The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (459 page)

On the day after Montgomery’s briefing, the debate over Anvil assumed new and troublesome dimensions. Ten days earlier, George Marshall proposed a halt in Italian operations once the Anzio beachhead was united with Alexander’s army, in order that ten divisions could be siphoned away from Italy in support of Anvil, which Marshall insisted must follow Overlord by July 10. The Americans’ rigidity on Anvil led Brooke to exclaim to his diary that it was “impossible to accept” Marshall’s plan to “go on the defensive in Italy. They fail to realize the forces available do not admit to two fronts in the Mediterranean.” Eisenhower told his naval aide, Commander Butcher, that he was “delighted” by Marshall’s decision “to forget Rome.”
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Eisenhower and the British Chiefs of Staff debated the matter, Eisenhower arguing that the German army, not a psychological prize such as Rome, should be the target. Brooke and the British counterargued that Rome was a military target and had to be taken in order for the Allies to continue northward into France or toward Trieste. By April 8, the Anvil question had become an unholy mess. Brooke, seeing Anvil’s negative consequences to the Italian campaign, joined Churchill in trying to introduce some flexibility into the debate. Roosevelt and Marshall, for their part, remained inflexible; they had promised Anvil to Stalin at Tehran, and that was that. Ironically, it was the continuing stalemate on the Italian front that had brought the wisdom of Anvil into question. “There was no use in landing in France,” Churchill later wrote, “unless we did so at the right time…. All turned on the capture of Rome.” Churchill fired off a telegram to Marshall protesting the abandonment of Rome, and was coolly rebuffed. Jumbo Wilson advised scrubbing Anvil altogether because there were simply not enough landing craft in the Mediterranean to undertake the operation. The Americans offered to bring landing craft from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, but only for use in Anvil, thus thwarting any British plans for amphibious operations in the Aegean. Then they withdrew the offer.
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Admiral King once again, as he had in 1942, began grumbling about the need to shift the war effort to the Pacific. Eisenhower played that card by reminding Brooke that U.S. Republicans wanted to draft Douglas MacArthur for a presidential run. MacArthur, in correspondence with Nebraska
congressman Albert Miller, had disparaged the New Deal and offered that he believed the European war was just about over. The letters, which Miller leaked to the press, gave Britons pause. The implication of Eisenhower’s gambit was that as president, MacArthur would shift everything to the Pacific. But Brooke held firm: Italy must be reinforced, and certainly not stripped. Marshall saw Italy as a stalemate and a diversion from striking into Germany through France. Churchill saw Italy as a substitute for Anvil. Eisenhower, whose first and most critical duty was to make Overlord a success, was caught between his American superiors and the British. Finally, on April 19, after General Alexander announced his plan to begin his Italian offensive in mid-May with a hoped-for junction with the Anzio forces by early June, the Americans conceded that Anvil could not take place in July. Eisenhower and Brooke hammered out an “appreciation” for the Combined Chiefs that did not mention Anvil and called for Rome to be Alexander’s springtime objective. The Anvil debate, full of twists and turns, lay dormant until mid-June, when it metastasized into crisis.
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I
n the east, Hitler had staked his hopes on the Wehrmacht’s resolve and the inability of the Red Army to fight on during a terrible winter, but the Red Army had ignored the winter. In February the Russians encircled 50,000 Germans on the lower Dnieper front. In March, the Red Army swept past Odessa, crossed the Dneister River on a three-hundred-mile front, and closed on Czernowitz, in Bukovina. The Russians bypassed the Crimea, leaving a German army trapped there. The Russian winter offensive had been so powerful that many in London and Washington believed the war would be over before summer. But even the Russians could not ignore the spring rain and mud season—the
rasputitsa.
In April the battle lines began to stabilize from the Baltic to the southern Ukraine.

The stabilization of the Eastern Front, David Eisenhower later wrote, “dashed lingering hopes on both sides of the Atlantic that Germany would be defeated before summer.” This is a vital observation, and it relates to several other unsettling lines of thought that percolated through the ranks and led to “a climate of doubt that persisted at all levels.” Most obvious, Eisenhower writes, was the realization that if the war did not end before summer, Overlord would have to take place. That truth, in turn, led to doubts over the ability of green American recruits to stand up to the Wehrmacht; the debacle at Kasserine had taken place only a year earlier, and at Anzio—“part of the Kasserine legacy”—the men were still on the beaches. Those doubts commingled with growing doubts about Soviet
intentions. Would the Red Army attack as agreed upon or stand by while the Anglo-Americans and Germans punched themselves out in the west? This was a fear Brooke had expressed to his diary at Tehran. On April 8, Eisenhower cabled the Normandy invasion date to Moscow. The Kremlin did not respond for two weeks, during which time the doubts only grew.
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The question of unconditional surrender weighed on everyone. Eisenhower sought permission from Roosevelt to “clarify” the terms of surrender in order that he could drop propaganda leaflets over Germany assuring Germans that fundamental rights—religion, assembly, trade unions—would be restored. From Eisenhower’s soldierly perspective, Germans willing to surrender were far more desirable than an entire nation fighting to the last man standing. Roosevelt flatly refused, telling his Chiefs of Staff, “I am not willing at this time to say that we do not intend to destroy the German nation.” Any “clarification” of surrender terms would be read by Moscow as backtracking on the annihilation of Germany agreed upon in Tehran. Stalin was quite willing to expend millions of Russian lives to gain that end. Churchill, like Eisenhower, saw in unconditional surrender the potential for horrific loss in Allied lives, but he thought better of bringing the subject up with Roosevelt. Churchill’s frustration over his diminished role in all matters political and military was evidenced by a remark he made in mid-April to Cadogan: “This battle [Overlord] has been forced upon us by the Russians and by the United States military authorities.” That was true, as was the fact that he had “hardened” to the plan.
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During April, as the invasion forces conducted field exercises on English beaches and in the countryside, the Allied air forces fully implemented Eisenhower’s pre-invasion air strategy known as the Transportation Plan, the object of which was to bomb every French rail hub, bridge, and tunnel that led to Normandy in order to isolate German forces and deny them mobility. Almost one hundred individual targets were marked for destruction, as well as dozens in Calais, to put the Germans off the scent. More than 120 German radar sites were added to the list. Eisenhower later wrote that Churchill feared that up to 80,000 Frenchmen would die in the bombings. Churchill was indeed worried, and told Roosevelt in an April telegram that he and the entire War Cabinet feared the “French slaughters” would result in 80,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead, an estimate that ultimately proved correct. It would be another Oran, a slaughter of Allies by friendly fire, Churchill argued, on a far bloodier scale. It was a strategy that would make enemies of the French. Churchill’s fear of French resentment did not in the end prove justified.

The French themselves were divided on the issue, with several resistance leaders telling HMG that the bombings would be resented in France, while
Major General Pierre Koenig, commander of French forces in Britain, told Eisenhower that the French people would accept twice the casualties if the sacrifice helped rid France of the reviled Boche. The War Cabinet asked Eisenhower to restrict targets to those that would yield no more than one hundred French casualties. Eisenhower refused, on the grounds that such restraint would “emasculate” the strategy. He assured Churchill that thousands of warning leaflets were dropped into the French countryside before the bombers came on. Not satisfied, Churchill went over Eisenhower’s head, to Roosevelt, and asked the president to overrule his general. Roosevelt flatly refused, telling Churchill, “However regrettable” the loss of French lives, “I am not prepared to impose from this great distance any restrictions on military action by the responsible commanders that in their opinion might mitigate against the success of Overlord or cause more Allied casualties.” The president’s reply hinted at a fundamental change in their relationship. Although Churchill was the man on the spot, in London and at the center of the planning and the action, his advice no longer carried the weight with Roosevelt that it once had. Roosevelt henceforth and from his great distance would be the final arbitrator in all such matters.
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A German radio transmission intercepted in May vindicated Eisenhower’s air strategy: “The raids carried out in recent weeks have caused systematic breakdown of all main line; the coastal defences have been cut off from the supply bases of the interior.”
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M
ay came in, and brought with it the most beautiful weather in years. Alec Cadogan, spending a few days at his Northiam cottage, effused to his diary, “The daffodils are over, except the very late white ones. And the narcissi are still out, and the spiraea arguta, like little snowmen. And the wallflowers a warm cloth of gold and bronze. The old pear tree in full bloom…. Lilac coming out…. Another gorgeous summer day.” It was all “heavenly.” He also noted the need for rain. Churchill, however, ushered in the new month with “gloomy forebodings” about the future behavior of Russia. “I have always not liked the month of May,” he offered to Jock Colville, who recalled that one of the first remarks Churchill had made to him four years earlier was, “If I were the first of May, I should be ashamed of myself.” But May 1944 began to prove itself praiseworthy.
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On May 11, Alexander made his move against the Gustav Line. In light of Anvil’s being postponed, it was hoped that this thrust would draw Germans away from Normandy. It did; twenty-five German divisions were now in Italy, and more had been sent to the Balkans in anticipation of an
Allied thrust north toward Vienna. On May 15, after four days of preparatory strikes, a Canadian corps was thrown into the battle for Monte Cassino. On the seventeenth, two Polish divisions led the final assault on the monastery. Along the Gustav Line twenty Allied divisions faced seven divisions of the German Tenth Army. The preponderance of Allied men, artillery, and aircraft began to bend the German lines. Kesselring ordered that reinforcements be rushed south from Anzio to defend his line.

It was too late. The end for the Germans at Monte Cassino came on May 18 when, after a point-blank artillery barrage and an assault by the Polish II Corps, the heights were taken. On that beautiful spring morning, Polish troops—less four thousand killed and wounded—entered the ruins of the monastery. The Germans had fled overnight. The Allied army pursuing them was one of the most cosmopolitan in history. In the Imperial Army: Britons, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Newfoundlanders, Indians, Ceylonese, Swazi, Mauritians, and Caribbeans. In the American: a black division and a Japanese American regiment. Among the Allies: Italians, French, Poles, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, and Senegalese. By May 18, more than 32,000 men—including Germans—lay dead and buried within sight of St. Benedict’s mountain sanctuary. But Highway 6, the road to Rome, was open. With Kesselring’s withdrawal of troops from Anzio, the time was ripe for an Allied breakout there, which if successful would cut off the German Tenth Army, now fleeing north from the Gustav Line. On May 23, the Allies finally broke out from the beachhead, where they had lived under fire for four months. Three days later they linked up with Clark’s Fifth Army. Then they turned toward Rome.
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