The tension between Churchill’s and Marshall’s strategies could hardly be clearer.
Instead of Marshall’s draft, Roosevelt sent Churchill a very short telegram merely stating that the next convoy should not sail to Russia.55 He could see no advantages in a major row with his principal ally only a few weeks before Torch. The suspicion must remain that Marshall wrote the draft more for the President’s benefit than for the Prime Minister’s.
In 1953, Moran asked Churchill which were ‘the two most anxious months of the war’. Without hesitation the Prime Minister answered September and October 1942.56 On the first day of October, Eden visited Downing Street after dinner, and found Clement Attlee there. ‘If Torch fails,’ Churchill told the two men, ‘then I am done for and must go and hand over to one of you.’57 With many more Conservative than Labour MPs in parliament as a result of Stanley Baldwin’s 1935 election victory, all three knew it would have been Eden rather than the deputy premier.
Later that week Kennedy recorded that Churchill ‘was like a cat on hot bricks about the future development of the war’. Lunching with the Prime Minister at Downing Street, he mentioned that he had a tin of snuff to give him, a present from Admiral Richard Stapleton-Cotton. ‘I thought of giving up cigars till we were back in Benghazi,’ Churchill said on accepting it. ‘Then I thought I’d give up snuff. Then I decided to do neither. I didn’t see why I should give up anything for any German.’ Kennedy later wrote that although Churchill was funny at Cabinet Defence Committee meetings, ‘It is rather like the headmaster making jokes to the boys–the laughs come very easily!’ This was unfair; Churchill genuinely was funny, and humour was needed to leaven the stress. When he had a sore throat he complained to Brooke that his doctors ‘have knocked me off cigars. That is the worst of having a high-class job–you have to go in for high-class cures. I should have said a wet stocking round my neck would cure me in a night.’
After dinner on 6 October, Eden and Oliver Lyttelton had a drink with Churchill in the No. 10 Annexe, where they were joined by Randolph Churchill, who at one point said, ‘Father, the trouble is your soldiers won’t fight.’ Eden was indignant, recording: ‘It was a revelation to me that Randolph is so stupid.’58 Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that although the British High Command thought their soldiers would fight, there was indeed an underlying fear that the Germans were man for man better soldiers, and this was one of the reasons that the invasion of France was postponed to 1944, until victories had been won over the Wehrmacht in the lesser theatres of North Africa, Sicily and Italy.
On 9 October Kennedy went to see Eisenhower, who had retained his post as commander of the European theatre as well as becoming supreme commander for Torch. ‘I found him in a very wrought up state…he said he was being continually bombarded with political, operational and administrative problems…I was sorry to see that he was feeling the stress so much.’ Eisenhower was unhappy with the British Government’s instructions to their commanders, which he felt gave them carte blanche to appeal over his head directly to Churchill. Kennedy pointed out that every British commander had always received pretty nearly identical instructions, but it hadn’t prevented Lords Haig and Gort from working with foreigners. Eisenhower then told Kennedy that he had ‘always considered this operation to be unsound strategically but he had been chosen for a variety of reasons to head it and he would drive it through in a spirit of loyalty and close cooperation’. When this amazing statement was reported to Brooke, the CIGS retorted: ‘What a bloody fool the man is!’59
Meanwhile, in Washington, Hopkins warned Marshall on 10 October that Roosevelt had received a ‘very urgent wire’ from Stalin asking that for the next few months deliveries of aircraft to Russia be more than doubled to five hundred per month. The President, through the Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinov, sent word that he would look into it at once. That morning Stalin followed it up with ‘a very urgent request’ for an immediate answer. Although Roosevelt knew that such a figure was completely impossible, he asked if Marshall could send Stalin three hundred extra aircraft over and above what had been agreed in the protocol, beginning immediately and starting with coastal defence fighters. ‘The President is anxious to get off a message to Stalin tonight,’ he was told.60
Marshall replied that same night: ‘Any immediate increase beyond the 212 airplanes per month now scheduled for Russia could only be managed by a reduction of planes urgently needed for our units in combat theatres,’ primarily Guadalcanal and Torch. US coastal defence units were ‘actually operational training units’, which had only half their proper complement of planes, and which in any case ‘weren’t suitable for an active theater’. Moreover, they were an important defence ‘against a possible trick carrier raid’. In short, Marshall’s answer to Stalin was no. By that stage in the war, he felt secure enough in Roosevelt’s regard to be able to take such a firm line, and know that it would be accepted.
Marshall was also subjected to regular demands from Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific, such as one of 17 October about ‘the critical situation’ in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, which concluded, ‘I urge that the entire resources of the United States be diverted temporarily to meet the critical situation; that shipping be made available from any source; that one Corps be dispatched immediately; that all available heavy bombers be ferried here at once,’ and so on.61 Marshall not surprisingly disliked the high-handed tone of the messages he received from MacArthur, who, rather than being sent ‘the entire resources of the United States’, had to be content with a heavy bomber group that was flown from Hawaii to Australia.
On 14 October Brooke received Montgomery’s detailed plan for a great attack to be unleashed on Rommel at El Alamein in nine days’ time. He decided that he would not pass it on to Churchill, even though the Prime Minister ‘was continually fretting to advance the date’ and asking him ‘why we were not being informed of the proposed date of attack’. Brooke wanted to protect Alexander and Montgomery from being bothered by Churchill, and subjected to demands that the plans be altered. It was nonetheless a serious and insubordinate decision to have taken. Like Marshall, however, Brooke knew what he could get away with by then.
The searing summer heat meant that there had been little fighting in North Africa since July, and both sides had been able to reinforce themselves, with the Allies being strengthened disproportionately more than the Axis. With two hundred thousand troops and over one thousand tanks, Montgomery had almost double Rommel’s forces. The battle front was only 40 miles wide, as the geological phenomenon known as the Qattara Depression closed off Rommel’s opportunities for a southern flanking move by fast armour. Montgomery’s attack began at 9.40 on the night of 23 October with more than one thousand guns firing the first of more than one million rounds at the German positions, and over the next twelve days a savage battle was fought, costing thirteen thousand casualties on the Commonwealth side and thirty-five thousand on the Axis. After three days, Brooke felt able to give the War Cabinet tentative details of how it was going; five hundred German and one thousand Italian prisoners had been taken, but there had been ‘No major clash of armour yet’.62 Then he filled in the Cabinet on the situation in Russia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Burma.
There followed discussion of the accusation appearing in British left-wing newspapers that Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer, had had ‘friends’ in the British War Cabinet when he flew to Britain in May 1941, which had inflamed Soviet suspicions. Smuts said ‘We should…find out more about H[ess] to find out who were his friends in Cabinet…Misunderstand[ings are] bad for atmosphere of two allies. They are building up a case and we must meet it before it has gone too far.’ Cripps–who had until recently been the ambassador in Moscow–called for a ‘simple statement by someone about Hess, clearing up the matter’. Churchill then explained:
Hess arrived, hot from Hitler’s entourage, and came to do great service for Germany at great risk. He wanted to be…conducted to the King to say that we [tha
t is, the Churchill ministry] had no backing here and to get a Government of the pro-Munich complexion installed. Hess was suffering from melancholia. We tried to make him talk…He gave us last chance for peace and the chance of joining the crusade against Russia. But he never said a word about his Cabinet friends who he had come to see. He had once met the Duke of Hamilton.63
A minister then suggested that the Government should make the records of Hess’ interrogation available to the press, to which Churchill’s answer was no. Smuts warned that the ‘impression’ of the incident might ‘seriously’ affect Anglo-Russian relations and Cripps added that full disclosure would ‘Get rid of an air of mystery’. Churchill, however, believed that the Russians were worried about much more important matters, such as ‘their losses’, adding that he might consider allowing Cripps to make a digest of the Hess documents for press and parliament, and the Cabinet could then decide whether to hand it to Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador. In the event neither thing happened, and the conspiracy theories about the Hess flight therefore swirled around, inflaming Russian suspicions to the detriment of the British Establishment, until the interrogation reports were finally released somewhat piecemeal half a century later in the 1990s, entirely confirming what Churchill had said.
On Tuesday 3 November, the US Congressional mid-term elections produced the best result for the Republicans since 1928, increasing their representation by ten senators and forty-seven Congressmen. Nonetheless the Democrats still retained a 58–38 majority in the Senate and a 222–212 majority in the House of Representatives. Roosevelt had been in power for nearly a decade, and there was much criticism of the way the war was being fought, but his party still controlled all three branches of the American government. The elections would undoubtedly have gone far better for him had Operation Torch taken place beforehand, but Marshall told four Pentagon historians in 1949, ‘off the record’, that the President ‘had made no word of complaint when he was told the invasion date although some of his men yelled pretty loud because we could not go in five days earlier’.
Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein was clear to all by 4 November, when Rommel started his full withdrawal, though hampered by Hitler’s policy of refusing to contemplate retreats. Egypt was clear of the Afrika Korps by 10 November. ‘Rommel was a fool not to have gone back a month ago,’ wrote Kennedy on 2 November, with near-perfect hindsight. ‘We should then have been faced with the problem of moving forward and building up again for an attack with a long line of communications exposed to Rommel’s raids, etc. Rommel cannot be such a good general as we thought. On the other hand, Montgomery has had colossal luck in arriving at the moment when he did and not sooner.’64 (Or indeed any later, when his victory would have been ascribed to Auchinleck’s dispositions.)
Fourteen years later, Marshall identified this period as the tipping point for the balance of power between the United States and Great Britain:
For a long time they had supremacy and we had a minimum of divisions either organized or overseas. The apex of British supremacy was the victory of the Eighth Army in Africa. Later, their strength dwindled until in the Italian campaign some units wouldn’t fight. We had to turn three of our divisions over to the commander there. They had simply lost all their fight. We didn’t blame them a bit, because they were completely exhausted and under strength.65
On Sunday 8 November, four days after Rommel began his full-scale retreat from El Alamein, he found simultaneous amphibious assaults taking place at eight places several hundred miles behind him, around Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. They were all successful. Eisenhower and his deputy Mark Clark were in overall command, and the American Western Task Force was under the command of Major-General GeorgeS. Patton. The Vichy French opposed the landings in all three places in their territory, but with differing intensity. Whereas Algiers had fallen by the first evening, and the fighting in Oran was over by noon on 10 November, the landing at Casablanca was bitterly contested until 11 November. Nonetheless, Torch was a success, and, unlike the Dieppe Raid, lessons genuinely were learnt for combined amphibious assaults in the future.
The counter-attack via Spain did not transpire; the weather was unusually fine; the feared losses to submarines and German bombers did not happen. Stimson ‘always believed Torch to be the luckiest operation of the war, although he was prepared to admit that those who had advocated the operation could not be expected to see it in that light’.66 The President had won his bet.
On the evening of 8 November, as the momentous news about Torch was coming in, Churchill was with Eden, Winant and Bedell Smith. ‘The PM was evidently much elevated by the success in Egypt and satisfactory initial stage of Torch and he talked even more frankly than customarily, the conversation lasting the greater part of the night,’ Bedell Smith telegraphed Marshall, who immediately passed the message on to Hopkins to show the President. ‘He is extremely anxious to have you and probably Admiral King come here at a very early stage for conference to reorient strategy in the light of new Mediterranean situation.’ Churchill had given up the Norway idea, thought Bedell Smith (wrongly), but he believed that a properly armed Turkey ‘will erupt’ into the Balkans against the Germans. (In fact, Turkey only declared war against Germany in late February 1945.) Bedell Smith concluded that Churchill ‘seems to be growing colder to the idea of Roundup except as a final stroke against a tottering opponent. As you know, the Pacific to him seems very far away and his constantly reiterated idea is that Russia, Britain and the United States must dispose of Germany and then concentrate on Japan. He hopes to clinch this strategy by your conference here.’67
As for France, Winant reported to Roosevelt, and Bedell Smith simultaneously to Marshall, that Churchill ‘feels bound in honour to support de Gaulle, with all his faults, as the one man who stuck to the apparently sinking ship and whose name has a following in civilian France’. Churchill feared that the pro-Allied General Henri Giraud, whom the Americans had slipped into North-west Africa during Torch in the hope of establishing him in power there, would turn into a source of difficulty, and he insisted that ‘Britain and the United States cannot each have a pet Frenchman.’68
In one evening of exuberantly loose talk with two key Americans, therefore, Churchill had effectively warned Roosevelt and Marshall that he wanted to ‘reorient’ strategy away from Roundup and towards the Mediterranean, do nothing more than contain Japan, and run de Gaulle against their favoured candidate, Giraud. He thereby neatly encapsulated the three next great areas of discord between the Allied grand strategists and told the Americans what he had in mind, much sooner than he needed to have done. Torch had arisen from a negotiated deal whereby he and Roosevelt had effectively split the difference over the numbers of troops needed for each part of the operation, and compromised over the geographical areas to attack.
Yet Churchill deserved his moment of exultation. At the War Cabinet the next day he hailed it as the ‘Biggest combined effort since Hitler’s attack on the Low Countries, and the largest amphibian operation ever undertaken…I beg my colleagues and military authorities to look on this as a springboard. We must look at once at military operations undertaken from there. This is the moment for the offensive.’ He added that it would be a ‘Tragic mistake to think we can take our time with this war. Hitler is playing now for a stalemate. This is our real danger. Never has there been more need for urgency in the war.’ Smuts suggested that the ‘real victory front’ was to be found ‘from the South not from the West’, and Churchill agreed, adding: ‘President Roosevelt calls this the Second Front. We won’t contradict this.’ He proclaimed himself ‘very anxious’ to ring Britain’s church bells in celebration the following Sunday; they had not sounded since 1940 because they were to act as tocsins warning of a German invasion.69
Churchill also wanted to ‘Bomb Italy, bring it forward as fast as possible,’ ordering Brooke to ‘Have it studied, worked out and report next week.’ He declared proudly that the ‘British Empire played the leading part of this ter
rific event,’ predicting that it ‘meant the obliteration of the German & Italian forces in Libya & Egypt’ and announcing that he would ‘Mark the victory in respect of Alexander and Montgomery with high reward and promotion’, since it was ‘One of the greatest victories won by the British Empire in the field. It’s a fine story.’ He then formally congratulated Brooke and Grigg, the War Secretary, for a ‘brilliant showing’, remarking that the ‘movement of the invasion convoy without loss was a marvellous story with 105 warships, 142 troop and supply ships’. Brooke then filled in the details of the successful operations at Oran, Casablanca and Algiers.70
The Cabinet was a long one, a full three hours. ‘Winston revelled over our success!’ noted Brooke at the time. ‘But did not give the Army quite the credit it deserved.’ This was unfair: in fact the Prime Minister suggested that the Cabinet should congratulate the CIGS and Grigg ‘for the fine performance put up by the Army’. Brooke observed after the war: ‘I think this is the only occasion on which he expressed publicly any appreciation or thanks for work I had done during the whole of the period I worked for him.’71
As well as being the first significant British Commonwealth land victory of the Second World War, El Alamein was also the last. Henceforth every major engagement was to be fought as part of an alliance. The peal of Britain’s church bells ringing to celebrate this great feat of Imperial and Commonwealth arms was also tolling the end of major unilateral military action, at least until the recapture of the Falkland Islands forty years later. Kennedy commented on how ‘remarkably thin’ the bells in London sounded that Sunday, and it reminded him how many churches had been destroyed.
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