Trident was necessary, however, as the prevailing sense between the British and American Staffs at this period was one of deep mutual suspicion. Just as Marshall and his Planners in the OPD of the US War Department suspected that the British never wanted to invade France, so too Brooke and the War Office Planners in Whitehall suspected that Marshall was resiling from the Casablanca final report, and sending resources to the Pacific that should have been allocated to Bolero and the Mediterranean. King, meanwhile, was still suspicious that the British would drop out of the war against Japan once the United Kingdom was finally made safe by the defeat of Germany. Conversely, Wedemeyer, Stilwell and others were suspicious that if Britain pursued the war against Japan vigorously it was merely to re-establish her Empire and block off American interests in the Far East.
Such was the atmosphere when at 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday 11 May the British party reached Washington, where it was met by Roosevelt, Marshall, King and Dill. They all went straight into a cocktail party in a large hotel, before Brooke moved into Dill’s house. The British again fielded a large team: Sir Alan Lascelles thought it dangerously so, complaining that Churchill ‘took with him, in the Queen Mary, the three Chiefs of Staff, Cherwell, all the Planners, the three Commanders-in-Chief in the East (Wavell, Peirse and Somerville), Leathers, Ismay and Jacob, the secretaries to the War Cabinet, and Beaverbrook. “Was für Plunder”, as any young Blücher in an Atlantic U-boat might exclaim.’27
Although the great liner sailed far faster than any German submarine, zig-zagging for further protection, it was a reasonable criticism. To confuse the enemy, notices in Dutch had been posted around the ship, intending to deceive spies into believing that it was Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands rather than Churchill who was the mystery VIP passenger.
On the day the Trident Conference opened, Wednesday 12 May, General Jürgen von Arnim surrendered in Tunisia, and over 230,000 Axis troops passed into captivity, though not Rommel himself, who had been recalled to Germany shortly beforehand ‘on health grounds’. It was a great victory after thirty-two months of fighting backwards and forwards along the North African littoral; it had proved that major opposed amphibious assaults could work, and that the Western Allies could co-operate successfully on the field of battle. Yet could they still co-operate successfully in the conference chamber? Between 13 and 25 May there were fifteen meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff–the eighty-second through to the ninety-sixth–as well as six plenary sessions of military officials with Churchill and Roosevelt at the White House.
‘The PM spoke at length on the advantages that would accrue to the Allied cause by a collapse or a surrender of Italy through its effect on the invaded countries of the Near East and Turkey,’ wrote Leahy of the opening meeting in the White House on 12 May. ‘In regard to a cross-Channel invasion in the near future it is apparently his opinion that adequate preparations cannot be made for such an effort in the spring of 1944, but that an invasion of Europe must be made at some time in the future.’ Churchill spoke of the psychological effect of ‘a definite break in the Axis conspiracy’, and of the withdrawal of Italian troops from the Near East, and of the chances of bringing Turkey on to the Allied side.
Churchill’s rhetoric about how he ‘passionately wanted to see Italy out of the war and Rome in our possession’ shows the degree to which grand strategy can be directed by considerations other than strict military logic.28 Sir Michael Howard has written that ‘For Mr Churchill himself, and perhaps for the commanders of the victorious British armies in Africa, the impulse to carry the battle into Italy was emotional as well as strategic.’ To force Italy out of the war and overthrow the strutting, bombastic Mussolini, the butt of so many of the Prime Minister’s best jibes–‘This whipped jackal Mussolini is frisking up by the side of the German tiger’–was a principal British war aim, just as a modern-day triumph through the streets of Rome could not but appeal to the historian and romantic in Churchill.
Leahy’s diary reveals his own profound suspicions of the British in his complaint that Churchill had ‘made no mention of any British desire to control the Mediterranean regardless of how the war may end, which many persons believe to be a cardinal British national policy of long standing’. In fact control of the Mediterranean had not really been a British policy objective since Nelson’s day. Leahy nonetheless seemed impressed that Churchill had described the group assembled in the Oval Office as ‘the most powerful group of war authorities that could be assembled in any part of the world’ (except, of course, in the Kremlin on any day of the week).
In reply, Roosevelt advocated a cross-Channel invasion at the earliest practicable date. He expressed opposition to any Italian adventures beyond the seizure of Sicily and Sardinia, and stated that the air transport line from India to China must be opened without delay, and that China must be kept in the war at all costs. He directed his Staff to look into the military possibilities of invading Bulgaria and Roumania via Turkey, however, promising to ‘investigate the political possibilities of such a move’ himself. Churchill added the idea of an attack on Sumatra, which he described as ‘lightly garrisoned’.29
Churchill opened his remarks by saying that the last time he and Brooke had been in the President’s Office was when Tobruk had fallen. ‘It was not a very happy beginning,’ Hopkins told Moran.
The Americans had not forgotten the occasion. They had gone to the White House to clinch the plan for the invasion of France, when news had been brought to them of the disaster. Then in some manner–they were even now not quite clear how–they found themselves agreeing to the diversion of ships and troops to North Africa that were meant for the invasion of France. They could not help admiring the PM’s gift of dialectic, but they had made up their minds that it was not going to happen again.30
The memory of the Tobruk news affected Brooke too. ‘I could see us standing there and the effect it had on us,’ he later wrote. ‘I felt rather as if in a dream, to be there planning two stages ahead, with the first stage finished and accomplished.’31
Just like Churchill, Brooke started off his meetings with Marshall badly. He ought to have reassured the Americans by making positive noises about some aspects of a future Roundup in 1944, but instead he left them deeply suspicious by painting a vista of victory in the Mediterranean. He also went badly wrong by mentioning various Greek and Turkish islands in the Aegean as places that might be captured next. This merely increased American suspicion that the British were looking to their supposed post-war eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern interests and ambitions, rather than concentrating on early re-entry into France.
At one Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting Marshall likened Brooke’s strategy to ‘a suction pump’ that would–if the Allies were to land in mainland Italy–suck enough troops from Roundup to leave it a mere Sledgehammer-sized operation. In order to prevent this, Marshall forced Brooke to agree at Trident that if the mainland of Italy were invaded after Sicily, three British and four American divisions would be withdrawn from the Mediterranean for Roundup by 1 November 1943. Without such an agreement, Marshall intimated, there could be no invasion of mainland Italy. Brooke duly promised. He was to regret it ever after.
When Moran, who seems to have conducted extraordinarily sensitive conversations on strategy even though he was only Churchill’s doctor, asked Hopkins what Roosevelt made of Churchill’s belief that Italy’s surrender might be the beginning of the end for Germany, the answer came: ‘Not much. This fighting in Sicily does not make much sense to him. He wants twenty divisions, which will be set free once Sicily has been won, to be used in building up the force that is to invade France in 1944.’ Churchill nonetheless convinced himself that, if he could only get Marshall out to Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers, ‘it would all be plain sailing’ and the general would agree with him about the need to invade mainland Italy. Moran personally believed that Churchill’s optimism was ‘interfering with the cold functioning of his judgement’, and in this he might well have be
en right.32 Even though Moran’s diaries need to be treated with a degree of wariness, since he wrote them up after the war from contemporaneous notes, this sentiment rings true. Marshall was far too objective a judge to be swung around by a trip to Algiers.
The next day, Thursday 13 May, Brooke gave the Combined Chiefs of Staff a presentation on global strategy that indicated for Leahy ‘that the British will decline to engage in 1943 in any military undertaking outside the Mediterranean Area’. Since Roosevelt had directed Leahy to press for an Anglo-American invasion of Europe ‘at the earliest possible date’, disagreements flared up immediately.33 The meeting left Brooke ‘thoroughly depressed’, which a tour of the brand new Pentagon building with Marshall and a quiet dinner alone with Dill did little to alleviate. Roosevelt, vigorously supported by Marshall, said he ‘feared that this [the British approach] meant a lengthy pecking away at the fringes of Europe’. Presidential elections beckoned in November 1944, and he wanted a definite commitment to a cross-Channel operation taking place before then.
Brooke opened the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting at 10.30 a.m. on Friday 14 May by telling the Americans frankly that the British Chiefs of Staff did not agree with their views on global strategy. Stilwell followed, saying that he disagreed with most of what the British thought too. They then all lunched together, and went to the White House to discuss Burma with Churchill and Roosevelt, who both made opening remarks. Then Wavell spoke, followed by Somervell who contradicted him, followed by Stilwell who disagreed with them both. ‘I remember feeling the absolute hopelessness,’ wrote Brooke after the war. ‘The Americans were trying to make us undertake an advance from Assam into Burma without adequate resources.’ Of ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, Brooke was predictably dismissive (‘a small man with no conception of strategy’), noting that he had a ‘deep rooted hatred of anybody or anything British!’34 Stilwell’s biographer, Barbara Tuchman, described Brooke as ‘a small, dark, unamiable man who disliked Americans and vice versa’, which was wrong in almost every instance. He did not dislike Americans in general, just Stilwell (and a few others, such as Cooke) in particular.
Meanwhile Stilwell recorded in his own diary that he had ‘locked horns with Brooke to King’s delight’, on specifics rather than over general policy.35 The British attitude towards Operation Anakim was characterized by Stilwell as ‘can’t–can’t–can’t’. Since Roosevelt, Churchill and Brooke were lukewarm towards Anakim, no amount of eloquence from Stilwell could have brought the Allied High Command behind it. By the end of the day, relations between the two negotiating teams had clearly become fraught, so it was very welcome when, at the weekend, Marshall and McNarney invited the six British Chiefs of Staff and Commanders-in-Chief as their guests to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Today such ‘getting to know you’ weekends in hotels among work colleagues–sometimes nicknamed ‘awaydays’–are a common business practice, but in the 1940s they were not. Yet that is essentially what this was intended to be, rather than the more traditional ‘Friday to Monday’ of the British country-house weekend. The idea was that the British and Americans would relax and interact socially, thereby lowering the temperature and helping to dispel the mutual suspicion that was tending to poison their counsels. If they got to know one another as individuals, so the reasoning went, they would be able to trust one another as comrades in the great combined purpose. Ismay said afterwards that the weekend was ‘beautifully arranged, had given them all a chance to get to know one another, and there had not once been a mention of the war. Otherwise, during a fortnight of meetings, discussions had been frank, at times bitter.’36
It was organized by Marshall’s personal aide, Frank McCarthy, who had a meticulous eye for detail. McCarthy had been born in 1912 near by in Richmond, Virginia, and like Marshall he attended the Virginia Military Institute, after which he became press agent to the theatrical producer George Abbot in New York. He joined the US Army Reserves on hearing an inspirational radio broadcast by John Wheeler-Bennett on the night of France’s surrender in June 1940, which the young assistant director of the British Press Service in New York had begun with the words: ‘Tonight my country stands alone–alone–before the embattled might of totalitarian Europe.’ By 1941 McCarthy was Marshall’s military secretary and in 1943–5 he was secretary of the War Department General Staff. After the war he co-produced magnificent war movies such as MacArthur, Decisions before Dawn and the 1970 Oscar winner, Patton. (Marshall, naive in some social matters, constantly but in vain introduced the handsome young McCarthy to attractive single women such as Joan Bright, not realizing that he was homosexual.)
The Williamsburg Inn where the two parties stayed had been built in 1936 by John D. Rockefeller Jr, who ordained that it should combine ‘comfort, convenience and charm’, but that it must not compete in splendour with the Governor’s Palace or the Capitol in Colonial Williamsburg, which he had been restoring at vast expense. McCarthy allocated Marshall Room 212, one of the smallest in the Inn, because ‘General Marshall especially desired that no particular attention be paid to him.’ Brooke was three doors down in 215. A new table was built for the thirteen (clearly unsuperstitious) guests who sat around it on the Saturday night, and the pitch of the swimming-pool lights was altered so as not to throw a glare in diners’ eyes. William Johnson, Rockefeller’s butler, was specially brought down from New York to supervise the food and service. The terrapin for Saturday’s dinner had to simmer in its own juices for two days in the Union Club in New York, before Johnson carried it down to Richmond on the upper berth of a Pullman.
Marshall’s plane arrived at Langley airfield at 3.52 p.m. and the British party five minutes later. From Langley they drove up Route 17 to Yorktown, hardly the most tactful of destinations for British guests. Marshall later recalled that, after stopping the car at the Yorktown Victory Monument, ‘I announced that they were engaged in a peaceful, and I hoped pleasurable, visit. I did not want them to pass by the historic spot that marked the virtual close of our American Revolutionary War–Yorktown–the site of Cornwallis’ surrender to George Washington. There was much laughter, but I was somewhat humbled to find one or two who had no recollection of that event.’
In his car, General Marshall’s conversation turned to duck-hunting and he told Pound and Wavell that he had found time to go only twice in the previous two years. Pound swanked about a hunt in India where his party had shot 1,656 ducks. Meanwhile, in the other car with McNarney, ‘General Brooke remarked about the birds and endeavoured to identify as many as he could.’ They spotted a hawk on the way into Williamsburg, which afforded the falconry expert Charles Portal a good line of conversation. On the way to tea at the Raleigh Tavern, Marshall was told that the large numbers of people lining the route had turned up in the hope of seeing Winston Churchill.37
Before dinner at the Williamsburg Inn on Saturday night, some British officers went for a swim in the pool–Portal dived in and momentarily lost his over-large swimming trunks–while others played croquet on the south terrace.38 By the time they reconvened in the hotel lobby for mint juleps at 7.45 p.m., in front of roaring fires, it was clear that the weather meant they would have to eat inside. Marshall sat at the head of the table, with Pound on his right, Brooke on his left and McNarney at the far end. For Britons who had survived two-and-a-half years of rationing, dinner was sumptuous. A crabmeat cocktail was followed by Terrapin à la Maryland, drunk with Harvey’s amontillado. For the rest of the dinner they drank 1929 Heidsieck Dry Monopole champagne. There was fried chicken in cream gravy, fresh asparagus, a Virginia ham, Canadian cheddar, and strawberry ice cream. The conversation at dinner was ‘lively and interesting’, and studiously avoided anything to do with the war. Marshall told of the time in April 1942 when his plane had been grounded at Bermuda on the way to the Modicum Conference and he read the lesson in church the next morning. Afterwards a woman ‘threw her arms around his neck and kissed him roundly’.
After dinner Marshall invited the guests to retire to the draw
ing room for coffee and brandy, and ‘urged all of them to forget about the future for the time being and let their thoughts dwell on that interesting period in the past when Williamsburg was the capital of England’s most important colony’. At 11 p.m. they visited the palace of the royal governors, admiring the authenticity of its furnishings, the beauty of the flower arrangements and the charm of its gardens. Marshall played a tune on an antique spinet. Admiral Pound got lost in the maze and had to call to his colleagues to rescue him, a couple of whom promptly got lost too.39 When they visited the Governor’s council chamber, Marshall remarked: ‘Gentlemen, why don’t we just sit down here and continue the meeting where we left off a few hours ago?’ But of course that wasn’t the point of the exercise at all.
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