Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  After Marshall produced a set of instructions for himself for the London visit, Roosevelt returned it with ‘Not approved’ written at the bottom right-hand corner, and ‘See my substitute’ underneath. At the end of these alternative instructions, the President wrote in his own hand the ominous words that, if he failed to persuade the British of the benefits of Sledgehammer, Marshall would have to determine ‘upon another place for US troops to fight in 1942’. Their watchwords in London, Roosevelt emphasized, must be ‘speed of decision on plans, unity of plans, attack combined with defense, but not defense alone’. Once again he signed the document as ‘Commander-in-Chief’.42

  Stimson’s autobiography attests that he ‘pushed his disagreement with the President to the limits prescribed by loyalty’. Had he and Marshall by then spotted, as he later claimed, that Gymnast ‘destroyed Bolero even for 1943’? It would have taken supreme foresight to have looked eighteen months ahead at that stage of the war, and might be doubted. Old men forget, but old statesmen forget selectively. Stimson did, however, foresee the way the impasse would be resolved, stating that since Churchill and Brooke categorically refused to undertake a cross-Channel attack in 1942, while Roosevelt ‘categorically insisted that there must be some operation in 1942’, the only way that both demands could be satisfied simultaneously was through Gymnast.

  Thus before Marshall even landed in Britain he was in a minority of one among the four Masters and Commanders, and he had failed to get presidential authority to try to bluff the British. It is unclear, even at this distance of time, whether King was aware that the memorandum he co-signed with Marshall might have been intended as a bluff. If he had thought it was Marshall’s genuine reaction to disappointment over Sledgehammer, he was about to be gravely disappointed.

  In Hinge of Fate, published in March 1950, Churchill wrote of this ‘very tense day in the White House’ that, although there were discussions about ending the Germany First policy, ‘There is no evidence that either General Marshall or Admiral King harboured such ideas.’ Yet in fact he knew from Dill’s telegram that that was not the case, and that both King and Marshall did harbour ‘such ideas’, or claimed to do so. Churchill blamed ‘a strong sense of feeling in the powerful second rank of the American staff’ for the resurgence of Japan First, adding that ‘The President withstood and brushed aside this fatal trend of thought.’ According to Dill’s telegram it was the Joint Chiefs themselves, not their lieutenants, who considered the Pacific ‘the only practical alternative to action in Europe’.43 Churchill had certainly been reminded of the contents of that telegram in 1950, because he had bowdlerized it on the previous page of his book. He played outrageously fast and loose with the facts in his six volumes of The Second World War, especially with regard to people who were still in positions of power at the time of publication, and Marshall had only just ended his post-war stint as US secretary of state.44

  Churchill edited out Dill’s final paragraph in which he had somewhat cheekily informed him that Roosevelt, Marshall and King were reading Soldiers and Statesmen. In an early draft of Hinge of Fate, Churchill had included that fact, along with the observation: ‘Naturally General Marshall could not know how perfect was the harmony of thought between his British comrades, and that the divisions and quarrels of Soldiers and Statesmen which had disfigured the previous war belonged to a vanished epoch.’ In the event, he cut this somewhat arch sentence before publication.

  The news from Russia was bad in mid-July 1942, with the Germans pressing forward along a wide front and the British War Office fearing that there seemed little chance of stopping them ‘before they get to the Caucasus and the oil’. It was hoped that by the time winter came, there might still be Russian resistance on the Volga. Auchinleck remained on the defensive in North Africa, with the initiative lying with Rommel. The ‘big commitment’ to the desert campaign worried British Planners, especially if the Germans got to the Caucasus and threatened Iran and Iraq. ‘Altogether, the war is in an anxious phase,’ noted Kennedy. This seems to contradict Wedemeyer’s criticism that ‘The truly depressing thing about [Gymnast] was that, even as it was being accepted, the danger of a junction of the Germans and Japanese in the Indian Ocean had completely evaporated. The fall of Tobruk had been a temporary worry.’

  Wedemeyer believed that, after the battle of Midway in June 1942, where the US Navy sank four Japanese aircraft carriers, ‘The British could no longer logically play up such a threat as they had in the past in order to obtain resources from American production for their African ventures. The die had been cast, however, before the full implications of Midway had dawned on the authors of [Gymnast]…our feet were on the ladder.’45 Yet even if the Japanese were no longer so serious a threat in the Indian Ocean after Midway, they continued to pose a threat to northern India until the victories at Kohima and Imphal in the spring of 1944, and even had there been no link-up at all, Germany’s control of the Iraqi and Iranian oil fields would have been disastrous for the Allies.

  On Thursday 16 July, Marshall, Hopkins and King flew from Washington ‘to finalize the competing claims’ between Gymnast and Sledgehammer (which was still confusingly called Bolero by some Britons and many Americans). Although Churchill knew from Dill that Marshall was considering dropping Germany First, he also understood that it was the Commander-in-Chief who took the ultimate decision, and he had squared him a month before at Hyde Park.

  Roosevelt’s written instructions to Marshall, Hopkins and King–of which Churchill was unaware–had left the field completely open in the conflicting claims between the two operations. He ordered the three men to ‘reach immediate agreement’, however, on ‘definite plans’ for action in 1942, as well as ‘tentative plans for the year 1943’. He ordained that ‘Absolute co-ordinated use of British and American forces is essential,’ that ‘It is of the highest importance that US ground troops be brought into action against the enemy in 1942’, and that ‘If Sledgehammer is finally and definitely out of the picture, I want you to…take into consideration…a new operation in Morocco and Algiers designed to drive in against the back door of Rommel’s armies.’

  Roosevelt then reiterated his commitment to Germany First–‘I am opposed to an American all-out effort in the Pacific’–making the extraordinary prediction that ‘Defeat of Germany means the defeat of Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life.’ His final line was about his ‘hope for total agreement within one week of your arrival’.46 Having thus completely hobbled his delegates, Roosevelt needed only to wait for Churchill and Brooke to turn down a 1942 Sledgehammer for Gymnast to be adopted faute de mieux. Roosevelt had not even permitted his team the possibility of stretching out negotiations, let alone coming home empty-handed.

  Before Hopkins left for London, he and the President worked out a series of private codenames for their messages to one another. Marshall was ‘Plog’, named after Roosevelt’s mother’s superintendent at Hyde Park, William Plog; Churchill was ‘Moses Smith’, named after a friend who rented a farm from Roosevelt; Portal was ‘Rev. Wilson’, the rector of the local church, and Brooke was ‘Mr Bee’, who was the caretaker of Roosevelt’s hilltop village there.47 The last would perhaps have not been as impenetrable to eavesdropping Germans as some of the others, but the characterization of Marshall, Churchill and Brooke all as tenants or employees of Roosevelt was an unconscious indication of the way that the relationship between the British and Americans was moving.

  Marshall’s TWA Stratoliner landed at Prestwick in Scotland at 5.19 p.m. on Friday 17 July 1942; his party also included Admiral King, Harry Hopkins (and his doctor), FDR’s press secretary Stephen T. Early, Brigadier-General Walter Bedell Smith and Marshall’s aide-de-camp Major Frank McCarthy. When they arrived, the weather was too bad to go on to London by plane, and Churchill had sent his train with Commander Thompson to take the senior members of the party direct to Chequers. This led to the first clash of the trip, however, since Marshall wanted to talk to Eisenhower and other senior Lo
ndon-based American Staff officers before seeing the Prime Minister, whereas Churchill understandably wanted to talk to Marshall, Hopkins and King before their views were informed and strengthened by Eisenhower and his Planning team. Marshall therefore instructed the train to go straight to London, where it arrived before breakfast on the morning of Saturday 18 July, Harry Hopkins and Steve Early playing gin rummy on the journey down. It was met at Euston Station by Brooke, Eisenhower and Winant. ‘Since Thursday, Ike has been working night and day, preparing reports for General Marshall’s use,’ recalled Eisenhower’s naval aide and family friend Harry C. Butcher in his bestselling diary, Three Years with Eisenhower, published in 1946.48

  The American party took sixteen rooms on the fourth floor at Claridge’s Hotel, where Marshall and King conferred with Eisenhower, Mark Clark, the Commander of the Eighth Air Force Carl Spaatz and Admiral Stark. Each of the rooms had a military sentry, with King insisting upon a Marine. Churchill was angry with Hopkins for snubbing his hospitality, and telephoned him at the hotel to upbraid him over the diplomatic protocols broken by such behaviour. ‘The Prime Minister threw the British Constitution at me with some vehemence,’ Hopkins later joked to Roosevelt. ‘As you know, it is an unwritten document, so no serious damage was done.’ He nonetheless went off to Chequers, while Marshall and King used the weekend to confer with the Planners.

  Brooke was ‘delighted’ that the Chequers weekend, at which he would have had to have been present, had fallen through, and was ‘very amused’ by a rumour that Marshall did not want to assume the post of supreme commander, ‘so long as he would have to deal with Winston as prime minister’. Brooke and the Chiefs of Staff also prepared for the visit, recognizing from Dill’s warning telegram to Churchill the potential danger that it posed to Germany First. ‘They have come over as they are not satisfied that we are adhering sufficiently definitely to the plans for invading France in 1943, and if possible 1942,’ Brooke noted. ‘In my mind 1942 is dead off and without the slightest hope. 1943 must depend on what happens to Russia. If she breaks and is overrun there can be no invasion and we should then be prepared to go into North Africa instead. But Marshall seems to want some rigid form of plan that we are bound to adhere to in any case!’ After the war, Brooke wrote of these meetings that he had ‘found Marshall’s rigid form of strategy very difficult to cope with. He never fully appreciated what operations in France would mean–the different standard of training of German divisions as opposed to the raw American divisions and to most of our new divisions.’ Brooke feared that Marshall still ‘hankered after direct action in France without appreciating that in the early days such action could only result in the worst of disasters’.49

  At 4 p.m. on Saturday 18 July, just as Brooke could see the end of the day’s work in sight and was thinking of going home, he was informed that all the Chiefs of Staff were ‘wanted at Chequers for the night!!’ He got there just in time for dinner, finding Pound, Portal, Mountbatten, Ismay and Cherwell already present. After dinner there was a long meeting reviewing the situation until 2 a.m., when they were taken to see a short film, finally getting to bed at 2.45 a.m.

  Chequers, a fine Elizabethan country house in Buckinghamshire with some neo-Gothic alterations, had been given to the nation by Lord Lee of Fareham in 1917 as a retreat for prime ministers who had nowhere to live near London. Churchill used it instead of the more distant Chartwell. Although we do not know which room was used for his meetings with the Chiefs of Staff, it might well have been the long and spacious library, where there were large sofas on either side of the fireplace and places for chairs to be drawn up. At their meeting on the Saturday night, Churchill and Brooke agreed to tell the Americans that the ‘only feasible proposition’ for 1942 ‘appeared to be’ an American landing in French North Africa, with ‘more easterly’ support from the British.50 They could not be certain that they were not about to be presented with an ultimatum and effectively blackmailed into undertaking some sort of cross-Channel operation, of course, but Churchill trusted to whatever deal he had worked out with Roosevelt at Hyde Park the previous month.

  With both sides thoroughly prepped for their coming clash, the British assembled at 12.30 p.m. on Monday 20 July. Brooke had originally intended to meet the Americans at 10 a.m. ‘for a private talk’, but Churchill was ‘very suspicious and had informed me at Chequers that Marshall was trying to assume powers of C-in-C of American troops which was President’s prerogative!’ Churchill knew that Brooke was highly sceptical of Jupiter and had been critical of Gymnast, and so presumably did not want him discussing operations with Marshall beforehand and in his absence. Instead Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff worked over lunch on the details of the British reply to Marshall’s proposals.

  When the Americans arrived at 3 p.m., Marshall put forward his case for Sledgehammer, stating that ‘We would be guilty of a gross military blunder if Germany should be permitted to eliminate an Allied Army of eight million men, when some stroke of ours might have saved the situation.’ If Russia and Germany were approaching their crisis, he argued, ‘Sledgehammer would constitute the most effective action that the Allies could take on behalf of Russia and, indeed, for the Allied cause in general.’ This led to what Brooke described as a ‘long argument’ with Marshall and King. ‘They failed to realize that such an action could only lead to the loss of some six divisions without achieving any results!’ the CIGS noted afterwards.

  When the Americans next argued for a Sledgehammer-style bridgehead to be established in Normandy in 1942 that would serve as the base for a Roundup-style operation in 1943, Brooke tried to convince them that there was no hope of it surviving the winter. Afterwards Gymnast was discussed, but the Americans said they preferred action in the Pacific to North Africa. The threat was therefore made, even if Roosevelt had already likened it to a child breaking dishes in a tantrum.

  Six years later, Jacob recalled some of the arguments used against Sledgehammer in those hard-fought July meetings:

  We said that if you do this there is no guarantee that you will be able to carry it out. In the meantime the Germans might stabilize the front in Russia and concentrate one hundred divisions in France. In that case Roundup could not be launched in ’43, six months would have been wasted, and we would still have undertaken no offensive action. The essential thing was, we said, to operate in 1942 in some area where we could meet the Germans on reasonable terms regardless of what happened in Russia.51

  This was an exaggeration: merely stabilizing the Eastern Front could not have freed up one hundred German divisions out of the 185 or so stationed there; only pushing the Soviets back beyond the Urals could have achieved that.

  At 11 a.m. the next day, Marshall presented Brooke with another memorandum in favour of Sledgehammer, in which he argued that it needed to be executed before 15 October 1942 and ‘regarded as the opening phase of Roundup with a consequent purpose, not only of remaining on the Continent, but of building up ground and air forces and logistic facilities, and expanding our foothold, to the limit of our capabilities’. He wanted a task-force commander appointed immediately, with an initial objective of taking the Channel Islands and Cherbourg. Such a foothold, Marshall argued, ‘will afford some relief from the continued inaction we are now enduring’ and would ‘provide valuable training and experience’ as well as tending ‘to promote an offensive spirit throughout the entire British and American armies, and peoples’. It would also bolster Russian morale, ‘and will either force some material diversions from the Russian front or will allow us to operate in France against the weakest forces we can ever hope to find there’.

  Meanwhile, the occupation of Cherbourg would seriously interdict German communications through the English Channel, and could take place before the enemy had an opportunity further to fortify the beach defences. This was a strong point to make, since it was mainly in 1943 and 1944 that the Germans built the formidable coastal fortifications known as the Atlantic Wall. Cherbourg’s capture, Marshall argued,
would also give ‘positive evidence to the people of France and other occupied countries of our will to carry the war to the enemy’.

  Marshall used his memorandum to counter some of Brooke’s arguments. On the question of lack of air support, he pointed out that, other than the Pas de Calais, Cherbourg was the best place for English-based air operations, which could be concentrated closely there. The 250 German bombers then stationed in France could be made to pay a high price at Cherbourg through fighter attack by day and barrage balloons and anti-aircraft defence by night. Their aerodromes would also be bombed continually. If it were true that Sledgehammer would have ‘no effect whatever on the Russian Front’, as Brooke alleged, then Marshall suggested that ‘our prospects for future success will be enhanced’.52 It was a curiously circular but logical and undeniably optimistic stance.

  It also had absolutely no effect on Brooke, however, who wrote in his diary: ‘Disappointing start! Found ourselves much where we started yesterday morning!’ They argued for two hours over the Russian front and weather conditions in the Channel, ‘during which time King remained with a face like a Sphinx, and only one idea, i.e. to transfer operations to the Pacific’. Yet Brooke’s physiognomy was equally unrevealing; Hopkins told Moran that ‘Nothing that they said appeared to make the slightest impression on General Brooke’s settled convictions…he kept looking into the distance.’53

  At 11 o’clock that night Brooke had to go to report to Churchill, who had returned to Downing Street. Although Eden and Hopkins were also there, he was not allowed to join them, ‘for fear that Marshall and King should hear of it and feel that I had been briefed by Hopkins against them according to the President’s wishes!!’ Instead Churchill came to the Cabinet Room to hear the results of the meetings so far, and Brooke did not get home to his flat at 7 Westminster Gardens until half-past midnight.