On 9 January, Brooke considered ‘a new scheme’ of Churchill’s under which Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy supreme commander, was to get a post at the Air Ministry and Alexander would leave Italy and take his place. Churchill wanted a high-profile Briton to be co-supreme commander in all but name. ‘This presupposed that divisions were withdrawn from Italy and the campaign there died away to a defensive one,’ thought Cunningham, who told Brooke that ‘the Americans would take it as an insult and think that Alex was being sent to hold Ike’s hand.’11 Another idea was simply to swap Tedder and Alexander around.
On 12 January Eisenhower wrote to Marshall to say that he didn’t oppose that concept, but Marshall thought it seemed like an admission of failure in the Ardennes. Brooke liked the idea of interposing Alexander–whom he did not rate very highly as a strategist–in between Eisenhower (whom he rated even lower) and the various army group, army and corps commanders. A plan to have Montgomery as Eisenhower’s land commander had briefly cropped up in the autumn, largely promoted by Montgomery himself. Now Churchill and Brooke were hoping to revive it for Alexander. On 10 January, Roosevelt sent Churchill a Joint Resolution of Congress awarding Dill a posthumous Distinguished Service Medal and donating $25,000 to erect the equestrian memorial in Arlington Cemetery. The President wrote that it was ‘evidence of a very wholesome state of mind in the midst of the bickerings that are inevitable at this stage of the war’.12
On 28 January, the day of the final victory in the battle of the Bulge, Marshall met Eisenhower near Marseilles, partly in order to demonstrate his continued confidence in him in the face of British pressure effectively to relieve him of the day-to-day control of the ground forces. It allowed the Army Chief of Staff to hear about the Supreme Commander’s future strategy, and thus arm himself against any British criticism at the Cricket Conference to which he was headed. The trip gave Marshall an unexpected chance to learn about the geography of the Balkans, in somewhat surprising circumstances. Staying with a Polish-born American liaison official in a villa outside Marseilles, Marshall had his hair cut by a barber who it transpired came from the crest of the Ljubljana Gap. The butler, who did the translation, also turned out to have been born and bred in the valley below, ‘So they spent about an hour and a half educating me as to the country,’ recalled Marshall. When he met the British soon afterwards in Malta, ‘they were astonished’ at his seemingly intimate knowledge of the geography of the region, and assumed that he must have once spent a summer there before the war.13 It stood him in very good stead. If Marshall was unwilling to commit American troops to Leros, Rhodes or Athens, he had always looked even less favourably on a political scheme to send armies into the Balkans. ‘The only thing the British hadn’t put in was trying to get to the North Pole,’ he once commented to Pogue about his ally’s supposed fondness for indirect ‘sideshow’ operations. His problem, as ever, was with the President. ‘I was frankly fearful of Mr Roosevelt introducing political methods, of which he was a genius, into a military thing which had to be on a fixed basis,’ he said in 1957. ‘This was particularly so in regard to the Balkan states and the now-termed satellite states. You can’t treat military factors in the way you do political factors. It’s quite a different affair.’ Marshall felt that his brief was not to save eastern Europe from Communism but instead to win the war in the shortest possible time and with the fewest possible Allied lives lost. After the Iron Curtain descended he was severely criticized for this, but at the time he did his military duty, leaving the political consideration to the politicians.
Eisenhower set out his plans for the double-envelopment of the Ruhr, and explained in detail his view of the European endgame, so that by the time Marshall left Marseilles on 29 January (he arrived in Malta the next day), he was well prepared for yet another showdown with the British over Eisenhower’s role and his strategy, whether they wanted one or not.
At the War Cabinet that same day, after hearing about the Wehrmacht withdrawing back to the Fatherland from Norway, Churchill likened Germany without military reserves to ‘Living in the middle of a spider’s web and not having a spider’.14 He then left for Northolt aerodrome and Malta, where he arrived with a temperature and went straight to bed that afternoon on board the cruiser HMS Orion. Brooke and Cunningham had already left that morning with Jacob, who was ‘nearly knocked [out]’ in the unpressurized cabin at an altitude of 12,000 feet and had to be given oxygen. They were met at the airport by Admiral Sir James Somerville, the head of the British naval delegation in Washington, and driven to Admiralty House where they were guests of the man who had succeeded Sir Andrew Cunningham as commander-in-chief Mediterranean Fleet, rather confusingly called Vice-Admiral Sir John Cunningham. Somerville had a lady flag lieutenant, noted Andrew Cunningham, ‘and the things he says to the poor girl are quite scandalous’.15
The first two Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings of the Malta Conference–the 182nd and 183rd of the war–took place on the morning and afternoon of Tuesday 30 January in the Montgomery House in Floriana, a suburb of Valletta, where the American delegation was staying. Procedure was settled quickly and Andrew Cunningham felt ‘We have no serious differences,’ but then he had also said that at Octagon on the eve of the discussion on the employment of the Royal Navy in the Pacific.
Marshall outlined Eisenhower’s plan for the main Allied attacks to be undertaken on a broad front north of the Ruhr by Montgomery’s 21st Army Group with a second attack between Frankfurt and Kassel by Bradley’s 12th Army Group. He ‘considered it essential that there should be more than one possible line of advance’, with the majority of the reinforcements then fed into whichever seemed to be doing best.16 The British worried that shifting the 15th Air Force from the Mediterranean to Eisenhower might damage their position in Italy, but Marshall said that it needed to be employed wherever the weather proved advantageous, and that the move wasn’t permanent.
At 2.30 p.m. the next day, 31 January, Andrew Cunningham spotted ‘Some differences over the Western front strategy and also minor ones over the Mediterranean strategy’. However, ‘Much was deferred as we pushed a number of new minutes at one another.’ That evening John Cunningham hosted a dinner at Admiralty House for the American and British Chiefs of Staff, as well as Maitland Wilson, Admiral Stark and many others, at which M. Bellizzi’s twenty-piece band ‘played splendidly’ until midnight. Everyone was very complimentary to Andrew Cunningham about the furniture and fittings of Admiralty House, which had been chosen by his wife Nona when they were stationed there from 1939 to 1942. ‘It was like old times,’ the ex-Commander-in-Chief reflected. Agreement was reached over issues as wide ranging as the priorities of the combined bombing offensive, the danger posed by German jet-fighters against Allied piston-engined planes, the allocation of resources between India, Burma and China, co-ordination with the Soviets (especially over bombing, from which was to come the destruction of Dresden a fortnight later), and the U-boat threat in British waters too shallow for the ASDIC underwater sonar device to work effectively. Furthermore, the Ljubljana Gap concept was effectively killed off–with the help of Brooke, who had by then had time to examine the operation more closely–and the British were also persuaded to go on the defensive in Italy and move five divisions from there to fight under Eisenhower.
Yet Thursday 1 February witnessed what have been described as ‘the most violent disagreements and disputes of the war.’ Churchill wrote to Clementine from HMS Orion that he had had luncheon alone with Admiral King the day before and Marshall that day, and could report: ‘Both are in great form and all the conversations at the Conference have been most friendly and agreeable.’17 But at the 2.30 p.m. Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting that same afternoon, coming straight from lunch with Churchill, Marshall called for an off-the-record session, and there he told Brooke exactly what he thought of his demand that Montgomery be given more American troops to effect the Rhine crossing, and much more besides. As Andrew Cunningham recalled it, Marshall:<
br />
let off rather a tirade about trying to fight the Western front battle by committee and also about the constant pressure maintained by Montgomery and the Prime Minister on Eisenhower. He said some pretty straight things about Montgomery, allowing personal feelings to enter into things. Brooke was not too good and we only noted Eisenhower’s submitted plan although both Portal and myself and King would have liked, under conditions, to note it with approval. Marshal [sic] practically made the question one of confidence in Eisenhower.18
Of course Marshall privately included Brooke himself in the list of those Britons exercising improper pressure on Eisenhower, even if he did not say so to his face. It had, after all, been Brooke who had on 12 December criticized Eisenhower’s strategy most ‘strenuously’ in the Annexe Map Room.
Quite what ‘pretty straight things’ Marshall said about Montgomery on that occasion we do not know, but a flavour of them might be taken from his strictly ‘off-the-record’ remarks to four Pentagon historians in 1949, to whom he said: ‘The Eighth Army had committed about every mistake in the book. It was no model campaign. The pursuit of Rommel across the Desert was slow. The British even laid a minefield in front of them which benefited the Germans more than it did the British…Montgomery left something to be desired as a field commander.’19 He added that El Alamein ‘gave a great boost to morale but was blown up out of all proportion to its importance’ and that Montgomery’s performance in north-west Europe was no better. If these were the kind of remarks Marshall made about Montgomery at Malta in 1945, as well as in Room 2E844 of the Pentagon four years later, it is understandable that the atmosphere became, in his own words, ‘very acidic’.
Brooke stuck up for his protégé as best he could, and when Marshall asked him to approve Eisenhower’s plan for the Western Front, he simply refused to do so, agreeing only to ‘take note’ of it. After the war Brooke wrote that ‘through force of circumstances’ he had to accept the plan, because they ‘were dealing with a force that was predominantly American, and it was therefore natural that they should wish to have the major share in its handling.’20 Marshall had protected his own protégé, Eisenhower, and the broad-front strategy of advance to the Rhine and Elbe, even suggesting to Ike that he threaten to resign on the issue.
Asked after the war to comment on what had happened at Malta, Marshall said that the session had been ‘a very hot one. We had great difficulty in reaching a general decision.’ He explained that ‘Montgomery wanted certain troops and a lead in the crossing of the Rhine,’ troops which had largely to come from the Americans. Eisenhower had given him practically all he asked for, but it had not satisfied him. ‘It was getting to be a quite serious political matter,’ and Marshall and Roosevelt ‘had a hard time beating it off’. Marshall also recalled telling Brooke that he and Roosevelt ‘hardly ever saw’ Eisenhower, who was ‘under the guns from Mr Churchill almost twice a day at times and very, very frequently all the time’. It is evident that Marshall personally blamed Brooke too, telling the Pentagon historians that ‘the real influence’ being brought to bear on Eisenhower ‘was the direct influence of Churchill and Alan Brooke. They were seeing him every week, and not going through the Combined Chiefs of Staff. We here in Washington were playing according to the rules.’ He claimed of the prestigious Rhine crossing planned in March (codenamed Plunder) that the British ‘were trying to restrict this thing so as Bradley couldn’t advance on the Rhine’, and that ‘They were all afraid of Patton getting loose down there.’
On other occasions Marshall referred to that meeting as ‘terrible’, which it clearly was.21 Deep and long-held American suspicions had come out into the open, and were very fully aired. ‘It was rough,’ said Marshall; ‘these sessions of lively arguments came up–and they were lively and they were very frank–but we always came to a harmonious conclusion.’ With his immense sense of fairness and objectivity, Marshall pointed out that ‘We Americans must keep in mind that the British…gave supreme command to Eisenhower in Africa when we had very few troops there and they had the dominant armies. They gave the supreme command, and reiterated it, to General Eisenhower, when General Montgomery’s famous Eighth Army came up along the northern rim of Africa,’ and even though ‘he was outranked.’ It was true; Eisenhower had only received his fourth star on 11 February 1943.
Marshall might well have also been venting irritation at the meeting provoked by what he later described as ‘This patronizing attitude towards American troops’ that he thought was ‘rather widespread in English circles’, instancing a time when the King ‘started telling me how fine it was to have Eisenhower in nominal command with Montgomery at his side, etc’. Marshall diplomatically confined himself to replying: ‘That’s very interesting, Your Majesty.’22 He was less restrained when General Alexander remarked to him, ‘Of course your American troops are basically trained,’ replying tartly: ‘Yes, American troops start out and make every possible mistake, but after the first time they do not repeat these mistakes. The British troops start out in the same way and continue making the same mistakes over and over, for a year.’23
Walter Bedell Smith was present at the closed session of 1 February, and he later recalled that Brooke was ‘upset’ about Eisenhower’s plan for the Rhine crossing and wanted ‘a directive to Ike which would require him to give a certain amount of troops to Montgomery’. Bedell Smith told Brooke that that would amount to a vote of no confidence in Ike, who would offer his resignation, upon which Brooke ‘disavowed any intention of getting rid of him’. It was hardly a ringing endorsement, nonetheless, and echoes other criticisms, such as that of the splendidly named Colonel C. H. Bonesteel III, who was in the Planning Department of 12th Army Group, and who said that Ike ‘Never really commanded. He was an arbiter or tribunal between services.’
A week after the row, Bedell Smith wrote to Marshall’s deputy chief of staff Tom Handy about a:
bitter argument with Field Marshal Brooke who wished to revise Ike’s directive in such a way that he could hardly move a division except north of the Ruhr. I had a couple of long talks with him after we got back to our rooms, and I give him credit for complete honesty in this matter, a tribute I have never paid him before; but he is stubborn as Hell, and stood out until finally GCM called a closed conference at the end of one of the sessions, spoke his mind as only he can do, for about fifteen minutes, and, as a result, the matter was dropped.
Bedell Smith added that ‘it would have been criminal’ if Eisenhower had ‘staked everything on one narrow thrust north of the Ruhr’.
After the war, Eisenhower signally failed to repay the support that Marshall had shown him at this crisis moment at Malta, and generally in having promoted him from lieutenant-colonel to four-star general in the less than two years between March 1941 and February 1943, and to five-star General of the Army on 20 December 1944 (only two days after Marshall himself). When in October 1952 Marshall came under violent criticism from the Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy for having let China ‘fall’ to the Communists when secretary of state, Eisenhower excised a paragraph of one of his election speeches in Milwaukee that described Marshall as ‘dedicated with singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America’.24 As President John F. Kennedy later put it: ‘No man is less loyal to his friends than Eisenhower. He is a terribly cold man. All his golfing pals are rich men he has met since 1945.’25
The morning after the ‘terrible’ meeting, on Friday 2 February, Brooke learnt that his aide-de-camp, flatmate and friend Captain Barney Charlesworth had been killed in a plane crash near Pantelleria. ‘He was always cheerful and in good humour no matter how unpleasant situations were,’ wrote Brooke of the loss, which came only eight months after the death of Ivan Cobbold and three months after that of Dill. Brooke was desperately sad for Barney’s wife Diana, and he found it hard during the day to keep his thoughts on the vital business at hand, ‘and not let them wander off to Barney’. It is sometimes easy to forget, when dealing with these
giants of mankind’s greatest war, that they were subject to ordinary human emotions too.
After a truncated, deadlocked Combined Chiefs of Staff meeting at Montgomery House, the fourteen-month-old heavy cruiser USS Quincy sailed into the Grand Harbour at Valletta, with Roosevelt and Leahy on board. The Joint Chiefs of Staff reported to the President at 4.30 p.m. and at 6 p.m. they were joined by Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff. No changes at SHAEF or alterations of strategy were requested by Brooke at that meeting, in the certain knowledge that they would be turned down. Indeed at Malta, where Roosevelt pointedly stayed for less than twenty-four hours, the President deftly warded off British attempts to discuss anything of importance at any length.
Churchill did try to use the opportunity to argue that ‘we should occupy as much of Austria as possible, as it was undesirable that more of Western Europe than necessary should be occupied by the Russians,’ to which Roosevelt reacted neither positively nor negatively.26 This was doubtless a relief to Marshall. Since Brooke by then anyway believed that the Ljubljana Gap concept was unworkable, and Churchill could not interest the Americans in it, and especially not Marshall, it died rather as the Prime Minister once claimed that Sledgehammer had, as a victim of Darwinian forces. Churchill and Roosevelt were not to speak privately again for another three days, and so next to nothing was discussed about how to deal with the Soviets at Yalta. Churchill fully recognized this increasing lack of influence with Roosevelt, telling Charles Moran in October 1951 that he had once ‘had great influence over the President’ but this had ended ‘about three months before Yalta; then he ceased to answer my letters.’27 In all, Churchill wrote 201 more letters and telegrams to Roosevelt than he received from him.
Masters and Commanders Page 71