A World at Arms (140 page)

Eventually, the arguments over the evacuation or retention of the Courland area were to play an important role, first in Hitler’s breaking with Guderian as his army Chief-of-Staff and, subsequently, in his appointing Dönitz to be his own successor. In the meantime, the fronts ground to a virtual halt in both East and West as both sides prepared for the final battles. If the German calculations and hopes proved correct, there was a very lengthy conflict still ahead; if they proved wrong and the Allies crushed all resistance, the divisions in Courland–rather like the German division left on the Channel Islands–could be said to have established their own prisoner-of-war camp even as the war was still under way.

^a
It would be worth investigating why the Red Army regularly did this, the American army usually did it, while the British army almost never did so.

^b
Although it is true that neither Bulgaria nor Finland yielded up their Jewish citizens for slaughter, the numbers involved were in both cases so small that the Germans did not think it worth the uproar when initial requests failed. The Wannsee Conference statistical estimates were 48,000 for Bulgaria and 2300 for Finland, but 742,800 for Hungary.

^c
This trend was the reverse of that in German planning for an invasion of England in 1940, which had begun with a 13 division assault but had been reduced to one of nine divisions with two airborne divisions.

^d
Some of the units were real, not notional, and were then “reassigned” to the actual invasion, being replaced in many cases by imaginary units supposedly newly arrived from across the Atlantic.

^e
The Americans’ breaking of Japanese codes also proved most helpful because the Japanese diplomatic and military representatives sent home detailed reports on the German defences in the West which were frequently intercepted and read.

^f
There are hints in the evidence that, given the risks of the entire enterprise, Eisenhower’s appointment left open the possibility of Marshall taking over if the invasion failed and a new one had to be mounted. See David Eisenhower,
Eisenhower at War,
p. 44.

^g
The confused German command structure was even more complicated than presented here. There were also Chiefs of Military Government for France, for Belgium and northern France, and for the Netherlands, assorted SS headquarters, and a host of other special units and commands which had proliferated in the years since 1940 and which no normal person could be expected to understand then or now. Ose,
Entscheidung im Westen,
pp. 60–64, attributes this proliferation to Hitler’s distrust of the officer corps; surely some of the staffs were maintained to provide berths for men who preferred the comforts of occupation in the West to the rigors of combat in the East.

^h
It was this decision which determined first, that the United States would accept an occupation zone in south Germany, and second, that American units in NATO would be stationed primarily in the southern and British units in the northern portion of the Federal Republic of Germany.

ⁱ
The British pressure on the Polish government in 1943–44 is astonishingly similar to that applied to the Czechoslovak government in 1938.

^j
Stalin tried to split the Polish community in the United States by talking in conciliatory terms to two of its prominent members, Professor Oskar Lange (who later represented the new Polish government in the UN), and Father Orlemanski, in June 1944 (see the documents in FDRL, PSF Box 66, File Poland-Orlemanski-Lange [May-June 1944]).

13

The alliance between the United States and Great Britain, developed in tentative stages even before Japan, Germany, and Italy drew the United States into the war, had from its beginning both built–intensions and elements making for cooperation. The tensions came in part from their divergent histories and perspectives, in part from their differing situations and strategies. The United States had gained its independence in a long and bitter war with England, a war which had affected the country more deeply than any conflict except for the civil war. The country’s national anthem recalls to its citizens an incident from their next war with England, and at later times in the nineteenth century there had been further serious friction about boundaries in the northwest and northeast, about fishery rights and British support of the Confederacy in the civil war, about rivalries in Central and South America, and about projects of some Irish-Americans to seize all or parts of Canada to hold hostage for the freedom of Ireland from British rule.

This last source of friction relates to the role of the Americans of Irish descent, who had become very numerous partly because of developments in Ireland during the middle and second half of the nineteenth century, and who were becoming increasingly influential in American politics in the first half of the twentieth century, especially because of their concentration in a number of large eastern and mid–western cities, where their role was crucial to the Democratic Party coalition which dominated American politics in the 1930S. Although their overt hostility to Britain was diminishing somewhat, it remained a factor in the picture.

Furthermore, Americans generally extended their antipathy for their own former colonial masters to the whole colonial concept. If they had generally very little idea of the extent to which Canada, Australia, New Zealand and what was then called the Union of South Africa were in fact fully in charge of their own internal affairs, they had no doubt that
India and the other colonial possessions of Great Britain were not. Having themselves through Congressional action in 1936 decided to withdraw from the one great deviation from their own anti-colonial tradition, the Philippines, they could see no reason why the British should not do likewise. Whatever the size and nature of other colonial empires held by other powers, any glance at a map–to say nothing of population statistics–showed that in the competition for the greatest empire and hence the worst place in American eyes, Britain indeed had taken the lion’s share.

For those concerned about the world trade causes and effects of the Great Depression, and that especially included Secretary of State Cordell Hull and much of the personnel of his State Department, the system of imperial preference instituted by the Ottawa Agreements of 1932 was an abominable restraint on trade and hence an obstacle to both prosperity and future peace. In addition, there was in both government circles and the American public a sense that the British were sharp and unscrupulous dealers, a quality they had most recently demonstrated by defaulting on their debt to the United States from World War I.

The British, on the other hand, resented the American refusal to share in the support of the peace settlement of 1919 as well as the American tariff system which, they believed, had caused many of their difficulties (including their debt default) in the first place. Many of them, especially in the Conservative establishment, objected to American criticism of the British empire in general and of British rule in India in particular. The arrival of large numbers of American troops in England led to many individual cases of friendship and eventually to thousands of marriages, but also produced considerable friction; the Americans, as a popular comment put it, were “over-paid, oversexed, overfed and over here.”

There were, in addition to the differences in popular attitudes, divergencies in strategic perception. The Americans constantly argued that the “Germany First” strategy demanded that something really be done against Germany in the European theater, and such favorite projects of Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff as mounting big operations to seize the Italian islands in the eastern Aegean did not look to them in the least likely to further that aim. On the contrary, the American leaders saw in such projects diversions designed for British imperial purposes more likely, by diverting resources, to delay than to speed up victory. The refusal of the British to provide a reasonable level of support for their own forces in the Indian theater, on the other hand, looked to Washington and its representatives on the spot as a means of holding
back on strengthening an anti-colonialist China until Britain could reclaim her colonies after the Americans had defeated Japan.

The British leaders, on the contrary, constantly objected to what they considered excessive American deployment to the Pacific (conveniently forgetting that they had requested it in the first place in order to assure the safety of Australia and New Zealand while much of the force of those Dominions was engaged in the British campaign in North Africa). The British also resented the insistence of the Americans on the priority of the cross-Channel invasion, the willingness of the Americans to sacrifice to that priority opportunities which they believed existed elsewhere, especially in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, and the failure of the Americans, as they saw it, to see that needs elsewhere precluded for the time being the manpower and resource allocations to the Burma theater, which the British in any case believed unlikely to produce the revived Chinese war effort Americans hoped for.
¹

The other side of this litany of troubles was an array of substantially more significant factors drawing and keeping the two powers together. The American President and the British Prime Minister had established a truly extraordinary personal and working relationship, and if in this the balance whenever they differed shifted increasingly to the more powerful American side, there was obviously on each side an exceedingly high regard for the other and a determination to make the alliance work. This sentiment was very much shared by the higher staffs of both men, so that, whatever differences over policy and strategy developed, the attempts to bridge these were always made in the shared assumption that cooperation was essential for victory. And until his death in November 1944, Field Marshal Dill invariably worked hard, and usually with success, to resolve whatever difficulties arose.
²

The cooperative attitude at the top had pillars at home and derived strength from implementing organs. At home, Americans admired the steadfastness of the British in their great trial while the British appreciated the help they had received and were continuing to get from the Americans. In practice the cooperation generally worked and in the process generated further cooperation. The various joint boards and committees working under the auspices of the Combined Chiefs of Staff carried out their activities with enormous success. In spite of the inherent difficulties of making combined plans and allocating scarce resources from ammunition to shipping space, it all somehow worked; and in the process large numbers of officers from both countries and all services learned to work together and became accustomed to doing so.
³
Furthermore, there were at least some theater operational commands which were effectively Allied in composition, nature, and functioning.

While MacArthur deliberately kept his headquarters in the Southwest Pacific from being the Allied construction it could (and probably should) have been and Mountbatten, in spite of really trying, simply did not have enough Americans assigned to his Southeast Asia Command to make that a truly Allied one,
^a
in the Mediterranean and in Northwest Europe there really did develop a truly integrated form of command structure. As much a tribute to the personal efforts of Eisenhower in this direction, the Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers and later his Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force in London and thereafter on the continent were a new type of organization (which Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson continued when he succeeded Eisenhower in the Mediterranean). Quite unlike earlier attempts at liaison or allied command as with Marshal Foch in World War I, these headquarters were of a fundamentally different kind. They developed their own cohesion and atmosphere, friendships and procedures, and they not only contributed immensely to smoothing the otherwise troublesome problems of managing the British-American alliance at the time but prepared the way for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) success in the decades after 1949.

Such structures were especially badly needed in the summer of 1944 and thereafter. The tension which developed over the stalemate, or what looked like stalemate, in Normandy tested the cohesion of Allied command. The troubles between Eisenhower’s headquarters, and especially its British members, and Montgomery came close to leading to the latter’s relief. Montgomery in turn had the most extraordinary difficulties with his Canadian commanders. As if this were not enough, the disappointing inability of the British, Canadians and Poles under Montgomery’s command to close the Falaise gap and completely trap the remnants of the two German armies which had been fighting in Normandy produced more friction.

At almost the same time, the British were still trying to get the landing in southern France cancelled in a bitter dispute with the Americans. The acrimonious nature of this particular argument over strategy
⁴
was related to British disappointment over the effect of that operation on the Italian front, which they preferred to see supported more heavily, and made all the more bitter by the memory of defeat in the Aegean the preceding fall. Only these factors can explain the complete disregard of logistics by the British: how did they expect the huge armies of the Allies to be supplied without the French Mediterranean ports?