Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [183]
And now the two North African campaigns faltered. The Allies were confounded by Hitler’s decision to reinforce the theatre. While this was strategically foolish, it rendered much more difficult the immediate task of the British and U.S. armies. American commanders and troops lacked experience. Though the Allies had numerical superiority in men, tanks and aircraft, the Germans fought with their usual skill and persistence. Alexander was famous for his courtesy and charm in addressing the Americans, but in private he railed at their military incompetence.
His reservations about Eisenhower’s soldiers were just, but it ill-became a British officer to express them. The British contingent in Ike’s forces, designated as First Army, was led by Gen. Sir Kenneth Anderson. Anderson proved yet another in the long line of his nation’s inadequate field commanders—“not much good,”687 in Brooke’s succinct words of dismissal. Operations in Tunisia dispelled any notion that First Army’s men were entitled to patronise their U.S. counterparts. Eisenhower was more willing than most of his countrymen to hide frustrations about Allied shortcomings, but he wrote in his diary on January 5, 1943: “Conversations with the British grow wearisome688. They’re difficult to talk to, apparently afraid that someone is trying to tell them what to do and how to do it. Their practice of war is dilatory.” A few days later, he added: “British, as usual, are scared someone will take advantage of them even if we furnish everything.” In another entry, he described the British as “stiff-necked.” Richard Crossman of Britain’s Political Warfare Executive thought that “getting on with Americans is frightfully easy689, if only one will talk quite frankly and not give the appearance of being too clever, but v[ery] few English seem to have achieved it.” In North Africa, they were less than impressed by Eisenhower. Though Churchill’s scepticism was later modified by necessity and experience, that winter he was sufficiently irritated by the general’s perceived blunders to evade fulfilment of Ike’s request for a signed photograph of himself.
At the beginning of December, the prime minister sketched a design for 1943 based upon his expectation that Tunisia would be occupied by the year’s end, and North Africa cleared of Axis forces a month later. By Christmas, this timetable was wrecked. Eighth Army’s westward advance against Rommel progressed much more slowly than Churchill had hoped in early November. The Russian convoy programme was further dislocated by the need to keep large naval forces in the Mediterranean. The British joint planners, unambitious as ever, favoured making Sardinia the Allies’ next objective. The prime minister dismissed this notion, urging that Sicily was a much worthier target. But he had begun to perceive that a 1943 D-Day in France was implausible.
Churchill now wanted a conference of the “Big Three,” to settle strategy. He loved summits, a coinage which he invented, not least because he believed that the force of his own personality could accomplish ends more impressive than his nation’s real strength could deliver, in its fourth year of war. But Stalin declined a proposal to meet in Khartoum, saying that he could not leave Moscow. Roosevelt was often less enthusiastic than Churchill about personal encounters. Just as the prime minister hoped for disproportionate results from these, to the advantage of his own country, so the president knew that the wealth and might of the United States spoke more decisively than any words which he might utter at a faraway conference table. But he liked the idea of visiting this theatre