by Walter Reid
A lot of ground that had already been covered at Casablanca was covered again at TRIDENT, partly because Admiral Leahy, Chairman of the American Chiefs, had been absent from the earlier conference. More generally, the Americans, sensitive to the feeling that they had been outmanoeuvred at earlier meetings, had begun to gain confidence and to speak out. They were as well represented as the British and backed up by rows of aides and assistants. The record was very much in mind, and the result was unproductive and formal. Best results were achieved when the Chairman of the day proposed an adjournment to an off-the-record meeting of the Chiefs alone. The process tended to reduce tensions. It was frequently necessary.
From now on these high-level meetings were increasingly fraught and difficult. The 76-year-old Secretary for War, Stimson, was particularly difficult. He personalised the argument and claimed that Churchill was obsessed by a Balkan strategy to redress the historical record of the Dardanelles. He did not reduce mutual confusion by conflating ROUNDUP and SLEDGEHAMMER, and referring repeatedly to ‘Operation Roundhammer’.
An unwelcome feature of TRIDENT was a renewed attempt, led as usual by Admiral King, to displace Germany First with a Pacific policy which would be followed until victory in the east, even if Britain were out of the war by then. The atmosphere was not pleasant. Americans charged the British with being half-hearted about ROUNDUP; Britons said that there was not much hope for ROUNDUP since American soldiers were not arriving in Britain at the agreed rate – by now there should have been 80,000; there were only 15,000. Even Marshall said that it might be better to put the Pacific first if Britain intended to ‘waste time in the Mediterranean’.1 But at the end of the day Germany remained first, even though all that could be done for the moment would be in North Africa or from its shores. There was neither time before the autumnal storms nor available resources to mount ROUNDUP, now transmuting into OVERLORD, in 1943. In the event Sicily, HUSKY, did not conclude until August 1943, the month originally planned for OVERLORD. The decision at TRIDENT was for a definite launch of OVERLORD in May 1944.
That left the Allies with the question of what to do in the meantime. The answer was to be Italy, which forward troops could already see from Sicily. It was an obvious decision, but it exacerbated tensions between Britain and America. A major division in strategic thinking led to exasperation and a growing conviction among the Americans that Britain was not really onside, and that her views must often simply be ignored and overridden.
It was agreed at TRIDENT that if Italy had fallen by the end of August (which proved to be a vain hope), further operations would be in that theatre, the Balkans or southern Europe.
Back in Britain the War Cabinet was always much bolder when they did not have to deal with Churchill face to face. While he was in Washington he decided on a military occupation of the Azores, which belonged to Portugal, Britain’s traditional ally but neutral in this war. There was quite a prolonged battle on the point, which Eden and the Cabinet won, preferring diplomacy to military occupation.
As everyone expected, Stalin reacted angrily to the news that there would be no cross-Channel landing in 1943. Churchill suggested a meeting, ideally at Scapa Flow. Roosevelt did not reply immediately to this proposal, but when Churchill said he would write direct to Stalin if he heard nothing more, the President jumped in to forestall the initiative. He said that he had only just received Stalin’s letter, which was quite simply not the case.
Roosevelt was crystal-clear that he would not be attending a meeting in Britain. America’s remarkable sensitivity to any suggestion that they were being manipulated by their closest allies continued to make a meeting on British soil unthinkable. In any event, Roosevelt had other ideas in mind. He had wanted for some time to meet Stalin independently and to achieve an ‘intimate understanding’ with him.2
In May 1943 Roosevelt’s emissary, Joseph E. Davies, told Stalin that his boss and Churchill did not see eye to eye on everything. They differed, for example, on colonialism. He tried to arrange a meeting à deux between Stalin and Roosevelt in Alaska. Churchill discovered this at the end of June 1943.
He had to accept that increasingly his relationship with Roosevelt was not going to be an exclusive one, but he was entirely against a one-to-one Roosevelt–Stalin meeting, which he said bore no comparison to his meeting with the Russian leader in 1942 ‘on an altogether lower level’. Roosevelt simply claimed that it was not his idea at all, but Stalin’s: ‘I did not suggest to U[ncle] J[oe] that we meet alone’; it had all been ‘Uncle Joe’s’ idea. More baloney: from intelligence sources Churchill knew this was not true. But Uncle Joe put an end to the whole matter by writing again to both men in such bitter terms that the idea of a meeting disappeared.
In the course of his visit Churchill had also to deal with the fact that America had broken her agreement to exchange information regarding the atomic project.
Churchill was concerned that America planned to attack Sardinia after Sicily and before Italy, an exercise which would consume time and resources without any significant benefit. But despite all the problems and untruths, by the time TRIDENT concluded on 25 May he had got much of what he had come for. It says much for his magnanimity and the breadth of his outlook that these divergences and differences did not colour his view of his allies or narrow the width of his vision. That vision remained large, romantic, idealistic and hopeful. He felt that the future would be marked by closer and closer convergence with America. At a lunch in the British Embassy in the course of TRIDENT, he said that there could be little hope for the future without the ‘fraternal association’ of Britain and the United States:
I should like the citizens of each, without losing their present nationality, to be able to come and settle and trade with freedom and equal rights in the territories of the other. There might be common passport, or a special form of passport or visa. There might be some form of common citizenship …
He developed these ideas further in a speech at Harvard on 6 September 1943.
Now he flew to Algiers to put heart into Eisenhower and the American planners. There Churchill’s thinking was based on the information then coming from Ultra, which indicated that Germany planned to pull out of Italy and retire to the Alps. The flaw in the strategy which he advocated was that Germany was to change her position. Just a few months later, in October 1943, Hitler told Kesselring to defend Italy south of Rome. Churchill’s plan at Algiers was not to move through Italy into the Balkans, but rather to use the country as a base. Eisenhower listened to his arguments over dinner and on the following day agreed that if Sicily went well, then the next attack should indeed be on mainland Italy. Critics who claim that Churchill did not have a coherent Mediterranean Strategy should observe a policy of coherent Mediterranean opportunism. What he urged at Algiers was part of it.
The opportunity to reflect on broad issues of strategy was often interrupted by difficulties among his French allies. But while Churchill was at Algiers there was a brief rapprochement between Giraud and de Gaulle when they became co-presidents of the FCNL. Churchill told Roosevelt in a telegram of 4 June, ‘The bride and bridegroom have at last physically embraced. I am entertaining the new committee at lunch today, but I will not attempt to mar the domestic bliss by any intrusions of my own’.
39
The First Quebec Conference: QUADRANT
Intensive bombing on Sicilian airfields began on 3 July 1943 and landings were scheduled for 10 July. Churchill sat up through the night, playing bezique, but periodically breaking off to say, ‘So many brave young men going to their deaths tonight. It is a grave responsibility.’
Even before Sicily had been captured he decided that he had to return to see Roosevelt again to consolidate the Italian venture. He wanted to see Italy occupied at least as far as Rome, and then used as a base to liberate the Balkans. Events were encouraging: Mussolini fell from power on 25 July and the news was greeted in Britain with great enthusiasm. The news reached Chequers where the Prime Minister was wa
tching cartoon films. Fitzroy Maclean was present and reported that Churchill rose to relay the news ‘[a]s the squawking of Pluto and the baying of Donald Duck died away’.1 In public Churchill played the news down: the real enemy had never been Mussolini, but Hitler. All the same, he told Roosevelt that he would be happy to deal with any non-fascist government in Italy that would allow the Allies to enter the country and to fight the Germans from there.
He boarded the Queen Mary on 4 August and, with the usual large contingent of some 300 persons, sailed for the conference in Quebec, with a side-trip to Hyde Park.
At Quebec he was told by Alex that the whole of Sicily had now been captured: ‘The last German soldier was flung out of Sicily and the whole island is now in our hands.’ But the campaign had not gone altogether smoothly. There had been disputes between Monty and Patten, as Monty tried to take over routes of advance that had been assigned to the latter. As so often, this lack of diplomacy did not tend to Montgomery’s benefit. Patten did not go out of his way thereafter to assist him, and moved independently towards Palermo. Monty’s heart was not wholly in the Sicilian campaign. He considered Italy to be an irrelevance and was not upset to leave Italy at the end of 1943 and come back to England to command 21st Army Group. Eisenhower’s control of Sicily was very loose, and Alexander was too sensitive to political issues to restrain Patten, who wanted the kudos of capturing notable towns rather than strategic features. Because the British Eighth Army and Seventh US Army did not, as planned, operate together, the Germans were able to escape from the island.
The purpose of QUADRANT, the First Quebec Conference, then, was to assess the Mediterranean situation and Italy in particular. Churchill was very apprehensive that the United States was not prepared to follow up Sicily with a serious Italian campaign. At TRIDENT the decision had been that resources were to be concentrated on OVERLORD, but the speed of events after HUSKY encouraged the British to hope that this decision might now be reconsidered. Churchill was pre-empted by the American Secretary of War, Stimson, who had just returned from a European tour, and got at the President first. The burden of the Anglophobe Stimson’s report was that the British were entirely uncommitted to a massive landing:
The difference between us is a vital difference of faith … We cannot now rationally hope to come to be able to cross the Channel and come to grips with our German enemy under a British commander. His Prime Minister and his Chief of the Imperial General Staff are frankly at variance with such a proposal. The shadows of Passchendaele and Dunkerque still hang too heavily over the imagination of these leaders of his Government. Though they have rendered lip-service to the operation, their hearts are not in it, and it will require more independence, more faith, and more vigor than it is reasonable to find in any British commander to overcome the natural difficulties of such an operation carried out in such an atmosphere of his government.
The American chiefs feared that FDR might be nobbled by the Prime Minister when he visited Hyde Park before the conference proper. They need not have worried: the President accepted Stimson’s position. It was now inevitable that there would be an American commander for OVERLORD, and that there would be no significant retention of troops in Italy.
But Churchill did secure an important concession from Roosevelt at the conference: there would at least be no immediate troop movements from Italy – indeed Alexander would be allowed landing craft for an Istrian landing. That did not mean that there were not heated discussions. In the light of HUSKY’s success Britain had imposed a standstill on naval movements in the area. The Americans took serious exception to this unilateral breach of the TRIDENT decision, and it was soon countermanded.
Again, Brooke said that the British did not mean to divert divisions from OVERLORD, but then qualified that statement: there would be no diversions – except to the extent that this would pull German divisions away from the landing area. This provoked such bitterness that the CIGS, who was chairing the conference, proposed a break for an off-the-record meeting of the Chiefs alone. Here the air was cleared a bit, as he told the Americans that there had to be more of an atmosphere of trust. The Americans thought that Britain was against OVERLORD; the British thought the Americans were so rigidly wedded to it that they would ignore the possibility of capitalising on success elsewhere. Brooke sought to demonstrate that Britain was fully committed to the landings, but believed that success would obviously depend in part on the strengths of the opposing forces in the theatre. Operations in the Mediterranean would reduce German strength in the north, and thus OVERLORD and the Mediterranean were not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent. This was phase two of Brooke’s Mediterranean Strategy, and he had great difficulty in getting Marshall to accept it. At the end of the day he appeared to do so, but many of Marshall’s compatriots continued to suspect that Britain would still try to slip out of the commitment.
The misunderstandings, the allegations of bad faith, were all the more regrettable in that they flowed from no more than a difference of emphasis. Almost all on the British side had worries about OVERLORD, although some were less ready than others to share them with the Americans. When Churchill expressed his concerns in a minute to the COS on 19 October 1943,2 Brooke agreed with him. There was a general concern that victories in the Mediterranean were not being followed up. There seemed to be a real risk that they would be thrown away by a premature conflict on the Atlantic seaboard, which Germany, with her logistical advantages there, would easily win. But no one doubted that ultimately the last great offensive of the war would take place there.
The outcome of the Quebec conference after some sharp disagreements and hard bargaining was a series of compromises. Essentially the Americans saw Churchill’s advocacy of Italy as hiding a desire to avoid a cross-Channel landing in its entirety. For the Americans the main Allied effort in 1944 should consist of landings on the Atlantic coast of France, and this was to be reflected in any 1943 decisions about the Mediterranean theatre. The American Chiefs also wanted to draw pressure away from the Channel coast by landings in the south of France. This was agreed to, and would later prove a source of considerable dissension. Churchill increasingly felt that the Italian campaign was fulfilling the same object in a more logical way, and a way that offered possibilities of subsequent development.
Italy was downgraded, in order to limit its drain on supplies, by confining the advance to the line Pisa–Ancona. Operations in the Balkans were to be similarly limited to supplying partisans and the minor use of commando forces. On the other hand Churchill secured Roosevelt’s agreement to leaving Japan aside until Germany had been defeated. The primacy of the German war, so important for Britain, could still not be taken for granted.
A Supreme Commander had to be chosen for the cross-Channel invasion, and it was now that the promise to Brooke was revoked, apparently on a whim, and without consulting or warning Brooke: ‘Not for one moment did he realise …’
Churchill’s motives for agreeing so readily to the change, indeed pretty well suggesting it, were complex. He feared that the European landings might be a disaster akin to one of the great First World War offensives, and he preferred that an American commander should take the blame. If Roosevelt had declined the proposal that the commander should be American, no one could blame Britain for what happened. Secondly, he reckoned that if the OVERLORD Commander were American, then the Mediterranean commander would be British and he was very anxious that he should have an intimate control over events in the Mediterranean. When it was rumoured that Marshall, the assumed commander of OVERLORD, might be in charge of the Mediterranean as well, Churchill moved fast to scupper the scheme, which would have conflicted with the principle of equality between the Western allies as well as taking the Mediterranean out of his portfolio.
The American perception that Churchill was not wholly committed to OVERLORD increasingly informed their approach to planning and its legacy was to detach them from the closest of cooperation even on other issues for the rest of the war. A
fter the war the view remained in America that Britain – or at least the Prime Minister – would always have shelved a full-scale invasion given the chance. The view is wrong: the only real divergence was on a question of timing and scale. Of course, if an alternative that was certain of success and cheaper in lives had turned up, Churchill would have preferred it.
It is worth remembering that there were others whose views were even stronger than his. Smuts managed to persuade the King that the Mediterranean was a more promising sphere of activity, and Churchill was summoned to a dinner at the palace with the King and Smuts on 14 October to discuss the question. He had already told Smuts and now told the King that ‘There is no possibility of our going back on what is agreed. Both the US and Stalin would violently disagree with us’. Even among the Chiefs of Staff it was felt that a doctrinaire commitment to OVERLORD was neglecting opportunities that might exist elsewhere – for instance in the Balkans. At a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff on 19 October (Smuts present) there was little dissension. Brooke spoke of the dangers of fighting on the basis of ‘lawyer’s contracts’, and Churchill summed up saying that ‘It was clear that if we [and not the Americans] were in a position to decide the future strategy of the war we should agree