The journalist Leonard Mosley believed that Churchill’s and Brooke’s volte face over Sledgehammer had left Marshall ‘appalled. Later he would become much more sophisticated in his reaction to examples of political expediency. But on this occasion he was genuinely shocked by what he considered Mr Churchill’s casual perfidy, and he did something that was quite unusual for him. He hit back.’29 On this occasion at least, Mosley was right. If it was all a bluff by Marshall, it was a daring and gigantic one, intended to terrify the British into re-engaging meaningfully with Roundup and Sledgehammer and dumping Gymnast. Yet such a scheme could be pulled off only with Roosevelt’s full support. There was certainly appetite for a new policy among American decision-makers. Eisenhower had already suggested that, if the British blocked the cross-Channel operations further, America should turn away from the Atlantic war and try to defeat Japan first. Douglas MacArthur continually emphasized the help that the United States could give Russia by drawing off Japan, thus allowing the Soviets to move divisions to their western front, as well as the popularity of a Pacific-centred war among Americans. Stimson was in favour and so too, of course, was Admiral King, who had opposed Germany First from the beginning.
Having digested Marshall’s telegram, Roosevelt telephoned from Hyde Park to ask for a full assessment of the Pacific alternative by the afternoon of Sunday 12 July. He wanted to know how many men, planes and ships needed to be withdrawn from the Atlantic, and its likely effects on the situation in the USSR and Middle East. Marshall immediately left Dodona for the War Department to draw up this appreciation. Of course it was impossible to reconfigure the whole of US grand strategy over one weekend, as both FDR and Marshall must have known.
On 14 July Churchill sent Roosevelt a five-sentence telegram that left no doubt about his stance. ‘I am most anxious for you to know where I stand myself at the present time,’ it began. ‘I have found no one who regards Sledgehammer as possible. I should like to see you do Gymnast as soon as possible, and that we in concert with the Russians should try for Jupiter. Meanwhile all preparations for Roundup should proceed at full blast, thus holding the maximum enemy forces opposite England. All this seems to me as clear as noonday.’30 It was clear as noonday to Roosevelt too–except the Jupiter part–as Marshall, Stimson and King were about to discover in equally forthright terms.
‘I have carefully read your estimate of Sunday,’ wrote Roosevelt to Marshall and Stimson on Tuesday 14 July, before his return to the White House the next day. ‘My first impression is that it [the Pacific option] is exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do following Pearl Harbor. Secondly, it does not in fact provide use of American troops in fighting except in a lot of [Pacific] islands whose occupation will not affect the world situation this year or next. Third: it does not help Russia or the Near East. Therefore it is disapproved of at present.’ In order to underline the gravity of this disapproval, as well as to remind Marshall, Stimson and King who was ultimately in charge, he signed his memorandum, very unusually for him, ‘Roosevelt C-in-C’.
After Marshall had explained Roosevelt’s view to the Joint Chiefs later that day, it was concluded that, although the Pacific would be preferable, ‘apparently our political system would require major operations this year in Africa,’ and the President wanted Gymnast. Marshall was effectively not blaming Churchill, therefore, but Democracy itself for the decision. The President was under political pressure, Marshall slightly disloyally explained to his Planning Staff, and that took precedence. Although Roosevelt still adhered to the formulation that he supported the concepts of both Roundup and Sledgehammer, Marshall fully appreciated ‘that he was leaning towards the North African strategy’.31 Without firm opposition to Gymnast from the President, Marshall faced defeat.
On the same day that Roosevelt comprehensively rejected the Japan First alternative, Dill told Churchill about a recent conversation he had had with Marshall. He warned that Marshall and King would be seeing Roosevelt the next day, and ‘would recommend turning to the Pacific as, in their opinion, the only practical alternative to action in Europe’, something Marshall had confirmed to Dill personally. Marshall’s objections to Gymnast, Dill reported, were that it would take carriers from the Pacific which were urgently required for operations already under way there, that it would necessitate a new line of sea communications, and that to strike at Casablanca would not draw off any German troops from Russia. Furthermore, to attack Bizerte or Algiers ‘would be too hazardous’ should the Germans attack through Spain to cut the Americans off, and finally it would also destroy any possibility of Roundup even in 1943.32
These were a formidable list of objections. Indeed Wedemeyer said of them after the war: ‘I couldn’t have presented the American case better if I had tried. One wonders where Dill got this information, which certainly would be considered classified.’ Dill further alerted Churchill that Marshall had warned him that any future concentration on the Pacific ‘would reduce the air forces sent to Britain by some two-thirds’, adding of Germany First:
There is no doubt that Marshall is true to his first love but he is convinced that there has been no real drive behind the European project. Meetings are held, discussions take place and time slips by. Germany will never again be so occupied in the East as she is today and if we do not take advantage of her present preoccupation we shall find ourselves faced with a Germany so strong in the West that no invasion of the Continent will be possible. We can then go on pummelling each other by air but the possibility of a decision will be gone. Marshall feels, I believe, that if a great businessman were faced with pulling off this coup or going bankrupt he would strain every nerve to pull off the coup and would probably succeed.33
This analogy broke down on a number of levels, of course. Great businessmen are virtually never faced with such stark alternatives, and in any case the difference between commercial bankruptcy, from which it is possible to return, and being flung off the Continent and possibly invaded was enormous.
Dill’s advice to Churchill was straightforward: ‘Unless you can persuade him of your unswerving devotion to Bolero, everything points to a compete reversal of our present agreed strategy and the withdrawal of America to a war of her own in the Pacific leaving us with limited American assistance to make out as best we can against Germany.’ Pogue believes that this letter was almost certainly sent with Marshall’s encouragement, which implies that if it was a bluff, Dill was probably in on it. Having read it, Churchill must have known that calling Marshall’s bluff risked a return to the dark twelve months when the British Commonwealth stood alone in 1940–41. He would be taking a gamble, with stakes that could hardly have been much higher.
Dill also mentioned another unwelcome fact to Churchill in his telegram, namely that the American Chiefs of Staff were reading Field Marshal Sir William Robertson’s two-volume memoir about the grand strategy of the Great War, Soldiers and Statesmen, and that Marshall had sent him a copy with the third chapter of the first volume heavily annotated. Churchill would have understood immediately what that meant. Robertson, who had been CIGS from 1915 to 1918, was a Clausewitzian, and volume i chapter iii of his book covered the Dardanelles expedition. ‘An essential condition of success in war being the concentration of effort on the “decisive front”, or place where the main issue will probably be fought out,’ it began, ‘it follows that the soldiers and statesmen charged with the direction of military operations should be agreed among themselves as to where that front is.’ Like Marshall, Robertson believed it to be in north-west France, not–as Marshall suspected Churchill did in both 1915 and 1942–in the Mediterranean.
Over the Dardanelles, Robertson did not deny that ‘it might be desirable to threaten interests which are of importance to the enemy, so as to oblige him to detach for their protection a force larger than the one employed in making the threat, thus rendering him weaker in comparison on the decisive front,’ which was to be precisely Churchill’s and Brooke’s Italian strategy for 1943–4, b
ut Marshall is unlikely to have underlined that for Dill’s attention. Much more likely candidates for annotation were Robertson’s strictures on ‘ministers’–primarily Churchill himself–who were ‘indifferent to, or ignorant of, the disadvantages which always attend on changes of plan and the neglect to concentrate on one thing at a time’. Churchill was also criticized by name for having briefed the supreme strategy-making body, the War Council, directly, instead of allowing the Admiralty professionals to do it, ‘as was, in fact, done after Mr Churchill left that department’.34
Marshall further read that the General Staff had been opposed to the Gallipoli Expedition from the very beginning, but had been overruled by the politicians, particularly Churchill. There were long quotations from the Dardanelles Commission Report about ‘the atmosphere of vagueness and want of precision which seems to have characterised the proceedings of the War Council’. Robertson criticized Churchill for sending messages to the Russians promising a diversionary attack on Turkey that had not previously been cleared by the War Council, and complained that ‘even the Prime Minister’, Herbert Asquith, ‘did not see the reply until after it had been dispatched’. Marshall would have also approved of the BEF commander Sir John French’s opposition to the plan to ‘draw off troops from the decisive spot, which is Germany itself’. French believed that in the Near East there were ‘no theatres…in which decisive results can be attained’. Gallipoli therefore precisely mirrored Marshall’s criticisms of Gymnast.
Robertson’s book was a critique as much of the process of decision-making–‘the whole affair was so irregularly handled’, he wrote–as of the Gallipoli decision itself. He criticized the methods by which Churchill had dragged the General Staff into the expedition, by taking advantage of ambiguous phraseology in War Council conclusions and by pressurizing the First Sea Lord, Jackie Fisher, at every opportunity. Robertson also charged the War Council in general and Churchill in particular with gross over-optimism, writing that ‘The stress laid upon the unquestionable advantages which would accrue from success was so great that the disadvantages which would arise in the not improbable case of failure were insufficiently considered.’35 He quoted the report as saying that Churchill had been ‘carried away by his sanguine temperament, and his belief in the success of the undertaking which he advocated’. Robertson charged that Churchill’s ‘unsystematic methods’ had led to disaster.
It is easy to see why Marshall and Stimson felt this should be required reading for Roosevelt in July 1942, but what they failed to take into account was that it was precisely because of the Dardanelles débâcle that Churchill behaved in so relatively restrained a manner towards his General Staff when he became prime minister. He railed, ranted, wept sometimes, often cajoled and relentlessly pressurized, but the Dardanelles had been the defining crisis of his life so far, and he had genuinely learnt from it.
Ismay believed that, while he was serving on Pershing’s staff, Marshall had:
Like almost everyone, both American and British, who fought in the main theatre…regarded our failure at the Dardanelles as well-deserved retribution for an unjustifiable strategic gamble, and he condemned the expeditions to Salonika and Palestine, etc, as diversionary debauches. In the Second World War he used all his influence to prevent the slightest deviation from the principle of concentration of all available force at the decisive point.36
Handy spoke for almost everyone in OPD when he said of Churchill: ‘He was a wonderful man, but we never thought that he was too hot as a military strategist…He was one of the main instigators of the Gallipoli operation in World War One. It had more or less been a complete disaster.’ When Churchill proposed action in the eastern Mediterranean, therefore, Handy and others suspected, ‘Maybe he wanted to prove he had been right then.’37
When Churchill learnt from Dill about Marshall’s annotations in Robertson’s book he of course spotted the implications, but replied in surprisingly good humour, saying of Gymnast: ‘Soldiers and Statesmen here are in complete agreement.’ Privately, however, he was pained by Marshall’s choice of reading matter. As Brooke told Kennedy, ‘Winston’s hackles were up,’ and the Prime Minister ‘indicated that he would make short work of Marshall if he tried to lay down the law over Soldiers and Statesmen’. Brooke had heard that in Washington ‘the supplies of Robertson’s book in the libraries have run dry and Ministers are walking about with Volume One under their arms.’ He went on: ‘It may do some good, but I doubt it.’ To have brought up the disastrous Dardanelles campaign directly with its principal author would have been a brave–or more probably a foolhardy–thing for Marshall to have done.
Even if the British soldiers and statesmen were not in complete agreement–especially over Jupiter–they were not as split in outlook as the Americans, for as Brooke commented to his diary that evening: ‘Harry Hopkins is for operating in Africa, Marshall wants to operate in Europe, and King is determined to strike in the Pacific!’ Since Hopkins represented Roosevelt, it is clear what the President wanted, and all that the British now needed to do was coalesce together under the coming onslaught from Marshall and the OPD. In his memoirs, Jock Colville recalled that Hopkins was ‘privately supporting Churchill and Alan Brooke in their determination that the first Anglo-American enterprise should be in North Africa and not…take the form of a premature, ill-judged invasion of Europe’. Without knowing it, Marshall was travelling to London with a cuckoo in the American nest.
On the evening of 14 July, at a meeting at No. 10 of representatives of Allied countries grandly entitled the Pacific War Council, Kennedy recorded: ‘Winston in his blue romper suit but with a clean white shirt with cuffs…looked well and serene, lit a cigar and proceeded to give a general survey of the war, speaking slowly and without effort.’ After asking the New Zealand High Commissioner Sir William Jordan to stop taking notes because it distracted his attention, he talked of shipping losses, the efforts to sustain Russia, and the Eastern Front, and pointed out that the Germans had only seventy-five days before winter fell there. He believed ‘The Japs would attack Russia when the moment came–they would stab her in the back…But for the moment they were gorged with their prey.’
Speaking in front of the representatives from Australia, South Africa, China, New Zealand and Holland, Churchill said that the loss of half of Japan’s aircraft carriers since the war started had made India’s and Australia’s positions safer. As for taking on Japan across the Bay of Bengal and through the islands of the south Pacific, this could be done only if Auchinleck beat Rommel and the threatened German attack through the Caucasus did not materialize. If it did, ‘We would have to devote all our efforts to meeting that onslaught.’ During the hour-long meeting, Churchill caught sight of some of his memoranda lying on the Cabinet table. As he spoke he took a paste pot and stuck one of his red labels saying ‘Action This Day’ on to a file, and rang for a secretary to take it away. Kennedy was impressed by the way that ‘He shows no sign of the terrific strain to which he is subjected.’38
Alec Cadogan’s diary entry of 15 July was similarly understated. After discussing the global situation in a conversation with Eden, he wrote: ‘We have made up our minds against a Second Front this year. This, I’m afraid, is right–sad though it might be. We want Americans to do Gymnast, President would probably be willing. But Marshall against. I fear that his idea is that, if Sledgehammer is off, America must turn her attention to the Pacific. This is all rather disquieting.’
Meanwhile, in Washington, Wednesday 15 July became, as Churchill acknowledged in his war memoirs, ‘a very tense day in the White House’, as the President’s willingness to carry out Gymnast came under severe threat from his advisers. When Roosevelt returned there from Hyde Park that morning, Stimson and Marshall visited to try to dissuade him one more time. They took along a copy of Soldiers and Statesmen, telling the President that it showed that Churchill had always been addicted to ‘half-baked’ schemes that drew attention from the vital front in northern France, and they point
edly left the book with the President afterwards, advising him to read it carefully.39
The meeting resulted, in Stimson’s words, in ‘a thumping argument’ between Roosevelt and Marshall over American involvement in the Middle East, which Marshall thought even more ill advised than involvement in the North African operation, as it would endanger the war in the Pacific and relegate any significant cross-Channel operation to 1944 at the earliest. Instead, Marshall argued, a Pacific-centric policy might be able to prevent Japan and Germany linking up in the Indian Ocean. The President nonetheless ruled out any major offensive in the Pacific. They did however agree that Marshall, Hopkins and King should go to London immediately, and Roosevelt cabled Churchill to that effect.
The President further told Stimson that he had disliked the Japan First memorandum he had been sent at Hyde Park at the weekend, which struck him as like ‘taking up your dishes and going away’–that is, being childish and petulant. Stimson had to admit the truth in that, but said that ‘it was absolutely essential to use it as a threat of our sincerity in regard to Bolero if we expected to get through the hides of the British,’ which Roosevelt did not deny.40 Stimson then employed an equestrian analogy to illustrate his point: ‘When you are trying to hold a wild horse, the way to do it is to get him by the head and not by the heels [sic], and that is the trouble with the British method of trying to hold Hitler in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.’
As far as Stimson was concerned, his and Marshall’s Japan First threat was a bluff, but in his autobiography he admitted that ‘Mr Roosevelt was not persuaded, and the bluff was never tried. It would not have worked in any case, for there was no real intention of carrying it out,’ which Stimson ‘supposed that the British knew as well as he did’.41 In fact, however, the British–especially Dill, unless he was a co-conspirator with Marshall–could never be certain of that, and Lord Halifax was writing in his diary at the time: ‘Just because the Americans can’t have a massacre in France this year, they want to sulk and bathe in the Pacific!’
Masters and Commanders Page 32