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By Root 972 0

he told the House of Commons on November 11, “I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am a prod. My difficulties rather lie in finding the patience and self-restraint through many anxious weeks for the results to be achieved.” For most of the Second World War, Churchill was obliged to struggle against his military advisers’ fear of battlefield failure, which in 1942 had become almost obsessive. Alan Brooke was a superbly gifted officer, who forged a remarkable partnership with Churchill. But, if Allied operations had advanced at a pace dictated by the War Office, or indeed by Brooke himself, the conflict’s ending would have come much later than it did. The British had grown so accustomed to poverty of resources and shortcomings of battlefield performance that it had become second nature for them to expect the worst. Churchill himself, by contrast, shared with the Americans a desire to hasten forward Britain’s creaky military machine. It was not that Britain’s top soldiers were unwilling to fight. It was that they deemed it prudent to fight slowly. Oliver Harvey noted on November 14, with a cynicism that would have confirmed Stalin in all his convictions: “The Russian army having played the allotted role678 of killing Germans, our Chiefs of Staff think by 1944 they could stage a general onslaught on the exhausted animal.”

This is an important and piercing insight upon British wartime strategy from 1942 onwards. There was a complacency, here explicitly avowed by Harvey, about the bloodbath on the Eastern Front. Neither Churchill nor Brooke ever openly endorsed the expressed desire of their colleagues to see the Germans and Soviets destroy each other. But they certainly wanted the vast attritional struggle in the east to spare the Western Allies from anything similar. Most nations in most wars have no option save to engage an adversary confronting them in the field. The Anglo-Americans, by contrast, were quarantined from their enemies by eminently serviceable expanses of water, which conferred freedom of choice about where and when to join battle. This privilege was exercised wisely, from the viewpoint of the two nations. The lives of their young men were diligently husbanded. But such self-interested behaviour, almost as ruthless as Moscow’s own, was bound to incur Russian anger.

The Allied invasion of French colonial Africa provoked a political crisis. By chance, Adm. Jean Darlan, Vichy vice president and foreign minister, was in Algiers when the Americans arrived. He assumed command of French forces which, to the surprise and dismay of U.S. commanders, resisted their would-be liberators with considerable energy, inflicting some 1,400 American casualties. There was then a negotiation, however, which caused Darlan to order his troops to lay down their arms, saving many more American lives. He was rewarded by Eisenhower, Allied supreme commander of Torch, with recognition as France’s high commissioner and de facto ruler of North Africa. The British, unconsulted, were stunned. Darlan had collaborated enthusiastically with the Germans since 1940. It had seemed plausible that he might lead the French navy against Britain—de Gaulle thought so. “La France ne marchera pas,”679 he told Churchill, “mais la flotte—peut-être;” “France will not march [on Britain]. But the fleet—perhaps.” Now, Darlan’s betrayal of Vichy demonstrated his moral bankruptcy. In his new role, he rejected requests for the liberation of Free French prisoners in North African jails, and indeed treated such captives with considerable brutality. Many exiled Frenchmen missed a great opportunity in November 1942 to sink their differences and throw themselves wholeheartedly into the struggle against the Axis. A British senior officer wrote aggrievedly: “Although the French hate the Germans680, they hate us more.” De Gaulle, Britain’s anointed representative of “Fighting France,” was, of course, outraged by the Darlan appointment, as was Eden. The Foreign Office had supported its lofty French standardbearer through many outbursts