Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  At this defeatist assertion, however, General Marshall really bridled. The discussion was “now getting to the heart of the matter,” he acknowledged. The big lesson of Torch—and in planning for the forthcoming invasion of Sicily—was the way such a campaign, inevitably, “sucked in more and more troops.” If “further Mediterranean operations were undertaken,” Marshall pointed out, “then in 1943 and virtually all of 1944 we should be committed, except to a Mediterranean policy.” Not only would this subsidiary campaign detract from the war in the Pacific, in terms of supplies, but it would mean “a prolongation of the war in Europe, and thus a delay in the ultimate defeat of Japan, which the people of the U.S. would not tolerate. We were now at the crossroads—if we were committed to the Mediterranean” rather than northern France in 1944, then “it meant a prolonged struggle and one which was not acceptable to the United States.”8

  Pinned against the ropes, poor Brooke now blamed a paucity of men. He explained that the “British manpower position was weak,” and its forces were, in all candor, not up to the challenge of a cross-Channel invasion—neither that year, 1943, when a lodgment area in Brittany might possibly be attained (though one that would be easily cauterized by the Germans, he claimed), nor in 1944, either.

  The U.S. chiefs were stunned by Brooke’s open confession.

  “No major operations,” Brooke affirmed, adding insult to injury, “would be possible until 1945 or 1946.”9

  Again, the U.S. chiefs could hardly believe their ears, especially when Brooke explained “that in the previous war there had always been some 80 French Divisions available to our side.” Now there would only be a handful, if that. Any advance from the Channel “towards the Ruhr would necessitate clearing up behind the advancing Army and would leave us with long lines of communication,” subject to German air and land counterattack. Not only was British manpower “weak,” but the RAF lacked mobility, having concentrated on bombing German cities, not supporting land armies; its planes and crews were therefore ill-equipped to support an invasion or subsequent campaign.10

  Despite the current Allied victory in Tunisia, the picture that Brooke presented was, then, bleak in terms of the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich.

  The two Western Allies were at loggerheads.

  Without the British as allies, an American invasion of Europe was a nonstarter, and the President’s “Germany First” strategy—as well as unconditional surrender of the Axis powers—would be in tatters.

  No major cross-Channel operations until 1945, perhaps 1946?

  When the President, at the White House, heard what Brooke had, at the Federal Reserve Building, openly declared—an assertion going further even than the Prime Minister had revealed at the meeting at the White House the previous day—he was amazed. So this was the “vast amount of work” the British chiefs had been doing—as Churchill had boasted in a telegram to the President from the Queen Mary as it neared New York!11

  The President was disappointed; in fact he was shocked. The British position seemed not only disingenuous but deceitful, in retrospect. Where the President had seen Torch and its Sicilian sequel as a crucial learning curve and rehearsal for a Second Front to be launched across the English Channel in 1944, the British had clearly backed Torch and the impending invasion of Sicily only to secure the Mediterranean as a shorter sea-lane to their occupation troops in India—while doing their best to avoid frontal combat with the Nazis in northern Europe.

  The President shook his head. That very morning he had been discussing with the president of the Czechoslovak government in exile, Dr. Edvard Benes, the unconditional surrender of Germany, and what might be done to partition or police the country to ensure the Germans could never threaten world peace for a third time. Now, at lunchtime, he was hearing from Air Marshal Charles Portal that the British chiefs had no intention of launching a cross-Channel attack before 1945 or, possibly, 1946, three years away. How could this new stance be explained to the majority of Americans who saw Japan, not Germany, as the nation’s primary enemy, yet had loyally backed the President’s “Germany First” strategy?

  The President had been told, in December 1942, that almost two million Jews had in all probability already been “liquidated” by Hitler’s SS troops.12 How many more Jews and others would Hitler exterminate by 1946? And all this so that Britain could sit out the war in Europe, at its periphery—not even willing to open the road to China, but hanging on to India and merely waiting for the United States to win back for Great Britain its lost colonial Empire in the Far East? It seemed a pretty poor performance.

  Although disappointed, the President was not defeated. Great leadership demanded positive, not negative, thinking, and Portal, as an airman, did not sound quite as obstinate or defeatist as Brooke.

  The British were visitors in a foreign land, and the best way to coax them out of their funk was, the President felt, to encourage them to overcome their understandable fears, not berate them; to help, not shame, their generals into recovering the confidence they would need to partner the U.S. military in mounting a cross-Channel invasion next spring.

  The home team must therefore, the President decided, be firm in class, but as nice as possible outside. He’d already planned with Marshall that the Combined Chiefs were all to be taken to Williamsburg, in Virginia, at the weekend—any talk concerning conference matters strictly forbidden. For his own part, while the U.S. chiefs of staff hosted their opposite numbers at the site of the first British settlement in America (a source of cultural pride for the British visitors, but also a reminder of the successful American revolution to wrest independence from the British), the President now decided he wouldn’t in fact take Churchill to Hyde Park, as he’d originally planned. Instead he would take him to his little mountaintop camp at Shangri-la. There he would work on him—insisting that Lord Beaverbrook, as an ardent supporter of an immediate Second Front, come too.13 And Eleanor, who’d returned from New York, would be asked to at least drive with them to the cottage—thus prohibiting Churchill from any attempt to talk alternative Allied military strategy.

  Extreme hospitality would thus be the order of the day. By burying the British with kindness, after working hours, the American hosts, in Williamsburg and at Shangri-la, would hopefully encourage their visitors to overcome their fears and confirm the Casablanca commitment to a fully fledged trial-by-combat cross-Channel invasion of northern France next spring: April or May 1944.

  Such was the plan. Whether it would work was another matter.

  At Shangri-la, once they settled in, the President took Churchill fishing. They settled by a local stream—the wheelchair-bound president “placed with great care by the side of a pool,” Churchill recollected, where he “sought to entice the nimble and wily fish. I tried for some time myself at other spots.”

  It was in vain. “No fish were caught,”14 Churchill recalled. Nor was Winston’s mind changed about a doomed Second Front.

  The three days in the Maryland mountains thus became something of a test of wills.

  Shangri-la and the President’s handling of Churchill on May 14, 15, and 16, 1943, mirrored Casablanca and the president’s handling of de Gaulle—prisonnier, as de Gaulle had complained, in the President’s Anfa camp. Now it was the Prime Minister’s turn to feel that way.

  Shangri-la was neither the White House nor Hyde Park. Instead it was, as Churchill later put it, “a log cabin, with all modern improvements.” He watched “with interest and in silence” as General Pa Watson brought the President not war documents but colorful stamps: “several large albums and a number of envelopes full of specimens he had long desired,” after which Roosevelt “stuck them in, each in its proper place, and so forgot the cares of State.”15

  For all the pretty mountain setting, the proximity to nature, and the restful quiet, the Prime Minister would not yield. The more the President and his supporting cast worked on him—both Hopkins and Beaverbrook attacking Churchill’s obsessive argument for the invasion of Italy and
the Balkans rather than northern France—the more determined Churchill became. So testy, in fact, that he even declined the President’s request that he accept an invitation from Madame Chiang Kai-shek to go to New York, where she was staying while receiving medical treatment—risking, as Churchill candidly described his refusal, the “unity of the Grand Alliance,” given the importance of the Generalissimo’s struggle against the Japanese in China.16

  Refusing to commit Britain to the 1944 cross-Channel invasion threatened, however, a far greater schism in the unity of the Grand Alliance than Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s wrath. As obstinate as de Gaulle, the Prime Minister relentlessly clung to his Mediterranean preference, fearful of a cross-Channel debacle.

  Pondering Churchill’s behavior at the time, Sir Charles Wilson, the Prime Minister’s doctor, wondered if the Prime Minister was suffering some sort of physiological problem. Churchill had, after all, hitherto pursued the “special relationship” with the United States with extraordinary patience, deference, and understanding. Now he was neither patient nor deferential, and certainly unwilling to conceive the strategic problem from an American perspective. His failure to grasp the import of what he was demanding—an extra year, perhaps two, of war in Europe without a Second Front, and a further year after that to defeat Japan—raised serious questions about the Prime Minister’s state of mind. He’d come down with pneumonia in February (at the same time the President had fallen ill, after returning from Casablanca), which had been more serious than could be made public at the time—and in its aftermath, Dr. Wilson wondered whether it might have affected Churchill’s judgment. Wilson himself had been stricken by fever on the voyage to America aboard the Queen Mary, and had had to be hospitalized in New York. When finally he caught up with his patient in Washington on May 17, he was frankly shocked. The Prime Minister had just returned from Shangri-la with the President—and what Wilson heard was amusing, but not encouraging.

  The Prime Minister had, according to members of the President’s entourage and Lord Beaverbrook, lost nothing of his extraordinary memory. On the return trip to Washington the presidential party had passed several Civil War battlefields, and Harry Hopkins regaled Dr. Wilson with an account of how Winston, hearing Hopkins could recite only two lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s famous Civil War poem, had recited the entire poem. “While we were still asking ourselves how he could do this when he hadn’t read the darned thing for thirty years, his eye caught a sign pointing to Gettysburg. That really started him off,” Hopkins recounted in awe—Churchill’s summary of the battle, with character portraits of the rebel generals Jackson and Lee, being equally amazing. About the current war, however, “Hopkins was a good deal less flattering about the P.M.’s contribution to the discussions which had begun on May 12 in the oval study of the White House,” Dr. Wilson recalled. “Indeed, he looked pretty glum as he assured me that I had not missed anything.”17

  The impasse appeared to be the same as the one the year before, when the Prime Minister had journeyed to the White House for the same reason: namely to explain why the British could not agree to a cross-Channel invasion that year. The British surrender at Tobruk, moreover, had made his point: the British were simply not ready for such a challenge in 1942, at a moment when they might even lose control of the Middle East to Rommel’s advancing Panzerarmee Afrika.

  Now, eleven months later, “damn it all,” Churchill was back, with “the old story once more, shamelessly trotted out and brought up to date,” Dr. Wilson recalled with concern, recording in his diary the sense of frustration felt by Hopkins: Churchill simply refusing to countenance the Casablanca strategy, unless Italy was swiftly defeated and the Third Reich miraculously fell apart.18 Hopkins had even imitated Churchill, saying: “Bulgaria’s defeatism in 1918 brought about the collapse of Germany; might not Italy’s surrender now have similar consequences? It will surely cause a chill of loneliness to settle on the German people and might very well be the beginning of the end.”19

  Loneliness as the beginning of the end—without the Wehrmacht actually being defeated in battle, or even forced back onto German soil? To those who remembered the consequences of the “collapse of Germany” at the end of World War I, this was understandably alarming.

  Dr. Wilson had asked Hopkins “what the President made of all this.”20

  “‘Not much,’” Hopkins had answered. “‘This [idea of] fighting in Italy does not make sense to him,’” he’d explained the President’s view. United States naval, air, and ground forces had been sent to the Mediterranean—against the advice of Hopkins, Stimson, Marshall, and the U.S. chiefs of staff, it was true—to learn how to defeat German troops in close combat, the President had insisted. As soon as the Sicily invasion and campaign were won, those forces—commanders and troops—were to be switched to England for the invasion of northern France in the spring of 1944, in accordance with the President’s strategy. “He wants the twenty divisions, which will be set free when Sicily has been won, to be used in building up the force that is to invade France in 1944,” Hopkins made clear.21

  At the Pentagon and Navy Department, the U.S. chiefs of staff were similarly frustrated.

  Brooke’s stonewalling, once the chiefs returned from Williamsburg, was especially irritating. “A very decided deadlock has come up,” Secretary Stimson noted in his diary on May 17, after speaking with General Marshall. “The British are holding back dead from going on with Bolero. They have done the same thing in regard to Anakim [the campaign to retake Burma] and are trying to divert us off into some more Mediterranean adventure. Fortunately,” he added, “the President seems to be holding out.”22 Stimson decided he must call the White House and make sure, though. “I called up the President, told him that I had prepared myself fully by reading all the minutes and was ready to talk with him at any time that he wanted to, although I did not want to intrude myself on him. He told me he was coming to the conclusion that he would have to read the Riot Act to the other side and would have to be stiff.”23

  Stimson, conscious of how the President liked to quote Lincoln, told him how President Lincoln had remarked of General Franz Sigel that, though he couldn’t “skin the deer,” he “could at least hold a leg.” By his intransigence, however, the Prime Minister was in danger of causing the Western Allies—Americans and British—to be Sigels in the war against Hitler: only daring to hold the Nazi leg while the Russians did the skinning. “Stalin,” he told the President, “won’t have much of an opinion of people who have done that,” he warned, “and we will not be able to share much of the post-war world with them.”24

  The President did not need reminding. Yet how compel an ally like Britain to conform to American strategy?

  The most worrying thing was that Churchill was now threatening to disrupt the Western military alliance just at the moment when the President was becoming more and more anxious to pressure Stalin to sign up to a postwar United Nations authority while the United States—furnishing more than 10 percent of Russia’s war needs—still had significant leverage. All in all it was too bad—with no breakthrough in sight.

  Whatever Stimson, Hopkins, the U.S. chiefs of staff, and later critics might say about Churchill’s sudden intransigence in May 1943, however, it is important to note that Churchill and his British contingent were not the only ones arguing in Washington against a Second Front. The prospect of heavy casualties in head-on combat with the Wehrmacht in northern France was sobering. Outside the War Department more and more people were objecting—especially people in the Navy Department who foresaw a long war with Japan if the “flower of our army and air force” was first expended “in combat with Germany,” as Bill Bullitt, assistant to the secretary of the Navy, warned in a renewed memorandum he wrote for the President on May 12.

  It was vital the President should, Bullitt argued, put more pressure on Stalin to declare war on Japan at the conclusion of the war against Hitler, lest the United States should have wasted its manpower and resources in a cross-Channel
campaign that could get bogged down, as in World War I—thus leaving itself, even after assumed victory, having to fight against Japan “while the Soviet Union is at peace,” and Britain contributing only insignificantly to the defeat of the Japanese. In that situation, “we shall have no decisive voice in the settlement in Europe,” Bullitt warned. “Europe will be divided into Soviet and British spheres of influence—according to present Soviet and British plans—and further wars in the near future will be rendered inevitable.”25

  Bullitt’s recommendation, once again, was the same as Churchill’s—to drive swiftly into central Europe through the Dardanelles.

  After Roosevelt’s death, Bill Bullitt would spend the rest of his own life lancing the memory of the President for having failed to take his recommendation. Only American “boots on the ground” in central Europe would stop Stalin’s “Sovietization,” Bullitt pointed out again in his memorandum—and the Balkans was the place to plant those boots.

  The President could only groan at this extra pressure from his own American side, given the latest British intransigence. Bullitt might have an excellent understanding of Russian communism; his Balkans strategy, however, remained militarily illiterate. Moreover, his latest political recommendation, namely that the President should threaten Stalin with a switch of American forces to the Pacific unless he agreed in writing not to Sovietize central Europe, was, at a time when the Western Allies did not have a single boot on the ground in Europe, less than realistic.

  No, the fact was, the President had little option but to stick to his own program: refusing to countenance a quagmire in the Balkans or the northern Italian mountains, and instead holding to the timetable for a U.S.-British Second Front that had been agreed at Casablanca: spring 1944. This strategy, if followed, would at least take U.S. and British forces to Berlin, ending the Third Reich and saving the western part of Europe from Sovietization. He would meantime continue to press Stalin, in order to see if he could get the Soviets to sign up to his postwar plan and to declare war on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. Without a genuine plan to launch a Second Front by 1944, however, it was unlikely to get very far, as Secretary Stimson had commented.