The Day of Battle Read online

  In this charged milieu, “the man from London” spoke. North Africa was done, Operation HUSKY in Sicily was near. “What should come next?” Churchill asked. The Allies had “the authority and prestige of victory” and must “grasp the fruits of our success.” Following his typed notes, he laid out his arguments: Russia fighting 185 German divisions; Allies currently fighting none; Italy ripe for the plucking.

  The prime minister had used the phrase “soft underbelly” in a cable to Roosevelt in November 1942, meaning the supposedly vulnerable southern flank of Axis Europe. Privately, to his military advisers this week, Churchill added, “We want them to agree to the exploitation of HUSKY and the attack on the underbelly taking priority.” Now he pressed the point. “Need we invade the soil of Italy, or could we crush her by air attack? Would Germany defend Italy?” Answering himself, Churchill said it was imperative “to use our great armies to attack Italy” rather than leave them idle after Sicily. If Hitler rallied to defend his Fascist partner, Benito Mussolini, that many fewer German troops could fight the Russians. The prime minister did not believe a defeated Italy would present an economic burden to the Allies, nor did he even concede “that an occupation of Italy would be necessary.”

  There it was, the British strategy in a Mediterranean nutshell. Roosevelt replied immediately. Churchill’s argument was vivid but unpersuasive. “Where do we go from Sicily?” the president asked, again echoing the prime minister. Some twenty-five Allied divisions—with roughly fifteen thousand men each—would muster in the Mediterranean by the end of Operation HUSKY and “these must be kept employed.” But he had “always shrunk from the thought of putting large armies in Italy,” a diversion that could “result in attrition for the United Nations and play into Germany’s hands.” Better to continue staging a mighty host in Britain. The subsequent invasion, a knockout punch aimed at the German homeland, “should be decided upon definitely as an operation for the spring of 1944.” Finishing, the president smiled and gave the casual toss of the head that one admirer called his “cigarette-holder gesture.”

  This impasse persisted the next morning when the Combined Chiefs—the half dozen heads of the American and British armies, navies, and air forces—met without Roosevelt and Churchill in the Federal Reserve Building, a severe rectilinear edifice with a pillared portico facing Constitution Avenue. The scent of roses and fresh cut grass seeped past the rigid sentries into the wainscoted room used by the board of governors; here, the U.S. delegation presented an eleven-paragraph memo entitled “Global Strategy of the War.” Point 3 held the crux: “It is the opinion of the United States chiefs of staff that a cross-Channel invasion of Europe is necessary to an early conclusion of the war with Germany.”

  A tall, austere man with sandy hair gone gray carried forward the American argument. General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, knew his mind on this issue even as he fretted over the president’s susceptibility to British blandishments. Marshall was a clean-desk man, famously convinced that “no one ever had an original idea after three o’clock in the afternoon,” and he disdained orthodoxy, sycophants, and the telephone. To Churchill he was “the greatest Roman of them all”; a British general described him as “a little aloof, dignified, above the battle, unbuyable…. I never saw him show his feelings in any way.” In fact, Marshall possessed a molten temper. He demanded that subordinates “expunge the bunk, complications, and ponderosities” from the nation’s war effort, and his signature query, accompanied by the unblinking gaze of those ice-blue eyes, could terrify lieutenants and lieutenant generals alike: “Are you confident that you’ve thought this through?” Aside from horseback riding, gardening was his sole civil diversion; “the pride of his heart,” according to his wife, remained the compost pile outside his Virginia home.

  Invading Italy, Marshall said, “would establish a vacuum in the Mediterranean” that would suck troops and matériel away from a cross-Channel attack. Operations after Sicily “should be limited to the air offensive” or risk “a prolonged struggle” in the Mediterranean, which was “not acceptable to the United States.”

  Arguments spilled from those thirty War Department studies: eliminating Italy from the war could bring more burden than benefit, since precious Allied shipping would be needed to feed the Italian civilian population. Germany would recoup the twelve million tons of coal currently provided Rome each year, as well as the rolling stock now needed to supply Italy. The “soft underbelly” in general lacked sufficient ports to support the huge Allied armies needed to plunge into central Europe. American planners considered the British beguiled by “side-shows,” “periphery-pecking,” and “unremunerative scatterization.” (That last must have disheartened every lover of the language regardless of strategic creed.) Privately, the Yanks suspected that Britain’s fixation on the Mediterranean reflected both traditional imperial interests and fainthearted reluctance to again risk the horrific casualties incurred on the Western Front a generation earlier.

  “Mediterranean operations,” Marshall added, “are highly speculative as far as ending the war is concerned.”

  Listening attentively was General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, whose sharp-featured countenance did not betray his private assessment of Marshall: “a big man and a very great gentleman who inspired trust, but did not impress me by the ability of his brain.” Brooke’s brain was able enough, though he tended to dismiss as purblind those uncommitted to his own vision. At fifty-nine, with round shoulders and dark, pomaded hair, he could be petulant—“very liverish,” in his phrase; this state was perhaps the handmaiden to exhaustion after four years of war with the Germans and, not infrequently, with Churchill. “When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do?” the prime minister said. “Thumps the table harder and glares back at me.” Brooke calculated that each month battling Churchill “is a year off my life”; in a letter to a friend he added, “It is the night work after dinner till 1 a.m. with him that kills me.” The ninth and youngest child of an expatriate Anglo-Irish baronet, Brooke had been born and raised in France, a history that bestowed on him both a native fluency and a lifelong dread of the nickname Froggie. He nurtured homely passions for birds and for wildlife photography, in which he was a pioneer. If Marshall had his compost pile, Brooke had Southeran’s shop on Sackville Street, where he would sit transfixed in his red uniform braces, scrutinizing ornithological plates. On the Queen Mary he had put aside Birds of the Ocean long enough to note in his diary, with handwriting as vertical and jagged as the Irish coastline: “Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that all those destined to carry [them] out don’t quarrel with each other instead of the enemy.”

  Now he quarreled with Marshall, albeit without raising his voice. The eleven-paragraph U.S. strategic memo was answered with a thirty-one-paragraph British countersalvo. Point 5 encapsulated Britain’s thesis: “The main task which lies before us this year in the European theatre is the elimination of Italy. If we could achieve this, it is our opinion that we should have gone a very long way towards defeating Germany.”

  Brooke pressed the point with staccato precision. Germany currently kept thirty-five divisions in France and the Low Countries, with another ten, available as reinforcements, in the Fatherland; attacking Italy would divert some of these German troops and weaken defenses against an eventual Allied cross-Channel attack, which might not be feasible until 1945 or 1946 anyway. If Italy collapsed, German soldiers would have to replace the forty-three Italian divisions occupying the Balkans and the seven others bivouacked in southern France. Without Italian allies, Berlin was unlikely to fight south of the Po Valley in northern Italy. “Our total commitment on the Italian mainland in the event of a collapse,” a British staff memo estimated, “will not exceed nine divisions.”

  A stack of studies, bound in red leather folders, further advanced the British cause. “If Italy collapses, the Germans cannot hold Italy and the Balkans, and they will conce
ntrate everything they can on the defence of the latter.” The Mediterranean offered such enticing oppportunities that “we shall have every chance of breaking the Axis and of bringing the war with Germany to a successful conclusion in 1944.”

  But, Brooke warned his American colleagues, unless the fight was carried into Italy after the capture of Sicily, “no possibility of an attack into France would arise.” Indeed, “to cease Mediterrranean operations on the conclusion of HUSKY would lengthen the war.”

  Momentary silence fell on the room as the session ended. The Allies were miles apart, still, and mutually suspicious. “Your people have no intention of ever crossing the Channel,” one American planner had told his British counterpart. Admiral Ernest J. King, the irascible U.S. chief of naval operations, subsequently advised his fellow chiefs, “We ought to divert our forces to the Pacific.”

  At Marshall’s suggestion they adjourned with a scraping of chairs and ambled next door to the Public Health Building. Lunch awaited them in the map room, where strategic thrust and parry momentarily yielded to small talk and the benign clink of cutlery. That night Brooke confided to his diary, “I am thoroughly depressed.”

  Washington lacked the isolated tranquillity that had distinguished Casablanca five months earlier. Endless meetings, often three or more a day, were followed by endless social obligations, including four consecutive nights of black-tie affairs. For all its sophisticated war paint, the capital remained a provincially convivial place, eager to please and atwitter at hosting such distinguished battle captains.

  Fans at a Washington Nationals baseball game applauded wildly at the appearance of a pair of genuine field marshals in the box seats. Bing Crosby and Kate Smith sang between innings as the visitors tried to divine the difference between home plate and a home run. At one dinner party, each arriving guest reached into a top hat—one for ladies, another for gentlemen—and drew a slip on which was printed the name of a famous lover in history. Table seating then was determined by uniting the paramours: Helen with Paris, Cleopatra with Antony, Chloe with Daphnis, Heloïse with Abelard. Also intimate, if less risqué, was a private showing at the White House of a new U.S. Army Signal Corps film, The Battle of Britain; doughty Royal Air Force pilots climbed into their cockpits, Spitfires tangled with Messerschmitts, mortally wounded planes heeled over in smoky spirals. Churchill sat transfixed by the spectacle, the flickering projector light reflecting off the tears that coursed down his plump cheeks. Only the Washington heat remained inhospitable, forcing some wilting Brits to desperate measures: the wife of the economist John Maynard Keynes was found perched, entirely nude, before the open door of a Westinghouse refrigerator in the Georgetown house where the couple was staying.

  To escape both official Washington and social Washington, Marshall bundled the Combined Chiefs onto a pair of transport planes for a weekend in southeast Virginia. Landing at Langley Field, the men squeezed into eight waiting Army staff cars and motored up Route 17 for a tour of the Yorktown battlefield, where the British professed—amid guffaws—not to recall “the name of that chap who did so badly here” in 1781. Then it was on to Williamsburg, the meticulously restored former colonial capital.

  If Washington had been atwitter, Williamsburg seethed with excitement at the visitation. Lawns had been trimmed, hedges clipped, honeysuckle cropped. At the Williamsburg Inn, linen and china emerged from wartime storage crates, and the silver was polished and repolished. Carpenters built a new table to seat thirteen diners and adjusted the floodlights to illuminate the dogwoods. Someone managed to circumvent government restrictions on Freon to procure the only two tanks of refrigerant south of Richmond: the inn would be pleasingly air-conditioned.

  John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had financed Williamsburg’s resurrection, got wind of the visit and assigned various servants to oversee dinner preparations. Appalled to learn that inferior cream might be used to make the ice cream, Rockefeller ordered a fresh urn dispatched from his estate at Pocantico Hills in New York, along with select fruits and cheeses, while his private club in Manhattan prepared fresh terrapin à la Maryland, which required two days of simmering. Terrapin, cream, fruit, cheese, and a consignment of sherry all were tucked into the upper berth of a Pullman car at Penn Station by an overburdened butler, who staggered off the train in Richmond four hours later and continued with his bounty to Williamsburg by limousine.

  Shortly before five P.M. on Saturday, May 15, the convoy of chiefs turned off Queen Street onto Duke of Gloucester Street before stopping at the old Capitol building, where they were greeted by a black doorman in colonial livery. Having admired the rubbed woodwork and the portrait of young George Washington, they strolled to the Raleigh Tavern for finger sandwiches and cinnamon toast in the Daphne Room, washed down with tea and highballs. Then it was on to the inn, where fires crackled in the twin lobby hearths—Freon be damned—and bourbon juleps were served in goblets made by a local silversmith. Dinner, at 8:15, included Rockefeller’s menu, plus crabmeat cocktail, Virginia ham, beaten biscuits, and a 1929 Heidsieck Dry Monopole champagne. All agreed that the strawberry ice cream was divine.

  After coffee and brandy, Marshall rousted the visitors for a midnight excursion to the colonial governor’s palace, brilliantly lighted with hundreds of candles in each room and throughout the gardens. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, lost his way in the topiary maze and called for help from the other chiefs, who rushed to the rescue only to get lost themselves, with much boyish chortling.

  Sunday morning, after breakfast on the terrace, the chiefs played croquet on the lawn or went swimming in borrowed trunks. Brooke, who was mulling whether to spend £1,500 for a forty-five-volume set of Gould’s Birds, tromped off with his field glasses in search of catbirds and hairy woodpeckers. Before heading to the airfield for the return flight, the high command filed into Bruton Parish Church, where ushers escorted them to General Washington’s pew. Parishioners jammed the sanctuary, clogging the twin transept aisles with folding chairs after the pews filled. Dudley Pound, who was suffering from an unsuspected brain tumor and had but a few months to live, had been asked to read the scripture. Stepping to the lectern, he thumbed to the sixth chapter of Matthew and sang out, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” Pound finished in a strong voice:

  Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

  While the chiefs went south, Roosevelt and Churchill headed north. With Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins also in the limousine, and a motorcycle escort clearing the road, the motorcade rolled up Massachusetts Avenue before angling out of the capital on Wisconsin Avenue toward the presidential retreat called Shangri-La—later renamed Camp David—in the Catoctin Mountains of central Maryland. Spying a billboard for Barbara Fritchie Candy, Roosevelt recited a couplet from John Greenleaf Whittier’s ballad about the legendary Civil War heroine who defied passing rebel troops by waving the Stars and Stripes from her window.

  “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

  But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

  To the president’s amazement, Churchill then “gabbled the whole poem,” all sixty lines—“She leaned far out on the window-sill, / And shook it forth with a royal will.” Soon the Roosevelts and Hopkins were punctuating the prime minister’s cadences with the refrain: “Shoot, if you must…”

  For three days they unbent in the serene glades of Shangri-La, napping in the log cabins, angling for brook trout, discussing the hot tramp of Confederate troops through these hills toward Gettysburg eighty years earlier. Another guest, Roosevelt’s daughter, Anna, wrote her husband on May 14 that Churchill “picks his teeth all through dinner and uses snuff liberally. The sneezes which follow the latter practically rock the foundations of the house…. I admired his snuff box and found it was one that had once belonged to Lord Nelson.” Often the president sat by a window with his beloved
stamp collection; when Churchill’s pleas grew too insistent for more tanks or more planes, more this or more that, Roosevelt would cut him short by holding a stamp specimen to the light and murmuring, “Isn’t this a beauty from Newfoundland?” On other occasions, to relieve the president from the “Winston hours,” an aide would summon Roosevelt to an imaginary phone call.

  They had much in common besides their ultimate responsibility for saving the world. They shared passions for secrecy, skulduggery, and military history. Roosevelt “loved the military side of events,” one subordinate wrote, “and liked to hold them in his own hand,” while Churchill seemed to fancy himself the reincarnation of his famous ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, the victor over the French at Blenheim in 1704. Despite his current resistance to Churchill’s Italian gambit, the president had his own “diversionist tendencies” and harbored a fascination for the Mediterranean nearly as lurid as the prime minister’s. Neither ever forgot, or tried to forget, the agony that war had brought to so many. (Marshall routinely sent Roosevelt brilliantly colored graphics detailing the latest combat casualty figures, “so that it would be quite clear.”) Certainly the president’s admiration and affection for Churchill ran deep. “Isn’t he a wonderful old Tory to have on our side?” he once asked.

  And yet: Churchill could draw near and no nearer. Convivial and charming, Roosevelt at his core remained opaque, mysterious, unknowable in what one aide called “his heavily forested interior.” Trying to follow his thought process, Henry Stimson said, was “very much like chasing a vagrant beam of sunshine around an empty room.” Seldom did he issue orders; rather, he intimated that he “wished to have things done.” No politician ever was better at resolving problems by ignoring them; Roosevelt could elevate inaction to an art form. Yet on more than twenty occasions he rejected the advice of his military brain trust to follow his own instincts, as he had done in deciding to invade North Africa the previous November. “Not a tidy mind,” one British observer noted, and the American chiefs could only agree. “The president,” Eleanor once said, “never ‘thinks’! He decides.”