Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (78 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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The fact was that the Americans were correct. Roosevelt was concerned that if there were not serious progress in Western Europe, Hitler and Stalin could still make a separate peace, and that he would be sent packing in the 1944 election. He understood the British abhorrence of a bloodbath in northern France and in Flanders, because of the horrors of the trenches of World War I, but he believed that mechanized and air war made trench warfare completely impractical and that American war production and manpower would provide the Allies overwhelming superiority. In all of this he was correct, and the Germans and Russians did have preliminary settlement talks in Stockholm in the summer of 1943, as Stalin was at pains to tell his allies when they finally met at the end of 1943.
It was agreed at Casablanca, after much acrimony between Brooke and Marshall, that with Eisenhower in command, the Allies would invade Sicily and the boot of Italy as soon as Tunisia was cleared, but supposedly without prejudice to an early cross-Channel invasion. This was, in fact, a victory for the British war plan, because it would be impossible now to launch an invasion of northwest Europe in 1943. Roosevelt and Marshall reasoned that it would have to be deferred to the spring of 1944, by which time the United States would have the preponderance of ground and air forces in the theater. Roosevelt determined that he and Churchill would have to meet with Stalin and convince him that they were serious about invading France, that the invasion of Italy would have to do in the meantime, and as an added earnest he declared to the press on behalf of both leaders that they would require the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan. There has been much criticism of this decision, but the treatment soon accorded to Italy made it clear that something less onerous could be obtained if the incumbent government were disposed of, and it did offer slight reassurance to Stalin and remove some of the sour taste of the rather sleazy arrangements with Darlan.
De Gaulle and Giraud joined the conference, de Gaulle only after, on Roosevelt’s suggestion, Churchill threatened to cut off all assistance to him. They agreed to a joint government of liberated North Africa, and it did not take de Gaulle, as both Churchill and Roosevelt, once he got a look at both men, agreed would happen, to outmaneuver the politically unskilled Giraud and reinforce his position as the leader of the combatant French, which now included a substantial Resistance in metropolitan France, and most of the French Empire except for Indochina. There was a joint meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt and de Gaulle and Giraud, who dutifully shook hands for the cameras. Churchill wrote: “The pictures of this event cannot be viewed, even in the setting of these tragic times, without a laugh.”
Churchill sent Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to meet with Roosevelt on March 13 and 15, 1943, and they had an extensive discussion. Roosevelt was very aware of the possibility that Stalin intended to seize large chunks of Europe. He had no difficulty awarding Russia part of Poland and compensating Poland with part of Germany, or with Russia taking back part of Finland and the small Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) that it had held for 200 years prior to 1917, though he hoped for a referendum there, “even a rigged one.”
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He didn’t see any point in trying to deny Stalin possession of what Russia had formerly held when he was certain to occupy it militarily anyway. Roosevelt was skeptical of any early French recovery, and made a number of “feckless” suggestions for creating new states in the Rhineland and elsewhere. He correctly doubted that the components of Yugoslavia would long cohere. Eden noted that “Roosevelt was familiar with the history and geography of Europe” and “He seemed to see himself disposing of the fate of many lands, allied no less than enemy. He did all this with so much grace that it was not easy to dissent. Yet it was too like a conjuror, skillfully juggling with balls of dynamite.” Eden insightfully thought him like a stamp-collector (which he was), musing about separating and attaching states, but was impressed by his knowledge and reassured that he had no illusions about Stalin. (Roosevelt had assured British economist and emissary Lord Keynes that he was far from being “an automatic supporter of the Soviet Union” and had acknowledged to Archbishop Spellman that Eastern Europe was likely to be dominated, at least for a time, by the Soviet Union.)
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The German Sixth Army of 300,000, terribly afflicted by combat, hunger, and the elements, surrendered on February 2, 1943. The Russian advance to the west continued into the spring, and the British and the Americans finally secured the surrender of 250,000 Axis troops in Tunisia and the end of the war in Africa, on May 13. This was another heavy blow to the Axis, shortly following the debacle at Stalingrad. In the two actions, the Germans and their allies lost 750,000 men, and they could not replace such losses as the Russians and even, had the need arisen, the Americans could. MacArthur cleared New Guinea between January and September 1943, and Japan’s senior admiral and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet, was killed when his plane was shot down on a tour of the Dutch East Indies, on April 18. He had attended Harvard University and been the naval attaché in Washington, and had warned against attacking the United States because of its industrial might. Nimitz, receiving code intercepts, asked Roosevelt’s authority to shoot Yamamoto’s plane down, which Roosevelt was happy to give. The Japanese had occupied a couple of the westernmost Aleutian Islands, midway between Japan and Alaska, but they were cleared out by American and Canadian troops between March and August.
The most extensive Anglo-American conference of the entire war took place at Washington, with weekend side trips to restored historic Williamsburg and the Catoctin Mountains, from May 12 to 25, 1943. There was another ding-dong battle over the comparative merits of the Channel and Mediterranean operations. Churchill was for the Channel crossing “as soon as there are reasonable prospects of success,” but agreed with Brooke that that could not happen until 1945 or 1946, because, as Brooke said, there were not 80 French divisions to join in against Germany. This was nonsense, as the United States would provide the difference, but Brooke didn’t have confidence in instantly created American forces. The Americans thought air superiority would reduce the numbers of soldiers needed on the ground. The Americans made it clear that Italy could become “a vacuum” that would suck in Allied forces all through 1944, and that this was “not acceptable to the United States.” The standard American gambit was that they were not prepared to stuff their forces into Britain while the British pursued imperial objectives in the Mediterranean, and that if the cross-Channel operation were not launched on a timely basis, they would decamp to the Pacific (where there would be no argument with anyone about how their forces were deployed).
Marshall and Brooke and their comrades made a sustained effort to be sociable and informal in leisure moments and the effect was very positive. All were reassured to see a human side of senior officers whom they had formerly found rather flinty and unremitting. Roosevelt and Churchill separated themselves from the service chiefs during the breaks and, as always, their relations, on which all else chiefly depended, were entirely cordial, despite strategic and philosophical differences. After a very convivial weekend at Williamsburg, it was ostensibly agreed that the Western Allies would invade northern France on May 1, 1944, and that an invasion of Italy would assist, rather than replace or defer, the French operations. This did not prevent a good deal of British waffling and evasive maneuvering through the balance of the year and even into 1944. Seven divisions would be ready for transfer from Italy to the French operation from November 1 on, at Marshall’s call. Marshall had raised his planned deployment to almost 600,000 men from the Sledgehammer sacrificial offering of the previous year, of 40,000, a sizeable improvement but still not adequate to clear the Germans out of France. It was already clear that the war would be won by whichever of the Soviet Union or the West bagged Germany, France, and Italy, and the Americans were concerned that there not be what Roosevelt called “a lengthy pecking away at the fringes of Europe”
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that would enable Russia to come farther into Europe than was desirable or preventable.
There was a very discursive discussion about China. Everyone agreed with the American commander in China, the acidulous General Joseph Stilwell, that Chiang Kai-shek was “a vacillating, tricky, undependable old scoundrel who never keeps his word.” Churchill didn’t want to do anything “silly” just to please Chiang, but Roosevelt was convinced, again quite presciently, that China would soon enter one of its cyclical upturns and be one of the world’s Great Powers again. Brooke dismissed Stilwell as “a hopeless crank,” living off Marshall’s patronage. Marshall defended Stilwell as “a fighter,” which even Brooke admitted, but Marshall went on to contrast him with British “commanders who had no fighting instinct and were soft and useless.”
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The Chinese ambassador to the U.S., and Chiang’s in-law, TV Soong, told the conference that China would make a separate peace with Japan if it did not receive adequate assistance. Roosevelt and Churchill did not take that threat seriously, but agreed to increased assistance to that country anyway
6. KURSK, THE FALL OF MUSSOLINI, AND THE FIRST QUEBEC CONFERENCE
 
In another of history’s greatest battles, and the greatest tank battle and one of the greatest one-day air battles in history, the Germans failed in their effort to launch a third consecutive summer offensive at the Battle of Kursk from July 4 to August 23, 1943. Soviet intelligence had warning of the German effort to close off the salient and built defenses in depth back 250 kilometers, 10 times the width of the Maginot Line, at the anticipated points of attack, in nine different fortified and entrenched lines of defense. Unlike his usual practice, Hitler followed the obvious course, as the salient was conspicuous on the front, and delayed for six weeks bringing in new tanks. Germany had nearly 800,000 men, 3,000 tanks, 10,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and 2,000 aircraft engaged, against 1.9 million Russians with 5,000 tanks (initially), 25,000 artillery pieces and mortars, and almost 3,000 aircraft at any time, as losses were replaced. In the course of the battle, though it was a heavy defeat, the Germans demonstrated their remarkable war-making ability by inflicting 1,041,000 Russian casualties while taking 257,000 themselves, and knocking out 8,000 tanks and 3,600 aircraft, while losing 1,040 tanks and 840 aircraft themselves. Unlimited Russian manpower and supplies from the United States, as well as their own large aircraft and tank production, told. It was the last German offensive in the east, and demonstrated again the immense scale of the war in Russia, compared with those in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.
The British, Americans, and Canadians invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, in the greatest amphibious operation in history up to that time. Field Marshal Alexander was the operational commander, under Eisenhower’s ultimate command, and Montgomery and Patton were the battlefield army commanders. The Allies landed 160,000 men and 600 tanks to meet 40,000 Germans and 230,000 Italians with 260 tanks. The fall of Messina on August 17 to Patton signaled the end of resistance on the island; the Allies had taken 22,000 casualties to 10,000 Germans and 132,000 Italians, approximately 80 percent of them prisoners captured uninjured as Italy’s commitment to Mussolini’s ill-considered plunge into war crumbled.
In the midst of the action, on July 25, Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III dismissed Benito Mussolini as premier after 21 years of his dictatorship and, having smarted under his condescensions throughout that time, had him arrested, and named Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a slippery political roué as unreliable as but more likeable than Darlan, as prime minister. (Badoglio had been one of those responsible for the catastrophic Italian defeat at Caporetto in 1917, which he went to great lengths to hide in subsequent official records, and was ambassador to Brazil and Duke of Addis Ababa for his contribution to the Abyssinian campaign in 1936. He was a thorough-going scoundrel, precisely what the times required.) Badoglio ordered the dissolution of the Fascist party on July 28 (having long been one of its grandees).
The first Quebec Conference, between Churchill and Roosevelt and their service chiefs, attended in slight part also by Canada’s Prime Minister King, took place between August 11 and 24, 1943. It was largely concerned with campaigns in Burma and China, confirmed the decisive turn in the Allies’ favor of the Battle of the Atlantic against German submarines, and again envisioned landings in France the following spring and summer on both the Channel and Mediterranean coasts. But there was again great American unease, as Churchill kept grasping for alternatives, including an invasion of Norway that his own staff regarded as mad. Both sides recited their now familiar scripts, but matters started to turn just before the arrival of the leaders, when Brooke led what amounted to a consciousness-raising session. He acknowledged that the Americans thought the British were not really committed to the cross-Channel operation (Overlord it was and henceforth here will be called), and that the British thought the Americans were so preoccupied with it that they would charge into Europe regardless of the strategic facts. The Trident formula was amplified and it was agreed that Overlord would proceed on schedule, that the invasion of Italy would follow the clearance of Sicily, and that a standard of professional evaluation of the need and efficacy of reinforcements as between the respective operations would thereafter be applied. Marshall emphasized that Roosevelt “understood the importance of capturing Berlin.”
The eccentric British guerrilla leader in Burma, General Orde Wingate, was introduced by Churchill and quickly became the Americans’ favorite British general by his swashbuckling style and combative instincts. The presentational highlight was royal relative and Churchill protégé Admiral Louis Mountbatten, who had just been appointed commander in Burma, showing the possibilities of specially treated blocks of ice to serve as stationary aircraft carriers. He demonstrated this by firing a revolver at the blocks. The untreated block of ice was reduced to bits and pieces, but the treated block was resistant, causing a bullet to ricochet around the room, narrowly missing several of the senior officers present. Aides outside the meeting room were briefly concerned that Anglo-American relations had deteriorated to the point that their military chiefs were exchanging fire with their own side arms. (Churchill and Roosevelt were not present.)

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