How the War in the West was Won

Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves to artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

—George Washington’s Farewell Address to the People of the United States, September 26, 1796

Let us say to the democracies: “We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. That is our purpose and our pledge.”

—Franklin Roosevelt’s State of the Union (Four Freedoms) address, January 6, 1941

Seventy years after the outbreak of the most destructive conflict unleashed on this earth, it is surprising that there is anything new to say, let alone discover about the Second World War. Yet Andrew Roberts has accomplished both in Masters and Commanders, his magisterial account of the intersections of the four men—the American president, the British prime minister, and their two military chiefs, General George Marshall and General Sir Alan Brooke—who were the heart of the Atlantic Alliance. It’s an account of the forging of the successful Allied war strategy under the hammer blows of disagreement and compromise, simultaneous mutual respect and distrust, conspiracy theories, national interest and electoral opportunism. How the two soldiers learned to work politically, and the two statesmen had to master strategy. It explains how bad decisions that unnecessarily cost many lives came to be made, and provides an unnerving insight into just how narrowly other disastrously bad strategies were avoided. Almost subliminally, it proves the United States’ essential internationalism, despite the efforts of isolationists in the 1930s.

Just as the outcomes of great events not infrequently flow from chance and coincidence, great histories often derive their impact from serendipity. Although Britain prohibited under the Official Secrets Act the keeping of diaries by senior figures in government and the services (in case they fell into the hands of German invaders) many, indeed most of the major actors in the grand wartime drama did so. Their American opposite numbers were under no such constraints. The candid, pithy and incisive comments in daily diary notes by “a vast cloud of witnesses” as one of them put it, add immense interpretative authority to the work. They also help to put a human face on the big names in the newspapers of the time.

Attempting to reconstruct the scenes of wartime meetings from committee minutes and reports, Roberts explained, is like trying to rebuild a Roman villa from a handful of tiny floor mosaics. His research therefore extended to the private papers of nearly seventy participants on both the British and American sides. But, and this is where serendipity comes in, he chanced on the verbatim notes of meetings of the War Cabinet, kept surreptitiously and illegally by Lawrence Burgis, a senior secretary in the Cabinet Office. These enlightened the historian but also enhanced the story, sometimes with irrelevant but charming detail such as Robert Menzies’s presentation of a stuffed platypus to Churchill, who in one of his playful moods, greeted guests with a booming: “This way to the flat-billed platypus, gentlemen!”

The test of a history such is this is how well the historian/dramatist can breathe life into the characters in his play. Roberts shows himself both assiduous in his research and deft in his selections from the mass of material. He has an eye for minutiae, such as the clutter of kitsch on Roosevelt’s desk. Common taste he may have had, but his love of the sea (his 400 ship models are today a treasure of the Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, New York) and his experience in the Navy office twenty years earlier gave him a broad understanding that belied his self-deprecation as an amateur at strategy. Lacking the military mental baggage of Churchill (who thought himself a second Marlborough), his political sense was “pitch-perfect”. But he had a byzantine management style, was unduly secretive (he would not allow any notes taken of meetings in his presence) and like Churchill occasionally had sudden wild ideas that alarmed his planners.

Churchill’s character has been so well described by others that adjectives such as self-centred, imaginative, dismissive, temperamental and peevish scarcely raise an eyebrow. An officer who recorded the work of the War Cabinet wrote:

Anybody who served anywhere near him was devoted to him. He was not kind or considerate. He bothered nothing about us. He knew the names only of those very close to him and would hardly let anyone else come into his presence. He was free with abuse and complaint. He was exacting beyond reason and ruthlessly critical.

Roberts concludes that despite all the criticisms, Churchill emerges as a genius, the madcap schemes he came up with “merely the tiny portion of inevitable detritus that floated in the wash of his greatness”.

The book’s revelation is how much effort Alan Brooke had to put into restraining Churchill’s fancies, and how much George Marshall did the same with Roosevelt. Brooke told a colleague that when Churchill started to declaim, the best way to deal with him was to “put an umbrella up”. Another suggested that “one of Brooke’s great gifts was being able to shake himself like a dog coming out of water after unpleasant interviews with Winston”. In his turn, Marshall was “terribly taken aback” when, after a long day, Roosevelt sprang on him the idea of sending a massive force to take control of the entire region from Teheran (Persia) to Alexandria (Egypt)—a venture far more ambitious than either Gulf War!

Coincidentally, the careers and characters of the two soldiers had been steeled by the tragic loss of their wives—Brooke’s in a car accident when he was at the wheel; Marshall’s from a sudden heart attack. The reader is left with detailed descriptions by colleagues to ponder how this affected their behaviour. Brooke was by far the more complex character. A lover of nature and zealous bird-watcher, he was a good delegator, but “ruthless, decisive, short-tempered to the point of rudeness, remote and in his military life, lonely”. A scion of the “Fighting Brookes” of Ulster, he had the DNA of generations of warriors, and lived up to his heritage.

In his grief, George Marshall also had flung himself into his military career; after a slow start it took off when as Deputy Army Chief of Staff he openly challenged the President’s plan to build aircraft instead of increasing the army. Roosevelt recognised his independent honesty and came to rely on his judgment and advice. Having convinced Roosevelt of the virtue of the (British) Chiefs of Staff model, he then ran it to exercise “a most salutary effect on the President’s weakness for snap decisions”. He was modest, serious, reserved and a good man manager. But of the two chiefs, clearly the duller. Brooke said of him, “I should not put him down as a great man”—a reflection on both.

A large cast of politicians, military men and bureaucrats swirled around, and centred on the four main protagonists. Each of the minor characters is brought to life (in proportion to his importance) in succinct and sometimes acidic recollection. We see Admiral Ernest King, responsible for the US Navy’s smashing Pacific victories (and well known to Australia) as an Anglophobe, a hard drinker like General Blamey and Marshal Voroshilov, a womaniser, tactless, petty and parochial; a hot-tempered and rigid disciplinarian, easily roused to obstinacy and pig-headedness, but a man to inspire the American fleet with a strong and offensive spirit.

The Chairman of the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, Admiral Sir Douglas Pound, a hero of the Battle of Jutland in 1916, on the other hand, had a “slow unimpressive look”, due no doubt to his narcolepsy. Brooke thought he “looked like an old parrot asleep on his perch” in meetings; others saw him perk up whenever the words cruiser or destroyer cropped up. Although Pound was an old friend, Churchill removed him and made Brooke chairman.

Two strong impressions leap out at the reader from this book. The first is the absolute unpreparedness of the United States for war in 1941, either in production or in organisation. As Dean Acheson, then Assistant Secretary of State, wrote in his memoir Present at the Creation: “Our military posture was weak and our armament industry … largely non-existent.” The second is the speed with which the country organised and recruited. While Britain had a well-developed Chief of Staff system working with a Prime Minister and a War Cabinet, the United States was handicapped by an unco-ordinated system of service heads. After adopting the British system, Marshall then invented the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee of both countries to plan the war. In 1939 America had only 200,000 men under arms; by January 1943 it had 3.6 million, by 1945 it had 8 million, largely due to a “production line” crash training program under Marshall’s direction. Roosevelt had enacted the country’s first peace-time draft in September 1940, calling up men between twenty-one and thirty-six; the following year it was extended to men from eighteen to forty-five, and those up to sixty-five had to register.

A month after Pearl Harbor, the two Allies agreed at Arcadia, the code name for their first Washington conference, on a policy of “Germany First”. However, by April 1942, the manoeuvrings and skirmishings between them that lasted all through the war at the strategic level began in earnest. Russian valour in the face of the treacherous German attack (Russia had been supplying its pact partner with grain and oil up to the day before Barbarossa tanks rolled in) had produced an enormous wave of public sympathy and demands for a second front. In Britain, the Beaverbrook newspapers were infuriating Churchill with their populist campaigning. United States citizens remembered Senator Harry Truman’s famously cynical and confused comment on June 23, 1941, the day after Germany attacked Russia:

If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.

Roosevelt had told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau: “Nothing could be worse than to have the Russians collapse. I would rather lose Australia, New Zealand or anything else.” So it was not difficult for the American planners to convince him that a cross-Channel operation should be launched in 1942, or the spring of 1943 at the latest, to relieve pressure on the Russians. Despite receiving massive materiel support, the USSR was alleging a bad faith little short of cowardice by the West. Having secured the extension of the draft by only one vote in the House of Representatives, the President knew his electoral support depended on being seen to strike at the German heartland without delay.

From this distance it seems bizarre that in June 1942, with a critical shortage of ships, planes, tanks and trained soldiery, the USA could have proposed an invasion of Europe before the end of that year. It was proof that the Second World War would be an intensely political conflict. The Americans concocted a plan with three elements: Operation Bolero, to ship half a million men and 3000 aircraft to Britain; Operation Roundup, to land this force on the French coast under cover of 5000 American and British aircraft; and Sledgehammer, a smaller alternative to Roundup involving a bridgehead in Normandy to draw off German forces from the Russian front.

Roosevelt sent Marshall and a team to London with their secret plan, thinking to surprise the British into agreement. But a Brigadier in the UK Joint Staff Mission in Washington got a sneak look at the seven-page document, and telegraphed a precis to London. By the time Marshall arrived, four days later, Brooke and Churchill were ready to oppose the plan as grossly premature. But in a too-clever subtlety that blighted future relations, Churchill disguised his reservations. Instead, he praised it warmly as “momentous”, grandly declaring that “the English-speaking peoples were resolved on a great campaign for the liberation of Europe”.

Examining the evidence in many diaries and memoirs, Roberts concludes that Churchill deliberately misled the Americans by letting them think he was just as committed to the plan, and by not mentioning his preference for attacks on Norway and North Africa (Italy came later). The Americans failed to spot the caveats in the Prime Minister’s honeyed words. Britain, still highly vulnerable, desperately needed the build-up of American troops under Bolero. Churchill and Brooke feared that if the Americans thought Britain shirked an invasion of the continent, they might switch their policy to the Pacific and a “Japan First” strategy. (Churchill’s own war history recorded that many American generals suspected his commitment and were in a “fish or cut bait” mood.) Later, the gambit had more serious repercussions for relationships with the Russians when Roosevelt promised the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, a Second Front in 1942, and appeared to renege on it for two years. Roberts concludes that Churchill effectively deceived the Russians by proxy. However, he seems to have overlooked Churchill’s specific denial of commitment, given to Molotov in London in June 1942: “We can give no promise.”

What swung the President to Churchill’s view against early invasion of Europe—to the chagrin of Marshall and his staff—were two external events, the coming Congressional elections and the unexpected fall of Tobruk. On that news, Roosevelt immediately promised the first 300 Sherman tanks off the production line to the British 8th Army then in retreat to Mersa Matruh. To ensure victory in North Africa he ordered planning for Operation Gymnast (later renamed Torch) which would see American troops land in Morocco and Algeria before the year’s end. The President had said he wanted American troops in Africa before the elections, but they landed five days after the polls closed. Throughout the war, such political considerations not infrequently overrode strategic planning. But the sudden shift in thinking caused some American staff officers (but not Marshall) to believe their President had been seduced by Churchill. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, an inveterate Anglophobe, wrote: “The Limeys have his ear, and we have the hind tit.”

That second Washington meeting (Argonaut) in April 1942 cast Marshall and Brooke as the standard-bearers of the two national strategic views on the conduct of the war. The Americans suspected that Britain had no stomach for a cross-Channel operation; the British considered Washington had no idea of the risks of a premature invasion, and even less understanding of the fighting qualities of the German soldier. But it was more complex than that. Roberts explains that George Marshall was a Clausewitzian; he believed in bringing the enemy quickly to battle on the most important front. The British would fully engage the enemy only when he was fatally weakened by peripheral attacks—the military theory of Sun Tzu.

Alan Brooke later characterised two separate areas of disagreement with the Americans—with Admiral King it was over what effort to put into the Pacific versus Europe; with General Marshall it was arguments of where in Europe the effort should go. At that first meeting (Brooke had not gone to Arcadia) Marshall and Brooke under-estimated each other: Marshall doubted Brooke’s intelligence and Brooke thought Marshall pompous. Churchill flew home from Washington, pleased with having out-manoeuvred the Americans. In The Hinge of Fate, the fourth volume of his history of the war, he described the visit as the most important of his fifteen trips to America.

The kaleidoscopic allegiances of the Masters and Commanders on strategic issues as the war progressed are best summed up in Roberts’s own words:

At Casablanca (Symbol) in January 1943, Marshall rightly suspected that Roosevelt was on Churchill’s and Brooke’s side and so accepted the Sicily operation …

At the third Washington (Trident) conference, Churchill wrongly thought Brooke and Marshall were conspiring against him, when in fact they were just fighting each other openly, while Roosevelt supported Marshall and won a definite date—1 May 1944 for the cross-Channel assault …

At Algiers in May 1943 Marshall simply blocked Churchill and Brooke over the invasion of mainland Italy because he knew he had the support of Roosevelt. The result was that tens of thousands of Germans escaped Sicily unnecessarily …

At the first Quebec conference (Quadrant) Roosevelt and Churchill dashed Brooke’s hopes of commanding Overlord. Brooke blocked Churchill’s schemes for operations in Norway and Sumatra …

The first Cairo conference (Sextant) saw another mutual blocking operation, as a result of which Stalin was the only true victor at Teheran (Eureka) …

“At the second Cairo conference a month later, Brooke and Roosevelt dashed Marshall’s plans for invading the Andaman Islands …

On the invasion of the south of France, Marshall and Roosevelt argued hard with Brooke and Churchill, but finally over-ruled them …

As for the hare-brained plan to capture Vienna via the Ljubljana Gap, Brooke joined Roosevelt and Marshall in opposing Churchill …

By mid-1943, sheer military might had tipped the balance of power in the strategic planning sessions in favour of the USA. With two-thirds of the force for Operation Overlord (D-Day) to be American, it became obvious to everyone except Brooke that Roosevelt could not countenance a British commander-in-chief. Rashly, Churchill had promised the role to Brooke on three occasions; when Churchill agreed with the President that the role should go to an American and offered no commiseration, Brooke had revealed to him “the crushing indifference of these monolithic figures to the lower forms of life”. His bitterness lasted to the grave. In reality, he should have known that the supreme command was not in Churchill’s sole gift. He revealed himself as naive (Roberts suggests arrogant) to rely on the promises.

Both allies made mistakes. Throughout, the Americans were obsessed with invading France and were wrong to oppose the Italy campaign. The British were right on that, but wrong in pushing beyond Rome. The Americans insisted on seven divisions being withdrawn from the Italian front for D-Day, but diverted the French mountain troops to their pet idea—a relatively useless invasion of the south of France. This slowed the advance up the Italian peninsula, which failed to breach the Gothic Line in the Apennines before winter. An unintended consequence of this (not explored by Roberts) was the encouragement of the Italian partisans who were being supplied by mostly British air drops. Sensing the war’s end, the CLNAI (Committee of National Liberation of Northern Italy), dominated by communists, seized the opportunity to leverage their postwar political position and redoubled their efforts to claim the role of liberators. The Committee’s first order of the day showed more political intent than interest in harassing the Germans:

There will be no place tomorrow among us for a reactionary regime, however masked, nor for a limp democracy … it will be strong and effective democracy … the Government workers, small farmers, artisans, all the Trades Unions and other organisations of workers will share power.

After the Liberation, the Allies had great difficulty in re-establishing a civilian administration because the CLNAI had by then staked its claim to be recognised as the interim government.

Inevitably, Australia and the Pacific did not occupy much space in the minds of the great strategists—except for the peremptory demands from General MacArthur (whom Brooke described as a “nuisance”) for more men and aircraft, and when John Curtin insisted on pulling the divisions out of the North Africa fighting to defend Australia. The diary of Sir John Kennedy, Director of Military Operations, records: “Winston was so angry at this that the meeting broke up and they were able to get to bed at a decent hour after all.”

The Kennedy diary is most valuable. It often throws harsh light on the deceptive officialese of formal minutes. For instance, the War Cabinet minutes recorded the decision not to reinforce Singapore as: “We did not wish to throw good men after bad.” Kennedy diarised the discussion as the Chiefs of Staff recommending evacuating Singapore and fighting the Japanese further south in Malaya (sic), “but Winston thinks the island should be fought to the last man”.

When the war with Japan did occupy more of their time, Churchill was still going on about recapturing Singapore and Malaya, and refused to support the Americans in the South-West Pacific. A frustrated Admiral Cunningham confided to his diary: “Churchill, Attlee and Eden will not lift a finger to get a force to the Pacific; they prefer to hang around and recapture our own rubber trees!”

Roberts’s description of how Britain’s war planning worked helps explain why Robert Menzies appeared to make so little headway during his three months in London in 1941 as an honorary member of the War Cabinet. The Australian Dictionary of Biography credits Menzies with objecting to the poor planning of the Greek campaign in which Australian and New Zealand forces suffered grievous losses, and with fighting for promises of full equipment for Australian troops. It records that he “altogether proved a thorn in Churchill’s side”. Churchill did all his planning through his Chiefs of Staff; the War Cabinet was a consulting, not a decision-making body. As Australia has so often found in the British relationship, consultation was a process of “advise and consent”: it implied seeking agreement to a decision already made. The book makes no mention of a theory beloved of some Australian left-wing historians that Menzies was trying to supplant Churchill as war leader.

In his research of the documents in the Roosevelt Presidential Library, Roberts missed (or more probably, discarded) a letter from FDR on June 1, 1942, inviting Curtin to visit him. “I think it would be most helpful if we might have a talk on the war situation,” he wrote, adding: “Would it be possible for you in the next few months to visit Washington, in which case I should be very glad to put at your disposal such transportation facilities as might render your voyage possible.” Curtin did not accept, and met Roosevelt for the first and only time in 1944, on his way to the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London. The moment had passed; that meeting was not a happy one. Carpe diem!

Here we return to the opening quotations. One theme understandably touched on but lightly in such a massive work is the controversial question of American isolationism. Roberts declares that in 1941, Roosevelt was “hamstrung by a Congress that was still largely isolationist in temperament”. He cites the 203–202 House of Representatives vote on the extension of the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 as showing that the America First Movement was still a powerful force. Other historians disagree.

In a major essay, The Myth of Isolationism, soon to be published, Professor Bear Braumoeller, formerly of Harvard, now at Ohio State University, says a cottage industry has grown up around the subject of American isolationism between the wars. He argues that the USA played a substantial role in European security politics in the 1920s and 1930s, exerting its influence through banks, not tanks. After examining American policy in the years leading to Pearl Harbor he concluded that it was quite responsive to events in Europe. The neutrality legislation of the 1930s, he says, was in fact a compromise between internationalists and isolationists, most of whom simply refused to see Nazism as a threat. He uses a raft of opinion polls to show that American commitment to fighting the war if necessary solidified nearly a year and half before Pearl Harbor. In 1939 Time magazine had named Hitler as Man of the Year, but depicted him as a mad organist in a desecrated cathedral, with his victims dangling from a St Catherine’s wheel.

Masters and Commanders does record that repairing the carrier HMS Illustrious in an American shipyard breached the strict neutrality laws; that 8000 British pilots were being trained in the USA; and that Roosevelt’s approval of Atlantic patrols led to the destroyer Niblack depth-charging a U-boat that had torpedoed a Dutch merchantman. But that’s not the half of it. In May 1941, Braumoeller points out, a German submarine sank the US freighter Robin Moor; in June, American ships helped search for the cruiser Prinz Eugen after the Bismarck battle; and in September, U-boat U-652 fired on the destroyer USS Greer. Shortly after that, the destroyers Kearny and Reuben James were sunk by German submarines. American military actions (especially naval actions in the Atlantic) constituted undeclared warfare, says Braumoeller. He adds: “The figleaf of non-involvement was held in place only by Hitler’s determination not to bring the United States formally into the war.”

In his final chapter, Roberts’s conclusions may surprise some of his readers. He writes that the decisions of Hitler and Stalin far more profoundly influenced the outcome of the war than those of any Briton or American. His reason: between 1939 and 1945, four out of every five Germans killed in combat died on the Eastern Front. More provocative, and not well supported by evidence, is his claim that soldier for soldier the German fighting man and his generals outperformed Britons, Americans and Russians both offensively and defensively by a significant factor virtually throughout the war.

Code words rattle through the story, most of which never reached public ears. The book offers a glossary of sixty-six, Allied and German, including Habakkuk, a now-forgotten British scheme urged by Mountbatten to build floating airfields out of ice and wood pulp. Churchill believed codenames should not be boastful, over-confident or despondent, frivolous or names of living persons. Despite his view that heroes of antiquity, the constellations or famous racehorses offered suitable names, many were flippant: Boozer, Saucy, Chastity, Loincloth and Wowser. Roberts comments that it could not have been easy for parents to discover their sons’ lives had been lost on Operation Toenails or Maggot, rather than on Retribution or Supercharge.

There is an excellent index and comprehensive references. Given the large cast on stage, an appendix of their full names and titles would have been helpful.

Throughout the war, the statesmen were the masters, and the commanders remained their instruments. Roberts leaves us in no doubt that that is the proper order of things, and the great strength of democracies. But the war also taught that unless the two work closely to develop strategy, disaster would be the result.

What the book conveys, above all else, is the tremendous sense of nervous excitement that pervaded all the grand strategy meetings. Despite irascibilities, the tensions of international horse-trading and inter-personal frictions, those four knew they were there to win the war. All their lives had led to this—the generals to pit their wits against the enemy forces to achieve military victory; the statesmen to defend and advance the interests of their own countries while in pursuit of the same victory. That the United States came out of the war with its interests enhanced, and Britain with its diminished, simply underlined the huge shift in the balance of economic power the war helped bring about in the five years. But despite the long hours, the tiring trans-Atlantic travel and the interminable frustration of dealing with each other to achieve grudging consensus, we see that there emerged a spirit of camaraderie, even friendship, from the conviction that Churchill grittily expressed in a letter to Brooke in 1945: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them!”

At the seventieth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the consequent declarations of war on Germany, this is a most timely, instructive and enthralling coda to the terrible events that followed.