The next day Churchill accepted the Combined Chiefs of Staff report, which must to a degree have allayed Marshall’s suspicions. However, as a consolation prize from the President, Churchill was told that Marshall could join him and Brooke on a journey to Algiers, which the Prime Minister hoped would enthuse the Army Chief of Staff about the advantages of an Italian campaign. Marshall, who was due to take three days’ rest after the rigours of Trident, was instead given only six hours’ notice–between 2 and 8 a.m.–before Churchill’s plane took off. He ‘ruefully’ remarked to Stimson ‘that he seemed to be merely a piece of baggage useful as a trading point’.54 He felt understandable chagrin at the President not consulting him, but as Henry Morgenthau recorded in his diary, Roosevelt ‘was tired. He has had ten days of arguing with Churchill, and the man is exhausted.’55
The President’s evident weariness worried Churchill. ‘Have you noticed that the President is a very tired man?’ he asked Moran. ‘His mind seems closed; he seems to have lost his wonderful elasticity.’ That might have been a euphemism for his ability to be persuaded by Churchill; certainly Hopkins no longer worried about the President being left alone with him. Later that day, Churchill articulated his concerns again. ‘The President is not willing to put pressure on Marshall,’ he said. ‘He is not in favour of landing in Italy. It is most discouraging. I only crossed the Atlantic for this purpose. I cannot let the matter rest where it is.’
In his memoirs, Churchill claimed that he wanted to take Marshall to Algiers in order to show that he had not ‘exerted an undue influence’ in favour of his Mediterranean strategy on the various commanders that he and Brooke were meeting in North Africa. Stimson was furious at this hijacking of Marshall, however, and accused Churchill of taking him along ‘in order to work on him to yield on some of the points that Marshall has held out on’. It was a mistake to do this because ‘To think of picking out the strongest man there is in America, and Marshall is surely that today…and then to deprive him in a gamble of a much needed opportunity to recoup his strength by about three days’ rest and send him off on a difficult and rather dangerous trip across the Atlantic Ocean where he is not needed except for Churchill’s purposes is I think going pretty far.’56 Marshall thought so too, but of course he obeyed his commander-in-chief.
Sicily was not even slated for invasion until 10 July, and Marshall’s extreme reluctance to discuss any post-Husky strategy with Churchill–let alone to get into detailed conversations regarding specific objectives such as Rhodes, Sardinia, Italy and Corsica–until he had first sounded out Eisenhower led to a comic situation on the plane. As Marshall told Pogue of Churchill, ‘Well, all during the earlier part of the trip he was so busy with his own state papers, which he’d gotten far behind in, that the hazard of such a conversation didn’t arise. But as we were approaching Gibraltar, Mr Churchill ran out of work and came back and sat down with me, and then I knew I was in for it.’ In order to steer the subject off future strategy, Marshall ‘hurriedly thought up something to talk about’. Lord Halifax had just lent him a biography of the former Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, so he chose that as a topic, which Churchill talked about for twenty minutes before ‘he suddenly ran out of soap’. After that Marshall asked what had really happened over Rudolf Hess’ flight to Britain in 1941. ‘I know that Brooke had never heard this and he was fascinated. I again was overly fascinated and he got to the end of that–that was about fifteen minutes.’ Just as Churchill had finished, Marshall asked about the Abdication Crisis, whereupon Churchill said that the King should have just gone ahead and married Mrs Simpson, which took up another twenty minutes. ‘It was a marvellous lecture, just marvellous. Then the steward, thank God, announced supper–and it was all over.’57
(It was a trick Marshall was to use on other occasions. At dinner the night before one conference’s plenary session, when he wanted to avoid talking strategy, Marshall asked Churchill about the Victorian historian Lord Macaulay. The Prime Minister leapt up and strode around the room reciting passage after passage, until ‘the lateness of the hour resulted in General Marshall respectfully saying goodnight and departing’, leaving Churchill ‘well satisfied about Macaulay but entirely frustrated about working on General Marshall’.)
On the earlier part of the journey to Algiers, from Washington to Botwood in Newfoundland, where they refuelled before crossing to Gibraltar, Marshall redrafted a communiqué to Stalin the wording of which Roosevelt and Churchill had previously disagreed over. Once Marshall had finished, Churchill telegraphed the President: ‘I agree with every word of it, and strongly hope that it can be sent to Stalin by the Chief of the United States Staff, concurred in by the CIGS, and that it has our joint approval.’ Churchill was thus hoping that the Western Allies were united on a message which stated that the aims of Allied strategy were ‘to give priority to the control of the submarine menace’ and ‘next in priority, to employ every practicable means to support Russia’.
The rest of the priorities Marshall set out were to try to get Turkey into the war, to keep up pressure on Japan by attacking the Aleutian Islands, to maintain China, and to prepare the French forces in Africa for eventual fighting in Europe. Roosevelt’s sole alteration was diplomatically to combine the first two, so that the goal of supporting the Russian war effort equalled that of defeating the U-boat threat. Stalin was also told that a full-scale invasion of the Continent would now definitely be launched ‘at the peak of the great air offensive’ in the spring of 1944.
‘I was immensely impressed with this document, which exactly expressed what the President and I wanted,’ Churchill later wrote of Marshall’s draftsmanship, ‘and did so with a clarity and comprehension not only of the military but also of the political issues involved. Hitherto I had thought of Marshall as a rugged soldier and a magnificent organizer and builder of armies–the American Carnot. But now I saw that he was a statesman with a penetrating and commanding view of the whole scene.’58 (Lazare Carnot was the French Minister of War whom Napoleon had dubbed ‘The organizer of victory’.) Of course when Churchill was writing The Hinge of Fate, Marshall was the US Secretary of State who was saving Europe with his eponymous reconstruction plan, so the foresight to spot a great statesman would have redounded well on Churchill. Nonetheless it was a fine encomium, and in the plane from Gibraltar in May 1943 Churchill had written to his wife, ‘I got the President to let General Marshall come with me in order that the work I am now about to do at Algiers should run evenly, and that there should be no suggestion that I exerted a one-sided influence. I think very highly of Marshall…There is no doubt he has a massive brain and a very high and honourable character.’59Another occasion saw Churchill describe Marshall to Moran as ‘The greatest Roman of them all’.60 This is worth bearing in mind when considering Elliott Roosevelt’s accusations that Churchill disliked and ‘can’t abide’ the US Army Chief of Staff.61
On 28 May 1943 Churchill, Marshall, Brooke and Ismay landed in Algiers, on the same day that the conclusions of Trident were announced to the press in a single sentence: ‘The recent conference of the Combined Chiefs in Washington has ended in complete agreement on future operations in all theatres of the war,’ which had the advantage of brevity despite its mendacity.
There were three formal meetings at Eisenhower’s villa in Algiers to map out post-Husky strategy, between late May and 3 June, but plenty of other, extraneous meetings too. In his 1967 book At Ease, subtitled Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower related how at this Algiers mini-conference ‘It developed that General Brooke…had never really liked the Overlord idea…He came to me privately and argued that all Allied troops should stay in the Mediterranean, chipping away at the periphery of the Axis empire. But we should avoid any commitment of major ground forces.’ To Ike’s question about how to rid central and western Europe of the Soviets in the absence of an Anglo-American invasion in the west, Brooke is reported to have ‘thought that the Soviets would not try to maintain such an extended empire and
would retire back into the limits of Russia once the war had been won’.62 Of this, Eisenhower wrote: ‘I was reasonably confident that both President Roosevelt and General Marshall were determined to take no chances on such an outcome and I must say I agreed.’
Yet little about this reminiscence rings true: firstly, Brooke was not absolutely opposed to Overlord ever taking place: he always knew the Continent had to be invaded from the west eventually for Germany to be defeated. Secondly, there is no record of this important conversation in Brooke’s private diary, though he had no reason to exclude it. Thirdly, there is no record in Butcher’s diary, which covered Eisenhower’s every move at that time. Fourthly, Brooke was not so naive when it came to Soviet ambitions, as his subsequent behaviour proved. It might be that Eisenhower, in this rather tall ‘story I tell to friends’, was ‘remembering with advantages’ as sometimes old soldiers are capable of doing, especially once their supposed interlocutors are safely dead.
At the first strategy session at Eisenhower’s villa his naval, army and air force commanders, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, General Sir Harold Alexander and Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder–all Britons–insisted that mainland Italy should be invaded so that the Germans would be obliged to reinforce Italy and the Balkans after Rome had surrendered. Forces in the Mediterranean, they said, could not be kept idle between the end of Husky, which they hoped would be in August, and the start of Overlord nine months later.63 Not to keep the initiative was to ask for the Axis to counter-attack, and they needed little invitation. Churchill then offered Marshall eight Commonwealth divisions in any push to capture Rome. Since in 1943 the British Army never fielded more than twenty divisions, this was a significant amount. (The Germans meanwhile had 156 divisions fighting full time on the Eastern Front alone.)64
Eisenhower accepted that, if Sicily fell soon, an invasion of Italy could indeed be advantageous, although Marshall resolutely refused to commit himself until they knew how it had gone. At the second strategy session on 31 May, Marshall asked Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, how many extra troops would be needed to attack Italy. Bedell Smith estimated thirty-three thousand American and thirty-three thousand Commonwealth troops needed to come from beyond North Africa and Sicily. Marshall said this might upset the agreements made at Trident for Overlord, but Churchill said the shipping could be made available from Britain.
Churchill was optimistic that he had persuaded Marshall, telling Moran that he ‘doesn’t, for the moment, want to make up his mind what we ought to do once Sicily is taken. But he is ready to accept my plan. He is not opposed to the invasion of Italy now.’ When Moran asked what had changed Marshall’s mind, Churchill seemed taken aback. ‘The merits of the case’, he expostulated, ‘are surely beyond question.’ Two months after that, however, Moran got a very different version from Marshall himself, who said he hadn’t thought then that the moment had come for a decision:
It would be better, I said to the Prime Minister, to decide what to do when Sicily was well under way. I wanted to know whether Germany was going to put up a stiff resistance in southern Italy or whether she would decide to retire to the Po as Winston suggested. I wanted more facts. I wanted to ask Winston a dozen questions, but he gave me no chance. He kept telling me what was going to happen. All wishing and guessing. When I did get a question in, Winston brushed it aside…I said to the Prime Minister that I would be content if Sardinia were taken before the invasion of France. He replied that the difference between taking southern Italy and Sardinia was the difference between a glorious campaign and mere convenience.65
The way that the great protagonists were clearly already buffing up their anecdotes while the war was going on–this one only a couple of months after the event–indicates the degree to which they knew that their deeds would interest historians for centuries to come.
Moran described how ‘Marshall’s long upper lip stretched in amusement’ as he told the story, and commented that Churchill had obviously ‘talked at the American’ rather than to him. ‘I have never heard anyone talk like this before,’ Marshall said. ‘I’d never met anyone like Winston. He is a very wonderful man, but he won’t look at things like a man who has been all his life a soldier. I must have facts.’66 Yet facts were impossible to glean about a future operation such as the invasion of a mainland five weeks before the operation to take its adjacent island had even begun. Informed, calculated ‘wishing and guessing’ had to play an important part in the creation of future grand strategy, and in this particular case the quest for non-existent facts materially damaged the next stage of the campaign.
The third and last strategy session at Algiers, on Thursday 3 June, agreed the bombardment of the railway marshalling yards on the outskirts of Rome. Marshall recalled to General John R. Deane after the war that he had ‘favored very much’ bombing Rome itself, believing ‘the blood of the present’ completely outweighed ‘the desire to preserve the historical treasures of antiquity’.67 Nonetheless, the minutes show that Churchill ‘expressed satisfaction at the great measure of agreement which he had found in these meetings’, and indeed the entry in Butcher’s diary covering the meeting was headed ‘Love Fest’, with more of a sense of relief than of sarcasm. Marshall made generous remarks about the British support for Eisenhower, and spoke of the ‘greatest discomfort’ that the Germans must be feeling about the Anglo-Americans working ‘so well as a team’. He did not, however, commit himself to any Mediterranean operation after Husky. Churchill’s memoirs therefore contained an outrageous misrepresentation of Marshall’s position when he summed up the meeting with the words: ‘I felt that great advances had been made in our discussions and that everybody wanted to go for Italy’ (unless by Italy Churchill meant just Sicily, which is unlikely).
Eisenhower meanwhile merely set up two Planning groups to investigate operations against Sardinia and southern Italy. ‘The curious situation obtained, therefore,’ records Michael Howard, ‘that when the Allied armies landed in Sicily, nobody had yet decided where they were to go next.’ Marshall went back to Washington via Accra, Ascension Island, Recife and Belem in Brazil. By 7 June he had covered 14,000 miles in eleven days, without yielding any significant strategic ground whatever. Brooke left Algiers, where he had spotted some crossbills and little bustards, for a weekend in the country with his wife.
Reporting to the War Cabinet in London on 5 June, Churchill commended the Trident final report, saying that his:
journey had been justified because of the Anglo-American difference in point of view. The US masses’ attention was turned mainly on Japan and tended to think it more important to keep China in the war than Russia. At the outset there were sharp differences between the Chiefs of Staffs. Theirs suggested that concentration on Italy and the Mediterranean would interfere with Bolero and would even prolong the war. But personal contacts and personal friendships broke this down and agreement was reached. This document agrees on Italy being the target, but we’ve undertaken to move some troops back at intervals for Bolero. Over Anakim there were differences also. We came to the conclusion there was no reason to re-open the Burma Road until mid ’45. But all the same we must fight, wherever we can engage the enemy…The US public hadn’t realized until I said it to Congress that the greater part of US forces are deployed in Pacific. The US Executive treats Congress as an enemy, and was surprised at the sort of speech I made, though I said it was common form for the House of Commons. US opinion is quite cool about North Africa. Strategic issues were settled in broad outline. Whereas a year ago we had to say ‘Hitler first and Tojo after’, there is now enough force to take a rather different view–a matter of emphasis now, not of choice…Eisenhower was inclined to go for Sardinia before Italy: I strongly advocated the second, then the first will fall in. I therefore went to see Eisenhower and took General Marshall with me. Marshall rewrote the paper for communication to Russia…this document is evidence of his great mental grasp. His visit to Africa with me has done him good–widened his appreciation
of the African campaign.68
Churchill had misled either the Cabinet or himself: Marshall was careful that neither the Trident final report nor any other document committed the United States to invading mainland Italy. Of Giraud and de Gaulle and the French National Committee, Churchill told the Cabinet that he ‘gave them all lunch yesterday, and a speech in my best anglicised French’.69
Returning to the War Office, Brooke summed up the Trident and Algiers talks as holding operations, telling Kennedy that the Americans had ‘slipped right back to their old conception of the invasion of Europe, and were most unwilling to be drawn into large and unknown commitments in the Mediterranean’. At Algiers, Marshall had even told Brooke that he still felt Torch had been a mistake. Brooke had no doubt that Trident had been ‘badly needed’, but another conference would be required soon. It was a prospect that filled him with dread.
Churchill introduced General Alexander to the War Cabinet on 7 June, after Brooke had summed up the general situation on all the fronts of the war. The Prime Minister began by expressing his ‘admiration for a great military achievement’, before Alexander, far more modestly, reported that ‘The situation is in a bit of a tangle. The first thing was to stabilize the front, tidy it up and separate the US and ourselves.’ Thus far he might have been talking about a complicated piece of knitting, but it got more martial when he spoke of how the Germans were attacking to regain the initiative, and he ended his long exposition by saying that his troops were ‘in terrific heart–never had such a good army as we have today. The Germans are not as good as they were.’70 This weakening of German combat effectiveness was the news that the British High Command had waited nearly four years to hear. Before it came, they rightly thought a return to the Continent suicidal. Once it was certified on Italian soil, however, it would lead to the beaches of Normandy.
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