Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (8 page)

Marshall had been thinking about this for some time. An avid student of history, he knew that the absence of unified command had caused problems in America’s past wars. At the Virginia Military Institute he had studied almost literally on top of a Civil War battlefield, and he was very much aware of how the absence of unified command between the Union Army and Navy had undercut the North’s numerical and matériel superiority. Marshall had also encountered the perils of disunity during the First World War when he had served on Pershing’s staff. Not until the very end of the war did the Allies overcome the suspicious nationalism of the associated armies to create a unified command on the Western Front. As a result of both his reading and his experience, Marshall had urged closer Army-Navy cooperation during the interwar years, establishing a joint command of the Caribbean in December just days before Pearl Harbor. Now he argued that having separate and independent commands for the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Navy was a recipe for duplication, confusion, and disaster. It was essential, in his mind, to have one man in charge.
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It is difficult in hindsight to appreciate what a radical proposal this was. The very idea of putting American soldiers under British command, or British soldiers under American command, or soldiers of any service under naval command, was little short of heresy. Even Stark instinctively recoiled, though King offered some encouragement. Portal suggested that perhaps “the committee here in Washington” could act as a kind of unified commander. But Marshall rejected the idea of command by committee out of hand. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that there must be one man in command of the entire theater—air, ground, and ships. We cannot manage by cooperation.” The British already believed that the Americans were untested novices and that it would take some time—perhaps years—for them to become competent managers of war. They now imagined the consequences if battle-hardened British soldiers were placed under the direction of inexperienced and overeager West Pointers. They could not say any of this, of course—they needed the Americans desperately and could not
afford to insult them, so instead they voiced skepticism about the whole notion of unified command.
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Marshall realized that he had sprung this idea on the delegates without having done the necessary staff work about how it would operate. It was unlike him. After the meeting, he pulled aside his young deputy, the newly promoted Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower (whom everyone called “Ike”), and asked him to prepare a formal proposal for presentation the next day. Marshall told him that it should be written in the form of a letter of instruction to whoever was chosen to direct Allied forces in the Far East. Eisenhower stayed up late that night to write it. It probably never occurred to him as he did so that he was establishing the precedent for unified command that would later make possible his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander. Eisenhower’s goal was to alleviate the suspicions of the British, and he therefore went out of his way to emphasize what a theater commander could
not
do. He could not relieve an officer of another service, he could not change the tactical organization, he could not use the supplies of one country to support another, and he could not “assume direct command” of the forces of other nations, only direct their strategic movements.
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Meanwhile, Marshall did the necessary legwork. He pitched the idea of unified command to Stimson, who liked it, and he and the secretary of war went again to see the president. Roosevelt listened and expressed general agreement, as he often did, then told Marshall to talk to Knox, for it would be essential to ensure that the Navy was in agreement. Even more than Knox, Marshall had to get the admirals on board, for few of them would welcome the idea of serving under an Army officer. Marshall met with the Navy’s senior admirals in Stark’s office. They remained skeptical, and they were especially concerned that the Army Air Force would somehow gain control of naval aviation. It was King who broke the logjam. To him it was simple logic that “effective operations would be impossible if three services, representing four different countries, should operate on their own without some immediate superior in the area.” Once King signaled his support, the others fell into line.
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The British service chiefs were cautiously supportive about the idea, and a few were openly enthusiastic. After Marshall made his proposal, he was
somewhat astonished when Pound (“the old admiral,” as Marshall called him in his reminiscences) came hustling out of the meeting to catch up with him and vigorously shake his hand. Then Dill came up and literally threw his arms around him. For all their enthusiasm, however, it was evident that they would follow Churchill’s lead, and the “former naval person” was likely to be a hard sell. In a conversation with Roosevelt in the White House on the night of December 27, Churchill maintained that unity of command might be all very well in principle, and might even be appropriate in a continental war, such as that of 1914–18, where the soldiers of the Allied armies had fought side by side, but in a global war, where forces were scattered all over the world, it was simply not practical. Beaverbrook and Hopkins were both present, and Beaverbrook took it upon himself to pass a note to Hopkins: “You should work on Churchill. He is being advised. He is open minded [on this] and needs discussion.” On the basis of that, Hopkins arranged for Marshall to meet with Churchill one-on-one. With Hopkins’s prodding, Churchill invited Marshall to come and see him in his White House bedroom the next morning. Very likely Churchill was confident he could overwhelm the soft-spoken American general with the force of his personality. It was a meeting of the irresistible force and the immovable object.
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Marshall found Churchill propped up in his bed with state papers spread out all around him—his usual morning workspace. Marshall declined the invitation to sit and remained on his feet, striding back and forth to make his presentation. He was, quite literally, a moving target. Churchill, as usual, began with a monologue. Marshall remembered that “he got off quite a spiel.” Churchill insisted that “a ship was a very special thing” and could not be put under an army commander. “What would the army officer know about handling a ship?” he asked. Marshall shot right back: “Well, what the devil does a naval officer know about handling a tank?” though that was not the point. When Churchill began to recite the centuries-long tradition of naval independence, Marshall interrupted him: “I was not interested in Drake and Frobisher,” he recalled saying, “but in [creating] a united front against an enemy which was fighting furiously.” Churchill was not used to being challenged so directly. After a while he got out of bed and went into
the bathroom. Marshall waited patiently, and eventually Churchill emerged from his ablutions wearing only a towel. Somewhat grudgingly, he agreed to discuss the issue with “his people,” and in the end he gave way. “It was evident,” he wrote later, “that we must meet the American view.”
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It helped considerably that Marshall let it fall that the man he had in mind for a unified command in the Far East was an Englishman, General Sir Archibald Wavell, who in due course was appointed supreme commander of what was called ABDA, an acronym for Australian, British, Dutch, and American forces. Wavell held his command for only forty-nine days. For all their unity, the Allies simply lacked the wherewithal to stand up to the Japanese onslaught in the Far East, especially in the air. The unexpected and astonishing fall of Singapore on February 15 marked the collapse of the experiment, and ABDA was dissolved a week later. But Marshall’s efforts had not been in vain, for they established the precedent for a unified theater command, and in the long term the principal beneficiary of that would be the man who had drawn up the proposal, Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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THE QUESTION OF NORTHWEST AFRICA
proved more difficult. Churchill had endowed his plan for an Allied landing there with the code name Gymnast, and an even more ambitious scheme of occupying all of French Northwest Africa was called Super-Gymnast. As the Arcadia delegates sought to juggle their scarce resources to match the almost uncountable demands of global war, however, it became increasingly evident that such plans were little more than a chimera. As always, the bottleneck was shipping: there was simply not enough of it to continue the convoys to Britain and Russia, keep the lines of communication open in the Pacific,
and
mount
an invasion of Africa. Marshall acknowledged that he could probably assemble three divisions, one of them a Marine division, for the proposed movement to North Africa, but that would leave no ships left to do anything else in the Atlantic. Churchill was crestfallen and declared that he would be “frightfully unhappy” if they had to scrap their plans on account of insufficient shipping. He suggested that perhaps the Allies could use battleships to carry troops. Roosevelt was dubious about that, though he promised to see what he could “dig up.” Given the realities of the shipping problem, it seemed evident that an invasion of North Africa, at least in the near term, was simply unrealistic.
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In spite of that, Roosevelt and Churchill wanted to keep the prospect of Gymnast open. At one of the last meetings of the conference, on January 12, Roosevelt asked how soon an invasion of North Africa could be launched, assuming that the shipping could be found to support it. Churchill declared that it could be done by March 3—less than two months away. Marshall demurred. He noted that “the shortage was not in troop carriers [alone] but in cargo carriers.” It was not enough merely to put soldiers ashore, even if the ships could be found to do so. They also had to be maintained there. King agreed. At the very least, he insisted, any such operation would have to wait until mid-April.
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Despite the obvious skepticism evident in these responses, the eternally optimistic Roosevelt announced that planning should begin at once for what he labeled “General Marshall’s plan.” “We will make Beaverbrook and Hopkins find [the] ships and will work on Super-GYMNAST at the earliest possible date.” Thus did the Allies take their first hesitant steps toward North Africa and the Mediterranean.
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THERE WAS ONE MORE
important result that came out of the Arcadia conference, one with significant long-term consequences for the Allied partnership. It emerged from the implementation of the ABDA command under General Wavell. According to Eisenhower’s memo, Wavell was to receive his orders from “an appropriate joint body.” The problem was that there was no such body to develop strategic plans. To create one, Roosevelt suggested that a permanent committee be set up composed of three
American and three British senior officers, with occasional representation from the Dutch and others on an advisory basis—in other words, a body very much like the one that had come together for the Arcadia conference. It seemed logical, too, that this permanent body should meet in Washington, not only in recognition of the fact that the United States was likely to provide the bulk of the men and materials during the war, but also because Washington was geographically located between the two theaters of war. Meeting in Washington would be easy enough for the American service chiefs, but clearly the British heads of service could not be expected to remain permanently in a foreign capital while a war was being fought at home. Someone other than the service chiefs would have to represent the British. The solution to this was near at hand. As Churchill had foreseen, Dill could stay on in Washington to represent the British Army, and the Royal Navy and Air Force could be represented by the senior members of those services on the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington. Stark would go to London as commander in chief of U.S. Naval Forces Europe (CINC-NAVEU), and that would allow King to take over the duties of chief of naval operations as well as COMINCH. The new decision-making and supervisory body thus created would be known as the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS).
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