Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  On the issue of the internecine loathing among the French leadership in Africa, which he later likened to ‘a basket of snakes’, Churchill thought de Gaulle was ‘missing his market’, as his two rivals Giraud and Darlan were both consolidating their positions. As ever, the Prime Minister’s underlying worry was of falling out with the Americans, and of their thinking in terms of ‘our Darlan and their de Gaulle’.34 At the next Cabinet meeting, Churchill reported that de Gaulle was ‘in a high-stepping mood. Anxious to embroil us with the Americans’, which was something Churchill would never allow. Meanwhile Alec Cadogan feared that American policy in North Africa ‘is not being directed by State Department, but by Gen. Marshall!’

  On Christmas Eve 1942, Churchill, Eden and Attlee lunched together at No. 10 after discussing policy towards Portugal. The Prime Minister ‘emphasised how much a key man R[oosevelt] was in the States’. In Britain whatever happened to Churchill himself, ‘or even all three of us’, there were enough ‘resolute men to carry on and see the business through. But in the US?’35 He didn’t think much of Henry Wallace, who had made a bawdy joke–‘and not a very good one’–at their first meeting, which Churchill had taken a few moments even to get.

  When the news arrived later that day that Darlan had been assassinated by a French patriot in Algiers, Eden was delighted. ‘I have not felt so relieved by any event for years,’ he told his diary. The Americans supported Giraud, although de Gaulle still had his own long-term plans. For all that Churchill did not want to row with the Americans over which Frenchman’s writ would ultimately run in Africa, on other issues he was willing to stand up to them. In a discussion on a treaty with China over Kowloon, Eden had commented that it was ‘going to be tiresome. We shan’t get much support from US though they should support us.’ Churchill warned him about America’s ‘Readiness to give away our imperial rights. Don’t let us go any further than we have gone.’36 Squabbling Frenchmen in Africa were one thing as far as the Prime Minister was concerned, the rights of the British Empire quite another.

  ‘I am afraid that Eisenhower as a general is hopeless!’ exclaimed Brooke in his diary, provoked by the slowness of the advance in Tunisia that Christmas. ‘He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I am afraid, because he knows little if anything about military matters.’ Since Eisenhower had been a soldier all his life, and a notably successful one in all he had undertaken, this can be discounted as a typical example of Brooke’s habit of disparagement-therapy. Moreover the political situation in North Africa was almost as important as the military at that point. As minister resident at Allied HQ in North-west Africa, the Conservative MP Harold Macmillan had an important part to play in advising Eisenhower in his difficult negotiations between Vichy and the Free French. Meanwhile Eden, discussing with Churchill the growing anxiety of the Chiefs of Staff about the American handling of the North African campaign, concluded: ‘They are probably right but they are not free from blame themselves for failing to supply our people with good tanks.’37

  The strategy of North Africa–Italy–France, stated the American historian Rear-Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison in an Oxford lecture series in the 1950s, ‘was a perfectly cogent and defensible strategy; but Sir Alan Brooke disclosed it only bit by bit, which naturally gave the Americans the feeling that they had been “had”.’ He cited Admiral King’s prediction that, once committed to the Mediterranean, ‘we would be forced to go on and on in that region and never be able to disengage.’38 Yet if Brooke had proposed North Africa as a stepping stone to mainland Italy and the Balkans, and possibly beyond, right at the start, the Americans would never have undertaken Torch. It is anyway very unlikely that Brooke was really ever seriously considering the Italian peninsula as an alternative when he was arguing against Sledgehammer back in April 1942.

  By New Year’s Day 1943 there had been what Kennedy called ‘a crystallization of the differences between us and the Americans over the strategy for 1943, and the increasing distrust of Eisenhower’s conduct of operations in North Africa’. The fact that the British side of the push towards Tunis was under the direct command of his friend and close colleague Kenneth Anderson, but was making slow progress, probably left Kennedy all the keener to blame Eisenhower. Marshall wanted ‘to go for Roundup and to cut Mediterranean activity to attacks by air from North Africa and possibly Turkey, while in the Pacific they want to carry on the operations against Japan on a scale that we feel is bound to prejudice the main object of defeating Germany first’.

  Meanwhile, by total contrast, Brooke wanted ‘to develop operations for the Mediterranean’, by which he meant attacking either Sicily, Corsica or Sardinia, and meanwhile put the ‘residue’ of US forces ‘into the United Kingdom pending the time when we can get back into the Continent without the certainty of defeat’. As for the Pacific operations, Brooke wanted ‘to cut them to the minimum required to hold Japan until Germany is defeated’. Since the gulf between these conceptions of future policy between Marshall and Brooke was so wide, it was evident that another conference was necessary, indeed overdue. Brooke was however willing to countenance such a thing only once he was confident that Churchill would not waver in his commitment to the Mediterranean strategy. Meanwhile the War Office Planners ‘had immense labour working out the shipping and other connected problems’ connected with the next stage of operations. This Staff work was to pay off handsomely later that month.

  The War Cabinet discussion on colonial policy on 7 January 1943 found the Prime Minister in typically pugnacious mood. There had been some pressure for a Government statement on the future of the Empire, somewhat analogous to the Atlantic Charter, yet Churchill severely deprecated any ‘Time taken off the war in order to find a formula to gratify the Americans. Why should we apologize? We showed the world a model of colonial development. The only criticism is that we haven’t spent enough in the colonies,’ he argued. ‘Or defended them,’ slipped in Eden. ‘Not so,’ replied Churchill. ‘When the war ends, we shall find we have defended them all.’39 One of the main reasons Churchill wished British forces to recapture Singapore, Malaya and Hong Kong, rather than merely have them returned to him at a peace conference, was so that he could make precisely this argument. It was why he wanted a Far East strategy based on the Bay of Bengal rather than the more direct route to Japan centred in the south-west Pacific.

  Lord Cranborne, the Colonial Secretary and a lifelong imperialist, pointed out that the pressure for an official statement had come from within the Government, not from Washington, and that it had been strong ever since the fall of Malaya. ‘Pressure, yes,’ retorted Churchill, ‘from people not in on the war.’ At this Eden pointed out that ‘Smuts, who is in on the war, favoured it.’ (The reason Eden brought up Smuts was that Churchill and Smuts had a relationship akin to a favourite nephew with his favourite uncle, ‘with the nephew’ in Tedder’s estimation ‘being Churchill’.)40 ‘Why bring this up now?’ asked Churchill. ‘We are busy enough with the war. If you do nothing, it will blow over.’ Yet the idea that nationalism in the former colonies then occupied by Japan might ‘blow over’ was sheer wishful thinking on Churchill’s part.

  The Chiefs of Staff meeting the following day was one of those in which Brooke complained that Admiral Pound was ‘asleep 90% of the time and the remaining 10% is none too sure what he is arguing about’.41 Since the Americans left Washington the very next day for the Casablanca Conference, which was to involve nine days of hard and detailed negotiations deciding the whole future course of the war, it is extraordinary that Pound should have been allowed to stay in his vital role as operational head of the Royal Navy. The task ahead for the Chiefs of Staff–and especially Brooke–was mammoth. Brooke believed that Churchill supported his Mediterranean policy, but he now had to persuade Roosevelt and Marshall of it. If that proved impossible he and Churchill needed to try to split Roosevelt from Marshall, as they had managed to do over Torch six months earlier.

  Locations where Roosevelt, C
hurchill and Stalin might have met had included Iceland (turned down as too cold by FDR), Khartoum and ‘an oasis south of Algiers’. Churchill preferred Marrakesh, where he’d spent a happy month painting in 1936, but the communications were thought not good enough. Stalin then argued that he could not leave Russia at such a vital juncture in the war, and Roosevelt did not want to meet Churchill privately before conferring with Stalin, but Churchill felt that he and the President had to meet beforehand in order to frame a joint answer to the major question that Stalin needed answered: when would there be a Second Front in Europe?

  Roosevelt stated that ‘for political reasons it would be impossible for him to come to London’. The next presidential elections were two years off, but he did not want to seem to be conforming to British-led strategy. Instead, Churchill accepted Bedell Smith’s suggestion of the small port of Fadala, 15 miles north of Casablanca where part of the Western Task Force of Torch had landed under Patton. In the event, the Anfa Hotel and its surrounding villas at Casablanca were chosen. Brooke was very fortunate indeed that Stalin did not attend the Casablanca Conference: had he been present it would have been far more difficult to win the commitment he hoped for, of only ‘limited offensive operations’ in north-west Europe for 1943, unless Germany suddenly collapsed.42

  Marshall left for Casablanca at 9 a.m. on Sunday 9 January, flying via San Juan and Trinidad; he was to be away for twenty days in all. With him were Admiral King, Lieutenant-General Arnold, General Somervell, Sir John Dill, Brigadier Dykes and Brigadier-General John R. Deane, secretary to the Joint Chiefs. Meanwhile a second group comprising Roosevelt, Hopkins, Leahy, Captain John McCrea of the White House Map Room, the President’s doctor Rear-Admiral Ross McIntyre, Grace Tully and other secretaries and bodyguards left Washington at 10.30 p.m. from a secret railway siding under the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, in the presidential train bound for Miami. This had a drawing room, a dining room that sat twelve, and five state rooms, all protected against machine-gun bullets.43 In the unlikely event of anyone trying to impersonate Leahy, he was furnished with a letter on White House writing paper signed by the President stating that he was aged sixty-seven, was 5 foot 10 inches tall, weighed 162 pounds and had grey-brown hair and grey eyes.

  The weather was too bad for a Clipper passage so it was decided to send Brooke, Pound, Portal, Mountbatten, Slessor, Leathers and Kennedy by two Liberator bombers from RAF Lyneham in Wiltshire. Brooke was placed next to Mountbatten on the overnight flight, which he found very uncomfortable, ‘as every time he turned round he overlay me, and I had to use my knees and elbows to establish my rights to my allotted floor space!’44 This could serve as a metaphor for Sir Alan Brooke’s entire war.

  12

  The Casablanca Conference: ‘We go bald-headed for Husky’ January 1943

  Each appeared to the other in a romantic light high above the battles of allies or subordinates: their meetings and correspondence were occasions to which both consciously rose: they were royal cousins and felt pride in this relationship, tempered by a sharp and sometimes amused, but never ironical, perception of the other’s peculiar qualities.

  Sir Isaiah Berlin on Roosevelt and Churchill1

  When Brooke’s party landed at Casablanca at 11 a.m. on Wednesday 13 January 1943, Churchill met them at the aerodrome wearing his air commodore’s uniform. ‘They arrived dirty, hot and tired,’ recalled Joan Bright of the War Cabinet secretariat, who was helping to organize the conference, ‘only to see their American colleagues emerge spruce, shaved and fed, from comfortable aircraft into the Moroccan sun.’2 Churchill was in ebullient mood, crying: ‘Now tumble out, you young fellows, and get on parade!’

  Elliott ‘Bunny’ Roosevelt, the President’s son, recalled Anfa Camp as ‘a pleasant resort hotel, unpretentious but very modern, small and very comfortable’, the compound of which was protected by barbed-wire and Patton’s troops. The President (codenamed ‘Admiral Q’) would be assigned Villa No. 2, only 50 yards away from Churchill (‘Air Commodore Frankland’) in No. 3. The President’s villa was far from unpretentious, however. It was decorated with–in Elliott’s phrase–‘plenty of drapes, plenty of frills’. It had a bed ‘at least three yards wide’ and a sunken bathtub in black marble. When the President first saw it, he whistled, and joked: ‘Now all we need is the madame of the house.’

  The morning after Churchill arrived, he asked Sawyers to prepare a bath at 11, after several others had had theirs, and the water was cold. ‘You might have thought that the end of the world had come,’ recalled Jacob. ‘Everyone was sent for in turn, all were fools, and finally the Prime Minister said he wouldn’t stay a moment longer, and would move into the hotel or to Marrakesh.’ He only calmed down ‘after lunch had had its mellowing influence’. In another of the villas, that occupied by Brigadier Guy Stewart, the Director of Plans, there was discovered ‘a large library of decidedly doubtful books. True, they were all in French which made it difficult for some, but many of them were profusely illustrated, in most artistic style, which helped. For some time we despaired of any work being done in that villa, but after a bit the excitement died down.’3

  The British fielded a large delegation at the Casablanca Conference–codenamed Symbol–comprising Winston Churchill, the three Chiefs of Staff (Sir Alan Brooke, Sir Dudley Pound and Sir Charles Portal), Lieutenant-General Pug Ismay, Sir John Dill, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Harold Macmillan, General Sir Harold Alexander, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, Major-General John Kennedy, John Slessor, the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff in charge of air policy, and Ian Jacob. The Americans meanwhile fielded Franklin Roosevelt, the four members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (George Marshall, Hap Arnold, Ernest King and William Leahy), King’s chief of staff Rear-Admiral Savvy Cooke, General Brehon Somervell of Army Supply Services, Mark Clark, Averell Harriman, Dwight Eisenhower and Albert Wedemeyer. In the lower Planning ranks there were many more Britons than Americans, something Marshall was to come to resent, criticize and ultimately learn from.

  The agenda had been fixed with the Americans before they left Washington. ‘Actually it contained a list of every topic under the sun,’ noted Jacob soon afterwards, ‘but the most important thing was to get settled in broad outline our combined strategy for 1943, and then to get down to brass tacks and decide how exactly to carry it out. There were clearly the makings of a pretty vicious little circle here.’ Brooke thought it best to put the war against Japan high on the agenda, reasoning that if Admiral King ‘was able to get everything about the Pacific “off his chest”’, then perhaps he ‘would take a less jaundiced view vis-à-vis the rest of the world’. He hoped the same would be true of Marshall over Burma and China, where the Americans wanted a stronger commitment to action than the British, fearful as they always were that the Chinese might be knocked out of the war altogether by the Japanese. It was an interesting psychological move of Brooke’s, almost counter-intuitive, but it did not come off.

  At 4.30 p.m. that first day, Wednesday 13 January, only a few hours after getting off the plane, the British Chiefs of Staff met Jack Dill to be briefed on the American stance before the first Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting the next day. He told them that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were entirely opposed to further exploiting Torch in the Mediterranean because it would prejudice the chances of Roundup and other, smaller operations against France, including raids against places such as Brest. They further thought it would weaken the bombing of Germany, employ vital naval craft and shipping for inadequate returns, and hinder operations in Burma which they thought important in order to keep China in the war and help them in the south-west Pacific; finally they feared that it would precipitate a German descent into Spain and the closing of the Straits.

  Furthermore, Dill warned that the Joint Chiefs of Staff believed that the British did not take the war in the Far East seriously enough, and that a considerable effort would be required to prevent Japan becoming so entrenched there that it would be impossible to
defeat her after Germany. He went so far as to say that the Americans had ‘a suspicion’ that Britain ‘would not put our backs into the work once Germany had been defeated’.4 He went on to speak of clashes between Marshall and King over strategy and allocation of resources: ‘The Navy control the landing craft, so that the Army finds it difficult to squeeze out what they want for their own projects.’ Dill also told the Chiefs how at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands on 7 August, the first American land offensive of the war, ‘the US Marines were thrown ashore, and then it was found that there was no follow-up, no maintenance organisation, and no transport’.

  The Americans were almost right about the British attitude towards the Pacific, which had been neatly summed up by Kennedy: ‘To get Burma (unless the Japs withdraw) we must have Rangoon and while the Japs are in strength we cannot collect the necessary forces for this until the Germans are finished. To get Rangoon we must have naval and air command in the Bay of Bengal–this we cannot get till Germany is out.’ But the Americans were undoubtedly wrong to suspect the British commitment to defeating Japan after Germany had surrendered.5

  Undeterred by Dill’s message, Brooke met Churchill at 6 p.m. to try to persuade him of the advantages of attacking Sicily next, rather than Sardinia. He argued that Sicily would involve crossing a shorter distance from Africa, therefore the landings would be easier to support, and it was also the more direct route into Italy. The US Planners, however, believed that there would be less opposition on the Sardinian landing beaches, and since it was further north its aerodromes would be better placed for the next stage of the bombing offensive against Germany, the unambiguously codenamed Operation Pointblank.