Finest Years (40 page)

Grandiose American promises of aid—initially eight million tons for 1942-43, half of this food—foundered on the Allies' inability to ship anything like such quantities. By the end of June 1943 less than three million tons had been delivered of a pledged 4.4 million. Joan Beaumont again:‘
Considerable though these
achievements and sacrifices were, they seemed poor in contrast to the promises which had been made…At the time when the Russian need was greatest, the assistance from the West…was at its most uncertain.' There was special Soviet bitterness about British refusal of repeated requests for Spitfires. The most strident of Russia's propagandists, Ilya Ehrenburg, denounced to his millions of Soviet readers the fact that the Allies were ‘
sending very few aircraft
, and not the best they have either'. The Russians claimed to be insulted on discovering that some Hurricanes they received were reconditioned rather than new. Given the poor quality of planes and tanks provided, Moscow began to focus its demands upon trucks and food.

Molotov flew on from London to Washington, where the White House butler reported to Roosevelt that Russia's foreign minister had arrived with a pistol in his suitcase. The president observed that they must simply hope it was not intended for use on him. Following a meeting at the White House on 30 May, Molotov displayed in his report to Moscow a frustration at Roosevelt's evasive bonhomie that would have struck a chord with the British. Dinner, the Russian complained, ‘was followed by a lengthy but meaningless conversation…I said that it would be desirable to engage at least 40 German divisions at the Western front in the summer and autumn of this year. Roosevelt and Marshall responded that they very much wanted to achieve this, but faced immediate shipping difficulties in moving forces to France.' The Russian pleaded that if there was no Second
Front in 1942, Germany would be much stronger in 1943. ‘
They offered no definite
information.' However, the president said that ‘
preparations for the second front
are under way…he, Roosevelt is trying to persuade the American generals to take the risk and land 6 to 10 divisions in France. It is possible that it will mean another Dunkirk and the loss of 100,000-120,000 men, but the sacrifices have to be made to provide help in 1942 and shatter German morale.'

Stalin cabled again on 3 June, first rebuking Molotov for the brevity of his reports. The Soviet leader said that he did not want to be told mere essentials. He needed trivial details as well, to provide a sense of mood. ‘
Finally, we think it
absolutely necessary that both [British and American] communiqués contain paragraphs about establishing the second front in Europe, and state that full agreement had been reached on this issue. We also think it necessary that both communiqués should include specifics on deliveries of material from Britain and the USA to the Soviet Union.'

Here were the same imperatives pressing Stalin as had weighed upon Churchill in 1940-41.
First, and as the Russian leader
acknowledged in his cables to Molotov, it was vital to persuade Hitler that there was a real threat of an Allied invasion of France, to deter him from transferring further divisions to the eastern front. Second, morale was as important to the peoples of the Soviet Union as to those of the democracies. Every gleam of hope was precious. Stalin nursed no real expectation that Anglo-American armies would land on the Continent in 1942. But, just as Churchill in 1941 promoted in Britain much more ambitious expectations of American belligerence than the facts merited, so Stalin wished to trumpet to the Russian people Roosevelt's and Churchill's assurances that a Second Front was coming, even though he himself did not believe them. If the British and Americans later breached such assurances, this would provide useful evidence of capitalist perfidy. For embattled Russia in the summer of 1942, ‘later' seemed scarcely to matter.

Back in London on 9 June, Molotov met Churchill once more, before the signing of a treaty of alliance. If the Russian's purpose was to promote discord between London and Washington, he was
by no means unsuccessful. The prime minister was much disturbed when Molotov told him of Roosevelt's aspirations for the post-war world, including international trusteeship for the Dutch and French empires in Asia, and enforced disarmament of all save the Great Powers. Then the foreign minister outlined his exchanges at the White House about the Second Front:

I mentioned among other things that Roosevelt agreed with the point of view that I had set forth, i.e., that it could prove harder to establish a second front in 1943 than in 1942 due to possible grave problems on our front. Finally, I mentioned that the president attached such great importance to the creation of a second front in 1942 that he was prepared to gamble, to endure another Dunkirk and lose 100,000 or 120,000 men…I stressed however that I thought the number of divisions which Roosevelt proposed to commit insufficient, i.e., six to ten.

Here Churchill interrupted
me in great agitation, declaring that he would never agree to another Dunkirk and a fruitless sacrifice of 100,000 men, no matter who recommended such a notion. When I replied that I was only conveying Roosevelt's view, Churchill responded: ‘I shall tell him my view on this issue myself.'

Oliver Harvey recorded the same conversation: ‘
Roosevelt had calmly told
Molotov he would be prepared to contemplate a sacrifice of 120,000 men if necessary—our men. PM said he would not hear of it.'

Molotov said years later: ‘
We had to squeeze
everything we could get out of [the Allies]. I have no doubt that Stalin did not believe [that a Second Front would happen]. But one had to demand it! One had to demand it for the sake of our own people. Because people were waiting, weren't they, to see whether help [from the Allies] would come. That sheet of paper [the Anglo-Soviet agreement] was of great political significance to us. It cheered people up, and that meant a lot then.'

The Anglo-Soviet Treaty signed on 26 May merely committed ‘
the High Contracting Parties
…
to afford one another military and other assistance and support of all kinds'. But in Moscow after Molotov's return from London,
Pravda
reported: ‘The Day is at hand when the Second Front will open.' On 19 June the newspaper described a meeting of the Supreme Soviet, whose members were told that the accords reached between the Soviet Union, Britain and the US reflected the fact ‘that complete agreement had been achieved about the urgency of opening of the second front in Europe in 1942'. This announcement, said the paper, was received with protracted applause, as was a subsequent statement that ‘these agreements are of the highest importance for the nations of the Soviet Union, since the opening of the second front in Europe will create insurmountable difficulties for Hitler's armies on our front'. All this was untrue, and well understood to be so by Stalin and Molotov. But among so many other deceits, what was one more, deemed so necessary to the spirit of the Russian people? And in this case the Russians were entirely entitled to declare that the Americans, and in lesser degree the British, were making promises in bad faith.

Molotov, in old age, asserted that he
found Churchill ‘smarter'
than Roosevelt: ‘
I knew them all
, these capitalists, but Churchill was the strongest and cleverest…
As for Roosevelt
, he believed in dollars. Not that he believed in nothing else, but he thought that they were so rich and we so poor, and that we would become so weakened that we would come to the Americans and beg. This was their mistake…They woke up when they'd lost half of Europe. And here of course Churchill found himself in a very foolish predicament. In my opinion, Churchill was the most intelligent of them, as an imperialist. He knew that if we, the Russians, defeated Germany, then England would start losing its feathers. He realised this. As for Roosevelt, he thought: [Russia] is a poor country with no industry, no grain, they are going to come and beg. There is no other way out for them. And we saw all this completely differently. The entire nation had been prepared for the sacrifices, for struggle.' This was, of course, a characteristic Soviet post-facto exposition of what took place in 1942-43. But Molotov seems right to have perceived in the Americans'
behaviour a fundamental condescension, of the same kind that underlay their attitude towards Britain. It was rooted in a belief that when the conflict ended, US power would be unchallengeable by either ally.

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his old friend George Patton on 20 July 1942: ‘This war is still young.' For Americans, this was true. But the British, after almost three years of privation, defeat, intermittent bombardment and enforced inaction, saw matters very differently. Washington was seeking to browbeat Churchill into sacrificing a British army, with token American participation, as a gesture of support for the Soviet Union. Marshall's cardinal mistake was failure to perceive that the scale of a battle in France was beyond the power of the Allies to determine. The Allies might seek to conduct a minor operation, but the Germans could mass forces to convert this into a major disaster.

There was never the smallest possibility that the prime minister and his generals would accede to the US proposal. ‘I do not think there is much doing on the French coast this year,' the prime minister minuted the chiefs of staff on 1 June. Britain in mid-1942 had fifteen divisions in the Middle East, ten in India and thirty at home, few of the latter ready for war. None of the fifteen first-line infantry divisions in Home Forces was fully equipped, while nine ‘lower establishment' divisions were in worse case.
Two-thirds of weapons
and equipment emerging from factories were being shipped directly overseas, where they were needed ‘at the sharp end', while Home Forces continued to queue for resources.

That spring Churchill pressed two proposals upon his chiefs of staff against their wishes. He prevailed on one, though not the other. He overruled Brooke's judgement that the seizure of Vichy-held Madagascar was unnecessary. Troops landed on the island in May, quickly capturing the main port, then fighting a six-month campaign against dogged Vichy resistance before the entire island was subdued in November. This was a wise precautionary move. If the Japanese, at the floodtide of their conquests, had fulfilled their ambitions to take Madagascar, British communications with India and the Middle East would have been critically threatened. The other Churchillian
proposal, however, for a landing in north Norway, was defeated by all-service objections. It should have been within the powers of the British Army in 1942 to seize and hold a Norwegian perimeter, thus frustrating further attacks on convoys to Russia by the Luftwaffe and German navy. But given the proven shortcomings of the army and Fleet Air Arm, Brooke was probably right to quash the plan. Such an operation would have fatally compromised Churchill's North African ambitions, which promised larger gains for lesser hazards.

The British and American publics were, however, ignorant of the weakness of the Western Allies' armed forces in comparison to those of their enemies. For most of 1942 they debated the Second Front with a fervour that exasperated the prime minister and his commanders. Churchill was disgusted by a
Time
magazine article which described Britain as ‘oft-burned, defensive-minded', and wrote to Brendan Bracken: ‘
This vicious rag should
have no special facilities here.' The British embassy in Washington reported to London: ‘
Advocacy of a second front
has increased largely as a result of the Russian reverses. An influential section of editorial opinion…has been insisting that the danger of such an operation now is more than outweighed by the greater danger likely to arise if it is delayed.' The British were constantly provoked by manifestations of American ignorance about operational difficulties.
A US officer at dinner
in London one night demanded of a British general why more fighters could not be flown to Malta, to protect Mediterranean convoys. The visitor was oblivious of the fact, irritably explained by his host, that Malta was far beyond the range of Spitfires or Hurricanes flying from Gibraltar.

The British were increasingly troubled by the difficulties of conveying their views to an American leadership of which both the political and military elements seemed resistant to its ally's opinions. A British official in Washington wrote to London in May 1942: ‘
No Englishman here
has the close relationship with Hopkins and the President which are necessary. There is no one who can continually represent to the White House the Prime Minister's views on war direction. The Ambassador does not regard it within his sphere.
Dill dare not as he would ruin his relationship with the US chiefs of staff if he saw Hopkins too often.' Brigadier Vivian Dykes of the British Military Mission wrote: ‘
We simply hold no cards
at all, yet London expects us to work miracles. It is a hard life.'

Churchill concluded that only another personal meeting with Roosevelt could resolve the Second Front issue, or more appropriately the alternative North African landing scheme—Operation
Torch
—in Britain's favour. He took off once more with Alan Brooke, in a Boeing flying-boat. By the afternoon of 19 June he was being driven around Roosevelt's Hyde Park estate,
tête-à-tête
with his host. Here was exactly the scenario which Churchill wanted, and which the US chiefs of staff deplored. Their commander-in-chief was talking alone with Britain's fiercely persuasive prime minister. Churchill wrote in his memoirs that the two men thus got more business done than at conferences. This was disingenuous. What he meant, of course, was that he was free from impassioned and hostile interventions by Marshall and his colleagues. At Hyde Park the prime minister was enchanted to be treated as ‘family', though his staff sometimes overreached themselves in exploiting guest privileges.
Private secretary John Martin
was sternly rebuked by Roosevelt's telephonist, Louise Hachmeister, when she found him ensconced in her master's study, using the president's direct line to Washington.