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: 6201
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.

FDR got it. He got it all along. His strategy was good, and he was the only Western leader whom Stalin respected. FDR and Stalin worked together pretty well. Truman and Stalin markedly less so. Churchill and Stalin detested each other.

This was important. FDR was trying to win a war in a way that would bring Russia back into the community of nations as a cooperative ally, as opposed to see a new risk of war immediately following WW2. Had FDR lived longer, there were decent prospects of that happening.

Had he lived out his fourth term, to 1948, it is very doubtful that there would have been a Berlin Blockade. History's course would have been very different.

But FDR died. And Truman became President. And Churchill became the experienced face of the West treating with Stalin. And that didn't work out well for anybody.

I'd bet that millions of people, formerly behind the iron curtain, would disagree.

How would it help them if Balkan campaign went wrong? Or if Stalin signed a separate peace with Germany? Or if Soviets overrun Germany?

It was a complicated game, do not forget that Hungary, Romania and others were allies of Germany. Churchill was certainly a fierce leader but not a professional general.

Maybe not,but he was the only world leader of a major power at the time that had ever experienced personal combat,and who had let others in combat.

As for King Franklin,all he cared about was saving his lust bunny,"Uncle Joe" and preserving communism. He never actually planned anything military that I know of,and he had no interest in anything military. All he cared about or took a hand in was politics and promoting communism.

His cousin-wife DID take an interest in humping a Army Corporal that decoded WH messages,though. Which caused King Franklin to make the only military decision he ever made,which was to get that Corporal transferred to a combat unit in the Pacific.

Hitler had experienced personal combat. He had the German equivalent of a medal of honor for it

Once France fell, the leader of Free France, General de Gaulle, had experienced a great deal of combat, been grievously wounded multiple times in WWI.

I forgot about Hitler being a corporal in WW-1,but IIRC,his award was closer to being a bronze star than a Medal of Honor. Technically,he wasn't even a combat troop. He was a foot messenger that carried messages from one outpost to another. IIRC,he got wounded and got a wound badge and the rough equivalent of a Bronze Star.

Once France fell, the leader of Free France, General de Gaulle, had experienced a great deal of combat, been grievously wounded multiple times in WWI.

I seriously doubt that. I think he was John Kerry before John Kerry was born in America. He damn sure never took any risks during WW-2,and Patton considered him to be a coward.

BTW,Churchill had been an officer during the Boer War,and lead some attacks. He was even captured at one point and made a POW,but escaped from the POW camp.