LF: How Churchill nearly lost WW2: In a version of history many will find hard to stomach, how our greatest hero - fuelled by alcohol and self-doubt - refused to sign up to D-Day... until forced to by the US President

Title: How Churchill nearly lost WW2: In a version of history many will find hard to stomach, how our greatest hero - fuelled by alcohol and self-doubt - refused to sign up to D-Day... until forced to by the US President
Source: Daily Mail Online
URL Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art ... gn-D-Day-forced-President.html
Published: May 22, 2016
Author: Nigel Hamilton For Mail On Sunday
Post Date: 2016-05-22 09:06:09 by cranky
Keywords: None
Views: 5085
Comments: 48

It was to be the turning point of the war: victory, rather than disaster, would now be the order of the day.

At Casablanca in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, leaders of the two main Western democracies, had gathered with their chiefs of staff to plan their further strategy against Germany, Italy and Japan.

This would culminate in 1944 in a challenge even Hitler had balked at in 1940 with Britain on its knees: a massive cross-Channel invasion – D-Day, as it would become known.

In May of 1943, more than 300,000 troops launched the final offensive in North Africa, and Montgomery's Eighth Army entered the city of Tunis for the unconditional surrender of Axis forces there.

With plans for a million US combat troops to be ferried to Britain, Roosevelt saw every prospect of mounting a successful 1944 Second Front, and winning the war that year, or early in 1945. The President had been under the impression his partnership with Churchill, his 'active and ardent lieutenant', was a firm and happy one. Had the two leaders not motored together after the Casablanca Conference to Marrakesh, the fabled Berber city, and sat and surveyed the vast Atlas mountain range?

Why, then, three months later in June 1943, was Churchill on his way to Washington on the Queen Mary to argue against a cross-Channel invasion, even in 1944, and reverse the agreements he'd made at Casablanca? It was to become one of the most contentious strategic debates in the history of warfare.

I had long venerated Churchill, not least for his six-volume memoirs, The Second World War, which won a Nobel Prize. But as a military historian I became increasingly sceptical about the veracity of his account.

Years of research among the Churchill and Roosevelt archives and among papers and diaries kept by those closest to the great war leaders, allowed me to piece together a very different picture from the unreservedly heroic that one that Churchill had portrayed – and that is the story of how he covered the traces of his repeated attempts in 1943 to abandon Allied plans for D-Day.

At heart, Churchill remained the dashing cavalryman who'd fought the Mahdi in the Sudan and, even as he approached 70, his ever-fertile mind was changing from day to day.

In the President's study at the White House on May 12, his lengthy speech, delivered with characteristic rhetorical flair, failed to dispel the US chiefs' fears. The British, it became clear, were not serious about crossing the Channel any time soon, unless the Germans collapsed.

After securing Sicily, Churchill argued, the Allies ought to invade Italy, obtain its surrender, then exploit the huge gap in the Adriatic and the Balkans to attack the Third Reich from the south and south-east.

A cross-Channel invasion, he allowed, 'must be made at some time in the future' – but not 1944.

More disturbingly, the British chiefs of staff seemed to be agreeing. The American generals were speechless. All eyes turned to the President.

In the nicest yet firmest way the President categorically 'expressed disagreement with any Italian adventure beyond the seizure of Sicily and Sardinia'.

As the chief of staff to the Prime Minister, General Ismay, recounted: 'It was clear there was going to be a battle royal.' Even Churchill's wife, Clementine, was worried the US might choose to redirect its efforts to the Pacific, sending him cable after cable at the White House, pleading: 'Surely the liberation of Europe must come first?'

The President was shocked. Almost two million Jews had already been 'liquidated' by Hitler's SS troops – how many more by 1946? Would the Russians lose faith in the Western Allies and seek an armistice with the Third Reich, leaving Hitler master of Europe? Roosevelt didn't think Stalin would stoop to that, but it could certainly undermine Soviet participation in the post-war United Nations he had in mind. And all so that Britain could sit out the war in Europe, hanging on to India and waiting for the US to win back its lost empire in the Far East?

The best way to coax the British out of their funk, the President felt, was not to berate them but help their generals recover their confidence. Extreme hospitality would be the order of the day. The President took Churchill fishing, the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt 'placed with great care by the side of a pool,' Churchill recollected, where he 'sought to entice the nimble and wily fish'.

The leaders' weekend in Williamsburg, Virginia, went so well that when talks resumed on May 18 the wholesome food and wine and civil conversation seemed to have done the trick.

General Alan Brooke, Churchill's Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had dropped his call to postpone a cross-Channel operation, if operations in the Mediterranean were allowed to continue. Then – by November 1 at the latest – the best battle-hardened divisions were to be transferred to Britain to prepare for D-Day, and a target date for April 1944. However, Brooke's position was not shared by his boss.

At six o'clock on May 18, Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King went to see Churchill and found him already in bed, wearing 'a white night-gown of black and white silk' and looking 'very frail' after seven hours working on the draft of his address to Congress the following day. 'As far as he was concerned,' King wrote later in his diaries, 'the plan was to follow the decisions of the Casablanca conference'.

And Churchill now claimed that this had authorised landings in Sicily, but had not explicitly gone further than that. Pressed by King, Churchill confided he remained as implacably opposed to a cross- Channel Second Front – indeed more so since the catastrophe of the Dieppe Raid, a disastrous failed assault on the German-held port in 1942. Was Churchill, with his 'glass of Scotch' beside his bed, living in an alcohol-laced cocoon? Alcohol seemed to fuel his rhetorical skills, but did it help him listen to Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs rather than his own voice?

The Churchill plan: An invasion of Italy, which would lead to the Italians' surrender and allow Allied troops to attack Hitler's forces from the south and the Balkans

On the afternoon of May 19, Churchill told US congressional representatives he favoured an Allied offensive through Italy and the Balkans. Yet, inexplicably, by that evening when Churchill joined the President and the Combined Chiefs in the Oval Office, he had changed his mind.

King wrote: 'The Prime Minister indicated his pleasure that a cross-Channel operation had finally been agreed upon. He had always been in favour of such an operation and had to submit to its delay in the past for reasons beyond control of the United Nations.' Had he truly had a Pauline conversion? Even General Brooke was disbelieving.

Churchill was back at the Oval Office on May 24 for the final terms of what was now called the Trident agreement. However, 'the PM,' Brooke recorded with exasperation, 'entirely repudiated the paper we had passed, agreed to, and been congratulated on at our last meeting!!'

Brooke had known his Prime Minister to be an occasionally maddening individual, but to behave like a spoiled adolescent in front of a US President not only directing a global war but furnishing the materials and fighting men to win it, seemed the height of folly.

Though the Prime Minister meant well, his doctor was worried he might be approaching a mental breakdown, or 'a gradual waning of his powers, brought on… by… doing the work of three men.'

In the President's Map Room after dinner, Roosevelt pulled no punches. The President sternly told the Prime Minister he had better shut up. The date for the cross-Channel invasion was now set. Period. With that, the Trident Conference was over, and D-Day, to be called Operation Overlord, would take place, come hell or high water, in the spring of 1944.

This still left the question of its supreme commander – an appointment that the President had suggested at Casablanca should go to a British officer to bolster the tentative British commitment. Now he was not so sure.

At the White House on July 9, Roosevelt's naval aide brought news that Allied troops had landed in Sicily, and the invasion was proving brilliantly successful. Soon, with complete naval and air superiority and Patton and Montgomery's ground forces threatening to strike out from the beaches, there arose the prospect that the Italians might overthrow Mussolini and submit to unconditional surrender without the Allies needing to invade. However, the President was soon worried by what he was hearing from London.

Once again the Prime Minister was plotting a new course. On July 13, he had minuted his chiefs of staff with an immortal phrase epitomising his irrepressible spirit.

Why, he'd asked, should the Allies merely land on the toe of Italy and 'crawl up the leg like a harvest bug, from the ankle upwards? Let us rather strike at the knee' – landing north of Naples.

'Not only must we take Rome and march as far north as possible in Italy, but our right hand must give succour to the Balkan Patriots.'

If the Americans declined to co-operate, 'we have ample forces to act by ourselves.' Only ten days after the landings in Sicily, he was contemplating dumping the Second Front, and now favoured Allied assault landings in Norway.

On August 10, Roosevelt emphasised to his Joint Chiefs of Staff that only by relentless concentration of force would the Allies win within a reasonable time frame. He was not averse to opening a front in Italy – limited to a line just north of Rome.

But when one of his admirals proposed abandoning Overlord if the British wanted to postpone, Roosevelt, to his advisers' amazement, 'said we can, if necessary, carry out the project ourselves.' And with that the President prepared to meet Churchill two days later.

His remark about the Americans mounting D-Day by themselves was as ridiculous as Churchill's claim the British could single-handedly liberate Italy, but the two statements indicated how much the two Allies' war strategies were separating.

The President drove Churchill and his daughter to Hyde Park, and there explained to Churchill that the imminent surrender of Italy was most welcome, but would not win the war against Germany, nor could be counted upon to keep Russia as an ally. Now Roosevelt decided to use his trump card.

For months Churchill had been pressing the US for an agreement to pool research on an atomic bomb. With only a cadre of theoretical physicists, the British had no possibility of producing such a weapon by themselves.

If Churchill would not commit to Overlord, the President now quietly indicated, the US would have to withhold such an agreement. But stand by the agreed strategy, and he would sign an agreement to share atomic research with the British –and not the Russians. The Prime Minister was shocked.

An agreement on the atomic bomb would have to remain as secret as the research itself; Churchill would not be able to reveal, let alone explain, why he had backed off his opposition to Overlord.

But after swallowing the bitter pill, he recognised he would have to agree to the President's terms.

There was one further potion, the President made clear, that Churchill must take before the two men left Hyde Park. The supreme commander of Overlord must be an American, since the largest contingent in the invasion would be from the US. It was a blow to Churchill's patriotic pride, but there was nothing that he could say other than: Yes, Mr President.

Because Roosevelt did not live to write his own account of the war, his true role as US commander-in-chief has often gone unappreciated.

Churchill's six-volume The Second World War was, however, near- devastating for Roosevelt's memory, since its magisterial narrative placed Churchill at the centre of the war's direction, and the President very much at the periphery.

But had Churchill prevailed, the war might well have been lost for the Allies. The struggle between the two leaders took most of 1943, and in its outcome Roosevelt may justly be said to have saved civilisation – but it was a close-run thing.

lCommander In Chief: FDR's Battle With Churchill, 1943, by Nigel Hamilton, is published by Biteback on June 7, priced £25. To get your copy for £18.75 (25 per cent off) with free P&P call 0844 571 0640 or visit www.mailbookshop.co.uk, up until May 29.

It was a well-known FACT even while WW-2 was going on. He had good historic personal reasons for being cautious about invading foreign shores.

Hard to believe anyone could grow up and obtain a university degree in GB and not know about this,so the question is "What causes this idiot and this paper to write and publish this story like it is breaking news of a long-held secret?"

I've read from the casablanca conference through the quebec conference churchill was unwaveringly foursquare for the invasion and stalin's claim that churchill was backing out of the invasion was baseless.

Also, I'd never read that fdr claimed the us could pull off the invasion without great britain.

Stalin was pushing for the invasion of Europe before we invaded Sicily or Africa. He wanted us to do that in order to get the Germans to pull units from the USSR to send to the beaches.

I am GUESSING Churchill was opposed to that because he was an intelligent man,and understood that the Nazi's and the Soviets bleeding each other dry was a good thing. I don't know this to be a fact,though.

Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union (contrary to Gudarian's advice at that time of the year) was the worst blunder of WWII. The Germans didn't have winter clothing and weren't familiar with the Soviet cold. When the word got out as to what was heppening, patriotic German Women were even sending their fur coats to the front to try to save the German army. German panzers would not operate in the Russian winter. The Germans got to within 10 miles of Moscow, but couldn't go a step further. In their retreat the Germans left a great percentage of an entire army in their retreat path as frozen bodies. The men who survived were too broken and crippled to be worth anything. At that point, Hitler had lost the war.

It was only a blunder because it failed. If it had been successful,it would have been hailed as a stroke of genius.

The truth is the Germans defeated themselves due to piss-poor planning,something shocking for the Uber Anal Germans. They (The Hitler "they") put all their eggs in the "we will be in Moscow before the first freeze" basket so they had given zero thought to having winter or any other supplies pre-staged and ready to go,and then they (the Hitler "they") doubled down by going full insane and deciding to "punish" the invasion troops by half-assed supplying them and forbidding them from retreating to defensible positions so they could better defend themselves. Hitler called the troops that surrendered cowards and traitors,and thus lost all support from the army.

I actually met the adult children of WW-2 German POW's on my last trip to Russia. They decided to just stay in Russia after the war and had wives,jobs,and obviously,children. Their children told me their fathers lived like and were treated like Soviets. The fathers had given up on Germany for the way they were treated and talked about by the Nazi's,but their adult children were claiming German citizenship through their fathers and trying to get the hell out of Post-Communism Russia,where the Ruble bought nothing and there were no jobs.

Then again,the Soviets lost so much manpower during WW-2 and had so much of their inferior infrastructure destroyed they were probably glad to have the warm,breathing male muscle around to do some of the reconstruction work and to pump out a few new Soviet citizens. Given the large number of Soviet women and the small number of available Soviet males,I'm guessing they had a pretty good social life before getting married,too.

As far as I could tell,there seemed to be no WW-2 resentments going either way with the children. None of that "yore daddy wuz a Nazi!" crap. From what I could tell,if the Russian economy hadn't gone in the tank,they would have been happy to stay there and would have never claimed German citizenship.

No, blunder is a blunder. If you make a stupid move in war, but a meteorite or volcano destroys your enemy, you are still a fool, only a lucky fool.

True. Anybody that doesn't think it doesn't get cold in Germany has never been there,and it is ludicrous to believe the German Army didn't have any idea of how cold it got in Russia. Hell,the German Army spent several years IN Russia working on developing their new equipment and tactics. Stalin leased them huge tracts of land so they could do this.

The problem was Magnificent Leader decreed that the Red Army would be smashed and the Nazi's in control of the USSR before winter got there,and God help anybody that tried to correct him.

Truth to tell,I place more blame on the senior German Army brass for not getting together and killing that SOB before the invasion even took place. They were the pros that knew better,but they just didn't have the balls to stand up to Magnificent Leader and tell him so.

When you take and follow orders from a crazy man and fail,the failure is YOUR fault. After all,the other guy was crazy and you knew it,but followed his orders anyhow.

Well put, and a mini version of what we were taught in basic (55) about the Nuremberg Laws, and 'just following orders'.

Which is why I'm not worried about Trump as CnC. --- If he does something crazy, he won't be obeyed...