Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [259]
The British Chiefs insisted that it was “unacceptable” for more Allied forces to be withdrawn from Italy. Eisenhower, as supreme commander, reasserted his commitment to the landings in southern France, and even more strongly rejected British notions, propounded in a plan drawn up by Maitland Wilson as Mediterranean C-in-C, for a drive from northeast Italy to the so-called Ljubljana Gap. On June 20 Ike wrote to Marshall that Maitland Wilson’s plan “seems to discount the fact that Combined Chiefs of Staff have long ago decided to make Western Europe the base from which to conduct decisive operations against Germany. To authorize any departure from this sound decision seems to me ill-advised and potentially dangerous … In my opinion to contemplate wandering off overland via Trieste to Ljubljana repeat Ljubljana is to indulge in conjecture to an unwarrantable degree … I am unable to repeat unable to see how overriding necessity for exploiting the early success of Overlord is thereby assisted.” The American Chiefs signalled on June 24 that Maitland Wilson’s Trieste plan was “unacceptable.” They confirmed their insistence that the three U.S. and seven French divisions earmarked for Anvil should be withdrawn from Italian operations.
Ill-advisedly, Churchill appealed against this decision to Roosevelt, while on June 26 the British Chiefs of Staff reaffirmed the “unacceptability” of the redeployment in a signal to their counterparts in Washington. Marshall remained immovable. On the twenty-eighth, Churchill dispatched a note to the president in which he wrote: “Whether we should ruin all hopes948 of a major victory in Italy and all its fronts and condemn ourselves to a passive role in that theatre, after having broken up the fine Allied army which is advancing so rapidly through the peninsula, for the sake of ‘Anvil’ with all its limitations, is indeed a grave question for His Majesty’s Government and the President, with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, to decide.” He himself, he said, was entirely hostile to Anvil. The next day, Roosevelt rejected Churchill’s message: “My interests and hopes,”949 he said, “center on defeating the Germans in front of Eisenhower and driving on into Germany, rather than on limiting this action for the purpose of staging a full major effort in Italy.” Roosevelt added, in the midst of his own reelection campaign, that there were also political implications: “I should never survive even a slight setback in ‘Overlord’ if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”
Amazingly, Churchill returned to the charge. In a message to Roosevelt on July 1, after a long exposition of the futility of Anvil—“the splitting up of the campaign in the Mediterranean into two operations neither of which can do anything decisive, is, in my humble and respectful opinion, the first major strategic and political error for which we two have to be responsible”—he concluded: “What can I do, Mr. President950, when your Chiefs of Staff insist on casting aside our Italian offensive campaign, with all its dazzling possibilities … when we are to see the integral life of this campaign drained off into the Rhone Valley? … I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement.” This was woeful stuff. It was supremely tactless for the prime minister to suggest to the president that, if he had been able to browbeat him face to face, he might have persuaded him to override his own Chiefs of Staff. To the British Chiefs, he expressed contempt for their American counterparts: “The Arnold-King-Marshall combination is one of the stupidest951 strategic teams ever seen. They are good fellows and there is no need to tell them this.”
The Americans were unmoved by the barrage of cables from London. The British, with icy formality, acceded to the launch of Anvil—now renamed Dragoon—on August 15. This was the moment at which Churchill perceived