The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  There were. In the course of December 22, “we got news that the arrangements to meet Winston and co. had to be revised owing to a change of time of their arrival, and accordingly aeroplanes and special trains were improvised,” the ambassador recorded. “Rather surprisingly, this all worked out pretty well, and they duly arrived at the airport about half past six, the President meeting them.”5

  Emerging from the U.S. Navy Lockheed Lodestar that had flown him from Norfolk, Virginia, once the Prime Minister’s battleship, HMS Duke of York, had moored there, Winston Churchill espied the familiar figure of the President of the United States leaning against his car. He had come—in person! In the summer they had gotten together only as potential partners, meeting aboard their respective battleships. Now they were in the same, if metaphorical, boat.

  The ten-day voyage across the North Atlantic had been brutal, the Prime Minister recounted to his host—storms so severe the vessel was reduced at times to six knots out of concern for its destroyer escort. In the end it had been compelled to shed its ocean antisubmarine lifeguards completely.

  “Being in a ship in such weather as this is like being in prison, with the extra chance of being drowned,”6 the Prime Minister paraphrased Dr. Johnson’s famous quip in a letter he posted that night to his wife. For his part, Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian-born British minister of supply who had accompanied Churchill on the voyage, declared he would have preferred traveling by submarine to being tossed about like balsa wood on the surface.

  “They didn’t enjoy their journey much,” Lord Halifax confided to his diary. “Max Beaverbrook told me he wasn’t sure whether their journey had been seven days or seven weeks at sea, but Winston seemed in good form, and we had quite a pleasant dinner at the White House—ourselves, Cordell Hull, Sumner Welles, Harry Hopkins, Winston and Max and one or two of their personal staff.”7

  Steaming alone and as fast as possible into the shallow waters of Chesapeake Bay to make up time, they had created so much swell that the Prime Minister’s luggage had been inundated in the hold in the ship’s stern. Fortunately, his clothes had stayed dry. After dinner at the White House the small group went upstairs to the Blue Room, “where we talked in the President’s study about Vichy and North Africa, and various other matters on the Atlantic side of the world,” as the British ambassador noted. “Complete unanimity of view and the atmosphere very good, Winston and the President getting on very well indeed together.”8

  In later years, following publication of Churchill’s memoirs and the diaries of Churchill’s doctor, Charles Wilson, a myth would spawn that the Prime Minister had somehow exercised strange magic on his Christmas visit to Washington: that he had somehow persuaded the legendary sorcerer of the White House into following a Churchillian rather than Rooseveltian strategy for winning the world war.

  It is an absurd myth. Dr. Wilson, who became Lord Moran, was not even present at the White House dinner, nor at the long discussion in the President’s study afterward. He had, it was true, been summoned from his hotel across the road by the Prime Minister. However, when he got to the upstairs bedroom where Churchill was staying, opposite that of Harry Hopkins, the Prime Minister was not there, he recalled. The White House Rose Room “smelt of cigar smoke and I tried to open the window. The crumpled bed-clothes were thrown back, and the floor was strewn with newspapers, English and American, just as the P.M. had thrown them away when he had glanced at the headlines,” for “he always wants to know what the papers are saying about him.”9

  An hour and a half later, “the P.M. came out of the President’s room. He looked at me blankly; he had forgotten he had sent for me.”10

  Churchill certainly seemed fired up, though. “I could see he was bottling up his excitement,” Dr. Wilson described. Seeing the agitation in Churchill’s whole being, he allowed the Prime Minister two “Reds,” or barbiturate pills, to ensure he got a good night’s sleep. In the elevator with Beaverbrook, thereafter, Churchill’s minister of supply remarked to Wilson that he had never “seen that fellow [Churchill] in better form. He conducted the conversation for two hours with great skill”—claiming the “P.M. had been able to interest the President in a landing in North Africa.”11

  The PM had interested the President in a landing in North Africa, rather than the other way around? Either Beaverbrook expressed himself badly in front of Dr. Wilson, or Dr. Wilson (who reconstructed many of his wartime conversations later, under the guise of contemporary diary entries) misheard him. Wilson, on his first trip abroad with Churchill, was a sensitive man and a cautious doctor; he had no idea what he was writing about militarily, beyond what Churchill purportedly said to him. The Prime Minister’s excitement that December night had certainly been palpable, but in reality it was owing to profound relief that, despite the disaster at Pearl Harbor and worsening situation in the Pacific and Far East—where Guam and Wake had been surrendered to the Japanese, Hong Kong was besieged, British forces were retreating to Singapore, and the Philippines looked next in line for Japanese conquest—the President was still determined upon a “Germany First” strategy.12 And, moreover, that the two leaders were of like mind about how that offensive strategy should start: in North Africa.

  The question in Churchill’s mind the entire time he was onboard the Duke of York, crossing the Atlantic, had been: would Pearl Harbor force President Roosevelt to change his mind, and to direct American efforts to the Pacific, as Hitler was hoping? On finding that this was not the case, and that the President was still bent on following a “Germany First” policy, beginning with his “great pet scheme” (as Secretary Stimson dubbed it) for American landings in Northwest Africa, Churchill’s excitement threatened to run wild.

  As Churchill cabled the next day to the war cabinet and rump Chiefs of Staff Committee (whose members had accompanied the Prime Minister to Washington, with the exception of General Sir Alan Brooke, the new chief of the Imperial General Staff, or CIGS), there had been “general agreement” in his late-night discussion with the President about preempting a German occupation of Vichy-controlled Northwest Africa. Also about seizure of French battleships rather than allowing them to fall into German hands; and about invading, if necessary, the Atlantic islands of the Azores and Cape Verde. With regard to the North Africa enterprise, Churchill proudly reported, “it would be desirable to have all plans made for going into North Africa with or without invitation. I emphasised immense psychological effect likely to be produced in France and among French troops in North Africa by association of United States with the undertaking.”13

  Association with the undertaking? It was an odd yet characteristic circumlocution, typical of Churchill’s often deliberately antique style of reportage. What he meant was, he was convinced the President was right to make landings in French Northwest Africa—Morocco and Algeria—an American, rather than British or Allied, enterprise: embarrassed to admit in writing that, given the unpopularity of the British among Vichy officials following his cruel orders for the sinking of the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir on the coast of French Algeria the year before, any hope of getting Vichy French commanders to welcome British troops alongside American soldiers might well doom the project.

  What made Churchill’s blood run so much faster, however, were the strategic advantages to the Allies of such an operation. As Churchill explained in detail in his cable to his war cabinet, the President “favored a plan to move into North Africa being prepared for either event, i.e. with or without [Vichy French] invitation. It was agreed to remit the study of the project to Staffs on assumption that it was vital to forestall the Germans in that area.” The real meat of the plan was, however, its ramification: the assumption that the British Eighth Army, currently advancing from Egypt into Libya in Operation Crusader, “achieved complete success. I gave an account of the progress of the fighting in Libya, by which the President and other Americans were clearly much impressed and cheered.”14

  Between the two American and British armies, advancing from ei
ther end of the Mediterranean in a vast pincer movement, General Rommel’s German-Italian Panzerarmee Afrika could thus be squeezed to extinction—if General Claude Auchinleck, commander in chief in the Middle East, fulfilled Churchill’s proud expectations.

  Given that this North African strategy would, ten months later, prove the very strategy that turned the tide against the Third Reich, leading inexorably to Hitler’s downfall, it is extraordinary that its genesis and authorship would become so misunderstood, so misconstrued, and so fought over by historians in subsequent years15—especially those who mistrusted Winston Churchill and his tendency to bend the truth with “glittering phrases.”

  Among those who distrusted Churchill right from the time of his arrival at the White House on December 22, 1941, was General Joseph Stilwell, a fearless, feisty American commander slated to go to China as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell not only resented what he saw as Roosevelt’s preference for the U.S. Navy over the U.S. Army, but—after conversing with Secretary Stimson and War Department planners who were convinced the President’s French North African landings would fail, and serve no strategic purpose—he proceeded to trash the President in his diary as a “rank amateur in all things military,” subject to “whims, fancy and sudden childish notions,” a U.S. commander in chief who had been “completely hypnotized by the British” into supporting a “cockeyed” and “crazy gamble” in North Africa, when the better strategy was so obvious. “We should,” he wrote in his diary, “clean the Pacific first and then face East”—exactly as Hitler had hoped when declaring war on the United States.16

  Stilwell, unfortunately, was not alone in holding such views at the time. Colonel Edwin Schwien, of the U.S. Army’s G-2 Intelligence Division, had already ridiculed the President’s insistence on American landings in French Northwest Africa as “a patent absurdity” in comparison with the opportunity to embrace cross-Channel landings in northern France.17 Colonel Albert Wedemeyer, a senior planning officer in the War Department who had been tasked with drawing up estimates of what would be required for whatever strategy was chosen, was also opposed to the idea of American landings in Morocco and Algeria—especially when Churchill arrived in the U.S. capital. As Wedemeyer warned his colleagues, Churchill was weaving an imperial “plot” that was against America’s interests.

  Whispers of such dissension within the War Department, moreover, were quick to circulate in rumor-ridden wartime Washington. Senator Hiram Johnson, the eighty-one-year-old isolationist, continued to believe America could avoid hostilities with the Third Reich, even after Hitler’s declaration of war. “The war is getting worse all the time, and we’re feeling it more and more. The President is trying to keep all matters within his hands,” he would write to his son several weeks later, after Churchill’s departure from Washington. Roosevelt “has been made a fool of by Winston Churchill, and in his innermost heart, I think he begins to realize it. We go merrily on spending money until we are pretty nearly over our debt limit, and it will be but a short time that we are. Another billion now for Russia. What a travesty this is! We are going to come out, everyone of moderate means, absolutely broke.”18

  Such criticism of the President, paraded at the time and in subsequent years, was not helped by Churchill himself.

  After being voted out of office in 1945, Churchill was doubly anxious to paint himself, in his six-volume memoirs, The Second World War, as a successful wartime prime minister. Against a background of the British losing every single battle against the Nazis in the two years after he became prime minister, he naturally wished to portray himself as the coauthor, at least, of the eventual strategy that reversed this sorry saga. Describing his visit to Washington shortly before Christmas, 1941, he thus introduced the reader to the only extant, documented account of his first discussion with President Roosevelt, on the first night of his trip. This was his cabled message to the British war cabinet, a document Churchill was making public for the first time, eight years after the event—Churchill explaining in his memoirs how, straightway after his arrival at the White House, he had “immediately broached with the President, and those he had invited to join us, the scheme of Anglo-American intervention in North Africa. The President had not, of course at this time read the papers I had written on board ship, which I could not give him till the next day. But he had evidently thought much about my letter of October 20. Thus we all found ourselves pretty well on the same spot. My report home shows that we cut deeply into business on the night of our arrival.”19

  This was, unfortunately, to mislead readers and historians, since it implied that Churchill had suggested U.S. landings in Morocco and Algeria on October 20, and the President had “evidently thought much” about the idea.

  The reverse, however, was the truth.

  President Roosevelt’s preferred strategy for U.S. landings in French Northwest Africa went way back to midsummer 1941, long before he even met Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland.

  Recognizing, in the wake of the Nazi invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, that Hitler could never be ultimately constrained save by force, Roosevelt had instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to research and then draw up an estimate of military production requirements—a program that would, of necessity, “make assumptions as to our probable friends and enemies and to the conceivable theatres of operation” in order “to defeat our potential enemies.”20 This secret Victory Plan—as it became known—was not to be too “detailed,” the President had ordered in July; rather, he’d urged, it was to be “general in scope,” in order to ensure “the efficient utilization of our productive facilities.” To meet the President’s directive, the secretaries of war and navy and the chiefs of staff had then taken two months to carefully set out, in consultation with the President, a top-secret, twenty-three-page gauge of what it would require for America to win a probable war against Germany and Japan, both in strategy and production numbers. Their report, or “Joint Board Estimate,” had been readied for the President on September 11, 1941, several weeks after he returned from Newfoundland.21

  The Victory Plan’s assumptions and predictions remain astonishing for their clarity and accuracy even seventy years after they were prepared for the President.

  “Assumed enemies” were “Germany, and all German-occupied countries whose military forces cooperate with Germany; Japan and Manchuko; Italy; Vichy France; and possibly Spain and Portugal.

  “Countries considered as friends or potential associates in warfare are the British Commonwealth, the Netherlands East Indies, China, Russia, Free France, people in German-occupied territory who may oppose Germany, and the countries of the Western Hemisphere.”

  The “national objectives of the United States” were given as “the preservation of the Western Hemisphere; prevention of the disruption of the British Empire; prevention of the further extension of Japanese territorial dominion; eventual establishment in Europe and Asia of balances of power which will most nearly ensure political stability in those regions and the future security of the United States; and, so far as practicable, the establishment of regimes favorable to economic freedom and individual liberty.”

  The U.S. document had then lain down the requirements necessary even if “the British Commonwealth collapsed”—necessitating a five-year struggle for the United States, which would last until 1946. With relentless realism, the report had considered “the overthrow of the Nazi regime by action of the people of Germany” to be unlikely—certainly not “until Germany is on the point of military defeat.” Even were a new regime to be established in Germany, “it is not at all certain that such a regime would agree to peace terms acceptable to the United States”—necessitating, therefore, unconditional surrender. Since Hitler’s Germany “can not be defeated by the European Powers now fighting against her,” the report had thus concluded, and “if our European enemies are to be defeated, it will be necessary for the United States to enter the war and to employ a part of its armed forc
es offensively in the Eastern Atlantic and in Europe or Africa.”

  Or Africa.

  It was this phrase that had, in truth, raised the hackles of the secretary of war and others working in the War Department. Nazi Germany, Secretary Stimson accepted, would be America’s primary foe in the event of war. Even so, a simultaneous two-ocean war would probably have to be waged, to hold the Japanese forces at bay until Hitler’s Germany surrendered, for the report did not envisage the British or the Free Dutch (whose government was in exile in London) would be able to “successfully withstand” a Japanese assault “against the British in Malaya and against the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies.” Therefore it would be up to the United States to furnish the munitions and the troops, not only to deal with Hitler in Europe, but to hold off the Japanese, and eventually turn defeat in the Pacific into victory in Southeast Asia.

  The report for the President had then addressed with great realism the thorniest question: how could such a simultaneous, two-ocean war be fought, with Germany as the primary foe? In accordance with the President’s wishes, the report had laid down initial American offensive operations to be directed on those areas where Germany’s “lines of communication” were most extended—Morocco, French West Africa, Senegal, and the Azores, if the Germans attempted to occupy those territories. In the case of Japan, likewise, it would mean striking where Japanese “lines of communication” were most extended: a strategy that would allow the United States to stretch the Japanese until Japan’s pips squeaked “owing to a lack of adequate resources and industrial facilities.” Meanwhile, by building up its own arsenal of trained combat troops and munitions, the U.S. would, over time, work its way into a position to win decisive victory, first over Germany, then over Japan.