14
The Overlordship of Overlord: ‘A balance of disguised bribes and veiled threats’ June–August 1943
High level war planning is an awesome responsibility, yet the whole business is carried on in an impersonal way…Plans were made on the basis of numbers, not individuals.
General Charles Donnelly’s unpublished autobiography, 19791
At 5 p.m. on Tuesday 15 June 1943, Winston Churchill did something that would colour his relationship with Brooke for the next twenty years. Just before the War Cabinet that day, he told the CIGS that he wanted him to ‘take the Supreme Command of Operations from this country across the Channel when the time was suitable. He said many nice things about having full confidence in me, etc.’ This was the first of three occasions that Churchill expressly offered Brooke command of Operation Overlord. Sworn to secrecy, Brooke did not even tell his wife, although when Churchill next met Benita he mentioned it to her too. Brooke later wrote that the offer ‘gave me one of my greatest thrills during the war. I felt that it would be the perfect climax to all my struggles to guide the strategy of the war into channels which would ultimately make a reentry into France possible, to find myself ultimately in command of the Allied forces destined for this liberation!’2
Yet from the very beginning, Roundup and then Overlord–as distinct from Sledgehammer–was always going to have significantly more American than British Commonwealth troops, twenty-seven divisions to twenty-one at its first conception. Furthermore, the whole political impetus for early implementation of the operation had come from Washington, indeed from Marshall personally, while the incubus had always been seen to be Brooke. Although senior Americans such as Leahy were calling him ‘Brookie’ by 1943, they still thought him ‘a somewhat forbidding personality’, something Churchill can hardly have failed to spot.3 Whereas Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley, Clark, Patton and Alexander had all commanded troops successfully in North Africa, Brooke had not taken the field since the two ill-fated BEF campaigns in 1940. He was undoubtedly qualified for and equal to the task of Overlord, but it was hardly a recommendation.
The Americans had not been officially consulted by Churchill about Brooke’s appointment, but the post of supreme commander of Torch and Husky had gone to Eisenhower after Marshall refused them. In retrospect, therefore, it seems surprising that Churchill should have built up Brooke’s hopes without first clearing the appointment with Roosevelt and Marshall, and almost incredible that Brooke did not spot that the job was certainly not by then in Churchill’s sole gift.
Perhaps Churchill offered it in the hope that Brooke would become more enthusiastic about Overlord as a result. The Briton Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Morgan had been appointed chief of staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (COSSAC), at Casablanca. Although there was still no supreme allied commander appointed, he had got on with drawing up the plans for Overlord at Norfolk House in St James’s Square in London. His first set were ready by July 1943 and approved the following month. With remarkably few alterations, these were the plans that were put into operation on D-Day the following year.
The American view of Brooke was represented by Elliott Roosevelt, who wrote in Rendezvous with Destiny:
The overall commander of the operation would not be Churchill’s candidate, General Sir Alan Brooke, who did not want a second front anyway. Marshall was the man who could be counted on to hold his own against Winston and strike at Germany where the Nazis were strongest, not temporize, as the British would have preferred, and delay landings in France until the Reich had been brought to its knees.4
This was a completely inaccurate representation of Brooke’s view: he believed an eventual Overlord was necessary, and had accepted May 1944 as its launch date at the Trident Conference. Yet it does help explain why he would not secure its command.
Operation Citadel, the Germans’ fifty-division assault on the Kursk salient in Russia, was launched on Monday 5 July 1943 and became the largest single battle in history, with more than two million men engaged on both sides. The German forces facing Kursk comprised nine hundred thousand troops, two thousand seven hundred tanks and assault guns, ten thousand artillery pieces and two thousand aircraft. Marshal Zhukov decided to reply with Operation Kutuzov, aptly named after the hero of the 1812 campaign since it involved allowing the Germans to attack first before unleashing a massive counter-stroke a week later, on 12 July. The mammoth battle continued over an area roughly the same size as the United Kingdom, before it was finally won by the Russians on 17 August. During a key moment of the Kursk struggle, on 17 July, Hitler withdrew II SS Panzer Corps from an important part of the line and sent it to Italy, striking confirmation of Brooke’s hopes for the Mediterranean strategy.
On the same day that Hitler launched Citadel, Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt to protest against his proposed draft proclamation to the Italian people on their liberation, stating that it did not mention the British contribution enough, and that, although he had acted as ‘your Lieutenant throughout’ Torch, as far as Husky and post-Husky were concerned ‘we are equal partners’ in terms of numbers of troops, ships and aircraft, and ‘I fully accepted your dictum that “There should be no senior partner”.’ The amendments Churchill suggested–‘in all the frankness of our friendship’–were minor, such as adding Alexander’s name to the proclamation as Eisenhower’s deputy and asking that the last three words in the phrase ‘the vast air armadas of the United Nations’ be replaced with ‘the United States and Great Britain’, explaining ‘After all it is the United States and Great Britain who are virtually doing the whole thing.’ Roosevelt concurred in these various alterations, and forwarded a copy to Marshall with the message ‘I think the Prime’s point is well taken.’5
The next day Churchill invited John Kennedy and Major-General Francis Davidson, Director of Military Intelligence at the War Office, to discuss troop strengths, although he was not up from his afternoon nap when they arrived at the No. 10 Annexe at 6 p.m. After talking about Kursk, which took precedence, he asked about Husky, and was told that the British and Americans would each land a quarter of a million men on Sicily in four days’ time. ‘The enemy forces should be outclassed quickly once we get a footing on the island,’ said Kennedy, which is indeed what happened.
Churchill didn’t like the way Syracuse was printed ‘Siracusa’ on the map that Kennedy produced, and as a great stickler for English pronunciation of foreign place-names he said ‘he didn’t like it and we should change it or the BBC would be getting hold of it next’.6 Later on in the campaign he objected to the foreign pronunciation of any place-names, as Cadogan noted, ‘calling it Pantellārea, and ridicules Pantelleíra; asks if we are going to talk about Afreéca and Parée! CIGS plays up nobly by calling Porto Empedocle Porto Empedoakle. PM didn’t bat an eyelid.’7
In a Cabinet discussion on war criminals on 7 July, Churchill reported that ‘FDR [was] inclined to let our troops shoot them out of hand! I suggested the United Nations [should] draw up list of fifty or so who would be declared as outlaws by the thirty-three nations. (Those not on the list might be induced to rat!) If any of these were found by advancing troops, the nearest officer of Brigade rank should call a military court to establish identity and then execute without higher military authority.’ The Lord Chancellor Lord Simon pointed out that Roosevelt had signed an Allied public declaration which said that the terms of an armistice would include provisions for surrender. ‘My scheme would be a refinement on that,’ argued Churchill. This did not persuade Simon, who mentioned that there was a UN Commission for Investigations of War Crimes. Attlee thought it might be convenient to hand over the worst Nazis to the ‘most injured nations like Norway and Poland’ for their own form of (rough) justice.8
After a dinner for the King at Downing Street that evening, Churchill took Brooke into the large garden of No. 10 at 1.30 a.m. and, standing ‘in the dark’, again told him that he wanted him to be the supreme commander for Overlord, this time even naming January or Febr
uary 1944 for an announcement. ‘He could not have been nicer and said that I was the only man he had sufficient confidence in to take over the job.’ In fact Churchill could not have been more heartless. After the war, Brooke recalled that he had been ‘too excited to go to sleep when I returned home, and kept on turning the thought over and over in my mind. Was fate going to allow me to command the force destined to play the final part in the strategy I had been struggling for?’ This time, however, Brooke ‘realized well all the factors that might yet influence the final decision and did not let my optimism carry me off my feet’.9
On Saturday 10 July 1943 the Allies landed eight divisions across a 100-mile front in southern Sicily, using several new kinds of landing craft which were successful despite rough seas. By nightfall the beaches were secure and the campaign against the 230,000 German and Italian defenders could begin in earnest. Some advocates of an early Overlord point out that the Allied sea invasion force for Husky was larger than that for D-Day, and the Allies took fewer casualties than at Salerno that September. Once it became clear by the second half of July that the Allies would win in Sicily, the next issue was whether the enemy could be prevented from fleeing the island over the 2-mile Strait of Messina.
Churchill welcomed the ‘Great Husky success’ at the War Cabinet on 12 July. ‘Generally speaking,’ he said, ‘we are over the first and most deadly phase. A letter from Eisenhower says after first 48 hours most critical time will come…Think myself very satisfied indeed. Syracuse captured before daybreak yesterday. Nothing like it I’ve ever read of.’10 Brooke was particularly delighted with the progress as he had strongly pushed for Husky at Casablanca against Portal, Pound, the British Planners, Mountbatten, Ismay and many American Planners, though not Marshall himself. Later in the Sicilian campaign, especially once the Allies got to Catania, they met tough German resistance, but the opening salvoes of it merited Churchill’s and Brooke’s satisfaction.
The next day Churchill’s thoughts moved towards the boot of Italy. ‘Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest bug from the ankle upwards?’ he asked the Chiefs of Staff. ‘Let us rather strike at the knee…Tell the Planners to throw their hat over the fence; they need not be afraid there will be plenty of dead weight to clog it.’11 This idea, of leapfrogging up the leg of Italy, was one that Marshall also supported, albeit without the gloriously clashing Churchillian metaphors. On 16 July he suggested to the Combined Chiefs of Staff that Eisenhower should take Naples with an amphibious operation, which should then turn into a march on Rome. An attack on Salerno, just south of Naples, was immediately put into planning mode, codenamed Operation Avalanche.
For Marshall, Avalanche was intended solely to remove Italy from the war and make the Germans draw away forces from their Western and Eastern Fronts towards the Southern, to defend against a serious attack that was not in fact going to come. For Churchill and Brooke, by contrast, such an attack most definitely was contemplated. ‘I will in no circumstances allow the powerful British and British-controlled armies in the Mediterranean to stand idle,’ the Prime Minister told Smuts. ‘I shall go to all lengths to procure the agreement of our Allies. If not, we have ample forces to act by ourselves.’12 This was sheer bravado; by that stage of the war an all-Commonwealth invasion of Italy without American participation was unthinkable.
On his trip to London in the second half of July, Henry Stimson found plenty of support for his view that a cross-Channel operation was feasible sooner rather than later. (Marshall told Pentagon historians in 1949 that the US War Secretary had quite literally included the early adoption of the cross-Channel operation in his nightly prayers.) Stimson spoke to Lieutenant-General Morgan and his American deputy, Major-General Ray W. Barker, both of whom feared that the Mediterranean campaign might well delay Overlord, which Stimson very confusingly called ‘Roundhammer’, yet another hybrid name despite the official change of nomenclature. He also met American Planners who said that Overlord was achievable as it stood, and that the RAF were confident of being able to drive off any German counter-attack against the Normandy bridgeheads.
Stimson accompanied the Churchill family on a weekend trip to Dover in the Prime Minister’s special train on Saturday 17 July to visit the Overlord preparations. As he reported to Roosevelt on his return, Churchill had brought in ‘with evident delight’ a telegram from Dill telling him that Marshall had proposed that a study be made of Avalanche. Churchill took this, according to Stimson, ‘as an endorsement by Marshall of his whole Italian policy and was greatly delighted’. Stimson was not about to permit this interpretation to be put on Marshall’s action, however, and as he told Roosevelt, ‘I pointed out to him that it probably meant that Marshall had proposed this as a shortcut intended to hasten the completion of the Italian adventure so that there would be no danger of clashing with the preparations for Roundhammer.’13 The use of the word ‘adventure’ was an indication of Stimson’s feelings about any more diversions from Overlord.
Speaking to Marshall by scrambler telephone, Stimson established to his own satisfaction that Avalanche was only being investigated in order ‘to obviate the danger of a long slow process “up the leg” which might eliminate Roundhammer altogether’. When he reported to Churchill that Marshall had supported his interpretation of the Avalanche message, and that therefore the Salerno landings were not intended to spearhead a full-scale invasion of Italy, the Prime Minister immediately ‘broke out into a new attack’ on Overlord, referring to a setback the British had received at Catania in Sicily during the past few days. Churchill even ‘praised the superlative fighting ability of the Germans. He said that if he had fifty thousand men ashore on the French Channel coast…the Germans could rush up sufficient forces to drive them into the sea.’ The Prime Minister then resurrected an image he had used before with Stimson and Marshall, the haunting one ‘of having the Channel full of corpses of defeated Allies’.14
This started an outright row, and ‘for a few minutes we had it hammer and tongs’, as Stimson proudly reported to Roosevelt. Churchill denied Stimson’s accusations that he opposed Overlord, asserting that Britain would ‘go through with it loyally’, which was hardly a ringing endorsement. He added that he was not insisting on going further north than Rome, ‘unless we should by good luck obtain a complete Italian capitulation, throwing open the whole of Italy’. He also–at least according to Stimson’s contemporaneous report–said ‘that he was not in favour of entering the Balkans with troops but merely wished to supply them with munitions and supplies’.15 Was Churchill deliberately misleading the US Secretary of War about his true intentions? Or did he merely wish to wait and see what the next stage might bring? To discuss the Balkans before Palermo had even fallen was more phantasmagorical than foresighted, and the whole conversation was later to have deeply baleful long-term effects, especially for Alan Brooke personally.
Stimson flew on to see Eisenhower in Algiers. He found the general in favour of a limited attack on mainland Italy, one which captured the air bases in the Foggia Plains that were needed in order to prosecute the bombing campaign against south-eastern Germany and Roumania, which could not easily be bombed from Sicily owing to the distance and lack of airfields. He concluded to the President that the American and British conceptions of the Italian operation were wildly at variance, that the British were hoping to ‘supplant’ the cross-Channel operation altogether and ‘neutralize’ any invasion of France, and that the two invasions could not be conducted simultaneously. Subsequent events were to prove him wrong, but there can be no doubt that when his report was delivered by Harry Hopkins to Roosevelt at Shangri-La, it caused great consternation.
Churchill stated his view to the Chiefs of Staff Committee on 19 July: ‘I have no doubt myself that the right strategy for 1944 is maximum post-Husky, certainly to the Po, with the option to attack westward in the South of France or north-eastward towards Vienna, and meanwhile to procure the expulsion of the enemy from the Balkans and Greece.’ This was very different inde
ed from what he told Stimson, if Stimson’s report to Roosevelt was accurate. However, Stimson would have recognized the next sentiment: ‘I do not believe that twenty-seven Anglo-American divisions are sufficient for Overlord in view of the extraordinary fighting ability of the German Army and the much larger forces they could so readily bear against our troops even if the landings were successfully accomplished.’16 Although twenty-seven was not the full complement of what was intended for Overlord, that was the number the Staffs thought would in practice be available by the target date.
Brooke spoke to Kennedy soon after the ‘harvest bug’ memorandum, believing there to be four or five German divisions in Italy. The Avalanche landings at Salerno just south of Naples would have limited air cover because of their distance from Sicily, and at Rome it would be non-existent, beyond what could be provided by aircraft carriers. The Germans were putting up strong resistance in Sicily–Catania didn’t fall until 7 August–which did not bode well for Italy either. ‘We might easily be outnumbered and outmatched in a landing as far north as Naples,’ feared Kennedy, and furthermore the Navy might suffer heavy losses. To lose large numbers of landing craft would also mean operations in the Mediterranean grinding to a standstill for months. Kennedy therefore preferred to land around the largely ungarrisoned toe of Italy or down by the heel and instep at Taranto.
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