Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (18 page)

As it happened, Stalin did not attend. He declared that he would not leave the Soviet Union so long as there were German soldiers on Russian soil. Perhaps, too, he felt that his refusal underscored the fact that while the western allies traveled around attending conferences, he was actually fighting a war.

Partly because of travel fatigue, and partly because of the prime minister’s nocturnal habits, most of the business sessions involving Churchill and Roosevelt took place in the late afternoon and evening. That allowed the Combined Chiefs to meet in the mornings to thrash out strategic alternatives before presenting their views to the heads of government in the afternoon. In effect, the generals and admirals proposed, and the political leaders disposed. The schedule also allowed time for some family reunions. Churchill arranged to have his son, Randolph, released temporarily from his post with the British Eighth Army in Egypt; both Elliot Roosevelt, who was with the U.S. Army, and Franklin junior, a lieutenant in the Navy, were present. Even Harry Hopkins’s son Robert, whom he had not seen in years and who was now an Army Air Forces photographer, was there.

The Combined Chiefs got together for their first session on January 14. The British were well prepared as usual, and Brooke led off with an hour-long presentation that emphasized the great results to be expected by invading Sicily. Such a move, Brooke argued, would “compel the Germans to disperse their forces,” and thereby give greater assistance to the Russians than an invasion of France would. Pound argued that continued Mediterranean operations were
all but inevitable since the limitations of Allied shipping made any other option impossible. Portal then took up the cause by asserting that continued pressure in the Mediterranean, along with unrelenting strategic bombing, would bring Germany to her knees.
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These arguments were neither new nor surprising to the Americans, for they were not significantly different from what Churchill had proposed a year earlier at the Arcadia conference. Marshall and the Americans remained skeptical, convinced that “an operation from the United Kingdom” was essential to ultimate victory. If the arguments had not changed, the circumstances had. The Torch landings and the subsequent North African ground campaign had revealed serious shortcomings in both American training and available assets. It was perhaps to be expected that the judgmental George Patton would find fault with the combat readiness of U.S. soldiers, many of them only a few months out of civilian life, but even Marshall was shocked when, during an evening walk outside Casablanca, he encountered a unit of newly arrived American soldiers and found the men so sloppily dressed and undisciplined that they were, in his view, “not usable for any battle against the Germans.” The British certainly agreed. Field Marshal Harold Alexander wrote to Brooke that the Americans “simply do not know their job as soldiers.” That was not true of every American, of course, but it was clear that more training and more experience would improve the odds of future battlefield confrontations.
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As for the sealift problem, the Torch landings had used up almost exactly half of the Allies’ available landing craft, and at Casablanca, Eisenhower reported that a subsequent move to Sicily would entail the loss of 50 to 75 percent of what was left. Landing craft, apparently, were like Kleenex: good for one use and then discarded. This was especially true for the small Higgins boats. The problem of underprepared American soldiers could be overcome with training and experience, but if the Allies expended most or all of their remaining landing craft in another Mediterranean operation, there would be few or none left for a cross-Channel invasion. Marshall was cold-bloodedly realistic in observing that “we could replace troops” lost in any Mediterranean campaign, but that “a heavy loss in shipping … might completely destroy any opportunity for successful operations against the enemy in the near future.”
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In reply to these concerns, Brooke adopted the demeanor of a longsuffering schoolmaster forced to deal with a class of particularly slow-witted pupils. “All matters have to be carefully explained and reexplained [to the Americans] before they can be absorbed,” he wrote in his diary that night. “They can’t be pushed and hurried, and must be made gradually to assimilate our proposed policy.” Brooke got support from Mountbatten, the director of combined operations, who suggested that instead of attempting to redeploy landing craft from the Mediterranean back to England, which would be a lengthy and tedious process, new landing craft should be brought over from America on the same transports that carried the U.S. troops. That way, the arriving GIs would have landing vessels available for amphibious training, and the landing craft already in the Mediterranean could remain there and be put to good use in local follow-on operations.
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Like Marshall, Brooke sought relief from the negotiations by taking walks, though in his case, they doubled as birding expeditions. (Brooke recorded excitedly in his diary that he spotted “sanderlings, ring plover, grey plover, and turnstones!”) During the sessions, he sought to reassure Marshall that the buildup of American forces in England could continue even as operations unfolded in the Mediterranean. He envisioned the movement of twelve thousand American GIs a month to Britain throughout the spring and summer, so by August there would be nine to twelve divisions in southern England for a thrust across the Channel if a “crack” in the German defenses provided an opportunity. And Brooke assured Marshall that “we should definitely count on reentering the Continent in 1944 on a large scale.” Of course, they had said much the same thing a year earlier about a 1943 invasion.
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This dispute was not merely about available resources or even strategy. At its heart it was the product of a fundamentally different understanding of the very purpose of a cross-Channel invasion. From the beginning, the British had envisioned any such assault as the final coup de grâce to be applied to an enemy utterly worn out by prolonged struggle and constant bombing; to them, no invasion should be attempted until Germany was visibly faltering and on the brink of collapse. The American view was quite different. To them, the invasion was not to ratify a victory already won; it
was to seize that victory by brute force. To the British, it was to be a victory lap; to the Americans it was a death grapple. In the long history of the alliance, this gap in perceptions was never bridged.
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After three days, the two sides were no closer to an agreement than they had been at the start. Brooke pushed for Sicily, Marshall for Brest, and King for expanded operations in the Pacific, and at times the conversations became “very heated.” It was Dill who broke the deadlock. As a British officer who lived in Washington and met every day with the JCS, he had a foot in each camp, and he knew just how much each side could give in order to reach an agreement. Moreover, Dill was one of the few besides Churchill who could stand up to Brooke. In a private meeting, Brooke told Dill that he would “not move an inch,” and Dill shot back, “Oh yes, you will!” After some effort, he obtained Brooke’s grudging agreement to several minor points. Then he went to see Marshall, and wrung similar concessions from him. As a result, when the Combined Chiefs met with Roosevelt on January 18, they were able to tell him that they had reached an agreement. The invasion of Sicily, code-named Husky, would go ahead, but the Allies would simultaneously continue the buildup of troops in England “for a thrust across the Channel in the event that the German strength in France decreases.”
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Though technically a compromise, Marshall and the Americans had once again given way on the main point. King was pleased that the war against the U-boats would receive the highest priority, and he secured approval to proceed with a Pacific offensive in the fall; Marshall got approval for a buildup of Allied forces in England. Nonetheless, the British won the big prize: authorization for an expanded Mediterranean campaign, a campaign that, once under way, would very likely draw more and more assets into the fight. Once again, the Allies had agreed to punch the tar baby, and the Americans knew that they had been outmaneuvered. Following the final session, the American brigadier general Albert C. Wedemeyer, who had assumed Ike’s old job as head of war planning, was resting in his room when Vivian Dykes, his British counterpart, stopped by for a drink. Wedemeyer and Dykes were old friends, having served together at Fort Myer in Virginia before the war. When Dykes sat down, Wedemeyer looked at him sharply and said, “Your people have no intention of ever crossing the
channel.” It was not so much an accusation as a statement, and Dykes did not deny it. Instead he sucked thoughtfully on his pipe and responded, “There is no accounting for Winston.”
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For his part, “Winston” appreciated that the Americans might feel hard done by (to use the British phrase) at the outcome of the conference, and he sought to ease their disappointment by suggesting that perhaps it was time to name a commander for the cross-Channel attack. Though Brooke hoped that when the time came, he might be that eventual commander, others expected that it would probably be an American, most likely Marshall. Given that, Churchill proposed the appointment of a British chief of staff as a deputy commander. Marshall supported the idea. While Churchill’s purpose may have been to offer the Americans a harmless consolation prize, Marshall saw that appointing a deputy commander or a chief of staff for the big invasion made such an invasion real in ways that mere assurances of future support did not. It also meant that the organizational and administrative work could begin at once, and that would speed the execution of the invasion when it finally did occur. And so, on January 22, the CCS agreed “that a British Chief of Staff, together with an independent U.S.-British staff should be appointed at once for the control, planning and training of cross-channel operations in 1943.” Whatever Churchill’s motives in suggesting it, it was the first tangible step toward the beaches of Normandy.
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Nine days later in Stalingrad, German field marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrendered 91,000 men including sixteen generals, all that was left of his army of 265,000, to the Russians. It was the greatest Allied victory of the war, and almost certainly Stalin reflected on the fact that while the British and the Americans talked, the Russians fought—and won—battles. To ensure that no one missed the point, on February 23, the anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, Stalin released an order of the day that contained this sentence: “In view of the absence of a second front in Europe, the Red Army alone bears the whole burden of the war.”
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One more aspect of the Casablanca conference requires mention here, if only because it commanded so much attention from newspapers at the time and from historians since. After the final session of the conference on January 24, Roosevelt and Churchill met with reporters to showcase the
grudging truce they had managed to engineer between Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle. Somewhat awkwardly, the two French rivals shook hands for the benefit of the cameras, and afterward Roosevelt announced, almost cavalierly, that the Allies had agreed to demand the “unconditional surrender” of the Axis powers.

Roosevelt later claimed that as he watched Giraud and de Gaulle shaking hands, it reminded him of Grant and Lee at Appomattox, and that recalled to his mind Grant’s demand for unconditional surrender at Fort Donelson. The idea of announcing a policy of unconditional surrender, he asserted, just popped into his head. Like many of Roosevelt’s stories, this was more fable than fact. He had discussed the policy with the Joint Chiefs at their planning session in the White House almost three weeks earlier, on January 7, and had confirmed it with Churchill at Casablanca. Moreover, it was not a flippant or thoughtless notion. Roosevelt knew that the Nazis had seized power in the 1930s in part by claiming that Germany had never been defeated on the battlefield in World War I but instead had been “stabbed in the back” by Jews, social liberals, and communists at home. He wanted to ensure that no such claim could be made this time. Moreover, making unconditional surrender an official policy would reassure Stalin that Britain and America would not make a separate deal with Germany behind his back, and perhaps it would also restrain Stalin from trying to make a deal of his own.
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Afterward, there was much conversation in the press and elsewhere about whether announcing a policy of unconditional surrender effectively backed the Axis into a corner and thereby made less likely an early end to the war. Some speculated that the announcement undercut efforts by dissidents in Germany who wanted to remove Hitler from power. Whatever the merits of such speculations, it is unlikely that Roosevelt’s announcement changed either the course of the war or Stalin’s views on a separate peace. In the meantime, there were more immediate and tangible issues at hand: there was still North Africa to be conquered, Sicily to be invaded, and a chief of staff to be appointed for the cross-Channel invasion of Europe.