The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (90 page)

Again Field Marshal Brooke took on the role of naysayer. Thin, sallow, and round-shouldered, privately known as Colonel Shrapnel, Brooke was both formidable and easily parodied. “Men admired, feared, and liked him: in that order, perhaps,” the
Economist
magazine observed. His civil passions were homely and endearing: lake fishing, Cox’s Orange Pippin apples, mimicry, a bit of opera, wildlife photography (in which he was a pioneer), and, most especially, birds—he could go on and on about Knipe’s
Monograph of the Pigeons
. Raised in France, the youngest of nine children born to a baronet from Northern Ireland, he had hoped to become a physician. Instead, as a young soldier Brooke proved to be “a gunner of genius in the great barrage-duels of the First World War,” a biographer wrote. Exploiting both mathematics and psychology, he was particularly adept at the creeping barrage and a practice known as “searching back,” intended to catch unwary enemies as they emerged from cover.

The tactic befitted the man. Never convivial, Brooke after another five years of world war was often dyspeptic and dispirited. “I don’t feel that I can stand another day working with Winston,” he had confided to his diary a few days earlier. “He is finished and gone, incapable of grasping any military situation and unable to get a decision.” But it was the cousins who most irked him, particularly as British clout dwindled and American influence grew. Now, as if again “searching back” at the Somme, he targeted Smith.

The British chiefs, Brooke said in his clipped staccato, believed the Allies had “not sufficient strength available for two major operations.” One attack avenue must be chosen, and only one. Montgomery’s route in the north appeared “the most promising,” given its proximity to both Antwerp and the Ruhr. Bradley’s southern assault would dilute Allied strength by diverting bridging kit and other matériel. The Bulge had revealed the folly of Eisenhower’s broad-front strategy in spreading an attack too thin. “Closing up the Rhine on its whole length,” as SHAEF proposed, could retard the advance. Would Montgomery have to wait on the riverbank until the Colmar Pocket was eradicated? Until Bradley’s forces crossed the Roer and cleared the Saar?

This argument had dragged on for five months, but Smith kept his poise to rally in defense of the SHAEF plan. Eisenhower intended to support “every single division which could be maintained logistically” in the north, he said, but topography required Montgomery to attack the Rhine on a narrow, four-division front that “might bog down” if confronted by Rundstedt’s residual host. Montgomery himself had acknowledged that barely two dozen divisions could be supported east of the Rhine in his sector until rail bridges spanned the river; Eisenhower was committed to supplying three dozen there, plus another ten divisions to exploit any breakthrough. But why should nearly forty other American and French divisions remain dormant when Germany clearly lacked sufficient strength to defend the entire Western Front? Putting all eggs in a single basket, Smith added, would be risky.

Marshall concurred, warning that it was “not safe to rely on one line of advance only.” The session adjourned without agreement, and Smith hurriedly cabled Eisenhower in Versailles. The British “will insist on something in writing to clinch the fact that the main effort on the north is to be pushed,” he wrote; they also wanted assurances that an attack on the Ruhr would not be delayed “until you have eliminated every German west of the Rhine.” The supreme commander replied promptly:

You may assure the Combined Chiefs of Staff in my name that I will seize the Rhine crossings in the north just as soon as this is a feasible operation and without waiting to close the Rhine throughout its length. Further, I will advance across the Rhine in the north with maximum strength and complete determination.

This pleased Brooke not at all, given Eisenhower’s continued insistence on bifurcating his force. To his diary on Wednesday, Colonel Shrapnel confided, “When we met at 2:30
P.M.
the situation was more confused than ever, as Bedell Smith had sent another wire to Ike which was also impossible and Ike had wired back. So we were again stuck.… I am feeling very tired, and old!”

Worse was to come. As Brooke prepared to climb into bed at midnight in the San Anton Palace, Smith appeared at his door for further discussion. The conversation grew warm. Brooke wondered whether Eisenhower had “his hands too full,” and whether his headquarters was too far from the front. Was he in fact “strong enough” for the job, or too readily swayed by whichever commander had seen him last? “Goddamn it,” Smith barked. “Let’s have it out here and now.” For an hour they traded jabs, until spent by exhaustion and the late hour. “I think the talk did both of us good,” Brooke wrote before falling asleep, “and may help in easing the work tomorrow.”

That was unlikely. Alerted by Smith to the late-night altercation, George Marshall had had enough. Not only did the British carping imply lack of faith in Eisenhower, but Brooke and his ilk appeared to champion Montgomery against his superior officer. “Please leave this to me,” Marshall told Admiral King.

As the chiefs convened again on Thursday afternoon, February 1, Marshall asked that the room be cleared of all subordinate officers and note-takers. No sooner had Brooke taken his chair than Marshall bored in. Why were the British so worried about the influence that Bradley and Patton had on Eisenhower? What about Roosevelt’s influence? Did the British consider that pernicious, too? “The president practically never sees General Eisenhower, and never writes to him. That is at my advice because he is an Allied commander,” Marshall said, eyebrows knit and voice rising to a wrathful timbre. In fact the British chiefs could not be “nearly as much worried as the American chiefs of staff are about the immediate pressures of Mr. Churchill on General Eisenhower.” The prime minister never hesitated to hector the supreme commander directly, day or night, circumventing the Combined Chiefs. “I think your worries,” Marshall declared, “are on the wrong foot.”

He had not finished. Should the British succeed in interposing a ground commander between the supreme commander and his three army group commanders, Marshall intended to resign—or so he had told Eisenhower. Montgomery was behind much of this pother, Marshall charged; despite being given “practically everything he asked for,” including the U.S. Ninth Army, he plainly craved “complete command.” If truth be told, Montgomery was an “over-cautious commander who wants everything,” an “impudent and disloyal subordinate” who treated all American officers with “open contempt.”

A stunned silence followed this tirade. After the war Brooke would write: “Marshall clearly understood nothing of strategy and could not even argue out the relative merits of various alternatives. Being unable to judge for himself he trusted and backed Ike, and felt it his duty to guard him from interference.” But Admiral Cunningham, the first sea lord, later observed that “Marshall’s complaint was not unjustified.”

For now, American indignation carried the day. Brooke fell silent, the chiefs promptly agreed to endorse SHAEF’s master plan, and the last great internecine tempest of the war subsided. For another month, the British conspired to replace Tedder as deputy supreme commander with Harold Alexander, whom they considered more pliant despite Brooke’s dismissal of him as “a very, very small man [who] cannot see big.” Eisenhower, braced by Marshall, advised London that if Alexander should arrive at SHAEF from Italy, he would find few military duties to occupy him. Spaatz would succeed Tedder as senior airman in the west, and there would be “no question whatsoever of placing between me and my army group commanders any intermediary headquarters.”

Few could doubt that the Americans now had the whip hand. “The P.M. was sore,” Kay Summersby jotted in her diary, “but E said he would get over it.”

*   *   *

Light rain spattered Luqa airdrome southwest of Valletta in the smallest hours of Saturday, February 3. A fleet of twenty-five transport aircraft, collectively known as Mission No. 17, stood beneath arc lights on the bustling flight line. Trucks and staff cars crept along the runway in search of this plane or that. Baggage handlers hoisted suitcases and crates into the bays—sealed boxes with secret documents bore black bands and yellow tags—while flight chiefs with clipboards carefully scrutinized the blue-and-white passes of the passengers clambering into the cabins.
CRICKET
was over; now would come
ARGONAUT
, a conference with Joseph Stalin at the Crimean resort of Yalta, on the Black Sea.

Roosevelt in recent months had proposed venues from Scotland to Jerusalem. Stalin, pleading ill health and the demands of his great offensive against Germany’s Eastern Front, countered with Yalta, a proposal that sent Anglo-American officials paging through their Baedeker guides. “I emphasized the difficulties that this decision made for you, but that in consideration of Marshal Stalin’s health you were prepared to meet them,” W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, had written Roosevelt in late December. Among the difficulties cited, aside from the seven-hour, fourteen-hundred-mile flight from Malta to a remote locale and Roosevelt’s own precarious health: “toilet facilities will be meager [and] there are no bars”; travelers were advised to bring sleeping bags and ample “bug powder”; electric current at Yalta was an odd 330 volts; and the Turkish government had given overflight permission for Mission No. 17, but “cannot guarantee that the planes will not be fired upon.” To a man the president’s advisers had opposed his making such an arduous journey, but Roosevelt insisted. As his aide Harry Hopkins later remarked, “his adventurous spirit was forever leading him to go to unusual places.”

Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed to limit their respective entourages to 35 people; instead, a total of 700 were flying from Malta, with more descending on the Crimea by train from Moscow and others arriving by ship. The Americans numbered 330, among them 14 generals, 15 full colonels, 18 bodyguards, and 8 cooks and stewards. The British travel roster ran on for eleven pages, including 62 signalers, 58 Royal Marines, a catering captain, a pair of cinema operators, 5 map-room officers, and 17 members of Churchill’s personal staff. Each traveler had been told to “invent a suitable and plausible cover story to account for departure and absence” from home, and the British Board of Trade discreetly issued 2,400 ration coupons for purchases of clothing suitable for “a place abroad where the climate is cold.” Churchill alone requested an extra 72 coupons to buy new uniforms and underwear.

In view of the rustic conditions anticipated at Yalta, the commissary list prepared by British provisioners for transport aboard Mission No. 17 included 144 bottles of whiskey, 144 bottles of sherry, 144 bottles of gin, 200 pounds of bacon, 200 pounds of coffee, 50 pounds of tea, 100 rolls of toilet paper, 2,500 paper napkins, 650 dinner plates, 350 tea cups and saucers, 500 tumblers, 100 wineglasses, 20 salt and pepper shakers, 400 sets of cutlery, 36 tablecloths, and 13 sugar bowls. Moreover, R.M.S.
Franconia,
bound for Yalta through the Dardanelles, carried a supplemental 864 bottles of whiskey and gin, 180 bottles of sherry, 20,000 American cigarettes, 500 cigars, and 1,000 boxes of matches. A separate shipment designated “Yalta Voyage 208” included several hundred bottles of Rhine wine, vermouth, Gordon’s gin, Johnnie Walker Red Label and King George IV whiskies, and 1928 Veuve Clicquot champagne, as well as 20,000 Chesterfield and Philip Morris cigarettes, 500 Robert Burns cigars, and a carton of toilet paper. For good measure, a consignment for Yalta entrusted to the British ambassador in Moscow included a dozen bottles of 1928 Château Margaux, cognac, beer, 10,000 Players cigarettes, and 48 bottles of White Horse, Black & White, and Vat 69 whiskies. No one would go thirsty. Churchill advised the White House that whiskey “is good for typhus and deadly on lice.”

“We left Malta in darkness,” an Army colonel wrote, “like migrating swans.” The first plane lifted into the low ceiling at 1:50
A.M.
, blue flame spurting from the exhaust manifolds as the pilot pushed the throttle to full power on Luqa’s short runway. Other aircraft followed at ten-minute intervals. The flight plan would take these swans across the Mediterranean almost to German-occupied Crete, followed by a ninety-degree left turn over the Aegean, past Athens and Samothrace, before the planes crossed European Turkey and the Black Sea. With radio silence imposed, pilots extinguished their lights at takeoff. Passengers set their watches ahead two hours and tried to sleep.

Churchill boarded a four-engine C-54 Skymaster provided him by the Army Air Forces; he claimed that British artisans had used five thousand animal hides to upholster the plush cabin. Huddled in his greatcoat, the prime minister resembled “a poor hot pink baby about to cry,” in the description of his daughter Sarah, who was in his traveling party.

Down the flight line stood C-54 No. 252, named
Sacred Cow,
which would be making her maiden flight with a passenger identified on the manifest only as “The Admiral.” Soon a caged elevator hoisted Roosevelt in his wheelchair into the plane’s aft cabin. Churchill would later recall that the president’s face “had a transparency, an air of purification.” There was “a faraway look in his eyes.”

Spitfire and P-38 fighter escorts already droned overhead. Aircrews in recent weeks had experimented to determine the lowest possible altitude that balanced safety and comfort: the flight would be made at 6,000 feet. The engines coughed and caught. Silver propellers whirred beneath a wet moon. At 3:30
A.M.
Sacred Cow
nosed into the night and banked to the east.

A Fateful Conference

W
EDGED
into a natural amphitheater between the Black Sea and the Crimean Mountains, Yalta seemed to have been built for drama. The towering peaks, bearing the gray scars of ancient avalanches, loomed above the town like “a vision of the Sierras,” as Mark Twain had written in
The Innocents Abroad
. Anton Chekhov, who wrote
The Cherry Orchard
and
Three Sisters
at his villa in Yalta, observed in “The Lady with the Pet Dog”: