Finest Years (49 page)

The conference broke up with fervent expressions of goodwill on all sides. Churchill gave his staff his usual instruction when it was time to pack, borrowed from memories of the back end of theatre programmes: ‘Wigs by Clarkson.' The prime minister and president drove for four hours to Marrakesh, where they installed themselves at the Villa Taylor. That evening, as the sun was setting amid the snowclad Atlas mountains, Churchill climbed to the roof to savour the scene, which had much moved him on a peacetime visit six years earlier. Now he insisted that the president must share the experience. Two servants locked hands to form a chair on which the president was carried up the winding stairs, ‘his paralysed legs dangling like the limbs of a ventriloquist's dummy', as Charles Moran noted cruelly. The prime minister murmured: ‘It's the most lovely spot in the whole world.'

It seems open to doubt whether Roosevelt gained equal pleasure from an experience which emphasised his own incapacity. Churchill could be notably insensitive to the vulnerabilities of others. Amid delight about winning his battle for the Italian commitment at Casablanca, he allowed himself to express an enthusiasm for Britain's ally which few of Roosevelt's conference team would have reciprocated: ‘I love these Americans,' he told his doctor, ‘they behave so generously.' Yet never again would his enthusiasm be so unqualified. If there had been a period of real intimacy between the US president and the British prime minister in 1941-42, when Roosevelt in some measure deferred to Churchill's experience of war, thereafter their relationship became steadily more distant. Mutual courtesies, affectionate rhetoric, were sustained. But perceptions of national interest diverged with increasing explicitness.

Before the two leaders parted, they dispatched a joint cable to
Moscow outlining the conference decisions. ‘
Whatever we decided
to undertake in 1943 would have to be represented to Stalin as something very big,' wrote Ian Jacob. The Soviet warlord was now told that there would be a landing in Europe ‘as soon as practicable'. Neither leader supposed, however, that their studied vagueness would fool Moscow. ‘Nothing in the world will be accepted by Stalin as an alternative to our placing 50 or 60 divisions in France by the spring of this year,' observed Churchill. ‘I think he will be disappointed and furious.' The prime minister was correct. To Marshal Georgy Zhukov, by now his most trusted commander, Stalin vented his anger about the inadequacy of Allied aid: ‘
Hundreds of thousands of Soviet people
are giving their lives in the struggle against fascism, and Churchill is haggling with us about two dozen Hurricanes. And anyway those Hurricanes are crap—our pilots think nothing of them.'

There was one important aspect of the Casablanca conference, and indeed of Allied strategy-making for the rest of the war, which was never expressly articulated by Western leaders, and is still seldom directly acknowledged by historians. The Americans and British flattered themselves that they were shaping policies which would bring about the destruction of Nazism. Yet in truth, every option they considered and every operation they subsequently executed remained subordinate to the struggle on the eastern front. The Western Allies never became responsible for the defeat of Germany's main armies. They merely assisted the Russians to accomplish this. For all the enthusiasm of George Marshall and his colleagues to invade Europe, it remains impossible to believe that the US would have been any more willing than was Britain to accept millions of casualties to fulfil the attritional role of the Red Army at Stalingrad, Kursk, and in a hundred lesser bloodbaths between 1942 and 1945. Roosevelt and Churchill had the satisfaction of occupying higher moral ground than Stalin. But it is hard to dispute the Soviet warlord's superior claim to be called the architect of victory.

Roosevelt took off for home on 25 January. Churchill lingered, and in those surroundings which he loved created his only painting of the war, a view of the Atlas mountains. Then he embarked upon one
of his most energetic rounds of wartime travelling, which pleased chiefly himself. Brooke was obliged to cancel a cherished scheme for two days' sightseeing and a Moroccan partridge shoot, to accompany his master to Turkey. The cabinet opposed this expedition, which ministers considered futile. Churchill overruled them, hankering to revive his grand design, which had foundered in 1941, to raise the Balkans against Hitler. He also rejoiced in the exhilaration of touring the Mediterranean as a victorious warlord, after the humiliations and frustrations of earlier years.

Arrived at the Cairo embassy early on 26 January, he recoiled from the ambassadress's offer of breakfast tea, demanding instead white wine. Brooke described the scene with fastidious amazement: ‘A tumbler was brought which he drained in one go, and then licked his lips, turned to Jacqueline [Lampson] and said: “
Ah! that is good
, but you know, I have already had two whiskies and soda and 2 cigars this morning”!! It was then only shortly after 7.30am. We had travelled all night in poor comfort, covering some 2300 miles in a flight of over 11 hours, a proportion of which was at over 11,000 ft., and there he was, as fresh as paint, drinking wine on top of two previous whiskies and 2 cigars!!' In Cairo, Churchill held significant conversations with his former historical researcher, the Oxford don William Deakin, now an SOE officer handling Yugoslavia. Deakin described the modest help being dispatched to the royalist General Mihailovic and his Cetnik guerrillas. He briefed the prime minister for the first time about the significance of Josef Broz, ‘Tito', who led a rapidly growing force of some 20,000 insurgents whom SOE believed to be less communist than they appeared. Deakin's views were supported by Ultra intercepts already known to Churchill, revealing German belief that the communists represented a much more substantial military threat than the Cetniks.

The prime minister endorsed approaches to Tito, and Deakin himself was soon parachuted to the Croat leader's headquarters. Unbeknown to the British, the partisan chief spent the spring of 1943 parleying with the Germans about a possible truce that would free his forces to destroy Mihailovic. Nazi intransigence, however, obliged the partisans to fight the Axis. The British, and especially
officers of SOE, were guilty of persistent delusions about Tito's politics. But they were right about one big thing: Hitler's determination to defend Yugoslavia and its mineral resources caused him to deploy large forces in a country well-suited to guerrilla operations. There, as nowhere else in occupied Europe outside Russian territory, internal resistance achieved a significant strategic impact.

The military contingent in Churchill's party set off for neutral Turkey clad in borrowed and absurdly ill-fitting civilian clothes. Churchill's visit to President Ismet Iononu on 30 January was no more successful than the cabinet had anticipated. The Turks were full of charm and protestations of goodwill. Always fearful of Stalin, they valued British good offices to dissuade the Russians from aggression on their northern border. In the stuffy railway carriage in which the two sides met, the British were half-embarrassed, half-impressed by Churchill's insistence on addressing the Ankara delegation in his fluent but incomprehensible French. It would have made no difference had he spoken in Chinese. The Turks were uninterested in joining the war. Why should they have done so? It might be true that the Allies now looked like winners. But since the Anglo-Americans had no designs on Turkey, it was surely prudent for that impoverished nation to maintain its neutrality. Brooke fretted about the security risks to the prime minister, on an ill-guarded train in the middle of nowhere. Local rumour had broadcast news of the visit far and wide. The CIGS searched out Churchill's detective, whom he discovered eating a hearty supper in the dining car: ‘
I told him that
the security arrangements were very poor and that he and his assistant must make a point of occasionally patrolling round Winston's sleeper through the night. He replied in an insolent manner: “Am I expected to work all night as well as all day?” I then told him that he had travelled in identical comfort with the rest of the party, and that I was certainly not aware that he had even started working that day.'

But the visit passed off safely until Churchill's Liberator, taxi-ing to take-off on his departure, bogged down on the runway at Adana. The prime minister made comic personal attempts to direct recovery
operations, with much gesticulation to the Turks about the plane's sunken wheel, before having recourse to a spare aircraft. Back in Cairo on 1 February, he learned of the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. Cabling to congratulate Stalin, he enthused about ‘a heavy operation across the Channel in August', involving seventeen to twenty British and US divisions. The Russians could scarcely be blamed for adopting a cynical view of their allies when the prime minister sought to sustain this charade within days of settling an entirely different agenda at Casablanca. He flew on to Montgomery's headquarters outside Tripoli. In a natural amphitheatre at Castel Benito, he addressed soldiers of Eighth Army. ‘After the war,' he said, ‘when a man is asked what he did it will be quite sufficient to say “I marched and fought in the Desert Army.” And when history is written…your feats will gleam and glow and will be a source of song and story long after we who are gathered here have passed away.' With tears in his eyes, he took the salute as 51st Highland Division passed in review before him through the streets of Tripoli, led by its pipers. He visited the New Zealand Division and eulogised Freyburg, its commander.

In Algiers on 6 February, he told former Vichyite military leaders that ‘
if they marched with us
, we would not concern ourselves with past differences'. At last the British were successful in achieving recognition for De Gaulle in North Africa. General Giraud was replaced as principal French authority by a national committee of uneasily mingled Gaullists and Giraudists. American distaste for De Gaulle persisted. But Washington grudgingly acknowledged that the Free French, whose soldiers had been fighting the Axis powers while Vichy's men collaborated with them, must be permitted some share in determining their nation's future.

At this, the end of Churchill's Mediterranean odyssey, he mused aloud about the possibility of his own death. Ian Jacob noted his remarks: ‘
It would be a pity to have to
go out in the middle of such an interesting drama without seeing the end. But it wouldn't be a bad moment to leave—it is a straight run-in now, and even the cabinet could manage it.' His words were significant for two reasons.
First, he knew as well as any man how plausible it was that he should die on one of his wartime air journeys, as so many senior officers died. Two members of the Casablanca secretariat were killed when their plane was lost on the journey home, news which Brooke ordered to be temporarily withheld from Churchill when it came through on the eve of his own flight to Turkey. General Gott, the Polish General Sikorski, Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, together with Arthur Purvis, the head of Britain's Washington purchasing mission, were only the most prominent figures killed on RAF wartime flights—interestingly, hardly any prominent USAAF passengers fell victim to similar misfortunes. Churchill observed, when a North African take-off was delayed by magneto failure, that it was nice of the magneto to fail on the ground. So indeed it was.

He was right also to perceive that the most critical period of his leadership was at an end. Many dramas still lay ahead, but Britain no longer faced any danger of falling victim to Nazi tyranny. The course was set towards Allied victory. Back in London on 11 February 1943, making a Commons statement about Casablanca, he observed that Great Britain and the US were formerly peaceful nations, ill-armed and unprepared. By contrast, ‘
they are now warrior nations
, walking in the fear of the Lord, very heavily armed, and with an increasingly clear view of their own salvation'. Mindful of the resurgent U-boat threat in the Atlantic, he stressed the sea as the principal area of danger. In response to a foolish question about what plans existed for preventing Germany from starting another war, he replied that this would provide fit food for thought, ‘which would acquire more precise importance when the present unpleasantness has been ended satisfactorily'.

It would be absurd to describe Churchill, in the early spring of 1943, as having become redundant. But after three years in which he had done many things which no other man could, he was no longer vital to Britain's salvation. If in 1940-41 he had been his nation's deliverer, in 1942-43 the Americans owed him a greater debt than they recognised, for persuading their president to the
Mediterranean strategy. His strategic judgement had been superior to that of America's chiefs of staff. Hereafter, however, his vision became increasingly clouded and the influence of his country waned. For the rest of the war Churchill would loom much larger in the Grand Alliance as a personality than as leader of its least powerful element. Henceforward, never far from the minds of both Roosevelt and Stalin was the brutal question which Napoleon asked about the Pope: ‘How many divisions have the British?'

In 1943, to Winston Churchill and to many British, Russian and American people, it sometimes seemed that the Western Allies spent more time talking than fighting Hitler's armies. Granted, large forces of aircraft battered Germany in a bomber offensive of which much was made in newspapers and cables to Stalin. The Royal Navy, with growing strength, assurance and success, was still waging a vital defensive struggle to hold open the Atlantic convoy routes. US forces fought savage battles with the Japanese in the Pacific. But this was the last year of the war in which shortage of resources severely constrained Anglo-American ground action. In 1944 a vast array of ships, planes, weapons and equipment generated by US industrial mobilisation flooded forth onto the battlefields, arming Allied forces on land, at sea and in the air on a scale such as the world had never seen. Until then, however, Churchill's and Roosevelt's armies engaging the Axis remained pathetically small in comparison to those of the Soviets.

The British committed thirteen divisions to North Africa, the Americans six. Of these formations, eight would land in Sicily. Some eleven British divisions in varying states of manning and under-equipment remained at home, training for operations in France or wherever else the prime minister decided to commit them. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of British troops were scattered along the North African littoral, and throughout Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Persia and India. These performed logistical and garrison functions of varying degrees of utility, but were not, as Churchill
often reminded Alan Brooke, killing Italians, Germans or Japanese. The US Marine Corps was deployed in the Pacific, while General Douglas MacArthur directed a modest army contingent in Australia and New Guinea. In 1943 the latter campaign was dominated by three Australian divisions. A huge Indian Army in India, supplemented by British units, pursued desultory operations, but seldom that year proved able to deploy more than six divisions against the Japanese. At a time when Stalin and Hitler were pitting some 200 apiece against each other in the east, it is scarcely surprising that the Russians viewed their allies' Mediterranean activities with contempt.

Most Anglo-American historians agree that a D-Day in France in 1943 would have been a disaster. It is only necessary to consider the ferocity of the resistance the Germans mounted in Normandy between June and August 1944 to imagine how much more formidable could have been their response to an invasion a year earlier, when Hitler's power was much greater, that of the Allies much less. But it infuriated the Russians that the British and Americans exercised to the full their luxury of choice, such as Stalin lacked after June 1941, about when to engage a major German army. It is possible that the Allies might have got ashore in France in 1943, and stayed there. But the casualties of the campaign that followed would have been horrendous, dwarfing those of north-west Europe in 1944-45. While the Russians fought most of their war beneath the triple goads of patriotism, compulsion and indifference to human cost, the Anglo-Americans were able to husband lives until their industrial resources could be deployed to overwhelming advantage. They chose to deploy far smaller front-line ground combat forces in proportion to their national populations than either Russia or Germany. David French, author of an acute study of the British Army in World War II, observes: ‘
In absolute terms
the British reduced their casualties simply by abstaining for long periods of the war from fighting the kind of intensive land battles in which they were bound to incur heavy losses.'

On 13 February 1943, when it was still hoped that the North African campaign could be wound up within a month, Churchill was exasperated to hear that the Sicilian landing could not take place
before July. He cabled Hopkins in Washington: ‘I think it is an awful thing that in April, May and June, not a single American or British soldier will be killing a single German or Italian soldier while the Russians are chasing 185 divisions around.' He, like the British people, was acutely conscious of the Russians' losses and—increasingly—of their victories in the Caucasus, at Kharkov and Stalingrad. He cabled Stalin constantly about the progress of the RAF's bomber offensive, and assured him mendaciously that the French invasion plan was being ‘kept alive from week to week'. When the chiefs of staff asked him to press Moscow for information about Russian military plans, he demurred: ‘I feel so conscious of the poor contribution the British and American armies are making…that I should not be prepared to court the certain rebuff which would attend a request for information.' In a flush of impatience, he asked his chiefs if the British could launch
Husky
, as the Sicily operation was now codenamed, on their own. No, was the firm reply. But in asking the question, Churchill discredited American suspicions that he was reluctant for his soldiers to fight.

February's defeat at the Kasserine pass in Tunisia, where a German thrust drove back in rout superior US forces, had no strategic significance. Within days Eisenhower's troops had regrouped and regained the lost ground. But it dealt a decisive blow to hopes of an early end of the campaign. On 27 February, Alexander reported on the state of US forces and the three French divisions, mostly colonial troops, now joining the campaign: ‘
Americans require experience
and French require arms…Hate to disappoint you, but final victory in North Africa is not (repeat not) just around the corner.'

It was a perverse feature of the war, that while the British people sustained warm admiration for Russian achievements, they seldom displayed the same generosity towards Americans. The Grand Alliance spawned a host of Anglo-Soviet friendship groups in Britain, but few Anglo-American ones. A Home Intelligence report of 14 January 1943 declared: ‘At the time of Pearl Harbor, public interest in the US received a momentary stimulus which soon declined and has (in marked contrast to the attitude to Russia and things Russian)
remained low ever since.' When news of the Kasserine battle was released in Britain, Violet Bonham Carter recorded in her diary a friend's story of meeting a vegetable seller in Covent Garden who said: ‘
Good news today
, sir!' ‘Have the Russians done well?' ‘No—the Americans have got the knock.' This, asserted Bonham Carter, represented ‘the universal reaction' to news of the reverse that had befallen Eisenhower's armies. A best-selling novel of the time was
How Green was My Valley
; Attlee jested unkindly that Alexander in North Africa was now writing a sequel,
How Green is My Ally
. Churchill deleted from a draft of his memoirs a February letter to the King in which he wrote: ‘
The enemy make a great mistake
if they think that all the troops we have there are in the same green state as are our United States friends.' Americans were irked to read the findings of a Gallup Poll that asked British people which ally was making the greatest contribution to winning the war. Some
50 per cent answered ‘Russia', 43 per cent ‘Britain'
, 5 per cent ‘China', and just 3 per cent ‘the United States'.

The British knew that the war was a long way from ending, and were resigned to that prospect. But after more than three years of bombardment, privation and defeats, weariness had set in. It is hard to overstate the impact of the blackout on domestic morale. Year after year, throughout the hours of darkness the gloom of Britain's cities was relieved by no visible chink of light. As the novelist Anthony Powell observed, few people's tempers were as sound in 1943 as they had been in 1939. The British were deeply sensitive to American triumphalism, of which echoes wafted across the Atlantic from these allies who still ate prodigiously and had never been bombed. Harold Macmillan wrote with lofty disdain about the Americans around him in the Mediterranean: ‘
They all look exactly alike
to me—like Japanese or Chinese.'

Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam lamented news of a later US battlefield success: ‘
I am told that our efforts
are scarcely noted in the American press. I fancy that the Americans after this war are likely to be more swollen-headed and tiresome than after the last; they may well be more troublesome to us than the Russians.' In their
hearts, all these men knew that their country could accomplish nothing without the US, that only American resources made the defeat of Hitler possible. But it was sometimes hard to avoid indulging ungenerous sentiments, amid British consciousness that the struggle was reducing their own society to penury, while America grew relentlessly in wealth and might. If many upper-crust British people hoped that the Soviets and Nazis would destroy each other in the course of the war, most Americans seemed well pleased by the prospect of the British Empire becoming a casualty of victory.

The Russians expressed renewed impatience about lack of progress in the Mediterranean. Stalin cabled Churchill: ‘The weight of the Anglo-American offensive in North Africa has not only not increased, but there has been no development of the offensive at all, and the time limit for the operations set by yourself was extended.' The Soviet leader said that thirty-six German divisions were being redeployed from the west to the eastern front, an unimpressive testimonial to Anglo-American efforts. Churchill persuaded himself that this show of anger reflected the influence of the Soviet hierarchy. He still cherished delusions that he possessed a personal understanding with Stalin, interrupted only when other members of the Moscow politburo demanded a harsher line with the imperialists. Anglo-Russian relations worsened again when the Admiralty insisted on cancellation of its March convoy to Archangel. German capital ships posed a continuing threat off north Norway, while British naval resources were strained to the limits by Mediterranean and Atlantic commitments. In early spring, for the last time in the war Allied decryption of U-boat signals was interrupted, with shocking consequences for several Atlantic convoys—forty-two merchant ships were lost in March, against twenty-six in February.

Churchill sought to placate Moscow by promising a dramatic increase in aircraft deliveries via Persia, and 240,000 tons of supplies in August. But once again, British assurances were unfulfilled because of shipping and convoying difficulties. Stalin cared nothing about these. Why should he have done? He saw only that his armies were being called upon to destroy those of Hitler, aided by more Western
words than action. After the war, Brooke expressed surprise about his own diary: ‘
It is rather strange
that I did not refer more frequently to the news from Russia.' Indeed it was. More than two million Russian soldiers—and millions more civilians—died in 1943, while British and American forces fighting the Germans lost around 70,000 killed, including bomber aircrew. In Moscow's eyes, it seemed characteristic that the Allies should again suspend supplies to Russia, where the real war was being fought, for the convenience of their own marginal operations in North Africa. Hugh Dalton asked Britain's Moscow ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, if there was a danger of the Russians making a separate peace with Hitler: ‘
He says he would not
rule this out, if we continue to seem to them to be doing nothing to help.'

Anglo-Soviet relations were further soured by the Germans' April announcement of the discovery of thousands of bodies of Polish officers killed by the Soviets in 1939 at Katyn, near Smolensk. On the 15th Churchill told General Sikorski, the Poles' leader in Britain: ‘Alas, the German revelations are probably true. The Bolsheviks can be very cruel.' In the Commons smoking room, when Duff Cooper and Harold Nicolson mentioned Katyn to the prime minister, he answered tersely: ‘
The less said about that
the better.' He urged Sikorski not to make much publicly of the story, to avoid provoking Moscow. Amid Polish rage, this warning went unheeded. The ‘London Poles' publicly denounced the Russians, who promptly severed relations with them and announced the creation of their own Polish puppet regime. Churchill warned Stalin sharply that Britain, in its turn, would not recognise Moscow's Poles. Lines were now drawn. Moscow was bent upon a post-war settlement that brought Poland into a Soviet-dominated buffer zone. Churchill expended immense energy and political capital throughout the next two years in efforts to prevent such an outcome. Yet nothing could alter geography: Warsaw lay much closer to the armies of Stalin than to those of Churchill and Roosevelt.

It might be supposed that, in those days, Churchill's daily existence was eased by the facts that many of the big decisions were
taken, his critics had been put to flight by battlefield success; Britain's survival was no longer in doubt. But there was no relaxation for a man who had chosen personally to direct the war effort, in the midst of a global struggle, and whose existence was entirely focused upon hastening Allied victory. Ian Jacob described him in bed of a morning: ‘
Sawyers brings the breakfast
; then Kinna is sent for to take something down; meanwhile the bell is rung for the Private Secretary on duty who is asked for news, & told to summon someone, say CIGS or Pug. Then it is the candle for lighting cigars that is wanted. Then someone must get Hopkins on the phone. All this while the PM is half-sitting, half-lying in his bed, breathing rather stertorously, & surrounded by papers.'

Elizabeth Layton, one of Churchill's typists, remarked that he hated any of his staff to speak, unless they had something of substance to say. ‘
There is nothing in the world
he hates more than to waste one minute of his time,' she wrote to her parents. ‘
He is so funny
in the car; he may dictate, or he may just think for the whole hour, mumbling and grumbling away to himself; or he may be watching the various things we pass, suddenly making little ejaculations like “Oh—look at the lambs”, or “What kind of aeroplane is that”—to which little reply is expected. I think he knows now that I have learned not to waste his time by making any fool observations, which one might have felt obliged to break the silence by doing.' That weekend, Churchill was at his most benign. ‘We had good news about Tunisia,' Layton wrote to her parents, ‘
so the boss was in a good temper
, and really I've seldom had such fun. He was very nice to us all and treated us like human beings for once! Poor man, don't think I ever blame him for not doing so—it is so understandable.'