by Walter Reid
(i) To reinforce the Italian theatre to the full.
(ii) To enter the Balkans.
(iii) To hold our position in the Aegean Islands.
(iv) To build up our airforces and intensify our air attacks on Germany.
(v) To encourage a steady assembly in this country of United States troops, which could not be employed in the Pacific owing to the shortage of shipping, with a view to taking advantage of the softening in the enemy’s resistance due to our operations in other theatres, though this might not occur until after the spring of 1944.3
Behind all of this was the feeling that OVERLORD was too inflexible, that its planning required an unnecessarily early withdrawal of troops and landing craft from the Mediterranean, and that although it might be possible to establish a bridgehead in Northern France, the German lines of communication were so good that there could be a repulse on a far, far greater scale than that of Dieppe. These concerns were reflected in a long telegram Churchill sent to Roosevelt on 23 October.4
Churchill’s reservations about OVERLORD have to be seen against the fact that at the time of the Quebec Conference the resources allocated to the invasion were scanty. Morgan’s planners had been allowed very limited numbers of men and quantities of shipping. Any possibility of attacking a substantial port had been discounted, and all that was envisaged was an invasion of Normandy by three divisions on a front of thirty miles. A landing on this scale was fraught with risk. Early in 1944, much more substantial operations were planned by Ike and Monty. At Quebec, Churchill prevailed on Marshall to accept an increase to four and a half divisions, but it was hardly surprising that he was apprehensive about an assault on the Atlantic Wall with such meagre resources.
When the Quebec Conference ended on 24 August, Churchill was dismayed to hear that Eden, Brooke, Portal and Mountbatten were all to fly home on the same flying boat. He told Eden, ‘I don’t know what I should do if I lost you all. I’d have to cut my throat. It isn’t just love, though there is much of that in it, but you are my war machine. Brookie, Portal, you and Dickie, I simply couldn’t replace you.’
After the end of the conference, Churchill spent some more time in America, partly on holiday at a fishing camp in the Laurentian Mountains, partly at Washington, and partly in Boston, where he received an honorary degree from Harvard. He remained closely in touch with the conduct of the war. Italy’s new Prime Minister, Pietro Badoglio, signed an armistice with the Allies on 23 September 1943, but before then Mussolini had been rescued from prison and established a new fascist government at Lake Garda on 15 September.
Eventually Italy was invaded. Landings of British and Canadian forces at Messina took place on 2 September and a week later Allied troops landed at Salerno; on the other hand, on the previous night the Germans occupied Rome.
40
Exasperation in the Aegean
Churchill was increasingly applying his mind to post-war issues. What was to be done with Germany? Was it to be divided, and if so how? On 5 September he wrote to Smuts, saying, ‘I think it inevitable that Russia will be the greatest land power in the world after this war will have rid her of the two military powers, Germany and Japan, who in our lifetime have inflicted upon her such heavy defeats.’ He hoped that there would be ‘a friendly balance with Russia at least for the period of rebuilding’. Beyond that he was not so sure.1
At the same time, he was involved in more immediate strategic planning. He agreed with Roosevelt on 9 September that if Allied troops enjoyed speedy success in Italy, substantial aid could go to the partisans and the Balkans. He remained convinced of the utility of operations in that area. Roosevelt responded with the generalisation that ‘we should be prepared to take advantage of any opportunity that presented itself’. Whether that meant much is debatable.
The landings at Salerno by Clark’s Fifth Army went badly, and the invading troops were almost repulsed. Churchill was horribly reminded of Gallipoli. He telegraphed to Alexander with his memories of defeat at Suvla Bay where Sir Ian Hamilton had remained remote from the action. ‘I feel it my duty to set before you this experience of mine from the past’. Alexander had already risen to the occasion and was on the beachhead. He quietly told Clark that his Corps commander, Ernest J. Dawley, appalled him: ‘I do not want to interfere with your business, but I have some ten years’ experience in this game of sizing up commanders. I can tell you definitely that you have a broken reed on your hands, and I suggest you replace him immediately.’
The Prime Minister left Halifax for the Clyde on 14 September, on board the battleship Renown. Among those on board was Dudley Pound. He was suffering from brain cancer and his health was poor and deteriorating. He handed Churchill his letter of resignation as they travelled by train to London. At Euston Station he was met by an ambulance, which took him to the Royal Masonic Hospital. Churchill visited him there on 8 October, on his way to Chequers, and at the King’s request placed the insignia of the Order of Merit in his hands. Pound could not speak, but recognised the Prime Minister and grasped his hand. He died on 21 October, Trafalgar Day.
The First Sea Lord, A.V. Alexander, nominated the obvious successor, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham. Churchill tried hard to resist Cunningham’s appointment. ‘Winston never forgave ABC for Alexandria’, said Admiral Royer Dick, who served with ABC throughout the war.2
Cunningham was independently minded, and had shown this when Churchill interfered at the time of Crete, but after Sir Bruce Fraser, the Admiral commanding the Home Fleet, had turned down the appointment (‘I believe I have the confidence of my own fleet. Cunningham has the confidence of the whole navy’). Cunningham got the job, tolerated but not liked. He was, like Wavell and Auchinleck, spectacularly tongue-tied: a handicap in dealing with an articulate virtuoso.
At sea, Cunningham had performed well; now, on land he proved disappointing. He and Churchill never got on. He prided himself on his independent mind. He criticised Churchill for allegedly not truly understanding the use of sea-power and he cannot have relished the fact that Churchill certainly did give pre-eminence in his strategic thinking in the Second World War to the army and considered moreover that the navy was a particularly closed and conservative profession.
Soon after reaching London, Churchill had to face claims in the Commons that the delay in the landings on mainland Italy had been due to negotiations about Badoglio’s appointment. He explained the need for time to prepare landing craft. ‘When I hear people talking in an airy way of throwing modern armies ashore here and there as if they were bales of goods to be dumped on a beach and forgotten, I really marvel at the lack of knowledge that still prevails of conditions of modern war’. His response was delicious. What he was saying was exactly what the Chiefs so often said about him.
Difficulties with the Chiefs continued. One of the high points in the turbulent relationship arose early in the following month, when he proposed on 7 October that the island of Rhodes should be seized. The Joint Planning Committee had submitted a plan on 6 October for an attack on the island, which involved moving forces out of the adjacent island of Kos. Churchill was excited by the adventure and called for his plane to be prepared so that he could fly to Tunis and obtain troops from Eisenhower.
No one shared his enthusiasm. Brooke despaired: ‘I can control him no more. He has worked himself into a frenzy of excitement about the Rhodes attack, has magnified its importance so that he can no longer see anything else and has set himself on capturing this one island even at the expense of endangering his relations with the President and the Americans and the future of the Italian campaign. He refused to listen to any arguments or to see any dangers.’ Roosevelt vetoed the proposal and forbade any switching of resources from Italy or OVERLORD. Churchill responded by saying that the Rhodes landing craft would be back in Britain nearly six months before they would be needed for OVERLORD. Roosevelt was unmoveable. Churchill’s secretary, Marian Holmes, recorded his sense of frustration: ‘The PM said he had had a bad day
, a very bad day. In a rather confiding way he said, “The difficulty is not in winning the war; it is in persuading people to let you win it – persuading fools”. He seemed distressed and said he felt “almost like chucking it in”. He had been trying to persuade the Americans to invade Rhodes’.3
The aphorism about winning the war naturally goes with what he said to Brooke on 1 April 1945 about allies: ‘There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them!’ But on both occasions he was not just throwing around bon mots. He was genuinely frustrated and even hurt that opportunities, as he saw it, were being lost. If they had been rejected after due discussion he would have accepted the position easily enough. What was so galling was that repeatedly for the rest of the war America would not even give proper consideration to arguments that he put to her.
How important the Dodecanese were, either in themselves or as a diversion of men and materials from other projects, must be very questionable. When Churchill heard that Jumbo Wilson was in favour of occupying them he was excited by the opportunity. It was just the sort of combined naval and army operation that appealed to his sense of history. He ignored Wilson’s warning that nothing could be done immediately because of lack of resources. He sent a personal signal: ‘Good. This is the time to play high. Improvise and dare.’ The Chiefs of Staff were told, ‘Here is a business of great consequence to be thrust through by any means … Immense prizes at little cost, though not at little risk’. The Germans certainly thought the islands were important enough to merit counter-action.
The appeal of the venture to Churchill seems to have had much to do with eighteenth-century history and derring-do. He sent a signal to Wilson on 13 September: ‘The capture of Rhodes by you at this time with Italian aid would be a fine contribution to the general war. Let me know what are your plans for this. Can you not improvise the necessary garrison out of the forces in the Middle East? What is your total ration strength? This is the time to think of Clive and Peterborough and of Rooke’s men taking Gibraltar’.
That historical allusion pretty well sums up the Dodecanese caper, Churchill’s last romantic frolic. It offered little prospect of altering the outcome of the war, and was not without its moments of farce. Major the Earl of Jellicoe arrived at the headquarters of Admiral Campioni, the Italian commander of Rhodes, bringing a personal letter from Jumbo Wilson. Fearing capture when he landed on the island, he had swallowed it, leaving him suffering from acute thirst and nausea. When he asked Campioni to throw in his lot with the British he had difficulty in making himself understood as a result of the obstruction in his throat. A high price was paid for these adventures in terms of British losses, and those Italians who supported the attempted seizure and were captured were summarily shot.
The Dodecanese scheme was pretty much Churchill’s own, and is one of his failures. The pity about it, after the needless loss of life, is that it was not a good issue on which to test the American connection. Pushing hard for a fairly obviously flawed operation lost him credibility and goodwill in the States, and meant that less attention was paid thereafter to better proposals.
The Dodecanese issue rankled with Churchill. After the war he criticised Ike as having been ‘obdurate’ and ‘unreasonable’ in the matter and he said of Roosevelt that ‘This was the only ungenerous act which I experienced in our long military partnership’. He was unfair to Ike, who had done what he could for Churchill at the time. Opposition to the plan stemmed as much from his own Chiefs of Staff as from FDR’s advisers.4 Brooke allowed himself to be exceptionally critical of Churchill in relation to the Dodecanese, but he too could be excited by Mediterranean opportunism and opportunities in the Balkans.5
On 24 October Alexander was at Eisenhower’s headquarters, and expressed doubts about OVERLORD. He recorded his worries about the expected strength of German resistance. Eisenhower summarised the meeting in a lengthy document. It consisted of four parts, the first three expressive of the doubts and dangers, but the fourth part consisting of an optimistic conclusion. Churchill forwarded only the three unfavourable bits to Eden, who was in Moscow, for use in negotiations with Stalin. The Americans discovered what he had done and were furious. Stimson said it revealed ‘how determined Churchill is with all his lip service to stick a knife in the back of OVERLORD’. Hopkins and Roosevelt were equally angry, the latter describing what Churchill had done as ‘improper’.6
In contrast with OVERLORD, Italy continued to seem to Churchill to be full of potential. According to Cadogan, he was prepared to resign if the Italian campaign were deprived of adequate resources. He may have threatened to do so, but he would never have carried out his threat. He was conscious that he could get away with as much as he did over Italy only because there was a preponderance of British forces on the battlefield. Things might be different later. He told the War Office in November 1943 that he wished to say to the Americans that ‘We will match you man for man and gun for gun on the battlefront’ in OVERLORD. In the event, American forces on all fronts did not equal those of Britain until a month after D-Day.
Eden’s mission to Moscow was to try to persuade Stalin that it might be well to capitalise on the Italian opportunities by delaying the cross-Channel landing. It was bitterly galling for Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff, who were at one with him on this matter, to see troops being removed from Italy, where there was a job to be done, in contemplation of cross-Channel landings whose outcome would be doubtful. It was to this sort of situation that Churchill referred when he talked about battles being ‘governed by lawyers’ agreements made in all good faith months before, and persisted in without regard to the ever-changing fortunes of war’.
Two British divisions in Sicily, which could have been used in Italy, were moved back to Britain in October for use in OVERLORD, still more than six months away. Another two divisions were about to go, together with four American divisions. Allied landing craft which could have been used as part of an assault on Rome were also about to be transferred until Eisenhower declared that without these landing craft his advance on Rome would be delayed until January or February 1944: the American Joint Chiefs gave the landing craft a stay of execution of just one month. The effect of the withdrawals was to reduce Allied strength in Italy from twenty-three divisions to eleven, and the ratio of Allied to German troops from 24:10 to 14:10.
As the cross-Channel landings approached, so the tensions between the allies increased. When and where and indeed whether the landings should take place mattered greatly to Churchill and Roosevelt; but the issue was of far greater importance to the third ally, Stalin, whose people continued to pour out their blood on an unimaginable scale, and for whom a second front was not an academic issue to be debated among strategists. Fairly amazingly, there had not yet been any meeting at which the Big Three were all present. Churchill had shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic and to Moscow, but Roosevelt and Stalin had never met.
It was now impossible to postpone a meeting further. The three great allies agreed to meet at Teheran at the end of November 1943.
41
Teheran
The relationship between Prime Minister and President was now more complicated than in the hands-across-the-sea days of ARCADIA. While the joshing and joviality still appeared on the surface, currents of suspicion and exasperation flowed below. The advisers and experts who swam in these deeper waters were particularly aware of these disturbances. On both sides there was a mood of distrust and suspicion.
Before Churchill and Roosevelt could meet Stalin at Teheran to consider the global conspectus, they had to sort out their internal difficulties over Italy. They agreed to have preliminary talks at Cairo – though a shorter meeting than the Prime Minister wanted.
On 11 November, suffering from a heavy cold and sore throat, and feeling ill because of his inoculations for cholera and typhoid, Churchill once again boarded the Renown. While they were at sea it was calculated that by then Churchill had travelled 111,000 miles since the
outbreak of war. In the course of talks with service chiefs while docked at Algiers, it was said that the Chiefs of Staff system was a good one. Churchill responded, ‘Not at all. It leads to weak and faltering decisions – or rather indecisions. Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together – what do you get? The sum total of their fears!’1
His next stop was Malta, where he was so ill that he spent two days in bed. He commiserated with Jumbo Wilson about the loss of Leros in the Dodecanese, where 5,000 British soldiers had been taken prisoner: ‘Like you, I feel this is a serious loss and reverse, and, like you, I have been fighting with my hands tied behind my back’.
The two Western leaders met at Cairo on 25 November 1943. A proposal for an American European Chief was renewed and again repulsed. Churchill therefore assumed that Marshall would command OVERLORD and that Eisenhower would replace him in Washington as Chief of Staff. It was a complete surprise to learn, in the course of a sightseeing drive with Roosevelt in Cairo, that the President needed Marshall beside him in Washington, and that Eisenhower would command OVERLORD.
Roosevelt handled the change of Supreme Commander badly. A secret memorandum from Hopkins for the President dated 4 October 1943 treated the appointment of Marshall as a given, but went on to argue that he should have command of all the Allied forces at OVERLORD, American and British, on land, sea and air. Only the Russians would not be under his command. Marshall would have had enormous powers and responsibilities, of which OVERLORD itself would only be one component.
Hopkins had been prepared to concede direct command of OVERLORD itself to Montgomery ‘in order to satisfy the British’ but only ‘in order to get our main objective of Marshall’s command over the whole business.’2 Inevitably, Churchill vetoed this proposal: he wanted the Mediterranean for Britain. After Churchill pretty well volunteered at Quebec that the Supreme Commander would be an American, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that the American would be Marshall. The choice seemed an inevitable one. In America Marshall’s standing was unchallenged, even by Macarthur, and he was highly regarded in Britain, both at Cabinet level and by popular opinion. At this stage in the war he was infinitely better known to the British public than Eisenhower. From the point of view of the United States, they could rely on Marshall not to be pushed around by the British: Roosevelt was firmly of the view that Churchill did not greatly like Marshall because the latter could always get the better of him.