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on foreign affairs. As a war minister he is superb, driving our own Chiefs of Staff, guiding them like a coach and four, applying whip or brake as necessary, with the confidence and touch of genius.” Even though Stimson’s proposal was indeed misguided, Harvey’s accolade was ill-timed. Churchill’s renewed foot-dragging showed him at his worst. For eighteen months, he had staved off Marshall’s demands for early action in France. The British had the best of the arguments, at the cost of fuelling American mistrust and resentment. Back in May, Brooke had written, expressing exasperation with perceived American inconsistency of purpose, “Agreement after agreement may be secured on paper749, but if their hearts are not in it they soon drift away again.” Yet Marshall and his colleagues could have applied the same strictures to the British, with at least equal justice.

Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan, appointed by the Chiefs of Staff to lead Allied planning for Overlord, later became embittered when he perceived himself marginalised before D-Day eventually took place. Yet his postwar private observations cannot be wholly discounted. “I firmly believe,”750 he told U.S. historian Forrest Pogue in 1947, “that [Churchill and his Chiefs] returned from Casablanca fully determined to repudiate the agreement that they had been forced there to sign with the Americans [for an invasion of France] … Apart from a mere dislike of the project, the British authorities proceeded to make every possible step to impede progress in NW Europe by diverting their forces, as unobtrusively as possible, to other theatres of war.” Morgan expressed his conviction that his own appointment was made in the expectation that he would eventually be sacrificed “as a scapegoat when a suitable excuse should be found for withdrawing British support from the operation.” Morgan cited the scepticism about Overlord of Admiral Cunningham, whom he quoted as saying, “I have already evacuated three British armies in the face of the enemy and I don’t propose to evacuate a fourth.” Morgan thought far more highly of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff and of Eisenhower than of the British leadership: The “Br. side … had suffered long series of disasters and had become ‘casualty conscious’ to a very high degree. Br manpower sit. In a state of bankruptcy. Inconceivable that Br. could play other than minor part in … reconquest of Europe from the Germans.”

The Americans did not, of course, read the prime minister’s July 19 minute to his Chiefs. But from the late summer of 1943 onwards, they perceived continuing British wavering about D-Day which they were now implacably—and rightly—committed to override. Churchill’s hesitation about an invasion in 1944 reflected an apprehension about the fighting power of an Anglo-American army against the Wehrmacht which was unworthy of the Grand Alliance now that its means were growing so great, its huge mobilisation approaching maturity, and the Germans so much weakened by the Red Army. While a mere eight British and American divisions were fighting the only Allied land campaign against the Germans in Sicily, where the Allies lost six thousand killed, four million Russians and Germans had been locked in a death grapple at Kursk, which cost Hitler a decisive defeat and half a million casualties.

Churchill’s new strategic vision embraced some wild notions. On July 25, Mussolini resigned and Italy’s government fell into the hands of King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The Italian dictator’s fall prompted Churchill to revive one of his favourite schemes, a descent on Italian-occupied Rhodes, designed to drag Turkey into the war. This ambition would precipitate a minor disaster later in the year, the Dodecanese campaign. Churchill’s standing in American eyes would decline steadily between the summer of 1943 and the end of the war, and he himself bore a substantial share of responsibility for this. It is true that his wise warnings about the future threat posed by the Soviet Union were insufficiently heeded, but this was in significant part because