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In those days in America, Churchill became excited by a possible landing on the Dalmatian coast, using 75,000 Polish troops and possibly 2nd New Zealand Division. On September 10, Roosevelt departed for Hyde Park, leaving Britain’s prime minister installed in America’s capital: “Winston, please treat the White House as your home,” said the president generously, urging him to invite whomever he liked. Churchill used this licence to the full, summoning Marshall to press upon him the case for hastening reinforcements to Italy. On September 14, at last he returned to Halifax, to board the battle cruiser Renown for home. His American hosts were glad to see him go. Their enthusiasm for his exhausting presence had worn as thin as their patience with his Mediterranean fantasies. Roosevelt’s secretary William Hassett wrote after their visitor’s previous Washington departure in May: “Must be a relief to the Boss for Churchill is a trying guest761—drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney, irregular routines, works nights, sleeps days, turns the clocks upside down … Churchill has brains, guts … and a determination to preserve the British Empire … He has everything except vision.” This was a view now almost universal within Roosevelt’s administration. Harry Hopkins told Eden, when the foreign secretary visited Washington, that the president—and indeed Hopkins himself—“loves W as a man for the war762, but is horrified at his reactionary attitude for after the war.” Hopkins spoke of the prime minister’s age, “his unteachability.”

The leaders of the United States were justly convinced that a cherry-picking approach to strategy was over. British evasions over a cross-Channel attack were no longer justifiable. If the Western Allies were to engage land forces on the continent of Europe in time to affect outcomes before the Russians defeated Hitler on their own, Overlord must take place in 1944. Henceforth, commitments in Italy must be adjusted to fit the overriding priority of the invasion of northwest Europe, and not vice versa. Marshall and his colleagues could scarcely be blamed for their exasperation at the prime minister’s renewed pleas for a descent on northern Norway, and the fit of enthusiasm with which he was seized for operations in the eastern Mediterranean.

It was widely expected both in Washington and London that Marshall would command Overlord. Churchill had broken it to Brooke at Quebec that his earlier insouciant offer of this glittering appointment to the CIGS was no longer open. It was foolish of both the prime minister and the general to have supposed that a British officer might be acceptable for the role; and even more so of Brooke, by his own admission, to sulk for several months about his disappointment. He possessed a sublime, and exaggerated, conceit about his own strategic wisdom. He had grievously injured himself in American eyes by prevarications about Overlord, even more outspokenly expressed than those of the prime minister. Brooke had no just claim to command of an operation which for months he had denounced as premature.

Only an American could credibly lead this predominantly American crusade, but Roosevelt kept open until November his choice of appointee. Marshall wanted the job, sure enough. The chief of staff of the army indulged a brief fantasy763 that Sir John Dill might be his deputy, or even—if the British persuaded the president that one of their own should command—that the former CIGS might be supreme commander. Stimson wanted Marshall, because he believed that the chief of the army alone had the authority and strength of character to overcome the “mercurial inconstancy”764 of the prime minister.

There was always a paradox about Churchill as warlord. On the one hand, he had a wonderful instinct for the fray, more highly developed than that of any of his service advisers. Yet his genius for war was flawed by an enthusiasm for dashes, raids, skirmishes, diversions, and sallies more appropriate—as officers who worked with him often remarked—to a Victorian cavalry subaltern