Even though the Eighth Army took Taranto on 10 September and there were four divisions ashore at Salerno by 13 September, with the 7th Armoured Division arriving that day, Alexander, who as commander-in-chief of Allied forces in Italy was Clark’s superior officer, was sending ‘somewhat gloomy’ telegrams stating that the Salerno bridgehead saw ‘the Germans concentrating faster than we can’. The War Office were ready with the blame. ‘Eisenhower never produced a proper appreciation,’ wrote Kennedy; ‘one doubts if he even made one. It is very hard to understand why he cannot deploy more of his colossal forces. It all seems to indicate rather a muddle at Algiers.’ The speed with which the Planners got these excuses arranged would have impressed a politician.
‘The only good feature so far is that it will bring home to the Americans a truer sense of the realities of these landing operations against Germans,’ Kennedy continued, ‘which should have a wholesome influence on their future plans and make our task of rubbing it into them less thankless. One must admire their drive and fearlessness in planning, but without due caution as well, disasters are bound to happen.’ Partly because of the two battleships from Malta, disaster did not in fact happen, but it is easy to guess the extent of the mutual Anglo-American recrimination that would have exploded if it had. But a few days later Kennedy was even prompted to observe: ‘If we had a walkover at Salerno we should almost certainly have had a bigger disaster later on. This is all very salutary.’31
Press rumours that Marshall was about to be promoted emerged in early September, with opposition to such a plan emerging from various quarters, all of them flattering to him. Some papers said that he was too precious to be wasted on a theatre commandership, others that Roosevelt was trying to remove the one strong man capable of preventing the reorganization of the Army Service Forces, for various supposedly nefarious reasons of his own. Three ranking senators on the Senate military affairs committee had to be personally placated by Stimson over this. On 16 September, Pershing himself wrote to the President from his hospital bed opposing Marshall’s transfer, describing his ‘deep conviction’ that it would be ‘a fundamental and very grave error in our military policy’ to lose someone so talented from the General Staff, because in a global war the most accomplished officer should be the Chief of Staff.32
If Marshall had asked for the job, he could have been supreme commander of Overlord, which after all won Eisenhower the presidency in 1952. Since Marshall served as US secretary of state after the war, it is not inconceivable that he might have run for the White House had he commanded the Normandy invasion. He is famous today, of course, but primarily because of his post-war European reconstruction plan. Just like Brooke, had he become supreme commander in the autumn or winter of 1943, Marshall would now be seen as one of the greatest generals of history, and the books, statues, aircraft carriers and street names presently dedicated to Eisenhower would today bear a different name.
Did Marshall glimpse any of this back in 1943? Whether he did or not, he put what he perceived to be his duty before hopes of lasting global glory, just as Brooke had in the Western Desert in August 1942. Eisenhower, a Marshall appointee and acolyte, had no hope of competing for the job against his mentor. He told his naval aide and confidant, Captain Harry Butcher, that ‘while his record as Allied Commander in North Africa would cause his name to be considered, he doubted if anyone except Generals Marshall and Brooke could be assigned.’ He also claimed that he liked his ‘semi-independence’ in Algiers, and ‘didn’t relish’ moving to a headquarters in London or Washington where he would be subjected to much more political interference.33
The War Cabinet of 20 September had to consider what would happen to the five battleships, eight cruisers, eight destroyers and twenty-one submarines of the Italian Navy that had surrendered to date. If there was any dispute with the Americans over which navy got which ships, Churchill thought, they should be divided equally. ‘What right does Italy have to pretend to be a modern power that has a future?’ he mused. Of the Italian ships that had already taken refuge in Fascist Spain, Churchill said there must be ‘no nonsense about that’.34 Very often, as on this occasion, Brooke gave long and detailed analyses of the global position on all fronts with no comment at all from Churchill. For the most part they worked closely with one another over the three-and-a-half years they were together; anything else would have been insupportable over that period of time.
On 28 September, Marshall reported in almost lyrical prose to Roosevelt all the benefits that had already accrued from the Italian campaign:
The fall of Foggia has come exactly at the time when it is needed to complement our bomber offensive now hammering Germany from bases in the UK. As winter sets in over northern Europe, our heavy bombers operating from the dozen or more (13) air bases in the Foggia Area will strike again and again at the heart of German production not only in Germany proper but in Austria, Hungary and Rumania. For our bombers operating from England, this aerial ‘Second Front’ will be a great assistance.35
It was typical of Marshall’s exactitude, even in an almost elegiac letter such as this, that he should still need to give the exact number of air bases that justified his phrase ‘dozen or more’. He went on to say that the Germans now had to provide 1,200 further miles of air defences, and ‘In a matter of days we will be in a position to strike into the soft side of Germany.’ This was the closest he got to accepting Churchill’s stance that Europe had a ‘soft’ side.
That same day, on the other side of the Atlantic, Churchill was ‘shouting a lot’ at a Defence Committee meeting on the Far Eastern situation. ‘Brookie obviously anxious lest too much were diverted from Mediterranean,’ noted Eden.36 After it, Eden, Attlee and Mountbatten stayed up until 1.30 a.m. discussing with Churchill whether Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham should replace Pound as first sea lord. On 8 September, Pound had visited Churchill in his big bed–sitting room in the White House to say that he had suffered a stroke and his right side was largely paralysed. ‘I thought it would pass off, but it gets worse every day and I am no longer fit for duty.’ When he signed his resignation letter back at the Admiralty, his secretary had to guide his hand. In his memoirs, Churchill claimed that, after Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser had refused the promotion, ‘the obvious choice’ had been Cunningham. In fact, however, Churchill put up a series of objections to the man who had stood up to him over Greece and Crete in 1941 and he only accepted Cunningham–who was indeed the obvious choice–with some reluctance. ‘Winston was loud in cries that he would not appoint any First Sea Lord who didn’t accept his Far Eastern plans,’ wrote Eden.37
At the end of the long session, Churchill joked that ‘he would end by killing us all by these late hours’, to which Eden laconically added in his diary, ‘which may well be true’. Three days earlier, Eden had worked hard on Saturday morning, then lunched with the Churchills and motored down to Cranborne. In his own words he was ‘Very tired after dinner and suffered from a complete “black out” which happily nobody noticed.’ The following year, when he slept badly, he ‘had to use heavy ration of dope to produce any effect’.38 A week later he was taking a pink pill to help him sleep. The physical and psychological pressures on the senior wartime decision-makers need to be borne in mind when considering their occasional bouts of furious ill-temper with one another.
The King’s Dragoon Guards took Naples on 1 October 1943. Dill wrote from Washington that day to congratulate Brooke on the Italian successes. ‘I don’t believe it was ever possible to make the Americans more Mediterranean-minded than they are today,’ he claimed, saying the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘have given way to our views a thousand times more than we have given way to them’. It was true, but it was all about to change. When Alexander wrote to Brooke on 17 October asking for landing craft to put ashore a force further north on the west coast of Italy, behind the German lines, Brooke replied that he ‘feared that any opinion from our side would be suspected by the Americans who seemed to have an ineradicable impression that
our hearts were not in Overlord and that we took every opportunity of directing to the Mediterranean resources which they considered should be concentrated in Great Britain’.39 He therefore suggested that it would be better to go via Eisenhower and the Combined Chiefs of Staff than direct to him.
That same day Kennedy made a diary note which explodes Brooke’s later claims that he had no interest in operations in the Balkans, an issue that was to become the next major bone of contention between the Masters and Commanders. ‘There is still a very distinct cleavage of opinion between us and the Americans as to the correct strategy in Europe,’ wrote Brooke’s colleague, closest aide, Director of Military Operations and fellow bird-watcher.
CIGS feels very strongly that we should exploit the openings in the Med and extend the range of our offensive operations to the Aegean and Balkans. The Germans are sitting on a volcano in the Balkans…The PM has come round to this point of view too, and has just said that he would like to tackle the Americans again upon it. But I must say I see no chance of converting them–especially in view of Marshall’s impending appointment for Overlord.
Just as in the Pentagon, the assumption until December 1943 at the War Office was that the post would go to Marshall.
Far from his holding Churchill back from the Aegean and Balkans, therefore, Kennedy believed–and was in a prime position to know–that Brooke was in fact building Churchill up to believe that the Mediterranean strategy might have much further to go northwards and eastwards. Unlike Churchill, however, Brooke was always intensely conscious of the importance of not disclosing future stages of his strategic ambitions to the (understandably) suspicious Americans.
Where Churchill, Roosevelt and Brooke were wrong, and Marshall right, was in rating highly the chances of bringing Turkey into the war against Germany. The British calculated that this was possible, even likely, and Roosevelt wanted to plan for it too, but Marshall never thought it likely, and did not want to design strategy around such an eventuality. In March 1943, Churchill said to Brooke of the Turks: ‘We must start by treating them purry-purry puss-puss, then later we shall harden!’40 Yet the Allies had no opportunity of doing either, as Marshall was correct: the Turks felt no inclination to declare war on a power as geographically close and still capable of lashing out as viciously as Nazi Germany. If purry-purry puss-puss did not work, neither did threats; in November Eden had asked Churchill what he should tell Turkey to try to coerce her into the Allied camp. Churchill replied: ‘Tell Turkey Christmas is coming.’41
There was only one occasion during the war when Brooke’s commitment even to an eventual Operation Overlord in 1944 seems momentarily to have wavered. Having received a note from Churchill at the morning Chiefs of Staff meeting on Tuesday 19 October, expressing the wish ‘to swing round the strategy back to the Mediterranean at the expense of the cross Channel operation’, Brooke noted: ‘I am in many ways entirely with him, but God knows where that may lead us to as regards clashes with Americans…I shudder at the thought of another meeting with the American Chiefs of Staff, and wonder whether I can face up to the strain of it.’ That evening at 10.30 there was another important meeting to discuss Overlord. As well as the Chiefs of Staff, Churchill had brought in Smuts, Attlee, Cadogan, Lyttelton and Leathers, a sure sign that he wanted political muscle behind him for a major démarche.
The Prime Minister criticized the May 1944 target date for Overlord; Cadogan suggested ‘stirring up action in the Balkans’ instead; Brooke complained of fighting a war based on ‘lawyers’ contracts’ (a reference to returning the seven divisions); Smuts spoke of ‘a clear run in to victory’ in the Mediterranean, at which Portal warned that the Americans would instead divert larger forces to the Pacific. The Prime Minister said he would be willing to risk that, and summed up in Utopian terms: ‘if we were in a position to decide the future strategy of the war’ the Americans should agree to ‘reinforce the Italian theatre to the full’, ‘enter the Balkans’, ‘hold our position in the Aegean Islands’, intensify air attacks on Germany, and build up US forces in Britain for an operation which ‘might not occur until after the spring of 1944’. Churchill therefore called for another full-scale Combined Chiefs of Staff conference in early November to try to sell this strategy to Roosevelt and Marshall.
Brooke put his name to this wish-list, knowing that that was all it could be, since Britain was no longer ‘in a position to decide the future strategy’ almost unilaterally. Roosevelt and Marshall were certainly not about to sign up for the first three desiderata, suspecting that it was merely yet another way of postponing the last. So the meeting served no useful purpose other than blowing off prime ministerial steam. It was not mentioned at all in Churchill’s war memoirs, probably because he did not want readers to appreciate how doubtful he still was about Overlord.42 Yet he was, and so–at least on this occasion–was Brooke. It was during the month of October 1943 that Brooke’s commitment to a spring 1944 Overlord, which had always been genuine, contrary to US suspicions, was seriously questioned for the first and last time. It had probably been the correct decision not to appoint him as its supreme commander after all.
On 21 October 1943–appropriately enough, Trafalgar Day–Sir Dudley Pound died in a London hospital. He had worked himself into an early grave. Commander Thompson recalled how deeply ‘distressed’ Churchill was by the death of one of his few personal friends in the higher command of the war.43 With Smuts often abroad and Beaverbrook in the Government but not the War Cabinet, Churchill had plenty of colleagues to work with, but few close friends. Brooke and Portal acted as pall-bearers at Pound’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, another was Pound’s successor, Cunningham, a man Jock Colville believed to be ‘impervious to Churchill’s spell’.44 A true naval hero (his biographer subtitled his book ‘The greatest admiral since Nelson’), Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham has been described as ‘a smallish man with sparkling blue eyes, not particularly robust physically, but with a will of iron and no respecter of persons’.45 Or prime ministers.
‘A.B.C.’ had entered the Navy in 1897, serving ashore in the Boer War before specializing in destroyers. He was commander-in-chief Mediterranean when he sank three 10,000-ton cruisers in the close-range night action off Cape Matapan in March 1941, without loss to the Royal Navy, and when, two months later, he accepted sinkings, against the General Staff’s advice, in order to bring twenty-two thousand troops off Crete rather than leave them to be captured. ‘You have said, General, that it will take three years to build a new Fleet,’ he had told Wavell on that occasion. ‘I will tell you that it will take three hundred years to build a new tradition.’46 He also kept Malta supplied by sea, despite heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Cunningham had been Allied naval commander for both Operations Torch and Husky. Eisenhower described him as vigorous, hardy and straightforward: ‘A real sea-dog’. The Navy meant everything to him. ‘He appears to have had no inner life and no intellectual interests,’ writes one historian. ‘His idea of a good time was to lie on his back and throw ping-pong balls into a chandelier.’47 (Which doesn’t sound like such bad fun, in fact.)
It took a man like Cunningham, who had crippled the Italian fleet at Taranto harbour with Swordfish torpedo bombers in 1940, putting three Italian battleships out of action, to stand up to Churchill’s constant demands for daring action. Yet if anyone deserved Churchill’s cruel jibe about the Chiefs of Staff Committee demonstrating ‘the sum total of their fears’, it was he. ‘In unexpected contrast to his powerful leadership at sea,’ admits his biographer,
A.B.C. himself was curiously passive as First Sea Lord. In the Mediterranean he had been master of men and events. He made things happen. In Whitehall, he let things happen to him. By his own testimony there were Chiefs of Staff meetings at which he made no contribution, or remained neutral on a particular subject because in his opinion it did not concern the Navy.48
After Stalin had agreed to meet the other two members of what was to be called the ‘Big Three’ at Teheran in late November 1943,
Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt on 23 October begging for another Anglo-American meeting soon, saying that they ought not to meet the Russians without first agreeing about future Anglo-American operations. He pointed out that by their Teheran meeting it would be ninety days since Quadrant, and in that time Italy had surrendered and been invaded ‘successfully’, and the Germans were gathering twenty-five divisions there. ‘All these are new facts,’ he concluded. He went on to state quite bluntly that ‘Our present plans for 1944 seem open to very grave defects.’ Putting fifteen American and twelve British divisions into Overlord while there were six American and twelve British and Commonwealth divisions in Italy meant that ‘Hitler, lying in the centre of the best communications in the world, can concentrate at least forty or fifty divisions against either of these forces while holding the other…without necessarily weakening his Russian front.’ (This was an exaggeration; Hitler had indeed weakened his Russian front in order to defend central Italy.) Instead of strategic need dictating the disposition of forces between the Mediterranean and the Channel, Churchill alleged, it was down to ‘arbitrary compromises’, by which he meant the seven-divisions deal. ‘The date of Overlord itself’, he pointed out, ‘was gained by splitting the difference between the American and British view.’ This telegram merely confirmed the suspicions of Americans such as Marshall and Hopkins that the Prime Minister had gone cold on the whole Overlord project once again.
Churchill went on to state that the date was looming when decisions over Overlord’s landing craft needed to be made, which if they were taken from Alexander ‘will cripple Mediterranean operations without the said craft influencing events elsewhere for many months’. Ditto the 50th and 51st Divisions then in Sicily, which were close to the Italian battle but would be out of action for seven months if they were transferred to Overlord instead. Speaking for Brooke and himself, Churchill wrote: ‘We stand by what was agreed at Quadrant but we do not feel that such agreements should be interpreted rigidly and without review in the swiftly changing situations of war.’49 There was only one way to interpret it: Brooke–many of whose favourite phrases appeared in the telegram–wanted to renege on the promise to withdraw the seven divisions, whatever effect that would have on the May 1944 date for Overlord.
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