Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [223]
Gort was no slave to creature comforts. When Ismay visited the ailing prime minister, he was greeted by pathetic solicitations for enhanced rations and a bath: “Do you think you could bring me a little bit of butter from that nice ship? … I only want a cupful of hot water, but I can’t get it.” Churchill’s bedroom overlooked a thoroughfare crowded with chattering Maltese. Moran recorded a touching moment: “From the street below came a great hubbub of voices818. His brow darkened. He threw his legs out of bed, and striding across the room thrust his head through the open window, bawling: ‘Go away, will you? Please go away and do not make so much noise.’”
The Chiefs of Staff held an unsatisfactory meeting, crowded into the prime minister’s bedroom. A few days earlier, John Kennedy expounded in his diary on British policy for the encounter with the Americans: “We have now crystallised our ideas819 as to the strategy to be advocated.” The Italian campaign should be continued; renewed efforts made to bring Turkey into the war through allied activism in the Balkans; and the United States urged “to accept a postponement of Overlord.” The Adjutant General, Sir Ronald Adam, told a fellow officer: “The PM’s stock is not high820 with the President at the moment, and the latter is being dragged rather unwillingly to Cairo … The PM has now gone very Mediterranean-minded, and the future of Overlord is again in the melting-pot.”
Churchill chafed constantly about the slow progress of Allied operations in Italy. Winter weather had reduced campaigning to a crawl, and the Germans were resisting with their usual determination. “The pattern of battle821 seldom varied,” wrote one veteran of the campaign, Fred Majdalany. “The Germans would hold a position for a time until it was seriously contested: then pull back a mile or two to the next defendable place, leaving behind a trail of blown bridges, minefields and road demolitions … The Allied armies would begin with a night attack—ford a stream or river after dark, storm the heights on the far side, dig themselves in by dawn, and hope that by that time the Sappers, following on their heels, would have sufficiently repaired the demolitions and removed the obstacles to permit tanks to follow up … The Germans, watching these proceedings, would attempt to frustrate them by raining down artillery and mortar fire.”
The prime minister was infuriated that two British divisions had already been withdrawn from the line, in advance of their return home to prepare for D-Day. In a minute to the Chiefs on November 20, he complained of Italian operations being compromised by “the shadow of Overlord.” He said that Yugoslavia’s partisans, whom he was eager to support more vigorously, were containing more Axis divisions than the British and American armies. He deplored American insistence on May 1 as the date for D-Day, “with inflexible rigidity and without regard to the loss and injury to the allied cause created thereby.” The consequence of this “fixed target date,” he said, was that “our affairs will deteriorate in the Balkans and that the Aegean will remain firmly in German hands … for the sake of an operation fixed for May upon hypotheses that in all probability will not be realized by that date.” Churchill wanted all available resources directed, first, towards capturing Rome by January 1944 and, second, upon taking Rhodes later that month. None of this was likely to find favour with the Americans, nor deserved to.
The British delegation sailed on from Malta to Alexandria, and thence flew to Cairo, arriving on November 21. Macmillan, seeing Churchill for the first time in some months,