Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Of this first encounter, Moran wrote:

  Brooke and Marshall, who now met, had a good deal in common. They both came of virile stock. However, the acquisitive instinct, common enough among full-blooded men, had no part in their lives. Their one ambition was to lead armies in the field, but they would not lift a finger to bring this about. They were both selfless men with a fine contempt for the pressures of the mob. Even if Brooke was not impressed by Marshall’s ability, he could not help liking him; he felt he could trust him–and that went a long way with the CIGS…With his long upper lip and craggy features, Marshall looked more like a painting by Dobson than a modern staff officer.10

  (The seventeenth-century portraitist William Dobson painted Charles I, Charles II, Prince Rupert and other grandees of the Stuart court, before being imprisoned for debt.)

  Pogue agreed that Marshall and Brooke had something in common:

  To most Americans, as to some of his colleagues, Brooke was icy, imperturbable, and condescending. Four years younger than Marshall, he was smaller in stature, delicately boned, and with large dark eyes that had a shining, impenetrable stare. Precise, methodical, abrupt to the point of rudeness, he lacked Dill’s charm. Marshall later saw a pleasanter side of Brooke…Some Americans sneered at his bird watching, but Marshall felt at home with a soldier who liked birds, gardening, and fine horses.11

  The sole reference that Brooke made to the dinner was that ‘Neither Hopkins nor Marshall disclosed their proposed plans for which they have come over. However it was an interesting evening and a good chance to get to know Marshall. But did not get back until 1.30am!!’ Churchill’s late hours were to produce a large number of double exclamation marks in Brooke’s diary over the coming years, as were subsequent meetings with Marshall.

  It was important for Hopkins to come on the mission, because as Marshall later admitted, ‘I couldn’t get at the President with the frequency he could–nothing like it; nor could I be as frank, nor could I be as understanding.’ Marshall was impressed with Hopkins’ physical courage in flying to London. A severe anaemic, in the previous two weeks ‘he had ten blood transfusions, and he had been found crawling up the back stairs at Hyde Park because he wasn’t strong enough to walk up.’ (If accurate, this was surprising, as the front stairs were supplemented by a lift for Roosevelt’s wheelchair.) Marshall maintained that Hopkins ‘supported me strongly where I was in difficulties with Churchill, and where I was in difficulties with the President’, and he had a gift of making ‘the military position–the strategical graphs and all–plainer to the President than I could possibly have done myself’.12 Yet, as Marshall was to discover on a subsequent trip to London, Hopkins the court favourite spoke only with his master’s voice.

  The meeting at which Marshall unveiled his Memorandum to Brooke and his colleagues took place at 10.30 the following morning, Thursday 9 April, and lasted two hours. Brooke had called a Chiefs of Staff meeting for 9 that morning, to consider their response before it was even formally proposed. As well as Brooke and Marshall, the others present at the later gathering were Pound, Portal, Major-General James E. Chaney (the USAAF commander in the British Isles), Wedemeyer, Ismay, Mountbatten and Hollis. Marshall presented his three plans, which comprised Bolero (the build-up of US forces in Britain), Sledgehammer (the nine-division assault to be launched in the autumn of 1942), and Roundup (forty-eight divisions and 5,800 planes attacking France on 1 April 1943). Marshall stated that Sledgehammer would be ‘justified only in case’ of an ‘imminent collapse of Russian resistance unless pressure is relieved by an attack from the west’. He went so far as to label it, somewhat dishearteningly, as ‘a sacrifice in the common good’, which was an error later pounced upon by its British critics.13

  The British minutes record Marshall suggesting that, if the war in the east were to develop ‘unfavourably’ for the Soviets, ‘We might have to stage an “Emergency Operation” on the Continent to help them’ (that is, Sledgehammer). Equally, if Germany failed to break Russian resistance in 1942, Marshall thought: ‘We ought to be prepared to exploit the consequences.’14 With Mountbatten worried about not having the element of surprise, and Portal doubtful about being able to give proper air support to the Sledgehammer bridgehead, Marshall failed to win support from the British Chiefs of Staff at this first meeting.

  For his part, Brooke strongly doubted Sledgehammer’s chances of success without a German collapse, which he did not foresee in the near future. He declared flatly that seven infantry and two armoured divisions were simply not enough to maintain the bridgehead against the forces that the Germans would be able to throw against Sledgehammer. ‘Worse still,’ he argued, ‘the Allies would be unable to extricate the units if the Germans determined to expel them.’15

  Brooke further pointed out that a shortage of landing craft meant that only about four thousand men could be taken across the Channel at any one time. To deliver the necessary reinforcements for Roundup or Sledgehammer would involve these craft going backwards and forwards across miles of open sea under constant Luftwaffe attack, in order to engage as many of the twenty-five German mobile divisions then estimated to be stationed in France as were sent to attack the landing places. Moreover, seven out of the nine divisions that Sledgehammer required would have to be British, and, in the neat understatement of one recent historian, ‘given London’s strategic views, this presented an obvious problem of motivation’.16

  According to Brooke’s account of the meeting, Marshall ‘gave us a long talk on his views concerning the desirability of starting [the] western front next September and [stated] that the USA forces would take part. However the total force which they could transport by then only consisted of 21/2 divisions!! No very great contribution. Furthermore they had not begun to realize what all the implications of their proposed plan were!’ In fact Marshall knew very well the problems; the day before he had left Washington, his Planners had concluded that by 15 September 1942 only fifteen-and-a-half Roundup divisions would even be in existence in the USA, let alone in Britain, that fighter cover would be insufficient over the battle zone, that landing craft would severely limit the force size, and that the shipping, cargo and port facilities required for Roundup would reduce what food and other supplies could to be exported to Britain. Brooke consistently underestimated the Staff work done by the Americans on all these issues, regularly resorting in his diary to sarcasm and reductio ad absurdum to caricature Marshall’s stance. None of these undoubted military and logistics problems, however, deterred Marshall, who wanted an agreement in principle rather than an argument about details. He was probably right in thinking that, once the political will for the operation was established, all the other issues would be surmountable.

  After the morning meeting, the British Chiefs gave their American counterparts lunch at the Savoy Hotel. ‘I liked what I saw of Marshall,’ concluded Brooke that night, ‘a pleasant and easy man to get on with, rather over-filled with his own importance. But I should not put him down as a great man.’17 There is of course a contradiction here, in that people rarely genuinely like those who they feel are over-filled with self-importance, but Brooke had no reason to lie to his diary or to Benita. After the war he had occasion to ruminate with hindsight about this diary entry, and he wrote:

  These first impressions of mine about Marshall are interesting and of course incomplete. They were based on the day’s discussions, which had made it quite clear that Marshall had up to date only touched the fringe of all the implications of a re-entry into France. In the light of the existing situation his plans for September of 1942 were just fantastic! Marshall had a long way to go at that time before realizing what we were faced with. It will be seen from my diary that during the next few days I was busy sizing up Marshall’s character and military ability. It was very evident that we should have to work extremely closely together, and for this a close understanding of each other was essential.18

  It is obvious that with Marshall doubting Brooke’s intelligence a
nd Brooke thinking Marshall pompous, relations had hardly started swimmingly, although of course neither knew of the other’s views. Marshall cannot have been in the best spirits either, because on 9 April the news came through that thirty-five thousand US troops had been captured on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines, the largest single surrender of American soldiers since Stonewall Jackson captured Harper’s Ferry eighty years earlier. (Unlike Singapore, however, the Americans at Bataan had held out for five months.)

  Even if Brooke was unconvinced, Marshall certainly impressed Ismay, who thought him ‘formidable’ and recorded in his memoirs: ‘He was a big man in every sense of the word, and utterly selfless. It was impossible to imagine his doing anything petty or mean, or shrinking from any duty, however distasteful. He carried himself with great dignity.’ He did find Marshall ‘somewhat cold and aloof’ at first, and noted that, unlike many other senior officers, the general never used either nicknames or Christian names, so Eisenhower was never Ike and Dill was never Jack. ‘But he had a warm heart,’ concluded Ismay. Marshall admitted to Ismay that the most painful part of his job was telling officers, some of them his close friends, that they could expect no further employment. ‘His integrity was unshakeable,’ Ismay believed, ‘and anything in the nature of intrigue or special pleading was anathema.’19

  While Marshall met Brooke and the Chiefs of Staff, Hopkins was with Churchill in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, where the Prime Minister was left in no doubt about ‘the serious weight which the President and Marshall gave to our proposals’. Hopkins made it plain that the two men had made up their minds that a cross-Channel attack was ‘by far the most advantageous from a strategic point of view’, and so they ‘mean business’. Hopkins furthermore told Churchill that the President and Marshall ‘were prepared to throw our ground forces in’, because Marshall had got the impression that Churchill’s advisers felt ‘that the ground attack would never be made, at least for nearly a year’. According to Hopkins’ notes of the meeting, ‘Churchill took this very seriously,’ saying he hadn’t hitherto fully taken in ‘the seriousness of our proposals’.

  Might the Americans have misunderstood the negative British reaction to Sledgehammer and an early Roundup–but not to Bolero, which they always favoured–because of Churchill’s manner? As Portal told the Australian war correspondent Chester Wilmot of the Chiefs of Staff’s own attitude towards the Prime Minister: ‘We used to listen to him enthralled with his words, but once we got to understand him we were never taken in. We knew him too well. We knew what to discount, what to accept. We got to know when he was in earnest, when he was only flying a kite.’ Portal felt that the Americans never understood this aspect of Churchill, however.

  They admired him and respected him but they were doubtful of his strategic judgment and suspected his political motives. They so often heard him raise wildcat ideas and they were never able to tell, as we were, when he was serious and when he was just leading them on. They didn’t realize, as we did, that half the time these ideas were just put up because Churchill believed that in the sharp clash of discussion ideas could be thrashed out and developed.20

  Portal went on to explain that if Churchill was worried about a particular course of action, he would sometimes throw out a suggestion in such a way as to make his listener think he was strongly in favour of it, and then would put forward arguments violently in support, not because he genuinely believed them but because he wanted to draw every possible objection out of his interlocutor. He would then drop the idea completely, satisfied that it did not measure up. ‘We were well aware of this technique, this means of clarifying his own thoughts,’ explained Portal, ‘but the Americans always took him seriously and literally, and so to them he appeared unpredictable, unreal and extravagant.’ In a rare bout of anti-Americanism, he added, ‘The reason why the Americans distrusted Churchill, in spite of their affection for him,’ was because ‘their rather pedestrian and matter-of-fact minds couldn’t keep track of the voluble outpourings of his fertile imagination.’21 Yet was it really so pedestrian or matter-of-fact to expect a British Prime Minister, at high-level global-strategy meetings, where lives could be at stake, actually to believe what he was saying?

  The Modicum Mission was based at Claridge’s, where the Americans took over an entire floor of the hotel, with Marshall booked under his codename Mr C. G. Mell. Wedemeyer’s bedroom was next to Marshall’s sitting room, and in his 1958 autobiography Wedemeyer Reports! he recounted being woken by a valet on the morning of 9 April who gave him bacon that was stringy, mushrooms that were tough and coffee that was ‘execrable’. There were no eggs.

  ‘I recall vividly this initial joust with the British concerning definite plans for a cross-Channel operation,’ Wedemeyer wrote, juxtaposing the Americans as ‘always keeping uppermost in mind the basic idea of concentrating and making a decisive effort against the heartland of the enemy’, against the British, who ‘kept returning to a concept of scatterization or periphery-pecking, with a view to wearing down the enemy’. According to Wedemeyer, Brooke:

  talked in low measured tones and was cautious as he commented upon the American concept as described by Marshall. The British were masters in negotiation–particularly were they adept in the use of phrases or words which were capable of more than one interpretation. Here was…all the settings of a classic Machiavellian scene…When matters of state are involved, our British opposite numbers had elastic scruples. To skirt the facts for King and Country was justified in the consciences of these British gentlemen…There was no expressed opposition to Marshall’s ideas at this first meeting, just polite suggestions that there might be difficulties in undertaking this task or that. What I witnessed was the British power of finesse in its finest hour, a power that has been developed over centuries of successful international intrigue, cajolery and tacit compulsions.22

  Even sixteen years after the conversations, Wedemeyer’s bitterness is plainly evident, and there was plenty more overt Anglophobia to come, along with such splendidly mixed metaphors as: ‘It is true, I thought, that the sun never sets on the British Empire. But neither does the dove of peace. Moreover, the wings of justice had constantly been clipped as British influence and possessions were increased all over the world. I reflected upon the history of the British as I sat watching these senior military leaders carefully parrying, sidestepping and avoiding a head-on collision at this stage of the scheduled conferences.’23

  Wedemeyer believed that the British were ‘familiar hands at using the intimidation of latent force or resorting to subtle deals, doing anything and everything to protect and extend British interests’, whereas by total contrast, ‘We Americans, who were adolescents in the international field, had no clear-cut conception of our national interest.’ The image of a trusting, naive America, personified by Marshall, being led down the garden path by wily, cynical, perfidious, aristocratic Old World Limeys, as personified by Brooke, was widely accepted among American Planners during the Second World War–indeed the ‘garden path’ metaphor was explicitly used by them later on in the conflict.

  At lunch at the Savoy Hotel that day, Wedemeyer sized up the British as individuals. ‘I surmised that Brooke would be a source of future trouble for my chief, General Marshall,’ he wrote years later. ‘I sensed in Brooke a quick, incisive mind. He was articulate, individual, sensitive; one who would nibble away to gain his ends, meanwhile skilfully avoiding the necessity of coming to grips frontally with a basic issue. Over the following months this initial impression was many times confirmed by many fellow Americans, and even by a few Britishers.’ Pound, by contrast with this Machiavellian monster, was a courteous gentleman with ‘a twinkle in his clear blue eyes’, small in stature and ‘rather taciturn’. Portal had a ‘large nose and high forehead. He seldom raised his eyes,’ and was careful when choosing his words. Poor old Is may was written off as merely ‘a smoothie’, ‘insincere’, a ‘Mr Fix-It’, a man ‘without real convictions and incapable of reaching
sound conclusions’, although Wedemeyer had a much more positive view of him later on. Not so of Brooke.

  In March 1948, Portal reminisced to Chester Wilmot about the British Chiefs’ reactions to the Marshall Memorandum:

  We wouldn’t look at it for 1942 and even then we were very doubtful for 1943. The Americans had tremendous confidence in their own troops and by and large their confidence was justified, for they did learn very quickly once they got into action–far more quickly than our chaps did, and once they got the experience they fought extremely well. But this doesn’t mean they could have carried out a successful invasion in ’42 even if the craft had been available, which they weren’t.

  He then made an astonishing admission–especially as he was talking to a television journalist–which confirms much of what the Americans were saying privately about the British Army at the time. ‘I’m afraid that we never had the same confidence in our troops,’ the Chief of Air Staff openly stated. ‘It was clear to us that they had been very badly shaken by the early defeats and we were very much afraid of setting them a task beyond their capacity.’24

  As for the accusation that Churchill had perfidiously and deliberately misled Marshall over seeming to support his Memorandum, as Stimson, Wedemeyer and several American historians were to allege, Portal told Wilmot that ‘When Winston described Marshall’s suggestion as “a momentous plan”, he was certainly not thinking of Sledgehammer but rather of Marshall’s idea that the final blow to Germany must be delivered across the Channel. We had learnt not to take Winston too seriously, and no doubt he was being polite to Marshall and was anxious not to discourage his general conception, but at no time did he or we agree to Sledgehammer.’ This was because ‘None of us believed that we could possibly hold any bridgehead.’25 Yet that was not at all the impression that Marshall took away with him when he returned home, and began to send troops to Britain under Operation Bolero.