Members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff had to fend off the civilian cranks who pop up in any war with what they are certain are the plans for victory, or at least with supposedly prophetic warnings about how to avoid defeat. Admiral King dealt (using what was for him uncharacteristic sympathy and tact) with one such individual who wrote from Maine in the period of nationwide panic that followed in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack with a warning to King to be on the lookout in case Germany should attempt a Pearl Harbor–type attack of its own along the eastern seaboard. The letter, bearing no signature, reads as follows:
German aircraft carriers as heard over radio to be completed, could take over Newfoundland via the way of Trojan Horse, (improbable, but think it over) (cut our communication off from Europe) and from there cripple air bases, ship yards [sic] lower morale by dropping bombs on N.Y. and Boston and Portland from the rear, then slip away into the Arctic Ocean.
Remember Pearl Harbor. Nothing is too daring or too fantastic for these war mad dictators.
Remember the Maginot Line.
Box 14
Cape Cottage, Maine
Perhaps this will help in some way even if it turns out to be only a bum steer.1
King received this letter when he was in the last days of his posting as commander in chief of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet and just before he was promoted to command the entire U.S. Navy. Even though the scenario outlined therein was completely impossible, if only for the reason that the German navy in World War II never had an operational aircraft carrier, the admiral nevertheless believed in doing his best to calm the fears of a jittery public. Since the letter was anonymous, King was forced to address his reply to a post office box. He wrote, on December 14, 1941:
Holder, P.O. Box #14,
Cape Cottage, Maine.
Sir—
Receipt is acknowledged of your letter mailed December 11, 1941, relative to possible action by the enemy.
Your interest in writing me is sincerely appreciated. You may rest assured that no possibility of attack on the Atlantic Coast has been minimized or overlooked; and that we are not likely to forget Pearl Harbor.
Thank you for your letter.
Very truly yours,
E. J. King.2
In fact, although the specific fears expressed by King’s correspondent in this instance were bizarre, to say the least, the Atlantic coast was in fact under a grave threat—one that King seems to have been slow to appreciate—namely, U-boats. For six months after American entry into the war, Admiral King failed to organize coastal convoys of cargo ships and tankers along the eastern seaboard, although transatlantic shipping was traveling in convoy even before Pearl Harbor. To make matters worse, it took King until mid-April 1942 to succeed in imposing blackouts on large cities like Boston and New York so that merchant vessels would not be backlit for prowling submarines during the hours of darkness.3 King’s biographer states that King’s tardiness in organizing coastal convoys was due to the fact that he was preoccupied with so many other pressing issues in the early months of the war that he did not have time to deal with the “happy time” (as they called it) that German submariners were enjoying off the east coast of the United States in early 1942, torpedoing dozens of Allied merchant ships with relative impunity. Samuel Eliot Morison argues that there were simply not enough escort-type warships available in early 1942 to make coastal convoys feasible. The answer is probably a combination of these two scenarios.4 Michael Gannon goes farther, ascribing extreme negligence to Admiral King, even using the word “dereliction” to describe King’s tardy response to the U-boat menace off the east coast of the United States in the first half of 1942.5 That summer, even with new escort vessels becoming available, President Roosevelt still felt that the convoy system was not being utilized enough along the East Coast. In regard to ending the practice of merchant vessels sailing alone and unprotected along the coast, FDR wrote to Admiral King in July that “frankly, I think it has taken an unconscionable time to get things going, and further I do not think that we are utilizing a large number of escort vessels which could be used. . . . We must speed things up and we must use the available tools even though they are not just what we would like to have.”6
It is safe to say that in the early months of the war, antisubmarine warfare was not Admiral King’s strong suit, although even Gannon admits that King did much better after the summer of 1942.7
As noted in chapter 1 above, the fact that Churchill’s own army chief would refer in his diary to the prime minister as “a public menace” shows that Field Marshal Brooke did not feel that Winston Churchill’s contributions to strategic debates had the sensible ring apparent in FDR’s above message to Admiral King.8 While certainly meddlesome, civilians like Churchill who thought they knew the best way to win the war served to remind the members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff that they worked for democratic governments in which civilian control of the military was (and remains today) a deeply cherished tradition.
That said, and while President Roosevelt was far more circumspect than was Winston Churchill when it came to making suggestions about strategy to Combined Chiefs of Staff members, the British feared the potential disruption that FDR’s strategic views might have. This sentiment no doubt stemmed from the constant vigilance demanded of the British chiefs in their efforts to derail the wild ideas of their own prime minister. One often-quoted episode from the Casablanca Conference shows the great lengths to which the British were willing to go in order to keep all politicians out of the process of devising strategy. During a break after one of the contentious CCS meetings at Casablanca in which Brooke and King had argued vehemently over the conduct of the war in the Pacific, Brooke had a talk with Dill. According to Brooke, “When I replied that I would not move an inch, [Dill] said, ‘Oh yes, you will. You know that you must come to some agreement with the Americans and that you cannot bring the unsolved problem up to the Prime Minister and President. You know as well as I do what a mess they would make of it.’”9
In general, it seems that the British members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff were saddled with highly intrusive armchair strategists to a greater extent than were their American colleagues. The most notorious of them was of course Winston Churchill. Churchill’s greatness as a wartime leader lay not in the strategic plans he dreamed up—which were almost always half-baked, if not downright reckless—but in the fact that he was a fighter. Churchill’s defiant spirit and his incredible energy were just what Britain needed in the crisis year of 1940. Ideas like accepting defeat, giving up, and countenancing Hitler’s dominance on the continent were completely alien to Churchill. His installation as prime minister on May 10, 1940, made him the personification of the mood of the British people, a mood that had crystallized into determination to see the war through, no matter what. How they were going to see it through was less important to the British people in 1940 than was the fact that they now had a leader at No. 10 Downing Street who had the dynamic personality and the energy to forge ahead with single-minded determination.
The problem was how to harness Churchill’s energy and keep that energy headed down a productive path. Left unchecked, Churchill’s energies tended to scatter, like pellets from the barrel of a shotgun, in many different directions. It is an understatement to say that the new prime minister had difficulty delegating responsibility and that the petty micromanaging he engaged in was a serious impediment to those who served him. In his memoirs Churchill reprints verbatim many of the telegrams and cables he sent to members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff during the war. Many of his wartime colleagues who reviewed sections of those volumes for Churchill prior to publication suggested that he include the answers he received. Churchill’s response was the replies would make his series too lengthy.10 The real reason is perhaps a bit more complicated. The queries Churchill sent to his service chiefs give the illusion that the prime minister was in charge and on top of all the issues. The answers he received would have shown that many of his requests for information were in reality absurd wastes of time and represented an obsession with detail that undeniably hampered the work of his service chiefs.
A March 1943 reply by Portal to one such query from the prime minister regarding a recent transatlantic flight to Newfoundland by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who was being flown to Washington by Churchill’s personal pilot (a young American named William J. Van der Kloot), illustrates this point accurately. Portal wrote Churchill, “You asked me about the time taken over Mr. Eden’s flight to Gander. I find that it was only 27 minutes longer than Captain Van der Kloot had expected when making his flight plan, i.e. 13 hours 36 minutes instead of 13 hours 9 minutes. The ground speed average was 140 knots, and the contrary wind averaged a strength of 34–45 knots except at the start of the flight when it was between 30 and 40 knots. . . . There is therefore nothing abnormal about the time taken.”11
The man entrusted with directing the wartime efforts of the Royal Air Force both at home in England and throughout the British Empire, in addition to his responsibilities as a CCS member for planning and directing overall Allied strategy, should never have been forced by the prime minister to waste his time responding to such trivial enquiries, of which there were many.12 It was not uncommon for the prime minister’s obsessiveness to extend to correcting the grammar of his subordinates. For instance, in late October 1942, Churchill minuted to Sir Edward Bridges of the War Cabinet Secretariat and to General Ismay as follows: “For general convenience it will be better in future to use the words ‘aircraft’ and ‘airfields’ instead of ‘aeropolanes’ and ‘aerodromes.’ The former method is better English, is shorter, is more in accord with American practice and, on the whole, in more general use.”13
The prime minister’s interest in military affairs caused difficulties for all of the British members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In the fall of 1942, Brooke was furious when Churchill and Secretary of State for War Sir James “P.J.” Grigg had proved unable to keep quiet after Brooke filled them in on the blow that was about to fall on Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein. Churchill and Grigg promptly told Eisenhower and his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, as well as two other persons—one of whom was a public relations administrator.14 Brooke concluded from this that “it is absolutely fatal to tell any politician a secret, they are incapable of keeping it to themselves.”15
General Brooke’s visit to Washington in June 1942 was the occasion of his first meeting with FDR. While he found President Roosevelt to be a charming man, the CIGS quickly became convinced that the president’s forte was politics, not strategy. Brooke felt that FDR tended to make suggestions about strategic planning that took little or no account of the implications the proposed course of action would have on the war effort as a whole.16 Also during this visit Brooke had a rare moment of agreement with Marshall and King, in that all three men became worried when the prime minister and the president left their military advisers in Washington and went off to spend a weekend at FDR’s Hyde Park estate. At this time, Brooke had not yet given up his initial opposition to Torch and therefore shared the worry of his American colleagues that Torch might be part of what, in Brooke’s words, “the PM and the President had been brewing up together at ‘Hyde Park’!”17 As we have seen, these fears were completely justified, in that Torch was one of the rare occasions during the war when President Roosevelt went against the opinion of his military advisers.
A few months earlier, Brooke had spelled out in his diary quite clearly the doubts he had about the leadership ability of politicians in general in wartime: “Politicians still suffer from that little knowledge of military matters which gives them unwarranted confidence that they are born strategists! As a result they confuse issues, affect decisions, and convert simple problems and plans into confused tangles and hopeless muddles. . . . It is all desperately depressing.”18 Brooke understood clearly that the prime minister had a combative personality. The key to handling such a person, Brooke believed, was to choose one’s fights carefully. The CIGS therefore decided early on that it was futile to protest against all of Churchill’s idiosyncrasies.19 As he explained to one of his wartime assistants, “We mustn’t argue with Winston on small things, but only on things that really matter.”20 This philosophy no doubt proved to be a useful survival skill for Brooke. Yet further proof that no detail was too small to escape the prime minister’s eye is the following March 1944 telegram from Churchill to the Minister of Works, Lord Wyndham Portal (not to be confused with the chief of the Air Staff): “Just below the Foreign Office, on the grass opposite St. James’s Park lake, there is a very untidy sack with holes in it and sand leaking out, a sandbag structure, and some kind of obstacle formerly used as a practice ground by the local Home Guard. It does not seem to have been used for a very long time. Such a conspicuous place ought not to look untidy, unless there is some real need which can be satisfied in no other way.”21 Churchill’s concern for the appearance of London’s public parks is, of course, to his credit. However, in the midst of a global war the minister of works surely had more important business to attend to, such as attempting to alleviate the wartime housing crunch in London, than the removal of a few sandbags.22
The need to argue selectively with Churchill may help to explain why Sir John Dill had not been a success as Brooke’s predecessor in the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff. According to Sir James Grigg, Dill was a more brilliant strategist than Brooke.23 However, the inability of Dill and Churchill to work together effectively may have been due to the fact that Dill, as CIGS, “had let himself be drawn into endless argument, and been worn down in debate, and in the end given in.”24 This made Dill’s tenure as CIGS a miserable experience. With his defenses eroded by the prime minister’s endless harangues, Dill had ended up going along (reluctantly) with costly adventures of the prime minister to which Dill was adamantly opposed. One of these was the British defense of Greece in April 1941.25
While better able than Dill to find ways of managing Churchill, Brooke nevertheless would have been happier if Britain’s wartime ruling coalition had included a greater number of forceful politicians who might have acted as counterweights to the prime minister. In the spring of 1942 Brooke wrote in this regard that “a government with only one big man in it, and that one a grave danger in many respects, is in a powerless way.”26
The prime minister’s keen interest in military affairs and the fact that he clearly felt himself to be a gifted strategist certainly created a problematic situation for the Combined Chiefs of Staff as a whole, and its British component in particular. The COS Committee did, however, enjoy one major advantage in dealing with Churchill’s attempts to interfere in the realm of strategic planning. This was, as Sir James Grigg stated, the fact that “since Gallipoli Churchill, despite his manner, was uneasy at taking a decision on operations. He would never pursue a course of action which he could not afterward tell the House of Commons, had had the full support of the Chiefs of Staff. He might bully and argue and try to win their support by wearing down their defences, but he would never over-rule them.”27
As troublesome as they found him, the British Chiefs of Staff were not necessarily opposed to every initiative put forward by the prime minister. For instance, Sir Charles Portal claimed that the British Chiefs of Staff were sympathetic to Churchill’s designs in the Balkans. Although his American Combined Chiefs of Staff colleagues disagreed with him on this issue, Portal himself felt that Allied operations in the Balkans would have provided a viable opportunity for an Allied advance toward Germany through Austria.28 According to Portal, “The British Chiefs of Staff were always strongly in favour of operations in the Balkans as a corollary to the Italian campaign, and as a means of dissipating the Axis forces.”29 Portal also felt that the Balkan strategy would prevent the creation of postwar Russian satellites there. He and the other British Chiefs of Staff felt that getting Allied troops on the ground in the Balkans would be a better way to support Overlord than would be the Anvil/Dragoon landings in southern France that the Americans favored.30 As we have seen, the Americans won this dispute. The Allies put troops ashore on the Riviera on August 15, 1944, to support Eisenhower’s ongoing campaign in Normandy.
Like Brooke, Portal apparently had no objection to Churchill’s penchant for communicating directly with Portal’s subordinates, such as Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris and other RAF commanders.31 However, it is true that the prime minister and his inner circle of civilian advisers proved to be the most troublesome group of armchair strategists with whom Portal was forced to deal during the war.
In late 1942 and early 1943, as the Allies were gaining air superiority on all fronts with highly advanced aircraft that were entering service in ever-increasing numbers, Portal began to encounter difficulties with civilian policy makers in London in regard to which British aircraft designs should receive priority in production. Two such individuals with whom Portal came into conflict during this time period were the minister of production, Oliver Lyttelton, and the minister of aircraft production, Sir Stafford Cripps.32 The chief of the Air Staff was apparently also concerned that such civilian administrators were exercising a detrimental effect upon the judgment of the RAF personnel who had been assigned to work in their offices as advisers.33
Several of Winston Churchill’s civilian confidants from the 1920s and 1930s found themselves in positions of considerable influence once Churchill’s political fortunes had been restored in September 1939, when he once again became First Lord of the Admiralty, and in May 1940, when he became prime minister. Lord Beaverbrook, Desmond Morton, and Frederick Lindemann (Lord Cherwell) were included in this group.34 In his authoritative history of Churchill’s relations with the navy, Stephen Roskill sides with other historians’ unflattering descriptions of these civilian advisers: “As one surveys that band it is difficult not to accept both Anthony Storr’s view that [Churchill] was attracted by ‘energetic adventurers’ and Liddell-Hart’s that he was ‘only comfortable with men of lesser calibre than himself.’”35 This criticism may be somewhat harsh in the case of Beaverbrook. While admitting that Beaverbrook was not an easy person to work with, A. J. P. Taylor casts him in a more favorable light. In regard to Beaverbrook’s tenure as minister of aircraft production during the Battle of Britain, Taylor writes that “at the moment of unparalleled danger, it was Beaverbrook who made survival and victory possible.”36 Undoubtedly, the tremendous output of fighter planes from British factories under Beaverbrook’s stewardship was a miraculous achievement. Nevertheless, Beaverbrook’s relations with the chief of the Air Staff were poor. Portal resented what he perceived as Beaverbrook’s vainglorious and devious nature. This fact takes on added significance when it is remembered that almost everyone who came in contact with the CAS found Portal to be easygoing, well mannered, and a pleasure to work with.37
Although his official title from December 20, 1942, onward was that of paymaster-general, Lindemann/Cherwell served unofficially as the prime minister’s scientific and statistical adviser. One reason why Cherwell, a distinguished Oxford physicist, became a controversial figure is that his faith in his own intellectual ability convinced him that he deserved to be in a position of great power. In short, he was arrogant. However, it should be noted that Cherwell’s desire for power was tempered by a sincere wish to be of whatever assistance he could to the prime minister.38 While he made many enemies, Cherwell is not without his supporters. One of these is his biographer, the Earl of Birkenhead, who claims that Cherwell’s persistence enabled him to fight and win some difficult bureaucratic battles that aided the Allied war effort. For example, in the summer of 1940 Cherwell came to the assistance of the British intelligence services in their efforts to form an accurate picture of German strengths and weaknesses. He helped to demonstrate that the Battle of Britain was winnable by proving that the German air force was not as powerful as two London bureaucracies, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Economic Warfare, had made it out to be.39
Birkenhead also points out that Cherwell “was usually at his best in matters where he had no preconceived ideas.”40 One such instance had to do with deficiencies in British ordnance. In the autumn of 1943 Cherwell quickly carried out a study proving that British high-explosive aerial bombs were less effective than those being used by the Germans. He urged (successfully) that the British armaments industry concentrate upon aluminized explosives rather than the older types. The results were good.41 Even C. P. Snow, one of Lord Cherwell’s harshest critics, concedes that Cherwell had an amazing ability to get things done.42 Birkenhead, while a sympathetic biographer, hints that what many found to be so infuriating about Cherwell was that where Cherwell did hold preconceived ideas, he could not be budged from those ideas even if he was wrong.43
Like Churchill, Lord Cherwell was fascinated by technology. This proved to be unfortunate for Portal, Pound, and Cunningham, as wartime improvements in aircraft design and in antisubmarine equipment were to attract a great deal of attention from Cherwell. As an officer in the comparatively low-tech army, Brooke seems to have spent less time fending off Cherwell than did his colleagues on the COS Committee. The latter were forced to waste a great deal of their time responding to unwarranted criticisms and unwanted suggestions from him (as routed through the prime minister). Cherwell’s brisk one-page notes could always get a hearing with Churchill who inevitably made follow-up queries. Consequently, Portal was forced to write detailed refutations of Cherwell’s critiques. The chief of the Air Staff (CAS) did not have the luxury of the kind of provocative statements, vague generalities, and complete lack of supporting detail that characterized Cherwell’s reports to the prime minister.
Portal treated Lord Cherwell warily, giving both qualified approval of Cherwell’s statistics and subtly masked criticisms of the flawed techniques that were invariably used to gather them.44 For instance, in one report that was forwarded to Portal by the prime minister with a request that the CAS comment on it, Cherwell was clearly stacking the evidence to support his own conclusions. Lindemann/Cherwell had found a 14.6 percent loss rate among Handley-Page Halifax bombers for the month of April 1942, as compared with 4.3 percent in March 1942. Portal made clear that Cherwell’s figures had been skewed by including special operations—in this case, a raid on the German battleship Tirpitz at Trondheim in Norway on March 30, 1942.45 Portal informed the prime minister that “the corrected figures are 10% and 9.2% for March and April.”46
Cherwell’s technique seems to have always been to go for the quick and sensational, knowing that this would have an impact on Winston Churchill, who liked to do the same thing. It was left for others, usually the British members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, to come up with the detailed information that, more often than not, showed the fallacy of the arguments. For instance, Lord Cherwell’s original report to Churchill on the above-mentioned Halifax loss rates consisted of a single sheet of paper (just the way the prime minister liked reports to be written) that made no mention of his faulty source base—that is, the raid against the Tirpitz.47
Although he certainly found such unwarranted criticism to be time-consuming and irritating, Portal was certainly not in the habit of digging in his heels and categorically denying that there were ever problems with the performance of British aircraft. In the summer of 1942, Portal made clear to the prime minister that he was aware of the fact that a lack of proper exhaust dampers and inability to maintain stability during evasive action made Halifaxes vulnerable to attack by enemy night-fighter aircraft. Portal assured Churchill that he was working to correct these difficulties.48
Lord Cherwell fancied himself to be an expert in the field of aircraft design. However, in this he proved to be no match for the chief of the Air Staff. In the summer of 1942 Cherwell informed the prime minister of a comparison he had made in regard to the relative merits of the German Focke-Wulf (FW) 190 fighter plane and the current British fighter types. Cherwell focused upon how well the Hawker Typhoon I, an excellent British fighter and ground-attack aircraft, stacked up against the German machine. The results, Cherwell informed the prime minister, showed that it was imperative to accelerate the development of the Napier Sabre-type engine, which he felt would revitalize the Typhoon and allow it to keep current with any aircraft that the Germans could put up. At this point, Cherwell had all but written off the superb Supermarine Spitfire of Battle of Britain fame, which he felt had reached the end of its operational life span.49
As always, the prime minister wanted Portal to comment on Cherwell’s assertions.50 Portal could see that as fine a machine as the Typhoon was, it had limitations. For one thing, it was heavy. Portal explained that he wanted to continue the development of new fighters like the Hawker Tempest or an advanced design from the Folland company to replace the Typhoon.51 Portal was thinking ahead, placing the issue in a framework wholly different from what Cherwell envisaged—merely improving the engine of an existing airplane, although Portal realized that it was always a good idea to continue to develop promising new engines. Portal began by explaining to the prime minister, as a way of assuring him that the British fighter situation was not as bad as Cherwell made it seem, that “although the Merlin [a Rolls-Royce twelve-cylinder, in-line engine] in the Spitfire is nearing the end of its development, there is still something to come, and the Minister of Aircraft Production informed us yesterday that he hoped to keep up with the B.M.W. [the Focke-Wulf power plant] development in the near future.”52 The operational life of the Spitfire was in fact extended considerably by the introduction of the Griffon 61 engine, which became that airplane’s new power plant in the spring of 1943.53 (Interestingly, it would not be until April 1954 that the Spitfire would finally be retired from frontline service with the Royal Air Force.54 This shows how little Cherwell knew when he dismissed the type as practically obsolete in 1942.)
Improved versions of the Sabre engine were becoming available in mid-1942 for use in the Typhoon II.55 Portal agreed that the Typhoon II should be rushed into production as soon as possible. However, he pointed out to Churchill that even the upgraded Typhoon would, because of its greater weight, be at a disadvantage when compared to the FW 190 in terms of climbing ability and maneuverability.56 The chief of the Air Staff felt that the best way to keep ahead of the FW 190’s performance was to develop a new fighter “of the lightest weight possible, designed for the same characteristics as the 190, i.e., maximum rate of climb from ground to medium altitude.”57 A short time later, Portal and the Air Ministry delivered to the Ministry of Aircraft Production their performance requirements for the new fighter plane.58
The case of Cherwell/Lindemann also shows what harm could occur when the ideas of an armchair strategist were allowed to influence strategy. Cherwell’s March 1942 “de-housing” report to Churchill is a prime example of this. As usual, it was a one-page document in which Cherwell proposed that Britain should concentrate its bombing campaign against the fifty-eight largest German cities. Lindemann’s idea was that instead of attacking individual industrial targets, the Allied war effort would be materially advanced if the workers in those cities could, through indiscriminate nighttime area bombing, “be turned out of house and home.”59
Cherwell had not initiated the idea of bombing German cities at night. The British had been engaged in such activity on and off since 1940. It was a policy that Portal supported. As a policy it was revitalized in February 1942 (before Cherwell’s paper was written) when Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, fresh from his duties with the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, became Commander in Chief, RAF Bomber Command. Harris was a vigorous proponent of nighttime area bombing. His appointment to Bomber Command happened to occur when the aircraft to carry out such a campaign were becoming more readily available. Early 1942 saw the beginning of a transformation of RAF Bomber Command in which twin-engine aircraft such as the Whitley and Hampden were being replaced by large, four-engined, long-range bombers of the Halifax, Stirling, and Lancaster types.60
Postwar analysis of the results of the strategic bombing campaign would show that British nighttime raids caused heavy German casualties, did a great deal of damage, and tied up a considerable amount of German resources for such things as antiaircraft defense and large labor detachments needed to repair damage after each raid. However, the inaccuracy of British bombing was a grave flaw. It was to be the conclusion of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that the American campaign of daylight strategic bombing of specific German industrial targets (particularly oil refineries) had a much greater impact upon the German war economy than did the British policy of destroying homes via nighttime area bombing. In addition to reducing German oil output, American daylight raids also caused considerable disruption in the munitions industry. This was due largely to the fact that the oil plants that were being bombed regularly by the Americans were also the producers of chemicals, such as nitrogen and methanol, that were vital ingredients in the production of all types of explosive ordinance, from artillery shells to rifle cartridges.61
Another aspect of daylight bombing by the Americans that proved devastating to Nazi Germany is that it forced the German air force to come up and fight to protect the homeland. This provided many benefits for the Allies. It forced the Germans to withdraw fighter aircraft from the Russian front and obliged the German aircraft industry to concentrate on building fighters for defense instead of bombers for offense. Most importantly, because American B-17 and B-24 bombers each carried at least ten heavy (.50-caliber) machine guns for defense and from December 1943 onward enjoyed long-range fighter escort, the German air force was utterly destroyed in aerial combat with the Americans (and by the simultaneous severe mauling the Luftwaffe was receiving at the hands of Russian fighter pilots in the East) by the summer of 1944.62 This had been a vital prerequisite for a successful Allied cross-Channel invasion.
In the last year of the war, American daylight bombing raids against synthetic-oil facilities had a devastating effect upon the German war effort. As oil output thus declined precipitously, the operational sorties (and even training programs) of the German air force had to be drastically curtailed.63 Indeed, it would be the conclusion of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey that “the greatest single achievement of the air attack on Germany was the defeat of the German Air Forces.”64 That achievement was due primarily to American daylight bombing. Even “Bomber” Harris admitted that in the British night campaign dropping bombs upon German factories was secondary to the primary goal of creating generalized chaos in German cities and that British bombing had almost no role whatsoever in the reduction of the German air force.65 A good example of the ineffectiveness of the British bombing campaign is a series of four massive raids carried out by Harris’ command against Hamburg in July and August 1943. These raids resulted in some 77,000 casualties among the city’s residents, including 40,000 dead. However, within three months Hamburg’s munitions factories were producing at almost three-fourths of their former capacity.66
At the Casablanca Conference, Portal had supported the Americans in their desire to expand and develop the idea of the daylight precision bombing of Germany, although he had doubts about its feasibility. The CAS became more enthusiastic when the Americans began to get results. In fact, Portal began to believe that the two Allied bombing campaigns should coordinate their activities to a greater extent. By mid-1943, Portal felt sure that the British were capable of hitting precision targets at night. He became disenchanted with Harris, who preferred area bombing, when the latter did not support this idea. Indeed, Portal became so angry when Harris refused to follow up the second American daylight raid against the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt in October 1943 with a British raid the same evening that he seriously considered firing Harris.67
The fairly successful American policy of daylight strategic bombing of German industrial targets had been pressed vigorously by General Arnold and his staff. British nighttime area bombing had backing within the RAF from figures like Portal and Harris. However, due to his influence with the prime minister, Cherwell may have helped to give that flawed policy undue weight. While he was to become a wholehearted enthusiast of the British bombing campaign and one of its most ardent champions, Winston Churchill had, it should be remembered, initially harbored doubts about its potential effectiveness. In the autumn of 1941 he had warned Portal not to overestimate the effectiveness of the aerial bombardment of German cities, that in his view it was far from clear that bombing cities would have any kind of large-scale effect upon the German military or upon munitions production.68 The prime minister went on to say, “Before the war we were greatly misled by the pictures [the Air Staff] painted of the destruction that would be wrought by Air raids. . . . This picture of Air destruction was so exaggerated that it depressed the Statesmen responsible for the pre-war policy, and played a definite part in the desertion of Czecho-Slovakia in August 1938.”69
Cherwell’s interference in the debate over the bombing campaign against Germany seems to have given Churchill, FDR, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff the erroneous impression that bombing, whether of the American precision type by day or British nighttime “carpet” bombing, could have a detrimental impact upon the morale of the German people. This turned out to be a misguided idea—rather than weakening morale, dropping bombs on people tends to have the opposite effect of making them very angry. It was defeat on the battlefield (particularly on the Russian front), the destruction of its navy, air force, and industrial infrastructure, and finally invasion by Allied ground forces that caused the defeat of Germany. German civilian morale did not “crack” under the weight of Allied bombing. However, as late as February 1943, in the wake of the Casablanca Conference, the Combined Chiefs felt that it might. The “Casablanca Directive” that provided a list of target priorities for the British-American Combined Bomber Offensive devoted considerable attention to German morale:70
1. |
Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened. |
|
2. |
Within that general concept, your primary objectives, subject to the exigencies of weather and tactical feasibility, will for the present be in the following order of priority: |
|
(a) German submarine construction yards. |
||
(b) The German aircraft industry. |
||
(c) Transportation. |
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(d) Oil plants. |
||
(e) Other targets in enemy war industry.71 |
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Of interest in this list of target priorities for the bombing campaign is that morale, which proved to be the wrong objective, ranks far higher than oil plants. The latter turned out to be the real answer to the question of how to destroy the German war economy through aerial bombardment.72 Without interference from such armchair strategists as Lindemann and Churchill, the Combined Chiefs of Staff might have come to this realization earlier than they did.
Armchair strategists were less of a problem for the American members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. For example, General Marshall and Secretary of War Henry Stimson worked quite well together. There were, however, some exceptions to this general rule. Admiral King’s relations with navy secretary Frank Knox had been quite cordial;73 however, the same could not be said of the situation that developed upon Knox’s death in April 1944 and his replacement by James Forrestal. As undersecretary to Knox from 1940 to 1944, Forrestal had been heavily involved in the naval procurement programs that had flourished in those years.74 Upon becoming secretary of the navy, Forrestal resented King’s influence in production issues, which the secretary apparently regarded as his own private preserve. Shortly after Knox’s death, Forrestal issued the following terse and sharp warning to King in regard to the Naval Office of Procurement and Material: “Any memorandums or Directives relating to or dealing with the functions of subject office will be cleared with the Office of the Secretary of the Navy before transmission.”75 Such bitterness between the navy secretary and the Chief of Naval Operations would have been unthinkable during the tenure of Knox. King’s own view of his relations with Forrestal was characteristically succinct: “I didn’t like him, and he didn’t like me.”76
President Roosevelt intervened far less often in strategic matters than did Churchill and Churchill’s cronies. The evidence shows that after the founding of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff in February 1942 the president went against their recommendations on only two occasions. In one, the decision to proceed with Torch, Roosevelt courted disaster by thus causing the delay of the cross-Channel assault until 1944. This choice, while keeping American casualties to a minimum, allowed Russian casualties to continue to skyrocket and caused a marked deterioration in the relations between the Soviet Union and its Western allies. The president’s other wartime incursion into strategic decision making was far more enlightened. As mentioned previously, the president placed severe constraints upon the Allied campaign to retake Burma from the Japanese by canceling the Buccaneer/Andamans campaign at the time of the Cairo/Teheran discussions in November and December 1943. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed the president on this matter.77 However, the dramatic success of the American advances in the Pacific theater, which in early 1944 began to exceed the expectations of all Allied planners, made it abundantly clear that the war against Japan was not going to be decided in Burma anyway. Thus, it must be admitted that in regard to Buccaneer, the president got one right.
Admiral King remarked in a 1949 interview that “the British Chiefs of Staff had to do what Churchill wanted done, whether they liked it or not. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had little trouble with President Roosevelt. . . . ‘If one would fight F.D.R. he would quit.’”78 In fact, as his biographer James MacGregor Burns has pointed out, Franklin Roosevelt’s greatness as a wartime leader stemmed largely from his willingness to delegate strategic decision making to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint and Combined Planning Staffs. FDR did not feel threatened by the military talent represented by the presence in Washington of the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff. Rather, he took pride in the fact that he almost never had to overrule the decisions of the Joint Chiefs, people whom he had had the wisdom to appoint to their commands.79 In terms of their respective temperaments, FDR was much more comfortable with a “hands off” management style than Churchill, who was happy only if he could interfere everywhere and anywhere.
Another reason that armchair strategy was less of a problem for the American CCS members than for their British colleagues is that in the United States some of the potential offenders neutralized each other by mutual antagonism and suspicion. For example, on orders from the president, the U.S. State Department was not represented at either Casablanca or Teheran.80 The president also seemed to attract most of the ire of American isolationists, to such an extent that they became a headache for him instead of the Combined Chiefs of Staff.
The Pearl Harbor attack greatly weakened the isolationist movement in the United States, but isolationism never quite went away. Some of the more radical isolationists, such as the “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin, were never reconciled to America as an active belligerent. Others, such as press baron “Colonel” Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune, and Republican senators Hiram Johnson (of California) and Arthur Vandenberg (of Michigan), became troublemakers of a different stripe, by attempting after Pearl Harbor to force FDR to repudiate the “Germany first” strategy in favor of devoting all of America’s military resources to the war against Japan. This sentiment went so far as to convince Senator Vandenberg in 1944 that he had found the perfect Republican presidential candidate to challenge FDR, in the person of General Douglas MacArthur. The constant complaints from the paranoid MacArthur that his Southwest Pacific command was being maliciously deprived of resources fit perfectly into the new cause of the isolationists—that liberating Europe was far less important than defeating the Japanese. Suggesting MacArthur, whose idea of a great president was Herbert Hoover, as a presidential candidate in 1944 shows how the sentiments of the isolationists–turned–“Pacific firsters” had by then become combined with the “anything to get rid of Roosevelt” desperation of the Republican Party.81 The idea of MacArthur as a candidate did not progress very far, and it would be Thomas E. Dewey who went down to inevitable defeat in the 1944 presidential election.
Another reason why President Roosevelt was less dangerous as an armchair strategist than Churchill was that FDR made more of an effort to keep the focus of the Allies upon military, rather than political, aims during the war. He was not entirely successful in this, however. The president felt compelled to attempt to formulate postwar political plans for Asia to a greater extent than for Europe.82 One result of this was the formulation of the Pacific War Council, which met on thirty-six occasions between April 1942 and February 1944. FDR served as chairman, thus entertaining another group of potential armchair strategists and keeping them out of the way of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Besides those of the United States, the members of the Pacific War Council consisted of representatives from Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the Free French. The issues discussed at meetings of the Pacific War Council included supply, strategy, and, according to Timothy Maga, “what the post-war Pacific should look like.”83
Roosevelt shared some of his own racial views with the members of the Pacific War Council. For instance, the president approved of a plan, which had been decided upon as far back as 1935, to grant independence from the United States to the Philippines in 1945. Rather paternalistically, he felt that a long period of American tutelage had prepared the people of the Philippines for independence. However, FDR dismissed the peoples of Borneo and Indochina as “headhunters,” not yet ready to be released from European colonial rule.84 Such a statement was at odds with the anticolonial sentiment that manifested itself in the United States during the war.
The Pacific War Council had no binding power to decide anything. It was solely a forum for inter-Allied discussion in regard to the war against Japan. In this regard, it provided a service to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Admiral King and General Marshall promoted the Pacific War Council vigorously. For them it represented an ideal method for dissipating the frustration felt by nations that were part of the Allied camp but had no representation in the deliberations of the Combined Chiefs of Staff—where the real decisions about strategy were being made.85 It should be noted, however, that the fact that the council lacked real power did not go entirely unnoticed by its delegates, such as China’s Dr. T. V. Soong.86
In marked contrast to the trust placed in his military chiefs by President Roosevelt was the relationship between Winston Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff Committee. Even an inveterate meddler like Churchill was reluctant to flatly overrule his military advisers. However, he appears to have devoted a great deal of energy to attempting to bring those advisers around to his point of view, rather than accepting their views at the outset. The controversy over the Pacific strategy described in chapter 3 is a good example of this. Meetings between Churchill and the COS Committee occurred far more frequently than did FDR’s meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not only did Churchill attend many of the regular COS Committee meetings in London, but Brooke had to give up the chair to him when he did.87 It is interesting to note, however, that if he chose to surround himself with civilian advisers who, like Lindemann/Cherwell, were sometimes problematic, Churchill’s judgment was considerably more sound when it came to military advisers.
All of the British Chiefs of Staff were subjected to the micromanaging tendencies of the prime minister. With varying degrees of success, each struggled to devise strategies to deal with this situation. Even though Churchill and Admiral Pound were friends—or perhaps because they were friends—Churchill’s temper tantrums and odd working habits (such as scheduling meetings at midnight, not because of any great crisis but simply because he liked working at midnight) took a greater physical toll on Pound than on the other British chiefs. Churchill’s written messages to Pound and Portal were invariably rude and accusatory. Such treatment seemed to sap Pound’s strength. The chief of the Naval Staff was physically a wreck even at the start of the war, seeming tired and prematurely old, as well as suffering severe arthritis in his left hip. Pound took Churchill’s criticisms to heart, overworking in his determination to provide dedicated service to the prime minister and the nation. In the end, Churchill wore Pound out.88
Air Chief Marshal Portal proved to be more successful in handling Churchill. The prime minister admired Portal for his tact, modesty, and determination.89 Portal conceded that what he referred to as Churchill’s “brainwaves on strategy” were highly problematic for the COS Committee. He felt, however, that Churchill made up for these with his courage, energy, and stamina and by supporting the British Chiefs of Staff when things went wrong.90 Portal’s biographer is undoubtedly correct in writing that upon receipt of one of the Churchill’s frequent and strongly worded criticisms, “Portal would reply in studiously courteous terms, avoiding polemics, but citing solid facts and figures to rebut the Prime Minister’s accusations.”91
Churchill’s attempts to impose his own strategic views upon the British Chiefs of Staff infuriated Admiral Cunningham after he took over the position of First Sea Lord in October 1943.92 Cunningham’s biographer, Oliver Warner, claims that Churchill and Cunningham got along well together.93 Archival evidence, however, does not bear this out. Cunningham’s diary entries in regard to the debates over the Pacific strategy (covered in chapter 3) indicate that Cunningham in fact developed an intense dislike for Churchill.94
The misguided Bay of Bengal strategy was not by any means the only wild idea of Churchill’s that the British chiefs were forced to attempt to neutralize. Brooke did not share Churchill’s enthusiasm for a campaign against the German forces in northern Norway (Operation Jupiter).95 Brooke wrote in September 1942, “It is quite impossible at the same time as the North African expedition. Shipping alone will make it impossible.”96 His colleagues on the COS Committee shared Brooke’s doubts.97 To the American CCS members, any ideas of landing in Norway were simply additional manifestations of the British reluctance to undertake Overlord. In the fall of 1943, however, Churchill had still not given up hope of an operation to drive the Germans out of Norway. This type of operation fit perfectly into the prime minister’s penchant for peripheral military operations, concepts that while imaginative had little or no strategic validity. (Gallipoli in World War I and Churchill’s obsession with the Dodecanese in World War II are other examples.) The disaster of the British Norwegian campaign of 1940, in which Churchill had played such a large role, seems only to have whet his appetite for a second go-around. As the plans for Overlord were becoming finalized, the British Joint Planning Staff echoed Brooke’s sentiments that Jupiter was simply not a practical or efficient use of Allied resources.98 General Marshall was in complete agreement with the Brooke and British planners in this regard.
There were civilians whom the American members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff found to be quite helpful. One of these was Harry Hopkins, who, in addition to being a close adviser to the president, served as the director of the American branch of the Munitions Assignment Board. Hopkins never questioned the right of the Combined Chiefs of Staff to have final say over Anglo-American munitions distribution.99 Hopkins was on excellent terms with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. In a letter written a few weeks after the Japanese surrender, Admiral King wrote the ailing Hopkins, “I shall never forget—nor do I intend to let others forget—how much the Joint Chiefs of Staff owe to your unfailing interest, your keen analysis, and your practical advice. In fact, the people of the United States owe you more than they know, but I am confident they will, in due course, come to realize the scope and importance of your services to the country throughout the conduct of the war.”100
Because the production of munitions was so closely associated with military strategy in World War II, there was always the danger that civilians involved with industrial mobilization might indirectly exert a harmful influence upon Allied strategy. Maintaining control over weapons production was therefore of great concern to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In the United States this was difficult, because there was no single “production czar.” However, the elements of the somewhat decentralized American munitions-production system did have one common basis, namely, that the federal government had taken control over all basic aspects of the wartime economy. This included providing the bulk of the money to build munitions factories, controlling the manufacture and distribution of machine tools and raw materials, and purchasing the finished products.101
Therefore, while the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff were forced to deal with civilian organizations, such as the War Production Board (WPB) and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, in regard to munitions production, Marshall, King, Arnold, and Leahy were able to maintain a dominant influence over what, and how much, was produced. One factor that allowed this to be accomplished was that the American services, and their chiefs, were all heavily involved in the procurement process. For example, through Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell, head of the Army Service Forces, General Marshall was able to maintain army control over the materiel produced for the Army Ground Forces. As stated in the official U.S. Army history, under the March 9, 1942, reorganization of the War Department that created the Army Service Forces/Services of Supply, “Somervell now found himself in command of the Army’s entire machinery for procurement, economic mobilization and supply.”102
As such, General Somervell sometimes clashed with (and acted as a brake on) Donald Nelson, chairman of the WPB. The board controlled the distribution of raw materials, but the Army Service Forces controlled the procurement of weapons and supplies for the Army Ground Forces. This included artillery, tanks, ammunition, and medical equipment. Somervell and Nelson disagreed as to the extent to which the American economy should be converted to war production. Nelson feared that Somervell wanted the virtual elimination of the production of any civilian goods whatsoever and felt that this would cause the economy as a whole to become dangerously unbalanced. As it turned out, Nelson’s view of what Somervell wanted was unduly harsh. The head of the Army Service Forces did not wish to shut down the civilian economy. He simply wanted to be sure that munitions production had priority until victory was achieved.103 General Somervell’s biographer summarizes the rivalry between Nelson and Somervell nicely, writing that General Somervell “saw Nelson as an errand boy, whose primary job was to see that army requirements were satisfied, and thus, he pushed for more efficient management in the WPB and a stronger voice for the military in the field of production. Jealously guarding the army’s prerogatives, Somervell refused to accept the WPB as a superior agency and aggressively asserted military claims to scarce raw materials.”104
Another player in the confusing tangle of American weapons procurement management was William S. Knudsen, a former president of the General Motors Corporation, who in January 1942 was commissioned directly from civilian life as an army lieutenant general and made “Director of War Production for the War Department.”105 Exactly where this placed Knudsen vis-à-vis General Somervell was not made clear, which seems to have been the way FDR liked to do business.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff worked with many forceful civilian personalities during the war (and had a few of their own strong personalities on tap, in the form of subordinates like General Somervell). There are several reasons why the Combined Chiefs were highly successful in keeping the armchair strategists at bay. Among these, Churchill’s fear of another Gallipoli (for which he might have to take the blame if he forced a strategic issue) and bureaucratic infighting among civilian agencies in Washington and London are certainly important. However, the most important reason seems to have been that because the Combined Chiefs of Staff were an unusually talented group of individuals, the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the general public were content to leave strategic decision making in their hands.