The World at War (51 page)

ANTHONY EDEN

I used to reflect sometimes in my more depressed moments that whereas the Russians could be amoral – for instance in their attitude towards the Poles and some of their neighbours – so our American friends could be exaggeratedly demoral, at least where American interests were not directly concerned, and we were somewhere between the two. And one of our constant troubles and differences was of course about Free French leader de Gaulle.

AMBASSADOR W AVERELL HARRIMAN

President Roosevelt's Special Envoy to Europe

In meeting with Stalin, Churchill was concerned about Poland. Poland and Eastern European countries had governments in exile and hospitality with the British in London. Roosevelt was interested in the longer term, wanted to get the United Nations started, and he realised President Woodrow Wilson had made a mistake waiting until after the First World War to propose the League of Nations. He wanted to get the Americans committed during the war and he also wanted to get Stalin committed. But Roosevelt accepted Churchill's objectives and Churchill accepted Roosevelt's objectives. Both men had one primary objective and that was to keep the Russians in the war, and to get the Russians to play the maximum level they could. Roosevelt, I think before we got in the war, hoped that we could limit our action as much as possible to Naval and Air Force participation. He didn't want to have American boys back in trench warfare which he'd known so well in World War One.

ANTHONY EDEN

De Gaulle and the future of
France was one of the most constant sources of argument between us and our American allies. My view was that de Gaulle was the symbol of French resistance and that as such he must be, as soon as was possible, given the authority we would have given to our French ally, and it was for the French people to deal with him afterwards, if he had to be dealt with, and not for us. However, the Americans – some of it was personal, FDR certainly didn't like de Gaulle – I thought the Americans were unfair to him and unfair to the French, and perhaps not over-eager to see France restored to a position of importance after the war. At any rate that was our chief difficulty and Winston, who could himself be impatient with de Gaulle, often had a difficult position to argue with Washington.

PROFESSOR VANNEVAR BUSH

Chairman of the US National Defense Research Committee

The White House became the place in which all orders on every subject emerged, and it became the centre of an enormous structure fighting a war. The way in which that happened in this country was extraordinary. The President was a far more powerful man in time of war in many ways than even the Prime Minister – his cabinet has no power, he's simply appointing his representatives, his power becomes almost absolute in time of war and no one's questioning it. I think Roosevelt used his power with great discretion. I don't think he ever interfered improperly with his military men – they made mistakes, but he kept the power. The military part of the Allies worked together with such mutual confidence and such integration of efforts in that war, and that was centred on the Combined Chiefs of Staff. It wasn't a piece of decoration, that's where the great decisions were made and that operated with great skill. I think Sir John Dill deserves the credit for a good part of that movement.

ANTHONY EDEN

For us it seemed a very strange system. FDR of course was the President, the supreme controller of foreign policy and more, in a sense, than the Prime Minister is here. And under him was his Secretary of State, Hull – a very revered figure – and Sumner Wells, the Under-Secretary. Wells was very close to
Roosevelt and Roosevelt used to act a lot through Wells. And then there was a curious situation that Hull and Wells were hardly on speaking terms. I remember once when I was on official visit to Washington during the war, and Hull was giving me a farewell dinner. I'd been staying at the White House and I went round the State Department to say goodbye to people I'd been working with, said goodbye to Wells and said casually, 'Of course I'll see you tonight at dinner,' and he flushed up and said, 'I haven't been asked.'

AMBASSADOR HARRIMAN

Churchill and Roosevelt's first wartime meeting was immediately after Pearl Harbor. Churchill came to Washington with his Chiefs and Beaverbrook was there too, and that started this wartime relationship. I think no two heads of government could ever work as closely together. It was interesting – there were different personalities and different procedures. Chief Presidential Adviser
Harry Hopkins played an extraordinarily important role in interpreting one to the other and whenever there were rough edges, smoothing them out. I was involved to some extent because I was in London, Hopkins in Washington, he saw all my telegrams and we worked closely together. But Roosevelt had his problems. We were in the first meeting with Beaverbrook to get our military and industrialists to raise their sights; he was quite anxious that we should have rapid mobilisation, he wanted to have minimum of human life and maximum use of munitions, so he got Beaverbrook to estimate how rapidly we could mobilise. It was agreed that Britain had taken too long, doing it step by step. Beaverbrook came out with this idea that we ought to get a hundred thousand aeroplanes, fifty thousand tanks and as many guns, and Roosevelt took that and announced it without consulting his Chiefs. They were furious, couldn't be done, but Roosevelt had a habit of doing things, establishing a principle without consultation, then just sitting there. There wasn't anything they could do and they had to come through with it. They did, with some pain and possibly some loss; at the same time it was achieved. The Americans all thought Beaverbrook had just pulled the idea out of his head. He didn't actually, he had some very skilful men who analysed the two countries and actually they were close to being right.

REAR ADMIRAL LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN

British Chief of Combined Operations

In June 1942 Churchill asked me to see Roosevelt and then the US Chiefs of Staff to explain our difficulties, which were not a lack of desire but a lack of physical capability to do a landing. The Americans had no special combined-operations organisation, had nobody with any specialised knowledge, and none with any experience. They knew that I certainly wouldn't do anything to discourage them. I first talked to Roosevelt with Harry Hopkins. Roosevelt said to me, 'My overriding need is to find a way to deploy the hundreds of thousands of young Americans that have now been trained in the Army to go and fight, and I'd like to do it this year.' I said, 'I don't think that's on.' He said, 'When I spoke to Winston we had a general agreement that there would be an operation in readiness, a sort of sacrifice operation if the Russians fared very badly. Have you looked into that?' I said, 'I certainly have and I can tell you right away it isn't on. The Germans have got twenty-five divisions and with the number of landing craft I've got now I couldn't put more than just over four thousand troops in the first flight. I couldn't get more than perhaps six divisions ashore with great luck and they'd make no difference at all. The Germans would not have to withdraw one division in Russia to compete with that. But if we fail, as I'm afraid we should, they then would have all those divisions ready to go against Russia, and they'd be much worse off Well, this discussion went on for a long while. He didn't take that lightly, it took an hour or two to convince him, then he said, 'All right: suppose the German morale cracks, what have you got ready?' I said, 'We have an
operation called Sledgehammer now being planned and with two months' notice we could send in troops, because of course then it would be on the assumption that Germans would not be resisting us in the same way. But that's not anything to rely on.' 'No,' he said, 'I know it isn't. My nightmare would be if 1 was to have a million American soldiers sitting in England, Russia collapses and there'd be no means of getting ashore.'

ANTHONY EDEN

The Americans were very much dedicated to the concept of attack across the Channel, and they had given some undertakings to Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov when he was in Washington going far beyond what we could do, and we were embarrassed when Molotov got back and showed us what he's been told. We said it wasn't possible. But I think the Americans got to understand that an early cross-Channel attack was just not on. And if we were going to do something soon as a joint effort on land, the only place we could do it was North Africa. So the Americans came to the same conclusion and there were things that attracted them about North African landings. They could make landings from the Atlantic, which the Americans always liked to do, rather than within the Mediterranean, which was mainly our responsibility. They were certainly wholehearted once they started with it and perhaps had accepted that this meant a delay in crossing the Channel.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL ALBERT WEDERMEYER

Author of the US Army's 'Victory Program'

At the beginning of the war the British strategy was essentially defensive, providing for limited air and naval operations and for an economic blockade of Europe. Aware of their limited means at that time they could not conceive of a major operation of the magnitude of Normandy unless and until the military and economic power of Germany had been greatly reduced. Even after the United States entered the war in 1941, the British still retained the general concept of
peripheral operations. For example, they planned for the employment of Americans in the attacks against Europe from the south, the British from the north and the Russians from the east. Army Chief of Staff General
George Marshall was determined to concentrate American offensive power into the British Isles, which after careful analysis he established as the logical place from which to conduct an invasion. Some planners recommended an attempt to establish a lodgement on the Continent in 1942, however, this seemed premature prior to appropriate preparations for such a big operation. General Marshall, as well as his staff, of which I was one, insisted that the planning and concentration continued to ensure maximum strength for the decisive invasion in 1943. So when these military considerations were out of the way along came the politicians, Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, who were determined to initiate operations in considerable force [
Operation Torch in North Africa] as soon as possible. And why? Well, from the political viewpoint they recognised that they could not justify to their people and to the Russians any extended delay in sending strong military power against the enemy.

JOHN McCLOY

US Assistant Secretary of War

There were times when threats were made. I think it was probably only once or twice. I recall General Marshall made a threat, 'Well, if you don't go along with us on our effort to get to grips with the main challenges in Europe we'll have no alternative but to move to the Pacific' That always put Mr Churchill's wind up and usually you got more support for another major effort. I think those were just intermittent flare-ups. Mr Churchill had a very real fear towards getting ashore prematurely on the European continent, he had very vivid memories of the sacrifice of a British generation in World War One – Passchendaele, Somme – they are always nightmares to him. His tendency was to try to avoid that or certainly not go ashore before we were ready for it. I think we probably could have delivered our strength a little earlier than we did on the main front. After all the passion that had been aroused after Pearl Harbor we just had to get ashore someplace and we had a tremendous urge to participate. In view of the British attitude that we were not prepared to go into the main theatre, we looked around for another spot to express our strength and it turned out to be Africa. We thought of it as being something of a diversion, but I think it did have an important effect and certainly it was timely. I think it would have been very awkward indeed if we hadn't gone at that point and thereby expressed ourselves, our strength, our energies.

ADMIRAL MOUNTBATTEN

I stayed in the White House with Roosevelt and we had a bout of long conversations before I saw the Chiefs of Staff. Bit awkward, but still I had to start with him. In the Pacific the American marines and the American aircraft carriers, as they built up, would probably be enough to carry on the war in the Pacific but he pointed out that Admiral King was asking for more and more resources to be drawn into the Pacific. I pointed out that surely the American Navy with the marines and their aircraft carriers could do all that was wanted provided they had enough resources, but I did go and see Admiral King privately afterwards to point out that he really must provide the sailors to man the landing craft in Europe. I said, 'I know you can't afford to give them from the regular Navy but the civilians are now joining. Instead of putting them in khaki as soldiers, put them in blue as sailors and they'll have the responsibility for getting our Army ashore' – and he liked that idea. That helped the whole thing to go through.

CAPTAIN GORONWY REES

British planning staff for D-Day

I think you can say that as far as the planning was concerned Normandy was an essentially British operation. Of course we had American officers with us and they worked very closely with us, but the original conception of the plan was a British one and the detailed planning of it was also, I would say, about ninety per cent British. But in the course of it one had to learn to work with the Americans and this was not an easy thing. Their methods of planning and their methods of conducting war are really terribly different from ours, and one had to learn an entirely different language in order to talk to them from the one used normally when speaking to British colleagues. They used an enormous amount of paper, they used three men where we would use one and they were, in strange ways, a very cumbersome military machine. You have to explain, everything has to be explained in detail, over and over and over again, and you can't simply take anything for granted with them. And this was quite a difficulty at first I think, but we all got to know each other in the end and then we got to speak each other's language.