Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  The Mediterranean Garden Path: ‘I intended North Africa to be a springboard, not a sofa’ November 1942–January 1943

  Prestige has surely been the most fruitful source of military mistakes since the beginning of time.

  Major-General John Kennedy, November 19421

  In his speech at the Mansion House dinner in London on Tuesday 10 November 1942, Churchill declared that the victories at El Alamein and Torch represented ‘perhaps the end of the beginning’ of the war. The phrase was originally thought up by Lieutenant-Colonel (later General Sir) Ridley Pakenham-Walsh when he was advising on Churchill’s four-volume life of the Duke of Marlborough in the early 1930s.2 When Churchill found a vivid phrase it often lodged in his brain to be called forth for later use; ‘fight them on the beaches’ first appears in relation to seal pups in Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

  Another famous phrase from that Mansion House speech–‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’–would only have confirmed Marshall and others in their suspicion that Churchill wanted to recover Malaysia and Singapore in order to preserve the Empire almost as much as to defeat Japan. Churchill’s researcher William Deakin believed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘felt lured into the Mediterranean…because they had to admit [not only] that the build-up for a decisive landing in northern France was far from completion, but that Mediterranean operations were essentially designed to further exclusively British interests–to preserve and control from Mediterranean bases the imperial route to Asia and the Far East’.3 It was undoubtedly what the Americans felt, but to what extent were they right?

  King George VI’s principal private secretary Sir Alan Lascelles, writing in a diary that he too, as a public servant, ought not to have been keeping, noted of Torch that ‘Winston, in his speech, gave the credit for its original conception to Roosevelt; but I believe it belongs more truly to himself.’4 Rather like some inventions and scientific discoveries, to say nothing of political ideas, it is often hard to pinpoint exactly the authorship of successful military strategies. They cannot be patented, and after the war Brooke strongly denied that it had been Churchill or Roosevelt rather than his own Planning Staff who had thought up the idea. Yet judging by Dill’s strictures against Kennedy, Torch does not appear to have been a War Office concept.

  Roosevelt himself spoke of the genesis of Torch at a meeting on 10 November with his vice-president Henry Wallace, House Speaker Sam Rayburn and the majority leaders of both Houses, Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts. The President mentioned that the Moroccan and Algerian attacks ‘had been talked over with Churchill when he was here last June’. Wallace claimed that it had been thought of as early as December 1941, when he had given FDR a Christmas present of a book about the Mediterranean, with certain chapters marked up to imply that an attack in North-west Africa was recommended. Roosevelt replied that it ‘began to take more definite form in July of 1942 when Hopkins visited London but it did not really take definite form until…August’.5 In the words of Mussolini’s foreign minister Count Ciano, later appropriated by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs disaster: ‘Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.’

  Of course total victory in North Africa was far from imminent, perhaps partly as a result of the compromises made over Torch. As Ian Jacob told the author, ‘We should have insisted on going straight for Tunis and Bizerte…It would have saved us six months of battling along the North African coast.’6 Within hours of Torch, German forces were landing at Vichy-controlled airfields in Tunisia, and on 11 November they landed at Bizerte too, which the British had wanted to earmark as a Torch target only to be overruled by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hitler’s decision to flood Tunisia with troops led ultimately to calamity after he refused to withdraw them, of course, but at the time they held up Kenneth Anderson’s eastward drive towards the Tunis Straits.

  The strength of Marshall’s voice in the counsels of Allied strategy directly correlated to the numbers of Americans under arms. He kept up unrelenting pressure on Roosevelt over the size of the US Army, claiming in December 1942 that the Bureau of the Budget had privately fixed the strength of the Army in the calendar year 1943 at 6.5 million, whereas the President had approved the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommendation of a planned strength of 7.5 million, and denouncing the way the Bureau of the Budget ‘definitely limits the development of the Army’. He rather histrionically told the President that the Bureau’s figures ‘jeopardize our success in this war and should be revoked immediately’. Roosevelt replied the next day with characteristic sang-froid: ‘I wish the Government as a whole would talk in terms either of calendar year or fiscal year but not both!…Let me put it so clearly that there can be no misunderstanding. For Budget purposes the strength of the Army is fixed for an average of 6.5m for the calendar year 1943.’ Since the US Army numbered five million in January and would be seven million by December, the President patiently explained, like a mathematics teacher to a plodding pupil, that the average could not exceed 6.5 million. Furthermore, the Director of the Budget understood that he had to budget for equipment for 7.5 million by the end of 1943. ‘If the Army and Budget people will only do what I have written,’ he concluded, ‘they will see there is no argument between them.’7

  It was a magisterial rebuke, and the figures still have the power to impress. An army of fewer than two hundred thousand when the European war broke out in September 1939 would grow into one of seven million–thirty-five times its size–a mere four years later. In divisional terms, the US Army had 37 trained divisions at the time of Pearl Harbor, 73 by Operation Torch, 120 by the summer of 1943 and 200 by D-Day. By contrast the British Commonwealth had seventy-five divisions by the summer of 1943 and hardly any more the next year.8 Nor was the American revolution confined to the Army; on 13 November 1942 a US shipbuilding yard built a standard 10,500-ton merchant vessel–a ‘Liberty ship’–in exactly four days and fifteen hours. Two days later the ship was fully equipped and ready for service. No other country or alliance could begin to match such efficiency and productive power.

  Eisenhower’s recognition, immediately after Torch, of the former vice-premier of Vichy, Admiral Jean François Darlan, as political head of French North Africa, raised political hackles in both Britain and America. Nonetheless it had been Darlan who, as titular head of all French forces, had ordered his troops to stop resisting the Allies, turning Torch, a potentially dangerous operation, into what Kennedy correctly described as ‘a walkover’. To recognize someone who had actively collaborated with the Nazis was politically embarrassing for the Americans, however good their raisons d’état, and there remained for the next three years deep disagreements between the British and Americans over where true legitimacy lay with regard to the French leadership, state and (especially) Army. Yet as Churchill had intimated with his remark over rival ‘pet Frenchmen’, and was explicitly to state several times over to his own Foreign Office, he was not about to jeopardize his valuable good relations with Roosevelt over the issue, least of all not in favour of someone as clearly Anglophobic as Charles de Gaulle, however much he admired the general for his actions back in 1940. Churchill, no less than Eisenhower, accepted the iron dictates of expediency in this respect.

  ‘It is a queer situation in North Africa,’ noted Kennedy on 12 November. ‘The French are allowing the Germans to put forces into Tunisia without firing a shot while they have opposed us in Algeria and Morocco…The truth of the matter is that although the French hate the Germans I am afraid they hate us more.’ The Germans got over five thousand men into Bizerte and Tunis unopposed immediately after Torch, and their tenacity there had lessons for the Allies over Roundup, underlining the formidable capacity of the Germans to counter-attack invading forces, which were never allowed to keep the initiative for very long.9

  On Sunday 15 November, a sleep-deprived Anthony Eden was at Chequers with Churchill, Smuts, Brooke
and the other Chiefs of Staff for a meeting called by the Prime Minister ‘to drive on his ideas of offensive action’, as Smuts put it later. ‘A bad night,’ Eden lamented in his diary. ‘I don’t know why it is that Chequers never suits me. Cold still heavy, if not heavier and [his physician Dr] Rossdale’s cocaine makes me feel giddy.’10 Just before the conference started at 11 a.m. a telegram arrived from Eisenhower announcing the terms of his agreement with Darlan, against which Eden protested, before the meeting got on to future strategy in general and Italy in particular. The idea that the next stage of Britain’s grand strategy of the Second World War, primarily the proposed attack on Italy, might have been discussed with the Foreign Secretary self-confessedly ‘giddy’ on cocaine might have been a cause for concern had it not been an area where Churchill and Brooke fully agreed. Churchill had also mentioned Italy to Roosevelt in his cable of 22 September proposing action in northern Norway when he had written: ‘We might decide to do Jupiter instead of attacking the underbelly of the Axis by Sardinia, Sicily and even possibly Italy.’ So the Americans were not unaware of what the British now began to argue was the inevitable next stage of the war.

  Captain Basil Liddell Hart believed that it was the tardiness of Eisenhower’s advance from Algeria into Tunisia that drew the Germans into moving such large reinforcements southwards across the Mediterranean in order to protect their Tunisian bridgehead, only to be ‘trapped with the sea at their back’.11 Had the entire German and Italian army in Tunisia–approximately a quarter of a million men–not been captured, they might well have stalled the later Allied advances into southern Europe. It might be, therefore, that the very lack of early success immediately after Torch paradoxically increased the successes later, given Hitler’s unwillingness to retreat even tactically, a characteristic that Allied strategists were about to note with glee.

  At the Chequers meeting, Smuts stated that ‘there seemed to him to be no difference of opinion on long-term policy,’ even though Churchill had written a memorandum complaining that the Chiefs of Staff were insufficiently aggressive. Churchill and Brooke did disagree on the amount of stores, supplies and general non-military equipment the Army needed, however, with the Prime Minister pressing for a heavy reduction in the administrative ‘tail’ of the forces in North Africa. ‘The Army is like a peacock,’ Churchill complained, ‘nearly all tail.’ Not to be outdone by an ornithological reference, Brooke retorted: ‘The peacock would be a very badly balanced bird without its tail.’12

  On 16 November, Churchill explained the Government’s position over Darlan to the War Cabinet. He said that Eisenhower had given a ‘convincing’ account of the political situation with regard to the French in North Africa, who after all still had four divisions in Morocco, three in Algeria and one in Tunisia. Darlan ‘is contemptible figure’, said the Prime Minister. ‘Whilst the French Navy was fighting, [he] was negotiating. He was now advising the French to fight against Germany.’ Churchill equally despised Giraud, who, he said: ‘1) signed a letter to Pétain saying he would behave, 2) then manoeuvred to get power for himself, 3) now he’s accepted a commission from Eisenhower to fight.’ Eden thought Eisenhower’s policy towards Darlan would outrage British opinion, and Churchill pointed out: ‘He’s not our C-in-C–Eisenhower is responsible to the Washington authorities. We can’t afford to upset Eisenhower just now.’ He concluded: ‘Eisenhower is our friend–grand fellow–we don’t want to get across him.’

  Eden said that nonetheless the US authorities must be told ‘fairly soon’ that the Darlan position could not be stabilized, and that ‘When we get Tunis we ought to get rid of’ the admiral. A telegram was drafted to that effect. Brooke then reported on Algiers, Oran and Casablanca and added that the ‘French are [now] showing tendency to assist us,’ although the capacity of Casablanca harbour was severely restricted. The Eastern Task Force had landed 56,000 men, the Central 51,700 and the Western 37,000, totalling 144,700 men to the west of Rommel.13

  The success of Torch raised a number of possibilities for the War Office Planners. At last the British Army was on the offensive, a new way of conducting warfare, although Churchill was never satisfied with the amount of ground covered, telling Major-General Sir Noel Holmes, the Director of Movements, ‘I intended North Africa to be a springboard, not a sofa.’ Among the scenarios that were now subjected to ‘urgent examination’ were projects for taking Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands (Operation Mandibles); bombing Italy; invading Sicily; sending air squadrons to help the Russians in the Caucasus; ‘getting command of the Aegean again’, and using Smyrna and the other Turkish ports further north. ‘The Germans are now in a mess, although they are still tough and strong,’ concluded Kennedy. ‘It is the maddest thing ever done in military history to hold a two-thousand-mile front through the Russian winter.’14

  Yet what every one of these plans had in common was that they involved what the American Planners were calling–comprehensibly if not felicitously–‘scatterization’.15 With an estimated total of thirty-six German combat divisions in the west in December 1942, Brooke considered it was still too early for Roundup, and certainly for Sledgehammer, although he could not have known that the number was only set to rise. Writing from the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, Dill warned that ‘There are still a good number of people in authority here, who feel that we have led them down the Mediterranean garden path and although they are enjoying the walk are fearful of what they might find at the end of it.’16 Foremost among these was George C. Marshall.

  For all this urgent new activity at the War Office–‘Winston issues notes urging on action everywhere and very soon,’ wrote Kennedy–Brooke still spent his lunch hours prowling around second-hand bookshops and hunting for gadgets for his bird-watching cameras, sometimes not returning until 4 p.m., although like Marshall he often continued working after supper. His contribution to the North African successes was recognized by the award of the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. With Churchill and Brooke now tending to agree on the big issue–that the next stage in the war ought to be in the Mediterranean rather than across the Channel–Brooke allowed himself to be irritated only by small issues, such as Churchill’s love of rodomontades during meetings. At one Defence Committee with ‘Winston holding forth’, he passed a note to Grigg saying ‘15 minutes gone and no work done’, which he subsequently altered to 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 and then 45, before the real business of the meeting began. ‘Winston is really stupid the way he tries his team,’ concluded Kennedy after he heard this. ‘I wish someone had the courage to tell him about it.’ (The only person other than the King who could, Clementine Churchill, had tried it successfully with a very direct note to her husband back in June 1940, but the effect had been temporary.)

  At a War Cabinet on 30 November 1942, the crucial issue of the Russian attitude towards future Allied policy was discussed. Churchill read a telegram he had received from Stalin about the Second Front, and commented that the ‘Mediterranean must be regarded as an inadequate contribution to the battle. We must not only fool around in the Mediterranean. It would be a calamity if it got in Russia’s mind we were only going to contribute with Mediterranean next year.’ This does not prove that Churchill still felt that Roundup was a possibility for 1943, but more likely implies that he was still hankering after Jupiter, or even a force in the Caucasus to link up with the Red Army. To Stalin’s request for aircraft support in the Caucasus, Churchill said Britain should ‘make a definite contribution to the fighting. Don’t want to dismount our squadrons.’17 Of course Brooke didn’t want to ‘dismount’ them either, but merely to use them in North Africa.

  On Wednesday 2 December, Brooke dined at Kennedy’s house, 98 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, and was ‘in great form and kept us interested and amused with graphic stories of his dealings with Winston and his trips to Moscow and America. He is very loyal to Winston and always shows that even when he is telling a story at Winston’s expense.’ ‘Brookie’ then described his dealings with Churchill, e
specially his ‘extraordinary obstinacy. Like a child who has set his mind on a forbidden toy. It is no good to explain that he will cut his fingers or burn them. The more you explain the more fixed he becomes in his idea.’ When the Prime Minister became ‘quite immovable on some impossible project’, Brooke said it often meant only that ‘he will not give way at that particular moment. Then suddenly after some days he will come round and will say something to show that [it] is all right and that all the personal abuse has been forgotten. Winston is a bully and like all bullies is worse if you don’t stand up to him.’ Brooke further complained of Churchill’s tendency ‘suddenly to start using the arguments which have been put to him as his own–even to those who have originally produced them–and as if they were something quite new’. Although many subordinates complain about their bosses in much these terms, it is hard to see how Kennedy could justify describing Brooke’s monologue as ‘very loyal to Winston’.

  Asked by another guest at their dinner à quatre, Jean Strathearn, who was ‘the biggest man’ out of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, Brooke said that since they were so different they could hardly be compared. ‘For instance, Roosevelt could never have rallied the country as Winston did after Dunkirk.’ This was surprising, and somewhat unfair, considering what Roosevelt had done in the difficult circumstances after Pearl Harbor, when the United States was not in danger of invasion. Brooke went on to say that ‘Winston had a very human and lovable side,’ and recalled how, when flying back from America early one morning, the Prime Minister had come up the plane to get a first sight of land, wearing his dressing gown and yachting cap and smoking a cigar, ‘and they peered down together through the clouds’. Churchill had said: ‘Do you know, I feel so thrilled. I can imagine the feelings of those men who first flew the Atlantic.’