The World at War (52 page)

MAJOR GENERAL MARK CLARK

Deputy Commander, Operation Torch, later Commander US Fifth Army in Italy

I had gone to England in 1942 with Ike. We were both major generals, he was in charge of planning in Washington and I had the training end of it, and General Marshall sent us over to England in the early spring of 1942 and that's when we were taken in tow by Mr Churchill. Pug Ismay and Dickie Mountbatten and all those fellows became fast friends of ours and mine; I admired them all. I didn't meet Alexander at that time but Mountbatten and Ismay were pretty well the right-hand men of the Prime Minister and they were the men we worked with. I thought they were fine, they helped us tremendously.

CAPTAIN REES

Well, there was this fundamental difference between the way we make war and the way the Americans make war. We were always conscious of how very small our resources were. We knew for instance that if we lost a division it would mean a disaster to us. Whereas the Americans were quite prepared to produce another division – there's an infinite number of divisions in the pipeline. And they regarded people as expendable in a way that we didn't, not only
men but also material, because again our resources were very limited and we simply could not afford to waste things in the way that the Americans could. On the other hand they showed great advantages in the sense that the American's equipment produced material that was beyond our means and their engineering instruments could perform feats in a time and at a speed which we could never dream of.

MAJOR GENERAL KENNETH STRONG

General Eisenhower's Chief of Intelligence

I think the British were very slow to realise that the main effort for war in Europe lay with the Americans. I think the British press was probably slow as well. I think people forget the great weight of divisions and supplies and so on were American. This in many ways was a sad thing for the British and Eisenhower was well aware of this shift of emphasis. But he was very devoted to Churchill: he was a very great friend of our country and one of the greatest friends I think we could have had, and when it came to any sort of point where we could be given the benefit of the doubt he always favoured us on the whole.

WYNFORD VAUGH AN-THOMAS

BBC radio journalist

I arrived in Italy as General Montgomery left. That may be a coincidence. He was going to look after the Second Front and I was going to look after the Italian Front, and I was invited to have a briefing with him, along with other war correspondents, so he could just give us a little word of encouragement before he left. He came briskly out of his caravan, it was a damp blowy day and the rain was coming down. It was quite clear that we were going to be stuck in those mountains for a very long time and he said, 'One thing I'd like to say, I'm going to other duties at home, but I want you to remember the troops have got their tails well up.' The American behind me said, 'Excuse me, General – what's up?'

MAJOR GENERAL CLARK

The fellow that I did most of my business with during the war was Alexander. I called him Alex and he called me Wayne – my name is Mark Wayne Clark and Ike always called me Wayne, so all my friends over there called me Wayne. I liked Alex from the start. I found that he was capable, kind, knowledgeable and very fair. You could talk very frankly with Alex and he'd talk frankly to you and you'd come to a decision. We struck up a very great friendship and he had with him Brigadier General
Lemnitzer, who I had taken over with me on my staff as my artillery officer, and we assigned him to John Harding, who was Alex's Chief of Staff, as a sort of American go-between so that if things started to go bad he could trot back and forth and straighten us out. So with Lemnitzer being the diplomat and the capable fellow that he is, things worked very smoothly.
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All the time I served under Alexander, and that was not only when I was in the Fifteenth Army Group commanding the Fifth Army but later when Alexander moved up to theatre command and the British government saw fit to ask my government to let me command the Fifteenth Army Group, which was all British. So all the time Alex was my boss. I admired him deeply; I still do.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

I remember a marvellous arrival of General Clark's Chief of Staff and he said, 'General Clark's got fifty-seven different bands and you're going to listen to every one of them.' And I said, 'What about this problem?' He said, 'Sir, in the American Army we don't solve our problems, we overwhelm them' and that's exactly what they did.

ANTHONY EDEN

I
expect the Americans were suspicious of ulterior British motives; it would have been very curious if they hadn't been. I think mainly they were worried that we should drag them into what they call the
Balkans, which in their language was quite a wide term, and certainly they were not in favour of what we should have liked to have done, which was the further advance up Italy and to have tried to get Vienna. They didn't want that, they wanted this concentration on France and they had their way. But that I think was their chief suspicion of us, and I suppose to some extent they thought we were always concerned for our own interests in different parts of the world, which no doubt was true. There's nothing very evil about that.

MAJOR GENERAL STRONG

Gradually, as the American resources grew, the number of divisions grew. In the end, they had something like four times as many divisions in the field as the British had. Then they got more and more influence. Whereas in North Africa they were extremely complimentary to Montgomery's Alamein operation, as they felt themselves stronger and stronger, and more competent, they became from time to time rather critical of the British. They were critical about the slow progress of the British in Sicily, Italy, and when it came to the beachhead landing in Normandy, which was directly conducted by
Montgomery under Eisenhower, and he did a magnificent job there. Eisenhower once said to me, 'I don't think there's any other chap could have got us ashore like Montgomery did,' yet as time went on they became more critical and thought Montgomery was slow and hesitant. It's not absolutely true, but that's the impression they got. And therefore this element really enters into the feeling that perhaps Montgomery was not quite the man to carry it out even if it had been possible.

MAJOR GENERAL FRANCIS DE GUINGAND

Field Marshal Montgomery's Chief of Staff

I think if you compare the relationship between, say, politicians and generals in the Second World War with the First World War, and between generals, there's no comparison – it was marvellous in the Second World War. Look at Churchill, he kept virtually the same Chiefs of Staff the whole time. In the First World War they were appointed and displaced and there was a terrible lack of confidence between politicians and the Service Chiefs – and there was an awful lot of bickering and jealousies between the commanders themselves. I don't think that really existed in the Second World War. Monty was very good, it was his team, all the people who served under him knew exactly where they were and they never tried to bounce any of their colleagues at all. And until the Ardennes thing in 1944 the relationship between Monty and American generals was reasonably good.

MAJOR GENERAL RONALD BELCHEM

Twenty-First Army Group Staff

I remember very well a night that Eisenhower came to stay at Monty's headquarters while we were in Germany. After eating our 'K' rations, Ike was telling his amusing stories of his childhood in the United States and they were on completely good terms together. Professionally, obviously, there arose differences between them from time to time because, if you will allow a broad definition, Eisenhower was a political general whereas Montgomery was a cold, calculating, ruthless combat general. It's very seldom that a general is both of these categories at the same time – the combat man sweeps aside any factor other than those concerned or helping to win the war as quickly as possible with the minimum casualties. The political general has a rather different task. He's dealing, shall we say, with public opinion, he's dealing with Roosevelt, with Churchill, with de Gaulle and things of this kind. He's also concerned with holding together a team which inevitably includes a number of personalities who could be difficult. In this case he was concerned with Bradley, Patton, Montgomery, the air commanders and sometimes Bomber Harris. It's a different problem that he has and therefore he cannot always agree with the much more direct approach of the combat general. I think perhaps Eisenhower was sometimes too diplomatic with Montgomery, because whenever he was firmly of an opinion and said, 'Stop – there's no further argument about this,' Montgomery stopped and concurred because that was his professional training. Indeed he once put it in writing to Eisenhower – 'Once a decision is taken there's no more argument.'

MAJOR GENERAL STRONG

I was one day with Eisenhower in his caravan and there he'd been discussing this problem of the British leading the advance into Germany, and a telephone call came through from the Prime Minister and he answered it. Then he laid down the phone and said, 'Look here, this is a dilemma. I'm being urged to use the British in the front line as a spearhead, and here the Prime Minister telephones me and says to me for goodness sake we've had losses in North Africa and Italy, there's a great deal of war weariness home in England. Spare what you can, save what you can. This is a very difficult problem – how am I going to do one and at the same time save British lives?'

PROFESSOR BUSH

Between American and British
scientists I don't think there ever was a war in history in which allies got along as well together as in this last one, and the relations between every part of the American and the British scientific effort was cordial. There remained disagreements at times, it wouldn't have been human if there hadn't been, but they were friendly disagreements and we worked together in great shape. I don't think there was any disagreement that hindered progress. At the beginning our relations with the military were rather distant. The military in both countries did not realise that the time had come for a great revolution in weapons and that they had to have particular interest in what the scientific fellows were doing. Later on it became close. When we first started all our men were introduced to the military's scientists, we did that throughout the war. Some of them were good, tough engineers, but they all had to be scientists and they had to accept them on faith. Towards the end of the war we had gotten to respect one another both ways and we could work in harmony and every group we had working on any subject, proximity fuses or radar, was made up of civilians and military, young military men particularly, who knew what was happening in the field and what was needed and what would work and what wouldn't, sat with the civilians and they worked together. And that happened on both sides of the Atlantic.

CHAPTER 21
ECONOMIC AND SCIENTIFIC WARFARE

When
The World at War
series was shown the Official Secrets Act was still a powerful tool of censorship and nobody then dared speak about the breaking of Axis cyphers, arguably the most significant operational-technological achievement of the war. The first crack in the dam was Frederick Winterbotham's 1974 book
The Ultra Secret,
but some information uncovered by Allied cryptographers was so embarrassing that it remained classified for decades. It was not until 1995, for example, that a Senate commission forced the release of material that showed how comprehensive Soviet wartime penetration of the US government had been. Another vital scientific achievement was the invention of the cavity magnetron at Birmingham University in 1940, which permitted the development of the airborne centimetric radar that was crucial to the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic, as well as to accurate night navigation and bombing. In combination with the proximity fuse, another British invention given to the United States in 1940, it spared London the worst of the V-l attacks in 1944. The fact that Britain could not herself develop these inventions (or the research into the atom bomb, handed over in 1941) and put them into large-scale production points to the single most important factor in the crushing of Nazism and Japanese militarism – the enormous surge unleashed by the war in the US economy. Despite considerable duplication of effort and profiteering on an epic scale, not only did it build and supply an American Army of millions and the largest Navy and Air Force in the world, it was also the indispensable financier and supplier of both Commonwealth and Soviet war efforts. Surplus capacity explains why
production peaked in Germany as late as mid-1944 despite devastating bombing – but Germany did not begin to mobilise until it was far too late, and when it did the Byzantine nature of the Nazi regime, mistaken labour allocations and cultural constraints prevented it achieving its full potential.

PROFESSOR VANNEVAR BUSH

Chairman of the US National Defense Research Committee

Scientific discoveries revolutionised the ideal of warfare completely and by the end of the war all we thought we knew about the ideal war at the beginning was obsolete. It's the only time in history that ever happened and it can't happen again, because before the war there was a great stock of technical knowledge built up ready for use, but which had never been applied to military things and, of course, therefore there was a great blossoming of new ideas and new devices.

CAPTAIN PETER GRETTON

Naval Escort Group Commander

Scientists used to analyse attacks by aircraft, attacks by certain ships on submarines and statistics on convoy work and that sort of thing. And they would produce new ideas on the use of ships, on the use of aircraft and the whole tactics of convoy defence, which I think revolutionised the whole affair. I think the most dramatic example was that the scientists early on studied the
size of the convoys and they soon discovered that if you doubled the number of ships in a convoy, in order to provide the same protection – the same degree of protection – you only had to increase the number of escorts quite marginally. So by increasing the size of the convoys considerably, this released escorts for other duties, in particular to forming the support groups which were later so extremely important in the Atlantic.