At lunch at the Citadel that day with the Roosevelts, Mackenzie King and the Governor-General of Canada, the Earl of Athlone (the King’s uncle, who was married to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Alice), Churchill told the President that he was ‘the head of the strongest military Power today, speaking of air, sea and land’. Roosevelt replied that it was ‘hard for him to realize that, as he did not like it himself. He could not feel that way.’8 Perhaps in order to equalize their relative worth, Churchill went on to say ‘quite frankly that if Britain had not fought as she did at the start, while others were getting under way, America would have had to fight for her existence. If Hitler had got into Britain and some Quisling government had given them possession of the British Navy, along with what they had of the French fleet, nothing would have saved this continent,’ especially with Japan preparing to strike. According to Mackenzie King’s notes, ‘The President was inclined to agree with him that they could not have got ready in time.’9 Churchill’s message was clear, and was not disputed by Roosevelt: the Americans might be providing the men, money and matériel today, but four years earlier the British had provided time: an equally important element for the defence of Western civilization.
The Second Quebec Conference (codenamed Octagon) witnessed the 172nd to 176th Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings back in the Salon Rose between Tuesday 12 and Saturday 16 September, as well as two plenary sessions at the Citadel on the 13th and 16th. The British and American Chiefs of Staff had not met since the Americans had come to London four days after D-Day in June. At the first Combined Chiefs meeting at noon on 12 September, Brooke agreed with the optimistic assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee that Germany was crumbling, and in those circumstances he saw ‘great advantages in a right swing at Trieste and an advance from there to Vienna’.10 Although German and Austrian resistance would mean not getting there till after the winter, he believed that seizure of the Istrian peninsula ‘not only had a military value, but also a political value in view of the Russian advances in the Balkans’.11
How different was this–albeit short-lived–stance from the one that Brooke later claimed to have adopted. ‘We had no plans for Vienna,’ he stated in Triumph in the West, ‘nor did I ever look at this operation as becoming possible.’12 Yet the minutes of the conference (which Brooke approved at the time) and the contemporary diaries of many of its participants are incontrovertible. At Octagon Brooke supported the Vienna strategy, and for manifestly political reasons, in complete contrast to his stated stance of not allowing such considerations to sway his judgement.
Had he been persuaded by Churchill, or Alexander, or his own anti-Bolshevism? We cannot know, and he soon afterwards changed his mind anyhow and thereafter denied he was ‘ever’ tempted by the Vienna option. For all that he is well represented by the impressive statue of him outside the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall, which rightly proclaims him a ‘Master of Strategy’ on its pedestal, Brooke was not above altering his point of view. The plan he presented to the Americans at Octagon was substantially the same one that he had decried when Alexander first mentioned it, and had argued against with Churchill. Yet by September 1944 he was seemingly all in favour. Unlike their statues, human beings–even Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke–are not made of bronze and granite.
Marshall told the British that he did not intend to weaken the Fifth Army in Italy by reinforcing the Seventh Army in southern France. (There were already four hundred thousand Allied troops taking part in Dragoon, after all.) He also promised to hold landing craft in readiness for a possible British amphibious assault in Istria, in contrast to everything he had previously said. That same meeting agreed to Eisenhower’s proposal to consider Montgomery’s northern approach–from Holland to the Ruhr–into Germany. Cunningham therefore found the American Chiefs ‘in a most accommodating mood and had no disputes’, and Charles Donnelly described the ‘tone’ at Octagon as ‘much more relaxed and agreeable than had been the case in previous meetings. It was no longer a question of if the Axis could be beaten, but when.’13 At 6.30 that evening, Cunningham found Churchill ‘in a mood of sweet reasonableness’. Was everyone going to be on his best behaviour throughout the conference? No; Admiral King had yet to speak.
Churchill told Colville that he feared Roosevelt had got ‘very frail’ since he had seen him last. Colville later said of Roosevelt–to whom he was introduced for the first time at Quebec–‘I heard him say nothing impressive or even memorable and his eyes seemed glazed.’ At his talks with Roosevelt at the Citadel, Churchill warned about ‘the rapid encroachment of the Russians into the Balkans and the consequent dangerous spread of Russian influence in the area’, something at which the American side took relatively little alarm. All that the conference minutes state is: ‘Balkans: Operations of our air forces and commando-type operations continue.’ Cunningham told Pogue in February 1947 that, at least up until the Yalta Conference, Churchill ‘thought he could help Russia by going into the Balkans or into Austria’. Cunningham did ‘not believe that he was motivated at that time by fear of Russia’.14 The truth was different.
Ian Jacob believed that Marshall and the American Chiefs ‘looked upon the Balkans as a political jungle and they weren’t going to have their troops in there. They regarded the whole war in Europe merely as a problem for a fire brigade. The fire was in Germany, therefore you sent the fire brigade by the shortest road into Germany…To them it was as simple as that.’15 If the British wished to get entangled in Balkan intrigues and struggles, Marshall seemed to be saying, he might provide some landing craft but would otherwise leave it entirely up to them.
‘It was a dazzling idea, this grand project of reaching Vienna before our Russian allies,’ wrote General Alexander in his memoirs, ‘and we discussed it informally at my headquarters.’ Yet taking the route to Vienna along the so-called Ljubljana Gap involved horrendous difficulties. The ‘Gap’ was a col 2,000 feet high and 30 miles wide leading to the Save Valley. Between the Save and Vienna is the Karawanken mountain range, with 6,000-foot peaks through which only two roads descended into the Klagenfurt valley. After that there were 200 miles of roads through yet more narrow valleys. ‘The powers of recovery of the German forces were a matter of record,’ points out Sir Michael Howard. ‘They would be falling back along their own lines of communication; at the Ljubljana Gap they would have had a front to defend about one-quarter of the length of the Pisa–Rimini Line…Finally, the distance from Rome to Vienna is some six hundred miles–about three times the distance from Naples to Rome which it had taken the Allies six months to cover.’16 It seems surprising that a strategist of Brooke’s eminence could ever have proposed such a scheme to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, though not that he should later have denied doing so. He had sarcastically criticized Churchill’s Jupiter plan for proposing to ‘advance victoriously over one mountain range after another’ in northern Norway, yet that is roughly what he himself now advocated in the push to Vienna.
Rear-Admiral Morison explained that the Ljubljana Gap, ‘narrow, tortuous, dominated by mountain peaks, would have been a tactical cul-de-sac’.17 A railway that ran through a large number of tunnels could have been easily destroyed, while the two-lane road could have supported two divisions at most. Furthermore, if it turned into a race to Vienna and Budapest, the Russians would comfortably have won it from the north-east. Even with a Trieste landing taking place in September at the earliest, the Western Allies had run out of time, as the Russians were already in Bucharest.
At the first plenary meeting of the conference, held at 11.45 a.m. on Wednesday 13 September, Churchill opened the proceedings with an overview of everything that had happened since they had last all met in Cairo:
Although the British Empire had now entered the sixth year of the war, it was still keeping its end up with an overall population, including the British Dominions and Colonies, of only seventy million white people. The British Empire effort in Europe, counted in terms of divisions in the field, was ab
out equal to that of the United States. This was as it should be. He was proud that the British Empire could claim equal partnership with their great ally, the United States, whom he regarded as the greatest military Power in the world. The British Empire had now reached its peak, whereas that of their ally was ever-increasing.18
While the subtle reference to how much longer the Empire had been fighting the Axis was reasonable, it was somewhat disingenuous of Churchill only to count the white population of the Empire and using that in contrast to the much larger population of the United States. At two-and-a-half million men, the Indian Army was the largest volunteer force in the history of mankind; it had soldiers fighting in almost every theatre, lost eighty-seven thousand of them during the conflict and won thirty Victoria Crosses. It surely deserved to be taken into account.
A ‘tentative programme and time-table’ had been drafted by the British on the Queen Mary, ostensibly ‘to save time’, which was agreed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff.19 Attempts to control the agenda had long been a British manoeuvre, and on three of the proposed four days of meetings some aspect or other of ‘British participation in the Pacific in the war against Japan’ found its way on to the schedule. At the first plenary session, Churchill expounded his Far East strategy, declaring that ‘He had always advocated an advance across the Bay of Bengal and operations to recover Singapore, the loss of which had been a grievous and shameful blow to British prestige which must be avenged. It would not be good enough for Singapore to be returned to us at the peace table. We should recover it in battle.’ He also found time to be gracious about Dragoon, congratulating the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operation ‘which had produced the most gratifying results’. Indeed, Churchill was exuberant, observing that in general ‘everything we had touched had turned to gold, and during the last seven weeks there had been an unbroken run of military successes’.20
In his answer, Roosevelt said he believed that the enemy would soon retire to the Alps and the right bank of the Rhine, but ‘The Germans could not be counted out and one more big battle would have to be fought.’ This was perceptive, and a full three months later the battle of the Bulge was to prove him right. The President did not agree with Churchill over Singapore, however, which he thought it possible to bypass, since the fortress ‘may be very strong and he was opposed to going up against strong positions.’ The Americans had been very successful at ‘island-hopping’ in the Pacific, leaving stranded Japanese garrisons in the rear for, as Roosevelt put it, ‘mopping up later’.
Churchill disagreed with Roosevelt, arguing that ‘there would undoubtedly be a large force of Japanese in the Malay Peninsula and it would help the American operations in the Pacific if we could bring these forces to action and destroy them in addition to achieving the great prize of the recapture of Singapore.’ In reply, Roosevelt ‘referred to the almost fanatical Japanese tenacity’, especially at Saipan, where he said ‘not only the soldiers but also the civilians had committed suicide rather than be taken.’21 In fact the civilian families who leapt from the 220-foot cliff at Marpi Point on Saipan in the Mariana Islands on 9 July 1944 did so under compulsion from the Japanese military, but more than seven thousand Japanese soldiers committed suicide there too, so Roosevelt was right about their fanaticism in general terms.
Octagon’s major point of contention then arose when Churchill asked what plans the Americans had for employing the Royal Navy in the Pacific after the collapse of Germany. The British wanted to be seen to be taking an active part in the victory over Japan, wanted the return of their many bases and possessions, and wanted the prestige in Australasia of having helped liberate the Far East. This could be done only by active Royal Navy involvement in the final victorious campaign. Although Roosevelt said he wanted ‘to use it in any way possible’, at that point Admiral King–who didn’t want it used at all–said that a paper had been prepared for the Combined Chiefs of Staff. It sounded like a delaying tactic to avoid a decision being taken in the plenary session before the two heads of government, and Churchill asked ‘if it would not be better to employ the new British ships in place of battle-worn vessels of the United States’. King reiterated that ‘the matter was under investigation’. Churchill then bluntly said that ‘the offer had been made and asked if it was accepted’. At this point Roosevelt stepped in and said categorically: ‘It is.’ Cunningham recalled FDR as replying: ‘No sooner offered than accepted.’22 King ‘glowered’ at his commander-in-chief’s intervention, but Churchill’s insistence had yielded the result the British wanted. These meetings were not simply for polite mutual congratulation after all, but the struggle was not over.
Donnelly thought that ‘Probably the chief reason for King’s dissent was that the US Navy…were smelling a not-too-far-off victory over Japan, a victory they were loath to share with an eleventh-hour entry.’ King also recognized that the active involvement of the Royal Navy in the south-west and central Pacific might entail the United States giving up bases that she would find it difficult to get back from Britain afterwards. (The US took leases on fourteen Atlantic and Caribbean bases for ninety-nine years in 1940, some of which she still uses to this day.) In his memoirs Cunningham recalled that the Chiefs of Staff had been pleasantly surprised when Churchill offered the British Fleet to operate alongside the US Navy, as he had hitherto wanted to use it exclusively against Singapore, Malaya and Borneo; it looked like a step back from the Bay of Bengal strategy.
The next meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, at 10 a.m. on Thursday 14 September, once again in the Salon Rose conference room of the Château Frontenac, was climactic. Far from Octagon being a ‘love feast’, it saw the most aggressive Staff clashes of the war so far. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had circulated a paper suggesting that the British Fleet ‘should be on the western flank of the advance in the south-west Pacific’, which would have accorded it a minor role at best. So Brooke started off by saying that the British Chiefs were ‘disturbed’ by the statement, adding that he ‘realized that this paper had been written before the plenary session on the previous day. He felt that it did not entirely coincide with the proposal put forward at that conference and approved by the President.’ Brooke then emphasized that ‘For political reasons it was essential that the British Fleet should take part in the main operations against Japan.’ British prestige in the Far East was intimately bound up with being in at the kill.
‘It might be that the British Fleet would be used initially in the Bay of Bengal and thereafter as required by the existing situation,’ answered Admiral Leahy, a classic delaying compromise, but Cunningham pointed out that the main Fleet ‘would not be required in the Bay of Bengal since there were already more British forces there than required’. He went on to say that a supply Fleet Train operating out of Australia, consisting of repair boats, ammunition transports, tankers, store-vessels, salvage craft and floating hospitals, would mean that a force of four battleships, six large carriers and twenty light Fleet carriers could operate unassisted for several months. The British Chiefs of Staff therefore wished to see the Fleet operate in the main battle theatre against Japan, which was in the central Pacific rather than the Indian Ocean.
Admiral King immediately weighed in, complaining that ‘at the plenary meeting no specific mention of the central Pacific had been made’, to which Brooke answered that ‘The emphasis had been laid on the use of the British Fleet in the main effort against Japan,’ which implied the central Pacific. King replied that ‘he was in no position now to commit himself as to where the British Fleet should be employed.’ Portal then quoted from an earlier CCS document agreed to by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which stated in paragraph nine that the British Fleet should indeed be used ‘in the main operations against Japan’.23 Cunningham ‘stressed that the British Chiefs of Staff did not wish the British Fleet merely to take part in mopping-up operations in areas falling into our hands’. Leahy replied that ‘he felt that the actual operations in which the British Fleet would take part would have
to be decided in the future,’ suggesting the reconquest of Singapore instead.
Portal was not about to be fobbed off with that, reminding the Combined Chiefs of Staff that Churchill had only the previous day offered the British Fleet for use ‘in the main operations against Japan’. At this point King said ‘that it was of course essential to have sufficient forces for the war against Japan. He was not, however, prepared to accept a British Fleet which he could not employ or support.’ This was despite Cunningham’s statement that it could support itself out of Australia with its large Fleet Train. ‘It would be entirely unacceptable for the British main Fleet to be employed for political reasons in the Pacific and thus necessitate withdrawal of some of the US Fleet,’ King insisted. At some point in these discussions, he went so far as to describe the Royal Navy as a ‘liability’.
Portal thereupon ‘reminded’ Admiral King that the Prime Minister had suggested that certain of the newer British capital ships should be substituted for certain of the older American ships. Cunningham added that, the very day before, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed ‘that it was essential for British forces to take a leading part in the main operations against Japan’. Whereupon, astonishingly, King ‘said that it was not his recollection that the President had agreed to this’, and anyhow ‘He could not accept that a view expressed by the Prime Minister should be regarded as a directive to the Combined Chiefs of Staff.’24
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