Masters and Commanders Read online

  sitting in his chair at the long table in front of the fire, either in his siren suit, or, if some engagement or attendance at the House of Commons followed the meeting, immaculately dressed in a short black coat, striped trousers, silk shirt and bow-tie with spots. Wonderful hands too–so well kept. He gave the impression that he had just dressed after a bath and had used talcum powder with liberality. As one entered that historic room one could generally tell from the expression on Churchill’s face if the meeting was set for fine, fair, or wet and stormy…though, as with the uncertainty of our weather prophets, one could not be absolutely sure that an unexpected storm would not blow up from somewhere.5

  After the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Churchill a stuffed flat-billed platypus as a present, it was put on view to the left of the lobby at No. 10. A group of people, including Burgis, were waiting there one day when Churchill arrived and, ‘beaming all over’, pretended to be the showman at a fairground, crying: ‘This way to the flat-billed platypus, gentlemen!’6

  Sir Edward Bridges’ instructions for the writing of Cabinet minutes insisted on their being ‘(a) brief (b) self-contained (c) in the main, impersonal, and (d) to the full extent the discussion allows–decisive’.7 Often this was the very opposite of what had actually happened in meetings that were prolix, open ended, highly personal and indecisive. Official Cabinet minutes are therefore opaque documents, usually deliberately so. As one War Cabinet secretariat clerihew put it:

  A page from Lawrence Burgis’ account of the War Cabinet meeting of 10 December 1941

  And so while the great ones depart to their dinner,

  The secretary stays, growing thinner and thinner,

  Racking his brains to recall and report

  What he thinks that they think they ought to have thought.8

  Sometimes the Cabinet minutes adopted a form of code for the initiated, similar to the Foreign Office euphemism whereby ‘a full and frank discussion’ meant a blazing row. When at the Cabinet Defence Committee of 2 March 1942, for example, Churchill and General Sir Alan Brooke clashed over the problems caused by the fan-belt drive and the lubrication system of the Cruiser tank, and the minutes record, ‘Some discussion then took place on the subject of these defects, in the course of which surprise was expressed that they should not have been detected earlier,’ one can be fairly sure that there was a hard-fought and possibly ill-tempered argument.9

  By reading the original, contemporaneous, handwritten notes that Burgis took, one can see who said precisely what at the meetings. From his jottings it is now possible, six decades later, to recreate the exact discussions that took place. Burgis’ very extensive papers have lain almost completely unexamined in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge since they were deposited in 1971. As he was a comparatively minor official, he has not so far excited any interest among historians, although admittedly his calligraphy and private shorthand is more hieroglyphic than easily interpreted English. Nonetheless the hundreds of yellow secretarial sheets do contain the record of what was actually said at those crucial meetings. Readers can if they wish check on my website–www.andrew-roberts.net–how I have reconstructed the sentences of speech from Burgis’ shorthand notes.

  Also appearing here for the first time in book form are the verbatim reports of Cabinet meetings made by Norman Brook (later Lord Normanbrook). These were released by the British National Archives in 2007 and provide a similar treasure trove of what precisely was said by ministers. Some of the more sensational revelations–such as Churchill’s scheme to execute Hitler by the use of the electric chair–were reported in the press, but huge amounts of fascinating information were not, and appear here with the source notes CAB 195/1, 195/2 and 195/3.

  Of course verbatim records, however well reported, can tell us next to nothing about the all-important aspects of exchanges besides the mere choice of words used. Swiftness of reply, absence of normal courtesies, tempo of speech, tone of voice, body-language, sheer decibel level, veins standing out on foreheads, clenching of fists, snapping of pencils and everything else that went to make up the expression of the arguments over wartime grand strategy simply cannot be conveyed in an account recording in cold print what was agreed, or even what was actually said. Attempting to reconstruct the scenes of wartime meetings from committee minutes and verbatim reports is like trying to rebuild a Roman villa from a handful of tiny floor mosaics. Nevertheless, a couple of sentences from a diarist who was present can sometimes be far more useful than pages of official documentation. It is therefore very fortunate for historians that there were so very many diarists among the primary actors of the Western Allies and among their best-placed spectators. Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), was the only one among the four principal actors of this book, but a remarkable number of other senior figures kept diaries, ‘a vast cloud of witnesses’ as one of them put it, even though it was expressly forbidden in Britain on security grounds.

  Britons who ignored the strict official regulations against keeping a journal included Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his chief of staff Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall, the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and his private secretary Oliver Harvey, Field Marshal Lord Wavell, Colonel Ian Jacob of the War Cabinet secretariat, the British Ambassador to Washington Lord Halifax, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office Sir Alec Cadogan, Brigadier Vivian Dykes of the Joint Staff Mission in Washington, Harold Nicolson MP, the Minister Resident in North-west Africa Harold Macmillan MP, Churchill’s doctor Sir Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran), Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal’s private secretary Stewart Crawford, the Secretary of State for India Leo Amery, General Sir Edmund Ironside, and even King George VI himself and his private secretary Sir Alan Lascelles. American diarists, who were admittedly under no such official strictures, included Dwight D. Eisenhower and his aide Harry Butcher, Vice-President Henry Wallace, the War Secretary Henry L. Stimson, the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William Leahy, the head of the US Army Air Force General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, the Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and General Joseph Stilwell. In Canada, the Prime Minister William Mackenzie King also kept one. These men knew they were making history, and as the official records can be extremely opaque, we must be grateful that they did. I have drawn extensively on these diaries, and on the unpublished papers of more than sixty confidants and contemporaries of the four principals, in order to try to recreate the drama and passion that went into the formation of Allied grand strategy.

  Anyone who was shocked by the attacks on Churchill contained in Brooke’s unexpurgated diaries that were published in 2001–and serialized in the Sunday Telegraph under the headline ‘Britain’s Wartime Military Chief Thought Churchill “A Public Menace”’–ought to read the journals of the equally peppery Admiral Lord Cunningham in the British Library, which I have drawn on particularly in the second half of the book. Yet in Cunningham’s 710-page autobiography, A Sailor’s Odyssey, it is hard to spot a sentence of criticism of Churchill, who was prime minister at the time of publication.

  Similar self-censorship took place in 1957 when Brooke’s former director of military operations, Major-General John Kennedy, published The Business of War, an autobiography based on his daily diaries, at a time when many of the senior Allied wartime figures were still alive and in senior positions (Eisenhower was president for example, and Macmillan prime minister). Born in 1893, and thus ten years younger than Brooke, though sharing many experiences during their careers, Kennedy was educated at Stranraer Academy and Woolwich and entered the Royal Navy in 1911. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in January 1915 and served on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918, including at the Somme. Wounded in August 1916, he nonetheless fought at the battle of Ancre in 1917, becoming an acting major. He then served on the British military mission during the Russian Civil War, working with the White commanders-in-chief Denikin and Wrangel, which he ‘looked upon as an adven
ture…when I was getting bored’. At the end of a decade spent at the Staff College and the War Office, he became director of plans in 1939.

  John Kennedy receives relatively little attention today–possibly because attempting to locate him on internet search engines results in more than sixty million hits relating to someone else of the same name–but his testimony from the very heart of the military decision-making process is compelling. In June 1940 he commanded the Royal Artillery section of the 52nd Division in France under Brooke, and between 1940 and 1943 was director of military operations (DMO), the senior War Office Planner, before becoming assistant CIGS for the rest of the war. He was thus a central eyewitness, but The Business of War excised many of the most caustic comments that he had originally written in his diaries, which have never been published in extenso. The handwritten daily journals now in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London show what this exceptionally well-placed officer genuinely thought at the time, and are an invaluable, though by no means entirely objective, source for both the strategic thinking of the British War Office and the machinations between the principals in this story.10

  In the decades after the war ended, with self-serving autobiographies and diaries, admiring biographies and slanted histories being published en masse, and with the fear of resurgent Communism revising the story of Yalta for political purposes in the West, it was difficult to arrive at an objective judgement about Allied grand strategy. History was often written in a partisan way, perhaps inevitably because of the immediacy, importance and sheer immensity of the subject. One of the quartet of power–President Roosevelt–never had the chance to tell his own tale, as Brooke did in the sulphurous diary extracts edited by Sir Arthur Bryant, published as The Turn of the Tide in 1957 and Triumph in the West in 1959, and as his American opposite number General George Marshall did to his biographer Forrest C. Pogue between 1956 and 1959. Churchill himself published no fewer than six beautifully written but highly subjective, not to say in many respects misleading, volumes of war memoirs. Today we can see that the real story was far subtler than the one that emerged shortly after the conflict, and than any of the surviving three represented it. As I hope this book will help show, historical truth tends to defy easy explanations, and is all the more fascinating for it.

  Introduction

  Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George Marshall and Alan Brooke met for the first time in the Oval Office of the White House at noon on Sunday 21 June 1942. Scheduled as a routine strategy session, it was to turn into one of the most significant moments of the Second World War.

  Roosevelt and Churchill had arrived in Washington on the presidential train from Hyde Park, FDR’s family estate in upstate New York, soon after 9 a.m. Having breakfasted and read the newspapers and official telegrams in the White House, at 11 a.m. the Prime Minister summoned Britain’s senior soldier, General Sir Alan Brooke, to come over from the Combined Chiefs of Staff offices on nearby Constitution Avenue. Lieutenant-General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Military Secretary to the War Cabinet, who was as usual with the Prime Minister, warned Brooke that Churchill was ‘very upset’ by some recent decisions taken in his absence by the Combined Chiefs–that is, by the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts the Joint Chiefs of Staff sitting in a powerful new Allied committee. But when he got to the White House Brooke found the Prime Minister ‘a bit peevish, but not too bad and after an hour’s talk had him quiet again’.1

  Since Brooke had not expected to visit the White House that day, he was wearing an old suit, and asked to be allowed to change into uniform before he met the President for the first time, but Churchill would not hear of it. They went to the Oval Office together and found Roosevelt, who had been afflicted with poliomyelitis since 1921, seated behind the large desk that had been given to his predecessor Herbert Hoover by the Grand Rapids Furniture Manufacturers Association.

  The desk itself was cluttered with knick-knacks and mementoes, many of which can be seen at Hyde Park today. There was a half-dollar commemorative coin in its box, a Lions Club International lapel pin, a stuffed elephant toy and carved wooden donkey, a capstan-shaped paperweight, a tape measure, a novelty figurine of an ostrich, a nail file, an enamelled copper ashtray made in Buffalo, NY, and a bullet about which nothing is known. It seemed more like a bric-a-brac store than the desk of the chief executive of the United States of America, and visiting a year later Brooke ‘tried to memorize the queer collection’, which also included a blue vase lamp, a bronze bust of Mrs Roosevelt, another small donkey made of hazelnuts, a pile of books, a large circular match stand, an inkpot and a jug of iced water. Colonel Ian Jacob, Ismay’s assistant, while admitting that the President’s study was ‘a delightful oval room, looking south’, uncharitably equated Roosevelt’s ‘junk of all sorts piled just anyhow’ with a ‘general lack of organization in the American Government’.2

  After being introduced to the President, Brooke began by apologizing for his informal dress. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Roosevelt replied jovially. ‘Why not take off your coat like I have, you will feel far more comfortable.’ It was an oppressively hot day, and the flinty Ulsterman was understandably charmed, later writing in his diary: ‘I was much impressed by him–a most attractive personality.’3 The Chief of Staff of the US Army, the courtly but steely Pennsylvanian General George C. Marshall, then arrived, and talks began over the various alternative strategies for a major Allied attack against the Germans in 1942.

  Discussions stopped for lunch with Mrs Roosevelt at one o’clock, at which the President reminisced that Brooke’s father and brother had stayed at Hyde Park half a century earlier, which the general had not known. Sir Victor Brooke had visited America looking for investment opportunities, and had written to his wife of the ‘glorious, wooded cliffs and rolling forests’ of the Hudson Valley, as well as of the Roosevelts’ kindness in putting them up for three days in their ‘dear little house, with a verandah all around it’. Brooke confided to his diary that night that he ‘could not help wondering what father would have thought if he had known then the circumstances in which Roosevelt and his youngest son would meet in the future!’

  Back in the Oval Office after lunch, as they returned to their deliberations, a pink slip of telegraph paper was brought in and handed to the President, who read it and, without saying a word, gave it to the Prime Minister. It announced that the Mediterranean port of Tobruk, the British Eighth Army’s stronghold in Libya that had for months been a potent symbol of resistance to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, had surrendered without warning to the 21st Panzer Division. Tobruk’s garrison–including two South African brigades and one from a British Guards regiment, as well as sixty tanks–had been captured en masse, and German radio broadcasts were claiming twenty-five thousand prisoners-of-war. (Rarely for him, Dr Goebbels had underestimated; the true figure turned out to be almost thirty-three thousand.)

  ‘This was a hideous and totally unexpected shock,’ recalled Ismay, ‘and for the first time in my life I saw the Prime Minister wince.’ Neither Churchill nor Brooke had foreseen what Brooke called this ‘staggering blow’. Marshall later spoke of how ‘terribly shaken’ Churchill looked.

  Ismay, whose fifty-fifth birthday it was, left immediately to try to get confirmation of the news from London. As he walked down the corridor, he remembered that it was also the birthday of his friend General Sir Claude Auchinleck, Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East. ‘Poor Claude,’ he later recalled thinking to himself. ‘What a horrible anniversary!’ He soon returned with a copy of the message that the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sir Henry Harwood, had sent to the Admiralty, stating: ‘Immediate. Tobruk has fallen and situation deteriorated so much that there is a possibility of heavy air attack on Alexandria in near future and in view of approaching full moon period I am sending all eastern Fleet units south of [the Suez] Canal to await events.’

  Worse was to come: a telegram from
Richard Casey, the British Government’s Minister Resident in the Middle East, marked ‘Most Secret. Most Immediate’, reported that although it had been proposed ‘to fight as strong a delaying action as possible’ on the Egyptian border, it was concluded that ‘The forces at our command in this theatre are inadequate to enable us to cope with the enemy.’ There was every prospect, therefore, that Egypt might fall to the Axis powers of Germany and Italy. It later also transpired that the great bulk of stores for Tobruk’s defence–vast quantities of oil, petrol, aviation fuel, ammunition and food–had inexplicably not been destroyed, but had fallen virtually intact into the hands of the Germans, who would now be using them for their march on Cairo.

  A year earlier, when Tobruk had previously been under siege, Churchill had sketched out to Roosevelt’s special representative Averell Harriman ‘a world in which Hitler dominated all Europe, Asia and Africa and left the United States and ourselves no option but an unwilling peace’. He argued that this was only preventable because Tobruk ‘still resists valiantly’, for if Egypt and therefore the Suez Canal were to fall to the Nazis, then the whole of the Middle East would collapse, after which Spain, Vichy France and Turkey would embrace the Axis powers and Hitler’s ‘robot new order’ would inevitably triumph. Tobruk was thus far more than a strategically important Mediterranean arsenal for Churchill: it was a shibboleth of survival, and its fall correspondingly dire.