The debate was not all bitter and hard fought; at one point the Prime Minister had the House roaring with laughter when he said of the prototype A-22 tank: ‘It had many defects and teething troubles, and when these became apparent the tank was appropriately christened “the Churchill”.’ The Government survived the debate easily–by 475 votes to 25–and the malcontents were well-known troublemakers, extremists or a combination of the bitter, disappointed and marginalized. Any senate of more than six hundred politicians will always be able to cobble together a couple of dozen professionally perverse members, even in wartime. After the debate, Roosevelt cabled Churchill just three words: ‘Good for you.’
On the second night of the debate, Churchill and his brother Jack dined with Eden, and the Prime Minister argued repeatedly that Britain had not done as well during the war as she should have, adding, ‘I am ashamed.’ They then discussed the problems of the Army, ‘its Trade Union outlook, paucity of talent, etc’.14 Churchill suggested ‘another journey’, probably a reference to his going out to the Middle East to see the situation for himself. When Eden deprecated this, saying he’d just get in the way, Churchill replied: ‘You mean like a giant bluebottle buzzing over a huge cowpat!’ Eden agreed that that was exactly what he meant.
Churchill employed humour regularly, and his words should not always be taken entirely literally. At a War Cabinet meeting in July 1942, when discussing the issue of what to do with the senior Nazis, Churchill said: ‘If Hitler falls into our hands we shall certainly put him to death. He was not a sovereign who could be said to be in hands of ministers, like the Kaiser. The man is the mainspring of evil. The best instrument to use would be the electric chair, which is used in America for gangsters and would no doubt be available on Lease Lend.’15 Churchill was serious about executing Hitler, of course, but probably not about the means, and certainly not because of the thrift involved.
Nor was it just the Nazis whom Churchill considered executing. ‘What led thirty thousand men to surrender at Tobruk?’ he asked the War Cabinet on 6 July. ‘Orders were given to generals not to surrender without express permission from home. Some order should be given that generals will be put on capital charge after the war if they surrender.’ This would include the Commander-in-Chief, although ‘some other generals should not be affected. Enquire about the four thousand tons of petrol Tobruk left undamaged.’16 General Nye answered that there was ‘no evidence’, but that a secret inquiry was under way in Cairo to discover what had happened.
Although he would hardly have said so to Churchill, Brooke agreed with the problem of paucity of talent in the Army. Writing to Wavell in India–‘My dear Archie’, and signing off ‘Yours ever, Alan’–he said that Harold Alexander was ‘one of the few good commanders we have got. But the shortage of good ones is one of my worst troubles. The last war casualties took the cream of the generation that should be providing division and Corps commanders now.’ Brooke also wrote:
I like Marshall and find him an easy person to deal with. There is a good deal of divergence of outlook which will want watching. King, the Admiral, has his eyes riveted on the Pacific whilst Marshall looks out towards Europe, and between them the ‘prima donna’ MacArthur must maintain the Australian front in the limelight! I think the President as Commander-in-Chief may well find himself puzzled at times!17 *
On 7 July the Chiefs of Staff pointed out to Churchill that preparations for a cross-Channel operation should be continued because it was important that the Allies should ‘Not lead the Russians to think there is no chance of our attacking this year’. The double negative is instructive. Brooke did not want Stalin to know that there was no hope of a Second Front in Europe in 1942; however, he did want the Americans to be told that Sledgehammer was off the agenda ‘at once’. He added that there was ‘no satisfactory solution’ to the problem of how to take and hold the northern tip of Norway.
At a War Cabinet at 5.30 p.m. that day memoranda written by both Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff were read out, because they had only just been finished and could not be circulated in time. Churchill then summarized the discussions he had had about Sledgehammer, Roundup, Gymnast and Jupiter. To be able to ‘summarize’ was a great advantage for the Prime Minister, who naturally put his side of the case forcefully and the opposing arguments with far less rigour. He was objective, however, in stating of Sledgehammer that ‘the conditions which would make this operation practicable in 1942 were now extremely unlikely to arise,’ and the War Cabinet agreed ‘only to make such preparations for it as would enable us to deceive the enemy, but not at the expense of interference with Roundup’.
Of Gymnast, however, Churchill said that ‘the President had always expressed the keenest desire to carry it out.’ They hoped an attack on Rommel from the west, and the capture of air bases in French North Africa, might transform the Mediterranean situation. It would consist of six US divisions, with ‘a spearhead of British assault troops’. As for Jupiter, Churchill admitted that the Chiefs of Staff found the ‘difficulties insurmountable’, but he nonetheless thought that a lodgement in northern Norway, possibly in conjunction with the Russians and Norwegians, was worth planning for. ‘The War Cabinet fully agreed with this view,’ recorded the minutes, which committed them to nothing.
Pound then pointed out, with regard to Jupiter, that in view of the disaster that had recently overtaken Convoy PQ-17–only eleven of whose thirty-five merchantmen had reached port–‘we would have great difficulty in setting up an air striking force in Murmansk. Furthermore, we should have to gain simultaneous control of all airfields between Petsamo and Narvik,’ a potentially vast operation. The naval forces required ‘were beyond our present capacity’, not least because anti-submarine craft would have to be withdrawn from the Western Approaches, which he said was ‘quite unacceptable’. Finally, the Germans had spent two years acclimatizing to Arctic conditions and had five divisions in northern Norway and its environs, with another three capable of being deployed there rapidly, as well as 255 aircraft.
‘After further discussion’, the minutes relate, the War Cabinet agreed that ‘the Americans should be encouraged to proceed with Operation Gymnast, and that we ourselves should undertake Jupiter, if by any means a sound and sensible plan could be devised’.18 It was an excellent let-out clause. They also decided that Jupiter was ‘to be carried out largely by Canadian troops’. The poor Canadians were obviously regarded as the forlorn hope by the Cabinet, though not by Brooke who had been attached to them in the Great War. The following month it was a largely Canadian force that was earmarked for the Dieppe Raid (codenamed Operation Jubilee). The lack of Canadians on the Combined Chiefs of Staff meant that, for all their superb loyalty and generosity, they were often assigned the toughest tasks. In the event, though, Jupiter was considered beyond even their capacity for self-sacrifice.
After that meeting, Eden went back to the Foreign Office and told Cadogan of the ‘Very gloomy outlook and Cabinet’, complaining that strategically the ‘Chiefs of Staff have no ideas and oppose everything.’ Churchill had said: ‘We’d better put an advertisement in the papers, asking for ideas!’19 It was one of the few examples of Winston Churchill ever telling an unfunny joke. Meanwhile, across Whitehall back at the War Office, Brooke agreed that the Cabinet had been ‘a thoroughly bad one’, telling Kennedy that ‘Winston was in one of his worst moods and abused the Army and criticised our generalship and our failure to use the masses of men in the Middle East.’ When Bevin had asked him whether it could not be right to urge Auchinleck to attack, Brooke replied that a false move would be fatal and the Auk ‘might lose Egypt in five minutes if he made a mistake’.20 Churchill apologized to Brooke after the meeting.
On 6 July Churchill wrote to Roosevelt to try to clarify the terms used for operations. Astonishingly enough–and this cannot but have added to the mood of mistrust between the two Staffs–the British and Americans often used the same term to denote quite different operations. At one stage, for example, Roo
sevelt had been writing ‘One-Third Bolero’ to mean Sledgehammer. Churchill suggested a final clarification, but of course could not explicitly name in the cable the places due to be attacked, which made the whole process even more convoluted. He also stated that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been using the term ‘Semi-Gymnast’, which in fact they had not.
The US Chiefs regularly used ‘Bolero’ to mean both the build-up in the UK and one or both of the cross-Channel invasion plans, whereas for the British it just meant the build-up. The distinction was vital for Brooke, who supported Bolero and an eventual Roundup but not Sledgehammer, whereas for Marshall it was less important. In several cases Planners seemed to use whichever term best supported their ideas, so British Staff officers occasionally criticized Roundup for attributes that in fact only pertained to Sledgehammer, causing further confusion in Washington. For a group that prided themselves as much as did Hollis and Jacob on the superiority of their organization and the precision of their language, it was extraordinary that the War Office secretariat could have allowed such ambiguities to pervade their counsels for so long.
Some British Planners had been using ‘Roundup’ to mean a limited, opportunistic attack across the Channel in the event of a German collapse, which was actually Sledgehammer, whereas for the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘Roundup’ was (rightly) taken to mean the vast, forty-eight-divisional attack on France. ‘To the befuddlement of both contemporaries and historians, both plans were labelled Roundup,’ records Warren Kimball.21 Churchill anyway disliked the term Roundup, which he thought either over-confident or over-gloomy, depending on who was likely to be rounded up.
As for ‘Gymnast’, the British originally thought it meant an Anglo-American attack east of Tunis. Yet by mid-1942 it had morphed into an American attack on Morocco near Casablanca, a different operation entirely. The situation was becoming absurd, so in his reply two days later Roosevelt defined the terms clearly, in accord with Churchill’s suggestions. Henceforth, Bolero would mean the preparation and movement of American forces into the United Kingdom. Sledgehammer was to be a limited, nine-divisional cross-Channel attack in 1942 in the event of either a German or a Russian collapse. Finally, Roundup was to mean the massive forty-eight-divisional cross-Channel invasion to liberate the Continent, ‘to be carried out by combined American and British forces in 1943 or later’. No mention was made of Gymnast, the mythical term Semi-Gymnast (found nowhere else in the records) or Super-Gymnast. Here, however, was an indication–the first in any document–that Roosevelt understood, in stark contrast to what he had told Molotov only the previous month, that the cross-Channel attack would not take place until possibly ‘later’ than 1943.
The next War Cabinet meeting addressed the question of who should command Roundup. Churchill said that on his recent visit to Washington he had gathered that if the supreme command was offered to Marshall–as the Americans were proposing to employ twenty-seven divisions to Britain’s twenty-one–the general ‘would be very pleased to accept it’, and Churchill added that ‘our interests would be best served by the appointment of an American as Supreme Commander’. If Marshall were appointed he would, of course, ‘receive loyal and effective aid and support from the Staffs in this country, who might be expected to exercise some influence over his views’, and he would also be best placed to obtain the maximum resources and equipment from the United States. If the operation failed, Churchill said, ‘there would be no reproach’ against ‘a British generalissimo’.22 He added that in so large an operation there would be plenty of British corps commanders. It was a deeply pessimistic stance to adopt, indicative of the Prime Minister’s fears.
Dill had written a telegram emphasizing Marshall’s claims and the War Cabinet expressed ‘general agreement’ that Roosevelt should be invited to appoint him, with ultimate responsibility to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The minutes are quite specific; though they do not record exactly what Brooke said, they do state that ‘The three Chiefs of Staff all expressed agreement with the proposal that General Marshall should be invited to be Supreme Commander.’ Meanwhile, Dill warned Churchill and Brooke that Marshall was seriously looking at a Pacific alternative if they continued to oppose Sledgehammer. It seems likely that Marshall himself drafted the telegram in which Dill first alerted London to the likely consequences of rejecting Sledgehammer in favour of Gymnast.23 But was Marshall bluffing?
Churchill replied to Roosevelt that the War Cabinet had been considering what he called ‘maximum Bolero’ (meaning Roundup) and asked whether ‘General Marshall would undertake this supreme task in 1943. We shall sustain him to the last inch.’ A few moments later, he sent another one-sentence telegram to say that he assumed that the appointment of Marshall ‘over Bolero 1943 does not prejudice operations of immediate consequence such as Gymnast’. Churchill must have known that Roundup was near impossible in 1943 if the troops earmarked for it were to be used in Gymnast, and certainly Marshall and Brooke knew it, since it was one of the primary reasons why Marshall opposed Gymnast, and one of the only reasons why Brooke could be prevailed upon to support it.
The morning after the telegrams were sent, Thursday 9 July, saw a flurry of almost identical news reports that Marshall was about to be appointed supreme commander of all Allied military forces, with Marshal Foch cited as the precedent. A report came from a US radio despatch quoting ‘British and American circles in Washington’, and was printed by the Evening Standard, Daily Mirror, News Chronicle and Daily Express in Britain. The following day saw a categorical denial by the War Department.
Yet Marshall was not to be fobbed off with the command of an operation still far in the future, especially once he had learnt from Dill that the War Cabinet meeting of 7 July had definitely decided against Sledgehammer and in favour of Gymnast. (Dill ought not to have told him; at that Cabinet meeting Brooke had specifically said he did not think the Americans should be informed of the decision too soon.) Once he realized what was happening, Marshall determined to fight back. He first went to Stimson to report what he called ‘a new and rather staggering crisis that is coming up in our war strategy’. He explained that the British were ‘going back on Bolero and are seeking to revive Gymnast–in other words, they are seeking now to reverse the decision which was so laboriously accomplished when Mr Churchill was here a short time ago.’ He cannot have yet digested Roosevelt’s telegram on definitions: Churchill supported Bolero, but opposed Sledgehammer.
Marshall complained to Stimson that Gymnast ‘would be simply another way of diverting our strength into a channel in which we cannot effectively use it’, meaning North Africa. ‘I found Marshall very stirred up and emphatic over it,’ recorded Stimson. ‘He is very naturally tired of these constant decisions that do not stay made. This is the third time this question has been brought up by the persistent British and he proposes a showdown which I cordially endorsed. As the British won’t go through with what they agreed to, we will turn our backs on them and take up the war with Japan.’ Stimson later wrote in a post-war addition to his diary that it showed the effect of Churchill’s ‘obstinacy on Marshall and me, for we were both staunch supporters of the “Europe First” plan and argued for the Pacific only because we were desperate at British inaction’.24
The same day as the press leaks, Eden’s private secretary Oliver Harvey recorded in the diary that he too kept throughout the war in defiance of regulations, that because of the British rejection of Sledgehammer the US Ambassador to London, John ‘Gil’ Winant, ‘is worried and so is Dill, both think it may cause the Americans to shy off the West and go all out for the Pacific.’25 Sure enough, the very next day, Friday 10 July, there was a great démarche in Washington. Marshall–with the enthusiastic support of Admiral King–telegraphed Roosevelt in Hyde Park to say that ‘If the United States is to engage in any other operation than forceful, unswerving adherence to Bolero plans, we are definitely of the opinion that we should turn to the Pacific and strike decisively against Japan; in other words, assume a defensi
ve attitude against Germany, except for air operations; and use all available means in the Pacific.’26
Did Marshall genuinely want to ditch Germany First because the British had turned against Sledgehammer, or did he simply hope the threat of it would persuade the British to change their minds? The fact that Dill took the threat seriously implies that it probably was genuine, unless Marshall was bluffing Dill too, or–much less likely–Dill was in on it and putting his friendship with Marshall before his duty to the British Chiefs of Staff. Also, since the British were not in receipt of Marshall–Roosevelt communications, there would be no point in Marshall sending that telegraph to Hyde Park if he was indeed bluffing.
Years later Marshall said he used the Pacific option ‘as a club’ with which to bludgeon the British whenever necessary: ‘In my own case, it was bluff, but King wanted the alternative.’27 Marshall was therefore claiming to have used King to give the bluff verisimilitude. (It is not known whether King ever knew Marshall was using him in this way.) Equally, that might well have been an ex post facto rationalization of Marshall’s actions, because they did not come off. King was certain that the British did not have their heart in the cross-Channel operation and said at a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting on 10 July that they would never invade Europe ‘except behind a Scotch bagpipe band’.28 (In a sense he was right; one of the very first men ashore on Sword beach on D-Day was Piper Bill Millin of Lord Lovat’s No. 4 Commando, playing ‘The Blue Bonnets’ and ‘keeping the pipes going as he played the Commandos up the beach’.)
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