On the day that Roosevelt despatched the bombshell telegram, Stimson had told a meeting at the White House that Churchill was hoping to disperse American forces to Africa, south-eastern Europe and the Far East, whereas the US should be ‘sending an overwhelming force to the British Isles and threatening an attack on the Germans in France; that is the proper and orthodox line of our help in the war.’ Marshall also wanted to force Germany to fight on two major fronts as soon as possible, and the following day Stimson found this view fully confirmed by the OPD, by then under the control of Eisenhower. Work was under way for what was to be called the Marshall Memorandum, which was shortly going to offer not one but two separate strategies to attack Germany via France. Roosevelt’s cable of 7 March therefore seems to have been an attempt to shock Churchill and Brooke into looking positively at an early cross-Channel attack, while warning them that the British contingent for Sledgehammer would have to be very much larger than the American.
Churchill did not have time to give his considered reply to the telegram before another arrived from Roosevelt, stating his ‘purely personal view so that you may know how my thoughts are developing relative to organization’. Rather like the fifteenth-century Borgia Pope Alexander VI dividing the globe into two spheres of influence between Spain and Portugal in 1494, Roosevelt proposed splitting half the world up into British and American areas of responsibility, what cynics might see as ‘zones of control’.
‘Responsibility for the Pacific Area will rest with the United States,’ wrote Roosevelt, whereas Singapore, India and the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, Libya and the Mediterranean ‘would fall directly under British responsibility’, although it had to be ‘understood that this presupposes the temporary shelving of Gymnast’. (The word temporary in this context was itself temporary; Marshall soon wanted it to be permanent.) A ‘third area’, comprising the whole of the Atlantic Ocean as well as ‘a new front on the European Continent’, would be the joint responsibility of Britain and the United States.15
London’s response to Roosevelt’s proposal was not, as might be expected, to protest that the British Dominions of Australia and New Zealand fell within the American sphere, but to fear that the Americans might tend to regard the Pacific war, as Kennedy put it, ‘more and more as their main responsibility leaving us too great a share of the war against Germany’. Dill meanwhile wanted Brooke’s permission to warn Marshall that unless the United States ‘reinforce[s] the Middle East strongly before it is too late’, the British might be defeated there, setting back victory ‘for years’. He had no trouble in getting it.
On 10 March the Japanese took Rangoon. ‘He has not an equable temperament,’ Kennedy complained of Brooke in his diary that day. ‘He does not laugh so much as during his first weeks, which is a pity.’ This was hardly surprising, considering the issues with which the CIGS had to deal, including weighing the relative importance of Ceylon and north-east India; fleet adjustments for Operation Ironclad (to capture the Vichy French port of Diego Suárez on Madagascar); the protection of Australia and New Zealand, and the air reinforcement of India and the Middle East, to which Roosevelt had ‘responded to our requests for assistance most nobly’. All that and laughter too was a tall order.
Brooke told Kennedy that, as far as finding talented generals was concerned, ‘the real difficulty was that the best men were killed in the last war’. Kennedy disagreed with this analysis, while pointing out to his journal that ‘The Germans had heavier casualties than we had and yet they produce lots of good leaders.’16 (By which he meant military ones.) Brooke, Kennedy and possibly Churchill all feared that the British fighting services were simply not as good as they had been in the Great War. ‘The Army has become too soft and is not fighting well,’ Kennedy wrote. ‘This I believe is because the nation has not the right spirit. We are fighting largely for negatives. The Atlantic Charter, etc, are not enough.’ He complained of criticisms of Churchill in the press, which he hyperbolically described as a ‘fifth column’, but also pointed out that, while it was hard to desert or surrender in ships and aircraft, in the Army it was easier for ‘a junior officer not imbued with the right spirit to persuade himself he was doing the best for his men if he surrendered instead of fighting it out’. (This rather skated over the fact that Percival was a lieutenant-general.) The mood of gloom in the War Office extended to pessimism about leadership in the British officer corps, as Brooke ‘held forth about the low quality of our people, the lack of ideals, the sloppy thinking encouraged at the universities, the general softness and pleasure-seeking of pre-war years’.17
Mid-March 1942 saw a great deal of discussion on both sides of the Atlantic about the possibility of a cross-Channel attack in order to relieve the hard-pressed Russians. These laid the ground for Marshall’s visit to London in early April, and for the tough arguments that were to rage between Americans and Britons over the next two years. On 14 March, Hopkins sent Roosevelt a memorandum saying that any bridgehead the Anglo-American forces might set up in France ‘does not need to be established unless air superiority is complete. I doubt if any single thing is as important as getting some sort of a front this summer against Germany. This has got to be worked out very carefully between you and Marshall in the first instance, and you and Churchill in the second. I don’t think there is any time to be lost, because if we are going to do it plans need to be made at once.’18 They did indeed, because early September was considered the last time that the weather permitted the English Channel to be safely passable for an assault. Eisenhower’s initial plans at that stage involved a landing between Calais and Le Havre east of the Seine, not in Normandy. Beachheads were then to be extended eastwards beyond Dunkirk to Ostend, Zeebrugge and the Belgian coast.19
On 16 March Brooke informed the War Cabinet of these American plans for ‘spearhead’ forces of some twenty divisions plus ten armoured divisions, most of which would have to be provided by Britain in the initial stages. Afterwards he and Kennedy had a long conversation about possible future operations in France. ‘The advocates of the Second Front always miss the point that sooner or later a force landed in France must fight a battle with the German Army. We must not be confused by ideas of the French rising, etc. The battle is the thing. We must wait till we have a chance of winning the battle. That cannot be till the Germans are cracking up.’ Kennedy’s diary does not differentiate which of the two men made this vital observation, which dominated British military thinking until D-Day, but it is safe to assume that it was the view of them both. For the British, this was always the key, yet they constantly feared that, if they seemed to blow too cold on a cross-Channel operation, the Americans might ditch the policy of Germany First and concentrate on the Pacific instead. This in turn would leave the United Kingdom naked if Russia lost in the east, and Hitler turned westward again, reviving Operation Sealion, his plan for the invasion of Britain.
In a handwritten letter from Washington on 18 March, Roosevelt, who had recently held talks with the Soviet Ambassador to Washington, Maxim Litvinov, unburdened himself very openly to Churchill about the future conduct of the war. ‘Here is a thought from this amateur strategist,’ he wrote.
There is no use giving a further single thought to Singapore or the Dutch Indies. They are gone. Australia must be held and, as I telegraphed to you, we are willing to undertake that. India must be held and you must do that…I do not visualize that they can get enough troops to make more than a few dents on the borders…You must hold Egypt, the Canal, Syria, Iran and the route to the Caucasus.
This was all broad brush and indeed taken for granted, but then the President went on: ‘I know that you will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.’20 Of course Roosevelt was putting in as delicate a way as possible the fact that he thought that Stalin
hated Churchill’s own guts, which was unsurprising given Churchill’s attempt to ‘strangle Bolshevism in its cradle’ in 1919–21. Yet Stalin ‘liked’ virtually nobody, least of all the leaders of the capitalist West, all of whom ought to have guessed his vicious ruthlessness from the well-publicized purges of the 1930s. Roosevelt’s self-description as an ‘amateur strategist’ suggests he recognized that, unlike Churchill, Marshall and Brooke, he had had no formal training in military matters.
Marshall meanwhile warned Roosevelt about the vulnerability of the Middle East. ‘From a military viewpoint, the region invites attack,’ he told him, ‘and its loss would permit junction by sea between the Japanese and the Germans,’ which would have ‘disastrous consequences’. Although the ABC-1 agreements with the British before Pearl Harbor ‘always placed the Middle East in the sphere of exclusive British responsibility’, Marshall had already told Dill that the US Army would help there ‘in every practicable way’. The promise of the three hundred Sherman tanks and one hundred 105mm self-propelled guns after the fall of Tobruk should be seen in this context.
The constant fear of both the American and British High Commands centred on what would happen if the Germans moved south-eastwards into the Caucasus and Iraq at precisely the same time that Japanese naval and air forces managed to close the Gulf of Persia and thus the southern exit of the Suez Canal. Brooke’s and Kennedy’s diaries return to that scenario constantly, for at that nightmare moment the Axis would effect a pincer movement on the near-defenceless Middle East, where much of the oil was derived that ran Britain’s war machinery.21 Fortunately, and of course entirely unbeknown to the Allies, the Germans and Japanese had not co-ordinated their strategies at all and were not to do so subsequently. The Axis essentially fought two entirely separate wars, to their mutual disadvantage. (A Japanese attack on Russia at the time of Barbarossa would have been invaluable to Hitler, for example.)
At the War Cabinet of 23 March 1942, Churchill said that he had heard from Ivan Maisky that:
Evidently Germany is going to use gas in new Russian offensive. We would treat use of gas against Russia as against us. We would retaliate against Germany. We will make common cause with Russia over that and he considered we could deter Germany by making an announcement. If he wanted us to do so we needed plenty of warning. Go into gas mask situation. Furbish them up and it would be a good thing to use them every day.
To this, Brooke added that the British had to ‘Work out carefully what our gas reserves are. Must go 100% out if we start.’22 Gas was never in fact used militarily on the Eastern Front, but Churchill’s reaction if it had been was clear.
At a working lunch held around the Cabinet table on Tuesday 24 March, Roosevelt, Stimson, King, Hopkins and Arnold heard a ‘fine’ presentation from Marshall of the OPD report for a fifty-division–60 per cent American–cross-Channel invasion in the spring of 1943. Stimson described the British strategy of fighting in North Africa rather than in the Pas de Calais as ‘the stopping up of rat-holes’, a powerful image. Afterwards Roosevelt, according to Stimson, ‘staggered me by a résumé of what he thought the situation was’, because it differed profoundly from his and Marshall’s. ‘He looked like he was going off on the wildest kind of dispersion debauch,’ remembered Stimson, ‘toyed awhile with the Middle East and the Mediterranean Basin, which last he seemed quite charmed with,’ but later the Secretary of War and Marshall ‘edged the discussion into the Atlantic and held him there’.23
At the end of the meeting, after the President proposed that the OPD plan should be turned over to the British via the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Hopkins said that ‘it would simply be pulled to pieces and emasculated’ there. Instead, ‘someone’–by whom he meant Marshall–should personally take it over to London and see Churchill, Brooke and the other Chiefs of Staff, ‘and get it through them directly’. The President agreed. (Stimson’s diary is invaluable, because Roosevelt would not allow note-takers at meetings such as this; on one occasion Marshall brought a Staff officer armed with a large notebook to record decisions, and ‘the President blew up’.)24
The idea behind Marshall’s London visit of April 1942 was therefore deliberately to try to bypass the Joint Planners of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, whose British contingent would have put the proposals through their stringent analytical process before Churchill and the Chiefs had a chance to view them. Indeed, had the British been forewarned of the details of Eisenhower’s proposals, they would have had their refutations prepared even before Marshall’s plane touched down. That evening Lord Halifax visited the White House for a ninety-minute meeting with Roosevelt and Hopkins. ‘The President was cutting stamps from his voluminous correspondence,’ noted Halifax in his diary, ‘and showed me a few of the addresses under which letters come to him.’ (One read: ‘His Majesty Roosevelt, United States.’) They did not disclose to him the scheme that Marshall had laid before them.
On 27 March, and with Marshall’s ‘warm approval’, Stimson wrote to the President at Hyde Park forcefully advocating that ‘You should lean with all your strength on the ruthless rearrangement of shipping allotments and the preparation of landing gear for the ultimate invasion,’ because the lack of what he called ‘landing barges’ was, in his opinion, ‘the only objection to the offensive that, after talks with British critics here, I have heard made’.25 In fact the British had a large number of other serious objections to the cross-Channel operation, primarily the wildly asymmetrical rate of projected reinforcement between the Allies and the Axis in France, but Stimson’s and Marshall’s pressure on Roosevelt was clear. Stimson also asked the President to send the Joint Chiefs’ plans to Churchill and Brooke ‘by a most trusted messenger’ as soon as they were ready, a reference to Marshall and/or Hopkins.
April Fool’s Day 1942 was an inauspicious date to choose for the White House meeting where Marshall persuaded Roosevelt of the viability of the cross-Channel operation, whose target date would be 1 April 1943, ‘the earliest possible moment that the necessary tactical forces can be accumulated’. Under the plan worked out by Eisenhower, Wedemeyer, Handy and Hull, but presented as the Marshall Memorandum, there would be three distinct operations proposed. The first was Bolero, under which the US would attempt to ship thirty divisions–approximately 500,000 men–including six armoured divisions, and 3,250 aircraft, to Britain.
Then, under Operation Roundup, these thirty American plus eighteen British divisions, supported by the American plus 2,550 British aircraft, would be landed somewhere between Boulogne and Le Havre to march on Germany. (Roundup is an American ranching term, and one that Churchill found absurdly optimistic because it sounded as though the Germans would be rounded up like cattle. See Appendix C.)
Thirdly, and quite separately from Roundup, there was to be a much smaller-scale operation, codenamed Sledgehammer, which was designed to establish a bridgehead at Cherbourg with nine divisions, and fight in Normandy as a method of forcing the Germans to draw off significant forces from the Eastern Front and thereby give the Russians a breathing space. Roundup and Sledgehammer were not intended to be mounted simultaneously. Bolero was the precondition for either.
Roosevelt wrote to Churchill later that day that he had completed his survey of the immediate and long-range problems of the military situations facing the Allies, and had ‘come to certain conclusions that are so vital that I want you to know the whole picture and to ask your approval. The whole of it is so dependent on complete co-operation by the UK and US that Harry and Marshall will leave for London in a few days to present first of all to you the salient points.’26 The terms ‘Harry and Marshall’ unwittingly denoted how much closer the President was to Hopkins than to his Army Chief. The President lunched with Marshall and Hopkins on 3 April and then went to see how his favourite construction project, the new Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Maryland, was progressing. He and Hopkins dined alone together that night, as they had three times that week, so there can be no doubt that when Hopkins visited London he knew pr
ecisely his master’s mind on every aspect of grand strategy.
Hopkins and Marshall had first met in December 1938, and by Christmas Eve 1941 Marshall was writing to Hopkins to say that ever since then ‘You have been a source of confidence and assurance to me.’ He was a key friend to have, but Marshall could be helpful to Hopkins too. In October 1941 he had arranged for the Adjutant-General to have Harry’s son Robert transferred from the Fort Dix reception centre to the Signals Corps replacement training centre at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey ‘without delay’ by priority telegram. ‘If you will let me know about two months from now what his interests are at that particular time,’ Marshall wrote to Hopkins, ‘I will do the rest.’27 Robert saw active service in Tunisia and survived the war; his eighteen-year-old brother Stephen was killed storming the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1944.
Marshall decided to take Wedemeyer and Hull to London, on a mission that was given the rather feeble codename Modicum. Wedemeyer had studied at the Berlin Kriegsakademie between 1936 and 1938, learning about armoured warfare from Heinz Guderian and about geo-politics from Professor Karl Haushofer, and meeting Göring, Bormann and other senior Nazis in the process. Gregarious and 6 foot 6 inches tall, he impressed Marshall with his intellect and writing ability. It didn’t harm his career prospects that he was also the son-in-law of Marshall’s friend and adviser General Stanley D. Embick, the former chief of the War Plans Division, who had devised the overall plan for the Pacific campaign, codenamed Orange.
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