Only in one area would Kennedy give Churchill much credit, and this was over Roundup and Sledgehammer, where he said that ‘Winston was good on this in his talks with Marshall. We have got it established that nothing big is to happen this year unless the Germans begin to crack. The Americans are still in confusion and the Marshall plan for moving an enormous army over here is being disputed by the other Services in the USA. This will be the next big thing to clear up.’30 With the news Mountbatten had brought back post-haste from the White House, that was exactly what was about to happen.
Just before leaving for America, Brooke took the day off to go to the Farne Islands off Northumberland to photograph seabirds, but his dinghy overturned alongside the naval launch and his £250 camera was damaged by seawater. ‘Although his day was spoilt he could laugh about it,’ recorded Kennedy. Warned that it was very hot in Washington in June, Brooke managed to get a lightweight military suit and white denim jacket made in twenty-four hours, although there was no time for his impressive rows of medal ribbons to be sewn on to the suit, because at 11.30 p.m. on Wednesday 17 June he and Churchill flew from Stranraer to Washington in a BOAC flying-boat called the Bristol. Brooke later told Kennedy, who had been to school at Stranraer, that Churchill had walked along the pier there singing the Great War ditty ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’. According to Ismay, ‘Our Boeing flying-boat was the acme of comfort–plenty of room, full-length bunks, easy chairs, and delicious food…We were in the air for twenty-six hours at a stretch, but the time passed quickly and pleasantly.’
At 4.30 p.m. US time, still four hours from Washington, Churchill asked Commander Thompson for dinner to be served. On being told of the time difference, and that he was going to have dinner at the British Embassy that night, he replied: ‘I go by tummy time, and I want my dinner.’ He put his personal method of avoiding jet-lag more delicately in his war memoirs, stating: ‘I adhered to my rule in these flights that meals should be regulated by stomach time. When one wakes up after daylight one should breakfast; five hours after that, luncheon; six hours after luncheon, dinner. Thus one becomes independent of the sun, which otherwise meddles too much in one’s affairs and upsets the routine of work.’
Before they left they heard from Auchinleck that he intended to hold Tobruk, covered by fighters from the port of Sollum in Egypt, which pleased Churchill greatly. He also had time to write to the King, saying, ‘Sir, In case of my death on this journey I am about to undertake, I avail myself of your Majesty’s gracious permission to advise you that you should entrust the formation of a new Government to Mr Anthony Eden.’31
While the British party was in the air, a shocked Henry Stimson attended a meeting at the White House at which Roosevelt reopened the whole issue of cross-Channel operations. ‘The President sprung on us a proposition which worries me very much,’ the Secretary of War wrote afterwards. ‘It looked as if he was going to jump the traces after all that we had been doing in regard to Bolero and to imperil our strategy of the whole situation. He wants to take up the case of Gymnast again.’ Stimson hoped that the reason he was doing this was ‘in his foxy way to forestall trouble that is now on the ocean coming towards us in the shape of a new British visitor’, but he could not be sure.
The President’s new démarche in favour of Gymnast met with ‘robust opposition’ from his advisers. Marshall had already prepared a paper against it, as he had ‘a premonition of what was coming’. Stimson also ‘spoke very vigorously’.32 During what the War Secretary called ‘a disappointing afternoon’, the Navy were nothing like so vigorous. Marshall could begin to see he was about to find himself in a minority of one, unless he was able to bring Brooke over to his point of view.
Marshall’s paper stated that ‘The Gymnast Operation has been reexamined on the assumption of full French co-operation, utilizing British shipping, and the use of US troops only.’ Among many problems he identified were the lack of aircraft carriers and naval escorts for the convoys in the Atlantic, delays over reinforcements, and the late availability of US anti-aircraft units (ready in October) and air forces (December). ‘The operation is not possible unless Bolero is abandoned,’ he concluded, ‘or at best indefinitely postponed.’
Furthermore, since the Gymnast operation involved occupying North-west Africa with 220,000 US troops, comprising six divisions and air squadrons protected by the Navy, it was extremely worrying that Casablanca harbour could only accommodate a maximum of forty-three vessels, with no more than twelve capable of being unloaded at any one time. Marshall estimated it would take a month to disembark forty thousand troops with all their equipment and supplies, and so to land the entire force ‘would consume at least six months’, while of course the enemy would try to ‘bomb Casablanca during the early phases’. Furthermore, the use of scarce British shipping ‘would seriously affect’ the flow of vital reinforcements to the Middle East and to India, and so in the event of a Russian collapse ‘the resulting threat to the Middle East would require a maximum of British shipping to block a probable Axis advance into that theater’.
Marshall also believed that, although French co-operation and Spanish neutrality were ‘essential’, nothing suggested that either would be forthcoming. With so little in its favour, he seemed almost to be understating his case when he concluded: ‘It appears that this operation should not be undertaken in the present situation.’33 Stimson also drew up a strong defence of the Sledgehammer operation for Roosevelt–who had by then gone to Hyde Park–which Marshall copied to Arnold, McNarney and Eisenhower.
At 8.15 p.m. local time on Thursday 18 June, the flying-boat Bristol landed at the Anacostia naval airstation in Washington. The party were met at the airport by Halifax, Dill and Marshall and driven to the Lutyens-designed British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue where they sat down to a second dinner. Brooke later observed of Churchill: ‘As I had to share every one of these meals with him and they were all washed down with champagne and brandy, it became a little trying on the constitution.’34
When Churchill discovered that Roosevelt was at Hyde Park rather than Washington, he was ‘rather put out at the President being away, and inclined to be annoyed that he hadn’t been diverted to New York’. Halifax noted that ‘He got into a better temper when he had some champagne.’ The party was kept up till 1.30 a.m., with Lady Halifax ‘much impressed’ by the way that Brooke, Ismay, Moran and John Martin ‘all took advantage of the darkness on the porch to snatch bits of sleep while Winston talked’.35
The Second Washington talks, codenamed Argonaut, started on the morning of Friday 19 June, with Marshall conferring with Churchill at the Embassy. The Prime Minister then flew up to Hyde Park to stay with Roosevelt for the weekend, as Marshall telegraphed the President warning that ‘your guest…is pessimistic regarding Bolero and interested in August Gymnast and another similar movement in Norway.’ This forewarned FDR, although the destination of the second operation should certainly not have been mentioned en clair. Marshall meanwhile warned Stimson that Churchill ‘was full of discouragement and new proposals for diversions. Therefore the importance of a firm and united stand on our part is very important.’ It was not to be.
Roosevelt’s great-grandfather had moved to the Hyde Park area in 1818, and half a century later James Roosevelt–the President’s father and seventh in a line of Roosevelts who were prominent in New York City–bought the Springwood estate there. They were not ostentatious, and James lived the equine, estate-management and hunting-based life of an English country squire. Franklin Roosevelt had been born at Springwood and had spent his boyhood there, privately tutored until the age of fourteen, before attending Groton, Harvard and (briefly) Columbia Law School.
Although it had been built as a farmhouse around 1800, FDR turned Springwood into a country house in 1915 by adding two substantial wings and extensively redesigning the rest, largely using his mother’s money. He adored the place, and returned there no fewer than two hundred times during his presidency. The house is still k
ept as it was during his last stay in March 1945, complete with the telephone in his bedroom that used to be connected straight through to the White House.
Because it was unchanged from his death, and opened to the public a year later, it is possible today to view the rooms where the two men planned the outlines of Allied grand strategy very much as they were then. Churchill would doubtless have felt at home seeing the large collection of seafaring prints on the hallway walls, at least until he noticed that they mostly commemorate the War of 1812. Elsewhere in the hallway a 1783 Isaac Cruikshank cartoon illustrates British Valour and Yankee Boasting and another The Fall of Washington 1814.
A beautiful panelled library extends the entire southern width of the house, with a large marble fireplace flanked by two high-backed chairs commemorating Roosevelt’s gubernatorial term in New York. Churchill stayed in the Pink Bedroom immediately on the right of the top of the staircase, one of many guest bedrooms in the thirty-five-room house. At one point on this trip, driving Churchill around the estate in his specially adapted Ford, FDR–who was 6 foot 3 inches tall and weighed 190 pounds–invited Churchill to feel his biceps, which were tremendously powerful.
The two men had much to discuss besides the cross-Channel versus North African operations, and reached full agreement for complete co-operation over the project to build and deploy the atomic bomb. While at Hyde Park, Roosevelt received a ten-point letter from Stimson, which had the unanimous endorsement of Marshall and his Staff, and which argued vigorously that an early Second Front in Europe was the best way of ‘keeping the Russian Army in the war and thus ultimately defeating Hitler’. Despite the Axis powers controlling every other ‘feasible landing spot’ on the Continent, ‘By fortunate coincidence one of the shortest routes to Europe from America led through the only safe base not yet controlled by our enemies, the British Isles.’ Hence Bolero, which Stimson described as ‘an essentially American project, brought into the war as the vitalizing contribution of our fresh and unwearied leaders and forces’. He listed its advantages as not requiring carrier-based air cover, and as being launched from a site that did not need time spent on its development and fortification and where ‘we could safely develop air superiority’. Furthermore, ‘Geographically and historically, Bolero was the easiest road to the centre of our chief enemy’s heart…Over the Low Countries has run the historic path of armies between Germany and France.’36
Stimson argued that the sinking of four Japanese aircraft carriers at the battle of Midway earlier that month had alleviated the danger of raids on American aircraft factories, and (less credibly) that unrest in Occupied Europe was increasing. He believed that a German victory over Russia might lead to a German invasion of Britain, when it would be ‘imperative for us to push our forces into Britain at top speed’, which would be impossible if American shipping was ‘tied up with an expedition to Gymnast’. Moreover, Gymnast’s need for large-scale aircraft-carrier support ‘could not fail to diminish the superiority over Japan which we now precariously hold in the Pacific’.
As for the consideration of ‘other plans’–by which Stimson meant Gymnast–‘When one is engaged in a tug of war, it is highly risky to spit on one’s hands even for the purpose of getting a better grip.’ The tug of war he was referring to was against Britain, not Germany, as was clear from the next sentence: ‘No new plan should even be whispered to friend or enemy,’ which through a process of elimination meant Britain, since Roosevelt would hardly whisper American plans to the Nazis. Stimson ended by saying that Gymnast would detract from Bolero, and nothing should be allowed to do that.37 It was a formidable indictment, and it is easy to detect Marshall’s hand in helping to draw it up, not least because many of its points precisely mirrored those from Marshall’s own note to the President on the same subject.
Back in Washington on 19 June, Brooke and Marshall met in Room 240 of the Combined Chiefs of Staff Building at 12.30 p.m., along with a large gathering of British and American senior servicemen, including Vice-Admiral Horne (representing Admiral King), Arnold, Ismay, Dill, McNarney, Eisenhower, Clark, Rear-Admiral Charles ‘Savvy’ Cooke, Colonel Jacob, Lieutenant-General G. N. Macready and Dykes. It was the first time that Brooke had met Arnold, whom Ismay described as ‘a veteran airman, with an unlimited belief in air power’. He certainly was a veteran, having first flown with the Wright brothers themselves. Jacob found Arnold a ‘cherubic little man, with white hair and humorous blue eyes. Quick on the uptake and rather impatient.’ Wedemeyer thought he had ‘a good understanding of human beings and the use of air power. I think he was a great administrator…self-effacing, never a strutter.’38 Marshall was fortunate to have Arnold as his right-hand man on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Brooke reviewed the strategic situation, and told the Committee that ‘the object of the PM’s visit was to clear up a number of points which had been mentioned by the President in a conversation with Lord Mountbatten’. These all related to grand strategy for 1942 and early 1943. He then touched upon some broad areas, indicating the Chiefs of Staff’s views on each. Sometimes minutes of Staff meetings, especially those written with an eye to history, or inter-departmental struggles, or minimizing inter-Allied disagreement, or anything other than a strict record of what took place, can be as difficult to decipher as the hieroglyphics of Linear B. Yet at this meeting Brooke rattled through the strategic objectives straightforwardly, which were:
The importance of employing in an active theatre the United States forces which were being sent to England, and in this connection the fact that no operation in France might be possible in the event of a Russian collapse, permitting large German reinforcements to return to Western Europe.
The difficulties which would arise, in the event of the Russians being hard pressed, in establishing a Second Front in Western Europe in 1942 in accordance with our promises.
The possible establishment in late 1942 or the winter of 1942/3 of a bridgehead in the neighbourhood of Cherbourg or the Brest salient as a base for 1943 operations.
The possibility of carrying out some kind of Gymnast operation in 1942. The undertaking of offensive operations based on Australia against the Japanese.
Brooke stated that ‘The crux of the matter was the degree of reliance we could place on the Russian front holding,’ about which he was fairly confident, since ‘the Russians’ showing, both at Sevastopol and in the Kharkov area, was encouraging.’ If the Russians held, he argued, ‘our chances of a successful offensive on the Continent in 1943 were good, and the Middle East situation would be relieved, as there would be no German threat to the oil fields and the Persian Gulf and therefore our scale of reinforcements could be cut down’.
If the establishment of a Western Front was impossible in France in 1942, Brooke continued, ‘then some form of Gymnast should be considered and forces now set up for Bolero might be used.’ Consideration needed to be given to training, shipping and whether it ‘was to be undertaken entirely by the United States forces or on a combined basis’, which would be largely dependent on whether the Vichy French resisted. Unlike Marshall, Brooke believed it improbable that there would be a ‘rapid arrival of German forces through Spain’.
Brooke then went through the four options that the British Chiefs of Staff had been considering ‘aimed at relieving pressure on the Russians’. These were, ‘A landing in the Pas de Calais Area’, ‘Establishment of a Bridgehead at Cherbourg or the Brest Salient’, ‘Large Raids’ and ‘Operations in Northern Norway’. The first, even if undertaken by six divisions, Brooke believed would be ‘unlikely to achieve important results’, such as the diversion of significant German forces from the Eastern Front. The Cherbourg operation would require fifteen divisions, but was ‘worth further careful study’. Large raids were also being considered actively, even those intended to last two or three days.
As for Norway, the opportunity to free the northern convoy route of German aircraft was highly attractive, but it would mean keeping four-and-a-half divisions supp
lied north of Narvik. If it was going to be done, it had to be undertaken immediately because the most dangerous period was during the extremely short Arctic summer nights when the Luftwaffe could operate virtually around the clock. Brooke was similarly non-committal about Burma, saying that since five or six Japanese divisions were within easy reach of Rangoon, a seaborne attack there could not be undertaken ‘except simultaneously with some other offensive against the Japanese’, by which he meant ones undertaken in conjunction with the Americans.39
Brooke’s exposition was short–all over by lunchtime–but it set the agenda for the rest of the Argonaut discussions. Nothing was ruled out, and Gymnast was on the long list of possible operations. In the revised version of the minutes he inserted two other aspects that had not been in the originals, either because he had not in fact mentioned them at the meeting or because of stenographical error, most probably the former. These were: ‘The possibility of economizing shipping by dispatching substantial US forces direct to the Middle East rather than by reinforcing the Middle East by British forces from the UK’, and the fact that ‘It would be necessary during the present visit to give urgent consideration to the question of command arrangements for a Continental offensive’ (that is, of who was going to command Roundup).
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