During the war it was not always apparent to the public, to politicians, or to military personnel just how important the Combined Chiefs of Staff was to the war effort of the Western Allies. Part of the reason for this was that a bureaucratic organization like the Combined Chiefs of Staff was a brand-new way of running a war. There were lingering doubts that war could be controlled by a central authority removed from the immediacy of the battlefield. Also partly responsible for this situation is the fact that none of the members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff had the publicity-seeking mentality of, say, Douglas MacArthur. In fact, its principal members all shared an active dislike for publicity. During the war, news that emanated from the battlefront (from the headquarters of the theater commander) had a more immediate hold upon the imagination of the public than did the decisions quietly being made by the Combined Chiefs of Staff in the Public Health Building on Constitution Avenue in Washington. To the public, the Combined Chiefs of Staff principals were better known as service chiefs rather than as members of a grand-strategy-manufacturing entity.
One result of the incomplete understanding of the value of central direction of the British-American war effort that existed at the time was that there were periodic efforts to move CCS members out of Washington and London and into large field commands of their own. This line of thinking was a reversion to the World War I idea that warfare should be controlled from a headquarters near the front line and was therefore the antithesis of the reasoning behind the creation of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Happily, these efforts failed. From the time that Admiral Leahy arrived in Washington in July 1942 until the end of the war, the only changes in the composition of the principal membership of the Combined Chiefs of Staff were the resignation of the then seriously ill Admiral Pound in September 1943, his replacement the following month by Admiral Cunningham, and the death of Field Marshal Dill in November 1944. Therefore, the Combined Chiefs were able to continue unhindered in their role as the primary strategic planning organization for the Western Allies.
Perhaps the primary reason that good sense prevailed in the matter of not breaking up the Combined Chiefs of Staff team by sending its members out to field commands is that, as Richard Overy has pointed out, the British and the Americans had learned the critical lesson from the Great War that grand strategy was too important to be left to frontline commanders, who might be too caught up in what was happening on their respective fronts to see the big picture. Politicians had to get involved in active oversight of military campaigns to avoid the type of military disasters brought on during World War I by the decisions of such frontline commanders as those two bumbling incompetents Sir Douglas Haig and Robert Nivelle.1 I would add to this that with rare exceptions, such as the decision to green-light Torch and then to cancel Buccaneer, Churchill and FDR felt compelled to delegate the direction of grand strategy for the Western Allies to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. As stated in chapter 6, this was not a concession that the prime minister and the president made willingly. In Churchill’s case, the terrible memory of Gallipoli was a constant reminder of his very real fallibility as a strategist.2 The oversight provided by Churchill and Roosevelt during World War II consisted largely of approving decisions arrived at by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, although, as stated previously, the Combined Chiefs had to fend off numerous attempts by their political overlords, especially Churchill, to influence strategic decision making by putting forward half-baked pet schemes, such as the Jupiter plan to drive the Germans out of Norway.
The activities of the Combined Chiefs of Staff represented a sort of board of directors, corporate style of running a war. Such a system invariably forced the Combined Chiefs to delegate a great deal of responsibility to their theater commanders in Europe, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and Asia. The question of how much authority to delegate was a difficult one. Throughout the war, the Combined Chiefs attempted to strike a balance between, on one hand, allowing their on-the-scene commanders enough discretion to modify CCS directives to suit local conditions without, on the other, appearing to be totally detached from the day-to-day activities of the Allied forces that were deployed at the various fighting fronts. On the whole, this system worked well. This was largely due, no doubt, to the fact that Allied theater commanders, such as Admiral Nimitz and General Eisenhower, were not afraid to exercise the considerable authority that had been delegated to them. There were, however, instances in which the Combined Chiefs of Staff delegated either too little or too much responsibility to their theater and other top commanders.
As mentioned earlier, both Marshall and Brooke had been considered for the Overlord command. That was not the only instance during the war in which there was talk of giving a field command to a member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Churchill had earlier tried to give Brooke a theater command in the Middle East. This was apparently something of a sudden inspiration, one that took hold of Churchill while he and Brooke were visiting the front in North Africa. During the course of this visit to the Western Desert in August 1942, the prime minister had decided to replace the Middle East commander, General Sir Claude Auchinleck, as well as his top field commander, Major General Neil Ritchie, then commanding the British Eighth Army. Churchill initially wanted Brooke to become part of the new command team that would, he hoped, reverse recent British setbacks in North Africa, such as the fall of Tobruk on June 21, 1942. Brooke describes, in his diary entry for August 6, his first intimation of the prime minister’s plans in a quote that nicely encapsulates the essence of the Brooke-Churchill working relationship for the entire war: “P.M. suddenly burst into my room. Very elated and informed me that his thoughts were taking shape and he would soon commit himself to paper! I rather shuddered & wondered what he was up to!”3
What Churchill had in mind was to make Egypt into a subtheater of the Middle East command and give it to Brooke. Serving under Brooke would have been General Bernard Montgomery, who was being considered for the Eighth Army command.4 In the end, Montgomery got the Eighth Army, but the new theater commander in Egypt was not Brooke but General Sir Harold Alexander. This was a relief to Brooke, who had declined the offer of the theater command primarily because he lacked firsthand experience in desert warfare. He was also aware that as CIGS he was in a position to act as a restraint upon the more grandiose of Churchill’s schemes; Brooke was convinced that in this way he was providing a valuable service to the Allies.5 Future events were to prove him entirely correct.
That Brooke, Marshall, and Dill could have been considered for top Allied field commands during the war shows the high esteem in which the individual members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff were held. It also shows that it took some time for the true value of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, as an integral unit that should not be tampered with, to sink in. In the end, it proved far more beneficial to the Allies to retain Brooke, Marshall, and Dill in their Combined Chiefs of Staff roles, from which they were able to continue to supervise overall American-British strategy. To carry out that strategy, they would rely upon their theater commanders, to whom they would delegate the responsibility for specific operations.
Clearly there were instances in which top Allied field commanders failed to measure up to the expectations of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. The crisis in the Western Desert in the summer of 1942 is a case in point. Technically, the decision to replace Auchinleck and Ritchie was made by Churchill, but Brooke, traveling with the prime minister at the time, concurred. As far as the replacements, Brooke and Churchill were agreed on General Alexander as the new Middle East commander, but Brooke had doubts about Churchill’s first choice as the new commander of the British Eighth Army, Lieutenant General William “Strafer” Gott. Shortly after being appointed, Gott was killed when the plane he was traveling in was shot down by a German fighter plane. Gott had been a friend of Brooke, and the CIGS was certainly distraught over his death. However, it did clear the way for Montgomery, whom Brooke preferred over Gott, to be named Eighth Army commander.6 In the 1950s, Brooke reflected on Gott’s death in an interesting sentence: “It seemed almost like the hand of God suddenly appearing to set matters right where we had gone wrong.”7
Another high-ranking field commander who had to be relieved was an American vice admiral, Robert L. Ghormley, who cracked under the strain of commanding the South Pacific Area during the Guadalcanal campaign in the summer and fall of 1942. Ghormley was not quite a theater commander, his command being a subset of the Pacific Ocean Areas theater command of Admiral Nimitz. However, Ghormley’s sector was an active one, and his breakdown could not have come at a worse time—the height of the fighting on Guadalcanal. Admiral Nimitz, who visited Ghormley at his headquarters at Noumea on New Caledonia on September 28, 1942, to confer with him, was shocked by what he found. Nimitz’s biographer records that Ghormley “was occupying a small hotbox of an office in his headquarters ship, the Argonne, which had no air-conditioning. He had scarcely left the vessel since he arrived at Noumea just before the invasion of Guadalcanal. Nimitz wondered why Ghormley had not taken more comfortable and commodious headquarters ashore. It appeared that the local French authorities had offered nothing of the sort and Ghormley had not insisted.”8
Indeed, Ghormley was physically wasting away under the strain of command. He seems to have fallen into a deep depression, due mainly to the pressures of the Guadalcanal campaign that he was supposed to be supervising. Ghormley’s teeth had become severely decayed, due most likely to a combination of the tropical climate and his own neglect, owing to his depression, of personal hygiene.
General Arnold, who was visiting the South Pacific Area at the same time, was also surprised that Ghormley almost never went ashore, though his ship was anchored in a protected harbor. Ghormley was working too hard and getting no exercise. In classic workaholic fashion, Ghormley worked all the time but got nothing done. A good example, at which both Arnold and Nimitz were aghast, was that some eighty merchant ships were anchored in the roadstead at Noumea and not being unloaded. Allied merchant ships, not to mention their precious cargoes of supplies and munitions, were in terribly short supply the world over, and such a bottleneck at Noumea represented managerial negligence that was practically criminal. Ghormley claimed that it was impossible to know what was in each ship and thus the order in which they should be unloaded, because nobody had prepared proper manifests when they had been loaded in the United States. That, if true, was something beyond Ghormley’s control. However, the solution was within his control, and his idea about how to solve the problem was simply not rational. Ghormley spoke of possibly sending the ships to Wellington, New Zealand, more than a thousand miles to the south, there to be unloaded, provided with manifests, packed up again, and sent back to Noumea.9 Meanwhile, the situation on Guadalcanal was getting worse and worse, and the American marines there were short of supplies of all kinds. What Ghormley should have done was to send those eighty ships to Guadalcanal immediately. Certainly doing so would have meant running the risk of sending something totally unneeded—say, perhaps, a consignment of typewriters—to the marines there, but no matter. Those ships undoubtedly also contained ammunition, medicine, and food that the marines did desperately need. There was no time for something so outrageous as sending the ships to New Zealand for sorting out.
With Admiral King’s approval, and not a moment too soon, Nimitz relieved Ghormley and appointed Vice Admiral William F. Halsey as the new commander of the South Pacific Area, effective October 18, 1942.10 The decision was a difficult one for Nimitz, since Ghormley was an old friend. Nimitz wrote to his wife, “Today I have replaced Ghormley with Halsey. . . . Ghormley was too immersed in detail and not sufficiently bold and aggressive at the right times.”11 When Ghormley visited Admiral King in Washington in late 1942, King became convinced that the pain caused by bad teeth had been the explanation for Ghormley’s poor performance in the South Pacific.12 However, it is more likely that the teeth were a symptom of Ghormley’s problems, not the cause.
One of Halsey’s first moves was to get off that infernal headquarters ship in the harbor and commandeer, not without complaints from the French, living and working quarters ashore in Noumea.13 The manner in which the rank and file of the Pacific Fleet found out about the change in command at Noumea is interesting. On October 26, 1942, barely a week after Halsey had arrived in Noumea, American ships, including the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Hornet, preparing to halt a Japanese naval force that was approaching Guadalcanal received a most un-Ghormley-like radio message. The impact of that message is perhaps best described by Edward Stafford in his biography of the Enterprise, which like the Lexington, was a very “happy” ship. The “Big E” had been Halsey’s flagship during the first six months of the war, but its crew had lost track of Halsey when the admiral was hospitalized just prior to Midway. Now, as they prepared to fight what would become known as the battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, the crew of the Enterprise found out what had happened to their beloved old admiral. As Stafford writes:
Before daylight on the twenty-sixth . . . a message was received from the headquarters of the commander, South Pacific Force, at Noumea. It was in a familiar style. Three words:
ATTACK, REPEAT, ATTACK
Only one man could have sent it and the Big E’s men knew him well. Bill Halsey was back in the war. . . . It was by his order that Kinkaid’s task force was engaged in the northwestward sweep which had found the enemy. A new confidence stirred through the Enterprise.14
Halsey also visited the marines on Guadalcanal, something Ghormley had failed to do. Halsey then cleared up the supply logjam that he had inherited by seeing to it that ships were unloaded quickly at Noumea and sent on their way. While Halsey’s performance when he returned to seagoing command in 1944 was to be decidedly less than stellar, his fighting spirit was just what the doctor ordered for the South Pacific area in late 1942. The vigor that Halsey brought to his new job as South Pacific commander was critical to the eventual American success in driving the last Japanese troops off Guadalcanal in early February 1943.15
As Army Chief of Staff, General Marshall too had to deal with field commanders who did not measure up under pressure. The most difficult such situation for Marshall developed in the always-troublesome Italian campaign shortly after the Allied landings at Anzio in January 1944, a campaign that was supposed to provide the Allies a shortcut to Rome. Instead of a shortcut, the Anzio campaign, for which Churchill had pressed vigorously, became a deadly stalemate. The senior Allied commander, American major general John P. Lucas of VI Corps, decided to dig in and fortify the beachhead rather than move quickly toward Rome. The results were deeply disappointing, even tragic—German troops rushed to the area and laid siege to the beachhead. For weeks, the British and American troops there were shelled by artillery and strafed and bombed by aircraft. With Marshall’s concurrence, Lieutenant General Mark Clark replaced Lucas with Major General Lucien K. Truscott Jr. The change of command did not immediately reverse the Allied fortunes at Anzio, but Truscott proved to be much more of a fighter than was Lucas.16
Historians have noted that during the war General Marshall read the memoirs of Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, who had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff during World War I when Alan Brooke had been a young officer serving in the trenches on the western front. In his book Soldiers and Statesmen, Roberts deplored such wasteful diversions as Churchill’s Gallipoli campaign and stressed the importance of concentrating strength on the Great War’s vital front—northern France and Belgium. For Marshall, the book was a vindication of his insistence, over British objections, on an early cross-channel invasion.17 Another work of military history that made a profound impression on General Marshall during World War II was Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, the first volume of which was published in 1942. Freeman sent a copy to Marshall, who read it with interest, as did Admiral King. Reading Lee’s Lieutenants reminded Marshall (and presumably King as well) that he was not the first high-ranking military officer who was sometimes disappointed in officers to whom he had delegated responsibility for action in the field.18 While many Civil War histories focus on the shocking incompetence of the successive commanders of the Union’s Army of the Potomac prior to the appointment of General George Gordon Meade in late June 1863, just a few days before Gettysburg, Freeman’s book is an excellent reminder that Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was not exactly the finely tuned Swiss watch that it is often characterized as having been. For instance, Marshall would have read Freeman’s postmortem on the performance of Lee’s subordinate commanders during the Seven Days’ battles in the summer of 1862. Freeman records how Confederate brigadier general Robert Toombs, an arrogant braggart, was so insubordinate that on one occasion early in the war General Joseph E. Johnston felt compelled to have him arrested. Later, at Malvern Hill, the last engagement of the Seven Days, the brigade Toombs was commanding performed poorly—a performance witnessed by Major General D. H. Hill. When Hill reprimanded Toombs sharply, the latter proceeded to challenge Hill, his superior officer, to a duel.19 Hill declined, informing Toombs that “when we have a country to defend and enemies to fight, [a duel] would be highly improper and contrary to the dictates of plain duty.”20
Even Lee’s most able commanders gave him trouble. For instance, in the wake of the Seven Days, Major General James Longstreet felt that “the other” and somewhat more famous Hill, Major General Ambrose Powell Hill, was allowing newspaper columnists to give him, Hill, too much credit for Confederate successes at Mechanicsville and Frayser’s Farm, at the expense of Longstreet, under whom A. P. Hill was then serving. A. P. Hill and Longstreet were both divisional commanders, and they were two of the Confederacy’s brightest stars in terms of military talent. Tension mounted between the two men, during which period Longstreet decided that A. P. Hill was being insubordinate. As with Johnston and Toombs, Longstreet had A. P. Hill temporarily arrested, but almost certainly with less reason than Johnston had had with Toombs. Again there was talk of a duel. Finally, Robert E. Lee had to step in and settle the dispute, by sending A. P. Hill and his division off to serve under Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.21
Marshall, incidentally, was a fast reader. Lee’s Lieutenants weighs in at over seven hundred pages, and Marshall, who did not have much time for recreational reading during the war, apparently finished it in a week or two.22 In December 1942, having read the book, Marshall wrote to Freeman that “my griefs over the personal feelings of leaders and subordinate leaders these days shrank into insignificance beside those of Lee. . . . The miracle of the rapid and quiet adjustments effected by Lee between Malvern Hill and Second Manassas is possibly the strongest evidence of his capacity to command citizen-soldiers.”23 Lee’s “adjustments” to which Marshall refers included settling the Longstreet–A. P. Hill feud and getting rid of incompetent generals like “Prince” John Magruder and Benjamin Huger. The politically well connected Toombs, a former senator from Georgia, was kept on for a time.24 Freeman’s assessments may have been colored somewhat by the fact that highlighting the deficiencies of some Confederate generals makes the achievements of Freeman’s true hero, Robert E. Lee, stand out in bold relief. Nevertheless, the book was an interesting read for General Marshall.25 Similarly, reading Lee’s Lieutenants may have helped Admiral King to feel less guilty about the Ghormley situation.
The rare occasions in World War II when the Combined Chiefs of Staff decided to bypass theater commanders and become involved in day-to-day operations in the field did not always end happily. The disastrous fate of convoy PQ 17, which was eviscerated by German submarine and air attack in July 1942 while en route from Iceland to Archangel, is a case in point. Admiral Pound bears much of the responsibility for the fact that twenty-three out of the thirty-four Allied merchant ships in the PQ 17 convoy were sunk by enemy action, with heavy loss of life. On July 4, when the convoy had been at sea for six days and had just passed south of Spitzbergen, Pound became convinced that heavy German surface ships based in Norway, including the battleship Tirpitz, had sailed to attack the convoy. He therefore issued a direct and highly controversial order to Rear Admiral L. H. K. Hamilton, one of two British admirals at or near the scene, that the Allied covering force of cruisers and destroyers had to be withdrawn and that the ships of the convoy were to scatter.26 Once they had done so, the ships of the convoy were virtually defenseless against German aircraft and submarines. It is a wonder that any ships reached Archangel at all.
The other British admiral near the scene was Sir John Tovey, the commander in chief of the British Home Fleet. Tovey commanded a separate inter-Allied striking force that was deployed along the northern convoy route for the very reason that it had been well known beforehand that the Tirpitz might appear and attack a passing convoy. The force that Admiral Tovey had at his disposal—which included the aircraft carrier HMS Victorious and two battleships, HMS Duke of York and USS Washington— almost certainly would have proven more than a match for the Tirpitz. The Allied battleships were at some distance from the convoy, however, and thus intercepting the Tirpitz would not have been easy. It would probably have been necessary for torpedo planes from Victorious to attack the German battleship and slow it down so that Duke of York and Washington could catch up, in a fashion similar to that in which the Bismarck, sister ship to the Tirpitz, had been destroyed a year earlier. Even to put the British carrier’s aircraft within striking distance might have required turning PQ 17 around and having it steam westward, away from the Russian ports and toward the Allied heavy ships, an idea to which Pound was opposed.27 In a sort of savage irony, the German battleship never appeared, having turned back to its base long before reaching the convoy. According to Stephen Roskill, Tovey, when informed of Pound’s orders to Hamilton, issued a “prophetic warning that to order the convoy to scatter would be ‘sheer bloody murder.’”28
Overruling his commanders on the scene was, in this instance, clearly a mistake on the part of Pound. It is especially surprising that Pound would overrule Tovey, who had a great deal of experience at sea and in combat. For instance, Tovey had been in command of the Home Fleet when it had finally tracked down and sunk the Bismarck. Tovey had been on hand for the final battle of that episode on May 27, 1941, on board his flagship, the battleship HMS King George V. However, Tovey was more than a hundred miles away from PQ 17 when the order to scatter was given. At least part of Pound’s decision to micromanage the situation from London was that the senior naval officer actually with the convoy was Captain Jackie Broome, RN, who commanded a force of destroyers and other small escorts. Pound felt it would be unjust to force a relatively junior officer to make such a momentous decision on his own.29 Thus, Pound’s motives were more benign than those of many people, like Pound, who cannot bring themselves to delegate. Rather than feeling himself superior and the only one capable of making an informed decision, Pound seems to have been trying to protect his underlings by taking the heaviest responsibilities upon himself. Nonetheless, the results of Pound’s decision were disastrous. He would have done better to order Broome to break radio silence (so as to confer with Hamilton and Tovey) and allow Tovey to make the final decision as to whether or not to scatter the convoy. Pound could have better protected his officers, not to mention the crews of the PQ 17 merchant ships that were sunk (in freezing Arctic waters, where there was almost no chance of survival for men who went into the water even if picked up quickly), by promising Tovey that he would support whatever decision Tovey made.
There were, however, occasions when Pound’s intervention in day-to-day operational matters seemed more enlightened and helpful. For example, the First Sea Lord never felt that enough was being done about the U-boat menace in the Atlantic. In July 1943, therefore, he curtly instructed the Naval Staff that “no vessel at present employed in the battle against the U-boats is to be diverted from this purpose or paid off without my approval.”30 A year earlier, Pound had worked out an arrangement with Air Chief Marshal Portal by which some additional long-range aircraft, such as Lancaster bombers, would be diverted from the bombing of Germany in order to concentrate on antisubmarine patrols over the Atlantic.31 Also, during the hunt for the Bismarck in May 1941, Pound made a significant contribution by realizing that Admiral Tovey’s staff aboard King George V had plotted the Bismarck’s position incorrectly and had thus for some hours inadvertently taken the Home Fleet away from the Bismarck. The Admiralty in London had the correct bearing, and Pound used it to enable Force H, hurrying north from Gibraltar, to find and damage the German battleship using carrier-based aircraft from HMS Ark Royal, slowing the Bismarck down so that Tovey was able to catch up the next morning and sink the German raider.32
Admiral Pound certainly believed in delegating responsibility, even though in practice he found it difficult to do so. He valued field commanders who were able to delegate. For example, Pound admired the way that General Eisenhower was able to successfully delegate responsibility to his commanders during Torch. In regard to Admiral Cunningham, who was then serving as the Allied naval commander for Torch, Pound noted that “Cunningham is co-operating with Eisenhower and has not received one single order from the latter.”33
Air Chief Marshal Portal was no exception to the general preference of CCS members to delegate whenever possible. However, Portal did score some notable successes when he decided that he had to intervene in day-to-day matters. For example, it was Portal who created the Pathfinders in August 1942. This was an elite unit composed of the air crews in RAF Bomber Command who had the best records for consistently finding their targets, night after night. By placing them all in one group and sending them out ahead of the main bombing force to identify the target area by dropping flares, Portal hoped to improve the accuracy of British nighttime bombing raids against Germany—which had hitherto been rather dismal.
Portal’s intervention in this matter differed from Pound’s action in regard to convoy PQ 17 in that Portal was attempting to find a long-term solution to a major problem, while Pound had acted to overrule a field commander during one specific operation. CCS members were entitled to act in such instances with the authority of the entire group, because the Combined Chiefs often appointed individual members to act on its behalf for a particular issue. For instance, Portal had been given the responsibility for supervising the Anglo-American combined bomber offensive on behalf of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. General Arnold performed a similar role in the operations of the American B-29 bombers based in the Mariana Islands for firebombing raids against Japanese cities. Such a system is similar to the manner in which, under the legal system of the United States, appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court are sometimes heard by one or two justices rather than by the entire Court.
Results were to prove that the Pathfinders were a successful organization. Portal’s biographer points out that while Group Captain S. O. Bufton of the Air Staff and Lord Cherwell had supported the idea of the Pathfinders, “it was Portal who insisted on its creation.”34 “Bomber” Harris was, along with his air group commanders, bitterly opposed to what he referred to as a “corps d’elite” within Bomber Command. Nonetheless, in June 1942, Portal politely informed Harris that he was being overruled; the chief of the Air Staff pointed out that the new organization would serve Bomber Command in the same manner that specialized reconnaissance units serve the infantry during ground campaigns. Rather than hurting the overall efficiency of Bomber Command as Harris feared by robbing the average squadron of its best pilots and air crew, Portal pointed out that the Pathfinders were sure to set a new standard of excellence that would have a ripple-down effect benefiting Bomber Command as a whole.35
Portal was capable of occasionally exchanging his good manners for ruthlessness when dealing with his subordinates.36 This is apparent in Portal’s desire for discipline in his command. The chief of the Air Staff was not afraid to prod his commanders. In July 1944 Portal wrote to Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, General Eisenhower’s air commander for Overlord,
It is stated in the report that an officer who failed to decipher a 5-Z message for four hours was “working under very difficult conditions due to enemy action.” If this means that the poor man had been blown up and was trying to collect his ciphers etc. in the dark, it is a perfectly good excuse. If, however, it means that the man who ought to have been deciphering a 5-Z message was cowering in a dugout because a few bombs were falling at intervals in the neighborhood then even under our rather milk and water arrangements he should be punished. In Russia he would be shot and I cannot help noticing that the Russians do seem to make a success of their war.37
According to his biographer, Admiral King “never entirely trusted Nimitz’s judgement. In King’s mind, Nimitz took bad advice and was too willing to compromise with the Army in the interests of harmony.”38 This may be an overly harsh assessment of the relationship between King and Nimitz. The two men kept in close touch with cables and telegrams on a daily basis and face to face in two-or-three-day conferences in San Francisco every two months. The Chief of Naval Operations allowed Admiral Nimitz, from the time of Trident (May 1943) onward, to move troops and ships around in the Pacific as he saw fit without prior permission from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.39 As described in chapter 3, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff determined overall strategic objectives in the Pacific theater under CCS auspices, such as the seizure of the Gilbert and Marshall island groups in the Central Pacific. Once these objectives had been identified, however, Admiral King allowed Nimitz to carry out a great deal of the detailed planning for each operation. For instance, while fulfilling his CCS directive to plan for the seizure of bases in the Marshalls, it was Admiral Nimitz who decided to jump straight to the heart of the group and land first at Kwajalein. It was a daring plan, and King was impressed with the nerve displayed by his Pacific commander.40
As First Sea Lord, Admiral Cunningham gave considerable latitude to his subordinates, as is apparent in a spring 1944 dispute between Cunningham and Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, who had succeeded Admiral Tovey as commander in chief of the Home Fleet, over an attack by naval aircraft against the Tirpitz, which had continued to take refuge in Norwegian coastal waters. The operation, code-named Tungsten, was carried out in April 1944. The German battleship was damaged but not sunk. Cunningham urged Fraser to make an immediate follow-up attack to finish the job. Fraser objected, knowing that it would be impossible to achieve surprise in a second attack following immediately upon the first.41 The debate got ugly. The minor mutiny on the part of Fraser that ensued is best described in Cunningham’s diary:
I called up Bruce Fraser about repeat Tungsten and found him in a most truculent and obstinate mood. He had . . . made the decision that Tungsten was not to be repeated. I reasoned with him and pointed out that C in C decisions were not irrevocable & that the Admiralty must be allowed some voice in what operations were to be carried out. He did not admit this & said if we were not satisfied we must get another C in C, and in fact indicated that he would haul his flag down if ordered to repeat Tungsten. I told him to sleep on it & call me up in the morning.42
The next day Fraser was still refusing and threatening to resign his command. Cunningham was not about to let this state of affairs continue. However, while he was determined that the second raid against the Tirpitz would in fact take place, Cunningham was prepared to allow Fraser to argue his case personally at the Admiralty. Cunningham reasoned that this would give Fraser the opportunity to back down in a dignified fashion. In the end it proved to be unnecessary; Fraser soon cooled down and agreed to carry out his orders.43 Admiral Cunningham had the wisdom to regard the entire episode with some humor. He seems to have dismissed Fraser’s outburst as nothing more than the result of the strain and frustration inherent in carrying out command responsibilities over an extended period in a long war.
As we have seen, the Combined Chiefs tried to steer clear of day-to-day operations but were not averse to occasionally getting involved in such activities if they felt that commanders in the field were not measuring up. One area in which the Combined Chiefs of Staff intervened in day-to-day operations was the use of airborne troops. The Combined Chiefs of Staff felt that there was a great deal of room for improvement in the Allied use of this new element of warfare. The Combined Chiefs were informed in March 1944 by the Combined Planning Staff that Allied commanders in the field were not following the procedures outlined by the CCS for the use of airborne forces.44 Therefore, the planners concluded, “we are not fully exploiting our inherent airborne potential or capability.”45 Such criticisms from the Combined Planning Staff struck a responsive chord among the Combined Chiefs. For example, General Marshall was a firm believer in the necessity for the Allies to utilize airborne troops aggressively and on a large scale.46
Marshall’s enthusiasm about the potential of Allied airborne troops to land quickly and unexpectedly behind enemy lines was seconded most strongly among the British chiefs by Field Marshal Brooke.47 This seems surprising, in that the two men did not often see eye to eye on strategic issues. Also interesting in regard to Brooke is that in spite of his conservative and cautious nature, he seemed to have had greater faith in the necessity for large airborne forces than did the “air man” Portal.48 This seems to be out of character for Brooke in that initiating new strategic ideas was not ordinarily considered to be one of Brooke’s strong points.
As chief of the Air Staff, Portal had doubts about the troop-and-equipment-carrying gliders that were to be towed behind troop-filled transport planes in an airborne operation as large in scale as Overlord promised to be. Portal remarked in a telegram to the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington in April 1943 that “the difficulties attending the use of [the gliders] are certainly formidable.”49 Portal had doubts about the readiness of American airborne forces and their commanders. In particular, Portal mentioned in the spring of 1943 that he felt Major General Mathew Ridgway, commander of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, was still learning about the proper employment of airborne troops.50 Portal was probably right, in that everyone was still learning about airborne troops in 1943, when moving troops by air was a very new idea.
It was some time before Portal came around to accepting the necessity for large Allied airborne forces. Six months before mentioning his doubts about the gliders, Portal had expressed unease about the entire airborne enterprise. This, it seems, was due to the serious shortage of transport aircraft faced then by Britain. In fact, the British had to rely heavily upon American transport aircraft throughout the war. The large aircraft being manufactured in Britain during the war were almost exclusively bombers, not transports. With their greater industrial capacity, the Americans were able during the war to produce more than 20,000 transport aircraft, as well as some 30,000 long-range bombers.51 Consequently, prompted by a nervous “Bomber” Harris, Portal initially opposed the creation of large British airborne forces, for fear that they would have to be transported in bombers, thereby largely curtailing the British bombing campaign against Germany.52 Faced with such a harsh choice, Portal informed the British Chiefs of Staff in September 1942 that “I regard the bombing of German industry as an incomparably greater contribution to the war than the training and constant availability of an airborne division and, as the two things at present seriously conflict, I would certainly accord priority to bombing.”53
At the same time, Portal had not forgotten his earlier pledge to support a cross-channel attack with all of the resources of the metropolitan air force. Because of that promise (mentioned earlier in regard to CCS deliberations regarding Overlord) Portal left the door open to the possibility that British bombers might have to be temporarily reassigned to troop-carrying duty.54 However, Portal’s conclusion at that time (September 1942) was that British airborne forces currently in training and those being planned for the future should be reduced in size. He did not then feel that England needed more than four thousand parachute troops and “a small glider-borne force.”55
Portal’s attitude toward the use of large airborne forces became more optimistic as time went on, most likely due to the enthusiasm for large-scale airborne operations shown by Brooke and Marshall and to the growing availability of American transport aircraft, which made it unnecessary for British bombers to desist from dropping bombs to carry troops. Allied bombing activity was, however, temporarily diverted from attacks on German cities in order to bomb railway installations in northern France, as well as other tactical targets, in support of Overlord.
The Combined Staff planners had become alarmed by sentiments like Portal’s 1942 views, expressed also by some Allied field commanders, that airborne troops should be organized into relatively small groups, that an airborne division might be “too heavy logistically.”56 Prior to the D-Day landings, Allied airborne and parachute troops had been used in North Africa, in Sicily, and on New Guinea. However, the troops transported to the battle zone by air in these operations had been organized in small units, such as regiments. Almost the entire U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, having arrived by air, had fought at Salerno in Italy in September 1943. Instead of landing behind enemy lines before the Allied ground troops had been put ashore, however, the troops of the 82nd landed within the Salerno beachhead seven days after the seaborne landings began, in order to provide much-needed support to the hard-pressed Allied forces, which had been pinned down near the water’s edge since coming ashore on September 8. Because such a supporting role was not the intended use for an airborne division, the Combined Planning Staff felt justified in concluding, in March 1944, that “the airborne division as such has never yet been tested in combat. The policy of organizing airborne troops into divisions should not be changed unless and until tests in combat show that this policy is unsound.”57
The Combined Planning Staff recommended, as a means of increasing the overall awareness as to the potential benefits to be derived from the imaginative use of airborne troops, that all Allied planning agencies, theater commanders, and other high-ranking field commanders appoint to their staffs officers experienced in troop carrier and airborne operations.58 The criticisms made and remedies suggested in regard to airborne troop deployment by the Combined Planning Staff were approved by the Combined Chiefs of Staff.59 The wisdom of the Combined Planning Staff was demonstrated shortly thereafter when three complete airborne divisions were used more or less successfully in the vicinity of the invasion beaches during the first wave of the Normandy assault. It is possible to speculate, however, that Marshall and Brooke would probably have liked to have seen the airborne troops landed farther inland than they actually were.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff as a group occasionally took a personal hand in other air-related matters as well. For example, while the CCS did not ordinarily plan individual bombing missions, usually delegating this responsibility to local commanders (such as Air Chief Marshal Harris of RAF Bomber Command or Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, the commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, based in England), there were a few exceptions. One was the low-level raid against Romanian oil refineries at Ploesti carried out by American B-24 bombers of the U.S. Eighth and Ninth Air Forces on August 1, 1943. Two months previously the Combined Chiefs had ordered that this attack take place. It had taken direct action after becoming convinced of the vital importance of Ploesti as a primary source of oil for Germany. General Eisenhower, as Allied commander in North Africa (from where the raid was to be launched), was consulted; however, the initiative for the raid came from the Combined Chiefs of Staff.60
During the Torch landings in North Africa, the Combined Chiefs of Staff gave as much latitude as possible to General Eisenhower, in his capacity as the Allied commander in chief of the operation, in the interpretation of their directives. For example, while he knew that the Combined Chiefs expected him to land in North Africa before the end of 1942, Eisenhower had been informed by the CCS in September 1942 that he was free to choose the actual landing dates.61 However, once the date was set for November 8, the Combined Chiefs did not want any last-minute changes. The Combined Chiefs became aware, one week before the assault was to begin, that Eisenhower was considering a delay until the 20th.62 On November 2, Sir John Dill informed the British Chiefs of Staff that “United States Chiefs of Staff recognize impossibility of altering date now and are so informing Eisenhower with my concurrence in name of Combined Chiefs of Staff.”63
General Eisenhower was also given retroactive latitude by the Combined Chiefs in regard to negotiating the “Darlan deal,” which allowed for an early halt to hostilities between Allied and French forces in North Africa. Under this agreement, which took effect on November 10, 1942, and was formally ratified by Eisenhower three days later, French forces in North Africa ceased all armed resistance to the Allied landings. In return, Admiral François Darlan was allowed to exercise command of French military forces in the region. He therefore came to overshadow General Henri Giraud, who had been handpicked by the Allies to be the top French civil and military official in North Africa. This agreement was made by Eisenhower on the spot, time constraints preventing him from consulting the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Because Darlan was the second most powerful politician in the collaborationist Vichy regime in France, there were public outcries against this deal in both Britain and the United States.64
On the situation in North Africa, Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, informed Foreign Minister Anthony Eden about the misgivings of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff about Darlan. Halifax stated that Admiral Leahy “has no confidence in Darlan and thought if by any unhappy chance the military situation were to turn sour on us, Darlan might well walk out on any agreement. . . . Leahy did not see how we were going to get quickly out of Darlan.”65 Admiral Leahy was in a position to know about the difficulties involved in dealing with Vichy politicians, having served as American ambassador to Vichy France before joining the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. While he was glad that the shooting had stopped at Oran and Casablanca, Leahy nevertheless felt that the best policy for the Western Allies would be to somehow extricate themselves from their agreement with Darlan as soon as possible. Leahy was aware that the Darlan deal was a public-relations nightmare for the Allies but felt that there was no easy solution.66
Darlan’s assassination on December 24, 1942, thus got the Western Allies out of a tight spot.67 Eden informed Halifax that the death of the French admiral had created a general feeling among the Allies that a great burden had been lifted. According to Eden, “Darlan’s assassination has aroused no emotional stories. The general reaction was relief that the chief obstacle to French unity has disappeared. There is also considerable satisfaction and even delight. . . . De Gaullists and other elements critical or hostile to Darlan privately sum up the situation by saying ‘that is one fewer.’”68
Allied administration of North Africa, however, continued to be a very difficult problem. Under an agreement worked out a week after the landings, the Combined Chiefs had determined, in conjunction with the president and the prime minister, that for the purposes of civil administration, North Africa would be divided into American and British zones.69 Perhaps because of their discomfort over the Darlan deal, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to assert themselves more forcefully in North Africa after the assassination. In late December 1942, after Darlan’s death, General Marshall sent a revised directive to Eisenhower that read, “With the approval of the president, you are authorized to appoint General Giraud provisionally in charge of both Civil and French Military Authorities in your area.”70 Eventually, the Allies arranged a power-sharing system for North Africa between Giraud and Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French. This system quickly led to a power struggle between the two men, a struggle in which de Gaulle was the winner.71
In allowing Eisenhower a great deal of leeway to run the Torch campaign (and later Overlord) as he saw fit, the Combined Chiefs demonstrated that they preferred to trust the judgments of their theater commanders when it came to managing the day-to-day operations on distant battlefronts. The freedom of action that was granted to Nimitz in the Pacific is another example of this. After setting overall objectives and allocating supplies, equipment, and personnel, the Combined Chiefs were more likely to intervene directly only in smaller-scale operations (such as creating the Pathfinders or scattering convoy PQ 17) that were not directly under the jurisdiction of a particular theater commander.
Delegation of as much responsibility as possible to their theater commanders and other high-ranking field commanders, such as Air Chief Marshal Harris, was absolutely essential to the success of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. This was the only way in which it could maintain a global perspective. By focusing on the broad outlines of operations, such as the Central Pacific drive, while leaving the detailed planning to subordinates in the field, the Combined Chiefs operated a very efficient command system. Such a system allowed the CCS to discuss many different issues, such as the Burma Road, the Mediterranean, weapons production schedules, and the supply of morphine in military hospitals in the course of a single day. Its members did not have to concentrate all of their time and energies upon a specific campaign, such as Overlord. Also, by allowing their field commanders to carry out the detailed planning of operations, the Combined Chiefs were able to take advantage of the knowledge gained by those commanders of local conditions the world over. The Combined Chiefs of Staff did sometimes feel compelled to become involved in details. Sometimes their intervention was helpful, sometimes not. On the whole, however, the balance struck by the Combined Chiefs of Staff between delegation and control from the center was highly effective.