Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [149]
In a series of meetings that began at Chequers, Marshall made his pitch. On April 14, he told Churchill and the British Chiefs that “within the next three or four months, we were very likely to find ourselves in the position when we were forced to take action on the continent.” Mountbatten, now a member of the Chiefs’ committee as head of Combined Operations, emphasised the dire shortage of landing craft. The prime minister cautioned that it was scarcely feasible to break off operations in all the other theatres in which Allied troops were engaged. Marshall, unimpressed by Britain’s extravagant commitments, as he perceived them, in the Middle East, observed that “great firmness” would be needed to avoid “further dispersions.”
The American visitors were generously plied with courtesies. They returned to Washington aware that Churchill and his commanders had doubts about a 1942 landing, but wrongly supposing that they were persuadable. Only slowly did Marshall and his colleagues grow to understand that British professions of principled enthusiasm were unmatched by any intention of early commitment. The chief of the army was too big a man to succumb to Anglophobia, as did some of his colleagues. But henceforward this stiff, humourless officer, who concealed considerable passion beneath his cool exterior, had a mistrust of British evasions, verbal and strategic, which persisted for the rest of the war. Churchill’s nation, he considered, was traumatised by its defeats, morbidly conscious of its poverty and obsessed with fear of heavy casualties. The British refused to accept what seemed to the Americans a fundamental reality: that it was worth paying any price to keep Russia fighting.
Throughout the war, the military leaders of the United States displayed a strategic confidence much greater than that of their British counterparts. The fact that Americans were never obliged to face the prospect of invasion of their homeland, still less the reality of bombardment of their cities, removed a significant part of the tension and apprehension which suffused British decision making. American forces endured setbacks abroad, but never the storm of shell at home and abject defeats abroad which characterised British experience for three years. On the issue of the Second Front, Marshall’s judgement was almost certainly gravely mistaken. The 1942 strategic view adopted by Churchill and Brooke was right. But the British damaged their relationship with the chief of staff of the army and his colleagues by persistent dissimulation. There was Churchill’s cable to Roosevelt of April 17, acknowledging American enthusiasm for an early landing in France, and asserting that “we are proceeding with plans and preparations on that basis.”556 As late as June 20 he was writing, albeit amid a thick hedge of qualifications: “Arrangements are being made for a landing557 of six or eight Divisions on the coast of Northern France early in September.” The British prevaricated because they feared that frankness would provoke the Americans to shift the axis of their national effort westward, towards the Pacific. Indeed, Marshall once threatened to do this.
The debate was further complicated by the fact that Marshall’s view accorded with that of the British and American publics. A host of ordinary people responded to the Russians’ plight with a warmth and sympathy absent from the attitudes of British ministers and service chiefs. The New Statesman of February 14,