On 15 March 1945 British troops reached the Rhine on a 10-mile front. Of the controversies over the so-called race to Berlin, Brooke later explained that the Occupation zones of Germany had been settled at Yalta, and that ‘Russia having taken what you might call the major part in the land warfare certainly had to have an equal part to the other two, on the Eastern Front…The advance into the country really had to coincide to a certain extent with what our final boundaries would be. That was what led to the stopping of the American advance at one point; they were going into territory that would eventually be occupied by Russia, they would lose men in doing so.’30 As there was no point in doing that, there was no race to Berlin between Montgomery and Patton, or anyone else. Berlin was in the Soviet zone, and if the Allies had reached it first, they would simply have had to withdraw.
In a wide-ranging, ruminative message to Roosevelt two days later, Churchill reminisced about how their friendship was still ‘the rock on which I build for the future of the world so long as I am one of the builders’. He said that he often thought back to ‘those tremendous days when you devised Lend–Lease, when we met at Riviera [Placentia Bay], when you decided with my heartfelt agreement to launch the invasion of Africa, and when you comforted me for the loss of Tobruk by giving me the subsequent three hundred Shermans of Alamein fame’.31 Churchill felt nostalgia for that nerve-wracking, but for him much happier, stage of the war when his relationship with Roosevelt was stronger and clearer than in the multi-nuanced later periods. Beneath this classic, slightly maudlin Churchillian reminiscence, there was a definite indication that it was Roosevelt rather than Churchill who had initiated the idea for Torch at Hyde Park in June 1942. Of course, occasionally Churchill did use such musings to try to bounce Roosevelt into action–such as his regular recollections of their ‘Istria’ conversation at Teheran to try to generate support for the Ljubljana Gap proposal–but there seemed to be no reason for this telegram, unless it was intended in the form of an elegy for a man who he by then suspected was dying. At about this time, Grace Tully sent a signed photo of FDR to Marshall, saying that the President ‘was a little surprised to learn he hadn’t already given one to him’. Perhaps Marshall suspected, too, that the President had less than a month to live.
The day that Churchill and Brooke set off to watch the Rhine crossing, Friday 23 March, Cunningham reported that the Chiefs of Staff that morning were ‘much more interested in the American fishing bait I produced and which has concentrated blood in it and so bleeds, than in our proper business of which there was not much’.32 With victories across all fronts, especially Patton’s when he took one hundred thousand prisoners and ‘smashed up’ nine German divisions south-east of the Moselle river, there was now little over which Marshall and Brooke could cross swords.
Harry Butcher recorded that Eisenhower had taken ‘special pleasure’ from Brooke, ‘who had once argued heatedly against the [Ruhr] plan’, generously telling him, as the Rhine crossing was actually in progress, that Eisenhower had been ‘right and that his current plans and operations are well calculated to meet the current situation’.33 After Brooke had sent Eisenhower a similarly flattering telegram on US Army Day, Ike told Marshall that ‘This was especially pleasing because of the past arguments we have had and to my mind shows there is a bigness about him that I have found lacking in a few people I have run into on this side of the water.’34 Eisenhower felt that the victories west of the Rhine had made possible the bold advances of General Courtney Hodges’ First and Patton’s Third Armies towards Kassel. ‘General Ike didn’t wish to sound boastful,’ wrote Butcher, ‘but he was like a football coach whose team had just won a big victory and he couldn’t help talking about the accomplishments of his players.’ (When Butcher had first met Ike, in Washington, he was indeed coaching an army football team at Fort Benning.)
On 24 March General Sir Miles Dempsey’s Second Army crossed the Rhine in Operation Plunder, watched by Churchill, Brooke and Eisenhower from a convenient hillock. The party saw Dakotas and gliders dropping parachutists and a Flying Fortress on fire. ‘Several of the returning Dakotas were in trouble,’ recalled one of the group, ‘and three or four crashed before our eyes, bursting into flames as they struck the ground.’ Nonetheless Churchill was not allowed to cross the Rhine during the battle, which left him ‘glum and angry’. The man who had charged with the 21st Lancers nearly half a century before was now just too important to be risked with the 21st Army Group. ‘I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success,’ wrote Brooke. ‘He had often told me that the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.’ It was a relief for Brooke to get him home safely, and home was at last safer too: on 28 March the last of 1,050 V-2 rocket-bombs landed on Britain, having killed over 2,500 Britons (far fewer than the citizens of Antwerp, however, of whom thirty thousand had been killed by these weapons).
As it turned out, the British and Americans did have an opportunity for one final contretemps before the German collapse. On 29 March the British Chiefs of Staff received what Cunningham called ‘Rather a disturbing telegram from Eisenhower direct to Stalin (a most improper procedure) in which he indicates he is shifting the axis of his main thrust to the south’. The British disapproved of this because they believed that denying the northern German ports to U-boats and the Dutch ports to E-boats and midget submarines was still vital at a time when shipping continued to be sunk. Churchill telephoned Eisenhower, who told him that the US Ninth Army was to be removed from Montgomery’s command after it had linked up with the US First Army between Kassel and Paderborn, and placed under Bradley. Montgomery would therefore be left to cover the front that he had previously controlled with both the British Second Army and the US Ninth Army with the former force only, while General Henry Crerar’s Canadian First Army ‘mopped up on the left’–that is, northern–flank. ‘Something curious has happened at Eisenhower’s HQ,’ concluded Cunningham. ‘Perhaps the US generals have ganged up and insisted on their national army being under US command.’
Whatever the reason, the Chiefs of Staff sent a protest to the Joint Chiefs of Staff ‘against this procedure and change of plan without any consultation with Combined Chiefs of Staff’.35 Cunningham and Brooke then went off fishing for the weekend at Mountbatten’s home, Broadlands in Hampshire, which Cunningham thought the ‘No 1 beat on the Test’. On Easter Sunday, however, they were summoned to Chequers to discuss Eisenhower’s plan to strip Montgomery of half his command.
Churchill had sent Roosevelt a long telegram–copied to Brooke and specifically to Marshall via Maitland Wilson in Washington–in which he expressed his ‘complete confidence’ in Eisenhower, a classic precursor to criticism.36 The telegram then described his doubts about the strategy relating to Berlin and the Elbe, saying he wanted to be certain that Marshall knew his thoughts. The response was prompt; in Cunningham’s words, Marshall sent ‘a very rough message in reply to ours’.
Brooke and Cunningham arrived at Chequers at 11.30 a.m. and went straight into a Staff Conference with Churchill, who was ‘a bit savage’ about the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had drafted a telegram that Cunningham thought ‘full of soft soap but with some pretty shrewd digs in it to the President’. He told them that Roosevelt ‘was in a pretty bad way and only the last day or two had been writing his own telegrams’. After lunch–at which the Americans Bernard Baruch and Gil Winant were present–Portal and Hollis drafted a reply to Marshall’s ‘rough message’. Meanwhile Brooke settled into a chair in the library and read a book he had taken down from a shelf, entitled The Theory and Practice of Prostitution.37 Churchill vetted the reply, upon which Cunningham ‘tried to get away but Brooky and I were had by him for a stirrup cup in the library’ and they didn’t manage to leave until 5 p.m.
The next day Jumbo Wilson wired from Washington, having spoken to Marshall who had claimed that he ‘could not really understand the fuss’. Marshall said he hoped the Anglo-Am
erican armies would reach the Berlin area by the end of April and he could not see much divergence between Churchill’s proposals and Eisenhower’s, ‘since, with the right of the northern armies advancing on the line Hanover–Stendal, the left wing of the central group would be on the line Paderborn–Magdeburg, while the Fifteenth Army masked the Ruhr area’.38 He added that he was not in favour of Eisenhower’s central thrust going further than Leipzig. Meanwhile the Russians could have Dresden.
Tedder flew over to explain to the Chiefs of Staff that Eisenhower’s original message had been sent in order to forestall Montgomery’s orders for the advance. ‘Monty has only himself to blame for the suspicion with which the Americans treat him,’ concluded Cunningham. The ‘only difference’ in the plan, he thought, was that the American Ninth Army ‘advances under Bradley’s instead of Monty’s orders’. There was a time when that difference would have led to a full-scale shouting match between Marshall and Brooke, but with the Joint Intelligence Committee now correctly predicting Germany’s collapse in a few weeks, it hardly seemed worth the row. All passion spent, the British gave way gracefully.
Just before he died, Roosevelt had the satisfaction of receiving a report from Marshall stating that ‘By about the end of April 1945, military operations on the continent of Europe will probably have reached the final stage–mopping up. The month of April will likely prove to be the transition period for Germany between organized resistance and utter defeat.’39 Similarly, Marshall received an encomium from Churchill via Maitland Wilson: ‘Pray further give him my warmest congratulations on the magnificent fighting and conduct of the American and Allied armies under General Eisenhower, and say what a joy it must be to him to see how the armies he called into being by his own genius have won immortal renown. He is the true “Organizer of Victory”.’40 Marshall replied modestly: ‘Our greatest triumph really lies in the fact that we achieved the impossible, Allied military unity of action.’
Was it merely for the record’s sake that Churchill sent Roosevelt a letter on 3 April seeming to suggest that they take Berlin, knowing perfectly well that there was no appetite in the General Staffs of either country to lose lives capturing a place they would later have to relinquish to the Russians under the terms of agreements already made? ‘If they also take Berlin,’ Churchill wrote almost rhetorically of the Russians, ‘will not their impression that they have been the overwhelming contributor to the common victory be unduly printed in their minds, and may this not lead them into a mood which will raise grave and formidable difficulties in the future?’ He did not explain what was ‘undue’ about the impression that the Soviets had been the ‘overwhelming contributor’, given that they had killed four out of every five Germans who died in combat. The Russian military dead of at least thirteen million was over twelve times that of the combined British and American, and their civilian dead (of around thirteen million) was a full two hundred times that of the Western Allies.
Roosevelt’s curt reply to Churchill–‘I do not get the point’–ended with his ‘regret that the phrasing of a formal discussion should have so disturbed you but I regret even more at the moment of a great victory we should become involved in such unfortunate reactions.’41 Churchill could hardly have felt that it was worth while ripping up the various agreements made with the Russians over Occupation zoning in order to dash for Berlin. More likely he wished to put in writing that he was on the right side of the Cold War which he saw–earlier than anyone else except perhaps Brooke–was looming. Between Churchill’s wildly over-optimistic report to the War Cabinet on returning from Yalta and this doleful telegram to Roosevelt only two months later, Stalin had given no indication that his promises of free and fair elections in eastern Europe had been genuine.
Of course Eisenhower also understood the political dimension involved in delineating where the military demarcation lines lay. As he wrote to Marshall on 7 April in a ‘Personal, Eyes Only’ message from his SHAEF HQ at Rheims, he thought his main thrust should be to the area including Leipzig, but with the left flank on the coast near Lübeck, which ‘would prevent Russian occupation of any part of the Danish peninsula’. The Leipzig thrust also allowed him maximum flexibility and the opportunity to disrupt any Fortress Southern Germany concept that the more fanatical Nazis might conceive. Over the issue of whether he should have communicated directly with the Soviet High Command rather than through the Combined Chiefs of Staff, the Supreme Commander explained, ‘Frankly, it did not cross my mind to confer in advance with the Combined Chiefs of Staff because I have assumed that I am held responsible for the effectiveness of military operations in this theater and it was a natural question to the head of the Russian forces to inquire as to the direction and timing of their next major thrust, and to outline my own intentions.’42 Eisenhower added that the British on his Staff such as Tedder and Morgan agreed with his stance.
On Thursday 12 April, Churchill was discussing with Cunningham the somewhat prosaic subject of whether forty fishing trawlers might be released from anti-U-boat duty when the Prime Minister mentioned that the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who was making desperate last-minute peace offers, ‘appeared to be trying to show that he wasn’t so bad as painted and PM said if it would save further expenditure of life he would be prepared to spare even Himmler’. Ever the seaman, Cunningham suggested that ‘there were plenty of islands he could be sent to.’43
That morning, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, Georgia, of a massive cerebral haemorrhage. As with Dudley Pound and John Dill, the President’s health could not take any more of the strain of fighting a global war. In a sense all three of them died for their countries, no less than any other combatant in that conflict. The Masters and Commanders had broken up; the quartet of power was over. Just as he had come to power in the same month as Adolf Hitler, so Roosevelt, his nemesis, also departed life in the same month. (Although Goebbels equated Roosevelt’s death with that of the Tsarina Elisabeth in 1762, which split the enemies of Frederick the Great, according to his Luftwaffe aide Nicolaus von Below, the Führer took ‘a more sober view devoid of optimism’.)44 The news of the President’s death did not reach Churchill until midnight London time, but Jock Colville recorded him as ‘very distressed’ by it.45 The Prime Minister ‘toyed with the idea’ of undergoing the still-dangerous journey of crossing the Atlantic in order to attend the funeral, but Lascelles opposed this ‘firmly’ on the King’s behalf.46 With decisions being taken in London concerning the fast-moving situation as the European war entered its denouement, it was pure romanticism even to consider making the journey for personal reasons, although it would have been a good opportunity to get to know the new President, Harry Truman. The fact that Eden and Attlee were both abroad at the time also militated against it. Nonetheless, by 1951 Churchill believed that missing the funeral was the biggest mistake he had made in the war, because hugely important decisions were being made for the rest of the war ‘by a man I did not know’, and he blamed Eden for the decision.47
Roosevelt’s death was of course the first item on the agenda of the War Cabinet the next day, where Norman Brook recorded Churchill as describing it as a:
Profound shock. [A] Leap into the unknown. Truman’s statement [said he] will keep present Cabinet and prosecute the war to the utmost against Germany and Japan. Truman will be [a] well man: FDR has been a sick man for months…Had thought of going to-day to funeral. But v[ery] private: in room at White House. Interment at Hyde Park. Relatives…only. Suggest A[nthony] E[den] sh[oul]d be present.48
Since Eden was not a relative, and anyway Roosevelt’s funeral was not at all private, this seems misleading. But, despite the tension between the two Masters in the last year or so, there is no evidence to support the notion that Churchill’s absence was ‘because he felt the President had latterly become unsupportive’, or that ‘the emotional link was never as close as was commonly thought,’ as some historians have suggested.49 Roosevelt was laid to rest in a field on the Springwood est
ate close to his house on Sunday 15 April, under a large slab of Vermont marble. It was an indication of how professional Marshall had always wanted to keep his relations with the President that this was the very first time he had ever visited Hyde Park.
After Roosevelt’s memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral on 17 April, Churchill was ‘feverishly composing over the luncheon table his tribute to the President’ which he was due to deliver in the House of Commons that afternoon. In the event the oration was delayed by an hour because an incoming Scottish Nationalist MP had chosen to bow to the Speaker without sponsors, which contravened a House of Commons resolution of 1688, and a debate and division had to take place. After the ridiculous came the sublime when Churchill, ‘his voice thrilling with emotion’, quoted from ‘The Building of the Ship’, the Longfellow poem that Wendell Willkie had brought over from Roosevelt in January 1941:
Thou too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
In the course of his address, Churchill said of Roosevelt:
What an enviable death his was! He had brought his country through the worst of its perils and the heaviest of its toils. Victory had cast its sure and steady beam upon him. In the days of peace he had broadened and stabilized the foundations of American life and union. In war he had raised the strength, might and glory of the great Republic to a height never attained by any nation in history.50
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