‘Some of us are beginning to wonder whether the invasion will ever come off.’
HOPKINS
AT 9.30 P. M. ON THURSDAY, 11 November 1943, Roosevelt was driven from the White House to repeat the vanishing trick he had employed to get to Placentia Bay twenty-seven months earlier. An hour after leaving Washington, he arrived at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia. There he boarded the presidential yacht, Potomac, which sailed for five hours to reach Cherry Point in North Carolina. As dawn came up, the bulk of a 58,000-ton battleship, the Iowa, could be glimpsed five miles out to sea. At 9 a. m., Roosevelt was wheeled up a special gangway on to the warship, where the three Chiefs of Staff were waiting.1
Though the Iowa was ready to sail at 10.20 that night, the President observed an old maritime superstition against setting off on a Friday. So the voyage began at six minutes after midnight. Three destroyers acted as escorts; two carriers provided air cover.
Roosevelt had turned down a request from his wife to join him. Hull was also left behind. No journalists had observed the transfer to the battleship. As far as America knew, its President was still on the yacht, taking a relaxing sea cruise.
Enjoying the fine, if cold, weather, Roosevelt changed into an old pair of trousers and a fishing shirt. At a meeting with the military men, he drew three lines on a National Geographic map of Germany to mark
Where each of the Allies would have its occupation zone. He predicted that Churchill would try to get America to take the southern area, landlocked and dependent for communications on routes through France. But he said he would insist on a zone in the north-west, including the ports of Hamburg and Bremen. Otherwise, the British would ‘undercut every move the US made’. Quite what he meant was not plain, but it denoted a suspiciousness Marshall felt he had to rebut.
Roosevelt also remarked that ‘the United States should have Berlin’. Its forces must win what he forecast would be a race with the Red Army for the German capital. At which, Hopkins chipped in to suggest putting two airborne divisions on stand-by to drop into the city ‘two hours after the collapse of Germany’. American occupation forces in Europe would number around a million men, the President went on. How long would they stay, Marshall asked. ‘For at least one year,’ was the reply. ‘Maybe two.’
On the second day of the voyage, a cry of ‘Torpedo defence!’ rang out as Roosevelt sat on deck in clear weather watching an anti-aircraft gunnery practice, cotton wool stuffed into his ears. One of the accompanying destroyers, the William D. Porter, had been using the battleship as an aiming point, and had released a torpedo by mistake. ‘It’s the real thing! ’ an officer shouted. Secret agents prepared to lift the President into a lifeboat. Did he want to go inside? Hopkins shouted. Roosevelt told his valet: ‘Take me over to the starboard rail. I want to watch the torpedo.’ A shockwave from an underwater explosion hit the hull. It did no damage, but Admiral King ordered the sacking of the destroyer captain. Though Roosevelt countermanded this, Hopkins noted, ‘I doubt that the Navy will ever hear the last of it.’2
* * * *
As the Iowa headed into the Atlantic, Churchill took the train to Plymouth to board the 36,500-ton battlecruiser, HMS Renown, for a five-day voyage to Malta. With him were Ismay, Winant, Moran and Cunningham, the First Sea Lord. As aide-de-camp, he took his daughter, Sarah, who was in the women’s air force; a dancer, she had appeared in West End revues and would make the film Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire. At twenty-two, she had married an Austrian-born actor and entertainer, Vic Oliver, eighteen years her senior, whom Churchill found ‘common as dirt’ and from whom she had split by this time.3
The British leader had a heavy cold and sore throat, and was suffering from the after-effects of cholera and typhoid inoculations. He was, his doctor noted, ‘in the doldrums’. His wife wrote urging him not to get angry at the summits, adding: ‘I often think of your saying, that the only worse things than Allies is not having Allies.’4
As was his habit, Churchill used the long sea voyage to draw up a lengthy note to present to Roosevelt and the American Chiefs to reinforce his strategic arguments. In his memoirs, the text begins by extolling the alliance as exhibiting ‘harmony and mutual comprehension’ unique in history, though ‘certain divergence of views, of emphasis rather than principle, have opened between the British and American Staffs’. He argued for a fresh push in Italy, and an offensive to the east Mediterranean to take islands in the Aegean Sea. Problems in Italy he attributed to the movement of forces to England for Overlord. ‘In the Mediterranean alone are we in contact with the enemy and able to bring superior numbers to bear upon him now,’ he added. ‘It is certainly an odd way of helping the Russians, to slow down the fight in the only theatre where anything can be done for some months.’5
In fact, as the historian David Reynolds shows in his analysis of Churchill’s memoirs, the version of this note published in 1952 was edited to rebut American accounts which depicted the Prime Minister as ready to renege on the commitment to Overlord. The full version made plain his priorities:
(a) Stop all further movement of British troops and British and United States landing craft from the Mediterranean.
(b) Use all possible energy to take Rome.
(c) Bring Turkey into the war...Meanwhile prepare an expedition to take Rhodes before the end of January.
(d) Seize a port or ports and establish a bridgehead on the Dalmatian coast, and carry a regular flow of airborne supplies to the Partisans. Use the British 1st Airborne Division and all the Commandos available in the Mediterranean... to aid and animate the resistance in Yugoslavia and Albania and also capture islands like Corfu and Kefalonia.
Only then did he add ‘(e) Continue and build up Overlord without prejudice to the above.’
Stopping over in Malta, where he was kept awake by street noise and the mooing of cows, Churchill, according to Brooke, launched ‘a long tirade on the evils of the Americans’. If they would not provide more support for Mediterranean operations, he would threaten to withdraw British forces from Overlord. If Washington threatened to shift forces to the Pacific, he would tell them to go ahead. His vehemence was such that the CIGS found himself in the unusual position of siding, in his mind, with the Americans against the Prime Minister.6
* * * *
Stalin was still in the Kremlin. On 9 November, he had received a message from Roosevelt dated the previous day saying he had cleared away difficulties in going to Teheran. Churchill only learned this after Harriman informed Clark Kerr. He sought to attribute this snub to ‘a most unfortunate misunderstanding’. ‘I rather wish you had been able to let me know direct,’ he added in a message to Washington.7
Stalin, too, showed a preference for bilateral communication that left out Churchill, who learned from Roosevelt that the Georgian had agreed to go to Teheran. A cable from the Kremlin arrived two days later. Typically, Roosevelt used a light form of words in passing on the dictator’s decision - ‘Thus endeth a very difficult situation, and I think we can be happy’. That was hardly a sentiment the Prime Minister could share given the way he had been treated by the other Allies. He could no longer harbour any illusions about his place in the relationship between the Big Two.
‘I have held all along - as I know you have - that it would be a terrible mistake if UJ [Uncle Joe] thought we had ganged up on him on military action,’ Roosevelt cabled him in answer to a suggestion of preliminary bilateral meetings. Relations with Moscow were, the President added, of ‘paramount importance’ - Soviet suspicions were shown when Molotov asked Harriman if his closeness to the British was based on a secret treaty. Roosevelt had been told of remarks in July by the Soviet ambassador to Mexico that Stalin regarded Churchill as irrationally anti-Soviet, and feared that a Big Three summit would be an Anglo-American stitch-up. The pro-Soviet current in Washington was so strong that the head of the State Department’s Russian section, Loy Henderson, resigned in frustration at the way his realistic assessments were ignored as a division opened up in the foreign service between those who recognised the nature of Stalin’s regime and those who went along with Roosevelt and Hopkins in preferring to keep quiet about the purges and gulags.
Roosevelt gave Churchill a general assurance about holding ‘many meetings’ before Teheran. What he actually did was to invite Molotov and a Red Army representative to join them in Cairo. This, he wrote to the Prime Minister, meant that ‘they will not feel that they are being given the “runaround”. They will have no staff and no planners. Let us take them in on the high spots.’
Churchill objected, and wrote that a Soviet general would have no authority, and ‘simply bay for an earlier second front and block all other discussions’. ‘Considering they tell us nothing of their own movements,’ he went on, ‘I do not think we should open the door to them as it would probably mean they would want to have observers at all future meetings and all discussions between us would be paralysed.’ Instead, he stressed the ‘fundamental and vital’ rights of the British and Americans to hold bilateral meetings given the nature of the ‘very great operation’ planned for 1944 which would involve no Russian troops. Invoking ‘the intimacy and friendship which has been established between us and our High Staffs’ and voicing the fears in his mind, he added: ‘If that was broken, I should despair of the immediate future.’
Desperate to get time alone with Roosevelt, Churchill suggested a variety of places and dates where they might meet bilaterally. He got nowhere. Instead, Roosevelt gave Chiang Kai-shek the dates of 20 to 25 November to be in Cairo - the full length of the conference. Nor did he hurry to get to Egypt, stopping to visit troops in North Africa on his way.
But his plans to bring the Russians into the tent were aborted when Churchill revealed to Stalin that Chiang would be at Cairo; Roosevelt had not mentioned this to the Kremlin. Whether the Prime Minister calculated on the result of this revelation is not clear, but he must have had a good idea of the reaction. Stalin replied that he was ill, so Molotov had to stay in Moscow to deal with everyday matters. In a subsequent message to Roosevelt, he dropped the mention of his health, simply saying that the Foreign Minister could not go to Cairo ‘due to some circumstances, which are of a serious character’. The ‘circumstances’ were that he was still anxious not to provoke Japan by meeting Chiang, and did not regard China as fit to attend a great power meeting. In a message to London, he underlined the second point by saying that the Teheran summit would consist only of the Big Three, and ‘the participation of any other countries must be absolutely excluded.’ ‘I understand your position,’ Churchill replied, ‘and I’m in full accord with your wishes.’
There were other sources of Anglo-American tension as the summit approached. Roosevelt expressed concern at ‘chaotic conditions developing in the Balkans’ where, he noted, anti-German guerrillas appeared to be fighting each other, not the enemy. The one man who could bring them together, the President said, was the US secret operations chief, William Donovan. This could only irritate Churchill given his personal interest in the area, and the British responsibility there.
France also came up again. The Free French had annoyed the British by unilateral arrests of members of the government in Lebanon, which Churchill reversed. He again suggested withdrawing support from de Gaulle, but was turned down by the War Cabinet. Meanwhile, Roosevelt gave Vyshinsky, the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister, who called on him on his way to join the Mediterranean council in Algiers, a lengthy explanation of why he had no confidence in de Gaulle.8
* * * *
On 21 November, Churchill flew to Cairo where he moved into a luxurious villa in the Mena Hotel enclave outside the city, which was somewhat spoiled by the large number of insects and the smell of burning camel dung used for fuel. Anti-aircraft batteries and searchlights had been set up, and large amounts of food and drink were brought in, including 22,000 pounds of meat, 78,000 eggs and 360 bottles of whisky, as well as half-a-million cigarettes and 1,500 cigars. The weather was pleasantly warm during the day, and cool at night.9
The following morning, Churchill went back to the airstrip to welcome Roosevelt, who had travelled via Tunis where he had had talks with Eisenhower. The President flew in an adapted C-54 aircraft known as the ‘Sacred Cow’ fitted with a stateroom measuring twelve feet by seven and a half. In the centre was a conference table bearing an inlaid presidential seal. An elevator had been installed for the President’s wheelchair, and impediments to his movement round the aircraft had been removed. With Admiral Leahy and Hopkins, Roosevelt settled into the ambassador’s villa, some three miles from Churchill. He had immediate legislative business to deal with, signing twenty-seven congressional bills, and vetoing two others.
To save him from having to move around, it was agreed that the main meetings of the summit would be held in his villa. Chiang Kai-shek, who had been the first to arrive, accompanied by his wife and three generals, was lodged conveniently close by.
As he might have feared, Churchill had few opportunities to talk to the President alone. ‘Lengthy, complicated and minor’ Chinese matters ‘occupied first instead of last place,’ he complained in his memoirs. Chiang had six meetings with Roosevelt at which the Chinese leader refused to commit himself, and constantly changed his mind. The President also busied himself seeing the Kings of Greece and Yugoslavia, high Egyptian officials, the US ambassador to Turkey and commanders in the Middle East. On two nights, he dined with close aides and played cards afterwards.10
The British got the Americans to agree to a unified command in the Mediterranean, and headed off the appointment of a single commander for both Overlord and the Mediterranean. Otherwise, Churchill and his delegation suffered a series of rebuffs that led him to categorise Roosevelt to Eden as ‘a charming country gentleman’ who lacked businesslike methods. As a result, he added, he had to play the role of a courtier and seize opportunities as they arose, though he had to go through another anti-imperial discourse from the President who told him: ‘Winston, you have four hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood and you just don’t understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it. A new period has opened in the world’s history and you will have to adjust yourself to it.’
Eden was disconcerted, too, when the Americans advised him not to make too much of the London-based European Commission, which he had brought into being. The Cairo summit, he would recall, was among the most difficult he had attended - ‘there was nothing for it but to wait and hold up our end as best we could’. Nor were matters improved when Cadogan discovered that Hopkins had handed the Chinese a draft of the communique, without having consulted the British on the wording. This obliged the Foreign Office official to spend time arguing for changes.
It was as if the Americans were out to put their ally in its place, with the Army Chief of Staff playing a key role. Roosevelt remarked to his son, Elliott, that Marshall was being ‘very patient, very polite, and very firm’ in pressing ‘the strategy of hitting Hitler an uppercut right on the point of the jaw...General George is still the best man at the conference table.’11
The General stood firm when Churchill pressed his pet plan to attack Rhodes and other Aegean islands. ‘All the British were against me,’ the American recalled. ‘It got hotter and hotter.’
Clutching the lapels of his jacket, Churchill positioned himself in front of the Chief of Staff.
‘His Majesty’s Government can’t have its troops staying idle,’ he thundered. ‘Muskets must flame.’
‘God forbid if I should try to dictate,’ Marshall shot back. ‘But not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned beach!’
Churchill calmed down, but the impression he was creating was counter-productive. Moran found Hopkins ‘full of sneers and jibes’ about the way the British leader went on about ‘his bloody Italian war’. ‘Some of us are beginning to wonder whether the invasion will ever come off,’ the aide snarled. ‘You’re not going to tell me that Winston has cold feet.’ In his diary that night, the doctor wrote: ‘What I find so shocking is that to the Americans, the P. M. is the villain of the piece; they are far more sceptical of him than they are of Stalin.’12
The Anglo-American row was not simply a matter of Overlord versus Italy. Churchill’s plans for the Aegean introduced a new element in the equation. The US chiefs wanted a two-pronged offensive in Burma - on land by American-trained Chinese troops crossing the border from Yunnan and by water over the Andaman Sea. Chiang insisted that ‘Burma is the key to the whole campaign in Asia’. But, it would be impossible to stage all four operations, the troop build-up for Overlord was already falling well short of targets. So, the Combined Chiefs had what Brooke described as a ‘father and mother of a row’. As at Quebec, junior officers were told to leave the room.13
‘Brooke got nasty and King got good and sour,’ Stilwell noted in his diary. ‘King almost climbed over the table at Brooke. God he was mad. I wish he had socked him.’
Marshall objected that a million tons of supplies stockpiled in Britain would go to waste if the Overlord timing was not respected. Then, once again, he raised the threat of switching efforts to the Pacific. Brooke pointed out that dropping the Burma project would enable ‘the full weight of our resources to bear on Germany’ - just the argument employed so often by the Americans against the British Mediterranean strategy. What neither general knew was that Roosevelt had given the Chinese a promise to land in Burma.
Chiang and his wife called on Roosevelt on the afternoon of his arrival, returning for a second conversation that night. Churchill learned of the first meeting when he sent his private detective round with an invitation to the President to dine with him. Walter Thompson returned to say he had not been able to deliver the missive because the President was meeting the Chiangs. ‘He cannot do this to me,’ Churchill complained. ‘He cannot do this to me.’
Still, he was impressed by the Generalissimo’s ‘calm, reserved and efficient personality’ - a highly misleading verdict on a leader who flew into rages and presided over a regime marked by corrupt incompetence. Brooke found the fifty-six-year-old Chinese leader ‘a cross between a pine marten and a ferret. Evidently with no grasp of war in its larger aspect and determined to get the best of the bargain... a shrewd but small man...very successful at leading the Americans down the garden path.’14
Madame Chiang, also known by her maiden name of Soong Meiling, contributed an unusual note to the proceedings. The forty-six-year-old American-educated daughter of one of Shanghai’s richest families used her perfect English to break into the discussions, repeatedly correcting the interpreters, and speaking on the side to the Generalissimo, chain-smoking all the while. Brooke felt that she was ‘a study in herself, a queer character in which sex and politics seemed to predominate, both being used indiscriminately, individually or unitedly to achieve her ends’. When the three leaders posed for group photographs, she joined them.
Receiving her at his villa on his first day in Cairo, Churchill said he supposed she regarded him as a scoundrel and imperialist out to grab more colonies.
‘Why are you so sure what I think of you?’ she replied evenly. Wearing a white jacket with a spray of rubies, and jade and pearl earrings, she handed him a gift of a long Ming-era scroll. Churchill found her ‘most remarkable and charming’, and wrote to his wife that he took back anything bad he had said.
At the first full session of the summit, Madame (never Mrs) Chiang appeared in a black slit satin dress, with a yellow chrysanthemum pattern, and a neat black jacket, big black tulle bows at the back of her head, hat and black veil, light stockings and black shoes with large brass nails. At one point, she shifted position, showing what Brooke called ‘one of the most shapely of legs’ through the slit in her dress. ‘This caused a rustle among those attending the conference and I even thought I heard a suppressed neigh coming from a group of some of the younger members,’ the CIGS added.
On the night of 23 November, Roosevelt invited the Chiangs to dinner. The Chinese account recorded the following highlights of the exchanges, as interpreted by Madame Chiang. Roosevelt opened by saying that China should be an equal member of the Big Four. This was very much what Chiang wanted to hear, but he turned down a suggestion that his country should play a leading role in the occupation of Japan, though he wanted its industrial plant, merchant ships, trains and rolling stock to be transferred to China, with which the President was in accord.
During the three-hour conversation, it was agreed that Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores Islands would be returned to China. The Ryukyu Islands would be split with the Soviet Union. Chiang requested Lend-Lease aid for 90 divisions, a $1 billion loan and payment of $100 million in gold for labour to build the airbase in Sichuan province from which the US air force would bomb Japan. In his diary, Stilwell noted that the Nationalist leader also asked for 600 planes, and Roosevelt promised him 12,000 tons of supplies each month over the ‘Hump’ route across the Himalayas. In a subsequent conversation with Hopkins, Chiang made clear that China would hold on to Tibet and did not want Moscow to take over Outer Mongolia - the aide scrawled himself a note that they were ‘afraid of [the] British’.
Roosevelt pledged an amphibious operation against Burma. But he held back from asking why 200,000 Nationalist troops were encircling the Communists in northern China rather than fighting the Japanese, or why, despite the huge size of his army, Chiang was launching so few offensives. Nor did he enquire why the Nationalists were asking for $1 billion when they still had nearly $500 million in American aid funds in bank accounts in America.
Chiang had every reason to feel content when he and his wife left Roosevelt’s villa at 11 p. m. He had been accorded recognition as one of the Big Four and had obtained promises of substantial territorial gains. Roosevelt said he favoured the return of Hong Kong to China - Chiang responded that he would make it a free port. He also got the Americans to agree to send an undercover mission to work with his secret police, nominally to fight the Japanese but, as anybody without rose-coloured spectacles could have foreseen, to persecute domestic critics. The headquarters of this joint operation outside Chungking became notorious
For torture and barbarous conditions.
When the matter of democracy arose at a subsequent meeting with Roosevelt, Madame Chiang deflected the conversation by expounding on what was being done for education in China, a highly dubious proposition. A report from the US Embassy shortly afterwards noted that the Nationalists seemed to have no intention of introducing representative government, and that the trend appeared to point in the opposite direction. Still, Roosevelt felt able to cable Hull that he ‘had a very satisfactory conference with Chiang Kai-shek and liked him’.
The Chiefs of Staff got a more realistic impression of the Chinese. The three generals Chiang brought with him were anything but forthcoming, although they felt a need to assure the Americans that aid would be used for military purposes rather than being hoarded or sold. When presented with the plan for Burma, they remained silent. Then their spokesman stood up to say: ‘We wish to listen to your deliberations.’ After another silence, Brooke explained that the Western Allies had completed their planning. It was for the Chinese to express their views. After more whispering, the spokesman rose to repeat: ‘We wish to listen to your deliberations.’15
The CIGS felt that everyone in the room was looking at him with suppressed amusement as they waited to see how he would handle this. Rising, he suggested that the Chinese take twenty-four hours to study the proposals. ‘Before we had time to realise it they had all slipped out through the door and disappeared,’ he recollected.
Turning to Marshall, he said: ‘That was a ghastly waste of time!’
‘You’re telling me!’ his counterpart replied.
When the Chinese returned the next day, one of their queries involved the number of British troops to be involved in Burma. Stilwell noted with satisfaction that this question ‘got under their [British] skin’. But, when the Chinese spoke of their right to aid, Marshall called them sharply to account. ‘Now let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘You are talking about your “rights” in this matter. I thought these were American planes, and American personnel, and American material. I don’t understand what you mean by saying that we can or can’t do thus and so.’
For all his frustrations, Churchill savoured two occasions on which the old intimacy with the President came back to life. On the first full day of the conference, 23 November, he asked his daughter to arrange for a car to take the two leaders to the Pyramids. When he went to tell Roosevelt, the President leaned forward on the arms of his chair as if about to rise to his feet. Then he sank back. It was, Sarah Churchill wrote to her mother, as if Churchill was able to make him feel for a moment that he was able to walk.16
‘We’ll wait for you in the car,’ Churchill said, going out with Sarah. ‘I love that man,’ he told his daughter in the sunshine, tears in his eyes. Whatever their differences on strategy, the Empire or de Gaulle, he would not put the relationship at risk. Nor would he imperil the Anglo-American alliance. His problem was that Roosevelt knew this, and could take the British leader for granted while he cast his line in Stalin’s direction.
Reaching the Pyramids at sunset, Churchill, in a three-piece cream suit, dark bow-tie and straw hat with a broad black band, climbed from the car and stood looking at the scene with one foot on the running board, as Roosevelt peered from inside. A guide recounted the history of the monuments as dusk fell.
Two days later, Roosevelt threw a giving Day dinner to which he invited Churchill and Sarah, but not the Chiangs. His son, Elliott, and his son-in-law, John Boettinger, attended, as did Hopkins and his serviceman son, Robert. After cocktails, twenty people sat down at table. Wearing a dinner jacket in contrast to Churchill’s blue siren suit, Roosevelt carved two large birds. Propped up in his chair, he placed the meat on plates, which were passed round - some of the guests had finished eating before the President finished carving, but he reserved just enough to make sure he had some for himself. There was champagne, and Hopkins got an American military band to play. Churchill requested ‘Ol’ Man River’ and ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny”. Roosevelt responded with a request for ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. When the orchestra went into the ‘Marine Hymn’, Roosevelt sang along and Churchill jumped to his feet flashing a V-sign.
Towards the end of the meal, the American leader lifted his glass for a toast which concluded ‘I, personally am delighted to be sharing this giving dinner with Great Britain’s Prime Minister.’ As Churchill rose to respond, Roosevelt silenced him by adding: ‘Large families are usually more united than small ones...And so, this year, with the peoples
Of the United Kingdom in our family, we are a large family and more united than ever before. I propose a toast for this unity, and may it long continue!’ Churchill recalled that he had ‘never seen the President more gay’.
After the meal, everybody went into the drawing room, where records were played. As the only woman present - and an accomplished dancer - Sarah Churchill was in great demand. Churchill waltzed with the presidential appointments secretary, ‘Pa’ Watson, watched with delight from the sofa by Roosevelt who, according to one observer, laughed enough ‘to wake the Pharaohs’.
It was an evening during which, as Churchill put it, ‘we cast care aside’. But he knew that, trying as the seventh Anglo-American summit had been, an even greater test lay immediately ahead. The next evening, the last at Cairo, Roosevelt chose to dine with his doctor, Watson, and two other aides before going to bed at 10 p. m., maintaining his arm’s-length attitude to alliance business rather than having a last discussion with the Prime Minister before they flew to meet Stalin. ‘Sure we are preparing for a battle in Teheran,’ Hopkins told Churchill’s doctor. ‘You will find us lining up with the Russians.’17
World History
