by Walter Reid
It was perhaps as well to demonstrate to the Americans and the world that Parliament, as much as the country, was solidly behind him. In any event, he was concerned about the government’s lack of authority in the House – to the extent, indeed, that he contemplated taking on the Foreign Secretaryship (which he was already doing in an acting capacity while the Foreign Secretary was ill), in addition to Defence and his duties as Prime Minister, so that Eden could concentrate on managing the difficult House.7
On 12 April he pointed out to Marshall that even if there had still been no breakout from the Anzio beachhead, or link-up with the rest of the army in Italy, eight German divisions had been pulled down to the Italian front. As a result he was able to obtain an agreement that no further troops would be withdrawn for the moment. Even as late as August 1944, after D-Day, Churchill was trying to have ANVIL forces diverted to Brittany. Marshall and the Joint Chiefs would have none of it. Churchill described Arnold, King and Marshall as ‘one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen’. But ‘they are good fellows and there is no need to tell them this.’ Just as well. The extent of the difference in views about Italy as opposed to OVERLORD was so great at this time that he drafted a cable to FDR threatening resignation on account of ‘absolutely perverse strategy’. He did not send it.8
In reality, he had a high opinion of Marshall and had been far from happy that the Supreme Command at OVERLORD had been given to Eisenhower, whom he liked, but did not particularly respect.
The loss of Churchill’s battle over ANVIL meant that nearly 40 per cent of the American Fifth Army in Italy was removed from the theatre, together with elements of air support and materiel. How successful the Allies would have been in Italy, even at full strength, remains debatable, but the more of them there were, the more Germans there would have had to be there too.
The Americans thought that Churchill was against the Normandy Second Front because of his ‘incurable’ preference for ‘eccentric operations’. In Robert Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, the American position is put at its lowest: ‘It was certainly no fault of Churchill’s that two American Expeditionary Forces went into France, north and south, in the summer of 1944’. Sherwood’s book displeased Churchill and he was very touchy indeed about any suggestion that he had not enthusiastically supported the idea of a Second Front. The reasons for his views were more complicated than the Americans allowed. Like the Chiefs of Staff, Churchill still feared the capacity of the Wehrmacht. On 9 April 1944 he told Cadogan, ‘This battle has been forced on us by the Russians and the United States military authorities.’ He told Roosevelt in November 1943, ‘Unless there is a German collapse, the campaign of 1944 will be the most dangerous we have undertaken and personally I am more anxious about its success than I was about 1941, 1942 and 1943.’9
There were reasonable grounds for his apprehensions. After all, if Dieppe had been a disaster and the Anzio landings a failure, what could realistically be expected of a landing in France? After the war, Marshall referred to Churchill’s weakness for the ‘soft underbelly’: ‘The soft underbelly had chrome-steel base-boards.’ But it might be thought that the base-boards of the Atlantic Wall would be stronger still. And if Kesselring could hold up the Allies in Italy repeatedly, when Alexander had a superiority over the Germans of two or three to one, what could be expected in France, where the Allies did not even have a toehold?
The extent to which OVERLORD, the largest and most ambitious amphibious landing in history, involved unquantifiable elements is reflected in a little episode recalled by Goronwy Rees. Rees was one of Montgomery’s staff officers. (Incidentally, he thought very highly of Monty, and found that – on military matters – he thought hard about what he was doing, something he found to be rare among generals.) Montgomery asked him for an estimate of casualties during the initial phases of the landings. After much work Rees tabulated his calculations and presented his figures to the Commander in Chief. ‘Thank you, very good, very good. But you see, it won’t do. If our casualties are as big as this, we can’t do the operation at all. We haven’t got the reserves to replace the casualties. Divide Major Rees’s calculations by half.’10
On the eve of the invasion Brooke wrote, ‘It is very hard to believe that in a few hours the cross-Channel invasion starts! At the best it will fall so very, very short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing of its difficulties. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.’11
That Italy vs ANVIL absorbed so much of Churchill’s time in the spring and summer of 1944 does not mean that he had no time for battle with the Chiefs. There were some long meetings and difficult passages. At the beginning of August 1944, for example, there were two days of seven-hour meetings that contained exchanges such as:
PM (to CIGS) It is no good losing your temper.
CIGS I am not losing my temper. But I am in despair that the PM will not give the decision he has been pressed for for over six months. PM It has now been proved wise not to have given a decision before, and the delay has done no harm.12
There were stresses, too, between Britain and America over South East Asia at this time. Churchill complained to Clementine in August 1944 that there were still too many British forces ‘mis-employed for American convenience’ in Burma, at the expense of the recapture of Singapore.13
A minor clash arose from Churchill’s enthusiasm for opportunism, reflected in a proposal of 2 February 1944 that Bordeaux be seized by a ‘coup de main’ on D plus 20 or D plus 30. The Chiefs of Staff vetoed this suggestion out of hand. But that was a minor skirmish compared to a major battle in the spring of 1944. The conflict between Churchill and the Chiefs in regard to British strategy in South East Asia in 1944 has been described as ‘perhaps their most serious disagreement of the war’.14
He wanted Britain to follow the European war with a Far Eastern campaign conceived from an Indian perspective and designed to recover Britain’s lost eastern possessions, focused separately from the American campaign against Japan. On 20 March 1944 he told the Chiefs that it was his ‘duty, as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence’ to rule that the Bay of Bengal was to remain the ‘centre of gravity for the British and Imperial war effort against Japan’. He wanted Britain to advance through the Bay of Bengal towards Malaya; the Chiefs wanted to join with the Americans in moving from Australia.
Unanimously the Chiefs insisted on joining the American advance in Japan through the Pacific. This issue brought the Chiefs closer to resignation than any other in the war.15 The issue was only truly resolved when it became academic in the light of the detonation of the atomic bomb. From the political and practical point of view, the Chiefs were no doubt correct, but from the point of view of a strategic defence of Britain’s national interests, Churchill’s position is understandable.
45
D-Day: De Gaulle Remains Below the Level of Events
As the prospect of returning to the European mainland came closer, there was increasing pressure on the British government, both in Parliament and in the country at large, to say how liberated France would be administered and with what authority in France Britain would deal. On 3 May 1944, for example, Anthony Eden faced difficult questioning on these points in the Commons.
Churchill’s difficulty was that while he had his own reservations about de Gaulle and the Free French, Roosevelt’s views were very much stronger. De Gaulle was out of Britain at this stage and Churchill wanted to bring him back so that he could be closer to events. Roosevelt also wanted him back in England, but not for a fleeting visit, rather to be corralled there until after D-Day. Churchill chose to delay the invitation until at or about the time of D-Day itself. When he spoke in the Commons on 24 May he tried to explain that the allies had not recognised the French Committee of Natural Liberation as the government or even the provisional government of France because they could not be certain that it was truly representative of the French nation – a very fair point. He was able to say
that de Gaulle had now been invited to pay a visit ‘in the near future’ and that he had just heard from Duff Cooper that the general would accept.
His speech was a particularly statesmanlike one but he did not carry the House with him. His old friend, Harold Nicolson ‘the Member for Paris’, made a particularly strong interjection: ‘I cannot fully explain either to myself or to others the true nature of the policy adopted by His Majesty’s government towards France …’ That was not surprising. There were many others who spoke in the same sense and they were supported in the press over the course of the next few days. Churchill was losing important public support and in the face of all this criticism he made several appeals to Roosevelt to allow de Gaulle’s people recognition. He met with little success. On 27 May Roosevelt un-helpfully wrote saying that he was hopeful that Churchill could persuade de Gaulle to assist in the liberation of France ‘without being imposed by us on the French people as their government. Self-determination really means absence of coercion’. Another rebuff followed shortly: ‘I think I can only repeat the simple fact that I cannot send anyone to represent me at the de Gaulle conversation with you’.
After Giraud had been forced out of the French Committee of National Liberation at the end of 1943, Churchill had faced growing pressure to recognise the FCNL as provisional rulers of France. America would certainly not go that far. They declined to recognise the Conseil as the official representative of France. The Alice in Wonderland solution arrived at during the QUADRANT conference in Quebec in 1943 was for America and Britain to issue separate statements, each setting out quite different positions in regard to the Conseil.
After much toing and froing and semantic brouhaha the United States did no more than ‘accept’ the FCNL. Britain chose to recognise the Committee in a rather circular formula as ‘administering those French territories which acknowledged its authority’. Churchill could still refer to de Gaulle, whom he had ‘raised as a pup’ as ‘a budding Führer’. ‘There is nothing this man will not do if he has armed forces at his disposal.’ As Foreign Secretary, Eden was much more in favour of de Gaulle, arguing that to contain a post-war Germany, there had to be a strong France and strong French morale. He argued so strongly for de Gaulle that Churchill warned him that they might be coming to a break.1
De Gaulle did nothing to make life easier for Churchill. On 26 May the FCNL unilaterally announced that it was now the Provisional government of the French Republic. The combination of de Gaulle’s pretensions and Roosevelt’s prejudices meant that the whole issue gave Churchill enormous concerns, and they were compounded by the fact that Roosevelt’s Supreme Commander, Eisenhower, wanted a French Provisional government ready to put in place following OVERLORD, something with which his President would not agree.
All or most of these worries were caused by Roosevelt, but when a de Gaulle visit to Washington was set up for the beginning of July 1944, the President made the swiftest of turnarounds. He continued to regard de Gaulle as ‘a narrow-minded French zealot with too much ambition for his own good and some rather dubious views on democracy’. He still believed that de Gaulle would ‘crumble and that the British supporters of de Gaulle will be confounded by the progress of events … [O]ther parties will spring up as the liberation goes on and … de Gaulle will become a very little figure’. More succinctly, ‘He is a nut’.2
But de Gaulle had successful meetings with Marshall, King, Henry Morgenthau, Cordell Hull (with whom he actually got on well) and the Mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia. He received a triumphant reception in New York and in Canada there were also great demonstrations of support. When he returned to Algiers on 13 July he learned that the American government now recognised his Committee as the de facto sole administration of France. Life would have been infinitely simpler for Churchill if Roosevelt had not taken so long to come to an inescapable conclusion; but he was, at base, always a politician rather than a statesman.
That American visit lay ahead; now, as D-Day approached, Churchill did his best to make de Gaulle’s visit memorable. When he landed at London airport a band played the Marseillaise. He was handed a personal letter from Churchill, ‘My Dear General de Gaulle, welcome to these shores!’ He was taken to Churchill’s headquarters in a special station near Portsmouth where, according to Eden, there was only one bath and one telephone (‘Mr. Churchill seemed to be always in the bath and General Ismay always on the telephone’). He walked down the railway line with Eden. Churchill, with his sense of history, was on the track to greet the general with outstretched arms, but de Gaulle did not respond to his embraces.
A sour petulance was as usual the general’s response to great events. He was greatly taken up with minor questions such as the American issued foreign currency that was to be used in France: ‘Allez, faites la guerre, avec votre fausse monnaie!’ De Gaulle complained about lack of official recognition. Churchill had to tell him that if he were not careful, the United States would disown the FCNL, in which case Britain would be with the Americans. Churchill had to say that in a dispute between the French National Committee and the United States, Churchill would always side with the United States. De Gaulle said he was well aware of that fact. Poor Churchill was not helped by Bevin who joined in with a booming intervention. He told de Gaulle that when Churchill said that Britain would always side with America, he spoke for himself only, and not the government. Churchill was indeed distinctly on his own in siding with the President against France, and de Gaulle knew it. Bevin, Attlee and Eden were for a more independent approach, and so was the bulk of parliamentary opinion. Churchill’s awareness of his vulnerability led him to bluster. He telephoned Eden on 6 June: ‘Again soon after midnight W. rang up in a rage because Bevin and Attlee had taken my view. Argument continued for forty-five minutes, perhaps longer. I was accused of trying to break up the government, of stirring up the press on the issue. He said that nothing would induce him to give way, that de Gaulle must go. There would be a Cabinet tomorrow. House of Commons would back him against de Gaulle and me and any of the Cabinet who sided with me, etc. FDR and he would fight the world.’
De Gaulle was particularly annoyed by Churchill’s suggestion that he should go to see Roosevelt. He did not like the idea of submitting himself as a candidate for approval. ‘The French government exists. I have nothing to ask, in this sphere, of the United States of America or of Great Britain.’3
Duff Cooper gives a wonderful picture of that evening at Churchill’s headquarters and of de Gaulle’s failure to rise to the level of events:
Anthony [Eden] tells me about his bitter battles on behalf of de Gaulle. The Prime Minister had invited de Gaulle to come over here for the big battle with France. On 4 June Winston and he [Eden] had gone down in a special train to near Portsmouth where they waited. De Gaulle and his party came there by car and Anthony went to meet them. They then lunched on the train and Winston produced champagne and drank to the health of France. Roosevelt had said that de Gaulle was not to be told of the operations but Winston ignored that, told him everything, took him across to see Eisenhower and forced the latter to show him the maps. Not one word of thanks from de Gaulle. Winston, feeling rather hurt, said to him, ‘I thought it only fitting that you should be present with us today’. ‘I see,’ said de Gaulle glumly, ‘I was invited as a symbol’ … Anthony was almost beside himself, feeling that Winston was deeply moved emotionally by the thought of the occasion, and that de Gaulle’s ungraciousness would make him dislike the man all the more. Finally Winston asked de Gaulle to dine with him. ‘Thank you – I should prefer alone with my staff.’ ‘I feel chilled,’ Winston said to Anthony.4
He walked away, back along the railway track, a stiff, solitary figure. Even with a return to French soil so imminent – perhaps because of its very imminence – de Gaulle was more difficult than ever, no more ready than in the past to see the importance of Allied unity. Instead he focused on the most trivial of details. Ike told him that as Supreme Allied Commander he would shortly be br
oadcasting to the French population. De Gaulle: ‘You, broadcast a proclamation to the French people? By what right? And what will you tell them?’ When de Gaulle was asked to make his own speech to the French people he declined to do so in the order envisaged, after the Heads of State and Eisenhower. ‘If I were to broadcast, it could only be at a different hour and outside the series’.5
On the following evening, ahead of the landings, de Gaulle was again asked to broadcast to France. The conditions he set were wrongly understood by Churchill as amounting to a refusal, and great diplomacy was needed by the Free French ambassador, Pierre Viénot, to reconcile the two men. At the very time that OVERLORD was being launched, Churchill was preoccupied by the stand-off. ‘I so beat up this poor man [Viénot] – de Gaulle of course would not come himself – that he practically collapsed. All his sympathies were with me. He was ashamed of de Gaulle.’ Eventually de Gaulle made his speech. Churchill then ordered that he be sent back to Algiers, ‘in chains if necessary. He must not be allowed to enter France.’ Eden prevailed on him to withdraw this demand.6