Whether Churchill really did intend to sack Brooke, or more likely to rap him over the knuckles via Ismay, is impossible to say. Similarly, if Brooke saw his job on the line over personal differences, it was natural that he would deny ‘hating’ his minister of defence, although the protestation of ‘love’ also rings hollow. To lose one’s job over the Bay of Bengal (India–Burma–Malaya–Japan) strategy versus the south-west Pacific alternative (Australia–Philippines–Formosa–Japan) might be understandable; yet to lose it over a personality clash, especially after serving together for so long, would have been absurd. As it was, Churchill did not push the issue to the point of resignations or sackings, although neither did he ditch the concept altogether.
Despite potentially needing Marshall’s support over Far Eastern policy, Brooke was not about to defer to him when it came to the Mediterranean. ‘As far as Anvil is concerned I am giving up hope of getting Marshall to understand what the situation is in Italy,’ he wrote to Dill. ‘It has taken two months arguing with him for him to see that the situation in Italy now is what could be predicted some time ago.’ He considered that staging Anvil at the same time as Overlord would be ‘impossible’.49 Brooke believed that the ten divisions Marshall now wanted for Anvil would not be enough ‘if you want to hold forces opposite us in Central Italy’. Brooke ended the letter ‘with best love to you both, Yours ever, Alan’, a particularly affectionate signing-off from this somewhat emotionally buttoned-up Ulsterman and now field marshal. In the Far East, therefore, Brooke sought Marshall’s help against Churchill over Culverin, while in the Mediterranean he sought Churchill’s help against Marshall over Anvil. Meanwhile, in Washington, Marshall complained to Dill that Roosevelt was being stubborn over the issue of unconditional surrender; he wanted to find a definition of victory that would encourage enemy forces to surrender, but he told Lord Halifax that he was ‘up against an obstinate Dutchman [that is, Roosevelt] who had brought the phrase out and didn’t like to go back on it’.50
‘So many interesting things are happening’, wrote Admiral Cunningham on 1 April 1944, ‘that I think it behoves me to keep a diary.’ In fine handwriting, his first entry was about how the Joint Chiefs of Staff were being ‘quite inflexible’ over Anvil. Yet another public servant was now keeping a daily journal, which has never been published but is invaluable in flooding light upon the deliberations of everyone taking part in the higher direction of the western part of the war. Three days into keeping it, when the War Cabinet was informed that there could be as many as 160,000 civilian casualties as a result of bombing the French railway network prior to Overlord, Cunningham noted, ‘Considerable sob stuff about children with legs blown off and blinded old ladies but nothing about the saving of risk to our young soldiers landing on a hostile shore. It is of course intended to issue warnings beforehand.’
April Fool’s Day 1944 also saw Dill warn Brooke that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apropos the reinforcements being sent to Italy, were ‘shocked and pained to find out…how gaily we proposed to accept their legacy while disregarding the terms of their will’. Among themselves the US Planners drew up a memorandum for General Handy entitled ‘What Shall We Do about Anvil?’ which argued that, without the operation, the US would be ‘committed to a costly, unremunerative, inching advance in Italy’, which would be politically unpopular in France and at home and might end with American troops being used as occupation forces in Austria, Hungary and southern Germany.51
From the adjective ‘unremunerative’ it is clear that a certain degree of cold-bloodedness was needed at the senior Staff level in order simply to continue to do the job. ‘If you let yourself get all involved in the personalities and cry that “here’s a poor man gonna get killed”, you’ll lose your country,’ recalled the OPD Planner Paul Caraway in his unpublished memoirs:
As far as we were concerned, when we said that we had ten divisions that we were going to put into this operation, those ten divisions weren’t a hundred and fifty thousand people, they were 150,000 units, ones, entities, and we calculated with a completely passionless arithmetic as to what those 150,000 units pack. We expected to get back the maximum number possible, and we hoped the commanders would do all right, but what we had to have were results.52
Caraway’s brother was in the forefront of every major attack of the 28th Division, but, as Caraway concluded after the war, ‘Of course you do it this way.’
From Cunningham’s journals it is evident that the Chiefs of Staff were looking towards the post-war situation, with a suspicious eye towards Russia, almost before any other British government agency or institution. Over the future of Middle Eastern oil supplies, for example, he noted in early April 1944 that they were approving the idea of American involvement there, ‘so as to have USA support should Russia in post-war days cast sheep’s eyes at Iranian or Iraqi oilfields’. This showed impressive foresight, considering that parts of the Crimea were still under German occupation at the time.
On Easter Monday, 10 April, Dill wrote to Marshall to ‘thank you for all the understanding consideration which you have shown us, and me in particular, in our difficult negotiations concerning the Anvil–Overlord disagreement. It has made me feel once more that honest disagreements are of relatively small importance so long as we are completely honest and frank in all our dealings.’53 This was not how Brooke felt. Only two days earlier the CIGS had told his diary that the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘have at last agreed to our policy, but withdrawn their offer of landing craft from the Pacific!! This is typical of their methods of running strategy.’ Brooke believed that the Americans were using the landing craft ‘as bargaining counters’ in trying to pursue a Pacific over a Mediterranean strategy. This was unwarranted; in fact, the Americans were constantly using landing craft in the Pacific for precisely the purpose for which they had been built.
Two days later, Churchill wired Marshall via Dill, saying that he was convinced that the decision to implement Anvil could not be taken until the Anzio beachhead had been linked up to the British Eighth and American Fifth Armies in Italy and the initial results of Overlord evaluated. Marshall replied the next day that they appeared ‘to be agreed in principle but quite evidently not as to method’. He argued that in order to keep options open when the time came, preparations for Anvil needed to be made immediately, even though they ‘may be at the partial expense of future operations in Italy’, and if Anvil turned out to be the wrong operation, Maitland Wilson would therefore always have ‘an amphibious force available to carry out another and less difficult amphibious operation’. He added that the ‘momentum’ of US operations in the Pacific meant that the forces there could not be ‘hamstrung’.54
Churchill then proposed to Roosevelt that a joint telegram, to be signed ‘Roosevelt–Churchill’, be sent to Stalin informing him of the agreed date of Overlord, 1 June 1944. A second paragraph should promise a ‘heavy offensive which we shall launch in Italy with all out strength in mid-May’. However, as Marshall told Roosevelt, Combined Chiefs of Staff representatives in Moscow had already informed the Russians about Overlord, and Churchill’s second paragraph might be taken in London to infer the cancellation of Anvil. He therefore advised the President not to authorize the sending of the telegram, and suggested another, somewhat anodyne, draft to Churchill, which was sent off unchanged by Roosevelt.
By then the British Chiefs believed that, in Cunningham’s words, ‘the only thing to do’ was to ‘abandon Anvil’.55 On 15 April, as Brooke ‘rattled through the business in great style’, they drafted a new directive to Maitland Wilson ‘cutting out Anvil’ altogether. The next day Churchill wrote to Marshall regretting that landing craft could not be diverted from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, as there was no definite date commitment to Anvil. He did not want the landing craft to come from Italy, as he could not ‘agree beforehand to starve a battle or have it break off just at the moment when success, after long efforts and heavy losses, may be in view’.56
The British and Americans
knew that without extra landing craft there could be no two-divisional ‘harvest bug’ move to break the Italian stalemate further north, and probably no Anvil either. ‘Dill tells me that you had expected me to support Anvil more vigorously in view of my enthusiasm for it when it was first proposed by you at Teheran,’ Churchill told Marshall. Yet that was before the Allied attack got bogged down south of Rome. According to the Prime Minister, the Germans were committing to Italy the very divisions that Anvil had been designed to divert from Overlord. It was a difficult thesis to prove, and his last paragraph was classically Churchillian, all about how ‘We must throw our hearts into this battle’, in Italy, ‘and make it like Overlord an all-out conquer or die’. It was just the kind of language that had no purchase with George Marshall.
Simultaneously, the British Chiefs were telling Marshall via the Joint Staff Mission that ‘we cannot possibly agree, here and now, that preparations for an Anvil should have priority over the continuation of the battle in Italy,’ and this would be true even after the Anzio beachhead had joined up with the main battle line. Without Pacific landing craft, they stated, far too precipitately and didactically as it turned out, ‘the possibility of Anvil, as a supporting operation to Overlord, is terminated’.57 Like the British words ‘demand’ and ‘tabled’, ‘terminated’ did not go down well with the Americans. It was always dangerous to present a man in charge of a six-million-man army with a fait accompli, but by 18 April Marshall had to conclude, as he told Churchill, that ‘Since Eisenhower’s assault is not to be supported by a landing in southern France, every possible deceptive effort…will have to be utilized to hold the German divisions in southern France during the critical days of Overlord.’ Marshall seemed to be admitting that Anvil was moribund; but was he?
The next day, Churchill once again expressed his severe doubts about Overlord itself, minuting to the Foreign Office: ‘This battle has been forced upon us by the Russians and the United States military authorities.’ His lack of enthusiasm was manifest, yet although he quoted from other parts of the minute in his war memoirs, that sentence and others like it were excised; indeed it is next to impossible for any reader of Closing the Ring to spot the slightest Churchillian doubt about the success of Overlord six weeks before it was launched.58
On 22 April Churchill attempted to set up a line of communication with Marshall separate from both Roosevelt and Brooke, writing to Dill that the Chiefs of Staff ‘did not much like’ Marshall’s last cable, which had refused the landing craft. ‘Let me know if he is offended by my corresponding through you with him,’ he went on. ‘I thought that as the President was away he would readily understand my difficulties. If he does not like it, you may assure him that it shall not happen again. I will send direct to the President, who will soon be coming back. This will not mean any personal cooling-off in my relations with the Senior American Officer.’59
Dill replied that he could see little to dislike in Marshall’s landing-craft cable and that he felt it ‘wrong for you to raise direct with Marshall military questions demanding an answer when such an answer can only be given by the United States Chiefs of Staff’. Problems would arise when King discovered what was going on, yet since ‘Marshall often wants to know how you personally are thinking,’ Dill suggested that Churchill use him as the go-between. ‘The President, as you know,’ Dill ended, ‘is not militarily minded and you will, in my view, gain little by referring purely military questions to him.’60 This was an astonishing remark to make at that stage of a world war about one of America’s greatest wartime presidents, but it was essentially true. Without telling Brooke, therefore, Dill had consented to be Churchill’s go-between with Marshall behind Brooke’s back, while he was also Brooke’s long-term go-between with Marshall behind Churchill’s.
Churchill would occasionally address questions to British Staff officers besides Brooke, but they automatically sent the answer to the CIGS first for approval. Brooke recalled that Churchill had once asked him: ‘How is it that whenever I write to any officer of the General Staff at the War Office I get a reply from you?’ Brooke told him that he ‘should prefer him to address such minutes direct to me, but that even if he chose to ignore the chain of responsibility he would still get replies from me!’61 The CIGS was a sufficiently experienced Whitehall departmental warrior not to lose control over these all-important lines of communication.
At the London Conference of Dominion prime ministers that opened on 1 May, Churchill made the same joke that he had on several other occasions to different audiences. The Americans, he said, ‘all along said we were leading them up the garden path in the Mediterranean’, which, while true, ‘had provided them with nourishing vegetables and fruits. Nevertheless, the Americans had remained very suspicious.’62 This had been funny the previous year when Tunisia surrendered with nearly a quarter of a million prisoners taken, and also when Sicily had fallen in the space of five weeks, but the punchline had worn thin by 1944, when Salerno, Monte Cassino and Anzio had proved no garden path and it was difficult to see what strategic fruits were still waiting to be plucked after Rome.
Staying at Chequers on the weekend of 6 to 8 May, to meet William Mackenzie King and John Curtin, Brooke was shown to a small study in which the secretaries worked, where Churchill told him in confidence that ‘Roosevelt was not well and that he was no longer the man that he had been, this he said also applied to himself.’ Churchill added that he could still sleep well, eat well, ‘and especially drink well!’ but that he no longer jumped out of bed the way he used to, and felt as if he would be ‘quite content to spend the whole day’ there. This was the first time that Brooke had ever heard him ‘admit that he was beginning to fail’.63 For all the adrenalin that pumped through the amazing, bull-like constitution of the Prime Minister, he was now in his seventieth year and had suffered pneumonia among other illnesses (though not the full-scale heart attack that is sometimes attributed to him in December 1941). Yet whereas the sixty-two-year-old Roosevelt was dead in under a year, Churchill had twenty more to live.
Thursday 11 May was to witness Harold Alexander’s and Mark Clark’s Diadem offensive, which finally broke through the Gustav Line–Monte Cassino fell to the Poles a week later–linked up with the Anzio beachhead and captured Rome on 4 June, despite a highly skilled retreat by the Germans that preserved most of their forces. Marshall put much of the credit for this down to Clark’s brand new 85th and 88th Divisions, which he thought proved that the US Army was ready for Overlord. There would now be no opportunity for German redeployment from Italy to France to deal with Overlord, so one of the main objects of the Allied campaign had been fulfilled. Indeed, late May brought the news that the Germans were taking four divisions from western Europe to reinforce Italy. ‘Whatever happens,’ exulted Cunningham, ‘the battle has fulfilled its purpose of keeping the Italian divisions’–by which he meant the German divisions based in Italy–‘away from the Overlord battle.’64 It was not now strategically necessary for Churchill and Brooke to insist upon another, painful, costly, drawn-out mountainous advance up to the Pisa–Rimini Line much further north, yet this is what they did, partly because it was a British-led operation.
On 15 May almost the entire upper echelon of the Allied High Command except the Joint Chiefs met at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith in west London in order to be briefed on the Normandy landings by Eisenhower, Montgomery (who had once been a pupil), the naval Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Expeditionary Force Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the Commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz (who made a bad impression by reading his speech), Sir Arthur (‘Bert’ or ‘Bomber’) Harris of Bomber Command, Sholto Douglas and three others. The King also spoke briefly, before presenting the American General Omar Bradley with the insignia of a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. In his speech, Churchill ought to have chosen a better form of words than ‘Gentlemen, I am hardening towards this enterprise,’ which let everyone know, in Eisenhower’s view, that the Prime
Minister ‘had long doubted its feasibility’ and had only finally, ‘at this late date, come to believe with the rest of us that this was their true course of action in order to achieve the victory’.
In fact the preparations for the Normandy landings, as Eisenhower knew better than anyone, had been progressing with Churchill’s active political support for several years. All that was in doubt was the date of their launch. Millions of maps had been printed; thousands of aerial photographs compiled; millions of rounds of ammunition had been stockpiled; hundreds of miles of roads had been built; 6,250 pounds of sweets, 12,500 pounds of biscuits and one hundred thousand packets of chewing gum had been distributed; sixty days’ supply of poison gas was prepared for retaliatory use; 25 square miles of west Devon were evacuated of its civilian population for training; mass rehearsals were conducted with live ammunition; vast encampments were built all over southern England with their own water supplies, field bakeries, post offices and camouflages; immense ingenuity and inventiveness were directed towards making the assault a success, including artificial harbours and underwater petrol pipelines.65 Although the Americans brought over a great deal in convoys–necessitating forty ships per armoured division–the British provided a huge amount in terms of logistics too, which Churchill never begrudged, but rather drove through with insistence on administrative efficiency and vigour.
In a War Cabinet discussion on Monday 22 May, regarding the request of a Yugoslavian general to be parachuted back into his homeland in order to make contact with Marshal Tito, Churchill joked to the War Cabinet: ‘I’m not sure I should make a good landing by parachute; I’d break like an egg.’ (The mental image of Humpty Dumpty is hard to avoid in this context.) He then reported on Italy: ‘The battle is very heavy. Alex is pleased. The French have made great advances on the left flank. The [Allied] armies are hinging north of Cassino…The next [few] hours may produce very remarkable results. There have been seventeen thousand total [Allied] casualties.’ Brooke then listed the advances made since the previous Monday, starting with a night attack across the River Rapido. Churchill was impressed by the way that Germany was being taken on in Italy ‘by four separate countries’, Britain and her Dominions, America, France and Poland, and insisted on ‘publicity for Britain in communiqués’, a regular demand of his. Otherwise he felt that although they had a quarter of the troops engaged, it ‘looks as if the British were laggards in the show’.66
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