The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (436 page)

Onboard the
Queen Mary,
Churchill was receiving his first briefings on Overlord, the proposed invasion of Normandy. He liked what he saw, up to a point. General Frederick Morgan had been ordered by the Combined Chiefs to produce a plan for a “full scaled assault” on Europe. He had been warned that based on Admiral King’s needs in the Pacific, he could expect only 3,300 assault and troop ships to carry out his plan. Thus limited, Morgan’s plan called for three seaborne and two parachute divisions to land in the general area of Caen. Two dozen British, Canadian, and American divisions would follow in the first weeks after the initial landings. That, Churchill concluded, would not trigger a German collapse if that was the intent; nor was it enough to exploit a German collapse if one was imminent. Churchill suggested that more troops go ashore along a broader front. Five months would pass before the Americans saw the wisdom of his suggestion.

Satisfied with the overall plan, Churchill, as usual, fretted over the details. Given that twenty-foot tides were common along the Normandy coast, he demanded to be briefed on the progress in building the Mulberry artificial harbors he had championed more than two years earlier. Only by building these harbors could enough men, machines, rations, and ammunition be gotten safely ashore in a timely fashion. The target was 12,000 tons daily; success depended on reaching it. Fuel for the trucks and tanks
would come by way of another technological marvel, a pipeline under the ocean (Pluto) from southeast Britain to the Normandy town of Port-en-Bessin. The pipeline’s deployment would be made more complex because it would probably take place under Luftwaffe attack. A third marvel was intended to protect the artificial harbors from high seas—an artificial breakwater (called a lilo) that consisted of large inflatable rubber bladders that supported underwater concrete screens. A demonstration took place in Churchill’s stateroom bathroom. The Great Man watched, perched upon a stool and dressed in his dragon dressing gown, as an admiral and a brigadier splashed away at the overflowing bathtub in which a miniature lilo calmed the waves. A stranger who witnessed the scene, Ismay wrote, “would have found it hard to believe that this was the British high command studying the most stupendous and spectacular amphibious operation in the history of war.”
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Churchill sought assurance that progress was being made on another concept he held dear: Mountbatten’s floating airfields made of ice and code-named Operation Habakkuk. The idea, Churchill stressed, “deserves very keen examination.” He had selected the code name, citing the Old Testament text from Habakkuk, “Behold ye among the heathen… for I will work a work in your days… which ye will not believe.” Indeed, many among the planning staff were nonbelievers. The idea, which Mountbatten introduced to Churchill during a Chequers weekend, had taken shape in Canada, not surprisingly given the sometimes frigid temperatures there. But Churchill envisioned deploying these million-ton monsters off the coasts of France and in the Indian Ocean, where they would serve as refueling stations for the RAF. No consideration appears to have been given to one critical design flaw: even outfitted with their planned refrigeration systems, the ice crafts would melt. Brooke disparagingly called Habakkuk “one of Dickie Mountbatten’s bright ideas,” but promised Mountbatten that he would be given an opportunity to present the idea in Quebec. The CIGS really had no choice but to acquiesce, for Dickie, having Churchill’s ear, operated on the principle of why talk to the monkey when you have the organ grinder. Thus, the disdain in Brooke’s diary entry upon being told by Churchill that he planned to elevate Mountbatten to the Southeast Asia Command: “He [Mountbatten] will need a very efficient Chief of Staff to pull him through.”
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The Atlantic voyage passed much like the one of May, with nightly games of bezique played with Harriman, who on the previous voyage had cautioned Churchill against deprecating the American daylight bombing strategy. Harriman now cautioned Churchill, who feared Overlord would derail his plans in Italy, against deprecating Overlord. Roosevelt, Harriman warned, was intent that Overlord take place in May 1944, and that
was that. Churchill responded that he hoped only to reach the Po River in northern Italy, hold that line, and strike into the Balkans from the Aegean. Given the difficulties of terrain, supply, and the enemy, on any march to the Po, three hundred miles north of Rome, that was far more easily said than done. Eisenhower believed that any plan to reach the Po would necessitate withholding so many men from Overlord “that the cross-Channel operation could not be undertaken in the spring of 1944.” That was unacceptable to the Americans.
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Meanwhile, Churchill had decided that an invasion of northern Sumatra, which he had first proposed in May, now offered the greatest strategic opportunity in Southeast Asia. On that score, Brooke lamented to his diary: “He [Churchill] has during the sea voyage in a few idle moments become married to the idea that success against Japan can only be secured through the capture of the north tip of Sumatra!” Churchill, Brooke added, “has become like a peevish child asking for a forbidden toy.”
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On August 9,
Queen Mary
dropped anchor in Halifax Harbor. Churchill and his party required two Canadian National Railway trains for the trip to Quebec City, which they reached late in the afternoon of the tenth. Churchill left the train just shy of the city in order to complete the journey by car with the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King. The principals bunked at the Citadel, on the cliffs above the Old City, while hundreds of staff officers took over the nearby Château Frontenac hotel, whose six hundred rooms had been cleared of guests but for one suite occupied by an elderly woman who was expected to die within days (she, however, lived, and was residing in the same room a year later when the second Quebec conference convened). The Americans were not due for three days.
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Prime Minister Mackenzie King and the Canadians found themselves looking in from the outside at their own garden party. Other than being given vague summaries of decisions made by the Combined Chiefs, the Canadians were excluded from the conference. Canada fielded five divisions in Britain and Sicily, including a division under Montgomery. During the Great War, Canada buried 66,000 of her sons, America, 117,000 of hers; adjusted for the difference in populations, America would have needed to plant more than one million crosses in Flanders. Canada had bled for England. Now, again, this nation of just eleven million was suffering several times more casualties on a per capita basis than the United States and almost as many as Britain. When, two weeks earlier, the Canadian commander in chief in London, General Andrew McNaughton, traveled to Malta in expectation of reviewing his troops in Sicily, Montgomery refused. Alexander backed Monty up; Eisenhower did not intercede. It was an appalling slight to Canada, yet since September 3, 1939, HMG’s
position was that Dominion forces served under British command. The Dominions had neither a permanent seat in the War Cabinet nor any binding say in its deliberations. The logic behind London’s arrangement with the Dominions was compelling from a military standpoint. Given that British troops (and British casualties) far outnumbered those of the Dominions, the apogee of the command structure must therefore be British. Franklin Roosevelt also understood that logic and was about to turn it against Churchill.
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W
ithin a day of arriving in Quebec, and before Quadrant began, Churchill boarded a train for a journey south to Hyde Park and a private meeting with Roosevelt. He was accompanied by Mary but not by Clementine, brought low by the long sea voyage. Mary had become the darling of the American press as soon as she set foot in North America. Other than being the prime minister’s daughter and manning an ack-ack battery in Hyde Park, she lived a normal life,
Time
reported. She did not much frequent London’s bare-boned nightclubs, did not smoke cigarettes. She loved to dance. Unlike her sister, Sarah, her father, and her brother, she drank only modestly, although late at night of an evening, she liked to sit before the fire in the company of her father and smoke a cigar. She dated British and U.S. officers.
Time
reported that when one of them, the American cartoonist and creator of G.I. Joe, Sergeant Dave Breger, fifteen years her senior, took her to see prizefights between British and U.S. soldiers, “she saw her first boxing. She asked everyone around her about the rules, cheered, chewed gum.” Her nickname was Chip; “she was a member of the jukebox generation” but wise beyond her years and “intelligent without thick lenses…. She has watched too many big minds grapple with too many big problems.”
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Churchill chose not to take the most direct routes from Quebec to Hyde Park, south through Vermont or along the Hudson. Never one to let the privileges of rank go begging, he instead took his party on a one-day four-hundred-mile detour in order that Mary might behold the majesty of Niagara Falls. While flashing the “V” sign for onlookers at Niagara, Churchill was asked by a reporter what he thought of the falls. He replied that he had been there before, in 1900, and that “the principle seems the same. The water still keeps falling over.” Then, after driving across to the American side, he reboarded his train. He loved trains, especially American trains. A decade earlier he had written in
Collier’s
of the luxuries of American Pullman cars, the wide and comfortable berths in the deluxe sleepers, the “gargantuan
meals” prepared with “skill and delicacy” and served by “the darky attendants with their soft voices and delightful drawl and courteous, docile, agreeable ways” and who were “an unfailing source not only of comfort but of perpetual amusement.” Thus ensconced in his favored mode of transportation—and taking delight in flashing his “V” at farmers in their fields as he stood at the window—he made the four-hundred-mile run east on the New York Central main line, past farms and fields alongside the Erie Canal, through the Mohawk Valley, and finally down the Hudson Valley to Hyde Park.
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There, the president awaited Churchill with homey meals of hot dogs, hamburgers, and clam chowder (Inspector Thompson thought the hot dogs “abominable”). Roosevelt, jaunty and the picture of civility, was ready to serve up to Churchill a nonnegotiable proposition. Henry Stimson, always wary of Churchill’s sway over Roosevelt whenever the two met alone, had delivered his brief to the president. Based on his unsettling conversations with Churchill in London, Stimson advised Roosevelt to repudiate the British “pinprick” strategy and to demand from Churchill a second front in France by May of 1944, and an American commander for that front, George Marshall. During his May visit to Washington, Churchill had told the U.S. Congress: “I was driving the other day not far from the field of Gettysburg, which I know well, like most of your battlefields. It was the decisive battle of the American Civil War. No one after Gettysburg doubted which way the dread balance of war would incline, yet far more blood was shed after the Union victory at Gettysburg than in all the fighting which went before.” Now, in mid-August, no one doubted how the war would end, and if the majority of the blood to be shed in France was to be American, Franklin Roosevelt wanted an American in command.
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This had not been the case just weeks earlier. Roosevelt and the American military chiefs considered that fair play called for the British to command the French invasion; after all, an American had commanded Torch and Husky. It was now London’s turn. Measured by casualties, it certainly seemed only fair that a Briton command Overlord. At the end of operations in North Africa, the U.S. Army and Army Air Force accounted for approximately 18,200 of 70,000 Allied casualties in that theater—2,700 dead, 9,000 wounded, and 6,500 missing. The British and Dominions suffered the vast majority of the remaining 52,000 casualties. By August, more than 100,000 British airmen, soldiers, and sailors had been killed in action since September 1939, along with 45,000 civilians and more than 20,000 merchant seamen. In Sicily, the British army finally surpassed the Home Island civilian casualty count. The final calculations in Sicily showed 13,000 British and Canadians killed, wounded, or missing, along
with the equivalent of two infantry divisions laid low by malaria and typhus, versus 10,000 American casualties. Measured by casualties thus far, Churchill had a far stronger case than Roosevelt in the matter of command of Overlord. But Roosevelt’s case rested on the assumption that by the time the invasion of France took place, or soon thereafter, American forces would equal the British, and within months would outnumber the British by as many as five to one. Therefore, he concluded, command of Overlord must go to an American.
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Shortly arriving at Hyde Park, Churchill acquiesced. Thus, one of the most significant military decisions made at Quadrant wasn’t made in Quebec, but on the banks of the Hudson River before the conference even began.