It was Stalingrad that finally, in Stimson’s words,
‘banished the spectre of a German victory in Russia, which had haunted the
Council table of the Allies for a year and a half’. It also greatly reduced the
likelihood of a German attack through Spain, cutting off the American forces
from their supply lines. Just as Wellington’s campaign in the Iberian peninsula
had been a small but significant ‘ulcer’ for Napoleon, but certainly not the
Russian ‘coronary’ that destroyed him, so too the North African and Italian
campaigns would be ulcerous for Hitler, but it was the Eastern Front that
annihilated the Nazi dream of Lebensraum (‘living space’) for the ‘master
race’. Four in every five German soldiers killed in the Second World War died
on the Eastern Front, an inconvenient fact for any historian who wishes to make
too much of the Western Allies’ contribution to the victory.
Between 24 August, when Churchill received what he called
the ‘bombshell’ news that Brooke and Marshall were deadlocked over Torch–with
Marshall wanting to attack only Casablanca and possibly Oran, but Brooke
wanting Algiers too–and 2 September, when Roosevelt changed his mind and
supported the inclusion of Algiers, there was renewed transatlantic struggle
between the Staffs. Marshall feared that the American forces would get cut off
if they landed too far east; Brooke wanted to try to stop Rommel escaping from
Tripoli, and so wanted to land as far eastwards as possible. Moran thought that
Churchill ‘was never so unhappy as when he was at odds with his military
advisers or his American allies’, but when he had to make a choice between
them, he came down firmly on Brooke’s side, not least because he had emphasized
to Stalin the comprehensive nature of Torch.
At 11 a.m. on 24 August, Kennedy and Major-General Francis
Davidson, the Director of Military Intelligence, were summoned to Churchill’s
private rooms in the No. 10 Annexe. ‘Winston lay in bed in his black dressing
gown with dragons, a half-sucked cigar in his mouth which he lit and re-lit
during the next hour and a half, without making any appreciable progress with
it, a glass of water on the table beside him.’ He had just returned from
Gibraltar, and told the two men how in Egypt ‘with the change of commanders a
new wind was blowing, how the Army was all in bits and pieces and that would be
put right now’ and of ‘the terrible wastage the “poor” Army had suffered’.
Reporting on Russia, the Prime Minister said that Stalin had
not made out that his situation was bad, ‘as he might have been expected to in
pressing for a Second Front’. Indeed he had been optimistic enough to remark:
‘Dieppe will be explained by Torch.’ Churchill added that he had bet Brooke
half a crown at odds of evens that the Russians would hold the Caucasus, and
boasted: ‘I drank as much or more than Stalin and Molotov together–they only
sip their liquor you know–and I was in quite good order.’
Kennedy then gave Churchill a blunt assessment on the
planning for Torch, specifically the inadequacy of the American contribution,
the need for overwhelming force, and a warning about ‘the first manifestation
of divergent strategies’. The bonhomie of the early part of the meeting
disappeared immediately as ‘Winston’s hackles rose at once and his eyes, which
were rather watery, began to flash.’ Anyone, he said, could make a plan
involving overwhelming force, but there could be no delay, especially for
further American forces coming from the Pacific. He wanted to bring forward the
date rather than delay it, saying that fighting Vichy France ‘was a soft
job–not like fighting Germans’, and that he would even ‘be prepared to go ahead
without the Americans themselves so long as they had plenty of American flags
to wave. What we wanted was a big show in the shop window.’
Kennedy replied that, although three divisions would be
ready in three weeks, it would take three or four months to get thirteen
together, yet the limiting factor was not troops so much as shipping, naval
escorts, aircraft carriers and, as ever, landing craft for the invasion force.
He argued that ‘the Americans should be in the thing wholeheartedly not only at
the beginning but subsequently’, pointing out that the growing American
commitments in the Solomon Islands and elsewhere in the Pacific showed that
they were diverting shipping and naval craft away from Germany First. ‘Winston
was distinctly ruffled’ before the meeting ended at 12.45 p.m.
On 25 August, Churchill reported to the War Cabinet about
Stalin, whom he described as a ‘large man’ of ‘great sagacity’. His visit had
‘Explained some past mysteries’ about Stalin’s behaviour before the war, and
the rebuffing of the British military mission to Moscow in August 1939. Led by
Admiral Sir Ranfurly Drax, this had been Britain’s last-minute attempt to
prevent the Nazi–Soviet Pact taking place. Churchill reported that Stalin had
been ‘certain Britain didn’t intend war…This was confirmed by our offers–France
of 80 divisions, Britain of 3 divisions. Stalin had been sure Hitler wasn’t
bluffing. At Munich an effort might have been made, after that nil was our
offered strength.’ To Churchill, who had denounced Munich at the time and
called for a united front with the Soviets against the Nazis thereafter,
Stalin’s assurances that the weakness of the Chamberlain Government in 1938–9
had left the Russians with no option but to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
was confirmation of his stance during his Wilderness Years. To those
Chamberlainites and Munichois still left around the Cabinet table, Stalin’s
assertions must have been galling. As for Torch, ‘Stalin did not exaggerate his
plight in order to exploit or extort help from us,’ said an impressed
Churchill.
That day Churchill and Brooke received a document from the
Joint Chiefs of Staff stating that the attack on Algiers would be too risky.
‘We are all profoundly disconcerted by the memorandum,’ Churchill replied on
the 27th. ‘It seems to me that the whole pith of the operation will be lost if
we do not take Algiers as well as Oran on the first day. In Algiers we have the
best chance of getting a friendly reception and even if we got nothing except
Algeria a most important strategic success would have been gained.’ Not to go
east of Oran, he went on, ‘is making the enemy a present not only of Tunis but
of Algiers’.
‘Torch is a great confusion,’ wrote Eden’s private secretary
Oliver Harvey in his diary. ‘It is very difficult to make plans on both sides
of the Atlantic and expect them to coincide. We are in favour of two prongs–US
think they will only have enough for one. We don’t like the East prong without
the West. Behind and above all this are Winston and Roosevelt goading each
other on to fix dates, etc, while all is vague.’ Kennedy meanwhile rightly
spotted that ‘It is a political operation and stands or falls by the
correctness of the political appreciations–reactions of the French, Spaniards,
etc, etc.’
Some American Planners thought that because the Vichy French
were supposed to prefer the United States to Britain, the Stars and Stripes might
be welcomed in North Africa whereas the Union Jack would be fired upon. This
led to the Americans attempting to persuade the British to play a junior role
in the landings, which was resented in some areas of the War Office and
Cabinet. Quite why this should be, beyond feelings of national pride, is hard
to say. The Americans had diplomatic relations with the Vichy Government,
whereas Britain did not, so it made sense for the operation to be presented as
an American liberation, and if that required the United States to spearhead it,
the Churchill Government should not have baulked at an opportunity to save
British lives. If national pride was the reason, as the war progressed there
were to be many more such turf wars over symbolism and prestige, which rarely
redounded to the credit of those involved.
‘We are undertaking something of a quite desperate nature
and which depends only in minor degree upon the professional preparations we
can make or upon the wisdom of our military decisions,’ wrote Eisenhower in his
diary that week. ‘In a way it is like the return of Napoleon from Elba–if the
guess as to psychological reaction is correct, we may gain a great advantage in
this war; if the guess is wrong, it would be almost as certain that we would
gain nothing and lose a lot.’ He feared that there might be ‘a very bloody
repulse’ and that Vichy France and even Spain might enter the war against the
Allies. Axis propaganda indeed began to give out that there was a concentration
of German forces near the Pyrenees, which there was not; and Marshall’s and
Eisenhower’s worry that the Germans might be invited by Franco to march through
Spain and outflank the Allies by closing the Straits of Gibraltar, trapping
American forces in the Mediterranean, failed to take into account Hitler’s and
Franco’s considerable mutual mistrust. (After their only meeting, at Hendaye in
October 1940, Hitler said that he would rather have three or four teeth pulled
out than sit through another conversation with Franco.)
Staying at Chequers on the night of Saturday 29 August,
Eisenhower and Mark Clark received a courier from Marshall saying that the
President had definitely decided to attack Oran and Casablanca with eighty
thousand US troops, but that the British should not arrive until a week
afterwards, and the attack on Algiers would be omitted altogether. As Roosevelt
was not planning to inform Churchill of this until the following Monday, for
Clark ‘this admonition to silence came at a difficult moment’. Brooke, Eden,
Mountbatten and Ismay were also present, trying to finalize plans for Torch, so
while ‘Churchill was enthusiastic’ and ‘Eden expressed optimism,’ Clark
‘fidgeted and boiled inside, and I imagine Ike did too.’ Clark recalled how
embarrassing it would have been ‘to air the latest word from Washington’ and he
and Eisenhower left on Sunday the 30th having ‘answered no more questions than
was necessary’.
It might have been this occasion that Eisenhower recalled in
his book At Ease, when he wrote of a meeting at Chequers where British and
American views were not meshing too well. Brooke said to him: ‘Naturally, you
cannot be expected to oppose violently something that Washington apparently
wants.’ Ike recorded: ‘Although I am sure he did not mean to imply that I was
swayed by fear of a reprimand, I explosively put him right. I told him flatly
that only the merits of a proposal, not its place of origin or its sponsorship,
mattered to me when the fortunes of nations were at stake.’ For all his charm,
Eisenhower could be waspish at times, even with Brooke. After the Chequers
meeting, Eden wrote in his diary: ‘Greatly impressed by Eisenhower and Clark,
as I have been before. We are lucky to have them as colleagues.’ Clark
meanwhile went back to London where he addressed thirty-seven British and
American generals, saying: ‘Some of you men are less confused than others about
Torch. Let’s all get equally confused.’
If Brooke assumed that Eisenhower could be swayed by
Marshall, Marshall feared that the Torch commander might be swayed by
Churchill, warning Admiral Leahy that at Chequers he was ‘very much under the
guns’. Marshall asked Leahy to use his influence ‘to see that the President’s
message gets off by Monday as the delays are fatal to the completion of the
plans and therefore directly affect the date for the operation’. Although many
important cables from Roosevelt to Churchill were drafted first by Marshall,
they would often be radically redrafted by the President–sometimes in Hopkins’
handwriting–before being sent off. Some important messages, such as the one
trying to persuade Churchill that British troops should take a junior role in
Operation Torch, went through several redrafts over a number of days and
emerged greatly different from Marshall’s original. This was even truer when
Admiral King was let loose upon early drafts, since FDR had a sense of how to
turn away wrath in a manner alien to the acerbic, straight-talking head of the
US Navy.
When Roosevelt’s cable duly arrived on Monday 31 August it
caused consternation. ‘I feel very strongly that the initial attacks must be
made by an exclusively American ground force supported by your naval and
transport and air units,’ it read. This was because Roosevelt believed that the
French would offer less resistance ‘to us than they will to the British’. He
suggested to Churchill and Brooke that a week after the operation, once French
non-resistance was secured, ‘your force can come in to the eastward.’ The
attack should preferably take place before 14 October, thought Roosevelt, but
certainly no later than the end of that month. He did not have to remind anyone
that the Congressional mid-term elections fell on Tuesday 3 November 1942.
At a War Cabinet meeting that day, Eden said that there was
a general impression in the press that the Second Front in Europe had been
cancelled for the rest of 1942. Although this was true, Churchill emphasized
that it was nonetheless ‘Important to play [up] to the Germans, and not let
them draw off troops from France.’ The last thing Churchill wanted was German
troop movements from France either to Russia or to North Africa. If that meant
encouraging the British press to believe that a cross-Channel operation was
still possible in 1942, it was easily a price worth paying.
Churchill answered Roosevelt’s telegram on 1 September,
arguing that not to attack Algiers simultaneously with Casablanca and Oran
might lead ‘to the Germans forestalling us not only in Tunis but in Algeria’,
and he urged that all three ports be targeted. Roosevelt replied the following
day agreeing to this, but demanding that each of the attacking forces be led by
American troops, with the United States controlling all relations with the
Vichy authorities once they had landed. This was undoubtedly sensible at Oran,
where the Royal Navy had sunk much of the Vichy fleet in July 1940.
There was a good deal of doubt over Torch in the British
High Command even comparatively late in the planning stage of the operation: on
3 September Dill told Kennedy that he didn’t believe in it, and feared it would
‘destroy his credibility in the States when it failed’, in which event he would
have to leave. After a Chiefs of Staff meeting that day, Kennedy told Brooke
that the operation ‘would have no chance today’, but might work in November if
Libya was softened up and Stalingrad held out. Kennedy also suspected that
Brooke ‘is not wholeheartedly behind the plan now that the implications are
coming to light more clearly’, especially those regarding the Navy and
shipping. In reality, Brooke had not been wholeheartedly behind it from the
start.
Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s first serious argument over
strategy ended in a compromise whereby they agreed to split the difference, in
terms of troops, between Algiers and Casablanca. ‘We are getting very close
together,’ the President wrote on 4 September, offering to reduce the
Casablanca force by five thousand men which, as five thousand had already been
taken off the Oran operation, released an extra ten thousand for Algiers. ‘We
should settle this whole thing with finality at once,’ he wrote. Churchill
agreed the next day, even offering that British troops might wear American
uniforms, and alleging that ‘They will be proud to do so.’ The President
signalled the end of the haggling with a telegram simply stating, ‘Hurrah!
Roosevelt,’ to which Churchill replied: ‘Okay full blast.’
The next meeting at Chequers with Eisenhower and Brooke was
therefore far easier than the last. With Pound and the Minister of War
Transport Frederick Leathers present, they decided that Torch must take place
on 4 November at the earliest, 15 November at the latest, with Ike’s ‘best
guess’ being 8 November.45 On 12 September Churchill had cause to thank
Roosevelt, telling him that the 317 Sherman tanks and 94 self-propelled 105mm
guns ‘which you kindly gave me on that dark Tobruk day in Washington’ had
arrived safely in Egypt and ‘been received with the greatest enthusiasm…As
these tanks were taken from the hands of the American Army, perhaps you would
show this message to General Marshall.’
Because the system of Allied convoys that were taking large
amounts of war matériel to northern Russian ports to help the Soviet war effort
was about to be suspended in order to provide shipping for Torch, Churchill
argued that further consideration should now be given to his favourite project
in the north, Operation Jupiter. In Moscow, Stalin had said that he would
contribute three Soviet divisions to seizing northern Norway if Churchill put
in two. In a memorandum to the Chiefs of Staff, Churchill reiterated the case
for invasion, in order to keep Russia supplied and therefore to prevent ‘the
whole mass of the German armies’ being let ‘loose upon us’. He underlined the
American aspect first, saying that Roosevelt regarded the maintenance of the
convoys as ‘an operation of equal magnitude as Torch, although he is ready to
skip one or perhaps two for the sake of Torch’. Then he presented his plan to
‘clear the Germans out of the north of Norway’, which he believed would incur
fewer losses than making the Merchant Navy take such lethal risks at least thrice
every two months.
Churchill objected to the Canadian First Army commander
General Andrew McNaughton’s very negative report on the feasibility of Jupiter,
complaining that ‘the exaggeration of difficulties’ seemed to be ‘customary’ in
military reports, and stressing that ‘It follows that if Jupiter as well as
Torch should get going, there could be no Roundup till 1944. This is already
the United States view. But Torch by itself is no substitute for Roundup.’ This
seems like a more or less blatant attempt to get Brooke to support the
Norwegian operation in order to stymie the cross-Channel one for 1943.
Churchill brought his plan up at the War Cabinet of 21 September, grumbling
that, with Torch under way, the Chiefs of Staff ‘took a rather unfavourable
view’ of providing the necessary shipping for Jupiter too. The phrase belies
the genuine strength of feeling the Chiefs of Staff had against attacking
Norway, which Brooke hardly ever mentioned in his diary without invective and
hyperbole.
As before when repulsed by his own Chiefs of Staff,
Churchill turned to Roosevelt. On 21 September he wrote a draft telegram about
Jupiter, pointing out that with Stalin, ‘simply to tell him now no more
[convoys]
till 1943 is a great danger.’ This was especially serious because
Stalin had ‘gained the impression’ at the Moscow Conference that Roundup was
not only ‘delayed or impinged upon by Torch but was to be regarded as
definitely off for 1943. This will be another tremendous blow for Stalin.’ As a
result, ‘We ought now to make a new programme.’
Churchill predicted that Torch would be successful and ‘we
might control the whole North African shore by the end of the year, thus saving
some of the masses of shipping now rounding the Cape. This is our first great
prize.’ In that case, he thought,
We might decide to do Jupiter instead of attacking the
under-belly of the Axis by Sardinia, Sicily and even possibly Italy…To sum up,
my persisting anxiety is Russia, and I do not see how we can reconcile it with
our consciences or with our interests to have no more [convoys] till 1943, no
offer to make joint plans for Jupiter, and no signs of a Spring, Summer or even
Autumn offensive in Europe. I should be most grateful for your counsel on all
this.
The telegram sent the next day reflected all these arguments
and more, but neither Marshall nor King would countenance Jupiter as a result.
Churchill had nevertheless allowed the Americans to glimpse the future
Mediterranean strategy he intended to adopt if prevented from attempting to
liberate northern Norway.
Although Marshall, King and Eisenhower appreciated that
undertaking Torch probably meant writing Roundup off for 1943, Roosevelt would
not admit as much, at least on paper. Churchill was keen that, despite Torch,
large numbers of American troops should continue to come over to Britain under
Bolero, not least because ‘if things go badly for us’ Britain would once again
‘have to face the possibility of invasion’. Keeping Roundup an open possibility
meant that the United States would continue to reinforce metropolitan Britain,
and Churchill asked Roosevelt to send him ‘revised programmes of what we may
expect in the next twelve months between now and next September under the
Bolero–Roundup scheme’. His fear–which was well founded–was that Admiral King
was siphoning (or ‘whittling’) off resources to the Pacific that should have
been coming to Britain instead. Meticulous research by Professor Mark Stoler on
troop, ship and landing-craft movements during this period suggests that this
was indeed the case.
Churchill wrote, in what reads like a begging letter to
Roosevelt, that over the next six months ‘it will be necessary for you…to send
at least eight US divisions to the United Kingdom in addition to your air force
programme’. These were large numbers, and could be justified only if Roundup
was still a possibility, for as Churchill put it: ‘Every argument used for
Sledgehammer and/or Roundup counts even more in 1943 and 1944 than it did in
1942 and 1943.’ Here, for the first time, Churchill used the word Roundup and
the date 1944 together.
The rest of the letter was yet another plea for Jupiter,
which only Churchill failed to recognize was a non-starter. He nonetheless
continued to promote it right up to the 1943 Quebec Conference, at one point
ordering Ismay to ‘suspend’ the entire War Office Planning Staff for opposing
it. ‘Winston has been particularly active in suggesting all sorts of schemes,’
noted Kennedy on 24 September. ‘He always wants to do more than we have
resources for and nothing seems to convince him that some things are impossible
or that dispersion is a dangerous business and that concentration is a
principle of war. Brooke says repeatedly, after seeing him, “I am convinced
that man is mad.”’
An undated (and eventually unsent) telegram from Roosevelt
to Churchill was drafted by Marshall on 25 September, which allowed the US
Chief of Staff to explain why Churchill’s Jupiter project ran flat against
Allied strategy. It was an answer to Churchill’s request for ‘a new programme’,
and a devastating one. In the course of a very long exposition of policy, which
Marshall must have known would not be sent as drafted, he drew attention to the
complete contradiction between Churchill’s regular statements about the need for
concentration of forces and his tendency to ‘advance urgent proposals requiring
further dispersion of means’.
Marshall wanted Churchill to be told that Torch must go
ahead on time, that the harsh fate of Convoy PQ-18–thirteen merchantmen sunk
out of forty between leaving Iceland on 2 September and reaching Murmansk on
the 18th–meant that the northern convoys had to be discontinued, with supplies
going through the Persian Gulf and the Alaska–Siberia routes instead, and that
the US refused to take part in Jupiter because ‘the disadvantages in the plan
far outweigh the advantages’. Furthermore, ‘The more forces we employ on the
perimeter of Continental Europe, obviously the fewer forces will be able to
penetrate vital enemy areas.’ Marshall even hoped that Roosevelt might say to
Churchill: ‘I do not believe that Stalin attaches to the Jupiter operation the
great importance implied in your message.’
As well as accusing Churchill of misrepresenting the Soviet
position, Marshall hoped that Roosevelt would tell the Prime Minister bluntly
that, as Torch had effectively wrecked any hopes of a 1943 Roundup, ‘The United
States does not plan to send to the United Kingdom during the next ten months
landing craft in excess of the number for which there will be operating
personnel, and adequate to carry troops for any probable 1943 offensive which
might be based on the UK.’ Since two paragraphs earlier he had stated that
Torch ‘definitely precludes’ Roundup in 1943, this would have been devastating
to Churchill. For all the debates about Roundup versus Torch, by October 1942
only one and a half American divisions had actually reached Britain. This was
partly because of the massive amount of food, vehicles and services that went
with them. It took 144,000 tons of shipping space to move a US infantry
division, and a quarter of a million tons if it was armoured. Though never
sent, the draft telegram did set out Marshall’s overall strategic thinking
unambiguously for Roosevelt:
In the implementation of plans such as Jupiter, Allied
military resources would be employed on the perimeter of the enemy citadel
[and]
…the Allied forces would not have sufficient and appropriate means
remaining for the initiating of a strong, decisive blow in any selected area.
On the other hand, a concentration of our means is most desirable in an area
where it will be possible to deal the enemy a decisive blow and come to grips
with him.
The tension between Churchill’s and Marshall’s strategies
could hardly be clearer.
Instead of Marshall’s draft, Roosevelt sent Churchill a very
short telegram merely stating that the next convoy should not sail to Russia.
He could see no advantages in a major row with his principal ally only a few
weeks before Torch. The suspicion must remain that Marshall wrote the draft
more for the President’s benefit than for the Prime Minister’s.
In 1953, Moran asked Churchill which were ‘the two most
anxious months of the war’. Without hesitation the Prime Minister answered
September and October 1942. On the first day of October, Eden visited Downing
Street after dinner, and found Clement Attlee there. ‘If Torch fails,’ Churchill
told the two men, ‘then I am done for and must go and hand over to one of you.’
With many more Conservative than Labour MPs in parliament as a result of
Stanley Baldwin’s 1935 election victory, all three knew it would have been Eden
rather than the deputy premier.
Later that week Kennedy recorded that Churchill ‘was like a
cat on hot bricks about the future development of the war’. Lunching with the
Prime Minister at Downing Street, he mentioned that he had a tin of snuff to
give him, a present from Admiral Richard Stapleton-Cotton. ‘I thought of giving
up cigars till we were back in Benghazi,’ Churchill said on accepting it. ‘Then
I thought I’d give up snuff. Then I decided to do neither. I didn’t see why I
should give up anything for any German.’ Kennedy later wrote that although
Churchill was funny at Cabinet Defence Committee meetings, ‘It is rather like
the headmaster making jokes to the boys–the laughs come very easily!’ This was
unfair; Churchill genuinely was funny, and humour was needed to leaven the
stress. When he had a sore throat he complained to Brooke that his doctors
‘have knocked me off cigars. That is the worst of having a high-class job–you
have to go in for high-class cures. I should have said a wet stocking round my
neck would cure me in a night.’
After dinner on 6 October, Eden and Oliver Lyttelton had a
drink with Churchill in the No. 10 Annexe, where they were joined by Randolph
Churchill, who at one point said, ‘Father, the trouble is your soldiers won’t
fight.’ Eden was indignant, recording: ‘It was a revelation to me that Randolph
is so stupid.’ Yet it is hard to escape the conclusion that although the
British High Command thought their soldiers would fight, there was indeed an
underlying fear that the Germans were man for man better soldiers, and this was
one of the reasons that the invasion of France was postponed to 1944, until
victories had been won over the Wehrmacht in the lesser theatres of North
Africa, Sicily and Italy.
On 9 October Kennedy went to see Eisenhower, who had
retained his post as commander of the European theatre as well as becoming
supreme commander for Torch. ‘I found him in a very wrought up state…he said he
was being continually bombarded with political, operational and administrative
problems…I was sorry to see that he was feeling the stress so much.’ Eisenhower
was unhappy with the British Government’s instructions to their commanders,
which he felt gave them carte blanche to appeal over his head directly to
Churchill. Kennedy pointed out that every British commander had always received
pretty nearly identical instructions, but it hadn’t prevented Lords Haig and
Gort from working with foreigners. Eisenhower then told Kennedy that he had
‘always considered this operation to be unsound strategically but he had been
chosen for a variety of reasons to head it and he would drive it through in a
spirit of loyalty and close cooperation’. When this amazing statement was
reported to Brooke, the CIGS retorted: ‘What a bloody fool the man is!’59
Meanwhile, in Washington, Hopkins warned Marshall on 10
October that Roosevelt had received a ‘very urgent wire’ from Stalin asking
that for the next few months deliveries of aircraft to Russia be more than
doubled to five hundred per month. The President, through the Soviet Ambassador
Maxim Litvinov, sent word that he would look into it at once. That morning
Stalin followed it up with ‘a very urgent request’ for an immediate answer.
Although Roosevelt knew that such a figure was completely impossible, he asked
if Marshall could send Stalin three hundred extra aircraft over and above what
had been agreed in the protocol, beginning immediately and starting with
coastal defence fighters. ‘The President is anxious to get off a message to
Stalin tonight,’ he was told.
Marshall replied that same night: ‘Any immediate increase
beyond the 212 airplanes per month now scheduled for Russia could only be
managed by a reduction of planes urgently needed for our units in combat
theatres,’ primarily Guadalcanal and Torch. US coastal defence units were
‘actually operational training units’, which had only half their proper
complement of planes, and which in any case ‘weren’t suitable for an active
theater’. Moreover, they were an important defence ‘against a possible trick
carrier raid’. In short, Marshall’s answer to Stalin was no. By that stage in
the war, he felt secure enough in Roosevelt’s regard to be able to take such a
firm line, and know that it would be accepted.
Marshall was also subjected to regular demands from Douglas
MacArthur in the Pacific, such as one of 17 October about ‘the critical
situation’ in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, which concluded, ‘I urge that
the entire resources of the United States be diverted temporarily to meet the
critical situation; that shipping be made available from any source; that one
Corps be dispatched immediately; that all available heavy bombers be ferried
here at once,’ and so on. Marshall not surprisingly disliked the high-handed
tone of the messages he received from MacArthur, who, rather than being sent
‘the entire resources of the United States’, had to be content with a heavy
bomber group that was flown from Hawaii to Australia.
On 14 October Brooke received Montgomery’s detailed plan for
a great attack to be unleashed on Rommel at El Alamein in nine days’ time. He
decided that he would not pass it on to Churchill, even though the Prime
Minister ‘was continually fretting to advance the date’ and asking him ‘why we
were not being informed of the proposed date of attack’. Brooke wanted to
protect Alexander and Montgomery from being bothered by Churchill, and
subjected to demands that the plans be altered. It was nonetheless a serious
and insubordinate decision to have taken. Like Marshall, however, Brooke knew
what he could get away with by then.
The searing summer heat meant that there had been little
fighting in North Africa since July, and both sides had been able to reinforce
themselves, with the Allies being strengthened disproportionately more than the
Axis. With two hundred thousand troops and over one thousand tanks, Montgomery
had almost double Rommel’s forces. The battle front was only 40 miles wide, as
the geological phenomenon known as the Qattara Depression closed off Rommel’s
opportunities for a southern flanking move by fast armour. Montgomery’s attack
began at 9.40 on the night of 23 October with more than one thousand guns
firing the first of more than one million rounds at the German positions, and
over the next twelve days a savage battle was fought, costing thirteen thousand
casualties on the Commonwealth side and thirty-five thousand on the Axis. After
three days, Brooke felt able to give the War Cabinet tentative details of how
it was going; five hundred German and one thousand Italian prisoners had been
taken, but there had been ‘No major clash of armour yet’. Then he filled in the
Cabinet on the situation in Russia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Burma.
There followed discussion of the accusation appearing in
British left-wing newspapers that Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer, had had
‘friends’ in the British War Cabinet when he flew to Britain in May 1941, which
had inflamed Soviet suspicions. Smuts said ‘We should…find out more about
H[ess] to find out who were his friends in Cabinet…Misunderstand[ings are] bad
for atmosphere of two allies. They are building up a case and we must meet it
before it has gone too far.’ Cripps–who had until recently been the ambassador
in Moscow–called for a ‘simple statement by someone about Hess, clearing up the
matter’. Churchill then explained:
Hess arrived, hot from Hitler’s entourage, and came to do
great service for Germany at great risk. He wanted to be…conducted to the King
to say that we [that is, the Churchill ministry] had no backing here and to get
a Government of the pro-Munich complexion installed. Hess was suffering from
melancholia. We tried to make him talk…He gave us last chance for peace and the
chance of joining the crusade against Russia. But he never said a word about
his Cabinet friends who he had come to see. He had once met the Duke of
Hamilton.
A minister then suggested that the Government should make
the records of Hess’ interrogation available to the press, to which Churchill’s
answer was no. Smuts warned that the ‘impression’ of the incident might
‘seriously’ affect Anglo-Russian relations and Cripps added that full
disclosure would ‘Get rid of an air of mystery’. Churchill, however, believed
that the Russians were worried about much more important matters, such as
‘their losses’, adding that he might consider allowing Cripps to make a digest
of the Hess documents for press and parliament, and the Cabinet could then
decide whether to hand it to Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador. In the event
neither thing happened, and the conspiracy theories about the Hess flight
therefore swirled around, inflaming Russian suspicions to the detriment of the
British Establishment, until the interrogation reports were finally released
somewhat piecemeal half a century later in the 1990s, entirely confirming what
Churchill had said.
On Tuesday 3 November, the US Congressional mid-term
elections produced the best result for the Republicans since 1928, increasing
their representation by ten senators and forty-seven Congressmen. Nonetheless
the Democrats still retained a 58–38 majority in the Senate and a 222–212
majority in the House of Representatives. Roosevelt had been in power for
nearly a decade, and there was much criticism of the way the war was being
fought, but his party still controlled all three branches of the American
government. The elections would undoubtedly have gone far better for him had
Operation Torch taken place beforehand, but Marshall told four Pentagon
historians in 1949, ‘off the record’, that the President ‘had made no word of
complaint when he was told the invasion date although some of his men yelled
pretty loud because we could not go in five days earlier’.
Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein was clear to all by 4
November, when Rommel started his full withdrawal, though hampered by Hitler’s
policy of refusing to contemplate retreats. Egypt was clear of the Afrika Korps
by 10 November. ‘Rommel was a fool not to have gone back a month ago,’ wrote Kennedy
on 2 November, with near-perfect hindsight. ‘We should then have been faced
with the problem of moving forward and building up again for an attack with a
long line of communications exposed to Rommel’s raids, etc. Rommel cannot be
such a good general as we thought. On the other hand, Montgomery has had
colossal luck in arriving at the moment when he did and not sooner.’64 (Or
indeed any later, when his victory would have been ascribed to Auchinleck’s
dispositions.)
Fourteen years later, Marshall identified this period as the
tipping point for the balance of power between the United States and Great
Britain:
For a long time they had supremacy and we had a minimum
of divisions either organized or overseas. The apex of British supremacy was
the victory of the Eighth Army in Africa. Later, their strength dwindled until
in the Italian campaign some units wouldn’t fight. We had to turn three of our
divisions over to the commander there. They had simply lost all their fight. We
didn’t blame them a bit, because they were completely exhausted and under
strength.
On Sunday 8 November, four days after Rommel began his
full-scale retreat from El Alamein, he found simultaneous amphibious assaults
taking place at eight places several hundred miles behind him, around
Casablanca, Oran and Algiers. They were all successful. Eisenhower and his
deputy Mark Clark were in overall command, and the American Western Task Force
was under the command of Major-General George S. Patton. The Vichy French
opposed the landings in all three places in their territory, but with differing
intensity. Whereas Algiers had fallen by the first evening, and the fighting in
Oran was over by noon on 10 November, the landing at Casablanca was bitterly
contested until 11 November. Nonetheless, Torch was a success, and, unlike the
Dieppe Raid, lessons genuinely were learnt for combined amphibious assaults in
the future.
The counter-attack via Spain did not transpire; the weather
was unusually fine; the feared losses to submarines and German bombers did not
happen. Stimson ‘always believed Torch to be the luckiest operation of the war,
although he was prepared to admit that those who had advocated the operation
could not be expected to see it in that light’. The President had won his bet.
On the evening of 8 November, as the momentous news about
Torch was coming in, Churchill was with Eden, Winant and Bedell Smith. ‘The PM
was evidently much elevated by the success in Egypt and satisfactory initial
stage of Torch and he talked even more frankly than customarily, the
conversation lasting the greater part of the night,’ Bedell Smith telegraphed
Marshall, who immediately passed the message on to Hopkins to show the
President. ‘He is extremely anxious to have you and probably Admiral King come
here at a very early stage for conference to reorient strategy in the light of
new Mediterranean situation.’ Churchill had given up the Norway idea, thought
Bedell Smith (wrongly), but he believed that a properly armed Turkey ‘will
erupt’ into the Balkans against the Germans. (In fact, Turkey only declared war
against Germany in late February 1945.) Bedell Smith concluded that Churchill
‘seems to be growing colder to the idea of Roundup except as a final stroke
against a tottering opponent. As you know, the Pacific to him seems very far
away and his constantly reiterated idea is that Russia, Britain and the United
States must dispose of Germany and then concentrate on Japan. He hopes to
clinch this strategy by your conference here.’
As for France, Winant reported to Roosevelt, and Bedell
Smith simultaneously to Marshall, that Churchill ‘feels bound in honour to
support de Gaulle, with all his faults, as the one man who stuck to the
apparently sinking ship and whose name has a following in civilian France’.
Churchill feared that the pro-Allied General Henri Giraud, whom the Americans
had slipped into North-west Africa during Torch in the hope of establishing him
in power there, would turn into a source of difficulty, and he insisted that
‘Britain and the United States cannot each have a pet Frenchman.’
In one evening of exuberantly loose talk with two key
Americans, therefore, Churchill had effectively warned Roosevelt and Marshall
that he wanted to ‘reorient’ strategy away from Roundup and towards the
Mediterranean, do nothing more than contain Japan, and run de Gaulle against
their favoured candidate, Giraud. He thereby neatly encapsulated the three next
great areas of discord between the Allied grand strategists and told the Americans
what he had in mind, much sooner than he needed to have done. Torch had arisen
from a negotiated deal whereby he and Roosevelt had effectively split the
difference over the numbers of troops needed for each part of the operation,
and compromised over the geographical areas to attack.
Yet Churchill deserved his moment of exultation. At the War
Cabinet the next day he hailed it as the ‘Biggest combined effort since
Hitler’s attack on the Low Countries, and the largest amphibian operation ever
undertaken…I beg my colleagues and military authorities to look on this as a
springboard. We must look at once at military operations undertaken from there.
This is the moment for the offensive.’ He added that it would be a ‘Tragic
mistake to think we can take our time with this war. Hitler is playing now for
a stalemate. This is our real danger. Never has there been more need for
urgency in the war.’ Smuts suggested that the ‘real victory front’ was to be
found ‘from the South not from the West’, and Churchill agreed, adding:
‘President Roosevelt calls this the Second Front. We won’t contradict this.’ He
proclaimed himself ‘very anxious’ to ring Britain’s church bells in celebration
the following Sunday; they had not sounded since 1940 because they were to act
as tocsins warning of a German invasion.
Churchill also wanted to ‘Bomb Italy, bring it forward as
fast as possible,’ ordering Brooke to ‘Have it studied, worked out and report
next week.’ He declared proudly that the ‘British Empire played the leading
part of this terrific event,’ predicting that it ‘meant the obliteration of the
German & Italian forces in Libya & Egypt’ and announcing that he would
‘Mark the victory in respect of Alexander and Montgomery with high reward and
promotion’, since it was ‘One of the greatest victories won by the British
Empire in the field. It’s a fine story.’ He then formally congratulated Brooke
and Grigg, the War Secretary, for a ‘brilliant showing’, remarking that the
‘movement of the invasion convoy without loss was a marvellous story with 105
warships, 142 troop and supply ships’. Brooke then filled in the details of the
successful operations at Oran, Casablanca and Algiers.
The Cabinet was a long one, a full three hours. ‘Winston
revelled over our success!’ noted Brooke at the time. ‘But did not give the
Army quite the credit it deserved.’ This was unfair: in fact the Prime Minister
suggested that the Cabinet should congratulate the CIGS and Grigg ‘for the fine
performance put up by the Army’. Brooke observed after the war: ‘I think this
is the only occasion on which he expressed publicly any appreciation or thanks
for work I had done during the whole of the period I worked for him.’
As well as being the first significant British Commonwealth
land victory of the Second World War, El Alamein was also the last. Henceforth
every major engagement was to be fought as part of an alliance. The peal of
Britain’s church bells ringing to celebrate this great feat of Imperial and
Commonwealth arms was also tolling the end of major unilateral military action,
at least until the recapture of the Falkland Islands forty years later. Kennedy
commented on how ‘remarkably thin’ the bells in London sounded that Sunday, and
it reminded him how many churches had been destroyed.
