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meetings “with consummate skill.”695 Away from the big table, “his curious regime of spending the greater part of the day in bed and all the night up made it a little trying for his staff. I have never seen him in better form. He ate and drank enormously all the time, settled huge problems, played bagatelle and bezique by the hour, and generally enjoyed himself.” Churchill was dismayed that the British Chiefs intended that a descent on Sicily should take place in September. This, he said, was much too late. While he did not accept the feasibility of a 1943 landing in France, he nonetheless wanted an alternative major Allied initiative by summer.

De Gaulle arrived, sulking, to meet Giraud. Churchill marvelled at his intransigence: “The PM stood in the hall watching the Frenchman696 stalking down the garden path with his head in the air,” wrote his doctor, Charles Wilson. “Winston turned to us with a whimsical smile: ‘His country has given up fighting, he himself is a refugee, and if we turn him down he’s finished. Well, just look at him!’ he repeated. ‘He might be Stalin, with 200 divisions behind his words. I was pretty rough with him. I made it quite plain that if he could not be more helpful we were done with it … He hardly seemed interested. My advances and my threats met with no response.” Tears came to Churchill’s eyes as he said: “England’s grievous offence in de Gaulle’s eyes is that she has helped France. He cannot bear to think that she needed help. He will not relax his vigilance in guarding her honour for a single instant.”

If the British were enjoying themselves at Casablanca, most of the Americans were not. Ian Jacob wrote disdainfully: “Being naturally extremely gullible697, the Americans calmly repeat any hare-brained report they hear.” John Kennedy wrote of their senior officers: “We feel that the Americans have great drive698 and bigger ideas than ours, but that they are weak in staff work and in some of their strategic conceptions. The Americans are extremely difficult to know. Under their hearty and friendly manner one feels there is suspicion and contempt in varying degrees according to personality.” This was so. A biographer of Eisenhower has written: “Many American officers found their British opposite numbers699 to be insufferable not only in their arrogance but in their timidity about striking the enemy.” One of Ike’s divisional commanders, Maj. Gen. Orlando Ward, wrote in disgust that Americans in North Africa found themselves reduced to the status of “a pointer pup … If someone with a red mustache700, a swagger stick and a British accent speaks to us, we lie down on the ground and wiggle.”

Harriman was dismayed by the eagerness of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff, when in exclusively American company, to badmouth the British. In their hearts, he thought, Marshall and his colleagues recognised the intractability of mounting a cross-Channel attack in 1943 as surely as did the prime minister and Brooke. But, in Jacob’s words, “they viewed the Mediterranean as a kind of dark hole701, which one entered into at one’s peril. If large forces were committed … the door would suddenly and firmly be shut behind one.” They still seemed obsessed, in the eyes of the British Chiefs, with fears that the Germans might intervene in North Africa through Spain. They deplored the sensation that the British, and explicitly Churchill, were exerting greater influence upon their president’s decisions than themselves.

The strategic deadlock was broken, in the end, by a combination of harsh realities and skilful diplomacy, in which Dill played a key role. In January 1943, the Americans had 150,000 troops in the Mediterranean theatre. The British in the region fielded three times as many soldiers, four times as many warships and almost as many aircraft as the United States. Once the North African campaign was wound up, formations immediately available for follow-up operations—located both in Britain and the Mediterranean—would comprise four French divisions, nine American—and twenty-seven British. Churchill’s own soldiers, sailors