Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  To produce such a genuine plan, he would have somehow to bring the British back into the fold, or the Second World War might well end in failure.

  PART EIGHT

  * * *

  The Riot Act

  29

  The Davies Mission

  ON THE SURFACE, the great victories at Stalingrad and then Tunisgrad boded well for Allied cooperation in eventually defeating the Third Reich.

  In truth, however, relations with the Soviet Union were not good—indeed were getting worse. Stalin’s rejection of the President’s invitation to the summit at Casablanca (or alternative venues the President had offered) had resulted in the sheer scale of the Russian war effort being underappreciated in the West. Even Stalin’s own ambassador to Washington, Maxim Litvinov, had warned the Russian Foreign Ministry that such standoffish behavior was counterproductive, indeed would make it harder, not easier, to get the Western Allies to commit to a timely Second Front.

  Stalin had paid no heed. This was hard for even the most sympathetic of American observers and reporters to understand. In terms of Allied military cooperation, Russia was, sadly, a write-off—Stalin constantly demanding more U.S.-British convoyed deliveries of war materials to Murmansk, yet refusing to order Russian aircrews to fly out of northern Russia to protect them, lest they leave the borders of the Soviet Union and not come back. This had led to, and continued to result in, terrible British and American shipping losses, not only in Lend-Lease war materials and food but Allied lives as well. Nor would the paranoid dictator allow Allied officers, or representatives, to monitor whether the contents of the convoys were being efficiently unloaded at Murmansk, or were appropriate to actual Russian war needs. The Russians had also refused for months to respond to whether U.S. bomber crews could land in the Soviet Union if they bombed the Ploesti oil fields in Romania—and when they finally did respond, they refused to allow Ploesti raids to be launched from Russian airfields, despite being at war with the Third Reich and its eastern European partners, Romania and Hungary. Whether it was paranoid fear that Russians might become infected by rich capitalist partners, or that Russia’s capitalist allies might obtain genuine, accurate, and detailed information—military, political, economic, social—about the Soviet Union, no one really knew. Nor had this changed as the tide of war against Hitler turned. As Western diplomats and journalists—who were forbidden to venture outside Moscow without close supervision—complained, there was virtually not a single Russian who dared question, counter, or ignore Stalin’s oppressive policies for fear of arrest, imprisonment, or even execution.

  More troubling still had been the sickening revelation, in April 1943, that more than twenty thousand Polish officers, police officers, and members of the intelligentsia had, on Stalin’s orders, been murdered in cold blood by Soviet occupation forces in 1940, during the time of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact.

  That disclosure—the decomposing Polish bodies unearthed by the Germans in the Katyn forest near the Russian city of Smolensk, but the Soviets denying culpability—had given cause for grave trepidation in the West, especially among Polish forces in exile.

  Nothing, but nothing, could excuse such mass murder. News of the massacre, at a moment when the tide of war had turned and the forces of the Third Reich seemed to be everywhere on the defensive, had offered the embattled Dr. Goebbels a heaven-sent opportunity to demonstrate to the German Volk,1 as well as people abroad, just how merciless a Russian victory in the war, and a subsequent Russian-imposed “peace,” would be.

  Stalin naturally protested it was a Nazi ruse. He denounced the leader of the Polish government in exile for suggesting Russian complicity, loudly claiming the Nazis, not the Soviets, had been responsible for the massacre. Both Roosevelt and Churchill had on good authority been told the bitter truth, however: that it was Stalin himself who had given the orders for the mass execution in 1940.

  With Stalin’s Soviet Union such an uncooperative, undemocratic, often downright evil partner of the Western democracies—though one that was still taking the brunt of casualties in the war against Hitler—both Roosevelt and Churchill were put in the iniquitous position of publicly accepting, or declining to comment on, Russian lies over the Katyn massacre. Besides, in the balance of atrocities, the Germans were still way ahead of the Soviets, both in SS mass-murder concentration camps and in the treatment of Russian POWs.2 Continued do-or-die Russian resistance to Hitler on the Eastern Front was crucial—no matter how ungrateful, paranoid, deceitful, and barbarous the Russians, and however chilling the prospect of postwar Sovietization.

  How maintain that morally dubious anti-Nazi coalition, though—let alone seek to move the Russian communists from their reign of terror into a more positive postwar world?

  It was in this respect that the relationship, or partnership, between the President and the Prime Minister was of the highest importance for the history of humanity. And in Washington, in May 1943, Prime Minister Churchill was coming very close to breaking it.

  Hitherto, Churchill had taken the same view as the President—that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, however odious in certain respects. But with Churchill threatening to pull out of the Casablanca accords and refusing to mount a Second Front in 1944, the question arose: would Stalin remain a friend? As Secretary Stimson warned, without a cross-Channel invasion—one that would force Hitler to fight on two fronts—would not the Russians lose military respect or faith in the Western Allies, and be minded to seek an armistice with the Third Reich, even a new Ribbentrop Pact that would leave Hitler master still of all western and central Europe?

  Roosevelt didn’t think Stalin would stoop to that, after the millions of casualties the German onslaught had already cost the Russians. But it could certainly undermine the President’s attempts to get Russian agreement to make air bases available and declare war on Japan, if and when the war with Hitler was successfully concluded, as well as getting Soviet participation in the postwar security system the President had in mind. The Second Front, in other words, was a sine qua non: a test that the Western, democratic Allies must meet if they were serious not only about the war but the postwar. Not footling around in the Mediterranean, but a willingness to face up to the war’s greatest challenge: D-day, as it would become known.

  The President thus changed his mind about a summit with Stalin—feeling it would be better to keep Churchill out of any meeting for the moment, if one could be obtained, lest the Prime Minister’s opposition to a cross-Channel operation give away their weak hand: namely the fundamental unwillingness of the British to countenance the heavy casualties involved in a Second Front. Somehow, Roosevelt was aware, to defeat the Nazis he must keep the Russians fighting in the East—and get the British to fight in the West, not footle about in the South!

  This was easier said than done. His cables to Stalin after Casablanca had deliberately, perhaps disingenuously, held out the possibility of a Second Front being mounted in the summer of 1943, after Husky; how then was he to explain to Stalin the Western Allies were not only abandoning any plans to launch a Second Front in 1943, but that the purpose of Churchill’s current visit to Washington, together with a military staff of 160 advisers, was to argue against a Second Front even in 1944? In fact, according to Churchill’s Chief of the Imperial General Staff, that no Second Front should be planned before 1945 or even 1946?

  “The Soviet troops have fought strenuously all winter and are continuing to do so,” Stalin had assured the President in March. The Führer had lost more than a whole army at Stalingrad, but he had many more at hand—perhaps as many as two hundred divisions, including whole panzer armies. The Germans were preparing for “spring and summer operations against the USSR,” Stalin wrote; “it is therefore particularly essential for us that the blow from the West be no longer delayed, that it be delivered this spring or in early summer”—i.e., 1943.3

  It was in this context that the President had summoned another former ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, to th
e White House the day after Churchill set sail for Washington. As the President explained to Davies, he’d decided to send Stalin a new letter by hand, to be delivered in such a way that Stalin would be forced to respond to the President’s renewed request for a private meeting.

  Davies was elderly and had been particularly naive in his acceptance of Russian propaganda regarding their communist show trials, arrests, and deportations in the 1930s. He was sincere in his judgment of Hitler and the barbarity of Nazism, however, and his evaluation of the Soviet will to defend Russia had proven more sophisticated than that of the U.S. military attaché in Moscow—in fact, he’d been the man who correctly reported to the President that Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941, was going to fail. As an emissary to show goodwill and firmness of American purpose in prosecuting the war against Hitler, the President could not have chosen better. The new, private letter Davies would hand carry would be a direct, personal invitation from the President to meet somewhere that summer and resolve their differences over strategy and timing—one the Russian dictator could not now refuse without giving offense to the President of the one country in the world supplying the Soviet Union with a significant amount of its war needs.

  The Prime Minister was not now to be invited to the proposed summit, the President made clear in the letter—though he could not give the true reason, even to Davies, who would doubtless be asked by the dictator, once he reached the Kremlin. Since the President could not reveal Churchill’s impending visit to Washington and his reported unwillingness, supported by his chiefs of staff, to launch a timely Second Front, he had merely told Davies he wished to meet Stalin, informally, to discuss the long-term future with him. Not, in other words, to address the matter of impending operations, but rather the conclusion of the war: unconditional Axis surrender, winning the war against Japan, and the establishment of a postwar United Nations authority. It would be, the President explained to Davies, a preliminary discussion, man to man, without risking, Roosevelt told his emissary, any international arguments over British—or French—postwar colonial empires. “Churchill will understand,” the President had assured Davies when giving him his instructions in the Oval Office on May 5. “I will take care of that.”4

  As Davies set off for Moscow via the Middle East, Churchill had arrived in Washington—and the Prime Minister’s refusal to countenance a Second Front had only reinforced the President’s determination to meet Stalin alone. Davies would hopefully convince the Russian dictator that the Western Allies were united and sincere in their commitment to launch a Second Front—the President’s willingness to travel halfway across the world to meet in person with the Russian leader surely a gauge of that sincerity.

  In the meantime, however, the President was determined to bring Winston Churchill to heel, lest he and his huge military team cause the Grand Alliance, rather than the Third Reich, to collapse.

  This, in essence, was the challenge of Trident: suborning Neptune.

  Adding to the behind-the-scenes war drama was the fact that the British chiefs of staff now parted company—physically and metaphorically—with their own Prime Minister.

  The chiefs’ weekend in Williamsburg, Virginia, went well—the officers glad to be out of Washington not only to be able to relax but to get to know their Allied counterparts as human beings. Talks had then resumed at the Federal Reserve Board building at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, May 18, 1943.

  Admiral Leahy, General Marshall, and Admiral King had feared the worst in terms of British intransigence, once back in uniform, so to speak. So worried, in fact, were the U.S. Joint Chiefs that they came to the table with a compromise whereby they would ask only for a minimum “lodgment area” across the English Channel in 1944, if the British were still so afraid of failure, and would only seek to expand it the following year, 1945.

  Once seated in the room, however, it was to find the “battle royal” was already won. To their astonishment, the President’s tactic of extreme hospitality appeared to have worked—the weekend away in Williamsburg, with wholesome food and wine and civil conversation having seemingly done the trick. Aided also by Field Marshal Dill—who’d reasoned with his successor as CIGS, General Brooke, that he must give in or risk a breakdown in what was a historic military coalition between the United States and Great Britain. The American people, the field marshal had made clear to his British compatriot, would not stand for the war in the Pacific being deliberately starved of men and resources for years, simply so the British could fiddle around in the Mediterranean—leaving Hitler’s legions in almost complete control of continental Europe. A firm date for a cross-Channel invasion must be tied down, and the necessary forces assembled to make it work.

  A new paper on “The Defeat of Germany”—not Italy—had therefore been ordered from both planning staffs over the weekend, while the Prime Minister was away at Shangri-la, to define exactly how Hitler was to be brought to unconditional surrender—namely by defeating Germany, not simply Mussolini’s Italy. By Monday night, May 17, the British version, approved by General Brooke, had been ready. When General Marshall read it through at the meeting on Tuesday, May 18, he was delighted. Though it talked a lot about further interim operations in the Mediterranean, it “appeared that [even] if Mediterranean operations were undertaken in the interval, a target date for April 1944 should be agreed on for cross-Channel operations.” In writing.

  General Marshall breathed a sigh of relief. Brooke then confirmed this was the case, the date formally recorded in the minutes of the meeting.5

  April 1944.

  Mirabile dictu, Marshall reflected. General Brooke had seemingly dropped his call for a postponement of a Second Front until 1945 or 1946, and was now definitely onboard—if, in the meantime, operations in the Mediterranean were allowed to continue that summer. “The rate of build-up of German forces in western Europe would greatly exceed our own on the Continent unless Mediterranean operations were first undertaken to divert or occupy German reinforcements,” Brooke maintained. “If these operations were first undertaken,” Brooke conceded, “April 1944 might well be right for a target date, though the actual operation would be more likely to be possible of achievement in May or June.”6

  Genuine, serious military preparations for a massive spring 1944 cross-Channel invasion by the Western Allies could now commence, the generals agreed—with only the thorny question left as to how far to limit interim 1943–44 operations in the Mediterranean so that they did not prejudice preparations for D-day.

  Leahy, Marshall, and King were still skeptical. The matter of “interim” operations in the Mediterranean would, they predicted, prove tortuous—but at Marshall’s insistence a formal commitment to D-day had been given by the British, in writing. Some seven battle-hardened U.S. and British divisions would be withdrawn that very fall from the Mediterranean theater to the United Kingdom. There they would begin training and rehearsals for the spring 1944 D-day assault. It seemed a reasonable compromise.

  For Secretary Stimson, at the Pentagon, the British climbdown was as much a relief as it was to General Marshall.

  The Prime Minister, meantime, had been kept well away from the daily Combined Chiefs meetings. Instead, he had been pressed by the President to go address a joint session of Congress again—“a very good speech, noteable for its good, downright eloquence,” Stimson recorded, after attending the performance on Capitol Hill, “on the main lines of war history and strategy and also for the adroitness with which he avoided any allusions to the real points of issue which are now being fought over between the staffs of the two countries.7

  “These points of difference have come out sharply in the two plans and it is taking all Marshall’s tact and adroitness to steer the conference through to a result which will not be a surrender but which will not be an open clash. The President seemed to be helping us,” Stimson added—Mr. Roosevelt adopting the same approach as his U.S. team, as “indicated by his telephone talk with me the other evening.” T
he President, Marshall had reported to the Secretary, was not only “taking the same line” but “insisting that the planners decide what will be the cost in shipping and men for the ‘big point’ (as the President called it)”: the cross-Channel invasion. Only when these requirements had been met would the planners be permitted, the President had said, to “determine from what is left over what can be done otherwise” in the Mediterranean.8

  The Second Front, in other words, would now be First Priority for the Western Allies.

  As to the sincerity of the British volte face not all were convinced, however. Admiral King, in particular, remained less than happy. Though the British seemed resigned to join the U.S. in launching a Second Front invasion in April or May 1944, they were insisting on so many landing craft, naval forces, air forces, ground forces, and logistics being assigned in the “interim” to the Mediterranean that—in King’s eyes—this could well prejudice the success of the primary cross-Channel strategy. More significantly to King—a true believer in prosecuting the war in the Pacific more robustly, now that the Americans and Australians were on the successful offensive there—such an interim policy threatened to slow down Nimitz’s and MacArthur’s plans, thus allowing the Japanese to “dig in.” The result would inevitably be grave American casualties—an aspect that seemed not to register with the British, whose main forces were being held in India as an army of colonial occupation, and were making every excuse not to take the offensive against the Japanese.