It is clear that something significant was going on at Downing Street that night. If he had nothing to reproach himself for, Hopkins would have been able to meet Brooke, as he had on numerous occasions when Marshall was present (including the meeting early that same day). It is therefore likely that Hopkins was passing on to Churchill and–at one remove therefore–to Brooke, Roosevelt’s view, which coincided with the British stance but clashed with that of Marshall and King.
The President was thus possibly–via his intimate confidant Hopkins–encouraging Churchill and Brooke to stay firm in their opposition to Sledgehammer, leaving Gymnast as the only alternative, under his written instructions to Marshall. Despite travelling over and staying at Claridge’s with them, Hopkins was nonetheless there to undermine Marshall’s and King’s position if they couldn’t get Sledgehammer past Brooke. Not meeting Brooke directly in Marshall’s absence would preserve deniability if necessary. Although this seems a lot to infer from a single diary entry, there is further circumstantial evidence to suggest that that was indeed what was going on.
Negotiations began again at 11 a.m. the next day, Wednesday 22 July, when Marshall handed Brooke another memorandum supporting an attack on the Cherbourg salient as the preliminary move for a larger assault in 1943, and Brooke put the case against. Rather than arguing the same issue yet again, the Americans merely stated that they would now have to put the matter to the President, asking to see Churchill beforehand. Brooke therefore fixed a meeting for 3 p.m. that day, and went to Downing Street to explain to the Prime Minister ‘how matters stood and to discuss with him most profitable line of action’.54
After lunch with his wife–‘it was such a joy and rest from my labours having a couple of hours with you’–Brooke went back to Downing Street for what was clearly going to be the major showdown of the visit. In the Cabinet Room between 3 and 4 p.m., Marshall, King and Hopkins argued for a Cherbourg bridgehead before Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff. ‘Without Sledgehammer,’ said Marshall, ‘we are faced with a defensive attitude in the European theatre.’55 Hopkins passed a piece of Downing Street paper on which he had written ‘I feel damn depressed’ to Marshall, who concluded the third meeting with the British by saying that he needed to report the stalemate to the President. Churchill–who Brooke thought was ‘very sound on the whole business’–told Marshall ‘that no decision was constitutionally valid until confirmed by the War Cabinet, of which Brooke was the senior military adviser’, thus effectively warning him that Brooke’s decision was final.56 Marshall cannot have hoped the War Cabinet would endorse his own views over those of the CIGS.
At 5.30 p.m. Brooke reported to the War Cabinet on the negotiations with the Americans and read out the salient points of Marshall’s memorandum for Sledgehammer, which he said ‘was envisaged by the American Chiefs of Staff as either (a) a desperate venture to assist Russia; or (b) a valuable prelude to the Roundup operation of 1943’. He then told the politicians what he had told the Americans, namely that Cherbourg was on the fringe of the area over which fighters could operate from Britain and thus no continuous fighter protection could be guaranteed. The maximum force that could be maintained there was six divisions plus ancillary units such as anti-aircraft, which he did not believe would ‘get very far inland’. To hold a peninsula 16 miles at the top and 65 at the base would require at least ten divisions, he argued, and since the United States could contribute only three by mid-October, ‘the rest of the force would have to be provided by this country’.
Brooke conceded that the Luftwaffe had only 250 bombers operating from four French aerodromes, but they could quickly fly in reinforcements from Germany. He reminded the Cabinet how they had reinforced their air forces bombing Malta in late 1941, despite the Russian campaign. The Germans had about twenty-seven divisions in France, he estimated, of which about fifteen were stationed in the coastal areas between Belgium and Brest. A force of some six to ten divisions could therefore quickly be built up and brought to bear against the Sledgehammer forces without weakening the Eastern Front.
Taking no account of the Italians, therefore, the Wehrmacht could amass a considerable force against the Cherbourg peninsula. The Allies would soon be bottled up there, Brooke argued, and a systematic air and land attack would be directed on the troops and port facilities. ‘The result might well be that our forces would be driven back into the sea,’ he feared, ‘while the troops themselves, and their equipment would be lost.’57 It was a dour assessment wildly at odds with the US memorandum, but it came from the man who had commanded both II Corps at Dunkirk and the Second BEF, much of which had been evacuated from Cherbourg itself.
Portal told the War Cabinet that a large fighter force could be available on the invasion day for about three hours, after which thirty-five fighters could be kept aloft at any one time, but they would be in the vicinity of a German first-line aircraft strength of 324 bombers and 426 fighters, three-quarters of which would be serviceable from the outset, so he could not guarantee ‘that we should not suffer severe losses during the assault’. As the campaign progressed, however, things might get worse. Even if two aerodromes in the peninsula and two in the Channel Islands were captured, he estimated, the fighter force would still be 280 or fewer, and would require protection by six hundred anti-aircraft guns.
‘Assuming that the Russians were still holding on the Volga, that Rommel had been driven back, and that Germany was not involved in major operations in Persia, Iraq or Spain,’ Portal said, ‘Germany might possibly be able to build up against us a force of 700 bombers and 930 fighters,’ of which he estimated three-quarters would be serviceable. Within six months, therefore, Cherbourg and its environs would be ‘a heap of ruins’. For good measure Admiral Pound gave statistics for how bad the weather could be in the Channel in the autumn. The four consecutive days of good weather needed for the attack happened, as an average over the last ten years, only 4.3 times in September and 2.2 times in October.
Churchill said that Cherbourg was attractive only as part of a much larger plan of simultaneous landings along the French coast, but would not work on its own and would delay Roundup indefinitely. ‘On the other hand,’ he told the War Cabinet in the Americans’ absence, ‘we must not show ourselves too ready to raise difficulties.’58 He was still very conscious of the pressures on Roosevelt and did not want to provoke Marshall’s ire unnecessarily, chiefly because of the Pacific alternative. Only Mountbatten supported the Cherbourg operation, as ‘the one area of the coast on which we could stage a successful assault this year’. Since it was Mountbatten’s criticisms of Sledgehammer during his marathon meeting with Roosevelt the previous month that had precipitated the whole change of plan, it is understandable that Brooke and the other Chiefs of Staff occasionally became exasperated with him. He was also the major progenitor of the calamitous Dieppe Raid the following month, and it is probably fair to assume that an attack on Cherbourg would merely have been a vastly larger version of that.
Churchill then stated that ‘If Sledgehammer was abandoned’, discussion of Gymnast ‘would at once be started’ and that ‘planning for Roundup in 1943 would, of course, continue.’ At this, Brooke told the Cabinet that Gymnast had to be carried out before the end of 1942, therefore ‘many months before Roundup’, and before the enemy could anticipate an attack in North Africa. While there had been ‘no definite discussion’ with the Americans on Gymnast, he said, ‘they were favourably impressed with the importance of the scheme’.59 It is hard to see how he could have come to this conclusion, given that the operation had indeed been considered, and dismissed, by Marshall only very recently.
At the end of the meeting, Churchill went around the table asking each member in turn for his views, and got a unanimous verdict against Sledgehammer and in favour of Gymnast (or actually a hybrid of it codenamed Mohican, which comprised several more attacks along the North African coast). Brooke recorded afterwards of Sledgehammer: ‘I had no trouble convincing Cabinet who were unanimously against
it.’60 Ismay was then instructed to inform Marshall that the War Cabinet had turned Sledgehammer down, which Churchill thought would ‘open the way for discussion on the alternative operation with the least difficulty’. Eisenhower reacted somewhat melodramatically to the news, telling Butcher that Wednesday 22 July 1942 could well go down as ‘the blackest day in history’ if Russia was defeated by ‘the big Boche drive now so alarmingly under way’, and the West had done nothing to save her.61
That night the British Chiefs of Staff gave their American counterparts dinner at Claridge’s, which must have been a somewhat strained social occasion as they all awaited the President’s response to Marshall’s gloomy report of the three days’ impasse. Nonetheless, Brooke recorded that ‘On the whole [it] went well.’ The least desirable placement for a Briton that evening must have been to be sat next to Ernest King, for as Marshall told Pogue in 1957: ‘I had trouble with King because he was always sore at everybody. He was perpetually mean. I made it my business to be on a very warm and understanding basis with the British, and they were appreciative of that. We were more suspicious of them than they were of us. This may not have been a compliment. I think they just thought we didn’t know enough.’
Back in Washington, Stimson insisted on seeing the standoff in terms of ‘a fatigued and defeatist government which had lost its initiative, blocking the help of a young and vigorous nation whose strength had not yet been tapped’.62 Brooke of course feared that the US strength would not be ‘tapped’ so much as wrecked, and Britain’s along with it. The experience of these negotiations with Marshall and King must have been rather like reliving his June 1940 conversation with Churchill at Le Mans.
That day John Kennedy was given a full briefing on the negotiations by Brooke, who told him that Roosevelt had ‘given instructions to Marshall to the effect that the American Army must get into action somewhere against the Germans and that he was to go and make plans accordingly’.63 This is so remarkably accurate that Brooke simply must have known at least the gist of the secret instructions that Roosevelt had given Marshall and Hopkins before they left. Had Hopkins leaked them to Churchill, who passed them on at the 11 p.m. meeting at Downing Street? However he came by the information, Brooke knew that if he stayed utterly intransigent over Sledgehammer–if he kept ‘looking into the distance’–Marshall was under orders finally to buckle. Thus forewarned, Brooke could hardly fail; it was like playing poker against an opponent whose cards were face up on the table.
Brooke told Kennedy that, after he had expounded on all the defects of Sledgehammer, Marshall had said to him: ‘Well, how are you going to win the war? You cannot win it by defensive action.’ Brooke replied that ‘That was another matter and the question was not so easy to answer.’ It was hardly an inspiring response from Britain’s senior military strategist, who still thought Gymnast risky and Jupiter suicidal.
Kennedy emphasized to Brooke that, over Sledgehammer, ‘much as one might hate constant refusal to take offensive action, there seemed no doubt that the project was impracticable in the near future. What we had to do in this phase of the war was avoid losing it. We could only expect a disaster if we landed prematurely.’64 He estimated that the Germans might concentrate up to thirty divisions against an invasion without taking a single one from the Russian front, since they had forty-seven in central Europe and twenty-seven in France. Moreover, the Allies would only have small aerodromes and few port facilities in the Cherbourg area, the use of which could be denied them by German air action alone. As Churchill also put it to Kennedy: ‘We should be eating up the seed corn of later and bigger projects.’65
Kennedy therefore believed it ‘really a good thing’ that Marshall had written his Sledgehammer memorandum, ‘for it is easier to point out the fallacies’. He considered it ‘most curious that Marshall has no sense of reality in considering the position that would arise if we found ourselves in the same land theatre as the German army with a tiny army against their huge forces’. He loyally concluded of his boss: ‘We are indeed fortunate in having Brooke to expound these matters, for he is clear and decisive and most practical in his outlook.’66
At a 3 p.m. meeting the next day, Thursday 23 July, Churchill told the Chiefs of Staff that ‘Roosevelt had wired back accepting that western front in 1942 was off. Also that he was in favour of attack in North Africa and was influencing his Chiefs in that direction. They were supposed to be working out various aspects with their staff and will probably meet us tomorrow.’ Roosevelt, Churchill and Brooke had therefore decided fundamentally to alter the future direction of the war southwards. The phrase ‘western front’, with its Great War overtones, was instructive; after all, Casablanca is six degrees further west than Cherbourg, and North Africa was never referred to as the ‘southern front’. Brooke was certainly not enthusiastic about Gymnast–soon to be rechristened Operation Torch for security reasons–and recorded that Churchill was ‘anxious that I should not put Marshall off Africa by referring to Middle East dangers in 1943. Told him I must put whole strategic position in front of Americans. Foresee difficulties ahead of me!!’67
That evening Marshall dined at Brooke’s flat in Westminster Gardens with Brooke, Grigg, the Quartermaster-General Sir Walter Venning and the Deputy CIGS Lieutenant-General Ronald Weeks. Marshall was ‘in very pleasant and friendly mood’, which is a fine testament to his strength of character since just about everything he had worked for on the strategic level since Pearl Harbor was collapsing around him, and his bluff had also been called successfully.68 If anything confirms the universal description of Marshall as a great gentleman it was his good nature when dining with his arch-antagonist (at least in strategic terms) that night.
‘We were at a complete stalemate,’ Marshall recalled of that period years later when talking to Pogue. ‘Churchill was rabid for Africa. Roosevelt for Africa. Positive reaction by both. Both were aware of political necessities. It is something we fail to take into consideration.’ The need for an alternative plan was now overwhelming, and the President’s instructions were unambiguous, so ‘One morning before breakfast, I sat down at Claridge’s in my room and began to write. I recognized we couldn’t do Sledgehammer and that there was no immediate prospect of Roundup. What was the least harmful diversion? Always bearing in mind that we didn’t have much. I started into writing a proposal…It called for an expedition into North Africa with operations, limits, nature.’69 Just as Marshall was finishing the paper, King entered the room. He had obviously come to the same conclusion. ‘It is remarkable now,’ recalled Marshall fourteen years later, ‘but King accepted without a quibble, despite the fact that he usually argued over all our plans’. King’s acceptance of the situation illustrates how hopeless it was for the American delegation.
Portal believed that the decisive factor in making the Americans accept Operation Torch was ‘our argument that we couldn’t amass enough shipping for Roundup until the Mediterranean was open, and we were saved a long [journey] all around the Cape. When we put this argument to Marshall and the others in conjunction with the Torch plan, they argued it out amongst themselves at the Dorchester all one evening, and finally came round to accepting our point of view.’70 He was wrong, and not just in the name of the Mayfair hotel. In fact it was a very clear order from their commander-in-chief that forced Marshall and King to think again.
Like Portal, Kennedy also thought that superior British arguments rather than presidential diktat had won the day. ‘The last week has seen a development in our planning with the Americans that may govern the future course of the war,’ he wrote. ‘Marshall and King came over with very fixed ideas of what they wanted to do and were convinced that our ideas were sounder.’71 This was a wholly inaccurate interpretation. Marshall and King hadrun up against two immovable objects in the shape of Churchill and Brooke, and in the event of not being able to shift them had been ordered by Roosevelt to take the North African route.
Once Marshall had completed his memorandum after breakfast on Fri
day 24 July, he contacted Brooke to arrange a noon meeting with the Chiefs of Staff. ‘I was a bit nervous as to what they might have been brewing up since our last meeting!’ Brooke confessed to his diary. ‘I wondered what new difficulties and troubles I might have to face!’ He needn’t have worried; Marshall’s paper, he discovered, contained ‘almost everything we had asked them to agree to at the start’. This document, officially entitled ‘Operations in 1942–3’ but known by its designation ‘CCS 94’ (that is, the 94th memorandum put out by the Combined Chiefs of Staff), was adopted with only minor alterations. In return for an agreement to give up Sledgehammer and an early Roundup, and to prepare for an attack on North Africa, Brooke had to agree to cuts in proposed air allotments in the Far East and to having a US armoured division stationed in Iran. Neither was problematic.
‘It having been decided that Sledgehammer is not to be undertaken as a scheduled operation,’ CCS 94 began,
we propose the following plans for 1942–3…If the situation on the Russian front by 15th September indicates such a collapse or weakening of Russian resistance as to make Roundup appear impracticable of successful execution, the decision should be taken to launch a combined operation against the North and North-west coasts of Africa at the earliest possible date before December 1942.
Marshall’s memorandum stated that Sledgehammer would be continued only for the purposes of deception; that an American armoured division would be sent to the Middle East in British ships; that the operation against Casablanca would be wholly American, while others against Algiers and Oran would be British ‘but under a United States veneer’, the whole to be under the overall command of an American; that ‘plans should be made…to re-enter Europe as soon as opportunity offered’, and that it was hoped that the US would have 3,100 first-line aircraft in Britain by April 1943, but 800 would be diverted to the Pacific and 700 to the North-west African operation, leaving ‘a substantial Air Force in this country for bombing Germany or for operations against the Continent in 1943’.
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