by Walter Reid
The triviality of de Gaulle’s reaction to events is amazing. Cadogan’s response was ‘It’s a girls’ school. Roosevelt, PM, and – it must be admitted – de Gaulle all behave like girls approaching the age of puberty. Nothing to be done’. De Gaulle kept it up. Two hundred French liaison officers were not allowed to accompany the embarkation because there had been no agreement about their duties.
When he came to make his broadcast he referred to his organisation as quite simply ‘le gouvernement Français’; Eden had seen the text in advance but let it through with a grin. ‘I’ll have trouble with the Prime Minister about this, but we’ll let it go.’ In fact, Eden was engaged in a very difficult pair of parallel dialogues with Churchill and de Gaulle. He was trying to explain to Churchill that Britain had either to break with de Gaulle, and thus France, or agree with him. ‘There is no middle course. We must point this out to the President and tell him that de Gaulle must be supported’. Simultaneously, he and Duff Cooper worked on de Gaulle to try to induce him not to distance his Committee from the Allies. De Gaulle’s fixation with national independence is reflected in a remark which he made to Eden over dinner on 7 June: ‘The General … continued to complain about our dependence on American policy. I retorted that it was a fatal mistake in national policy to have too much pride’. De Gaulle did not accept that advice, then or ever.
The wisdom of keeping de Gaulle on a short lead was underlined by what happened when he was allowed a day trip to France on 14 June: when he got to Bayeux, without any warning and without any agreement he undercut American attempts to establish a civil administration by appointing his own man, François Coulet, as Commissioner of the Republic for the Liberated Territory of Normandy.
When he was allowed on French soil for longer he became even more outrageous. He insisted that General Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division, which had been trained in Britain and was partly composed of French elements of the British Eighth Army, should be allowed to be the first unit to reach Paris. He himself followed Leclerc into the capital where he made the famous speech at the Hôtel de Ville: ‘Paris [has been] liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the armies of France, with the help and support of the whole of France, of France that is fighting, of France alone’.7 He was of course working to restore self-respect and to rewrite the history of the years since 1940, but there was something a little mean-minded in the way he did it, just as when he ordered British SOE officers whenever he met them to leave the country they had been fighting to defend: ‘You have no place here’.8
His fiction prevailed. Until recently French histories of the war made little reference to the role of the Americans in the liberation and less, or none, of that of the British.
46
The Return to Europe
Accounts of Churchill’s exhaustion have to be read with caution. The diaries of his intimates are full of entries recording what a shadow he was of his former self, how lacking in vitality he was, how aged. A few pages on they record how wonderfully renewed and vigorous he is. He had enormous powers of rehabilitation. Just six months after D-Day he was rushing off to Greece from a family Christmas, eating by the light of hurricane lamps with shells exploding all round him – and enjoying the adventure hugely.
But at this time, in the early summer of 1944, after nearly five years of war, he was showing unmistakable symptoms of exhaustion. One of the symptoms, strangely, was to talk more and not less at Cabinet meetings. He became discursive, monopolised the meeting and prevented discussion of much of the agenda.
Part of the reason was simply that what had been his overwhelming preoccupation – fighting for victory – had now essentially been achieved. As he said, it was now a straight run in – ‘even the Cabinet could do it on their own’. After the Quebec Conference he said to Charles Wilson, ‘I have a very strong feeling that my work is done. I have no message. I had a message’. Now Lyttelton told Eden that ‘the Cabinet was on the verge of mutiny about late hours and length of sittings’. Eden remonstrated unavailingly. At a Defence Committee meeting on 6 July 1944, Brooke exploded insubordinately: ‘If you would keep your confidence in your generals for even a few days, I think we should do better … I have listened to you for two days on end undermining the Cabinet’s confidence in Alex until I felt I could stand no more. You ask me questions, I gave you answers. You didn’t accept them and telegraphed Alex who gave the same answers.’ It was not the Prime Minister’s best evening. Eden described it as deplorable, and A.B. Cunningham, always ready to be critical of Churchill, described him as ‘very tired and too much alcohol.’1
Generals could be difficult, even hurtful. Monty refused to let the Prime Minister address his troops ahead of D-Day. The accounts of the incident originate from Montgomery himself and may not be accurate as far as their details are concerned. In one account, ‘Monty runs through the battles he’s won in the past two years, Alamein, Tripoli, Mareth, Wadi Akarit, the assault upon Sicily, the invasion of the Italian main-land … Did the Prime Minister wish to … come between a general and his men, his own staff in fact? “I could never allow it – never”, Monty pronounced. “If you think that is wrong, that can only mean you have lost confidence in me” ’.2 In another account, Churchill gave in to Monty, in tears. Even if neither account is wholly accurate, the Prime Minister was not allowed to address the troops. It was, as he well knew, a historic occasion, a Henry V opportunity. He would have loved it, and would have done something wonderful, inspiring the men and adding to his country’s literary heritage. It is doubtful that he could have done any damage beyond upstaging Monty.
The scale of Anglo-American bombing ahead of D-Day worried Churchill. The high numbers of French and Belgian civilian casualties seemed unacceptable. Eisenhower did not agree and the matter went to Roosevelt. Churchill asked that if the estimate of collateral casualties were above a certain level, raids should not take place. Roosevelt declined to intervene. Churchill told Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Tedder, the British Air Commander in Chief and Eisenhower’s Deputy, ‘You’re piling up an awful load of hatred’.3
The finality of Roosevelt’s word on such matters is surprising, given that as late as D-Day British troops were still more numerous than Americans. By the end of the war, American deployment was 80 per cent, but at D-Day 57 per cent of the troops were British. All the same, America did not spare Churchill the knowledge that they were the masters now.
The final battle between Britain and America over ANVIL, scheduled for 15 August, took place in the middle of June. Britain had very persuasive evidence from Enigma decrypts that Germany would not defend herself against an attack in the south of France as strongly as she would defend herself against attacks from Italy. This was supported by a further decrypt received on 28 June, which revealed that Hitler had ordered the defence of the Apennines, whatever the cost. The British Chiefs of Staff and Churchill were at one in seeing huge attractions in an amphibious landing near Trieste, coupled with renewal of the Italian advance. The result would be to pull away more German divisions from Normandy, assisting the breakout far more than a successful landing on the French Mediterranean coast. Churchill and the Chiefs were supported by an enthusiastic General Wilson, in command of British forces in the Middle East, who wanted to carry out an amphibious assault at the top of the Adriatic, pushing on east to Zagreb and then Austria and the Danube. Even Brooke was positive: ‘Now we have the most marvellous information, indicating clearly the importance Hitler attaches to Northern Italy.’
The Enigma decrypts, referred to always as ‘Boniface’, a code for a code, were downplayed by America, and indeed Marshall dismissed the value of Boniface with a mistaken reference to what this intelligence had said ahead of D-Day.
Brooke, Portal and Cunningham telegraphed to the American Chiefs on 28 June: It would be a ‘grave strategic error not to take advantage of destroying the German forces at present in Italy and thus drawing further reserves on to this front’. Their approach was reinforced by
Churchill, telegraphing to Roosevelt to remind him of approving noises about Istria which the President had made at Teheran. Roosevelt responded speedily but negatively, saying that his political survival would be in doubt if any setback in Normandy could be attributed to the transfer of forces to the Balkans. There had been no mention of the Balkans. Did Roosevelt even understand what was being put to him? His slip may have been a Freudian one: the Americans had by now developed an allergic reaction to the very word ‘Balkans’. When Harold Macmillan was discussing the capture of Rome with American top brass, he sensed that some of them were warming to Alexander’s plans. But there was an interjection from Marshall: ‘ “Say, where is this Ljubljana? If it’s in the Balkans we can’t go there.” I told him it was practically in Austria and he seemed relieved.’4 Macmillan took the trouble to mark the ‘a’ of ‘can’t’ to show how Marshall pronounced it. For some reason it is Butler, rather than Macmillan, who is always described as ‘feline’.
Churchill responded tactfully to the President, making the point that there was no question of doing anything in the Balkans, and returned again to what Roosevelt had said to him at Teheran.
The President remained uninterested, proposing putting the dispute to Stalin. Stalin would obviously have sided with the President, quashing any idea of Allied activity in the areas of Eastern Europe which he was about to seize. Churchill explained this to the President and decided that, as so often, a meeting would be needed to resolve the problem. A flying boat and a bomber were made ready for the journey to the States, but Roosevelt would not even discuss the matter. ‘What can I do, Mr. President, when your Chiefs of Staff insist on casting aside our Italian offensive campaign, with all its dazzling possibilities … ? I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement.’ A poignant observation.5
Even in hindsight Churchill thought ANVIL (or DRAGOON as it became, allegedly because Britain had been dragooned into it6) had been a mistake. In September he told Colville that he thought that although an un-distinguished minority would argue that there should have been an invasion in 1943, the grand strategy, the movement through TORCH, HUSKY and so on to OVERLORD, would be highly approved. But ANVIL (as it is convenient to continue to refer to the operation) had been a pure waste: it had not helped Eisenhower at all, and by reducing Alexander’s armies, had allowed the Germans to transfer troops from Italy to the invasion zone.7 Churchill always regarded emasculation of the Italian campaign in favour of ANVIL ‘as the major error of our Allied strategy’, a view which was not contradicted by the Memoirs of Mark Clark, the Senior American Commander in Italy.8
Although Churchill had accepted from Teheran onwards that there was to be a massive cross-Channel landing in May (or June) 1944, he had continued to see it slightly differently from the Americans. As late as February 1944 he advocated a revived study of JUPITER, an attack on Norway to supplement OVERLORD although at the cost of drawing resources away from it. Brooke and the others always dismissed his interest in Norway with a sneer, but Brooke himself had talked of ‘spelling OVERLORD with the letters T-Y-R-A-N-T’.9
If OVERLORD had been supplemented by attacks from Scandinavia and the southern French Atlantic coast, or by ‘rolling up Europe from the South-East, and joining hands with the Russians’, as Churchill advocated to Dominion Prime Ministers in May 1944, the war would not have concluded with a massive thrust on a single front. What the result would have been will never be known, but what is clear is that the offensive on the western front, as it did take place, was seriously flawed. This book is intended to be a survey of grand strategy, and not tactics, but, briefly, there were huge losses in the hard fighting to escape from the bocage of Normandy, advances at many stages were slow and often stalled, and casualties were so much higher than expected that two British divisions had to be disbanded and American troops moved from the Pacific theatre.
Apart from many individual mistakes, a series of problems flowed from the fact that the concept was of one great frontal advance. The Americans repeatedly threw themselves forward in hugely costly attacks, and tended to try not to lose face by breaking off unprofitable actions. Conversely, the Germans were able to concentrate their resources in defence, notably by deploying new troops in ‘the Miracle of the West’.
That still lay ahead, but in the meantime America found the continued British enthusiasm for Italy tiresome. They were also irritated by what they regarded as unacceptable stratagems. For instance, just forty-eight hours before the American Seventh Army set sail from Italy and Corsica for the South of France, the British Chiefs communicated with the British Theatre Commander in the Mediterranean, telling him to consider abandoning the attack and diverting the troops to Brest. Apart from the practical issues, the constitutional irregularity of the request offended the Americans. The responsible body was not the British Chiefs, but the Combined Chiefs. The British Chiefs did copy their letter – but not to the Combined Chiefs, simply to their opposite numbers in Washington. There was a very sharp reaction. The Americans were technically correct.
47
The Second Quebec Conference
ANVIL opened on 14/15 August, despite all Churchill’s efforts. He had opposed the diversion of resources from Italy not only because that theatre was dominated by Britain, but also because of his awareness of the strategic desirability of limiting the influence of the Russians in the Balkans and Eastern Europe after the war. His vision was never shared by the Americans. It was his defeat over ANVIL that prompted his famous, not entirely facetious, remark that he would leave the matter to history, but that he intended to be one of the historians.
While we shall never know what a full-scale continuation of the Italian campaign might have done, it can certainly be said that ANVIL did not contribute much to victory or even to the success of the Normandy campaign. As late as December 1944, when he was Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean, Alexander was still arguing strongly for an advance from Italy into Austria and Yugoslavia. By then the plan was unrealistic and Brooke was angered by Alex’s interference and support of what he was by now describing as ‘Winston’s strategic ravings’.
Churchill received no more support on the issue from his man in the Mediterranean. When Wilson succeeded Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean he pursued a policy of neutrality in the dispute between America and ANVIL on the one hand and Britain and Italy/the Balkans, on the other. While that was constitutionally correct, Churchill was disappointed to be supported neither by his CIGS nor the SAC Mediterranean.
A continuation of the Italian campaign at full strength had really been killed off long before OVERLORD began, but in early August there did remain a slight prospect that ANVIL might be cancelled and its resources transferred to landings in Brittany. This would have supported the flank of the Normandy campaign and would have assisted Montgomery greatly. Churchill planned to consult with Montgomery on 5 August, but had to divert because of fog. He found that Eisenhower, who had been for the plan, had very speedily changed his mind, although his Chief of Staff, General Bedell Smith, had not. The Prime Minister asked Hopkins to support Brittany. He flew back to Montgomery’s headquarters, but cut short his visit rather than distract Monty at the height of the battle, and returned to Britain to receive a message from Hopkins saying that he was sure that the President would not agree. The British Joint Staff Mission in America argued the case with their American counterparts but ‘could not budge them’. Roosevelt confirmed to Churchill that there was to be no change of plan. That was regrettable: Brittany made more sense that the Riviera.
All this flying around had not exhausted the 69-year-old Churchill. He now went on to Algiers and then to Italy to be with Alex. In Algiers he had a brief meeting with Randolph, who was recuperating from the results of a plane crash in Yugoslavia. Randolph pressed him to countermand a recent decision not to meet de Gaulle: de Gaulle was the frustrated leader of a defeated country whereas Churchill ‘as the unchallenged
leader of England, the main architect of victory can afford to be magnanimous without fear of being misunderstood’.1 Magnanimity was of course one of Churchill’s most evident qualities, and it was its very absence in de Gaulle that so disappointed him. He told Eden in June 1944, ‘remember there is not a scrap of generosity about this man’. To Roosevelt: ‘I am sure he will make all the mischief he can’. He was not much more enthusiastic about other future European allies: he told the Foreign Office in November 1944, ‘The Belgians are extremely weak, and their behaviour before the war was shocking. The Dutch were entirely selfish and fought only when they were attacked, and then only for a few hours’.2
On 12 August, possibly by way of an amend for many slights, Roosevelt invited Churchill but not Stalin to a meeting in Quebec for the following month. Before he left for this, the Second Quebec Conference, Churchill dashed around the Mediterranean basin, swam in his beloved sea and told the Chiefs of Staff that if Alex could break through into the Po Valley, he still favoured a move into the Adriatic. He continued to have his eye on Vienna, and had told Alex that if the war should end prematurely he was to dash for the city with armoured cars.
On his return to London ahead of the Quebec trip his exertions took their toll and he succumbed again to pneumonia. As he recovered he tried – in vain – to persuade Roosevelt to join him in appealing to Stalin to support the rising in Warsaw. Stalin was simply standing back and allowing the Nazis to suppress the rising. Churchill wanted to tell him that if he did not at least allow allied aircraft to use Soviet bases to bring in supplies for the insurgents, allied support to Russia would be reduced or withdrawn. Roosevelt was not prepared to do this or indeed anything else: he was secretly asking Stalin for use of airbases to allow America to bomb Japan. Churchill did all he could, but had to confess to Smuts that he had less and less influence.3 The Polish Underground Army in Warsaw was loyal to the London government-in-exile, and Churchill recalled no occasion when the War Cabinet was so angry with its allies.4