosevelt made the historic declaration that the Allies would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from Germany. He appears to have done so without much discussion and without really understanding the implications of what he was doing. It was of course the opposite of what Churchill had stood for until now. The Prime Minister had always been ready to consider a negotiated peace with any element of German society that could deliver it. The declaration was bound to stiffen German resistance and to cut away at any prospect of a coup against Hitler. Victory as a result of war from the air was now impossible, and the Allies were committed to a full-scale land conflict.
Roosevelt’s declaration was made at a press conference. The myth that it was a totally unscripted, unilateral declaration by America became part of British folklore, supported by Bevin in the Commons on 21 July 1949, when he said that the War Cabinet had never been consulted, and by Churchill, who confirmed that the first he had heard of unconditional surrender was at the press conference. But Churchill later apologised to the Commons. He had been at error. The declaration had been discussed by him and Roosevelt in advance of the press conference, Churchill had obtained the War Cabinet’s approval, and they indeed sought to include in it all three Axis powers (rather than leaving Italy out to encourage her defection). Bevin’s recollection had been as wrong as Churchill’s.11 But it is likely that Ismay was correct in holding that neither the President nor the Prime Minister appreciated the significance of the form of words on which they agreed.12 In the final communiqué there was not even a mention of unconditional surrender.
De Gaulle, still uncomfortably harnessed to Giraud, continued to cause Churchill immense difficulties. Although Churchill could still think of him fondly when he remembered the dark days of 1940, by now he was more inclined to describe his protégé as ‘the monster of Hampstead’ (de Gaulle was aware of the appellation and on one occasion referred to ‘the monster of Downing Street’). Things were now so bad that Churchill instructed Eden to prepare a document called ‘Guidance for the Press and the BBC in the event of a break with General de Gaulle’ – an extensive curriculum vitae, detailing all the general’s anti-British history.
It was bad enough that de Gaulle was anti-British, but at a press conference in Washington on 9 February in which he criticised Allied policy in North Africa he stirred up much hostility in America too. Roosevelt was now complaining that Churchill was not keeping his puppet under control.13
In March 1943 de Gaulle decided to go to Cairo. Britain was very apprehensive that he would take the opportunity to stir up trouble. At length Churchill agreed to see de Gaulle on 2 April. The prickly general said that he was a prisoner and would soon be sent to the Isle of Man. Churchill reassured him: such a distinguished soldier would certainly be sent to the Tower of London. The interview ended a little more warmly, with de Gaulle making great efforts to melt the ice, and conveniently for Churchill, a message soon appeared from Eisenhower asking that de Gaulle should delay his visit to Egypt. Unfortunately a day or two later de Gaulle was persuaded that Eisenhower’s message had been written at the inspiration of the British, and relations sank to their previous depths, with de Gaulle denied permission to go anywhere where he could cause problems as he certainly would have done.
But while de Gaulle’s stock with the British and American governments was very low, it continued to rise in the bourse of public opinion. For that reason, and having been told by Eden to be nice to him, Churchill met de Gaulle again on 30 April and positively encouraged him to go to Algiers. He was ready to back any agreement that gave de Gaulle and Giraud equal powers. Just five days later Churchill sailed to the United States for the Third Washington Conference and received a memorandum of complaint from the President: ‘I am sorry, but it seems to me the conduct of the Bride continues to be more and more aggravated. His course and attitude is well nigh intolerable … I do not know what to do with de Gaulle. Possibly you would like to make him Governor of Madagascar!’
This was followed by a meeting with Hull in which, in the context of an otherwise civilised exchange, the Secretary of State urged the British to stop building up de Gaulle and the Prime Minister urged the Americans to stop building up Giraud. In the face of all the American pressure, Churchill inclined to break with de Gaulle and reported so by telegram to the War Cabinet in London. Eden noted, ‘Everyone against and very brave about it in his absence’.14
Churchill left America with no progress made in the de Gaulle vs Giraud battle. The situation was one of stalemate, and on 17 June Roosevelt wrote to Churchill in much the same terms as those of the memo which Churchill had received in Washington: ‘I am fed up with de Gaulle and … there is no possibility of our working with de Gaulle … I am absolutely convinced that he has been and is now injuring our war effort and that he is a very dangerous threat to us. I agree with you that he likes neither the British nor the Americans and that he would double-cross both of us at the first opportunity … We must divorce ourselves from de Gaulle …’15
Churchill’s response was more imaginative. The Conseil National de la Résistance had recently been set up at a meeting in the Rue du Four in Paris, as a result of the efforts of Jean Moulin. Moulin said there could be no question of subordination to Giraud: de Gaulle must be the sole leader. Churchill saw in this organisation the opportunity to do what he had wanted for some time and ‘put de Gaulle into commission’: neutralise him by making him simply primus inter pares – or, perhaps, not even primus.
In no time at all Churchill’s manoeuvre backfired. Soon Giraud was extracted from the co-presidency of the Conseil and not long afterwards ceased to be Commander-in-Chief. By the end of 1943 it was clear that de Gaulle had certainly not been put ‘in commission’. He remained unconstrained, free to roam and free to continue to make enormous mischief.
These ongoing Gallic problems were in the future. As the Casablanca Conference ended, the Eighth Army entered Tripoli. On the following day Churchill took Roosevelt to Marrakech, to show him the sun setting on the Atlas Mountains: ‘the loveliest spot in the world’ for Churchill. Roosevelt left on the following day and Churchill stayed on to paint the mountains, the only painting he executed in
the course of the war. From Marrakech he flew to Cairo, where he decided on a British mission to Tito’s communist partisans in Yugoslavia. He then flew on to Turkey for talks with President Inönü, but failed to persuade him to end his neutrality. On his return to Cairo, where he heard that the Germans had surrendered at Stalingrad, he quarrelled at dinner with Randolph and then embarked on a long disquisition about Omdurman. The next day, on to Tripoli, where he told the Eighth Army, ‘When history is written and all the facts are known, your feats will gleam and glow and will be a source of song and story long after we who are gathered here have passed away’. On 4 February he took the salute at a march past with the 51st (Highland) Division and other units. The tears ran down his cheeks as the pipes played and the men, fresh from battle, marched past.
Even the austere and vinegary Brooke came close to being moved as he too watched the Highland Division pass by, and compared them with what he had seen before Alam Halfa: ‘Then they were still pink and white; now they are bronzed warriors of many battles and of a victorious advance. I have seldom seen a finer body of men or one that looked prouder of being soldiers … The whole division was most beautifully turned out, and might have been in barracks for the last three months instead of having marched over 1,200 miles.’
It was scarcely surprising that after all these travels and a four week absence from Britain Churchill succumbed on his return to pneumonia; ‘Of course, I work wherever I am and however I am. That is what does me good’.
37
The Strains Intensify
In North West Africa Britain had three times as many men and four times as many ships as America but served under an American commander. This surprised Marshall, amongst others, but Churchill was quite frank in saying that it was a price worth paying for the adoption of his Mediterranean Strategy. In any event, he knew that in reality it was Alexander and not Eisenhower who was directing the battle.
There are telegrams in which the Allied Supreme Commander poignantly asks Alexander for ‘the essentials of your broad tactical plan’ and Churchill pointed to the nature of their relationship when he talked of asking Alex to go ‘through the ceremonial processes’. Harold Macmillan, at this stage attached to Eisenhower’s headquarters, said with some condescension that the role of the British was to run the American empire in the same way as ‘the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius’. Not only did the Greeks, in Macmillan’s view, have better brains than the Romans; they were also better at fighting.
Alexander’s appreciation of the American II Corps which had been defeated at the Kasserine Pass was, ‘soft, green and untrained … I handed them a victory on a plate, but their hands were too weak to take it’. Eisenhower, Bedell Smith, his Chief of Staff, and Patton, the Corps Commander, ‘are not professional soldiers, not as we understand that term’. But he stressed that the British must be careful not to imply any superiority: the two nations must suffer together and conquer together.1
Not all Britons were so circumspect. The American Ralph Ingersoll, planning OVERLORD on the Anglo-American staff of COSSAC (Chief Of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander), reported that his countrymen were frankly told by their allies, many of whom had served with American units in Africa, ‘ “But you chaps simply haven’t the commanders. Look how long it took us to find Montgomery – and you have only just begun your war” … They really believed this.’2
COSSAC was headed by the British Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan, whose title was ‘Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (Designate)’. It was a pretty nebulous body, with Morgan acting as a Chief of Staff to an SAC who did not yet exist. Its responsibility was to plan the invasion of north-west Europe. Within COSSAC, support was divided between landing on the Pas de Calais and to the north of the Cotentin peninsula. The split was on a national basis: the Americans were for the second option, the British for the first, and Morgan did not think much of either. Mountbatten resolved the deadlock by inviting the planners to his HQ at Largs in Scotland, where the American view prevailed. Morgan presented the plan, which Churchill immediately named OVERLORD, in May 1943.
Difficulties and tensions between the British and American components of COSSAC persisted. The Americans had a sense of inferiority when they dealt with their British counterparts, whom they recognised to be able and intelligent and, above all, more experienced.3 The Americans represented an army that had never fought a battle.
As well as having military experience, the British officers were well versed in the techniques of politics and obstruction. According to the Americans the British deployed a variety of techniques to ensure that their wishes prevailed. Rank was pulled, there was a delicate manipulation of agenda, American newcomers were seduced by a charm offensive, and if that failed to work were neutralised by being sent home on some pretext. Added to all that, the plan for OVERLORD, 113 pages long with ten maps, was written exclusively in British military terms, and frequently left the Americans bemused. ‘To maintain’ meant ‘to keep in repair’ to the Americans, but as a British military term of art meant ‘to supply’. ‘Lift’ was not a verb: it meant the fleet required to move forces and supplies to France. ‘Hard’ was not an adjective but a noun, meaning a beach paved to accept the loading and unloading of landing craft.
It seems clear that the British were concerned to obscure who was to be in charge of the invasion. While there was to be a Supreme Allied Commander, the British emphasised that he would not actually command. His function was largely to be political, presiding over an Anglo-American military authority, and negotiating with the governments in exile in Britain. Military decisions would be made by the Combined Chiefs.4 The Americans had no difficulty in concluding that if in any event even two of the three Commanders-in-Chief were British, OVERLORD could be varied or even postponed at Churchill’s whim. In fact Morgan argued that since the ultimate superiority of American power dictated that the Supreme Commander would be American, all three Commanders-in-Chief should be British. He pointed out that the British Commanders had a monopoly of experience in waging the war.
On his recovery from his pneumonia, just after Montgomery’s success at Wadi Akarit, where 6,000 prisoners were taken, Churchill was astounded to learn that Eisenhower had decided not to follow up the expected success in Tunisia with an immediate invasion of Sicily – because he had discovered that there were not just the expected six Italian divisions there, but also two German divisions. He was following the advice of an appraisal by the British Joint Planning Committee, but Alexander and others had already rejected it. Churchill was horrified at the reaction to a mere two divisions. His comment was perceptive: ‘This is an example of the fatuity of planning staffs playing upon each other’s fears, each service presenting its difficulties at the maximum, and Americans and Englishmen vying with each other, in the total absence of one directing mind and commanding willpower’. That is not just Churchilliage: it is a fair assessment of the conservative inclinations of a series of different agencies yoked together, no one of them wishing to be responsible for accepting a necessary risk.
Churchill’s philosophy in regard to the Joint Planning Committee encapsulates precisely his feelings in relation to the British Chiefs of Staff. If the Chiefs of Staff had not been faced with his directing mind and commanding willpower, the war would not have been won as it was, however infuriating and exhausting his presence could be.
His energising arguments won the day and the British Chiefs of Staff, and the American Joint Chiefs, agreed with him: the landings were to go ahead. But difficulties remained. The British Chiefs decided that the landing craft earmarked for cross-Channel landings would be required for Sicily and that accordingly if Sicily went ahead it would do so at the expense of any cross-Channel venture in 1943. This was not what the Americans wanted. On the one occasion that ‘Jakey’ Devers, the senior American member of COSSAC, was invited to dine with Churchill, the Prime Minister told him that Sicily was going to be a cheap victory. ‘That’s what the world w
ants, cheap victories.’ Devers is reported to have replied, ‘If you will forgive me, sir, I think that’s bunk. I think one squad of soldiers on the Channel coast of France will mean more to the world than two armies ashore in Sicily’.5
Churchill decided that to force Sicily forward he had to meet FDR again: another example of a conference decision requiring clarification and confirmation. He left for America and the Third Washington Conference on board the Queen Mary and on 7 May heard the news of the capture of Tunis and then Bizerta. On 10 May the church bells rang, or possibly rang again, depending on whether or not General Kennedy’s recollection was accurate. All North Africa was now in Allied hands and 240,000 prisoners had been taken. Alex signalled to the Prime Minister: ‘Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over. All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.’
38
TRIDENT
When Churchill, en route for his meeting with Roosevelt, heard that a German submarine was going to cross the Queen Mary’s path, he ordered that a machine-gun be put in his lifeboat. He told Averell Harriman, ‘I won’t be captured. The finest way to die is the excitement of fighting the enemy.’ Then a pause and the disarming touch that made him so irresistible: ‘It might not be so nice if one were in the water and they tried to pick me up’.
Despite his age and encroaching infirmities, Churchill loved these high-level trips and conferences. But one must not lose sight of the fact that they were absolutely necessary for the effective prosecution of the war. Some American planners were now arguing strenuously for the Pacific and not Sicily for summer 1943. Indeed landing craft for Sicily were no longer being transferred from the Far East. Churchill told Hopkins that he was ‘conscious of the serious divergences beneath the surface’ before he left for this Washington conference, TRIDENT. But he still had a stock of goodwill with FDR and once at the White House he was able to persuade the President that Sicily should proceed and should be followed by the invasion of Italy, HUSKY. He did not have to do a great deal of persuading. Sicily had been more or less agreed on at Casablanca, and was logically pretty inevitable.