by Walter Reid
He rang Macmillan repeatedly ‘in a state of great anxiety and emotion’ to find out what the latest developments were. At length the general accepted the invitation with extremely bad grace: tactfully Macmillan told Churchill that he had accepted it ‘with pleasure’. Even at that, there were further explosions before the meeting, when Churchill discovered that de Gaulle had forbidden a visit from General de Lattre de Tassigny, who had been invited for later in the week. His immediate reaction, from which Duff Cooper had to prise him, was to cancel his meeting with de Gaulle.
When the meeting did eventually take place, it began over lunch, with Duff and Diana Cooper, Clementine, Diana Churchill and others present. The lunch went well and there was a splendid Churchillian stage whisper to Duff Cooper: ‘I’m doing rather well, aren’t I? Now that the General speaks English so well, he understands my French perfectly’. Even de Gaulle, who heard the aside as he was intended to do, managed to laugh.
The after-lunch exchanges did not go so well. Churchill tried to impress on de Gaulle that he had to avoid creating a division in France between opponents and supporters of the Vichy regime. De Gaulle continued to infuriate and Churchill’s wonderful response goes to the heart of his notion of working with more powerful allies: ‘Look here! I am the leader of a strong, unbeaten nation. Yet every morning when I wake my first thought is how I can please President Roosevelt and my second thought is how I can conciliate Marshal Stalin. Your situation is very different. Why then should your first waking thought be how you can snap your fingers at the British and Americans?’ By the following day, de Gaulle had absorbed enough of what Churchill had told him to invite the Prime Minister to review French troops in Marrakech.
43
Italy and OVERLORD
The Anzio landing, designed to lead to the capture of Rome, was approved by Roosevelt on 29 December, while Churchill was still at Marrakech. It was hard to scrape together sufficient landing craft, and the process involved delaying the transfer of some to Britain by a month. The landings took place on 22 January, when Churchill was back in London. He was full of exciting proposals for follow-ups to Anzio – the Dalmatian Coast or Northern Italy. But the landings went badly: ‘We hoped to land the wildcat that would tear the bowels of the Boche. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.’
Alexander was failing to bind the Allied armies together. He was not impressed by the American performance and there was jealousy between his two Army Commanders, the American Clark and the British Leese. Clark had no great love of the British and thought that Alex was biased in favour of Leese. He was anxious to reach Rome before his British counterpart and had the American weakness of thinking in terms of seizing headline objectives rather than those that were militarily significant. On Bastille Day, Leese’s resentment of Clark and his self-promotion led to his walking out of the French celebrations.1
In course SHINGLE, the Anzio landings, moved into DIADEM, the attack on Rome, via an assault on the Gustav Line, and the three battles of Monte Cassino. Shortly after the liberation of Rome, Badoglio, the unappealing ex-fascist leader whom Churchill had incautiously accepted as leader of the Provisional government, was toppled and replaced by Ivanoe Bonomi, whose father loved the works of Sir Walter Scott. Churchill was not enthusiastic, but acquiesced in the appointment. Attlee complained that all this had been done without reference to the War Cabinet. Churchill, most unconvincingly, said that it would have caused ‘great inconvenience’ to call a meeting of the War Cabinet on a Sunday afternoon.
The Germans fought with very great skill in Italy. Their tactics were flexible and their staff work impressive. They were very far from a spent force. Contrary to everything that Churchill and others had expected, under the stimulus of Speer’s reforms German production increased, despite all that strategic bombing had done.
By contrast, the British economy was increasingly weak. British exports were only 30 per cent of what they had been in 1938 and over half of her balance of payments deficit was funded by the United States. Economic issues were another strand of the tensions between the two English-speaking allies. There were oil rivalries in the Middle East. Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt on 4 March 1944: ‘Thank you very much for your assurances about no sheep’s eyes at our oilfields in Persia and Iraq. Let me reciprocate by giving you the fullest assurance that we have no thought of trying to horn in upon your interests or property in Saudi Arabia.’2 There was also friction in regard to aviation and post-war bases and routes.
By the end of January 1944, with slow progress in Italy, the American planners were seriously concerned about implementation of OVERLORD. The full quota of landing craft required for the operation had not yet been built, and many of those that were available were being used for the Italian landings as part of what they regarded as a jaunt personally dreamed up by Churchill, a campaign that never made military sense.3 Just how the repeated postponements of OVERLORD frustrated the Americans is emphasised by the words with which Marshall chose to end his paper on the strategic concept of the whole war: ‘[I]t was our purpose to avoid the creation in Italy of a vacuum into which the resources of the cross-Channel campaign would be dissipated as the Germans had bled themselves in the North African campaign’.
Some of the reasons the Americans gave for British reluctance to press on with OVERLORD were fanciful: a desire, for instance, to preserve the youth of the aristocracy from the losses they had experienced in the First World War. But there was a genuine puzzlement among the Americans on COSSAC that even the arrival of the V-weapons did not encourage the British to get on to the Continent and stop them at source. Ralph Ingersoll, an American on the staff of COSSAC from the start:
It still seems sufficient testimony to the courage and character of the British that the very live threat of national disaster by pilotless planes and rockets did not appear to sway a single British officer’s determination to let nothing hurry or distract him in his politics or planning. It is not as if the capability of the V-weapons were underestimated or taken lightly … But the British remained unhurried.4
But even on an American calculation the chances of successful invasion were poor. Ingersoll himself says that in the summer of 1943 the odds were on the Germans, and that ‘[T]he net of the experienced military advice … was certainly against hasty invasion of northwest Europe’. The emphasis is his, and it represents a significant qualification.5
Churchill was at very great pains in his history of the war to say that he had not opposed the idea of the sort of landing which OVERLORD was, and it is perfectly true that he was not against such landings in principle and did not dispute that the war could only be finished by a direct assault on Fortress Europe. That is not to say that he was enthusiastic about the prospect of such an operation. He was always anxious to see Germany’s strength and perhaps her economy eroded before risking the assault. His attritional–peripheral approach meant that he never did feel quite certain that the time was right for OVERLORD.
His views were typical of those that had become prevalent in Britain after 1918, the view that the First World War had been an anomalous British adoption of the alien approach of Clausewitz and Napoleon. It has been argued that his aversion to a major European land campaign was not based on the First World War experience.6 This view is based on the absence of references to the First World War in the correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt. Be that as it may, it is perfectly clear from innumerable other references to that war that it did weigh heavily with Churchill.
Memories of the earlier war were not, however, the only restraining factor. His reservations also stemmed from the fact that he was far from confident that heavy losses, which he was always prepared to contemplate where necessary, would result in a decision.7
The fact that the war ended with frontal attacks on Germany from the east and west does not necessarily mean that America was right and Churchill wrong. By 1944 – if the landings went well, a major hypothesis – America c
ould bring so much materiel to bear that the outcome was inevitable. But that does not necessarily mean that the strategy was subtle and inspired. A similar strategy had won the First World War, but at enormous cost and only after prolonged stalemate. Churchill and Lloyd George had been the most outspoken critics of that strategy. Thus Churchill had written of Third Ypres in The World Crisis: ‘[I]n Flanders the struggle went on. New divisions continued to replace those that were shattered. The rain descended and the mud spread. Still the will-power of the commander and the disciplines of the army remained invincible … Ceaselessly the Menin Gate of Ypres disgorged its stream of manhood …’8
For Churchill the personification of military negativism was William Robertson, CIGS for most of the First World War. Just before Marshall visited Britain in July 1942, he had been studying Robertson’s Soldiers and Statesman. Dill telegraphed Brooke to say that Marshall had marked up Chapter 3 of Volume One, in which Robertson stressed the importance of concentration on the decisive point and the mistake, as he saw it, and as American theorists were to see it, of diversion of resources to the Dardanelles. The War Office in Britain, who started to study Robertson’s book with great interest found that the same chapter carried the message that service chiefs must speak their minds and not acquiesce in political decisions.9 The man whom Churchill saw as the epitome of poor soldiering (‘He had no ideas of his own … He represented professional formalism expressed in the plainest terms.’) was the man Marshall looked to as his exemplar.
Dill and particularly Brooke were roused to fury by Churchill’s attacks on the generals and his criticism of what he saw as their defeatism. They resented it, perhaps inordinately and unnecessarily, when he accused their profession of cowardice and said that firing squads should be sent out to North Africa. This was partly because he had a fairly poor opinion of the quality of the British Army, both at its higher levels and through the ranks. The bearing of the British troops did not always impress. The retreat to Dunkirk, the Battles of Crete, and North Africa, pre-Montgomery, showed instances of poor performance alongside examples of great courage and sustained discipline. Many observers thought that the bloodletting of the Great War had deprived the army of a generation of natural leaders, and that the quality of the 1939 army as a whole bore no relation to the highly trained and professional BEF of 1914.
There was something behind Churchill’s criticisms. Wavell and Auchinleck made much of the training that their troops required before they could face action and Wavell confirmed that his men had not displayed soldierly qualities.10 The Prime Minister noted the surrender in Malaya and Singapore to much smaller Japanese forces. There were many instances of German victories in North Africa over larger units. Tobruk was taken by a force half the size of the garrison. By the end of the Desert War, the Eighth Army was fairly spent. There were many other pieces of evidence available to the Prime Minister.11 He had not been impressed by the army’s performance in Norway. Even before the fall of Singapore he wrote to Violet Bonham-Carter, saying that ‘our soldiers are not as good fighters as their fathers were. In 1915 our men fought on even when they had only one shell left and were under a fierce barrage. Now they cannot repel dive-bombers. We have so many men in Singapore, so many men that they should have done better.’
His reservations about the army’s performance were shared by others. Eden and Cadogan had similar views. Even Brooke wrote in his diary when Singapore fell, ‘If the army cannot fight better than it is doing at present we shall deserve to lose our Empire!’ Brooke was no less apprehensive than Churchill about OVERLORD. He wrote in his diary that he was ‘torn to shreds with misgivings … The cross-Channel operation is just eating into my heart …’ It might prove ‘the most ghastly disaster of the war’. America, with her belief in the invincibility of large numbers, and with a limited experience of the events of the previous war, did not understand how genuine and how reasonable such apprehensions were.
44
ANVIL and the Vienna Alternative
Bad as they may have been, the difficulties and rows in autumn 1943 about the movement of divisions from Italy for OVERLORD were not as fierce as the battles that took place in spring 1944, as the allies clashed over switching resources from Italy to ANVIL, the French Mediterranean landings. Churchill was never at all enthusiastic about ANVIL. It seemed to do what Italy did, but not as well. After the fall of Rome, it seemed to him and Alexander that there were huge Italian opportunities to be seized.
He saw the possibility of reaching the Ljubljana Gap and Vienna. Brooke was also for keeping up the pressure on the Germans in Italy – in his case, simply in order to tie up as many Germans on that front as possible. The effectiveness of this strategy can be and has been questioned. At the high point in 1944 there were 1,677,000 Allied forces, land and air, in the Mediterranean, compared with 411,000 under Kesselring in Italy.1 Who then was drawing in the other’s forces, Kesselring or Alexander? The answer is in part that the Allies in the Mediterranean theatre were not only there for Italy. It is true that looking at Italy alone by June 1944 Allied troops outnumbered Kesselring by two to one, but that does not necessarily mean that the investment was unprofitable: even if it did not actually draw Germans away from Normandy, and did not absorb one German soldier for every Allied soldier, the Italian campaign kept Kesselring’s army out of the way.2
But while persistence in the Italian campaign did tie up German troops in that theatre, it did not prevent Germany from increasing her strength in the west at the same time as maintaining or even increasing her strength in Italy. By June 1944 there were twenty-eight German divisions, with a real strength of twenty-three, in Italy, as against an Allied strength, according to Liddell Hart, of thirty divisions. Bryant’s claim for Brooke (presumably with the latter’s agreement) was that the continued offensive in Italy, first, was essentially Brooke’s achievement and secondly, drew German forces away from OVERLORD. The first claim cannot be substantiated. It is true that at Casablanca Brooke had pressed for the Mediterranean but Churchill’s keenness to get on with ROUNDUP at that time was a brief enthusiasm. The Mediterranean involvement was primarily due to Churchill. The answer to the second claim lies simply in the fact that the continued campaign merely retained German troops which could otherwise have gone to Normandy.3
Churchill and Brooke were not separated over ANVIL. At Teheran Brooke had been conscious that Stalin, wanting a free hand in the Balkans, wished to see the Allies out of Italy. Brooke wanted the Italian campaign continued – and continued without a diversion of resources to ANVIL. In the spring of 1944 he and Dill pressed hard to convince the Americans that it was important that the Italian campaign continued. Brooke wanted Germany to continue to be tied in to the Italian front. He calculated that if the campaign continued, at least eighteen German divisions would be held on that front. He could not induce Marshall to understand, let alone accept, that ANVIL would weaken Allied pressure on the Italian front. Kennedy too saw how Alexander was helping OVERLORD, and that the Mediterranean landings would bring that to an end.4
Brooke resented the wind-down of Italy; but he acquiesced earlier than Churchill did. Conversely, on 25 October 1943, he had complained in his diary that the build-up in Italy was slower that he had expected because of ‘the Americans who have put us in this position with their insistence to abandon the Mediterranean operations for the very problematical cross-channel operations. We are now beginning to see the full beauty of the Marshall strategy! It is quite heartbreaking when we see what might have been done this year if our strategy had not been distorted by the Americans.’
On 1 November 1943 Brooke had prepared for a further Combined Chiefs meeting, ‘and the stink of the last one is not yet out of my nostrils!’ His diary entry, even from him, is remarkable:
I now unfortunately know the limitations of Marshall’s brain and the impossibility of ever making him realize any strategical situation or its requirements. In strategy I doubt if he can ever see the end of his nose. When I look at the
Mediterranean I realize only too well how far I have failed in my task during the last 2 years! If only I had had sufficient force of character to swing those American Chiefs of Staff and make them see daylight, how different the war might be. We should have been in a position to force the Dardanelles by the capture of Crete and Rhodes, we should have the whole Balkans ablaze by now, and the war might have been finished in 1943!! Instead, to satisfy American shortsightedness we have been led into agreeing to the withdrawal of our forces form the Mediterranean for a nebulous 2nd Front, and have emasculated our offensive strategy!! It is heartbreaking.5
The difference between Brooke on the one hand and Churchill and Alex on the other is that the CIGS did not subscribe to the Vienna Alternative. Once it was clear that ANVIL was to go ahead he was for accepting the position. The Vienna Alternative he flatly rejected on the grounds of terrain and time of year. Brooke’s diary for 28 March gives a picture of the Prime Minister as a very old and tired man (but again and again he proved himself capable of rebounding from exhaustion into exuberant vitality). ‘We found him in desperately tired mood. I am afraid that he is losing ground rapidly. He seems quite incapable of concentrating for a few minutes on end, and keeps wandering continuously. He kept yawning and said he was feeling desperately tired.’
It may have been exhaustion that caused Churchill to overreact to a minor government defeat on the following day, 29 March. It was the Conservatives and not the Labour Party who revolted. They did so over a proposal for equal pay for men and women teachers and on this minor matter the government lost by just one vote – because Sir George Harvie-Watt was in his bath. Churchill insisted on a vote of confidence on this trivial issue. Harold Nicolson queried whether he was not going over the top. ‘No. Not at all. I am not going to tumble round my cage like a wounded canary. You knocked me off my perch. You have now got to put me back on my perch. Otherwise I won’t sing.’ He won the vote with a majority of over 400. The PM had no embarrassing sense that he had taken a sledgehammer to a nut. He wrote to Randolph, ‘I was sure you would be interested in the House of Commons racket. I am the child of the H. of C., and when I was molested by a bunch of cheeky boys I ran for succour to the old Mother of Parliaments and she certainly chased them out of the backyard with her mop.’6