Masters and Commanders Read online

  At this point in the war, Britain had been defeated by the Germans wherever the two had fought on land: in Norway in April 1940, in France and Belgium the following month, in Greece in April 1941 and in Crete the following June. In May and early June 1942, Lieutenant-General Sir Neil Ritchie had been defeated by Rommel in the Gazala area, forcing a withdrawal towards Egypt and leaving Tobruk to defend itself. Alongside this debilitating series of defeats on land, Allied shipping losses in the Atlantic had doubled since January 1942; the Arctic convoys were coming under heavy pressure from the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe in northern Norway; the convoy route around southern Africa was increasingly threatened by U-boats, and the expansion of Bomber Command seemed to have stalled. Seven years later, Brooke summed up the global situation they had faced by saying: ‘German Forces were through the Caucasus, Japanese forces were threatening Australia and India, the Mediterranean was closed, and Persia had been entirely depleted of forces to save threatened points. The whole of the oil reserves in the Middle East in Iraq and Persia were at Hitler’s mercy.’4

  Furthermore, Churchill knew he would now come under renewed political pressure back in London, and a motion of no confidence in his government was indeed tabled in the House of Commons soon afterwards. ‘I am ashamed,’ he confided to his doctor at the time. ‘I cannot understand why Tobruk gave in. More than thirty thousand of our men put their hands up. If they won’t fight…’ The Prime Minister then ‘stopped abruptly’, since what followed was ‘too ghastly to articulate’. As Churchill himself recalled in his memoirs: ‘This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war…Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.’5

  It was at this desperate juncture that there began the three-year relationship between the four chief strategists of the Western Allies, the quartet of power that ultimately crafted the victories that were to come. Although it is taken for granted that emotion, persuasiveness and charisma have a large part to play in politics, the same is not generally thought to be true of grand strategy. Intelligence reports, weather forecasts, hard facts about opposing forces and objective military assessments are believed to decide when, where, why and how great offensives are launched. Yet, as I hope this book will show, the two political Masters and two military Commanders of the Western powers who ultimately took these decisions together were flesh and blood, working under tremendous stress, and prey to the same subjective influences as everyone else.

  Why, if the USA was attacked by the Axis in the Pacific Ocean, did she devote such effort to counter-attacking in North Africa? Why, if the most direct route to Germany from Britain was via north-west France, did the Western Allies march to Palermo and Rome? Why, if Operation Overlord was intended to drive into Germany via north-west France, did four hundred thousand men land 500 miles to the south more than two months later? Why did the Allies not take Berlin, Vienna or Prague, but allow the Iron Curtain to descend where it did? One of the aims of this book is to show the degree to which the answers to these questions, and many more, turned on the personalities and relationships of the four key figures who are its central focus: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, George C. Marshall and Sir Alan Brooke.

  The lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians ultimately rested on the deliberations of these four: two Americans and two Britons, two politicians and two soldiers. Each of the four men was strong willed, tough minded and certain that he knew the best way to win the war. Yet, in order to get his strategy adopted, each needed to ensure that he could persuade at least two of the other three. Occasionally the politicians would side together against the soldiers, and vice versa. (Up in Hyde Park the day before the Tobruk news arrived, for example, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to oppose Marshall’s plan for an attack on France in 1942.) More often the Britons and Americans would take up positions according to nationality, but sometimes alliances were formed across both professional and national lines; just as politicians had to master strategy, so the soldiers were forced to become political. Once made, such groupings were always likely swiftly to reconfigure, as the four Masters and Commanders danced their complicated minuet, each fearing the potentially disastrous consequences of getting out of step with the others. When that happened to any one of the four–as it did to Churchill, Marshall and Brooke at different stages of the war–his views were overruled by the opposing trio. Each Master and Commander was thus constantly manoeuvring for position vis-à-vis the other three, and only one of them never found himself isolated.

  Both real and feigned anger was seen at their many wartime meetings, as well as immense moral and political pressure, threats and cajolery, deliberate misleading of each other on occasion, high rhetoric masking low politics, shouting matches followed by last-minute compromises, mutual suspicion and exasperation, and even one near nervous breakdown. Yet charm, humour and good-fellowship could sometimes lift the mood at key moments too. There were titanic rows and emotional reconciliations, and at the end of it all there was, of course, Victory. This then is the story of how the four Masters and Commanders of the Western Allies fought each other over how best to fight Adolf Hitler.

  PART I

  Enchantment

  1

  First Encounters: ‘I had heard a good deal about him!’ 1880–June 1940

  War is a business of terrible pressures, and persons who take part in it must fail if they are not strong enough to withstand them.

  Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: 19151

  Winston Churchill, a man who was said to have ‘won the decathlon of human existence’, did not impress any of his fellow Masters and Commanders on first acquaintance.2 On Monday 29 July 1918, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, was asked to speak impromptu at a dinner of Allied war ministers at Gray’s Inn, one of London’s ancient legal Inns of Court, and years later he recalled that Churchill had ‘acted like a stinker’ and was ‘one of the few men in public life who was rude to me’.3 They then did not see each other again until August 1941, when–to Roosevelt’s evident chagrin–Churchill had to admit to having completely forgotten the occasion. He later remembered it for the benefit of his war memoirs, however, writing of how he had been ‘struck’ by Roosevelt’s ‘magnificent presence in all his youth and strength’.4

  George Marshall was similarly underwhelmed by Churchill on their first contact in 1919, at a great Allied victory parade in London, and twenty-two years later regaled a Sunday luncheon party at the British Embassy in Washington with the story. There had been three thousand American troops present, ‘all picked men of about 6'2'', with every kind of decoration’, yet every time that Marshall tried to make any observations to Churchill about them, all he elicited was gruff silence. Prohibition had been ratified by the US Congress that year and finally, after all the dignitaries, including King George V, had processed around the rear rank and back up the flank of the parade, Churchill turned to Marshall to make his only remark of the day: ‘What a magnificent body of men, and never to look forward to another drink!’5

  Alan Brooke’s first personal encounter with Churchill came down a crackling telephone line between his headquarters at Le Mans in France and 10 Downing Street in June 1940, and was to be the worst by far.

  By contrast with Churchill’s behaviour at the parade, the one adjective constantly employed to describe George Catlett Marshall was ‘gentlemanly’. Good-natured, charming, with fine manners, Marshall was nonetheless a tough man, and knew it. ‘I cannot afford the luxury of sentiment,’ he once told his wife Katherine about his job as US Army chief of staff, ‘mine must be cold logic. Sentiment is for others.’6 She agreed, writing in her autobiography, Together: Annals of an Army Wife, of how she had read many articles and interviews that mentioned her husband’s retiring nature and modesty, but she added: ‘Those writers have never seen him when he is aroused. His withering vocabulary and the cold steel of his eyes would sear the soul of any man whose failure deserved censure. No, I do not think I would call my husban
d retiring or overly modest. I think he is well aware of his powers.’

  There was self-effacement nonetheless. Marshall’s friend and diligent biographer Forrest C. Pogue noticed that Marshall deprecated the use of the word ‘I’ and tended to adopt the first person plural in describing the actions of the War Department or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, even when he had been the driving force behind them. In a passage accusing Anthony Eden, Bernard Montgomery and others of vanity, Churchill’s doctor Sir Charles Wilson (later Lord Moran) wrote: ‘To remain gentle and self-effacing after climbing to the top of a profession’, as Field Marshal Lord Wavell and George Marshall had done, ‘is to me an endearing trait.’7 It is one thing to be thought of as self-effacing, but altogether another to be regarded as an exemplar of it.

  Alone among the four subjects of this book, Marshall–born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania on the last day of 1880–did not come from the upper classes. His father was a prosperous co-owner of coke ovens and coalfields, at least until December 1890 when an unwise investment in a Shenandoah Valley land promotion brought him to the brink of bankruptcy. Marshall nonetheless had a happy childhood, and his family could still just about find the $375 per annum (plus $70 for uniforms) to send him to the prestigious Virginia Military Institute (VMI) in Lexington, Virginia.

  Years afterwards, Marshall recalled that he had overheard his elder brother Stuart, who had himself graduated from VMI, begging their mother not to allow George to enrol there because his lack of intellect would disgrace the family name. ‘Well, that made more impression on me than all the instructors, parental pressure, or anything else,’ Marshall recollected. ‘The urgency to succeed came from hearing that conversation; it had a psychological effect on my career.’8 Sure enough, he became first captain of the Corps of Cadets, played All-Southern football, and graduated high in the class of 1901.

  Although it had ended thirty-two years before Marshall arrived at VMI in 1897, the American Civil War still dominated the ethos of the Institute. The building itself had five or six cannonballs from the conflict still sticking out of its walls. Marshall’s hero and role model was the Confederate leader Robert E. Lee; watching Stonewall Jackson’s widow at a memorial anniversary of the battle of New Market, and seeing the graves of its young dead, made a profound impression on him.

  The Spanish–American War broke out in the spring after Marshall joined VMI, and as he told the cadets there fifty-three years later, on what was by then called Marshall Day, ‘For the first time the United States stepped into the international picture. At that period, there was not a single ambassador accredited to the United States. We were recognized in the world largely as a country of Indians and buffalo, crude and remarkable manners, and the sudden wealth of a few.’9 By the time Marshall himself became secretary of state of the United States in 1947, it was indisputably the most powerful country in the world, partly because of what it had achieved during his time as Army chief of staff.

  On leaving VMI, and having personally lobbied President McKinley in the White House for the right to sit his lieutenant’s examination early–not the action of an overly modest lad–Marshall married his sweetheart, the belle of Lexington, Lily Carter Coles. He had been courting her ever since his last year at the Institute, where he had risked expulsion in order to meet her in the evenings. ‘I was much in love,’ was his explanation for the risks taken with his nascent military career. They married on 11 February 1902 and he managed to extend his honeymoon from two days to one week before reporting for duty in the Philippines.

  Although America’s instantaneous victory over Spain meant that Second Lieutenant Marshall served in the Philippines only in peacetime, his career was meteoric after his return in 1903. As senior honor graduate of the Infantry–Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, Marshall won promotion to first lieutenant in 1907 and became an instructor there. Fort Leavenworth was then, and was to remain, a centre of advanced military thinking in the Army, and it was there that Marshall formed many of his assumptions about strategy and tactics. During another tour of the Philippines in 1913–16 he organized, as chief of staff for a US field force, a defence of the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor against a mock Japanese invasion.

  As a captain assigned to the General Staff, Marshall sailed to France in 1917, in the first convoy of troops to go there, and was reputedly the first man to alight from the first boat.10 He found a conflict of deadlock and attrition, very different from the war of movement seen in the last few months of 1914, and then again in the last three months of 1918. Marshall participated in the first entry of US troops into the Allied line, in the Luneville Sector, and–as a Staff officer–in the victory at Cantigny on 28 May 1918, the first American offensive of the war.

  After the repulse of the German offensive of June 1918, Marshall was detailed to the Operations Section of US General Headquarters at Chaumont, and in August was attached to the Staff of the First American Army, of which he became chief of operations before the Armistice. General John ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, the Commander-in-Chief of American forces in Europe, eventually promoted him to colonel. Crucially, in May 1919 Marshall became aide-de-camp to Pershing, under whom he served for the next four years. Although he had not seen action in the field, therefore, Marshall was held to have had an extremely good war. He had witnessed the mutual slaughter of 1917 give way, in the late summer and autumn of 1918, to the open war of manoeuvre that the Allies won. It was to have a profound effect on his strategic thinking.

  Alan Francis Brooke was born on 23 July 1883 at Bagnères-de-Bigorre near the French Pyrenees, a fashionable area around Pau where his parents went for the hunting–it was known as ‘the Leicestershire of France’–and for the fine climate. He was the seventh and much the youngest child of Sir Victor Brooke, who had inherited, aged eleven, the title of third baronet and the estate of Colebrooke Park in Brooke-borough, County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. Alan’s mother was Alice Bellingham, the daughter of another Irish baronet.

  On both sides of Brooke’s family lay deep roots in Ireland’s Protestant Ascendancy. Nicknamed ‘the Fighting Brookes of Colebrooke’, they had been soldiers of the Crown for centuries. One had defended Donegal Castle during the English Civil War, another took over Lambert’s Brigade to hold the centre of Wellington’s line at the battle of Waterloo. No fewer than twenty-six members of the family served in the First World War, and then twenty-seven in the Second, of whom twelve died in action. Yet it was to be the sensitive youngest sibling Alan who was to become by far the greatest soldier of them all.

  It is not hard to see from where Alan Brooke’s utter fearlessness was derived. Even if his DNA had not included generations of warriors, his father was a Victorian hero–adventurer, as well as that most unusual of phenomena–a genuinely popular Irish Protestant absentee landlord. Born in 1843, Sir Victor Brooke was named after his godmother Queen Victoria. His dead-eye shooting abilities–he could split a croquet ball thrown in the air with one shot and then split the largest fragment with the second–stood him in good stead hunting in India, where ‘his life depended more than once upon making no mistake’.11

  From floor to ceiling at Colebrooke, in halls and passages and many of the rooms, there were heads of every variety, including two tigers and a black panther, and vast elephant tusks were piled up under the billiard table. Handsome, fair-haired, 6 foot tall and 45 inches around the chest, Sir Victor resembled a John Buchan hero. Along with strength of character, an ‘open-hearted Irish nature’ and immense charm, he was an assured public speaker and universally popular. At the London Fencing Club, he once jumped 5 feet 10 inches in the high jump, and could lift enormous weights. Hearing that a local policeman had won a reputation as an undefeated wrestler, he issued a challenge and duly beat him. He then outran a Canadian champion hurdler. His sporting feats were well known in Ulster, and having such an extraordinary father must have had an effect on his youngest son. When Alan Brooke showed great moral courage at various moments of his military career, it should be reca
lled that his father had tracked tigers, wolves and bears, and had crossed jungles and deserts in order to do so. He was also a noted biologist with intellectual attainments to match his physical ones. Sir Victor died aged only forty-eight, from fatigue induced by tracking ibex across an Egyptian desert when he was supposed to be convalescing from a lung that he had punctured while hunting in France. Alan was eight years old.

  As a child, Alan Brooke lived a self-contained life, close to nature and to his mother.12 Growing up for most of the year in the Pyrenees, he spoke French (with a heavy Gascon accent) before he learnt English, and spoke both languages very fast, something that some Americans were to come to dislike and mistrust later on, fearing that a fast-talking Limey was trying to get something over on them. Educated at a day school at Pau, Brooke was never sent to an English boarding school, further removing him from the then prevailing Spartan culture of heartiness, but also from interaction with contemporaries of his own age, nationality and social background. In contrast to Marshall’s success at football, Brooke did not play team games. Quite how little of a team-player he would turn out to be later in life had yet to make itself known.

  For all that he later seemed to others to be cold, restrained, tough and on occasion heartless, Brooke was in fact an emotional man. Churchill’s secretary Elizabeth Nel wrote that he ‘always seemed to me something of an enigma; he seemed so calm and well controlled, and yet the expression of his face sometimes betokened that he had strong feelings beneath the surface.’13 He did indeed; Brooke was a loner who had all the self-assurance of the British upper classes of the day. From an early age he knew where he came from, what he liked, what he wanted and how to get it. Class was a vital factor for late Victorians such as Churchill and Brooke. Churchill’s aristocratic credentials as the scion of a dukedom created in 1702 impressed and sometimes overawed his contemporaries, though not Brooke, whose ancestors had served the Crown for a similar length of time.