Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Mountbatten told his hosts frankly that, since the Germans had twenty-five divisions in France, however hard-pressed Russia might be she would not be aided by a massacre of Allied troops there. Roosevelt replied that he did not want to accumulate one million American troops in Britain if all they were going to do was form a home guard while British troops fought in the Middle East and India.24 Shoring up the British Empire was not the proper role of the US Army, he implied. Nonetheless, Mountbatten could spot a chink between Roosevelt’s and Marshall’s views on future operations, and he encouraged Churchill and Brooke to come over to try to widen it.

  ‘Lord Mountbatten was closeted with Roosevelt for five hours,’ noted a highly suspicious Wedemeyer. ‘I understand that no American officer was present…Now we had an extremely articulate Britisher endeavouring to raise bogeys about the hazards of a cross-Channel operation.’25 Although Wedemeyer was chronically suspicious of British motives on most occasions–he joked that he would never meet a British officer without a witness being present–he was right to be on this occasion.

  Mountbatten’s report of his White House meeting, which according to his aide Commodore John Hughes-Hallett had in fact lasted six hours, indicated that Roosevelt had agreed with him that there were not enough landing craft to mount a Sledgehammer sufficiently powerful to force Germany to take pressure off Russia. Yet the President still wanted the British to make some sort of landing, in order to damage German morale. Furthermore, he was ‘resolutely opposed to sending a million men to England on the off-chance that Roundup’ would be launched. Roosevelt wanted absolute guarantees of an attack by 1 April 1943, but Mountbatten spotted that in Roundup’s absence the President was much more sympathetic than his advisers to the idea of landings in North Africa.26 Mountbatten flew back via Montreal and went straight to Chequers, where he was kept up until 4 a.m. reporting to Churchill. He then made it to the Chiefs of Staff meeting at 9.30 a.m., and worked a full day until 9.30 p.m.

  Here was the news for which Churchill had been waiting and hoping. Alerted that there might be a chance of splitting Roosevelt off from Marshall over Sledgehammer and an early Roundup, and guiding him instead towards North Africa–where Rommel was once again on the offensive–Churchill leapt. ‘In view of the impossibility of dealing by correspondence with all the many difficult points outstanding,’ he telegraphed the President, ‘I feel it is my duty to come to see you. I shall hold myself ready to start as weather serves from Thursday 18th onwards, and will advise you later. I shall bring the CIGS, General Brooke, whom you have not yet met, with me, also General Ismay.’

  The need for an American attack in North Africa could not have been more pressing. On 10 June Churchill had held a two-hour Staff Conference on Middle Eastern strategy, saying that he doubted Auchinleck’s offensive spirit–‘I don’t know what we can do for that Army, all our efforts to help them seem to be in vain’–and complaining that the one hundred thousand Commonwealth soldiers defending Egypt ‘all come up for their rations but not to fight’. These were terrible libels on the British Army, and Brooke regarded it as his duty to defend his men. Just before he went to bed, he told his friend and aide-de-camp Barney Charlesworth, who shared his flat in London, ‘Well, that is one of the bloodiest days I have had for a long time.’27

  Three days later, having lost 230 tanks, British forces withdrew to the Sollum–Sidi Omar Line near the Libyan frontier with Egypt. Churchill cabled Auchinleck to say ‘he presumed there was no question in any case of giving up Tobruk’, for, ‘as long as Tobruk was held, no serious enemy advance into Egypt was possible’. Auchinleck replied the following day that he had no intention whatever of doing so. Taking time off from weeding and hoeing the long herbaceous border at his country home, Thatched Cottage, near Northam in Sussex, Alec Cadogan wrote of Rommel’s victories: ‘I suppose he’s a very good general, but I am quite convinced that our own (including CIGS) are blockheads, who cannot learn anything.’ It was a rare criticism of Brooke, and probably prompted by frustration at the lack of success in the Western Desert rather than by genuine doubts about his intelligence.

  June 1942 was the worst month of the war so far for Allied shipping losses, with 83 per cent of the tonnage lost through U-boat action, and 60 per cent in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Marshall wrote to King in mid-June, ‘The losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard and in the Caribbean now threaten our entire war effort,’ pointing out that 22 per cent of the bauxite fleet and 3.5 per cent of all tanker tonnage had been lost in that month alone. King replied two days later that the US had little in the way of anti-submarine forces and that convoys would be used as ‘the only way that gives any promise of success’. It was far too late in the conflict for him to be discovering that, given how valuable convoys had been in the Great War.

  Pound meanwhile had to announce to the War Cabinet that he was not very hopeful of a convoy being able to reach Malta at all. That island had been heavily bombed by Axis planes based in Sicily, yet holding it was vital in order to interdict resupply of the Afrika Korps from Italy. Churchill answered that this was ‘Grave; have another shot. Lie [to the press]; say all important stores got in.’ In the previous week alone thirty-six ships had been sunk, with the loss of 225,000 tons in eight days, and the losses were getting more widespread. Brooke then went through the ‘two distinct phases’ of the battle then being fought at Bir Hacheim and Knightsbridge, which had forced the British withdrawal. Churchill said this did not strengthen ‘the case for passive defence’. He expressed anxiety about Auchinleck’s lack of reserves and said that the Eighth Army seemed to have been ‘outmanoeuvred and outfought’ and had ‘lost the battlefield’, estimating Rommel as having only 150 tanks.

  Photographic Insert

  1. The Masters and Commanders at the Casablanca Conference, January 1943

  Back row from left to right: General Brehon Somervell, General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, Admiral Ernest J. King, Lieutenant-General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, General George C. Marshall, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, General Sir Alan Brooke, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, Rear-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten. Front row: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill

  2. General John J. ‘Black Jack’ Pershing and his aide-de-camp, Colonel George C. Marshall, in France in 1919

  3. Alan Brooke in the uniform of a lieutenant of the Royal Horse Artillery, 1910

  4. Without entourage or even a detective, Winston Churchill arrives at Downing Street for a Cabinet meeting on 15 May 1940, two days after his ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ speech

  5. President Roosevelt telling Congress about the attack on Pearl Harbor the previous day, 7 December 1941, which he memorably dubbed ‘a date which will live in infamy’

  6. Churchill and Roosevelt meet for the first time since 1918, on board the USS Augusta on 9 August 1941, during the top secret Riviera Conference. Roosevelt is receiving a letter from King George VI. From left to right: Averell Harriman (right hand in pocket, smiling), King (right hand in pocket, head turned), Churchill, unidentified naval officer, Franklin Roosevelt Jr, Sumner Welles, Captain John R. Beardall USN, President Roosevelt and Captain Elliot Roosevelt.

  7. ‘The tremendous hold the Limeys have on Our Boy’: Churchill making a point, which Roosevelt is enjoying, on board HMS Prince of Wales at Placentia Bay on 14 August 1941

  8. Marshall, Churchill and US Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson watch a mass demonstration of paratroopers at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, on 24 June 1942

  9. Alan Brooke’s lunch for Marshall at the Savoy Hotel in July 1942. From left to right: Portal, Pound, Marshall and Brooke

  10. Harry Hopkins, General Mark Clark, President Roosevelt and General Dwight D. Eisenhower eat lunch from mess kits after inspecting American troops in North Africa on 31 January 1943

  11. Eisenhower and Marshall meet in Algiers, 3 June 1943

  12. Churchill, recuperating from pneumonia in his blue and gold bedragonned dressing gown on Christmas Day 1943 in Ca
rthage. On the steps behind him, Eisenhower and General Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland Wilson, are, from left to right, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, unidentified soldier, Admiral Sir John Cunningham, General Sir Harold Alexander, Major-General Sir Humfrey Gale, Brigadier Leslie ‘Joe’ Hollis and General Walter Bedell Smith

  13. Generals George S. Patton (note the pearl-handled revolver), Omar Bradley and Bernard Montgomery smiling together in France. Their intense rivalry suggests the photograph was highly posed

  14. The Combined Chiefs of Staff at Casablanca, January 1943. Note Brooke’s jabbing finger. Brigadier Vivian ‘Dumbie’ Dykes, the dark-haired moustachioed man near the top left of the photograph, has only a few more days to live

  15. At Allied HQ in North Africa on 8 June 1943. From left to right around Churchill are Anthony Eden, Brooke, Tedder, Andrew Cunningham, Alexander, Marshall, Eisenhower and Montgomery

  16. A Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting at the First Quebec Conference, codenamed Sextant, in August 1943. From the left: Brooke, Brigadier-General John R. Deane, Arnold, Marshall, Admiral William Leahy and Pound

  17. The Château Frontenac hotel towers over the Second Quebec Conference, codenamed Octagon, in September 1944. Sitting at the nearby Citadel are, from left to right: Clementine Churchill, the Earl of Athlone, President Roosevelt, HRH Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Prime Minister of Canada, William Mackenzie King

  18. Churchill and Roosevelt greet each other at the Second Quebec Conference, 1944

  19. Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Andrew Cunningham, Brooke, Portal and Ismay at Quebec, 1944

  20. Planning campaigns in smoke-filled rooms: the British Joint Planning Staff at the Château Frontenac in September 1944, Quebec Conference. Lieutenant-Colonel Aubertin Mallaby is sixth from the left

  21. Marshall’s stepson, Lieutenant Allen Tupper Brown, who was killed by a German sniper near Rome in May 1944

  22. Brooke (centre) and his friend, flatmate and aide-de-camp, Barney Charlesworth, during exercises in October 1941. Charlesworth was later killed in an air crash in February 1945

  23. Churchill with his friend and surrogate uncle Field Marshal Jan Smuts on the lawn of the British Embassy in Cairo in August 1942; behind them are Tedder and Brooke

  24. Churchill’s chief of staff, ‘Pug’ Ismay, thanks a lady called Hildegarde for singing a song about England, 1942

  25. The Anglophobic General Albert C. Wedemeyer with General Marshall: he bugged his office desk to record British officers’ indiscretions, with Marshall’s knowledge

  26. General Sir Archibald Wavell at the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, with the American General Joseph W. Stilwell, another Anglophobe

  27. The British Chiefs of Staff on the eve of Victory in Europe: Cunningham, Brooke (with jabbing finger in motion) and Portal in April 1945

  28. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff: Leahy, Arnold, King and Marshall in a celebratory mood at the end of the War

  29. Lawrence Burgis of the War Cabinet secretariat, who took verbatim notes of the War Cabinet throughout the conflict, and his friend Brigadier Leslie ‘Jo’ Hollis in the Map Room of the Cabinet War Rooms

  30. Major-General John Kennedy, Director of Military Operations and later Assistant Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who had much in common with his boss Alan Brooke, including keeping a forthright daily diary

  31. Major-General Thomas Handy, Marshall’s assistant chief of staff, whose recollections shed light on the inner workings of the Operations Division of the US Army after 1942. A letter from Sir John Dill to General Marshall lies on his desk

  Churchill then went into the history of the training of the 10th Armoured Division and instructed the CIGS ‘to look into counter offensive at first possible date’, accepting that there had been ‘Not a lot of change in the actual positions. Total advance of Germans has not been very great after three weeks fighting.’ Many of these criticisms accorded with Brooke’s own view, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that, even at these great crisis moments of the war, Brooke was confining his fury to his diary rather than openly rowing with the Prime Minister.

  In response to the Lidice massacre in Czechoslovakia–where the Germans had shot 181 innocent villagers and taken away forty-nine women to be gassed at Ravensbruck, in revenge for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia–Churchill reported a conversation he had had with the Czech leader, Eduard Beneš, ‘about the possibility of reprisals for the savage cruelties now being practised by Germans in Czechoslovakia’. Churchill ‘Suggested wiping out German villages (three for one) by air attack’, and proposed that one hundred bombers would be required to drop incendiaries from low levels in bright moonlight on three unprotected German villages, with the reason announced afterwards. If it was ‘thought worthwhile’ by the Cabinet, Churchill said he would give the RAF discretion to carry out such a raid ‘to fit it in when they can’. As might be expected, this prompted a lively debate.

  Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary for Air, thought it a diversion from proper military objectives, as well as an unnecessary risk to RAF planes and crews. Attlee doubted whether ‘it is useful to enter into competition in frightfulness with the Germans’. The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, considered the likelihood of reprisals on English villages which had no air-raid sirens or shelters. He feared the public would say: ‘Why have you drawn this down on us?’ Eden approved of ‘the deterrent element’ and Bevin argued that ‘Germany responds to brute force and nothing else,’ whereas Stanley Bruce, the Australian High Commissioner, feared that it might lead to even greater atrocities in Czechoslovakia. The Lord President of the Council, John Anderson, was opposed because ‘It costs us something and them nothing.’ Brendan Bracken and the Colonial Secretary Lord Cranborne were also opposed. ‘My instinct is strongly the other way,’ said Churchill. The Secretary for India, Leo Amery, asked: ‘Why a village? Why not a residential town?’, but the Lord Privy Seal, Sir Stafford Cripps, said that the operational argument against such a reprisal raid was very strong. ‘I submit (unwillingly) to the view if the Cabinet are against,’ concluded Churchill.28

  After a report from Brooke on the Levant–Caspian front, where Churchill said ‘We’re not very strong–we’ve only two men and a boy there, and Libya has lost us some face again,’ the discussion got round to public morale. Churchill told the Cabinet that it was ‘Likely the news for next months will cure undue optimism,’ and there would be ‘No practical change on the Second Front which newspapers think so easy’. Bracken reported that a Second Front was being demanded at public meetings all over the country. ‘Can’t be helped,’ replied Churchill, ‘but ministers should be careful–the less said the better.’ As for the demonstrations themselves, he felt that the ‘Important thing is to make clear that close relations with Russia does not involve coddling our Communists.’29

  In Libya, meanwhile, the South African brigades had retreated from Gazala into Tobruk. The 50th Division were stranded behind the German lines and feared lost, orders for their withdrawal having been sent too late. ‘CIGS tells me however that Winston thinks this movement a piece of fine generalship,’ wrote Kennedy, whose own view was that it was ‘a piece of bad bungling’, not least because the Germans were claiming to have captured twelve thousand prisoners. Kennedy put the episode down to bad British and good German generalship, the inferior quality of British to German tanks in both manoeuvrability and firepower (British tanks were mostly armed with a 2-pounder gun against the German 41/2-pounder). ‘Winston has been especially wrongheaded throughout this battle,’ opined Kennedy. ‘There has been a stream of telegrams from him, practically none of which should have been sent by a PM. These telegrams have not been the result of calmly considered advice from the Chiefs of Staff.’ It was true that Churchill had deluged Auchinleck with questions, such as that of 14 June, ‘To what position does Ritchie want to withdraw the Gazala troops?’, and exhortations such as ‘This is a
business not only of armour but of will-power,’ but these hardly affected the outcome of the struggle.

  The usual procedure was for Churchill to draft telegrams and then get agreement for them over the telephone, which Kennedy considered ‘dangerous’, because ‘although he appears to be covered in each step by professional advice, the general trend of strategy is too much influenced by his personality.’ If the battle went well, the directives and orders he constantly issued ‘would give the impression that he had directed all operations successfully as a sort of Commander-in-Chief’. Yet if they went awry, ‘he as PM is bound to be in a very bad position.’

  Churchill’s plans for the reconquest of Burma Kennedy thought ‘quite impractical because the resources…are not even in sight. But he bores away at it.’ Equally, Operation Jupiter was ‘impractical from the naval, air and army points of view…out of the question. Yet Winston has been pressing it and wasting our time on it for several weeks.’ In Kennedy’s view the most dangerous matter of all was Churchill’s pressure on Auchinleck to hold Tobruk under any circumstances. He spoke to Brooke about how, back in April 1941, Wavell had taken the decision to defend Tobruk, and that it had come right owing to the unexpected withdrawal of German forces–especially Luftwaffe–to the Russian front. Yet now he felt that for all of Tobruk’s obvious importance to the defence of Egypt it could only be held at too high a cost, especially to the Navy, in view of its long desert perimeter. ‘If we are to lose it,’ he advised the CIGS, ‘it is better to lose it without throwing away a big garrison at the same time.’ Yet he feared that its political value would weigh too heavily with Churchill to permit evacuation.