Having been shown what he called ‘an amazing document’–the final report of the Arcadia Conference summarizing the conclusions reached–Stilwell wrote:
It demonstrated the tremendous hold the Limeys have on Our Boy. They shout off their faces as if they were our delegates and not theirs. So and so simply must be done. The Magnet Plan [to base US troops in Northern Ireland] will relieve several British divisions, which can now go home to jolly old England, thank you. No hint that they might help elsewhere. And we must keep up the Lend–Lease torrent to our British cousins, even though our people go without…And by God the Limeys now say it is impossible for Great Britain to produce even the munitions she needs for herself, and we must keep up our stream of offerings or else. I don’t know what ‘or else’ means, but I would like to ask them. And then tell them what they could do.36
Small wonder that Stilwell’s nickname was ‘Vinegar Joe’, or that he was later considered unsuitable to command inter-Allied operations. His account dripped with sarcasm and Anglophobia, and was an unfair summary of the conference, yet it did represent the sincere view of a number of senior OPD officers towards Britain.
‘We did look at Great Britain with suspicion at the time,’ Marshall admitted to Pogue in 1956, mentioning how once, after the British had proposed something–he could not recall what–his senior Planners Albert C. Wedemeyer and Ed Hull had persuaded him to oppose it because they feared British ‘ulterior motives’. Marshall presented their rebuttal to the British Chiefs of Staff, only to learn from Portal that the proposal had originally been taken from an American Planners’ memorandum.37
The suspicion that Marshall and the Planners, especially Stilwell, Wedemeyer and Hull, felt over Gymnast was that Britain needed the operation not so much to deliver a blow against Rommel as to ‘pull the British Empire’s chestnuts out of the fire’ in North Africa after the fall of Tobruk. The defence of British Middle Eastern interests, in places like Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, was always held by the OPD to be the primary reason why Churchill and Brooke wanted to drive the Afrika Korps out of Africa. As with all really enduring but ultimately wrong conspiracy theories, it had just enough of a leavening of truth to give it life. Of course the British wanted to protect Egypt, but ultimately it was also in America’s best interests that the Germans did not capture the Middle Eastern oil fields, which would have been the very next step for the Afrika Korps.
Over at the White House on New Year’s Day 1942, Halifax recorded that Roosevelt and Churchill were consulting in Churchill’s bedroom, while he and Beaverbrook were sitting on a box in the corridor and Harry Hopkins was ‘floating past in a dressing-gown’. The Ambassador can be forgiven for thinking it ‘the oddest ménage anybody has ever seen’. Churchill was keen not to overstay his welcome in Washington, and so decided to take some days off. He was not yet ready to return to England, however. The detailed conversations still going on between the military Staffs about how to concert military action, which, after ABC-2 and ABC-3, had got up to ABC-4, were too important, but according to the preternaturally well-informed Ian Jacob he felt that his continued presence in the White House might be irksome and ‘liable to cause suspicion’ in the minds of American servicemen and Cabinet members, ‘who might think he was trying to establish too intimate a connection with the President’. He therefore went, with his assistant private secretary John Martin, his naval aide Commander Tommy Thompson and Moran, to stay incognito in a bungalow near Miami for five days from 5 January.
Marshall made his own plane available to fly the party to Florida, and FDR’s principal bodyguard was assigned to protect Churchill there. On his return, the man related how the Prime Minister would bathe naked and was once ‘rolled by rough seas. He had then got up and shaken his fist at the sea, and been rolled again, and reduced to a state of great indignation.’38 It was nothing compared to the indignation he was to feel once Operation Gymnast seemed to slip from his grasp.
On 9 January 1942, the day that the Eighth Army recaptured the Cyrenaican port of Bardia, Marshall sent Roosevelt a memorandum on French North Africa that breathed freezing cold over Gymnast. It stated that the proposals to occupy Madeira and Tangier and land a large force at Casablanca might indeed have their advantages in protecting the south Atlantic sea lanes and air routes and ‘preventing the extension of Axis influence to the West and South’, but they also involved serious disadvantages.
Attacking Madeira would sacrifice the element of surprise, would be opposed by Franco, and might prompt a counter-attack by the Axis from the Canaries. Furthermore Spain had 150,000 men in Spanish Morocco, many of them veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and Tangier was vulnerable to air bases in Spain and North Africa. It was also doubtful what support could be expected from ‘the natives of North Africa and the opportunist French…Self-preservation will undoubtedly be their controlling motive. For planning purposes, it must be assumed that both French and natives will adopt the line of action which involves the least danger to themselves.’ Marshall concluded that the only possible plan was one that combined not attacking Spanish territory and being invited by France to occupy French Morocco.39 The first part was possible, the second was not.
Two days earlier, Roosevelt had proposed to Congress a truly massive increase in the defence budget, designed to produce 125,000 aircraft, 75,000 tanks and no fewer than 8 million tons of shipping by the end of 1943. Marshall had already doubled the size of the US Army to two hundred thousand by the time of Pearl Harbor, but was further to increase it forty-fold by Victory in Japan Day. The total number of Americans mobilized in the Second World War–14.9 million–was more than that of Britain (at 6.2 million) and France (6 million) combined, twice that of Japan (7.4 million), more than Nazi Germany (12.5 million) or China (8 million), and surpassed only by the awe-inspiring 25 million mobilized by the Soviet Union (whose troops were however often grossly under-equipped).40 It was this huge expansion of America’s war-making power that underlay Marshall’s ability to ‘mesmerise’ Churchill, who understandably stood in awe of the sheer productive capacity of the United States.
The drawback, at least for Britain, of Roosevelt’s massive increase in armaments was Marshall’s growing desire that as much of them as possible should be kept in the United States until it was certain where they would be needed. Marshall wrote to the President via Hopkins to warn against Lend–Lease allocations being changed, especially if the US Army was to be built up to 3.6 million men by the end of 1942. It had thirty-five divisions in mid-January, and it was hoped that ten of them would be fully equipped, the remainder averaging 50 per cent by the end of March.41 On 25 March the creation of a further thirty-six new divisions would be undertaken, which would be 50 per cent equipped during the calendar year 1942, always supposing that all the desired production schedules were met.
Marshall warned the President that the ammunition-production rates were ‘seriously inadequate’ for the number of troops in training, arguing that any increases in Lend–Lease ‘must involve the cutting down on equipment for units that we may be called upon to commit to active theatres once we embark on any particular operation’. Basic arithmetic showed that of the fourteen-and-a-half new divisions–only two-thirds of which would even exist by the end of the first quarter of 1942–only nine were earmarked for Europe and Africa, and the rest to the Pacific and Latin America. Although this meant that the Germany First policy still prevailed, it effectively precluded any serious hope of the United States conducting any significant operations on the European mainland in 1942.
The last meeting of Arcadia took place on Wednesday 14 January 1942 at the Federal Reserve, after which it was adjourned to the dining room by Admiral Stark, who presided over cocktails and a lunch that was repeatedly interrupted by photographers’ flashlights. Robinett listed the conference’s achievements as: confirming the Germany First priority; establishing the Combined Chiefs of Staff mechanism for conducting combined US–UK operations; agreeing on the principle of unity of command in eac
h theatre; prescribing the limits of Pacific reinforcement; drawing up common measures to keep China in the war; and the coordinating of shipping.42 These were impressive, and stand as a tribute to Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall, Portal and Pound. When the British party left Washington that evening, ninety-two of them fitted into three Boeing Clipper flying-boats; they took 18,000 pounds of luggage, including silk stockings, lipstick, hams, underclothes, soap and oranges, as well as what Jacob called ‘other acceptable produce to take to expectant families’.43
On his return from Washington, Churchill reported to the War Cabinet, and started off with a soon-to-be-famous story:
The President and his wife were kind and hospitable. I lived in intimacy with them, just up the corridor from the Map Room…The first day after I arrived FDR came in and I had time to grab a towel…The last thing he said when he came to see me off was ‘To the bitter end, trust me.’ We are suffering heavy blows…but the US is setting about the war with great vigour…they have jumped right into it. There is a sense of resolve to fight it out. They have tactical ideas of war, Hitler is the enemy, they will do what can re: Japan. But…nothing will get in the way of defeating Hitler. [He then spoke of the United States] occupying the North & West African Coast. If they could win it, it would be a vital factor for our Mediterranean shipping–sixty Infantry Divisions and ten Armoured Divisions is what they are aiming for–they should be enough…The Americans are anxious to get into combat with the enemy. There is Olympian calm at the White House.44
Churchill was clearly relieved by the reiteration of the Germany First policy; furthermore from this report it seems that Gymnast had been agreed with Roosevelt even while Marshall was still investigating its potential, and was having increasing doubts over it. Churchill reported that Harry Hopkins was ‘our great friend’ and he seemed surprised by the level of access he had had with Roosevelt: ‘Lived in the closest intimacy, lunched nearly every day alone or with Hopkins, their ministers asked me what happened–went to Florida for five days.’45 The juxtaposition of this last piece of information tends to support Jacob’s surmise that Churchill left Washington because he feared he was getting too close to Roosevelt for the comfort of American officials, who had to come to ask him for reports on the President’s thinking on various points.
It also seems that the Administration had succumbed to a bout of hubris, although it is unclear how far Churchill shared it: ‘All in all their Cabinet feel that have got over the hump of the war. If they do it well they will do it in 1943, if clumsily 1944 or 1945. Supplies of matériel and manpower are overwhelming.’ Over the Arcadia agreements, Churchill said: ‘Marshall, Hopkins & the President wanted unity of command in the Far East–I was at first against it (I was impressed with Marshall who is not narrow). He proposed Wavell…Anyone who has seen what has happened since will see that it shows how necessary it was.’
Churchill said he had also ‘proposed to Marshall to take brigades at a time for guard duty on the English beaches–they would like that–troops should be used that want training–not their best troops as they need to keep them for North Africa.’ Here was a further indication that Churchill hoped and expected American forces, indeed the ‘best’ of them, to see action in North Africa long before any cross-Channel invasion. Moreover, he seems to have mentioned it directly to Marshall, who had only agreed, however, to US brigades guarding the invasion beaches of southern England.
Later in his briefing, Churchill told the War Cabinet that he had been ‘Impressed with calibre of the 3 American Chiefs of Staff’, and that since Admiral Stark’s ‘number’s up’, because of Pearl Harbor, ‘Admiral King is the man with whom we shall have to deal.’ Roosevelt had therefore not hidden from Churchill the fact that the man held ultimately responsible for the Pearl Harbor débâcle would be replaced as soon as the immediate crisis was over, as he duly was in March. Stark’s replacement, Ernest J. King, was to provide the British Chiefs of Staff with more problems than any other American in the higher direction of the war.
Pausing only to reminisce about his journey back–‘I drove the plane for a bit…the engines purred like happy kittens’–Churchill then gave a global overview of strategy.
According to the classic rules of war, you stave off one and crush the other. Well we’ve done that; they have only 1/3 of North Africa left and when pushed out of Cyrenaica the picture will then be all altered. If we had squandered our strength we would be thin and dissipated before a war that had not begun. We would have been guilty of grossest error of policy. We should not have got through but for Russia…There is no use supposing we can keep a lot of a/c [aircraft] and tanks in Britain. All must be disposed of to best ability. Then the Japanese will feel the…power of the US–they’ll never forgive Pearl Harbour–they will find her and disarm her…They feel over the hump.46
It was Brooke who made the worst prediction of the meeting. When asked about the protection of transport on the way to Singapore, he said, ‘If we can go on putting stuff in it ought to be all right.’ The next day the Japanese invaded Burma, and two days after that Rommel launched a new desert offensive and began driving the British back to the Gazala Line defending Tobruk. ‘It was apparent that we could not consider Singapore a fortress, for it seemed that no proper landward defences had been prepared,’ Churchill informed the Defence Committee on 21 January. ‘Taking the widest view, Burma was more important than Singapore. It was the terminus of our communications with China which it was essential to keep open. The Americans had laid the greatest stress on the importance of keeping the Chinese fighting on our side.’ As for reinforcing Singapore: ‘We did not wish to throw good men after bad.’47 The fact that Churchill had been the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had financed the building of the Singapore fortress, with its lack of ‘proper landward defences’, was understandably not raised by anyone. Even as late as 2 February, Burgis was recording at the War Cabinet that, after Brooke had reported that Commonwealth forces had withdrawn inside the city, where there was four months’ food supply and ‘satisfactory’ water supplies, Churchill said that thirty-seven thousand men had already been sent to defend Singapore and it was the ‘Will of the Cabinet to defend it to the last’.48
After the meeting on 2 February, Anthony Eden recorded in his Rymans Scribbling Diary that Churchill was tired and depressed and had a cold: ‘He is inclined to be fatalistic about the House [of Commons], maintained that the bulk of Tories hated him, that he has done all he could and would be only too happy to yield to another,’ adding that the complaints over Singapore, the Australian Government’s ‘intransigent’ demands for the return of two divisions from Libya to defend their homeland, and constant ‘nagging’ from the Commons ‘was more than any man could be expected to endure’.49 Churchill might well have been suffering a bout of ‘black dog’ depression, or merely complaining melodramatically, as it is inconceivable that he would really have been willing to hand over the premiership to Eden or anyone else. Equally it is often overlooked how much the Chamberlainite backbench Tories still distrusted Churchill, even after 1941.
That same day, Brooke wrote to Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East, about Auchinleck’s recent suggestion for ‘carrying the war into Germany from Africa’ in a letter that affords us a glimpse into the CIGS’s strategic thinking at the time. ‘I am afraid it does not take account of the shipping situation,’ Brooke wrote. ‘Shipping is exercising a stranglehold on strategy which is likely to be increased by recent events…What I am certain of is that North Africa would provide an excellent base of attack on Italy.’ This was not something, however, that Brooke had any intention of letting on about to the Americans, who were wary about committing themselves even as far west as Algiers at the time. As late as mid-January 1943, he was deliberately leaving it open whether any North African campaign should be followed up on mainland Italy. If the Americans had suspected that the British wanted to attack Italy after North Africa, rather than land in France, they would not have looked favo
urably on attacking North Africa in the first place.
As for future operations against Tripoli, Brooke wrote: ‘Against Italians all would be well, but against Germans, and with some six weeks to obtain reinforcements, the odds may well be stacked heavily against us.’ In the Far East there was no prospect of any offensive in the near future; indeed ‘the difficulty is to find adequate resources to cork up the holes…And yet, if we don’t withdraw from the Middle East to reinforce the Far East, we may well lose control of communications in the Indian Ocean to such an extent as to seriously endanger our communications with the Middle East, thus rendering it difficult to reinforce you at all.’ The true horrors of the situation, which were only just becoming apparent with the possibility of Singapore’s fall, were to blight the next eight months.
In a Defence Committee meeting at 10 p.m. on 21 January, with Churchill wearing a red dressing gown adorned with dragons, the Chiefs argued that it would be better to evacuate Singapore and fight on further south in Malaya, explaining that the Singapore channel was narrow, that British aerodromes could be dominated by Japanese artillery fire from Johore, that mangrove swamps tended to impede fields of fire, and so on, all factors that made Singapore a bad defensive position. ‘But Winston’, noted John Kennedy, ‘thinks the island should be fought to the last man.’ After a good deal of discussion, a message from the Australian Prime Minister John Curtin was brought in disagreeing with British proposals for defending Australia, which Curtin thought needed to be done by Australian troops presently fighting in North Africa. ‘Winston was so angry at this that the meeting broke up and they were all able to get to bed at a decent hour after all.’50
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