CHAPTER 20
The fact that American and British geopolitical interests were often divergent did, not greatly impinge on the conduct of the war at the practical level. There were moments of cultural abrasion and many illustrations of George Bernard Shaw's aphorism about Britain and America being 'two countries divided by a common language'. However, US Lieutenant General Lucian Truscott summed it up well: 'British and American soldiers invariably got on well together, and it was only among the higher echelons that friction developed between the Allies. All in all, British and Americans held each other in mutual respect; they were worthy Allies who fought well together.' At a time when more Britons than ever before are indulging in the anti-Americanism that has become such a feature of politics in Europe, it is perhaps as well to remember that not long ago one of the many Commonwealth war cemeteries in France was vandalised by someone who left a message that the British should take away their garbage. In international relations, as Ambrose Bierce put it, to do a favour is often to make an enemy because the beneficiaries, anxious to be relieved of the burden of gratitude, will submit the motives of the benefactors to forensic examination in an effort to prove that they were not altruistic. Because my words of introduction to the last chapter could be read in that light, it is appropriate to follow them with some of the material available inThe World at War transcripts – little of which reached the broadcast programmes – that reminds us of the instinctive affinity that existed between Americans and British, and the enormous patience each had at times to exercise with the other in the complex joint pursuit of their common cause. At the same time the manner in which institutional concerns dictated US strategy, in particular with regard to the invasion of Europe, and the American philosophy of overwhelming rather than solving problems, are themes not without resonance today.
ANTHONY EDEN
British Foreign Secretary
There was of course the big problem of Anglo-American relations, where Churchill played this very key part throughout. It's been said, and perhaps there's some truth in it, that he was perhaps over-anxious to keep in step with FDR, on the other hand a little incident happened one evening which illustrated Winston's mind in that respect. For some reason he wanted to call a meeting of ministers on the afternoon of Christmas Eve in 1942, and I protested vehemently so he moved it to the morning. After the meeting Attlee and I had luncheon with him alone. We were talking about the war and Winston said this to us: 'I want you to understand the key importance of FDR. After all, if I was eliminated or even if all three of us were eliminated, there would still be responsible men who would carry on the battle and see us through to victory. But in the United States, if anything happened to FDR where is the man who could carry on as things are today?' And that, I have no doubt, was in Winston's mind all through, particularly in view of the system in the United States where the Vice President was not in the picture and there was no obvious successor. And that explains a large part of it. On the whole our relations were good, despite all the many difficulties. On the military side, of course, the man who contributed enormously to this was Sir John Dill, our military representative in Washington, and his relations with General Marshall. When Dill died America paid this unique compliment in their whole history, of asking that he should be buried in Arlington cemetery with the American war heroes.
DR STEPHEN AMBROSE
American historian
The British Empire and the greatness of the British as a nation was dependent upon her physical separation from the continent and on the very wise British foreign policy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, of which the most outstanding part was that the British paid others to do the fighting for them. You see this most clearly in the Napoleonic Wars – the British Treasury is used to support the Prussian armies and to support the Russians to fight against Napoleon. So Britain emerges from the Napoleonic Wars in a very strong position thanks to the geographical accident that there is an English Channel. In the twentieth century, technology overcame the Channel and Britain is now part of Europe and very much involved in Europe's wars. And the United States becomes the offshore island and in World War Two was very wise indeed – what we did was pay the Europeans to do our fighting for us.
ANTHONY EDEN
I used to reflect sometimes in my more depressed moments that whereas the Russians could be amoral – for instance in their attitude towards the Poles and some of their neighbours – so our American friends could be exaggeratedly demoral, at least where American interests were not directly concerned, and we were somewhere between the two. And one of our constant troubles and differences was of course about Free French leader de Gaulle.
AMBASSADOR W AVERELL HARRIMAN
President Roosevelt's Special Envoy to Europe
In meeting with Stalin, Churchill was concerned about Poland. Poland and Eastern European countries had governments in exile and hospitality with the British in London. Roosevelt was interested in the longer term, wanted to get the United Nations started, and he realised President Woodrow Wilson had made a mistake waiting until after the First World War to propose the League of Nations. He wanted to get the Americans committed during the war and he also wanted to get Stalin committed. But Roosevelt accepted Churchill's objectives and Churchill accepted Roosevelt's objectives. Both men had one primary objective and that was to keep the Russians in the war, and to get the Russians to play the maximum level they could. Roosevelt, I think before we got in the war, hoped that we could limit our action as much as possible to Naval and Air Force participation. He didn't want to have American boys back in trench warfare which he'd known so well in World War One.
ANTHONY EDEN
De Gaulle and the future of France was one of the most constant sources of argument between us and our American allies. My view was that de Gaulle was the symbol of French resistance and that as such he must be, as soon as was possible, given the authority we would have given to our French ally, and it was for the French people to deal with him afterwards, if he had to be dealt with, and not for us. However, the Americans – some of it was personal, FDR certainly didn't like de Gaulle – I thought the Americans were unfair to him and unfair to the French, and perhaps not over-eager to see France restored to a position of importance after the war. At any rate that was our chief difficulty and Winston, who could himself be impatient with de Gaulle, often had a difficult position to argue with Washington.
PROFESSOR VANNEVAR BUSH
Chairman of the US National Defense Research Committee
The White House became the place in which all orders on every subject emerged, and it became the centre of an enormous structure fighting a war. The way in which that happened in this country was extraordinary. The President was a far more powerful man in time of war in many ways than even the Prime Minister – his cabinet has no power, he's simply appointing his representatives, his power becomes almost absolute in time of war and no one's questioning it. I think Roosevelt used his power with great discretion. I don't think he ever interfered improperly with his military men – they made mistakes, but he kept the power. The military part of the Allies worked together with such mutual confidence and such integration of efforts in that war, and that was centred on the Combined Chiefs of Staff. It wasn't a piece of decoration, that's where the great decisions were made and that operated with great skill. I think Sir John Dill deserves the credit for a good part of that movement.
ANTHONY EDEN
For us it seemed a very strange system. FDR of course was the President, the supreme controller of foreign policy and more, in a sense, than the Prime Minister is here. And under him was his Secretary of State, Hull – a very revered figure – and Sumner Wells, the Under-Secretary. Wells was very close to Roosevelt and Roosevelt used to act a lot through Wells. And then there was a curious situation that Hull and Wells were hardly on speaking terms. I remember once when I was on official visit to Washington during the war, and Hull was giving me a farewell dinner. I'd been staying at the White House and I went round the State Department to say goodbye to people I'd been working with, said goodbye to Wells and said casually, 'Of course I'll see you tonight at dinner,' and he flushed up and said, 'I haven't been asked.'
AMBASSADOR HARRIMAN
Churchill and Roosevelt's first wartime meeting was immediately after Pearl Harbor. Churchill came to Washington with his Chiefs and Beaverbrook was there too, and that started this wartime relationship. I think no two heads of government could ever work as closely together. It was interesting – there were different personalities and different procedures. Chief Presidential Adviser Harry Hopkins played an extraordinarily important role in interpreting one to the other and whenever there were rough edges, smoothing them out. I was involved to some extent because I was in London, Hopkins in Washington, he saw all my telegrams and we worked closely together. But Roosevelt had his problems. We were in the first meeting with Beaverbrook to get our military and industrialists to raise their sights; he was quite anxious that we should have rapid mobilisation, he wanted to have minimum of human life and maximum use of munitions, so he got Beaverbrook to estimate how rapidly we could mobilise. It was agreed that Britain had taken too long, doing it step by step. Beaverbrook came out with this idea that we ought to get a hundred thousand aeroplanes, fifty thousand tanks and as many guns, and Roosevelt took that and announced it without consulting his Chiefs. They were furious, couldn't be done, but Roosevelt had a habit of doing things, establishing a principle without consultation, then just sitting there. There wasn't anything they could do and they had to come through with it. They did, with some pain and possibly some loss; at the same time it was achieved. The Americans all thought Beaverbrook had just pulled the idea out of his head. He didn't actually, he had some very skilful men who analysed the two countries and actually they were close to being right.
REAR ADMIRAL LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN
British Chief of Combined Operations
In June 1942 Churchill asked me to see Roosevelt and then the US Chiefs of Staff to explain our difficulties, which were not a lack of desire but a lack of physical capability to do a landing. The Americans had no special combined-operations organisation, had nobody with any specialised knowledge, and none with any experience. They knew that I certainly wouldn't do anything to discourage them. I first talked to Roosevelt with Harry Hopkins. Roosevelt said to me, 'My overriding need is to find a way to deploy the hundreds of thousands of young Americans that have now been trained in the Army to go and fight, and I'd like to do it this year.' I said, 'I don't think that's on.' He said, 'When I spoke to Winston we had a general agreement that there would be an operation in readiness, a sort of sacrifice operation if the Russians fared very badly. Have you looked into that?' I said, 'I certainly have and I can tell you right away it isn't on. The Germans have got twenty-five divisions and with the number of landing craft I've got now I couldn't put more than just over four thousand troops in the first flight. I couldn't get more than perhaps six divisions ashore with great luck and they'd make no difference at all. The Germans would not have to withdraw one division in Russia to compete with that. But if we fail, as I'm afraid we should, they then would have all those divisions ready to go against Russia, and they'd be much worse off Well, this discussion went on for a long while. He didn't take that lightly, it took an hour or two to convince him, then he said, 'All right: suppose the German morale cracks, what have you got ready?' I said, 'We have an operation called Sledgehammer now being planned and with two months' notice we could send in troops, because of course then it would be on the assumption that Germans would not be resisting us in the same way. But that's not anything to rely on.' 'No,' he said, 'I know it isn't. My nightmare would be if 1 was to have a million American soldiers sitting in England, Russia collapses and there'd be no means of getting ashore.'
ANTHONY EDEN
The Americans were very much dedicated to the concept of attack across the Channel, and they had given some undertakings to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov when he was in Washington going far beyond what we could do, and we were embarrassed when Molotov got back and showed us what he's been told. We said it wasn't possible. But I think the Americans got to understand that an early cross-Channel attack was just not on. And if we were going to do something soon as a joint effort on land, the only place we could do it was North Africa. So the Americans came to the same conclusion and there were things that attracted them about North African landings. They could make landings from the Atlantic, which the Americans always liked to do, rather than within the Mediterranean, which was mainly our responsibility. They were certainly wholehearted once they started with it and perhaps had accepted that this meant a delay in crossing the Channel.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL ALBERT WEDERMEYER
Author of the US Army's 'Victory Program'
At the beginning of the war the British strategy was essentially defensive, providing for limited air and naval operations and for an economic blockade of Europe. Aware of their limited means at that time they could not conceive of a major operation of the magnitude of Normandy unless and until the military and economic power of Germany had been greatly reduced. Even after the United States entered the war in 1941, the British still retained the general concept of peripheral operations. For example, they planned for the employment of Americans in the attacks against Europe from the south, the British from the north and the Russians from the east. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall was determined to concentrate American offensive power into the British Isles, which after careful analysis he established as the logical place from which to conduct an invasion. Some planners recommended an attempt to establish a lodgement on the Continent in 1942, however, this seemed premature prior to appropriate preparations for such a big operation. General Marshall, as well as his staff, of which I was one, insisted that the planning and concentration continued to ensure maximum strength for the decisive invasion in 1943. So when these military considerations were out of the way along came the politicians, Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, who were determined to initiate operations in considerable force [Operation Torch in North Africa] as soon as possible. And why? Well, from the political viewpoint they recognised that they could not justify to their people and to the Russians any extended delay in sending strong military power against the enemy.
JOHN McCLOY
US Assistant Secretary of War
There were times when threats were made. I think it was probably only once or twice. I recall General Marshall made a threat, 'Well, if you don't go along with us on our effort to get to grips with the main challenges in Europe we'll have no alternative but to move to the Pacific' That always put Mr Churchill's wind up and usually you got more support for another major effort. I think those were just intermittent flare-ups. Mr Churchill had a very real fear towards getting ashore prematurely on the European continent, he had very vivid memories of the sacrifice of a British generation in World War One – Passchendaele, Somme – they are always nightmares to him. His tendency was to try to avoid that or certainly not go ashore before we were ready for it. I think we probably could have delivered our strength a little earlier than we did on the main front. After all the passion that had been aroused after Pearl Harbor we just had to get ashore someplace and we had a tremendous urge to participate. In view of the British attitude that we were not prepared to go into the main theatre, we looked around for another spot to express our strength and it turned out to be Africa. We thought of it as being something of a diversion, but I think it did have an important effect and certainly it was timely. I think it would have been very awkward indeed if we hadn't gone at that point and thereby expressed ourselves, our strength, our energies.
ADMIRAL MOUNTBATTEN
I stayed in the White House with Roosevelt and we had a bout of long conversations before I saw the Chiefs of Staff. Bit awkward, but still I had to start with him. In the Pacific the American marines and the American aircraft carriers, as they built up, would probably be enough to carry on the war in the Pacific but he pointed out that Admiral King was asking for more and more resources to be drawn into the Pacific. I pointed out that surely the American Navy with the marines and their aircraft carriers could do all that was wanted provided they had enough resources, but I did go and see Admiral King privately afterwards to point out that he really must provide the sailors to man the landing craft in Europe. I said, 'I know you can't afford to give them from the regular Navy but the civilians are now joining. Instead of putting them in khaki as soldiers, put them in blue as sailors and they'll have the responsibility for getting our Army ashore' – and he liked that idea. That helped the whole thing to go through.
CAPTAIN GORONWY REES
British planning staff for D-Day
I think you can say that as far as the planning was concerned Normandy was an essentially British operation. Of course we had American officers with us and they worked very closely with us, but the original conception of the plan was a British one and the detailed planning of it was also, I would say, about ninety per cent British. But in the course of it one had to learn to work with the Americans and this was not an easy thing. Their methods of planning and their methods of conducting war are really terribly different from ours, and one had to learn an entirely different language in order to talk to them from the one used normally when speaking to British colleagues. They used an enormous amount of paper, they used three men where we would use one and they were, in strange ways, a very cumbersome military machine. You have to explain, everything has to be explained in detail, over and over and over again, and you can't simply take anything for granted with them. And this was quite a difficulty at first I think, but we all got to know each other in the end and then we got to speak each other's language.
MAJOR GENERAL MARK CLARK
Deputy Commander, Operation Torch, later Commander US Fifth Army in Italy
I had gone to England in 1942 with Ike. We were both major generals, he was in charge of planning in Washington and I had the training end of it, and General Marshall sent us over to England in the early spring of 1942 and that's when we were taken in tow by Mr Churchill. Pug Ismay and Dickie Mountbatten and all those fellows became fast friends of ours and mine; I admired them all. I didn't meet Alexander at that time but Mountbatten and Ismay were pretty well the right-hand men of the Prime Minister and they were the men we worked with. I thought they were fine, they helped us tremendously.
CAPTAIN REES
Well, there was this fundamental difference between the way we make war and the way the Americans make war. We were always conscious of how very small our resources were. We knew for instance that if we lost a division it would mean a disaster to us. Whereas the Americans were quite prepared to produce another division – there's an infinite number of divisions in the pipeline. And they regarded people as expendable in a way that we didn't, not only men but also material, because again our resources were very limited and we simply could not afford to waste things in the way that the Americans could. On the other hand they showed great advantages in the sense that the American's equipment produced material that was beyond our means and their engineering instruments could perform feats in a time and at a speed which we could never dream of.
MAJOR GENERAL KENNETH STRONG
General Eisenhower's Chief of Intelligence
I think the British were very slow to realise that the main effort for war in Europe lay with the Americans. I think the British press was probably slow as well. I think people forget the great weight of divisions and supplies and so on were American. This in many ways was a sad thing for the British and Eisenhower was well aware of this shift of emphasis. But he was very devoted to Churchill: he was a very great friend of our country and one of the greatest friends I think we could have had, and when it came to any sort of point where we could be given the benefit of the doubt he always favoured us on the whole.
WYNFORD VAUGH AN-THOMAS
BBC radio journalist
I arrived in Italy as General Montgomery left. That may be a coincidence. He was going to look after the Second Front and I was going to look after the Italian Front, and I was invited to have a briefing with him, along with other war correspondents, so he could just give us a little word of encouragement before he left. He came briskly out of his caravan, it was a damp blowy day and the rain was coming down. It was quite clear that we were going to be stuck in those mountains for a very long time and he said, 'One thing I'd like to say, I'm going to other duties at home, but I want you to remember the troops have got their tails well up.' The American behind me said, 'Excuse me, General – what's up?'
MAJOR GENERAL CLARK
The fellow that I did most of my business with during the war was Alexander. I called him Alex and he called me Wayne – my name is Mark Wayne Clark and Ike always called me Wayne, so all my friends over there called me Wayne. I liked Alex from the start. I found that he was capable, kind, knowledgeable and very fair. You could talk very frankly with Alex and he'd talk frankly to you and you'd come to a decision. We struck up a very great friendship and he had with him Brigadier General Lemnitzer, who I had taken over with me on my staff as my artillery officer, and we assigned him to John Harding, who was Alex's Chief of Staff, as a sort of American go-between so that if things started to go bad he could trot back and forth and straighten us out. So with Lemnitzer being the diplomat and the capable fellow that he is, things worked very smoothly.*49 All the time I served under Alexander, and that was not only when I was in the Fifteenth Army Group commanding the Fifth Army but later when Alexander moved up to theatre command and the British government saw fit to ask my government to let me command the Fifteenth Army Group, which was all British. So all the time Alex was my boss. I admired him deeply; I still do.
WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS
I remember a marvellous arrival of General Clark's Chief of Staff and he said, 'General Clark's got fifty-seven different bands and you're going to listen to every one of them.' And I said, 'What about this problem?' He said, 'Sir, in the American Army we don't solve our problems, we overwhelm them' and that's exactly what they did.
ANTHONY EDEN
I expect the Americans were suspicious of ulterior British motives; it would have been very curious if they hadn't been. I think mainly they were worried that we should drag them into what they call the Balkans, which in their language was quite a wide term, and certainly they were not in favour of what we should have liked to have done, which was the further advance up Italy and to have tried to get Vienna. They didn't want that, they wanted this concentration on France and they had their way. But that I think was their chief suspicion of us, and I suppose to some extent they thought we were always concerned for our own interests in different parts of the world, which no doubt was true. There's nothing very evil about that.
MAJOR GENERAL STRONG
Gradually, as the American resources grew, the number of divisions grew. In the end, they had something like four times as many divisions in the field as the British had. Then they got more and more influence. Whereas in North Africa they were extremely complimentary to Montgomery's Alamein operation, as they felt themselves stronger and stronger, and more competent, they became from time to time rather critical of the British. They were critical about the slow progress of the British in Sicily, Italy, and when it came to the beachhead landing in Normandy, which was directly conducted by Montgomery under Eisenhower, and he did a magnificent job there. Eisenhower once said to me, 'I don't think there's any other chap could have got us ashore like Montgomery did,' yet as time went on they became more critical and thought Montgomery was slow and hesitant. It's not absolutely true, but that's the impression they got. And therefore this element really enters into the feeling that perhaps Montgomery was not quite the man to carry it out even if it had been possible.
MAJOR GENERAL FRANCIS DE GUINGAND
Field Marshal Montgomery's Chief of Staff
I think if you compare the relationship between, say, politicians and generals in the Second World War with the First World War, and between generals, there's no comparison – it was marvellous in the Second World War. Look at Churchill, he kept virtually the same Chiefs of Staff the whole time. In the First World War they were appointed and displaced and there was a terrible lack of confidence between politicians and the Service Chiefs – and there was an awful lot of bickering and jealousies between the commanders themselves. I don't think that really existed in the Second World War. Monty was very good, it was his team, all the people who served under him knew exactly where they were and they never tried to bounce any of their colleagues at all. And until the Ardennes thing in 1944 the relationship between Monty and American generals was reasonably good.
MAJOR GENERAL RONALD BELCHEM
Twenty-First Army Group Staff
I remember very well a night that Eisenhower came to stay at Monty's headquarters while we were in Germany. After eating our 'K' rations, Ike was telling his amusing stories of his childhood in the United States and they were on completely good terms together. Professionally, obviously, there arose differences between them from time to time because, if you will allow a broad definition, Eisenhower was a political general whereas Montgomery was a cold, calculating, ruthless combat general. It's very seldom that a general is both of these categories at the same time – the combat man sweeps aside any factor other than those concerned or helping to win the war as quickly as possible with the minimum casualties. The political general has a rather different task. He's dealing, shall we say, with public opinion, he's dealing with Roosevelt, with Churchill, with de Gaulle and things of this kind. He's also concerned with holding together a team which inevitably includes a number of personalities who could be difficult. In this case he was concerned with Bradley, Patton, Montgomery, the air commanders and sometimes Bomber Harris. It's a different problem that he has and therefore he cannot always agree with the much more direct approach of the combat general. I think perhaps Eisenhower was sometimes too diplomatic with Montgomery, because whenever he was firmly of an opinion and said, 'Stop – there's no further argument about this,' Montgomery stopped and concurred because that was his professional training. Indeed he once put it in writing to Eisenhower – 'Once a decision is taken there's no more argument.'
MAJOR GENERAL STRONG
I was one day with Eisenhower in his caravan and there he'd been discussing this problem of the British leading the advance into Germany, and a telephone call came through from the Prime Minister and he answered it. Then he laid down the phone and said, 'Look here, this is a dilemma. I'm being urged to use the British in the front line as a spearhead, and here the Prime Minister telephones me and says to me for goodness sake we've had losses in North Africa and Italy, there's a great deal of war weariness home in England. Spare what you can, save what you can. This is a very difficult problem – how am I going to do one and at the same time save British lives?'
PROFESSOR BUSH
Between American and British scientists I don't think there ever was a war in history in which allies got along as well together as in this last one, and the relations between every part of the American and the British scientific effort was cordial. There remained disagreements at times, it wouldn't have been human if there hadn't been, but they were friendly disagreements and we worked together in great shape. I don't think there was any disagreement that hindered progress. At the beginning our relations with the military were rather distant. The military in both countries did not realise that the time had come for a great revolution in weapons and that they had to have particular interest in what the scientific fellows were doing. Later on it became close. When we first started all our men were introduced to the military's scientists, we did that throughout the war. Some of them were good, tough engineers, but they all had to be scientists and they had to accept them on faith. Towards the end of the war we had gotten to respect one another both ways and we could work in harmony and every group we had working on any subject, proximity fuses or radar, was made up of civilians and military, young military men particularly, who knew what was happening in the field and what was needed and what would work and what wouldn't, sat with the civilians and they worked together. And that happened on both sides of the Atlantic.