Quoting the German general Wilhelm von Thoma, whom secret microphones had picked up telling fellow POWs in Hertfordshire, ‘Our only hope is that they come where we can use the Army on them,’ Churchill said he didn’t doubt that Overlord would be successful in getting ashore and deploying, but he was ‘deeply concerned’ with what would happen between the thirtieth and sixtieth days thereafter. ‘I have the greatest confidence in General Marshall and…if he is in charge of Overlord we British will aid him with every scrap of life and strength we have,’ Churchill claimed, before imploring Roosevelt, ‘My dear friend, this is much the greatest thing we have ever attempted, and I am not satisfied that we have yet taken the measures necessary to give it the best chance of success. I feel very much in the dark at present, and unable to think or act in the forward manner which is needed. For these reasons I desire an early conference.’ He suggested 15 November ‘at latest’. Roosevelt, who was suffering from influenza, replied on 25 October, suggesting a meeting, with small staffs, at the Pyramids.
Simultaneously Churchill telegraphed Marshall: ‘Naturally I feel in my marrow the withdrawal of our 50th and 51st Divisions, our best, from the very edge of the battle of Rome in the interests of distant Overlord. We are carrying out our contract, but I pray God it does not cost us dear. I do hope to hear of your appointment soon. You know I will back you through thick and thin and make your path here smooth.’50 Meanwhile Brooke was furious that operations in Italy seemed to be ‘coming to a standstill’. He did not credit Kesselring’s fine resistance, but blamed Marshall’s ‘insistence to abandon the Mediterranean operations for the very problematical cross Channel operations’.51
Brooke feared a major German counter-offensive on the Eastern Front unless the Russians were successful–which they were being, breaking into the Nogaisk Steppes on 27 October–and complained that the Allied build-up in Italy was both slower than the German and far slower than he had expected. ‘We shall have an almighty row with the Americans who have put us in this position,’ he predicted, and then wrote sarcastically: ‘We are now beginning to see the full beauty of the Marshall strategy!! It is quite heartbreaking when we see what we might have done this year if our strategy had not been distorted by the Americans.’52 Rarely was his diary safety-valve used to greater effect.
In fact the Americans were not insisting on ‘abandoning’ the Mediterranean. All that they had insisted on at Quadrant was sticking to the Trident agreement that seven divisions should be withdrawn from the Mediterranean for Overlord by 1 November. Now, within a week of that date, the British were frantically attempting to renege. Rather than ‘distorting’ the British strategy, the Americans had gone along with it to a remarkable extent, and the fruits were evident: the defeat of Italy and diversion of many German divisions southwards. Brooke was thus not only indulging in hyperbole, but attempting to turn what was originally intended to be a subsidiary front into a major one.53 For all that the Third Reich could be harried from the south, it could only be killed stone dead from the west, by taking the Ruhr, and the east, by taking Berlin. With the time for that approaching, the seven divisions were needed more in Britain than in Italy.
Yet senior British figures could not appreciate that at the time. If Alexander’s pessimistic prognostications about the Germans massing to crush him in Italy proved accurate, thought Alec Cadogan, ‘all this “Overlord” folly must be thrown “Overboard”.’ After Alexander’s doleful report, Cadogan recorded that the whole War Cabinet were ‘definite’ that Britain could not be tied to the 1 May 1944 timetable for Overlord, and ‘Winston will fight for “nourishing the battle” in Italy and, if necessary, resign on it.’54 Of course Churchill’s resignation was unthinkable, and was merely a negotiating tool or rhetorical device. Michael Howard has written of Churchill and the Italian campaign, ‘over whose destinies he brooded with such possessive passion’, that this was a case where emotion took over in strategy-making. Churchill spoke of the Italian campaign, where there were twelve British and Commonwealth divisions under their own commanders Alexander and Montgomery, in a more personal and emotional way than he ever did of the far larger Allied campaigns in France and Germany the following year. Howard rightly puts this down to ‘sheer chauvinism’.55
On 26 October, the Joint Chiefs of Staff began selecting attendees for the coming Cairo Conference (codenamed Sextant) and were not going to make the same mistake that they had at Casablanca. Seventy-five officers and thirty warrant officers and enlisted men were chosen for the military delegation, with twenty more officers coming in from other theatres, not including further signals, medical and supply personnel. Furthermore Eisenhower, Stilwell and General Claire L. Chennault, the USAAF commander in China, would also be attending along with their Planning Staffs. Nor did that include the political and diplomatic group personally attending the President. The Americans would arrive at the Pyramids inundated with Staff, ready to deal with anything the British might spring on them.
‘I feel that Eisenhower and Alexander must have what they need to win the battle in Italy,’ Churchill wrote to Roosevelt about the importance of taking Rome, ‘no matter what effect is produced on subsequent operations.’ On 27 October Roosevelt drafted a reply to Churchill that he never sent, but a copy of which he passed to Marshall, stating that preparations for Overlord–which he was ‘anxious’ should take place on 1 May 1944–‘seem to have reached a stage from which progress difficult unless and until [the] Commander is appointed. As you know[I] cannot make Marshall available immediately.’ FDR suggested that Churchill ‘may care to consider early appointment of British Deputy Supreme Commander’, before going on to suggest Brooke, Dill or Portal.56
Brooke would not have entertained the idea after having been turned down for the top job, and it anyway seems slightly absurd that Roosevelt should have encouraged the appointment of a deputy before he himself got round to choosing the supreme commander, which was perhaps why the message was never sent. After the war, Lieutenant-General Morgan told Pogue that the President had revealed to him in November 1943 that he needed an Army chief of staff ‘who could handle MacArthur’. Eisenhower had served on MacArthur’s staff for nearly nine years in the 1930s, and might therefore have adopted a deferential attitude, whereas the President knew that Marshall could handle the difficult, occasionally irascible but undeniably brilliant MacArthur, whom Marshall had never liked. That might have been the real reason why Eisenhower became supreme commander instead of taking Marshall’s place as US Army chief of staff. Another possibility is that health reasons intervened; in June 1954 Marshall told Moran that his heartbeat had been ‘all over the place’ at Quadrant.57
‘During the past week,’ Kennedy confided to his journal on 30 October, ‘matters have moved steadily to a head with regard to the divergence of view between us and the Americans on future strategy.’ Alexander had sent Eisenhower his appreciation of how his advance on Rome had slowed up for lack of landing craft to attack round the German flanks, and asking for more troops. (Very few generals ever write to their superiors requesting fewer.) The problem was, in Kennedy’s words, that:
if we give Alexander what he wants, and if we allot further resources for operations in the Aegean and Balkans as we should do to take full advantage of the situation, Overlord must perforce be postponed. The American Chiefs take the view that this is a breach of contract and almost dishonourable. The impasse arises from a fundamental difference in the British and American points of view as to what is possible in a combined operation.58
Kennedy believed that history proved that combined operations often failed through ‘slowness of “buildup” on the part of the attacker’. Well-planned and well-executed plans generally succeeded, he believed, citing Gallipoli as an example of a plan that was badly executed. (In fact Gallipoli had been executed as well as it could have been; it was the plan to send thousands of men again and again up precipitous slopes over a rocky peninsula far from Constantinople in the teeth of well-entrenched and dogged Turkish
resistance over eight months that had been the real problem.)
‘We have never yet carried out a successful combined operation in the face of strong opposition on the beaches,’ wrote Kennedy. ‘Sicily and Salerno were not strongly opposed. In France we may expect to meet such opposition.’ The Americans had a faulty appreciation of the problems involved, he believed, and instanced Eisenhower’s steep learning curve once he had arrived in North Africa, and the way that he had declared the Sicilian landings ‘impossible’ if the Germans had more than two divisions on the island. American reliance on overwhelming air power in breaking up enemy concentrations was, in Kennedy’s view, ‘illusory’, since ‘Air power has never yet in this war interfered seriously with the Germans’ power to move their armies.’ Despite the Allies’ overwhelming domination of the air over Sicily, two German divisions had managed to escape, but Kennedy was wrong to deprecate the importance of air power, which was indeed seriously to interdict the Germans’ capacity to counter-attack at Normandy. ‘In the end,’ he predicted, ‘I suppose we shall probably go into France with little opposition and then the historians will say that we missed glorious opportunities a year earlier, etc, etc. It will be the Easterners and the Westerners as in the last war but with locations reversed!’59 (Kennedy was referring to the controversy within the British High Command in 1915 over Gallipoli versus the Western Front.)
The prospect of yet another Combined Chiefs of Staff conference filled Brooke with weariness and dread, as usual. ‘The stink of the last one is not yet out of my nostrils!’ he wrote on 1 November. ‘I now unfortunately know the limitations of Marshall’s brain and the impossibility of ever making him realize any strategical situation or its requirements. In strategy I doubt if he can ever, ever see the end of his nose.’60 Brooke went on to blame himself for his failure to make the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘see daylight’, which was really a disparagement of them, posing unconvincingly as self-criticism. Had the Americans gone along with the Dodecanese projects, ‘We should have been in a position to force the Dardanelles by the capture of Crete and Rhodes, we should have the whole Balkans ablaze by now, and the war might have been finished in 1943!!’ Instead of that golden prospect, however, Brooke believed that to satisfy ‘American shortsightedness’ the seven divisions had to be sent off ‘for a nebulous 2nd Front’ which has ‘emasculated our offensive strategy!! It is heartbreaking.’ Did Brooke really mean all this, since he had not supported the capture of Crete or Rhodes–let alone the Dardanelles–at the time, and certainly not in the Chiefs of Staff Committee? He was also writing on 1 November, the date the divisions were due to be withdrawn, yet five of the seven were still fighting in Italy.
Brooke’s outburst–written after the strain of a long Chiefs of Staff meeting and a Cabinet meeting and before yet another night meeting, of which he was ‘sick unto death’–was, as Michael Howard points out, ‘neither accurate nor fair’.61 In fact, the aims for the Mediterranean theatre agreed in the three 1943 conferences had all been achieved by the end of the year, including clearing the sea for Allied shipping and tipping the anti-U-boat campaign in the Allies’ favour. Around forty-five German divisions were now operating in Italy and the Balkan peninsula; Allied planes from Foggia were bombing central and south-eastern European targets nightly, and Yugoslavian partisans were on their way towards receiving huge amounts of supplies to tie down almost as large a number of German divisions as those operating in Italy. That was about as much as the Mediterranean campaign could ever realistically have achieved.
The Americans–who were indeed probably wrong to consider invading France in 1942 or 1943–were right to insist on doing so by the late spring of 1944. Furthermore the British, who were right to call for the invasion of Italy up to Naples in 1943, were similarly wrong to continue the campaign up to Rome, let alone beyond. The Allies had already achieved their aim of luring large German reinforcements into Italy; they did not then need to play to the Germans’ defensive strengths by trying to break through the Gustav Line and subsequently the Gothic Line much further north. There had to be a Salerno to take Naples, but once the Foggia airstrips were secured there did not need to be an Anzio landing to help take Rome, nor the many costly assaults on Monte Cassino. If a moment needs to be pinpointed when the British started to get strategy wrong, and the Americans started to get it right, it was in mid-October 1943 when Churchill successfully persuaded Brooke to try to postpone Overlord. Brooke seems to have overcome his month of autumn madness, however, and never returned to the supposed attractions of attacking Rhodes and Crete or ‘forcing’ the Dardanelles. Indeed he later came to deny they ever existed.
In late October 1943 Dill wrote to Marshall and King suggesting that the British and Americans should each have an officer attached to the other’s Planning Staff. Predictably, King opposed this, so Marshall wrote him a memorandum saying, ‘It seems to me that Dill’s proposal is sound unless we assume an attitude of suspicion in relation to this matter. We have to work with these people and the closer the better, with fewer misunderstandings I am certain.’ He instanced the success of having General Morgan at COSSAC. Morgan had been working in Washington since Quadrant, and Marshall believed he had gone so native that ‘it may be embarrassing in his relation to the British Chiefs of Staff in London.’62
Marshall then pointed out that, when it came to ‘the other side’–meaning Britain, not Germany–‘We are fighting battles all the time, notably in regard to the Balkans and other places, and the more frankness there is in the business at the lower level the better off I believe we are; particularly because it seems to me in a majority of cases the younger elements on the British side favour our conceptions rather than those of the Prime Minister.’ King once again replied negatively, arguing that such an arrangement ‘would permit us no privacy in the consideration of problems which are purely those of the United States’. Marshall forwarded this reply to Dill, and the project was stillborn.
Just as some Americans retained their suspicion of Britons, so some Britons preserved their equally unjustified sense of superiority over the Americans. After dinner at 10 Downing Street with the King and the Chiefs of Staff on 3 November, Sir Alan Lascelles reported that the Chiefs’:
great problem at the moment is to teach the Americans that you cannot run a war by making rigid ‘lawyers’ agreements’ to carry out preconceived strategic operations at a given date (i.e. ‘Overlord’), but that you must plan your campaign elastically and be prepared to adapt it to the tactical exigencies of the moment. They don’t seem to grasp that a paper-undertaking made in the autumn to invade Europe (or any other continent) in the following spring may have to be modified in accordance with what the enemy does or does not do in the intervening winter.63
Since these are all views and phrases that crop up in Brooke’s diaries, memoranda and conversations of the time, it is not difficult to work out Lascelles’ placement at dinner that right. Needless to say, had the Americans twice promised something in writing that Brooke still very much wanted, and had they threatened to renege on it, Brooke would probably not have been so aristocratically disdaining of ‘lawyers’ contracts’. Marshall did not want the seven divisions out of pedantic literalism but because he felt they would do more good in France than in Italy. And by then he was right.
A proposal from Admiral Leahy that Marshall should take over both the Mediterranean and the Western Fronts caused consternation in London on 8 November. Dill warned Brooke who warned Churchill, and, according to Brooke’s report to Kennedy, the Prime Minister threatened that he would not agree to it ‘while he remained in office’. Kennedy, who had only that week been made assistant CIGS, with control over the Operations, Intelligence, Plans and Maps departments, saw it as an attempt to stymie the Mediterranean campaign in favour of Overlord. As it turned out, the following day Marshall contacted Churchill and Brooke via Dill to say that Leahy’s proposal had come from Roosevelt, but it ‘had never received any proper consideration by the US Chiefs of Staff. I do
not think you need to take it too seriously.’64 It was a relief to the British to hear that Marshall was not interested, but not that Leahy had been encouraged by the President.
With only days to go before the Cairo Conference began, the British crystallized their ideas about what they wanted out of it. The main desiderata would be to continue the offensive in Italy, to increase the flow of supplies to the partisans in the Balkans, to try to induce the Balkan powers to break away from Germany, to induce Turkey to enter the war, and to accept a postponement of Overlord. Of these five British hopes, only the first two were adopted in the short to medium term, far below Brooke’s normal hit-rate. For by the time of the Cairo Conference, the balance of power had decisively shifted to the Americans, and it was never to shift back. In terms of economic might, industrial and military production, troops under arms, sheer numbers of ships and aircraft, and almost every single other measurable criterion of power, the United States had comprehensively overtaken Great Britain by November 1943, and was also overtaking the British Commonwealth as a whole.
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