In the spring of 1942 a confidential guide was drawn up in the US War Department to the personalities of the British Chiefs of Staff. For ‘Sir Allan [sic] Brooke’, it read: ‘Suave, intelligent, politico.’ Sir Charles Portal had ‘Lots of ability, imbued with offensive spirit, however, primary interest in creating tremendous, and essentially British, air power.’ Pound was written off as ‘A tired old gentleman, straightforward, quixotic, an eminently successful naval officer of the old school.’ Lord Louis Mountbatten they believed to be ‘an outstanding naval officer’ but one whose ‘enthusiasm might result in hastily and ill-considered judgments’. From a distance, and taking into account that it misspelt Brooke’s Christian name and could not decide whether Pound was straightforward or quixotic, this estimation was surprisingly accurate, if rather overgenerous about Mountbatten’s abilities as a sailor.
The Chiefs of Staff met every day except Sunday, and very often had another meeting in the evening. The number of meetings held after the outbreak of war is testament to the Chiefs’ diligence, with 117 meetings in 1939; 441 in 1940; 463 in 1941; 420 in 1942; 372 in 1943; 414 in 1944, and 198 in 1945 before V-J Day, a total of 2,425 meetings, of which 1,329, the majority, were chaired by Brooke.12 There were also eighty Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings at which Marshall and Brooke were present, and a further thirteen plenary sessions at the various conferences attended by Churchill and Roosevelt as well. By the end of the war, these men all knew each other very well.
Every Monday evening the three British Chiefs attended the War Cabinet to give an account of the global struggle over the previous week. This was the supreme policy-making body of the nation and unless there was urgent news to impart or a foreign guest to welcome they started with long analyses from the CAS, then the CNS and then the CIGS, with only the Prime Minister commenting and interjecting. After they had summed up the news from all the fronts, Churchill began discussions and invited comments, but usually only from those ministers directly involved.
As well as these, at 10.30 a.m. every Tuesday the Chiefs of Staff would meet the Joint Intelligence Committee in Great George Street. ‘I had to lead this little choir,’ recalled its chairman, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck. ‘I gave an aperçu of the position as we saw it. Then they questioned us.’ He formed a high opinion of Portal–‘the best, the most intelligent and the calmest’–but disliked Brooke, whom he thought less able than Dill. Bill Bentinck, who later became the ninth and last Duke of Portland, nonetheless recalled how Brooke completed the agenda in half the time that Pound had taken.13 ‘Brooke was a powerful personality,’ he recalled. ‘He used to gobble like an irate turkey. He was very difficult and could be pig-headed.’
Not all War Cabinet meetings were held at Downing Street, and their location could be changed at the last minute. As well as in the Cabinet War Rooms underneath Whitehall, they were held in the GPO Research Station at Dollis Hill (once), the Rotunda in Horseferry Road, the disused Down Street tube station and Church House beside Westminster Abbey (during the Blitz). In the Cabinet War Rooms seating accommodation was so constrained that Burgis recalled that ‘an extra table was put inside the square exactly opposite the…mouth holding the cigar’. Pound christened it ‘The Dock’. The room was air-conditioned, although on one occasion, squeezing past the very fat Ernest Bevin, Burgis unwittingly switched the air-conditioning off, after which, ‘with the PM’s cigar, Attlee’s pipe and Bevin’s cigarettes, the atmosphere soon became unbearable’.14
A body Churchill never came to like was the Joint Planning Staff, which provided information and ideas for the Chiefs of Staff and which he called ‘the whole machinery of negation’, since, as Jacob recalled, all too often they produced papers ‘which proved conclusively that what he wanted to do was out of the question’. Churchill told Brooke that ‘Those damned Planners of yours plan nothing but difficulties’ and on another occasion described them as ‘psalm-singing defeatists’.15 Given that Brooke saw it as an important part of his job to defend the Staff from prime ministerial ire, this provided another fruitful area of contention between them.
Yet, as ever with Churchill, humour infused criticism. Seen in the cold light of six decades later, the word defeatist has an almost sinister ring, but if Churchill said it to Brooke with a twinkle in the eye, it might have been meant humorously, especially when attached to the adjective ‘psalm-singing’ which summoned up the image of joyless Puritan Planners stymieing the imaginative plans of the Cavalier premier. Without wishing to subject everything Churchill said to the fetters of structuralist analysis, it is important to try to see his many jibes and gags in proper context. There is sadly no special font for ironic humour, since many of Churchill’s remarks, which in print simply look downright rude, would undoubtedly merit it. Equally, there is no doubt that occasionally Churchill was often genuinely furious with the Joint Planners, as when they opposed–or more accurately provided the grounds for the Chiefs of Staff to oppose–his plans for operations against northern Norway, Singapore and northern Sumatra.
The Defence Committee was formally a sub-committee of the War Cabinet, which Churchill chaired in his capacity as minister of defence and which included all three service ministers–the Secretary of State for War, the Secretary of State for Air and the First Lord of the Admiralty–as well as the Chiefs of Staff. This met less frequently–only twenty times in 1942, for example–and sometimes went months without convening, but it did consider important issues. The items on the agenda for its meetings in Great George Street covered–to take a typical sample from late 1942–convoys to Russia, Operation Breastplate (an attack on Tunisia from Malta), the catch-all item ‘Future Strategy’, a draft telegram to Stalin, the build-up of American forces in Britain, aircraft carriers for the Pacific, the situation in Tunisia, and several more.16 Non-service ministers attended as and when required, and the secretariat comprised Hollis and Jacob, neither of whom helpfully secreted their verbatim notes like Burgis. From Brooke’s diaries it is clear that decisions of the Defence Committee meetings often seem to have produced the most furious rows between him and Churchill.
Eden wanted to abolish the Defence Committee altogether, but recorded that Churchill was ‘obstinate about it, and maintains that it is one place where service ministers have a show’.17 Eden thought that since it effected little and tended to attract criticism in parliament, it ought to go, but Churchill spotted that it would be better for an impotent committee to attract criticism than the real power-house of the war, which were the Staff Conferences–that is, those Chiefs of Staff committees that he attended too. As the war progressed, Defence Committee meetings got fewer, while the number of Staff Conferences increased. By contrast, full-scale War Cabinets–though important in home policy and theoretically the ultimate arbiter–rarely interfered in major issues of grand strategy, to Brooke’s intense relief.
A vital cog in each of these bodies was Lieutenant-General Hastings Ismay, who combined the official posts of military secretary to the War Cabinet and chief Staff officer to the Minister of Defence; he was also a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, although he didn’t sign their reports. This collection of posts emphasizes how much of a hybrid he was, while always being Churchill’s faithful ‘Pug’. He personified the formal and informal links between civil and military authorities, Churchill and Brooke. Able to interpret each man’s views to the other, he tried to ward off some controversies before they blew up and softened others once they had. ‘Ismay was the oil-can that greased the relationship between Churchill and Brookie,’ says General Fraser18–much as Dill oiled that between Brooke and Marshall.
Pug was the son of Sir Stanley Ismay, a judge in India and author of the 1885 work Rules for the Superintendence and Management of Jails in the Central Provinces. Born in 1887 and educated at Charterhouse and Sandhurst, Pug had had a varied Army career, having been a cavalryman on the North-west Frontier, served in Somaliland during the Great War, attended the Staff College at Quetta as well as the RAF Staff College in An
dover, been military secretary to the Viceroy of India Lord Willingdon, and then assistant secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence. He was recognized by everyone as a ‘good chap’ and, despite being a professional soldier, his ultimate loyalty lay with Churchill. Brooke liked him as much as Ismay himself admired Brooke, and so the wheels between Prime Minister and CIGS, which could otherwise have ground against one another on a myriad of occasions, were kept well oiled. In an enclosed world that sometimes witnessed malice and backstabbing, no one seems ever to have had a bad word to say of Ismay.
Dining with John Kennedy at the Savoy Grill on 4 June 1942, Ismay said that Churchill ‘needs someone to use as a whipping boy on whom to blow off steam’ and he was ‘quite frank in admitting this as his chief function’. He added that ‘If someone with sounder and stronger judgment could hold his job it would doubtless be better, but the chances are that such a person would soon be thrown out.’ Kennedy concluded that he would not have had Ismay’s job ‘for anything in the world’. Churchill could be fantastically rude to Ismay: he would occasionally shout ‘Appeaser!’ at him, or say, ‘You have grown fat in honours from your country, and now you betray her,’ or ‘All you want is to draw your pay, eat your rations and sleep,’ or ‘Very well, if you don’t care about winning the war, go to sleep,’ but this was said in mock-anger, and Ismay knew not to take it seriously.19
One of Churchill’s unfairest remarks was the one he made–‘with frightful sibilant emphasis’–about the Chiefs of Staff Committee to the Minister Resident in North-west Africa, Harold Macmillan: ‘Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together–what do you get? The sum total of their fears.’20 It is sometimes asked why, if Churchill was so difficult to work with, people nevertheless stuck at it, rather than simply resigning, as everyone was always free to do. As Sir George Mallaby of the War Cabinet military secretariat, the brother of Colonel Aubertin Mallaby, wrote:
Anybody who served anywhere near him was devoted to him. It is hard to say why. He was not kind or considerate. He bothered nothing about us. He knew the names only of those very close to him and would hardly let anyone else come into his presence. He was free with abuse and complaint. He was exacting beyond reason and ruthlessly critical.
Yet he concluded that ‘Not only did he get away with it but nobody wanted him otherwise. He was unusual, unpredictable, exciting, original, stimulating, provocative, outrageous, uniquely experienced, abundantly talented, humorous, entertaining…a great man.’21 Moreover it is given to few to live in the limelight of history, or even near the penumbra of the limelight that was always trained on Churchill during the war. It further afforded anecdotes for friends, children and grandchildren. Above all, it was work that mattered.
In May 1943 Brooke wrote to Wavell, who had threatened to resign the command of the Indian Army over Churchill’s rudeness, to say that ‘If I were to take offence when abused by Winston and given to understand that he had no confidence in me, I should have to resign at least once every day!’ But Brooke never felt that it would be ‘likely to have the least effect in reforming Winston’s wicked ways!’ It was anyhow unpatriotic to resign in wartime; personal issues needed to be put in the overall perspective of duty rather than one’s sense of pique. Brooke considered it his duty to remain CIGS regardless of Churchill’s behaviour, and he also knew he was making history. Churchill’s occasional bouts of ill-temper were after all a small price to pay in order to be able to say: ‘I was there.’ (Of course that is not always a commendable reason to continue to serve; it was also partly why Traudl Junge and his other secretaries stayed with their–personally rather considerate–Führer till the end.)
Churchill himself constantly emphasized that Britain was writing a new and glorious chapter in her history, equating the struggle with the days of the Spanish Armada and Napoleonic Wars. Anyone leaving the central stage of world history prematurely would have seemed a small figure indeed, and for all Brooke’s strictures against Churchill in his diaries it is hard to find an expression of a sincere intention to resign. He desperately wanted the war won so that he could escape the pressure and Churchill, but he recognized his central place in the struggle and never genuinely considered quitting it prematurely, except once in 1944 when the entire Chiefs of Staff were ready to leave office sooner than permit an attack on northern Sumatra. At a dinner at the Ritz with Kennedy in mid-March 1942, Margesson suggested that ‘One of Brooke’s great gifts was being able to shake himself like a dog coming out of water after unpleasant interviews with Winston, and another his power of debate (and his rasping voice).’22
Churchill’s tendency to micromanage could be infuriating. Only three days before Brooke took over the Chiefs of Staff chairmanship, the Prime Minister wrote to him that he had noticed in a press report that a British regiment had ‘failed to silence’ some machine-guns in the desert and asked the CIGS for an explanation, adding that he understood that the way to silence machine-guns was by artillery fire. ‘This is typical of Winston’s futility,’ thought Kennedy. To inundate the CIGS with minor operational matters down to regimental level, and to write on such a subject to the man who invented the very concept of the creeping barrage, indeed either shows Churchill’s ‘futility’ or alternatively his genius at leaving no stone unturned, or perhaps both simultaneously.
Although Moran’s diaries are a somewhat tainted source, as he wrote them up from notes long after the events they described, there is no indication that he invented, and he was an intelligent and perceptive man who was indeed present at many key moments in the war. His view of the relationship is therefore valuable:
The PM got his own way with everyone else: only Alan Brooke would not budge. If he sensed Winston’s dislike of criticism he paid no attention to it. He could indeed be brutally frank in pulling to pieces Winston’s pet projects. He would even venture to stand up to him when summoned to appear before the Cabinet, and if necessary to answer him back. In short, he kept Winston on the rails in the conduct of the war. That is his epitaph.23
It is important not to caricature Churchill’s relationship with Brooke as one of constant friction and mutual irritation. Brooke’s diaries tend to concentrate on the rows precisely because he used his journals as a way of venting his spleen. Nonetheless in the Burgis and Norman Brook verbatim accounts of the War Cabinet meetings there are astonishingly few accounts of such clashes, which suggests that they could not have been a very regular occurrence. No soldier enjoys interference from politicians, and Brooke was no exception, but he often acknowledged how inspirational Churchill was to the general populace, and he understood how important that was.
There could also be perfectly innocent misunderstandings between the two men, as in this comical account by Churchill’s secretary Elizabeth Nel of an incident at which she was the only spectator, other than the Prime Minister’s notoriously ill-behaved fluffy grey Persian cat, Smokey:
Mr Churchill sat in bed and Smokey sat on the blankets watching him. The PM’s telephone conversation with the CIGS was long and anxious; his thoughts were far away; his toes wiggled under the blankets. I saw Smokey’s tail switch as he watched, and wondered what was going to happen. Suddenly he pounced on the toes and bit hard. It must have hurt, for Mr Churchill started, kicked him right into the corner of the room shouting, ‘Get off, you fool’ into the telephone. Then he remembered. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean you,’ and then seeing Smokey looking somewhat dazed in the corner, ‘Poor little thing.’ Confusion was complete, the CIGS hung up hastily and telephoned the private secretary to find out what was happening. It took a long time to get it all sorted out, and Sir Alan Brooke assured that it was not his fault.24
In another of history’s significant coincidences, on the same day that Alan Brooke took up the reins of the Chiefs of Staff–Monday 9 March 1942–George Marshall instituted a very wide-ranging reform of the War Department. With the Joint Chiefs of Staff system now fi
rmly in place he wanted to sweep away the pre-Pearl Harbor deadwood and create a far tighter, smaller, more efficient staff structure with clearer and more direct lines of reporting. Having seen his General Staff grow imperceptibly from 122 to nearly 700, Marshall massively slimmed down the operation, with all the changes coming into effect immediately.
Major-General Joseph T. McNarney, the chairman of Marshall’s War Department Reorganization Committee, recommended instituting a tripartite structure for the US Army, and Marshall forced it through. By splitting the US Army into three separate commands–Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces and Army Service Forces–Marshall reestablished central control over the machinery. Within two months, no fewer than six hundred officers had come off the Staff, which became manageable again. Dozens of generals over the age of fifty were retired (although not Eisenhower or Patton). Many senior officers never forgave Marshall, but that was the price of leadership. One of the senior Planners who survived the mass cull, Lawrence ‘Abe’ Lincoln, was to call it ‘a matter of evolution, or perhaps almost revolution, effected by necessity’.25
The War Plans Division, which had been in existence since 1921, was thrown by Marshall into an alphabet soup of other forces–including the AGF, A-AF and SOS–to create the all-powerful Operations Division (OPD). It had a Theater Group, Strategy and Policy Group, Operations Group, Troop Control Group, Logistics Group, Current Affairs Group, and so on, which then broke down into sections covering different aspects of Army affairs, and Eisenhower was at the head of it. In addition to its plans and policy role, OPD became Marshall’s command post. ‘OPD ran the war,’ Lincoln recalled. ‘Its planners made the plans which under General Marshall’s influence guided the strategy around the globe.’ Marshall was helped in his massive reorganization by the fact that the President was relatively uninterested in the Army. As he told Pogue, ‘While I picked theater commanders without him knowing the people–he never saw Ike before he was appointed–he even intervened in selection of heads of department in the Navy.’26
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