Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [148]
TEN
“Second Front Now!”
ON APRIL 3, 1942, Roosevelt dispatched to London Harry Hopkins and George Marshall, bearing a personal letter from himself to the prime minister. “Dear Winston,” this began, “What Harry and Geo Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and mind in it. Your people & mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, & these peoples are wise enough to see that the Russians are to-day killing more Germans & destroying more equipment than you & I put together. Even if full success is not attained, the big objective will be. Go to it!”
The mission of Hopkins and Marshall was to persuade the British to undertake an early landing in France. This was the chief of staff of the U.S. Army’s first encounter with Alan Brooke, and each man was wary of the other. They were a match in stubbornness, but little else. The Ulsterman was bemused when Marshall told him that he sometimes did not see Roosevelt for six weeks: “I was fortunate if I did not see Winston for 6 hours.”550 The British were offered two alternative U.S. plans. The first called for a 1943 invasion by thirty U.S. and eighteen British divisions, with the strategic objective of securing Antwerp. Marshall, acutely mindful of the urgency of the Russians’ plight, favoured the second and less ambitious option: an operation to be launched in September 1942 by mainly British forces, supported by two and one-half U.S. divisions—“no very great contribution,”551 as Brooke observed acidly. The American general acknowledged that it might be impossible to indefinitely hold a beachhead on the Continent in the face of a rapid German buildup. He nonetheless considered that the benefits of drawing enemy forces from the Eastern Front at such a critical moment made even a short-lived incursion into France worthwhile.
It was almost intolerably galling for the British, after suffering German bombardment and siege through thirty-one months, for twenty-seven of which the Americans had sat comfortably in the dress circle, that they should now be urged to sacrifice another army in compliance with bustling U.S. impatience for action. Brooke wrote of Marshall: “In many respects he is a very dangerous man552 while being a very charming one!” The CIGS told his staff553 that the highest aspiration of any credible Anglo-American operation in France in 1942 would be to seize and hold the Cherbourg Peninsula across the twenty-mile width of its neck. Measured against the war in the east, said Brooke, where the Russians were fighting across a thousand-mile front, so feeble an initiative would make the Western Allies the laughingstock of the world. John Kennedy commented on Soviet demands for a French invasion: “The extraordinary thing is that the Russians seem554 to have no idea of our real strength. Or if they do, they are so obsessed with their own point of view that they do not care what happens to us.” It was odd that a British general should expect anything else from Moscow. It was much more dismaying, however, to find the Americans prey to the same strategic fantasy, arguing the case for a sacrificial, even suicidal sortie into France, of a kind Japanese samurai might have applauded.
Churchill nonetheless responded enthusiastically to the president’s letter, “your masterly document,” as he called it. “I am in entire agreement in principle555 with all you propose, and so are the chiefs of staff. If, as our experts believe, one can carry this whole plan through successfully, it will be one of the grand events in all the history of war.” Here, the prime minister set the tone for all British dealings with the Americans about the Second Front, as the invasion concept was popularly known—the “First Front