Like every oft told anecdote, there are a number of slightly different punch-lines and attributions of it, but the waggish remark wouldn’t have been retold–and indeed wouldn’t have been funny–had the Combined Chiefs of Staff not by then had a reputation for acrimony. Although the joke sounds too good to be true, it was confirmed to Charles Donnelly by Colonel Andrew McFarland, secretary of the Planning committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of those turfed out of the conference room. What is still inexplicable even today is what Mountbatten could possibly have been thinking of in demonstrating the ricochet-inducing qualities of Pykrete in front of the entirely unprotected Combined Chiefs of Staff.
Marshall’s and Brooke’s off-the-record meeting and other similarly frank discussions meant that by Thursday 19 August much had been agreed at Quadrant: Overlord was to be ‘the primary US–British ground and air effort against the Axis in Europe’ with 1 May 1944 reiterated as the definite launch date; an attack on southern Italy would be undertaken by the forces agreed at Trident ‘except insofar as these may be varied by decision of the Combined Chiefs of Staff’ (Marshall would have preferred no strings attached, but Brooke got that wording added); there would also be a landing on the south coast of France (codenamed Anvil) to coincide with Overlord, and the defeat of Japan was planned within twelve months of victory in Europe, which was assumed would come in the autumn of 1944.11
The Manhattan Engineer District project was also beginning to bear fruit. This was the codename given to the creation of the atomic bomb that had been developed jointly at Los Alamos in New Mexico by British and American scientists, under the terms of the agreement Churchill and Roosevelt had come to at Hyde Park in June 1942. At Quadrant it was agreed not to deploy the weapon without the consent of both powers, and that Marshall would chair a committee to control the project.
(The prospect of the Bomb actually working filled Churchill with joy. On 23 July 1945 he told Brooke–‘pushing his chin out and scowling’–that the imbalance of power was now redressed with the Russians, who did not have it, and that he could finally dictate to Stalin: ‘we could say if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev, Karkhov [sic], Stalingrad, Sebastopol, etc, etc. And now where are the Russians!!!’12 One wonders what the poor inhabitants of Stalingrad did to deserve a double dose of vaporization, despite the flattening of their city by the German Sixth Army. As it was, Churchill lost the general election three days later and neither Britain nor the United States so much as considered employing nuclear blackmail against their still domestically fêted ally, which lost over twenty-seven million dead in its Great Patriotic War.)
At Quadrant, long-range strategy for the Pacific was put back to a future conference, and the US was left to attack the Philippines in its own way, with Rabaul to be ‘neutralized rather than captured’. A South-East Asia Command (SEAC) was to be created, separate from the India Command, although it was not long before Pentagon wags nicknamed it ‘Save England’s Asian Colonies’. All these agreements, some going against the grain of the British strategic thinking, disprove Wedemeyer’s suspicion that ‘Quebec was a repetition of Casablanca, of course.’13
On the penultimate day of the conference, Brooke once again exploded against Churchill in his diary, writing on Monday 23 August that it was bad enough having to face the American demand for the transfer of the seven divisions in ten weeks’ time, ‘But when you add to it all the background of a peevish temperamental prima donna of a Prime Minister, suspicious to the very limits of imagination, always fearing a military combination of effort against political dominance, the whole matter becomes quite unbearable! He has been more unreasonable and trying than ever this time.’ Some historians believe that Brooke was on the verge of a breakdown at this period; his own diagnosis, recorded on 24 August, is revealing:
The conference is finished and I am feeling inevitable flatness and depression which swamps me after a spell of continuous work, and of battling against difficulties, differences of opinion, stubbornness, stupidity, pettiness, and pig-headedness. When suddenly the whole struggle stops abruptly and all the participants of the conference disperse in all directions, a feeling of emptiness, depression, loneliness and dissatisfaction over results attacks one and swamps one! After Casablanca, wandering alone in the garden of the Mamounia Hotel in Marrakesh, if it had not been for the birds and the company they provided, I could almost have sobbed with the loneliness. Tonight the same feelings overwhelm me, and there are no birds!
At the very least he was in desperate need of rest.14 The very next day he wrote that he had been feeling ‘liverish’ and would have liked ‘to remove’ the criticism of Churchill, but that would have meant rewriting several pages of his diary, and he didn’t have the time.
At noon on Tuesday 24 August, Quadrant ended with a press conference. During it, as Churchill launched into a speech, Roosevelt leant over to Leahy and whispered: ‘He always orates, doesn’t he, Bill?’ The next day Brooke and Portal went fishing for two days in the Lac des Neiges, but after driving 60 miles ‘through the bush’, and going 2 miles up the lake by motor launch, just as they had started fishing, to Brooke’s ‘horror’, Churchill turned up with his Canadian host, Colonel Clarke, and Brooke was obliged to leave his beat. ‘I could have shot them both I felt so angry,’ he wrote. This does not mean, as some have speculated, that Brooke was genuinely feeling murderous towards the Prime Minister, but was merely an expression of furious frustration at having his brief respite from him temporarily ruined. ‘What made it worse was that Winston couldn’t fish and lost a good trout through having his line slack,’ he later told Kennedy. Brooke was clearly not long disturbed, because in two days he caught 93 trout and Portal 104, averaging 11/2 pounds, with the biggest at 33/4 pounds.
When Churchill was on his boat, unwittingly disturbing his service Chiefs’ well-deserved relaxation, Royal Marine Lance-Corporal Emerson, who was fishing with Inspector Thompson, fell into the lake. ‘Don’t expect your prime minister to come and fish you out!’ Churchill called, but he did lend him one of his suits to wear.15 Admiral Pound did not feel well enough to fish. Ismay had remarked to Joan Astley about Pound’s ‘lethargy, and the lack of his former crisp grasp of essentials’ while the conference was going on. ‘Little did I realize on saying goodbye to old Dudley Pound’, Brooke noted in his diary, ‘that I should never see him again!’16
Back in London on 30 August, Brooke and Kennedy went through Eisenhower’s plans for Operation Baytown, landings on the toe of Italy on 3 September, also Operation Avalanche, the landings in the Gulf of Salerno just south of Naples on 9 September, and the simultaneous Operation Slapstick, the attack on Taranto in the heel of Italy. They thought them ‘sketchy’, and the fact that the British Chiefs of Staff couldn’t issue instructions direct to Eisenhower was ‘a confounded nuisance’. The Joint Chiefs of Staff tended not to demand as much information from their commanders in the field as the British did, which Kennedy put down to the fact that ‘The Washington machine is not so highly organized as ours.’ Overall they considered that these operations were ‘in the nature of a gamble–which might be justified’.17
Brooke has been criticized for not interfering enough with his generals’ battle plans. ‘Errors in the planning of Tunis, Sicily, Salerno, Cassino and Anzio might have been averted by the Chief’s timely advice,’ argued the historian Nigel Nicolson.18 Since none of those was solely a British operation, any advice to commanders such as Eisenhower and Clark would have had to be directed through the Combined Chiefs of Staff; Brooke was no longer able to give ‘timely advice’ that had the force of authority, and anyhow he tended to think it best to trust to the judgement of the man on the spot. He did, however, write regular personal letters to commanders like Wavell, Auchinleck and Montgomery that had all the force and authority of the CIGS, who each of those men accepted was a master strategist.
Discussing the upshot of Quebec–‘Good in so far as they le
ft most of the big things to be settled in the light of developments’–Brooke complained to Kennedy about the Americans’ lack of trust, especially over the return of the seven divisions in the autumn. He said that it had emerged that this distrust stemmed from ‘something the PM had said to Stimson during his visit here’.19 This was doubtless the Dover train conversation in which Churchill had criticized ‘Roundhammer’ and spoke of thousands of Allied corpses floating in the Channel. He had also mentioned supplying the Balkans from Italy. Small wonder the Americans had got alarmed whenever Brooke tried to renegotiate the seven-divisions deal.
Kennedy believed that once the Americans were committed on the Italian mainland, ‘the problem would solve itself,’ since ‘If we needed the divisions, they would stay there.’ He recalled Foch being asked in 1914 how many British soldiers he needed for his campaign, and the marshal answering: ‘One, and I shall make sure he is killed.’ Brooke agreed that once American troops were in action it might prove near impossible to withdraw too many men from a continuing battle. On the issue of the Pacific, he complained that Churchill had been ‘extremely trying’ over the operations against the Japanese from India and had ‘brushed aside’ Chiefs of Staff appreciations and demanded attacks that were ‘quite beyond the capacity of the forces available. His free discussions with the American Chiefs of Staff, Louis Mountbatten and Wingate had embarrassed the Chiefs considerably.’20
For all that the British deplored American distrust of them, they too distrusted the Americans. Inveighing against Eisenhower’s Italian plans, Kennedy wrote: ‘The real fault goes back to the American unwillingness to devote great strength to the Mediterranean effort. We do not feel that the Americans fully grasp the realities of operations against the Germans and how seriously they have to be taken.’ This, only days after Sicily had been wrested from the Axis grasp, seven months after the Kasserine Pass débâcle, and less than forty-eight hours before the Baytown landings, was deeply unjust.
When Mark Clark’s Fifth Army landed at Salerno on Thursday 9 September 1943, the Germans had fourteen divisions in Italy. By the end of October they had no fewer than twenty-five, with reinforcements having been drawn equally from Russia and north-west Europe. Professor Sir Michael Howard, who won the Military Cross with the Cold-stream Guards at Salerno, considers that number ‘more than enough to pacify the country and compel the Allies to fight hard for every yard of their advance on Rome’.21 Moreover, because the invasion of Sicily opened up all sorts of other possibilities for the Allies in Europe’s ‘underbelly’, the Germans had to cover the entire area. By the end of 1943 there were a further twenty German divisions stationed in Yugoslavia, Greece and the Aegean islands, for example.22
With forty-five divisions thus standing guard on Germany’s southern flank, protecting south-east France, Austria and the Balkans, the Wehrmacht could not help but be weakened on the two Eastern and Western Fronts that were indeed to mean life or death to the Reich. The reason that the Germans did not simply pull back to an easily defensible line north of Rome was that their commander Field Marshal Albert Kesselring–a former chief of staff of the Luftwaffe–well understood the use that could be made of the airfield complex around Foggia in south-east Italy. He was also under orders to contest every inch of Italy. After the war, Major-General Walter Warlimont of Hitler’s military staff wrote that the Führer’s Mediterranean strategy ‘threw a far greater strain upon the German war potential than the military situation justified and no long-term compensating economies were made in other theatres.’23 Brooke could hardly have hoped for a better encomium. ‘One elementary principle governed everything but there was no great lofty idea behind it and no thought of concentrating upon essentials,’ continued Warlimont; ‘instead the supreme command had only one object, to defend the occupied areas everywhere on their outermost perimeter.’ This was precisely how Brooke had hoped Hitler would try to cope with the defeat in Sicily: by replicating the Tunisian and Stalingrad errors in Italy. It fitted into the Nazi philosophy that willpower was all in warfare as in politics, but it made for terrible strategy.
Mark Clark’s Fifth Army, comprising one American and one British corps, landed at Salerno, a port on an inlet of the Tyrrhenian Sea. With air cover provided from British aircraft carriers and Sicily, the troops got ashore in Operation Avalanche, but heavy German counter-attacks spearheaded by three panzer divisions from 12 to 14 September came close to flinging them back into the sea. Amphibious operations were risky ventures, and had it not been for the battleships HMS Warspite and HMS Valiant arriving from Malta during the six-day battle and training their 15-inch guns on the German positions, events might have gone differently. The Germans also used heavy bombs guided by radio for the first time, and two Allied cruisers were severely damaged on 11 September. Warspite herself was knocked out of action on 16 September, and had to be towed back to Malta. By then, however, contact had been made with the Eighth Army, which had marched up the 150 miles from Reggio. The near-disaster of Avalanche militates against the idea that Sledgehammer or Roundup could have worked in 1943.
The next row between the British and Americans was started by Churchill putting forward various schemes for Italy designed to take advantage of her surrender, but which Roosevelt and Marshall feared would divert resources from Overlord. Brooke, meanwhile, thought that the campaign to take Rome needed a major concentration of effort. It started a month-long argument between Churchill and the others over the recapture of Rhodes, in which Churchill recognized that he was in a minority of one.
In the first fortnight of September, after Quadrant, Churchill went to Washington, Boston and Hyde Park. Brooke was spared this trip and returned to London. Eden thought Roosevelt’s ‘determination not to agree to a London meeting for any purpose, which he says is for electoral reasons, is almost insulting considering the number of times we have been to Washington…We are giving the impression, which they are only too ready by nature to endorse, that militarily all the achievements are theirs and Winston, by prolonging his stay in Washington, strengthens that impression.’24 By early October Churchill had to accept that his scheme to attack in the Dodecanese–Rhodes, Leros, Samos and Cos–had failed to win over anyone else.
Once back in Britain, Churchill wired the President asking for Marshall to come out to the Mediterranean for a conference in Tunis to settle the matter, hoping ‘in his heart’ to be able to swing the meeting by his force of personality, as he had convinced himself he had done at Algiers. Roosevelt replied: ‘Frankly I am not in sympathy with this procedure under the circumstances. It seems to me the issue under discussion can best be adjusted by us through our Combined Chiefs of Staff set up in better perspective than by the method you propose.’25 Brooke thought this a ‘very cold reply’, but Churchill wired back again asking Roosevelt to reconsider, leaving Brooke to comment: ‘The whole thing is sheer madness, and he is placing himself quite unnecessarily in a very false position! The Americans are already desperately suspicious of him, and this will make matters far worse.’ Marshall flatly refused to allow any troops to be spared for the Dodecanese operations, and this largely unnecessary row, brought on by Churchill, was perhaps the first clear indication that the Americans were beginning to recognize what had been true since Brooke was denied the post of supreme commander for Overlord, that they had become the senior partner in the relationship.26
The Prime Minister had not helped his own case by including in his original telegram to Roosevelt the sentence ‘Even if the landing craft and assault ships on the scale of a division were withheld from the buildup of Overlord for a few weeks without altering the zero date it would be worthwhile.’27 Over Rhodes, Marshall recalled telling Churchill, using a profanity that was all the more powerful because it never usually passed his lips: ‘God forbid if I should try to dictate, but not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned island!’28
‘I doubt if I did anything better in the war’, stated Marshall in 1956, ‘than to keep him on the main poin
t. I was furious when he tried to push us further into the Mediterranean.’ He remembered many ‘hectic scenes’ with Churchill over the Dodecanese, recalling that the Prime Minister ‘Could be strong and loud. Churchill, however, once he accepted a point, would not hold it against him. Would put his arms around him.’ Marshall also appreciated the British Chiefs of Staff’s position over that issue, which he described as ‘extraordinarily difficult. Mr Churchill was very intense when he got a certain idea and he did business with them every day, where sometimes I didn’t see the President for a month.’29 As well as being a strength, of course, this could also be a weakness, because, as Marshall admitted, he was still fearful–though less so now–that the President might be ‘inveigled’ or ‘palavered’ by Churchill into ‘side shots’.
In early drafts of his war memoirs, Churchill was bitter about the Americans baulking his Dodecanese enterprise, arguing that, ‘but for pedantic denials in the minor sphere’, the Allies could have controlled the Aegean. From there he had hoped to strike north, and pressurize Turkey into entering the war. Chapter 12 of Closing the Ring is entitled ‘Island Prizes Lost’, and he blamed the ‘prejudice’ of the President’s advisers, though not Marshall by name. He also had some criticisms of Eisenhower, and Roosevelt was described as ‘ungenerous’. All these were removed before publication, however, probably because Ike was supreme commander of NATO’s Allied Command Europe at the time. Perhaps Churchill used the early proofs of his book as a safety-valve, rather as Brooke used his diary and Roosevelt his draft telegrams, because throughout the extensive redrafting process sharp comments about individuals were constantly toned down, often on the advice of General Pownall, Norman Brook, William Deakin and other members of his ‘Syndicate’ of drafters and fact-checkers. What Churchill also omitted was that Brooke had been just as resolutely opposed as the Americans to what the CIGS described in his diary as ‘Rhodes madness’.30
Masters and Commanders Page 54