by Max Hastings
He persuaded Washington that a new summit was now needed, to settle plans for Italy. This meeting, Quadrant, was to be held in Quebec. On 5 August 1943 he stood on the platform at Addison Road station in West Kensington, singing ‘I go away/This very day/ To sail across the sea/Matilda.’ Then his train slid from its platform northwards to Greenock, where his 200-strong delegation boarded the Queen Mary, bound for Canada. Churchill landed at Halifax on 9 August, and remained in North America until 14 September, by far his longest wartime sojourn there. Since it was plain that the big decisions on future strategy would be taken by Americans, as usual he sought to be on the spot, to deploy the weight of his own personality to influence them. While the combined chiefs of staff began their debates in Quebec, Churchill travelled by train with his wife and daughter Mary to stay with Roosevelt. At Niagara Falls he told reporters: ‘I saw these before you were born. I was here first in 1900.’ A correspondent asked fatuously: ‘Do they look the same?’ Churchill said: ‘Well, the principle seems the same. The water still keeps flowing over.’
At Hyde Park it was stifling barbecue weather, with hamburgers and hot dogs. Churchill fumed about reports of Nazi mass killings in the Balkans. He sought to interest the president in the region, with little success. Then the two leaders travelled to join the discussions of their chiefs of staff. The venue had been chosen to suit common Anglo-American convenience, without much heed to the fact that it lay on Canadian soil. Moran wrote that Canada’s premier, Mackenzie King, resembled a man who has lent his house for a party: ‘The guests take hardly any notice of him, but just before leaving they remember he is their host and say pleasant things.’ Secretary of State Cordell Hull was permitted by Roosevelt to make one of his rare summit appearances at Quadrant, not much to his own satisfaction. Unwilling to share Churchill’s late hours, one midnight Hull announced grumpily that he was going to bed. The prime minister expressed astonishment: ‘Why, man, we are at war!’
Many subsidiary matters reared their heads at the Quadrant conference. Churchill was still pressing to launch a British landing on Sumatra, evoking a rash historical precedent by asserting that ‘in its promise of decisive consequences it invited comparison with the Dardanelles operation of 1915’. He introduced to the Americans two newly favoured heroes, Brigadier Orde Wingate, who had commanded a column of his Chindits behind the Japanese lines in Burma, and Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who led the RAF’s heroic May 1943 attack on the Ruhr dams. Wingate proved a shortlived protégé: closer acquaintance caused Churchill to realise that he was too mad for high command. Meanwhile the young airman’s superiors, notably including Sir Arthur Harris, believed that the transatlantic trip ‘spoiled young Gibson’ by exposing him to a popular adulation in Canada and the US that went to his head. Stars of battle, like their artistic counterparts in peacetime, have seldom fitted comfortably into the entourages of prime ministers.
Meanwhile, Stalin was making threatening demands for a Russian voice in the governance of occupied territories. He cabled from Moscow demanding the creation of a joint military commission, which should hold its first meeting in Sicily. In Quebec, Churchill warned the Americans of ‘bloody consequences in the future…Stalin is an unnatural man. There will be grave troubles.’ He was correct, of course. Thereafter, the Russians perceived the legitimisation of their own conduct in Eastern Europe. Since the Western Allies decreed the governance of territories which they occupied, the Soviet Union considered itself entitled to do likewise in its own conquests.
But the central issue at stake at Quebec was that of Overlord. The Americans were implacably set upon its execution, while the British continued to duck and weave. Wedemeyer wrote before the meeting that it was necessary for the US chiefs to advance a formula which would ‘stir the imagination and win the support of the Prime Minister, if not that of his recalcitrant planners and chiefs of staff’. Marshall’s biographer, the magisterial American historian Forrest Pogue, remarks of Churchill in those days: ‘As usual, he was full of guile.’ This seems to misread the prime minister’s behaviour. Opportunism and changeability, rather than studied cunning, guided most of his strategic impulses. Yet there is no period of the war at which American dismay about British behaviour seems better merited than autumn 1943, as Eden and others acknowledged. Churchill and his commanders had always professed themselves committed to launching an invasion of Europe in 1944. At the Casablanca and Washington conferences, the British had not argued against Overlord in principle, but merely fought for delay. Now, it seemed, they were altogether reneging.
Churchill opened his budget at Quebec by reasserting principled support for an invasion. But he pressed for an understanding that if, in the spring of 1944, the Germans deployed more than twelve mobile divisions in France, the operation should not take place. Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, director of the Anglo-American COSSAC staff which had been planning the invasion, suggested that if the Germans appeared capable of deploying more than fifteen divisions against the beachhead in the two months following D-Day, a landing should not be launched. When the Germans flooded the river plains around Caen a few days before the conference began, COSSAC’s operations division minuted: ‘The full implications of this have not yet been assessed, but it is quite possible that it will finally “kill” Overlord.’ Brooke made plain his continuing scepticism about the operation’s feasibility.
The British case was that the immediate strategic priority was to seize the chances of the moment in the Mediterranean, rather than to stake everything upon a highly dangerous and speculative cross-Channel attack. In war, they argued, circumstances were always changing. They were more realistic than the Americans, in their understanding that a decision to enter Italy was irrevocable: ‘If we once set foot on the Italian mainland,’ wrote John Kennedy, ‘we are in for a big commitment…The Americans I am sure do not realise that limited operations in Italy eg against Naples, are impossible. We must either stop at the Straits of Messina or go the whole hog.’ On 17 August, Churchill received a characteristically triumphalist signal from Alexander: ‘By 10am this morning, the last German soldier was flung out of Sicily.’ The prime minister’s enthusiasm for his favourite general seldom flagged, and he applauded the Sicilian operations as ‘brilliantly executed’. Yet it had taken thirty-eight days for much superior Allied forces to expel less than three German divisions. Far from being ‘flung out’ of the island, inexcusably General Albert Kesselring’s troops had been allowed to withdraw in good order across the Straits of Messina with most of their vehicles, guns and equipment.
At all the wartime conferences there was a stark contrast between the strains upon the principals, middle-aged and elderly men contesting great issues day and night, and the delights afforded to hundreds of attendant supporting staff who did not bear their responsibilities. The latter—staff officers, officials, clerks, ciphering personnel—worked hard at the summits, but also played hard. Duty officers were always in attendance upon the teletype machines which rattled forth signals and reports around the clock. Typists composed minutes of the day’s meetings, and planners prepared drafts for the next. But it seemed to these young men and a few women miraculous to be delivered for a few weeks from rationed, battered, darkened England to bask in bright lights and prodigious quantities of food and drink, all of it free. Most danced and partied enthusiastically through the nights while their great men wrangled. The English visitors revelled in shopping opportunities unknown in Britain for four years.
Events did more than changes of heart to patch up Anglo-American differences at Quebec. The known readiness of the new Italian government to surrender made it plain to Marshall and his colleagues that Allied forces in Sicily must advance into Italy. It seemed unthinkable to leave a vacuum which the Germans could fill as they chose. The British, for their part, professed to endorse the Overlord plan presented by Morgan and the COSSAC team. There was much bickering about a cut-off date at which Allied divisions earmarked for France must be withdrawn from the Mediterranean, and t
hus about what objectives in Italy might feasibly be attained beforehand. Churchill, who dreamed of Allied armies driving towards Vienna, instead reluctantly endorsed a line from Livorno to Ancona by November, saying: ‘If we can’t have the best, these are very good second bests.’ In the event, Livorno and Ancona would not be taken until late June 1944. But in the heady days of August the Allies still supposed that once the Italians surrendered, the Germans would not make much of a fight for Mussolini’s country.
When the conference ended on 24 August, Ian Jacob wrote: ‘There seems to be general satisfaction, though I can’t see what has been decided which takes us much beyond Trident.’ The ‘general satisfaction’ was merely a matter of public courtesy. Brooke wrote: ‘The Quebec conference has left me absolutely cooked.’ He subsequently acknowledged that at this time he was close to a nervous breakdown. The Americans were deeply unhappy about British conditionality towards Overlord. Churchill’s team had not for a moment abandoned their determination to keep the Allies deeply engaged in Italy, even at risk to D-Day. After a brief break at a mountain camp for fly-fishing—not a pastime which Churchill indulged with much conviction—he travelled to Washington, where he spent the next five days urging the need to hasten operations in Italy. On 3 September, Italian representatives signed the surrender document at Cassibili in Sicily, while at dawn units of Eighth Army landed on the Italian mainland north of Reggio. Five days later, the British 1st Airborne Division seized the port of Taranto without opposition, which Churchill dubbed ‘a masterstroke’ in a laudatory signal to Alexander.
On 9 September, Mark Clark’s Fifth Army staged an amphibious assault at Salerno, precipitating one of the bloodiest battles of the campaign, and a near-disaster. ‘It was like fighting tanks bare-handed,’ wrote an American infantry colonel facing a Panzer assault on the beachhead. ‘I saw riflemen swarm over the top of moving German tanks trying to shoot through slits or throw grenades inside. Other tanks would machine-gun them off. They ran over wounded men…and spun their treads.’ In the first hours, Clark was sufficiently panicked to order re-embarkation, until overruled by Alexander. At painful cost, a perimeter was established and held. That day, as German forces raced to occupy key strategic positions across southern Italy, the Italian fleet set off towards Malta to surrender. Its flagship, the battleship Roma, was sunk en route by German bombers, once again demonstrating the Luftwaffe’s skills against maritime targets. A mad Allied plan for a parachute assault on Rome was mercifully cancelled at the last moment. Even the Anglo-Americans at their most optimistic were forced to acknowledge that, against the Germans, excessive boldness was invariably punished.
Churchill was mortified that, once again, he was in Roosevelt’s company when bad news came. He had held out to the president a prospect of easy victory in Italy. Now, instead, they learned of savage German resistance at Salerno. The British had been naïve in anticipating that a surrender by Italy’s government must of itself deliver most of the country into Allied hands. Brooke had told the combined chiefs of staff on 13 May: ‘He did not believe Germany would try to control an Italy which was not fighting.’ He and Churchill were importantly deceived by Ultra decrypts which showed that the Germans intended to abandon most of Italy without a fight. In the event, however, and as so often, Hitler changed his mind. This was a direct consequence of the Allied armies’ poor showing, in German eyes, on Sicily and at Salerno. Anglo-American commanders and men exposed their limitations. Montgomery’s performance was no more impressive than that of Mark Clark. The Germans were astonished by the ease with which some British and American soldiers allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. Kesselring, the German commander on the spot, concluded that defending Italy against such an enemy might be less difficult than he had supposed. He reported accordingly to Hitler. The Führer responded by ordering a vigorous defence of the peninsula, a task which the field marshal—who was appointed German supreme commander in Italy on 6 November—undertook with extraordinary energy and effectiveness. Allied fumbling of the first phase of operations in Italy thus had critical consequences for the rest of the campaign.
In those days in America, Churchill became excited by a possible landing on the Dalmatian coast, using 75,000 Polish troops and possibly the New Zealand Division. On 10 September Roosevelt departed for Hyde Park, leaving Britain’s prime minister installed in America’s capital: ‘Winston, please treat the White House as your home,’ said the president generously, urging him to invite whomever he liked. Churchill used this licence to the full, summoning Marshall to press upon him the case for hastening reinforcements to Italy. On 14 September, at last he returned to Halifax, to board the battlecruiser Renown for home. His American hosts were glad to see him go. Their enthusiasm for his exhausting presence had worn as thin as their patience with his Mediterranean fantasies. Roosevelt’s secretary William Hassett wrote after their visitor’s previous Washington departure in May: ‘Must be a relief to the Boss for Churchill is a trying guest—drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney, irregular routines, works nights, sleeps days, turns the clocks upside down…Churchill has brains, guts…and a determination to preserve the British Empire…He has everything except vision.’ This was a view now almost universal within Roosevelt’s administration. Harry Hopkins told Eden, when the Foreign Secretary visited Washington, that the president—and indeed Hopkins himself—‘loves W as a man for the war, but is horrified at his reactionary attitude for after the war’. Hopkins spoke of the prime minister’s age, ‘his unteachability’.
The leaders of the United States were justly convinced that the time for butterfly strategy-making was over. British evasions over a cross-Channel attack were no longer justifiable. If the Western Allies were to engage land forces on the Continent of Europe in time to affect outcomes before the Russians defeated Hitler on their own, Overlord must take place in 1944. Henceforth, commitments in Italy must be adjusted to fit the overriding priority of the invasion of north-west Europe, and not vice versa. Marshall and his colleagues could scarcely be blamed for their exasperation at the prime minister’s renewed pleas for a descent on north Norway, and the fit of enthusiasm with which he was seized for operations in the eastern Mediterranean.
It was widely expected both in Washington and London that Marshall would command Overlord. Churchill had broken it to Brooke at Quebec that his earlier insouciant offer of this glittering appointment to the CIGS was no longer open. It was foolish of both the prime minister and the general to have supposed for a moment that a British officer might be acceptable for the role; and even more so of Brooke, by his own admission, to sulk for several months about his disappointment. He possessed a sublime, and exaggerated, conceit about his own strategic wisdom. He had grievously injured himself in American eyes by prevarications about Overlord, even more outspokenly expressed than those of the prime minister. It was absurd to suppose that Brooke might have claimed command of an operation which for months he had denounced as being launched prematurely.
Only an American could credibly lead this predominantly American crusade, but Roosevelt kept open until November his choice of appointee. Marshall wanted the job, sure enough. The chief of the army indulged a brief fantasy that Sir John Dill might be his deputy, or even—if the British persuaded the president that one of their own should command—that the former CIGS might be supreme commander. Stimson wanted Marshall, because he believed that the chief of the army alone had the authority and strength of character to overcome the ‘mercurial inconstancy’ of the prime minister.
There was always a paradox about Churchill as warlord. On the one hand, he had a wonderful instinct for the fray, more highly developed than that of any of his service advisers. Yet his genius for war was flawed by an enthusiasm for dashes, raids, skirmishes, diversions, sallies more appropriate—as officers who worked with him often remarked—to a Victorian cavalry subaltern than to the director of a vast industrial war effort. The doctrine of concentration of force, an obsession of the Americans and especially of
Marshall, was foreign to his nature. Though Churchill addressed his duties with profound seriousness of purpose, he wanted war, like life, to be fun. This caused the American service chiefs, earnest men all, not infrequently to think him guilty of frivolity as well as of pursuing selfish nationalistic purposes. Brooke, meanwhile, was perhaps the greatest staff officer the British Army has ever known. But experience of fighting the Germans for four years on short commons had made him a cautious strategist, and by this stage of the war an unconvincing one. He shared the Americans’ impatience, indeed exasperation, with Churchill’s wilder schemes. But in the autumn of 1943, and indeed well into the winter, Brooke was joined to the prime minister in a common apprehension about Overlord. American resolution alone ensured that the operational timetable for D-Day was maintained. If Roosevelt and Marshall had been more malleable, the British would have chosen to keep larger forces in Italy, especially when Clark’s and Montgomery’s advances languished. D-Day would have been delayed until 1945.
The Allies were now committed to take the port of Naples, and exploit northwards to Rome. Thereafter, they had uneasily agreed that the future of the Italian campaign should be settled in the light of events. John Kennedy wrote on 3 September: ‘It will be interesting to see whether the Americans have judged the Mediterranean war better than we have.’ He himself bitterly regretted the scheduled diversion of forces from Italy to Overlord: ‘But we cannot dictate and I doubt if we could have done more to persuade the Americans. They are convinced that the landing in France is the only way to win the war quickly, & will listen to no arguments as to the mechanical difficulties of the operation or the necessity of weakening & drawing off the Germans by means of operations in the Medn.’ A month later, he was still writing about the arguments concerning ‘the Mediterranean versus Overlord strategy’, but the War Office seemed resigned to the likely triumph of the latter: ‘In the end I suppose that we shall probably go into France with little opposition & the historians will say that we missed glorious opportunities a year earlier etc. etc.’