Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  16

  Eureka! at Teheran: ‘I wish he had socked him’ November–December 1943

  You can use a brilliant but lazy man as a strategist, a brilliant but energetic man as a Chief of Staff, but God help you with a dumb but energetic man!

  General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold1

  ‘We must not regard Overlord on a fixed date as the pivot of our whole strategy on which all else turns,’ wrote Brooke in a memorandum for Churchill before the Cairo Conference. ‘We should stretch the German forces to the utmost by threatening as many of their vital interests and areas as possible and, holding them thus, we should attack wherever we can do so in superior force.’2 Brooke suggested advancing beyond Rome to the Pisa–Rimini Line, intensifying aid to the Balkan partisans, pressing Turkey to open the Dardanelles and doing everything possible to ‘promote a state of chaos and destruction in the satellite Balkan countries’. Yet, as was now very apparent, areas east of the Adriatic ‘were regarded by American strategists with something akin to the superstitious dread with which medieval mariners once contemplated the unknown monster-infested reaches of the Western Ocean’.3 Marshall was foremost among these, and with Overlord slated for less than six months away, only one strategy could prevail.

  On Monday 15 November 1943 Roosevelt held a meeting at Shangri-La attended by Harry Hopkins and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at which he indicated the very firm stance he intended to adopt towards Churchill and Brooke at the coming Cairo (Sextant) and especially the Teheran (Eureka) conferences, the second of which Stalin was also going to attend. The Chinese generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek would also be coming to Cairo, and Far Eastern strategy was another area at which the Americans expected clashes with the British.

  Although ‘the British wanted to build up France into a first-class Power, which would be on the British side,’ the President said that ‘It was his opinion that France would certainly not again become a first-class Power for at least twenty-five years.’ To a Joint Chiefs of Staff memorandum opposing involvement in the Balkans strategy, all FDR said was ‘Amen’, adding that the United States should ‘definitely’ take a stand against it at the earliest opportunity. The minutes also record that Roosevelt ‘said it was his idea that General Marshall should be the commander-in-chief against Germany and command all the British, French, Italian and US troops involved in this effort’.4 It is evident from his mention of the Italians–who had no part to play in Overlord–that he meant Marshall to accept an inclusive European command that encompassed the Mediterranean theatre. Given that Marshall could be guaranteed to push for Overlord rather than Italy were he to assume the overarching supreme command Roosevelt wanted, and given that the previous month Churchill had threatened to resign if the Italian battle were not ‘nourished’, trouble clearly loomed.

  Over the future of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, Roosevelt told his advisers: ‘The British are definitely monarchists and want to keep kings on their thrones. They are monarchist-minded,’ whereas ‘We would like to get the King out.’ Although Leahy and Admiral King could not see what difference it made, and thought that the situation would ‘solve itself’, the President insisted on a national plebiscite on the issue. Whether this was more for ideological republicanism, to punish Victor Emmanuel for waiting so long before acting against Mussolini, or to irritate the British, must be open to doubt. Finally he said that he would like his meeting with Chiang Kai-shek ‘to be separate from and precede any meeting with the British’. Churchill’s telegram resiling from the May date for Overlord meant that the Anglo-American relationship was in for a testing time the following week.

  ‘The coming conference will be a difficult one,’ judged Kennedy, accurately.

  The Americans seem to think we have acted in an almost underhand way over the Mediterranean and have been guilty of unilateral action to implement our belief that the Mediterranean should have priority over Overlord, in spite of signed agreements in the contrary sense. This is curious because we have felt exactly the same about them. CIGS feels that the war may have been lengthened by the American failure to realize the value of exploiting the whole Mediterranean situation and of supporting Turkey strongly enough to bring her into the war.

  Kennedy concluded that ‘The time has now come for plain speaking on both sides.’5 In fact, as we have seen, there had already been a good deal of plain speaking up until then. Cairo was to hear much more.

  Just as Roosevelt was gradually becoming less enamoured of Churchill, so Churchill was finding an anti-American streak in himself that had not been apparent since the naval disputes of the mid-1920s. A new tone of asperity had entered the ‘Former Naval Person’ correspondence on both sides, and on the evening of 18 November, when the Chiefs of Staff met around the Prime Minister’s bed in Malta after his nap, Churchill ‘gave long tirade on evils of Americans and of our losses in the Aegean and Dalmatian coast’. Of course by losses he meant missed opportunities, and Brooke was worried that the line the Prime Minister was intending to pursue at the conference would be ‘all right if you won’t play with us in the Mediterranean we won’t play with you in the English Channel.’ After the war Brooke put what he called Churchill’s ‘new feelings of spitefulness’ down to the fact that ‘the strength of the American forces were now building up fast and exceeding ours. He hated having to give up the position of the dominant partner which we had held at the start. As a result he became inclined at times to put up strategic proposals which he knew were unsound purely to spite the Americans. He was in fact aiming at “cutting off his nose to spite his face”.’6

  Brooke believed that the primary attraction for Churchill of an Austrian or Balkan front lay in the fact that it would be ‘a purely British theatre when the laurels would be all ours’. Objectively, such nationalistic atavism–if Brooke was right in attributing such feelings to Churchill–was of course completely out of place in a war that had to be fought as a combined effort, but both Roosevelt and Churchill had their re-election to consider: Roosevelt in November 1944 and Churchill as soon as the war in Europe was won, which was then expected to be at about the same time. Just as it was important for Roosevelt electorally not to be seen as holding on to Churchill’s shirt-tails, so Churchill had proclaimed only a year before that he had ‘not become the King’s first minister’ in order to see the empire he loved liquidated. Churchill could see the way events were headed, and did not like it. Overlord would be a majority American operation, so prestige dictated that the British Empire should be able to claim the lead role in destroying Nazism in the Mediterranean.

  The minutes of a strategy meeting held at 3 p.m. in the admiral’s cabin of Roosevelt’s ship on Friday 19 November make it clear quite how deeply conscious the Americans were of their emergent superiority by the time of Sextant. Right at the start of the discussion about having a supreme Allied commander for the west, covering Overlord, the Mediterranean and the Middle East, the question was raised whether Churchill would accept such a proposition.7 Marshall pointed out that ‘at times the British Cabinet has overridden Mr Churchill’s decisions’, but it was the President who put his finger on the main point at issue, when he asked what total forces Britain and the US would have at home and abroad by 1 January 1944. The figures produced were as follows: the British Army, Navy and RAF would total 3,822,000 men plus 1,070,000 Dominion forces, which for some reason was rounded down to four and a half million. The United States, meanwhile, would have 3,779,600 men serving overseas but enough in uniform in America to bring the total to 10,529,400, which for some equally mysterious reason was rounded up to eleven million. Therefore, the President observed, ‘We are definitely ahead of the British as regards the number of men we have overseas at the present time and we will soon have as many men in England for Overlord as the total British forces now in that place.’ Marshall added that ‘he felt that we were already ahead of the British in England,’ where there were only five operational divisions. Arnold added that overseas, ‘with regard to air, we have passed the B
ritish rapidly. By 1 January 1944 we will have over twelve thousand operational planes, while the British will only have about eight thousand.’ The implications were obvious: Roosevelt and Marshall could speak with a far stronger voice at Cairo than at any other conference hitherto.8

  Roosevelt said he ‘felt that the overall Mediterranean command proposed by the British might have resulted from an idea in the back of their heads to create a situation in which they could push our troops into Turkey and the Balkans’. King pointed out that this would be impossible because the Combined Chiefs of Staff would still have the final say in grand strategy. The President replied that he would veto any plan of Alexander’s to use American troops and landing craft against the Dodecanese if the Prime Minister brought up the subject again. The meeting then got around to the question of Churchill’s proposed Balkan initiative. Here Marshall was adamant, telling the President:

  We must see the question of this Balkan matter settled. We do not believe that the Balkans are necessary. To undertake operations in this region would result in prolonging the war and also lengthening the war in the Pacific. We have now over a million tons of supplies in England for Overlord. It would be going into reverse to undertake the Balkans and prolong the war materially…The British might like to ditch Overlord at this time in order to undertake operations in a country with practically no communications. If they insist on any such proposal, we could say that…we will pull out and go into the Pacific with all our forces.9

  This time, unlike in the summer of 1942, Roosevelt did not demur. Churchill’s complaints about Overlord had gone too far. The Pacific threat, which in most of the Anglo-American strategic discussions up to this point had been implicit rather than explicit, was now becoming real. This time the Americans were not going to be bluffing.

  Roosevelt evinced yet more hostility towards Britain in the COSSAC proposals for the division of post-war Germany into zones, codenamed Rankin. He believed that ‘The British wanted the north-western part of Germany and would like to see the US take France and Germany south of the Moselle River. He said he did not like that arrangement.’ Other than mentioning its Roman Catholicism, the President did not explain what he had against ‘southern Germany, Baden, Württemburg, everything south of the Rhine’, but he clearly preferred America to control the Protestant north-west of the Reich. The reason was doubtless because that was generally where the manufacturing industries were located. But once again the President was wrong to ascribe sinister intent to British policy-makers. Marshall explained that the geographical breakdown sprang from the simple logistical fact that the British were going to be on the left (that is, northern) flank of Overlord, which would take them into northern France and hence northern Germany, whereas the United States on the right (that is, southern) flank would necessarily–unless there was an administratively nightmarish cross-over of forces–wind up to the south. King added that the military plans for Overlord were too far developed to permit any change in deployment. Roosevelt then astonishingly suggested that American forces might instead be sent around Scotland and land in northern Germany, adding that ‘He felt that we should get out of France and Italy as soon as possible, letting the British and the French handle their own problem together. There would definitely be a race for Berlin. We may have to put the US divisions into Berlin as soon as possible.’10

  At this stage of the war, therefore, it was not Russia that Roosevelt was hoping to beat to Berlin, but Great Britain, and he was suggesting completely altering the entire Overlord planning in order to effect it. As the OPD Planner Lieutenant-General Charles Donnelly recorded: ‘To have carried out Roosevelt’s [first] idea, there would have to have been a massive crossing of the lines by Army groups which would have played no end of havoc with transportation and logistic dispositions. Roosevelt finally gave in on this later when the logic became clear to him.’11

  It was at this meeting too that Roosevelt said one of the strangest things of the entire war, when he ‘envisaged a railroad invasion of Germany with little or no fighting’. Marshall disagreed, saying that the land advance would have to be done by motor trucks as there was unlikely to be much rolling stock, whereupon Hopkins ‘suggested that we must be ready to put an airborne division into Berlin two hours after the collapse of Germany’. Leahy felt that with civil war likely in France it would be best if the British were left with the problem rather than the United States, since ‘The Germans are easier to handle than would be the French under the chaotic conditions that could be expected in France.’

  Roosevelt concluded the session with the observation that ‘the British would undercut us in every move we make in the southern occupational area [of Germany] proposed for the United States. He said that it was quite evident that British political considerations were at the back of the proposals in this paper.’ As the Sextant Conference opened in Cairo, therefore, Roosevelt evidently felt deep suspicion of and even hostility towards Britain, although often on absurdly illogical grounds.

  ‘We felt almost from the outset of the meetings at Cairo that our American associates, so many of whom we looked upon as close friends, had worked themselves into a state bordering on self-deception,’ wrote Air Marshal Sir William Sholto Douglas, the Commander-in-Chief of the RAF in the Middle East. ‘They seemed to be determined not to listen to our ideas…there was more of a negative, automatic rejection of the views of the British by the Americans than any positive approach to a consideration of new ideas.’ British commanders felt ‘something approaching wonderment over the blank refusal by the Americans to listen to what we had to say’.12

  Mutual suspicion was not helped by the fact that by mid-November 1943 the Allied push up Italy had frustratingly stalled in bad weather at the Gustav Line, which ran through the town of Cassino, 87 miles south of Rome close to the Rapido river. Hitler had imposed a draconian no-withdrawal policy on Kesselring, even though the same strategy had cost Germany a quarter of a million men both in Tunisia and at Stalingrad. Cassino’s sixth-century Benedictine abbey–once it was severely damaged by Allied aerial bombardment on 15 February 1944–provided in its rubble a highly effective strongpoint to hold up the Allied advance. The battle of Monte Cassino was one of the most hard-fought engagements of the Second World War, after the flooding of the Rapido meant that tanks and motorized equipment could not be employed.

  The Mena House Hotel in Giza, in the suburbs of Cairo, was built in the early 1890s, almost in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Although the Combined Chiefs of Staff held twelve meetings there–their 127th through to 138th between 22 November and 7 December–its members were distributed in villas along the road to Cairo. There were also five plenary sessions held in Roosevelt’s Villa Kirk in the grounds of the hotel. The British Chiefs’ villa looked imposing from the outside, but Hap Arnold decided he preferred his rooms because although the British had three baths each, they had no hot water. ‘It was said to belong to a princess,’ recalled Cunningham of his villa, ‘but if so she had rather skimped the plumbing.’13

  The British delegation nonetheless moved in en masse, their eight hundred items of baggage weighing 35 tons. Everything was provided by the Royal Marines, including a barber, orderlies (whose average age was eighteen and a half, since higher gunnery ratings could not be spared), and batmen for Women’s Royal Naval Service officers, ‘whose duties included washing their “smalls”’.14 Part of the job of the security detail included burning all jottings and blotting paper left over at the end of each day’s deliberations.

  The Americans arrived at Sextant with even more Staff officers than they had had at Quadrant. As well as Marshall, Leahy, King and Arnold and five aides, additional officers included Lieutenant-General Somervell, Major-General Handy, Rear-Admiral Cooke and eleven other senior officers, plus three from the Joint Strategic Survey Committee; three from the secretariat; six Joint Staff Planners; the ‘Senior’, ‘Red’, ‘Purple’ and ‘Blue’ teams of the Joint War Plans Committee, numbering twelve; three from the Joi
nt Logistics Committee; nine Logistics Planners; four from the Planners’ secretariat (including Donnelly); two from Intelligence; eight Theater Representatives; two from War Shipping Administration (including Lew Douglas); two from the Assistant Secretary of War’s Office and two from the Civil Affairs Division, totalling seventy-nine officers in all.15 When the British asked difficult questions this time, there would be someone on hand with the answers.

  Between Monday 22 and Friday 26 November the two sets of Chiefs of Staff met separately in the mornings, and then the Combined Chiefs of Staff met formally together in the afternoons. On the Tuesday and Friday the discussions got rather acrimonious. Although the British wanted an agreement on Overlord and the Mediterranean before they all met the Russians at Teheran, the Americans needed a decision on south-east Asia immediately, but wanted to discuss Overlord and the Mediterranean only at Teheran, where they knew they would be supported by Stalin, who was as desperate for Overlord as he was opposed to a Western presence in the Balkans. Furthermore, Roosevelt and Marshall rated Chiang Kai-shek highly and saw China as a post-war great power, whereas Churchill thought him a peripheral figure and Brooke considered that he ‘Evidently [had]…no grasp of war in its larger aspects but [was] determined to get the best of the bargains’ and ‘never did much against the Japs during the war’.16 The scene was thus set for another titanic clash.

  The plenary session with Chiang Kai-shek on the morning of Tuesday 23 November was not successful, despite his wife Madame Chiang appearing at the meeting wearing a clinging black satin dress with ‘a slit which extended to her hip bone and exposed one of the most shapely of legs’, as a result of which Brooke thought he ‘heard a suppressed neigh’ coming from a group of the younger Staff members.17 Over the question of air operations from India and China into Burma, Arnold wrote in his diary, ‘Before we finished, it became quite an open talk, with everyone throwing his cards on the table, face up.’18 Another problem centred around ships: were there enough for an expedition to Rangoon? Or to land troops near Aykab? Would aircraft be available to attack Rangoon? The British were more interested in keeping shipping in the Mediterranean than in the Indian Ocean, and little progress was made. ‘Brooke treated the Burmese campaigns with an indifference so cold that it might have been culpable if they had not been so strategically irrelevant,’ wrote a reviewer of his biography many years later.19