Stalin, who had not left the USSR since 1918, was of course the cynosure of all eyes at Teheran. Other than Harriman and Hopkins, the Americans were almost all meeting him for the first time. He was also disrespectful about allies in an overt way that sent a frisson of excitement through the conference. ‘When he talked about the British, the Prime Minister, and the CIGS,’ recalled Arnold, ‘he was half humorous, half scathing.’46 He dressed in a light-brown uniform with red stripes on his trousers and gold epaulettes on his shoulders which featured a large gold star and the insignia of a Red Army marshal. He wore the Gold Star medal, was about 5 foot 4 inches and Arnold thought him ‘a fine-looking soldier’.
There was a cult of personality about Stalin among Western strategists almost as powerful as the one that his propagandists had ordained for him back in the USSR. ‘Stalin is more of a hero than the King or even Winston,’ marvelled Kennedy, who was shocked to notice that many of the Scots Guards stationed at the Tower of London had a picture of the marshal over their beds. At the end of the plenary meetings at Teheran, Major Buckley recalled ‘a neck-and-neck race round the table between Cunningham and Hollis to secure the latest of Stalin’s famous doodles, with the Royals as ever winning by a short head’.47 (Buckley and Hollis were Royal Marines.)
Roosevelt later explained to his long-standing labor secretary, Frances Perkins, how he had melted the ice with Stalin by making common cause with him against Churchill, at least in a social sense. ‘I had come there to accommodate Stalin. I felt pretty discouraged because I thought I was making no personal headway,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stay in Teheran forever. I had to cut through this icy surface so that later I could talk by telephone or letter in a personal way.’ Roosevelt said he had an inkling that the Russians did not feel happy that he and Churchill were ‘conferring together in a language which we understood and they didn’t’.
Therefore, at the next session, Roosevelt joked in a whisper to Stalin, ‘Winston is cranky this morning, he got up on the wrong side of bed.’ After Stalin smiled at that, Roosevelt decided he ‘was on the right track. As soon as I sat down at the conference table I began to tease Churchill about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his cigars, about his habits. Finally Stalin broke out into a deep, hearty guffaw, and for the first time in three days I saw light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was then that I called him “Uncle Joe”…that day he laughed and came over and shook my hand.’48 The light Stalin saw was a chink through the Anglo-American façade, and that was what made him happy quite as much as Roosevelt’s jokes. Far from not ‘feeling right’ about the Anglo-Americans conferring in English, the Russians assumed the capitalist nations would provide a united front; when Stalin saw that this was not necessarily true he was naturally delighted.
‘Churchill, lighting up his cigar,’ recalls his interpreter, Hugh Lunghi,
at first seemed not unduly embarrassed by the fairly heated arguments between the Americans and British over strategic priorities now being played out in front of Stalin. As the debate developed, the Prime Minister increasingly appeared on the defensive, still arguing strongly for his vision of the military options. At the start, regardless of Roosevelt’s ‘jokes’ at Churchill’s expense, Stalin seemed puzzled at the open display of disunity between the Americans and the British. Then…he allowed his normally inscrutable face a rare smile. Stalin spoke–as always–softly, briefly, to the point, completely in command of facts and statistics, hardly ever looking at a note, asking pertinent, awkward questions. At times we could hardly make out his words, with their marked Georgian accent.49
Lunghi was also ‘struck by the yellow whites to his greenish-brown, cat-like eyes’.
Even though dangerously outnumbered, Churchill could not be shifted from some stances. After Roosevelt told Stalin that Overlord was targeted for 1 May 1944, Churchill said that the operation would indeed take place some time in 1944, and that the Mediterranean operations were ‘always regarded’ as ‘stepping stones’, but added: ‘I wish to place on record that I could not, in any circumstance, agree to sacrifice the activities of the armies in the Mediterranean in order merely to keep the exact date of May 1 for Operation Overlord.’
Writing in 1951 in Closing the Ring, Churchill said that although the cross-Channel assault ‘was the greatest event and duty in the world’, a million Allied troops were fighting in Italy and he did not want to see them sabotaged. ‘Here the American, clear-cut, logical, large-scale, mass production style of thought was formidable,’ he wrote. ‘In life people have first to be taught “Concentrate on essentials”.’ As a result of these battles with the Americans, he recalled, ‘Twenty or a dozen vehicle landing-craft had to be fought for as if the major issue turned upon them.’50 Marshall’s reply would be that it was he who was concentrating on the essential operation of Overlord, and Churchill who was not, and at that stage of the war he would have been right.
On Tuesday 30 November–Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday–Voroshilov mounted a full-scale attack on Brooke over his supposed lack of commitment to Overlord, especially with regard to shipping, landing craft and air cover. It was the first time that the Soviets had met the Combined Chiefs of Staff for Staff discussions on all the war fronts, and Leahy recalled that although Marshall was ‘inclined to go along’ with Voroshilov about Overlord, ‘Sir Alan Brooke insisted stubbornly that all available Mediterranean forces should be used in the Italian and Eastern Mediterranean campaigns, including the pet project of…the capture of the island of Rhodes.’51 Since Marshall had already stated that no American would be taking part in that ‘goddamned’ operation, the battle-lines were drawn. It was soon clear that Hopkins had not been bluffing when he threatened that the Americans would join the Russians in putting maximum pressure on the British.
When Voroshilov asked Brooke point-blank if he attached the same importance to Overlord as General Marshall, Brooke replied that he did, but added that he knew how strong the German defences were in France and that ‘under certain circumstances Overlord could fail.’ To this Voroshilov ‘admitted the difficulties of a trans-Channel operation’, but said that the Russians ‘had encountered comparable difficulties in the crossing of wide rivers and had overcome them because they had the will to do it’.52
At that point Marshall decently came to Brooke’s defence, pointing out the obvious difference between crossing a river and undertaking an amphibious invasion of a country. Failing to cross a river might be a reverse, he said, whereas ‘the failure of a landing operation is a catastrophe’. Marshall went on to say that, although his Great War experience had all been about roads, rivers and railroads, in the last two years it had been based on oceans and seas. ‘Prior to the present war I never heard of any landing craft except a rubber boat,’ he joked. ‘Now I think about little else.’53 He added that the US had plenty of men–1.6 million stationed in Europe and 1.8 million in the Pacific–but his primary problem was moving them.
Brooke told Voroshilov that of the twenty-seven German divisions in Italy, eleven could be destroyed or captured by an amphibious attack just south of Rome behind the Gustav Line, and the need for landing craft for that would push back Overlord by one month to 1 June. He tried to explain amphibious operations to the Russian, but with limited success. (Hugh Lunghi, who was translating for Brooke, recalled Voroshilov being dismissive about landing craft during the Channel crossing, saying ‘We usually managed to find local resources like trees, timber to make rafts. Red Army men can use their initiative.’)54 The Combined Chiefs of Staff then agreed to sixty-eight landing craft staying in the Mediterranean until 15 January 1944, and a general push being made up to the Pisa–Rimini Line. In return, the British Chiefs of Staff agreed that an attack in the south of France–Operation Anvil–should coincide with Overlord, disregarding Stalin’s wish that it precede Overlord as strategically impractical.
‘My British counterparts will tell you that we didn’t have the landing craft,’ sneered Albert Wedemeyer in 1
973. ‘They made a great evacuation from Dunkirk without the landing craft, particularly craft that would permit it. We could have if we had the spirit and the will, and if the Navy had not begun to take surreptitiously some of our landing craft out to the Far East if they were convinced they were going across earlier.’55 What he said about the US Navy was true, but so senior a Planner ought to have recognized the very different types of craft needed when assaulting a beach and when evacuating from one.
The Americans were deeply suspicious of Churchill’s eloquence and persuasiveness at Teheran, while also admiring it. In 1946 General John R. Deane, who had been secretary of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before being sent to head the US military mission to Russia in 1943, published a book about US–Russian wartime co-operation in which he recalled of the Eureka conference: ‘Churchill used every trick in his oratorical bag, assisted by illustrative and emphasizing gestures, to put over his point. At times he was smooth and suave, pleasant and humorous and then he would clamp down on his cigar, growl, and complain.’56 It seems hard on Churchill that he should be expected to have identical moods throughout these exhausting, stressful and vital times, but equally he was the master of the theatrical, which is partly what makes him still so fascinating.
Hugh Lunghi recalls that ‘Brooke was like the headmaster of our group, beside whom Portal and Cunningham seemed like sixth-formers on holiday. He was the least easy, he was strict, serious about everything, didn’t relax. But he was a joy to interpret for, as he was a linguist and so he stopped every few sentences and was completely logical.’
At the end of the afternoon plenary session on the second day, Stalin put the key question: ‘Who will command Overlord?’57 He appreciated that it would come off only if someone senior, talented and utterly committed was in charge. Roosevelt–from whom a decision was by now long overdue–answered that the commander had yet to be appointed, while Churchill said that although a Briton had been responsible for the planning, he was willing to see an American take the job, which must have been galling for Brooke to hear once again. ‘Stalin made it plain’, Harriman later recalled, ‘that until the supreme commander was appointed he could not take seriously the promise of a cross-Channel invasion. For him the appointment was a specific assurance that the invasion would take place.’
Roosevelt and Churchill both had Marshall in mind at this stage, and Stalin also believed that Marshall would get history’s ultimate call-up. ‘They considered him the one soldier pre-eminently qualified to command what all agreed was likely to prove the most difficult operation in the history of warfare,’ averred Harriman. Roosevelt also believed that, with his headquarters in London, ‘Marshall, alone, with his granite integrity, was equipped to resist any eleventh-hour manoeuvres by Churchill and General Brooke to delay or divert the cross-Channel invasion.’58
Yet at Cairo both King and Arnold had protested that Marshall simply could not be spared, and if Eisenhower was to take over as Army chief of staff while Marshall was in London, the wilfulness of his former boss MacArthur might cause serious problems. Harriman’s views on the issue, as stated in 1975, are instructive: ‘I know that General Marshall wanted more than anything else to command this historic military action, and I have no doubt that Roosevelt would have appointed him if he had given the slightest indication of his personal desires. But he left the decision entirely to the President. It was the most selfless thing any man could do.’59
With an American commanding Overlord, a Briton–either Alexander or General Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland Wilson, the Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East–could command in the Mediterranean. No one seems to have considered promoting a Canadian to an important international command, despite the number of their troops, the quality of their commanders, the size of their Navy and the generosity of their exchequer. A more assertive prime minister than Mackenzie King could probably have secured a better deal for Canada in particular and the British Dominions in general.
Was Marshall somehow shirking the awesome responsibility of commanding Overlord? There is no evidence to suggest that he would have done anything other than thrive on it. He had faith in Eisenhower’s abilities, of course, otherwise he would certainly have taken it on himself. Had he done so, then Eisenhower, Bradley, Clark, Patton and MacArthur could not have complained. He probably felt, like Brooke the previous year, that he had a duty to keep his master in check, and that no one else was likely to do it so well. Because he vouchsafed his private thoughts to no one on this matter–not even to his wife or Forrest Pogue–we only have Marshall’s own high character as circumstantial evidence on which to base a judgement.
The most likely explanation for his great act of self-abnegation is the straightforward one: that he put his country’s best interests before his own ambition, despite the fact that, as he had told Stimson, ‘a soldier’s first wish is to serve in the field’. Brooke was right: when asked after the war whether Marshall had stayed because he was ‘the one man they had who could get on with the British’, the field marshal answered, ‘Well, that may have been the case but I think it would have been a great pity to move General Marshall…as he had a complete grasp by that time of the functions of the Staffs, and to take him away for a command would have removed one of the lynchpins of the higher direction of the war.’60 He might just as easily have been describing his own decision to stay on as CIGS, and probably was.
Churchill’s birthday banquet at the British Legation in Teheran on Tuesday 30 November 1943 afforded Stalin an opportunity to chaff Brooke. Arnold thought he counted a total of one hundred toasts drunk at the dinner, each after a short speech. Major Buckley, who swiped one of the candles from Churchill’s birthday cake as a memento, recalled Marshal Semën Timoshenko ‘finished under the table’. At one point Roosevelt proposed a toast to Brooke, making a reference to their fathers having known one another. Stalin then chipped in, saying that as a result of this conference, and ‘of having come to such unanimous agreement’, he hoped that General Brooke ‘would no longer look upon Russians with such suspicion’ because if he really got to know them, as the CIGS himself paraphrased it, ‘I should find that they were quite good chaps!!’ For some reason Brooke blamed mischief-making by Harriman for what he called in his diary this ‘most unexpected and uncalled for attack’. To modern ears it sounds as if Stalin was teasing Brooke rather mildly, not making a serious accusation, but of course we cannot know the tone in which he uttered his remark.
Roosevelt’s interpreter, Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen, took it seriously too, recalling in his autobiography Witness to History how Stalin’s mock-toast caused ‘some consternation among the British because Sir Alan was known to be an Irishman with a quick temper, and it was feared that he might destroy the friendly atmosphere with an angry reply to Stalin’s gratuitous insult’.61 Instead Brooke waited for a propitious moment to answer–‘It was rather nervous work, considering what the audience was!’–and made a graceful speech implying that he had only been feigning his anti-Bolshevism, just as Stalin himself had created ‘masses of dummy tanks and aeroplanes on the fronts [where] he was not going to attack’. This went down well and the buttoned-up Briton was surprised to be virtually hugged by Stalin after dinner, ‘almost with our arms round each other’s necks!’ (It is quite untrue, as Bohlen claimed, that Brooke had said in his speech that he had feigned his anti-Soviet feelings in the same way that Stalin had feigned his anti-Nazi feelings at the start of the war, and that ‘the dictator [took] the jibe in good humour’. Bohlen might have been good at interpreting Russian into English but he couldn’t interpret English into American very well, because to have mentioned the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact to Stalin in semi-public would have been an unthinkable diplomatic faux pas.)
‘Overlord and Anvil are the supreme operations for 1944,’ stated the Combined Chiefs of Staff final report of the Eureka Conference. ‘They must be carried out during May 1944. Nothing must be carried out in any other part of the world which hazards the success of these two
operations.’62 This seemed to go back upon the agreement over landing craft needed for the Anzio operation, codenamed Shingle, and the Andamans attack, codenamed Buccaneer. Stalin promised to declare war on Japan after Germany surrendered, and to launch an offensive during Overlord to discourage the Wehrmacht from moving troops westwards during its initial stages. The minutes of the discussions regarding Poland read: ‘The Prime Minister demonstrated with the help of three matches his idea of moving Poland westward, which pleased Marshal Stalin.’ Put simply–and with three matches there could hardly have been any other way–Churchill wanted the old Curzon Line to be the future Russo-Polish border, so Poland would be compensated with east German territory for the loss of land to the USSR. The outlines of a proposed new world organization, to be called the United Nations, were discussed, and agreements were reached on Iranian post-war independence.
Brooke was content with the final report, and soon afterwards managed to get the Overlord date pushed back a month so that it would not hobble the campaign to take Rome, and the south of France attack turned into something more elastic which he believed at the time ‘can be adjusted without affecting Italy too seriously’.63 By the time of D-Day in June 1944, the Allies had twenty-seven (fuller-strength) divisions in Italy. Military historians such as Basil Liddell Hart and Richard Holmes have legitimately questioned, therefore, quite who was pinning down whom in that wasp-waisted peninsula.64 Once the far higher Allied populations and sizes of armies are taken into account, however, Churchill’s and Brooke’s Italian strategy was worth while, up to a point. The problem was that they took that point further north than the Gustav Line, with fewer returns than the great effort and loss of life strategically justified, especially after the fall of Rome on 4 June 1944.
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