Brooke was against the idea, ‘because he does not think the man could be found. Or if he could it would be somebody like MacArthur who would be more of a nuisance than anything else.’ Brooke’s distaste for an early operation left him feeling that if anyone should be making the running in terms of organization, it should be Marshall. (He was to alter his view of Douglas MacArthur, who by the end of the war he considered the finest Allied commander of them all, a view perhaps aided by the fact that he was operating more than ten thousand miles away.) Kennedy put the opposing view over the issue, saying that, since plans were obviously taking definite shape over in Washington, any future commander could be handed plans for whose execution he would be responsible even though he had not been party to drawing them up. Kennedy told Brooke that such a problem ‘would of course be solved if he himself or one of the other Chiefs of Staff, who had seen the plan grow up, took charge’, but Brooke failed to rise to the bait, merely restating his view ‘that at the moment we should only get Marshall or MacArthur if we pressed it and that would not help’.10 This is the only recorded occasion in the war that Brooke was dismissive of Marshall by name in front of someone else.
On 26 May 1942 Churchill asked for the construction of special piers that could unload supplies from ships during an invasion of France. ‘They must float up and down with the tide,’ he minuted. ‘The anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out.’ Planning for the vast ‘Mulberry’ harbours and the Pipeline Under The Ocean (PLUTO) was thus put in motion a full two years before D-Day, testament to British commitment to an eventual return to the Continent. Nonetheless, two days later Churchill sent Roosevelt a couple of telegrams setting out his doubts about any cross-Channel attack in 1942, and in support of the old Operation Ajax attack on Norway (now rechristened Jupiter), which he hoped would address the President’s concerns about helping Russia. In the first he wrote: ‘We must never let Gymnast pass from our minds. All other preparations would help if need be towards that.’ In the second he went into the three great difficulties that Brooke felt worked against an early Sledgehammer and what Churchill now called ‘Super-Roundup’, namely the Luftwaffe’s command of any paratroop landing sites, the lack of landing craft–only 383 would be operational by August 1942 and 566 the next month–but most importantly the American contribution, which would not be up to strength until 1943.
Churchill reported to Roosevelt that he had told the visiting Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov that it was ‘the earnest resolve of the British Government to see what could be done this year to give the much needed support to the valiant Russian armies’, but had significantly added that ‘It was unlikely that any move we could make in 1942, even if it were successful, would draw off large numbers of enemy land forces from the Eastern Front.’11 From this, Roosevelt could have been left under no misapprehension about Churchill’s and Brooke’s profound doubts about Sledgehammer.
On his return to Washington from Modicum in April, Marshall had appointed Eisenhower to command all American forces in the European Theater of Operations. Eisenhower then flew to London. In his diary for 28 May, he recorded a meeting on Roundup in which Brooke ‘outlined the position in detail’, stressing the need for agreement on a supreme commander ‘at an early date’. As we have seen, this was probably a bluff, as Brooke was in no hurry over anything to do with attacking the Continent. Eisenhower replied that any operation taking place in 1942 would ‘be under British command, with our forces attached to the British in suitable capacities’.12 He went on to say that Marshall might be prepared to accept Mountbatten as the commander, which was unlikely to commend itself to Brooke, who was sceptical about Mountbatten’s abilities.
Eisenhower noted, ‘It is quite apparent that the question of high command is the one that is bothering the British very much and some agreement, in principle, will have to be reached at an early date in order that they will go ahead wholeheartedly into succeeding steps.’ The fact that Eisenhower had written of ‘the assault echelon of Bolero’ rather than Roundup, just as Churchill had written of ‘Super-Roundup’, is indicative of the severe nomenclature confusions that both allies were soon to experience over the codenames of these three distinct but almost overlapping operations.
The next day Kennedy met Eisenhower for the first time and found him ‘a very pleasant, intelligent and forceful character’, as did almost everybody. They discussed the maps in their offices. On Kennedy’s, ‘America is shown twice in order that one may realize the size of the Pacific, the usual maps being cut through the middle of the Pacific.’ Eisenhower said he did the same thing, but as Kennedy, a son of the Empire, observed with astonishment: ‘He had had his map cut through India because that was the place in which he was least interested!’ Brooke also liked Eisenhower, and was greatly amused when Ike quoted one of his young Staff officers telling him: ‘Well, you know sir, there are two things in which, from the beginning of time, amateurs have always considered themselves experts–one is military strategy and the other is prostitution.’13
The same day that Eisenhower met Kennedy, Molotov arrived at the White House at 4 p.m. for a series of meetings that lasted until after midnight. The next day he was back to see the President, Hopkins, Marshall and King, with interpretation undertaken by Vladimir Pavlov and Samuel H. Cross, the Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard. In answer to the Soviet Foreign Minister’s long and impassioned request for a Second Front in 1942 to draw off forty German divisions from the USSR, Roosevelt asked Marshall ‘whether developments were clear enough so that we could say to Mr Stalin that we were developing a Second Front’. Marshall replied, ‘Yes, Mr President.’ Then Roosevelt ‘authorized Mr Molotov to inform Mr Stalin that we expect the formation of a Second Front this year’.14
There was a good deal of theatre to all this, since the President knew perfectly well what had been agreed the previous month in London. Yet after his reception there, where Churchill and Brooke gave no such cast-iron commitment, Molotov could have been forgiven for assuming that there were divided counsels among the Western Allies, and that it was the Americans who were driving the idea forward. The fact that this was true does not make it any less reprehensible of Roosevelt for promising something that was still in its early developmental stages and which Churchill had recently downgraded in his telegram. For all the kudos that the Americans gained from the Soviets over the British by this play-acting, the President had set the Allies up to disappoint Stalin when no Second Front emerged in France either in 1942 or in 1943. Of course it could not have happened had Churchill and Brooke been more straightforward with Marshall about the genuine likelihood of any operation in the near future.
Marshall outlined to Molotov what seems to have been a hybrid Sledgehammer–Roundup operation, emphasizing that the transport difficulties ‘were complicated by the necessity of sending tonnage to Murmansk’. He laid out his strategic vision, which was ‘To create as quickly as possible a situation on the Continent under which the Germans would be forced into an all-out air engagement, but they will not engage on this scale without the pressure of the presence of our troops on the ground.’ He envisaged shipping enough men across the Channel ‘to provoke an all-out battle for the destruction of the German air force’.15 Under this idea, Cherbourg was intended as a kind of honey-trap, to draw in the Luftwaffe to its destruction by squadrons based in the Channel Islands, the Cotentin Peninsula and mainland Britain.
At the end of Molotov’s visit, Roosevelt issued a communiqué to the press which included the fateful words: ‘Full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent task of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942.’16 This raises the question whether he genuinely believed a Second Front was still possible, or whether he merely wished to placate Molotov. Did he hope to calm public opinion rather than inflame it with such a remark? Or did he hope such a promise might encourage the British to plan more proactively? We do not know. It is one of the many aspects of America’s enigmati
c commander-in-chief that historians continue to debate. The most likely explanation was that given by Ian Jacob to Chester Wilmot in the spring of 1948: ‘Roosevelt went much too far in his assurances to Molotov and did so without reference to us and on the strength of what Marshall told him.’17 Since Marshall only told him what Churchill had explicitly told him at the key Defence Committee on the evening of 14 April, Churchill was effectively deceiving the Russians by proxy, as an unexpected by-product of misleading the Americans about Britain’s true enthusiasm for Sledgehammer and an early Roundup.
Molotov flew back to London from Washington. Although Churchill did not want to put his name to a ‘full understanding’ for ‘a Second Front in Europe in 1942’, Roosevelt had effectively sold the pass, and just such an Anglo-Soviet communiqué was indeed released on 11 June. At the same time, Churchill gave Molotov an aide-mémoire in front of his colleagues in the Cabinet Room which stated that, although the Allies were making preparations for a landing in August or September 1942, the shortage of landing craft meant that ‘We can therefore give no promise in the matter.’ Molotov did not care about this private caveat, having secured the all-important public declaration. As he later pointed out, he did not think that the Western powers would create a Second Front in 1942, but their promise to do so had immense political and propaganda potential once they had reneged upon it for two calendar years running. ‘This undermined faith in the imperialists,’ he wrote. ‘All this was very important to us.’ For all that Roosevelt would have been outraged at being classed as an imperialist, that was of course how both the Western Allies were regarded by the veteran Bolshevik.
Meanwhile Roosevelt told Churchill that he had ‘got on a personal footing of candor and of friendship as well as can be managed through an interpreter’. This was again frankly naive, as Molotov was notoriously lacking in either candour or friendship with foreigners, which could carry with it a death sentence, even in Stalin’s closest circle. Roosevelt added: ‘I am more anxious than ever that Bolero proceed to definite action beginning in August and continuing so long as the weather holds.’ Changes were made to this draft by Hopkins who cut the words after ‘beginning’ and inserted ‘in 1942. We all realize that because of weather conditions the operation cannot be delayed until the end of the year.’18 While resiling from the August date, therefore, Roosevelt and Marshall still hoped to keep to 1942, or at least they wanted Brooke and Churchill to think that they still supported that date. Since the weather in the English Channel in autumn is notoriously changeable, in effect Hopkins’ altered wording mattered little.
Delivering the graduation speech at West Point on Sunday 31 May, Marshall further built up public expectations by announcing that ‘American troops are landing in England and will land in France,’ at which the Corps of Cadets let out ‘a mighty roar’ of cheering. He ended his address by saying: ‘We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming power on the other.’ He gave no timetable for the French operation, obviously, but this speech indelibly thereafter connected his name and reputation to an early cross-Channel operation.
Eisenhower returned from London on 4 June to report back to Marshall. He had met the Chiefs of Staff, Bernard Paget of Home Command, Bernard Montgomery of South-eastern Command and Archibald Nye, as well as all the most important Americans there, and he told his diary, ‘It is necessary to get a punch behind the job or we’ll never be ready by spring 1943 to attack. We must get going.’ That is also what he told Marshall, and a week later, after recording speculation that he might go over to command the US forces in whichever operation was chosen, he wrote in his diary: ‘The chief of staff says I’m the guy.’ With II Corps earmarked to be shipped over and Mark Clark as its commander, the man universally nicknamed Ike (except by Marshall) commented: ‘Now we really go to work.’
In May 1942, the US Army moved into the first half-million square feet of the Pentagon building, even though the $87 million construction project would not be complete until the following January. Previously the General Staff had worked in the Old Munitions Building, a temporary Great War structure on the Mall, so to provide security for the move soldiers were posted along the whole route from there, across the Fourteenth Street bridge, and through the fields to the vast new structure. The Army’s files were transported from the old building to the new in armoured cars. At a mile in circumference, the Pentagon was the largest building in the world at the time. With office space for forty thousand people it had been built in a little over a year, albeit with an accident rate four times the average for US building sites.19 The size of the edifice gave rise to jokes about how easy it was to get lost, such as the one about the pregnant lady who asked a Marine guard to help her get to a maternity hospital, saying it was an emergency as she was in labour. When he said that she shouldn’t have gone there in that condition, she replied: ‘When I came in here, I wasn’t.’
At a War Cabinet on Monday 1 June, Churchill ‘congratulated’ Portal and Bomber Command on the previous night’s raids, when 1,137 bombers had ‘left this island and almost as many go tonight’, describing the attacks as a ‘Great manifestation of air power. US like it very much. Give us bigger action again early next month.’ Portal replied that although fifty-one bombers had been lost, photographs taken over Cologne and the Rhine ‘show results are good’. In a reference to bombing Germany earlier in the war, Churchill had said that he did not see why ‘the disgusting stertorous slumber of the Boche should remain undisturbed,’ and on another occasion, urging that the size of bombs dropped on Germany be increased, he complained: ‘We might as well drop roasted chestnuts.’20
Pound had far less happy news; a convoy from Iceland to Russia had been very heavily mauled–of the thirty-five ships the Cabinet had chosen to send, six were sunk by bombers and one by a U-boat, with the overall loss of 147 tanks, 37 aircraft and 770 motor vehicles. Churchill wanted the next convoy postponed, but Eden pointed out the disastrous effect on Anglo-Russian relations that would result. Brooke, his forearms badly swollen after being stung trying to shake a swarm of bees off a branch that weekend, reported on the fighting taking part in that area of the Western Desert known as ‘Knightsbridge’.21 On 2 June, Lieutenant-General Sir Neil Ritchie, commander of the Eighth Army, was forced to abandon the Gazala Line, a series of fortified positions stretching 40 miles from Gazala on the coast to Bir Hacheim.
On the morning of Sunday 7 June, Churchill telephoned Eden at his seventeenth-century country house, Binderton, near Chichester in Sussex. Eden had stayed in bed to work on the contents of his red despatch boxes as it was too cloudy to enjoy gardening, and instead talked to the Prime Minister about the disappointing reports from Libya, which he admitted ‘depressed’ them both as Rommel appeared to be retaining the initiative. ‘I fear we have not very good generals,’ said Churchill. Eden recorded that the Prime Minister ‘was also depressed by the Chiefs of Staff’s sudden decision to cancel their own previous plans to take[a] certain place in north’, are ference to Trondheim. Churchill feared it was because of the ‘extreme reluctance’ of the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral Sir John Tovey, to continue sending convoys to Russia. ‘The politicians are much abused, but they get little help or inspiration from their service advisers’ was Churchill’s comment, to which Eden added, ‘It can hardly be denied.’22 Before this rather self-pitying conversation evokes too much sympathy, it ought to be pointed out that Operation Ajax/Jupiter had been a Churchillian idea that Brooke and all the Chiefs had always opposed equally doggedly.
Churchill was enormously cheered by the news that started to come in on 8 June about the great American naval victory at the battle of Midway, indicating that two Japanese carriers had been sunk and two damaged, prompting him to declare to the War Cabinet:
Losses at sea have produced signs of fear on part of the Japs–the Navy is a political force in Japan, which will perhap
s be more inclined to a restrictive and cautious policy. This policy might be in harmony with sending out submarine raiders. If we think of this as having an effect on the Jap situation, I think they will go for China and Chiang Kai Shek conquest. I don’t think they’ll try India or Australia. This gives us two or three months’ breathing-space. We must come to rescue of China–it would be an appalling disaster if China were forced out of the war and a new government set up. The General Staff should think of attacking lines of communication in Burma. If carrier losses are confirmed we can review the consequences of diminution of enemy forces. If Japan adopts conservative course it is a chance for us to get teeth into her tail.23
Brooke evidently agreed, as he answered that there was a ‘possibility of opening up the Burma Road in the next two or three months to land practical military aid’. Churchill answered: ‘Tell Chiang Kai Shek to hold the fort because we are coming next October or November.’ Asking for a report from Wavell, Churchill said: ‘The further removed from danger and fighting, the more dangers and responsibilities seem to weigh with officers,’ which might or might not have been a criticism of Wavell, or even of the Chiefs of Staff.
By mid-June 1942, Churchill desperately needed to know Roosevelt’s state of mind over Roundup and Sledgehammer. The man he cannily chose to sound him out was Lord Louis Mountbatten, who as director of combined operations had been promoted by Marshall as a possible commander for the operations, despite being a sceptic of Sledgehammer due to the paucity of landing craft. On 15 June, Mountbatten dined with the President and Harry Hopkins at the White House, but crucially, and to their chagrin, Marshall and King were not present. In post-war interviews, Marshall spoke of how Mountbatten used to go to him behind the backs of the British Chiefs of Staff, telling him privately how he supported various American stances that Brooke opposed. This time, however, he would very effectively undermine Marshall himself.
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