INTRODUCTION

Only nine American military officers, five generals and four admirals, have ever earned the right to wear five stars on their uniforms. It is telling that almost half of that very select group made up the American contingent of the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) in World War II. The British members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff likewise attained the highest military ranks that Britain could offer. In addition, the three British Combined Chiefs of Staff members who survived the war were all elevated to peerages. None of these men have household names, which is a pity, because famous Allied World War II leaders who are household names in the United States and Britain, such as Eisenhower, MacArthur, Nimitz, Montgomery, Alexander, and Slim, all worked for the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

The Combined Chiefs of Staff was set up in January 1942 in Washington, D.C., as the supreme uniformed military command for the Western Allies. The CCS became the nerve center of the most highly integrated effort at coalition warfare in history, namely, the British-American alliance in World War II. The Combined Chiefs of Staff had as their task the formulation of military and logistical strategies that seemed best suited to bring about Allied victory in World War II as quickly as possible. The Combined Chiefs of Staff incorporated as its principal membership the American Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the British Chiefs of Staff (COS) Committee, the military advisory bodies to President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, respectively. Making Washington, D.C., the home base for the Combined Chiefs of Staff presented an obvious problem for the British. Because the British Chiefs of Staff were forced to spend most of their time in London, they designated a high-ranking officer from each of the three British military services—air, army, and navy—to represent them in Washington on a day-to-day basis and at regular weekly meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff. At the eight major wartime conferences involving Britain and the United States, the British Chiefs of Staff themselves were always in attendance. The Washington-based representatives of the British Chiefs of Staff were known as the Joint Staff Mission (JSM), an organization that operated in Washington under the direction of Field Marshal Sir John Dill from January 1942 until his death in November 1944 and continued until the end of the war under Dill’s successor, Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson. Sir John Dill was also the senior British representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff.1

Never before or since in history has one military staff been responsible for the planning and ongoing supervision of as many simultaneous, large-scale military operations as was the Combined Chiefs of Staff in World War II. Although it was arguably the most important international organization of the twentieth century, the Combined Chiefs of Staff and its contribution to Allied victory were frequently overlooked in the literature on World War II written in the immediate postwar period.²

At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the British Chiefs of Staff Committee consisted of General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff; Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, chief of the Naval Staff and First Sea Lord; and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, chief of the Air Staff. The British Chiefs of Staff had two high-ranking deputies who were not quite subordinates but also not quite equals. Lieutenant General Sir Hastings Ismay, as military adviser to the Minister of Defence (Churchill), sat with the COS Committee but was not technically a member (although some would argue the point). Vice Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, as Chief of Combined Operations, participated in COS discussions only when combined operations were being debated. In September 1943, a gravely ill Admiral Pound resigned from the COS Committee, dying shortly thereafter. He was replaced in October by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew B. Cunningham. At the time of Pound’s resignation, Mountbatten too left the COS organization, to take up his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander of the new Southeast Asia Command. Mountbatten’s place as Chief of Combined Operations was taken by Major General Robert E. Laycock.

The American Joint Chiefs of Staff organization was created in February 1942, modeled on the British COS Committee. The initial members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army Chief of Staff; Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet; Admiral Harold R. Stark, Chief of Naval Operations; and Lieutenant General Henry H. Arnold, commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces. In March 1942, President Roosevelt decided that Admiral King would thenceforward hold down the two positions of Commander in Chief, U.S. Fleet, and Chief of Naval Operations. Admiral Stark therefore left the Joint Chiefs of Staff in order to become Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces in Europe. In July 1942, Admiral William D. Leahy, who had recently returned from serving as U.S. ambassador to Vichy France, joined the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Leahy was the president’s representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and became the presiding member of that body. Admiral Leahy was given the complicated title of Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.3

There was a great deal more turnover in the personnel of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington than there was among either the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff or the British Chiefs of Staff Committee. However, in the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington served some very impressive figures. These included Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, who later went on to command RAF Bomber Command during the combined bomber offensive against German industrial cities, and Admiral Sir James Somerville, who had previously commanded the British Force H based on Gibraltar and then the British Far Eastern Fleet—the latter in operations against the Japanese.

The most important figure among the British Joint Staff Mission was its leader, the aforementioned Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who became very popular in Washington. Because he was on bad terms with the prime minister, Dill was free to give the Americans his own views, not Churchill’s. This made Dill very useful to the Americans, who came to trust him more than any other British military officer. This statement requires some qualification, in that Dill was not without his critics. For instance, the memoirs of American general Albert C. Wedemeyer, a key planner for the Combined Chiefs of Staff, make clear that Wedemeyer had a deep distrust of Dill, as well as of every other British national he met during the war. Wedemeyer was an isolationist and an admirer of Charles Lindbergh in the latter’s capacity as a spokesman for the Committee for America First. There was, then, at least one high-ranking American army officer in Washington during the war who was not enamored of Sir John Dill.⁴ Nevertheless, Dill frequently adopted the American point of view in inter-Allied debates over strategy. When he did not, American planners (because most of them trusted him) realized that they might be wrong and became more open to compromise. To Dill is owed a great deal of the credit for making the Combined Chiefs of Staff function effectively.5

The two biggest headaches for members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff were heated disputes among themselves over strategy and collective disputes with their civilian overlords, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Examining the activities, and the headaches, of the Combined Chiefs of Staff is vital in order to gain an understanding of how Britain and the United States managed to put up with each other as allies during the war.

Speaking of allies, by far the greatest limitation on the influence wielded by the Combined Chiefs of Staff was the fact that it was the Russian army, not that of the Americans or the British, that destroyed the German army as an effective fighting force in World War II. Indeed, so high were German casualties on the Russian front (80 percent of all Wehrmacht losses during the war) that, as Omer Bartov has pointed out, “it was in the Soviet Union that the Wehrmacht’s back was broken long before the Western Allies landed in France, and even after June 1944 it was in the East that the Germans continued to commit and lose far more men.”⁶ Thus, as we shall see, perhaps it is accurate to say that the cross-channel attack of June 6, 1944 (Operation Overlord), and the Combined Chiefs of Staff debates and planning that preceded it were critical in determining the extent of the victory that would be won over Germany, not whether Germany would be defeated.

Another limitation on the power of the Combined Chiefs of Staff was that thankfully neither Britain nor the United States was or is a military dictatorship. Consequently, civilian political leaders, in this case Churchill and Roosevelt, had to approve any Combined Chiefs of Staff plan before it could be put into action. The prime minister and the president could also give advice and orders to the Combined Chiefs of Staff. As we shall see, however, the politicians gave plenty of advice but were extremely reluctant to issue direct orders to the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

Despite these limitations, the Combined Chiefs of Staff wielded tremendous power. In addition to the task of planning global strategy, the Combined Chiefs of Staff were forced to grapple on an everyday basis with issues that in their young days as officer cadets none of them could ever have imagined would be part of a military career. Demands upon the judgment of CCS members came from all directions. Some of these were outgrowths of the responsibility for strategic planning, such as planning the production of munitions, supervising the development of new weapons, and seeing that the finished goods arrived at the appropriate fighting fronts on schedule. Others were not. For example, there were requests from the U.S. State Department for guidance on how to respond to complaints from the Japanese government, routed through Spain and Switzerland, that American submarines were attacking Japanese hospital ships.7 There was also the perennial need to balance the sacred principle of civilian control of the military with the need to quash the half-baked pet schemes regarding strategic decision making that were put forth from time to time by politicians. CCS members also had to contend with requests from the press for war information, as well as requests from private citizens for everything from their autographs to their physical presence at countless speeches, fund-raisers, and other war-related events. This is an indication that members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff were quite well known to the public during the war but have been largely forgotten now, at least in the United States. Indicative of this is that Andrew Roberts had to change the subtitle of his wonderful book Masters and Commanders when it was published in the United States in 2009. The British edition had included the name “Alanbrooke” in the subtitle. When he had been made a peer shortly after the war, Field Marshal Brooke had been consulted as to what he would like his title to be. He simply combined his first and last names and was thus created “1st Viscount Alanbrooke.” Everyone in England recognizes the name “Alanbrooke,” but Americans do not. This book is, in part, an effort to do something about that.

Despite the vast array of subjects that required their attention during the war, the members of the Combined Chiefs were able to adhere to the primary task—the defeat of the Axis powers. They handled their responsibilities so well that, as stated above, each achieved the highest military rank their respective nations could bestow. In December 1944, a grateful U.S. Congress awarded five-star rank to each of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (and to three American CCS theater commanders—Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and General Douglas MacArthur). By that time, British Combined Chiefs of Staff members had already achieved equivalent ranks. Brooke was a field marshal, Cunningham an admiral of the fleet, and Portal a marshal of the Royal Air Force.

The British-American alliance during World War II was a complex phenomenon. The Combined Chiefs of Staff played a crucial role in permitting this alliance to work by serving as a forum where various tensions could be sorted out and dealt with. Some of these strategy-related tensions were interservice in nature. For example, there was controversy between the American Army Air Forces and the U.S. Navy as to which service would operate the long-range, land-based maritime patrol aircraft that hunted for German submarines off the East Coast of the United States. (The Navy won. These aircraft were under naval control from March 26, 1942, onward.)8 The most important tensions within the British-American alliance, however, were international rather than interservice. They involved questions regarding broad issues of strategy, such as the importance of keeping China in the war, the proportion of Allied resources that could be devoted to the war against Japan, and which locale—France or Italy—would prove to be a better place from which to launch the Western Allies’ main assault against the German army. On such questions as these, the American and British military high commands held views that differed profoundly.

Field Marshal Sir John Dill’s role of mediator among the Combined Chiefs of Staff was made much easier by the fact that he was a close personal friend of American army chief of staff, General George C. Marshall.⁹ Prior to his arrival in Washington in December 1941, Dill had been Brooke’s predecessor as chief of the Imperial General Staff. Dill’s tenure as CIGS had been a tumultuous one, due to military disasters, such as the British defeats in Greece and on Crete, and the difficulties of working in close proximity to Winston Churchill on a daily basis. While his services in Washington would prove to be invaluable to the alliance, Dill had never been able to forge an effective working relationship with Churchill (admittedly, no easy task for anyone). Fortunately for the alliance, the fact that Dill and Churchill did not get along very well was to prove a source of delight to the Americans, who, as suggested above, were always suspicious of Churchill’s attempts to interfere in strategic planning. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff trusted Dill to act as a British counterweight to the prime minister.¹⁰ Churchill’s dislike of Dill stemmed in part, ironically, from the latter’s impeccable good manners. Churchill wanted a CIGS who (like Brooke) was willing to argue vehemently. Churchill needed a sparring partner, and he knew it.¹¹

There were several factors that were conducive to a close wartime transatlantic relationship between London and Washington. A common language is the most obvious. Another was the experience of having fought on the same side (and against one of the same enemies) in World War I. There was also, of course, the famous friendship between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. Their voluminous correspondence leaves no doubt that the two men regarded each other highly. The most important factor, however, for the success of the Western alliance was the supremely high quality of military advice provided by the Combined Chiefs of Staff to the president and the prime minister.12

On a chapter-by-chapter basis, this book proceeds in the following manner. I begin with a biographical chapter on the Combined Chiefs of Staff in which I include a thumbnail sketch of each member. Chapter 2 is an attempt to focus on the workings of the CCS as an integral whole and as a modern bureaucracy. I give a detailed view here of the Casablanca Conference, as well as some information about wartime Washington, D.C., as the home base for the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization. I then describe the Combined Chiefs at work in regard to the war in the Pacific. Next, I have attempted to demonstrate that during the war the Allies proved to be incomparably superior to the Axis nations when it came to the art of working together as a coalition. This chapter represents an attempt to prove, first, that the difference between the manners in which the two sides approached the question of coalition warfare was crucial to Allied victory, and second, that the Combined Chiefs were central to this process of coalition building. Attention is given here to the strains between the Western Allies and the Russians, with a view toward demonstrating that while these strains made effective cooperation difficult, the level of cooperation between the British/American component and the Russian component of the alliance was still vastly superior to that demonstrated by Germany, Japan, and Italy. The chapter dealing with Overlord is, like that dealing with the war in the Pacific, an attempt to show the relative effectiveness of the Combined Chiefs of Staff format in reducing inter-Allied friction regarding questions of great strategic significance. These two campaigns represented the two most contentious issues with which the Combined Chiefs had to grapple during the war. In the chapter on “armchair strategy,” it is my intention to prove that it was the Combined Chiefs of Staff organization, not politicians, diplomats, or bureaucrats, that was the most important planning agency behind the military victories achieved by the Western Allies during the war. Chapter 7 outlines the method by which the Combined Chiefs of Staff supervised the activities of their subordinate commanders in the field. The purpose of the final chapter is to explain the manner in which the Combined Chiefs of Staff were drawn into dealing with issues of production and diplomacy that had not previously been regarded as areas with which high-ranking military officers needed to concern themselves.

Throughout this work, I have been guided by the following goal—to prove that through its ability to resolve serious disputes the Combined Chiefs of Staff held the Anglo-American alliance together and was the most important organization for the formulation of British-American military strategy during World War II.