Finest Years (52 page)

Meanwhile, Stalin was making threatening demands for a Russian voice in the governance of occupied territories. He cabled from Moscow demanding the creation of a joint military commission, which should hold its first meeting in Sicily. In Quebec, Churchill warned the Americans of ‘bloody consequences in the future…Stalin is an unnatural man. There will be grave troubles.' He was correct, of course. Thereafter, the Russians perceived the legitimisation of their own conduct in Eastern Europe. Since the Western Allies decreed the governance of territories which they occupied, the Soviet Union considered itself entitled to do likewise in its own conquests.

But the central issue at stake at Quebec was that of
Overlord
. The Americans were implacably set upon its execution, while the British continued to duck and weave. Wedemeyer wrote before the meeting that it was necessary for the US chiefs to advance a formula which would ‘
stir the imagination
and win the support of the Prime Minister, if not that of his recalcitrant planners and chiefs of staff'. Marshall's biographer, the magisterial American historian Forrest Pogue, remarks of Churchill in those days: ‘
As usual, he was
full of guile.' This seems to misread the prime minister's behaviour. Opportunism and changeability, rather than studied cunning, guided most of his strategic impulses.
Yet there is no period
of the war at which American dismay about British behaviour seems better merited than autumn 1943, as Eden and others acknowledged. Churchill and his commanders had always professed themselves committed to launching an invasion of Europe in 1944. At the Casablanca and Washington conferences, the British had not argued against
Overlord
in principle, but merely fought for delay. Now, it seemed, they were altogether reneging.

Churchill opened his budget at Quebec by reasserting principled support for an invasion. But he pressed for an understanding that if, in the spring of 1944, the Germans deployed more than twelve mobile divisions in France, the operation should not take place. Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, director of the Anglo-American COSSAC staff which had been planning the invasion, suggested that if the Germans appeared capable of deploying more than fifteen divisions against the beachhead in the two months following D-Day, a landing should not be launched. When the Germans flooded the river plains around Caen a few days before the conference began, COSSAC's operations division minuted: ‘
The full implications of this
have not yet been assessed, but it is quite possible that it will finally “kill”
Overlord
.' Brooke made plain his continuing scepticism about the operation's feasibility.

The British case was that the immediate strategic priority was to seize the chances of the moment in the Mediterranean, rather than to stake everything upon a highly dangerous and speculative cross-Channel attack. In war, they argued, circumstances were always changing. They were more realistic than the Americans, in their understanding that a decision to enter Italy was irrevocable: ‘
If we once set foot
on the Italian mainland,' wrote John Kennedy, ‘we are in for a big commitment…The Americans I am sure do not realise that limited operations in Italy eg against Naples, are impossible. We must either stop at the Straits of Messina or go the whole hog.' On 17 August, Churchill received a characteristically triumphalist signal from Alexander: ‘By 10am this morning, the last German soldier was flung out of Sicily.' The prime minister's enthusiasm for his favourite general seldom flagged, and he applauded the Sicilian operations as ‘brilliantly executed'. Yet it had taken thirty-eight days for much superior Allied forces to expel less than three German divisions. Far from being ‘flung out' of the island, inexcusably General Albert Kesselring's troops had been allowed to withdraw in good order across the Straits of Messina with most of their vehicles, guns and equipment.

At all the wartime conferences there was a stark contrast between the strains upon the principals, middle-aged and elderly men contesting great issues day and night, and the delights afforded to hundreds of attendant supporting staff who did not bear their responsibilities. The latter—staff officers, officials, clerks, ciphering personnel—worked hard at the summits, but also played hard. Duty officers were always in attendance upon the teletype machines which rattled forth signals and reports around the clock. Typists composed minutes of the day's meetings, and planners prepared drafts for the next. But it seemed to these young men and a few women miraculous to be delivered for a few weeks from rationed, battered, darkened England to bask in bright lights and prodigious quantities of food and drink, all of it free. Most danced and partied enthusiastically through the nights while their great men wrangled. The English visitors revelled in shopping opportunities unknown in Britain for four years.

Events did more than changes of heart to patch up Anglo-American differences at Quebec. The known readiness of the new Italian government to surrender made it plain to Marshall and his colleagues that Allied forces in Sicily must advance into Italy. It seemed unthinkable to leave a vacuum which the Germans could fill as they chose. The British, for their part, professed to endorse the
Overlord
plan presented by Morgan and the COSSAC team. There was much bickering about a cut-off date at which Allied divisions earmarked for France must be withdrawn from the Mediterranean, and thus about what objectives in Italy might feasibly be attained beforehand. Churchill, who dreamed of Allied armies driving towards Vienna, instead reluctantly endorsed a line from Livorno to Ancona by November, saying: ‘If we can't have the best, these are very good second bests.' In the event, Livorno and Ancona would not be taken until late June 1944. But in the heady days of August the Allies still supposed that once the Italians surrendered, the Germans would not make much of a fight for Mussolini's country.

When the conference ended on 24 August, Ian Jacob wrote: ‘There seems to be general satisfaction, though I can't see what has been decided which takes us much beyond
Trident
.' The ‘general satisfaction' was
merely a matter of public courtesy. Brooke wrote: ‘
The Quebec conference has
left me absolutely cooked.'
He subsequently acknowledged
that at this time he was close to a nervous breakdown. The Americans were deeply unhappy about British conditionality towards
Overlord
. Churchill's team had not for a moment abandoned their determination to keep the Allies deeply engaged in Italy, even at risk to D-Day. After a brief break at a mountain camp for fly-fishing—not a pastime which Churchill indulged with much conviction—he travelled to Washington, where he spent the next five days urging the need to hasten operations in Italy. On 3 September, Italian representatives signed the surrender document at Cassibili in Sicily, while at dawn units of Eighth Army landed on the Italian mainland north of Reggio. Five days later, the British 1st Airborne Division seized the port of Taranto without opposition, which Churchill dubbed ‘a masterstroke' in a laudatory signal to Alexander.

On 9 September, Mark Clark's Fifth Army staged an amphibious assault at Salerno, precipitating one of the bloodiest battles of the campaign, and a near-disaster. ‘
It was like fighting tanks
bare-handed,' wrote an American infantry colonel facing a Panzer assault on the beachhead. ‘I saw riflemen swarm over the top of moving German tanks trying to shoot through slits or throw grenades inside. Other tanks would machine-gun them off. They ran over wounded men…and spun their treads.' In the first hours, Clark was sufficiently panicked to order re-embarkation, until overruled by Alexander. At painful cost, a perimeter was established and held. That day, as German forces raced to occupy key strategic positions across southern Italy, the Italian fleet set off towards Malta to surrender. Its flagship, the battleship
Roma
, was sunk en route by German bombers, once again demonstrating the Luftwaffe's skills against maritime targets. A mad Allied plan for a parachute assault on Rome was mercifully cancelled at the last moment. Even the Anglo-Americans at their most optimistic were forced to acknowledge that, against the Germans, excessive boldness was invariably punished.

Churchill was mortified that, once again, he was in Roosevelt's company when bad news came. He had held out to the president a
prospect of easy victory in Italy. Now, instead, they learned of savage German resistance at Salerno. The British had been naïve in anticipating that a surrender by Italy's government must of itself deliver most of the country into Allied hands. Brooke had told the combined chiefs of staff on 13 May: ‘
He did not believe
Germany would try to control an Italy which was not fighting.' He and Churchill were importantly deceived by Ultra decrypts which showed that the Germans intended to abandon most of Italy without a fight. In the event, however, and as so often, Hitler changed his mind. This was a direct consequence of the Allied armies' poor showing, in German eyes, on Sicily and at Salerno. Anglo-American commanders and men exposed their limitations. Montgomery's performance was no more impressive than that of Mark Clark. The Germans were astonished by the ease with which some British and American soldiers allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. Kesselring, the German commander on the spot, concluded that defending Italy against such an enemy might be less difficult than he had supposed. He reported accordingly to Hitler. The Führer responded by ordering a vigorous defence of the peninsula, a task which the field marshal—who was appointed German supreme commander in Italy on 6 November—undertook with extraordinary energy and effectiveness. Allied fumbling of the first phase of operations in Italy thus had critical consequences for the rest of the campaign.

In those days in America, Churchill became excited by a possible landing on the Dalmatian coast, using 75,000 Polish troops and possibly the New Zealand Division. On 10 September Roosevelt departed for Hyde Park, leaving Britain's prime minister installed in America's capital: ‘Winston, please treat the White House as your home,' said the president generously, urging him to invite whomever he liked. Churchill used this licence to the full, summoning Marshall to press upon him the case for hastening reinforcements to Italy. On 14 September, at last he returned to Halifax, to board the battlecruiser
Renown
for home. His American hosts were glad to see him go. Their enthusiasm for his exhausting presence had worn as thin as their patience with his Mediterranean fantasies. Roosevelt's secretary
William Hassett wrote after their visitor's previous Washington departure in May: ‘
Must be a relief to the Boss
for Churchill is a trying guest—drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney, irregular routines, works nights, sleeps days, turns the clocks upside down…Churchill has brains, guts…and a determination to preserve the British Empire…He has everything except vision.' This was a view now almost universal within Roosevelt's administration. Harry Hopkins told Eden, when the Foreign Secretary visited Washington, that the president—and indeed Hopkins himself—‘
loves W as a man for the war
, but is horrified at his reactionary attitude for after the war'. Hopkins spoke of the prime minister's age, ‘his unteachability'.

The leaders of the United States were justly convinced that the time for butterfly strategy-making was over. British evasions over a cross-Channel attack were no longer justifiable. If the Western Allies were to engage land forces on the Continent of Europe in time to affect outcomes before the Russians defeated Hitler on their own,
Overlord
must take place in 1944. Henceforth, commitments in Italy must be adjusted to fit the overriding priority of the invasion of north-west Europe, and not vice versa. Marshall and his colleagues could scarcely be blamed for their exasperation at the prime minister's renewed pleas for a descent on north Norway, and the fit of enthusiasm with which he was seized for operations in the eastern Mediterranean.

It was widely expected both in Washington and London that Marshall would command
Overlord
. Churchill had broken it to Brooke at Quebec that his earlier insouciant offer of this glittering appointment to the CIGS was no longer open. It was foolish of both the prime minister and the general to have supposed for a moment that a British officer might be acceptable for the role; and even more so of Brooke, by his own admission, to sulk for several months about his disappointment. He possessed a sublime, and exaggerated, conceit about his own strategic wisdom. He had grievously injured himself in American eyes by prevarications about
Overlord
, even more outspokenly expressed than those of the prime minister. It was absurd to suppose that Brooke might have claimed command
of an operation which for months he had denounced as being launched prematurely.

Only an American could credibly lead this predominantly American crusade, but Roosevelt kept open until November his choice of appointee. Marshall wanted the job, sure enough.
The chief of the army indulged
a brief fantasy that Sir John Dill might be his deputy, or even—if the British persuaded the president that one of their own should command—that the former CIGS might be supreme commander. Stimson wanted Marshall, because he believed that the chief of the army alone had the authority and strength of character to overcome the ‘
mercurial inconstancy
' of the prime minister.

There was always a paradox about Churchill as warlord. On the one hand, he had a wonderful instinct for the fray, more highly developed than that of any of his service advisers. Yet his genius for war was flawed by an enthusiasm for dashes, raids, skirmishes, diversions, sallies more appropriate—as officers who worked with him often remarked—to a Victorian cavalry subaltern than to the director of a vast industrial war effort. The doctrine of concentration of force, an obsession of the Americans and especially of Marshall, was foreign to his nature. Though Churchill addressed his duties with profound seriousness of purpose, he wanted war, like life, to be fun. This caused the American service chiefs, earnest men all, not infrequently to think him guilty of frivolity as well as of pursuing selfish nationalistic purposes. Brooke, meanwhile, was perhaps the greatest staff officer the British Army has ever known. But experience of fighting the Germans for four years on short commons had made him a cautious strategist, and by this stage of the war an unconvincing one. He shared the Americans' impatience, indeed exasperation, with Churchill's wilder schemes. But in the autumn of 1943, and indeed well into the winter, Brooke was joined to the prime minister in a common apprehension about
Overlord
. American resolution alone ensured that the operational timetable for D-Day was maintained. If Roosevelt and Marshall had been more malleable, the British would have chosen to keep larger forces in Italy, especially when Clark's and Montgomery's advances languished. D-Day would have been delayed until 1945.