Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Portal–repeating himself almost word for word for the third consecutive time, a sure signal that the talks were getting deadlocked and ill-tempered–said ‘that the Prime Minister felt it essential that it should be placed on record that he wished the British Fleet to play a major role in the operations against Japan’. Brooke added that ‘as he remembered it, the offer was no sooner made than accepted by the President.’ His use of Roosevelt’s exact phrase was telling. King sensibly changed tack at this, and asked for specific British proposals, whereupon Portal went back to quoting from paragraph nine of the CCS document that related to the Royal Navy playing ‘a full and early part’ in ‘the main operations’ against Japan. Leahy accepted that, with the caveat that they could ‘not say exactly where the Fleet could be employed at this moment’.

  King, however, would not let the matter rest there, but asserted ‘that the question of the British proposal for the use of the main Fleet would have to be referred to the President before it could be accepted’. Cunningham repeated Brooke’s point that it already had been, to which King, trying to widen the argument and bring in Arnold, replied ‘that the Prime Minister had also referred to the use of British air power in the Pacific’. Arnold said that the amount of British air power would depend on the development of suitable facilities, to which Portal added that he would put forward proposals for ‘air facilities available in the bases in the Pacific so that the British could play their part’.

  Marshall then spoke for the first time, suggesting that ‘the best method would be a statement of numbers of aircraft and dates at which they would be available.’ Arnold agreed. Brooke stated that since the Combined Chiefs had accepted the principle of the British Fleet operating in the central Pacific–which King by then most certainly had not–British land forces ‘could only arrive at a later date’. King asked whether ‘it was intended to use the British Fleet only in the main operations and to make no contribution to a Task Force in the south-west Pacific’. He and Marshall then disagreed over the Task Force proposal, and in King’s authorized biographer’s view, ‘they nearly had words.’ After King had criticized Marshall, Leahy told him: ‘I don’t think we should wash our linen in public.’25

  For the British this could hardly have played out better, with an open US Army-versus-Navy spat, in which the US Navy representatives were themselves split. Brooke stoked up the situation by repeating that ‘The British Fleet could of course play a part in operations in the south-west Pacific if they were required.’ Finally the Combined Chiefs ‘Agreed that the British Fleet should participate in the main operations against Japan in the Pacific’, in a manner both ‘balanced and self-supporting’.26 This meant that it could expect no logistical support from Admiral King’s US Navy, which anyone present could probably have guessed anyway.

  ‘King made an ass of himself,’ recorded Cunningham in his diary, ‘and having the rest of the US Chiefs of Staff against him had to give way to the fact that the British Fleet would operate in the central Pacific, but with such bad grace.’ Arnold recounted the way that ‘King hotly refused to have anything to do with it. All Hell broke loose! Admiral King could not agree that there was a place for the British Navy in the Pacific, except for a very small force. The American Navy had carried the war all the way from Honolulu to the west and it would carry it on to Japan!’27 In the end the issue was never resolved because the Japanese surrendered only three months after Victory in Europe Day, although Task Force 57, the British carriers under Vice-Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings, did play a part in neutralizing Japanese airfields in the Sakishima Gunto islands, 250 miles south-west of Okinawa, and by frequently attacking Japanese forces on Formosa.

  Arnold’s own role had been almost as unhelpful as King’s, however, and when later Churchill said to him, ‘With all your wealth of aerodromes, you would not deny me the mere pittance of a few for my heavy bombers, would you?’, Arnold replied that the Super Fortresses had started to move in to Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima, and it would take a Combined Chiefs of Staff decision to reverse that and replace them with Lancasters. This was all a ridiculous dispute about pride, prestige and post-war positioning. Of course the Americans should have grasped the chance to broaden the load, perhaps saving American lives in the process. Instead, as King’s biographer accepts, ‘Not only was King unwilling to share in the glory, but, most galling of all, he called the Royal Navy a liability.’28

  Recalling the row, Brooke commented that King had ‘lost his temper entirely’. Portal later remembered ‘blunt speeches and some frayed tempers’, while Arnold’s biographer rightly described that meeting as ‘one of their most emotional and acrimonious confrontations during the war’.29 King’s own semi-autobiographical account completely failed to mention it, but as Arnold’s biographer asserts, the book ‘made convenient omissions where his habitual bad manners were concerned’. On that occasion it seems to have been Marshall who calmed the situation, and the minutes recorded the very obvious compromise–but arguably also commonsensical–solution, ‘that the method of the employment of the British Fleet in the main operations in the Pacific would be decided from time to time in accordance with the prevailing circumstances’.30 This could be taken to mean absolutely anything or everything, which was what was fully intended.

  The open disagreement between Marshall and King over the south-west Pacific Task Force–washing their dirty linen in public, as Leahy had called it–could not have happened among the British Chiefs of Staff, who strictly adhered to collective responsibility. Once decisions were taken internally, they were presented as unanimous to the outside world, whether it was to Churchill, the War Cabinet or the Americans. It was the secret of Brooke’s power, and he knew it, acknowledging it in generous terms when his two colleagues retired after the war. As is clear from Cunningham’s diary, like any independently minded man he sometimes disagreed with his colleagues, but he stuck to the ethos of the Committee that he had joined relatively late on in the war. Over Anvil, for example, he wrote in his autobiography: ‘On the whole I was neutral, though when it came to a collective decision I was at one with my colleagues.’31

  On the evening of the row, after a vast dinner, Colville recalled that ‘there was a shockingly bad film chosen by the President. The PM walked out halfway through which, on the merits of the film, was understandable, but which seemed bad manners to the President.’ At the next Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting, at 10.30 a.m. on Friday 15 September, ‘Everything went sweetly,’ with King ‘more or less resigned’ to having the Royal Navy in the central and south-west Pacific after victory in Europe. It was not so sweet at the 6 p.m. Staff Conference with Churchill, however. The Prime Minister tried to amend the Combined Chiefs’ final report until it was pointed out that it had been agreed with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and so was not susceptible to change without their permission. ‘He was just at his worst and Brooke was very patient with him,’ wrote Cunningham. ‘Looked likely to wreck all the good that had been done. Finally we left him as he had to see General Marshall but we briefed Eden to talk to him.’ This, too, conformed to the pattern of earlier conferences: a last-minute threat by the Prime Minister to destabilize the whole network of agreements was seen off by Brooke at the eleventh hour.

  That same day Roosevelt and Churchill, amazingly enough, initialled the Morgenthau Plan, which said that Germany needed to be turned ‘into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’. Brooke was fundamentally opposed, already seeing Germany as a future ‘ally to meet the Russian threat of twenty-five years hence’.32 Considering that twenty-five years after writing that in 1944, West Germany was an integral part of NATO and Russia had just crushed the Prague Spring, Brooke was more acute than either Roosevelt or Churchill at the time. Once Churchill had properly examined the plan, which amounted to an agricultural Treaty of Versailles and would have hardly allowed a fraction of Germany’s population to survive on her own territory, he rightly denounced it as ‘unnatural, unchristian and unnecessary’
.

  The final Combined Chiefs of Staff session at 11 a.m. on Saturday 16 September ‘went very happily’, as did the final plenary session and press conference at the Citadel. The British Chiefs of Staff had plans to go off fishing together that afternoon, but at 2.30 p.m. a message arrived to say that Churchill wanted to see them that night to discuss operations in Burma. Portal wrote a note pointing out all the arrangements he would be wrecking, and the Prime Minister cancelled the meeting. ‘He really is a most selfish and impossible man to work with,’ wrote Cunningham of the incident.33 This was undeserved: Churchill was prime minister and minister of defence during a world war and he wanted to discuss a major theatre of operations with his Chiefs of Staff, while they wanted to go off fishing. As he had been the one to give way, it was hardly the moment to accuse him of selfishness.

  Being a keen fisherman was almost a precondition of entry to the Chiefs of Staff Committee in the Second World War, on both sides of the Atlantic. After a Chiefs of Staff meeting in April 1944, Cunningham had gone off to the Army & Navy Stores in London to buy tackle, and there he found Portal buying waders. A fortnight later Brooke presented him during another Chiefs of Staff meeting with an all-purpose dry fly. After Octagon the three men flew off to fish three lakes in canoes, and had ‘good sport’. At the same time, Arnold and Marshall went on a ten-day fishing break in the High Sierras, riding out together from Bishop, California. At altitudes of 10,000 feet, ‘in the middle of an excellent fishing ground’, they were kept in touch with Washington 2,400 miles away by radio. (On one occasion top-secret papers in a securely locked pouch were misdropped by an Army courier plane 2 miles away from the camp. ‘To say there was confusion, apprehension and concern is putting it mildly,’ recalled Arnold.)

  After fishing, the British Chiefs made their way back via New York, where Cunningham stayed at the Knickerbocker Club on Fifth Avenue. He tried to buy fishing tackle at Abercrombie & Fitch, and noticed in a department store that his devoted secretary, Captain A. P. Shaw, ‘appeared much interested in buying undies…for a lady who I sensed was not Mollie Shaw’.

  Roosevelt could not attend the Second Moscow Conference (codenamed Tolstoy) because of the presidential elections, and it was at this conference that Churchill concluded the notorious ‘percentages’ deal with Stalin. The Prime Minister had already suggested an arrangement of this kind to Roosevelt on 31 May, but had been turned down. Nonetheless, he went ahead and offered the Soviets paramountcy in Roumania if Britain were given a free hand to put down the Communist insurgency in Greece. Stalin had probably already decided not to intervene there in any event, and so placed a big blue tick on what Churchill, with some understatement, later called this ‘naughty document’.

  Realpolitik in eastern Europe hardly came more blatant and brutal than in Soviet policy towards Poland. On 2 October, discussing the way that Stalin had cold bloodedly refused clearance for aircraft to help Warsaw during the recent uprising there, Eden told the War Cabinet that the Polish President and Commander-in-Chief had been ‘unhelpful’ in the publicity they had given to Russia’s actions. Churchill then spoke of ‘These heroic people dogged by their maladroitness in political affairs for three hundred years.’34 It is one of the less attractive aspects of British policy-making in this period that the Government constantly gave the Russians leeway over the Poles, even to the point of declining to recognize that Stalin, and not the Nazis, had committed the Katyn Massacre of Polish officers in 1940 despite overwhelming proof to that effect.

  Averell Harriman and John R. Deane, head of the US military mission to Russia, were invited to the military conferences with Stalin, and were amused by the way that Brooke gave excellent presentations of Eisenhower’s plans, which were then subjected to constant interruptions by Churchill, who would ‘leap from his seat and stride to the map in order to emphasize the magnitude or difficulties of certain phases of the Anglo-American operations’.35 It is doubtful that Brooke took much solace from the fact that General A. E. Antonov, the Red Army Deputy Chief of Staff, was subjected to much the same kind of behaviour by Stalin. Deane also recalled with embarrassment a meeting on the evening of 14 October in the large conference room outside Stalin’s office, in which Stalin asked him how many divisions the Japanese had, and he did not know. ‘The day went to the British,’ he admitted, after Brooke ‘quickly thumbed through his papers and came up with the right answer’.

  Because Roosevelt and Marshall were not present, the Second Moscow Conference was not able to resolve major issues in eastern Europe, and when Churchill did complete his percentages deal with Stalin, it was not ratified by the Americans, insofar as he even explained it to them. Churchill went on to claim, rightly, that Britain had nonetheless saved Greece from ‘the flood of Bolshevism’. Speaking to Leo Amery soon after returning from Russia, Brooke said that ‘the change even in two years away from proletarian Communism to uniforms, decorations, rigid class distinctions, etc and towards old fashioned nationalism is very marked. There is fearful squalor behind the façade.’36

  In early October, Churchill having effectively been given the go-ahead by Stalin, Lieutenant-General Ronald Scobie’s III Corps began to occupy Athens in Operation Manna, at least once Generaloberst Alexander Löhr’s Army Group E evacuated Greece in order to avoid being cut off by Soviet forces. Rather like the Suez Crisis of 1956, this could hardly have come at a worse time in the American electoral cycle. As the Germans had started to withdraw from Greece, Churchill cabled Roosevelt to warn him that the Communist-dominated EAM (National Liberation Front) and its military wing ELAS (National Popular Liberation Army) would soon fill the power vacuum in Greece and crush all opponents unless Athens were swiftly occupied by the Allies.

  At the time, Roosevelt replied that he had no objections to this. When Scobie arrived, however, fighting broke out between ELAS and supporters of King George II of the Hellenes, and there was much criticism in the American press about Limey attempts to impose a reactionary, monarchical regime on freedom-loving Greek republicans. (In fact the King favoured a liberal democratic constitution, and most of the Greek republicans were pro-Soviet Communists.) Stalin, under the terms of the ‘naughty document’, did his bare minimum to support ELAS and EAM, but Roosevelt failed to say a word in Britain’s favour. Churchill said he understood the President’s difficulty, but he privately resented the complete lack of moral support afforded him on that occasion. Marshall utterly opposed any American involvement in Greece to assist Britain (although when he became secretary of state he supported US intervention there).

  On Tuesday 7 November 1944 Franklin D. Roosevelt was re-elected with 25.6 million votes, against 22.0 million cast for the Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey. Marshall congratulated him ‘with great respect and compete loyalty to your leadership’. Yet neither Roosevelt nor Marshall altered his stand to a more supportive one over Greece, and on 10 December it was discovered that Admiral King–never one to let an opportunity to discomfit the British go by–had even ordered the American landing craft in the Mediterranean to cease taking British troops and supplies to Greece. This was later quietly countermanded by Harry Hopkins, acting on Roosevelt’s behalf.37 There were unmistakable echoes of the incident six months previously when King had unilaterally tried to move the flotilla from the Channel without consulting the Admiralty, though at the next day’s Chiefs of Staff meeting Brooke reported that ‘Hopkins had asked the PM that there should be no recriminations and the PM had agreed.’

  Marshall later recalled: ‘We were very much afraid that Mr Churchill’s interest in matters near Athens and in Greece would finally get us involved in that fighting, and we were keeping out of it in every way we possibly could.’ On 13 December, Roosevelt cabled Churchill to say that ‘the traditional policies of the US’ meant that as head of state he had to be ‘responsive to the state of public feeling’ against Britain on the Greek issue, and he concluded, ‘I don’t need to tell you how much I dislike this state of affairs as between you and me.’ Churchill
replied generously: ‘I have felt it much that you were unable to give a word of explanation for your action, but I understand your difficulties.’ The new burden of combating Communism in south-eastern Europe therefore looked as if it would be carried entirely by the British.

  On 2 November, Walter Bedell Smith flew to London for lunch with Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff. ‘Some good talk’, recorded Cunningham, who learnt there of the huge attacks planned by Eisenhower along the whole Allied line, with Patton starting off with nine divisions in three days’ time and Bradley and Montgomery leading the main attack towards the Cologne–Ruhr area. ‘Brooke obviously does not think the main attack has enough weight behind it and looks on Patton’s attack as too great a diversion of strength,’ noted Cunningham. ‘However these Americans are often right!!’ For all the regular confluence of views between the CIGS and the First Sea Lord, that was simply not a sentence that could have been written by the former. Churchill joked that in the discussions with the Americans over whether Alexander should be given two extra divisions, the opinion at Eisenhower’s headquarters was ‘that it would be cheap at the price provided Monty accompanied the two to Italy and Alex came in his place’.

  On 4 November, Field Marshal Sir John Dill died in Washington. ‘We mourn with you the passing of a great and wise soldier, and a great gentleman,’ Marshall wrote to Brooke as part of a long and heartfelt letter that concluded: ‘His task in this war has been well done.’ By a special Act of Congress, Dill was buried at Arlington Cemetery, the only non-American to have been accorded that honour. There is a very fine equestrian statue of him there, cast with such attention to detail that it is even possible to make out the rosettes on three of his campaign medals.

  Marshall read the lesson at the funeral. Another of the mourners, a cousin of the general, noted afterwards: ‘I have never seen so many men so visibly shaken by sadness. Marshall’s face was truly stricken…It was a remarkable and noble affair.’38 Giving Marshall a silver tea service to remember her husband by, Dill’s widow Nancy wrote to say: ‘He really loved you, George, and your mutual affection meant a great deal to him–he always trusted you implicitly.’ Marshall’s reply mentioned ‘the intimate bond between Dill and myself’. Under the impression that Dill was about to be recalled to London for being too pro-American, Marshall had organized for a number of American honorary degrees to be bestowed on him, to convince Churchill of his prestige.