The next Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting became, in Brooke’s classic understatement, ‘somewhat heated’ over his proposal to divert landing craft from a project supported by Roosevelt, Marshall and especially King–an attack on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal codenamed Operation Buccaneer–to the Aegean. Donnelly recalled that ‘things became so hot that Admiral King and General Brooke traded insults’. Stilwell’s diary entry for that meeting read: ‘Brooke got nasty and King got good and sore. King almost climbed over the table at Brooke. God he was mad. I wish he had socked him.’20 Sholto Douglas found it an ‘unhappy–though perversely stimulating–experience’ to hear Brooke and Marshall have ‘the father and mother of a row’.21 The upshot was that the landing craft went to neither the Andamans nor the Aegean but stayed in Italy for use in the Anzio landings now scheduled for January 1944.
It is still one of the great mysteries of the Second World War that while the United States could spend $350 billion on the conflict, and was capable of building a Liberty ship in one hundred hours, there never seemed to be enough landing craft to go around all the major theatres. Marshall blamed officials in the Bureau of Yards and Construction for deliberately engineering the shortages, but without producing any evidence for the accusation.22 ‘After Midway,’ concludes Roosevelt’s biographer,
it should have been possible to direct more men and landing craft to the European theatre. By the summer of 1943, the US Navy had twice as many battleships and three times as many aircraft carriers as Japan. In May 1944, the United States had thirty-one thousand landing craft, but only 2,500 assigned to D-Day. Two-thirds of the landing craft on that occasion were provided by the British.23
Immediately after the Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting ended, a trilateral one began attended by four Chinese generals, at which Brooke further infuriated the Americans by cross-examining them mercilessly about their plans. Stilwell thought it a ‘Terrible performance. They couldn’t ask a question. Brooke was insulting. I helped them out.’ When the Chinese were asked about the Yunnan force protecting the Burma–India–China communications link in south-west China, Stilwell replied for them. ‘Brooke fired questions,’ he recalled, ‘and I batted them back.’24 In this he was helped by Chennault, but since Brooke thought Stilwell ‘was nothing more than a hopeless crank’ and Chennault ‘a very gallant airman with a limited brain’, not much was achieved. ‘The meeting came to a standstill!!’ wrote Brooke afterwards, and as he left it he told Marshall: ‘That was a ghastly waste of time!’25
On no evidence whatever, Stilwell’s biographer Barbara Tuchman put Brooke’s tough cross-examination down to his being ‘the kind of Englishman who considered a foreigner to be snubbed and if non-white to be stepped on’.26 Regardless of how Brooke would have taken to being called an Englishman, it was surely within his rights as Chief of the Imperial General Staff to ask the Chinese searching questions about the defence of Yunnan, the key province where China’s training facilities and supply depots were located and where the airlift over the Himalayan ‘Hump’ terminated. Meanwhile Stilwell ‘continually made snide remarks concerning the British’, recalled a doubtless delighted Wedemeyer, ‘criticizing their inability or unwillingness to fight’.27 For the most distinguished member of the Fighting Brookes, this too must have been infuriating.
Marshall called for a major attack in Burma in early 1944, using British, Indian and Chinese troops. He said that Chiang Kai-shek’s support for Operation Tarzan–capturing Upper Burma in order to protect Hump supplies and open the Burma Road–‘constituted a milestone in the prosecution of the war’.28 As with Sledgehammer, however, Brooke tended to look askance at Marshall proposing major attacks that were not to be carried out by significant bodies of Americans.
‘The British used one word repeatedly which irritated our side,’ wrote Donnelly; ‘when they wanted some aircraft or other matériel they submitted their “demands”; we would have said “requests” or “needs”. The British did not use the term in any harsh sense but did not understand the difference in emphasis we attached to the term.’29 Although the British and Americans spoke a common language, Ed Hull explained in his unpublished autobiography that ‘We didn’t always mean the same thing with what we said, however, and this sometimes led to misunderstandings. The British use the expression “to table” a matter when they want to bring it up for immediate discussion, while we use it normally to put the question aside or defer action on it.’ At one Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting a rancorous discussion ensued after Portal said he wanted to table the issue of intensifying the bombing campaign against Germany, and Arnold thought he wished to postpone it.
Furthermore, the British included a broader group in their need-to-know list than the Americans. ‘When they were trying to swing us over to their point of view in some particular matter,’ recalled Donnelly, ‘it was not uncommon for them to bring the matter up in a number of different committees and discussion groups. Our representative often did not know anything about the matter, not having been briefed or included on the need-to-know list, with the result that on several occasions someone expressed a view that was opposite to our official position.’ The British would then naturally fasten upon whichever answer was more amenable to them. ‘Even General Arnold’, Donnelly recalled, ‘got talked into a commitment to furnish three hundred C-47 transports for a Far Eastern operation before he talked it over with his logistics experts. It took him a couple of months to get off this hook.’30
At the Sextant and Eureka conferences, wrote Arnold, ‘We found it very difficult to reconcile the conflicting racial and national aspirations: Chinese, Russian, British, American.’ Through it all, however, he noted how ‘General Marshall was increasing in stature, in comparison with his fellows, as the days went by. He had more mature judgment, could see further into the future.’ When they went to view the Sphinx together at Giza, Arnold told Roosevelt that, although Marshall would be the best supreme commander for the European theatre, he would ‘very much dislike to see him go’, not least because he was the best adviser the President had.31
At lunch with Eden on Thursday 25 November, Churchill complained that poor progress was being made at the conference. Cadogan believed this was because Roosevelt was ‘a charming country gentleman’ who had no methods of organization, and ‘the Prime Minister had to be a courtier, seizing opportunities when they arose.’32 He might have been right about Churchill’s seizing opportunities, but Roosevelt’s façade of charming country gentleman should not have fooled the permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office. Little progress was being made at Cairo because the President did not want it to be until they met Stalin at Teheran.33
The Americans vastly overestimated Chiang Kai-shek’s capabilities and importance at Cairo, while showing much suspicion of British intentions in the Balkans but surprisingly little of Russian ambitions there or elsewhere. Roosevelt had wanted to invite Molotov to Cairo, but the Russians wouldn’t meet the Chinese generalissimo for fear that it might compromise the uneasy truce Russia had maintained with Japan since 1941. Churchill also had to put up with presidential joshing over Russia such as: ‘Winston, you have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood and you just don’t understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it. A new period has opened in the world’s history and you will have to adjust yourself to it.’34 Considering that Churchill had signed the first article of the Atlantic Charter, which stated that Great Britain desired no territorial changes that did not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned, it couldn’t have been easy remaining the ever attentive ‘lieutenant’ during such lectures as that.
Hopkins, telling Moran about a meeting on 25 November, reported that Churchill had hardly stopped talking, mostly about ‘his bloody Italian war’. The President’s confidant was dry and ‘full of sneers and jibes’, remarking: ‘Winston said he was a hundred percent for Overlord. But it was very important to capture Rome, and the
n we ought to take Rhodes.’ He made it clear to Moran–perhaps with the intention of having it passed on–that if Churchill was going to adopt this stance at Teheran, ‘The Americans will support the Russians.’35 The threat could not have been more explicit. ‘All Hopkins’ views on strategy come, of course, from Marshall,’ concluded Churchill’s doctor, who added a medical analogy, ‘but in changing hands they seem to go sour, as a microbe gains in virulence when it passes from one host to another.’
Moran, an acute observer who (it must be emphasized again) wrote up his contemporaneous notes much later, noticed at Cairo ‘a certain hardening of purpose in the American camp. They left Quebec in great heart, assured that everything was settled for good. And here is the British Prime Minister at his old game again. There is an ominous sharpness in their speech when they say that they are not going to allow things to be messed about in this way indefinitely.’36 When considering the testimony of any doctor, of course, it is worth bearing in mind that he sees his subjects most often when they are least well.
Churchill’s doctor even wondered whether the invasion would ever come off, believing that his patient had changed his mind since Quebec, especially after the near-defeat at Salerno, and had ‘grown more and more certain that an invasion of France as planned must fail’. Churchill also supposedly told Moran at this time that Roosevelt ‘is the most skilful strategist of them all…better than Marshall’. Roosevelt certainly got his way more often than any of the other Masters and Commanders, despite self-confessedly knowing the least about grand strategy. As for Marshall, Churchill’s effect on Roosevelt meant that ‘He can never be sure what will happen when Winston and the President get together. With the President wobbling, he and Admiral King fear that the Prime Minister may, after all, get his own way.’ As Hopkins aggressively reiterated to Moran: ‘Sure, we are preparing for a battle at Teheran. You will find us lining up with the Russians.’37
Hopkins–ever FDR’s assiduous courtier–undoubtedly seems to have viewed Churchill as an opponent rather than a friend at this time, telling the American editor and publisher Ralph Ingersoll that the reason Marshall had to become supreme commander in the West was because he was the only man qualified to ‘stand up to Churchill’, who dominated his own generals. As already noted, it was Hopkins’ view that ‘He is the only general in the world whom Churchill is afraid of,’ for, ‘when Churchill gets oratorical, Marshall just listens and then brings the conversation back to earth with just the right facts and figures to destroy the PM’s case.’38 Marshall was not the ‘only’ general like that; he might also have been describing Sir Alan Brooke.
Thanksgiving Day, Thursday 25 November, was dedicated to trying to improve relations between the American and British Chiefs, because, as Arnold wrote, they ‘had had hard sledding over many fundamentals and weren’t getting along very fast’. The meeting of the Plans Committee that evening was postponed and instead they concentrated on socializing. However, Brooke thought the church service before their Thanksgiving Dinner was ‘a sad fiasco and abominably badly run…I was in a cold sweat of agony throughout.’39 Whatever the state of Anglo-American relations, those between the British Army and RAF can hardly have been perfected by Air Marshal Tedder opining that ‘We should decorate Rommel for teaching the British Army how to fight.’
The next day, Friday 26 November, saw Brooke and Marshall have what the former called ‘the father and mother of a row!’ at a 2.30 p.m. off-the-record Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting. Given that they knew they had to meet both their own political masters almost immediately, and then Stalin in forty-eight hours’ time, they nonetheless ‘made more progress’, recorded Brooke. ‘In the end we secured most of the points we were after.’ A pattern had thus definitely emerged, of initial disagreements and intense brinksmanship, with a big row clearing the air in the final hours of the conference and a compromise deal covering most of the theatres agreed only moments before the generals were due to present their final report, knowing that if they could not agree one then Roosevelt and Churchill would be free to settle matters between themselves, which both sets of soldiers automatically assumed would be far worse.
‘We discussed the war in all its aspects and phases, and came to full agreement on all matters of moment without any difficulty,’ wrote Cunningham of the Cairo Conference in his 1951 memoirs, A Sailor’s Odyssey. ‘There was no dissimilarity of views at this conference.’40 This was completely untrue, and Cunningham must have known it to be, writing only eight years later and having been present at all the key meetings. In the Sextant compromise, the Joint Chiefs of Staff accepted the British view that the Mediterranean command would not be subordinated to the Supreme Allied Commander, who would be responsible for Overlord alone, thus stymieing Marshall’s ability to wind down the Italian campaign.41 They also accepted the British proposals for the Mediterranean ‘as a basis for discussion with the Soviets’ and further agreed that the date of 1 May 1944 was not completely sacrosanct for Overlord. The Americans nonetheless refused to postpone, let alone cancel, Operation Buccaneer, the attack on the Andaman Islands.
After the war, Brooke summed up Cairo by complaining that the three fronts of Russia, Italy and the Channel ‘might have been separate wars’ for Marshall, who he claimed refused to accept their intimate interrelation or the way in which strategy ‘had become a delicate matter of balancing’. He wondered what might have happened had MacArthur–‘the greatest general of the last war’–been Army chief of staff instead. (MacArthur more than returned the compliment in 1962, describing Brooke as ‘undoubtedly the greatest soldier that England has produced since Wellington’.) ‘I must…confess that Winston was no great help in the handling of Marshall,’ continued Brooke, ‘in fact the reverse. Marshall had a holy fear of Winston’s Balkans and Dardanelles ventures, and was always guarding against these dangers even when they did not exist.’42 Yet for all his post-war protestations over this, the dangers did indeed exist, and Brooke was a leading progenitor of them.
According to Elliott Roosevelt’s tendentious 1946 memoir of his father, As He Saw It, the President grew exasperated with Churchill during the Cairo Conference. ‘Believe it or not, Elliott,’ FDR is supposed to have said there, ‘the British are raising questions and doubts again about that western front.’ Elliott claims he replied, ‘But I thought that was all settled at Quebec!’ ‘So did we all,’ replied his father. ‘It is, too. It’s settled. But Winston keeps on making his doubts clear to everybody.’ Of course one must read with scepticism claims of perfect verbatim recall of three-year-old conversations, but Elliott then reports his father telling him that over the issue of Churchill’s desire for a Balkan offensive: ‘I think Winston is beginning not to like George Marshall very much. He finds that no matter what tactics he uses, whether it’s wheedling or logic or anger, Marshall still likes best the strategy of hitting Hitler an uppercut right on the point of the jaw.’
In fact there is no evidence that Churchill held Marshall in anything other than high regard, and he was perfectly capable of feigning anger to get results, and was completely able to compartmentalize his life. ‘The morning at Mena when the Prime Minister was really on the warpath,’ recalled his Royal Marine chief orderly Major Buckley, ‘he growled at Eden; he told off the Chiefs of Staff; he moaned at General Ismay and, firing a real broadside at John Martin, disappeared into the grounds.’ Later Martin discovered him ‘apparently in high good humour’, arguing with his orderly, Lance-Corporal Wright, over the respective merits of first-class versus village-green cricket, with ‘Wright arguing back’.43
On Saturday 27 November the entire conference decamped to Teheran, flying over the Suez Canal, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and the Syrian desert. Stalin had arrived the day before. Iran was under Allied–mainly Russian–control, and security was intense. It was the first time that the Big Three had met together; Churchill was nearly sixty-nine, Stalin sixty-four and Roosevelt sixty-one. (They were to die in reverse order of age, Roosevelt in 1945, S
talin in 1953 and Churchill in 1965.)
Three plenary sessions were held on Sunday 28, Monday 29 and Tuesday 30 November at the Russian Legation and there was one military conference on the middle day. For all their vast secretariat, Marshall and Arnold missed the first plenary session due to a scheduling error; they went on an automobile tour of the mountains north of Teheran instead. From the first moment of the conference, Brooke convinced himself that Stalin had ‘a military brain of the very highest calibre. Never once in any of his statements did he make any strategic error, nor did he ever fail to appreciate all the implications of a situation with a quick and unerring eye.’ By contrast Brooke characteristically thought Marshal Voroshilov had ‘nothing in the shape of strategic vision’.44 Nonetheless, everything Stalin said that day would have delighted Marshall and was utterly opposed to Brooke’s strategic views.
The Russian dictator stated unequivocally that Overlord should be the overriding priority for 1944, that the Italian campaign was a mere diversion (and an unimpressive one at that); that Turkey would not enter the war, so Britain’s Aegean plans were stillborn, and that southern France needed to be invaded before Overlord.45 Arnold’s notes of Stalin’s remarks on how to win the war–‘Hit her where the distance to Berlin is the shortest. Don’t waste time, men or equipment on secondary fronts’–was Marshall’s policy distilled to its essentials. It is impossible not to notice that when Marshall said exactly these kind of things, and far less didactically, Brooke derided him as a worthless strategist, yet when Stalin said them he was accorded Brooke’s ultimate accolade.
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