To Churchill and his countrymen the Japanese attack was a godsend: Britain and the empire would survive. That night the prime minister went to bed and “slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.” But much pain and suffering remained for the new cobelligerents. The weeks following Pearl Harbor were a time of agonizing, unrelenting retreat for the Allied forces facing Japan. On December 8 Japanese troops invaded and quickly subdued independent Thailand and British-ruled Malaya; on December 10 Japanese torpedo planes sank the Royal Navy’s powerful capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse on the South China Sea. That same day Gen. Masaharu Homma landed his army on the beaches of northern Luzon, the major island in the Philippines. The attack on Pearl Harbor had mysteriously failed to alert MacArthur to imminent danger. Just hours after news arrived in Manila by cable of the devastating blow to the American Pacific Fleet in Hawaii, the general’s entire air force, parked wing-to-wing on Clark Field, was wiped out by Japanese Mitsubishi bombers and Zero fighters swooping in from Formosa.
And on and on the bad news continued. In early December, Japanese troops seized the U.S. possessions of Guam and Wake Island and occupied British Hong Kong. Meanwhile, MacArthur’s force of army regulars and half-trained Philippine Scouts abandoned Manila and retreated to the narrow Bataan Peninsula and the bastion of Corregidor island in Manila Bay. There, cut off from reinforcements, they would hold out for four months, fighting bravely but hopelessly against overwhelming enemy forces.
Through early 1942 the Japanese rampage in the Pacific continued. In January the forces of Emperor Hirohito invaded the Dutch East Indies and overwhelmed its local defenders in a matter of weeks. At the end of the month British troops withdrew from the Malay Peninsula under relentless Japanese attack and retreated to Singapore, the key British naval base in the Far East. On February 15 the Singapore garrison, after a mismanaged defense, unconditionally surrendered, an act that Winston Churchill would call “the greatest disaster” in British history. Later that month the British abandoned Rangoon in Burma (now Myanmar), allowing the Japanese to cut the Burma Road, the principal route for vital supplies to the troops of China’s Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, Japan’s chief opponent on the Asian mainland. On March 8 Japanese troops came ashore on the vast mountainous island of New Guinea, just north of Australia. An invasion of that island continent, part of the British Commonwealth, now seemed imminent.
Nor did the military landscape on the vast plains of Eastern Europe appear less dire in those early months of war for America. Despite crushing losses of men and equipment during the summer and fall of 1941, in December the Red Army had counterattacked and pushed the Wehrmacht back from the gates of Moscow. But it had not ended the German threat. The Soviet winter gains were limited, and by March the battle lines between the enemies had stabilized. With spring, however, the rested and resupplied German army promised to renew the offensive. In the eyes of the Western Allies, Russia’s survival in these months remained in serious doubt, and with it the chances of eventual Anglo-American victory over Hitler.
At home Pearl Harbor ended the careers of both Adm. Husband Kimmel and Gen. Walter Short, chiefs of their respective services in Hawaii. Blamed for neglecting the official warnings of imminent Japanese attack, both men were sacrificed to the public’s quest for scapegoats following the December 7 disaster. Admiral Stark also fell victim to public anger after Pearl Harbor. Accused of failing to warn Kimmel in Oahu aggressively enough of imminent danger, he was removed as chief of naval operations and replaced by Ernest King. Marshall survived the post–Pearl Harbor recriminations, but the catastrophe in the Pacific affected him profoundly. According to his biographer Forrest Pogue, Pearl Harbor was one of “the most staggering blows sustained by Marshall in the course of the war.”1
In these early catastrophic weeks the chief of staff worried particularly about the Philippines, where he had spent much time as a junior officer and where MacArthur and many of his own army friends and colleagues were now caught in the perils of a major war, faced with death or capture. Though army planners had long doubted the ability of the United States to defend the islands from a determined Japanese attack, in the months before Pearl Harbor they had changed their minds and sent MacArthur B-17 bombers and other new military equipment, and promised more, in hopes that a strengthened Philippine bastion might deter, or at least slow, any Japanese Pacific attack. As Marshall described the then new defensive policy to a small trustworthy group of Washington correspondents on November 15, three weeks before Pearl Harbor the United States, in great secrecy, was “building up its strength in the Philippines to a far higher level than the Japanese imagine.” General MacArthur was “unloading ships at night, . . . building airfields in the carefully guarded interior, . . . allowing no one within miles of military reservations.”2
Unfortunately the chief of staff had not realized till too late how little time remained for a credible military buildup in the islands or how grossly unprepared MacArthur was, psychologically as well as materially, for a major Japanese attack. The crippling blow to the U.S. Navy on December 7 made it obvious that the islands could not be relieved or even reinforced. But the government chose not to be candid with MacArthur. Through the months-long Philippine ordeal, both Marshall and the president misled the general. More planes and supplies were on their way, they assured him. On December 11 Marshall cabled: “We are making every effort to reach you with air replacements and reinforcements as well as other troops and supplies.”3 On the twenty-sixth, after noting the “splendid conduct” of MacArthur’s “command and troops,” Marshall assured him that “yesterday the President again personally directed the Navy to make every effort to support you.” The general could “rest assured the War Department will do all in its power to build up at top speed the air power in the Far East to completely dominate the region.”4 Not until the very end, with final collapse imminent, did they admit that the defenders were on their own.
Yet the failure was not for want of trying. Faced with heartrending pleas from Bataan for more men and supplies, Marshall struggled to find some way to break through the Japanese cordon. The War Department shipped disassembled planes and supplies to Australia, hoping that they could then be sent by commercial freighter to MacArthur. The plan to run the blockade foundered on reality. No private ship captain would risk the job; nor would shipowners offer vessels for hire at any price. A thousand tons of supplies eventually reached the Philippine defenders by submarine, but this met only a tiny fraction of their need.
Though there was no denying the logistical realities, MacArthur and his soldiers could not help feeling abandoned by their countrymen—resentments that have to be taken into account in explaining the later tensions between MacArthur and his boss in Washington.
As a sort of recompense the army promoted MacArthur to four-star general. In January, bowing to public opinion at home and hoping to reassure the nervous Australians now awaiting attack, Roosevelt and Marshall approved a daring rescue of the general, his family, and his staff by swift navy PT boats. Safely in Australia by mid-March, MacArthur was assigned command of all Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific. He would now have a far wider role in the Pacific war than as commander in the Philippines. But driven by survivor’s guilt and by a deep sense of loyalty toward the Filipino people and the soldiers left behind, he promised redemption. On his arrival Down Under, the general told reporters in Adelaide that he had been rescued for the purpose of “organizing the American offensive against Japan.” A “primary object of that offensive,” he noted, was the “relief of the Philippines,” and, he famously asserted, “I shall return.”5 For the remainder of the war MacArthur would battle, primarily against the navy, to point the American counteroffensive against Japan due northward through the Philippines.
As he looked on helplessly at the advancing tide of Japanese conquest in the Pacific, Marshall’s attention was deflected to the pressing issues of British-American cooperation and grand strategy. It has been said that coalition warfare is the most difficult kind to conduct, and so it has been many times in the past. From this long perspective, the Anglo-American alliance in World War II, the way smoothed by a shared language and a shared institutional and legal history, was a triumph. And yet there would be occasion after occasion during the three and a half years following Pearl Harbor when the interests, goals, and preferences of the two nations would clash and the differences be resolved—only imperfectly—toward the end, primarily by the clear ascendancy of American manpower and matériel. Several of the fault lines between the two nations had already become visible at the Atlantic Conference at Argentia Bay. Now, with America finally in the war, they would take on new meaning and urgency at the marathon “Arcadia” meetings in Washington between Churchill and Roosevelt and the British and American staffs in the fading, fraught days of December 1941 into mid-January 1942.
The Arcadia Conference was the brainchild of Britain’s larger-than-life prime minister. Eager to seize the initiative in guiding Allied military strategy now that the United States was on board, on December 22 Churchill and his cohort of experts and top brass arrived in Washington prepared to convince the Yanks that they, the more experienced partner, should lead. Above all, they felt that the Allies’ motto must remain, without reservation, Europe First, a goal undoubtedly jeopardized by the Japanese attack in the Pacific.
The success of the project, the prime minister believed, depended in large part on establishing cordial relations with the president, and Churchill shamelessly, then and later, cultivated FDR who, at Arcadia at least, allowed himself to be beguiled by the prime minister. As for Marshall and Churchill, according to the historian Andrew Roberts, at Arcadia the chief of staff “started to exercise a fascination over the Prime Minister.” Jock Colville, Churchill’s private secretary, later noted that “there were few people who could mesmerize Churchill,” but “Marshall was one of those few who came close to doing so.”6
Inevitably, the Americans had their own agenda. Before the “cousins” appeared on the scene the president gathered his chief war advisers, civilian and military, at the White House to discuss the U.S. positions in the forthcoming conference. One of the more prominent topics under consideration was America’s possible role in North Africa. Even before Pearl Harbor, FDR had been intrigued by suggestions that either Dakar, directly opposite the great eastward bulge of Brazil, or French North Africa, edging the south shore of the Mediterranean, might be profitable targets for early American military action. Marshall had objected, primarily because of shortages of manpower and equipment. Now, at the pre-Arcadia meetings, with the United States finally at war, the president once more raised the Africa issue, and once more Marshall demurred. With the needs of the Pacific and recently formulated plans to relieve the British garrisons in Iceland and Northern Ireland with American troops, there simply was not enough manpower to go around, he said. And yet in a memo to the president at about this time the chief of staff also speculated that the United States could mount an attack on North Africa, but only if the Vichy authorities would “invite the United States and Great Britain jointly to occupy and defend North Africa,” a highly remote likelihood.7 Having failed to insist that the African options were strategic errors, not merely supply and diplomatic problems, Marshall apparently left FDR with the impression that once the logistical difficulties were solved, one or more of the African operations might be worthy goals. If so, the failure had consequences that Marshall would later regret.
The strategic meetings in Washington between the two national leaders were held at the White House, where the charming, garrulous, bibulous, and self-indulgent prime minister was put up in the East Wing in a bedroom close to both Harry Hopkins and the president himself. FDR and Churchill had lunch together almost every day, often joined by Hopkins, and dined at the White House in the evenings, though these meals were more social. They also met together with both military staffs. The combined staffs, in turn, convened some twelve times at the new Federal Reserve Building on Constitution Avenue. Heading the British delegation at these meetings were First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, and Air Marshal A. T. (“Bomber”) Harris. In the months to come Marshall would deal extensively especially with the first two. At Arcadia he did not meet his top equivalent on the British side, Alan Brooke, the newly designated chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS); he had been left behind in Britain to mind the store. The American contingent, besides Marshall, consisted of Admiral Stark, still chief of naval operations; Admiral King, then commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet; and General Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps.
Now as at Argentia, the experienced British were bursting with detailed plans for the future and, FDR’s African musings aside, the Americans were not. Rather, the American planners, though still wary of their allies’ apparent obsession with their own imperial needs, were open to suggestion. Churchill and his colleagues from the outset were determined to deflect the understandable, if unspoken, urge of the Americans to concentrate on the Pacific, where they had so recently been treacherously attacked and where they were already grappling with the enemy. In fact, for virtually the rest of the war British leaders would worry that their ally might abandon Europe to channel its energies and resources against Japan. And they had reason to be concerned. Though in the end Stimson, Marshall, and their colleagues would remain committed to defeating Germany first, at times over the next three and a half years, often urged by the navy, they would play the “Pacific First” card to coerce and intimidate the uneasy British at a point of disagreement. Before long they would be joined by MacArthur in Australia, who would fire barrages of demands for redistributing resources to the Pacific from Europe. And perhaps still more worrisome was the state of grassroots American public opinion. It was not easy in the months after Pearl Harbor to explain to average midcontinent citizens why their country’s war effort was centered on Germany and Italy when it was Japan that had perfidiously attacked the United States. In fact polls in the weeks immediately following Pearl Harbor showed that as many as 25 percent of the American public favored an immediate end of the war with Germany through negotiation. Some 10 percent even endorsed peace with Germany on any terms.
In all, then, the British could not be certain of their ally’s resolution, and Churchill’s strategy proposals at the opening session of leaders and staffs at the White House on December 23 sought to reinforce the Europe First principle. Germany, the PM announced, must be the chief target of the Allies’ war effort, while in the Pacific theater they must conduct only a holding action. Despite all the British doubts, however, at the Arcadia meetings there was no overt divergence on this issue; the Americans had already accepted Europe as the primary theater. But the prime minister also made it clear that the British version of Europe First differed from the American. Britain was a sea power, not a land power. With the exception of the disastrous 1914–18 experience in France, it had not sent large armies to the Continent in the past; it had historically relied on allies to do its ground fighting. And what, in the end, had that deviation from traditional practice during the Great War brought but the slaughter of an entire generation of young Britons? In the months leading up to D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, British planners were haunted by images of mangled Tommies strewn on the Flanders fields, as had happened a generation before, or their massed corpses bobbing in the Channel. And the British lacked the resources for a full-throated cross-Channel invasion. A nation of forty-eight million in 1941, with a GDP one-third of America’s, two years after the onset of war Britain had almost reached the limits of its manpower and matériel reserves. If there was to be a cross-Channel invasion the Americans must inevitably lead it.
Now in Washington, Churchill explained that the Allies must rely on a campaign of attrition, as hinted at in Argentia, not a direct confrontation with the enemy’s military might. Germany should be subjected to a rigorous naval blockade and devastating air bombardment while the subjugated peoples of German-occupied Europe were incited to rise up against their conquerors. Meanwhile, opportunistic limited sorties, particularly if German power faltered, should be launched directly against Hitler’s forces on the Continent, in part to help the beleaguered Soviet Union. Finally, perhaps in 1943, there might be a major Allied invasion of the occupied Continent itself. In later months the Allies would argue boisterously over whether the centerpiece of their grand strategy should be a mass cross-Channel assault or nibbles at the edges. In these debates the Americans might have confronted the PM with Gallipoli in 1915, when First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had sought to finesse the lethal head-on assault deployed in France with a “peripheral” strategy that had served England so well in the past. That attempt to knock Turkey out of the war had been a disaster; it had not helped to avoid the murderous trench warfare in France and Belgium or advanced the Allied cause one inch. Fortunately for Anglo-American comity at Arcadia in 1941 no one was willing to mention that embarrassing precedent. In the end Arcadia would nail down Europe First as Anglo-American policy but leave unsettled the way that strategy would be expressed. The resulting uncertainty would fuel many months of debate and raise a cloud of confusion, resentment, and outright rancor.
Yet even as they wrangled over Europe, the conferees in Washington could not ignore the disaster unfolding in the Pacific. To meet the danger the Allies agreed to establish a Pacific command to be called the ABDA after the American, British, Dutch, and Australian national jurisdictions and forces in the theater of operations. It was at this point that Marshall made his chief contribution to the conference. Starting with the ABDA, all theaters of war, he urged, should be subject to a “unity of command” principle, by which a single designated commander of whatever service, of whatever nationality, would organize and execute all operations, including those on land, sea, and air, of all the forces engaged. Marshall cited his own experience in support of his bold proposal. It represented, he declared, his “personal views and not those as a result of consulting with the Navy” or even with his “own War Plans Division.” The scheme was inspired, he noted, by what he “saw in France” in the previous war, where until the Allies chose the French general Ferdinand Foch, in 1918, as supreme commander of the Allied armies, “much valuable time, blood, and treasure was needlessly sacrificed.” But Marshall proposed to go even beyond that precedent. Foch had been assigned primarily a coordinating function: He did not have the authority to give orders to his British and American allies. The proposed new supreme commander would have this power in his theater. “I am convinced,” Marshall noted, “that there must be one man in command of the entire theater—air, ground, and ships.” “Human frailties,” he acknowledged, “are such that there would be emphatic unwillingness to place portions of troops under another service.” But if adopted, the plan “would be a great advance over what was accomplished during the World War.”8
The British at first balked at the proposal. Churchill objected that the experience of the Great War was not relevant. Unlike the Western Front in World War I, where there was a continuous line of battle, in the current Far East the Allied forces were widely scattered. Besides, the final authority would be even more concentrated than in Foch’s day. The British admirals were also skeptical. The Royal Navy was, as its American counterpart, not willing to surrender its autonomy in any theater of operations to an army or air corps general, even one of their own, who obviously could not fully understand the special nature of naval operations. As for CIGS, though not present in Washington to object, he, too, was uneasy with the unity-of-command principle and would largely remain so through the war.
Churchill finally yielded to strong pressure from Roosevelt and Marshall. The American chief of staff, the PM wrote to his cabinet colleagues, had come with Hopkins to his White House room and “pleaded his case with great conviction,” and he had yielded.9 Katherine would later colorfully depict the occasion, with—as she learned from her husband—Churchill in his White House room “propped up in bed with his work board resting against his knees and his ever present cigar in his mouth or swung like a baton to emphasize his points.”10 The American navy, though never fully reconciled to the scheme, also yielded. Thereafter, through the rest of the war in each theater there would be one general (or admiral)—a “supreme commander”—responsible for the Allied operations to defeat the enemy.
Though at times challenged, and in practice sometimes relaxed, the system overall would work well. Given the special hazards of coalition warfare, it was probably indispensable to final victory. Marshall considered it “basic to the whole control of the war” and one of his chief contributions to that victory.11 And indeed it was; he deserves unstinting praise for its achievement. But it did not invariably produce successful results. During the conference itself, in the first instance of unified command, the British general Sir Archibald Wavell, initially victorious over the Italians in North Africa, was, at Marshall’s suggestion, chosen as chief of operations of the ABDA theater, with his mission defined as holding the “Malay Barrier” against further Japanese advance. Unfortunately the mission quickly collapsed. It took only a few weeks for the barrier to crumble as Japan’s early momentum carried its forces past the Allies’ key defensive points. By the end of February the command’s headquarters in Java was overrun by the Japanese. ABDA was dissolved soon after and the Pacific theater redivided so that its western portion was assigned to MacArthur, now headquartered in Australia.
Arcadia produced another important command innovation. Clearly there had to be some final link in the joint military chain of command. It had been agreed early on that there would be a top military council to represent both British and American staffs, called the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS). (In the event, it would convene primarily at major Allied strategic conferences.) Foreshadowing the inevitable American preeminence, the Combined Chiefs would be headquartered in Washington, where the British would be represented by a Joint Staff Mission. For most of the war this group would be headed by the genial field marshal John Dill, whom Churchill considered too lackluster and pessimistic and had fired as CIGS in London, replacing him with Brooke. Since the RAF would be represented on the Combined Chiefs, it proved necessary to elevate Hap Arnold to that body, though the U.S. Air Corps remained officially only a subordinate branch of the army. The first meeting of the CCS would convene on February 9, and it thereafter would function by and large successfully. Meeting some two hundred times during the war, it effectively coordinated the strategies of the two allies. Churchill later noted that it was at these sessions “that the most important [military] decisions were taken.”12 Though its power to override national preferences was unprecedented, even the skeptical General Brooke agreed in the end that the CCS was “the most efficient [organization] that had ever been evolved for coordinating and correlating the war strategy and effort of two allies.”13
Among the few specific Atlantic-oriented military operations proposed at Arcadia was a British plan, code-named Gymnast, that coincided with FDR’s scheme to invade Vichy-controlled North Africa. The plan ignored Marshall’s diplomatic and logistical reservations. Churchill believed the ostensibly neutral French forces there might welcome an American landing in Morocco. Moreover, having recently defeated Mussolini’s ill-led, ill-equipped troops in Libya, the British, he claimed, could contribute to the operation some fifty thousand troops already in place. Between the two nations, all of North Africa might drop like a ripe fruit into Allied hands.
The Gymnast proposal was the germ of the later British-American invasion of French North Africa, and from the outset many American military planners remained skeptical. For one, the Anglophobic General Embick, still Marshall’s senior strategy adviser, was sure that UK politics—to protect the Suez Canal and Britain’s lifeline to India—were the real motives behind the plan. As for its viability, Embick insisted, the British claim that control of the southern shore of the Mediterranean would “afford an advantageous area from which to launch an invasion of Europe” was a delusion.14 Marshall kept quiet on the North Africa issue, remaining strangely indecisive at Arcadia. At one point in the discussion of North Africa he did directly object, but obliquely and on political rather than strategic grounds. Asked by Roosevelt whether it would be feasible for American troops to land at Casablanca if the French chose to resist, Marshall declared that the operation would be “extremely hazardous” and its failure would have a “very detrimental effect on the morale of the American people.”15
A consummate politician, the president saw such a result as the very opposite of his intentions. Whether or not wise strategically, it made sense domestically, both politically and psychologically. The U.S. armed forces were expanding at a furious pace. They had to be used. The voters were impatient; they wanted action; the troops must be not allowed to remain idle in the Atlantic area, certainly not if Germany’s defeat was to be the country’s first priority. With the president pushing them, American planners refined the details of a possible “Northwest Africa Project,” noting the need for far more troops than the original British estimate and the difficulty of finding sufficient shipping to move large forces from the continental United States to the French North African colonies. In the end the planning at Arcadia for a North African invasion ended without a firm conclusion, the issue to be raised in more urgent form months down the road with many of the same arguments marshaled, for and against, as at Washington during the winter of 1941–42.
The final meeting of Arcadia dealt with allocating munitions production quotas among the Allies. Marshall insisted that the new Munitions Assignment Board to be created be placed under the authority of the CCS and not divided between London and Washington. So strongly did he feel about this matter that he told FDR, Churchill, and the staffers present that if his view was not accepted he would resign as chief of staff. Marshall’s impassioned plea produced a compromise: The single board would be tried for a month and then evaluated. This satisfied Marshall, and ultimately his scheme worked so well that it was retained for the remainder of the war.
Besides its primary strategy-planning mission, Arcadia provided an opportunity to formalize the emerging coalition of anti-Axis powers. Calling themselves the “United Nations,” in Washington twenty-six countries at war with one or all of the Axis nations—including the United States, Britain and its dominions, China, the European governments-in-exile, and the Soviet Union—pledged to fight and defeat “the . . . forces of conquest” in the name of “life, liberty, independence, as well as the righteous possibilities of human freedom, justice and social security . . . throughout the world,” and to coordinate their military efforts to these ends. Little more initially than a convenient tab for the wartime anti-Axis coalition, the UN became the germ of the international peacekeeping body organized in 1945 at San Francisco to replace the failed League of Nations. Marshall had nothing to do with the UN’s creation; at Arcadia British-American war strategy was his sole concern. He would, however, later be intricately involved in the affairs of the postwar international body.
Churchill had intended to leave Washington in a week, but his stay was extended to include a visit to Canada to address the parliament in Ottawa, and a weeklong trip to Florida to relax in the sun. After dinner with Hopkins and FDR on January 14 Churchill finally left for home by plane. He could be satisfied that much had been achieved to cement the alliance between the two English-speaking nations, but he had little reason to be happy at the way the war was going. Japan’s easy victories over imperial forces in the Far East had shaken the British people’s confidence. A failed operation in mid-1941 to rescue Greece from German invaders only demonstrated once again Britain’s skill in evacuations. The regiments sent to Greece had weakened the forces of Gen. Claude Auchinleck, Wavell’s successor in North Africa. The initial British gains against Italian marshal Rodolfo Graziani in Libya were soon being reversed by troops under Gen. Erwin Rommel, now arriving to rescue the Germans’ ineffectual Italian allies. Whatever had been achieved in Washington, when Churchill returned home he would have to face angry critics in the House of Commons.
Arcadia had not laid out a road map for the war. But if the next move was not to be French North Africa, then where would the Allies strike? As the weeks passed with no effective American action against the Axis, public opinion at home, briefly united by Pearl Harbor, began to fragment. Apathy toward the war, or Pacific First sentiment, took hold, especially in the Midwestern isolationist belt. Meanwhile, Admiral King began to push for more of the nation’s limited military resources to be allotted to the Pacific.
One answer to the puzzle of “what next” was provided by Dwight Eisenhower, the fifty-one-year-old officer whose talents Marshall had spotted at the 1941 General Headquarters maneuvers, had befriended, and had recently brought to Washington to head the Army’s War Plans Division to replace Gen. Leonard Gerow, who Marshall believed “was growing stale from overwork.”16 In a late February 1942 paper and in a memorandum prepared some weeks later, Ike laid out a well-argued blueprint for an Anglo-American war strategy. Though he devoted some space to the Pacific theater, his focus was on the Atlantic. But Ike rejected the southern coast of the Mediterranean as the major theater of operations. In line with Marshall’s thinking he concluded that the best way to defeat the Axis was an “attack through Western Europe,” with England serving as the operations base.17
A vital piece of his reasoning was Russia’s continuing plight. In early 1942 and for months thereafter, the outcome of the titanic struggle between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Reich remained in serious doubt. As expected, after pausing for the winter the German offensive had resumed with major advances into the Caucasus, which threatened the vital Russian oil supply and even promised to bring German divisions into contact with Japanese forces moving westward against Burma and India. Not until the winter of 1943, at remote Stalingrad, would the German army suffer a major defeat. Yet even after the victory at Stalingrad, in their savage struggle to survive the Russians would sustain immense losses in manpower and economic resources and at times barely hold on.
Marshall and his colleagues fully understood the vital role of Russia in the war against the German enemy. Army planners had told the president in late December that “Russia alone possesses the manpower potentially able to defeat Germany in Europe.” They were preaching to the already fully converted. That March FDR wrote to Secretary Morgenthau: “Nothing would be worse than to have the Russians collapse. I would rather lose New Zealand, Australia, or anything else than have the Russians collapse.”18 The Western Allies had accepted the necessity to supply the Soviet Union with as much war matériel as they could spare, transporting the bulk of it by sea, despite remorseless U-boat attack and heavy losses, to Murmansk and other Russian Arctic ports. But to Stalin and his colleagues this effort was not enough. What Russia needed was a “second front,” a powerful Allied attack in the West against Nazi-occupied Europe that would draw off many Nazi divisions from their murderous work in the East. British and American planners, then, were fully alert to Russia’s critical role in the struggle with Germany and feared for their own fate if it went under. Recalling perhaps the disastrous Russian surrender to the Germans in 1917, in his March memorandum Eisenhower had keeping Russia in the war very much in mind. Russia “must not be permitted,” he wrote, “to reach such a precarious position that she will accept negotiated peace, no matter how unfavorable to herself, in preference to a continuation of the fight.”19
Eisenhower’s memos solidified the thinking of army planners and strongly influenced the chief of staff himself. The historian Richard Steele claims that they “marked the end of the army’s ambivalence toward the peripheral strategy and the beginnings of unified, consistent support of the immediate concentration of American forces preparatory to an assault on German-held territory.”20 Steele overstates the case, but the memos undoubtedly clarified Marshall’s and the War Department’s thinking.
Marshall wasted no time conveying his new resolve to the president. On March 25, along with King, Stimson, Knox, Arnold, and Hopkins, he lunched at the White House and presented Eisenhower’s suggestions to FDR. His was not the only perspective proposed that day. King had just written the president a note warning against neglecting the Pacific. Playing the race card that was never entirely absent from the Pacific-Atlantic debate, he declared that the United States could not allow Japan to conquer the “white man’s countries” of Australia and New Zealand “because of the repercussions among the non-white races of the world.”21 If FDR was immune to the racial argument, he was not indifferent to the navy’s perspectives, and initially endorsed a Pacific First approach. But he was obviously uncertain of his direction and seized on Eisenhower’s memo when Marshall brought it to his attention at the meeting. Would the chief of staff work out the details? he asked. The War Department planners quickly assembled a document for FDR’s consideration.
The proposal Marshall submitted later that day, though it has been called the “Marshall Memorandum,” was not his alone. It had been worked on and worked over by Eisenhower and several planning staffers in the War Department. It was more specific and more decisive than Marshall’s previous versions of Europe First. The document vigorously defended an early cross-Channel second front and sketched out the scope of the operation, including the possible area of the Allied landings, their timing, and the forces to be used. It also divided the operation into several distinct phases and provided names for each. As phase one of the plan, it proposed putting ashore Allied forces on the French coast as early as the fall of 1942. Labeled Sledgehammer, this operation would not, however, be the massive cross-Channel assault against the Wehrmacht designed to deliver the coup de grâce to Germany. Rather, it would be a large-scale raid that would draw German troops and planes from the eastern front and thereby relieve the excruciating military pressure on the Soviet Union. The true second front, Roundup—the British-American cross-Channel invasion in force—would come in mid-1943. Both operations would be preceded by Bolero, a massive buildup in Britain of American combat divisions along with their equipment and 3,200 warplanes. FDR gave it his stamp of approval when Marshall and Stimson brought the detailed proposal to the White House, authorizing the chief of staff and Hopkins to proceed quickly to Britain to clear the proposal with the “former naval person”—that is, the British prime minister.
The joint mission to London in early April was a bare-bones affair. Besides Marshall and Hopkins it included as Marshall’s planning aide Albert Wedemeyer, the Victory Program author, but few others. Marshall and the colonel traveled in civilian clothes aboard an amphibious Boeing “flying boat,” the only plane then in commercial transatlantic service. Landing in Northern Ireland after a freezing twenty-four-hour flight, the Americans were whisked off to grimy, bombed-out, war-worn London to meet Churchill and General Brooke. Marshall and Brooke, the top commanders in their respective armies, would meet many times subsequently, both as collaborators and opponents.
As an adversary Brooke was a formidable figure. A small, sardonic, dark-eyed, dark-haired Anglo-Irish Ulsterman of distinguished military lineage (with a very British passion for birdwatching), Brooke had fought in France in 1940 and had helped organize the extraordinary Dunkirk evacuation that saved the British army after the Allied rout. Another prominent British general, Bernard Montgomery, would later call him “the greatest soldier—soldier, sailor, airman—produced by any country” during the war.22 In December 1941 Churchill appointed him to replace Dill. An outwardly dour, rather supercilious man, the new CIGS was skeptical of the Americans from the start. They had, he would note, never encountered the German army and did not know how formidable a fighting machine it was. Absent from Arcadia, he had never met Marshall, and was now not overly impressed with him. Writing in his diary on April 9 he noted: “I liked what I saw of Marshall, a pleasant and easy man to get on with, rather over-filled with his own importance. But I should not put him down as a great man.” Brooke and his colleagues were scornful of Sledgehammer, whose chief burden would have to be borne by British troops since few trained Americans were yet available. In his later comment on this original diary entry, Brooke would remark: “In the light of the existing situation his [Marshall’s] plans for September of 1942 were just fantastic! Marshall had a long way to go at that time before realizing what we were faced with.”23 The observant Hopkins did not need to read Brooke’s diary to perceive his doubts; Brooke had said enough for him to “indicate that he had a great many misgivings.”24
Despite their reservations, the British were initially happy to embrace the American proposals. If nothing else, Bolero reinforced the American commitment to Britain and to Europe. But in London the Americans quickly learned, or rather relearned, that British priorities were different from their own. Defeating the Axis remained of course their shared primary interest, but Britain’s specific agenda—understandably—did in fact include preserving its prewar empire. Protecting the Mediterranean lifeline to the Persian Gulf, India, and the Far East would at times obscure the larger goal. But more to the point, they were terrified that the cross-Channel operation as proposed by the Americans would be a disaster.
Now, at meetings at Downing Street and at Chequers, Churchill’s country estate, that often lasted till early morning, Marshall and Hopkins argued with the PM and Brooke over the American proposals. The British forcefully attacked Sledgehammer, which they perceived as a more ambitious operation than Eisenhower, at least, had intended. How could it possibly succeed? Most of the troops at this stage, Brooke reminded the Americans, would have to be British, and no more than seven infantry and two armored divisions could be mustered for the operation. These forces, even if successfully landed, could not hold out against a concerted German counterattack. They would not be “strong enough to maintain a bridgehead against the scale of attack which the Germans could bring against it,” and it was “unlikely that we could extricate the forces if the Germans made a really determined effort to drive us out.”25 Churchill emphatically agreed. As he would later write in his massive history of World War II, “The Allies would be penned up in Cherbourg and the tip of the Cotentin peninsula and would have to maintain themselves in this confined bomb and shell trap for nearly a year under ceaseless bombardment and assault.”26
And Brooke and the prime minister were certainly right. Sledgehammer was a suicide mission. Given their limited resources of skill, numbers, matériel, and shipping, the Allies were not realistically prepared in mid-1942 to cross the English Channel in force and take on the Germans entrenched behind massive fortifications, especially on Cotentin or in the Pas-de-Calais area where the landings were to be effected. No better evidence for Sledgehammer’s folly was the outcome of the Dieppe Raid in mid-August, when, by orders of the overimaginative Lord Louis Mountbatten, British chief of Combined Operations, a force of six thousand predominantly Canadian troops landed at Dieppe on the French Channel coast to test German defenses and collect intelligence. More than half the attackers were killed or captured, while the RAF lost 106 planes to the Luftwaffe’s 48. The disaster would starkly disclose the hazards of any cross-Channel operation against Festung Europa so early in the process of the Bolero resource buildup and the American troop-training process.
If better disguised, British skepticism also extended to Roundup, the later main thrust, as well. That phase lacked strategic understanding, CIGS wrote in his diary. It did “not go beyond just landing on the far coast!! Whether we are to play baccarat or chemin de fer at Le Touquet, or possibly bathe at Paris Plage is not stipulated!” he wrote sarcastically. “I asked him [Marshall] this afternoon, do we go east, south or west after landing? He had not begun to think of it!!” Moreover, Brooke insisted, the proposal did not take into account logistical realities. As Brooke later observed: “With the situation prevailing at that time it was not possible to take Marshall’s ‘castles in the air’ too seriously!” The availability of shipping was another problem. “We were desperately short of shipping and could stage no large scale operation without additional shipping.” And this issue directly affected the choice of Axis targets. It “could only be obtained by opening the Mediterranean and saving a million tons of shipping through elimination of the Cape [of Good Hope] route.” Brooke was not opposed, he claimed, to an eventual direct ground attack on Germany. “We might certainly start preparing for the European offensive,” he added, “but such plans must not be allowed to interfere with the successive stages of operations essential to the execution of this plan.”27
Brooke eventually came to respect and honor Marshall as a man, but after these discussions he would consistently dismiss him as a strategic mediocrity. The American chief of staff, he noted, was “a good general at raising armies and providing the necessary links between the military and political worlds. But his strategical ability does not impress me at all!!” He went on, “In fact, in many respects he is a very dangerous man whilst being a very charming one.”28 Not all the British military leaders were as critical of Marshall as Brooke. Gen. Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s personal military adviser and link to the CCS, would be more generous, though he like many others emphasized the American’s strength of character rather than his military acumen. As Ismay later wrote, “Marshall was a big man in every sense of the word, and utterly selfless. It was impossible to imagine his doing anything petty or mean, or shrinking from any duty, however distasteful.” He agreed that he was “somewhat cold and aloof” at first. “But he had a warm heart, demonstrated, he confessed, by his pain when forced to fire a subordinate for incompetence.”29
Still brooding over the humiliating British defeat in the Norway campaign of the previous year, Churchill privately preferred a scheme to invade northern Norway (Operation Jupiter) that even his own generals thought dimwitted. But the volatile PM still feared the Americans might turn to the Pacific as a course that made political sense to them. He also did not want to offend his new friend, the American president, who had approved the Marshall Memorandum, and at an all-night session on April 14, the PM agreed to “offensive action in 1942, perhaps, and in 1943 for certain,” while still expressing fear of a linkage of the Germans advancing eastward through the Middle East and the Japanese westward though India.30
Despite all the warning signs of underlying dissent, Marshall unaccountably expressed satisfaction with the Anglo-American discussions at this April meeting in Britain. He and Hopkins both believed they had reached a firm agreement about Roundup. Marshall admitted he was somewhat less certain about Sledgehammer, but the Americans left England generally pleased with the overall results. In fact it is now known that the British leaders had not been candid with the Americans. However frank in his diary, Brooke had failed to convey fully in person his dismay at the American proposals. And the British deception, apparently, went beyond CIGS. As General Ismay later wrote: “Everyone seemed to agree with the American proposals in their entirety. No doubts were expressed; no discordant note struck.” But, he added, “I think we should have come clean; much cleaner than we did.”31 The dissimulation was compounded by a cable from Churchill to FDR on April 12. In a review of the discussions at Chequers, he lavished praise on the American plan. “I am in entire agreement in principle with all you propose,” he wrote, “and so are the Chiefs of Staff.” If, he added, “as our experts believe, we can carry this whole plan through successfully, it will be one of the grand events in all the history of war.”32 And the PM not only endorsed the full-throttled cross-Channel invasion for 1943, but Sledgehammer as well. In truth, America’s allies did not intend to go through with Sledgehammer and even had reservations about Roundup. For the next two years the British would continue to blow hot and cold on Roundup (later renamed Overlord), to the despair of the Americans.
And, though devious, they were right to question seriously the proposed 1942 attack. It was in fact grossly premature. Pressing for Sledgehammer in 1942 was a serious error in judgment on Marshall’s part. Steele’s conclusion is convincing:
Responsibility for the fumbling American strategy-making and its near disastrous results rests mainly with the chief of Staff. He was in a position to know the facts that made SLEDGEHAMMER a false vision, yet continued to press for the operation long after the high costs and probable negative results were apparent. To the extent the President depended on Marshall for military on the first offensive, he was ill-served.33
Marshall, then, was clearly wrong to push Sledgehammer as a key part of the American strategy that he and Hopkins brought to Churchill and Brooke that April. His defenders have insisted that the chief of staff thought the operation justified only if German successes became “so complete as to threaten the imminent collapse of Russian resistance.” It would then be “a sacrifice in the common good.”34 But how could such an acute observer of American public opinion as Marshall believe that a bloody defeat on the French beaches so early in the war could avoid being a political disaster to American leadership, civilian and military, and not have serious consequences for the entire conduct of the war? His myopia can only be explained by the profound American fears of Soviet collapse and its consequences. In hindsight, the issue is further muddied by the reality of the astonishing Russian military turnaround at Stalingrad that winter of 1942, making the second front militarily—though surely not politically—irrelevant.
On April 18, before returning to Washington, Marshall visited American troops in Northern Ireland. Just before flying back the next day he sent a top-secret message to the president: “I think our trip has been successful”35 He was mistaken. In the end Sledgehammer was never carried out. The British, for their own cautious reasons, would rescue Marshall from an almost certain military catastrophe.
Amid the strategic trials and acute professional anxieties of early 1942, private life for the Marshalls went on apace. They lived simply at Quarters No. 1 at Fort Myer, close to the War Department, still headquartered at the old Munitions Building. Repelled by the capital’s social whirl, Marshall learned how to deflect the engagements and speaking requests that came in a flood after his appointment as chief of staff. For those parties he could not avoid he invented an effective dodge: arrive early for cocktails, chat with the hostess and a few guests, and arrange to be called away by emergency messenger as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Katherine was up to her hairline performing as a good army wife, attending meetings, serving on committees, constantly on the telephone for some cause to benefit military wives and families, while at the same time keeping in touch with widely scattered members of her own family. In September, before Pearl Harbor, she slipped on a loose porch rug and broke four ribs. She recuperated too slowly to suit her husband, who fretted that she was spending too much time and effort on duties and not taking enough rest for a speedy recovery.
In his private capacity Marshall was not a traditional “family man” deeply immersed in domesticity and well connected to relatives. His job, peripatetic and crisis driven, would not have permitted it at this point in his life—or, for that matter, ever after. But more than this reality, his own parents were dead, and he was never close to his brother, Stuart, though he kept in affectionate touch with his sister, Marie, now Mrs. John J. Singer. Over the years, however, the childless Marshall did develop ties to his stepchildren, Molly, Clifton, and Allen. Katherine’s children were now already in their twenties and had embarked on adult lives. In 1942 all were directly or indirectly associated with the military. Molly, a new mother, was married to Maj. James Winn, a field artillery officer. In mid-1942 the Winns were living at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where James was commander of the Fourth Field Artillery Battalion. Clifton was in Army Officer Candidate School, and the youngest, Allen, also married and a father, was a trainee at the Armored School at Fort Knox and, after attending OCS, would be commissioned a second lieutenant in the tank corps.
Marshall followed a strict hands-off policy regarding his military stepsons and son-in-law, a practice that Allen, for one, applauded. But not Katherine. She could not help intruding where she could to advance her children’s interests. Allen asked his mother to back off, but, Marshall noted in a letter of September 1942, “whether or not she will scrupulously carry out your request I do not know.”36 Marshall’s self-denying policy did not preclude offering professional advice to his military children, however. In this same letter the chief of staff suggested that the tank corps would suit Allen: “I think you would find your interest greatly stimulated there and a fertile field for the future as a commissioned officer.”37 It was advice that Marshall would surely come to regret.
In 1940 Katherine bought Dodona Manor, in Leesburg, Virginia, thirty-five miles from Washington. Located in “a quaint and very old Virginia town,” the estate was, Katherine proudly wrote, “as unreconstructed a place as you could find, alluringly replete with tradition and history.”38 The main residence was a two-and-a-half-story white-painted brick house with a four-column portico. The entrance survived from 1786, though the house itself dated from the early nineteenth century. It had been renovated by a previous owner, but there remained much work to do on the grounds to make the property comely and comfortable. During the general’s April absence in England, Katherine hired a flock of landscapers and contractors to build a garage, construct brick walkways, and tear down unsightly old sheds and outbuildings. The work was done in time for Marshall’s return from Britain. After a brief stop at his office, the chief of staff drove down with Katherine to Leesburg. Marshall examined the property as if on a military tour of inspection and declared himself pleased: “This is home, a real home after forty-one years of wandering,” he announced.39 Marshall would find that Dodona Manor eminently suited his self-image, and he would retire there as a Virginia squire after his many years of public service.
When Marshall was not busy arguing America’s strategic case to his British allies and mapping out sweeping military initiatives, he was superintending a vast bureaucracy with literally millions of clients and thousands of managers. His job required improving the efficiency and effectiveness of an agency growing exponentially and charged with turning hordes of callow American civilians into fighting men capable of facing the veterans of the Axis, supplying them with the food, transportation, moral support, and weapons needed for their tasks, and finding officers fit to lead them in battle.
The first priority for Marshall on assuming his rank as chief of staff in 1939 was to streamline a creaky, decrepit army structure in which, despite the reforms earlier in the century, Civil War agencies and practices lingered on. As Marshall noted just after the war, the general staff, created as part of Elihu Root’s reforms in 1903, had “become a huge, bureaucratic, red-tape-ridden operating agency” that “slowed down everything.”40 Specifically, too many officers had direct access to the chief, while heads of autonomous agencies and offices jealously guarded their entrenched privileges. These arrangements entangled the chief and his three deputies in endless details and petty disagreements. It took days to get “a paper through the War Department,” Marshall wrote soon after Pearl Harbor. “Everybody had to concur.”41 Recognizing the immensity of the task, in late November 1941 Marshall recalled Joseph McNarney, now a general based in London, to head a department reorganization committee. A frank, laconic air corps officer who had graduated from West Point in Eisenhower’s class, McNarney quickly chopped out much of the underbrush that had clogged decision making in the War Department. He and his deputies abolished outright the agency of the chief of arms and cut back the powers of the chiefs of infantry, cavalry, field artillery, and coast artillery. The number of individuals who would have direct access to the chief of staff was reduced from sixty to six and three new commands—Army Ground Forces, Army Air Forces, and Army Services Forces—to serve under Gens. Lesley McNair, Hap Arnold, and Brehon Somervell, respectively—were created.
Newly installed in office, Marshall ruthlessly slashed deadwood from the existing officer corps. He remembered Pershing’s troubles with incompetent officers in 1917–18 and resolved to do better. When, in an October 1939 off-the-record interview, the military columnist George Fielding Eliot asked the newly appointed chief of staff how he intended to avoid Lincoln’s long, frustrating quest for a winning general during the Civil War, Marshall acknowledged that “the present officers of the line” were mostly “too old to command troops in battle under the terrific pressures of modern war.” Their minds, he noted, were set in “outmoded patterns,” and could not change to meet new conditions if the United States became involved in a European war. He did “not propose to send our young citizen-soldiers into action . . . under commanders whose minds are no longer adaptable to the making of split-second decisions in the fast moving war of today.”42
Even before appointment, as deputy chief of staff, Marshall had sought to replace the seniority system for officers’ promotion with one based on merit. “I wanted to be able to put your finger on the man you wanted, and he would work like the devil . . . instead of being interested in something, besides the two cars and his wife’s bathrooms he wanted at the end of his career.”43 Fortunately, over the years he had kept track of men who had impressed him as bold, intelligent, loyal, and, preferably, young. Initially he drew heavily for the surging ranks of officers on men he had met and admired in France or at Fort Leavenworth. It has often been said that Marshall was an incomparable judge of military talent. Omar Bradley, one of his choices for top leadership, later wrote: “In the choice of his commanders General Marshall evinced his almost unerring judgement of men.”44 And the recent military author Thomas Ricks would more or less agree. “While sometimes mistaken,” he writes, “the Marshall system generally achieved its goal of producing military effectiveness.”45
Yet in fact the selection process did not work as well as Bradley and Ricks believed. More than occasionally Marshall was dismayed when, elevated to new wartime responsibilities, his choices failed the competence test. In the end the quality of Marshall’s selections was mixed. On the one hand we note the names of fighting generals Patton, Robert Eichelberger, Courtney Hodges, J. Lawton Collins, and Lucian Truscott. Among his appointments as administrators were distinguished performers like Somervell, whom Marshall made head of the new Services of Supply, and of course Dwight Eisenhower, whom he would elevate to top leadership in both the Mediterranean and for Overlord. But he was far from infallible, and there would be more than a few duds and mediocrities on the list of those he favored.
As a salient feature of Marshall’s reorganization of War Department and army personnel, he insisted that his subordinates, including combat commanders, be autonomous, self-activating agents. His formula with both generals and civilian aides was: “You know what the right thing to do is, so do it; don’t bother me.” The approach is perhaps best illustrated by his initial relations with Dwight Eisenhower, whom, just days after Pearl Harbor, he brought to Washington to head the Far East section of the Army’s War Plans Division. In his Munitions Building office he had briefed the new brigadier on the perilous status of the American military and naval position in the Pacific and asked him to outline what he thought the strategic response should be. Directed to an empty desk in the War Plans Division, Eisenhower quickly managed to come up with a few written suggestions; when he showed them to his boss, Marshall said, “I agree with you.” Then the chief of staff explained his management theory: “Eisenhower, the Department is filled with able men who analyze their problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.”46
This early example of delegated authority was not aberrant. It remained Marshall’s management style through his entire public career, often disconcerted his colleagues and subordinates—and at times served him ill. Marshall justified his hands-off policy as a way to reduce bureaucratic red tape and preserve his time for high-level decisions. But it was also a way to conserve his own limited energies and uncertain health. The doctors had warned him even before the First World War to avoid overwork, and he had responded by restricting himself to a modest daily schedule that often ended at three or four o’clock in the afternoon. This habit, too, at times troubled observers, especially those who encountered it for the first time.
Changes in army personnel policy are never achieved without cost. And so it was with the early personnel housecleaning. Some officers forced into retirement with reduced benefits never forgave the chief of staff for their plight.
Marshall proposed one more major reform to improve the structure of military command at the very top. Because the air corps, an army subdivision, was represented on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the navy was, in effect, outvoted. To even the score the president, he felt, should appoint a chairman for the Joint Chiefs from the navy. Though an admiral, this person, Marshall anticipated, would serve as a “neutral agency” to minimize interservice disputes. Marshall had a preference for the post: Adm. William D. Leahy, then U.S. Ambassador to the Vichy French government. Roosevelt was frankly puzzled by Marshall’s proposal for another member of the Joint Chiefs, but agreed to go along. In the end Leahy ended up being FDR’s personal representative, his “legman,” much like Hopkins, rather than an autonomously functioning member of the Joint Chiefs, a development that did not please Marshall entirely.47
As the uniformed head of the army one of Marshall’s most critical functions was converting millions of young American civilians into soldiers. The Victory Program had projected training some 8.8 million men to serve in the army, with approximately 2 million of that number in the air force. As a manpower blueprint the program had serious flaws. In any case, it said nothing about how these men were to be made into soldiers. Marshall had more than a little experience with training men to fight. His work in the thirties CCC camps had taught him how to impose discipline and order on raw civilians. His many dealings with the National Guard had provided further lessons, as had the rebellious OHIO movement of 1941. By the time he became head of the U.S. Army he had developed some strong views regarding the proper way to create a powerful military force out of the human material available in the country.
First, he felt, traditional forms of discipline must be revised. In place of the “monotonous drilling which . . . achieved obedience at the expense of initiative,” and “excluded ‘thought’ of any kind,” he favored “respect rather than fear; the effect of good example by officers; and the intelligent comprehension of all ranks of why an order has to be and why it must be carried out.”48 Easier said than done. Yet Marshall understood that morale was all-important and tried to achieve these ends. He sought to improve the safety of his men by replacing the shallow helmets of World War I doughboys with the deeper, more protective steel “pots” seen in the pictures of their World War II GI successors. When a visit to a small Southern army-base town showed him the squalid off-duty recreation facilities available for men at the nearby post, he returned to Washington and helped create the USO (United Service Organization), a joint military-civilian group that throughout the war would schedule performances for army audiences of such Hollywood and Broadway headliners as Betty Grable, Bob Hope, Glenn Miller, Marlene Dietrich, and Martha Raye.
Marshall was also determined that American soldier-civilians be enlightened on the reasons for their efforts and sacrifices. In the spring of 1941 he directed army commanders to remind recruits of their country’s democratic heritage and link this heritage explicitly to their military service. Under his aegis the army produced a series of paperback textbooks in American history and international relations, made widely available to the men. Most famous of the morale-building devices was a series of seven movies, produced and directed by one of Hollywood’s top directors, Frank Capra, collectively titled Why We Fight, explaining the origins and meaning of the war in both oceans. The films were not objective; the American cause, not surprisingly, was depicted as without blemish. Today World War II is still—rightfully—held to be the “good war.” Unfortunately, in the manner of the day, racist elements, especially concerning the Japanese enemy, were a part of the war and part of the series. Whether Marshall endorsed these views or not, at the end of each film the narrator quoted the chief of staff’s words: “The victory of the democracies can only be complete with the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan.”49
Were these educational programs effective? Compared to the Wehrmacht soldiers’ fanatical, bitter-end defense of the Nazi cause, American GIs, particularly in the European-Mediterranean theaters, would often seem uncertain of the reasons for their risks and painful sacrifices. Yet Marshall had identified a serious problem of morale and sought constructively to correct it.
On the matter of race and its problems for the army, Marshall was probably a little ahead of his time and his place. The United States fought World War II—against the most brutal and blatant proponent of racist ideology in history—with a racially segregated military. In the army black soldiers, airmen, and sailors were assigned almost exclusively to all-black units, generally under the command of white officers. They were also largely restricted to service functions; few ever saw combat. The arrangement, of course, echoed the unequal social system that prevailed by law through the entire South and, informally, was widely observed in the North as well. It was reinforced by the large proportion of white Southern officers and noncoms who made the military their lifetime careers. Marshall of course was not Southern-born, but he was in his own mind a Virginian, and accepted many of the racial values of his adopted state, including a defense of “separate but equal.” When liberals, including the president’s wife, Eleanor, pushed for racial integration in the armed forces, Marshall pushed back. Responding to a memo calling for integration from the black judge William Hastie, dean of the Howard University Law School and recently appointed by FDR as a civilian aide to Stimson, Marshall noted that what Hastie proposed would be “tantamount to solving a social problem which has perplexed the American people throughout the history of the nation.” The army could not “accomplish such a solution and should not be charged with the undertaking.”50 In a September 1941 letter to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, by pointing out that American Communists had come out for military integration, he implied its subversive nature.
Yet, while acting within the racial limitations of most contemporary white Americans, Marshall favored what he considered fair play. He did not condone bigoted racist behavior. Black candidates for officer status must be judged on their merits, he insisted. That meant, however, that the army must select their number only in proportion to blacks in the general population. He also sponsored a preflight training program at all-black Tuskegee Institute that gave rise to the famous Ninety-Ninth Fighter Squadron, which flew successful missions in North Africa and Europe, and he praised Eisenhower’s use of black soldiers in the 1944–45 Battle of the Bulge, though Ike then was perhaps moved more by desperation than by a commitment to equality.
In later years Marshall would often be called the “Organizer of Victory.” Did he excel, then, as architect of a well-trained citizen army? The enormous difficulties and challenges he faced—the embedded individualistic American values, the nation’s cultural diversity, its provincialism and regionalism, the severe time constraints events imposed—must be kept in mind. And with these very real limitations, his training of an army ground force for combat was not an outstanding success.
Marshall believed in an informed soldier who understood why it was important for him to learn the laborious skills assigned in training. This was commendably democratic, but it did not make for individual GI initiative in battle. Ironically, in North Africa and Europe the Wehrmacht rather than the U.S. Army would excel in small-unit initiative. Between 1939 and the war’s end in mid-1945 the American army expanded from some 200,000 men to 8.5 million. Perhaps, considering the task of creating a mass army virtually overnight, the result could not have been different. The American soldier in battle, at least in the early stages, inevitably resembled the product of American mass production in manufacturing. The German soldier, on the other hand, seemed the product of the “boutique” craftsman tradition of Continental Europe.
In fact Marshall delegated much of the actual day-to-day training process—weapons mastery, marching, marksmanship, bivouacking, sanitation, unit maneuvers, small unit and officer leadership, and the rest—to General McNair, his appointee as head of the Army Ground Forces. Early in the war McNair was widely praised for his training programs. An article in the Saturday Evening Post in late January 1943 reassured readers that if “our boys, rushed into battle after one year . . . of high gear training” can “outsoldier German troops,” the credit “must go to a five-foot-eight soldier” from “Verndale, Minnesota,” widely hailed as “the brains of the American Army. . . . If you have a son or husband in uniform,” the article noted, “you may owe his welfare or even his survival to ‘Whitey McNair.’”51
McNair’s celebrity did not last. According to the army’s own self-examination, he was aware of the American infantry soldiers’ failings and sought to rectify many of them. But by the time of his death in France from friendly fire in July 1944, he and his work had come under damaging attack. The publicly aired charges included initially prescribing too brief a draftee-basic-training period (only thirteen weeks), failure to encourage initiative and small-unit tactics, and inadequate training in weapons proficiency. In North Africa, in their first serious encounters with the Wehrmacht, American troops and their commanders would prove both unskilled and unsteady.
The air force and navy did a much better job of creating pilots than the army did creating infantrymen. Only painfully, and often lethally, did American young men learn in actual combat the skills of soldiering, and they probably never equaled man-for-man their counterparts in the Wehrmacht. As for teaching the vital lessons of “combined arms combat”—the integration of infantry, artillery, armor, and air—those, too, were feebly if at all transmitted to officers and men at the training camps. At the Kasserine Pass, in central Tunisia, especially, the failure would detonate like a bomb and shame the American army. Marshall himself recognized the weaknesses of the training process when, a decade and a half after the events, he acknowledged that “some of the divisions” sent to North Africa in the fall of 1942 “were only partly trained and badly trained.”52
Yet despite Marshall’s awareness, the transatlantic failings of the American infantry in battle would be fostered by several of his own policies regarding recruitment and replacement in the army’s ground forces.
Raising and training an army, while important, were only secondary functions of the chief of staff. As for grand military strategy, it did not take long for the apparent Anglo-American agreement of early 1942 on future operations to unravel. By May a careful new study of Sledgehammer had reinforced the view of British planners that it would be a very risky venture unless German morale were to deteriorate abruptly—an unlikely prospect. Later that month Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, visited London and Washington carrying Stalin’s demand that Britain and the United States mount a second front before the start of the Wehrmacht’s expected new spring offensive in the East. Any attack by the Western Allies, Stalin directed Molotov to tell Churchill, must force the enemy to withdraw at least forty German divisions from the Russian front to be effective in helping the Soviet Union. Churchill balked. Explaining the necessity of achieving air supremacy over the landing area and the shortage of landing craft to transport troops and equipment, he warned Molotov that any help in 1942 must be limited despite the “best will and endeavour,” and any move Britain could make in that year was “unlikely . . . even if successful” to “draw off large numbers of enemy land forces from the Eastern Front.”53 The Russian envoy got a better reception in Washington. Though Marshall sought to keep Roosevelt from too firm a commitment for 1942, the president, in a public statement, gave the Russian envoy a virtual guarantee of an effective second front for that year. “Full understanding was reached,” the president told the press, “with regard to the urgent task of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942.”54 Churchill quickly dispatched Louis Mountbatten to Washington to undo the damage, and the admiral’s discouraging remarks gave the president pause. On second thought, FDR said privately, maybe American troops might be better employed in North Africa after all.
Hoping to bolster Roosevelt’s apparent change of heart and reinforce his Gymnast scheme, in mid-June Churchill came once again to America with Brooke and Ismay in tow. To head off the persuasive PM, Marshall, Stimson, and a circle of Marshall’s military allies composed a statement strongly endorsing the complete Sledgehammer-Bolero-Roundup sequence and sent it off to Hyde Park, the president’s Hudson Valley estate, where, to escape the Washington heat, the two leaders met before going on to the capital. While they conferred in leafy Dutchess County, Brooke and Marshall discussed issues in sweltering pre-air-conditioned Washington, where Brooke’s London-weight woolen uniform was a torment. Though they continued to disagree about Sledgehammer, they seemed in accord on Gymnast: The North African campaign would be a wasteful diversion of resources better employed elsewhere. They also shared mistrust of their bosses. Both Brooke and Marshall feared that the military “amateurs” who led their respective countries did not fully understand the nuts and bolts of warfare and were too often moved by political considerations or, in Churchill’s case, by an overactive historical imagination and an almost adolescent yearning to recapitulate the military glory of his distinguished ancestor the Duke of Marlborough. Talking of this period fourteen years later, Marshall noted: “We were largely trying to get the President to stand pat on what he had previously agreed to. The President shifted, particularly when Churchill got hold of him. . . . The President was always ready to do any sideshow and Churchill was always prodding him.”55
But Roosevelt’s change of heart had firmer foundations than an admiration of Churchill. As yet the American contribution to any operation in Europe must be limited, and so British wishes must be heeded. Besides, as Churchill had noted, there was an acute shortage of landing craft as well as a scarcity of shipping brought on by heavy losses to U-boats in the Atlantic, and by Admiral King’s sequestering vessels for the Pacific. At their Hyde Park discussion Churchill had confronted the president with these realities and was soon insisting that the only alternative to a 1942 landing in France to draw off German strength was his North African project. Roosevelt found it difficult to deflect this argument and resolved to hand it over to the military chiefs when he and Churchill arrived back in Washington from Hyde Park. At this meeting Marshall and Stimson continued to support Sledgehammer, but the Combined Chiefs worked out a rather mealymouthed compromise preserving Roundup but sidelining any 1942 cross-Channel attack unless “an exceptionally favorable opportunity” should occur.56 On the morning of June 21, in the middle of these discussions in the White House, an aide handed FDR a telegram. The president handed it to Hopkins, who then passed it to the prime minister. It read: “Tobruk has surrendered, with twenty-five thousand men taken prisoner.”57
The news was devastating. The British base at Tobruk in eastern Libya had seemed the last barrier between Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the Nile Valley and then the oil-rich Middle East. “This was one of the heaviest blows that I can recall during the war,” Churchill later wrote.58 Not only did the surrender threaten devastating military and strategic consequences; it also reflected badly on the reputation of the British army, which had suffered humiliating defeats in France two years before, followed by the Greek fiasco and then the shameful surrender of Singapore following Pearl Harbor. FDR responded immediately. The United States, he declared, would send three hundred of the new U.S. Sherman tanks to General Auchinleck, now dug in at El Alamein, less than one hundred miles from Alexandria on the Nile. After observing that the Shermans had yet to be widely distributed to his own troops, Marshall instantly agreed to go along. When they finally arrived the tanks would contribute to Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s later success against the supple Rommel, soon to be called the Desert Fox.
Generous to an ally on the ropes, on the larger issues of future global strategy Marshall was offended by the continued British waffling. Their sabotage of Sledgehammer, he felt, was downright duplicitous. Even worse, Bolero, the buildup for a cross-Channel operation, was now also in jeopardy. With Stimson’s approval, Marshall resolved on a showdown. If the British insisted on replacing Sledgehammer with Gymnast, he told the Joint Chiefs at a meeting on July 10, the United States should “turn to the Pacific for decisive action against Japan.” With Admiral King’s enthusiastic endorsement, the suggestion was forwarded in a memo to FDR along with the warning that if adopted, Gymnast would scatter and dilute American forces and thus “curtail if not make impossible” a cross-Channel offensive not only for 1942 but for 1943 as well.59
It is not clear whether the Pacific First proposal was serious or pure bluff. After the war both Marshall and Stimson insisted it was intended solely to frighten the British into accepting Bolero and Sledgehammer. But that they both considered a Pacific offensive a real alternative to Europe First is reinforced by a second memo from Marshall to the president on the same day. After noting that it would be “impossible to do BOLERO without full British support,” Marshall frankly described his strategy: “My object is again to force the British into acceptance of a concentrated effort against Germany.” But “if this proves impossible,” he would “turn . . . to the Pacific with strong forces and drive for a decision against Japan.”60 In fact at this moment Marshall was bluffing King as well as Churchill and his staffs. In a letter to Eisenhower of July 30, he noted that the proposed “list of withdrawals for the Pacific” would give the United States “liberty of action though not necessarily to be carried out in full. . . . Of course,” he added, “Admiral King would like to have them all in the Pacific,” but his own “intention” was “to make only the withdrawals that seem urgently required for the Pacific as the situation develops there.”61
Serious or not, the apparent change of heart deeply troubled the British. Dill warned Churchill from his post in Washington that the Americans meant what they said. The prime minister’s response was vividly Churchillian: “Just because the Americans can’t have a massacre in France this year,” he wrote back, “they want to sulk and bathe in the Pacific.”62 It also angered the president, who did not perceive his own emerging Mediterranean strategy as partial abandonment of Europe First, or at least of its cross-Channel aspect. Roosevelt shot off a reply to Marshall, which he emphatically signed “Commander-in-Chief.” The Joint Chiefs’ memo was “exactly what Germany hoped the United States would do following Pearl Harbor,” FDR wrote. Equally bad, it did not provide for using American troops in combat nor did it help “Russia or the Near East.”63 Keep in mind, FDR continued, that once Germany had surrendered, Japan could be dealt with in a few months.
Though the memo was clearly a gambit in the Anglo-American battle over strategy, unfolding events were willy-nilly forcing some shift of U.S. military planners’ attention to the Pacific. And even if official American policy placed Europe first, MacArthur in Australia, Adm. Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Ocean Area, and the Japanese enemy had different agendas. Though they were ferocious rivals for leadership of operations in the Pacific, both American commanders had no trouble agreeing that Japan was the chief Axis enemy and seeing the focus on Europe as excessive. And, in any case, the Japanese did not intend to stand still while the Americans polished off Germany and Italy. In early June. Admiral Yamamoto dispatched a powerful task force of battleships, carriers, cruisers, and destroyers eastward toward American-controlled Midway Island in the central Pacific to provoke a showdown battle that would, he hoped, deliver a crippling blow to the American navy and compel the enemy to accept a negotiated peace advantageous to Japan. The bold strike failed disastrously. Having broken the main Japanese naval code, the Americans were prepared for the assault. In a few furious hours, U.S. Navy dive-bombers sank four large Japanese carriers while Wildcat pursuit fliers shot down one hundred Zeros with their veteran Japanese carrier pilots. Japan’s forward momentum in the Pacific was ended. American forces were on the move, too. In early August, in the first U.S. land offensive against the Pacific enemy, U.S. Marines landed on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, triggering a ferocious struggle of ground forces, planes, and ships that for six agonizing months was touch and go for the American navy and its land combat division.
Clearly, then, it was impossible to ignore the Pacific. Thereafter, according to Stoler, the Joint Chiefs, Marshall included, would seek to quietly evade the president’s veto and fight at least a partial Pacific war. It would prove to be a bloody, costly, and chancy grind, rather than the walkover that FDR supposed. But in light of later events Marshall was right to invest at least moderate resources in the Pacific war while continuing to focus on the Atlantic.
By now, confronted by British intransigence over Roundup and the inadvisability of the Pacific alternative and prodded by Churchill, FDR had concluded that the North African invasion plan was the best option for 1942. Those young Americans streaming from the training camps should be fighting the enemy, not doing guard duty and listening to patriotic lectures in the United States. Besides, Gymnast would give American troops and commanders vital combat experience and perhaps partially satisfy Stalin that the Western Allies were doing something to stop Hitler. It would also serve as a rebuff to MacArthur, whose grandiose military and political ambitions in the Pacific seriously irked the president.
To help settle the matter Roosevelt once more ordered Marshall and Hopkins off to Britain to meet with Churchill and his military leaders, accompanied this time by Admiral King. Before leaving, Marshall conferred with FDR at the White House. Operations in the Mediterranean region, he warned the president, would delay an Allied cross-Channel attack until 1944. The two, according to Secretary Stimson, had a “thumping argument” and Marshall—incorrectly, as it happened—“thought . . . he had knocked out the President’s lingering affection for first GYMNAST and then the Middle East.”64
The three envoys left for Britain on July 16 armed with a two-page memo from the president designed to clear the strategic air. The envoys should “reach immediate agreement” with the British on “definite plans” for 1942 as well as more “tentative plans” for 1943. It was “of the highest importance that U.S. ground troops be brought into action against the enemy in 1942,” the message declared. But if Sledgehammer was “finally and definitely out of the picture, FDR wanted the three “to take into consideration . . . a new operation in Morocco and Algiers designed to drive in against the back door of Rommel’s armies.” Roosevelt took the occasion to repeat his objections to a Pacific First strategy. “I am opposed to an American all-out effort in the Pacific,” he wrote, reinforcing his view with the silly prediction that the “defeat of Germany means the defeat of Japan, probably without firing a shot or losing a life.”65
But whatever the president preferred, Marshall did not intend to abandon his opposition to a North African operation. Before the Americans left for Britain, Dill wrote to Churchill from Washington to warn him what to expect when they arrived. Either mistakenly or to goad the prime minister, he asserted that Marshall’s “first love” was the Pacific theater. He was, moreover, now convinced that the prime minister preferred an attack in North Africa to one in Europe. Marshall had lost confidence in Britain’s commitment to Roundup, Dill wrote. He believed that there was “no real drive” in Britain behind the preparations for a cross-Channel landing in 1943. As to how Churchill should respond to Marshall’s skepticism, he advised the prime minister to work hard to convince his visitors when they arrived that he was truly “determined to beat the Germans” and would “strike them at the earliest possible moment.”66
Marshall, King, and Hopkins landed in Scotland on July 17 and went directly to London to confer first with Eisenhower, who, through Marshall’s auspices, had been appointed in June primarily to head Bolero, but with the grand title of Commanding General, United States Forces, European Theater. It is a challenge to account fully for this extraordinary honor. Ike had no combat experience; he had never led troops in battle. To warrant his new title he had been catapulted in rank ahead of sixty-six more senior major generals. A recent biographer of Eisenhower believes that the choice was essentially an empty gesture: Neither Marshall nor Secretary Stimson, says Jean Edward Smith, “believed the new operation [the cross-Channel attack] would ever take place,” given the president’s recent drift.67 But there was a more fundamental reason for the Eisenhower appointment: Marshall was choosing a general very much like himself: a coordinator, planner, and conciliator rather than a commander. For the conduct of a coalition war, that must have seemed more important than dash and flash, leading offensive operations, and inspiring troops.
But in any case, Marshall still believed Sledgehammer viable. The day before arriving in Britain he sent Eisenhower an eyes only cable asserting his primary purpose was “to ascertain” from him “whether or not it was believed possible to carry out sledgehammer and advise the president accordingly.” He also asked Ike to be ready “with searching analysis of sledgehammer situation; [and] also be prepared with specific outline for how sledgehammer might be carried out.” He went on to tell the new commanding general that the proposed North African operation seemed “completely out of the question from Pacific naval requirements point of view alone.”68
Ike, like Marshall, still believed that Sledgehammer should be tried, although, he admitted, a successful 1942 beachhead in France was a long shot. The operation was necessary to keep eight million Russians “in the war,” he told his visitors when they arrived in London. Gymnast, on the other hand, would not reassure the Russians and would only scatter Allied strength and probably rule out Roundup in 1943. The president’s memo had tilted the pointer toward the Mediterranean; Ike had turned it once more toward France.
Reinforced by his protégé’s opinion, Marshall and the American envoys met with Churchill, Brooke, and the leading British military chiefs at Chequers on July 20. The chief of staff argued passionately for Sledgehammer. The Western Allies must not allow the destruction of the Soviet army if they could prevent it, he asserted. And Sledgehammer “was the most effective action that the Allies could take on behalf of Russia.”69 The British remained skeptical. That day, after wrangling with Marshall and King, Brooke noted in his diary: “They [the Americans] failed to realize that such an action could only lead to the loss of some 6 divisions without achieving any results!”70 Finally, on July 22, the American envoys gave up the fight and informed the president that they and the British had reached a complete impasse. Not surprised at the result, FDR cabled back that their mission now was to agree to some operation in 1942 against the Germans, preferably in North Africa. Several more rounds of intense Anglo-American discussions ensued with Marshall and his colleagues attempting to prevent a final veto of the 1942 cross-Channel attack. But without success. In the end the Americans were compelled to agree that Sledgehammer was dead and instead Gymnast (now labeled Torch) would be launched in the fall. And yet a shard of optimism survived, at least in Marshall’s mind. Perhaps the North Africa operation could be whittled down sufficiently to permit Roundup in 1943. The continued irresolution, however small, did not please FDR. On July 30 he ended all doubts with an emphatic ukase: “As commander-in-chief,” he directed that Torch “would be undertaken at the earliest possible date.” It was “now our principal objective and the assembling of means to carry it out should take precedence over other operations,” including Roundup.71 In the words of the historian Thomas Parish, “Marshall had been completely defeated.” The president “had exercised his prerogative as chief strategist.”72
Marshall may have been miffed at being overruled, but with time he came to recognize the political imperatives. As he told Forrest Pogue in late 1956, he and his colleagues had failed to see that the “leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained.” That might sound like the wrong word, he admitted, but it conveyed the correct thought: “people demand action and the U.S. could not wait until everything was entirely ready.”73
And so by midsummer the Anglo-American strategic road immediately ahead had finally been determined: Whatever the chief of staff preferred, the Mediterranean it would be. But one more person would have to be convinced—Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin. In Cairo to discuss with his generals the deteriorating situation in Egypt and the Middle East after the fall of Tobruk, Churchill decided he would bring the news of the Allied decision to the Soviet leader in person, a mission, he admitted to Roosevelt, that promised to be a “raw job.” The PM arrived in Moscow by air on August 12 with Brooke, Wavell, and other high-level British officers, accompanied by Averell Harriman, representing FDR. They reached the Soviet capital as the struggle at Stalingrad to check the German thrust toward the vital Caucasus oil fields was gathering steam, with the outcome still in doubt. To bring “Uncle Joe” the news that there would be no cross-Channel second front in 1942, Churchill admitted, “was like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole.”74 In fact Stalin almost certainly knew what the prime minister intended to tell him, so deeply had Soviet spies in Britain penetrated secret Allied discussions at the highest levels.
At the first of several meetings at the Kremlin, Churchill confessed to Stalin that there would be no cross-Channel attack, no second front, in 1942. “The British and American Governments,” he reported in the first meeting, “did not feel themselves able to undertake a major operation in September, which was the only month in which the weather was to be counted on.” In effect, he expounded, the Western Allies could not soon mount “an operation which would have the effect of bringing German infantry and tank divisions back from the Russian front.”75 But that did not mean, he hastened to add, that the British and Americans did not intend to help their Russian ally. They were preparing “a very great operation in 1943,” and for that purpose a million American troops were scheduled to reach Britain by the spring. Unhappy with this news, Stalin repeated Soviet demands for an attack in the West in 1942. When Churchill described the drawbacks of a premature cross-Channel effort, Stalin brashly questioned the Western Allies’ courage. Why were they “so afraid of the Germans?” he asked. His own “experience showed that troops must be bloodied in battle” for their leaders to know their fighting qualities. “A man who is not prepared to take risks cannot win a war,” he insisted, and concluded with a remark that the British should try fighting for a change.76 An outraged Churchill replied that he pardoned the aspersion “only on account of the bravery of the Russian troops.”77 But he also sought to defend the Anglo-American agenda for 1942. “What was a second front” after all? he asked. “Was it only a landing on a fortified coast opposite England? Or could it take the form of some other great operations which might be useful to the common cause?”78 Britain and the United States were determined to do their part against Hitler before the present year was out, he assured the Soviet leader. The expanding British-based air war against Hitler’s cities and factories was contributing to German defeat. But, more important, the Allies were going to launch a major attack that fall in North Africa that would weaken the Axis and help Russia immensely. Operation Torch would free the Mediterranean from Axis control and “threaten the belly of Hitler’s Europe.” To illustrate his point Churchill pointed to a sketch of a crocodile he had drawn on a blackboard. The Western Allies meant to “attack the soft belly of the crocodile” in 1942 rather than its “hard snout,” the cross-Channel assault to be reserved for the following year. Torch, he assured Stalin, would draw off much German strength, especially planes of the Luftwaffe, from the eastern front. At first Stalin professed to be reassured. At least the Western Allies did not intend to sit on their hands through 1942. “May God help this enterprise to succeed,” he responded. Several times during the prime minister’s exposition, Harriman, as FDR’s personal representative, intruded to add that Roosevelt was “in full agreement” with Churchill on the decisions reached.
Stalin’s acquiescent mood did not last, and the next day, in an aide-mémoire, he lambasted the British for breaking promises he claimed had been made to Molotov on his recent visits to London and Washington. The “refusal of the Government of Great Britain to create a Second Front in 1942 . . . inflicts a mortal blow to the whole of Soviet public opinion and . . . complicates the situation of the Red Army at the front and prejudices the plan of the Soviet command,” the document asserted.79 Churchill replied the next morning with a brief written defense of the British position that denied any broken promises and repeated the arguments for Torch.
Though Stalin continued to act jovial and personally friendly, the rest of the PM’s stay in Moscow was rocky. Military discussions between Brooke and the Soviet generals in the remaining days of the visit never got off the ground. The Russians refused to answer questions about their fighting fronts and simply repeated as a mantra, “A second front now.”
Yet as he left Moscow for home on the sixteenth, Churchill remained optimistic. He had, he felt, established a cordial relationship with the man in the Kremlin whose goodwill seemed so vital to ultimate victory over Hitler. The Russians now “knew the worst, and having made their protest are entirely friendly,” he reported to his cabinet.80 But Churchill was deceiving himself. Whatever goodwill the Soviet leader had shown him was merely part of the act. Stalin still needed the Anglo-Americans, however disappointing their material aid had been thus far, and he chose not to jeopardize it.
Most important, Torch was now definitely on track. Yet what remained for Marshall and all the others whose brains and energy would be engaged in the immense, tangled, and complicated diplomatic, logistical, and military tasks in the months ahead could not yet be known. The difficulties and challenges in the end would far exceed even those anticipated by Torch’s most determined opponents. As for Marshall, he had been overruled; he could no longer hope to avoid a major operation in North Africa.