The last meeting, at 9.30 p.m. on Saturday 23 January, broke up with effusive words of congratulation, with Marshall speaking of his ‘appreciation of the readiness of the British Chiefs of Staff to understand the US point of view and the fine spirit of co-operation which they had shown during the discussions’. Brooke answered in similar vein, saying that ‘Mutual appreciation of each other’s problems was only possible through personal contacts.’ Even Admiral King claimed for the record that ‘he fully agreed with Sir Alan Brooke as to the great value of the basic strategic plan which had been worked out at the Conference. In his view this was the biggest step forward to the winning of the war…The discussions which had been held had enabled a true meeting of minds to take place between the British and US Chiefs of Staff.’56
For all these flowery words, the Americans were convinced that the British had had the best of Symbol. Britain’s success there was all the more extraordinary considering the wild mismatch in projected force strengths between her and the United States. When Portal and Arnold compared notes at the conference about the future sizes of their air forces by December 1944, the discrepancy was startling, even if one bears in mind that the figures did not take into account the rest of the British Commonwealth. Portal, recalled Arnold, ‘was shooting for 537 squadrons, or 9,870 airplanes’ and a 1.2 million-man RAF. Arnold, on the other hand, was planning on having 52,000 aircraft and a 2.36 million-strong USAAF.57
At the concluding press conference on 24 January 1943, Roosevelt stated that General Ulysses S. Grant had been known as ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant, and that the Allies were also demanding unconditional surrender from the Germans and Japanese (but not the Italians) in the present struggle. It is often argued that this insistence led the Germans and Japanese to fight more fanatically than would otherwise have been the case, although it cannot be proven. What is plainly untrue, however, is that the policy merely sprang fully formed from Roosevelt’s mind without any consultation with Marshall or Churchill. In fact Churchill had not only given prior approval but had cabled the War Cabinet over the issue four days earlier, and his colleagues had not objected. Although subsequently both Marshall and Churchill claimed they had been surprised by Roosevelt’s announcement of the policy at the press conference, they both later accepted that they had in fact been consulted beforehand. On 7 January Marshall stated that Allied morale would be helped by the uncompromising demand, and Stalin’s suspicions allayed.58 ‘While the words were obviously of value to Goebbels,’ Lord Halifax wrote of this new departure, ‘the chaps at the top, knowing that there was only a halter for them at the finish of this business, would have made their people fight to the end anyway.’59
The harassed, overworked and fiercely suspicious Wedemeyer was convinced that Casablanca had been a catastrophe which dragged the United States into Brooke’s Mediterranean strategy against her will and contrary to her original intentions. ‘Our own Chiefs of Staff were not at all in accord with the British,’ he recalled fifteen years later. ‘But General Marshall’s relationship with Roosevelt differed subtly from the relationship that existed between the British Chiefs of Staff and the Prime Minister. They had frequent, almost daily, access to their political leader…[which] made for unanimity of purpose and ensured a united front whenever the Britishers marched off to conferences. They always knew in advance what they wanted. They had aims.’ Of course, in Wedemeyer’s world, these were not the defeat of the Axis powers: ‘Usually their aims could be related to Empire or their post-war position in the world of commerce.’60
Rather than listening to Marshall and King, claimed Wedemeyer, Roosevelt had been ‘surrounded by many drugstore strategists’, among whom he numbered Hopkins, FDR’s counsel and chief speechwriter Judge Samuel Rosenman, his military aide Major-General Edwin ‘Pa’ Watson and Averell Harriman. Wedemeyer believed that, when the President demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender in January 1943, it was because ‘It had been driven home to him by many of his closest cronies like [Justice] Frankfurter, Morgenthau and Judge Rosenman–all Jews who actually felt bitter against the Germans. No question about it, they convinced the President that this time the peace terms must be signed on German soil.’61 Wedemeyer had clearly imbibed more than just military theory from the time he spent in pre-war Berlin.
On Saturday 23 January the Eighth Army entered Tripoli, the major Axis supply and entry point for North Africa. The retreating Germans had tried to raze the city, harbour and airfield, but these were quickly repaired. After another meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff at 10 a.m., there was the third and last plenary session, held in the boiling heat of Roosevelt’s villa.
In these somewhat unlikely surroundings, the Chiefs of Staff joined the President and Prime Minister to go through each paragraph of the final report together, occasionally making slight modifications and amendments. ‘It has been a wonderfully good conference in the end,’ thought Kennedy, as well he might considering how many British desiderata were incorporated into the final text. After lunch that day, Brooke, Dill and Kennedy had motored out to the invasion beach at Fédala, and came away feeling that Torch had been very lucky in terms of weather and lack of opposition; they concluded that more smoke and air cover would be needed in future amphibious operations.
‘Finished the Staff conferences,’ Roosevelt told Suckley, ‘all agreed de Gaulle a headache–said yesterday he was Jeanne d’Arc and today that he is Georges Clemenceau!’62 Although de Gaulle’s handshake with Giraud had been duly photographed, neither would agree on subordination to the other. The French North African Army therefore stayed separate from the Free French forces, an absurd arrangement militarily.
At Casablanca Churchill believed–or professed to believe–that Roundup could still be mounted in 1943. That placed him on the same side as Roosevelt and Marshall, and put Brooke in the perennially dangerous position of being out of step. Fortunately, however, Churchill’s strong desire to see the Allies marching into Rome and overthrowing Mussolini meant that Roundup considerations were kept, in the American phrase, ‘on the back-burner’ during 1943. By contrast, Roosevelt did not support Marshall to the extent that he needed him to in order to defeat the Mediterranean strategy. At Casablanca, no less than in London the previous July, Marshall was the odd man out of the quartet of power, and his strategic views suffered as a result. The fact that he went to Casablanca opposed to any further action in the Mediterranean, but left it having threatened to resign if Sicily were not attacked, shows how far his views had been brought around by circumstances, primarily by lack of presidential support.
‘Brooke’s personality and drive have accomplished great things,’ concluded Kennedy, who was inclined to a degree of hero-worship of his boss. ‘Both sides are really convinced now that we are on the right lines and we can now drive ahead with the war on a co-ordinated plan.’ The historians of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Field Marshal Lord Bramall and General Sir William Jackson, believed that the whole Allied grand strategy of the war–the WW1 Arcadia plan as updated by CCS 94–might have been overturned by the Americans at Casablanca if Brooke had not been by Churchill’s side there.63 The stakes had therefore simply been too high for Brooke to indulge his own first desire–indeed any general’s–which was to lead an army into battle.
Brooke had got almost all he wanted from Casablanca, but at a very high price. For him it was never glad confident morning again. Too many Americans in very senior positions were certain that he had driven too hard a bargain over too many policy areas–and from too weak a position–to permit another conference like that. Portal explained this feeling shortly after the war, saying of Symbol that:
One of the greatest snags was that the American Chiefs of Staff were always looking for hidden motives, whenever we put up a plan. They were the victims of the common American impression that the British are frightfully cunning and will do you down at every turn. They were aware of the popular American conception that the British are much more clever than the Americans
in diplomatic negotiation, and they always seemed to us frightened of being trapped…They were convinced that we wanted to use American troops to further our own political ambitions, and we never really allayed this fear.64
13
The Hard Underbelly of Europe: ‘Total War requires total mobilization’ January–June 1943
Logistics Churchill disdained.
Sir John Colville, May 19821
‘It’s difficult to argue against success,’ wrote General Hull in his unpublished autobiography, ‘for the North African operation was a complete success. However, I still believe it was strategically a mistake.’ In order to capitalize on Torch’s success, he argued, the Allies were ‘practically forced’ into the long struggle ‘over extremely difficult terrain’ up the Italian peninsula. He went on to argue that there were twice the number of German divisions in France and the Low Countries in 1944 that there had been in the summer of 1943, which was not quite accurate but not far off. The phrase ‘mission-creep’, like ‘group-think’, is a modern one, but they both have applications for the Second World War. Under mission-creep, operations continue to be undertaken for reasons far removed from the original intention, because the conduct of the conflict has imperceptibly outgrown the reasons it was undertaken. That is what was to happen in Italy.
Ian Jacob believed that being expelled from North Africa ‘would be shattering for the Italians. Their vitals would be exposed to attack.’2 The surrender of Italy would present Hitler with a tough choice: either let her go or else reinforce her by taking troops from elsewhere, such as Russia and the Balkans. There was an aspect to the Führer that was only just becoming apparent to the Allied High Commands: it seemed clear from the orders that he gave both to Paulus in Stalingrad and to Rommel at El Alamein (and again in Tunisia) that he could not countenance even strategically justified withdrawals. This psychological disorder on his part–the result, perhaps, of going from corporal to commander-in-chief without the intervening stage of divisional command or Staff college–was to be a strategic blind-spot that was to be greatly exploited by the Allies over the coming months and years.
Interviewed by NBC television in 1958, Brooke explained how the British strategy for the Mediterranean was designed to draw out the Germans:
The soft underbelly of Europe was the whole of southern Europe including a portion of southern France, the whole of Italy and the whole of Greece, all of which Germany was defending, and all of which is difficult to defend. It’s like a series of fingers spread out into the sea. In order to defend it you’ve got to disperse your forces through it…We crossed over into Italy by defeating the Italian forces and wiping them off the map, forcing German detachments to take over the jobs that the Italians had been doing and to detain forces in Italy. That was the idea.3
On the day the Casablanca Conference ended, Churchill and Roosevelt drove 120 miles to Marrakesh, having a picnic lunch on the way, and stayed the night at the Villa Taylor, which had been built in 1927 by the American industrialist Moses Taylor and which had subsequently become the residence of the US vice-consul. It had a ‘Marvellous view of snow-capped Atlas’ mountains, as FDR told Daisy Suckley.
Churchill insisted on the President being carried up on to the roof of the Villa Taylor, ‘his paralysed legs dangling like the limbs of a ventriloquist’s dummy, limp and flaccid’ in the words of an onlooker, and together they watched the purple mountains changing colour in the setting sun. It was from that roof that Churchill painted his only picture of the war, despite taking his canvases and paint box on several trips. He gave it, a view of the minaret of Katoubia Mosque in Marrakesh with the Atlas range beyond, to Roosevelt. Inspector Thompson, who admittedly was a bodyguard rather than an art critic, remarked that ‘The whole scene was a riot of the colour from which he draws his inspiration.’4 After the President had been carried back down the tower, Churchill walked with Charles Moran among the orange trees in the garden. ‘I love these Americans,’ he said. ‘They have behaved so generously.’ It is unclear whether he was referring to their vice-consul providing the villa, or their agreeing to his Mediterranean strategy.
‘I saw him in bed and I think it was one of the most marvellous sights I’ve ever seen in my life,’ said Brooke of Churchill at the Villa Taylor, before going on to describe the lights on either side of the ‘ornate Moorish’ bed and how he was ‘wearing one of those two marvellous dressing gowns, which suited the ceiling, full of red dragons’.5 Brooke himself was staying at the Mamounia Hotel, where Jacob joined him for coffee–there was no tea on offer–in the garden. ‘The Hotel is said to be the finest in North Africa,’ enthused Jacob, ‘and I think it could lay great claim to the distinction. The public rooms are large and airy, and the bedrooms on the second floor are a dream, as they open onto balconies from which it almost seems as if one could touch the Atlas snows.’ The next day the CIGS went bird-watching. Churchill was still wearing his bedragoned dressing gown when he saw the President off from the aerodrome on the morning of Monday 25 January, and he himself left with Brooke shortly afterwards for Cairo and then Turkey.
It was while he was in Cairo that Brooke learnt from Portal that one of the Liberators returning home from Gibraltar with Planning Staff on board had crashed. The outer starboard engine had caught fire an hour away from the Welsh coast, and then it and its surrounding framework had plunged into the sea. When the pilot tried to land at Haverfordwest aerodrome, the inner starboard engine had cut out and then the bomber somersaulted and smashed into fragments. Vivian Dykes and Guy Stewart were asleep in the hold when they died instantaneously, and two others were seriously injured. Astonishingly, thirteen people on board escaped with minor injuries.
On Brooke’s instructions, the news was kept from Churchill ‘in view of tomorrow’s journey’. When it was broken to him once he had landed in Turkey, his thoughts naturally turned to what would happen were he himself to die. ‘It would be a pity to have to go out in the middle of such an interesting drama,’ Jacob heard the Prime Minister ruminate. ‘But it wouldn’t be a bad moment to leave. It is a pretty straight run now, and even the Cabinet could manage it.’6 The war saw a large number of prominent people die in aircraft crashes or shootings-down, including ‘Strafer’ Gott, General Sikorski, the Duke of Kent, Orde Wingate, Admiral Yamamoto, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Marshal Italo Balbo, Major-General Vyvyan Pope, Sir Bertram Ramsay, Subhas Chandra Bose and of course Major Glenn Miller. Roosevelt and Churchill were brave men to undertake such arduous journeys at their ages. In all, Churchill made no fewer than nineteen journeys outside the United Kingdom between August 1941 and March 1945, none of them free from hazard.
Speaking to his assistant Bill Hassett, who had asked about the risks involved in flying to and from Casablanca, Roosevelt said the decisions could not have been arrived at any other way. ‘We were not getting anywhere in our plans for operations,’ he said. ‘The British joint chiefs would agree among themselves, but they could not reach an accord with our joint Staffs.’ Furthermore Roosevelt had to consider ‘the personal equation; the prima donna temperament’. If he sent Stimson to London, then the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, ‘would have thought he should go. It was the same between the Army and Navy in London. Churchill and I were the only ones who could get together and settle things.’7
At 7.45 a.m. on Sunday 31 January 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus (promoted by Hitler the day before in an attempt to dissuade him from surrendering) destroyed his wireless equipment–it must have been something of a relief to know there would be no more ‘Stand fast’ messages from the Führer–and was captured in Stalingrad after 162 days of the most gruelling campaign in the history of warfare.8 Hitler’s refusal to allow any attempted break-out from the 15-by-9-mile Kessel area had helped seal the Sixth Army’s doom. What happened next was almost biblical in its apocalyptical ferocity: of the 91,000 survivors of the Sixth Army and allied detachments who surrendered and became prisoners-of-war in Russia–more than 170,000 had already died in t
he fighting–only nine thousand ever returned home, many of them as late as the mid-1950s.
The immediate effect of the surrender was to make Roundup less likely in the short term as a necessity for relieving Russia, but more likely in the medium term as a means of exploiting the loss of German morale attendant upon the slow realization by the more perceptive of them that the odds had now tipped significantly against their winning the war.
On 3 February Churchill wrote to Roosevelt to say that Stalin was entitled to more precise information about the Casablanca conclusions, since ‘no one can keep secrets better’. He suggested that they should tell Stalin that they hoped to ‘destroy or expel’ a quarter of a million Germans and Italians in eastern Tunisia by April; that in July they would attack Italy with three or four hundred thousand men with the object of promoting an Italian collapse ‘and establishing contact with Yugoslavia’, and that ‘we are aiming at August for a heavy operation across the Channel’ of between seventeen and twenty divisions, supported by almost the entire metropolitan air force of Great Britain. Churchill concluded by proposing that they also ‘say that in accepting the conclusions of our Combined Chiefs of Staff, the President and the Prime Minister have enjoined upon them the need for the utmost speed and for reinforcing the attacks to the extreme limit that is humanly and physically possible’. Churchill added: ‘I have talked it all over with the CIGS who is in agreement.’9
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