Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [197]
The Anglo-American armies needed to learn manifold lessons about command structures, air support and large-scale opposed amphibious landings. These the Mediterranean provided in 1943. But, when the Russians were fighting huge and bloody battles in the east, it is unsurprising that American officers recoiled from the prospect that their own ambitions for the coming year should be so modest. Many senior figures in the U.S. Army doubted that the British were sincere about supporting a French D-Day even in the spring of 1944. Marshall and his colleagues, and indeed Roosevelt, were apprehensive that once the Allies got themselves into Italy, they would not be able to easily extricate the forces which it would be essential to shift to Britain before the end of the year.
During Churchill’s first days in America, he visited Roosevelt’s retreat at Shangri-La in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and delivered another magnificent oration to Congress on May 19. When Halifax, at the Washington embassy, fussed that after the war the Americans might demand repayment of Britain’s Lend-Lease debt, Churchill said truculently: “Oh, I shall like that one734. I shall say, yes by all means let us have an account … but I shall have my account to put in too, and my account is for holding the baby alone for eighteen months, and it was a very rough brutal baby … I don’t quite know what I shall have to charge for it.” He was dismayed, however, by a perceived decline in Roosevelt’s health. “Have you noticed that the President is a tired man?”735 he demanded of Moran. “His mind seems closed; he seems to have lost his wonderful elasticity.” While it was true that the president’s health was declining, the real significance of his changed mood was that he was less amenable to Churchill’s blandishments.
The prime minister would have been even more troubled had he known that at this very moment the president was secretly pursuing a bilateral meeting with Stalin, excluding Churchill, through the good offices of the prewar U.S. ambassador to Moscow, the egregious Joseph E. Davies. Davies, like Stafford Cripps, was a devoted admirer of the Soviet Union. During his time in Moscow, he sought to persuade his wife that volleys she heard as NKVD firing squads executed victims of the purges were mere construction workers’ jackhammers. Davies formed a large art collection from works sold to him at knockdown prices by the Soviet authorities, looted from galleries or confiscated from murdered state enemies. His adulatory memoir of his time in Russia was made into a 1943 Hollywood movie, Mission to Moscow, using a script authorised by himself. In May, Roosevelt provided a USAAF aircraft to fly Davies to Moscow carrying prints of the film for Stalin’s edification. Though this deplorable figure failed to arrange the encounter Roosevelt sought, the president’s willingness to employ him reflected shameless duplicity towards Churchill.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff, meanwhile, were locked in close, tense, almost continuous sessions under Marshall’s chairmanship. Brooke, on May 13, made remarks which stunned and appalled the Americans. Dismissing prospects of an early invasion of France, he said that “no major operations would be possible until 1945 or 1946, since it must be remembered that in previous wars there had always been some 80 French divisions available on our side … The British manpower position was weak.” Marshall responded icily: “Did this mean that the British chiefs of staff regarded Mediterranean operations as the key to a successful termination of the European war?” Sir Charles Portal interjected, in a fashion surely designed to limit the damage done by Brooke’s brutal assertion, that “if Italy was knocked out this year, then in 1944 a successful re-entry into NW Europe might well be possible.” British scepticism, said Portal, focused on the notion that a force of twenty to twenty-five divisions could achieve important results across the Channel on the continent of Europe, which was quite impossible “unless almost the entire bulk of the German Army736 was