Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  This seems like nothing less than an endorsement of Sledgehammer in only five months’ time, or even ‘before then’, but only once United States troops were flooding over under Bolero, or what Churchill was soon confusingly to call ‘Super-Bolero’. Yet were the British really committed to such a ‘concentration against the main enemy’ in a cross-Channel attack? The historians Warren Kimball and Norman Rose describe Churchill’s message as ‘disingenuous’.58 The writer Leonard Mosley went further, writing of Churchill’s ‘insincerity’.59

  Brooke meanwhile told John Kennedy over at the War Office that ‘he had backed the first stage–that is movement into the UK–because that suits all eventualities including defence of the UK and possible action overseas elsewhere, as well as the main conception put forward by Marshall,’ and that Marshall ‘has gone back with substantial agreement in principle, but a better realisation of practical difficulties and a better appreciation of the possible dates’. This seems a clear indication that Brooke had accepted Sledgehammer in principle because he wanted Bolero in practice, and knew that Sledgehammer could be argued out when the time came. Some in the War Office thought the Americans themselves would drop Sledgehammer as soon as their Planners had further analysed its deficiencies.

  In Ulster, Marshall inspected the Bolero advance guard, American units under Major-General Russell P. Hartle. While he and Hopkins were there, and then while they were on their way to Port Patrick in western Scotland prior to flying home, a situation developed that led Churchill to suggest that the two men return to London. Roosevelt had heard that Marshal Philippe Pétain, the dictator of Vichy France, was restoring the pro-German former premier Pierre Laval to power, under pressure from Hitler, leading the President to ask Marshall to consider reviving Gymnast, on the ground that the French in North Africa might prefer the Allies to Laval.

  Although Roosevelt did not think the situation was fast moving enough to justify Marshall returning to London, his instinctive reaction–that Gymnast be reactivated–was indicative of a continued presidential fondness for the North African operation that the American Chiefs intensely disliked. Marshall can hardly have failed to infer as much. Often, even when nothing comes of them, such démarches can throw sudden light on a scene, like a split-second flash of nocturnal lightning. Marshall, in Eden’s phrase, ‘would not be stopped’ from returning home, but he now knew that his various memoranda had not killed off Gymnast in Roosevelt’s restless mind.60

  After the war, Albert Wedemeyer told the BBC interviewer Richard Dimbleby that, on their flying-boat going back to Washington, Marshall had turned to him and said: ‘I think the British have bought your plan, but I think they did so with tongues in their cheeks.’61 Wedemeyer also claimed to his SOOHP interviewer that Marshall could tell by the questions that the British had asked him that they preferred to invade Europe through the so-called ‘soft underbelly’ of the Mediterranean.62 Was this ex post facto rationalization, or did it really happen? Did Marshall really spot Brooke’s future foot-dragging over Roundup as early as on his return flight home? If so, it makes his later professed shock at British perfidy rather deceptive itself. Wedemeyer was a senior member of the Joint Planning Staff and was present at strategy conferences before he became US Chief of Staff of the South-East Asian Command in 1943. His testimony–even at three decades’ remove–is therefore noteworthy. In the end, however, it is simply not convincing: as Michael Howard notes, the British had no conception of invading Europe from the south in April 1942, with the phrase ‘soft underbelly’ not being coined by Churchill until the following year.

  Ismay essayed a metaphor of seduction when describing the Modicum Conference to Pogue four years later, saying the British had been ‘swept off their feet when Marshall and Hopkins visited them on Roundup and that they agreed to it without considering what it entailed’. According to him, Churchill and Brooke ‘were swept away by the prospect of going back [to France] in 1943’.63 This was only partly true, and to continue the analogy, Churchill might have been flirting outrageously, but Brooke was still only mildly teasing. Certainly neither had by then decided to go all the way.

  7

  The Commanders at Argonaut: ‘The easiest road to the centre of our chief enemy’s heart’ April–June 1942

  There are no laws of war which say that men can die but staff officers mustn’t be vexed.

  Ronald Lewin1

  As Marshall and Brooke bade farewell in London their two sets of Staffs got down to putting meat on the bones of the three operations, which in the case of Roundup and Sledgehammer were still positively skeletal. As they did so, a process now known as ‘group-think’ got under way on both sides of the Atlantic. Knowing that Marshall was committed to an early cross-Channel operation, the Operations Division of the US War Department found arguments and strategies to support one. Similarly, knowing that Brooke was in favour of a later operation, once Germany had been ‘ripened’, the War Office Planners found arguments to oppose an early crossing. It is surprising, despite their all being intelligent, independent thinkers, how few American Planners supported a later and how few British Planners an earlier cross-Channel operation. Meanwhile, London watched intently for any sign in Washington that the President could be detached from Marshall in his support of Sledgehammer. If the tectonic plates gave any hint of shifting between them, speed in exploiting it would be of the essence.

  Foremost among the sceptics of an early Second Front in the British War Office was the man whose duty it now was to begin planning for one, the Director of Military Operations, John Kennedy. He receives relatively little attention as an important figure today, but his testimony from the very heart of the military decision-making process is compelling. ‘The slowness of getting ashore and the certainty of ultimate defeat while the Germans are in a good state are the governing factors in knocking a French operation out of court at the moment,’ he wrote, neatly encapsulating British thinking in April 1942. ‘We cannot afford to lose a big Army detachment so long as there’s a chance of the Germans surviving the Russian battle and then attempting invasion.’2

  Over the next four months, the War Office were planning to send abroad five divisions–four infantry and one armoured–while only receiving a maximum of two American divisions into the United Kingdom, leaving a large net loss of troops from the mainland. Another problem with Roundup was the widespread belief in British military circles that the Free French were unreliable. After General de Gaulle’s chief of staff Pierre Billotte came to see Brooke, bringing maps and plans for sabotage in France and for raising the local population, Kennedy commented: ‘It is hard to get all of these on the right basis because of the difficulty that de Gaulle cannot be trusted.’3 Relations between de Gaulle and the British Government had deteriorated soon after his flight to London in June 1940, and worsened when loose talk by Free French officers was blamed by the British for the Allied attack on Dakar that September turning into a débâcle.

  On Sunday 19 April, as Lord Halifax drove to the airport in Washington to welcome Marshall home, and Hopkins stopped off at Hyde Park to report on Modicum to the President, Kennedy told his diary: ‘I think the Germans will be able to advance a long way when the weather permits but that they will not be able to knock the Russians out and the Russian front will remain and prove a fatal commitment in the end.’ That was just the sort of prescience he was hired for. ‘We can do a lot by raids and air action to cause a diversion of strength from the Russian front,’ he continued, ‘although not much to affect the German Army dispositions.’

  Although a constant American refrain would be that Britain was not doing enough to help the beleaguered USSR, of the two countries it was even more in Britain’s interests than America’s that Russia should remain fighting. If Germany won in the east she would have been able to move into Iran and Iraq, cutting off Britain’s oil supply.4 Yet even that danger would not have justified Sledgehammer, so Brooke believed, because it would have made no appreciable difference to what happened in t
he east, while costing the Allies dear if it failed, as he was certain it would.

  Marshall had mentioned Sledgehammer as a ‘sacrifice’ to avert an imminent collapse of Russian resistance, and was to refer to it as such for the rest of his life. He had made it clear in London that this sacrifice would be made mainly by the British, since so few American divisions could be transported for ‘immediate’ action by the autumn of 1942. By 15 September, the US could provide only 700 of the planes required, for example.5 Yet by presenting two operations instead of one–that is, Sledgehammer as well as Roundup–Marshall allowed the British authorities to concentrate their arguments on the weaker of the two. In strategic and tactical terms this was undoubtedly Sledgehammer, which the War Office Planners soon came to view as little more than the modern equivalent of the ‘forlorn hope’ that was sometimes seen in seventeenth-century battles.

  When Marshall returned to Dodona he saw all the improvements that Katherine had made in his absence in Washington and London. ‘As we drove along the narrow roller-coaster road,’ she recalled,

  the honeysuckle along the fences filled the air with fragrance, the cows were heading towards the barns for their evening meal, while sheep grazed contentedly…George gave a sigh of contentment, and then followed the happiest hours of the past three years. He stopped the car, got out and walked around, taking in every detail. Finally he turned and said in a husky voice, ‘This is home, a real home after forty-one years of wandering.’

  They sat on the lawn until 9 p.m. as he told her of the highlights of his trip to ‘war-torn Europe’.

  On Thursday 23 April Churchill spoke to a secret session of the House of Commons, the first since the fall of Singapore in February. In one of his longest speeches of the war, he made no attempt to minimize the various disasters of the previous six months. He described how the Ark Royal, Barham, Prince of Wales and Repulse had been sunk, and how the battleships Nelson, Valiant and Queen Elizabeth had been crippled, pointing out that in a mere seven weeks one-third of the Navy’s battleships and battle cruisers had either been sunk or severely damaged. He related to an understandably sombre House that one hundred thousand Commonwealth troops had surrendered Singapore to a mere thirty thousand Japanese.

  Yet he concluded his wide-ranging recitation of these ‘ugly realities’ with an upbeat assessment of the future, and said that the Germany First policy was ‘earnestly and spontaneously shared by the Government and dominant forces in the United States’. He went on: ‘The visit of General Marshall and Mr Hopkins was to concert with us the largest and swiftest measures of this offensive character. It will no doubt become common knowledge that the liberation of the Continent by equal numbers of British and American troops is the main war plan of our two nations.’6

  He then read out a recent telegram from Roosevelt, which stated that the President was ‘delighted with the agreement which has been reached between you and your military advisors and Marshall and Hopkins. They have reported to me of the unanimity of opinion relative to the proposal which they carried with them and I appreciate ever so much your personal message confirming this.’ In fact the numbers of troops earmarked for the operations were far from equal–seven British divisions to two American for Sledgehammer, or eighteen British against America’s thirty divisions for Roundup–but then neither was there genuine ‘unanimity of opinion’ between Marshall and Brooke over either operation, as was soon to become evident.

  At the War Cabinet of 27 April, with Norman Brook taking verbatim notes, Portal gave details of the bombing raids on Cologne and Rostock. Churchill said: ‘Don’t make too much of this in Press–we’re hitting them three times as hard–don’t give impression this is quits…Tone down, and keep in proportion. Don’t give out photos.’ (A red-haired Scottish sergeant-pilot from Motherwell who was being honoured at the White House for heroic feats bombing Germany told Halifax of the tremendous fires in Rostock. ‘I’m afraid we not only killed them,’ he said; ‘we cremated them.’)7 Later on in the War Cabinet, discussing the modifications proposed for ‘R’-class battleships, Churchill denounced them as ‘Floating coffins. Unsafe to face any modern vessels or air attack.’ Pound replied that any increase in their armour would produce bulges that would reduce their speed to 15 knots, further reducing their value as ocean-going warships.

  ‘On 13 January last,’ Marshall wrote to Roosevelt on 5 May, ‘you authorized an increase in the enlisted strength of the Army to 3.6 million by 31 December 1942. Authorization for additional men in 1942 is now essential to our plans.’ In the intervening four months the Army had had to garrison the lines of communication to Australia, and rush reinforcements to Hawaii, Alaska and Panama. Anti-sabotage measures and enemy internment sucked in further troops. ‘The Bolero plan requires a material increase in special troops, eventually requiring some three hundred thousand men for the ground forces alone.’ Marshall therefore asked for another 750,000 men, making a total of 4.35 million, by January 1943.8

  Although Roosevelt did not reply to that immediately, the next day he sent his own memorandum to Marshall, Stimson, Arnold, King and Hopkins, which was not to be circulated beyond them. ‘I always think it well to outline in simple terms and from time to time complex problems which call for overall planning,’ he began. ‘Therefore I would like you gentlemen to read the following.’ Emphasizing that with ‘the world situation changing so rapidly’ the memorandum could only apply to the present time, it nonetheless set out future strategy from the very first sentence: ‘The whole of the Pacific Theater calls, at the present time, fundamentally for a holding operation.’ Two bombing offensives–against the Japanese mainland and its lines of communication–were desirable in the furtherance of ‘defence of all essential points’. Further west, the President believed ‘We can very nearly separate India and Burma into a separate theater of war.’ Here, the primary responsibility was British, but with the US assuring air connections with China and helping British armies in India.

  Roosevelt characterized the recapture of previously British-and Dutch-owned islands as ‘premature’. In the Near East and East African theatres, the responsibility was again British, although America ‘must furnish all possible matériel’ in Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and the Persian Gulf. Britain and America would split responsibility for the Atlantic, while ‘The principal objective is to help Russia,’ since ‘It must be constantly reiterated that Russian armies are killing more Germans and destroying more Axis matériel than all the twenty-five United Nations put together.’ (At that time the phrase ‘United Nations’ was shorthand for the global anti-Axis coalition, and had nothing to do with the post-war multilateral organization.) The President then brought up the possibility, once they had air superiority, of fast Commando raids and week-long ‘super-Commando operations’ of up to fifty thousand men on the Continent, and finally ‘a permanent front’ big enough to ensure that it was not ‘pushed into the sea’.9

  While the Pacific, Indo-Burmese and Near East theatres all required merely to maintain existing positions ‘for the next few months’, Roosevelt opined, the Atlantic theatre needed ‘active operations to be conducted in 1942. I fully realize difficulties in relation to the landing of armed forces under fire,’ he wrote. Nonetheless, ‘The necessities of the case call for action in 1942–not 1943.’ Roosevelt concluded: ‘If we decide that the only large scale offensive operation is to be in the European area, the element of speed becomes the first essential.’ This memorandum would have come as no surprise to Marshall–who would probably have been forewarned of it by Hopkins–and it merely reiterated his own Germany First views on grand strategy. However for the US Navy, and especially for Admiral King, it represented a serious reverse to their Pacific ambitions, at least in the medium term.

  Nonetheless there were also alarming implications for Marshall in Roosevelt’s memorandum. While seeming to reaffirm his own Memorandum, it actually contained a bombshell that threatened it profoundly. The phrase ‘action in 1942–not 1943’ effectively meant
that the British could ultimately decide where the first military blow against Germany and Italy fell, just as Brooke was starting to consider outright opposition to Sledgehammer and having severe doubts about an early Roundup. Since the British had an effective veto on both operations, which could only be staged from the United Kingdom, Roosevelt’s insistence on ‘action in 1942’ handed over the final say to Churchill and Brooke. Seeing the President’s memorandum in terms of his turf war with Admiral King, Marshall seems to have failed–at least for the moment–to spot what for him would soon be a far more dangerous portent.

  Meanwhile, in London, Brooke had to consider who should be in charge of any cross-Channel attack were one to take place that September. ‘We have to nominate commanders now and make plans for conversion for forces to an offensive basis on a phased programme which at the outset must still take account of the possible revival of the invasion threat,’ said Kennedy, ever the professional Planner. ‘Staffs have to be reorganized and augmented and arrangements coordinated with the Americans. We have considered whether we could get a Supreme Commander appointed in order to obviate a soviet of Commanders–Army, Navy and Air Force and American and British.’