Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (9 page)

For the rest of the war, though the heads of government made the important strategic decisions, the CCS implemented those decisions, made the plans, drafted the orders, and pretty much ran the war. That included a responsibility to prioritize, allocate, and distribute the tools of war, which in practical terms meant distributing the products of American industry. This, of course, was another of the principal issues that had brought Churchill and his advisors, including Beaverbrook, across the ocean to talk to the Americans, and they were ready as ever with a specific proposal on the matter. The British urged the creation of a Supply Board that would establish procurement priorities for the war effort; similarly, a Munitions Board and a Shipping Control Board would set priorities in those fields. The Americans were suspicious. They wondered why a board composed of 50 percent British representatives should decide how to distribute material that was 100 percent American-produced. In the end, they agreed to establish two
boards, one American and one British, to recommend priorities. The recommendations would go to the Combined Chiefs, and
that
body would make the final decisions. This additional power—to determine where to send the ships, tanks, and planes of American industry—gave the Combined Chiefs additional control over the direction of the war.
³⁶

The British and American publics were entirely unaware of these negotiations, and for them the most important consequence of the Arcadia conference was the formal announcement, on January 1, 1942, of the Declaration of the United Nations. Roosevelt came up with the term “United Nations” to replace “Allies” because the United States and the Soviet Union were not in fact allied—they were merely on the same side. The new declaration was largely a restatement of the goals spelled out in the Atlantic Charter but extended now to embrace all of the nations that were at war with the Axis. It confirmed the principle of “national self-determination” and announced that the signatory nations believed that “complete victory over their enemies is essential to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.” For that reason they were “now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world.” There was some back-and-forth with the Russians about the inclusion of the phrase “religious freedom,” but in the end the Russians agreed to sign, as did the representatives of twenty-five other nations.
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BY NOW, CHURCHILL WAS EAGER
to get back to London to resume his hands-on management of the war. Roosevelt and Hopkins personally escorted him, Pound, and Portal to the train station and bid them goodbye—Dill, of course, was staying on. A special train took Churchill and his party to Norfolk, where they boarded a big four-engine Boeing 314 Clipper flying boat for a flight to Bermuda, where they were to reboard the
Duke of York
for the six-day voyage back to England. Churchill, however, was impressed with the size and comfort of the big flying boat, and he asked the pilot, Kelly Rogers, if the plane could make it from Bermuda all the way to England. Rogers said it could, and so in the end that was how Churchill made his return. It had been less than fifteen years since the world had celebrated
Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, and now heads of government were making the flight. From then on, leading figures in the Anglo-American alliance would visit one another by air, thus shrinking the geographical gulf between them.
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Churchill’s trip had been a resounding success. Both the Germany-first strategy and the continuation of Lend-Lease support had been reconfirmed, the Declaration of the United Nations created an umbrella under which all the countries fighting against Germany could shelter, and a mechanism for global strategic management had been established in the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Churchill later mused that “future historians” would view the founding of the Combined Chiefs of Staff as “the most valuable and lasting result” of the Arcadia conference. He had been forced to acquiesce to a unified command for the Far East, but the Americans had agreed to send several divisions of soldiers to Iceland and Ireland to relieve British divisions for the war in the Middle East. Moreover, though the American high command had not embraced his Gymnast plan for an invasion of North Africa, the idea had found favor with the man who mattered most: the American president. To be sure, some differences had emerged as well. It was obvious that the Americans were convinced that sooner or later, and preferably sooner, a full-scale amphibious assault aimed at Germany’s heart would be necessary. Churchill accepted that reality, but he continued to hope that by 1943 such an invasion might constitute only the final shove that brought a tottering Nazi regime crashing down.
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On the negative side, the Arcadia conversations had exposed the Allied weaknesses in matériel that made an early invasion of any kind problematic. Even Gymnast would prove difficult unless the Allies could somehow overcome the quandary of insufficient shipping—too few troopships, cargo ships, tankers, and especially landing craft. To overcome that lacuna would necessitate not only an unprecedented building program but also neutralization of the German U-boat menace in the Atlantic. Before the Allies could seriously plan an invasion of any hostile shore, they would first have to secure the Atlantic sea-lanes, gain air superiority over the prospective enemy beaches, and assemble a stockpile of munitions and supplies. These
were mostly issues of mobilization and productivity, and in time the Americans would solve them. Churchill had believed from the first that the American industrial cornucopia would prove decisive. He had known, too, that the war against Hitler would be a long, bloody slog, but at least now he believed he could see the way forward.

G
EORGE MARSHALL
’
S COURTLY MANNERS
, Virginia accent, and deferential demeanor sometimes led others to underestimate the steel within him. Roosevelt saw it early. Back in the fall of 1938, with the war still looming, the president brought together a roomful of his military advisors to discuss how to prepare the country for the coming storm. He had previously obtained congressional approval for a major naval buildup, and now he sought to do the same kind of thing for the Army. Marshall was in the room, but as a mere brigadier general, he sat at the end of a sofa, off to one side. Roosevelt outlined an aggressive program that emphasized the production of military aircraft. He told the assembled officers that he wanted an air force of twenty thousand planes. He had concluded that he probably could get Congress to approve only about half that number, he said, but that was acceptable because his real motive was to develop the industrial facilities for airplane production so that a more rapid armament could take place later if needed. To accomplish this goal, he went on, it would be necessary to funnel most of the increase in the Army’s appropriation
for that year into aircraft production and leave other programs pretty much as they were. He went around the room to ensure that all were in agreement with this idea, and his eye fell on the sandy-haired brigadier general at the end of the sofa. “Don’t you think so, George?” he asked.

Marshall was a stickler for form who bristled silently at being called “George,” even by the president of the United States. He had listened with growing alarm to Roosevelt’s lengthy disquisition, fearful that such a program would leave U.S. ground forces mired in a state of continued unreadiness. He had said nothing while the president spoke, but now he had been asked his opinion, so he gave it: “I’m sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with that at all.”

Roosevelt was visibly startled, though he did not follow up on Marshall’s comment at the time. When the group adjourned and the men filed out the door into the anteroom, several of them turned to Marshall to offer their condolences for what they were certain was the end of a promising career. Instead, five months later, Roosevelt appointed Marshall chief of staff of the Army, with four-star rank.
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Marshall’s particular combination of deference and candor, so evident in his remark to Roosevelt, also worked well in dealing with his naval counterparts (Stark and King) and with the British—even, as was evident at Arcadia, with the redoubtable Churchill. Months later, the judgmental and not entirely admiring British General Alan Brooke confided to his diary that while he did not think Marshall much of a strategist, he acknowledged that he was very good at “providing the necessary links between the political and military worlds.” In a global coalition war, that skill would prove invaluable and make Marshall, as much as anyone in uniform, the architect of Allied victory.
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During the first six months of 1942, however, Marshall found himself on the losing side of a difficult and often frustrating campaign to convince first his fellow service chiefs, then the Combined Chiefs, and finally Churchill and Roosevelt that an early cross-Channel invasion of occupied France was the best and surest way to victory. From January through July 1942, Marshall employed reason, argument, and on one occasion blackmail to convince the heads of the American and British governments to accept the need for, and the wisdom of, his strategic vision. It was a campaign that
tested his diplomacy, his debating skills, and often his patience, and in the end it was one that he would lose.

THE COMBINED CHIEFS OF STAFF
created at the Arcadia conference met more than two hundred times during the war, a number that does not include the scores of private discussions and informal conversations that took place on a near daily basis. The first meeting, held in the U.S. Public Health Building on Constitution Avenue because no other site was available, occurred on January 23, only nine days after Churchill returned to England. Marshall, King, and Arnold attended regularly, with occasional support from Eisenhower, whom Marshall had appointed in February to head the Army’s War Plans Division.
*
Dill was the principal British spokesman, and he was seconded by Admiral Sir Charles Little, who led the British Joint Staff in Washington until he returned to England later in the year and was replaced by Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. The Royal Air Force was represented by Air Marshal D. C. S. Evill, whose name occasioned some amused comment. Others circulated in and out. A more permanent change occurred in July when Admiral William D. Leahy returned from his difficult and delicate assignment as the U.S. ambassador to Vichy France and Roosevelt made him his chief of staff in which capacity he joined the CCS as its titular head.

Early on, a kind of unofficial protocol emerged in which the Americans convened separately in the morning or over lunch to ensure that they were more or less in agreement before they met with their British counterparts in the afternoon. There was no official authority for these meetings of the American service chiefs, and no name for the group they formed, though others soon began to refer to it as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), a name that has stuck. Later in the war, Roosevelt sanctioned both the organization and the name with an executive order, but in the beginning it emerged out of convenience and necessity, an important first step toward cooperation—if not quite integration—among the American armed services, which up to
then had operated as autonomous entities. The meetings of both the Joint Chiefs and the Combined Chiefs soon came to dominate the work calendars of the principals. King estimated that despite his dual role during the war as both chief of naval operations and commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, he spent two-thirds of all his time on either JCS or CCS matters.
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The CCS was not, however, a decision-making body. Everything it did was subject to oversight and reversal by the heads of governments. Churchill, who, in addition to his role as prime minister also held the portfolio of Minister of Defence, continued to direct British strategy from his basement war room in Whitehall. To him, both the British Chiefs of Staff in London and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington were merely advisory bodies, and his larger-than-life personality dominated British strategic decision making throughout the war. For his part, Roosevelt was much less of a bully to his service chiefs, but his instinctive preference for a loose and informal (some said chaotic) administrative style unbound by clear wire diagrams or strict protocol allowed him to give the Joint and Combined Chiefs the freedom to make plans and to recommend policies—as long as everyone understood that in the end the final decisions were always his. Even then, he was as likely as not to change his mind.