Finest Years (51 page)

On 4 June, Churchill flew home to Britain by Liberator. Four days later he offered a survey of the war to the House of Commons which was justly confident, though Marshall and his colleagues might have disputed his sunny portrayal of Anglo-American relations: ‘All sorts of divergences, all sorts of differences of outlook and all sorts of awkward little jars necessarily occur as we roll ponderously forward together along the rough and broken road of war. But none of these makes the slightest difference to our ever-growing concert and unity, there are none of them which cannot be settled face to face by heart-to-heart talks and patient argument. My own relations with the illustrious President of the United States have become in these years of war those of personal friendship and regard, and nothing will ever happen to separate us in comradeship and partnership of thought and action while we remain responsible for the conduct of affairs.' Here was, of course, an expression of fervent desire rather than of unfolding reality.

If Churchill expressed satisfaction about the progress of the war, Stalin did not. He cabled Roosevelt, copied to Churchill, to express dismay at Anglo-American postponements of D-Day, then wrote direct to the prime minister on 24 June: ‘It goes without saying that the Soviet Government cannot put up with such disregard of the most vital Soviet interests in the war against the common enemy.' Two days later, Churchill responded by dispatching one of his toughest messages of the war to the Russian leader: ‘Although until 22nd June 1941, we British were left alone to face the worst that Nazi Germany could do to us, I instantly began to aid Soviet Russia to the best of our limited means from the moment that she was herself attacked by Hitler. I am satisfied that I have done everything in human power to help you. Therefore the reproaches which you now cast upon your Western Allies leave me unmoved. Nor, apart from the damage to our military interests, should I have any difficulty in presenting my case to the British
Parliament and nation.' He was growing weary of the Russians, writing a fortnight later: ‘
Experience has taught me
that it is not worthwhile arguing with Soviet people. One simply has to confront them with the new facts and await their reactions.'

Yet many British citizens sympathised with the Russian view. ‘
I am the last to plead
Stalin's case,' Clark Kerr cabled from Moscow on 1 July, but it seemed to the British ambassador that the weakness in the British position lay ‘not in our inability to open this second front but in our having led him to believe we were going to'. Beaverbrook, still chronically disloyal, wrote to Henry Luce, overlord of
Time
magazine, on 2 July: ‘
In my view there is
an undercurrent of uncertainty [in Britain] whether an attack on Italy can, so far as Russia is concerned, attain the proportions of a real Second Front. The public are convinced that the chance has now come to take the fullest advantage of Russian successes. And no operation in the West which left unaffected the German dispositions in the East would for long meet with popular favour.' Surrey court shorthand-writer George King agreed with Beaverbrook: ‘
When Mr Churchill received
the freedom of London last week,' he wrote on 7 July, ‘he said it seemed clear that “before the leaves of autumn fall, real amphibious battles will be in progress.” One hopes so, because much as all must dread the casualties, the Allies owe such an action to Russia and the slaves of Europe.' Oliver Harvey wrote from the Foreign Office: ‘
To some of the Government
it is incredible, unforgivable, indeed inadmissible, that the Russian can be so successful. This is the attitude of the W[ar] O[ffice].'

On 10 July, Allied forces landed in Sicily under the command of Britain's Sir Harold Alexander. In Washington and London, ministers and generals knew that
Husky
was marred by all manner of blunders, great and small. The airborne assault was shambolic. Anglo-American command arrangements remained confused throughout the campaign. Italian troops showed no desire to fight seriously, but the three German divisions on the island displayed their usual high professionalism in resisting the attacks of Alexander's much superior forces. The British
and American publics, however, knew little about the bungles. They perceived only the overriding realities that the landings were successful, and that within weeks Axis forces were driven from Sicily. Brooke, who had been profoundly worried about
Husky
because it reflected a British design, experienced a surge of relief. Churchill, rejoicing, urged the chiefs of staff on 13 July to plan ambitiously for follow-up operations in Italy: ‘Why should we crawl up the leg like a harvest bug, from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee.' He wanted early amphibious landings, even before Sicily was cleared, directed against Naples and Rome. On 16 July he told Smuts: ‘I believe the President is with me: Eisenhower in his heart is naturally for it.'

Macmillan pitied Eisenhower, attempting to fulfil his role as Mediterranean supreme commander amidst a constant bombardment of cables marked ‘private, personal and most immediate', and emanating variously from the combined chiefs of staff, Marshall, Roosevelt, Churchill direct, Churchill through the Foreign Office, or Eden through the Foreign Office. ‘
All these instructions
,' observed Macmillan laconically, ‘are naturally contradictory and conflicting.' He and Ike's chief of staff, Bedell Smith, endeavoured to sort and reconcile such communications and decide which should be acted upon.

Even as Churchill enthused about the prospects in the Mediterranean he began to waver again about
Overlord
, as D-Day in France would henceforward become known. On 19 July he told the chiefs of staff that he now had doubts whether the forces available in Britain by 1 May 1944 would suffice for a successful landing ‘in view of the extraordinary fighting efficiency of the German Army, and the much larger forces they could so readily bring to bear against our troops even if the landings were successfully accomplished. It is right for many reasons to make every preparation with the utmost sincerity and vigour, but if later on it is realised by all concerned that the operation is beyond our strength in May and will have to be postponed till August 1944, then it is essential that we should have this other consideration up our sleeves.' He urged them to dust down
Jupiter
, his long-cherished scheme for a descent on north Norway.

Oliver Harvey wrote admiringly in his diary on 24 July about the firmness with which Churchill had dismissed a proposal from Henry Stimson, visiting London, to advance the 1 May D-Day date: ‘
On this, I'm thankful
to say, the PM will refuse absolutely to budge. On military affairs he is instinctively right as he is wrong on foreign affairs. As a war minister he is superb, driving our own Chiefs of Staff, guiding them like a coach and four, applying whip or brake as necessary, with the confidence and touch of genius.' Even though Stimson's proposal was indeed misguided, Harvey's accolade was illtimed. Churchill's renewed foot-dragging showed him at his worst. For eighteen months he had staved off Marshall's demands for early action in France. The British had the best of the arguments, at the cost of feeding American mistrust and resentment, which now ran deep. Back in May, Brooke had written, expressing exasperation with perceived American inconsistency of purpose: ‘
Agreement after agreement
may be secured on paper, but if their hearts are not in it they soon drift away again.' Yet Marshall and his colleagues could have applied the same strictures to the British, with at least equal justice.

Lt.Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, appointed by the chiefs of staff to plan
Overlord
, later became embittered when he perceived himself marginalised before D-Day eventually took place. Yet his post-war private observations cannot be wholly discounted. ‘
I firmly believe
,' he told US historian Forrest Pogue in 1947, ‘that [Churchill and his chiefs] returned from Casablanca fully determined to repudiate the agreement that they had been forced there to sign with the Americans [for an invasion of France]…Apart from a mere dislike of the project, the British authorities proceeded to make every possible step to impede progress in NW Europe by diverting their forces, as unobtrusively as possible, to other theatres of war.' He expressed his opinion that his own appointment was made in the expectation that he would eventually be sacrificed ‘as a scapegoat when a suitable excuse should be found for withdrawing British support from the operation'. Morgan cited the scepticism about
Overlord
of Admiral Cunningham, whom he quoted as saying: ‘I have already evacuated three British armies in the face of the enemy and I don't propose
to evacuate a fourth.' Morgan thought far more highly of the US chiefs of staff and of Eisenhower than of the British leadership: ‘On Br side…had suffered long series of disasters and had become casualty conscious to a very high degree. Br manpower sit. in a state of bankruptcy. Inconceivable that Br could play other than minor part in…reconquest of Europe from the Germans.'

The Americans did not, of course, read the prime minister's 19 July minute to his chiefs. But from the late summer of 1943 onwards they perceived continuing British wavering about D-Day which they were now implacably—and rightly—committed to override. Churchill's hesitation about an invasion in 1944 reflected an apprehension about the fighting power of an Anglo-American army against the Wehrmacht which was unworthy of the Grand Alliance now that its means were growing so great, its huge mobilisation at last approaching maturity.

Churchill's new strategic vision embraced some wild notions. On 25 July, Mussolini resigned and Italy's government fell into the hands of King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The Italian dictator's fall prompted Churchill to revive one of his favourite schemes, a descent on Italian-occupied Rhodes, designed to drag Turkey into the war. This ambition would precipitate a minor disaster later in the year, the Dodecanese campaign. Churchill's standing in American eyes would decline steadily between the summer of 1943 and the end of the war, and he himself bore a substantial share of responsibility for this. It is true that his wise warnings about the future threat posed by the Soviet Union were insufficiently heeded. But this was in significant part because the Americans lost faith in his strategic judgement.

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.