In 1957 Marshall explained to Pogue the contrasting ways that he had worked with King and Arnold on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. Soon after Pearl Harbor, when a turf war had soured relations, Marshall had visited King in his office in the Munitions Building and told him to his face: ‘If you and I start fighting at the very start of the war, what in the world will the public say about us? They won’t accept it for a minute.’ King thought so too, for as Marshall commented: ‘We did get along. We had one or two pretty mean fights, but anyone has that.’ In the USAAF Commander’s case, Marshall recalled that he ‘tried to give Arnold all the power I could. I tried to make him as nearly as I could chief of staff of the air without any restraint, though he was my subordinate. And he was very appreciative of this.’65 They were two very different approaches, and of course Marshall could not have adopted the Arnold approach with King, who was technically his equal in rank. Yet hard-fought compromise on the one hand and generous devolution of power and responsibility on the other produced the right results in each case for Marshall, a talented man-manager.
On the same day that the Joint Chiefs of Staff met for the first time, Brooke drove back from his country house, Ferney Close in Hampshire, with ‘soft rain freezing on the surface’ of the roads, to discuss with the Chiefs of Staff the parameters for the Combined Chiefs of Staff’s powers, which were to be very wide indeed. After a long meeting Brooke recorded that, ever since Portal and Pound had returned, he had ‘told them that they “sold the birthright for a plate of porridge” while in Washington. They have, up to now, denied it flatly. However this morning they were at last beginning to realize that the Americans are rapidly snatching more and more power with the ultimate intention of running the war in Washington! However, I now have them on my side.’66 Although the biblical quotation was actually ‘mess of pottage’, the point was made. Brooke never truly felt that the United States should be allowed to, as he put it once in a letter to Dill, ‘butt in’ on areas of the British Empire–such as Burma–that he felt did not concern them.
For Brooke the setting up of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, with its very wide powers, marked a tilt in the balance of power between the British Commonwealth and the American Republic which, with an ultimate US mobilization of 14.9 million people, could only go in one direction. ‘Seldom has the passing of power been so concretely defined,’ writes one historian of the locating of the Combined Chiefs, noting also that ‘Brooke’s was the lone voice of protest.’67 Nevertheless, within the British Chiefs of Staff Committee itself, Brooke would soon be in a position to assume control of the making of grand strategy, and would then turn the Committee into his personal fiefdom.
On 5 February 1942 Lord Halifax asked Mrs Cary Langhorne of Virginia, at a dinner at the British Embassy in Washington, whether Americans disliked Britain. She replied that ‘that was putting it a bit too strong’, but volunteered that, both through history and from what they thought to be ‘English habits of thought’, many Americans had ‘a certain inferiority complex’. This begs the question of whether the British were haughty towards Americans, and Brooke was certainly accused by members of the US War Department of adopting an aloof attitude towards them.
There is little in Brooke’s diaries that criticizes Americans per se, as opposed to the strategic views of Marshall and the Joint Chiefs, although a snobbish anti-Americanism was indeed rife among the British upper classes at that time. Americans were widely thought to be vulgar and plutocratic, although that could emphatically not have been held against the ones that Brooke dealt with during the war, especially Roosevelt, Marshall, Arnold and Eisenhower, who were models of the well-mannered gentleman.
One of the most emotional letters Brooke ever wrote was to an American, the US Ambassador to London Gil Winant, who had sent him a set of Audubon bird books on his retirement as CIGS in January 1946. Writing from the War Office in his customary light green ink, Brooke used unaccustomed superlatives such as ‘wonderful’, ‘deep feelings’, ‘great joy’, ‘beyond my wildest dreams’, and said that he could not ‘remember having been made happier by a present’. To get under the tough exterior of Alan Brooke, one needed ornithology.
Although Brooke decried the practice of commanders in the field writing to Churchill letters that were not copied to himself, he did not mind receiving information from them that he would not have considered passing on to the Prime Minister, even though Churchill also held the post of minister of defence. On 6 February Auchinleck wrote to ‘My dear Alan’ to say that he was sending out a long official telegram about ‘the possibility of our resuming the offensive at an early date’, adding that ‘I purposely refrained from giving the detailed calculations of our prospective tank strength on which we have reached our conclusions,’ because he had ‘learnt from previous experience the impossibility of reconciling such figures with those arrived at by calculations carried out at home, particularly by the Defence Minister’. He nonetheless had sent under separate cover his calculations in full, ‘as I thought you would like to have them for your own personal information, and that of your advisers’.68
The implication was obvious: Auchinleck was going behind Churchill’s back to Brooke, providing him with important information that Churchill ought to have had as minister of defence. In this way he hoped that he might limit Churchill’s capacity for interference with his command. The CIGS should not have gone along with this underhand activity, but he did. Indeed, as Kennedy recorded, ‘Brooke found it an invaluable rule never to tell Churchill more than was absolutely necessary,’ recalling him once scoring out nine-tenths of a draft minute to the Prime Minister, saying as he did so: ‘The more you tell that man about the war, the more you hinder the winning of it.’69
4
Brooke and Marshall Establish Dominance: ‘He was very difficult and could be pig-headed’ February–March 1942
It is only by building up the authority of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that we can do anything to curb the tendency of the American Chiefs of Staff to take unilateral action.
Field Marshal Sir John Dill to General Sir Alan Brooke, October 19421
It was almost certainly the fiasco over the escape of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen on 12 February 1942, blithely steaming up the English Channel and evading every effort of the Royal Navy and RAF to stop them, that persuaded Churchill to appoint Brooke in Pound’s place as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee.2 ‘I’m afraid, sir,’ Pound had told the Prime Minister on the telephone, ‘I must report that the enemy battle cruisers should by now have reached the safety of their home waters.’ Churchill had gone quiet for a moment, then said ‘Why?’ but put the phone down before his old friend had a chance to go through the litany of blunders that had taken place. Unlike Brooke and Portal, Pound was also an operational officer as first sea lord, and Churchill felt that to chair the Chiefs of Staff on top of these other responsibilities was too much for him.
‘Pound is necessary to me,’ he had told Robin Barrington-Ward of The Times the previous December. ‘His slow unimpressive look is deceptive!’ In fact it was not at all deceptive, but rather the effect of a narcoleptic medical condition that is still undiagnosed today. A month beforehand, Brooke had noted how, in a Chiefs of Staff meeting on shipping shortages, ‘During most of the discussion the First Sea Lord went sound to sleep, and looked like an old parrot asleep on his perch!’ Although there is still doubt about what ailed the sixty-five-year-old admiral, there is none that he ought to have been retired altogether by Churchill rather than merely relieved of his Chiefs of Staff chairmanship. Pound’s biographer argues that although he did catnap and also had a habit of closing his eyes when concentrating, he also had the ability to perk up whenever words like ‘cruiser’ or ‘destroyer’ cropped up in the conversation.3 Nonetheless, Brooke’s testimony on more than one occasion is unambiguous and such an affliction should have automatically removed him altogether from the higher direction of a vital service during a world war.
> ‘You should lighten your load,’ Churchill wrote to Pound when relieving him of the chairmanship. ‘If therefore you represented this to me,’ he continued, very courteously, ‘I could arrange for Brooke, as it is the Army’s turn, to preside on the Chiefs of Staff Committee.’4 It is very unlikely that in wartime the principle of Buggins’ Turn really existed for the chairmanship of the Chiefs of Staff, as in peacetime; Brooke won it because he was acknowledged to have the best strategic brain, and possibly because at forty-eight Charles Portal was ten years younger than him. Churchill also asked that the Director of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, should join the Chiefs of Staff as an equal member. Churchill admired Mountbatten and wanted Combined Operations–between the Army, Navy and Air Force–to be given a greater role in strategy-making. This greatly irritated Brooke, who later complained that Mountbatten ‘frequently wasted both his time and ours’. Pound also opposed Mountbatten’s appointment, but they were overruled.
On the morning that Brooke was due to take over as chairman, Monday 9 March 1942, Pound thoughtfully turned up early and took the junior seat that Brooke had formerly occupied, saving his colleague from the embarrassment of physically seeming to usurp him. ‘Went off all right,’ noted Brooke, ‘and both Portal and Pound played up very well.’ The phrase–echoing the Henry Newbolt line ‘Play up, play up and play the game’–was actually high praise from someone of Brooke’s background.
Brooke’s RAF colleague on the Committee, Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), was born in Hungerford in May 1893. A descendant of a Huguenot family that had arrived in 1695, he played in the Winchester College cricket XI before going up to Christ Church, Oxford. After having won a motorcycle race in 1914, Portal joined the Army as a despatch rider in the Royal Engineers, two days after the outbreak of the Great War, and was mentioned in the very first batch of wartime despatches written by Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the BEF. The following month a shell landed near Portal, killing five people; he escaped injury because he was blown through a doorway. He later transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and won the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross. He was an authority on falconry, owning a famous game falcon called Sibella, a first-rate shot and a keen fisherman, and was reputed to be able to pilot any type of aircraft then in existence. As a squadron commander in the late 1920s he also won the Minot trophy for bomb-aiming.
Portal’s Times obituary in April 1971 recorded an apology he once made to Churchill after a Chiefs of Staff meeting: ‘I’m sorry if I seemed a bit over-assertive or hot under the collar, Prime Minister,’ for which he received the characteristic reply: ‘In war, my boy, you don’t have to be sorry; you only have to be right!’5 Colville recalled Portal as a ‘quiet, unemotional and unassuming Wykehamist…who only spoke when he had something to say, listened intently and neither made promises unless he could fulfil them nor allowed himself to be the victim of undue optimism or pessimism’. Many Americans thought him the most impressive of the three British service Chiefs.
Portal tended to give the CIGS better support against the Prime Minister than did Pound. ‘Sir Charles Portal handled Churchill extremely well,’ wrote Jacob. This handling of the Prime Minister–which could at times resemble the handling of a Mills grenade–was a vital part of the duties of all the Chiefs of Staff. Fortunately there were only four of them during the whole course of the war after December 1941, and each had his own way of doing it. Brooke was forthright, Pound charming, Portal logical and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham–who replaced Pound in the autumn of 1943–uncompromising.
The Chiefs of Staff system–which Ismay believed to be ‘the most perfect machine for the higher organization of the war’–was in theory a triumvirate that made suggestions as to military policy and then had the responsibility for initiating, explaining, expounding and defending them. ‘In practice, however’, recalled Archie Nye, the responsibility rested primarily on Brooke’s shoulders ‘and much less on those of the CAS and the CNS [Chief of the Naval Staff]’. This Nye put down partly to the fact that Brooke was the chairman, and ‘partly to his overwhelming personality, his exceptional clear brain and his forceful character’.6
While still commander-in-chief of Home Forces, Brooke had attended a Chiefs of Staff meeting in autumn 1940 that he had afterwards likened to the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Under his own chairmanship, business was despatched promptly and efficiently. The Committee’s greatest strength lay in the collegiate nature of its decision-making, but from March 1942 he was acknowledged to be primus inter pares, in the same way that Marshall was becoming on the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. Brooke despised committee chairmen who allowed meetings to go on too long, or who pursued red herrings. In the month that he took over the Chiefs of Staff Committee, he railed to Kennedy about the way Churchill ran the Defence Committee meetings, ‘Here we have been arguing two hours over a simple issue which any one of us could have decided in a few minutes and we have got no answer yet.’7 In a sense it was no different from many complaints made by subordinates about their bosses the world over.
Pound and Portal were hardly ever steamrollered by Brooke, but were unmistakably guided by him, and until Cunningham joined the Chiefs of Staff after Pound’s retirement there are only a very few examples of Brooke failing to get his way, even against the combined opposition of the other two Chiefs. The quid pro quo of collegiality was rock-solid devotion to the Committee’s decisions once taken. During the whole war there was not so much as a single leak from anyone on the Chiefs of Staff Committee about anything discussed there, however seemingly trivial. Nor were there any examples during the war of Marshall or Churchill managing to turn a member of the Chiefs of Staff against the others once a decision was taken, even if that Chief had vigorously opposed it. It was the reason that Churchill never once overruled–as he was constitutionally permitted to do–any military decisions of the Chiefs of Staff Committee during the Second World War. Jacob wrote of Brooke, Portal and Pound: ‘The Prime Minister developed a very strong liking for these three, and a real respect for their judgement and professional attainments.’8 Colville went even further, claiming that Churchill ‘might argue with the Chiefs of Staff, and bark at them fiercely; but he loved them deeply.’9 Whether that was really true of Brooke will be for the reader to decide.
‘They stood in awe of him,’ Colville wrote of the relationship between Churchill and the Chiefs, ‘but they seldom failed to stand up for their convictions, nor would he have respected them if they had been a tamer body. He complained of their obstinacy and would grumble to their combined faces that he was expected to wage modern war with antiquated weapons; but I never remember him denigrating them as men.’ It was hardly likely that Churchill would have denigrated men who had sunk the Wiesbaden at the battle of Jutland (Pound), closed the Belgian gap on the retreat to Dunkirk (Brooke), been awarded a Military Cross in the Great War (Portal) and won the naval victories of Taranto and Cape Matapan (Cunningham).
‘I cannot say that we never differed among ourselves…’ Churchill admitted in his war memoirs, ‘but a kind of understanding grew up between me and the British Chiefs of Staff that we should convince and persuade rather than try to overrule each other. This was of course helped by the fact that we spoke the same technical language, and possessed a large common body of military doctrine and war experience.’10 The military historian Captain Basil Liddell Hart believed that Churchill had not overruled the Chiefs of Staff on any issue, ‘even when his views were mostly clearly right’, because of the Dardanelles disaster, after which he had spent two years in the political wilderness ‘as a penalty for putting himself in opposition to the weight of official opinion’. It might well have summoned up occasional ghosts for Churchill, but that was unlikely to have been the main reason. Instead, as Portal told the broadcaster Chester Wilmot, Churchill:
was always the democrat. For all his ardent advocacy of his own point of view he was at heart always a compromiser and he was most thoroug
hgoing in his search for advice and expert opinion…He wanted good hard stones on which to sharpen the knife of his ideas…He knew his own weaknesses, and knew that he needed to have around him men who from their experience and their expert training could keep his imagination in check.11
Churchill would not have chosen the good hard stone of Alan Brooke as CIGS, and then also as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff three months later, if he had wanted someone he could bully. He knew of the reputation of the Fighting Brookes, and would certainly have remembered the argument during his telephone call to Le Mans in June 1940. It was part of the self-confident bigness of Winston Churchill that he appointed such a foil for his own genius, the best possible person to ‘keep his imagination in check’ when many another, lesser politician would have opted for a yes-man in that post.
As well as being a master strategist, Brooke was a successful departmental tactician. The Deputy CIGS Sir Ronald Weeks recalled how good he was at choosing the best battlegrounds to fight Churchill, telling an interviewer about the constant stream of requests and demands from the Prime Minister that he passed straight on to Weeks, which were ‘frequently annoying to the recipient, and often difficult to answer–sometimes they were trivial.’ Yet, as Weeks spotted, Brooke tried never to fight Churchill over small issues and would often refuse to sanction Weeks’ combative replies to minutes from No. 10, hoping to let them ‘die a natural death’. On big issues, however, Weeks noted that ‘Brooke would not give way, and would fight Churchill to the last ditch–Churchill rarely in the end would go against him, but there was many a prolonged fight. The secret of Brooke’s success with Churchill lay in the fact that he only fought him on big matters.’ Brooke never sought out confrontation with Churchill, any more than Churchill did with him; it was simply in the nature of their jobs that clashes arose, and a consequence of the profoundly serious way that both men viewed their responsibilities.
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