The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (405 page)

Mountbatten had been planning just such a foray for months, the target Dieppe, the strategic port in northwest France. Yet Churchill had also understood for months that a strategically meaningful landing in Europe that summer was out of the question, although throughout the year he harbored hopes for 1943. Yet by July, even 1943 began to look problematic.
Eisenhower, in his memoirs, wrote: “It became increasingly doubtful… that a full-out frontal attack could be launched in the early spring of 1943, and because it would be extremely hazardous to begin a major operation across the English Channel in the fall of the year, we began to realize that a large-scale invasion might not be possible before the spring of 1944.” Eisenhower reluctantly concluded, as had Roosevelt, that the spring of 1944 might be the earliest the Allies could put an army into France, far too late to help the Russians. Whether a landing in North Africa—or anywhere, for that matter—would do anything to improve the Soviet situation was now the question du jour among the military planners. Eisenhower’s aide Harry Butcher believed that German and Japanese “industrialized strength,” along with the rubber and oil of Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma, would spell the end of the “British Empire, as we have known it” and leave the United States in “a defensive position, virtually alone in the world.”
Time
reduced the implications to a stark reality: “Hitler is winning in Russia.” If the Red Army does no better than it has so far, “Russia will be defeated. Germany will win the present phases of World War II in Europe…. The allies will then have lost their best chance to defeat Germany and win World War II.”
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T
he time had come for the Anglo-Americans to fight; to not fight was to lose the war in Europe. With that appalling scenario in mind, in early July Roosevelt instructed King and Marshall to remember three “cardinal principles” when they sat down in London with the British Chiefs of Staff: “speed of decision on plans; unity of plans; attack combined with defense but not defense alone.” So eager to get to work were the American and British staffs that they held informal meetings on July 19 in Churchill’s absence. That was a mistake. Churchill, as minister of defence and per the authority vested in him, had intended to preside at the first meeting. The chiefs’ violation of protocol resulted in a Churchillian detonation at Chequers, where, in front of Hopkins, he paraded up and down the great hall reading from a book of British war laws. As he finished each page, he ripped it from the book and threw it down. The chiefs got the message. Then, within two days of sitting down with the British on the nineteenth, the Americans reluctantly agreed that Europe was beyond reach in 1942. Three days later they agreed upon North Africa as the target. On July 24, Operation Gymnast was rechristened Operation Torch, and a jumping-off date of late October was settled upon. Torch meant that Roosevelt would have his men on the beaches before the election; for Churchill and Brooke,
it meant taking the first step in their push to clear the Mediterranean. But Eisenhower—who within a few weeks would be promoted to three-star rank and named commander in chief of Torch—saw things differently from both Roosevelt and Churchill. Like Marshall, Eisenhower looked upon Torch primarily as a sideshow to Roundup, its only merit being that it possibly would “contain” the Germans after the Wehrmacht defeated the Red Army, a defeat that, as the last days of July arrived, Eisenhower believed was imminent. Torch for Ike was a colossal mistake. Its approval by Roosevelt, he told an aide, “is the blackest day in history.”
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On July 27 Roosevelt cabled Churchill: “I cannot help feeling that the past week represented a turning point in the whole war and that now we are on our way shoulder to shoulder.” Actually, they were about to start bumping shoulders. The British and American principals, military and political, had agreed on a target, but for different and possibly conflicting reasons. It became apparent in coming weeks that neither the specific objectives in North Africa nor a follow-through strategy had been addressed. Even the makeup of the invasion force was in doubt. Roosevelt wanted the entire land portion of the venture to be an American operation, based in part on his political need to put American boys into action and in part on his belief that the French North Africans hated the English and would welcome the Americans. He proposed to Churchill that if the British desired to attack Algiers, they do so a week after the Americans landed on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The British role in Torch, Roosevelt insisted, must be limited to air and sea support. This stunned Churchill. Knowing that Roosevelt heeded the advice of his generals, Churchill tried to persuade Eisenhower to persuade the president to approve a real joint Anglo-American venture. He succeeded a few weeks later, but his influence over Roosevelt was lessening. Churchill understood, Harriman told the president, “that he is to play second fiddle in all scores and then only as you direct.”
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As for Charles de Gaulle and any role he might play in the invasion, Roosevelt looked upon the Frenchman as a mere soldier and one who manifested Bonapartist ambitions, although nothing in de Gaulle’s deeds or words had ever indicated an ambition to become a military dictator. Eisenhower grasped what Roosevelt did not: de Gaulle was hated by the Vichy because he had not surrendered while they had, and because he was everything Vichy loyalists were not—patriotic and courageous. Roosevelt simply did not understand that, with the result that Eisenhower was told by Washington that “under no circumstances” was the Frenchman to be told of the decision on Torch. Churchill, too, had more than his share of problems with de Gaulle, but they came about as a consequence of trying to work with the obstinate Frenchman, not against him.
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As Churchill saw it, the major flaw with the original plan for Torch
resulted from Marshall’s fear that to venture too far into the Mediterranean—specifically to Algiers—might result in his army being cut off. The news of American resistance to attacking Algiers came as a “bombshell,” Churchill told the president, and he asked that a British contingency be added in order to strike Algiers, and that American troops be transferred from the Moroccan part of the invasion in order to facilitate a drive east from Algiers, with Tunis the ultimate objective. Roosevelt took his time pondering the concept, but he found Eisenhower in fundamental agreement with Churchill. By mid-September Roosevelt agreed to transfer ten thousand men to the eastern operation, which would now take place simultaneously with the Moroccan landings. This opened up opportunities that Brooke and Churchill had sought all along. For Brooke, a continental second front could not be contemplated as long as Malta lay under siege and Tunis was held by the Axis. Churchill, with his eye on flushing Italy from the war before thrusting northward into Germany’s southern flank, strongly believed that if Torch did not include a push from Algiers into Tunisia, with the capture of Tunis as the ultimate objective, it risked becoming a dead end. Churchill prevailed on the matter of Algiers, but the Americans and British continued to debate the details and objectives of Torch into late September, prompting Eisenhower’s aide Commander Butcher to complain to his diary, “Trying to follow the evolution of Torch is like trying to follow the pea in a three-shell game.”
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During the July meetings, the British and American military chiefs had begun to take the measure of one another, and the results were decidedly mixed, and not strictly along national lines: Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, was in Brooke’s estimation “an old dodderer” and “beyond retirement.” Pound, who was almost sixty-five, was so given to falling asleep at staff meetings that he was replaced by Brooke as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee: “He [Pound] is asleep 90% of the time,” Brooke told his diary, “and the remaining 10% is none too sure what he is arguing about.” Brooke had no way of knowing that Pound’s drowsiness was due to an undetected brain tumor. The CIGS considered Pound’s American counterpart, Admiral Ernest King, to be “a shrewd and somewhat swollen headed individual” who was “biased entirely in favor of the Pacific.” King (so tough, blue jackets claimed, that he shaved with a blowtorch) had long been known for his hair-trigger temper and heavy drinking. He had sworn off whisky for the duration, but not, as Brooke was to note, champagne or wine, which on more than one occasion resulted in King’s becoming quite “nicely lit up” and combative. King joined Eisenhower and Churchill in Brooke’s pantheon of those who lacked strategic vision. Marshall, too, in
Brooke’s estimation “has got no strategic vision, his thoughts revolve around the creation of forces and not on their employment.” Yet Marshall shared Brooke’s steadfast belief in “Europe First,” although they disagreed on where and when to strike. They both had to keep an eye on Admiral King. As for the strengths of the other major American players, Brooke found Eisenhower “quite incapable of understanding real strategy.” The Army Air Force’s Hap Arnold “limits his outlook to the air,” and General Mark Clark was “very ambitious and unscrupulous.” Yet as a group, Brooke later chirped, the Americans were “friendliness itself.”
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Churchill, for his part, did not think much of his own Chiefs of Staff or high-ranking officers in general. Referring to the COS during a luncheon, he told his guests, “I am obliged to wage modern warfare with ancient weapons.”
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For their part, the American military chiefs thought as little of their boss’s strategic acumen as the British chiefs thought of Churchill’s. Marshall was especially wary of politicians. He had pledged to himself never to laugh at Roosevelt’s jokes, and he upheld the pledge. Churchill, in April, had displayed his political side to Marshall, who, though completely loyal to Roosevelt and respectful of Churchill as a statesman, remained loyal first and foremost to his troops. He saw no glory in death. He hated to see men die under any circumstances, most of all the transparently political, and that is how he looked upon Torch.
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Although Brooke (and Churchill) had sent Marshall home in April with the false impression that they had agreed to a 1942 invasion of France, the two generals got along well professionally, recalled Sir Ian Jacob. This was despite Brooke’s “hard, distant, lofty” demeanor, which was manifested by his speaking rapidly and, according to Jacob, with an overbearing air of self-assurance. Brooke also, recalled Jacob, tended to allow his tongue to dart out of his mouth and flit around his lips, lizardlike, an unfortunate quirk that distracted listeners from the merit of his words. If Brooke possessed a sense of humor, it was well concealed.
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Compared to Brooke, the dour George Marshall was a cutup. He was also—blessedly for the alliance—unaware of Brooke’s contemptuous diary jottings in which he pilloried his American counterpart. Brooke called Marshall a “great man, a great gentleman, a great organizer, but definitely not a strategist.” In fact, Brooke termed Marshall’s strategic abilities “the poorest.” Marshall, in turn, thought much the same of Brooke, and told Hopkins that although Brooke “might be a good fighting man, he lacked Dill’s brains.” Brooke, though critical to a fault, harbored no ambition other than to win the war. Years later, when he prepared his diaries for publication, he took pains to add italicized explanations for many of his biting pronouncements. Marshall by then was a dying old man whose
stature in American and European history could in no way be diminished by Brooke’s long-ago scribbling. And Eisenhower by then was president, a shock to Brooke, who wrote: “He certainly made no great impression on me at our first meeting… and if I had been told then of the future that lay in front of him I should refuse to believe it.”
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Brooke was egalitarian; he criticized everybody, American and British, Mountbatten and Churchill most of all. Churchill, Brooke concluded, “never had the slightest doubt that he had inherited all the military genius of his great ancestor Marlborough!” Yet he could not “understand a large strategic concept and must get down to detail!” As with all who dealt with Churchill, Brooke learned that he was “quite impossible to argue with” and if he did concede a point, tended to later “repudiate everything he had agreed to.”
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Brooke’s worst invective was directed toward Dickie Mountbatten, who the CIGS found to be “the most crashing bore,” prone to “always fiddling about with unimportant matters and wasting other people’s time.” Mountbatten “suffers from the most desperate illogical brain,” he told his diary, “always producing red herrings.”
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The paths of Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery also crossed during the early summer. Several weeks before the July meetings, Eisenhower paid a courtesy call on Montgomery, who commanded all troops in southeast Britain. Ike made the mistake of lighting one of his daily ration of eighty Chesterfields while waiting for Monty to wind up a staff briefing. The ascetic Montgomery (a devout nonsmoker and nondrinker) detected the aroma of tobacco smoke in the air and barked out that whosoever was the offender should snuff out the fag, immediately. Eisenhower complied, and so learned his first lesson about the diminutive and combative Englishman: Monty liked things his way and only his way. This was true also on the battlefield, where he preferred a set-piece style of combat in which events unfolded in strict accordance with his well-laid plans. Churchill, on the other hand, liked to quote Napoleon’s maxim, to wit, that forming a “picture” of a battle was foolish, for conditions could easily be deranged by Providence. Churchill had run up against Montgomery’s asceticism the previous year, when after a day of inspecting Montgomery’s troops near Brighton, he repaired with Monty to the Royal Albion Hotel, where Churchill anticipated a good whisky and a cigar. Monty declined the libations, declaring that he neither drank nor smoked, and furthermore was 100 percent fit. Churchill rejoined that he both drank and smoked and was 200 percent fit.
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