Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  By March 1942, therefore, Alan Brooke in London and George Marshall in Washington had both established dominance over their administrative and bureaucratic hinterlands, and over the military side of the creation of grand strategy. Their clashes with Churchill and Roosevelt–and with each other–could only be conducted once they were entrenched as the two guiding forces on the Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committees. That achieved, each man now tried to promote his vision for victory.

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  Gymnast Falls, Bolero Retuned: ‘It would be the most colossal gamble in history’ February–April 1942

  Mr Michael Stewart bets Mr John Lawrence £5 that the Continent of Australia is invaded by the Japanese within six months from today.

  Brooks’s Club wager book, 27 January 19421

  On 14 February 1942–St Valentine’s Day–Bomber Command issued its Area Bombing Directive, aimed at damaging ‘the morale of the enemy civilian population and, in particular, of the industrial workers’. Soon afterwards, heavy attacks took place on cities such as Essen, Cologne and Lübeck. Agreed in the ABC Staff talks in Washington as a major part of Britain’s contribution to the ‘softening up’ of Germany before eventual invasion, as well as dislocating German industry and supporting the Russians, this policy was initially supported wholeheartedly by Churchill, although Brooke was less convinced. The CIGS’s doubts stemmed not from any humanitarian anxiety for German civilians, so much as from concern about the campaign’s effectiveness and that too many raids were being directed against Germany rather than more immediately important targets in North Africa, where General Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Korps would be disembarking later that month. He also saw vast and increasing sums of money being spent on producing bombers that he felt might more fruitfully be spent on tanks and ships.

  The news of the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese by Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival arrived at the War Office at 4 p.m. on Sunday 15 February 1942. Five days earlier Churchill had warned the War Cabinet that Britain was ‘In for a rough time. There will be smashing blows but we will not come out bust. There must be no gloom or disheartenment. We must send what force we can to Burma. We have to screw down rations and not eat into reserves of food. The Army at home must brace themselves.’2 In lightning attacks, the Japanese had crossed over on to Singapore island itself and captured the reservoirs without which the city–already low on food and military supplies–could not survive.

  Kennedy considered the wider strategic implications of the fall of the British Empire’s strongest fortress in the Far East to attacking forces only one-third the size of the garrison, and noted that ‘India is naked.’ The main fleet based in Ceylon was ‘very bare’, fighting was taking place near Rangoon, and Darwin in northern Australia was ‘comparatively defenceless’. The Chiefs of Staff’s response was to try to take one of the three Australian divisions from the Middle East to protect Burma or Ceylon, and bring back one or two of the Indian divisions from Iraq, even though in Kennedy’s opinion the forces in Iraq were not strong enough to meet a German attack, ‘and never will be’, and were only just enough for internal security. Kennedy recommended suspending the bombing of Germany and instead using the planes ‘for essential air reinforcement’ of Ceylon, Burma, Australia, New Zealand, India and the eastern Mediterranean.

  Like Brooke, Kennedy considered the bombing campaign against Germany ‘ineffective’ and ‘beyond our means’. He repeated to his diary the views he had injudiciously blurted out at Chequers the previous year, that, if it came to the worst, ‘It is certainly more important to hold India and Ceylon than to hang on in Egypt. We are getting very little for our effort in the Middle East and certainly not enough to compensate for serious losses of positions in the Indian Ocean.’3 After hearing Churchill’s views on Singapore, Kennedy reiterated: ‘It is wrong to depend so much on one man who is so temperamental, so lacking in strategical knowledge and in judgment, despite his other great qualities.’ This summed up the view of Churchill that was held almost universally among senior British Planners, and especially by Brooke, though none failed to praise those ‘other great qualities’, principally the fillip he gave national morale.

  Waiting for Auchinleck’s offensive in the Western Desert, which Brooke was also ‘very anxious’ for, left Churchill ‘often in a very nasty mood these days’, as Brooke told Kennedy. In particular he often brought up the subject of replacing Auchinleck with General Harold Alexander, who was considered to have done well conducting the 600-mile-long retreat through Burma. In a diary entry that never made it into his memoirs, Kennedy concluded that Churchill was ‘pretty vindictive sometimes and has a very nasty streak in him…What a queer mixture he is. He is such a bad judge and such a terrific advocate.’4

  Brooke briefed the War Cabinet about Singapore on 16 February, saying that Percival had been short of food and ammunition and had given orders to destroy the giant 15-inch guns there. He then went on to discuss Burma, where ‘the Japs were closing in on the frontier using elephants’. Sumatra, Libya and Russia were also mentioned, but Singapore was undoubtedly the focus of the tragedy. Churchill summed up, declaring that in ‘spite of difficulties’ he had ‘confidence that the alliance would break the enemy’.

  The grievous twin humiliations of the fall of Singapore and the simultaneous daylight escape of the German battle cruiser Gneisenau, her sister ship Scharnhorst and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen from Brest to Wilhelmshaven on 12 February also encouraged Churchill to reshuffle his coalition government. The Labour leader Clement Attlee became deputy prime minister, Sir Stafford Cripps entered the Cabinet as leader of the House of Commons, Sir James Grigg replaced Margesson as secretary for war, and Lord Beaverbrook resigned from the government altogether, ostensibly to pursue his campaign for a Second Front.

  Beaverbrook was in a powerful position to influence policy: he owned Britain’s highest-circulation newspapers, knew everyone in power on both sides of the Atlantic–Roosevelt liked him, for example–and was widely credited as minister of aircraft production between May 1940 and May 1941 with having built the Hurricanes and Spitfires that had won the battle of Britain, although they were in fact for the most part produced during the eleven months of peace bought by Neville Chamberlain at Munich. When he went on political crusades, Beaverbrook was a formidable opponent and to Brooke’s profound irritation and Marshall’s delight his next one was to be in favour of an immediate Second Front in Europe to aid the hard-pressed Soviets. Of course in fact there were any number of fronts against the Germans already, including those of the Atlantic, Africa, Murmansk convoys and strategic bombing, but by then the phrase had stuck. Campaigning for a sixth front would not have had quite the same ring.

  ‘Brooke had a lively distrust of Lord Beaverbrook,’ Margesson told an interviewer after the war, although it would be fairer to say that he distrusted all civilians who thought they knew more about grand strategy than the General Staff. He generally disliked and distrusted many of Churchill’s lifelong friends and cronies, but especially Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken, Cherwell and Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, although he was perfectly willing to acknowledge their qualities as amusing dining companions. This disapproval was based not simply on personality, but on important strategic grounds. Brooke believed that Beaverbrook ‘had over-committed British resources without thought of consequence’ in his negotiations with the Soviets in Moscow in October 1941 as minister of supply.5

  Unfortunately for Brooke, the call for a Second Front came not just from the strange alliance of the capitalist tycoon Beaverbrook and the British Communist Party, but also from a British public that was intensely admiring of the courage and resilience of the Red Army. Although public meetings were often sponsored by Communist front organizations, tens of thousands of entirely non-political Britons attended them. The Russian Ambassador Ivan Maisky was cheered in the street and begged for his autograph.

  Brooke’s adamant opposition to an early Second Front alienated plenty of liberal intellect
uals such as C. P. Snow, who believed that Marshall’s ‘judgment was ultimately better than Churchill’s and far ahead of General Brooke…whose judgment, particularly about Russia, was abysmal’.6 In fact Brooke had a far more hard-headed attitude towards the Russians, who had until very recently been allies of the Nazis and had been supplying them with grain and oil right up to the night that Barbarossa was launched. When Alec Cadogan went to visit Brooke in April 1942, he ‘found him rather impatient with our attitude of giving everything Russians ask and getting nothing in return. Of course the Russians are fighting–but for themselves and not for us.’7

  Far more exasperating for Brooke to deal with than intellectuals like Snow was Churchill himself, but, as Kennedy recorded on 20 February, Brooke was ‘standing up well to the strain and keeps his sense of humour’ three months into the job. The CIGS said that ‘the best way to deal with Winston when he begins to declaim is “to put an umbrella up”. He just sits silent and next morning generally finds that Winston has become more reasonable.’ Viewing the Far Eastern situation three days later, covering Malaya, Java, Siam and the landings of Japanese troops in Bali and Timor, Brooke predicted that Tokyo’s next move would be to march on India itself. As for Singapore, he reported to the War Cabinet that seventy-three thousand Commonwealth troops had been captured there so far, but since Churchill and Brooke had agreed not to reinforce the city in the latter stages there was no recrimination over the defeat–at least none is apparent from the War Cabinet minutes or from the notes on which they were based.

  One by-product of the collapse in the Far East was the dissolution of the ABDA Command for which Marshall had lobbied so hard two months earlier. Under it Wavell, the Commander-in-Chief in India, had set up his HQ at Lembang in Java on 15 January 1942, in order to oversee all Allied forces in the Far East, taking his orders direct from the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington. By the time it was dissolved–a mere six weeks later–the Japanese were in Sumatra, Singapore, Borneo and Bali, and three days later they landed in Java as well.

  Since Pearl Harbor, Marshall had despatched 129,772 American troops abroad, along with 190 planes and 1.12 million tons of cargo. On 16 March he sent the President a report about ‘the extreme hazards to which our overseas troops movements are exposed’, warning that if the luxury liner Queen Mary, now requisitioned as a troop ship, were sunk with nine thousand American soldiers on board, it would inevitably ‘produce heavy political repercussions’.8 Since he was not actually suggesting that the ship should not be used to transport such numbers, this message seems to have been largely an exercise in back-covering, something in which senior soldiers occasionally have to indulge as well as politicians.

  It was not down to shipping constraints so much as fear of failure that plans for the Anglo-American landings in Morocco were indefinitely postponed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff on 3 March, much to Marshall’s satisfaction. Henceforth he directed his Planning Staff, now under the overall command of Major-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to begin detailed studies for a direct attack on Germany via north-west France, at least once the Japanese had been stalled. This change of emphasis marked the opening of Marshall’s two-year argument with Churchill and Brooke. For the moment, however, the British accepted that the North Africa operation had to be postponed because of the Far East situation and they were not kept fully informed about how advanced and detailed Eisenhower’s cross-Channel plans were becoming.

  As part of the Senior Officers Oral History Program in 1973, Ed Hull related that he had reported for duty at the War Department on the Sunday of Pearl Harbor, an inauspicious start for what nonetheless turned into a very successful military career. As head of the eight-man Future Plans section of OPD, Hull was invited by Tom Handy to draw up plans for an invasion of Europe. Before then, Hull recalled, although the War Department had detailed plans for invading places like Brazil, Dakar and the Canary Islands, ‘There wasn’t a plan for putting a force ashore in any place in Europe or Africa that really was of any value.’

  Soon after the Japanese attack, Hull and his team ‘investigated and studied the approaches to Europe from Norway to Dakar in Africa’. They analysed port facilities and beaches along the entire Atlantic seaboard ‘in order to ascertain, as a matter of record, whether or not they were suitable for landing operations’. His section concluded that the best place to land was on the north-west coast of France, after a major build-up of forces in Britain. It was feasible ‘under two situations’, he recalled thirty years later. Under the first, ‘Russia was getting pretty bad blows from the German armies. Nobody knew whether she could withstand it or not.’ Because the US desperately needed to keep the USSR in the war–‘otherwise we would have to land against the resistance offered by the entire German military strength’–Hull devised an emergency plan to help Russia by landing a single corps on a beachhead on the Cherbourg peninsula hoping that the British and Americans could ‘gradually reinforce that resistance to hold whatever was facing us’.9 This was later codenamed Operation Sledgehammer.

  Under the second scenario there would be ‘a build-up of air and ground forces on the island of England across the channel from Normandy where we would base aircraft that could support a landing on the Normandy coast’. Although later in the war there were planes that could fly considerably further, at that time the range of fighter aircraft was limited to about 150 miles. The plan for this build-up became known as Operation Bolero. (In claiming authorship of both Sledgehammer and Bolero, Hull might seem to sound like what the Americans then called a ‘glory-hog’, not least because that credit was also claimed by Wedemeyer, Handy and of course Eisenhower. In fact all these plans were essentially OPD team efforts.) On 27 March 1942, Marshall set Eisenhower, Handy and Hull to work on a redraft of the Sledgehammer and Bolero plans, which he said had to be ready by 1 April at the latest.

  On 7 March a bombshell telegram arrived in London from Roosevelt and Marshall, which seemed to put the whole Germany First policy itself at risk. ‘We have been in constant conference,’ wrote the President, ‘to ensure that nothing is left unexplored which can in any way improve our present prospects.’ In a detailed global overview of the war, he concluded that the United States ‘agrees that the Pacific situation is now very grave, and, if it is to be stabilized, requires an immediate, concerted, and vigorous effort.’ This would require ‘some of our amphibious forces, and the use of all our combat loaded transports…and thus seriously reduces present possibilities of offensive action in other regions’. The difference between an indefinite postponement and a cancellation was then made clear. ‘Gymnast cannot be undertaken,’ wrote the President, referring to the planned invasion of Morocco, and the movement of US troops to the British Isles must ‘be limited’, and thus ‘any American contribution to land operations on the continent of Europe in 1942 will be materially reduced.’

  The shipping available to the US would lift a total of about 130,000 men and, the telegram said, increases from ship conversions during 1942 were estimated at only an extra thirty-five thousand men. By June 1943 new construction would give an additional forty thousand, by December 1943 an additional one hundred thousand, and by June 1944 a further ninety-five thousand. Thus, assuming no losses, ‘the total troop carrying capacity of US vessels by June 1944 will be four hundred thousand men.’10 That June 1944 was to be the very month of D-Day could not have been predicted by anyone at that time, of course, but the figures were a stark warning to the British. Since it was assumed that any early Second Front worthy of the name–one which might take significant pressure off Russia–would require at least one million men, Roosevelt and Marshall were effectively admitting that they would be incapable of providing the necessary manpower for years. Furthermore, once warplanes were allocated to Alaska, Hawaii, the north Pacific islands, Australia, the south-west Pacific, the Caribbean, the China–India–Burma theatre and other ‘outposts on lines of communications’, the USAAF planes available for offensives against Germany were estimated to tot
al only four hundred by July 1942, no more than 560 by October 1942 and 1,040 by January 1943. As Churchill’s official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert has summed up: ‘For a landing in September 1942, as desired by Stalin, America could provide only 40% of the landing craft and 700 of the 5,700 combat aircraft needed.’11 The rest, by implication, had to be provided by the Commonwealth.

  ‘In confiding thus fully and personally to you the details of our military arrangements I do not mean that they should be withheld from your close military advisers,’ wrote Roosevelt. ‘I request, however, that further circulation be drastically reduced.’ Brooke and the other Chiefs could be told, therefore, but otherwise the severe limits of US military capacity in the western theatre should be kept as secret as possible. Roosevelt obviously appreciated the effect that this news might have on Churchill, ending his telegram with the underlined sentence: ‘This may be a critical period but remember always it is not as bad as some you have survived so well before.’12

  A month later, Clementine Churchill described her husband as ‘bearing not only the burden of his own country but for the moment of an unprepared America’, for as Gilbert concludes: ‘American lack of preparedness was the decisive factor…in the inability of the Allies to mount an amphibious attack against northern Europe in 1942.’13 Why was it, then, that Roosevelt, only one month after transmitting this cable, sent Marshall and Hopkins to London to try to persuade the British to mount an early Second Front? The answer seems to be that the Americans intended it to be an overwhelmingly British operation.14