Churchill went straight to his room. After dinner and a movie there was a meeting in the President’s Map Room, with Harry Hopkins and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, General Ismay.
In the narrow, windowless room, its walls hung with giant maps and thousands of the most secret reports, cables, and memoranda locked in filing cabinets in the center, the President pulled no punches. The date for the cross-Channel invasion was now set, he told Churchill, and the forces for it must be withdrawn from the Mediterranean by November 1, 1943—period.
Churchill was furious. Returning finally to his room at 2:00 a.m., the Prime Minister summoned his doctor.
Sir Charles Wilson found “the P.M. pacing his room”—and blaming the President. “There was no welcoming smile. When I asked him how he had been he did not answer. He had other things to think about besides his health. He stopped and said abruptly, ‘Have you noticed that the President is a very tired man? His mind seems closed; he seems to have lost his wonderful elasticity.’”5
Dr. Wilson—ignorant of the cause—watched as Churchill “went up and down his room, scowling at the floor.” “The President is not willing to put pressure on Marshall,” he explained. “He is not in favour of landing in Italy. It is most discouraging. I only crossed the Atlantic for this purpose. I cannot let the matter rest where it is.”6
Dr. Wilson could prescribe sleeping medication, but he could do nothing to change the situation. Nor could Churchill. The President had said no—and there was little that could be done without seriously undermining, even wrecking, the Western alliance. The Prime Minister would have to accept defeat. The die, after all, was now cast. Even the Canadians were getting ready for a cross-Channel assault in 1944, with no interest in fighting in Italy—let alone Yugoslavia. Once back in Ottawa, Prime Minister Mackenzie King was preparing to tell his War Cabinet that it had been agreed in Washington that “the big battle will come early next year.” Moreover, that “the Canadian army will be used along with the American army and the British army to make the final assault on Europe from the North”—not Italy or the Balkans. And “that we may expect the end of the war not before the end of this winter but before the end of another winter (1945).”7
Churchill continued to pace. He had not become prime minister of Great Britain and the one leader able to stand up to Hitler, however, by caving in to force majeure—particularly pressure from his own countrymen. Dr. Wilson’s medication would permit him to sleep, briefly—but not to alter his convictions.
Before the Combined Chiefs of Staff could reappear before their political and military masters at the White House on the morning of May 25, therefore, Churchill began a new attack on the Trident agreement.
That the Prime Minister meant well was not at issue. Long-term geopolitical British considerations had to be taken into account. But singlehandedly to attempt to bend the president of the United States to follow a British agenda was foolhardy—especially in opposition to his own military team.
Dr. Wilson had already been worried lest the Prime Minister, by undertaking so many responsibilities, by refusing to delegate, by drinking so much, and by making so many wild trips abroad, might be approaching a mental breakdown, or “a gradual waning of his powers, brought on by his own improvidence, by his contempt for common sense and by the way he has been doing the work of three men. There is no hour of the night when I can be certain that he is in his bed and asleep. Of course, this cannot go on forever.”8
It couldn’t—and explained in part the Prime Minister’s amazing behavior, to the embarrassment of all, especially the President.
The Combined Chiefs assembled again in Roosevelt’s office at 11:35 a.m. Once again they were treated to Churchill at his most petulant. “We were therefore exactly as we had started so far as the paper we had submitted to the President and PM was concerned,” Brooke recounted in despair in his diary, adding, in his slashing hand, “the PM had done untold harm by rousing suspicions as regards ventures in the Balkans which we had been endeavouring to suppress.”9
Churchill, Secretary Stimson afterward learned from the President, “acted like a spoiled boy the last morning when he refused to give up on one of the points—Sardinia—that was in issue. He persisted and persisted until Roosevelt told him that he, Roosevelt, wasn’t interested in the matter and that he had better shut up.”10
For that, at least, General Brooke was grateful to the President.
With the President’s final loss of patience and his stern word to Churchill, the meeting had mercifully come to an end.
Debate was over—and with that dramatic finale, the Trident Conference done. D-day, to be called Operation Overlord, would take place, come hell or high water, in the spring of 1944.
A grand, celebratory luncheon for the Prime Minister, Combined Chiefs of Staff, and all the senior staff officers involved in the conference was given by the President at the White House at 1:30 p.m. on May 25.
Early the next morning, Roosevelt drove down with Churchill to the special Clipper terminal on the Potomac River. The 160 members of the British military contingent would be sailing home from New York, but the Prime Minister and General Brooke were to board a huge Boeing seaplane that would fly them first to Newfoundland, and from there to North Africa.
The President had been skeptical regarding Churchill’s new mission—as the Prime Minister was aware. It had not stopped Churchill, however, and the two leaders had come to a compromise. Churchill had assured the President he had no motive other than to review British and Allied HQ preparations in Algiers for the impending assault on Sicily, Operation Husky. Given the President’s chariness, Churchill had felt compelled to suggest that General Marshall accompany him, as a gage of his fealty to the President and the war strategy finally and formally agreed between allies. The President had thought this an excellent idea—General Marshall flying, so to speak, as a U.S. marshal.
Poor Marshall had not been consulted.
At the Pentagon, Secretary Stimson had been furious—on Marshall’s behalf. “Marshall told me of it,” Stimson recorded in his diary, “and said he rather hated to be traded like a piece of baggage.”11
The U.S. war secretary remained deeply suspicious, moreover. Churchill was “going to take Marshall along with him” for no other purpose, Stimson protested, than “to work on him to yield on some of the points that Marshall has held out on in regard to the Prime Minister’s excursions in the eastern Mediterranean.” This was too bad. General Marshall was worn out having to deal with Churchill’s two-week visit, along with his vast retinue of military chiefs and advisers seeking to overturn the Casablanca agreement. Of all people, the general now surely deserved a break. In this respect, “to think of picking out the strongest man there is in America, and Marshall is surely that today, the one on whom the fate of the war depends, and then to deprive him in a gamble of a much needed opportunity to recoup his strength by about three days’ rest and send him off on a difficult and rather dangerous trip across the Atlantic Ocean where he is not needed except for Churchill’s purpose is I think going pretty far,” Stimson frothed in his diary, outraged by the iniquity. “But nobody has any say”12—the President being the elected president, by far and away the most powerful man in America, and this his will.
For his part, the President found it ironic he was having to send Marshall to North Africa to keep the irrepressible Churchill on the rails. Roosevelt was not sorry, though. Seeing Eisenhower, Clark, Patton, perhaps, and the general lay of the land following General Eisenhower’s great victory at Tunis would be no bad thing for his Army chief of staff. The number of Axis troops that had surrendered was now said to have exceeded even those at Stalingrad; the omens were good.
Word had also come from Moscow, moreover, that Stalin had finally agreed to a personal meeting. This would probably now take place in August. The President would pretend to be going to Canada to see Prime Minister King—and secretly fly north across Alaska to the projected rendezvous with the Russian di
ctator.13 It was a relief, in these circumstances, that he, the President, would be able to convince Stalin that the Western Allies were united in their resolve to mount the Second Front in the spring of 1944—and important that Marshall hold the Prime Minister tightly to this agreement. No more reneging, or alternative ventures, or pessimistic doomsaying behind his back!
The cross-Channel invasion would not take place in 1943, to Stalin’s likely disappointment, but it would definitely be mounted in overpowering, U.S.-dominated force in May 1944—and would, the President was confident, lead to the end of the war, either at the end of 1944, or early 1945. Only Churchill, in his unpredictable way, could possibly mess this plan up.
Admiral Leahy remained suspicious. As he noted with scarcely concealed distrust, the “agreements finally reached” were excellent, and would advance the American cause: to defeat Hitler. “This is, of course, based on an assumption that the agreements will be carried out by our allies.”14
Ironically, General Brooke was just as skeptical as Leahy—at least with regard to his boss, the Prime Minister. Churchill’s great qualities did not include consistency of military strategy. As Brooke had noted in exhaustion on May 24, summarizing his colleagues’ contributions to the “Global Statement of Strategy” that the Combined Chiefs had drawn up, Admiral King was still besotted by war in the Pacific theater; General Marshall was too bold, willing to chance a cross-Channel invasion that would risk putting into the cauldron of battle “some 20 to 30 divisions, irrespective of what happens on the Russian front, with which he proposes to clear Europe and win the war”; Air Marshal Portal, by contrast, was imagining the war in Europe would be won by “bombing” alone; Admiral Pound was believing “anti-U-boat warfare” was the key; while Brooke himself favored all-out war in the Mediterranean, not to defeat Germany, per se, but to “force a dispersal of German forces, help Russia, and thus eventually produce a situation where cross-Channel operations are possible.”
“And Winston???” Brooke had continued, rhetorically, in the privacy of his diary. “Thinks one thing at one moment and another at another moment. At times the war may be won by bombing and all must be sacrificed to it. At others it becomes essential for us to bleed ourselves dry on the Continent because Russia is doing the same. At others our main effort must be in the Mediterranean, directed against Italy or the Balkans alternatively, with sporadic desires to invade Norway and ‘roll up the map in the opposite direction to Hitler’! But more often than all he wants to carry out ALL operations simultaneously irrespective of shortages of shipping!”15
To his credit, Churchill was not unaware of or even embarrassed by his own impetuous, pepper-spray, relentlessly demanding/urging nature—“I am arrogant, but not conceited,” he told a companion in 194316—but had no idea Brooke was keeping such a candid journal, especially one that might be used to indict him, later, as a volatile commander in chief of lamentably poor and inconsistent judgment. After all he, Winston Spencer Churchill, would ensure his own skills as a writer and historian would make certain he came out smelling of roses—as he openly confided in North Africa some days later. Veracity would not be his objective as an eventual memoirist/historian, he would tell General Eisenhower and a dozen top American and British generals invited to dinner at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Algiers. Having imbibed several whiskeys, he announced that “it was foolish to keep a day-by-day diary because it would simply reflect the change of opinion or decision of the writer”—a diary “which, when and if published, makes one appear indecisive and foolish.”17
To illustrate his dictum Churchill instanced the daily journal of British Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. Sir Henry had left copious diaries detailing his role before and during World War I. In one entry he had unwisely forecast: “There will be no war.” This was unfortunate because “on the next day war was declared,” Churchill told his enthralled listeners.
Since Eisenhower’s naval aide was himself keeping a daily diary this was unwise, but Churchill had by then imbibed too much alcohol to care.
The English field marshal, Churchill went on happily, had subsequently been assassinated on his doorstep by Irish republicans, in 1922—leaving the question of what to do with his precious war diaries. “The wife had insisted the diary be published post-humously,” Eisenhower’s aide recorded, “and, consequently, General Wilson was made to appear foolish. For his part, the Prime Minister said, he would much prefer to wait until the war is over and then to write his impressions so that, if necessary, he could correct or bury his mistakes.”18
Bury his mistakes. It was a telling phrase.
Flying to North Africa with Winston, however, General Marshall would at least exert adult supervision, the President was satisfied. Marshall could be counted upon not to permit the Prime Minister to veer off into any wild ventures now that the cardinal issue of the Second Front and its timing had been formally resolved.
This still left open, however, the question of command.
Who should be the cross-Channel assault supreme commander—an appointment that, in order to help bolster the somewhat tentative British commitment, the President had at Casablanca suggested should go to a British officer?
In the wake of Trident, however, the President was not so sure. General Marshall’s faith in Bolero, now renamed Operation Overlord, had been constant and unremitting. Might not General Marshall, an American, be a surer bet as supreme commander—not only in making certain the assault was actually carried out on time, but in dealing at close quarters with a British prime minister whose penchant for meddling in battles was now notorious?
By spending time not only with General Eisenhower but with English field and staff generals at Ike’s headquarters in Algiers, Marshall would get to know potential British colleagues, generals, and subordinates better, the President felt. As well as the British prime minister.
By contrast, Churchill was concerned that, if the Second Front was indeed to be launched at American insistence, his candidate for supreme command, General Alan Brooke, should be on the best of terms with the President. There thus arose, on May 26, an added irony, as the two army chiefs of staff of their respective nations boarded the former British Overseas Airways Boeing 314 A seaplane, registration number G-AGBZ, bobbing on the Potomac early that morning. Churchill had duly boarded the Clipper, having made his farewells. Aware that he’d promised Brooke command of Overlord, however, he had told the CIGS to go and sit for a few minutes with the President in his car, in case the President decided to raise the matter.
The President gave nothing away. “He was as usual most charming,” Brooke noted in his diary that night, “and said that next time I came over I must come to Hyde Park to see where my father and Douglas [Brooke’s brother] had looked for birds.”19
Roosevelt’s invitation was typical of the President—wanting the conference to end on a happy, personal note. Brooke was certainly touched, and the two men shook hands.
The ornithologist and his thorny opposite number, General Marshall, then took their seats inside the body of the huge Boeing seaplane as its engines roared to life, ready for takeoff—the President waiting to watch. Both Marshall and Brooke were now contenders to command the greatest amphibious invasion in human history—one that would undoubtedly, as Hitler himself remarked, “decide the war.”20
PART NINE
* * *
The First Crack in the Axis
33
Sicily—and Kursk
AT THE WHITE HOUSE on the evening of July 9, President Roosevelt was giving a state dinner for General Giraud. He was also waiting patiently for word from General Eisenhower as to how the invasion of Sicily, timed to start soon after midnight in the Mediterranean, was going. Had Allied deception measures worked? Were the Germans waiting for the Allied armies to come ashore in the south? How would Italian forces fight on their home soil?
Finally Admiral Brown, his naval aide, brought him the news.
Taking General Giraud upstairs to his study, Roosevel
t met Daisy Suckley, who was staying in the Blue Room, on the landing. The President had told her the dinner would go on until a quarter to eleven, so Daisy was happily sewing a seam on her new nightgown when “the elevator door suddenly opened—I heard the P’s voice—I grabbed my diary, my pen, my workbox, & my nightgown—started to flee! The President stopped me, laughing, halfway down the hall already, & followed by the General. My thimble flew to the right, my spool to the left. The General laughed & we shook hands—the P. spoke over his shoulder as he was wheeled into his study: ‘The General & I are going to have a heart to heart talk—We have landed in Sicily! The word has just come!”1
For his part, Admiral Leahy noted in his own diary: “During the dinner the president announced that British-American-Canadian troops were in process of invading Sicily. Our best information indicates that the enemy force now on the island consists of 4 or 5 Italian divisions and two German divisions, which we should be able to defeat in time if the landing is successful.”2
The President was pleased, but like Leahy, he was determined not to give way to overexpectations. Failure would delay but by no means wreck the agreed timetable for a cross-Channel assault the next year; victory, however, would give the Allied forces—including French troops fighting under Eisenhower’s command—further confidence that they could mount a major amphibious invasion and defeat the Wehrmacht in combat: the prerequisite for a successful Overlord.
And with that quiet confidence the President set off the next day to spend the weekend in Shangri-la with his de facto domestic deputy president, former Justice James Byrnes—his head of the Office of War Mobilization—and Byrnes’s wife, as well as Harry Hopkins and his wife, and Daisy Suckley. After watching a movie in the mess hall, “We sat around,” Daisy Suckley, “to get news about the invasion of Sicily—During dinner, we had tried also, but static is very bad and reception not good up on this hill, even when the weather is clear . . .”3
Commander in Chief Page 30