At a Chiefs of Staff meeting in London at 10 p.m. on 4 August there was some discussion about shifting Dragoon from the south of France to Brittany, which Churchill said Eisenhower had already recommended to Marshall. The Chiefs of Staff therefore telegraphed Washington supporting the change, while warning Maitland Wilson ‘that it might come off. All this due to the spectacular advances of the US armoured forces in Brittany.’49 Yet the very next day, when Churchill and Cunningham flew to the Cherbourg peninsula but were unable to land owing to fog, they stopped instead at Eisenhower’s headquarters at Sharpener Camp on Thorney Island, a peninsula in Chichester Harbour, West Sussex. Over an ‘excellent’ lunch, they discussed moving Dragoon across to Brittany, and to Cunningham’s surprise found Eisenhower ‘dead against it and had never sent a message putting it forward’.50 Cunningham believed it was ‘very apparent that the PM, knowingly or not’, had ‘bounced’ the Chiefs of Staff into sending their telegram to the American Chiefs of Staff. Sure enough, two days later the Joint Chiefs of Staff turned down the Brittany idea out of hand, and Cunningham blamed Churchill for being Machiavellian over what was probably only a genuine misunderstanding.
‘What a drag on the wheel of war this man is,’ Cunningham wrote four days later after having three meetings in one day at which Churchill tried yet again to push for the Sumatran operation. ‘Everything is centralized in him with consequent indecision and waste of time before anything can be done.’ Eden noted that Churchill ‘generally seemed very tired and unwilling to address himself to the arguments’, and as a result, ‘Brookie became snappy at times, which didn’t help much.’51 What earlier in the war had been a creative tension between Churchill and Brooke was fast becoming simply mutual friction.
The next day Cunningham was furious that Churchill had ordered Ismay not to circulate a paper on Far East strategy before their 10.30 p.m. meeting, even though it had been ready at 4 p.m. ‘Thus we are governed!!’ he wrote afterwards. ‘I presume he himself has such a crooked mind that he is suspicious of the Chiefs of Staff.’ Part of the problem was the absurd times that these meetings were scheduled: ill-temper could almost be guaranteed at meetings that night after night began at 10.30 p.m. and which could often go on for three or four hours. Cunningham wrote–admittedly after a long, busy and very trying day–that the meeting had been ‘A breeze at the start’ when Brooke asked for time to consider the Prime Minister’s new paper. Its first four paragraphs were devoted to the subjects on which they were to approach the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ‘the way it was to be done, and the fifth arranging to double-cross them’, added the irascible First Sea Lord. ‘I often wonder how we expect the US Chiefs of Staff to have any respect for us. We allow our opinions to be overridden and ourselves persuaded against our own common sense at every turn.’52
On Friday 11 August, the Chiefs of Staff were warned by Ismay in a closed session that Churchill ‘was just raving last night and absolutely unbalanced. He cannot get over having not had his own way over Anvil.’ To Cunningham’s surprise it was the normally placating Charles Portal ‘who suggested that we must have a showdown with him before long if he went on as he is now’. Cunningham agreed, particularly disliking the way Churchill was attempting ‘to dictate’ to the Chiefs of Staff what they should say to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They decided to hold the issue off for twenty-four hours to let the Prime Minister ‘recover his balance a bit’, especially as he was off to Algiers and Italy for a fortnight anyhow. They also concluded that ‘after their exhausting week with the PM’ they would all three go off for the weekend a day early. With the Vice-Chiefs taking the Saturday morning meeting instead, Cunningham went down to Hampshire and repaired his lawn-mower.53
On Tuesday 15 August 1944–Napoleon’s 175th birthday–Operation Dragoon (formerly Anvil) was launched, with seventy-seven thousand troops of the US Seventh Army landing along the French Riviera coast between Cannes and Cavalaire, while an American and British airborne force of nine thousand men landed a few miles inland. The Free French also took part, and casualties amounted to only 520 of the seaborne force, of whom fewer than one hundred were killed. Ten weeks after D-Day, the reserves of German Army Group G had long before moved northwards.
Both Toulon and Marseilles fell on 28 August, Lyons on 2 September, and ten days after that contact was made with Patton’s Third Army at Dijon. With one hundred thousand German prisoners taken, the south of France liberated, 300 miles covered in a month and good supply bases in Toulon and Marseilles secured, Dragoon was, on its own terms, a military success, although the Germans were already withdrawing from southern France in any case. Considering the mutual suspicion and sustained anger that its planning caused in the highest Allied counsels of the war for so long, Dragoon today seems like a typhoon in a teacup, yet on 2 November 1944 Churchill told Bedell Smith and Cunningham that ‘History would pronounce on the Dragoon operation,’ implying that the verdict of Clio would be unfavourable. Cunningham suggested that it would depend on who wrote the history, to which Churchill replied that ‘he intended to have a hand in that’.54
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Octagon and Tolstoy: ‘It takes little to rouse his vengeful temper’ August–December 1944
The personal relations between Roosevelt and Churchill illustrated a real alliance of interests; the personal relations between Roosevelt and Stalin concealed a real opposition of interests.
Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson, 19481
The loss of General Alphonse Juin’s French Expeditionary Corps, mountain-trained units intended to break the Gothic Line, to Dragoon effectively forced Alexander to winter in the Apennines, fighting a campaign of attrition with what he had left. At that point the Germans ought strategically to have withdrawn from the Po to the Alps, thus freeing up divisions to fight in France, but the Führer’s no-withdrawal obsession precluded that. It is small wonder that Churchill was actually relieved that Hitler survived the 20 July Bomb Plot, telling the House of Commons in September that ‘It would be most unfortunate if the Allies were to be deprived in the closing stages of the struggle of that form of warlike genius that Corporal Schicklgruber has so notably contributed to our victory.’
As the war progressed, such political factors as the post-war political configuration of Europe weighed more heavily with the politicians, but not with the generals whose sole job was to see every campaign in terms of what would bring victory soonest with the minimum loss of Allied life. ‘By and large we were not influenced by political factors in making our military decisions,’ claimed Portal. Churchill and Eden were, of course, but, as he rightly pointed out: ‘That was their job.’ Over such issues as Operation Torch, the Bay of Bengal strategy and the liberation of Vienna and Berlin–all of which had deeply political overtones–the Chiefs of Staff resolutely considered only the military implications. That does not mean that they were not also keenly aware of the potential dangers that arose from a vast Red Army pushing towards the heart of Europe.
The next issue to divide the Americans and British was over what kind of supreme commander Eisenhower should be. Was he to function as essentially a non-executive chairman of the board, overseeing but not interfering much in the activities of his Army commanders, and calming the prima-donna tendencies of his lieutenants such as Bernard Montgomery (21st Army Group), George Patton (Third Army) and Omar Bradley (12th Army Group)? Or was he going to exercise direct daily military control over the immense scope of the war in France, the Low Countries, north-west Europe and Germany, at least as much as any individual reasonably could? In very crude outline, Churchill and especially Brooke wanted the former, while Roosevelt and especially Marshall expected and demanded the latter.
That question then led to the next: what kind of front would the Allies choose in the drive to the Rhine and beyond? Would it be a ‘broad’ one that comprehensively forced the Germans back towards the Fatherland, with two major advances on wide fronts north and south of the Ardennes, or would the attack instead be on ‘narrow’ fronts, spearheaded by several fast
er thrusts to try to capture important targets deep within Germany, possibly even including Berlin before the Red Army reached it? Here again, roughly speaking, Roosevelt and Marshall supported Eisenhower’s inclination for the former, while Brooke and Churchill tended to opt for Montgomery’s and Patton’s preference for the latter.
On the question of what the armies in Italy under Alexander and Clark would do once Lucian Truscott’s Fifth Army and Sir Richard McCreery’s Eighth Army broke through the Gothic Line, the Americans strongly deprecated proposed moves towards Trieste, Istria, the Ljubljana Gap, Vienna and the Balkans. Over Far East strategy, the British–with Churchill now generally persuaded and included–wanted the Royal Navy to join in the reconquest of the south-west Pacific alongside the US Navy, but it was (rightly) feared that Admiral King wanted to spurn this help. All these grand-strategy issues, and more localized ones as they arose, gave Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Brooke ample incentive to continue dancing their complicated, fast-moving, intimately interlocking minuet.
On 18 August, Lord Halifax and Alec Cadogan visited Marshall at the Pentagon. Halifax noted that Marshall was ‘quite optimistic’ about the campaign in north-west France and showed them maps of how advance elements of the Allied forces were only about 12 miles from Paris. Marshall said he believed that, since the Germans were exhausted and starved of oil and resources, Eisenhower should adopt a broad front, taking local setbacks as they came. At a meeting between Montgomery and Eisenhower five days later, Monty told Ike that in his opinion the Supreme Commander should stay aloof from the land battle, and that his 21st Army Group should make a single bold thrust along a narrow front straight to Berlin.
That meeting seems to have had precisely the opposite effect of what Montgomery hoped for, because Eisenhower very soon afterwards set up his own Command HQ in France. At a Chiefs of Staff meeting at this time, Cunningham sought to moderate criticism of the Americans, pointing out that ‘We should do exactly the same if we had two-thirds of the troops in the field.’ Employing a phrase that should have expired in 1914, he told his journal: ‘I am full of hope that the war will be over by Christmas.’2 It was ominous, but an appreciation that the British Joint Intelligence Committee encouraged too, with their generally over-optimistic estimates of Allied strengths and German weakness.
On 29 August Churchill sent Roosevelt a telegram about the Mediterranean in which the final paragraph once again brought up their Teheran conversation. It ended, ‘I am sure that the arrival of a powerful army in Trieste and Istria in four or five weeks would have an effect far outside purely military values.’ Although the condition of Hungary could not be predicted, he believed that having troops there would leave the Western Allies ‘in a position to take full advantage of any great new situation’.3 Roosevelt passed this on to Marshall, who asked McNarney and Handy to work on a draft reply that covered Italy in full but deliberately bypassed Istria completely. Churchill cannot have failed to mark the implications.
On a visit to Montgomery, Brooke satisfied himself that the Allied armies in the north were strong enough to destroy the German forces ranged against them. Montgomery’s mission was to take the British and Canadian armies up the coast, while Bradley commanded the nine-division 12th Army Group on his right. Patton’s Third Army, part of the 12th Army Group, was to make for the German border south of the Ardennes mountain region, through which the Germans had attacked in 1940. The broad-front strategy had prevailed for the moment, though Brooke was far from happy with it.
At a lunch party at Downing Street on 30 August–the day that the Red Army entered Bucharest and the seat of French government was transferred from Algiers to Paris–Cunningham was asked by Lord Camrose about Eisenhower taking over the day-to-day command of the ground forces in two days’ time. He defended it as ‘expected’ and ‘the correct procedure’, and then overheard Camrose telling Clementine Churchill that it would be ‘most popular’ if Monty were made a field marshal. ‘I trust it will come to nothing,’ wrote Cunningham, very prematurely, as two days later it did. The reason seems partly political; Churchill, wearing ‘a sumptuous pale-blue dressing gown of oriental design’ in his Annexe, told Lascelles that the promotion ‘will put the changes in command in their proper perspective’. With a full-scale conference about to take place in Quebec, the Prime Minister wanted Montgomery’s rank to be at least notionally superior to that of the senior American generals, even including Marshall. ‘The Americans would not like it,’ remarked Cunningham. ‘I don’t much myself.’4
On 3 September the British Second Army liberated Brussels, and the next day Antwerp was taken and flying-bomb sites in the Pas de Calais started to be destroyed. With the Americans having liberated both Rome and Paris–although for political reasons the Free French were allowed to take the fore in the latter–victory in the west seemed within the Allies’ grasp. Now even Roosevelt and Marshall accepted that the time had come for another conference.
Churchill seemed in a good mood at 11 a.m. on Tuesday 5 September in the saloon car of his train on the way up to the Clyde, where he was going to board the Queen Mary. Cunningham reckoned that ‘If he keeps up his present attitude things should go well in Quebec and it will be what the Americans called “a love feast”. But it takes little to rouse his vengeful temper and he will do anything then to get the better of our allies.’5 At 5 p.m. Churchill called Cunningham back to the saloon to say that there was a rumour that Germany had capitulated, and what if, two days out to sea, it proved to be true? ‘The only thing to do was to turn the ship round and come back,’ replied the First Sea Lord. On board the great liner, which sailed from Greenock for Halifax, Nova Scotia, that night, were Winston and Clementine Churchill, Brooke, Portal, Cunningham, Leathers, Cherwell, Ismay, Hollis and Colville.
As the Prime Minister crossed the Atlantic, the President was attending a meeting at the White House to discuss Henry Morgenthau’s extraordinary plan to deindustrialize post-war Germany. ‘There is no reason why Germany couldn’t go back to 1810,’ expounded Roosevelt at some length, ‘where they would be perfectly comfortable but wouldn’t have any luxury.’ In fact 1810 saw the German Confederation dominated by Napoleon, with Prussia still seething with revanchism after her humiliation at Jena–Auerstadt, but the general point was made. Roosevelt’s reverie of a defanged Teutonic rural idyll was darkened only by the idea that Britain might be the ultimate beneficiary of the lack of competition from German iron and steel manufacturers. Discussing the Saar and the Ruhr, with Hopkins and Morgenthau arguing on one side and Stimson and Hull on the other, it was ‘a very unsatisfactory meeting’, as Roosevelt worried ‘that the English would have the advantage of the steel business if the Ruhr were closed’ and consequently ‘he had the idea that this thing was good for England.’6 The assumption that that could therefore not also be good for the United States shows how far Roosevelt’s thinking had come since the Riviera and Arcadia conferences.
On Friday 8 September the first V-2 rocket-propelled bombs fell on Britain, and Churchill held a wide-ranging Staff Conference on the liner in which, according to Cunningham, ‘he was in his worst mood. Accusing the Chiefs of Staff of ganging up against him and keeping papers from him and so on.’ He refused to accept that after Kesselring was defeated, Italy ‘becomes a secondary front and that the real work is on the Russian and Western fronts’, even though that had effectively been true ever since D-Day. Churchill still hankered after an amphibious operation against Istria, even though the Chiefs of Staff thought it ‘of no military consequence and so on and so on’.
Churchill’s true animus was against the Americans, however, ‘who he accuses of doing the most awful things against the British. There is no question he is not well and is feeling this hot sticky weather,’ thought Cunningham. The liner was in the Gulf Stream where the water was 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and when Churchill tried to persuade Commodore James Bissett to change course towards cooler climes, Cunningham had to go with the commodore–who had first gone to sea in 1898
–to talk the Prime Minister out of it. ‘I am afraid that he is very definitely ill and doubtful how much longer he will last,’ wrote Brooke the next day. ‘The tragedy is that in his present condition he may well do untold harm!’ Ten years after Brooke wrote that, Churchill was Prime Minister again, and twenty years later had outlived both Cunningham and Brooke.
The trip on the Queen Mary witnessed another particularly low point in Churchill’s relationship with the British Chiefs. On 10 September, just before the ship docked at Halifax, Brooke complained–in perhaps his most oft-quoted and notorious diary entry–that at their noon meeting on Culverin that day Churchill:
knows no details, has only got half the picture in his mind, talks absurdities and makes my blood boil to listen to his nonsense. I find it hard to remain civil. And the wonderful thing is that 3/4 of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other 1/4 have no conception what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war!…Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again.7
Redeeming Churchill (and himself) somewhat was Brooke’s post-war comment that these remarks were written ‘at a moment of exasperation’. A married couple who felt like that about each other could always get divorced, but that route wasn’t open to Churchill and Brooke, although once the war was over they saw little of each other by choice.
When the Churchills’ train arrived at Quebec at 10 a.m. on Monday 11 September, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were just disembarking from theirs. The High Command again had suites on the fifteenth floor of the Château Frontenac, airy in the heat and with fabulous views overlooking the river. The place cannot have had happy memories for Brooke, however, since it had not been far off, on the Citadel terrace, that Churchill had told him that he would not after all be commanding Overlord, which had since been such a success. Cunningham noted that the American Chiefs of Staff seemed ‘in good form and very friendly’. They certainly arrived mob-handed, their military delegation alone numbering 125.
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