After the war, Brooke added: ‘The President had no military knowledge and was aware of this fact and consequently relied on Marshall and listened to Marshall’s advice. Marshall never seemed to have any difficulty in countering any wildish plans which the President might put forward. My position was very different.’ Because Brooke conceived part of his duty as weaning Churchill off impractical schemes, which he sometimes needed to do in other ways than mere outright opposition, Brooke became ‘convinced that on many occasions Marshall imagined that I was in agreement with some of Winston’s wilder ideas; it was not easy for me to explain how matters stood without disloyalty to Winston. On several occasions I believe that Marshall thought that I was double crossing him.’51 He did indeed, and understandably so after Brooke’s apparent support for Roundup (with reservations) during the Modicum talks and then two months later coming out so strongly against it at the Argonaut Conference.
Lew Douglas, who as deputy director of the War Shipping Administration from 1942 to 1944 and US ambassador to London from 1947 to 1950 was in a good position to know, claimed after the war that Marshall thought Brooke had been dishonest over the date of cross-Channel operations, while Brooke ‘thought Marshall was being stupid. Marshall had the full support of Stimson and was bitter against Churchill.’52 This is a fascinating insight, quite at variance with all Marshall’s later encomia about Brooke’s integrity and gentlemanly behaviour. After the way that Brooke had seemed to change his tune, it was perhaps natural for Marshall to feel let down, indeed hoodwinked. Bitterness against Brooke, perhaps extending to Churchill too, would have been a reasonable enough reaction, though obviously not one that could have been much alluded to at the time or–for political reasons–for some time afterwards.
Whether or not Marshall was ever bitter, Wedemeyer certainly still was in 1958 when he wrote that ‘The insincerity of the British about Bolero–Roundup was ultimately to be exposed long after the war, when Sir Alan Brooke confessed that the promotion of Gymnast was specifically designed to stall the cross-Channel operation scheduled for 1943.’53 In fact Brooke never confessed any such thing, not least because that was not the rationale. Gymnast was promoted by Churchill and Roosevelt rather than Brooke; it was undertaken because Brooke and Churchill had concluded that both Roundup and Sledgehammer were impossible in 1942, and the politicians wanted definite military action in the calendar year 1942 for perfectly comprehensible political reasons. Brooke’s own preference was for Roundup in 1943 if possible, but of course a successful operation that helped finally to win the three-year, pendulum struggle along the length of the North African littoral was very welcome too, especially as late June 1942 saw Rommel forcing the Eighth Army into full retreat to Mersa Matruh, and Auchinleck taking over day-today command of the battlefield from Ritchie. Simultaneously, on the Eastern Front, the Germans scored some spectacular early successes in their summer offensive.
Soon after his return to Britain, Brooke sent Marshall a telegram thanking him ‘for all your kindness’ and expressing ‘the conviction that our discussions have gone a long way towards ensuring that close cooperation and understanding so essential between us in the execution of the task we are engaged in’. Marshall replied: ‘Greatly relieved that you have made a safe trip and deeply appreciate the gracious message just received from you. If nothing else was accomplished during the visit of the Prime Minister, I feel that the intimate accord and I believe understanding developed between us justified the trip. It was an honour to the Army to have you here and a great privilege to me.’ One wonders whether Marshall intended the deep ambiguity of the phrase ‘If nothing else was accomplished…’in quite the way that it read.
Brooke thought much had been accomplished, and told Kennedy back at the War Office that it was ‘a good thing in many ways’ that he and Churchill had been in Washington when the ‘bad news’ about Tobruk arrived, since ‘It was easier to explain things to the Americans by word of mouth than by telegram. The Americans showed a fine spirit and great eagerness to get into the war and particularly to help in the Middle East.’ Bolero would ‘go ahead with the movement over here at the greatest possible speed which is good’. As for Gymnast versus the cross-Channel projects, Brooke merely said that they ‘were discussed and put on a proper basis’.54
Although Marshall was enough of a soldier–politician to see the auguries clearly, he did not consider the battle for an early cross-Channel operation entirely lost, although he did deeply deprecate Gymnast, and Roosevelt’s support for it. Had he been offering to contribute more than around 700 of the 5,800 aircraft it was estimated that such a venture required, he would have been in a much stronger position to insist. Instead, he prepared to implore in London once more, and in person.
9
Torch Reignited: ‘A new and rather staggering crisis in our war strategy’ July 1942
If Rommel’s army were all Germans, they would beat us.
Winston Churchill, July 19421
‘The criticism of Sledgehammer is that we had so little and that it could virtually have been destroyed,’ argued George Marshall after the war. ‘This overlooks the fact that the Germans had little in the West and that little was of poor quality.’ It was true; the Germans had only twenty-five divisions ready to repel Sledgehammer in 1942, but over twice that number in France and the Low Countries in 1944. Marshall continued: ‘I thought I had a firm commitment on Roundup,’ but in Washington ‘the backing of the President weakened.’2
When considering German divisions, there is a severe problem comparing like with like. A full-strength panzer division simply cannot be compared with one just brought out of the line after heavy losses, and an elite division like the Grossdeutschland had little in common with a rear-areas security division; it would be like comparing the Guards Armoured Division with the Home Guard, and tells us next to nothing. Yet divisions are the standard currency of grand strategy, and have to be employed as such. Because German divisions were constantly being moved around the Reich, Russia, Africa and Occupied Europe during the war, and some were of superb fighting quality and well equipped while others were little better than militia, made up towards the end of the war of middle-aged men and adolescents, any statement of what the Allies might or might not have faced had they invaded France in 1942 or 1943, or even of what they did face on 6 June 1944, when there were around fifty-seven German divisions in France and the Low Countries, must be inexact. Although these fifty-seven divisions were clearly many more than the average of around twenty-five estimated to have been in France for much of 1942, they were smaller and weaker from losses sustained in the meantime.3 Intelligence reports on where German divisions were at any one time were necessarily inexact also.
It is vital, when considering the Allies’ attitudes towards cross-Channel operations, to try to remember that they did not know what we do today, that Operation Roundup (rebranded as Overlord) took place on 6 June 1944 and was a success. Amphibious operations generally did not have a happy history in British arms; indeed many had led to humiliating evacuations. Churchill was very conscious of this, telling Eden in July 1941: ‘Remember that on my breast are the medals of the Dardanelles, Antwerp, Dakar and Greece.’4 It was true. Churchill had been directly responsible for four of the worst amphibious operations and evacuations of both world wars, and while in his mood of self-decoration he might also by then have added Norway, Dunkirk and Crete.
Moreover, the number of German divisions stationed in France, and even their quality, was not really the essence, because until the spring of 1944 they always had strong reserves that could be rushed to wherever the coastal blow fell. In December 1961, J. R. M. Butler, the general editor of the Grand Strategy series of the Official History of the Second World War, wrote to Brooke to ask him to comment on one of the volumes then in production. In his reply, Brooke complained that one of the chapters failed to expound upon the geographical and communication factors that affected the German position. He explained his overall view of strategy and
thus his fundamental difference of view from Marshall. ‘Having been forced to fight on two fronts during the 1914–18 War’, he began, the Germans ‘had further developed their East–West communications with double railway lines and autobahns, to meet the possibility of being again forced to fight on two frontiers. They were capable of moving some six to eight divisions…simultaneously from East to West.’ Yet the Germans had far less easy manoeuvrability in southern Europe and the Mediterranean, where, he argued, the rail and road communications from northern France to southern Italy and the Mediterranean ‘were very poor. Furthermore, command of the sea gave us the power of selecting our point of attack at a suitable point on the outer circumference of German-and Italian-held territory.’ Brooke then lamented that he:
could not get either Marshall or Stimson to realize that operations across the Channel in 1942 and ’43 were doomed to failure. We should go in with half-trained divisions against a superior number of war-hardened German divisions and the Germans would have the facility of reinforcing that front at a rate of two to three divisions for every one we might put in. Any idea of a cross Channel operation was completely out of the picture during 1942 and ’43, except in the event of the German forces beginning to crack up, which was very unlikely.5
Samuel Eliot Morison was unconvinced by these arguments, pointing out in his Oxford lectures the various excellent north–south connections in southern Europe and especially Italy, where Field Marshal Kesselring was able to rush troops swiftly and effectively to Salerno and Anzio in 1943–4. There were also some who thought that Brooke was wrong in thinking that there was any great mass of reserves in Germany which could be called upon to repulse Sledgehammer or Roundup. One of these was the man theoretically best placed to know, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee throughout the war, who thought Brooke was always too pessimistic on this score and that the Germans were stretched to the limit on the Eastern Front and ‘substantially without reserves’ in central Europe.
Yet because each service had its own intelligence section, and each Chief of Staff was reading the Ultra decrypts that arrived from Bletchley Park every day, they were able to form views that were often at variance with those of Cavendish-Bentinck and the Joint Intelligence Committee, whose principal job was to collate all three services’ intelligence reports to see if any overall pattern emerged. The Joint Intelligence Committee therefore played a more minor role in the Second World War than its name suggests, and than it has in later conflicts.
Brooke was keen to scotch the assumption of so many American Planners that he was viscerally opposed to any cross-Channel operation ever taking place, something to which even Dwight Eisenhower’s war memoirs, Crusade in Europe, lent some credence. ‘A major factor in all American thinking at that time’, Eisenhower wrote, ‘was a lively suspicion that the British contemplated the agreed-upon cross-Channel concept with distaste and with considerable mental reservations concerning the practicability of ever conducting a major invasion of north-west Europe.’6 Just as politicians are advised never to use the word ‘never’, so the word ‘ever’ should be absent from grand strategy. (Strictly speaking, Eisenhower was right, however, because he was writing of a general ‘lively suspicion’ rather than saying it was justified.)
‘I was all for assembling US divisions in England to complete their training and in preparation for the ultimate cross-Channel operation,’ Brooke told Butler. ‘I could never get Marshall to appreciate the fact that the North Africa and Italian operations were all part of one strategy preparing for the final blow. I feel it is most important that our strategy should be looked on as one large whole, and not detached theatres, and one in which we made full use of our historical maritime strategy.’ Here, Brooke was using too much hindsight, as invading Italy was nowhere near the agenda on either the Modicum or Argonaut missions.
Until Germany was weakened by bombing and on the Eastern Front, and there was enough shipping available for a massive attack, Brooke was determined not to undertake anything more than large-scale raids, on places like Dieppe and Saint-Nazaire. Over the Second Front, David Fraser writes, ‘Churchill’s and Brooke’s minds were complementary, with the former producing the visionary, the latter the prosaic elements.’7
Meanwhile, Roosevelt made clear to American strategists–though not to the British–that he too had concerns about an over-hasty Roundup. ‘We were largely trying to get the President to stand pat on what he had previously agreed to,’ Marshall later said of this very trying period for him. ‘The President shifted, particularly when Churchill got hold of him…The President was always ready to do any sideshow and Churchill was always prodding him. My job was to hold the President down to what we were doing. It was difficult because the Navy was pulling everything toward the Pacific, and that’s where the Marines were, and they got a lot of publicity.’8 It was to try to break this seeming log-jam over future policy–with the cross-Channel operations stalled by the British and Gymnast opposed by the American military–that Marshall visited London again in July 1942, accompanied once more by Hopkins.
The historian Richard Overy has convincingly argued that because Britain had no large settler communities in the Mediterranean, nor vital economic interests, and took much of her oil from the New World by 1942–although she did need to deny Germany access to Middle Eastern supplies–‘The chief argument for Allied presence in the Mediterranean was that here they were fighting a corner of the war that they could win in 1942, against weak Italian forces, spiced up with a handful of German divisions and air squadrons. It was not a glamorous alternative, but it was a realistic one.’9 This went to the heart of the Anglo-American disagreements about whether to undertake Torch. If it was just a defensive measure to ‘close the ring’ around Germany while still relying on bombing and blockade for victory, the American OPD would be excused for concentrating strength in the Pacific instead. Yet if it was the vital first stage in clearing the North African littoral, turning the Mediterranean into an Allied lake and thus easing pressure on shipping, press-ganging hitherto neutral Turkey into a war that Italy was simultaneously being forced out of, then threatening the so-called ‘soft underbelly’ of southern Europe and drawing German divisions away from Russia, Torch could be absolutely integral to Germany First. Preparing for an eventual Roundup by these methods made much more sense to British strategists.
General Hull recalled that although the OPD had discarded plans for invading North Africa by mid-1942, ‘The British hadn’t though. They still had a problem in Africa and that was the area of principal concern to them. That’s the area where Churchill wanted to go. We tried our darnedest not to get into it but Mr Roosevelt decided that we would have to go into North Africa or someplace else and start fighting Germans face to face and that was why we agreed to go into there.’10 Many Americans, especially the Anglophobes of whom there then seems to have been no shortage in the OPD, assumed that Churchill and Brooke–proud sons of the Empire both–had ulterior imperialist motives for wanting Gymnast, namely the defence of the British Empire in Egypt and its interests in the Middle East.
Though no Anglophobe himself, Marshall astonishingly did not reprimand Albert Wedemeyer for installing a secret tape recorder in his office, one that he could activate with his knee from behind his desk. He later played Marshall a recording in which British officers from the Joint Planning Staff had made ‘unreasonable demands, while using big names like Roosevelt and Hopkins to intimidate me or influence my action. Marshall was extremely interested and advised me to record all future discussions, which I gladly did.’11 Wedemeyer claims he later also told Dill, who ‘was surprised, but sympathetic, too’. (There is no record of Dill warning any British Planners about this underhand activity.) Perhaps it was true that the British took advantage of the fact that American Planners were not always au fait with presidential intentions over grand strategy, but it was a devious thing for Wedemeyer to have done, and if the British had discovered it before the end of the wa
r it would have wrecked Anglo-American trust, especially if it had been revealed that Marshall had not forbidden such disgraceful behaviour.
On 1 and 2 July 1942, Churchill faced the House of Commons for a two-day debate on the fall of Tobruk. Supporting the motion ‘that this House…has no confidence in the central direction of the war’, the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan said that the War Cabinet as a whole should be able to meet the Chiefs of Staff ‘instead of the Prime Minister’. At this Churchill interjected: ‘They do.’ But Bevan continued: ‘Instead of the Prime Minister seeing them before the War Cabinet sees them. Because then the Prime Minister goes into the War Cabinet defending his own decisions.’ Churchill again interjected: ‘That is not true.’ In fact it was very substantially the case, because Staff Conferences very often preceded War Cabinets. Much less credibly another critic, Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, complained that Churchill was too easily swayed, and ‘could never be induced to override the advice of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, or to undertake any exercise, unless they were prepared to share fully with him in the responsibility’.12
Later on in the same debate, Churchill said he would ‘meet a complaint which I have noticed that the Minister of Defence [was] in Washington when the disaster of Tobruk occurred’. In fact, Churchill argued, still speaking of himself in the third person, ‘Washington was the very place where he should have been. It was there that the most important business of the war was being transacted.’ He prayed Brooke in aid: ‘When I left this country for the United States on the night of 17 June, the feeling which I had, which was fully shared by the CIGS, was that the struggle in the Western Desert had entered upon a wearing down phase, or a long battle of exhaustion, similar to that which took place in the autumn.’13
Masters and Commanders Page 30