The Day of Battle (4 page)

They got to work at 2:30
P.M
. on Wednesday, May 12, in Roosevelt’s oval study, a snug hideaway above the Blue Room. Nautical paintings and etchings decorated the walls, and a bearskin covered the floor. The president sat in his armless wheelchair greeting Churchill and the ten other men—mostly from the Combined Chiefs—who joined that first session. Roosevelt’s massive desk, positioned away from the windows by the Secret Service, held a blue lamp, four cloth toy donkeys, a stack of books, an inkpot, a medicine bottle, a small clock shaped like a ship’s wheel, and a bronze bust of the First Lady, which had somehow escaped the scrap collectors.

Five months earlier, American strategists had left the Casablanca conference convinced they had been outfoxed by the British, who were better prepared and had been unified in their determination to continue the
Mediterranean strategy begun with the invasion of North Africa. To avoid another humiliation, the Yanks before
TRIDENT
had bombarded the British with position papers; they also drafted more than thirty studies on various war policies and doubled the size of the U.S. delegation. In searching for “a grand design by which to reach the heartland of Europe” in decisive battle, American planners scrutinized potential portals to the continent, from the Iberian Peninsula and southern France to Italy, Greece, and Turkey. Still, almost to a man they favored the most direct route across the English Channel.

The president’s brain trust also worked hard to overcome what many considered the biggest obstacle to American strategic hegemony: Roosevelt himself, and his evident willingness to be swayed by Churchill’s honeyed oratory. “The man from London…will have his way with our Chief, and the careful and deliberate plans of our staff will be overridden,” the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told his diary on May 10. “I feel very troubled about it.” The U.S. Joint Chiefs had conferred with Roosevelt at the White House three days earlier and had wrung from him a vow to press the British for commitment to a cross-Channel invasion of Europe. Driving home the point, a Joint Chiefs memo reiterated the Pentagon’s “antipathy to an invasion of the Italian mainland,” while warning that the British “are traditionally expert at meeting the letter while avoiding the spirit of commitments.” Roosevelt replied with a three-word scribble across the margin that echoed Churchill’s minute on the
Queen Mary:
“No closed minds.”

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 concentrate 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.