The United States and Great Britain have now reached the crossroads in the war where perseverance in the practice of dispersing the limited resources and reversing or amending decisions involves a grave danger that the war will become stalemated or that decisive action leading to complete victory will be indefinitely postponed.
—Maj. Gen. Thomas Handy, U.S. Army, August 8, 1943
As Roosevelt fished in Canada, the converted Cunard liner RMS Queen Mary steamed westward in the Atlantic bearing Winston Churchill, the 230-member British delegation to Quadrant, and well secured below decks, thousands of Axis prisoners of war.1 Brig. Gen. Kenneth McLean, Air Cdre. Victor Groom, and Royal Navy Capt. M. J. Mansergh, the COSSAC team sent along in support, attended the third aboard-ship meeting of the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and briefed them on the “Overlord Outline Plan.”2 The chiefs then wrote a covering note recommending that the Combined Chiefs of Staff approve the outline plan with the plan’s three conditions. These were that the German Luftwaffe fighter force would be reduced in strength; German Wehrmacht reserve offensive forces in France on the target date would not exceed twelve full-strength division equivalents; and the artificial harbors would provide sheltered water for over-the-beach expansion and resupply of the landed Allied assault force.3 The chiefs’ note recommended authorizing COSSAC to proceed with detailed planning.4 This was important, if qualified, progress.
Two days later, the COSSAC team members were relaxing in their cabin when McLean and Groom were summoned on short notice to explain the plan to Winston Churchill. The prime minister lay in the bed of his stateroom while the two officers set up their large-scale map and, as recounted by Churchill, “explained in a tense and cogent tale the plan which had been prepared for the cross-Channel descent upon France.”5 In the moment, the prime minister’s preference for the Mediterranean strategy and his opposition to the cross-Channel assault were set aside. Churchill, who liked the COSSAC plan, was moved to show McLean and Groom his own plan, which involved ten armored brigades and “relied on ‘violence and simultaneity.’” Churchill wanted the ground forces in COSSAC’s plan increased by 25 percent. If approved, this would bring the assault force up close to the number of troops that COSSAC himself, British Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, would have preferred from the outset. Told by the COSSAC men that making the troop increase would come down to a matter of landing craft, Churchill declared that more landing craft must be produced.6
The COSSAC men had emphasized to Churchill the importance of “Mulberry,” the two artificial harbors for over-the-beach buildup and sustainment of the invasion force. That prompted a demonstration. Members of the British COS Committee crowded into the bathroom of Churchill’s suite. According to Gen. Sir Hastings Ismay, the prime minister in his colorful dressing gown sat on the commode to observe while an admiral splashed his hands in the water at one end of the bathtub to make waves and a brigadier stretched a sponge across the other end to show the mitigating effect of the “Mulberry” block ships.7
The Queen Mary steamed on toward Halifax. Meanwhile Britons and Americans were talking in Washington. They would draw together closer still the separate issues of European war strategy and the atomic bomb.
*
After tumbling over Great Falls, the Potomac River, separating the District of Columbia from Virginia, flows south and broadens to become tidal and up to a half mile wide. In the routine of government in Washington, the phrase “across the river” is said frequently. “Across the river” might be spoken as a reminder of powerful third party interests in a pending decision or an announcement of travel a short distance to elevate a discussion.
During the first week of August 1943 with FDR away, intense discussion and negotiation of the critical issues separating Britain and the United States took place on each bank of the Potomac. In Virginia, talk at the Pentagon was of strategy for Europe and in Washington, across the river, sharing atomic information. Each would shape the impending meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill and, through their linkage, the outcome of the conference in Quebec.
At FDR’s invitation to Churchill to “send over your top man in this enterprise,” Sir John Anderson arrived at the British embassy in Washington, Monday, August 2.8 Head of the British atomic bomb program, Anderson had flown over to negotiate resumption of atomic information sharing. Waiting for him was a telegram message of encouragement from the prime minister. Its source, back in London, was a chit on which in the upper right had been handwritten and underlined, “Explosives,” and in the entirety of its body, “Best of luck—Winston.”9
Anderson checked in with William Akers, Britain’s resident liaison for the atomic bomb project and suspect to the Americans because of his long association with Imperial Chemical Industries. The American scientists saw in ICI a potentially powerful competitor for postwar commercial applications of atomic energy.10
Negotiation between Vannevar Bush and Sir John Anderson began almost quaintly via cross-town secure mail messengers. The afternoon of August 3, a letter to Anderson from his American opposite arrived by courier at Britain’s shaded, red-brick Georgian-style embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Bush had sent an extract from the December 15, 1942, “Conant memorandum” as written then. Bush had added his “Present interpretations” to the enclosed points as a baseline to which the British were invited to recommend modifications as a vehicle for an atomic information interchange agreement.11
Following some discussion between them of the Conant memorandum, the British scientist sent on August 4 a letter by courier to Vannevar Bush at the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) a mile away. Bush received Anderson’s refinement of the wording of Churchill’s July “Heads of Agreement” draft and a proposal for a second, more detailed agreement on implementation with Anderson’s draft text of both.12
While negotiating with Anderson, and under pressure from colleagues, Bush continued to try to make sense of the confusion of instructions from the president that he encountered while in London. His anxiety was heightened by the July 30 memorandum from his deputy, James Conant, that awaited him in Washington. Conant reacted to FDR’s July 20 instruction to Bush by reaffirming his own opposition, writing that “a complete interchange with the British on S-1 is a mistake.” Conant authorized Bush to quote him to “higher authority if you see fit.” Roosevelt, absent from the city, was Bush’s only higher authority.
Charged to negotiate on their behalf and acutely sensitive to divided opinion among his stakeholders, Bush completed a “Memorandum for the File Made as Original Only” with his account of the “Sequence of Events Concerning Interchange with the British on the Subject of S-1.” To the memorandum Bush added two handwritten notes. First, “the President was out of town when Sir John & I both came to the U.S., so that I could not make immediate contact with him to clarify the somewhat general instructions in his letter to me [of July 20]. Aug 4 V.B.” That was followed by “Letter from Sir John received Aug 4. Arranged to discuss with Mr. Stimson.”13 Bush encapsulated his view of the effect of the disparity between the critical verb in FDR’s message as sent from the White House, via OSRD, and the message he received in London (renew replaced with review) as “a very strange bit of confusion.”14 Over the days of their negotiation, Anderson developed a sense that Bush lacked “the strength to control Dr. Conant.”15
Bush spent August 5 consulting with the Military Policy Committee to develop a response to Anderson’s letter and refining the draft agreement received the day before. Bush was able to review the material and hold discussions with Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, and Dr. Conant. Vice President Wallace was out of town, but at the conclusion of his consultations, Bush was confident that Wallace would support the committee’s response.16
While Bush was consulting, Anderson crossed the Potomac to lunch with Stimson and Marshall. The lunch in Stimson’s Pentagon office also included Stimson’s aide, Harvey Bundy, who had participated in the key meeting with Churchill on Tube Alloys–S-1 in London on July 22. During lunch, according to Bundy, Stimson and Marshall, both members of the Military Policy Committee, “discussed S-1” with Anderson.17 Stimson and Marshall, according to Anderson, stated to him their wish to fully restore Anglo-American collaboration.18 If correct, this went farther than Bush, Conant, and Groves were prepared to go.
To Anderson’s surprise, he found Stimson and Marshall minimally informed about the atomic bomb project. Anderson recorded that Stimson said that he had reached a new understanding of the issues.19 From the scientist’s perspective, Stimson may have shown only cursory awareness of physics-driven issues of the project, but he certainly understood the policy issues. His insightful summation of the Anglo-American atomic impasse in the July 22 London meeting that he and Bush had with Churchill had influenced the prime minister’s draft agreement now in negotiation between Anderson and Bush. This second meeting with Anderson at the Pentagon reinforced Stimson’s personal position that the atomic bomb should be a joint possession of the two countries.
Brought to Washington in its evolved form by Anderson, Churchill’s proposed atomic agreement included five points. The four substantive points, unchanged from the July 22 London discussion, clearly went beyond reopening to the British of the current wartime research to develop an atomic bomb. They would establish a policy framework for a U.S.-British political-military atomic relationship with no stated limit to its duration. The four substantive points were as follows:
1. A free interchange to the end that the matter be a completely joint enterprise.
2. That each government should agree not to use this invention against the other.
3. That each government should agree not to give information to any other parties without the consent of both.
4. That they should agree not to use it against any other party without the consent of both.20
The draft’s fifth point established a process of governance for implementing the exchange of atomic information by creating a U.S.-British commission. Bush opposed sharing with the British except on the basis of “need to know” to win the current war. As a scientist, wary to step into foreign policy matters, Bush found his negotiating opportunity in the fifth point.21 He agreed to the process while withholding the substance.
On Friday, August 6, Bush brought to a conclusion the negotiation with Anderson on the draft for an Anglo-American atomic research and policy agreement. The scope of agreement was narrow and specific. In a formal letter to Anderson, Bush reserved the first four out of five negotiating points as “matters of international understanding . . . [f]or the consideration of the President and the Prime Minister.”22 Bush told Anderson in his letter that he had reviewed the fifth point, on the process and governance of information interchange, with all of the members of the U.S. Military Policy Committee except Vice President Wallace who was away. The U.S. committee, he told Anderson, could accept the draft formulation for the governance body and process. They considered early selection of the Anglo-American Combined Policy Committee that would govern the information exchange process to be very important.
Bush wanted Anderson’s statement of his intention to present the draft agreement as it stood to Churchill so that he, Bush, could “simultaneously transmit” this to the president.23 The underlying message meant to be carried to both leaders was clear.
Although a process for cooperation was attainable, this would remain an abstraction with U.S. atomic bomb research closed to the British, unless Churchill came to terms directly with Roosevelt in an agreement on the substantive issues, all of which remained open. Only settling these would establish the atomic relationship that the prime minister considered so vital to Britain’s postwar future. When next Churchill and Roosevelt met, one week hence at Hyde Park, the two leaders would do so knowing that each came to the table with a critical, open issue: the atomic bomb and Overlord.
These separate issues had come into intimate proximity in the White House during the Trident Conference the previous May and again in London in July. If resolution of Anglo-American differences might be found through their linkage, how much latitude did the president have under Congress’s 1941 Declaration of War and the U.S. Constitution? At the War Department, following the previous day’s lunch with Sir John Anderson, the large, long-term implications of the proposed atomic research and policy agreement with the British in fact was a source of concern.
Somewhere ahead, on the path to winning the current war, there was a threshold beyond which a treaty might be required for Anglo-American collaboration on creation of an atomic bomb, its control, and policy on its use. That especially would be so if the collaboration was intended to extend beyond this war. At the request of General Marshall, Harvey Bundy wrote a memorandum to Stimson to urge that these implications, pressed by Conant and Bush with support from Groves, be made clear to FDR.24 Acknowledging his understanding of Stimson’s view that the product of S-1 should be “the joint possession of the UK and the U.S.A.,” Bundy advised Stimson:
If you take the matter up with the President, I think it vital that he should understand that what Dr. Bush and Dr. Conant are really trying to do is to work out the agreement for interchange of information so that nobody, including the political opponents of the President, will be in a position to say that he acted otherwise than under the war powers and for the sole purpose of winning the war. Therefore, they are strenuously of the opinion that the agreement should stand on a reasonable basis of quid pro quo and exchanges should be limited to the exchanges of information which will help expedite the S-1 development. They are trying to avoid at all costs the President being accused of dealing with hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money improvidently or acting for purposes beyond the winning of the war by turning over great power in the post war world to the U.K. without adequate consideration or without submitting such a vital question for consideration and action by both Executive and Legislative authority.25
Bundy submitted the memorandum to Marshall that day to check that it accomplished the general’s intended purpose. Marshall replied, “I think it is o.k.” At some later date, Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves, the military lead for the Manhattan Project (S-1), added a note to his copy: “Their views were in complete accordance with the opinions of the Military Policy Committee” of which Groves was a member. What would constitute “a reasonable basis of quid pro quo” to win the war might be seen differently, however, from the perspective of President Roosevelt and from that of his science adviser.26
Anderson and Bush now had closure if only so far as Bush would allow their negotiation to go. Writing to Bush from the British embassy on August 6, Anderson proposed that he submit their amended draft to Churchill and that Bush do the same with FDR.27 This would take some time, as the president was out of the city fishing and Churchill was at sea headed for Canada.
The following day, Saturday, Bush prepared a package for transmittal to FDR on his negotiation with Anderson on atomic information exchange. In his cover letter Bush noted for the president that he had withheld comment from Anderson on the first four points of policy, deferring these to FDR and Churchill. Bush wrote, “I have encountered some strong opinions concerning them, but you will undoubtedly wish to consult on this broad aspect of the matter directly rather than through me.”28 Those “strong opinions” certainly included the clear statement by Churchill’s science adviser, Lord Cherwell, to Bush in Harry Hopkins’s presence on the last day of the Trident Conference, May 25, that Britain wanted to produce and possess an atomic bomb after the present war.29 They also included Conant’s equally clear intent—shared by Bush and Groves—that the enormous U.S. effort in the Manhattan Project should serve the U.S. objective to win the current war, not British postwar interests.30
*
All the while Bush and Anderson were negotiating on atomic research sharing in Washington, across the river at the Pentagon, General Marshal and his allies were restoring cohesion to the U.S. military position for the Quadrant Conference. Of immense help to them was the timely hand-delivery from London of COSSAC’s Overlord Outline Plan.
As Stimson completed his trip report to FDR on August 4, Maj. Gen. Ray Barker, COSSAC’s American deputy freshly arrived from London, was meeting with the U.S. Joint Planning Staff to brief and defend COSSAC’s Overlord Outline Plan. This was the first of several meetings at the Pentagon in which the substance of the Allied plan would be revealed to U.S. military leaders and their staff. In the second meeting of the JPS that day, Maj. Gen. Albert Wedemeyer and Brig. Gen. Laurence Kuter attacked the original and revised Joint War Plans Committee (JWPC) plans that favored the Mediterranean strategy. These two proponents of cross-Channel assault wanted to return to “sound strategic plans which envisage decisive military operations at times and places of our choosing, not the enemy’s.” In their view, Overlord must be the primary Allied strategy in fact as well as name.31 But the challenge to primacy for Overlord in the U.S. position on strategy was not yet resolved.
On Thursday, August 5, the day when FDR in Canada was reading Stimson’s report advocating Overlord with Marshall’s endorsement, the debate within the Pentagon on sticking with that very strategy continued. In partial response to the criticism from Wedemeyer and Kuter, the Joint War Plans Committee shifted its view to favor a pincers assault on the peninsula of Europe with the cross-Channel and southern France invasions in mutual support.32 From the perspective of Overlord’s advocates, that was movement in the right direction. However, another staff group, Joint Strategic Survey Committee (JSSC), sent a memorandum to the Joint Chiefs of Staff calling attention to the “inviting promise of [the] new situation in Mediterranean” and expressing the Committee’s willingness to “envisage encroachments” on the cross-Channel operation that might reduce it to a purely opportunistic effort to exploit “a marked deterioration” in Germany’s Atlantic defenses.”33 In all but name, the JSSC had advocated the British strategy.
By a coincident action on this day, helpful to U.S. Army advocates for Overlord, Deputy Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Joseph McNarny issued a directive reaffirming the Operations Division’s authority as “the element within the General Staff having primary interest in overseas operations.”34 Within the Pentagon, OPD was the fountainhead of advocacy for Overlord.
While debate continued in the Pentagon, the start of Quadrant moved ever closer. That day, the U.S. Advance Team for the Conference flew from Washington to Quebec City.35
Viewing this American crisis of confidence from afar were the British Chiefs of Staff and, with interest second to no one, Morgan and his COSSAC team in London. From the Pentagon, August 5, Barker reported back to Morgan in London via the new, secure radiotelephone, Sigsaly. On the line with Morgan was Jacob Devers, U.S. Army commander of the European theater of operations.
Barker apprised the two generals of his meeting with the Joint Planning Staff. Summarizing their conversation in a report to his staff, Morgan wrote that Barker detected a “slight weakening of the American attitude [oppositional to Overlord] induced, as previously, by U.S. Navy authorities (NIWP Admiral Cooke). He is confident that he got there in the nick of time and reinforced a successful counter-attack by the War Department.”36 Barker reported that the Joint Planning Staff gave the Outline Plan a “good reception.” On the movement of U.S. divisions to the United Kingdom, Barker had learned that two from the United States would be switched out.
More unsettling was Barker’s news that the “War Department have asked if we should be broken-hearted if we did not receive the promised four divisions from Africa, but were given instead an equal number of divisions from the United States.” Lt. Gen. Devers responded emphatically in the negative. The combat experience of the four U.S. divisions to be transferred to the UK from Africa was a quality vital to the success of D-Day. Devers ordered Barker to “stand out for the move from Africa as now arranged.” In his assessment, Morgan warned his staff about the “danger of relying too much on promised reinforcement from Africa” and that it was “evident to me that both British and U.S. authorities are chiseling as hard as they can go.”37
At its 100th meeting at noon on August 6, the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed the COSSAC “Overlord Outline Plan” with Barker participating. Barker emphasized that the plan was from a U.S.-British point of view, that the existence of more than twelve full-strength German divisions in France would not mean that the plan would be impossible, but that in that event “special consideration as regards planning for the operation will be mandatory.” Barker clarified for the Joint Chiefs the issues and conclusions on over-the-beach maintenance of logistics and told them that tests in Scotland showed the prototype piers for the artificial ports to be “rugged and serviceable.” Marshall told the JCS that Maj. Gen. Thomas Handy, director of the Operations Division, was correct in stating the strategy choice to be between the Mediterranean with political results as its goal and, on the other hand, Overlord as an aggressive offensive action to achieve military results.38
Marshall asks Barker for his “frank opinion” of British attitude toward Overlord. In reply, “Barker said that every soldier of all ranks [in COSSAC] up to and including General Morgan and General Paget were 100 percent favorable toward Overlord. He said that when the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and others come under the ‘sunlamp’ of the Prime Minister, it is obvious that the latter’s attitude is reflected and that everyone knows that the Prime Minister is always looking into the Mediterranean and especially into the Aegean.” Absorbing this rich discussion of the “Overlord Outline Plan,” and looking ahead to the Quadrant Conference, the JCS directed Barker to prepare a paper that would expand and clarify the ideas expressed in COSSAC’s plan (accepted into the U.S. system as Report JCS 442).39
On Friday, August 6, the Joint Chiefs of Staff took to the offensive against the dissenters by sharply questioning the JSSC paper, a meeting in which General Marshall backed Overlord strongly. Chastised, the JSSC relented and produced a new, revised “Joint Chiefs of Staff QUADRANT and European Strategy” memorandum (JCS 443-Revised) now based on priority for Operations Overlord and Pointblank-Sickle, the Combined Bomber Offensive, and its transatlantic buildup and logistical support operation. Reflecting the position the JCS intended to take with the British chiefs, the paper stated that if the Quadrant Conference decision was made in favor of the Mediterranean, “OVERLORD should be affirmatively abandoned.” Further, “If the British insist on a strategy for Europe which cannot be reconciled with the overall objective of ending the war as soon as possible, the U.S. Chiefs of Staff will have to consider transferring to the Pacific some of the U.S. resources now committed to Europe.”40
Friday concluded with the staff again aligned in acceptance of the U.S. strategy concept approved by JCS. By Saturday morning the revised papers for JCS no longer bore any traces of support for making the “main effort in Mediterranean.”41
Saturday, August 7, U.S. Joint Staff Planners submitted to the Combined Chiefs of Staff the U.S. intelligence case meant to support the JCS position at Quadrant, “Estimate of the Enemy Situation, 1943–1944, European-Mediterranean Area” (CCS 300/1). The intelligence estimate noted a favorable turn in the Battle of the Atlantic. It described Germany’s basic task to be “gaining an advantageous negotiated peace by dividing her enemies politically . . . beating off their attacks, or by making her defeat so costly as to dissuade them from the task.”42
This was a reasonable assessment of Germany from the Allied perspective in 1943 if a rational adversary was assumed and probably close to how the German General Staff saw their situation. Unaccounted for in the assessment was the perspective of Hitler and the Nazi leadership. Abundantly clear to most of them was that, short of now unattainable victory for Germany, an end to fighting also would bring their personal end.
As internal Pentagon discussions and the Bush-Anderson negotiations across the river moved to their separate resolution, Quadrant Conference preparations advanced further. Late that Saturday afternoon, the first of four special trains carrying the U.S. delegation departed for Quebec City.43
Already two days at sea were Winston Churchill and the full British delegation, having departed Faslane, Scotland, aboard RMS Queen Mary on August 5.44 Averill Harriman and his daughter Kathleen were aboard. Harriman dined with Churchill every evening and then played Bezique, a nineteenth-century French card game from which Pinochle evolved. Harriman recounted, “Churchill still worried that the Americans, in their preoccupation with the climactic assault on the French Coast, would insist upon withdrawing troops [the seven divisions agreed at Trident] and landing craft from Mediterranean, effectively vetoing operations he had in mind for Italy.”45
*
Sunday morning, August 8, with the U.S. staff revolt against Overlord ended, Maj. Gen. Thomas Handy was writing at his desk in the Pentagon. Handy had succeeded Eisenhower as the director of the War Department Operations Division. The Joint Chiefs, including Handy’s boss, General Marshall, would meet with Roosevelt in two days with a further Churchill-Roosevelt meeting to follow imminently. The principals in Washington had received no information about how Secretary Stimson’s report, guided in its presentation by Marshall’s experience and Hopkins’s presence, had been received by FDR. Thus for them, and for Handy as he wrote, the strength of the president’s support for the now-unified U.S. military advocacy of Overlord was something still to be determined.
Handy spent the Sabbath writing a ten-page secret memorandum that, from the U.S. perspective, succinctly defined and prioritized the strategy decisions that must be taken by the United States and Great Britain at the Quadrant Conference.46 Handy addressed his task with three developments in mind: Friday’s JCS rejection of the Joint Strategic Survey Committee’s bid to give near-term priority to the Mediterranean; Saturday’s U.S. intelligence estimate that described Germany’s basic task as attempting to gain an advantageous negotiated peace by dividing her enemies politically; and the already-begun deployment of the U.S. team to Quebec for Quadrant. Within twenty-four hours, Handy’s memorandum would become the basis for the proposed Allied strategy paper that the U.S. chiefs would press upon the British, CCS 303.
Although setting a date for the cross-Channel invasion and the size of the force, twenty-nine divisions, Trident’s expedient outcome, ten weeks earlier, had permitted continued parallel development of both the cross-Channel and Mediterranean strategies. After hesitating to consider again, the U.S. side was convinced that the United Nations had neither the time nor the resources to ride two horses. The U.S. military had come to agreement on its preferred mount, the cross-Channel assault.
Writing with a confidence reinforced by Marshall’s endorsement of his strategic assessment the preceding Friday, Handy put to paper the essence of the concerns that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their supporting planners had been voicing since the Trident Conference in May.
He set out the two choices. One was an opportunistic strategy of expanding operations in the Mediterranean, while relying on the bloodletting of the eastern front and internal weakening to bring Germany to the point of collapse. Or the Allies could affirm that only direct, explosive assault from the west across the Channel and into northwestern Europe, striking directly into Germany and joining with the Russian assault from the east, could defeat the Third Reich. Handy argued the case for cross-Channel assault as the superior choice. But above all, he concluded, Allied strategic indecision had to end at Quadrant. He wrote with emphasis that “even more vital to the achievement of victory than the particular course of action chosen is the pressing necessity of deciding what that course of action shall be and then sticking vigorously and whole-heartedly to that decision.”47
Titled “Conduct of the War in Europe,” the paper began by setting forth in unvarnished terms the consequences of the United Nations having “failed during the past year and a half to concentrate their forces and hold to decisions” in Europe. Handy concluded that the original objective of the Bolero plan for moving a U.S. force to the United Kingdom for a direct assault on Germany through northwestern Europe had been frustrated. Using then-available figures for the end of April 1943, the memorandum stated that the goal had been to have 1,047,000 U.S. troops in the UK for cross-Channel attack by that date. However, per the memo, at the end of April, only 452,000 U.S. troops were in Europe facing the Axis. Moreover, these were divided approximately equally between the UK and Mediterranean theater with 260,000 in UK.48 At the time Major General Handy wrote his memo in early August, the number of U.S. troops in UK actually was 278,742, a mere 19,000 troop increase in four months.49
This end-of-July total fell 76 percent short of the U.S. Army’s original Bolero goal of 1 million troops deployed to Britain by the spring of 1943,50 on the way to 1.4 million U.S. troops fully ready for the cross-Channel invasion of Europe. The competition continued between force requirements in the Mediterranean and buildup for the cross-Channel invasion through Operation Bolero. In mid-July, three weeks before Handy’s memo, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, at General Eisenhower’s request, approved diversion to the Mediterranean of a convoy destined for the United Kingdom incurring a net subtraction of 66,000 troops from the buildup for Overlord.51
Handy could have added details of the composition of the U.S. forces in the United Kingdom. These illuminate the qualitative magnitude of the shortfall. Nine months after the transfer of forces from the UK for the November 1942 invasion of North Africa, the flow of U.S. ground combat troops to the British Isles had slowed to a trickle. Only one U.S. ground combat division, the Twenty-Ninth Infantry, remained deployed in Britain. Yet there had been no offsetting increases in troops deployed for other vital needs. Despite expanding and intensifying air operations, in significant part to implement Operation Pointblank, the reduction of Luftwaffe capability in advance of the cross-Channel invasion, the U.S. Eighth Air Force did not have enough crews in the UK to man all of its combat aircraft. Surviving aircrews, reduced in number by combat losses, were approaching exhaustion.52 There were shortages among logistical support and engineering troops critical to preparing facilities in the United Kingdom that would provide the foundation for expansion of the U.S. force.
Compounding the quantitative shortfall in deployed forces, Handy wrote, was wasted logistical effort and operational planning in the United States and the UK. Handy explained that the effects were magnified in North America because of much greater geographic distances between factories, depots, camps, and embarkation ports. Although stating unequivocally that the North African landings, Operation Torch, had proved their value, Handy lamented that cargo capacity was squandered because hundreds of thousands of tons of supplies were transshipped through the UK to North Africa rather than being shipped directly from the United States. In the United States, preparation for operations that were kept in suspense by strategic indecision was causing units to be trained and equipped on a priority basis “for an agreed operation [cross-Channel assault] which is continually postponed, while a series of secondary operations [North Africa, Sicily] are undertaken for which they are either not required or unsuitable.” The waste, Handy wrote, “if continued will certainly postpone victory, and may result in only a partial defeat of the Axis.”53 The COSSAC staff was in agreement with the last point, and Barker may have said as much in his Pentagon meetings, which Handy attended.
Handy found that as of August 1943, “the United States and Great Britain have two forces of limited size located in widely separated areas facing the European Axis. Neither of these forces nor their bases are at present adequate to launch an offensive which will bring victory quick and complete. Furthermore, it is doubtful that they are now sufficient to take full advantage of an opportunity presented by a major weakening of Axis power.”54
By ensnaring themselves in a cycle of strategic indecision, maldeployment, and waste, Handy concluded, “The United States and Great Britain have now reached the crossroads in the war where perseverance in the practice of dispersing the limited resources and reversing or amending decisions involves a grave danger that the war will become stalemated or that decisive action leading to complete victory will be indefinitely postponed.”55
Writing on Sunday, Handy knew that in two days the Joint Chiefs of Staff would meet with Roosevelt in the White House to discuss strategy for Quadrant and that two days later, the president would meet Churchill at Hyde Park, he and the JCS believed, basically alone. No one in Washington yet could gauge Roosevelt’s commitment to the cross-Channel strategy (so clearly the choice of Marshall and the JCS) or the durability of FDR’s commitment under Churchill’s “sunlamp.” More fuel for their anxiety as to whether and where the president would take a stand was about to come from Roosevelt himself.
General knowledge of the Americans’ renewed resolve reached the British Quadrant delegation at sea aboard Queen Mary in an August 8 encrypted radio message from the British military mission in Washington. General Sir Alan Brooke, a passionate amateur ornithologist, concluded from the news that “we are to have a very difficult time of it at this Conference. Americans determined to carry on with preparations for re-entry into France and for Burma campaign at expense of Italy. They do not seem to realize the truth of the motto that ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’!”56