Commander in Chief

by Nigel Hamilton

  There was, moreover, public impatience in America to consider.

  “I am very much afraid that, if the British succeed in getting us pulled out any further onto the limb in the Mediterranean,” Stimson noted, “we shall face a widespread loss of support for the war among our people.” This was serious. “Polls show that the public would be very much more interested in beating Japan than in beating the European Axis [powers],” he acknowledged, thanks to Pearl Harbor—something that could easily translate into “all kinds of personal and party politics” that could damage the bipartisan, “Germany First” war effort.9 This danger extended, he knew, to his fellow Republicans across the country, who were once again demanding that General MacArthur be recalled from Australia to stand in the 1944 presidential election—a campaign in which MacArthur would doubtless call for a switch of U.S. priority to the Pacific to face not Hitler, but America’s “true” enemy, Japan.

  What Stimson and Marshall failed to realize, however, was that General Brooke had now parted company with his prime minister—and that Winston Churchill would be the problem, not the British chiefs of staff.

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  A Dozen Dieppes in a Day

  SEATED AT THE Federal Reserve Board in the Combined Chiefs of Staff meetings, General Brooke had failed to noticed the Prime Minister’s increasingly divergent trajectory. Even the President, living with the Prime Minister each day at the White House, had been unaware of what Churchill was saying behind his back.

  Hearing from Admiral Leahy on May 18 that the British chiefs had backed off their opposition to a 1944 or 1945 invasion of France, the President had been delighted by news of his team’s success. This would be of inestimable help when and if he met with Stalin, since he would now be able to reveal to the Russian leader, in person and in all honesty, a firm date for the Second Front. It would be a formal U.S.-British military commitment that, even though Stalin had fervently hoped it would take place in 1943, would nevertheless encourage the Soviets to hold out against Hitler’s impending summer offensive on the Eastern Front.

  The President was crowing too early, however.

  The first intimation the Prime Minister was charting his own course in opposition even to his own British team had come on the evening of May 18, 1943—reported to the President by none other than the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King, who had accepted the President’s invitation to attend the latest meeting of the Pacific War Council and to stay at the White House.

  From his train, Mackenzie King had gone to Pennsylvania Avenue to settle in and have a word with his fellow prime minister. It had been 6:00 p.m., but Churchill was in bed, in the Queen Elizabeth Room on the second floor. He had looked “very frail,” and was wearing “a white night-gown of black and white silk,” King described in his diary. “He has lost the florid coloring and his face was quite white. Looked soft and flabby. He had a glass of Scotch beside him near his bed,” and “looked to be very tired”—as well he might. On a special writing tray Churchill was still, after some seven hours, working on the draft of the address the President had asked him to give to Congress the following day. He was keen for Mackenzie King to read the text—anxious not to say anything impolitic, given that people in Washington were already talking about the 1944 presidential election, still more than a year away. “He indicated that he had not completed his speech and would be taking a little sleep before dinner, which I took to mean that he would not wish the conversation to take up too long.”1

  The two prime ministers had first talked of the recent Allied victory in Tunisia, where General von Arnim had finally surrendered on May 12. It was “really shocking” Churchill claimed, “the way the Germans came in at the end”—“giving themselves up, falling and crawling; some of them waving plumes [white flags], and [he] said that an hour before, when they thought they could win, they were most savage and brutal. He imitated their different attitudes in his own face.”2

  This was vintage Churchill: his vivid imagination running free (since he had obviously not been present at the surrender), yet amazingly astute in his reading of German moral duplicity: able to switch from barbarous hubris toward other humans to shameless appeals for “humanitarian” clemency when they themselves were overpowered.

  Once again Mackenzie King found himself entranced by the British prime minister’s mind and his colorful use of language. They swiftly moved on to the reason for Churchill’s presence in Washington, however. “Churchill began to tell me about the conferences here,” King noted in his diary that night. “Said that they were discussing the plans. That he and the Americans were very good in accepting Roosevelt’s decisions in the end”—as they had at Casablanca. “He thought that he and Roosevelt were very much of the same view,” even if there were “differences of emphasis.”3

  Prime Minister King was baffled. This was not what he’d been told that very afternoon on his visit to the Canadian legation in Washington. There he’d been informed that “the Americans were pressing for a cross-Channel Second Front”—“invasion from the North”—whereas “the British plan was for invasion [of Europe] from the South, either through the Balkans or [southern] France. Views had not yet been reconciled.”4

  How, then, could Roosevelt and Churchill be on the same page? Was Churchill now accepting the President’s Second Front strategy? Or was the President accepting Churchill’s new strategy—and what was it, in fact? A second Dardanelles? Had he misunderstood? What was Churchill really saying—or not saying?

  It was at this point that Churchill made clear “that as far as he was concerned, the plan was to follow on the decisions of the Casablanca conference,” which had authorized landings in Sicily in July that year, in Operation Husky—but had not explicitly gone further than that, he now claimed. “The thing to do was to get Italy out of the war,” Churchill explained. “Altogether he believed this could be done, and said he would not treat them [Italians] too badly if they were to give up and particularly if they were to yield up their fleet. If he could get the fleet, he would be prepared to use it to attack the Japanese.” Meantime, however, there was the matter of Europe—and the defeat of Hitler. “The plan was to start the invasion of Europe through Sicily and Sardinia,” Churchill now told Mackenzie King, confidentially, “either on through the Balkans or possibly through [southern] France depending on how matters developed.” It would be easier than a cross-Channel attack.

  “They would be getting footholds all along the way, and Russia might put on a very strong offensive and they [the Allies] would be working toward Russia”—via “southern Europe,” the Prime Minister explained. “There was a chance, too, that Turkey might come in,” King noted Churchill’s words, “though not until she got plenty of equipment. He was not pressing her at present.”

  King—aware that the Pacific Council would have to wrestle with the implications of Churchill’s alternative new strategy, so similar to his notorious failure in World War I—pressed Winston to explain in more detail.

  Lest there be any misunderstanding, Churchill privately confided that he remained as implacably opposed to the notion of a cross-Channel Second Front as he had been the year before—indeed more so, now, after the catastrophe of Dieppe. “Speaking of invasion [of France] from the North,” across the English Channel, “he said that he did not want to see the beaches of Europe covered with slain bodies of Canadians and Americans. That there might be many Dieppes [suffered] in a few days,” were such an operation to be launched. “That he, himself, could provide 16 divisions which would include ours [i.e., Canadians] but there was only one American division in England. This was all they had against the numerous divisions Germany could muster; unless Americans were prepared to send a large number of divisions to cross at the same time, he did not see how they could attempt anything of the kind.”5 It would be, King again recalled Winston’s actual words, “slaughter”—“a dozen Dieppes in a day.” “I thought,” King noted, “this was pretty strong language.”6

  Mackenzie King was no
w doubly dubious as to Churchill’s claim that he and the President—let alone the U.S. chiefs of staff—were of the same mind. “I asked if the Americans were likely to make much difficulty over these particular plans,” King noted. “He replied that the President and he were very close together; that they could not settle all these things at once. They had to run along for a time”—in order to dupe the U.S. Joint Chiefs. “The President was inclined more his way and he thought that his [U.S] chiefs of staff would accept loyally his decisions in the end.”7

  Mackenzie King said nothing. In truth he was gobsmacked, however.

  Yes, the President had indeed insisted, at their last meeting, in December 1942, that further operations should first be carried out in the Mediterranean in 1943, in order to learn the hard, attritional lessons of modern war before attempting anything as hazardous as a cross-Channel invasion. But the President had never said anything to suggest he believed the Allies should attempt to defeat the Third Reich by attacking from the south. Was Churchill, with his “glass of Scotch” on the table beside his bed, making this all up? Was he living—as he tended to do, in the eyes of the abstemious Canadian who had vowed not to drink liquor for the duration of the war—in an alcohol-laced cocoon? Alcohol seemed certainly to fuel Churchill’s fertile imagination and brilliant rhetorical skills—but did it equip him to listen to what President Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs were telling him rather than to his own voice?

  Dimly, though, Churchill seemed aware the President had been keeping him away from the Combined Chiefs of Staff over the weekend—indeed from anyone who might become alarmed over his Mediterranean ambitions. “He said that the President and he had been off together at Blue Ridge over the week-end,” at Shangri-la. The following weekend, however, Churchill “wanted to see a few friends,” and was going to insist he be allowed to stay at the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, where he could meet with and telephone anyone he wanted. “Thus far, he had not seen hardly any.”8

  King was somewhat alarmed, but held his tongue, unwilling to disconcert Churchill on the eve of his important appearance before Congress—which, as prime minister of Canada, King had been invited to attend.

  Mackenzie King’s worst fears indeed materialized the next day when, at the Capitol at midday on May 19—the very day Ambassador Davies arrived in Moscow bearing the President’s private letter to Stalin—Churchill followed up his congressional address by talking frankly to senior members of Congress.

  “After the luncheon, members of the Senate and representatives of the foreign committee came into the room, and Mr. Churchill was subjected to a quiz,” Mackenzie King—who attended this meeting, too—recorded that night in his diary. “He faced squarely the question as to strategy. Told those present that he felt the great objective now was to knock Italy out of the war.” This would, he said, “clear the Mediterranean which would mean a through route to India, China; make all the contacts with the Orient much easier. He believed the great offensive was coming against Germany on the part of Russia,” and “in the Southern part by allied forces pressing up through the Balkans, and there would be a relief of the pressure on Russia. They might, too, get some of the satellite states of Germany to change their attitude. They would also get additional help from Yugoslavia where some 10 [Italian] divisions were tied up there which could be added to the allied numbers. Thought that all this would be helpful to Stalin. He thought the Germans could be driven entirely out of Italy and would probably leave Italy to look after herself.”

  King was puzzled. Driven entirely out of Italy? Churchill’s forecast of Hitler’s likely reaction to an Allied invasion of Italy and the Balkans—especially after the example of German tenacity in reinforcing Tunisia over the past six months—sounded disturbingly naive, even schoolboyish. His prediction, moreover, seemed at odds—very poor odds—with his defeatism concerning the prospects for a Second Front. To the postprandial group of senators and congressmen, Churchill “made it pretty plain,” King noted, “he did not favor any immature attack on Europe from the North,” across the English Channel. “He spoke of the few divisions they have in Britain—I think 18 altogether including our own, only 1 American division, and that Hitler was able to move many divisions from one part of the continent to the other in a very short time. Referred to the scarcity of ships, etc”—going “pretty far in making clear the plan is to attack across the Mediterranean into Europe either via [southern] France, Sicily or further East [in the Balkans], without designating what locality would be first.”9

  Even more astonishing to the Canadian prime minister was Churchill’s complete lack of shame or caution in opposing the President’s strategy in front of U.S. lawmakers, behind the President’s back—having “instructed them,” Mackenzie King noted, that with regard to questions they were welcome “to try and knock him off his [strategic] perch.”10 He even outlined the idea of a “peace conference,” similar to Versailles in 1919, that would take place, perhaps in England, at the end of hostilities—with both Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress “invited” to participate.11

  Versailles, then, moved to Westminster . . .

  That Churchill was playing a dangerous double game became clear later that afternoon when the President invited the Combined Chiefs of Staff to the White House, following their afternoon meeting at the Federal Reserve Building. The President had heard via Admiral Leahy that the chiefs had confirmed their agreement to an April or May 1944 cross-Channel Second Front—but that tempers in the morning’s meeting, when addressing remaining “interim” operations in 1943, had become so frayed the secretaries had been asked to leave the room while the chiefs dueled it out.

  General Marshall’s contention that further operations in the Mediterranean that fall would inevitably suck in the forces needed for a successful cross-Channel attack had hit home—Brooke defending his own strategy by claiming a cross-Channel attack would never succeed unless the Wehr- macht was first forced to fight hard not only on the Russian front but in Italy. Heavy fighting in Italy was thus the prerequisite of a successful invasion in the spring of 1944. “After the capture of a bridgehead” in northern France, “a Cherbourg might be seized, but the provision of the necessary forces to cover this would be difficult unless the Germans were greatly weakened or unable to find reserves,” Brooke had warned.12 A serious military campaign in Italy, in other words, would be the weakening blow: essential in order to make the April or May 1944 operation work.

  Marshall had countered that such a strategy might very well achieve the opposite. The British, he’d summarized, were exaggerating the ease of a campaign in Italy, while perilously underestimating the need to throw maximum logistical effort into the real priority: the cross-Channel invasion. It should, Marshall reminded Brooke and the other committee members, “be remembered that in North Africa a relatively small German force had produced a serious factor of delay to our operations,” given the mountainous terrain. “A German decision to support [defend] Italy might make intended operations extremely difficult and time consuming.”13

  No truer warning to the British was ever given in World War II—though Brooke would never admit, either then or in retrospect, that Marshall was right. Marshall had, Brooke merely confided to his diary that night, “suggested that the meeting should be cleared for an ‘off the record’ meeting between Chiefs of Staff alone. We then had a heart to heart and as a result of it at last found a bridge across which we could meet! Not altogether a satisfactory one, but far better than a break up of the conference.”14

  The compromise was certainly vague and open-ended. Rather than halting major offensive operations in the Mediterranean after the successful seizure of Sicily, as the President and Marshall wished, Eisenhower would be authorized to capitalize on any signs of an Italian collapse to seize airfields in southern Italy—but only assigning experienced Allied forces for the remainder of the summer. Then—at the very latest on November 1, 1943—the best battle-hardened U.S. and British divisions w
ere to be withdrawn from combat and transferred to Britain to prepare for D-day. This, they all agreed, should be mounted either in April or in early May, 1944.

  This compromise, confirmed by all, had duly been reported by the Combined Chiefs when summoned to meet with the President in the Oval Office at 6:00 p.m.

  They were then joined by the Prime Minister, on his return from the Capitol.

  Nine Allied divisions were to be ferried in the assault across the English Channel on D-day itself, with twenty more in the days that followed—a massive rolling offensive backed by Allied air power and naval support. Whatever was left in the Mediterranean could be used by Eisenhower to “eliminate Italy from the war and contain the maximum number of German divisions.”

  According to the minutes of the Oval Office meeting, “the PRIME MINISTER indicated his pleasure that the Conference was progressing as well as it was and also that a cross-Channel operation had finally been agreed upon. He had always been in favor of such an operation and had to submit to its delay in the past for reasons beyond control of the United Nations.”15

  Given what Churchill had told U.S. congressional representatives that very afternoon—namely, that he did not favor what he saw as a “dozen Dieppes in a day” on the beaches of northern France—and given that he favored, instead, an Allied offensive through Italy and the Balkans, this was tantamount to perjury, unless the Prime Minister had truly had a Pauline conversion.

  Only time would tell.

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