Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Yet Brooke was simply not in agreement with the concept of an August 1943 date for Roundup, one month after Operation Husky, not least because some of the same landing craft were thought to be needed for both operations. Unless Churchill took refuge in the wording of the sentence–that these operations were being ‘aimed at’–it was disingenuous. Roosevelt was equally sanguine, however, replying: ‘I wholly approve of your view.’ He did suggest changes, such as replacing the word ‘Italy’ with ‘Sicily’ and saying that Roundup ‘must of course be dependent upon the condition of German defensive possibilities’, but otherwise he was just as over-optimistic as Churchill. His military aide, Pa Watson, commented to Marshall the next day that over Roundup the President ‘promises much more than can be done, even though the word used is “aiming”’. It seems that Churchill, Roosevelt and Brooke, and possibly Marshall, were taking refuge in lexical exactitudes in order not to fall out at that stage either with each other or with Stalin over the realities governing Roundup. Promising Stalin an August 1943 Roundup–or seeming to–suited each of their agendas at the time. They had done the same with Molotov the previous June, but in the long run it was very bad policy to mislead Joseph Stalin.

  The first full Cabinet after Churchill’s return from his four-week journey on 7 February dealt with the threat of a fast by Mahatma Gandhi. Taking Brooke’s place at the meeting was John Kennedy, who recorded: ‘Winston thundered at the Cabinet and said that the line proposed by them and the Viceroy was much too weak–Gandhi should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting. We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.’ Grigg then said that Gandhi was getting glucose in his orange juice, and another minister suggested that he was having ‘oil rubbed into him which was nutritious’, allowing Churchill to claim that this ‘is apparently not a fast, merely a change of diet’.10 In the event Gandhi was not released and completed his three-week fast in good health, though if he had died in gaol on a fast-cum-hunger-strike their decision would have haunted the Government for years.

  The mood then lightened, and Churchill told the Cabinet a little of his African and Turkish visits. He and Brooke had failed to persuade Turkey to enter the war, which was the primary purpose of their visit. He said that British troops got a bad exchange rate for sterling in Algeria, but, after all, they ‘had nothing to spend their money on except oranges and women’. He teased Herbert Morrison by saying that the recent criticism of the former Vichy Interior Minister Marcel Peyrouton, then a Giraudist governor of Algeria, was not wholly justified: ‘After all, it may be a misfortune to be Home Secretary, but it is not a crime.’ He said he did not know whether Eisenhower was a good general or not, but he supposed that good generalship consisted largely of ‘sleight of hand’. He then reminisced about how he had had the President carried up the tower and on to the roof of the Villa Taylor in Marrakesh to see the sunset over the Atlas mountains: ‘One of the most lovely sights I know in Africa.’ All of this charm and good-natured badinage allowed him to vouchsafe the barest minimum to his colleagues in terms of the actual strategy agreed at Casablanca.

  Between 16 and 21 February, Churchill suffered a bad bout of pneumonia, a serious problem for someone in their sixty-ninth year. It was during one such illness that Marshall told Churchill that he nicknamed pneumonia ‘the old man’s friend’. Churchill said: ‘Pray explain?’ to which Marshall replied: ‘Oh, because it carries them off so quickly.’ Moran recalled how jokes like that established Marshall ‘high in the PM’s favour’.11

  Discussing the ban on visitors in ‘Invasion Areas’ along the south coast that had been in force since 1940, the War Cabinet later in February slipped neatly from maintaining the ban because of fear of a German invasion of Britain to maintaining it because of the hope of an Allied invasion of France. Herbert Morrison argued that there was ‘No justification for maintaining this ban unless very strong military reasons for it. [We] Don’t want to destroy the “invasion mentality”–but [the] public aren’t fools.’ At this point Grigg enlightened the Home Secretary: ‘Our main point is not that: it is preparations for offensive action. We shan’t want people unnecessarily to see what we are doing.’ Brooke then pointed out that ‘We shall later have to deny entry to [the] coastline: and over a wide area to provide cover.’12 These, again, are not the actions of officials who–as many American Planners would have had it–‘never’ wished to re-enter the Continent. Neither was the RAF’s systematic bombing of the European railway system which started on 6 March 1944.

  The Allied offensive that took place in the gap in the Tunisian mountain chain called the Kasserine Pass opened on 14 February. It ended in an American defeat at the hands of Rommel five days later, although the Allies subsequently rallied to a fine defence. For the cost of 989 German casualties (and 535 captured Italians), the US II Corps suffered 6,600 killed, wounded and missing. It proved that there was still much to learn about equipment, generalship, tactics and above all the capacity of the Wehrmacht to counter-attack. All these had serious implications for a summer 1943 Roundup, to which all of the Masters and Commanders, even including Brooke, continued to pay at least a form of lip-service.

  In early March several newspapers ran stories saying that Marshall was shortly to be appointed to command the Allied forces in Europe. Katherine Marshall later recalled that she read these comments and editorials and ‘was determined not to be caught napping. George had said nothing and I asked him no questions.’ Nonetheless she bought a second-hand trailer in readiness for any move. Marshall was meanwhile testifying before Congress trying to get a Manpower Bill passed that would increase the US Army to 8.2 million men. ‘Emergency manpower shortage cannot be met overnight,’ he told the special committee. ‘The 1944 army must be trained in 1943…Total war requires total mobilization of resources. This is not being done.’

  Brooke and Marshall were meanwhile arguing over the American desire to ship arms to Giraud’s forces in Africa, which Brooke saw as a waste of shipping resources considering that the French ‘can play no part in the strategy of 1943’.13 The situation was not eased by the antics of de Gaulle, and on 3 March Churchill even threatened to have the Free French leader arrested. According to the verbatim minutes taken at the War Cabinet meeting by Norman Brook that day, Eden reported that de Gaulle had asked to visit his troops in North Africa. At a sensitive time between the Giraudist and Free French forces in the French colonial empire, it was feared that his always combustible presence might wreck the delicate balance of power there. When de Gaulle was told by the Foreign Office that the moment was ‘unsuitable’, he enquired whether he was ‘to regard himself as a prisoner’. Churchill suggested a form of words by which he should be told that it was ‘Not considered in [the] interests of the United Nations at this stage…that he should leave the country.’ As usual, he worried about Roosevelt’s reaction, urging Eden to ‘Think of the Americans, who believe us responsible for all de Gaulle’s acts.’14

  Brendan Bracken then suggested that they should prevent de Gaulle from broadcasting from London, but Eden pointed out that the general couldn’t in any case ‘without pre-censorship by me’. Churchill said that the press should be asked not to discuss the issue, as the ‘Free French will try [to make] propaganda about [de Gaulle being a] “prisoner”.’ Attlee believed there would be trouble anyway, since ‘his reputation is higher than ever’. Churchill was adamant. ‘Put it quite bluntly,’ he said to Eden. ‘And arrest him if he tries to leave e.g. by a French destroyer. Security measures should be laid on to prevent that.’15 When discussions resumed on 15 March, Churchill said that de Gaulle was ‘actuated by personal motives’, and believed he had the ‘title-deeds of France in his pocket’. The Prime Minister concluded that Giraud was ‘a much better man: and de Gaulle was probably a bitter enemy of Great Britain.’16

  On the same day that Churchill threatened to arrest de Gaulle, 3 March, 111 adults and 62 children were killed in Bethnal Green tube station in the East End of London,
the worst non-military single-incident death toll of Britain’s entire war. When on 6 April the report commissioned by the Government was brought to him, Churchill was determined that it should be suppressed until after the end of hostilities. It revealed that public panic during an air raid had been responsible, rather than a direct hit by the Luftwaffe, which had been the official explanation. Churchill declared himself:

  Against giving such limelight to this incident…It would give disproportionate importance, and be meat and drink to the enemy and an invitation to repeat. We will say the Report was received and considered: no need to publish it: and all its lessons are being vigorously applied. Why publish? The Government’s position is unassailable. Moreover, we said earlier there had been ‘no panic’: this makes clear there was panic and it was partly the cause: and this we are withholding.

  The Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, disagreed, contending that the large number of deaths ‘shook the public’, and that refusing to publish the report would be taken as an admission that there was something to hide. He added: ‘We held off the discontented locals by the promise to publish the results.’ Attlee, who sat for the nearby Limehouse constituency, was concerned to ‘Make it clear that panic was not due to Jews and/or Fascists,’ which were two of the rumours swirling about at the time.17 In the event the report was not published until 1946.

  Between 8 and 12 March 1943 the Eighth Army repulsed heavy German counter-attacks in Tunisia, foreshadowing the end of the German presence in North Africa. Reporting to the War Cabinet about the successes in the Western Desert, Brooke stated that the Churchill tank was doing well, and that the American forces in the middle sector were ‘almost back to where they were before the German attack’. As for the Eighth Army, there were ‘indications of German columns turning round and going back’.18 It was not all sweetness, however; on 22 March after the War Cabinet heard from Nye about the land advance on the west Burmese port of Akyab in the Arakan–in which nine Japanese battalions were fighting fifteen Allied ones–Churchill pronounced it ‘Very unsatisfactory. Though we outnumber [the Japanese] they outmanoeuvre us. No unit ascendancy on our part.’ Nye had to ‘Admit we are not as good as Japs at jungle warfare’, even though the Allies had superior weapons and, at 1,500 versus 2,500, fewer battle casualties.19 In the event Akyab stayed in Japanese hands until January 1945.

  By 29 March the battle in Tunisia seemed to have turned against the Allies once again. After Brooke had given his report to the War Cabinet, Churchill said: ‘Not happy about fighting in the north, we uniformly had the worst of it. Looks as if Germany is beating us unit for unit, despite the fact that we have greater artillery than the enemy.’20 The terrible truth was–and it was not just true of the Tunisian campaign–that unit for unit the Wehrmacht regularly did indeed beat the British and American armies. The statistics are incontrovertible; in his intensely detailed studies of several hundred individual military engagements, the historian Trevor Dupuy has concluded that:

  In 1943–44 the German combat effectiveness superiority over the Americans and British was in the order of 20–30%. On a man-for-man basis, the German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50% higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances. This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had local air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost.21

  It was an astonishing achievement, and one that Brooke and Churchill reluctantly recognized privately but of course could never publicly acknowledge. The battles at Kasserine Pass, Anzio, Monte Cassino, Caen, Arnhem and the Ardennes forced the deeply uncomfortable fact upon both the British and American High Commands that the Germans, even in defeat, were formidable fighters against whom significant numerical superiority on the ground and in the air was needed.

  The same day that the War Cabinet assessed Eisenhower’s slow progress in North Africa, Marshall met Harry Butcher who was on his way back to Algiers and told him to tell ‘General Eisenhower’–it was never ‘Ike’ with Marshall–to ignore the criticisms that were being made by the press and politicians, and also sotto voce in the armed forces. Marshall said he was ‘not to waste time on any effort to defend any of his past actions’ and ‘not to waste his brain power’ over it. ‘The General said Ike’s rise or fall depended on the outcome of the Tunisian battle,’ recorded Butcher. ‘If Rommel & Co. are tossed into the sea, all quibbling, political or otherwise, will be lost in the shouting of a major victory.’ It was doubtless meant to be highly supportive, but if Marshall really did use the phrase ‘or fall’, it would have concentrated Eisenhower’s mind wonderfully.

  On 30 March Churchill was asked in the Commons how many fronts His Majesty’s forces were engaged upon, to which he replied ‘three fronts–in North Africa, in Burma and in the South-west Pacific…His Majesty’s ships have to operate continuously on all the oceans of the globe. The areas in which our air forces are engaged may be defined as follows: Western Europe, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, India and Burma, the Pacific.’ Another member asked whether, therefore, the use of ‘that very misleading phrase the Second Front ought to be discontinued’. Churchill was not about to fall into any trap over this, since any public criticism of the phrase might be misinterpreted by the Soviets, so he said: ‘No, sir; I do not want to discourage the use of it, because our good friends, fighting so hard, know very well what they mean by it.’

  An aspect of foreign policy that was to bedevil both Britain and America–naivety about the true post-war intentions of the USSR–emerged at the War Cabinet of 13 April when Anthony Eden reported on his recent visit to the United States. The Foreign Secretary said that Roosevelt had asked him whether he ‘thought that Russia would want to “Communise” Europe after the war’, and he replied that he ‘did not think so, and that he thought one of the best ways of avoiding this was that we should do what we could to keep on good terms with Russia’.22 As the verbatim reports make clear, the Churchill ministry was just as naive as the Roosevelt Administration about Stalin’s true purpose, which was to bring as much of Europe under the Soviet heel as he could. Kennedy recorded that one delegate from a British military mission to Moscow in December 1941 had declared that Stalin was ‘like a clergyman, another [that he was] like a respectable old farmer, another that he was like a great cat. All agreed that he was quiet and shrewd and absolutely ruthless.’23 It seems that far too many people in the higher directorate of the war concentrated too much on the worthless first parts of this analysis rather than the accurate last four words.

  In the course of a War Cabinet discussion about the command structure of Husky, Churchill reported that the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted an American-led enterprise. ‘We have suggested it would be administratively convenient to have a British commander and joint staff all under Eisenhower. But we may have to argue on the basis that command goes with major forces…And no US Navy goes inside the Mediterranean. On this, Husky couldn’t be more than equal share. I don’t feel we should give way.’24 The Cabinet agreed. The result was that Montgomery and Patton were given equal billing in the invasion of Sicily under Eisenhower, which was to lead to much competition and animosity between the two generals, and just as many headaches for their superiors.

  By late April 1943, Brooke and Churchill were considering what should happen after Sicily fell, fearing that Marshall might refuse to attack mainland Italy, but instead demand that everything should be concentrated on a cross-Channel attack. ‘I was conscious of serious divergences beneath the surface,’ Churchill wrote later, ‘which, if not adjusted, would lead to grave difficulties and feeble action during the rest of the year.’ So he wrote a telegram to Roosevelt offering to be with him by 11 May, along with Brooke, in order to discuss the exploitation of Husky, the future of Anakim, the shipping situation and ‘a number of other burning questions’.


  The month originally envisaged for Roundup–May 1943–saw forty-two German divisions stationed in the West. Although the Roundup plans envisaged forty-eight divisions landing eventually, that would not now be enough, even supposing ‘there had been sufficient assault shipping to lift them, or merchant shipping to supply them, or aircraft to cover them, or signals intelligence to guide them, which in each case there was not’.25

  After tea on Saturday 17 April, Churchill called Brooke about a wire he had received from Marshall suggesting that the attack on Sicily should take place even before Tunisia was finally cleared of Axis forces. ‘Quite mad and quite impossible,’ was Brooke’s reaction to the idea of simply undertaking Husky seemingly regardless of the fact that over two hundred thousand enemy troops were still holding out astride the Allied supply lines, ‘but PM delighted with this idea which showed according to him “a high strategic conception”. I had half hour row with him on the telephone.’26 North Africa was only finally cleared of Germans and Italians in May, just two months before Husky was launched. The whole discussion merely confirmed Brooke in his low appreciation of Marshall’s grasp of strategy, and of Churchill’s. The advent of the ‘Trident’ Conference in Washington therefore filled Brooke with foreboding. ‘I do NOT look forward to these meetings,’ he wrote, ‘in fact I hate the thought of them.’ It had been less than four months since Casablanca, and Brooke was not constitutionally attuned to debate, preferring to give orders rather than to discuss them. He did not trust the Americans’ good faith, fearing that the meetings would involve many hours of argument and hard work defending Germany First, after which ‘they will pretend to understand, will sign many agreements and…will continue as at present to devote the bulk of their strength to try to defeat Japan!!…It is an exhausting process and I am very very tired, and shudder at the useless struggles that lie ahead.’ After the war, Brooke blamed the diversion of American effort into the Pacific for the fact that the war went on as long as it did. The accusation of prolonging the war was a surprisingly common one among strategists, even though it was about the most serious one imaginable.