Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (11 page)

Despite these various concerns, the British did not reject the idea of a 1942 cross-Channel invasion out of hand. Indeed, the British Chiefs of Staff spent many days and weeks studying various alternative scenarios for landings in either the Pas de Calais or the Cotentin peninsula. They worked up several plans for quick coastal raids or the establishment of a permanent bridgehead, and some British officers became keen advocates of an early offensive. But in the end, the numbers just did not add up. Any landing in 1942, even a small-scale raid, would have such a tiny margin of error as to
be nearly suicidal, and was unlikely to be of any significant help to the Russians. By the time Marshall and Hopkins arrived in England, Churchill had concluded that a cross-Channel operation in 1942 was simply out of the question.
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Marshall and Hopkins arrived on April 8, and they met the next day with General Alan Brooke, Dill’s successor as chief of the Imperial General Staff and Marshall’s counterpart.
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Sporting a David Niven–style pencil mustache, Brooke was a small, neat, birdlike man, which was appropriate since bird watching and bird photography were his life’s passion. From the beginning, however, Marshall and Brooke talked past each other. In part this was because of the phenomenon, observed by many over the years and generally attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that Americans and Britons were one people divided by a common language. Brooke, an Ulsterman, not only spoke with the Gaelic accent of Northern Ireland but did so in a rapid-fire delivery that often left the Americans entirely perplexed. Moreover, Brooke also had a lower dental plate that occasionally got in the way of his machinegun pronouncements. Since the Americans were unwilling to pester him with constant requests to repeat himself, much of what he said flew past them without ever finding purchase. For his part, Brooke understood Marshall’s soft Virginia-accented speech well enough—it was the content of that speech that he thought absurd. Brooke liked Marshall personally (“a pleasant and easy man to get on with,” he noted in his diary) but found his arguments so “fantastic” that he concluded Marshall was “no strategist.” Brooke conceded that Marshall was “a good general at raising armies,” but “his strategical ability does not impress me at all!!”—the two exclamation points underscoring his incredulity.
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Marshall’s central argument was that the Allies must somehow halt the drip, drip, drip of the continuous drain of resources to secondary theaters and get serious about the necessary buildup for the eventual invasion of
Europe. As he had explained it to Roosevelt, “The most important consideration is the gathering of the largest force of ground troops possible in the British Isles at the earliest possible date.”
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What Brooke heard, however, was an American general insisting that a cross-Channel operation should be seriously considered for that fall, and to him that was utterly ridiculous. Rather than respond the way Marshall had to Roosevelt four years earlier (“I don’t agree with that at all”), Brooke instead implied a general acquiescence, if not quite full acceptance. Coached by Churchill, Brooke feared that if the Americans were denied their preferred strategy, they might abandon the Germany-first concept and turn to the Pacific. So he agreed “in principle,” but remained vague about specifics. Curiously, and a bit ironically, this was precisely the managerial gambit that Roosevelt often used when confronted with problems that he preferred not to engage.
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For most of a week, Marshall and Hopkins met with Brooke, Pound, and Portal to discuss what Brooke called “Marshall’s scheme for [the] invasion of Europe.” Their daytime meetings were generally followed by elaborate late-night dinners, generally hosted by Churchill. Marshall often flagged when social activities lasted well into the morning hours, but Brooke took it all in stride. It was, after all, part of his job to keep up with the prime minister. Indeed, Brooke expressed astonishment when Marshall told him that it was not unusual for him not to see the president for months at a time. Brooke responded ruefully that he was lucky if he could escape the prime minister for six hours.
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During the week, Brooke softened a bit in his reaction to Marshall (“The more I see of him the more I like him,” he wrote), though he continued to believe the American scheme was not only wrongheaded but foolish. Nevertheless, on April 14 the British formally accepted the American plan, which Brooke recorded in his diary as “offensive action in Europe in 1942 perhaps, and in 1943 for certain.” That was a fair summary of what Marshall sought. But Brooke’s private reaction, confided to his diary, was that “it was not possible to take Marshall’s ‘castles in the air’ too seriously.” If Brooke was less than fully forthcoming to Marshall, Marshall was similarly guilty. His real plan, after all, was to use the
prospect
of a 1942 invasion to keep men
and supplies coming to England so that they would not be sent off to some peripheral theater and thereby make a 1943 invasion impossible. Moreover, despite British agreement, Marshall recognized the reluctant and conditional nature of their acquiescence. To a colleague back in the States he wrote, “Virtually everyone agrees with us in principle, but many if not most hold reservations regarding this or that.”
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Officially, at least, it was agreement and consensus all the way. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on April 17, “We wholeheartedly agree with your conception of concentration against the main enemy.” His only qualification was that because of recent triumphs by the Japanese in the Indian Ocean, including the fall of Rangoon in Burma, “a proportion of our combined resources must, for the moment, be set aside to halt the Japanese advance.” He noted that “the campaign of 1943 is straightforward, and we are starting joint plans and preparations at once.” Significantly, however, he added one more note toward the end: “We may, however, feel compelled to act this year.” When Churchill wrote that, it was not Sledgehammer he had in mind. The Americans had barely left for home when Churchill sat down with Brooke and told him frankly that it was “impossible to establish a front” in France with the small number of landing craft available in 1942. Brooke was relieved to hear that the prime minister was so “amenable to reason,” until Churchill told him that what
he
had in mind for 1942 was an invasion of Norway!
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Roosevelt replied to Churchill’s April 17 cable as if everything were settled. “I am delighted with the agreement which was reached between you and your military advisors and Marshall and Hopkins,” the president wrote. “They have reported to me of the unanimity of opinion relative to the proposal which they carried with them.”
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THAT APPARENT UNANIMITY
began to evaporate almost at once, and the calls for a division here, a squadron there, and convoy support somewhere else continued. Early in May, Eisenhower noted privately, “Bolero is supposed to have the approval of the Pres and Prime Minister. But the struggle to get everyone behind it, and to keep the highest authority from wrecking it by making additional commitments of air-ship-troops
everywhere is never ending.” Moreover, the program received a near-mortal blow that summer in consequence of the arrival in Washington of two foreign emissaries: one of them a handsome, urbane, charming English aristocrat, and the other a bespectacled, humorless, cold-eyed Russian realist.
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The realist arrived first. Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was Stalin’s foreign minister and the man who had negotiated the 1939 pact with Germany’s Joachim von Ribbentrop to divide Poland between them—the document that gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland and start the war. Now, with Russia fighting for her survival, Molotov had flown from Moscow to ask what the Western Allies were willing to do to ease the pressure on the Red Army. In London Molotov signed a twenty-year Mutual Assistance Agreement with the British, but Churchill had declined to give him any guarantees about a second front, and so Molotov flew on to Washington, where he arrived on May 29 to talk to Roosevelt. As Churchill had done, he stayed in the White House during his visit, and there was an awkward moment at the very start when a White House butler unpacking his luggage found a loaded pistol alongside a loaf of brown bread and a sausage. Upon inquiring what he should do about the weapon, he was told to leave it where it was and say nothing. The fact that Molotov had felt the need to bring his own sustenance and means of self-defense speaks volumes about his state of mind.

Molotov was a tidy, diminutive man whose round spectacles gave him an owlish, academic aspect, and his prim and dour demeanor clashed jarringly with that of the ebullient and gregarious Roosevelt. Moreover, their conversations were complicated by the fact that each of their statements had to be laboriously translated. There were often lengthy delays as the two interpreters discussed the nuances of each comment between themselves before offering a translation, and as a result, the talks proceeded haltingly. Roosevelt asked Marshall, King, and Hopkins to be present at the first full meeting on May 30 when he invited Molotov to “put the situation before them” and “treat the subject in such detail as suited his convenience.” Molotov got right to the point. Hitler “was the master of all Europe,” he said, and given his strength, he “might throw in such reinforcements in manpower and material that the Red Army might
not
be able to hold out.” He suggested
that Hitler would try “to deal the Soviet Union a mighty crushing blow” that summer. He therefore wanted to know: could the Western Allies “undertake such offensive action as would draw off 40 German divisions”?
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Roosevelt responded that the United States considered it an “obligation to help the Soviets,” but its efforts were severely constrained by the limits of “ocean transport.” Molotov waved off that concern by asserting that “the difficulties … would not be any less in 1943.” “If you postpone your decision,” he said, “you will eventually have to bear the brunt of the war” and “next year will unquestionably be tougher than this one.” He cut to the chase: his government wished to know “in frank terms” what position the Western Allies took “on the question of a second front.” He had asked Churchill the same question, but the prime minister had deferred to Roosevelt. So now he asked the American president directly: could the United States “undertake such offensive action”?

Roosevelt turned to Marshall. Were developments “clear enough so that we could say to Mr. Stalin that we were preparing a second front”?

Marshall answered with a single syllable: “Yes.”

Roosevelt then turned back to Molotov and told him he could “inform Mr. Stalin that we expect the formation of a second front
this year
.”

No doubt alarmed by the chasm of difference between “preparing” a second front, which he had affirmed, and actually establishing one “this year,” Marshall quickly added the far more conditional observation that “we were making every effort to build up a situation in which the creation of a second front would be possible.” It was as far as he could go without openly contradicting the president.
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The rest of Molotov’s visit passed more prosaically. Roosevelt raised other issues, including Finland, which the Russians had invaded in 1939, and the postwar management of the liberated territories, though at least twice he reiterated the American determination to “set up a second front in 1942.” Roosevelt asked Molotov if the Soviets would accept a cutback on their promised Lend-Lease shipments in order to free up more shipping for that second front. At that, Molotov bristled. Demonstrating his instinctive distrust, he asked what would happen if Russia agreed to the cutbacks and no second front materialized. Roosevelt sought to reassure him, but
Molotov remained suspicious, and the question was shelved. The Allies would simply try to overcome the shipping problem.
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Meanwhile, it was necessary to draft a public statement about what exactly the two men had agreed upon. The key sentence in the final document was neither elegant nor definitive: “In the course of the conversations full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942.” While the statement contained the words “Second Front” and “1942,” it was immediately evident that acknowledging the urgency of a task was hardly the same thing as a pledge to accomplish it. Apparently it was now the Americans’ turn to say, “We’ll see.” Molotov accepted it because he perceived that it was all he was likely to get. Churchill accepted it because he thought it “might make the Germans apprehensive,” though not for a minute did he assume that it meant a Western Front in France in 1942. To make sure Molotov understood that, he prepared an aide-mémoire to give to the Russian foreign minister when he passed through London en route back to Moscow. In it, Churchill was careful to state that although the British and Americans were “making preparations for a landing on the Continent,” they could “give no promise in the matter.” There it rested … for now.
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